We finally arrived home after a day of airline delays. However, that did not diminish the excitement from the conference. The last day was as informative and good as the previous days.
Tom Heffigan, Randy Guliuzza, Matthew Ingle, and Grace Lasdell presented a paper on Symbiotic Relationships. As I mentioned in the anticipation blog, I was looking forward to this presentation and it did not disappoint. Randy Gulliuzza started the presentation by saying that "when we are doing biology, we are doing reverse engineering." This is a profound statement that recognizes that God is the designer of everything, and our work is to figure out what He did and how, or reverse His engineering. The problem with Darwin is that he personified nature as a substitute engineer for God. This reverse engineering is illustrated in the picture below. The only things we cannot reverse engineer are the life consciousness agencies.
A key difference in our creation understanding of biology from the naturalistic paradigm is that from our perspective, environments do not send instructions to organisms. Organisms gather information from the environment. From the evolutionary perspective, environments are causing the organism to change by forcing itself on the organisms. From the creation perspective, the organism is changing because its genetic program is using input from the environment. Organisms define for themselves what environmental stimuli it will use. This is a huge paradigm difference.
Nathan Mogk presented a paper of a proposed mathematical model of accelerated nuclear decay. This was a good initial attempt that needs to be validated.
Overall impressions of the conference:
I found the conference to be one of the best so far. I am impressed by how much creation science has moved beyond refuting evolution and toward the development of a cohesive, comprehensive, and confident biblical creation model. A model that not only explains what God has done and is doing but also has predictive power and utility. To be sure, we have a long way to go, but we are moving in the right direction and pulling all the scientific disciplines together.
If you want to help support our travel costs, you can go to: https://give.cornerstone.cc/creationeducation.
God Bless,
Dr. Rich Overman