
Dr Carl Wieland M.B., B.S.
Founding editor, Creation magazine, and one of the pioneers of the modern creation movement in Australia.
Biography
After 41 years of activity and prominence in the creation movement, the last 28 of them as the fulltime Managing Director of the ministry that eventually became Creation Ministries International in Brisbane, Australia, Dr Carl Wieland commenced a well-earned retirement from active creation ministry in early 2015.
His successor as Managing Director of CMI-Australia, head scientist Dr Don Batten, said at the time, “These are big shoes to fill, but one of the hallmarks of Dr Wieland’s decades of exemplary service was a commitment to making sure that CMI did not focus on individuals, personalities or ‘name recognition’, but rather on a team approach. One of his enduring legacies is the calibre of the CMI team that he helped to build. This consists of many talented and committed individuals worldwide in various roles, with younger scientists and speakers due to come on board in coming years, in more than one country in which CMI operates. This longstanding ethos will stand the ministry in good stead in both the medium and long-term future.”
During his last fulltime year, 2014, Carl was particularly thrilled at seeing the completion of several projects dear to his heart, including the hugely impactful Evolution’s Achilles Heels documentary and book project, as well as the groundbreaking commentary The Genesis Account. In addition, a big encouragement has been the continuing wonderful growth in web traffic (in early 2015, this was around 20,000 unique visitors each day and rising), with a constant and increasing flow of testimonies of lives changed worldwide.
Carl had an ongoing interest in the ability of people in developing countries to access the huge amounts of free material via this site; as well as in other-language translations. At the time of his retirement, CMI resources were available in 39 languages other than English. In Australia’s regional neighbourhood, he played significant roles in the establishment of: the Hong Kong Creation Resources Ministry (and the translation and printing of both Stones and Bones and The Creation Answers Book into both Chinese scripts), the Singapore Friends of CMI (including several potential speakers), and the Philippines Creation Network.
Another legacy of Carl’s is his major role in conceiving and setting up the formal federation of CMI ministries, known as CMI-Worldwide. This aims to ensure that all the autonomous CMI offices across the globe stay bound within a structure that maximises accountability and minimises the potential for the painful splits and personality struggles one sees from time to time in ministry of all types. Under this structure, each national ministry’s accountability in important things is not to any individual, or a single Board potentially influenced by a persuasive personality, but to the federation of all the CMI countries acting in concert, each answerable to its fellows. A key concept in this thinking was the protection of the interests of supporters, recognising that their giving was ultimately to a cause more than to an organisation.
During his decades in ministry, Carl was a popular speaker and writer, and lectured extensively in Australia and internationally. Not long after graduating as a medical doctor in 1973, he began speaking by invitation on creation vs evolution part-time, and eventually founded Creation Science Association of South Australia in 1977, the first formal creationist organisation in Australia.1 This soon had branches in all states other than Queensland. His long-time friend Peter Sparrow (of Creation Bus fame) was on that first committee. The first copy of Creation magazine was produced on his doctor’s office photocopier in mid-1978. At around the same time, two schoolteachers in Queensland2 were beginning a creation outreach through churches utilizing a missions model.
In the late 1970s all the various state groups, which were already cooperating in several ways, amalgamated, with Carl disbanding the CSA and placing it and the magazine under the headship of the group in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), which already had some fulltime workers. In 1980, it formally incorporated as the Creation Science Foundation. Carl continued working as a family medical doctor in South Australia while supporting the Queensland ministry and doing voluntary writing and speaking for it, concentrating on the southern parts of the nation. In that period, he served for a time as President of the Christian Medical Association of South Australia.
In May 1986, after falling asleep at the wheel in Australia’s Northern Territory, Carl was involved in a head-on collision with a fully laden fuel tanker at highway speeds. This led to nearly six months in hospital and some 56 reconstructive operations extending into succeeding years.3
In early 1987, while he was recovering from the accident, the Queensland ministry suffered a serious crisis involving one of the original founders. This led to a catastrophic decline in confidence and support, and near-insolvency. In view of his background and reputation among supporters via the magazine, Carl was asked to head the ministry for a time to try to help it survive, given that the only remaining founder figure was already working fulltime in the US.
This rebuilding effort involved long spells ‘on the road’, often for weeks, giving the message in town after town across Australia. In the first few years after the accident, he often undertook ministry while on crutches and/or bandaged, following the latest operation.
This ‘temporary stint’ ended up being 28 years of fulltime leadership of the ministry, amounting to over four decades of creationist involvement in all. During this time, the ministry changed its name to Answers in Genesis,4 then later to Creation Ministries International. Prior to his retirement, CMI’s magazine Creation had subscribers in well over 100 countries. CMI’s Journal of Creation was widely regarded as a world leader of its type, and CMI-Australia was actively cooperating with sister ministries in six countries.
During his over four decades in creation ministry, Carl authored numerous articles in Creation magazine (of which he was editor-in-chief), on creation.com, and in the associated in-depth Journal of Creation (formerly TJ). He was the executive producer of CMI’s 2009 documentary on Darwin, The Voyage that Shook the World. Following is a list of the books he authored or co-authored up to retirement, followed by his published articles.
Publications
Books
- The Creation Answers Book, (edited by Don Batten) with David Catchpoole and Jonathan Sarfati (available in Albanian, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Russian and Spanish). See index of online chapters and free chapter study guides.
- Stones and Bones
- Dragons of the Deep: ocean monsters past and present
- Beyond the Shadows: making sense of personal tragedy
- One Human Family: the Bible, science, race and culture
- World Winding Down: Understanding the Law of Disorder—and how it demands a Creator.
Creation magazine articles
- Algae to oil: Algal ‘slurry’ turns to crude oil in minutes
- The Creation Safari man
- A garden proclaiming creation
- Flights of fancy
- Can they all be wrong?
- Darwin, Spurgeon and the ‘black dog’
- Chimps ‘natural killers’ after all
- Ancient Egypt confirms: Genesis is history
- Prioritizing People
- Kamikaze caterpillars
- ‘The dingo’s got my baby!’
- Our shrinking brains
- Jesus on the age of the earth
- Slavery and ‘one drop of blood’(see also responses to critics of this article)
- Bees outsmart supercomputers
- The mysterious giant squid
- Mutant (non-ninja) turtles
- Full-size Noah’s Ark in Hong Kong
- The great chromosome fiasco
- Replenish the earth: Were Adam and Eve supposed to fill the planet with their descendants—or to refill it?
- ‘Lost world’ animals—found!
- Standing firm: A leading scientist’s life shows how ‘radical’ ideas can lead to the greatest breakthroughs (interview with Dr Raymond Jones)
- Love is more than skin deep: A chat with Dickson and Cynthia Unoarumhi
- Caving in to creation: Interview with Romanian geologist, Dr Emil Silvestru
- ‘He made the stars also’: Interview with Creationist Astronomer, Dr Danny Faulkner
- It doesn’t take a rocket scientist … An interview with missile researcher Joe Sebeny
- Bird evolution flies out the window: Carl Wieland talks with anatomist [Retired 2000] Professor David Menton, who reveals some exciting new thoughts on that controversial ‘early bird’, Archaeopteryx
- Review of Lee Spetner’s book Not By Chance!
- Beetle bloopers: Even a defect can be an advantage sometimes
- The evolution train’s a-comin’ (Sorry, a-goin’—in the wrong direction)
- Speedy species surprise: The rapid appearance today, of new varieties of fish, lizards, and more defies evolutionary expectations … but fits perfectly with the Bible
- Superbugs not super after all (antibiotic resistance)
- Your appendix … it’s there for a reason
- Radiometric dating breakthroughs
- Furry little humans?
- Bears across the world …
- A Beatle’s search for God?
- ‘Hanging Loose’: What should we defend?
- Living for 900 years (available in Spanish)
- Living (and eating) like a caveman?
- Our brain: Do we use only a small portion of it?
- Message Mania—Deciphering the human genome: what does it mean?
- The lies of Lynchburg: How U.S. evolutionists taught the Nazis
- Aping humans
- Sensational dinosaur blood report!
- The ultimate machine: Interview with human anatomist Dr David Kaufmann
- Bridges and bones, girders and groans (available in Spanish)
- Has an ape learned to talk? (available in Spanish)
- Golden Numbers: Mysterious numbers in nature
- Probing the earth’s deep places
- Refuting Richard Dawkins on evolution
- Pollen Paradox
- Oil not always a ‘fossil fuel’
- The Sulawesi Bear Cuscus
Journal of Creation articles
- Elasmosaurus? No, you goose …
- Some bugs do grow bigger with higher oxygen
- A challenge to traditional cultural anthropology
- Fish scales in the Cambrian?
- Variation, information and the created kind
- Speciation Conference: Good news for creationists
- At last: A good mutation?
- Diseases on the Ark (Answering the critics)
- Decreased Lifespans: Have We Been Looking in the Right Place?
- The religious nature of evolution
- Lost World of Mutants Discovered
- Latin Lizards: Logos vs Lottery
- A shrinking date for ‘Eve’ (available in Spanish)
- Mirror, Mirror on the Wall—Which is the Strangest Theory of All?
- Why a fly can fly like a fly
- Review of Jonathan Weiner’s evolutionary book: The Beak of the Finch: Evolution in Real Time
- Review of Edward Larson’s evolutionary book: Summer of the Gods
- Review of Mark Noll’s compromising evangelical book: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
- Review of Richard Milton’s anti-Darwinist book: Shattering the Myths of Darwinism
- Review of Charles Officer and Jake Page’s book: The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy
- Cuddly cold-cures counter critics (koalas and their diets)
Other articles
Dinosaur soft tissue and related topics
- Evolutionist questions CMI report—Have red blood cells really been found in T. rex fossils?
- Still soft and stretchy: Dinosaur soft tissue find—a stunning rebuttal of ‘millions of years’
- Doubting doubts about the Squishosaur
- Dinosaur soft tissue and protein—even more confirmation! Mary Schweitzer announces even stronger evidence, this time from a duckbilled dino fossil, of even more proteins—and the same amazingly preserved vessel and cell structures as before.
- Fascinating four-chambered fossil find! (Medical X-ray scans reveal the structure of a fossilized dinosaur’s heart!)
- Dino proteins and blood vessels: are they a big deal?
- Radiocarbon in dino bones
- Fossil squid ink that still writes!
The Indonesian ‘Hobbit’ and other ape-man subjects
- Soggy dwarf bones: An Indonesian island reveals the existence of an extinct group of pygmy humans
- Hobbling the Hobbit? Indonesian scientists reject the hype about ‘Flores Man’
- Hobbit bone wars: Professor says new analysis on ‘stolen bones’ confirms ‘hobbit’ just a small, sick human
- Not another (yawn) ‘ape-man’
- Skull wars: new ‘Homo erectus’ skull in Ethiopia (available in Spanish)
- Homo erectus misunderstandings? (response to a critic of above article)
- Ethiopian ‘earliest humans’ find: A severe blow to the beliefs of Hugh Ross and similar ‘progressive creationist’ compromise views
- Redating Leakey’s Ethiopian human finds: more problems for compromise
- Toumai ‘ape-man’ suffers another blow
- The ‘Lucy Child’
- Speech, music—and Neandertals
- National Geographic unveils ‘Wilma’ the Neandertal lady
- Curved spines and pregnant primates
- Ardipithecus again
- Ark ‘hominids’
- Not the Flintstones—it’s the Denisovans
Environmentalism, Earth Day, Global Warming
- Hot Potatoes: Is there a ‘creationist view’ on genetically modified foods?
- Earth Day: Is Christianity to blame for environment problems?
- Global warming: what is ‘the creationist view’?
- ’The Day the Earth Stood Still’—a movie review
- Researcher speaks up on pressure to conform
- Running out of puff: Low oxygen may have medical benefits—implications for the ‘Vapor Canopy’ model
Vaccination, disease, medicine
- Human tails?
- Vaccines and Genesis
- Are vaccines biblical, safe or effective?
- Surrogate Mothering and IVF: are they biblical?
- Evolution—‘a science that’s leading to cures’?
- Is evolution really necessary for medical advances?
- SARS and evolution: A new virus—doesn’t that show evolution?
- More musings on our ‘useless’ appendix
- Adam and the immune system
- Swine flu—Is it evidence of evolution?
- Infections, prions and evolution
- Cryonics, the soul and immortality
- Wrangling over rib regeneration
Why are there bad things such as pain and death in the world?
- Waves of sadness: Tsunami terror raises age-old questions (available in Spanish)
- Evolution and social evil (available in Polish and Russian)
- The Haggard tragedy: ‘Christianity must be wrong because of all the hypocrites in the church!’
- The Darwin Anniversary
- The teeth of the patriarchs
Mutations and natural selection
- ‘Fast mouse evolution’ claims: Creationists should get excited
- Steve Jones and the ‘end of human evolution’
- Creationist article ‘saved my favourite cow’
- New eyes for blind cave fish?
- Breathtaking new frog surprise
- The Human Genome Project: how should we view it?
- National Geographic backs down—sort of!
- Blast from the Past (Prof. Blasius, director of leading natural history museum, denounced Darwin’s Origin)
- Bacterial mutations plus biblical geology
- Rapid tomcod ‘evolution by pollution’? Yeah, right … and wrong
- Poison-resistant tomcods and the meaning of ‘evolution’
- Is ‘devolution’ offensive to God?
Fossils
General/biblical
- Biblical inerrancy and the age of the earth
- The Lamb—and Genesis history—in Scripture
- Scientific ‘fact’, the Word of God and understanding
- Arguing about authority
- Are women genetically superior to men?
- Arguing about authority
- The ‘Hong Kong ark’ fiasco
- Being prepared—facing the tough questions
- The Year the Water Dragon Roared
- Is evolution to blame?
- Is Christianity ‘for whites only’?
- Creation articles stir deep thinking
- Noah’s Ark, or … what?
- The (long) road to Indonesia
- Bring on the hecklers?
- Could Adam and Eve have given rise to all the ‘races’?
- Does the universe need a cause?
- 6,000 years of biblical history: Questions and answers
- Biblical vs evolutionary perspectives on attraction
- Has the universe always existed?
Human brain
- Brain chemistry and the fate of the personality after death
- The brain—brainier than believed before
- Robots will not take over the world
Origin of life, Cosmology
- Physicist’s ‘breakthrough’ on the origin of life: can thermodynamics of heat dissipation explain chemical evolution?
- Life from space? Unlikely … Let’s wait and see
- Huff and Bluff: Can ‘quantum magic’ save chemical evolution?
- Speed of light slowing down after all?
- A new age of quantum madness
- It’s about time: Secular researchers agree: creationist helps develop the most precise clocks in the universe
- Infinity through dark glasses
Importance of biblical creation plus miscellaneous creation topics
- Creation—the ‘dealbreaker’ for today’s generation
- Why we do what we do
- Butterfly tactics and the spiritual battle
- Death—and victory
- Defending young earth is not biblical?
- ‘I’m a Christian, but the Bible’s all stories … ’
- Follow the leader(s) …
- Creation evangelism
- Same data, different interpretations?
- How do we know God created nature?
- CMI booklet reflects ‘stubbornness and arrogance’ (?)
- Apartheid, racism, and biology
- The Bible and interracial marriage
- Aboriginal cannibalism and our One Human Family
- Immigration, culture, and Christ
- CMI’s views on the Intelligent Design Movement
- Dawkins and Eugenics: A leading high priest of evolution reveals its ugly side
- Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies and Genesis 1
- Animals and Auschwitz!
- Creation among the coconut palms
- Helping the Needy—with Creation?
- The launch of Creation Ministries International—South Africa
- Evolution’s evangelist
- Why is theistic evolution so problematic?
- Linking and feeding
- Sound bites vs sound science
- Loving the Bible too much?
- Caged lions And the young generation in the church
- Conversions in the land of the rising sun
- ‘Go to hell, creationists!’
- The Darwin Anniversary
- World atheist convention rejects Australian creationist debate challenge
- The Wisdom of God: Jesus or a created thing?
- Avatar and the ‘new’ evolutionary religion: A movie review
- Errors in the Bible?
- Polarized reaction to atheists’ refusal to debate CMI
- Justifying apostasy: A formerly well-known Australian pastor goes off the rails—and tries to persuade others to follow. A review of From Faith to Reason, by Brian Baker.
- Bald heads and talking snakes
- Blind fish, island immigrants and hairy babies
- Big bangs on the earth-or big belches? New discoveries and new theories put a different spin on impact-extinction links
- Swedish trees older than the universe?
- Jesus: imposter or Israel’s God?
- Here there be dragons … but no centaurs
- The ‘giant footprint’ of South Africa
- Ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies and Genesis 1
- What a relief …
- Childbirth pains and human consciousness
- Are Christians ‘atheists’ with respect to other religions?
- Of missing gaps and magic bullets
- Science, history, and the Bible
- The uniformity of natural law
The article Carl Wieland retires by Gary Bates and Jonathan Sarfati was written as a tribute.
See this interview from Creation magazine, Creation pioneer looks back
References and notes
- This refers to biblical creation specifically, not to just being ‘anti-evolution’, as was the earlier Evolution Protest Movement, whose criteria were broad enough to include non-trinitarian cult adherents, gap theorists, etc. Return to text.
- Ken Ham and John Mackay, operating then as Creation Science Educational Media Services and Creation Science Supplies. Return to text.
- The subject of his book Beyond the Shadows. Return to text.
- The Brisbane-based ministry CSF had seconded Ken Ham to the US in 1986, prior to Carl’s being asked to come on board. And in 1996, after 10 years with ICR and with help, which included a substantial cash grant from the Australian ministry, a US ministry was established in Kentucky which soon became Answers in Genesis. The Australian parent body later followed suit with a name change. Cooperation of mutual benefit continued apace, with Carl serving on the Board of AiG-USA. A parting of the ways eventually led in 2006 to the Australian ministry and the bulk of the then AiG offices in other countries changing their names to Creation Ministries International. With the loss of any US subscriber support base, CMI established a new US sister ministry in Atlanta, Georgia, eventually led by Gary Bates, formerly Carl’s 2-i-c in Australia. Return to text.
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