The Darwin Deception

A splendidly scientific letter in this week's New Scientist!

2012-02-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

It is impossible to tell whether a reader’s letter in this week’s New Scientist is from an evolutionist or a creationist! It reads:

“Why are scientists and teachers resistant to mentioning intelligent design and climate change denial in school science classes? They are wonderful examples to demonstrate the difference between pseudo-science and real science. Properly equipped teachers will not have to take sides; the students will work it out for themselves. Problem solved.”

I couldn't have put it better myself. Down with the censors and thought controllers, lets have REAL free thinking.

NHS reforms-Evolution or revolution?

2012-02-12T02:10:00.000-08:00

The UK government says its National Health Service 'reforms' are 'Evolutionary, not Revolutionary'. This throws up some strange ideas. This might seem a trivial and opportunistic comment, but hear me out.

Currently, Britain has a state run near monopoly healthcare provider, the National Health Service which in theory is ‘Universal (treats everyone) Comprehensive (treats everything) and Free at the point of use.’ Presently the NHS is going through another of its periodic re-organisations. The politicians are addicted to re-organisations; they call them ‘reforms’. If you say ‘managerial shake-up/reorganisation’ people groan and say ‘Oh no, not again!’ whereas if you say ‘reform’ it sounds noble and grand. And thereby hangs a tale. Loading misleading meanings (positive or negative) on to words is an effective strategy used by partisan politicians, other confidence tricksters and writers of fiction.

It would take thousands of words to describe the arguments for and against these contentious reforms even in outline and that is not the focus of this blog, I’ll come to the connection in a few moments. Essentially, they are top-down, government driven, introduce competition between healthcare providers, are said to be about ‘choice’, ‘progress’ ‘excellence’ and various other happy words, and are to be imposed on a reluctant healthcare work force by a government ‘because they can’. The 5 most important criticisms of the reforms are that (A) they will cost a lot of money to implement, (B) hardly anyone understands them, (C) they are untested, (D) have created uncertainty in which experienced staff are leaving and forward planning is blighted, and (E) with a very few exceptions, the entire healthcare profession is opposed to them for the above reasons. Andrew Lansley, the Conservative politician who masterminded the reforms brushes the criticism of doctors, nurses, midwifes and patient representatives away, accusing the professionals of protecting their vested interests or opposing reform because the government is worsening their pension arrangements.

On today’s news, the Prime Minister David Cameron came to his Health secretary’s defence, saying the NHS reforms, and here I come to my main point, were ‘Evolutionary, not Revolutionary’

The reforms are evolutionary? Well that is interesting. Because I thought that Andrew Lansley had actually thought about the reforms, that they had a goal, that they were, dare I say, intelligently designed.

Getting away from the narrower point about healthcare provision, important though this is, there are a couple of important points here about language, which is of course the medium we use to communicate meaning. I know the English language is a funny old bird, that there are nuances and changes over time, but if the meaning of a word is to be changed out of recognition, we should be alerted to this. We need straight language that means what it says. Calling these reforms ‘Evolutionary, not Revolutionary’ is wildly inaccurate. The changes are clearly revolutionary, in that they are a sudden change, imposed by design, from the present system to a very different way of doing things. In Darwinian evolution, things happen very slowly over a great deal of time, small (too small to observe, that’s why they have to be imagined). In Darwinian evolution, many variations are thrown up by random mutations, the ones which are an improvement (if any) are conserved, the others (the vast majority) are ‘ruthlessly exterminated by natural selection’ (Darwin’s phrase).

Hold on a minute. Do I want my country’s healthcare system, on which my loved ones and I may depend and for which I am heavily taxed, to be subject to this kind of process? I’d much prefer an intelligent design model.

So there are 2 interesting points about language and meaning which arise from this. One is that the terms evolution and design are yet again being mixed up in a chaotic manner which makes reasonable discussion about either process impossible. I have said before that this makes it more difficult to hold the evolutionists’ feet to the fire about the scientific failures of their ‘microbes to man by natural selection on random mutations’ hypothesis.

A second point which I have not made so often if at all, is that evolutionary thinking seems to have crept into general thinking as a way of understanding creative processes. In short, if our politicians, opinion formers and leaders actually BELIEVE that the most potent creative force of all, the one that made life including Man, consists of the production of large numbers of entities more or less at random and eliminating the least fit by destructive competition until you are left with the best, then this is the process we should use in our statecraft, industry, public service etc. Lansley’s NHS reforms are predicated on quality and value arising from competition in a healthcare market.

In other words, when men believe that the processes imagined by Darwin are the deepest underlying reality concerning creative processes, and that there is an ‘onwards and upwards’ progress, they apply this kind of thinking to policy. Why wouldn’t they? After all, as a Christian I take God’s word into account and pray before I design a project in my life. If they believe in ‘progress’ through natural selection acting on chaos, perhaps they believe that creating chaos is the key to progress. Far fetched? I have heard this many times.

We act on what we believe. If our leaders believe the Darwin mythos, they will act on it as trhey plan our lives away. This explains a lot.

Stephen Meyer versus Keith Fox on intelligent design

2012-02-08T02:53:00.000-08:00

Last night I listened to a podcast discussion on Premier Christian Radio between Stephen Meyer, author of ‘Signature in the Cell’ and a theistic evolutionist, Professor Keith Fox of Southampton University. The podcast can be found here http://www.c4id.org.uk/

I thought Meyer made his case very effectively. He set out the case for the intelligent design hypothesis explaining how it is not religious but derives from what we know about life, and in particular what we know about information, the main subject of his book. When we study, as Meyer has, DNA and the science of information and consider the precise, compact and multi-layered hierarchies of digitally coded information stored on the DNA molecule, we have cause to ask how this information originated. We then, as Meyer explained, infer to the most reasonable explanation. Design, necessity or chance? How can we test this?

We can test it by observing the characteristics of information bearing systems that we know empirically were designed. We have abundant evidence of such information arising from minds, but not a single example of meaningful information arising from mindless processes. Not even an excuse for one. It is therefore entirely rational to imply a designing mind based on what we know from empirical observations about the natural world. As Meyer, whose Cambridge PhD was in the philosophy of science, explained, this is the exact same process of reasoning which Darwin and Lyell applied-look at currently operating causes and effects in the world today and use them to make assumptions about the past.

His opponent Keith Fox in response simply re-stated the traditionalist Dawkinist faith position. ‘Natural selection could have done it…you’re appealing to a God of the gaps…..given enough time it must have happened…science asks how.’ As is so often the case when rationalistic arguments against Darwinianism are put, he did not seem to have grasped what Meyer was saying and had no answers but to appeal to authority and a Darwin of the gaps. ‘OK, we have no idea how life or information originated’ he was forced to admit ‘…but science is working on it and we know that it ‘could have’ happened by evolution.’ (NB I paraphrase, you can listen for yourself to see how fairly I have reported the debate-ED)

At no point, and he was given the opportunity, did Professor Fox explain how his ‘theistic’ version of evolution differed from that of the materialists. He seemed not to want to be labelled as a materialist, but failed to explain how his world view differed from, say P Z Myers or Sam Harris. I have always wanted to ask a professing Christian who laps up the evolutionism of Dawkins what he hopes to gain by distancing themselves from those who challenge that godless view. The interviewer did not ask this question.

I hope that Stephen Meyer will bring out a shorter version of the excellent ‘Signature in the Cell’ for the general reader, there are strong science arguments in it that should be more widely heard in the origins discussion. But sadly I have little hope that it will persuade those who cling to their iconic Darwin of the gaps as they recoil from the idea of the Big Scary God, who if able to create near instantaneously, can also resurrect our dead bodies and bring us into judgment-as Jesus said He will. They will go on denying the clear and positive evidence of design that the whole of existence from the level of the atom to the cosmologic constants, our bodies and especially our brains, shows. We deny this in culpable ignorance.

I hate washing dirty linen in public, but it ill behoves prominent Christians in science to side with the enemies of the faith. People like Fox do not even seem to bring a distinctive version of evolution to the table, not even explaining, if Genesis and John 1 vs1-5 are metaphor, what they are metaphors of. These issues deserve further consideration. For pity's sake, why are so called Christian evolutionists running a mile from the very concept of design? design stares us in the face and has at the very least a respectable minority putting forward reasoned scientific defence for it, why are Christians in Science lining up to do Dawkins' work for him (albeit more politely) against the ID movement? Has he ever heard the phrase 'useful idiot'?

When Meyer was on a book tour in the US, Dawkins refused invitations to debate with him although he was on a US book tour as well, on the grounds that Meyer was a young earth creationist. Meyer denied this and insisted that his arguments were from mathematics and biology, as he clearly showed on this Premier Christian radio interview. Darwin defenders routinely side-step the severe challenge to their beliefs from the intelligent design hypothesis by misprepresenting their opponents as young earth creationists (they are not)and using the demarcation dispute. This is a disgrace and a cop out. If evolutionists refuse to engage with the issue of information as set out by Meyer, they are clinging to a faith position in the teeth of the evidence.

Draw Darwin day

2012-02-07T07:41:00.000-08:00

Today is the 200th aniversay of the birth of Charles Dickens, an Englishman who actually achieved something useful and is still loved.

A while ago, Dickens' image was removed from the English £10 note and replaced by Darwin's, wrongfully I thought. Darwin's birthday is coming up at the weekend. Thinking about that other historical personality who is protected from ordinary criticism in my country and whose followers killed a whole bunch of people for drawing disrespectful cartoons of him, I thought I'd see if I can start a tradition.

Welcome to the first 'Draw Darwin' day! Post something on your own blog and link to this. Captions could include 'I have no difficulty in imagining' ...'surely we can believe'...'I can hardly doubt' ...'I have nothing to say about origins' or other quote from that goldmine of Guff 'Origin of Species.' You don't have to be any good at drawing, concentrate on the eyebrows.

Is human evolution slowing down?

2012-02-03T02:04:00.000-08:00

Listening to the radio this morning I hear that BBC atheist Professor Steve Jones, styled an evolutionary biologist, is on ‘Question Time’ this evening. He is introduced by a reference to the thesis associated with him that ‘human evolution is stopping.’ Which he supports by saying that since fewer older men are fathering children, the ‘mutations on which evolution depends’ are declining in frequency.’

There is nothing to be gained by cussing at the radio or throwing it across the room, less still to be gained by writing to the pro-Darwin BBC. So I do some Googling and confirm that Jones apparently does believe this utterly irrational statement.

Here are Jones views lifted from a Canadian science blog

Human evolution is grinding to a halt because of a shortage of older fathers in the West, according to a leading genetics expert. Fathers over the age of 35 are more likely to pass on mutations, according to Professor Steve Jones, of University College London.

Speaking today at a UCL lecture entitled "Human evolution is over" Professor Jones will argue that there were three components to evolution – natural selection, mutation and random change. "Quite unexpectedly, we have dropped the human mutation rate because of a change in reproductive patterns," Professor Jones told The Times.

This is because cell divisions in males increase with age. "Every time there is a cell division, there is a chance of a mistake, a mutation, an error," he said. "For a 29-year old father [the mean age of reproduction in the West] there are around 300 divisions between the sperm that made him and the one he passes on – each one with an opportunity to make mistakes.

"For a 50-year-old father, the figure is well over a thousand. A drop in the number of older fathers will thus have a major effect on the rate of mutation."

Professor Jones added: "In the old days, you would find one powerful man having hundreds of children." He cites the fecund Moulay Ismail of Morocco, who died in the 18th century, and is reputed to have fathered 888 children. To achieve this feat, Ismail is thought to have copulated with an average of about 1.2 women a day over 60 years.

Another factor is the weakening of natural selection. "In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of 20. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to 21."

Decreasing randomness is another contributing factor. "Humans are 10,000 times more common than we should be, according to the rules of the animal kingdom, and we have agriculture to thank for that. Without farming, the world population would probably have reached half a million by now – about the size of the population of Glasgow.

"Small populations which are isolated can evolve at random as genes are accidentally lost. World-wide, all populations are becoming connected and the opportunity for random change is dwindling. History is made in bed, but nowadays the beds are getting closer together. We are mixing into a global mass, and the future is brown."

Apparently, nobody has told Jones that mutations degrade the precious and highly ordered information stored on the DNA and so cause damage. John Sanford has explored this in his book ‘Genetic Entropy: the Mystery of the Genome’ which contains startling evidence in support of a recent creation of a once perfect genome which then became subject to corruption, since the human genome is degrading due to accumulating corruptions and looks to be on a downhill trend towards extinction. Unhappily for evolutionists, the copying errors which are the only possible source of the variations that natural selection can only act by conserving (as Darwin wrote) are pretty uniformly unhelpful.

Ans as Michael Behe writes in ‘The Edge of Evolution’, when mutations do confer benefit, it is limited and situational (like sickle cell disease) and results from broken or blunted genes, not the creation of new meaningful information. Order does not arise from random mutations. Jones does the intelligent design and creationist movements a favour by coming out and (unless I misinterpret him) saying that more mutations would build better humans. They wouldn't, but if he actually believes that the decline of mutations from older fathers is slowing down evolution, why doesn't he argue for other means of inducing a higher rate of mutations to make up for it? Of course, I do not wish to imply that Jones is a cruel man or delights in the suffering that most mutations large enough to matter cause. It is his reasoning that I question, not his personal ethics. But what he appears to believe is that mutations are somehow good for us. On my reading of evolutionism, this is an article of faith as there is no other source of the random variations which allegedly created us.

Jones could easily blow the intelligent design movement out of the water by, for example, offering a realistic scenario for the evolution of Krebs cycle or even showing us a handful of examples of random mutation creating meaningful new DNA information that coded for a useful NEW characteristic not previously present in the genome. No luck so far. Perhaps that is why he has to rely on absurd philosophical grandstanding like the above.

It is a basic tenet of Darwinist belief that at least a significant minority of mutations are creative and lead to selectable advantages at the level of the whole organism. Empirical observations reveal the complete opposite, as the intelligent design hypothesis predicts. But since when were directly observable facts a hindrance to the pure faith of men like Jones? They rely on their Darwin of the gaps to fill in the disconnect between their evolutionist religion and the facts of science.

If Jones is worried about evolution running out of steam, perhaps he should be in favour of nuclear war? This would reduce the human population and increase mutations by radiation. The red in tooth and claw struggle among the irradiated survivors, without contraception, vaccination or rule of law, should speed evolution up again, if that’s what Jonesey wants. Former atheist Kurt Vonnegut wrote about something similar in his novel 'Galapagos'.

Over to you, Mr Ahmadinajad.

Farewell Terry Hamblin

2012-02-01T04:28:00.000-08:00

The death has been announced of Dr Terry Hamblin who was an eminent scientist and haematologist and a committed Christian and young earth creationist involved with the Biblical Creation Society. He was also a gentleman with a warm and generous heart. He faced his coming death, which he blogged about on his Mutations of Mortality blog, with courage and hope.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/medicine-obituaries/9036815/Terry-Hamblin.html

Dr Hamblin's commitment to Christ, a Biblical world view and rejection of Darwinism did not in any way prevent him being a leader and a high achiever in his field of research, in particular he was a pioneer of chronic lymphocytic leukemia research and treatment, as his obituary on the Telegraph (linked) shows.

His exemplary life shows once again that creationism is not a science stopper.

There is no conflict between true religion and true science. The conflicts are between the Darwin mythos and the findings of empirical science, and between the rival faith positions of materialism and Christianity.

Goodbye Terry, be seeing you.

Another icon of evolution tumbles-ice age microbial antibiotic resistance discovered

2012-01-05T06:40:00.000-08:00

The following is from the latest Answers in Genesis news digest.

Are bacteria really evolving?

Back in 1988, explorers frozen in 1845 were autopsied at the University of Alberta, and six strains of bacteria isolated from their colons were revived. According to microbiologist Dr. Kinga Kowalewska-Grochowska, “Three of them also happen to be resistant to antibiotics. In this case, the antibiotics clindamycin and cefoxitin, both of which were developed more than a century after the men died, were among those used.”

Now researchers have gone a step further. They have isolated bacterial DNA from Ice Age permafrost and found genes coding for resistance to several classes of antibiotics, including β-lactams, tetracycline, and glycopeptide antibiotics.

Then, focusing on the genes encoding vancomycin resistance, they recreated those gene products in the lab. The three enzymes thus produced worked together to resist vancomycin in the same way as their modern counterparts.They conclude, “Antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon that predates the modern selective pressure of clinical antibiotic use.”

So how did the bacteria already have suitable weapons years before their enemy was invented? Antibiotics and their antidotes are actually natural substances produced by fungi, algae, and bacteria. Dr. Gerry Wright explains, “Antibiotics are part of the natural ecology of the planet so when we think that we have developed some drug that won't be susceptible to resistance or some new thing to use in medicine, we are completely kidding ourselves. . . . Microorganisms have figured out a way of how to get around them well before we even figured out how to use them.” He adds, “Antibiotics are remarkable resources that need to be carefully husbanded.”

Some of this genetic material is in a form that can be transferred to other microorganisms. Microbiologist Dr. Stuart Levy, who has warned of profligate use of antibiotics for 30 years, explains, “What had been missed in the 1960s and 1970s was the ease with which resistance could appear,” he said. “Bacteria share these genes like baseball cards with each other.”

So is antibiotic resistance the poster-child of evolution? No. There was a time when people thought bacteria evolve resistance because they “need” to. But—as demonstrated in this study and in the 1988 one—the variations and mutations that confer resistance are already in the genomes of some bacteria. The “resistance information” does not necessarily develop in response to the antibiotic threat. Natural selection allows resistant bacteria to survive and reproduce, replenishing the bacterial population. And those surviving bacteria are still bacteria—the same kind of bacteria they were all along.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/12/31/news-to-note-12312011

Human and chimp genomes quite different

2011-12-29T07:07:00.000-08:00

Research has shown that the often repeated 98%-99% similarity between human and chimp DNA is misleading. A thorough review of evidence has put the similarities at 85-59% maximum.

See http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/arj/v4/n1/blastin

The DNA similarity figures are often used to claim support for human and chimpanzee descent from a common ancestor, but are misleading. They have tended to ignore non-coding sequences, so called 'junk DNA' which is increasingly being seen as more important than had previously been thought. Almost nothing is known of how the proteins such as collagen are actually assembled and put into place, just producing a lump of collagen is no good, you need working tendons attached to the right places at each end, etc. This higher order assembly instruction information, which is not observed to be produced by untintelligent processes, is most likely located in the so called junk DNA which is usually omitted from DNA percentage comparisons.

DNA similarities can equally well be taken to signify common design, there are after all only so many ways to build bone, hair, skin or muscle. Krebs cycle and other very fundamental metabolic processes are common to all living things so there is bound to be a huge amount of similarity in DNA between cabbages and kings, lettuces and lemmings etc.

The reality is that far from supporting their case as they would have us believe, DNA poses numerous insuperable problems for the Darwinian, not least since it and its associated check and repair mechanism are irreducably complex and are built by proteins and nanomachinery which it codes for, the mother and father of all chicken and egg situations.

Cambrian eyes and evolutionist confirmation bias.

2011-12-09T01:14:00.000-08:00

Announcements about an ancient arthopod predator has led to further statements about the evolution of vision which are not supported by the evidence but are another example of Darwinian confirmation bias and wishful thinking.

The following item came from the Christian Science monitor as it was the first hit, but the account is replicated elsewhere and was covered in the same way on BBC radio news last week.

>>>>Anomalocaris's newfound eyeballs establish it as an ancient relative of today's arthropods – a broad classification of organisms that includes creatures ranging from lobsters and shrimp to spiders and damsel flies, the researchers say.

But what a relative. "Anomalocaris is the stuff of nightmares," said team leader John Paterson, a paleontologist with the University of New England in Australia, in a prepared statement.
In addition to its length, Anomalocaris sported a pair of barbed arms that protruded like pincers in front of its head, and a circular mouth with rasp-like serrations.

Based on fossil specimens of the creature uncovered in the US, China and Canada, scientists have inferred Anomalocaris's position at the top of the food chain not only from its outward structure, but from the circular mouth marks found on hard-shelled trilobites, which could grow to lengths comparable to a large umbrella, as well as trilobite remains in fossilized fecal matter associated with Anomalocaris. Some researchers hold that these creatures would have been more partial to soft-bodied marine animals.

Whatever the mix of prey, the discovery and analysis of Anomalocaris eyes "confirms that it had superb vision to support its predatory lifestyle," Dr. Paterson said.

The team found the remains in shales from a quarry on Kangaroo Island, just off the southern coast of Australia. The shale formation, known as Emu Bay shales, is noted for preserving soft tissue, as well as skeletal remains.

The Emu Bay shales have yielded two species of Anomalocaris. The pair of eyes appeared in a section of shale that also yielded other specimens of Anomalocaris's arms and body flaps.

The researchers add that the presence of these eyes at this stage in the evolution of life on Earth indicates how quickly, in geologic time, novel features can emerge.<<<<<

In other words, we found this extremely ancient animal which had incredibly efficient eyes which seemed to be perfectly designed to work alongside its other features for a predatory function, and we attributed them to evolution because we know evolution is true however little evidence we have. Wow, even more evidence for evolution! We found something spectacularly well visioned with no ancestors, that must surely shut the cretinists and IDiots up for ever! Darwinian gradualism must still be true, but it must have worked very quickly. The absence of intermediate forms, as admitted by prominent evolutionists like S J Gould and Colin Paterson of the Natural History Museum, is no problem-we have loads of excuses for that. We routinely dismiss the alternative explanation of creation although it fits the evidence better, since this would upset the assumptions about existence which we prefer.

An alternative explanation for this ancient fossil's extremely complex structure, including but not limited to its eyes, is that the oldest creatures, or at any rate those associated with what are believed to be the oldest sedimentary layers, showed extremely complex features because they had bene designed that way from the beginning. These creatures appear suddenly in the deepest fossil layers, fully functional, with no ancestors or intermediate stages.

This evidence fits a creation model better than a Darwinian.

Dawkins the blasphemer against his own religion of scientism

2011-10-11T04:13:00.000-07:00

A group of 30 leading academics, including Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, have signed a statement calling for legal action to prevent creationism or intelligent design being taught in schools. The statement, and the attitude of Dawkins new book, raises concerns about the future of science. The statement on the website http://evolutionnotcreationism.org.uk/ [1] reads as follows.

'Creationism and ‘intelligent design’ are not scientific theories, but they are portrayed as scientific theories by some religious fundamentalists who attempt to have their views promoted in publicly-funded schools. There should be enforceable statutory guidance that they may not be presented as scientific theories in any publicly-funded school of whatever type.

The current government guidance that creationism and ‘intelligent design’ should not be taught in school science should be made statutory and enforceable. It also needs to be made comprehensive so that it is clear that any portrayal of creationism and ‘intelligent design’ as science (whether it takes place in science lessons or not) is unacceptable.

But this is not enough. An understanding of evolution is central to understanding all aspects of biology. The teaching of evolution should be included at both primary and secondary levels in the National Curriculum and in all schools.'

This campaign is supported by the British Humanist Association and a group calling itself Ekklesia, masquerading as a Christian think tank.

This is blasphemy. Dawkins habitually uses the phrase ‘teaching creationism’ when he means ‘questioning evolutionism’. He is nowhere near as clever as he likes to portray himself, but he is clever enough to realise that a deadly new attack is gaining ground against his beloved Darwin mythos. He simply cannot allow this. But for him to come out and say ‘The Darwinian evolutionism is a settled scientific consensus which may not be questioned, however much new evidence there is against it’ is, as he well knows, blasphemy against his religion of scientistic materialism.

For example, when challenged to debate with Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell and an Oxbridge science PhD just the same as Dawkins, when both men were in book tours in the US recently, he refused. He said this was because Meyer was a creationist. Bollocks. Meyer is not a creationist and his book deals with mathematical arguments against the belief that DNA could have created itself. Dawkins cannot counter Meyer’s scientific arguments, so he transforms them (in his rhetorical imagination) into ‘creationism’ so they can be dispensed with without any intellectual effort. Eugenie Scott is quoted by Meyer in the above book using exactly the same trick to avoid answering (or rather, failing to be able to answer) inconvenient questions. Effectively, she says ‘You are a Christian therefore any argument you make against Darwinism is BY DEFINITION religious and therefore need not be considered.’ The idea that the reverse might be true, that Darwinism receives special status and freedom from questioning since it is foundational to atheist belief, is not put.

So, by trying to use the power of the law to silence dissent on a matter of science, and refusing to acknowledge scientific arguments which he cannot answer, Dawkins proves himself an inquisitor, obscurantist, dogmatic, intolerant and FRIGHTENED hypocrite. No wonder he refuses debates unless he has carefully selected the ground and the terms.

Think about it. Dawkins, in the name of science, is trying to use the power of the law to silence free enquiry and prevent something that is called a scientific theory from being tested. Why is this not creating a scandal?

When the day comes for him to give account before a just Creator God, I believe Jesus will rightly say on that day

'I will condemn you out of your own mouth.'

more fossil evidence for creation

2011-10-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

A friend drew my attention to this article in Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111005110957.htm

This beatiful fossil, asserted to be 120 million years old, is of a winged insect. I confess I lack the skills to classify it precisely, but very obviously it is very much the same as the thousands of moths, butterflies, lacewings and other winged insects we see today. If an entomologist, desperate to impose evoutionary theory upon the uncompliant evidence, is able to pick out some trivial difference in wing shape or whatever, then so what? Its a fully formed, beautifuly designed, winged insect from tip to tail. If evolutionism is true (*), it had to have evolved gradually from something that wasn't a winged insect. The evidence for any such gradual evolution is absent.

Predictably, it is claimed to be evidence about 'lacewing evolution'. What it in fact shows is a perfectly formed winged insect which like many another fossil is near as so what? identical to its living descendants we see today.

So, once again, the fossil record gives evidence of sudden appearance and stasis (with extinctions) which is entirely consistent with the biblical creation account but of no support whatever to the Darwin mythos. But the evolutionists will never let evidence get in the way of a good story.

(*) it isn't.

Meredith Kercher murder-Amanda Knox acquital. What of our approach to evidence?

2011-10-04T02:20:00.000-07:00

I haven't been following this sorry case in detail but heard the extensive reporting. Now Amanda Knox, one of three people convicted of this appalling murder, has been freed.

the Italian authorities have been criticised for having a cavalier disregard for due process and the rules of evidence and approaching the case with their minds already made up. I do not know whether this is true or not, just that it is now the official story.

a reporter on BBC radio said this morning,

'It seems that the authorities accepted the evidence that supported their case and disregarded the evidence that did not.'

This immediately made me think of evolutionary 'science' which routinely does the same, and always has since 1859.

A topical example: a lot of fuss has recently been made about some feathers found preserved in amber which have been pronounced dinosaur feathers (which are needed to support the evolutionary conclusions which have already been reached and declared sacrosanct). However, there was no evidence linking the feathers to unequivocal dinisaur remains. This FACT has been sidelined, although it obviously renders the 'evidence' worthless. However, people who don't know any better will have heard this one sided presentation of flimsy evidence and thought

'Yay! more mountains of overwhelming evidence to prove those dumb ass creationsts wrong!'

On the other hand, the much more important findings of semi liquid blood encased within fossil t. rex femur has barely been reported outside creationist web sites. That is because it raises major questions about how old dinosaur fossils really are, questions which might challenge evolutionary orthodoxy and which are therefore impermissible.

So, the Italian police (If guilty as alleged) are not the only people who are highly selective with the evidence and sometimes approach it with their minds already made up.

I do not know whether Amanda Knox is guilty or innocent, and it is probably none of my business. However, Meredith Kercher remains dead.

When we face God on Judgment Day we will all get perfectly fair trials. ALL the evidence will be on record, it will be undeniable, and there will be no lying weaselly lawyers with their tricks. And no plea bargaining or appeal. The only chance of a succesful appeal for guilty sinners like me is now, through Christ.

More on 'dinosaur feathers' scam

2011-09-28T06:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/09/24/news-to-note-09242011

The following extracts (unedited) from Answers in Genesis item on the 'dinosaur feathers' story confirms that, as John Humphyrs didnlt ask but as i suspected, there was no evidence to allow investigators to conclude that any of the 'fuzzy inclusions' found in Canadian fossil amber were associated with dinosaurs. All pure speculation and bluster.

This is no surprise to anyone familiar with the way that Darwinian science works difrerently from, er, science.

with science, you begin qith a question and them nmove forward through testable observations to a tentative conclusion.

with Darwinian science, you begin with a non-negotiable conclusion and then look for evidence that might fit. Evidence that refutes the conclusion is rejected, other evidence is overemphasised and exaggerated to fit the conclusion. Read the full item and judge for yourself.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

"The amber tid-bits, most less than a centimeter across, are leftovers from the “Late Cretaceous” Grassy Lake coal bed in Alberta, Canada. Paleontology graduate student¹ Ryan McKellar surveyed 4000 pieces of amber and found eleven with feathery, hairy, or fuzzy inclusions.....

Significantly, despite the alleged resemblance to “protofeathers,” none of the amber specimens contain any other portions of their original owners. Therefore it is impossible to be sure what animals any specimens belonged to. The article in Science states, “Neither avian nor dinosaurian skeletal material has been found in direct association with amber at the Grassy Lake locality. . . . There is currently no way to refer the feathers in amber with certainty to either birds or the rare small theropods from the area.”⁷ Yale evolutionary ornithologist Richard Prum notes, “The lack of any other remains in the amber—a distinctive bit of bone, say, or a shred of skin—leaves open the possibility that the structures aren't associated with dinosaurs at all.”⁹''

'leaves open the possibility........

shouldn't the discussion have begun by stating that there was no evidence that the feathers were from any kind of animal other than those in whom feathers are invariably and exclusively seen-birds?

this is what evolutionists call 'mountains of overwhelming evidence.'

James Wong-ethnobotanist and Darwin worshipper, and 'dinosaur feathers'

2011-09-27T02:11:00.000-07:00

I return to a theme I keep mentioning here, the systematic misuse of the word 'evolution'. This matters: we cannot falsify a theory if we cannot define it.

Watching the weekly BBC TV farming magazine programme Countryfile last Sunday, James Wong was on a trip to Downe house. What this had to do with agriculture, I don't know. He said that Charles Darwin was his hero. Jesus of Nazareth is mine.

He took a look at the garden where The Greatest Scientist Ever did his nature studies for 40 years, and considered the quadrant in the garden. I read about this in Origin of Species, a decent little experiment in which Darwin sectioned off a square yard of lawn and didn't mow the grass. After a while, the number and kind of plants became different. This was, and is, a good example of natural selection.

Mr Wong said 'what a great example of evolution!'

I will spell this out clearly since many people who claim to be scientific and objective continue to be completley wrong about it. Darwin's experiment with his lawn showed that some plants do better when cut or grazed short, others do better when left to grow long. This is a good example of natural selection, or if you must, adaptation to an environment

BUT

it is not evolution. No genetic change AT ALL has ocurred. Neither does this process have any inherent tendency to bring about ANY genotypic change, over however many years it is repeated. It is a sorting process which CREATES NOTHING NEW.

I went to James Wong's web site to make sure I got his name right. He has posted the following there

>>>>I'm James Wong - a botanist, gardener, broadcaster & natural remedies obsessive, who's passionate about all things botanical.

I'm putting together jameswong.co.uk as an alternative, fresh guide to cool stuff to grow, for committed plant geeks & horticultural virgins alike.

Over the next few months I will be uploading everything I know and everything I do - from recipes for my favourite herbal remedies to my "plant of the week" blog - as well as updates to all my latest TV, books and talks. Come back and watch how it evolves! <<<

'come back and watch how it evolves'.

I would bet my pension against a round of drinks that Mr Wong's web site is intelligently designed.

This is how 'drip, drip, drip' propaganda works. befuddle, misrepresent, keep repeating SCIENCE, SCIENCE, SCIENCE like a mantra, and suppress and ridicule people who ask the wrong questions.

PS I have been too busy to comment on the dinosaur feathers scam in detail, this has been adressed on Answers in Genesis and elsewhere. Briefly, I heard a scientist interviewed about this ob BBC radio 4 by notorious 'sceptic' (except where evolution is concerned) John Humphrys. The scientist waxed lyrical about the dinosaur feathers preserved in amber while I waited for the obvious question 'how do we know the feathers were from a dinosaur?'. The question never came, understandably since even to ask it woudl imply the blasphemous unthinkability that the scientist was just making this up, whereas obviously the news item was meant to underscore evolutionism as in reptile to bird evolution.

Later on that week, the BBC launched a new CGI animation showing all sorts of dinosaurs with feathers. Its all carefully co-ordinated.

I haven' had time recently due to work commitments to study the whole thing in depth, but I gather that the feathers were NOT attached to a dinosaur, but merely presumed to be dinosaur. In fact, they are pretty much identical to the feathers we see in modern birds. This manipulation and spinning of evidence should come as no surpise to anyone. All it proves is how desperate they are to keep up the indoctrination and at all costs prevent the evidence against the Darwin mythos from being discussed in the media.

Dinosaur feathers-more lies

2011-09-18T05:50:00.000-07:00

Last week I listened to the normally combative and ultra sceptical BBC journalist John Humphrys interview a researcher abut a new find of alleged dinosaur feathers preserved in amber. All manner of speculation flowed about what this told us about feathered dinosaurs. I was waiting for him to ask the very obvious question 'how do we know these feathers are from a dinosaur?' He never asked this elementary, completely obvious question. Scepticism is not for evolution.

Anyway, I have now had time to check it out and discovered that the feathers were not closely associated with any dinosaur remains. Its all speculation. Just feathers. Fascinating, but all it proves is that there used to be animals with feathers. There still are-they're called birds.

see here http://crev.info/content/110915-grebe_left_imaginary_dinosaur_feathers_in_amber

but what did anyone expect? Evolution holds it as a fundamental faith position that birds evolved from dinosaurs, so the absent evidence is manufactured, exagerated, hyped and sold. And if you asked the wrong questions you're an ignorant history denier. No need to test the evidence, just believe!

Antibiotic resistant germs confirmed in pre-antibiotic era frozen corpses

2011-09-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

A fully referenced item on the Answers in Genesis web site confirms what has actually been fairly obvious all along-that the frequently repeated assertions that antibiotic resistant bacteria are evidence for evolution are, and always have been, bull. Click below for full article. The extract is clipped and hyperlinks removed but is otherwise unedited

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/09/10/news-to-note-09102011

Actually, antibiotic resistance is not evolving.

Bacteria from the permafrost of the Yukon Territory has been revived and coaxed to reveal its secrets. A team from McMaster University has re-discovered the phenomenon of ancient antibiotic resistance and demonstrated it in a new direct way.

Antibiotic resistance has long been a problem, especially in hospital settings where lots of antibiotics are used. Pathogens resistant to antibiotics survive and take over, causing many difficult-to-treat infections. Many claim that antibiotic resistance is the observable proof of evolution. But are bacteria really evolving?

Back in 1988, explorers frozen in 1845 were autopsied at the University of Alberta, and six strains of bacteria isolated from their colons were revived. According to microbiologist Dr. Kinga Kowalewska-Grochowska, “Three of them also happen to be resistant to antibiotics. In this case, the antibiotics clindamycin and cefoxitin, both of which were developed more than a century after the men died, were among those used.”

Now researchers have gone a step further. They have isolated bacterial DNA from Ice Age permafrost and found genes coding for resistance to several classes of antibiotics, including β-lactams, tetracycline, and glycopeptide antibiotics

Then, focusing on the genes encoding vancomycin resistance, they recreated those gene products in the lab. The three enzymes thus produced worked together to resist vancomycin in the same way as their modern counterparts. They conclude,

“Antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon that predates the modern selective pressure of clinical antibiotic use.”

So how did the bacteria already have suitable weapons years before their enemy was invented? Antibiotics and their antidotes are actually natural substances produced by fungi, algae, and bacteria. Dr. Gerry Wright explains, “Antibiotics are part of the natural ecology of the planet so when we think that we have developed some drug that won't be susceptible to resistance or some new thing to use in medicine, we are completely kidding ourselves. . . . Microorganisms have figured out a way of how to get around them well before we even figured out how to use them.” He adds, “Antibiotics are remarkable resources that need to be carefully husbanded.”

Some of this genetic material is in a form that can be transferred to other microorganisms. Microbiologist Dr. Stuart Levy, who has warned of profligate use of antibiotics for 30 years, explains, “What had been missed in the 1960s and 1970s was the ease with which resistance could appear,” he said.

“Bacteria share these genes like baseball cards with each other.”

So is antibiotic resistance the poster-child of evolution? No. There was a time when people thought bacteria evolve resistance because they “need” to. But—as demonstrated in this study and in the 1988 one—the variations and mutations that confer resistance are already in the genomes of some bacteria. The “resistance information” does not necessarily develop in response to the antibiotic threat. Natural selection allows resistant bacteria to survive and reproduce, replenishing the bacterial population. And those surviving bacteria are still bacteria—the same kind of bacteria they were all along.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

So there we have it. Again. If Darwinian evolution were true, plants, bacteria and animals would have had to come up with completely new gene sequences in answer to new environmental challenges. As Darwin wrote in 'Origin of Species' 'without variations, natural selection has nothing to work with'. The above item shows, yet again, that what is called evolution is merely shuffling the pack. Cyclical change within the population due to selective pressures, yes, but with no progressive forward trajectory and NO NEW GENES BEING MADE.

When will the evolutionists stop making claims about antibiotic resistant bacteria modelling progressive evolution when they ought to realise these claims are false? Its the same as the peppered moth story, an interesting nature lesson, and a good model of selection pressure changing gene frequency in a population, but in no way demonstrating the kind of progressive forward evolution in which new genes are created by random mutation and then create new phenotypes which are selected to make different, better animals and plants. That kind of change would have had to happened millions of times for the supposed 'jumped up from a puddle' common ancestor to turn into everything else. They can't even show us a single convincing example of one species becomeing another.

I'll blog about sickle cell disease later, another big Darwinian fraud.

illogical 'logic'

2011-09-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

I saw this response to an email on Answers in Genesis which I thought made some points very well.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2011/09/02/feedback-hilariously-illogical

Somebody called AD wrote >>>>>The information on your website is so illogical and wrong that it’s hilarious. Yet I feel worried that there are so many people who obviously believe this @!*&%$. I’m an Australian and I feel utterly embarrassed to think that Ken Ham is an Australian. And also someone that supposedly has an applied science degree from the university of queensland? Just because you believe in something doesn’t make it true. It’s one thing to read the bible’s stories and garner moral lessons from them, but to take its word literally? The bible is a historical book, which has been edited and changed over history. This site’s utter hate of science is ridiculous. Scientific thought is logical and critical thinking. The thoughts and ideas on this site are illogical and disgusting. Just because you can’t explain something or science is yet to explain it, doesn’t mean that the unexplainable is attributed to an unseen entity. This site even tries to refute things that science clearly explains. It’s just sad!
– A.D.<<<<

here is part of the response (shortened but this section unaltered)

Dear A.D.,
Thanks for sending us an email. I am replying below to your comments and questions. Please note that my comments are said with sincerity. (I understand that tone is sometimes difficult to display in writing, so I wanted to be up front about it.)

'The information on your website is so illogical and wrong'

Such as? This is called an unsubstantiated allegation, which you agreed not to send when you agreed to the feedback rules. So I’m surprised such a claim was made without any backing. We want the information on the website to be both logical and correct, so if there was anything to be challenged, please point it out so we can revisit to make sure it is accurate and modify it if necessary.

Based on the humanistic worldview promoted in your email (i.e., the Bible is not true), why do you think logic exists? For logic to exist, the Bible must be true. The sheer fact that you believe logic exists betrays the very worldview to which you pay lip service. In other words, your worldview is self-refuting. Please see Atheism: An Irrational Worldview.

'that it’s hilarious.'

This is an epithet fallacy. But consider the humor of someone claiming something is wrong and chuckling about it, and yet they cannot name why it is wrong.

'Yet I feel worried'

Why would an evolutionist worry (see Luke 12:22)? If everything follows either purely random processes or purely predetermined material results of chemical reactions, then why worry? In such a worldview, this is illogical.
Again, the fact that people worry reveals that they want some sort of moral code, which is meaningless in an evolutionary worldview, by the way. But I’m glad you have the sense of worrying because it means that you want morality. I want to encourage you, however, that morality comes from God.

that there are so many people who obviously believe this @!*&%$.

This is another epithet fallacy.

<<<<

the response continues. Click on the link to read it in full.

This ilustrates some of the debating tactics used to attack anything that quesstions the prevailing secular humanist world view. The respondent (Bodie Hodge) demonstrates and examines the tactics, for example to assert

'The information on your website is so illogical and wrong'

without specifying which information is 'illogical and wrong' and why. The bold assertion is just enough, as with cliches like 'mountains of overerwhelming evidence' and the immortal 'could have, might have, must have ' which from Darwin onwards answers every charge about the lacking empirical evidence for abiogenisis, information building mutations, transitional forms etc.

And so it goes. Thanks to those creationists and Darwin questioners who find the time and energy to respond in detail to the kind of stuff AD posted. I have done with engaging with this kind bluster and bombast, so I just post it like it is and leave it. People can do what they please with it. Unles of course determinism is true, in which case they can do what they are programmed to do with it!

The peppered moth scam

2011-08-24T04:41:00.000-07:00

Nothing very original here, just letting out some suppressed truth about the fake evidence used to brainwash schoolchildren. Starting with peppered moths.

The peppered moth is one of the icons of evolution, as everyone who wants to pass a biology exam must know, and believe without question. Profesor Steve Jones, BBC atheist and mate of Dawkins, said this was the best evidence for evolution. What is the worst, I wonder? The fact that 'all the scientists accept it' (except the ones who were made an example of for questioning it and the others who therefore learned not to ask the wrong questions)?

Basically, the peppered moth-biston betularia- has 2 forms, light and dark. Always has, always will. Lots of animals are the same, for example melanistic adders (vipera berus). This is an incredibly banal biological fact. Darker and lighter moths can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, so according to the simplest and most realistic definition, are one species. Got that? one species. Same as humans who also have various skin colours but are one species.

The peppered moth is, apparently, predated on by birds as it rests on tree trunks. The darker form is easier seen when resting on light coloured tree trunks, while the lighter form is better camouflaged. The reverse is true when the tree trunks are darker. So far, so logical. and, yes, this is an example of natural selection or differential survival. No problem with that. The elimination of less fit forms leaving more space for fitter forms to survive and breed (which is all natural selection is) is entirely consistent with young earth creationism.

I will set aside the issues about how the original experiments on peppered moths were, shall we say, 'helped along' to make sure they showed the desired result. That story is important, and can be Googled, but is superfluous when it comes to exposing the peppered moth story as rubbish evidence for evolution.

As tree bark colour changed due to differential lichen growth in different conditions of air quality due to industrial pollution, so apparently the relative proportions of darker to lighter moths altered. This apparently proved evolution. Except that no evolution has taken place. Unless you define evolution in such a way that this evidence supports evolution as defined in your definition, which definition is supported by this evidence. In other words, unless you employ the kind of self referential and circular argument which was perfected (apart fom his appalling English) by Charles Darwin.

Anyone awake out there? You have been had.

Altering the gene frequency (for example, for colour, as here) in a population is not a process by which you could ever turn one animal or plant into an entirely different one. To quote the late Don van Vliet 'the dust blows forward and the dust blows back'. Cyclical variation is not the same as progress. No new genes are being produced. Time doesn't help, as it is quality, not quantity, that matters here.

When I had the peppered moth story rammed down my throat in biology class I couldn’t see why it proved evolution. I still can’t. That’s because it doesn’t. Its just another atheist scam pretending to be science. My biology teacher said ‘remember, this isn’t the same as white and black rabbits being released in snow or on black slag heaps and being shot with a rifle!’ But it is. Its exactly the same. Its just differential survival due to variable levels of camouflage against predation. I tried to believe my teacher out of respect for what I assumed was his superior knowledge, but I now realise he was teaching what he was taught to teach, and in the way he was taught to teach evolution. This is the revealed truth- memorise and believe it or you will fail the exam, and don’t ask questions which imply that evolution might not be true.

All the biology teachers believe evolution-or they will be sacked.

Biston betularia=biston betularia. Dark or light forms, still biston betularia. Minor cyclical change within the pre-existing gene pool= no evolution. Its a swindle and a scam to say that the peppered moth story supports the idea of all living things coming from a common ancestor by natural selection acting on random mutations.

Teacher is a deceiver, and deceived. And so are the people who say that evolution rests on empirical and potentially falsifiable evidence.

2011-08-23T02:56:00.000-07:00

<Post-Darwinist>

Guitar evolution and the misuse of language

2011-08-23T01:48:00.000-07:00

I posted on this issue before, but its very important. Words should mean what they mean, or else language routinely misleads and honest debate is impossible. As one of Lewis Carrol's characters said in Alice in Wonderland, 'when I use a word, it means exactly what I intend it to mean.' (PS for those who don't know, Alice in Wonderland is a satirical fantasy). In science, words must mean something precise and agreed.

In this video, the guitarist discusses the merits of the DiMarzio 'evolution' guitar pickup.

However, and very obviously, the pickup was intelligently designed. So why is it called 'evolution'?

On BBC radio 4 last week, a man was being interviewed about the London 2112 Olympic games. Describing how the buildings and security arangements were coming on, he used the term 'evolving' or 'evolve' three times. Again, clearly there is intelligent design input going on here.

Does this matter? Yes. anyone who struggles through Darwin's appallingly badly written book 'Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life' cannot fail to note the mangling of language and use of circular and self referential argument which characterises it. Amongst other offenses against science and logic, Darwin pointedly refused to define what is meant by a species. How come? So he could use the word 'species' to mean whatever he wanted it to mean, to avoid the risk of falsification. As then, so now. Define a word vaguely to prevent it being held down and seriously examined.

I repeat, because it matters, if the word 'evolution' simple means 'change over time', then we need a different word to describe the imaginary Darwinian process whereby hydrogen atoms from the supposed big bang turn into people without the intervention of a designing and creative intelligence.

Language, like guitar music, is allowed to change over time, but if the widely understood meaning of words becomes too vague, they become useless-other than to mislead. Darwinians need to be consistent, accurate and scientific over the use of language. They should come down hard on the use of the term 'evolution' to describe any process which involves forward thinking, teamwork, design or planning, or else invent a new word for the process by which Darwin and his follwers imagine plants, animals and humans to have emerged from dirty water. If they will do neither, they will have to learn to live with accusations of using slippery propaganda to mislead a gullible public.

The Sperm whale as an example of why Darwinian gradualism fails

2011-08-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

There was a documentary on channel 4 last Monday about the dissection of a sperm whale washed up dead on the Kent coast. An amazing Darwin-busting demonstration of irreducibly complex structures that could not possibly have evolved, although that’s not how it was presented. So I thought I’d present a brief alternative commentary.

With the help of live film of the dissection, expert testimony, experiments and animations, we saw how features like the specialised myoglobin rich muscle together with many other physiological and anatomical features working in concert allowed very deep diving to catch giant squid. This prey only ever lives at extreme depth, so its hard to see how the whale evolved its ability to dive deep, stay down for an hour, echolocate and catch giant squid by ‘numerous gradual changes’. You either go the whole way or its nothing at all; there are no giant squid at 100, 200 or 300 metres etc.

I suppose a convinced Darwinian will confabulate a story about supposed giant squid ancestors which lived in shallow seas and gradually moved deeper over aeons while they co-evolved with the sperm whale. That’s the wonder of Darwinism, starting with the old fraud himself, it has always been possible to imagine anything and then fill in the evidential gaps with supposition backed up by appeal to the consensus of the mutually appointed experts.

6 or 8 times evolution was referred to, but no evidence was offered, not even the ‘Pakicetus’ skull fragments or the so called vestigial legs which are simply pelvic structures to which essential muscles are attached. No need to offer evidence, just wheel on Dawkins and some shots of the Darwin Temple (used to be the Natural History Museum) and keep repeating bold assertions.

The nasal structures in the whale’s huge head were particularly challenging for Darwinian gradualist explanations. The nostrils are divided into two asymmetrical halves. One was for breathing, and was serviced by an astounding conical array of long tendons from truncal muscles which snapped the nostril valve open and at the same time pulled the long nostril passage open to let air in and out of the highly specialised lobleless lung, which the whale scientist described as being unique and highly efficient. This whole arrangement allowed fantastically fast gas exchange for a quick turnaround and another deep dive for food.

The other half of the nostril came round at a different angle from the main airway and passed though a specialised organ called the ‘monkey lips’. A puff of air through this made a vibration, a bit like a fart I suppose. The air connected with the other nostril, all the time the valve remaining tight shut, and re-circulated. This would obviously be essential at depth, although evolution wouldn’t know that when it started playing around with the land based whale ancestor’s nostrils before they became a blow hole, and couldn’t plan ahead if it did. Looked designed to me. The noise passed back through the spermaceti filled head (the spermaceti as we were shown in a diving experiment is perfectly constituted to make an adjustable buoyancy/diving aid) hit a part of the skull described as being like a radar dish, and bounced forward though the lower part of the head and out at a blunt point to project forward. Like a lot of the organs in the whale, it had multi functions, both for communicating with other whales of the family group and to echo locate prey. Biggest noise in the animal world with a range of 60 km.

For brevity I will omit other whale features such as the hinged rib cage, prehensile penis, blubber, flukes, tail first birth, ability to suckle young underwater etc. which all look as if they were designed, did not have any counterparts in terrestrial quadruped mammals the whale is aleged to have evolved from, and would not have been viable let alone advantageous during supposed intermediate stages.

The really big problems this whale posed for evolutionists are

(A) How do random mutations create the new DNA information to code for all this highly complex stuff that looks designed? Why should they?

(B) How did this animal’s ancestors move from being land based mammals to fully seagoing mammals via ‘numerous gradual changes’ since it appears from the examination of the whale that every part of it has to be exactly as it is for the whole organism to function at all?

(C) How did all the ‘adaptations’ to allow sperm whales to catch giant squid at 1 kilometre depth come together at the same time? The question matters because any one of them is useless without all of the others present and working together in unison. Darwin was pretty keen in the idea that any adaptation that conferred no selective benefit would be ‘ruthlessly exterminated’. Surely that would apply to intermediate non-functioning organs and behaviours, like diving to 300 metres and not finding any squid.

Quite a set of problems for the Darwinians. On the other hand, they could just deny, confabulate, imagine, bluster and bombast as usual. The alternative, to accept that God is creator, would involve accepting that God is also Lawgiver and Judge. If the second and third of these propositions are unacceptable due to our sinful rebellion, the first had better not be true. That’s where evolutionism is coming from; it has nothing at all to do with following the evidence where it leads, its about massaging evidence to support a conclusion that has already been reached.

Dawkins read out a passage from the book of Job about a great sea monster Leviathan (whether it is a whale or dinosaur that is being described in this passage is disputed). It’s a shame he didn’t read the whole passage where God answers job out of the whirlwind. He asks him ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?’ and other such questions.

Where indeed.

PS re comments.

I can budget about 2 hours a week on average out of my complicated life for Darwin criticism. That's not enough time to respond to comments, especially since no evolutionist i have ever crossed swords with has every been satisfied with any response. I have a responsibility to manage my time wisely and that doesn't involve endless disputation. I am not posting for hardened Dawkinists although I hope even they may think again. I am posting for reasonable people who may be in the position I was before I heard the evidence against evolution for the first time, browbeaten and bamboozled by the 'mountains of overwhelming evidence...there is (must be) no debate...donlt question this orthodoxy...only an ignorant cretinist IDiot could doubt evolution!' brigade.

I post what I post, and I allow free and unmoderated comment, but I don't respond to it. Don't, not can't. Any readers can make of that what they will. Sorry if anyone has a problem with that. I have a problem with loads of things I cant do quack about, that's life.

More ‘life on Mars’ bull. They just can’t leave it alone.

2011-08-05T01:34:00.000-07:00

YET AGAIN we are being treated to recycled and overhyped 'news' about the possibility of water on Mars and its possible significance for spontaneous origin of life.

Quote from several web sources, accessed today, 5^th August

‘’Scientists have discovered a new phenomenon on the surface of Mars which can potentially prove that seasonal water, and therefore life, could exist in the red planet.

The decades-long study of Mars has already established that water exists in the Red Planet in icy form, especially around its polar caps, and beneath the surface. But so far no investigation has shown Martian water flowing like a stream. The new finding can open leads in search for life on Mars, scientists say.”

‘scientist say’ you say? Must be true then because scientists are always right. Especially when they are trying to create some hype to get their grants renewed or sell a book.

>>>>NASA released images Thursday that appear to show flowing water on Mars.
Rich Talcott, the Senior Editor of Astronomy Magazine in Waukesha, called it an exciting day for astronomy and planetary science.

"This would be a big boon," Talcott told Wisconsin's Afternoon News. "(The water) increases the odds there could be life on Mars."

Talcott believes there is likely life across the universe already.

"The fact that we have two planets in this galaxy with water would certainly indicate there is probably lots of water in existence across the universe," he said.

"Life developed pretty easily here on Earth. That bodes well that life will get started elsewhere."<<<

‘Talcott believes.’

Life developed pretty easily here on Earth’ Did it? That’s news to me. Last I heard the scientists had pretty much admitted defeat over non designed origin of life scenarios-although they tend to keep quiet about it. Oh sure, I have seen some evolutionist propaganda videos on YouTube, as full of ‘could have..might have..first take a ‘simple’ cell…’ speculation and as empty of actual evidence as Origin of Species itself.

The bluster continues…….“This new finding can help scientists big time in their search for life in Mars. "This is water today, not in the past," McEwen told space.com, pitching a case of briny water should be flowing in some places on the planet's surface…..

But it's all speculation right now — we wish we knew," he said.

Even skeptics have been won over by this new finding. Many scientists who thought it was premature to conclude there was water on Mars have seemingly accepted this study. This is what a former U.S. Geological survey scientists told the LA Times: "I've been something of a skeptic of the possibility of liquid water right at the surface under present conditions ... and I've been irritated in the past by people immediately jumping to yell, 'Water on Mars!...' "I think they [latest findings] make a very good case. … The story hangs together," said Michael Carr.”

So, there may be evidence of water in Mars, but

’its all speculation right now, we wish we knew’

Yep, that sounds about right ‘its all speculation’.

This story ‘maybe water, therefore inevitably life will have evolved on Mars-Yay! That blows the lousy creationists out of the water, don’t it?!?’ This story, and others very like it, have been surfacing and getting way more publicity than they deserve for some years now. The bottom line is that there are some long distance observations that appear to be consistent with, although not proof of, the presence of liquid water on Mars. That’s the reality. Then we move on to the fantasy.

The fantasy is that where liquid water is present (and it seems to be exceedingly rare-Earth is a truly favoured planet to have so much of the stuff) life will spontaneously arise, as evolutionists believe, happened here in Earth.

For any speculative God-free origin of life hypothetical scenario, liquid water is the inevitable starting point. However, that is a bit like saying that in order to build a fully equipped Nimitz class aircraft carrier, with its nuclear reactor, fighter jets, radar, missile defense systems and all, first you need an ocean. True, but then the difficult stuff begins. The issues facing non designed origin of life scenarios begin with the presence of a large and stable liquid water situation, but magnify hugely-water is the 'easy' bit. It would require several lengthy essays to set out the other necessary conditions for a single celled life form to emerge without design. I won’t even get started on them in this post. But they matter, and are never discussed whenever the 'water, which enables life to evolve' propaganda is gassed out. I regard this as very dishonest.

The constant repetition of the ‘maybe there’s water on Mars, so life must have evolved there, so that proves evolution.’ propaganda, because thats all it is, insults listeners’ intelligence. Who is behind this repetitive massaging and manipulation of an insignificant scrap of news? Who is paying for it? What is its goal? Surely it is aimed at deceiving the simple.

SETI (Search for Extra Terestrial Life) is on the verge of being abandoned, we have no evidence at all of the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, although we do have evidence of super-human intelligence in the coherent, meaningful, super-compressed information carried in our DNA (See Stephen Meyer's book 'Signature in the Cell') and evidence of life after death through the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Why are we thrashing around like crazy, spending money and using skills that ought to go on water engineering and re-afforestation projects in Africa, trying against all the evidence to find some origin and meaning of life story other than the one we have been given by our Creator and Redeemer?

By that way, I laughed like a drain when the arrogantly named ‘Beagle 2’ British Mars probe crashed and burned on Christmas Day 2003. Serves them right, who says God has no sense of humour? If they ever do find any bacteria on Mars, which I doubt, they will probably have been introduced there in a Piltdown spaceman plot. Wasn't it Einstein who said 'don't look to hard for something, you might find it.' Confirmation bias or what?

Photosynthesis-can't live without it, but how could it it have evolved?

2011-08-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

DNA check and repair

2011-08-04T08:04:00.001-07:00

Darwin's unfalsifiable test of falsification

2011-08-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

Darwin wrote in ‘Origin of Species’ that ‘if it could be shown that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have come about by numerous gradual changes then my theory would fail utterly’. He then went on to say with his customary smugness ‘But I can find out no such case.’

This is often referred to as ‘Darwin’s test of falsification’, but can be easily discerned as a sly trick, designed to give the impression that the theory is falsifiable, when actually it isn’t. Of course Darwin could ‘find out no such case.’ of an organ that could not have arisen by natural selection acting on variation, because it was and is an imaginary process. Like C S Lewis, I have no difficulty in imagining a flying horse or a talking mouse. However, I make a distinction betwen fantasy and reality. Darwin had no difficulty imagining a bear evolving into a whale. But no such thing has ever been observed, and you cannot falsify a theory that is based on imagination.

Darwin is at pains to appear reasonable, but in fact is setting the reader up to be deceived. Nowhere does he explain what falsification of his theory would look like. That is because it was deliberately set up to be unfalsifiable. Nowhere does he give a single empirical observation of one animal or plant changing by more than cyclical variation within a species. Always the appeal to imponderables and ‘might have beens’. Read his book and see how often he uses the language of faith and imagination, expressions like 'I can hardly doubt' and 'it would be rash to say that this might not have happened'.

In my view, all known biochemical processes satisfy the test of falsification in that they could not have arisen gradually-since intermediate forms would have had no function so could not have existed. You cannot get from A to Z if you die at Q. The unrefuted Mike Behe sets this out in detail in Darwin’s Black Box. A couple of examples would include Krebs cycle, photosynthesis, blood clotting, the immune system and DNA check and repair. Each of these vital processes fails (utterly) if key components are missing, none can be credibly theorised to have arisen by natural selection acting on random mutation. Even if the mutations were incredibly lucky (and why would they be? real world mutations aren't) each stage of the process has to be (A) viable, (B) stable enough to be transferable to the next generation, and (C) a selective advantage at the level of the whole organism. Nothing like this has ever been observed, to create any biopchemicalprocess, nor given what we now know about biochemistry, is it theoretically credible. You can get from a fish to a bird by drawing cartoons showing the imaginary transformation, but you can't fudge the biochemistry that way. Its too unforgivingly precise.

Another good example of a mechanism which could not possibly have arisen Darwin style is DNA check and repair and DNA. Both systems are incredibly complex and depend utterly on each other, so what did one system do in the Darwinian dreamtime while its indispensable other half was evolving? Like climbing a ladder without rungs, it doesn’t work at all until it all works. The Darwinian can bluster, bombast and confabulate, appeal to authority, throw the smoke bombs of distraction tactics or the stink bombs of personal abuse, but can’t deal with these problems.

I may post some links to YouTubes which illustrate some of these irreducible complex systems which falsify Darwinism. Judge for yourselves.

Dystrophin muscle protein, another big fail for Darwinian gradualism

2011-07-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

There was a story on the news yesterday about a new drug which apparently may help sufferers with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. This is a very bad disease which like so many others is genetically determined. It's caused by a single mutation which messes up one part of one system, the result is disability and a lingering death. That’s what mutations often do, as intelligent design theory predicts. For a fuller account of the biology, Wikipedia is a good place to start, just Google on Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

The Wikipedia article begins ‘Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a recessive X-linked form of muscular dystrophy, which results in muscle degeneration, difficulty walking, breathing, and death. The incidence is 1 in 3,000. Females and males are affected, though females are rarely affected and are more often carriers. The disorder is caused by a mutation in dystrophin gene, located in humans on the X chromosome (Xp21). The dystrophin gene codes for the protein dystrophin, an important structural component within muscle tissue. Dystrophin provides structural stability to the dystroglycan complex (DGC), located on the cell membrane.’

Lets look at those last two sentences again,

‘ The dystrophin gene codes for the protein dystrophin, an important structural component within muscle tissue. Dystrophin provides structural stability to the dystroglycan complex (DGC), located on the cell membrane.’

Sounds very complicated? That’s because it is. One ‘tiny little’ piece of a sub-system of muscle is out of place, the whole system is trashed. That seems to me to unequivocally rule out Darwinian gradualism as a cause for the interlocking and irreducibly complex system that is skeletal muscle. Darwinianism requires that random gene mutations build better structures, given time and natural selection. However, the empirical science gives us example after example of mutations causing disability and death. Natural selection may prevent Duchenne gene being passed on, but this is a conservative, not progressive, effect. Evolution requires progress, mutations are not seen to provide it.

The great question the biology of DMD raises is, how did we get working muscle tissue in the first place? Not by random DNA mutations anyway-we see them fouling the system up here, not improving it. If muscle isn't fully functional, its no use, so if it evolved, EVERY STAGE it passed through must have been fully functional. That's before we start on the integrated systems of bone, tendon, joint, blood and nerve without which the muscle is as much use as a debit card in the middle of the Sahara desert or a laptop without electricity.

One is reminded of Darwin’s test for falsification, that if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed that could not possibly have developed by many gradual changes then his theory would utterly fail. He added smugly ‘but I can find out no such case’. That would be because of his great faith, whereby any objection was met with an ‘it could have happened-I have no difficulty imagining it.'

But if the protein dystrophin is so essential to normal muscle function (which this disease proves it is), and if one small gene defect affecting this one molecular system causes a fatal disease, (as it does) how can Darwinian processes possibly account for the development of normal functioning dystrophin? In proposed Darwinian gradualism, dystrophin and the other sub systems that make up functioning muscle came about from ‘humble beginnings’ (whatever they were, Darwin had no idea-he was bluffing and confabulating) via ‘numerous gradual changes’.

Each and every one of these imagined stages from 'humble beginnings' to the fully functioning muscle we see today would have had to be at least survivable inot successful reproductive age just to avoid death, and to actually achieve evolution, would also have to confer a selective advantage. But this example is not survivable and certainly is no improvement. A watch does not work until it is all assembled, and neither does dystrophin.

This example of one mutation messing up a highly complex fine-tuned system that was previously working well is only one of hundreds that could be quoted. Darwin’s test of falsification is satisfied not once, but by every single biochemical sub system, not one of which could possibly have been made from scratch by the unguided process of natural selection acting on random mutations. It is much more logical to propose that the things which we see in nature were designed and created.

This is all the more so since we have the testimony of Jesus of Nazareth, whom God raised from the dead, and of whom the apostle John wrote....

'All things were made by HIm, and without Him was not anything made that was made' (John's Gospel, chapter 1)

Happy Birthday Gregor Mendel-the Christian monk who founded the science of genetics

2011-07-20T03:44:00.000-07:00

I am sure Google won't mind me posting this doodle in celebration of the monk with the peas or pasting a bit from them celebrating the great, but humble, man.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Had it not been for a bunch of peas on the Google homepage, chances are you wouldn't have even heard of Gregor Mendel least of all remember his (189th) birthday.

Mendel as google will tell you was an Austrian botanist and monk and is considered as the father of genetics.

Mendel was born Johann in Heinzendorf, Austria (it is presently part of the Czech Pepublic) and got the name Gregor after he joined a monastery of the Augustinian order.

In Vienna, he studied physics and mathematics as also the anatomy and physiology of plants.

It was however in a monastery in Brunn that he began his experiments with plant hybridisation with the pea plant.

His findings enabled him to formulate the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. These laws would later be known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.

Soon after he turned his attention to honeybees and even as his peers and contemporaries were less than welcoming of his work, Mendel himself did little or nothing to publicise his works.

Further his responsibilities in the order left him little or no time to pursue his scientific goals.

On January 6, 1884 Mendel died aged 61, his work largely gone unrecognised.

The following century however was more kind and his work got the recognition it truly deserved and Mendel was acknowledged as the father of genetics.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Thankfully, nobody had told Gregor Mendel that science and religion were supposed to be eternal opposites, enemies locked in a death struggle which only one could win. In fact, this doctrine is quite recent. And evidently false, at least in the case of the Christian faith which rests on sound historical foundations including multiple fulfilled prophecies, miracles and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Many great scientists have seen no contraditions between a deeply held traditional Christian faith and honest empirical science.

It has been suggested (I say no more that that) that Mendel's work was hushed up during Darwin's lifetime as it was not at all supportive of Darwinianism, which a powerful anti-Christian movement wanted to foist on the world despite the lack of evidence. Mendelian inheritance is a good model for understanding allele frequency variability, which fits in well with Darwin's actual observations concerning variations and natural selection, but also demonstrates predictable limits on variation, which is very bad for Darwin's imagined common descent. Darwin's observations were often very good, its his conclusions which were rubbish. Unlike Mendel, he allowed his imagination to run away with him and made conclusions which ran way beyond his evidence. Also, unlike Mendel, he had a powerful movement (including many revolutionaries and atheists) who wanted his theory to be true.

Anything which demonstrates limits to variation is not good for Darwinism, which depends on the belief that variation is unlimited. Mendels peas remained peas. Darwin's speculation that variations could add up to eventually produce entirely different plants and animals is not supported by empirical observation, which shows clear limits to the varaibility seen within species. Dogs always dogs, grass always grass, carp always carp, and so on.

Happy birthday Gregor. See you.

More evo-doublethink

2011-07-19T02:54:00.000-07:00

Rather trivial, you may say, but life is made up of lots of little details.

walking back from the train station yesterday, I saw a council notice up about a public consultation concerning a new local settlement. Shall we call it Blackheath although that isn't it's name.

the headline read 'Blackheath is evolving!'

what was the consultation meeting about? Planning. So, in fact, Blackheath is being intelligently designed. The use of the word 'evolving' is completely incorrect. The opposite of the truth. Of course, I am not suggesting any dishonesty on the part of the local authority, just another example of how our language has been manipulated and its meaning mangled.

The word 'doublethink' comes from George Orwell's future dystopic novel 1984 and refers to one of the tricks whereby the language was manipulated by the ruling power, who of course controlled education and the media, to steer people into thinking and saying only what was approved.

Darwinian evolution cannot plan, it has no goals, and is as likely to walk over a cliff as it is to walk along a path. In fact, much more likely to walk over a cliff or just lay down and die given what we know about DNA mutations. People know from their everyday experience of life that unguided proceses do not build useful or beautiful things. Intelligence is required to produce meaning, always. The planners of Blackheath know this, that's why they are asking for ideas and thinking about design and purpose. This is not evolution.

The way that the word evolution has been laden with false meaning is a classic example of doublethink. The idea that planned, purposeful improvements are the same thing as Darwinian evolutionistic processs is completely inaccurate, so to promote this is a deliberate lie. A lot of people are taken in by it. Who was it that said if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth?

Of course, the English language changes. However, if the meaning of a word changes beyond all recognition, we need a new word to describe the thing the word used to mean. If designed improvement can now be described as evolution, we need a new word to describe the supposed process whereby life, having originated without a designer, adds complexity by random mutations and natural selection, despite the abundant evidence that this does not happen.

How about Dawkinism? But then I already use that term for an approach to debate that involves grandstanding, special pleading, distraction tactics, misprepresentation, bombast, character asassination and denial of contrary evidence and arguments.

On the other hand, if deceit is the aim, we can leave things as they are and let people be bamboozled into thinking that evolution and design are the same. But they are not, and it matters.

Genetic entropy kills Darwin

2011-07-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

An interesting item here http://crev.info/content/110605-genetic_entropy_confirmed came to my attention from a link from the Biblical Creation Society weblog. Basically, more research has supported the work of John Sanford (Cornell plant geneticist) who wrote about genetic entropy.

Genetic entropy is the most catastrophic thing possible for Darwinians, robbing them as it does of their only mechanism, confirming that the idea of new meaningful genetic information arising from random mutations leading to new features and new creatures is a fanciful lie which runs directly counter to the empirical evidence.

We all know that most if not all mutations big enough to make a noticeable difference are harmful, the list is VERY long. Occasional 'blunted or broken genes' to use Mike Behe's phrase confer limited situational benefit at a high cost (as with sickle cell haemoglobin), but what of the effect of 'neutral' mutations? The materialist's hope is based on the idea that (no other designer-free scenario being even imaginable) these small 'lucky' mutations somehow accumulated over time to build new meaningful genetic information that could, for example, turn a fish into a land animal. Of course, this has never been observed. It is an article of the evolutionists' faith.

John Sanford in his seminal book 'Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome' speaks of 'near neutral' rather than neutral mutations. These are not big enough individually to impact the phenotype, at least not yet, but as they slowly accumulate, very slowly due to the marvellously designed DNA check and repair mechanism in every cell, they eventually foul things up. As intelligent design theory would predict.

Snford likens the accumulation of near neutral mutations to randomly changing one letter per page of a book every year. For quite some time, the page is just as meaningful (athough if it was a mathematical or chemical formula, the effect might be more immediate) because most of the prose is intact and the reader compensates for the spelign miskates. For example if the word 'word' is misspelled 'wrod'. But in time, inevitably, what once was meaningful prose becomes gobbledegook though random substitutions, deletions, insertions, duplications etc. This is what happens to our degenerating DNA. How could such changes EVER build meaningful new DNA instructions to, for example, turn a swim bladder into a lung? Pure Darwinian fantasy and invention, sustained only by wilfully blind faith, hatred of God, suppressing counter arguments, bullying and propaganda.

Sanford shows that not only could the human genome not have created itself, but it cannot even maintain itself. The terrifying (for materialists) corollary of this is that not only is mankind doomed, but plotting the number of acumulating genetic defects backwards, our genome must have been created relatively recently. Bad news for Darwinians and materialists, good support for biblical creationists.

Thankfully, there is good news through Jesus Christ, whose risen majestic form was seen by many more humans than have ever seen one kind of animal involve into a different kind. It is still possible to repent and get right with God through His Son Jesus Christ. But don't delay, for as with the human genome and the planet, time, our ultimate non renewable resource, is running out.

The Infinite Monkey cage-BBC radio 4

2011-06-01T03:00:00.000-07:00

I listened to this piece of jokey atheist triumphalism on radio 4 the other day. Apart from the usual side swipes against theists (none on the panel to give a response, as BBC bias theory would predict) we heard some stuff about dark matter and dark energy, some hope that the famous CERN large hadron collider would come up with some answers as to why the universe was expanding at a very different rate to what big bang theory predicts.

There was also a welcome, if guarded, admission from Steve Jones that new discoveries about DNA revealed more questions than answers. We apparently have fewer genes than might be expected, less than a cabbage, Jones asserted. So how do our extraordinarily complex bodies build themselves and function so well? The obvious response to this is that there is something other than genes at work. The evidence points to a master operating system the complexity of which we cannot begin to fathom. The DNA that codes for proteins is only a small percentage of the whole. We can sequence the gene that codes for collagen, but how is the collagen made into specific tendons to move muscles? It all looks like design, but way beyond anything our best scientists can do.

Regardless of whether or not science will unlock the mysteries of the operating system that assembles the products of the genes into a living being, the question as to how this level of purposeful complexity came to be without mind is not answered. No wonder that Brian Cox and his chums like to rely on humour, what sounded like canned laughter, and side swipes at soft targets like Harold Camping (who was denounced as a false prophet by Christians everywhere before his prophecied end of the world failed to materialise on 22nd May)

The issues of the origin of information in DNA or the validation of intelligent design theory by the discovery that 'junk' DNA is nothing of the kind was not raised except in as much as theism was dismissed as a cop out. Better to trust in Darwin of the gaps than confess the limits of science.

I couldn't help thinking how much more interesting The Infinite Monkey Cage would be if, for example, Stephen Meyer had been asked to join in, but he would have asked some naughty questions and spoiled the atheist materialist consensus. Can't have that can we? There might have been children listening, we can't allow them to hear any doubts about Darwin.

Incidentally, the programme's title relates to an evolutionist myth that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters would eventually write the works of Shakespeare. This is pure Darwin of the gaps, there is no sound theory or experimental evidence to back it. When someone tried an experiment with a dozen or so monkeys in Paignton zoo, Devon, the results were as intelligent design theory would predict. The monkeys shit and pissed over the typewriter and hammered on it, producing a rather small amount of perfect nonsense. not even a single correctly spelled word emerged.

Meaning only ever comes from mind. That's not an assertion or faith position, but an observation. If meaning were to be observed deriving from a non intelligent source, it would falsify intelligent design theory. But it hasn't been seen yet.

The programme was supposed to be about questions that science could possibly never answer. It came across as materialist self congratulation

Origin of life and faith in Darwin of the gaps

2011-04-26T05:04:00.000-07:00

An item in Scientific American once again admits that ‘..scientists don’t have a clue how life began’. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-bu-2011-02-28

However honest this admission might be, the author (John Horgan) finishes with a statement of his faith in Darwin of the gaps and an attack on Biblical Christian faith as dishonest (he doesn’t specify Christianity but we know that’s what he means. The Hindus and Buddhists don’t care and the Muslims aren’t listening).

‘Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse (see for example the screed "Darwinism Refuted," which cites my 1991 article), but they shouldn't be. Their explanations suffer from the same flaw: What created the divine Creator? And at least scientists are making an honest effort to solve life's mystery instead of blaming it all on God.’

This is dumb. Comparing the failure of science to demonstrate any plausible mechanism for origin of life with Christians failure to answer the childish retort ‘Who made God’ demonstrates poor thinking. The assertion of Christians is that God is the uncreated first cause who exists outside of time. Why is that by definition impossible? Materialists also have to have an uncreated first cause (e.g. what was there before the big bang, why is there something rather than nothing, how and why do physical laws exists etc) but prefer to refuse to admit this. Perhaps pride and a determination to be independent of our maker is at work here.

‘Science is working on it!’ as an answer to the abject failure of origin of life research demonstrates a faith position. Science has been working on origin of life scenarios for a very long time, but every discovery only unearths even more complexity and reduces the probability of undirected origin of life even further. Materialists have faith that science will one day demonstrate a plausible undirected origin of life scenario, but it is faith despite the evidence, faith in the teeth of all the evidence so far- all of which shows life exhibits too much specified, functional complexity to have arisen without a designer. By contrast, the Christian faith is backed by the evidence of multiple fulfilled prophecies and miracles and above all the resurrection of Jesus which we have just celebrated.

Note also Horgan's implication that Christian faith is dishonest by contrast with the ‘honest effort to solve life’s mystery’ by evolutionists-who begin by ruling out the Christian revelation and continue by insisting that there must be a naturalistic solution although all the evidence so far is that there is none.

The honest thing would be to admit that everything we actually observe about life is that is does not, cannot and did not emerge from non life without an intelligent cause.

New Scientist, Old Darwinian propaganda

2011-04-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

Last week’s New Scientist carried a feature on evolution with a front cover illustration of a multi component animal (sorry I can’t show it) that represented a fish turning into a man. The tail was fishy and still in the water, the body made up of several parts from different animals, the head of a lemur and a human hand holding on to a branch. Evolutionists have always made much use of animations; they have to, especially when brainwashing children, because of the lack of evidence for the things they assert. Visual aids to help us overcome our natural scepticism when told to believe in things we can't see.

The article was supposed to be about how new evidence showed that evolution could occur much faster than was previously thought. Evolution (for example, reptiles changing into birds, fish changing onto amphibians etc) as you will recall, has to be deemed to have taken place over very long periods of time since it can’t be observed during recorded human history. But the item didn’t offer anything new, just more spin, and not even original spin, on old stories. Was the ridiculous evolutionary chimera artwork (reminiscent of the designs on the pillar at the Darwin Temple (sorry, Natural History Museum) on the front cover triumphalism, or nervousness?

A look inside at the article revealed a re-hashed mix up of several familiar tales. Peppered moths, spiny sticklebacks, ‘Darwin’s’ finches…..minor cyclical changes due to shuffling previously existing alleles. There were more animations depicting animals morphing onto completely different animals, like what we don’t observe in the real world. Walt Disney (I think) was right when he said ‘if its possible, it isn’t animation’.

Yet again, the oldest trick in the Darwinists’ book, going right back to the master of sophistry and non sequitur himself-taking minor cyclical variations within a species and calling them evolution. Fraud and fiddling. Still, people continue to be taken in by it. If we are going to call minor cyclical changes such as colour in the peppered moth or beak size and shape in Galapagos finches evolution, we need a different term for the supposed (and unobserved) process whereby animals and plants (having spontaneously emerged from non-life without a designer) change into completely different animals and plants by information-adding mutations, like the ones that don’t occur except in the imaginations of Evolutionists. Which takes us back to animations and art work. Anything is possible if you will only believe.

Does meaningful use of language matter?

2011-03-31T08:17:00.000-07:00

One of the most effective strategies if you want to bamboozle people is to monkey around with the meaning of words. This isn’t the same as the biased and loaded use of adjectives- see earlier reflection on ‘think tanks’ being described as ‘right wing’ (conservative) or ‘respected’ (socialist)- although that trick is out of the same box. In ‘Alice in wonderland’ one of the fantasy characters says ‘when I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more, nothing less’. But if we are to communicate meaningfully, especially about disputed matters, we need to have words whose meaning is concrete, not fluid. A spade is a spade.

Of course I am writing about the misuse of the word ‘evolution’. This happens so often that I intend to look out for specific examples and blog about them as I see them. Here’s an example from yesterday.

Last night I was at a rock and roll concert, never mind which, at which an old favourite song was introduced. The band leader described how the song began (he might have talked about the song’s ‘genesis’ but didn’t). He said that after the song had been originally written by 4 guys in a basement, ‘it evolved’. What he meant by that was that the song had changed over time. But is the use of the word 'evolve' or ‘evolution’ correct when used in this sense, when the song was evidently designed?

The song had indeed (like my waistline) changed over time. I first heard it in the 1970s and have 2 recordings which are non identical, but, like all songs, it was undeniably the result of intelligent design. It began with a group of men who knew they wanted to write a song, with words and music, to perform and record. They had purpose. They had memory. They had critical faculties. They had ambition. They were able to introduce and test different musical ideas, dropping some and incorporating others. Their musical instruments and recording equipment were likewise intelligently designed. The song was designed, then refined, by intelligent minds. In what way is this evolution, since Darwinian evolution has no mind, memory or goal?

May the term ‘evolution’ be correctly applied to such a process as the writing and performance of a song? This is perhaps negotiable, BUT if so, then to avoid confusion we need a completely different term for the supposed process by which, according to the followers of Charles Darwin, humans came into being from a supposed primitive common ancestor. Song writing has been observed many times, the change by Darwinian evolution of one kind of animal into another kind, never.

It ultimately renders language meaningless if we use the same word to describe 2 completely different processes, one which proceeds from purposeful mind and one which does not. Using the term evolution to describe a process which can be shown to be intelligent design is either dumb or part of a deliberate strategy to bamboozle people into believing something they can’t be persuaded of by honest evidence.

Obviously I am not trying to blame the musician, he was just going with the cultural flow, but this was a clear, if perhaps trivial (is anything trivial?) example of how a fundamental error of logic can seep into the popular culture and invade it so fully that people don’t realise what it is they have swallowed. In mathematics, you can never reliably get a correct answer if there is a basic flaw in the way you calculate things.This is true for other matters as well.

We must use words correctly if we wish to avoid confusion, however it is my assertion that the promoters of Darwinianism strive to achieve confusion. Their vague and untestable assertions prosper best in a fog.

Centre for Intelligent Design, and 'respected' think tanks

2011-03-30T03:18:00.000-07:00

The new British Centre for Intelligent Design is launching a summer school to educate and enable activists to carry the message. Subjects to be covered are the scientific (astronomical, mathematical, genetic, biochemical, nanomachines etc) basis for ID, the truth about the Dover trial and much else. The need for this is highlighted by the continuing media and Darwin activist campaign to prevent ID arguments being heard, so that Darwinian theory dominates our culture by default, appeals to authority and endless repetition of speculation and falsehood as fact.

One of the strangest things about the debate, apart form the mainstream media's reluctance to cover it, is the fact that many Christian organisations seem to take the side of the enemies of the Christian religion in refusing to acknowledge the evidence of design we see in the created things. Alistair Noble writes an effective rebuttal against an attack on ID by one such organisation Ekklesia. These people claim to be a Christian theological think tank but I only ever hear them cited by the Liberal-Left BCC sniping at mainstream, i.e. Bible believing, Christianity. Are they really Dawkinist moles? It would hardly be a surprise to find that some of the sixties and seventies liberals and crypto-communists who have been on a long march through the establishment to slowly undermine and destroy British Christendom would have furthered their goal by joining the church. The theory that many senior churchmen are actually working covertly to destroy the church from within has considerable explanatory power and fits with scriptural prophecy.

http://www.c4id.org.uk/

Noble's esay on the above link is well worth reading in full. He demonstrates the usual lazy inaccuracies, off the shelf cliches and oft repeated smears and sneers in the Ekklesia article in question. He asks why a purportedly Christian organisation specifically refuses to see evidence of design in the natural world, when clearly not only the Bible writers but also the founding fathers of most of the natural sciences (men like Pasteur, Galileo, Kepler, Maxwell, Newton etc) not only saw design but were inspired by it. Noble writes that the illusion of non-design goes against everything we can observe in nature. It is utterly counter intuitive, has not been observed, and has no credible mechanism. Darwin only made it appear to work by all kinds of special pleading and appeals to faith, but now that we know how much sophisticated and purposeful information is contained in each cell, the idea of undesigned life is contrary to all reason, since we observe that meaningful information is only ever seen to arise from intelligent sources. Only. Ever. No exceptions.

I really think this question needs to be asked-why are even Christians who accept evolution (whether for fear of being called names, don't realise how much it matters so haven't thought about it, or because they haven't heard the evidence against) so nervous about even going so far as to say 'well the cosmos and living things LOOK designed!' Perhaps they are nervous about where that might take them, for example a creationist might ask 'If as you say God created through evolution, where are the hymns praising Him for it?' Of course, no such hymn could be written, and parodies apart, as far as I know none has been. Following the evidence wherever it goes can be scary, so perhaps zero tolerance of Darwin dissent is the most comfortable option for the Christian who doesn't want to get into a fight.

NB 'Think tank' seems to be just a fashionable term for some mutually selected like minded friends who have a common view, and the ability to articulate it in corridors of influence and power. I have no idea who chooses which think tanks get quoted and which get ignored. Probably the Guardian readers at the BBC. Someone noted that when the BBC introduces a spokesman from a conservative minded think tank, they are introduced as a 'right wing' think tank, but when they introduce a left wing think tank, it is introduced as a 'respected' or 'influential' think tank, never a left wing one. Similarly, ID supporters are always assumed to be motivated by (usually Christian) religion, but the athiesm of most of the promoters of Darwinism is usually glossed over or considered irrelevant. Stephen Meyer made this point (in his book Signature in the Cell) about an interview he had with Eugenie Scott, where Meyer's Christianity was made the main issue (thus preventing the merits of his mathematical and genetic arguments about ID being discussed) but Scott's atheism was taken as a given and irrelevant to her promotion of evolutionism. In this context, atheism can be seen as a science stopper.

Sophisticated brainwashing can work well, especially when it comes from respected sources over a long period of time, but crude brainwashing can still be effective if enough people are sufficiently dumbed down. If anyone has any doubts about dumbed down Britain, just take a look at the front covers of the magazines and newspapers people are buying.

Darwin doubters 'slightly bonkers' says BBC's John Humphrys

2011-02-04T03:52:00.000-08:00

John Humphreys on the BBC radio 4 Today programme last week made an off hand reference to people who doubt evolution as ‘slightly bonkers’. BBC listeners and viewers will have to take his word for it, since it is BBC policy never under any circumstances to allow anyone who doubts Darwinian orthodoxy to express the scientific reasons for their doubts. And this despite a recent BBC survey which showed that only half of us accept Darwinism-and this after decades of wall to wall evolutionist propaganda and vigorous suppression of dissent.

Interesting compare and contrast with the wide open platform the BBC and the Today programme in particular gave to now disgraced medical researcher Andrew Wakefield. When several years ago he was in a minority of one asserting that the MMR vaccine was causing brain and bowel disease, the BBC had him on time after time, given all the space he needed to make his case. He was given equal space with the establishment view which was helpd by absolutely everyone else, so he was in a far smaller minority than Darwin doubters. Wakefield has since been exposed as a liar and struck off the medical register, the British Medical Journal is running a series of articles about this providing evidence that not only was he concealing major conflicting financial interests but actually falsified his data. Its not me claiming this, its Britain’s foremost peer reviewed scientific medical publication And from the BBC? Silence.

So, some minority views are given plenty of space, others only mentioned when they are being jeered at.

4 children died in the measles outbreak which predictably (and it was predicted) resulted from the publicity given to Wakefield’s ‘bonkers’ and we now know totally wrong views. Don’t expect the BBC to accept any responsibility for this. However, that is nothing to the disaster that could occur to the British secularist establishment if the even bigger fraud of Darwinism were exposed to serious scrutiny. The BBC will maintain its policy of smearing and sneering at the intelligent design movement and Darwin dissent in general, but never allowing its scientific basis to be openly discussed. There is too much at stake.

Star Trek Insurrection and another evolutionary Fairy Tale

2011-01-25T07:22:00.000-08:00

Watched a Star Trek movie on TV last night, ‘Insurrection’. Interesting plot, if quite clichéd. Could have managed without Picard, Worf and Data singing from HMS Pinafore, but never mind. As I watched, I wondered how long it would be before they introduced an evolutionary theme. About a quarter of all the Star Trek episodes I remember watching included an evolutionary theme, and of course all space alien sci fi is based on evolutionary assumptions about life originating as a matter of course all over the universe. Star Trek originator Gene Rodenberry of course was a New Ager. I didn’t have to wait long.

Without doing a full film review, the Baku (I think) were living an idyllic pastoral life, very Garden of Edenish, and some decrepit aliens were spying on them and planning, with the aid of a corrupt or perhaps idealistic but naive Star Fleet admiral, to steal their planetary paradise from them. The bad aliens were all wrapped up like mummies, their sores bleeding through artificial skin, heavily dependent on life support machines and prosthetics and mention was made of their accumulating genetic disorders. So far, so genetically entropic, but what of the Baku?

Caution plot spoiler!

Well, it turns out the crumbly bad guys from another planet are close relatives form the original home world. Turns out the Baku had settled on a planet with some marvellous rings that concentrated a special kind of radiation (not ordinary radiation, you know the sort that causes harmful mutations) and as a result they don’t get old. In fact, the anti-ageing effect sets in at maturity, very convenient or else they wouldn’t grow up. Sounding like a fountain-of-youth Fairy Tale? The Enterprise crew found themselves feeling younger, with ‘firmer boobs’, re-growth of baldy Jen-Luc’s hair and all sorts of friskiness. We weren’t told how the Baku didn’t overrun the planet with population growth, what with there being no death, but let’s not worry about that. Several solutions can be suggested.

Anyway, the bad guys want to take over the planet so that they could soak up some of those healing rays and see their accumulated genetic faults reversed, a sort of anti-ageing deep clean. Interesting plot. Just one small problem. Naturally occuring radiation of whatever imaginable kind is just a flow of raw electromagnetic energy. Whether particles, waves or wavicles, electrons, neutrons, isotrons, positrons, bosons, tacheons, quackons or mekons, radiation bombards DNA and smacks it up. That’s how you get cancer and other stuff that goes wrong with originally good DNA. No possible way round this, not with all the science fiction writer’s licence you can muster. You can't fix something complicated that's bust by chucking dumb energy at it.

But its all good background evolutionary brainwashing. Hey, life can’t originate or improve itself spontaneously on earth, but perhaps in a distant part of this or another galaxy, a special planet with pretty rings will focus special radiation so that life ‘could …may have…must inevitable…’emerge. Sorted.

I hear an ‘I can hardly doubt…’ coming on.