TRUTH MATTERS

There’s a new book out by Michael Lynch which falls into the category of “Trying to Come Up With Some Plausible Naturalistic Theory of the Origin of Phenotypes Because We’ve Been Nyah-nyahing Creationists About Doing This for Years.” Massimo Pigliucci reviews the book in the Aug 31, 2007 issue of Science in an article entitled “Postgenomic Musings” and makes the following interesting statements [my comments are in brackets] …

Everyone in biology keeps predicting that the next few years will bring answers to some of the major open questions in evolutionary biology, but there seems to be disagreement on what, exactly, those questions are. [much less what the answers are]
…
[Explaining one of S.B. Carroll’s points in his Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom] Lynch’s comment that science isn’t about inspiration (I guess it truly must be about perspiration), however, misses Carroll’s point: what the modern synthesis has not given us is a theory of form, and applying population genetics to genomics–as valuable an exercise as that is in its own right–isn’t going to give us one either. As much as genes are fundamental to the evolutionary process, there is much more to biology than genes and their dynamics. The very fact that molecular biologists are now talking (albeit often naïvely) about higher-level “-omics,” all the way to phenomics, means that they appreciate that genomes are only a part of the story, arguably the simplest part to figure out. Read more »

C.S. Lewis is known for his children’s books, but he was also a very clear thinking apologist for the Christian faith. He was agnostic for many years, but eventually became a Christian and was very prolific in his writings which were tailored specifically for non-believers. One of his greatest non-fiction titles is Mere Christianity which not only is easy, entertaining reading, but also a clear picture of the essentials of the Christian faith stripped of all the often confusing man-made religious trappings that so often encumbers it. I highly recommend this book to everyone … it’s easy reading guys and less than 200 pages.

Section One of Mere Christianity is called “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe” … an intriguing title to be sure. Here’s how he begins in Chapter 1: The Law of Human Nature …

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: “How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?” — “That’s my seat, I was there first” — “Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm”– [and so on.] People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grownups.

Read more »

In a recent Nature Book Review about the new book, Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory, Clive Gamble, Cambridge University Press: 2007, Proctor compares paleontology and geology and notes that in both … “absence of evidence can be evidence of an absence.”

Books and Arts
Nature 448, 752-753 (16 August 2007)

Material metaphors
Robert N. Proctor

Gamble shows that the rate of invention grows slowly over the long haul of human evolution, and reminds us that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But how long should we search the Middle Palaeolithic for painted caves or sculpted figurines before concluding that none was ever done, and not for lack of interest, but for lack of capacity? For many years, geologists were reluctant to recognize catastrophes, postulating ‘missing strata’ to account for apparent jumps. The rehabilitation of catastrophes over the past few decades owes much to a renewed appreciation that absence of evidence can be evidence of an absence. I think it is fair to ask whether the situation might not be similar for paleoanthropology.

And who, may I ask, has pushed geologists to this new realization?

Henry Morris? Perhaps? Anyone heard of The Genesis Flood way back in 1961?

Rehabilitation? Hmmm … yes … rehabilitation. Why? Well because most of the Founders of Modern Science explained the Geologic Column by reference to the Very Large Catastrophe known as the Genesis Flood. Then along came the “Genesis is a Fairy Tale” people and sold their bill of goods to a new academic elite who for some reason had a strong motivation to believe them in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

Interesting, isn’t it?

For some great quotes on catastrophism see my article HERE.

Sir Karl Popper was one of the best known Philosophers of Science and is best known in scientific circles for his “Demarcation of Science” that is, his attempts to define or “demarcate” what science is and what science is not. You can read about him more extensively in an encyclopedia if you wish, but this will be a short review of what Popper actually wrote in chronological order. Below, we shall see that Popper clearly described ‘law-based’ science, that he excluded evolutionary biology from this program and called it unscientific and ‘metaphysical,’ that he later recanted about the scientific nature of it and then provided a different program for testing what he calls the ‘historical sciences’ of which Ev Bio is one. Read more »

PREDICTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY SPECIAL CREATION: We will not find any ‘ape-men’ living anywhere on earth. We will only find apes and humans, no ‘in-betweens.’ BASIS FOR PREDICTION: Genesis 1&2 – Separate creation of man and beast. Man is made in the image of God, etc.

PREDICTION OF DARWINIAN THEORY OF EVOLUTION: We should find societies of ‘ape-men’ living in various places on earth. BASIS FOR PREDICTION: Darwinian view that H. sapiens descended from an ape-like ancestor over millions of years.

THE RESULT?
Darwinist prediction: SPECTACULAR FAILURE
Special Creation prediction: CONFIRMED

Jerry Bergman tells the story here … http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5033 … and I would encourage you to circulate this story far and wide. These types of actions are the direct result of Darwinian thinking and need to be exposed. Discussion at IIDB found HERE. Here are some excerpts from Bergman’s article … Read more »

SUBTITLE: Why are many scientists so opposed to investigating Immaterial Intelligence? (I.e. Theology, which used to be called the ‘Queen of Sciences’)
SUB-SUBTITLE: Will the ‘Queen’ regain her rightful throne in academia? (Picture credit: Wiki “atom” which means “unsplittable” … what a misnomer that turned out to be! So don’t let today’s physicists tell you we will EVER arrive at a truly elementary particle.)

ANTI-SUPERNATURALISM
I have always said that anti-supernaturalists … or materialists if you like … those who either deny the supernatural or say it’s unscientific to explore it … truly are NOT. That is, they are not anti-supernaturalists at all upon close inspection. They actually believe in many supernatural things. The spontaneous assembly of life from non-living chemicals that supposedly occurred several billion years ago is a prime example. It’s never been observed in the lab … just like I’ve never observed my supernatural God creating anything in the lab … so it’s a supernatural belief, although adherents will deny this. The spontaneous origin of new proteins, new cell types, and new organs is another example. No one’s ever observed it. They just assume it can happen on faith in the supernatural. Now some may come back and say, “I beg your pardon, new proteins are formed spontaneously all the time.” Yes, I say, this happens in the same twisted way that I could say my dented up, rusted out Ford Mustang is a “new car.” Click here for that discussion. UPDATE 9/3/07: I just read an interesting article about a recent book by Canadaian neurosurgeon Mario Beauregard (Denyse O’Leary coauthor) called “The Spiritual Brain.” Read the article HERE. Read more »