FREE PUBLIC EVENT: TWU Science, Faith, and Human Flourishing and the CSCA present an evening with Darrel Falk (Professor of Biology, Emeritus, Point Loma Nazarene University) and Todd C. Wood (Founding President, Core Academy of Science).
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Join us for a special evening with two separate lectures, featuring Darrel Falk (Evolutionary Creationist) and Todd C. Wood (Young-Earth Creationist). Each lecture is one hour, including introductions and q&a.
Falk: EVOLUTION, CREATION, AND THE GOD WHO IS LOVE
If humans and all forms of life were created through the evolutionary process—and the evidence for this is very strong—it presents a potential dilemma for Christians. Why would the God who taught us to love the weak and feed the hungry, the God who told us that the meek shall inherit the earth seemingly create humankind through the seemingly heartless process sometimes referred to as “survival of the fittest?”
These are interesting times in evolutionary biology. The discipline has itself been evolving and many of its leaders are recognizing the significance sometimes of cooperation as a dynamic and important component of the evolutionary process. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that a key driving component in the change that has taken place in our lineage—the hominin lineage—for at least three million years has been the importance of individuals being able to work together as a communal unit within small groups. Some scholars would even go so far as to say it is the “Secret of Our Success.” Perhaps—this talk will suggest—biological fitness in our lineage is not that different than the qualities that Jesus laid out as being central to the Christian life. We’ll explore the evidence for this. But more than that, we’ll also explore the question of the nature of divine action in the ongoing history of creation. As Christians we believe that God is an active, even personal presence in our lives through the Holy Spirit. Is there some form of consistency between the God we believe we experience in our individual lives, and the activity of the God who was present and active hundreds of thousand to millions of years ago? This is a key question for Christians to think about and this talk will explore possible answers.
Darrel Falk is Senior Advisor for Dialog and former president of BioLogos. He is also Emeritus Professor of Biology at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego where he has been based since 1988. He is a graduate of Simon Fraser University, with a doctorate in genetics from the University of Alberta and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia and the University of California, Irvine. He began his career on the faculty at Syracuse University where he was tenured prior to his move into Christian higher education. Dr. Falk has given numerous talks about the relationship between science and faith at many universities, churches, and some seminaries. Besides his extensive writing at the BioLogos website, he is the author of Coming to Peace with Science (InterVarsity Press) and the forthcoming book with Todd C. Wood, The Fool and the Heretic: How Two Scientists Moved beyond Labels to a Dialog about Creation and Evolution (Zondervan).
Wood: The Quest: Understanding God’s Creation in Science and Scripture
The Christian debate over creation is often characterized by mutually exclusive viewpoints that proponents claim are completely superior to all other options. As the slogan goes, “There is no evidence for my opponent’s view, and all the evidence supports my own view.” The persistence of the debate exposes the falsity of these claims and thus calls for a different approach to resolving the conflict. In cases where two independent testimonies appear to be in conflict, both testimonies ought to be re-examined. The question at hand is not merely whether a certain model can make sense of the data but whether alternative models might make as much or better sense. In this process of re-examining scripture and science concerning our origins, I have found many open questions that have yet to be answered. This uncertainty, I think, calls for caution rather than dogma. Despite uncertainty, I do believe evidence warrants considering young-age creationism as the most likely model among those currently proposed.
Todd C Wood is a Michigan native and graduate of Liberty University (Summa Cum Laude). He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Virginia in 1999, where he specialized in computational biology and protein evolution. He then did a post-doc on the rice genome at the Clemson University Genomics Institute. He spent 13 years at Bryan College and launched Core Academy of Science in 2013. Core Academy is a creation ministry that nurtures the next generation of Christ-like creation researchers to explore the hardest problems in creation. He is an expert in comparative genomics and computational systematics. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 technical papers, including papers in Science, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and Answers Research Journal. He is the author or co-author of six books, including The Quest: Exploring Creation’s Hardest Problems and The Fool and the Heretic, written with Darrel Falk and Rob Barrett. In addition to teaching high school Bible and theology classes at Rhea County Academy, Todd also wrote the Introduction to Science textbook used in the ninth grade science class. His current research focuses on the created kinds of insects, floral mutations in trillium, and creationist interpretations of human fossils. He was featured in the 2017 documentary Is Genesis History? In his spare time, he likes to make pie and watch classic movies.