BioLogos’s Fossil Record Page Conspicuously Missing the Cambrian Explosion

The BioLogos website has a static page titled “What does the fossil record show?,” which would naturally lead one to expect that if you read the page, then you’ll learn what the fossil record shows. What’s odd about the page is that the page makes no mention whatsoever of the Cambrian explosion. This is despite the fact that Robert L. Carroll calls the Cambrian explosion “[t]he most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution”: The most conspicuous event in metazoan evolution was the dramatic origin of major new structures and body plans documented by the Cambrian explosion. Until 530 million years ago, multicellular animals consisted primarily of simple, soft-bodied forms, most of which have been identified from the fossil record as cnidarians Read More ›

Intelligent Design explains and unifies data from across the spectrum of scientific fields

Previously I noted that BioLogos has created a taxonomy of various viewpoints in the debate over origins that First Things blogger Christopher Benson called “helpful”. Given how badly it misrepresents ID, in my view it is anything but. Previously I showed that ID finds its supporting evidence in the fields of cosmology/physics and biology, thus refuting BioLogos’s mistaken assertion that “Intelligent design (ID) proponents believe that much of modern science is wrong and must be rejected because of its naturalism.” Let me reiterate two more points I made in response Benson’s orginal post: 2. The BioLogos taxonomy states: “The term Intelligent Design, although appropriated by these science critics, is used in many ways and is embraced by the first 5 Read More ›

Coming to Peace with Science by Appealing to the Consensus

In his book Coming to Peace with Science, Point Loma Nazarene University biology professor Darrel R. Falk makes many arguments for common descent and Darwinian evolution. Many of these arguments are evidence-based (some of this evidence is countered in a previous post), but some of his most forceful arguments are not based upon evidence. They are based upon appeals to authority. Consider the following: If you’re seeing a pattern here, it’s because Dr. Falk likes to appeal to the authority of “virtually all” scientists to make his arguments. Now to Dr. Falk’s credit, he spends a lot of time talking about the evidence, but this repeated argumentum ad “virtually all” scientists is a little troubling. Now as I wrote recently, Read More ›