American Spectator

Modern Man’s “Red Herring”

Published by Papa Giorgio

ORIGINALLY POSTED IN JANUARY OF 2014

Jump to Bradley Monton’s Isaac Newton and the methodological method.

... LAWS!

  • Newton is a leading contributor to the scientific worldview, and yet he does not bind himself by the assumption of uninterruptible natural law ~ Bradley Monton
  • The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern ~ CS Lewis
  • Meredith’s whole argument about ID, miracles, and the so-called “breaking” of natural laws is nothing but a red herring. Again, the real issue is about the nature of causation not about natural law ~ Michael Flannery

In the most recent issue of FIRST THINGS (February 2014), Stephen Meredith attempted to critique Intelligent Design theory, by, essentially creating straw-men arguments or by debating issues others have dealt with well.

Later in this “short” review of topics that caught my critical eye, we will see the similar vein John Derbyshire takes in the January/February (2014) issue of The American Spectator in comparing ID to Islam.

AT LEAST American Spectator had the foresight to have an alternative view side-by-side, so you get to see what an erudite, idea filled presentation looks like (Stephen Meyer’s)…

— a portion of which I will publish at the bottom from a magazine I recommend highly —

…alongside another filled with fallacious arguments, non-sequiturs, and a lack of intelligence in laying out a positive case (John Derbyshire).

First, however, my mind went immediately to David Hume and CS Lewis after reading the following from Stephen Meredith in the First Things article:

If God is omnipotent—that is, can do all that is possible without self-contradiction—what is the re­lationship between God and causality? Is there any causality outside an omnipotent God? Or is anything in nature that seems to act as an efficient cause only carrying out the causality of God, with no agency of its own? These questions get to the heart of a philosophical problem posed by Intelligent Design: It supposes that natural law, which is the basis for science, operates most of the time but is periodically suspended, as in the Cambrian “explosion” and the origin of life itself.
As well as reading John Derbyshire in the American Spectator article:
…IT IS THE religious aspect that causes most scientists to shy away from ID. Not that scientists all hate God. Many of them are devout.…

…The metaphysics of ID is occasionalist. It holds, to abbreviate the doctrine rather drasti­cally, that causation is an illusion; that every­thing happens because God makes it happen.

Why does ice float on water? Aristotle thought it was a matter of shape (see On the Heavens, IV.6). Science says it’s because ice is less dense than water. The occasionalist says it’s because God wills it so….

…But: Ice floats on water because God wills it so? Oh.

This straw-man built up by Mr. Derbyshire seems likewise heavily influenced by Hume, who said in his well known essay entitled, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the following:
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined  … It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.”

(David Hume: The Essential Philosophical Works, eBook, [2012], pages 662 and 663)

JOHN LENNOX breaks down Hume’s argument thus:
A. Argument from the uniformity of nature:

1. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature
2. These laws have been established by ‘firm and unalterable’ experience
3. Therefore, the argument against miracle is as good as any argument from experience can be

B.  Argument from the uniformity of experience:

1. Unusual, yet frequently observed, events are not miracles – like a healthy person suddenly dropping dead
2. A resurrection would be a miracle because it has never been observed anywhere at any time
3. There is uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise it would not be called miraculous

Dr. Lennox continues:

Are miracles ‘violations of the laws of nature’

Argument 1.    Hume says that accounts of miracles ‘are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations’ (op.cit. p.79).

Fallacy. In order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something which is abnormal, if you do not know what is normal. Example: 1) virgin conception of Jesus; 2) conception of John the Baptist.

Argument 2.    Now that we know the laws of nature, belief in miracles is impossible.

Fallacy. The danger of confusion between legal and scientific use of word law. Why it is inaccurate and misleading to say that miracles ‘violate’ the laws of nature. It is rather, that God feeds new events into the system from time to time. There is no alteration to or suspension of the laws themselves.   

‘If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point.  Immediately all nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born’ (C.S Lewis, Miracles. p.63).

Continuing with CS Lewis and his relating to us this “red herring” of naturalism in rejecting the miraculous/metaphysical aspects of reality:
The first Red Herring is this. Any day you may hear a man (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I don’t believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they didn’t know the laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility.”

By the “laws of Nature” such a man means, I think, the ob­served course of Nature. If he means anything more than that he is not the plain man I take him for but a philosophic Natu­ralist and will be dealt with in the next chapter. The man I have in view believes that mere experience (and specially those artificially contrived experiences which we call Exper­iments) can tell us what regularly happens in Nature. And he finks that what we have discovered excludes the possibility of Miracle. This is a confusion of mind.

Granted that miracles can occur, it is, of course, for experi­ence to say whether one has done so on any given occasion. But mere experience, even if prolonged for a million years, cannot tell us whether the thing is possible. Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not deny­ing that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. A miracle is by definition an exception.

[….]

The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people “in olden times” believed in them “because they didn’t know the laws of Nature.” Thus you will hear people say, “The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.” Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancee was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of na­ture women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St. Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point—that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, “The thing is scientifically impossible,” he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supple­mented by something from beyond nature. When St. Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancee’s pregnancy was due not to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature. All records

[….]

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. If I knock out my pipe I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonises it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they ap­ply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Imme­diately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous sper­matozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Preg­nancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the new­comer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be di­gested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.

[….]

A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results fol­low according to Natural law. In the forward direction (i.e. during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole.

CS Lewis, Miracles (New York, NY: Touchstone Publishers, 1996), 62-63, 64-65, 80-81, 81-82.

This is mainly the point Michael Flannery makes near the end of this portion of his critique of the First Things article, entitled: “Writing in First Things, Stephen Meredith Offers Confusion in the Guise of Critique“:

…He [Stephen Meredith]  has

1) a faulty view of ID’s relationship to nature, miracles, and the supernatural;

2) no clear definition of what ID really is; and

3) an erroneous view of much of the history related to ID, evolution, and theology.

In company with John Derbyshire, Meredith, insists that ID proponents are “occasionalists,” holding to a particular theological understanding of causation. As occasionalists they do “not credit natural or physical law with enough causal power to enact evolution on its own.” Instead they “educe supernatural causes to do most of the heavy lifting in worldly events.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding. ID does not require the “breaking” of natural law or the notion that a natural law would have done X but instead Y happened. As William A. Dembski has pointed out, ID doesn’t need this “counterfactual substitution.” People act, for example, as intelligent agents not by “breaking” or “suspending” natural laws but by arranging or front-loading laws to suite particular ends (The Design Revolution, pp. 181-182). Meredith seems to argue that ID is incongruous with modern science because it invokes miracles and yields to supernatural causes. Here Meredith is making an old mistake, called out again by Dembski: “The contrast between natural law and supernatural causes is the wrong contrast. The proper contrast is between undirected natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other” (p. 189).

Furthermore, Meredith’s concern regarding miracles contravening natural laws seems to suggest a position of tension between the miraculous and science itself. However, this is not a scientific position. It is a philosophical one suggestive of methodological naturalism. “Scientists, as scientists,” Norman Geisler explains, “need not be so narrow as to believe that nothing can ever count as a miracle. All a scientist needs to hold is the premise that every event has a cause and that the observable universe operates in an orderly way” (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 467). Meredith’s whole argument about ID, miracles, and the so-called “breaking” of natural laws is nothing but a red herring. Again, the real issue is about the nature of causation not about natural law…

Even atheist philosophers refute the idea that to incorporate a theistic view into nature is NOT anti-science, and works within the scientific paradigm:

FOLLOWING SUPERNATURALISM MAKES THE SCIENTIST’S TASK TOO EASY

Here’s the first of Pennock’s arguments against methodological naturalism that I’ll consider:

allowing appeal to supernatural powers in science would make the scientist’s task too easy, because one would always be able to call upon the gods for quick theoretical assistance…. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.

This argument strikes me as unfair. Consider a particular empirical phenomenon, like a chemical reaction, and imagine that scientists are trying to figure out why the reaction happened. Pennock would say that scientists who allow appeal to supernatural powers would have a ready-made answer: God did it. While it may be that that’s the only true explanation that can be given, a good scientist-including a good theistic scientist—would wonder whether there’s more to be said. Even if God were ultimately the cause of the reaction, one would still wonder if the proximate cause is a result of the chemicals that went into the reaction, and a good scientist—even a good theistic scientist—would investigate whether such a naturalistic account could be given.

To drive the point home, an analogy might be helpful. With the advent of quantum mechanics, scientists have become comfortable with indeterministic events. For example, when asked why a particular radioactive atom decayed at the exact time that it did, most physicists would say that there’s no reason it decayed at that particular time; it was just an indeterministic event!’ One could imagine an opponent of indeterminism giving an argument that’s analogous to Pennock’s:

allowing appeal to indeterministic processes in science would make the scientist’s task too easy, because one would always be able to call upon chance for quick theoretical assistance…. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.

It is certainly possible that, for every event that happens, scientists could simply say “that’s the result of an indeterministic chancy process; there’s no further explanation for why the event happened that way.” But this would clearly be doing bad science: just because the option of appealing to indeterminism is there, it doesn’t follow that the option should always be used. The same holds for the option of appealing to supernatural powers.

As further evidence against Pennock, it’s worth pointing out that prominent scientists in the past have appealed to supernatural powers, without using them as a ready-made answer for everything. Newton is a good example of this—he is a devout theist, in addition to being a great scientist, and he thinks that God sometimes intervenes in the world. Pennock falsely implies that this is not the case:

God may have underwritten the active principles that govern the world described in [Newton’s] Principia and the Opticks, but He did not interrupt any of the equations or regularities therein. Johnson and other creationists who want to dismiss methodological naturalism would do well to consult Newton’s own rules of reasoning….

But in fact, Newton does not endorse methodological naturalism. In his Opticks, Newton claims that God sometimes intervenes in the world. Specifically, Newton thinks that, according to his laws of motion, the orbits of planets in our solar system are not stable over long periods of time, and his solution to this problem is to postulate that God occasionally adjusts the motions of the planets so as to ensure the continued stability of their orbits. Here’s a relevant passage from Newton. (It’s not completely obvious that Newton is saying that God will intervene but my interpretation is the standard one.)

God in the Beginning form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles … it became him who created them to set them in order. And if he did so, it’s unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature; though being once form’d, it may continue by those Laws for many Ages. For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation…. [God is] able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the Parts of the Universe….

A scientist who writes this way does not sound like a scientist who is following methodological naturalism.

It’s worth noting that some contemporaries of Newton took issue with his view of God occasionally intervening in the universe. For example, Leibniz writes:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to them, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time; otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”

Note, though, that Leibniz also thought that God intervened in the world:

I hold that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace.

Later investigation revealed that in fact planetary orbits are more stable than Newton thought, so Newton’s appeal to supernatural powers wasn’t needed. But the key point is that Newton is willing to appeal to supernatural powers, without using the appeal to supernatural powers as a ready-made answer for everything.

Pennock says that “Without the binding assumption of uninterruptible natural law there would be absolute chaos in the scientific worldview.” Newton’s own approach to physics provides a good counterexample to this—Newton is a leading contributor to the scientific worldview, and yet he does not bind himself by the assumption of uninterruptible natural law.

Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, 2009), 62-64.

How one can go from the above rational positions by a Christian (CS Lewis), and an atheist (Bradley Monton), to comparing floating ice as an unnatural event held in situ by God’s continuous miraculous intervention. And then compare this straw-man to the Islamic understanding of extreme fideistic occasionalism?

The claim that there is a God raises metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and existence. In general, it can be said that there is not one concept of God but many, even among monotheistic traditions. The Abrahamic religions are theistic; God is both the creator of the world and the one who sustains it. Theism, with its equal stress on divine transcendence of the universe and immanence within it, constitutes a somewhat uneasy conceptual midpoint between deism and pantheism. Deist conceptions of the divine see God as the creator of a universe that continues to exist, without his intervention, under the physical impulses that he first imparted to it. In pantheism, God is identified with the universe as a whole. Theism itself has numerous subvarieties, such as occasionalism, which holds that the only real cause in the universe is God; thus, all other causes are simply signs of coincidence and conjunction between kinds of events occurring within the created order. For example, heat is not what causes the water in a teakettle to boil but is simply what uniformly occurs before the water boils. God himself is the cause of the boiling.

An important object of metaphysical reflection is God’s nature, or the properties of that nature. Is God simple or complex? If omniscience, omnipotence, and beauty are part of the divine perfection, what exactly are these properties? Is timeless eternity part of God’s perfection? Can an omnipotent being will that there be a four-sided triangle or change the past? Does an omniscient being know the future actions of free agents? (If so, how can they be free?) Does an omniscient being who is timelessly eternal know what time it is now?

(HISTORY OF RELIGION)

Nor do Christians suspend belief or do not question their own understanding or nature’s causes for events, like Islam has, historically:
We humans have an inner balance with which we weigh good and evil. This balance, in Muslims stopped working. The indicator is stuck on zero. Muhammad’s companions could no longer register right and wrong. Because it’s hard to envision how a human being could be this ruthless, they persuaded themselves that he must be from God. As for why this god is so demonic, they fooled themselves with the lies that he told them. He told them that it is not up to man to question God. This absurd explanation satisfied his benighted followers. They resorted to fideism and argued that reason is irrelevant to religious belief. The great Imam Ghazali (1058 – 1111) said: “Where the claims of reason come into conflict with revelation, reason must yield to revelation.” A similar thesis in defense of foolishness is presented by Paul in 1 Cor. 1:20-25 where he argues “the foolishness of God is wiser than (the wisdom of) men”. The statement “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd), often attributed to Tertullian, is based on this passage of Paul. In DCC 5 he said: “The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.” Upon this belief in absurdity fideism is founded and it is the position that has been adopted by Muslims. This fideistic attitude allowed the early believers to abandon reason and accept whatever Muhammad did, even his blatant crimes, without questioning him.

(WHY CAN’T ISLAM BE REFORMED?)

And when something “unnatural” is introduced into nature, this does not interfere one iota with science or the natural order of events, causality, or the like. As CS Lewis said many years ago, this is a Red Herring. Not to mention, that in reality, neo-Darwinian thinking IS A METAPHYSICAL PREMISE at its core. So often times it is the kettle calling the pot… well, you know.

IN a great presentation from True U. (Focus on the Family store | Discovery Institute), Dr. Stephen Meyer shows how — by using the supposition from Hinduism that the earth sits atop a turtle used by Stephen Hawking’s — the materialist position differs little from this religious supposition. This video is to replace an old, defunct, MRCTV video uploaded early 2014, but here today (11/4/2023). I added a William Provine clip from his 1994 debate with Phillip Johnson at Stanford. The entire debate can be see HERE.

“We must ask first whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is scientific or pseudoscientific …. Taking the first part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the history of life is a single process of species-splitting and progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England. This part of the theory is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and so not subject to test.”

Colin Patterson [1978] (Dr. Patterson was Senior Principal Scientific Officer of the Paleontology Department of the British Museum of Natural History in London.)

People think evolution is “science proper.” It is not, it is both a historical science and a [philosophical] presupposition in its “neo-Darwinian” form. The presupposition that removes it from “science proper and moves it into “scientism” is explained by an atheist philosopher:
If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism – the philosophical position that restricts all explanations in science to naturalistic explanations – it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility.

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design ~ Apologetics315 h/t

In other words, the guy most credited in getting us to the moon used science to get us there, but was a young earth creationist. His view on “origins” (origin science) is separate from his working science. Two categories.

Likewise one of the most celebrated pediatric surgeons in the world, whom a movie was made after, “Gifted Hands,” is a young earth creationist. And the inventor of the MRI, a machine that diagnosed my M.S., is also a young earth creationist.

Evolutionary Darwinism is first and foremost an “historical science” that has many presuppositions that precede it, making it a metaphysical belief, a philosophy, as virulent anti-creationist philosopher of science, Michael Ruse explains:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

Michael Ruse, “Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians,” National Post (May 13, 2000), p. B-3. (Via ICR)

….Nevertheless, there is a second, and arguably deeper, mystery associated with the Cambrian explosion: the mystery of how the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutation could have given rise to all these fundamentally new forms of animal life, and done so quickly enough to account for the pattern in the fossil record. That question became acute in the second half of the twentieth century as biologists learned more about what it takes to build an animal.

In 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery, namely, its ability to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions—the information—for building the crucial protein molecules that the cell needs to survive. Just as English letters may convey a particular message depending on their arrangement, so too do certain sequences of chemical bases along the spine of a DNA molecule convey precise information. As Richard Dawkins has acknowledged, “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or as Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”

The Cambrian period is marked by an explosion of new animals exemplifying new body plans. But building new animal body plans requires new organs, tissues, and cell types. And new cell types require many kinds of specialized or dedicated proteins (e.g., animals with gut cells require new digestive enzymes). But building each protein requires genetic information stored on the DNA molecule. Thus, building new animals with distinctive new body plans requires, at the very least, vast amounts of new genetic information. Whatever happened during the Cambrian not only represented an explosion of new biological form, but it also required an explosion of new biological information.

Is it plausible that the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA could produce the highly specificarrangements of bases in DNA necessary to generate the protein building blocks of new cell types and novel forms of life? 

According to neo-Darwinian theory, new genetic information arises first as random mutations occur in the DNA of existing organisms. When mutations arise that confer a survival advantage, the resulting genetic changes are passed on to the next generation. As such changes accumulate, the features of a population change over time. Nevertheless, natural selection can only “select” what random mutations first generate. Thus the neo-Darwinian mechanism faces a kind of needle-in-the-haystack problem—or what mathematicians call a “combinatorial” problem. The term “combinatorial” refers to the number of possible ways that a set of objects can be arranged or combined. Many simple bike locks, for example, have four dials with 10 digits on each dial. A bike thief encountering one of these locks faces a combinatorial problem because there are 10 × 10 × 10 × 10, or 10,000 possible combinations and only one that will open the lock. A random search is unlikely to yield the correct combination unless the thief has plenty of time.

Similarly, it is extremely difficult to assemble a new information-bearing gene or protein by the natural selection/random mutation process because of the sheer number of possible sequences. As the length of the required gene or protein grows, the number of possible base or amino-acid sequences of that length grows exponentially. 

Here’s an illustration that may help make the problem clear. Imagine that we encounter a committed bike thief who is willing to search the “sequence space” of possible bike combinations at a rate of about one new combination per two seconds. If our hypothetical bike thief had three hours and took no breaks he could generate more than half (about 5,400) of the 10,000 total combinations of a four-dial lock. In that case, the probability that he will stumble upon the right combination exceeds the probability that he will fail. More likely than not, he will open the lock by chance.

But now consider another case. If that thief with the same limited three hour time period available to him confronted a lock with ten dials and ten digits per dial (a lock with ten billion possible combinations) he would now have time only to explore a small fraction of the possible combinations—5,400 of ten billion—far fewer than half. In this case, it would be much more likely than not that he would fail to open the lock by chance.

These examples suggest that the ultimate probability of the success of a random search—and the plausibility of any hypothesis that affirms the success of such a search—depends upon both the size of the space that needs to be searched and the number of opportunities available to search it. 

In Darwin’s Doubt, I show that the number of possible DNA and amino acid sequences that need to be searched by the evolutionary process dwarfs the time available for such a search—even taking into account evolutionary deep time. Molecular biologists have long understood that the size of the “sequence space” of possible nucleotide bases and amino acids (the number of possible combinations) is extremely large. Moreover, recent experiments in molecular biology and protein science have established that functional genes and proteins are extremely rare within these huge combinatorial spaces of possible arrangements. There are vastly more ways of arranging nucleotide bases that result in non-functional sequences of DNA, and vastly more ways of arranging amino acids that result in non-functional amino-acid chains, than there are corresponding functionalgenes or proteins. One recent experimentally derived estimate places that ratio—the size of the haystack in relation to the needle—at 1077non-functional sequences for every functional gene or protein. (There are only something like 1065 atoms in our galaxy.)

All this suggests that the mutation and selection mechanism would only have enough time in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth to generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched. Thus, the neo-Darwinian mechanism, with its reliance on random mutation, is much more likely to fail than to succeed in generating even a single new gene or protein in the known history of life on earth. In other words, the neo-Darwinian mechanism is not an adequate mechanism to generate the information necessary to produce even a single new protein, let alone a whole new Cambrian animal….

[….]

Of course, many scientists dismiss intelligent design as “religion masquerading as science.” But the case for intelligent design is not based upon religious or scriptural authority. Instead it is based upon scientific evidence and the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself used in the Origin of Species. 

In rejecting the theory as unscientific by definition, evolutionary biologists reveal a deep a priori commitment to methodological naturalism—the idea that scientists must limit themselves to materialistic explanations for all things. Yet, we know from experience that certain types of events and structures—in particular, information-rich structures—invariably arise from minds or personal agents. Indeed, no thinking person would insist that the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, for example, were produced by strictly materialistic forces such as wind and erosion. Yet, by insisting that all events in the history of life must be explained by reference to strictly materialistic processes evolutionary biologists preclude consideration of a designing intelligence in the history of life, regardless of what the evidence might indicate. 

This commitment to a wholly materialistic account of the origins of life also helps to explain the reluctance to criticize the Darwinian theory publicly. Many evolutionary biologists fear that if they do so they will aid and abet the case for intelligent design—a theory they disdain as inherently unscientific. Those of us who support the theory of intelligent design advocate a more open approach to scientific investigation. Not only do we think the public has a right to know about the problems with evolutionary theory, we also think that the rules of science should allow scientists to “follow the evidence wherever it leads”—even if it leads to conclusions that raise deep and unwelcome metaphysical questions.

(AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

Can you believe in God and science at the same time? Many claim that belief in religion is at odds with “the science” of today. But is that really true? In this five-part series, Stephen Meyer, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, attempts to answer this existential question.

Series “Broken Out”

  1. Are Religion and Science in Conflict? — Science and God | Does belief in God get in the way of science? The idea that science and religion are inevitably in conflict is a popular way of thinking today. But the history of science tells a different story.
  2. How Did the Universe Begin? — Science and God | Was the universe always here, or did it have a beginning? If so, how did it start? Mankind has debated these questions for centuries and has only recently begun to find some answers. And those answers may point to some even more intriguing conclusions.
  3. Aliens, the Multiverse, or God? — Science and God | Even staunch Darwinists have acknowledged that life in the universe displays an appearance of design, rather than being created out of random chance. If that’s true, where did that design come from? In other words, does a design require a designer?
  4. What Is Intelligent Design? — Science and God | Chances are if you’ve heard anything about intelligent design, you’ve heard that it’s faith-based, not science-based. Is that true? Or does modern science, in fact, point us in the direction of a designing intelligence?
  5. What’s Wrong with Atheism? — Science and God | Is there any meaning to life? Or is life nothing more than a cosmic accident? Scientific atheists claim the latter, but ironically, it’s science itself that suggests the former.

“Justice Shrugged” | Trump Indictments

Published by Papa Giorgio

I have some time on my hand [literally] to read a lot of articles due to an operation. One of the best I have come across yet is over at REAL CLEAR POLITICS, titled, “Justice Shrugged: The Persecution of Donald Trump” — which came via JJ Sefton’s “Morning Report.”

I will add some media before and link other articles worth your time —  after this…

                                    TURLEY                                                                  DERSHOWITZ

Here is the article:

Here’s what I dream of Donald Trump saying when he stands trial on bogus charges proffered by his political opponents: “I do not recognize this court’s right to try me … I do not recognize my action as a crime.”

Those are the fighting words of industrialist Hank Rearden when he was put on trial for ignoring an unjust law in Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.” Although the circumstances of the cases differ, Rearden is a perfect avatar of Donald Trump, as both larger-than-life men are persecuted by the justice system for seeking to pursue their own self-interest and for refusing to surrender to government oppression.

Self-interest is central to the Objectivist philosophy of Rand, who grew up in Russia and witnessed first-hand the oppression of free thought and free enterprise following the 1917 Communist revolution. Her masterpiece, “Atlas Shrugged,” is the ultimate roadmap to how American democracy can be subverted by leftist bureaucrats and a corrupt media to destroy some individuals and intimidate the rest.

In the novel, Rearden has created a unique metallic alloy that carries his own name. Rearden Metal is far superior to steel and was in high demand by contractors, but tyrannical government regulations prohibited Rearden from selling to customers of his own choice. He ignored the government’s warnings and sold to one of the few honest businessmen left in the country. That meant he had broken the law, and because of his stature and reputation for excellence, the government prosecuted him as a warning to others that they dare not pursue their own self-interest, too.

Rearden epitomizes the essence of individualism, striving to achieve his goals despite societal pressure. As an industrialist, he prioritizes his innovation and accomplishments, unapologetically pursuing personal success. His trial underscores the struggle between individual rights and the perceived interests of society, reflecting Rand’s championing of individualism.

Similarly, Trump’s refusal to accept the election results turns on his deep sense of individualistic ambition, his willingness to challenge societal norms, and his determination not to surrender his principles, even at the expense of public ridicule, political persecution, and now potentially years in prison. But you can’t view the 2020 election in a vacuum. Trump was no different than Rearden in fighting what he knows is a rigged system. For the preceding five years, Trump had been the victim of a series of vicious attacks by the Deep State and the media who never really accepted him as president. So Trump had no reason to accept the election results parroted by the same actors who had already tried to destroy him multiple times.

And now, two and a half years after the 2020 election, as Trump has a fighting chance of returning to the White House in the greatest political comeback in history, his enemies have come for him again, with three separate indictments and soon to be a fourth.

The four-count indictment most recently brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith is intended to make a victory in 2024 nearly impossible. The Deep State in this case represents the entrenched bureaucracy of the federal government as well as the individual states’ election officials. This is the same Deep State that gathered up 51 national security officials to sign a statement prior to the 2020 election that falsely claimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of Russian disinformation.” It had none of them. No wonder Trump was disinclined to accept their conclusions that the election was secure and fair. Trump sought to prove his concerns about the legitimacy of the 2020 election by pursuing a vigorous legal strategy as was guaranteed to him under the First Amendment’s right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice is determined to deny that right to Donald Trump, and by extension to the rest of us. You either agree with the government’s interpretation of election results or else you risk going to jail. The indictment brought against Trump acknowledges that everyone has a First Amendment right to speak their minds and even to “formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means,” but it then avers that Trump’s right to believe he won the election is abrogated by a string of court losses and equally pessimistic assessments from so-called experts.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the Department of Justice has overstepped. The four counts in the indictment are based on what prosecutor Jack Smith calls three conspiracies: “A conspiracy to defraud the United States” by seeking to stop the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021; “a conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified; and “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

INTERLUDE

RPT NOTE: Much like the Stalinist Court Trials, evidence typically allowed for a defendant to use was in fact not allowed: “The trials successfully eliminated the major real and potential political rivals and critics of Joseph Stalin.” In similar fashion, the J6 Committee “hearings” refused anyone  who would bring countering testimony or challenge their charges. And now any evidence that would have been available to Trump from those hearings was reportedly destroyed – that should have been kept per the law!

CONTINUING

All of these alleged conspiracies and the resulting four charges are directly related to the joint congressional session on Jan. 6, when the Electoral College votes were opened and debated to determine whether they should be counted. Moreover, when Jack Smith announced the indictment, he suggested that Trump was responsible for the riot that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on that day, yet none of the charges hold Trump responsible for the violence. Every charge in this dubious indictment could have been brought even if the protesters had marched “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol as Trump had requested. The charges in the indictment have nothing to do with the violence; they only relate to Trump’s insistence that he won the election, and that he would do whatever it takes to prove it.

In other words, these are not real crimes like insurrection or sedition; they are thought crimes. Smith’s “conspiracy” charges simply reflect that Trump consulted his lawyers to develop a legal strategy on how to right the wrong that he perceived. In its substance, from paragraphs 8 to 123, the indictment merely alleges over and over again that Trump refused to accept the conclusions of others that the election of Biden was legitimate, and that he had help from like-minded attorneys. How infuriating that must be to prosecutor Smith, who believes with all his heart that no one could doubt the veracity of what government officials (like him!) tell us.

But millions of us did doubt the official story of a Biden victory. In the weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020 election, I wrote about problems with the election on Nov. 6, Nov. 13, Nov. 23, Nov. 30, and Dec. 7. If I had been able to ensure that Trump had read those columns at RealClearPolitics, I might be under indictment for conspiracy now, too. Then on Jan. 2, 2021, I wrote a column called “Our Electoral Crisis: The Call of Conscience on Jan. 6.”

In that preview of the challenge of electoral votes from disputed states, I wrote, “There is no reason to expect that the Jan. 6 session of Congress will result in certification of President Trump as the victor of the 2020 election. Despite the extensive evidence of fraud that has been amassed, this vote will be an exercise in raw political power, not an expression of blind justice. Probably the best that Trump supporters can hope for is a fair hearing before the American people regarding the reason why doubts exist as to the legitimacy of Biden’s apparent victory.”

Because of the riot at the Capitol, even that small hope was dashed, as most of the congressional debate about fraudulent activity in swing states was canceled when the joint session resumed late in the evening. It is important to note that Trump was the political victim of Jan. 6, not its beneficiary. Because of the violence, he lost his last opportunity to have a public debate on the voting irregularities that made millions of us believe the election returns were compromised. Yet Jack Smith would have you believe that it was Trump’s plan all along to shut down the electoral count that day as part of a plan to overturn the results. It’s just a fairy tale told to Trump-hating liberals to make them feel better.

MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle summed up Smith’s theory of the case in a segment on “Morning Joe” the day after the indictment was unsealed. “It’s one thing to have beliefs. We all have beliefs,” Barnicle said. “Donald Trump had the belief that he won, and he can articulate it as long as he wants, but he does not have the right to transform that belief into illegal conduct.”

What that means is that we all have First Amendment rights to be wrong, but we do not have a right to persuade others that we are right. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the first step toward totalitarianism. What we are seeing in Jack Smith’s indictment is the attempt to criminalize what I would call “other thought,” the insistence that you will make up your own mind and pursue your own truth regardless of what the government tells you. This is an attempt to codify the suppression of ideas that we saw the Deep State impose on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in 2020. You have the right to think whatever you want, but as soon as you share thoughts that dispute the official narrative, you can be silenced, and in Trump’s case locked up in a federal penitentiary.

Well, he wouldn’t be the first person to be jailed for “other thought,” and you don’t have to turn to Russia or China for examples. How about Henry David Thoreau, who spent a brief time in jail in 1846 for protesting the Mexican-American War and wrote about his beliefs in “Civil Disobedience”?

“Any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one already,” Thoreau told us. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

That certainly will be true should the unthinkable happen and Jack Smith achieve his goal of imprisoning Trump. In a very real sense, the indictment is less an accusation against one man than a ham-handed attempt to enforce group-think on any Americans who resist the imperial decrees from Washington, D.C. Consider this passage from “Atlas Shrugged” in light of the hundreds of Jan. 6 convictions that turned ordinary Americans into felons:

“Did you really think we want those laws observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against … We’re after power and we mean it … There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Rearden, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”

One of the most striking parallels between the Trump and Rearden cases is the complicity of the mass media in promoting hatred for the defendants. The legacy press has been trying to destroy Trump for seven years now, starting with the Russia hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment hoax, the Trump taxes hoax, and the classified documents hoax. It didn’t matter what topic came up; the media turned it into another reason to hate Trump. Most recently, they have drummed up the “fake electors” narrative as proof that Trump intentionally tried to steal the election.

That is essentially the linchpin of Smith’s case. When Trump’s team put forward alternate electors on Dec. 14, 2020, they were following the entirely legal precedent that Democrat John F. Kennedy used successfully in the 1960 election, when Hawaii’s result was in doubt until after Dec. 14. The reason that date is so important is because the U.S. Constitution mandates that all electors must give their votes on the same day. If Trump’s lawyers were able to prove fraud after Dec. 14, but his electors had not voted on that day, then their votes would be lost forever.

Trump is an obstacle to the Deep State that seeks power over people, just as Hank Rearden was an obstacle to the economic tyranny of “Atlas Shrugged.” Rearden was not a person of quite the stature of Trump, but more of an Elon Musk – a self-made man of unthinkable wealth who didn’t follow anyone’s rules but his own. But that last quality is shared by all three men, and perhaps that more than anything is what has made them all targets.

Here’s how Rand described the media’s assault against Rearden as his trial began, and how their campaign to marginalize him had failed because the regular people oddly identified with the millionaire industrialist just as Trump gains popular strength with each new indictment thrown his way:

The crowd knew from the newspapers that he represented the evil of ruthless wealth; and … so they came to see him; evil, at least, did not have the stale hopelessness of a bromide which none believed and none dared to challenge. They looked at him without admiration – admiration was a feeling they had lost the capacity to experience, long ago; they looked with curiosity and with a dim sense of defiance against those who had told them that it was their duty to hate him.

That’s how the trial started, but by the time Rearden spoke in his own defense – or rather spoke to demolish the prosecution’s false claims – the crowd was in full support of Rearden in his battle against the nameless, faceless bureaucrats who had regulated the country into despair. When he turned to the crowd in the courtroom:

He saw faces that laughed in violent excitement, and faces that pleaded for help; he saw their silent despair breaking out into the open; he saw the same anger and indignation as his own, finding release in the wild defiance of their cheering; he saw the looks of admiration and the looks of hope.

As the crowd surged around him, he smiled in answer to their smiles, to the frantic tragic eagerness of their faces; there was a touch of sadness in his smile. “God bless you, Mr. Rearden!” said an old woman with a ragged shawl over her head. “Can’t you save us, Mr. Rearden? They’re eating us alive, and it’s no use fooling anybody about how it’s the rich that they’re after…”

It is just that same magical connection which happens between Trump and his supporters at a MAGA rally, and that is why Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and President Joe Biden want to put Trump behind bars. He gives people hope, and hope is dangerous when you have a plan to subjugate them. To succeed, tyranny needs willing victims, and Trump – like any Ayn Rand hero or heroine – fights back. That’s the true reason his enemies hate him.

“We fight like hell,” Trump said on Jan. 6, not in regard to violence but in regard to protecting our country from the thugs who would transform it into a dictatorship. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

That’s the fighting spirit which makes me know my dream of Trump rejecting the court’s authority, like Hank Rearden did, will never come to fruition. While it would have a hint of poetic justice, that’s not what Trump is after. He wants real justice, political justice, freedom for all, and that means he has to stand up, stand tall, stand firm. When he says that the government is coming through him to get to you, he’s not joking……

MORE READING

  • FBI Agent Lied Under Oath About Knowledge Of Hunter Biden Laptop, Talks With Facebook, Document Reveals (NEW YORK POST)
  • David Weiss: A Not So Special Counsel: The man behind the failed plea deal to protect Hunter Biden should not be leading the investigation into his misdeeds (AMERICAN SPECTATOR)
  • Donald Trump and 18 Co-Defendants Indicted on 41 Charges (BREITBART)
  • Georgia Indictment Charges Trump, Lawyers, Aides for Speech Violations, Nationwide ‘Conspiracy’ (BREITBART)
  • Trump J6 Judge Worked at Fusion GPS, Burisma Law Firm (NATIONAL POST)
  • Who will go to prison, Biden or Trump? It’s Hard To See A Graceful Exit From The Current Mess (WASHINGTON TIMES)
  • Biden Censors Battered — Expect An Epic Supreme Court Showdown (NEW YORK POST)
  • Why Wouldn’t Americans See Politics in Trump Indictments? It’s Transparently Clear They Will Influence The 2024 Election (FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE)
  • The Illusion of Scandal: How Washington is Attempting to Dismiss $20 Million as an Illusion (JONATHAN TURLEY)

 

A Must Read AMERICAN SPECTATOR Excerpt… BAM!

Published by Papa Giorgio
The Impeachment That Killed Americans: Instead of dealing with the virus, Dems focused on getting Trump.

The lethal price tag for the months of the Impeach Trump obsession by Democrats is now in — and rising.

Over there at Breitbart, Joel Pollak, one of the serious journalists of the day, has put together this telling timeline that shows exactly what Democrats were doing as the coronavirus loomed. Here’s the link to Joel’s story — and here’s his very revealing timeline:

  • January 11: Chinese state media report the first known death from an illness originating in the Wuhan market.
  • January 15: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds a vote to send articles of impeachment to the Senate. Pelosi and House Democrats celebrate the “solemn” occasion with a signing ceremony, using commemorative pens.
  • January 21: The first person with coronavirus arrives in the United States from China, where he had been in Wuhan.
  • January 23: The House impeachment managers make their opening arguments for removing President Trump.
  • January 23: China closes off the city of Wuhan completely to slow the spread of coronavirus to the rest of China.
  • January 30: Senators begin asking two days of questions of both sides in the president’s impeachment trial.
  • January 30: The World Health Organization declares a global health emergency as coronavirus continues to spread.
  • January 31: The Senate holds a vote on whether to allow further witnesses and documents in the impeachment trial.
  • January 31: President Trump declares a national health emergency and imposes a ban on travel to and from China. Former Vice President Joe Biden calls Trump’s decision “hysterical xenophobia … and fear-mongering.”
  • February 2: The first death from coronavirus outside China is reported in the Philippines.
  • February 3: House impeachment managers begin closing arguments, calling Trump a threat to national security.
  • February 4: President Trump talks about coronavirus in his State of the Union address; Pelosi rips up every page.
  • February 5: The Senate votes to acquit President Trump on both articles of impeachment, 52-48 and 53-47.
  • February 5: House Democrats finally take up coronavirus in the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia.

And there, in black and white, is exactly the problem. Republicans at the time warned that Democrats were so mindlessly obsessed with impeachment that other issues were being routinely ignored. Immigration, trade, health care, and on and on went the list of concerns that were being ignored in favor of the impeachment obsession.

But there was another issue Democrats were ignoring while they spent their time impeaching the president. A very, very big issue that involved life or death.

The American Spectator’s Dov Fischer took it head on right here. His title:

The Real Threat to Our Democracy During Coronavirus

Pelosi, Schiff & Co. were too busy dragging the country through impeachment to pay attention to ominous developments in Asia.

Dov Fischer nailed it exactly.

Yes, indeed, while all that impeachment obsession was happening, the coronavirus was making its debut. Note well in the Pollak timeline this date — January 11, the day that “Chinese state media report the first known death from an illness originating in the Wuhan market.” And with that virus news out there, a mere four days later, Speaker Pelosi focuses not on that — but on holding the House vote that impeaches the president, followed by an elaborately staged spectacle in which she signs her name to the documents with a stash of 30 gold pens resting on a silver tray. Then, in another elaborately staged spectacle, she formally parades the articles through the halls of the Capitol to deliver them to the Senate.

Then there is January 21, a full 10 days after news of the virus has gone public — and the first known person who had been in Wuhan arrives in America. Carrying the virus. Two days later Pollak notes this:

  • January 23: The House impeachment managers make their opening arguments for removing President Trump.
  • January 23: China closes off the city of Wuhan completely to slow the spread of coronavirus to the rest of China.

And not to be forgotten: on January 31, President Trump announced this, per the Washington Post:

Trump administration announces mandatory quarantines in response to coronavirus

Announcement comes as U.S. airlines cancel flights to China amid growing fears

Mere days later, on February 4, President Trump delivered his State of the Union address, in which he said this:

Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases. We are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the coronavirus outbreak in China. My administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.

And the reaction to that speech from the Pelosi Democrats?

Famously, when the president reached the end of his speech, Speaker Nancy Pelosi ostentatiously stood and ripped the speech in half. That doesn’t count the Democrat members who made a point of walking out on the speech or labeling it, as Pelosi did, a “pack of lies.”….

(READ IT ALL)

Scientific Explanations, To Be True Need Also To Be Falsifiable

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Post’s thumbnail picture is of Karl Popper) Even though I use the neo-Darwinian theory as my prime example, this applies just as readily to the conspiracy theories revolving around the New World Order, and the like. You can visit my “Conspiracy Mantras” page to go to some of my posts on the various topics, there.

“Darwinian explanations for such things are often too supple: Natural selection makes humans self-centered and aggressive—except when it makes them altruistic and peaceable. Or natural selection produces virile men who eagerly spread their seed—except when it prefers men who are faithful protectors and providers. When an explanation is so supple that it can explain any behavior, it is difficult to test it experimentally, much less use it as a catalyst for scientific discovery.”

Skell, P.S., Why do we invoke Darwin? Evolutionary theory contributes little to experimental biology, The Scientist 19(16):10, 2005; quoted by Jonathan Sarfati in Creation 36(4):1 September 2014.

Charles “The Hammer” Krauthammer makes this point in regards to the Climate Change frenzy:

Here are some examples (via the CORBETT REPORT)

The following is one of the reasons I reject Darwinian evolution (and, frankly, conspiracy theories like WTC-7 being a conspiracy), and any scientist would reject anything for.

“Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”

K.R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London, England: Hutchinson & Co, 1959), 316; found in, Werner Gitt, Did God Use Evolution? Observations from a Scientist of Faith (Portland, OR: Master Books, 2006), 11. (See also: SCIENCE AS FALSIFICATION)

That is to say, if a theory explains everything it explains nothing:

“The underlying problem is that a key Darwinian term is not defined. Darwinism supposedly explains how organisms become more ‘fit,’ or better adapted to their environment. But fitness is not and cannot be defined except in terms of existence. If an animal exists, it is ‘fit’ (otherwise it wouldn’t exist). It is not possible to specify all the useful parts of that animal in order to give an exhaustive causal account of fitness. [I will add here that there is no way to quantify those unknowable animal parts in regards to the many aspects that nature could or would impose on all those parts.] If an organism possesses features that appears on the surface to be an inconvenient – such as the peacock’s tail or the top-heavy antlers of a stag – the existence of stags and peacocks proves that these animals are in fact fit.

So the Darwinian theory is not falsifiable by any observation. It ‘explains’ everything, and therefore nothing. It barely qualifies as a scientific theory for that reason….

The truth is that Darwinism is so shapeless that it can be enlisted is support of any cause whatsoever…. Darwinism has over the years been championed by eugenicists, social Darwinists, racialists, free-market economists, liberals galore, Wilsonian progressives, and National Socialists, to give only a partial list. Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, Communists and libertarians, and almost anyone in between, have at times found Darwinism to their liking.”

The above is from an article by Tom Bethell in The American Spectator (magazine), July/August 2007, pp. 44-46.

Another Quote:

DARWIN CONCEIVED OF EVOLUTION in terms of small variations among organisms, variations which by a process of accretion allow one species to change continuously into another. This suggests a view in which living creatures are spread out smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities, like colors merging imperceptibly in a color chart.

Life, however, is absolutely nothing like this. Wherever one looks there is singularity, quirkiness, oddness, defiant individuality, and just plain weirdness. The male redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti), for example, is often consumed during copulation. Such is sexual cannibalism the result, biologists have long assumed, of “predatory females overcoming the defenses of weaker males.” But it now appears that among Latrodectus hasselti, the male is complicit in his own consump­tion. Having achieved intromission, this schnook performs a character­isti somersault, placing his abdomen directly over his partner’s mouth. Such is sexual suicide—awfulness taken to a higher power.

It might seem that sexual suicide confers no advantage on the spider, the male passing from ecstasy to extinction in the course of one and the same act. But spiders willing to pay for love are apparently favored by female spiders (no surprise, there); and female spiders with whom they mate, entomologists claim, are less likely to mate again. The male spider perishes; his preposterous line persists.

This explanation resolves one question only at the cost of inviting another: why such bizarre behavior? In no other Latrodectus species does the male perform that obliging somersault, offering his partner the oblation of his life as well as his love. Are there general principles that specify sexual suicide among this species, but that forbid sexual suicide elsewhere? If so, what are they Once asked, such questions tend to multiply like party guests. If evolutionary theory cannot answer them, what, then, is its use? Why is the Pitcher plant carnivorous, but not the thorn bush, and why does the Pacific salmon require fresh water to spawn, but not the Chilean sea bass? Why has the British thrush learned to hammer snails upon rocks, but not the British blackbird, which often starves to death in the midst of plenty? Why did the firefly discover bioluminescence, but not the wasp or the warrior ant; why do the bees do their dance, but not the spider or the flies; and why are women, but not cats, born without the sleek tails that would make them even more alluring than they already are?

Why? Yes, why? The question, simple, clear, intellectually respect­able, was put to the Nobel laureate George Wald. “Various organisms try various things,” he finally answered, his words functioning as a verbal shrug, “they keep what works and discard the rest.”

But suppose the manifold of life were to be given a good solid yank, so that the Chilean sea bass but not the Pacific salmon required fresh water to spawn, or that ants but not fireflies flickered enticingly at twi­light, or that women but not cats were born with lush tails. What then? An inversion of life’s fundamental facts would, I suspect, present evo­lutionary biologists with few difficulties. Various organisms try various things. This idea is adapted to any contingency whatsoever, an interesting example of a Darwinian mechanism in the development of Darwinian thought itself.

A comparison with geology is instructive. No geological theory makes it possible to specify precisely a particular mountain’s shape; but the underlying process of upthrust and crumbling is well understood, and geologists can specify something like a mountain’s generic shape. This provides geological theory with a firm connection to reality. A mountain arranging itself in the shape of the letter “A” is not a physically possible object; it is excluded by geological theory.

The theory of evolution, by contrast, is incapable of ruling anything out of court. That job must be done by nature. But a theory that can confront any contingency with unflagging success cannot be falsified. Its control of the facts is an illusion.

David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin & Other Essays (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2009), 45-47. 

One last example via:

PIVOT:

So too is the conspiratorial view of history (Bilderbergers, Council of Foreign Relations, Banking Institutions, Rosicrucians, The Knights Templars, on-and-on). It is used as an over-arching meta-narrative by Marxists, libertarians, anarcho-leftists, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, druggies (stoners), to Christian Evangelicals.

Illuminati - New World order

If someone or something disproves an aspect of this theory that person is branded a “shill” ~ or the fact has been “planted” by those in power who wish people to believe this “counter-point.” It explains everything and therefore nothing.

It becomes a metaphysical explanation… religious, so-to-speak. God, or theism, while having evidential aspects, IS ultimately a metaphysical program, and thus, outside of material explanations. So is evolutionary naturalism as well as the New World Order — taking into account the above.

Post-Script

Before getting to two fun videos, I want to give an example of the depth of people not self-reflecting on what they are saying… applying it to themselves to see if their sweeping statements are true or just platitudes. After explaining via another site’s excellent work refuting yet another convoluted “matrix” of conspiratorial shenanigans regarding World Trade Tower Seven (WTC-7),  I got this “challenge”?

  • Shaun your proof that Chemtrails are working!

Besides spelling my name wrong, here is my response (reformatted for ease of reading… but response 100% intact):

Jeffrey M.C., you believe in chem-trails?

As with other issues, like with an atheist saying Christianity is a crutch… not realizing that this argument cuts both ways and that atheism can be a crutch to escape judgement and wanting to live under an umbrella of full autonomy in the universe [being your own god]… this argument cuts both ways.

If chemtrails were a program to control one’s thinking in some way, why would it be proof if someone rejected “conspiracies”? Why couldn’t people who believe in whatever conspiracy theory be evidence for the program?

Like I point out in my “Alex Jones Section,” and elsewhere… conspiracy people think Jones is being controlled by the New World Order to spread misinformation — leading people away from the more important conspiracies.

And that is the point… small phrases like “pull-it” are taken [ripped] from their context, the evidence from the two parties involved in those [actual] conversations are ignored, and a matrix of unfounded and false evidence is then laid on top of this phrase… and then after this is distorted… people move on to the next myopic point to do the same.

MUCH LIKE when skeptics or the cults come in and rip a small portion of the text out of context, ignore the clear testimony of those involved in the verse itself, and lay a false history or hermeneutic over the text… moving on to do the same with another verse. [Like Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example with John 1:1]

In other words…

  • your contention,
  • or the person who says these programs are to obfuscate the “real conspiracies,”

…use the same amount of evidence [hint, inference only] and the competing contentions raised by conspiracy theorists are not provable of disprovable. BECAUSE there will always be another contention [twisted as discussed… inferred] to explain away the refutation.

For instance, I make good arguments against the main propositions used to support the deliberated destruction of WTC-7… and I am tricked by chemtrails. You see, there is no winning

…[and I linked to this post]…

And thus, no information [truth] is passed on.

I further explain for people who cannot pick-up what I am laying down:

In other words…

I could simply respond to Vytas S. when he said,

  • “Sean, I remember watching a CNN video of the countdown to when Building 7 came down,”

by saying:

  • Vytas, you’re proof that Chemtrails work!

[“Proof” ~ as used above ~ should be in quotation marks signifying another intent for it.]

Here is M.C.’s response (try not to laugh):

On the same Note Sean how do you know your information is correct… think about it. Most media information is impregnated with NWO progressive Liberal Spinbull. Alex has dedicated his life exposing mainstream media no matter who is in White House. If he is only right 30% of the time we are screwed. I will say he is right about 83% of the time and have watched his truths come to the forefront. ChemTrails are real…. and a threat to all of us. Weather Manipulation IS FOR REAL!. The Fight between Republicans and Democraps is a manipulated NWO Farce to keep us occupied and seperated…. WAKE UP AMERICA!

There is no way to argue reasonably with such a person… he will explain e v e r y t h i n g as a conspiracy — so I tap out — as truth is unknowable in his scenario.

Movie Time

Sen. Schumer’s Bigoted, Nay, Racist Past

Published by Papa Giorgio

Jay D. Homnick is interviewed about his 2006 American Spectator article on U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (NY), entitled, “RACE TO THE TOP“.

….What Schumer explained to these audiences was as follows. If they elected him to the State Assembly, he would put forth a bill that would create a set of provisions, ostensibly to “help” the underprivileged urban blacks. It would identify those apartment buildings on Ave. K as being in a state of some dilapidation, requiring an extensive facelift and revamping of the apartments. I don’t recollect with certainty if ownership would be assumed by the State itself or one of those “community rehabilitation organizations” that served as the instrument of choice for soaking up large sums of government money for the stated purpose of redeveloping slums.

The residents would then all be relocated into government or government-subsidized housing in other areas while the apartments were being renovated. At the end of the process, the individual apartments would be redefined as co-ops or condominiums to be sold to private owners. Although on paper the current tenants would be given priority for the right to purchase the newly upgraded condos, we could be sure that — ha, ha, ha — the blacks would not be able to raise the cash required, which would be not inconsiderable.

The presumption was that by then they would have grown comfortable in their new surroundings and they would not feel victimized by the process. The refurbished apartments would be purchased by white people and, shazzam, the neighborhood sore spot would be fixed. I am ashamed to say that the people bought into this mean-spirited and racist proposition. On top of its other faults the idea was also chimerical, with no real chance of working in the political reality of our time.

In the end, construction was done on those buildings through some sort of government project, but all the black people remained. Naturally no one could complain, because their original intent was not something that could be publicized. So there it is, the inside scoop on how Charles Schumer, the patron saint of anti-racism, rose to power in a Brooklyn neighborhood….

This is important because (a) it is noted that the media has not asked Sen. Schumer about this — whereas if he were a Republican I am sure everyone’s 12-year-old to the oldest infirmed member of the family would have heard about this “racism.” (Read here media bias.) And secondly, it brings into context all the “holier than thou” attitude Chuckie Boy has been spouting as of late. TO WIT… Senator Chuck Schumer tells Stephen Colbert that, yeah, of course Donald Trump’s a racist

Mass Shootings Have Decreased ~ Obama vs. Australia

Published by Papa Giorgio

The American Spectator has this great information that sets the record clear by giving guidelines to the debate:

Type “mass shootings” and “common” into a search engine and you’ll get all sorts of breathless commentary that might lead one to believe there Americans face a genuine epidemic of shooting rampages. A few headlines:

  • Vox: “Mass shootings on campus are getting more common and more deadly.”
  • ThinkProgress: “Mass Shootings Are Becoming More Frequent.”
  • NPR: “Study: Mass Shootings Are On The Rise Across U.S.”
  • Washington Post: “Why are mass shootings becoming more common?”

[….]

Homicide in America is far more common than it ought to be. But mass shootings — defined as four or more murders in the same incident — constitute a minuscule share of the total, as I discuss in “The Shooting Cycle” in the most recent edition of the Connecticut Law Review…

I want to break here and post something Mother Jones said in trying to define what a Mass Shooting is… “she” says this:

Broadly speaking, the term refers to an incident involving multiple victims of gun violence. But there is no official set of criteria or definition for a mass shooting, according to criminology experts and FBI officials who have spoken with Mother Jones.

Mother Jones then goes on to quote the definition — after being ambiguous about it — as four or more [excluding the shooter]. Wikipedia says this:

The FBI defines mass murder as murdering four or more persons during an event with no “cooling-off period” between the murders. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location where one or more people kill several others.

  • Aggrawal A. (2005) Mass Murder. In: Payne-James JJ, Byard RW, Corey TS, Henderson C (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Forensic and Legal Medicine, Vol. 3, Pp. 216-223. Elsevier Academic Press, London
  • “Serial Murder – Federal Bureau of Investigation”. Fbi.gov. Retrieved 2012-03-07.

It is odd to me why Mother Jones would be ambiguous about it while at the same time use the accepted FBI terminology/definition. At any rate, I HIGHLY suggest reading this Debunking of Mother Jones’ “10 Pro-Gun Myths,” worth the read.

Obama recently praised Australian gun-control.

ANN COULTER tackles this “Australian Stat” often mentioned. She quotes the New York Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal as saying this:

Rosenthal also produces a demonstrably false statistic about Australia’s gun laws, as if it’s a fact that has been carefully vetted by the Newspaper of Record, throwing in the true source only at the tail-end of the paragraph:

“After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. … Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent … said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.”

John Lott Responds:

…Here is the actual data from Australia. First note that gun ownership exhibits a very interesting pattern that isn’t often acknowledged. There was a large gun buyback in 1996 and 1997 that reduced gun ownership from 3.2 to 2.2 million guns. But immediately after that gun ownership increased dramatically and is essentially back to where it was before the buyback. Why is that important? Well, if it is the number of guns that is important, you should initially see a large drop in suicides or crimes and then see it increasing. Yet, in none of these data series do you observe that pattern.

For example, homicides didn’t fall until eight years after the laws. It is not clear what theory they have for why the long delay would occur. Nor can I even find an acknowledgment of that long lag in the cited literature. A more natural explanation for the drop at the eight year point would be the substantial increases in police forces that occurred at that time…

…ELSEWHERE he states:

…This is actually pretty amazing given the threat that the government could actually again try to confiscate guns in the country. That imposes a real potential tax on gun ownership.

Australians own as many guns now as they did at the time of the Port Arthur massacre, despite more than 1 million firearms being handed in and destroyed, new research reveals.

A University of Sydney study has shown there has been a steady increase in guns imported into the country over the past decade, with the number of privately owned guns now at the same level as 1996. . . .

Weirdly, gun control advocates are claiming that the buy back is lowering suicides at the same time that they are upset that gun ownership is back to it pre-buy back levels. One doesn’t need a semi-auto to commit suicide. While Australia’s population grew by 20 percent between 1997 and 2011, apparently its gun ownership rate grew by 45 percent. If they are right, the pattern should have been clear: suicides with guns should have plunged in 1997 and then quickly grown after that. Obviously that pattern wasn’t what was observed….

Crime is dropping recently in Australia, but this can be attributed to gun ownership rising back up to the previous rates before the ban. GAY PATRIOT comments on the before mentioned Obama quote about Australia:

I reiterate the two hidden rules of “Common Sense Gun Laws:”

1. “We only want to keep guns away from dangerous persons.”

2. “Anyone who owns a gun is a dangerous person.”

NATIONAL REVIEW also makes the point that in order to praise Australian “success,” one is praising anti-Constitutional actions:

Let me be clear, as Obama likes to say: You simply cannot praise Australia’s gun-laws without praising the country’s mass confiscation program. That is Australia’s law. When the Left says that we should respond to shootings as Australia did, they don’t mean that we should institute background checks on private sales; they mean that they we should ban and confiscate guns. No amount of wooly words can change this. Again, one doesn’t bring up countries that have confiscated firearms as a shining example unless one wishes to push the conversation toward confiscation.

[….]

Obama gave the impression that gun-violence is on the increase. This is false. As both Pew and the Department of Justice recorded last year, the majority of Americans believe that gun violence is proliferating when it is in fact dropping. This year marked a 20-year low. More than anything, America has a copycat problem in its schools.

Just a long side-note, continuing with the AMERICAN SPECTATOR article:

 

…The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 2002-2011, 95 percent of total homicide incidents involved a single fatality, 4 percent involved two victims, 0.6 percent involved 3 victims, and only .02 percent involved four or more victims. Another study performed between 1976 and 2005 yields similar results — that less than one-fifth of 1 percent all murders in the United States involved four or more victims. In other words, the bottom line is that out of every 10,000 incidents of homicide, roughly two are mass killings.

Further, contrary to what the zeitgeist may suggest, mass shootings are not on the rise. Prominent criminologist James Alan Fox has found “no upward trend in mass killings” since the ’70s. Take campus statistics as an example: “Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year,” Fox told CNN  (and roughly 99 percent of these reported homicides were not mass shootings).  “Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses.” Mass shootings on college campuses lag far, far behind many much more prevalent social and mental health problems.

The rare nature of these incidents also holds true for safety in K-12 schools, which garnered a significant amount of attention in the wake of the tragedies in Columbine and Newtown. According to two reports by the Centers for Disease Control, the probability of a child “dying in school in any given year from homicide or suicide was less than one in 1 million between 1992 and 1994 and slightly greater than one in 2 million between 1994 and 1999.”

…READ IT ALL…

Of course any story like the above needs a positive one added to it. The Blaze has this:

Two armed criminals reportedly put a gun to a 17-year-old girl’s head on Monday night as she was outside retrieving something from a car. The man, whose intentions still aren’t entirely clear, then ordered the teenager to take them into her house — a decision that would prove to have deadly consequences.

Peering out the window of the St. Louis home were the girl’s mother and father, each prepared to protect their daughter with deadly force. There was also a 5-year-old boy in the house, though his relationship to the family wasn’t known on Tuesday.

The girl’s father, a 34-year-old man, reportedly observed the men walking towards his home while holding a gun to his daughter’s head, a sight that no father ever wants to see. He quickly retrieved his firearm and his wife did the same.

The brave dad then confronted the two criminals and opened fire, hitting both suspects with accurate shots…