Just finished watching Todd Wood’s plenary presentation at Origins 2020, linked here on Wood’s blog.
Wood says he was inspired by our paper on postcreationism, published this past May. He reviews the history of creationism in a lot of detail, from the origins of modern science through the present, and predictably concludes that he is not a postcreationist at all, but rather a “native creationist” who is simply building on a firm framework.
Interesting for a lot of reasons. First, the history of creationism was very good. Ham and Mortenson and others from AiG love to gloss over the history and act as though a strict six-day creationist synthesis was always the default even long before The Genesis Flood. That, of course, is just not true, and while Wood doesn’t appear to be directing his presentation toward AiG in any way, it is a very effective foil to their notions. It’s hard to maintain the idea of YEC as historically monolithic in the face of all his evidence to the contrary.
There are a few minor disagreements…for example, I don’t think his characterization of the Galileo Affair was entirely accurate, but I can let that slide. I wouldn’t have expected complete agreement, of course.
I was disappointed, however, that he really sort of just stopped when he came to modern creationism. The whole point of our article is that this modern hyperspeciation view espoused by Jeanson (and, to some extent, Wood) is a qualitative departure from the creationism that solidified around Morris and Whitcomb, as well as the neocreationism that came after it. If Wood argues he was a “Native Creationist” from the beginning, he needs to look closely at whether the evolving acceptance of expansive common ancestry is actually aligned with the “native” creationism he grew up with. We argue (convincingly, in my view) that it is not.
On issues of flood geology, modern creationists may cling with surprising tenacity to the pillars laid by Morris and Whitcomb, but there is not much left of the creationist biology of that era.
