Well, good morning.
I'm Todd Wood.
I am currently a part-time high school teacher
and I am president
of a small creation ministry called Core Academy of Science.
And it is a great pleasure to be here today and share with you.
The assignment was why I'm a creationist,
and I think the more
interesting question for me is why I'm still a creationist.
How I became a creationist, that's really not interesting.
So going to school, went to a Christian school,
conservative Christian high school and graduated.
Went off to Liberty University
and other conservative Christian school and I was steeped
in creationist lore,
and ideas, and arguments.
I knew all that sort of stuff.
And I was, well,
you know, you're that age, and you're smart,
you're hot stuff.
You think you're pretty cool.
And I remember taking their creation studies course,
in which I didn't really study,
because I didn't have to
because I already knew all that stuff.
It was great.
So I just blazed through that got an A.
It was really easy.
All my friends were studying really hard and I'm like,
whatever.
And I remember distinctly in my undergrad
as I began to take more and more classes and get higher up
in biology and learn more about biology,
I started to have questions.
And I remember one particular moment
during my undergraduate years
when I was reading a book called Digging Dinosaurs,
it's by Jack Horner.
It's, he's talking in that book about dinosaur nests.
And it was big stuff back then the discovery
that there were dinosaurs
that made nests and apparently took care of the nest,
so it was kind of a big deal.
And I wanted to learn more about them and of course,
you know, I was still young and still infatuated with dinosaurs.
Well, I'm old and I'm still infatuated with dinosaurs.
Who am I kidding?
So dinosaur nests,
and I'm reading this book about dinosaur nests,
and I'm thinking in my geological naivete
that these nest must be Pre-Flood.
These dinosaurs must have made the nest the flood came along
and wash them away and bury their nests
and there you go.
And as I'm reading I come to this part in the book
where they talk about nests in different layers in one place.
They found nests, multiple layers of nests.
And suddenly I thought to myself,
"wait a minute, how does that work?"
right.
How do you get a dinosaur nest
that's buried by the flood and then the dinosaur comes back
and makes another nest in the middle of the flood?
What?
This was a memorable crisis for me,
and it is a crisis much
like well, I think every student has at some point.
Hopefully there is going to be a point
at which you start studying
and learning for yourself and you come to the realization
that you don't have all the answers.
Just like I came to the realization
that I don't have all the answers.
I'm not so hot after all.
It's an important lesson to learn.
And unfortunately,
for many people in the creation evolution world those kinds
of crises start them off down the slippery slope, right?
They figure if I can't explain dinosaur nests then
how do I explain this, and how do I explain that,
and it begins to snowball.
And what starts out as an interesting question turns
into this massive emotional hang up and I can't get
beyond this question.
And even when they
encounter reasonable answers to the question,
they can't even recognize the reasonable answers
because they are so wrapped up in that question.
I did not have that particular experience.
I did not start down that slippery slope
towards unbelief.
Instead, I just thought to myself
as I was reading this book,
"well, I must not really understand what the flood is.
Maybe I should learn more about this."
And yes, I understand that is a really odd reaction.
Most kids that age come to those crisis points
and it's just reacting with fear, and doubt,
and anxiety, and for me, it was simply a matter
of I don't really understand the flood.
And here I am 25 years later and guess what?
Guess what I've learned about dinosaurs and their nests?
I don't really understand the flood.
Yeah, still 25 years later don't have the answers
to that little puzzle.
But soon, I had a new puzzle to wonder about and
that was evolutionary biology.
I was really interested
in evolution and particularly molecular evolution.
It was kind of a big new thing back in those days,
and I wanted to study
that when I went to graduate school.
And so that's what I did.
Off to grad school I went.
And I remember distinctly sitting in a lecture
in my biochemistry course.
So the first year of grad school,
I had a five credit biochemistry course in the fall
at a five credit biochemistry two course in the spring.
So lots of biochemistry the first year.
There was one section there on protein evolution.
I remember very distinctly sitting in that class listening
to the professor explained the statistics
of protein evolution
and thinking to myself
that is an amazing argument for evolution and I have no idea
how to answer it.
All the stuff
that I learned about creationism did not help me at that point,
because I realized none of it really answered these questions.
And I don't have the answers either.
And I began,
see back then this was this was the beginning
of the wide internet coming into popularity.
It was Windows 95 era and America Online.
Yeah, remember and modem dialing up.
It was great, those were the days.
And so I emailed some people
and I asked them, some creationists,
and I asked them,
"you know, what's the answer to this question?
Here's this really good argument for evolution,
and I don't have an answer to it,
and maybe somebody else will have the answer, right?"
And they wrote back and said,
"no, we don't know the answer to that one."
And again, it was this sort
of shock to my system because I thought, hmm,
this is an interesting problem.
This argument for evolution is really good.
Evolution isn't as stupid as I may have been led to believe or
as I may have thought.
It's really, you know,
when you step back and you look at what's going on here,
this is pretty compelling.
And so I thought, well,
if there isn't a creationist explanation,
and again, this is where my weirdness comes in,
then I ought to make one.
Once again, the whole slippery slope for some reason,
I evaded it.
And I continue to wonder at God's grace and His mercy
for allowing me to avoid the slippery slope
and in the face of what I felt was really compelling evidence,
and arguments,
and pressure from the college and the Graduate School.
It would have been easy for me to just
make that transition and become a regular,
old evolutionary biologist.
And I don't know, you know,
I could stand here and pretend like I have the secret
to all this stuff and I've got the key
and you just need to buy my book
and follow me on Facebook in order to learn all
the important secrets of how to not lose your faith.
I don't, I don't know.
I'm not going to I'm not going to say that.
One thing that I just keep thinking about
as I was doing all of this and having all
of these intellectual crises,
I was firmly entrenched in my church,
and in a community of believers, and in my faith.
I could look into my own life and see the miracles
of God's movement
as He orchestrated things and moved me along in my life
and in my career.
And you know,
I'm reminded of, and again, I don't want to pretend like I'm
something special because I'm not anything special.
But I'm reminded of Peter sitting in that boat seeing
Jesus coming across the water through that storm,
walking on the water.
And Peter says "hey,
let me get out and do that too."
And you know,
we give Peter a lot of guff for looking at the storm
and sinking into the water.
But let's face it,
Peter was the only one who had the guts to get
out of that boat.
And I, you got to give him credit for that.
But the lesson from that story has always been, you know,
as long as he was focused on Christ as long,
as he was focused on Jesus, he walked on that water.
And maybe that's what happened to me.
I don't know.
Maybe that was it.
Maybe I had such a faith community around me,
and I had such a firm conviction and being convinced
that this was true.
That Jesus was going
to lead me through that when those storms came up,
and big storms they were.
Man, I just walked right through them.
Well, maybe I probably doggy paddled,
but close enough.
I got through them somehow.
And, you know,
if there's a lesson that I can leave you students with,
that would be it.
Do not forsake the assembling together of believers.
Don't don't leave the community.
Don't think that you are the one that has to solve everything.
Because every one of us every scientist
in this room has questions
that they don't know the answer to.
We all do it.
And it's just part of science and it's part of growing up
and it's okay.
And by remaining in the community of believers,
remaining in the body of Christ where God has placed you,
and God wants you that is how,
I believe, you can whether those storms.
And that is why I am still a creationist.
Thanks.