Explore
John Baumgardner, Ph.D.

John Baumgardner, Ph.D.

Biography

John Baumgardner was working on a Ph.D. in electrical engineering when he discovered the reality of Jesus in a dramatic way through a group Bible study of the Gospel of John. After a four-year tour of duty at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, where he was engaged in gas dynamic laser research, he joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ. Observing the deliberate use of evolution to assault and destroy the faith of Christian college students, Dr Baumgardner began to develop and present classroom lectures and evening forums to expose evolution’s false claims.

Upon realizing that Noah’s Flood involved a planetary-scale tectonic catastrophe, he left Campus Crusade to begin a Ph.D. program in geophysics at UCLA in order to obtain the expertise and credentials to address the problem of the mechanism of the Genesis Flood at a professional scientific level. His Ph.D. thesis research involved the development of a 3-D spherical-shell finite-element model for the earth’s mantle, a program now known as TERRA.

Upon completing his Ph.D. in geophysics and space physics, he accepted a position as a staff scientist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he continued his research in planetary mantle dynamics, including the potential for catastrophic mantle overturn. He presented his work describing this mechanism for the Genesis Flood, now known as ‘catastrophic plate tectonics,’ at six International Conferences on Creationism held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr Baumgardner’s technical work at Los Alamos included development of a new global ocean model for investigating climate change. He served as a member of the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) team and led the RATE research effort on carbon-14. He retired from Los Alamos in 2004 and joined the Institute for Creation Research in 2005 where he helped develop a state-of-the-art computer program named Mendel’s Accountant for modeling of the processes of mutation and natural selection. In 2008 he joined Logos Research Associates, a collaborative network of Christian research scientists whose focus is origins and earth history issues from a Biblical perspective.

Education

  • B.S., Texas Tech University, Lubbock, 1968
  • M.S., Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 1970
  • M.S., Geophysics and Space Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1981
  • Ph.D., Geophysics and Space Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, 1983

Interviews

Articles


Back to Other biographies and interviews of interest

Published: 9 February 2006