So you can see JUST how arbitrary historical science is (Darwinian evolution in this case), scientists have just doubled the age of man, via Creation Research Society’s, Creation Matters newsletter (July/Aug 2014, Volume 19, Number 4) ~ “Your Inner Ape Just Got Older”:
Evolutionists have doubled their date of the chimp-human split from 7 million to 13 million years ago. How, and why? National Geographic announces gleefully, with a picture of a chimp playing with a child, “Ancient Human-Chimp Link Pushed Back Millions of Years.”1 Based on a study of chimp genes in Science,2 …
[….]
The new estimate is based on current mutation rates in the sample, but a lead author confessed, “We also don’t know if mutation rates varied widely in the ancient past; maybe they were different than now.”
1.Vergano, D. (2014, June 12) Ancient human-chimp link pushed back millionsof years: Older male chimps sped evolution and reset era of our last commonancestor with apes. National Geographic Daily News. Retrieved June20, 2014 from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/06/140612-chimp-father-evolution-human-science/
2. Venn, O., I. Turner, I. Mathieson, N. de Groot, R. Bontrop, and G. McVean.2014. Nonhuman genetics. Strong male bias drives germline mutation inchimpanzees. Science 344(6189):1272–1275.
Two observations… the first one being in a form of a question:
“Does this cause an increase in confidence towards neo-Darwinian ‘science’ showing evidence of early evolutionary man and ‘his’ origins? Or does the above cause less confidence in the origin of mankind’s history, according to an evolutionary past?”
I argue it cause less confidence. Why? — you so astutely ask. This is why: ALL the evidences and previous timelines based on a wide variety of work from archaeology, paleontology, and dating methods used to date man’s time-table… are thrown out. Why does science, so called, make such giant leaps (remember that the age of the Virgo Cluster being essentially chopped in half?)? Because the previous evidence is shoddy, and very, very subjective.
The second commentary is at least an honest admission from the researchers. I wish such honesty existed in the dating community… not the dating community as in male/female. But the dating community in the radioactive measurements. Even Forbes Magazine is catching up to the idea:
One of the first things that Physics students learn when they study radioactivity is the idea of the half-life. A half-life is the period of time in which it takes one-half of a given amount of a radioactive substance to decay. Radioactive decay happens when a radioactive substance emits a particle. It’s impossible to predict exactly when a given atom of a substance will emit a particular particle, but the decay rate itself over a long period of time is constant.
Or, at least, that’s what we thought. But if physicists at Stanford and Purdue are correct in their findings, the whole theory of constant radioactive decay rates could be thrown out the door.
The story begins, as scientific discoveries often do, randomly. Literally, in this case. The team of physicists was investigating the possibility of using radioactive decay rates to generate random numbers, since the rate is constant but the emission of individual atoms is unpredictable, it seemed like a perfect fit.
Then came the problem:
As the researchers pored through published data on specific isotopes, they found disagreement in the measured decay rates – odd for supposed physical constants.
Checking data collected at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal Physical and Technical Institute in Germany, they came across something even more surprising: long-term observation of the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation. The decay rate was ever so slightly faster in winter than in summer.
Was this fluctuation real, or was it merely a glitch in the equipment used to measure the decay, induced by the change of seasons, with the accompanying changes in temperature and humidity?
As you can see in my more lengthy dealing with the matter as a supplement to a men’s group at church, the assumption of continuous decay rates at the present — observable — rates applied to the past is a HUGE assumption that is not scientific at all. Here are other “icons of evolution” decunstructed:
Many atheists claim that science disproves the Bible. Despite these claims, science is actually quite consistent with Scripture.
Christians often feel unequipped to defend their faith in this area — but this need not be so. Instead, any Christian can defend his or her faith against any scientific claim from an atheist, even without knowing the details of that particular claim. Why? Because science itself disproves atheism.
Atheism, when taken to its logical conclusion, denies the fundamental assumptions and requirements of science. Therefore, if science is valid, then atheism must be false.
In this presentation, engineer and former atheist Spike Psarris will present on “Defeating Atheism with Science,” showing why this is true. Join us as we discuss how Christians can defend their faith in all areas of science. After a brief discussion of specific evidence like fossils, radiometric dating, and intelligent design, we’ll dig deeper and see how science itself disproves atheism. Understanding a few fundamental ideas about science are all that’s necessary for any Christian to be well-equipped in this area.
About the Speaker:
Spike Psarris was previously an engineer in the United States’ military space program. He entered that program as an atheist and an evolutionist. He left it as a creationist and a Christian. He now speaks on creation and Christian apologetics, equipping believers to defend their faith and glorify their Creator.
http://edinburghcreationgroup.org | With the rise of genetics and molecular biology, evidence is emerging that Darwinism is not the unlimited process we once thought.
Sylvia Baker is a biology graduate of the University of Sussex and the University of London. She accepted the evolutionary theory put to her at school and at university – until the pressure of evidence forced her to rethink the whole question.
One of the greatest mysteries facing humans is how life originated on Earth. Scientists have determined approximately when life began (roughly 3.8 billion years ago), but there is still intense debate about exactly how life began. One possibility — that simple metabolic reactions emerged near ancient seafloor hot springs, enabling the leap from a non-living to a living world — has grown in popularity in the last two decades.
Recent research by geochemists Eoghan Reeves, Jeff Seewald, and Jill McDermott at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is the first to test a fundamental assumption of this ‘metabolism first’ hypothesis, and finds that it may not have been as easy as previously assumed. Instead, their findings could provide a focus for the search for life on other planets. The work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 1977, scientists discovered biological communities unexpectedly living around seafloor hydrothermal vents, far from sunlight and thriving on a chemical soup rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and sulfur, spewing from the geysers. Inspired by these findings, scientists later proposed that hydrothermal vents provided an ideal environment with all the ingredients needed for microbial life to emerge on early Earth. A central figure in this hypothesis is a simple sulfur-containing carbon compound called “methanethiol” — a supposed geologic precursor of the Acetyl-CoA enzyme present in many organisms, including humans. Scientists suspected methanethiol could have been the “starter dough” from which all life emerged.
The question Reeves and his colleagues set out to test was whether methanethiol — a critical precursor of life — could form at modern day vent sites by purely chemical means without the involvement of life. Could methanethiol be the bridge between a chemical, non-living world and the first microbial life on the planet?
Carbon dioxide, hydrogen and sulfide are the common ingredients present in hydrothermal black smoker fluids. “The thought was that making methanethiol from these basic ingredients at seafloor hydrothermal vents should therefore have been an easy process,” adds Reeves.
The theory was appealing, and solved many of the basic problems with existing ideas that life may have been carried to Earth on a comet or asteroid….
[….]
“What we essentially found in our survey is that we don’t think methanethiol is forming by purely chemical means without the involvement of life. This might be disappointing news for anyone assuming an easy start for hydrothermal proto-metabolism,” says Reeves. “However, our finding that methanethiol may be readily forming as a breakdown product of microbial life provides further indication that life is present and widespread below the seafloor and is very exciting.”
The researchers believe this new understanding could change how we think about searching for life on other planets.
Uncommon Descent notes the following after quoting the above Science Daily article:
As noted earlier, origin of life is a problem in the origin of huge amount of information and looking for a way it happened due to some fluke has always been a waste of time.
Software engineer Arminius Mignea’s specifications for a simplest self-replicator in Engineering and the Ultimate would be a useful read on that score. It advances the discussion by setting out what origin of life (by human or other hands) models should look like, to merit consideration.
Too often, people play rhetorical games that sound like: “Life happened, so my ‘stink world’ is plausible” or “The prevailing consensus says Stink World is plausible, therefore life.”
It’s a form of homage to philosophical materialism, not science really, and it suck in lots of well-meaning people. They don’t realize that when we are asked to accept an inherently implausible idea because it is materialist, we are invited to put materialism above every other consideration, including logic, reason, and evidence.
“Since women that believe in God are less likely to have abortions, does that mean that natural selection will result in a greater number of believers than non-believers.”
~ A question asked by a student attending a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig (a theist) and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci (an atheist).
Assuming, then, the validity of the “underlying instinct to survive and reproduce” in neo-Darwinian thought… of the two positions (belief and non-belief) available for us ~ to choose from ~ which would better apply to being the most fit if the fittest is “an individual… [that] reproduces more successfully…”?[1] The woman that believes in God is less likely to have abortions and more likely to have larger families than their secular counterparts.[2] Does that mean that natural selection will result in a greater number of believers than non-believers?[3]
So, “religious” people ~ both in the “God” view as well as the “non-God” view are to be modeled… according to evolutionary philosophy.
The atheist should then ~ according to the widely accepted theory of origins in his own worldview ~ become religious.
Notes
[1] From my son’s 9th grade biology textbook: Susan Feldkamp, ex. ed., Modern Biology (Austin, TX: Holt, Rineheart, and Winston, 2002), 288;
“…organisms that are better suited to their environment than others produce more offspring” American Heritage Science Dictionary, 1st ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), cf. natural selection, 422;
“fitness (in evolution) The condition of an organism that is well adapted to its environment, as measured by its ability to reproduce itself” Oxford Dictionary of Biology, New Edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), cf. fitness, 202;
“fitness In an evolutionary context, the ability of an organism to produce a large number of offspring that survive to reproduce themselves” Norah Rudin, Dictionary of Modern Biology (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1997), cf. fitness, 146.
[2] Dinesh D’Souza points to this in his recent book, What’s So Great About Christianity:
Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and abortions there outnumber live births by a ratio of two to one. Russia’s birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand find themselves in a similar predicament. Then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the quite literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Birth rates are abysmally low in France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. The nations of Western Europe today show some of the lowest birth rates ever recorded, and Eastern European birth rates are comparably low. Historians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague. Lacking the strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. Nietzsche predicted that European decadence would produce a miserable “last man’ devoid of any purpose beyond making life comfortable and making provision for regular fornication. Well, Nietzsche’s “last man” is finally here, and his name is Sven. Eric Kaufmann has noted that in America, where high levels of immigration have helped to compensate for falling native birth rates, birth rates among religious people are almost twice as high as those among secular people. This trend has also been noticed in Europe.” What this means is that, by a kind of natural selection, the West is likely to evolve in a more religious direction. This tendency will likely accelerate if Western societies continue to import immigrants from more religious societies, whether they are Christian or Muslim. Thus we can expect even the most secular regions of the world, through the sheer logic of demography, to become less secular over time…. My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. Atheism is a bit like homosexuality: one is not sure where it fits into a doctrine of natural selection. Why would nature select people who mate with others of the same sex, a process with no reproductive advantage at all?
(17, 19.). Some other studies and articles of note:
W. Bradford Wilcox, “Fertility, Faith, & the Future of the West: A conversation with Phillip Longman,” Christianity Today, Books & Culture: A Christian Review (5-01-2007), found at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/mayjun/4.28.html?start=1 (last accessed 8-13-2009);
Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3-32, esp. 24-29 — I recommend this book for deep thinking on the issue.
[3] Adapted from a question by a student at a formal debate between Dr. Massimo Pigliucci and Dr. William Lane Craig during the Q&A portion of the debate. (DVD, Christian Apologetics, Biola University, apologetics@biola.edu, product # WLC-RFM14V).
“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.
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)
I thought I would post a few items for the average man to engage someone lightly about Genesis. Here I want to focus on larger, easier to defend positions and will also throw in some minutia for the person who is curious about the issue as well. I will give a short reply and then get into details on a few of them as well. In conversations there should be an easy – minimalist – exchange that is easy to communicate.
Firstly, the most basic thing one can say about Genesis is that its authors intended it to come across as literal. James Barr, Oriel Professor of the interpretation of the Holy Scripture, Oxford University, England, in a letter to David C.C. Watson (23 April 1984), stated the following:
The following is an extract from a letter written in 1984 by Professor James Barr, who was at the time Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford. Professor Barr said,
“Probably, so far as l know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Gen. 1-11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that (a) creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience (b) the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story (c) Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark. Or, to put it negatively, the apologetic arguments which suppose the ‘days’ of creation to be long eras of time, the figures of years not to be chronological, and the flood to be a merely local Mesopotamian flood, are not taken seriously by any such professors, as far as I know.”
Thus, according to the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, Tim is completely deceived in his wish to read Genesis figuratively. Let it be emphasized that according to professor Barr, virtually every professor at a world-class universities believes Gen. 1-11 are intended to convey the six 24 hour day creation and universality of Noah’s flood. (Planet Preterist)
Barr, despite not believing Genesis’ literal sense, does however, understand what the Hebrew so clearly taught. It was only the perceived need to harmonize the Bible with the alleged [evolutionary] age of the earth which led people to think anything different of the easy reading of Genesis—it was nothing to do with the text itself.
So the memory points can look like this:
• One of the leading Hebrew professors of our day; • From Oxford University; • Who did not believe in the literalness of Genesis; • Teaches that the language and cultural times; • Demand a literal reading of the text; • Whether you agree with the outcome of that reading or not.
Simple enough. If one kinda’ remembers these points they can communicate the text’s meaning in a way that shows that insertion of long ages is a newer phenomena, not something warranted by the text itself. Here is an opening of a debate between a theistic evolutionist and a young earth creationist that makes clear the theological implications of anything but the Biblical position (the entire debate can be found here):
While theistic evolution is almost at complete odds with the Gospel message, we should understand that the union between man-and-God is the acceptance of Jesus, not these particulars.
There have been great men of God who have been theistic evolutionists… this does not mean we have to be. (See video to the right, and I wish to thank Darren for keeping the tendency to judge unrighteously in check).
Another important aspect of this whole thing is the idea that there are different genres in Scripture such as narratives, letters or epistles, parables, book of wisdom, hyperbole, poetry, and the like. In the technical book, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol. 2, a professor of language from our Masters College here in our valley, points out that the structure of Genesis demands a reading that is in the historical narrative genre. Here is the graph from that chapter:
(One may wish to read my “Hermeneutics” presentation I gave at church.) A great layman introduction to the technical information in the above mentioned book which is mostly science driven, except for the chapter written by professor Steven W. Boyd, is the book, Thousands not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution, Questioning the Age of the Earth. Of course, if you engage on this level at Starbucks, you may get the next response of whether you agree with God choosing genocide in the Old Testament since you choose the literal nature of the Bible. While one should have responses to this in their quiver… this is not the topic at hand. I will give some resources at the end to help answer all this. However, one needn’t go too much beyond this dealing with the text. Faith is involved, and this faith gives us an objective knowledge of reality:
…fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; that such an experience Provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.
William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. [Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008], 43
It is this assurance [the witness of the Holy Spirit] we have that validates the Scriptures and what they mean to teach. (See also p. 178.)
Now, on to TIME — old versus young universe positions. I know people can get frustrated in conversation in regards to these ideas. My tactic I use is merely to try and get the skeptic to admit a principle in regards to the universe. That is, time dialation. Here are some great examples.
Nuclear clocks at sea level are the most accurate time to set time to. Why? Here is a great example to explain why.
During the 1970s it was realized that gravitational time dilation caused the second produced by each atomic clock to differ depending on its altitude. A uniform second was produced by correcting the output of each atomic clock to mean sea level (the rotating geoid), lengthening the second by about 1×10−10. This correction was applied at the beginning of 1977 and formalized in 1980. In relativistic terms, the SI second is defined as the proper time on the rotating geoid.
Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into deep space. The other stays on Earth. When the traveling twin returns home, he discovers he’s younger than his brother. This is Einstein’s Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. ~ NASA
So time is relative just from earth to our orbit. Similarly, what about theoretical forces such as black-holes?
…Although your watch as seen by you would not change its ticking rate, just as in special relativity (if you know anything about that), someone else would see a different ticking rate on your watch than the usual, and you would see their watch to be ticking at a different than normal rate. For example, if you were to station yourself just outside a black hole, while you would find your own watch ticking at the normal rate, you would see the watch of a friend at great distance from the hole to be ticking at a much faster rate than yours. That friend would see his own watch ticking at a normal rate, but see your watch to be ticking at a much slower rate. Thus if you stayed just outside the black hole for a while, then went back to join your friend, you would find that the friend had aged more than you had during your separation. (Time Dilation; also, Virginia Tech Q&A)
You can see that gravitational forces (and velocity) affect age… not just our age but how our perception of age and an actual age throughout the universe may be a bit different than we suppose. The point is to get the objector to admit to this principle and then merely say, “listen, I am no physicist, but from these simple examples I can see that age in the universe may be more relative than either you or I can imagine. However, I would much rather talk about how the Judeo-Christian Scriptures is getting right in regards to a beginning of time.” That’s it. Some quick examples to get your objector to see that science is proving that the appearance of age may be drastically different than what you and he may know.
• Nuclear clocks at sea level are most accurate; • Age differences between twins on earth and in orbit; • Between friends, one on earth and one falling into a black hole; • Point out that there may be more to age than what we know.
Also, while much of science is based on the absoluteness of the speed of light, scientists have long speculated that there are things in the universe that move faster than the prescribed light. There is finally a laboratory experiment proving such a feat and it has been published so other scientists can go over it with a fine-tooth comb to see if there are any mistakes in the study.
The team has published its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.
If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science will come tumbling down.
Antonio Ereditato added “words of caution” to his Cern presentation because of the “potentially great impact on physics” of the result.
The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics – as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” the report’s author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration told BBC News on Thursday evening.
“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t. ….(BBC NEWS)
So even the “light years” you hear spoken of may also be relative – only time will tell.
Reasons why speed of light may not be the fastest game in town or was constant:
A 2008 quantum physics experiment also performed by Nicolas Gisin and his colleagues in Geneva, Switzerland has determined that in any hypothetical nonlocal hidden-variables theory the speed of the quantum non-local connection (what Einstein called spooky action at a distance) is at least 10,000 times the speed of light.
Salart; Baas; Branciard; Gisin; Zbinden (2008). “Testing spooky action at a distance”. Nature 454 (7206): 861–864.
For the first time, astronomers have distinguished individual stars in a galaxy in the Virgo cluster and measured their distance from Earth. Observations of the galaxy NGC 4571, made with a new high-resolution camera, support the notion that objects in the universe may lie about half as far away as previously thought. If so, the cosmos as a whole may be smaller than believed.
Robert D. McClure of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, British Columbia, and his colleagues conducted their study at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. They photographed NGC 4571, obtaining sharp enough resolution to distinguish bright individual stars from groups of fainter stars. By comparing the brightness of the luminous stars with that of Milky Way stars in the same class and at a known distance from Earth, they deduced that NGC 4571 lies 50 million light-years from Earth.
Because astronomers often use the distance to Virgo as a yardstick for assessing the distance of objects farther out in the universe, the new finding indicates that such objects may lie much closer to Earth, McClure says. Since an object’s distance serves as an indicator of its age, a smaller cosmos would seem to suggest that the universe is younger than the estimated 10 to 20 billion years. On the other hand, scientists have clearly established an age of 15 billion years for some ancient star groups in the Milky Way.
The high-resolution camera attached to the Mauna Kea telescope uses adaptive optics to correct for the image-distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere (SN: 6/8/91, p.358), yielding an image about five times as sharp as those produced by most other ground-based telescopes, McClure says.
…A simple interpretation of the large value of the Hubble Constant, as calculated from HST observations, implies an age of about 12 billion years for a low-density universe, and 8 billion years for a high-density universe. However, either value highlights a long-standing dilemma…. ~ HubbleSite (NASA)
But this brings a verse to mind, “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). I think the Apostle was passing on something he may have encountered at the Mount of Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-9). But to say the early thinkers (like the Apostles) did not know about God being outside of the time-space continuum is clearly shown to be false by the verse in 2 Peter. While the earth was once thought to be the center of the universe, and many skeptics deride the significant nature Christianity gives the earth and emphasize the insignificant place of the earth in our vast universe — recalling Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” quote. However, because of the building blocks of science and the best known shape of the universe, has caused a 4th dimension to be postulated. While we of course operate in three-dimensions, the fourth dimension is postulated as this (a great layman definition is to follow):
….The common view among cosmologists is that the universe is a four dimensional Riemannian manifold whose spatial part of the metric is increasing over time. This is interpreted as an expansion of the universe.
Imagine you are at a random spot on a spotted balloon, when someone inflates the balloon you’ll see the spots moving away from you, so it would seem you are at the center of the expansion. Furthermore, the further away the spots are the faster they move away from you. This is also true for the universe: the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it moves away from us.
Further imagine that you are a creature that only exists in two dimensions. That is, you have width and depth, but no height. So living on the surface of the balloon, you cannot see the shape of the balloon itself. If you went for a walk in a straight line, you would actually go around the balloon and end up where you started, despite not being aware that you were traveling in a circle.
The theory goes that the three dimensions of our universe that we can see are like the two dimensions of the surface of the balloon, which wraps around on itself in another dimension, so that if we traveled through space in a straight line, we would eventually return to our starting point. The fourth dimension is time and String theory holds the universe exists right up to ten dimensions.
One consequence of this idea is that the universe therefore has no edge (just like there is no edge to the surface of a balloon) and therefore no center. Thus for any location in space, it would appear that that location is at the center of the expansion of the universe….
If we were really at the center of the universe, this would support the idea that the Earth occupies a “special place” in the universe, which would support the biblical idea of creation, even though the Bible does not claim that the Earth is physically in the center of the universe. So many scientists find the idea that it only looks like we are at the center of the universe an attractive one.
Here is Dr. Russell Humphrey’s talking about the public’s misconception of the Big-Bang:
In the big bang’s mathematical model of the beginning, space itself would expand outward with the ball of hot matter, and the matter would completely fill space at all times. There would never be a large empty part. In the most favored version of the big bang, if you traveled very fast in any given direction, you would arrive back at your starting point without ever encountering a large region of empty space. That makes it impossible to define a boundary around the matter, so the matter could have no center of mass. With no unique center for gravity to point to, there would be no black hole at the beginning.
Knowing their theory is very difficult to visualize, big bang experts don’t try hard to correct the public’s “island universe” misconception. But occasionally they do make brief comments, such as, “This [picture of the big bang] is wrong . . . there is no center and edge.” (ICR)
This creates the perfect setting for what scientists say is a truthism. Wherever you are you are at the center of the universe. Not only earth… but you. So if you were to travel 5-billion light years away from earth, you are still at the center of the universe. Why? Because of the shape the universe is in and the folding of the space-time-continuum in on itself. Here is a great layman picture of what we are talking about and how the universe most probably looks/acts:
This is significant, because you, me, and others are at the center of God’s plan and focus. We are of most importance to God’s love and passion and He is a jealous God. He wishes none to be lost, loving us more so than even His concern shown for the sparrow falling from a nest.
(Video added Oct 7th, 2021)
Three presentations by Dr. Humphreys can be found here, in them he talks about: helium diffusion, starlight & time, quantized red shift, center of the universe, and gravitational wells.
This expansion of the cosmos, which young-agers say happened MORE quickly than old-earth creationist (OEC), has a lot to do with measured time and why a physicist can say that the universe is 14-billion years old. Dr. Russell Humphrey’s explains this a bit more here (above). IN the above linked presentation Dr. Humphrey’s deals with some of the bad presumptions made by the Big-Bang theory, for instance, matter always existing. But if you take his theories and combine them with current knowledge, we come pretty close to some solid facts supporting the Biblical aspect to the Big-Bang. So not only are we at the center of the universe… but very possibly at the real center of the universe – or close to. Or, the initial creative moment of the universe, as Humphrey’s points out in the above [#2] presentation.
So you could bullet point this for memory purposes thus:
• The universe has no center as you would understand a “point” being; • It is analogous to a balloon expanding as one fills it with air; • It would be possible to leave earth traveling in a straight you could return to earth; • This wrapping around of space is called “the fourth dimension;” • It causes the center to be from the perspective of the person it involves.
Another neat aspect of where science has led us is to the understanding that the Hebraic Scriptures, unlike every other religious text/holy book out there, is that the Bible alone seems to predict what only now the evidence of what science is showing us. Lee Strobel does a great job in relaying the evidence that we live in a finite cosmos and not an infinite one in his discussion with Dr. William Lane Craig (updated with J. Warner Wallace):
When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to fudge his equations by putting in a facto that would hold the universe steady.
In the 1920’s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre were able to develop models based on Einstein’s theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn’t exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang — and the name stuck! [Later in his career, Fred Hoyle confirmed the expansion through work on the second most plentiful element in the universe, helium.]
Starting in the 1920’s, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models.
LET US TAKE A QUICK BREAK from this excerpt to fill in some information from another excerpt, and then we will continue:
As mathematicians explored the theoretical evidence, astronomers began to make observations confirming the expansion of the universe. Vesto Slipher, an American astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory. in Flagstaff, Arizona, spent nearly ten years perfecting his understanding of spectrograph readings. His observations revealed something remarkable. If a distant object was moving toward Earth, its observable spectrograph colors shifted toward the blue end of the spectrum. If a distant object was moving away from Earth, its colors shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.
Slipher identified several nebulae and observed a redshift in their spectrographic colors. If these nebulae were moving away from our galaxy (and one another), as Slipher observed, they must have once been tightly clustered together. In 1914, he offered these findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, proposing them as evidence the universe was expanding.
A graduate student named Edwin Hubble seas in attendance and realized the implications of Slipher’s work. Hubble later began working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles. Using the Hooker telescope, he eventually proved Slipher’s nebulae were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way composed of billions of stars. By 1929, Hubble published findings of his own, verifying Slipher’s observations and demonstrating the speed at which a star or galaxy moves away from us increases with its distance from Earth. This once again confirmed the expansion of the universe.
…CONTINUING…
For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears redder than it should be, and this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubble’s astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaitre.
Then in the 1940’s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universe’s background radiation — and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model.
The third main piece of the evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements, like carbon and iron, are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernova into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of the stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There’s no other explanation.
So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by the scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials… Up to this time, it was taken for granted that the universe as a whole was a static, eternally existing object…. At the time an agnostic, American astronomer Robert Jastrow was forced to concede that although details may differ, “the essential element in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy”…. Einstein admitted the idea of the expanding universe “irritates me” (presumably, said one prominent scientist, “because of its theological implications”)
Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Towards God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004), 105-106, 112;
J. Warner Wallace, God’s Crime Scene: A Cold-Case Detective Examines the Evidence for a Divinely Created Universe (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2015), 32-33.
This should be put in bullet points for easy memorization:
Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915;
Around the same time evidence of an expanding universe was being presented to the American Astronomical Society by Vesto Slipher;
In the 1920s using Einstein’s theory, a Russian mathematician (Alexander Friedman) and the Belgium astronomer (George Lemaitre) predicted the universe was expanding;
In 1929, Hubble discovered evidence confirming earlier work on the Red-Light shift showing that galaxies are moving away from us;
In the 1940’s, George Gamow predicted a particular temperature to the universe if the Big Bang happened;
In 1965, two scientists (Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson) discovered the universe’s background radiation — and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero.
God is truly amazing! Now, the above explained “Big-Bang” as accepted by most evolutionary scientists assumes the eternal state of matter. The theists in the above example reject this, just an aside.
And here are, for the curious, a great presentation (which I broke up into each assumption for ease of consumption) dealing with dating methods and there problems for dating the earth in long ages:
What Is Radioactive Dating & Its Assumptions?
Evidence 1 Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 2 Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 3 Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 4 Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
Evidence 5 Challenging Assumptions In Radioactive Decay Rate
In some parts of Africa, it is actually an advantage to have mutated, oddly-shaped red blood cells.
This condition, known as sickle cell anemia, is usually a disadvantage, but, ironically, it can actually help protect someone from malarial infection because a sickled red blood cell is less appetizing for the malaria parasite.
Many people mistakenly view this sort of change as an example of evolution in action—because a mutation in DNA has made people better adapted to their environment.
But if microbes really did turn into mankind—which is what evolution teaches—this would require the addition of new DNA information to turn the relatively simple genome of a microbe into the vastly more complicated one of a person.
In the case of sickle cell anemia, the opposite has happened, because DNA information has been corrupted and lost, not gained, because the crippled blood cells are less able to transport oxygen.
Dr. Mark McCartney, co-editor Kelvin: Life, Labours and Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2008). Dr. McCartney lectures in the School of Computing and Mathematics at the University of Ulster. Along with his research in applied mathematics, he has an interest the history of physics, co-editing “Kelvin: Life, Labours and Legacy” (with Raymond Flood and Andrew Whitaker) and “Physicists of Ireland” (with Andrew Whitaker). His PhD is in theoretical physics. (All views expressed here are those of“Saints and Sceptics”).
Dr. McCartney explains the limits of science, responds to the claim that science and Christianity have always been in conflict, and sums up the evidence for God in three words: “There are laws.”
Dr. McCartney develops his thoughts on atheism, science and morality, explains the “Fine-Tuning” argument, and discusses multiverses.
The Apollo project was the first mission to take images of Earth rising over the Moon. The KAGUYA successfully shot high-definition images of the Earth-rise showing an impressive image of the blue Earth which was the only floating object in pitch-dark space. These are the world’s first high-definition earth images taken from about 380,000 km away from the earth in space.
The image taking was performed by the KAGUYA’s onboard high definition television (HDTV) for space use developed by NHK. The moving image data acquired by the KAGUYA was received at the JAXA Usuda Deep Space Center, and processed by NHK.
The satellite was confirmed to be in good health through telemetry data received at the Usuda station.
* Note: Earth-rise is a phenomenon seen only from satellites that travel around the Moon, such as the KAGUYA and the Apollo space ship. The Earth-rise cannot be observed by a person who is on the Moon as they can always see the Earth at the same position.
Hear expert testimony from leading evolutionary scientists from some of the world’s top universities:
• Peter Nonacs, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UCLA • Craig Stanford, Professor, Biological Sciences and Anthropology, USC • PZ Myers, Associate Professor, Biology, University of Minnesota Morris • Gail E. Kennedy, Associate Professor, Anthropology, UCLA
A study of the evidence of vestigial organs*, natural selection, the fifth digit, the relevance of the stickleback, Darwin’s finches and Lenski’s bacteria—all under the microscope of the Scientific Method–observable evidence from the minds of experts. Prepare to have your faith shaken.
This is the second of a great series, below was the first release:
i can’t get enough of this conversation!!! pbs needs to give you gentlemen a morning talk show.
ME
May I say I disagree that the data supports evolution, neo-Darwinian at least. The data is INTERPRETED a certain way, for instance, from my first chapter of my book (it is a refutation of sorts to a fellow classmate that produced the DVD, “The God Who Wasn’t There”).
And the main idea here is that one position is metaphysical, the other is more neutral… which will lead into my next comment, and a change of direction to the conversation if you do not mind Doc Melendy
….Let us see if we can ferret out Mr. Flemming’s starting premise with an interview with Dr. Dean Kenyon,[1] Assistant Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University (Emeritus), when he was asked this question: “What are the general presuppositions that scientists make who study the origin of life?” Dr. Kenyon responded:
“Well, I think there are two general kinds of presuppositions that people can make, one is that life, in fact, did arise naturalistically on the primitive earth by some kind of chemical evolutionary process. The second presupposition would be that life may or may not have arisen by a naturalistic, chemical process. Now, if you have the first presupposition, then the goal of your research is to work out plausible pathways of chemical development to go to the bio-polymers, then to the protocells; and what would be likely pathways that you could demonstrate in the laboratory by simulation experiment. If you have the second presupposition, your still going to be doing experiments, but you’re going to be more open to the possibility that the data, as they [or, it] come[s] in from those studies may actually be suggesting a different explanation of origins altogether.”[2]
The logical position, what I would say is the truly scientific way to look at these issues, is to say what Kenyon just did: “life may or may not have arisen by a naturalistic, chemical process.” He, in other words, did not beg the question. This embedded philosophy[3] is what the fervor was over in Kansas a few years back. The Kansas Board of Education caused a firestorm by hearing the drafting board’s proposal to change one word in the working definition of science. The original drafting commission defined science as:
“Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.”
The Kansas board of education drafting committee defined science as,
“Science is the human activity of seeking logical explanations for what we observe in the world around us.”[4]
This simple word change, and the subsequent fervor it caused, illustrates the embedded philosophy in current science.[5] So the first thing that Principle Sipus should have asked of Brian is for him to define what science is and the type of evidence his definition of science produces. After getting his definition he should have asked this:
Since the evidence you are asking for is excluded by your definition of empirical science, aren’t you “begging the question” Brian? Likewise I could ask of you to disprove by the scientific method God’s existence, and, by your definition of science — which excludes anything metaphysical — I would be setting you up for failure, because science (at least as you [Brian] define it) is incapable of proving or disproving God.”
[1] Kenyon received a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Chicago in 1961 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University in 1965. In 1965-1966 he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Biodynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Research Associate at Ames Research Center. In 1966, he became Assistant Professor of Biology at San Francisco State University. He has been Emeritus at San Francisco State University since 2000.
[2] Focus on Darwinism: An Interview with Dean H. Kenyon (Focus on Origin Series, Access Research Network, DVD, 2004).
[3] I will give yet another example that makes my point for me: “Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.” Kansan State University immunologist, Scott Todd, correspondence to Nature, 410 [6752], 30 September, 1999.
[4] Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 68 (emphasis added).
[5] i.e., scientism, materialism, empiricism, existentialism, naturalism, and humanism – whatever you want to call it… it is still a metaphysical position as it assumes or presumes certain things about the entire universe. D’Souza points this a priori commitment out:
Naturalism and materialism are not scientific conclusions; rather, they are scientific premises. They are not discovered in nature but imposed upon nature. In short, they are articles of faith. Here is Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin: “We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a priori commitment, a commitment — a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Dinesh D’Souza points to this in his recent book, What’s So Great about Christianity (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2007), 161 (emphasis added).
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.
(Atheist) Bradley Monton, author of “Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design”
Tom, let’s leave your specialty for a bit, if you don’t mind, and enter into the above topic. “What is evidence.” Historically, in the Christian faith, there have been two books, one is “Book of Revelation,” and the other is the “Book of Nature.” The early Church Fathers (really apologists) said you can/could glean information from both — one of course being more complete, at least, for the Christian.
I am sure you would agree with most of what is below[?], it comes from a discussion I had a decade ago:
…The question then is: What evidence do you need? Or better yet: What kind of evidence? Can Science help? Lets see… the scientific method merely shows that if miracles did occur in the past, that science (as currently defined) could not prove, or disprove, their occurrence. You cannot find out what Napoleon did at the Battle of Austerlitz by asking him to come and fight it again in a laboratory with the same combatants, the same terrain, the same weather, and in the same age. You have to go to the records. We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like the innumerable other questions [of history], excludes laboratory treatment. And Christianity claims to be a historical belief. The resurrection of Jesus was an historical event, one that cannot be repeated in the laboratory. So how, then, do we deal with the historic claims of Christianity? Like any other historical event, we go to the records.
“What are the distinctive sources for our beliefs about the past? Most of the beliefs we have about the past come to us by the testimony of other people. I wasn’t present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I didn’t see my father fight in the [S]econd [W]orld [W]ar. I have been told about these events by sources that I take to be reliable. The testimony of others is generally the main source of our beliefs about the past…. So all our beliefs about the past depend on testimony, or memory, or both.” (Philosophy for Dummies, by Tom Morris, pp. 57-58)
“In advanced societies specialization in the gathering and production of knowledge and its wider dissemination through spoken and written testimony is a fundamental socio-epistemic fact, and a very large part of each persons body of knowledge and belief stems from testimony.” (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Robert Audi[2nd ed.], p. 909)
“But it is clear that most of what any given individual knows comes from others; palpably with knowledge of history, geography, or science, more subtly with knowledge about every day facts such as when we were born..” (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich, p. 869)
So when Shadow Warchief says, “I haven’t seen a single shred of evidence for the existence of God,” is he defining what evidence is and how we get knowledge about past events, and then going to the sources to see if they are credible or not? (http://www.scribd.com/doc/48848626/Apologetics-Evidence-Paper)
From this past conversation the point is made that evidence isn’t always empirical. Remember my mock discussion between the professor and his student? — not “mine,” but from the book I recommended to you).
So, how do you prove God? You can have fingerprints of His work (intelligent design, which predates Christ, and thus, is not “creationism” in disguise), you can combine the “Book of Revelation” with that of “Nature” (creationism), BUT… how do you prove God’s existence?
Only if God dealt with — miraculously — our world. Which the Christian faith says He did. Of course coming in human form as well. Yes, the Creator of the space-time-continuum, the BANG behind the “Big-Bang” came to our world. Whether you are an old earth creationist (OEC), a theistic-Christian, or a young earther (YEC)… the answer to the question of “who Jesus is/was” should be answered by our faith. And thus answer the idea that God’s existence can be proven.
Yeah?
Tom Melendy
Okay Sean, the quality of your posts is decreasing. You’re now citing an Assistant Professor (Emeritus just means retired) of physics/biophysics at San Francisco State University (note this is NOT the same as the University of California San Francisco – SFS is just one step above a community college for Pete’s sake) as a source on a question about biology. That’s an epic Fail. His NSF fellowship – no biggie – particularly when he got it, back in the 60s when grant funding rates were over 50%, and fellowship rates were even higher, it was a breeze to get those things (and yes, I got a more prestigious fellowship during much more competitive times – I was also a US Presidential Fellow if you know what that means).
I’m not here to argue the Big Bang, that’s not my area. Nor am I here to argue the origins of life on Earth. While I have read a few of the papers on that area, it is not my specialty, and I am ill equipped to ague for or against it – so I won’t. I take no position on these topics. What I am fairly well equipped to defend, is that from the early forms of life on this planet, there is a clear fossil, and in many cases genetic (I say “many” because we can’t extract useable genetic material from the earliest fossils) record that is phenomenally consistent with evolution (many would say “creating” but I’ll say) being the method by which current forms of life on this planet were created (again, if anyone wants to propose evolution as the way in which God created the animals and mankind, I have zero problem with that). I agree, Sean, science cannot disprove miracles – nor can science disprove things supernatural. I agree that some things cannot be tested in the laboratory because we cannot ‘be’ there and cannot reproduce it in the laboratory (your example about Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz), for these we have to rely on other evidence – but it is NOT JUST testimony Sean – we an go to old battlefields today and we can find evidence of the battles and how they occurred. People can even collect samples of DNA from items from battles fought hundreds of years ago and find out who was fighting – testimony is important, but so is other methods of evaluation. – back to the point I was making – I agree science cannot disprove miracles. Yet when you have something where there is clear evidence that it can be the result of a natural process – why invoke a supernatural process? The rule of Occams razor comes into effect here (yes, I can invoke a little philosophy too Sean) – the principle of parsimony states that when using logic or question/problem-solving, the simplest argument or the argument invoking the fewest gaps or unsupported steps is favored. Specifically – there is a great deal of evidence that supports evolution being the process by which complex forms of life, and mankind, arose from earlier forms of life. Even given miracles are possible, the rule of Occams razor states that the conclusion that current forms of life arose through evolution is far more favored over a second theory, that all current forms of life arose through a miracle(s). In other words, if a natural process can be used to explain this, one should not assume the miraculous theory. If I carry out an experiment and natural sciences cannot explain my result – I say so; I say the results cannot be explained. That is not the case for evolution, don’t invoke miracles when you don’t need to.
I wish to add here that Tom’s adding DNA to the example of Napoleons Battle of Austerlitz misses the point. The scientist grabbing some bones from the battlefield is still 100% relying on historical records/testimony that this is where the bone is coming from. A picture of Abraham Lincoln is considered authentic because of the historical testimony surround the picture in question and the many other testimonies surrounding other pictures. We come to knowledge that this isn’t a “carny” look alike for photo ops.
ME
Sean Giordano It is telling to me that you dismiss a point (the point is separate from the person) in an ad-hominem manner. Dr. Kenyon, when an evolutionist, had one of the most popular book in the cutting edge of where evolutionary theory was heading at that point (science corrects itself).
There are Nobel prize winning scientists that are I.D.’ers, and I noted before that the guy most credited in getting us to the moon, the co-founder of the MRI, and the most lauded pediatric surgeon are YEC. Not to mention Dr. Edgar Andrews would surely at least like to survey your positions above… as well as Dr. Jonathan Sarfati. Even if they do not get involved in the convo, there are very intelligent men who take positions that are rejected apriori to the dealing with the positions taken based on the evidence. in other words, you define, apriori, what evidence is… sometimes based on whether a person is an evolutionist or not. In fact, you are talking to a three time felon, high school drop out. I just happened to have read over 2,000 books cover-to-cover (I have over 5,000 in my home library) and finally went to seminary to get a non-scientific degree.
Ironic… the quote must have hit close to home for you to mention his position (I am only assuming based on your reaction… if we were playing poler, its called “a tell”).
The idea I clearly espoused via the quote from my book is the same the atheist Dr. Monton pointed out in regards to Newton’s position (arguably the greatest scientist):
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 (Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press, 2009), 62-64.
[….]
Haha… just thought of this. Next you will tell me his Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University is less important than you Ph.D. UCLA. Funny. I love the humorous positions that come from these discussions. the Bible says “a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18b).
It is ironic that Tom would not accept the simple premise that Dr. Kenyon gave because he is both ONLY an assistant professor AND has a doctorate in a field of science not related wholly to that of Tom’s… yet, here he is talking with a 3-time felon/high school drop out.
Tom Melendy
Who’s being haughty now Sean? You’ve stopped your “dialog” with me and now you’re just proselytizing. You’re complaining that I’m criticizing people’s degrees – it’s not where they are so much as what their background is! I’m sorry, biophysics is NOT biology – it’s physics (yes, applied to biological problems, but it’s PHYSICS!). Like I’ve posted above, reading the books does not make you a specialist, I don’t care if you’re a three-time felon college drop-out, OR a person with a biophysics PhD from Stanford.
[….]
And I will point out that you now refuse to engage my arguments – again, it looks like you’ve chickened out of the dialog and are just throwing quotes at the wall hoping something sticks. ANSWER MY POINTS IF YOU WANT A DIALOG! Could it be perhaps that you don’t know how to respond to a scientist who isn’t invested in discrediting the existence of God or miracles, but instead is just interesting in arguing the merits of evolution? You’ve replied to none of my points over the past day Sean. While I have criticized some of the “specialists” you cite, I have also responded to most of your points.
[….]
It seems almost as if you didn’t really want a dialog Sean, and that it was more like you were looking for a soap-box. Are you still unwilling to admit any credence for a role in evolution in the creation of mankind (whether God-driven or natual-laws driven)?
Here we come to the end of where Dr. Melendy participates. I answer a couple of his specific inquiries, but know that they are asked as if they cannot be answered. Enjoy the responses:
ME
(I will mention a book for each section for those reading this.)
YOU ASKED (I deal with two more in-depth below)
let me ask you a question. If God created all the species* currently on the Earth either 6000 years ago, or through intelligent design, why is there so much evidence that supports Evolution? Why Ancient species, why evidence for intermediate* species? If you believe in an all-powerful God, yet don’t believe in Evolution, then why are these fossils there, then why does the genetic code show evidence of intermediates and sequence-relatedness consistent with Evolution? Do you believe God put it all there just to try to confuse us? Seems like a lot of trouble just to play a little mind-game with mankind – ??
Have you ever sought out a book by a doctorate holding person to answer these? Or do you go around thinking they are unanswerable?
Correcting Some Bad Thinking
*MACROEVOLUTION-SPECIES
I still think you were passing false information on in this regard to Jim:
Jim, Macro evolution has been observed in the laboratory under controlled conditions – within just a few generations you can “breed” fish to be miniature fish, which reproduce and “grow” up while never getting bigger than the size they were bred for.
And to me:
Macroevolution does NOT require an “increase in the gene pool” – the gene pool of the horse and donkey are virtually identical, yet they are separate species (yet closely related enough to produce sterile offspring). The reason they are different species is due to the cytogenetic changes (note that does NOT involve additional genetic material or a greater gene pool).
You should know what the other side believes before asking a question, its 101, you asked: “If God created all the SPECIES currently on the Earth either 6000 years ago, or through intelligent design, why is there so much evidence that supports Evolution?” He didn’t, God created the “Kinds,” which is more like Order (Felidae, Canidae, etc). You have a doctorate, right? Do you get it yet? Order… species… different.
In every Oxford dictionary and companion book to biology, physics, and the like, textbooks (I have many university level texts)… macroevolution has the same definition. I think you telling people on this site that special change is evidence of macro-evolution is deplorable. But maybe you thought no one would catch this because you were degreed. You did back away from this though… in many more words though than just saying “I was wrong.” I even had to throw in an elementary picture to make the point (http://tinyurl.com/3npkel8).
It is very important not to confuse the “created kind” with the modern use of the word species. Although animals like the fox and coyote might be considered different taxonomic species, they are still parts of the same “kind” of animal. The created kind is thought to be more often synonymous with the “Family” level of classification in the taxonomic hierarchy; at least in mammals; and occasionally it can extend as high as the order level. Here are some examples:
Felidae — Scientists from Creation Ministries International and the Institute for Creation Research have proposed that the original feline kind was comparable to the Liger and the Tigon.
Canidae — Including Wolves, Foxes, Jackals, Coyotes, and Domestic dogs.
Camelidae — Including both the Camel and the Llama, which are reproductively compatible, their hybrid offspring being known as “Camas.”
Bovidae — Including Cattle, Buffalo, Bison, and Yaks.
Equidae — Including Horses, Zebras, and Asses.
Caprinae — Including Sheep, Goats, and Ibex.
Crocodilia — Including all the varieties of Alligators, Crocodiles, and Gharials.
Elephantidae — Including African and Asian elephants, Mammoths, Mastodons, and Gomphotheres.
Thus the created kind corresponds roughly to the family level of taxonomic classification, and possibly even the order, with the notable exception of humanity wherein the genus is representative.[10]
Humanity — Dr. Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer of the University of Munich concluded that H. erectus/H. ergaster, Neanderthals and H. sapiens were members of the same basic type (which corresponds to a monobaramin) genus Homo.
*INTERMEDIATES (THIS DOESN’T MEAN THEY DON’T BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION, IT JUST MEANS THEY ARE HONEST):
Anthropologist Edmund R. Leach told the 1981 Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science:
✔ “Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so.”
David Raup, curator of geology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago:
✔ “He [Darwin] was embarrassed by the fossil record because it didn’t look the way he predicted it would and, as a result, he devoted a long section of his Origin of Species to an attempt to explain and rationalize the differences…. Darwin’s general solution to the incompatibility of fossil evidence and his theory was to say that the fossil record is a very incomplete one…. Well, we are now about 120 years after Darwin, and knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time. By this I mean that some of the classic cases of Darwinian change in the fossil record, such as the evolution of the horse in North America, have had to be discarded or modified as a result of more detailed information [archaeopteryx as well].”
Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, probably evolution’s leading spokesperson today, has acknowledged:
✔ “The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.”
George Gaylord Simpson, perhaps the twentieth century’s foremost paleontologist, said:
✔ “This regular absence of transitional forms is not confined to mammals, but is an almost universal phenomenon, as has long been noted by paleontologists. It is true of almost all orders of all classes of animals, both vertebrate and invertebrate.”
David B. Kitts of the school of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Oklahoma wrote:
✔ “Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of ‘seeing’ evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of ‘gaps’ in the fossil record. Evolution requires [key word, requires] intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.”
Dr. Steven Stanley of the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, John Hopkins University, says:
✔ “The known fossil record fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic [structural] transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid.”
Professor Heribert Nilsson, Director of the Botanical Institute at Lund University, Sweden, declared after forty years of study:
✔ “It may, therefore, be firmly maintained that it is not even possible to make a caricature of an evolution out of paleobiological facts. The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as due to the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.”
Gareth J. Nelson, of the American Museum of Natural History:
✔ “It is a mistake to believe that even one fossil species or fossil ‘group’ can be demonstrated to have been ancestral to another. The ancestor-descendant relationship may only be assumed to have existed in the absence of evidence indicating otherwise.”
Moreover, Newsweek reported:
✔ “In the fossil record, missing links are the rule: the story of life is as disjointed as a silent newsreel, in which species succeed one another as abruptly as Balkan prime ministers. The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms between species, the more they have been frustrated.”
Moreover, one of my favorite quotes from an article entitled Paleontology and Uniformitarianism:
✔ “Contrary to what most scientists write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so, we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory.”
I am merely continuing the conversation. You mentioned God is un-provable. However, God entered into creation, thus — giving us a verifiable way of proving the existence of Himself. You put the onus on someone (happened to be me) to explain a way that we can prove His existence as much as we can prove Augustus Caesar existed. If this is proselytizing, then so be it.
BOOK: “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus,” by Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona.
OCCAM’S RAZOR
Both Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. J.P. Moreland use it to prove God. the earliest version is Aristotle, and Galileo Galilei and Albert Einstein used it. Remember, Einstein said, “I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist,” this doesn’t leave too many options.
The actual change in the study was by artificial selection (man caused — intelligence), leading to this truism:
Note that this is not evolution because the selection pressure—which is essentially an artificially-imposed version of “natural selection”—simply favors certain genes over others; it cannot generate any new genetic information. Neither such ‘artificial’ nor ‘natural’ selection can turn plaice into people; it can only operate on (i.e. cull out) genetic information that already exists.
Stephen Jay Gould called them “just-so stories” (also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative). “How the Daffodil Got Its Trumpet;” “How the Rhinoceros Beetle Got Its Horns;” Etc… evolution has stories, you merely told one yourself: how silversides size proved macro-evolution.
You seem to reject positions taken because of the persons degree or teaching position, or whether they are religious or not. So, here is a short list of biologists who are mostly creationists and some I.D.’ers:
• Dr. Arthur Ernest Wilder-Smith (Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry at University of Reading, England; Dr.es.Sc. in pharmacological sciences from Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich; D.Sc. in pharmacological sciences from University of Geneva)
• Dr. Jerry R. Bergman (Ph.D. student, department of chemistry Miami University, Oxford, Ohio; Ph.D. in human biology from Columbia Pacific University, San Rafael, California; Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan)
• Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, Biology (Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Harvard Medical School)
• Dr. Kimberly Berrine, Microbiology & Immunology
• Prof. Vladimir Betina, Microbiology, Biochemistry & Biology
• Dr. Andrew Bosanquet, Biology, Microbiology
• Dr. Rob Carter, Marine Biology (Ph.D., University of Miami)
• Dr. David A. DeWitt, Biology, Biochemistry, Neuroscience (Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine)
• Dr. Andrew J. Fabich, Microbiology
• Prof. Carl B. Fliermans, Professor of Biology (Ph.D., Indiana University)
• Prof. Robert H. Franks, Associate Professor of Biology
• Dr. James A. Huggins, Professor and Chair, Department of Biology (Ph.D, University of Memphis)
• Dr. Arthur Jones, Biology (Ph.D., University of Birmingham)
• Prof. Gi-Tai Kim, Biology
• Dr. Leonid Korochkin, M.D., Genetics, Professor of genetics at Yale University, head of Molecular Biology laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences
• Prof. Chris D. Osborne, Assistant Professor of Biology
• Dr. Ariel A. Roth, Biology (Ph.D. in biology from the University of Michigan)
• Dr. Timothy G. Standish, Biology (Ph.D. in biology and public policy from George Mason University)
• Dr. Sung-Hee Yoon, Biology
• Dr. Henry Zuill, Biology (Ph.D. in biology from Loma Linda University)
• Dr. Frank Marsh, Biology
• Dr. Jonathan Wells, Biology (molecular and cell biology from the University of California at Berkeley)
• Dr. Lee Spencer, Biology
• Dr. Chris D. Osborne, Biology (Ph.D. in biology from Loma Linda University)
• Dr. David Menton, Biology (Ph.D .in Biology from Brown University)
• Dr. John W. Klotz, Genetics (Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Pittsburgh)
• Dr. Pierre Gunnar Jerlström, Molecular Biology (Ph.D. in molecular biology, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia)
• Dr. Karen E. Jensen, Biology (Ph.D. in biology from Loma Linda University)
• Dr. Wayne Frair, Biochemistry (Ph.D. in Biochemical Taxonomy from the Rutgers University)
• Dr. Daniel Criswell, Molecular Biology (Ph.D., University of Montana)
• Dr. Kenneth B. Cumming, Biology (Ph.D. [and M.S.] from Harvard)
• Dr. Art Chadwick, Biology (Ph.D., University of Miami)
• Dr. Michael E. Brown, Biology (Ph.D. in biology with an emphasis in molecular biology from Loma Linda University)
• Dr. Raymond G. Bohlin, Biology (Ph.D. in molecular and cell biology from the University of Texas)
