Abstracts Due for Origins Conference 2024

Hi, everyone!

Sitting at our breakfast table and looking out the window at our backyard, watching the robins hopping around our silver maple doing their thing, I am reminded of that old saying, “The early bird catches the worm.” Well, it’s time to remind you all to be early birds and submit your proposals for the 2024 Origins Conference. The deadline for submissions is March 31 and the instructions for writing your proposals are at this link.

You’ll be getting something a lot better than robins get. You’ll be getting the opportunity—subject to editorial board review—to present your ideas to the creation community gathered for the 2024 Origins Conference. And subsequently, the possibility that, after your papers have been peer-reviewed, to have them published in the Journal of the Creation Theology Society 3.

So, what are you waiting for? There’s room for only so many presentations at the conference. So, be that early bird and get your proposal in!

Dr. Boyd

Steven W. Boyd, M.S., Th.M., M.Phil., Ph.D.

Executive Editor of the Creation Theology Society;
Research Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages;
Director of the Cataclysm Chronology Research Group

Spring Symposium 2024

Dr. Bob Cole (CTS board member) will present The Biblical Theology of מין/Created Kind in the Hebrew Bible as the topic in our CTS Spring Symposium 2024. Mark the date and time in your calendar: Thursday, March 21, 8:00 PM (EST).

The symposium will be conducted on ZOOM (link plus pass code 980922). You may invite interested friends by giving them the information directly or refer them to this blog post. Please do not publish this information on any other website or on social media. 

Fall Symposium Video

On the evening of December 8 CTS hosted its first Online Fall Symposium with twenty-one CTS members logging in. The topic for our symposium was “The Biblical Flood in the Literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls” led by our President, Dr. Jeremy Lyon. Wipf and Stock published Jeremy’s Qumran Interpretation of the Genesis Flood in 2015. If you have an interest in this topic, this book provides very helpful translations, descriptions, analyses, and discussions of four scrolls: the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen), a Genesis pesher (4Q252), a fragment of an admonition based on the Flood (4Q370), and a fragment of a paraphrase of Genesis and Exodus (4Q422).

The Fall 2022 Online Symposium video can be accessed via this link. In this way, those of you who were unable to join us can still hear the presentation and the subsequent Q&A.

Watch for announcements regarding future online symposia. We plan to offer at least two each year — one in the Fall and one in the Spring. The symposia provide only members the privilege of live-stream watching and participation. Every active member receives a Zoom invitation ahead of time so they can join the symposium. Post-symposium access to the videos are available to anyone through the CTS website.

JCTS Issue 1 in Mail

Issue 1 of the Journal of the Creation Theology Society has been printed and is in the mail to all our members! Click this link to go to the Journal page for the latest information and for a free download of a sample article.

Soon we will announce a Members Only page where members can access the digital version.

JCTS First Issue Published

The premier issue of the Journal of the Creation Theology Society has been published! For a first issue, this one is packed! — over 200 pages! Thanks to the labors of our Senior Editor Steve Boyd and his staff (Lee Anderson and Doug Smith) CTS members will soon be receiving their hard copy of JCTS in the mail (snail mail).

In the near future we will establish a members-only page on our website so a digital copy can be viewed. Stay tuned for that future announcement, right here on the CTS blog.

In addition, we will soon be making it possible for anyone to purchase a digital copy of CTSJ articles or the full issue online.

Call for Papers: Origins Conference 2022

Now that Origins Conference 2021 has wrapped up, we invite all CTS members to look forward to Origins Conference 2022. For everyone who attended the recent conference in person or online, the various presentations stir our enthusiasm for research and writing in the field of creation science. What topic would you like to pursue with a view to presenting a paper for the general sessions of the next Origins Conference? We have set no specific theme for the general sessions, so you have a great deal of freedom in choice of topic.  Any topics dealing with the text, philology, hermeneutics, theology, and apologetics of Genesis 1–11 and any other texts dealing with primeval history will be gladly accepted for consideration.

To submit your proposal, follow Guidelines for a Paper Proposal (click on link to download this one-page aid).

Deadline for Proposal: September 1, 2021

Deadline for Paper Submission: January 31, 2022

Submit to: Dr. Steven Boyd at sboyd@creationtheologysociety.org

Why so early? Since CTS papers that go through the full approval process will be published in our Journal of the Creation Theology Society, we must have time for

  1. our consideration of your proposal and response to you,
  2. your research and writing,
  3. our submitting your paper for peer review (minimum of 3 peer reviewers),
  4. peer reviewers’ return of their comments,
  5. your completion of necessary revisions, and
  6. our approval for your final paper to be presented and published.

CTS’s inaugural issue of the Journal of the Creation Theology Society (JCTS) will feature this year’s Interdisciplinary Session papers and edited transcription of the panel discussion. We will also publish Origins Conference 2021 general session abstracts from our sister societies (Creation Biology Society and Creation Geology Society). The journal plans to include CTS papers from general sessions only after those papers have undergone full peer review and editing procedures. Simply presenting a paper in the general session does not guarantee publication in the journal.  

We will publish our inaugural volume in both hard and digital copies around year’s end or early in 2022. Watch the website for its announcement.

4 Weeks until Origins Conference

Soon the 2021 Origins Conference will be taking place in three physical locations, as well as online. All three Creation societies (Creation Theology Society, Creation Biology Society, and Creation Geology Society) will participate and welcome attendees in St. Louis MO, Dayton TN, and Santa Clarita CA starting at 4:00 PM PDT (7:00 PM EDT) on Wednesday, July 28. The conference will adjourn at 2:30 PM PDT (5:30 PM EDT), Saturday, July 31. If you have not yet registered, please go to this registration link to do so. 

During the conference a number of the attendees will present papers on a variety of topics and conduct a Q&A following each paper. A special Interdisciplinary Session will feature three papers and a panel discussion on The Fountains of the Great Deep and the Windows of the Heavens in the Genesis Flood Narrative.

The full schedule of the sessions and locations for the physical meetings will be published soon online — watch for it on our CTS website, as well as on the Creation Biology Society website.

Cogitations on Interdisciplinary Creation Research

A signal feature of the Creation Theology Society (CTS) is highly valuing interdisciplinary collaboration in creation research. This is immensely beneficial in both directions: the scientific, grammatical, and hermeneutical breakthroughs that can occur by proceeding from an accurate understanding of the biblical text; and the results which can obtain by applying scientific, linguistic, and mathematical methodology to the text—as the following testimony proves.

I’ve been involved in several interdisciplinary creation research projects and have seen firsthand the excellent results which can come from such undertakings. First, the RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth), which was very successful in looking at the problem of radioisotopic dating from a number of different perspectives: geology, geophysics, and physics and then my work on the genre of Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 using statistical methodology. (Employing such atypical techniques to the text has been the hallmark of my approach, beginning with my dissertation). In this case, instead of being satisfied with the usual qualitative approach to distinguishing genre from genre, I worked with two statisticians to develop a quantitative model (a logistic regression model) for predicting genre. The best model was based on the relative frequency of wayyiqtol (which traces the flow of the events in a narrative). At a statistical confidence level of 99.5% the model predicts that the probability that Genesis 1:1–2:3 is prose, not poetry, is between .999942 and .999987.

Second, was the FAST project (Flood Activated Sedimentation and Tectonics), which led to the third such effort, the Cataclysm Chronology Research Group, an ongoing collaboration between a team of Hebraists and a geologist, Dr. Andrew Snelling, in which a close reading of the text in terms of the real world implications of what it is saying show that there is temporal discontinuity in the text at points. This then led to challenging the long-standing understanding of the dominant Hebrew narrative form and developing a semantic methodology for ascertaining sequence based on ‘temporal reasoning’, which will be applied to the 261 verbs in the Flood account. In addition, set theory and the concepts of general functions can be applied to the mapping of the recounting of Divine pronouncements and commands in the Flood account to their later reports of actualizations and compliance, respectively, by considering each verb as a point with multiple coordinates representing essential characteristics.


The fourth example is the documentary Is Genesis History?, which exemplifies a presentation to the public of the evidence from a range of disciplines for the historicity of Genesis 1-11.


And finally, in the fall of 2019 at the inaugural Bulwarks and Frontiers Conference scientists and scholars from diverse specialties had an opportunity to listen to, learn from,  and query one another as they each presented their assessment of the status of creation research in their particular discipline.

The birth of CTS promises such interdisciplinary collaboration on a grand scale between rigorous study in the Hebrew text and the hard sciences and consequent amazing results. Come join us and experience the thrill of discovering how God’s Word and world interface!

Why I Believe CTS Should Exist

Shortly after my salvation my pastor introduced me to The Genesis Flood by Whitcomb and Morris. At the time I was a lab assistant for my high school biology teacher. After graduation I received a National Science Foundation grant to perform ecological research at Pingree Park, the science camp for Colorado State University. I pursued a potential career in wildlife management in junior college before the Lord led me into biblical studies at a Bible college and on into seminary and a Doctor of Theology degree in Old Testament and Hebrew from Grace Theological Seminary, where I sat under Dr. Whitcomb as one of my mentors. Two other creationist mentors had also made a huge impact on my interest in the book of Genesis, Dr. Leo Lapp and Dr. Bernard Northrup. Through a half century of teaching, along with several decades of involvement in Bible translation ministries overseas and Stateside, I’ve been invited to write an exegetical commentary on Genesis, which is a work in progress. 

In addition to research, writing, and publishing in the area of biblical creationism, I have been actively involved with co-leading biblical creation trips in Grand Canyon with Canyon Ministries for the past 13 years. I am currently the chairman of that ministry’s board of directors. My background has prepared me to understand the importance of creation theology.

The Scriptures make it clear that creation came about through an all-powerful and all-wise Creator. Therefore, what we call “creationism” or “creation theology” really amounts to a study of the God who brought everything into existence. Whereas the hard sciences focus on evidence within the physical creation, the “queen of sciences,” theology, delves into the realm of the ultimate source of creation, the Creator Himself.

When we emphasize the Creator, we cannot escape dealing with His written Word by which He reveals to us how and why He created. For theologians the goal must be to exegete the Scriptures with accuracy so we might learn what God has revealed for us. Having thus expounded divine revelation, biblical scholars position themselves for supplying revelatory information with which believing scientists might guide their research and develop their models.

For years Kurt Wise has begged many of us to do just what we propose to do through this new society. We’ve designed CTS to link with sister societies like Creation Geology Society and Creation Biology Society for the academic cross-fertilization necessary to ongoing creation research. We might have responded slower than you desired, Kurt, but we’re ready to launch CTS and pour ourselves into the tasks at hand. We invite all of you reading this blog post to join us — get involved. Become a member of CTS now.

The Creation Theology Society (CTS) provides a venue for a Bible-believing community of scholars to perform research in the evidence contained in the biblical text, to prepare their resulting studies with the involvement of peer review, and to present to creation scientists significant biblical data to aid them in their examination of the physical evidence. Such operations closely parallel the way biblical scholars have acted as catalysts for archaeological research in Bible lands. With Bible in hand, theologians and historians walked over the geographical setting of biblical events in order to identify significant biblical sites for archaeological investigation. CTS scholars will walk through the biblical text to identify significant details that might instigate scientific investigation.