Divergence and Dialogue Blog

  Photo from G. Kuban's October 2022 Taylor Trail excavation (c. Noah Edmonds) Last week's article  briefly went over the history of the human footprint controversy in the Paluxy River of Glen Rose, Texas, and mentioned that Glen Rose and the Paluxy are both places of special interest in my life for personal and professional reasons. If you'd like a more detailed history of the controversy, check out Glen Kuban's summaries that flesh out the story from first-hand experience. (Kuban, 2022b, 2022c) The original argument was that human and dinosaur footprints had been found together in the riverbed - a belief held to by the townsfolk in the early 1900s based on misinterpreted elongated metatarsal dinosaur tracks . This view would be adopted by several prominent groups in the emerging contemporary young earth creationist movement as proof that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, bolstering their interpretation of the Biblical narrative. (Whitcomb & Morris, 1961...

Photo from G. Kuban's October 2022 Taylor Trail Excavation (c. Noah Edmonds) Ever since I began to work seriously on the question of young earth creationism (or ever since it began working on me), I've been incredibly interested in the claims of human tracks, remains, and other anomalies that have reportedly been found in the Paluxy River, a tributary of the Brazos River that flows near the town of Glen Rose, Texas. Nearly all of the research I took part in while majoring in biology/paleontology took place in or concerned the Paluxy - it's a pristine site rich for study, holding innumerable theropod and sauropod trackways that were initially laid down during the mid-Cretaceous and hadn't seen the light of day until a massive flood of 1908 broke away the layers of rock that had protected them. The townsfolk of the early 20th century believed that various unique, large elongated tracks found in the riverbed had been made by oversized human beings alive at the time of th...

  Introduction In a 2020 article for the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation, psychotherapist Martin McManus presents a critical perspective on the impact of evolutionary and psychoanalytic thinking on the public and Church's understanding of mental health and well-being. His main arguments are that thinking in evolutionary terms has led to psychologists viewing human beings as nothing but material machines that can be fixed through drugs, rejecting spiritual realities and leading people to be left numb and confused. What's more, evolutionary thinking negatively impacts morality by categorizing harmful behaviors as "natural" by evolution and encouraging their expression The article presents its argument in five major points: Evolution is an atheistic and materialistic consequence of the Enlightenment, which rejected God, causality, and meaning. Both psychoanalysis and psychiatry have had net negative impacts on mental health and well-being. Due to their basis in at...