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Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Debunking Evolution: problems, errors, and lies exposed, in plain language for non-scientists!

“Evolution” mixes two things together, one real, one imaginary. 

Variation is the real part. The types of bird beaks, the colors of moths, leg sizes, etc. are variation. Each type and length of beak a finch can have is already in the gene pool for finches. Creationists have always agreed that there is variation within species, but of course not ACROSS SPECIES which is evolutions problem.

But what evolutionists do not want you to know is that there are strict limits to variation that are never crossed. They want you to think that changes continue, merging gradually into new kinds of creatures. This is where the imaginary part of the theory of evolution comes in. It says that new information is added to the gene pool by mutation and natural selection to create frogs from fish, reptiles from frogs, and mammals from reptiles, to name a few.

Do these big changes really happen? Evolutionists tell us we cannot see evolution taking place because it happens too slowly. A human generation takes about 20 years from birth to parenthood. They say it took tens of thousands of generations to form man from a common ancestor with the ape, from populations of only hundreds or thousands. We do not have these problems with bacteria. A new generation of bacteria grows in a matter of hours.

There are more bacteria in the world than there are grains of sand on all of the beaches of the world (and many grains of sand are covered with bacteria). They exist in just about any environment: heat, cold, dry, wet, high pressure, low pressure, small groups, large colonies, isolated, much food, little food, much oxygen, no oxygen, in toxic chemicals, etc. There is much variation in bacteria. There are many mutations (in fact, evolutionists say that smaller organisms have a faster mutation rate than larger ones1).

But they never turn into anything else. They always remain bacteria. Fruit flies are much more complex than already complex single-cell bacteria. Scientists like to study them because a generation (from egg to adult) takes only 9 days. In the lab, fruit flies are studied under every conceivable condition.

There is much variation in fruit flies. There are many mutations. But they never turn into anything else. They always remain fruit flies. Many years of study of countless generations of bacteria and fruit flies all over the world shows that evolution is false and is not happening today.

This is how the imaginary part is supposed to happen: On rare occasions a mutation in DNA improves a creature’s ability to survive, so it is more likely to reproduce (natural selection).

That is evolution’s only tool for making new creatures. It might even work if it took just one gene to make and control one part.

But parts of living creatures are constructed of intricate components with connections that all need to be in place for the thing to work, controlled by many genes that have to act in the proper sequence.

Natural selection would not choose parts that did not have all their components existing, in place, connected, and regulated because the parts would not work. Thus all the right mutations (and none of the destructive ones) must happen at the same time by pure chance.

That is physically impossible. To illustrate just how impossible it is, imagine this: on the ground are all the materials needed to build a house (nails, boards, shingles, windows, etc.).

We tie a hammer to the wagging tail of a dog and let him wander about the work site for as long as you please, even millions of years. The swinging hammer on the dog is as likely to build a house as mutation-natural selection is to make a single new working part in an animal, let alone a new creature.

Only mutations in the reproductive (germ) cells of an animal or plant would be passed on. Mutations in the eye or skin of an animal would not matter. Mutations in DNA happen fairly often, but most are repaired or destroyed by mechanisms in animals and plants. All known mutations in animal and plant germ cells are neutral, harmful, or fatal. But evolutionists are eternally optimistic. They believe that many beneficial mutations were passed on to every species that ever existed, since that is the only way evolutionists think different species are made.

There are two versions of evolution. The first (neo-Darwinism) proposed that many tiny changes made new creatures. They could not find these tiny changes between one type of creature and another in the fossil record, so a few evolutionists proposed instead that change occurred by occasional leaps (punctuated equilibrium).

Each hypothetical beneficial mutation could only make a slight change. Any more than that would be so disruptive as to cause death. So punctuated equilibrium is not really one leap at a time.

It envisions a lot of slight changes over thousands of years, then nothing happens for millions of years. Evolutionists say with a straight face that no fossils have been found from a leap because thousands of years is too fast in the billions of years of “geologic time” to leave any.

On the other hand, without fossils there is no evidence that any leaps ever happened, and of course there is no evidence that leaps or gradual changes are happening today in any of the millions of species that still exist.

whaleEvolution is all about constant change, whether gradual or in leaps. Consider a cloud in the sky: it is constantly changing shape due to natural forces.

It might look like, say, a rabbit now, and a few minutes later appear to be, say, a horse. In between, the whole mass is shifting about. In a few more minutes it may look like a bird.

The problem for evolution is that we never see the shifting between shapes in the fossil record. All fossils are of complete animals and plants, not works in progress “under construction”. That is why we can give each distinct plant or animal a name.

If evolution’s continuous morphing were really going on, every fossil would show change underway throughout the creature, with parts in various stages of completion. For every successful change there should be many more that lead to nothing. The whole process is random trial and error, without direction.

So every plant and animal, living or fossil, should be covered inside and out with useless growths and have parts under construction. It is a grotesque image, and just what the theory of evolution really predicts.

Even Charles Darwin had a glimpse of the problem in his day. He wrote in his book The Origin of Species: “The number of intermediate varieties which have formerly existed on Earth must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.” The more fossils that are found, the better sense we have of what lived in the past. Since Darwin’s day, the number of fossils that have been collected has grown tremendously, so we now have a pretty accurate picture.

The gradual morphing of one type of creature to another that evolution predicts is nowhere to be found. There should have been millions of transitional creatures if evolution were true.

In the “tree of life” that evolutionists have dreamed up, gaps in the fossil record are especially huge between single-cell creatures, complex invertebrates (such as snails, jellyfish, trilobites, clams, and sponges), and what evolutionists claim were the first vertebrates, fish. In fact, there are no fossil ancestors at all for complex invertebrates or fish. That alone is fatal to the theory of evolution. The fossil record shows that evolution is wrong and never happened.

The platypus has a duck-like bill, swims with webbed feet, and lays eggs. Yet nobody calls it a transitional creature between mammals and ducks.

Archaeopteryx has long been held up as the great example of a transitional creature, appearing to be part dinosaur and part bird. However, it is a fully formed, complete animal with no half-finished components or useless growths. That is also the case for the other birds in the evolutionary tree. Evolutionists just placed some of the many living and extinct species next to each other to make the bird series.

The same is true for the famous horse series. Fossils of each type of supposed ancestor are of complete animals. They are not full of failed growths and there are no parts under construction. There are many more differences between each type of animal than their size and the number of toes. Every change in structure, function, and process, between Hyracotherium (formerly Eohippus) and the horse would have had to have developed through random trial-and-error if evolution were true.

The fossils have not caught any of these changes in the midst of being created, even though they should have occurred over long periods of time. Evolutionists just placed living and extinct species next to each other to make the horse series.

When researchers began “reading” the amino acids in proteins in the 1960′s, evolutionists expected that proteins such as hemoglobin or cytochrome C, common to many types of creatures, would be more alike for creatures close to each other on the evolutionist’s “tree of life”, and more unlike for creatures farther apart on the “tree of life”.

Instead, this comparative biochemistry found that the protein sequences were just as different between creatures near on the tree as between those far apart, using percent of sequence differences. There is lots of variation in these proteins, but no evolutionary progression.

f_chimpsaysnom_3b93fcdAnother old evolution myth still popular is the notion that things that look like gill slits, tails, etc. in developing human embryos show the embryo repeating all the stages of human evolution.

In 1866, Ernst Haeckel proposed his “biogenitic law” (not to be confused with the law of biogenesis that says life only comes from life). His idea was that growing vertebrate embryos went through all the forms of their supposed evolutionary ancestors (“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”). He published drawings comparing growing embryos of a number of animals such as the pig, cat, salamander, etc.to growing human embryos.

The similarities that he said he found helped persuade people to believe the theory of evolution. Scientists eventually discovered enough about embryology to quietly discard the “biogenetic law”, but it was not until a careful photographic study of growing vertebrate embryos was conducted in 1997 that Haeckel’s deceit was fully revealed.

They found that his drawings were so far from reality that they could not have been done from the actual embryos.4 He must have faked them.

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Evolution violates two laws of science. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that things fall apart over time, they do not get more organized, unless there is already a mechanism in place to build things up.

But this very same Law prevents such a mechanism from assembling by itself. The Law of Biogenesis was established by Louis Pasteur three years after Darwin’s book was published, and simply says that life only comes from life. Living cells divide to make new cells, and fertilized eggs and seeds develop into animals and plants, but raw chemicals never fall together and life appears.

Evolutionists often call certain chemicals “the building blocks of life”, giving people the false impression that you just stack the building blocks together and you get life. No one has ever done that, including the famous 1953 Miller/Urey experiment where all they got were clumps of amino acids.

Many people mistakenly think scientists have made life from chemicals in the lab, but they have not (though many have tried very hard). If one were to succeed, you would know about it. He would get every science award there is, be all over the news, and have movies, books, buildings, statues, and schools dedicated to him, so desperate are evolutionists on this matter. For something to be a law of science, it can never be found to have been violated, even once, over thousands of trials. No exceptions. A theory that violates two laws of science is in big trouble.

When confronted with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, evolutionists usually use two tricks to try to escape. The first is to state that “it only applies to closed systems, and biological creatures are open systems, so it doesn’t affect evolution.” Since most people know nothing about open or closed systems, the trick works. The fact is that the Second Law applies to all systems, open or closed, and to all actions and chemical reactions, from molecules to galaxies. The words “except for…” are not in this universal law. “Open system” means energy is free to flow through from the outside.

For example, you eat food (which comes from outside yourself) and your body survives. Evolutionists believe that all you need is an open system with sufficient energy flowing into it for evolution to succeed. If that were so, you could just stand right behind a jet engine as the aircraft prepares for takeoff, absorb that blast of energy, and evolve to a higher life form. In reality, of course, you would be incinerated because absorbing energy without a mechanism to convert it to a useful form is destructive or useless.

The mechanism must be very specific. Sticking food in your ear will not work; it must go into your mouth and through the digestive system. And the mechanism must be in place and functioning first, before energy is added or the energy is wasted.

The “open system” ploy is just an attempt to avoid dealing with the Second Law because the Law prohibits any biological mechanism from falling together by pure chance, without assistance or plan, using only the properties of matter.

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The second trick is to say that “when you freeze water, the disordered molecules become beautifully ordered ice crystals or snowflakes. If water can bypass the Second Law and organize its molecules by a natural process, why not the chemicals of life?” At room temperature, water molecules are bouncing off each other and you have water.

When you take away heat and they freeze, water molecules stick to each other with weak molecular bonds, forming ice crystals and snowflakes because of the shape of the H2O molecule. The same thing happens if you put a bunch of weak magnets in a jar and shake it. The magnets bounce around. When you stop, the magnets stick together. They are at a lower energy level.

There is order, yet no complexity – just a simple repetitive structure that does not do anything. The Second Law is not bypassed or violated. But guess what. Amino acid molecules that form proteins, and nucleotide molecules that form DNA and RNA resist combining at any temperature.

To combine, they need the help of mechanisms in a living cell or a biochemist in an organic chemistry laboratory. It means that nothing happens in the primeval soup, the pond of chemicals where evolutionists believe life began. DNA and RNA dissolve in water5, so there could not even be water in the primeval soup. DNA is made of only right-handed versions of nucleotides, while proteins are made of only left-handed versions of amino acids.

Yet any random chemical reaction that produced nucleotides or amino acids would make an equal mix of left and right-handed versions of each. Even if the thousands of nucleotides or amino acids needed to form individual DNA or protein molecules were able to combine from this mix, they would be a jumble of left and right-handed versions that could not function at all. Ilya Prigogene coauthored a paper in 1972 that says in an open “system there exists a possibility for formation of ordered, low-entropy structures at sufficiently low temperatures.

This ordering principle is responsible for the appearance of ordered structures such as crystals… Unfortunately this principle cannot explain the formation of biological structures.”3 Prigogene won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for research in dissipative structures, such as tornados, for contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and for bridging the gap between biology and other sciences. Evolutionists wrongly claim he won for showing how thermodynamics could explain the formation of organized systems, from fluctuations in chaos, that lead to the origin of life. They thought he was their hero. Thirty years later, nothing has come of it.

There is no escape from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It prohibits the spontaneous origin of life and the progression from microbes to man.

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Even a single cell is not simple. In Darwin’s day researchers looked at cells under the microscope and saw little balloons filled with goo they called protoplasm, so they thought cells were simple forms of life. Almost 150 years later we know that there are many types of cells, and each cell is a little city at work.

The smallest known genome (Mycoplasma genitalium) has 482 genes.2 The minimum possible for an organism to survive is probably 200 to 300 genes. Most bacteria have 1000 to 4000 genes. A popular textbook on the cell (Molecular Biology of THE CELL, 4th edition, 2002, Alberts, Johnson, Lewis, Raff, Roberts, Walter; Garland Science, NY, NY) is almost 1500 pages long and weighs 7 pounds. Everything about the cell is stunningly complex. Plants and animals are made of many millions of cells.

There are only two possibilities. Either every part of every living thing arose by random chance, or an intelligence designed them. In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the theory of evolution is dead wrong, many are not ready to throw in the towel. They desperately hope that some natural process will be found that causes things to fall together into organized complexity.

These are people of great faith. And they are so afraid of connecting God with science that, like the Japanese Army of World War II, they would rather die than surrender. Unfortunately, the staunchest defenders sit in places of esteem and authority as professors, scientists, and editors, and have the full faith of the news media. The public is naturally in awe of their prestige. But once the facts are spelled out it becomes obvious that the theory of evolution is long overdue for the trash can, and to perpetuate it is a fraud. Perhaps it made sense for what was known when The Origin of Species was published in 1859, but not today.

Darwin is liked by evolutionists because he liberated science from the straitjacket of observation and opened the door to storytellers. This gave professional evolutionists job security so they can wander through biology labs as if they belong there.

From David Coppedge
Speaking of Science, Creation Matters, May/June 2003

COME ON SKEPTICS..BRING IT ON!

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What about Fossils and Natural Selection

The fossil record does not support the case for natural selection. One excellent summary (Gliedman, 1982, p. 90-91) reflects the current opinion well:

No fossil or other physical evidence directly connects, man to ape…. The problem for gradualism [those who support gradual evolution or orthodox Darwinian evolution] is that . . . these ancestral species remain essentially unchanged throughout their million-year life spans, yet each of them differs substantially from its immediate predecessor. . . . Sudden-change theorists find plenty of support for their point of view in the glaring list of critical evolutionary events that no gradualism, including Darwin’s, has ever explained satisfactorily. In addition to the lack of a missing link to explain the relatively sudden appearance of modern man, gradualism cannot easily explain the mysterious ‘Cambrian explosion’ 600 million years ago.

This was an evolutionary leap that transformed the earth . . . from a mess of simple microscopic bacteria and blue-green algae to a planet bursting at the seams with primitive representatives of every type of multicellular plant and invertebrate animal-from the lowly protozoans to such complex creatures as the trilobites, … the best that gradualism can do is point to the ground beneath their feet; the fossils buried in the earth somewhere, they say, and may someday be discovered.

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The lack of transitional forms is a serious problem that can no longer be attributed to hypothesized undiscovered fossils (Johnson, 1990; Gould, 1989). All of the multi-millions of fossils so far discovered fit quite well into existing groups and rarely is it even argued that a fossil type fits between two orders or even families. Animals have come and gone, but very few of them meet even the minimal requirements necessary to claim that their fossil type is one of the many billions of different transitional forms that must have existed if the gradualism view is correct.

To explain this difficulty, believers in the punctuated equilibrist’s view of Gould postulate that relatively few links exist, and very few fossils can be found because the rate of evolution during the gaps was geologically rapid. The theory also argues that the transitional forms were highly unstable, thus rapidly died off, leaving behind very few fossils. But once an animal was in a stable slot in the environment, though, it existed for long periods of time consequently leaving behind many more fossils during this stage.

The major problems with the punctuated equilibrium view is that it is based on almost a total lack of transitional forms; consequently one might ask, “How do we know that these creatures existed and were unstable if we have no evidence of them?” The reason that this is concluded is if they were stable and survived for long periods of time, we would have abundant evidence of them. Since we do not have this evidence, given evolution is true, they must have existed, but only for a short while and this is why no evidence of them now exists.

This argument from lack of evidence is, at best, misleading and, at worst, involves the circular reasoning fallacy. In the punctuated equilibrium view, multi-millions or more transitional forms must also exist, just fewer than in the old view. Arguing primarily from lack of evidence is also true of the gradualism model: none of these links have been discovered for certain. Hitching (1982, p. 40) concludes that:

Today most museums and textbooks accept gradualism as readily as they accept natural selection. Logically, then, the fossil record ought to show this stately progression. If we find fossils, and if Darwin’s theory was right, we can predict what the rock should contain; finely graduated fossils leading from one group of creatures to another group of creatures at a higher level of complexity.

The ‘minor improvements’ in successive generations should be as readily preserved as the species themselves. But this is hardly ever the case. In fact, the opposite holds true, as Darwin himself complained; “innumerable transitional forms must have existed, but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?”

Darwin felt though that the “extreme imperfection” of the fossil record was simply a matter of digging up more fossils. But as more and more fossils were dug up, it was found that almost all of them, without exception, were very close to current living animals. Size and shape may have varied, such as the woolly mammoth compared to elephants today, but the variations were small.

Fossil intermediates are consistently missing in virtually all of the, most important places, and some paleontologists argue that no true, major transitional forms have been shown to exist, and that all claimed transitional forms are, at best debatable. Macro-evolutionists generally concede that, although the evidence for intermediates is at present limited, they have faith that they will be found in the future if we just keep digging.

The limited evidence, such as the few hypothesized transitional form claims as Archaeopteryx, often do not stand under examination. Archaeopteryx is probably the best-known and oldest example of a supposed intermediate, and the creature’s traits, as well as where it fits in the fossil record, are still being hotly debated.

Benton (1983, p. 99) concluded that “no consensus on Archaeopteryx” exists, and that scientists are still debating even such basic questions as, “can the bird fly, is it ancestral to birds, did it originate from dinosaurs or from some earlier stock and, indeed, is it even a bird?” He (1983, p. 99) quotes a detailed study on the brain case of Archaeopteryx that concludes that the “details of the brain case and associated bones at the back of the skull seem to suggest that Archaeopteryx is not the ancestral bird, but an offshoot from the early avian stem.”

The relationship of Archaeopteryx in the origins of bird controversy is so controversial that Thulborn and Hamley in an extensive review identified seven hypotheses concerning the affinities of Archaeopteryx (Benton, 1983, p. 100).

This notorious lack of transitional forms is not due to any shortage of fossils. Billions have now been unearthed, so many that quality specimens are often sold to collectors for as little as a quarter. Petroleum, oil, natural gas, chalk, cement and many other petrochemicals and minerals are claimed to be products of fossils, thus are called fossil fuels or minerals.

Over 250,000 different species of fossil plants and animals are known to exist, and almost all of them are extremely similar to the 1.5 million species now known to be living on earth (and about one million of these are insects) while the rest fit into known extinct types (Day, 1989). When a fossil is unearthed, it most always is known type. Discovery of a new species, whether extant or extinct, is a once in a lifetime event for many zoologists that is often rewarded by naming the species after the discoverer.

Rensch (1959) admitted that few, if any, examples of micro changes (which he calls transpacific evolution) exist in the fossil record. He added hopefully that finding intermediates in the future should not yet be regarded as impossible. Most research areas along this line have turned out to be dead-end roads which have diverted biologists from other far more promising areas of research.

Darwin’s explanation for the lack of transitional forms, the alleged extreme imperfection of the geological record due to our poor search efforts, can no longer be used to explain away the evidence. We now have enough fossils to be assured that we have a fairly good idea of the variety of past animal life, especially those types with hard parts.

We can even make some reasonable conclusions about the extinct forms and variety of animals, such as jelly fish and bacteria, which are not preserved either as well or as often as animals with hard parts. Our good knowledge of many ancient insects is partly due to the many types that are preserved in amber or other substances which prevent the decay of the soft, fragile parts (Reid, 1985). These were described eloquently by Zahl (1978, p. 237):

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Recently, in a laboratory at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, I focused a magnifying glass on a clear marble-sized sphere in which a tiny fossil fly hung suspended…. This elegant piece of tea-hued amber, along with its elfin inclusion, was only one of several thousand stored in drawers stacked from floor to ceiling in the Museum’s Department of Fossil Insects. . . . In each was a fly, ant, grasshopper, beetle, or spider, all perfectly lifelike as though some magic wand had cast the spell of frozen sleep upon them….embalmed you might say, fifty million years earlier; yet its tenants looked singularly like the fly, ant, grasshopper, beetle, or spider in my own garden.

 

Had evolution overlooked such genera during the intervening fifty thousand millennia?

Trilobites, although long extinct, have been studied extensively and we now know a great deal about the morphology, growth, molting, appendages and internal anatomy of the 60 known species. We even have good insight into how their holochroalic eyes work. Enough is known about the past living world to produce a fairly good picture of it. And, this picture precludes macroevolution.

Natural selection, although it “explains” minute changes, is far less viable in explaining the events called for by the theory of punctuated equilibria. Many of the challenges to Darwinian evolution are specifically challenges to natural selection. And these are such that the theory at the very least requires severe modification (Leigh, 1971). As Hitching (1982)

stated, “Darwin’s explanation of evolution is being challenged [today] as never before, not just by creationists, but by his fellow scientists.” The fact is that: . . . for all its acceptance as the great unifying principle of biology, Darwinism, after a century and a quarter, is in a surprising amount of trouble.”

The reason is because Darwinism or its modem version, neo-Darwinism, “. . . has not, contrary to general belief, and despite very great efforts, been proved.” Given the above, why then is natural selection accepted? Macbeth (1971, p. 77) attempts an answer:

[Does] the evidence mean that Darwinism is correct? No. Sir Julian Huxley said, once the hypothesis of special creation is ruled out, adaptation can only be ascribed to natural selection, but this is utterly unjustified. He should say only that Darwinism is better than the other. But when the others are no good, this is faint praise.

Is there any glory in outrunning a cripple in a foot race?

Being best-in-field means nothing if the field is made up of fumblers.”

That changes have occurred in nature and in animals, no informed person doubts. Nor does anyone deny that species have arisen and disappeared-the dinosaurs and trilobites are the most prominent of thousands of good examples. Many creatures that once roamed the earth no longer exist today, and some species around today evidently did not exist a long time ago.

The concern is that microevolution is labeled evolution, then based on the evidence for microevolution the claim is made that evolution has occurred. Microevolution has been well documented and creationists have no difficulty with this fact; they stress that we should go only as far as the empirical data carries us (Johnson, 1991).

The fact is, the documented changes are minor and fully explainable by innate,variation laws. Most creatures that are around now are close to identical to their ancestors who lived far back in time-some even from almost the very beginning of the fossil record, such as many types of bacteria, insects, jelly fish, reptiles and fish.

Even Darwin recognized that the natural selection theory had serious problems. For example, Gould (1980, p. 32) noted, “Darwin lived to see his name appropriated for an extreme view that he never held-for Darwinism has often been defined, both in his day and in our own, as the belief that virtually all evolutionary change is the product of natural selection.” According to Gould, Darwin openly objected to this “misunderstanding” of his position. In the introduction of the 1872 edition of his Origins of the Species, Darwin stated:

As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection…. in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous at the close of the introduction-the following words: ‘I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.’ This has been of no avail. (Quoted in Gould, 1980, p. 32)

A major reason that Darwin took this position, Gould (1980, p. 32) concludes, was because “. . . organisms display an array of features that are not adaptations and do not promote survival directly.” Darwin attempted to explain away, or in some way account for these mechanisms, but largely failed and he knew this. In respect to Homo sapiens, Grasse (1977, p. 85-86) pointed out that, although the source of selection, namely mutations, differentiate individuals, yet

… the human species, despite the magnitude of its population and the diversity of its habitats, both of which are conditions favorable for the evolution of the human species, exhibits anatomical and physiological stability. In wealthy western societies natural selection is thwarted by medical care, good hygiene, and abundant food, but it was not always so.

Today in underdeveloped countries, where birth and death rates are equally high (tropical Africa, Amazon, Pakistan, India, Patagonia, some Polynesian islands), natural selection can exert its pressure freely; yet the human type hardly changes. In the population of the Yucatan, which since the Spanish conquest has been subjected to terrible vicissitudes, one can find Mayan men and women who are the exact replicas of their pre-Colombian ancestors from Palanque of Chicken Itza. For several millennia the Chinese have numbered hundreds of millions.

The conditions of their physical and social environment have favored intensive selection. To what result? None. They simply remain Chinese. Within each population, men differ by their genotype, and yet the species Homo sapiens has not modified its plan or structure or functions. To the common base are added a variety of diversifying and personifying ornaments, totally lacking evolutionary value.

Evolutionist’s, Atheist’s, & Skeptic’s explain this..if you can!

THE DNA PROBLEM:HOW DID IT FORM?

The following studies will prove very interesting in the least, and very enlightening at best: our studies will take us on a journey to distant places and times from the PAST!

I WILL USE OTHERS SCIENTIFIC DATA HERE as all Atheist's do, SO NO “COPY- PASTE” ISSUES ARE ACCEPTED AS EXCUSES NOT TO ANSWER THESE FACTS AS PRESENTED!

“At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt”……. I.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician; Member NY Academy of Sciences; Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America; “Darwin Was Wrong – A Study in Probabilities”; New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4 When Darwin began advocating his infant idea that the world could be explained by naturalistic means, the prevailing view of the cell was that it was as simple as a Hostess Ho Ho; chocolate icing on the outside, chocolate cake on the inside and a creamy filling.

It was the kind of thing those predisposed to do so could imagine could arise by accident –either the single cell or the HO HO. Darwin had no clue as to the perfect design and complexity of the “SIMPLE HUMAN CELL”, in fact Darwin himself said : “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances—

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for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic observation—

could have been formed by natural selection seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Charles Darwin Origin of the Species, Chapter 6

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

your works are wonderful, I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.

When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. “..Psalm 139 The truth is { And these are NOT MY FACTS they are your FACTS which make evolution IMPOSSIBLE! }, man with all his science and technological ability has not yet created anything as complex as the single living cell. This ALONE says VOLUMES ABOUT THE ABILITY OF SCIENCE COMPARED TO THE ALMIGHTY GOD OF SCRIPTURE!

“If all the DNA in your body were placed end-to-end, it would stretch from here to the Moon more than 500,000 times! In book form, that information would completely fill the Grand Canyon more than 75 times! Yet,if one set of DNA (one cell’s worth) from every person who ever lived were placed in a pile, the final pile would weigh less than an aspirin!…..Center for Scientific Creation

In fact, in the simplest single cell of bacteria, there is as much information as there is in every book in each of three metropolitan libraries combined. DNA, Design and the Origin of LifeCharles B. Thaxton, Ph.D.
This paper was presented as part of the conference, Jesus Christ: God and Man, an international conference in Dallas, Texas, November 13-16, 1986. Dr. Thaxton was then Director of Research, The Julian Center, P.O. Box 400, Julian, CA 92036.

“The classical design argument looked at order in the world and concluded that God must have caused it. Archdeacon William Paley in the nineteenth century refined the argument. He also gave it perhaps its most eloquent and persuasive formulation. Paley looked at the order of human artifacts and compared it to the order in living beings.

If human intelligence was responsible for artifacts, reasoned Paley, then some intelligent power greater than man must have accounted for living beings.

The major problem with this design argument was its claim to reason from order in the world to a supernatural designer. For Paley did not provide any uniform experience of the supernatural, which alone could make good his claim. As valid as this objection was, however, only philosophers seemed concerned about it.

It was an argument by Charles Darwin that raised doubt for most people concerning true design in the world.According to Darwin natural selection produced apparent design which the faithful mistook for true design. So the matter has stood in the scientific community and the world at large for a century.

Scientific discoveries made in this century, however, threaten to change the outlook fundamentally in regards to design. However, few outside the relevant disciplines seem aware of it. I am referring to developments in relativity theory and quantum mechanics, neurophysiology,information theory, and molecular biology, particularly the elucidation of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). I shall focus my remarks on DNA and its relation to design and the origin of life.

Due to advances in molecular biology, the process of reproduction, or self-replication, has become better understood. At the core of this process is the DNA molecule. Though not itself alive, DNA is usually regarded as the sine qua non of life. DNA is considered the identifying mark of a living system. We judge something as living if it contains DNA.

Molecular biology has shown us how extremely intricate living things are, especially the genetic code and the genetic process. Interestingly enough, the genetic code can be best understood as an analogue to human language. It functions exactly like a code — indeed, it is a code: it is a molecular communication system within the cell.

A sequence of chemical ‘letters’ stores and transmits the communication in the cell. Communication is possible whatever symbols used as an alphabet. The 26 letters we use in English, the 32 Cyrillic letters used in the Russian language, or the 4-letter genetic alphabet — all serve in communication.

In recent years, scientists have applied information theory to biology, and in particular to the genetic code. Information theory is the science of message transmission developed by Claude Shannon and other engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the late 1940s. It provides a mathematical means of measuring information. Information theory applies to any symbol system, regardless of the elements of that system. The so-called Shannon information laws apply equally well to human language, Morse code, and the genetic code.

The conclusion drawn from the application of information theory to biology is there exists a structural identity between the DNA code and a written language. H.P. Yockey notes in the Journal of Theoretical Biology:

It is important to understand that we are not reasoning by analogy. The sequence hypothesis [that the exact order of symbols records the information] applies directly to the protein and the genetic text as well as to written language and therefore the treatment is mathematically identical.

This development is highly significant for the modern origin of life discussion. Molecular biology has now uncovered an analogy between DNA and written human languages. It is more than an analogy, in fact: in terms of structure, the two are “mathematically identical.”

In the case of written messages, we have uniform experience that they have an intelligent cause. What is uniform experience? It simply means that people everywhere observe a certain type of event always in association with a certain type of cause. When we find evidence that a similar event happened in the past, it is reasonable to infer it had a similar cause. As I shall argue, based on uniform experience there is good reason to accept an intelligent cause for the origin of life as well.

Two Kinds of Order

 

You may recognize this argument for an intelligent cause of life. It is a form of the design argument that has been popular among theists for centuries. The design argument makes use of the same mode of reasoning used in the historical sciences today — namely, the argument from analogy.

The design argument assumes that the order we see in the world around us bears an analogy to the kind of order exhibited by human artifacts, by tools and machines and works of art. Since the two kinds of order are similar, the cause of one must be similar to the cause of the other. The order in human artifacts is the result of human intelligence. Therefore, the order in the world must be the result of an intelligent being we call the creator.

dna-an 

The argument from molecular biology is a modern restatement of the argument from design, with a few significant refinements. The older design argument went straight from order in the universe to the existence of God. From time immemorial, the beauty of birds and flowers, the cycle of the seasons, the remarkable adaptations in animals, have led people to posit some type of intelligent cause behind it all.

Not just Christians but a wide range of believers in some form of intelligence have buttressed their belief by appealing to the wonderful order and complexity in the world.

During the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the argument from order took on even greater force. Scientists studied the intricate structures in nature in a depth and detail unknown in previous ages. Many became more convinced than ever that such order required an intelligent cause. Isaac Newton expressed a common sentiment when he declared, “this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

“The argument from design has always been the argument most widely accepted by scientists. It is the most empirical of the arguments for God, based as it is on observational premises about the kind of order we discover in nature. Ironically, it was also the Scientific Revolution which eventually led many to reject the argument from design. Repeatedly, scientists discovered natural causes for events which until then had been mysterious. If natural causes could explain these things, perhaps they could explain everything else too. Do we really need an intelligent cause to explain the order of the world?

Take, for example, the structure of a snowflake. The intricate beauty of a snowflake has led many a believer to exclaim upon the wisdom of the creator. Yetthe snowflake’s structure is nothing mysterious or supernatural. It is explained by the natural laws that govern the crystallization of water as it freezes.

The argument from design claims that the order we see around us cannot have arisen by natural causes. The snowflake seems to refute that claim. It demonstrates that at least some kinds of order can arise by natural causes. And if matter alone can give rise to order in some instances, why not in all others as well? Why do we need to appeal to an intelligent being any more to explain the origin of the world? We need only continue to search for natural causes. Many materialists today use this argument.

What is coming to light through the application of information theory is there are actually two kinds of order. The first kind (the snowflake’s) arises from constraints within the material the thing is made of (the water molecules). We cannot infer an intelligent cause from it, except possibly in the remote sense of something behind the natural cause.

The second kind, however, is not a result of anything within matter itself. It is in principle opposed to anything we see forming naturally. This kind of order does provide evidence for an intelligent cause.

The Difference It Makes

Let’s explain these two kinds of order in greater detail. As you travel through various parts of the United States, you may come across unusual rock formations. If you consult a tourists’ guide, you will learn that such shapes result when more than one type of rock make up the formation.

Because their mineral composition varies, some rocks are softer than others. Rain and wind erode the soft parts of the formation faster than the hard parts, leaving the harder sections protruding. In this way, the formation may take on an unlikely shape. It may even come to resemble a familiar object like a face.

In other words, the formation may look as though it was deliberately carved. However, on closer inspection, say from a different angle, you notice the resemblance is only superficial. The shape invariably accords with what erosion can do, acting on the natural qualities of the rock (soft parts worn away, hard parts protruding). You therefore conclude the rock formed naturally. Natural forces suffice to account for the shape you see.

Now let’s illustrate a different kind of order. Say in your travels you visit Mount Rushmore. Here you find four faces on a granite cliff. These faces do not follow the natural composition of the rock: the chip marks cut across both hard and soft sections. These shapes do not resemble anything you have seen resulting from erosion. In this case the shape of the rock is not the result of natural processes. Rather, you infer from uniform experience that an artisan has been at work. The four faces were intelligently imposed onto the material.

None of us finds it difficult to distinguish between these two kinds of order, the one produced naturally and the other by intelligence. To come back to the argument from design, the question is: which kind of order do we find in nature?

If we find only the first kind, then our conclusion will be that natural causes suffice to explain the universe as we see it today. An intelligent cause, if there is one, is merely a distant First Cause. It is a deistic kind of God who created matter with certain tendencies and then stood back to let these work themselves out mechanically.

If, on the other hand, we find any instances of the second kind of order, the kind produced by intelligence, these will be evidence of the activity of an intelligent cause. Science itself would then point beyond the physical world to its origin in an intelligent source.

It is easy enough to find examples of the first kind of order. The snowflake was one. The properties of the atoms that compose a snowflake determine its crystalline structure. Wind and temperature explain cloud shapes. Ripples of sand on a beach result from the impact of wind and waves. The waves of the sea form by wind, gravity, and the fluid properties of water. None of these goes beyond what we expect to result naturally, given the properties of the material itself. The beauty of a sunset may inspire poets, but natural causes suffice to explain it.

The pervasive example of the second kind of order is life itself.

A Code In Miniature

One of the greatest scientific developments of the twentieth century has been the discovery of the DNA code. DNA is the famous molecule of heredity. Each of us begins as a tiny ball about the size of a period at the end of a sentence. All our physical characteristics, i.e., height, hair color, eye color, etc., are ‘spelled out’ in our DNA. It guides our development into adulthood.

The DNA code is quite simple in its basic structure (although enormously complex in its functioning). By now most people are familiar with the double helix  

structure of the DNA molecule. It is like a long latter, twisted into a spiral. Sugar and phosphate molecules form the sides of the latter. Four bases make up its ‘rungs.’ These are adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. These bases act as the ‘letters’ of a genetic alphabet. They combine in various sequences to form words, sentences, and paragraphs. These base sequences are all the instructions needed to guide the functioning of the cell.

The DNA code is a genetic ‘language’ that communicates information to the cell. The cell is very complicated, using many DNA instructions to control its every function. The amount of information in the DNA of even the single-celled bacterium, E. coli, is vast indeed. It is greater than the information contained in all the books in any of the world’s largest libraries. The DNA molecule is exquisitely complex, and extremely precise: the ‘letters’ must be in a very exact sequence. If they are out-of-order, it is like a typing error in a message. The instructions that it gives the cell are garbled. This is what a mutation is.

The discovery of the DNA code gives the argument from design a new twist. Since life is at its core a chemical code, the origin of life is the origin of a code. A code is a very special kind of order. It represents “specified complexity. To understand that term, we need to take a brief excursion into information theory as it applies to biology.

Measuring Information

“One if by land, two if by sea.” Paul Revere did not know information theory, but he was using its principles correctly. A simple but effective code informed the Patriots of the British route of approach.

dna_e0 

Information theory realizes an important goal of mathematicians, to make information measurable. It finds its place in biology through its ability to measure organization and to express it in numbers. Biology has long recognized the importance of the concept of organization. However, little practical was possible until there was a way to measure it. Organization stated in terms of information does this. “Roughly speaking,” says Leslie Orgel, “the information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure.”The more complex a structure is, the more instructions needed to specify it.

Random structures require very few instructions at all. If you want to write out a series of nonsense letters, for example, here is all you do. The only instructions necessary are “write a letter between A and Z,” followed by “now do it again,” ad infinitum.

A highly ordered structure likewise requires few instructions if its order is the result of a constantly repeating structure. A whole book filled only with the sentence “I love you” repeated over and over is a highly ordered series of letters. A few instructions specify which letters to choose and in what sequence. These instructions followed by “now do it again” as many times as necessary completes the book. By contrast with either random or ordered structures, complex structures require many instructions. If we wanted a computer to write out a poem, for example, we would have to specify each letter. That is, the poem has a high information content.

Specifying a Sequence

Information in this context means the precise determination, or specification, of a sequence of letters. We said above that a code represents “specified complexity.” We are now able to understand what “specified” means. A thing is more highly specified the fewer choices there are about fulfilling each instruction. In a random situation, options are unlimited and each option is equally probable. In generating a list of random letters, for instance, there are no constraints on the choice of letters at each step. The letters are unspecified.

An ordered structure, on the other hand, like our book of “I love you’s,” is highly specified. Each letter is specified. Nonetheless, it has a low information content, as noted before, because the instructions needed to specify it are few. Ordered structures and random structures are similar in that both have a low information content. However, they differ in that ordered structures are highly specified.

A complex structure like a poem is likewise highly specified. It differs from an ordered structure, however, in that it is not only highly specified, but also has a high information content. Writing a poem requires new instructions to specify each letter.

To sum up, information theory has given us tools to distinguish between the two kinds of order we spoke about at the beginning. Lack of order — randomness — is neither specified nor high in information.

The first kind of order is the kind found in a snowflake. Using the terms of information theory, a snowflake is specified but has a low information content. Its order arises from a single structure repeated over and over. It is like the book filled with “I love you.” The second kind of order, the kind found in the faces on Mount Rushmore, is both specified and high in information.

Life Is Information

Molecules characterized by specified complexity make up living things. These molecules are, most notably, DNA and protein. By contrast, nonliving things fall into one of two categories. They are either unspecified and random (like lumps of granite and mixtures of random nucleotides), or they are specified but simple (like snowflakes and crystals). A crystal fails to qualify as living because it lacks complexity. A chain of random nucleotides fails to qualify because it lacks specificity. No nonliving things (except DNA and protein in living things, human artifacts and written language) have specified complexity.

For a long time biologists overlooked the distinction between two kinds of order (simple, periodic order versus specified complexity). Only recently have they appreciated that the distinguishing feature of living systems is not order but specified complexity. The sequence of nucleotides in DNA, or of amino acids in a protein, is not a repetitive order like a crystal. Instead it is like the letters in a written message. A message is not composed of a sequence of letters repeated over and over. It is not, in other words, the first kind of order.

Indeed, the letters that make up a message are in a sense random. There is nothing inherent in the letters “g-i-f-t” that tells us the word means “present.” In fact, in German the same sequence of letters means “poison.” In French the series is meaningless. If you came across a series of letters written in the Greek alphabet and didn’t know Greek, you wouldn’t be able to read it. Nor would you be able to tell if the letters formed Greek words or were just groupings of random letters. There is no detectable difference.

What distinguishes a language is that certain random groupings of letters have come to symbolize meanings according to a given symbol convention. Nothing distinguishes the sequence a-n-d from n-a-d or n-d-a for a person who doesn’t know any English. Within the English language, however, the sequence a-n-d is very specific, and carries a particular meaning.

There is no detectable difference between the sequence of nucleotides in E. coli DNA and a random sequence of nucleotides. Yet within the E. coli cells, the sequence of “letters” of its DNA is very specific. Only that particular sequence is capable of biological function.

The discovery that life in its essence is information inscribed on DNA has greatly narrowed the question of life’s origin. It has become the question of the origin of information. We now know there is no connection at all between the origin of order and the origin of specified complexity.

There is no connection between orderly repeating patterns and the specified complexity in protein and DNA. We cannot draw an analogy, as many do, between the formation of a crystal and the origin of life. We cannot argue that since natural forces can account for the crystal, then they can account for the structure of living things. The order we find in crystals and snowflakes is not analogous to the specified complexity we find in living things.

Are we not back to a more sophisticated form of the argument from design? With the insights from information theory we need no longer argue from order in a general sense. Order with low information content (the first kind) does arise by natural processes. However, there is no convincing experimental evidence that order with high information content (the second kind or specified complexity) can arise by natural processes. Indeed, the only evidence we have in the present is that it takes intelligence to produce the second kind of order.

The Present As the Key to the Past

Scientists can synthesize proteins suitable for life. Research chemists produce things like insulin for medical purposes in great quantities. The question is, how do they do it? Certainly not by simulating chance or natural causes. Only by highly constraining the experiment can chemists produce proteins like those found in living things. Placing constraints on the experiment limits the ‘choices’ at each step of the way. That is, it adds information. If we want to speculate on how the first informational molecules came into being, the most reasonable speculation is there was some form of intelligence around at the time.

The scientists searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) would recognize the kind of order inherent in a decodable signal from space as evidence of an intelligent source. These scientists have never seen an extra-terrestrial creature. However, they would recognize the similarity of a message from space to messages generated by human intelligence. In the same way, we note that the structure of protein and of DNA has a high information content.

We recognize its similarity to information (like poems and computer programs) generated by human intelligence. Therefore we may properly infer that the source of information on the molecular level was likewise an intelligent being. Furthermore, we know of no other source of information. Efforts to produce information-bearing molecules by chance or natural forces have failed. We have not seen the creator, nor observed the act of creation. However, we recognize the kind of order that only comes from an intelligent being.

With the new data from molecular biology and information theory, we can now argue for an intelligent cause of the origin of life. It is based on the analogy between the DNA code and a written message. We cannot identify that source any further from the scientific data alone. We cannot supply a name for that intelligent cause.

We cannot be sure from the empirical data on DNA whether the intelligence is within the cosmos but off the earth as asserted by Hoyle and Wickramasinghe. It might be beyond the cosmos as historic theism maintains. All we can say is that, given the structure of a DNA molecule, it is certainly legitimate to conclude that an intelligent agent made it.

Life came from a who rather than a what. We may be able to identify that agent in greater detail by other arguments. We may, for example, gain insight from historical, philosophical, or theological argument, or by considering the relevant lines of evidence from other areas of science. However, from scientific data on DNA alone we can argue only to an intelligent cause.

Let’s spell out the steps of the argument more explicitly. Does it in fact satisfy the principle of analogy? Yes, it does. First, we establish that an analogy does exist between the kind of order we see in living things and the kind we see in some other phenomena made by human intelligence.

We have an abundance of examples of specified complexity: books, machines, bridges, works of art, computers. All these are human artifacts. In our experience only human language and human artifacts match the specified complexity exhibited by protein and DNA. Second, we ask what is the source of the order in these modern examples? We know by uniform experience that its source is human intelligence.

The only remaining question is whether it is legitimate to use this reasoning to infer the existence of an intelligent cause before the existence of human beings. I would argue it is. A phenomenon from the past, known by uniform experience to be like that caused only by an intelligent source, is itself evidence that such a source existed. Even the simplest forms of life, with their store of DNA, are characterized by specified complexity. Therefore life itself is prima facie evidence that some form of intelligence was in existence at the time of its origin.

It is true that our actual experiential knowledge of intelligence is limited to carbon-based organisms, particularly human beings. However, scientists already speculate on some other kinds of intelligence, i.e., non-human, when they seriously seek to discover ETI’s. Some even argue that intelligence exists in complex non-biological computer circuitry. Scientists today conceive of intelligence freed from biology as we know it. Then why can we not conceive of an intelligent being existing before the appearance of biological life on this planet?

Uniform Experience

In scientific terms, the analogy criterion is the same thing as the principle of uniformity. It is the dictum that our theories of the past must invoke causes similar to those acting in the present. David Hume was getting at the same idea with his phrase, “uniform experience.”

As regards the origin of life, our uniform experience is that it takes an intelligent agent to generate information, codes, messages. As a result, it is reasonable to infer there was an intelligent cause of the original DNA code. DNA and written language both exhibit the property of specified complexity. Since we know an intelligent cause produces written language, it is legitimate to posit an intelligent cause as the source of DNA.

We have now defined the DNA code as a message. It is now clear that the claim that DNA arose by material forces is to say that information can arise by material forces. However, the material base of a message is completely independent of the information transmitted. The material base could not have anything to do with the message’s origin. The message transcends chemistry and physics.

When I say a message is independent of the medium which conveys it, I mean that the materials used to send a message have no affect whatever on the content of the message. The content of “Apples are sweet” does not change when I write it in crayon instead of ink. It is unaffected by a switch to chalk or pencil. I can say the same thing if I use my finger and write it in the sand. I can also use smoke and write it in the sky. I can translate it into the dots and dashes of Morse code. Even people holding up posters at a baseball game can transmit the same information.

The point is, there is no relationship at all between information and the material base used to transmit it. The ink or chalk I use to write “Apples are sweet” does not itself look red, nor taste sweet like an apple. There is nothing in the ink molecules that compels me to write precisely or only that particular sentence. The information transmitted by my writing is not within the ink I use to write it. Instead, an outside source imposes information upon the ink using the elements of a particular linguistic symbol system.

The information within the genetic code is likewise entirely independent of the chemical makeup of the DNA molecule. The information transmitted by the sequence of bases has nothing to do with the bases themselves. There is nothing in the chemicals themselves that originates the communication transmitted to the cell by the DNA molecule.

These rather obvious facts are devastating to any theory that assumes life first arose by natural forces. Such theories dominate the intellectual landscape today. Some theories assume that self-organizing properties within the chemicals themselves created the information in the first DNA molecule. Others assume external self-organizing forces created DNA. Yet this is tantamount to saying the material used to transmit information also produced it. It is as though I were to say it was the chemical properties of the ink itself that caused me to write “Apples are sweet.”

We can state our case even more strongly. To accept a material cause for the origin of life actually runs counter to the principle of uniformity. Uniform experience reveals that only an intelligent cause regularly produces specified complexity. To be sure, we may still posit a non-intelligent, material cause as the source of specified complexity, even though we do not regularly observe it.

We may argue that in the rare occurrence, in spite of its trivially small probability, such an event might happen. The problem is, however, that to argue this way is no longer to do science. Regular experience not negligible probabilities and remote possibilities is the basis of science.

Darwin convinced many of the leading intellectuals in his time that design in the world is only apparent, that it is the result of natural causes. Now, however, the situation has taken a dramatic turn, though few have recognized its significance. The elucidation of DNA and unravelling the secrets of the genetic code have opened again the possibility of seeing true design in the universe.”

I WOULD PERSONALLY ADD THAT THE FEW WHO DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THIS ARE HARD CORE ATHEISTS WHO “CANNOT SEE TRUTH” BECAUSE IT IS NOT WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THEIR “FACTS ON THEIR TERMS BOX”, WHICH IS THEIR WAY OF NOT ADMITTING DEFEAT ON A SCIENCE ISSUE!

Did you know that a recent poll taken among the Monkey community stated that 9 out of 10 simians agreed that Evolution was an insult to their intelligence?

CAN YOU DEFEND THE GENERAL THEORY OF EVOLUTION {MACRO NOT MICRO} ?

THE 250,000 DOLLAR CHALLENGE!

Why the Burden of Proof is on the Atheist By: Ralph McInerny
Should one review the considerations and discoveries and breakthroughs that have been taken to render religious belief false, inane or pointless, the list could prove amusing. Greek atomism, disease and death, heliocentrism, electricity, the new physics or philosophy or psychology, have all been advanced as telling decisively against any belief in God. The point on which the refutation or rejection rests, for a moment the latest thing, is all too soon forgotten or refuted. Shouldn’t this tell against atheism?

Of course skeptics seldom think of themselves as part of a tradition. They take no more responsibility for the follies of earlier versions of themselves than they do for the claims of theists. The skeptic is always at Square One, arguing ab ovo, willing to be himself alone against the world, and even when he wheels in the views of others for support we sense that he feels no need for company in order to hold what he does, or to deny what he does.

Believers have recently gotten a little weary of being assigned research projects or intellectual tasks by the skeptic and have devised a number of versions of the tu quoque to stop the demands. No one is more adroit at this than my colleague Alvin Plantinga and I shall not attempt to steal his fire. (The phrase has nice theistic overtones but perhaps assigns Al a place more exalted than he himself would claim.)

I simply refer to the structure of God and Other Minds. This book argues that it is no less reasonable to believe in God than to believe in the existence of other minds. But critics of theism cannot get along without belief in other minds, therefore they have no consistent way of objecting to theism.

In other words, So’s your old man.

A later version of this is to counter the claim, one, that there are certain basic propositions which do not include ‘God exists’ and, two, that other such propositions as ‘God exists’ must be justified by grounding them in basic beliefs. The theist can accept this model of justification and blandly add that ‘God exists’ is one of his basic propositions. Why not?

This should not be understood in a private or subjective sense. When Job says that he knows that his redeemer liveth, he is not simply reporting on his psyche; he doesn’t mean that he knows that he knows something or other, it doesn’t matter what. It is the object proposition and the truth it contains he is asserting. Does the believer who says ‘God exists’ is basic for him want simply to report on his idiosyncratic convictions?

If he does, he may be saying only that he has as much right to take ‘God exists’ as basic as his critic does to take sense data or truths about the world as basic. Perhaps that is all Plantinga wishes to do. The upshot is then to claim that the believer and his critic are in the same boat.

They agree on some formal account-that there are basic propositions and propositions derivative from them-but there is no way to adjudicate claims as to what propositions, materialiter loquendo, can function as basic. The skeptic is simply wrong if he thinks some version of empiricism is beyond dispute or, worse, that it is part of the formal theory.

My own first question envisages a meatier interpretation than that. I am asking whether the skeptic is justified in calling into question the truth of ‘God exists.’ Why not put the burden on him?

Why not insist that he is attempting to convict of irrationality generations of human beings, rational animals like himself, whole cultures for whom belief in the divine and worship are part of what it is to be a human being?

Were all those millions, that silent majority, wrong? Surely to think something against the grain of the whole tradition of human experience is not to be done lightly. It is, need one say it, presumptuous to pit against that past one’s own version of the modern mind.

This suggests that the present generation is in agreement on things incompatible with belief in God. Or that all informed people now alive, etc. etc. Meaning, I suppose, that all present day skeptics are skeptics.

Is there thus a prima facie argument against atheism drawn from tradition, the common consent of mankind both in the past and in the present time? I think so. There is a way in which it is natural for human beings to believe in God.

I think of St. Thomas who on several occasions observed that a person need only look around at the world and gain the idea of God. The order and arrangement and law like character of natural events impose the idea. Indeed, so easily does the idea come that it seems almost innate.

This may be taken both as a factual historical remark as well as a theoretical claim. Thus it has been in the experience of the race. The difficulty with this all but universal acceptance of the divine lies in the identification of God. That is, trees and wind, sun and the world itself have been identified with God, nor has it been necessary to choose among these possibilities. This diversity does not tell against the naturalness of the recognition.

Let me cite a parallel in St. Thomas in order that it may be clear what he is and what he is not saying here. Thomas, as you know, agrees with Aristotle that there is an ultimate end of whatever we do, that any human action of any human agent aims at the supreme good or ultimate end which is happiness. The familiar objection to this is that humans have very different aims when they act and that any given human appears to have a plurality of aims not easily reducible to the kind of unity Thomas’s view suggests. Since Thomas was not the village idiot, we may presume that he is aware of the diversity mentioned and that he does not think it tells against his doctrine of ultimate end. How not?

He distinguishes in any action the ratio boni, the note of goodness, the formality under which we do any action, on the one hand, and, on the other, the particular deed done in which we take that formality to be realized. What the dizzying variety of deeds done have in common is the reason we do any of them, our aim, and that is that they are good for us to do, meaning, to do such-and-such is perfective of the kind of agent I am.

A vast variety of types and tokens of act fill that bill. Some do not. Just as I may, misled by a miracle diet plan, think ground glass is good for me, so I may think theft is a kind of action perfective of the kind of agent I am. To want to be healthy, the presumed goal of dieting, with being wealthy and wise following hard upon, of course, is an unquestionable good for man; physical well-being is a constituent of any adequate account of a fulfilled human life. The problem lies with the ground glass.

No need to go on about this here. What I wish to recall is the way in which Thomas holds that human agents always act under the same formality-aiming at what is perfective of them-and that this in no way precludes legitimate and illegitimate diversity in action.

In similar fashion, the idea of the divine, the concept of a god, is what is shared; the identification of this or that or the other thing as God does not destroy the common assumption. Men disagree about who and even what God is. Another way Thomas makes this point is by saying that ‘God’ is a common noun, not a proper name.

Consider Thomas’s remark about Anselm’s proof. Someone might not agree that ‘God’ means that than which nothing greater can be conceived. What does Thomas think is the common formality of the term ‘God.’ The etymology of the Greek term suggests to him: one who sees, with the connotation, I think, of one to whom we are responsible, one on whom we depend for being or well-being, one to thank, petition, worship, placate.

Thomas’s reference to Anselm is in a discussion in which he argues that ‘God exists’ is not a self-evident truth. At first blush, this seems incompatible with his other view that knowledge of God is natural, easily had, widely shared, kind of unavoidable. There is no incompatibility because the latter claim, that knowledge of God is natural, means that men easily make the requisite inference as, e.g., from the order in the world.

Does not the burden of proof then fall on the shoulders of the skeptic? Yes. And the skeptic is the first to admit this-or at least to exemplify it. I would hazard the view that more attention is paid to theism, religious belief, the existence of God, as a problem to be dealt with, as something that is an intellectual task, by the skeptic than by the believer. I have met many more militant skeptics than I have believers who look as if they were going to toss and turn all night unless they developed an airtight proof for the existence of God.

The Thomist distinguishes rigorously between theism and Christianity in terms of the distinction between praeambula fidei and mysteria fidei. The preambles of faith are truths about God which happen to have been revealed but which had been discovered, independently of revelation, by the pagan philosophers. Theism, call it natural theology, establishes truths about God on the basis of other truths which are accessible in principle to any human being. Mysteries of faith, on the contrary, are truths about God which cannot be established as such by grounding them in or deriving them from what anyone knows.

This distinction would seem to imply that even if the best conceivable results were obtained on the level of theism, this would do nothing to establish the truth of the mysteries of faith, precisely those truths which are the heart and soul of Christianity, viz. that Jesus is both human and divine, that there is a Trinity of persons in the one divine nature, that we are called to an eternity of blissful union with God, etc.

The distinction between nature and grace, between the natural use of human reason and reasoning which is aided by grace and revelation, makes it clear that while Thomas holds that theism is natural and relatively easily attained, he does not regard this as making the further step into Christian belief as a continuation of the same sort of thinking.

It is, of course, within the ambiance of his own religious faith that Thomas makes such distinctions, just as it is in reflecting on revealed truths and on what philosophers have accomplished that he distinguishes the preambles from the mysteries.

Given the distinction, there would be no way in the world that the believer can respond to the non believer’s demand that he show that the central truths of Christianity are true. Current day skeptics doubtless think that theism is in every bit as much trouble as Christian mysteries and thus that the distinction does not make much difference.

Indeed, the skeptic might well say to me that my suggestion that the burden of disproof is on him in the case of theism should lead me to the same claim with respect to Christian mysteries. That is, he might say, an awful lot of people over the last two thousand years and an awful lot of people today are Christians. Do I accordingly think that it is natural to be a Christian and that until proven otherwise Christianity ought to be accepted as true?

Of course the parallel does not hold. It is the Christian who makes the distinction. St. Paul says that the misbehaving Romans are inexcusable because they can come to knowledge of the invisible things of God from what God has made. Just as men have a law written in their hearts which is not identical with the law of the Gospel. It is the Christian who insists that it is only thanks to the grace of Christ that he has accepted the word of God.

It might seem that the believer would have no particular interest in theism. From the point of view of the fullness of revelation the truths about God men could learn on their own are few in number and relatively exiguous. There are several reasons why someone like Thomas Aquinas exhibits such an interest, but let me stress only one here, the one which enables him to formulate an argument for the reasonableness of belief.

The truths of faith, the mysteries, are truths about God whose truth cannot be established by natural reason. (Nor can their falsity.) Does this mean that Thomas is a fideist if by fideist we mean one who holds that nothing we know counts either for or against Christianity? No, because Thomas has devised proofs on behalf of the claim that it is reasonable to accept as true propositions whose truths we cannot now comprehend. And one of those arguments makes use of the preambles of faith.

It is not that preambles of faith provide premises from which mysteries of faith could be concluded to be true. That would of course erase the difference between preambles and mysteries. The argument is rather this. If some of the truths about himself that God has revealed can be known to be true (the preambles), it is reasonable to hold that all the rest (the mysteries) are true. It is that argument, and its far reaching implications, that explains the historic interest of Christian believers in theism and natural theology. If theism is accepted by the non-believer, he has one less obstacle to accepting the grace of faith.

The believer believes on the basis of Romans 1:19, and the Roman Catholic on the basis of Vatican I, that men can come to knowledge of God by natural reason. The believer does not need such proofs. He does not fret when relevant objections are brought against his own efforts to formulate one. He will return to the task, not to shore up his own faith and certainly not in search of something that will argue another irresistibly into the faith. There is only one way to come to believe.

This is why, in discussions with skeptics, the believer confines himself to philosophical theism. His aim is not to triumph, to crush, to embarrass, even simply to succeed, since success in natural theology has such an oblique relation to what is truly important, that all men recognize and accept the pearl of great price. If there is something that makes the believer toss and turn it is the thought that he might become an impediment to another’s acceptance of the gift of faith. From the Web-site “ORIGINS” AT http://www.origins.org

Let me add here that I personally DO NOT NEED ANY PROOF OUTSIDE OF THE LIFE-CHANGING WORK THAT GOD HAS DONE INSIDE ME, BUT I SEE THAT THOSE WHO HAVE NOT COME TO THE FAITH, DO NEED OUTSIDE EVIDENCES TO BRING THEIR MINDS TO A PLACE WHERE THEY CAN ACCEPT BY FAITH WHAT THAT EVIDENCE LEADS TO!

For all the BIG TALK of people outside the Faith, all they want is HARD CORE, SOLID EVIDENCE SO THEY MAY TAKE THAT FIRST STEP! Chemist and five time Nobel nominee, Henry “Fritz” Schaefer of the University of Georgia, commented on the need to encourage debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution.

“Some defenders of Darwinism,” says Schaefer, “embrace standards of evidence for evolution that as scientists they would never accept in other circumstances.” Schaefer was on the roster of signers of the statement, termed “A Scientific Dissent on Darwinism.”Which included 99 other Scientists.

“I am skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” HERE IS A GREAT CHANCE FOR ANY SKEPTIC TO EARN A COOL 250,000 DOLLARS, HOW? PROVE EVOLUTION TO THIS VERY SMART MAN! Well what are you waiting for?

Dr. Hovind’s $250,000 Offer

Author: Dr. Kent Hovind

Formerly $10,000 offered since 1990

I have a standing offer of $250,000 to anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution.* My $250,000 offer demonstrates that the hypothesis of evolution is nothing more than a religious belief.

Observed phenomena:

Most thinking people will agree that..

A highly ordered universe exists.

At least one planet in this complex universe contains an amazing variety of life forms.

Man appears to be the most advanced form of life on this planet.

Known options:

Choices of how the observed phenomena came into being..

The universe was created by God.

The universe always existed.

The universe came into being by itself by purely natural processes (known as evolution) so that no appeal to the supernatural is needed.

Evolution has been acclaimed as being the only process capable of causing the observed phenomena.

Evolution is presented in our public school textbooks as a process that:

Brought time, space, and matter into existence from nothing.

Organized that matter into the galaxies, stars, and at least nine planets around the sun. (This process is often referred to as cosmic evolution.)

Created the life that exists on at least one of those planets from nonliving matter (chemical evolution).

Caused the living creatures to be capable of and interested in reproducing themselves.

Caused that first life form to spontaneously diversify into different forms of living things, such as the plants and animals on the earth today (biological evolution).

People believe in evolution; they do not know that it is true. While beliefs are certainly fine to have, it is not fair to force on the students in our public school system the teaching of one belief, at taxpayers’ expense.

It is my contention that evolutionism is a religious worldview that is not supported by science, Scripture, popular opinion, or common sense. The exclusive teaching of this dangerous, mind-altering philosophy in tax-supported schools, parks, museums, etc., is also a clear violation of the First Amendment.

How to collect the $250,000:

Prove beyond reasonable doubt that the process of evolution (option 3 above, under “known options”) is the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence. Only empirical evidence is acceptable.

Persons wishing to collect the $250,000 may submit their evidence in writing or schedule time for a public presentation. A committee of trained scientists will provide peer review of the evidence offered and, to the best of their ability, will be fair and honest in their evaluation and judgment as to the validity of the evidence presented.

If you are convinced that evolution is an indisputable fact, may I suggest that you offer $250,000 for any empirical or historical evidence against the general theory of evolution. This might include the following:

The earth is not billions of years old (thus destroying the possibility of evolution having happened as it is being taught).

No animal has ever been observed changing into any fundamentally different kind of animal.

No one has ever observed life spontaneously arising from nonliving matter.

Matter cannot make itself out of nothing.

My suggestion:

Proponents of the theory of evolution would do well to admit that they believe in evolution, but they do not know that it happened the way they teach. They should call evolution their “faith” or “religion,” and stop including it in books of science. Give up faith in the silly religion of evolutionism, and trust the God of the Bible (who is the Creator of this universe and will be your Judge, and mine, one day soon) to forgive you and to save you from the coming judgment on man’s sin.

*NOTE:

When I use the word evolution, I am not referring to the minor variations found in all of the various life forms (microevolution). I am referring to the general theory of evolution which believes these five major events took place without God:

Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves.

Planets and stars formed from space dust.

Matter created life by itself.

Early life-forms learned to reproduce themselves.

Major changes occurred between these diverse life forms (i.e., fish changed to amphibians, amphibians changed to reptiles, and reptiles changed to birds or mammals).

Answers to Commonly Asked Questions about the $250,000 Offer

Students in tax-supported schools are being taught that evolution is a fact. We are convinced that evolution is a religion masquerading as science and should not be part of any science curriculum. It has nothing to do with the subject of science. There are at least six different and unrelated meanings to the word “evolution” as used in science textbooks.

Cosmic evolution the origin of time, space and matter. Big Bang.

Chemical evolution- the origin of higher elements from hydrogen.

Stellar and planetary evolution- Origin of stars and planets.

Organic evolution- Origin of life from inanimate matter.

macroevolution Origin of major kinds.

Microevolution Variations within kinds- Only this one has been observed, the first five are religious. They are believed, by faith, even though there is no empirical evidence to prove them in any way. While I admire the great faith of the evolutionists who accept the first five I object to having this religious propaganda included in with legitimate science at taxpayer’s expense.

Even a quick review of a typical public school textbook will show that students are being deceived into thinking all six types of evolution above have been proven because evidence is given for minor variations called micro-evolution. The first five are smuggled in when no one is watching.

This deception is a classic case of bait and switch. One definition of evolution (such as “descent with modification”) is given and the others are assumed to be true by association. The first five meanings are believed by faith, have never been observed and are religious. Only the last one is scientific. It is also what the Bible predicted would happen. The animals and plants would bring forth “after their kind” in Genesis 1.

Many have responded to my offer of $250,000 for scientific proof for evolution. The terms and conditions of the offer are detailed very clearly on my web site www.drdino.com. Here are some answers to some commonly asked questions.

The offer is legitimate. A wealthy friend of mine has the money in the bank. If the conditions of the offer are met, the money will be paid out immediately. My word is good.

The members of the committee of scientists that will judge the evidence are all highly trained, have advanced degrees in science as well as many years of experience in their field. For example: there is a zoologist, a geologist, an aerospace engineer, a professor of radiology and biophysics, and an expert in radio metric dating to name a few. They are busy people and do not wish to waste time on foolish responses.

Nor do they wish to waste time arguing with skeptics and scoffers who seem to have nothing else to do than ask silly questions when they really don’t want answers (so far this has been the typical response to the offer). I will not reveal their names for this reason. Any legitimate evidence will be forward to them and they will respond. At that time they may identify themselves if they choose. The merit of the evidence presented and the reasonableness of their response does not depend on who they are.

Evidence of minor changes within the same kind of plant or animal does not qualify as evidence and will not be sent to the committee to waste their time. For example, doubling the chromosome number of a sterile hybrid does not add additional genetic information; it duplicates what is already present in the parent plant.

Because of the absence of additional genetic information the resultant plant can’t be classified as different or new species. The plant may differ in a number of ways – bigger, vigorous as observed in any polyploid plants. Such easily recognizable phenotypic changes have confused many. Some evolutionists have jumped to the conclusion that a new species has been evolved.

The key is that no new genetic information has been added. Even a new “species” is not proof for evolution as the offer calls for. See the conditions of the $250,000 offer on the web site. Some have insisted on a precise definition of the word “kind”. The Bible defines “kind” as those that are able to “bring forth” or reproduce. Those animals that were originally able to reproduce were of the same kind. There may be diversity now, 6000 years later, that could cause some varieties of the original kind to not be able to reproduce now.

For example, I understand that rabbits from Alaska cannot breed with rabbits from Florida yet they are still the same kind of animal. It is obvious that a dog and a wolf are the same “kind” of animal (they are currently classed as different “species” yet are inter-fertile– hmmm, what is the precise definition of “species”?) where a dog and a fish are not. While there may be some blurry areas that would be worthy of research in defining the original kinds, rather than muddy the issue with these type questions it would be wise to focus on the obvious cases like the dog/fish comparison.

These are obviously different “kinds” of animals. So, for the sake of clarity, prove the dog and the fish evolved from a common ancestor. The honest scientist would be wise to admit that no evidence exists that could begin to prove the dog and the fish have a common ancestor. He may believe that they are related but that is not science and that is my point in the offer. Some believe this type of evolution happens but it should not be presented to innocent students as a “fact”. Further, it certainly is not evidence that the other four definitions of evolution have occurred.

The idea that the majority of scientists believe in the theory is not evidence either. Majority opinion is often wrong and must be corrected. History is full of examples.

Anonymous letters will be ignored.

Rather than simply sending in scientific evidence for evolution, some have wasted lots of their time and mine sending letters demanding to know who is on the committee, what bank account the money is in, asking Bill Clinton type questions about the definition of words like “is”, etc.

When I do not respond the way they want me to they post notices on their web sites claiming that I owe them the money or that the offer is a sham! It is obvious they are using the Red Herring tactic to draw attention away from the fact that they have no evidence to support the religion of evolution. I tell everyone who inquires, if you have some evidence, send it in, don’t beat around the bush. Give us the best you have on the first try please to save time.

Many have offered evidence of microevolution and assumed that the other 5 meanings of the word are somehow magically connected. They don’t seem to realize that they are blinded to the obvious. Treat the $250,000 offer as a lawyer would treat a ‘who-done-it’ case. It is your job to prove that what is being taught to our kids as fact (all six meanings of the word evolution above), is indeed a fact.

If this cannot be done then it should be admitted that evolution is a religion but not a science. Some say it is unfair to define evolution including the origin of the universe. They say it only has to do with “change in gene frequency over time.” All you need to do is read your local textbook and see that all 6 meanings of the word are part of what is taught as evolution theory. If these nay Sayers are agreeing that it should not be included then they should help me get it out of the books, if they are genuine.

Over the years I have heard many evolutionists say, “Evolution is a theory like gravity is a theory. Don’t you believe in gravity?” They repeat this mantra as if repetition will make it true. Their example is silly of course. We can all observe gravity every moment of our lives. We can do tests and experiments to verify the theory of gravity. No one has ever seen an exception to it. By the same token, no one has ever observed evolution nor been able to demonstrate any evolution beyond minor variations within the kind. To try to make evolution science by associating it with theories like gravity is ridiculous.

Nearly all responses to my $250,000 offer go something like this: “Of course no one can prove evolution, can you prove creation?” This response is what I expected and wanted. Neither theory of origins can be proven. Both involve a great deal of faith in the unseen. So my next logical question is: “Why do I have to pay for the evolution religion to be taught to all the students in the tax supported school system?” Since all taxpayers are being forced to pay for evolution to be taught exclusively in public schools and evolutionists have had the last 130 years and billions of dollars in research grants to prove their religion, the burden of proof is on them to supply proof of their theory.

I do not have time or interest in getting involved in long e-mail debates, but I will talk to anyone by phone or debate with any qualified scientist (even a panel of evolutionists) in a public forum at a university, on radio or TV, as long as there is equal time for each position not each person. If you call, please have a list of topics to discuss or questions to ask and feel free to record the conversation if you like. Just inform me that you are recording please. I hope this response is satisfactory.

I have taught for years that evolution is nothing but a religion mixed in with real science. Many have been duped into believing in it. There is no evidence that any plant or animal ever can or did change to any other kind or creature. It is time that intelligent people the world over began to admit that the king has no clothes! There is no evidence for changes between kinds of animals.

The Bible teaches that God made them to “bring forth after their kind.” This is all that has ever been observed. The same Bible teaches that everyone will face the Creator one day to be judged for everything they have said, done or thought. I recommend that everyone prepare for that day by taking advantage of God’s mercy and forgiveness afforded through the free salvation offered to any who will confess their sin and receive Jesus Christ as their Lord.

If you are interested in learning more about becoming a Christian, please call me. I travel a lot but always take time for calls when I am in the office. I am most often in Wednesday through Friday at 850-479-3466. Check my itinerary on my web site for my location if you need to talk with me while I am out speaking. If possible, attend a seminar. Seminars are free and we always have a question answer time for those who attend.

Sincerely,
Kent Hovind

THIS IS ONE OF THE BEST CHALLENGES TO THE GENERAL THEORY OF EVOLUTION I’VE EVER SEEN, AND IS JUST ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF HOW WE HAVE THE BETTER THEORY OF BEGINNINGS THAN THEY DO AND THUS ANOTHER PROOF THAT THERE IS A GOD!

Feel free to take this challenge

{MAKE SURE YOU STAY WITHIN THE CHALLENGE, DON’T WASTE HIS TIME WITH SILLY EXAMPLES OF “MICRO-EVOLUTION” THIS IS NOT DENIED- ONLY “MACRO-EVOLUTION” UNDER THE GENERAL THEORY WHICH CAN’T BE PROVED.}

New Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God

A Seminal Presentation by Astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross, given in South Barrington, Illinois, April 16, 1994

“The Discovery of the Century” -Stephen Hawking

I want to take you back to almost two years ago, April 23, 1992. On that day, a discovery was announced that, in the words of the British physicist Steven Hawking, “…is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.” This is remarkable because Steven Hawking has a reputation for understatement.

Michael Turner, from the University of Chicago, says the significance of this discovery cannot be overstated. They have found the Holy Grail of cosmology. As to how holy of a grail we’re talking about, George Smoot, who led the team of 30 American astrophysicists who made the discovery said, “What we have found is evidence of the birth of the Universe. It’s like looking at God.”

Frederick Burnham, a science historian, said in response to this discovery, “The idea that God created the Universe is a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years.”

The reason I’m starting with these quotes is because anything that is being called ‘The greatest discovery of the century’ and anything that makes belief in God more credible that it’s ever been before, is something that every Christian should be apprised of and equipped to share with his friends at home, in the neighborhood and at work.

The Day They Found 90% of the Universe

Now, what exactly was it that these astronomers discovered? They found 90% of the universe. Any day that you find 90% of the universe is a red-letter day. What they essentially found was a new kind of matter. For a couple of years, physicists have suspected that the universe must have a different kind of matter.

Ordinary matter is the stuff that we’re used to. Electrons, protons, neutrons, everything we see here on planet Earth is made up of ordinary matter. Ordinary matter is a property that strongly interacts with radiation, so it’s rather easy for astronomers to detect the stuff.

But we found the problem, which was this: In 1990, the cosmic background explorer satellite proved that the universe is extremely entropic. In fact, the universe has a specific entropy measure of 1,000,000,000. Entropy measures the efficiency with which a system radiates heat and light, and the inefficiency in which it performs work.

The universe is by far the most entropic system in all existence. To give you a point of comparison, a burning candle has a specific entropy of two. A burning candle is something we realize is very efficient in making heat and light, and very inefficient in performing work. The universe is far more entropic than a candle, by many orders of magnitude.

But it led to a problem. If the universe has that high a degree of entropy and all matter strongly interacts with radiation, and the radiation left over from the creation event measures to be incredibly smooth, then the matter likewise should be that smoothly distributed. But it isn’t.

As you look at the galaxies and clusters of galaxies, rather than being smoothly distributed like the radiation form the creation event, it’s clumpy. Astronomers wanted to know why. We have proof that the universe was created in a hot, big, bang due to the incredible entropy, but how do we explain the galaxies?

The discovery of exotic matter explains the clustering of the galaxies. Exotic matter does not strongly interact with radiation, and because it doesn’t, it can clump independent of the radiation. Since it doesn’t really matter in gravity whether the matter is exotic or ordinary, the laws of physics still apply.

Two massive objects will attract one another under the law of gravity, and if one of those massive objects is made of ordinary matter and the other is made of exotic matter, they will still attract.

Once exotic matter clumps, it can draw ordinary matter to it, and hence we can have the universe we see today. The radiation from the creation event is still very smoothly distributed, but the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are clumped.

April 23, 1992 was the first detection an astronomer made of this type of matter. Since that time, there have been seven other independent detections of this exotic matter. If you’re interested, you can read all about it in my book, The Creator and the Cosmos, which was published a few months ago.

In this back issue, we describe the set of discoveries that established the existence of exotic matter which led to the conclusions from the scientific community that we now have conclusive proof that the universe was indeed created, and that’s why we say that we’re looking at the face of God.

On April 24, 1992, I was on the radio with three other physicists to discuss this discovery. A couple of the gentlemen were from George Smoot’s team, but the one that I was most curious about was Geoffrey Burbridge, who I had as a professor while I attended the University of Toronto, and who I knew to be an atheist.

Physicists Join “The First Church of Christ of the Big Bang”

I was wondering how Geoffery was going to respond to the news of this discovery. The first words out of his mouth were a complaint, and they were that as a result of this discovery, his peers in physics and astronomy were rushing off to join the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.

What encouraged me about Jeffrey’s statement was that even Jeffrey, as an atheist, recognized the equation, Big Bang = Jesus Christ. If you prove the Big Bang, you prove Jesus Christ. I want to briefly explain to you how that follows and I want to reveal something to you that leads to that.

Why Big Bang = Jesus Christ

It’s something that’s probably more beautiful than anything that you’ve ever seen living here in Illinois . Or for that matter California or where I grew up, British Colombia, which I think is the most beautiful place in the world.

I want to show you something that far transcends the beauty of even the scenery that we see on this planet Earth. [Shows Einstein's singularity equation.] But, then what could possibly transcend the beauty of equations of physics? For those of you who are starting to break out into a cold sweat, this will be gone in less than a minute and I’ll never show you another one again.

I thought that you might be curious of the equation that convinced Albert Einstein that God exists, that God created the universe. This equation falls under the theory of general relativity. For those of you who have a background in calculus, you’ll recognize this term here as an expression for acceleration.

What Einstein had done was to drive the equation for the acceleration of the entire universe. On the other side of the equation, you see four physical constants. I don’t really have to explain them to you, except to point out that they all have positive values.

Four well-known physical constants with positive values, yet there’s a minus sign in front. That immediately tells us that the entire universe experiences negative acceleration. The universe is decelerating. That was a tremendous challenge to the theology of his day because in the 200 years previous to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, academic scientific society was operating on the premise that the universe was static.

Belief in a Static Universe Led to Darwinian Evolution

That was really what fostered the birth of Darwinian evolution, the idea that the universe is static, infinitely old and infinitely large. Static, in that it maintained the conditions essential for elements to assemble themselves into living systems, as Emanuel Kant reasoned, long before Charles Darwin came up with a theory.

Emanuel Kant longed to come up with a theory of biological evolution but he didn’t have the biological data to develop it. Nevertheless, he laid the philosophical foundation that if the universe is infinitely old and infinitely large and static, maintaining the ideal chemical situation for life chemistry to proceed, then one can posit that the dice of chance is thrown an infinite number of times and in an infinite variety of ways.

If you have infinite throws at the dice of chance, then any matter of complexity would be conceivable – even something as complicated as a German philosopher. But this equation challenged that very notion by saying that the universe is not static; it decelerates.

Einstein was well aware that the term for pressure (P) in the universe is rather tiny compared to the term for mass density (represented by the Greek letter Rho ). It’s divided by a huge number – the velocity of light squared. You’ve got this extremely small number divided by a huge number.

This means that for all intents and purposes, we can ignore that “3P/C²” relative to the density. We can drop that term out, and then we have something much simpler to solve.

Proof that the Universe is Not Static, but Expanding

It’s still a non-linear differential equation, so it’s not all that easy. But Einstein was able to perceive and demonstrate that, according to this equation, the universe not only decelerates, it positively expands. Hence, the Big Bang. How so? Normally, I demonstrate this for audiences by bringing a grenade, but they no longer let you take grenades on airplanes.

I only do that demonstration when I’m on TV or in California, so you’re just going to have to pretend that I’ve got a grenade here in front of me. If I were to pull the pin from the grenade, you’d feel a few effects. One being that the pieces of the grenade would expand outward from the pin. That’s positive expansion.

Those outwardly expanding pieces of the grenade would inevitably bump into obstacles into this room. When they collide with those obstacles, they slow down. That’s deceleration. After a grenade has exploded, a physicist could make measurements of the positions and the velocities of the pieces of shrapnel, and through the equation Velocity = Distance/Time, he could calculate the moment that the pin was pulled on the grenade.

We can do the same thing with the galaxies in the universe. We can measure their positions and their velocities and calculate the moment that the “pin” was pulled on the entire universe.

As Einstein pointed out, the significance is that the universe has this moment of pin pulling. It has a beginning. Through the principle of positive fact, if the universe has a beginning, it must have a beginner, hence the existence of God.

To his dying day, Einstein held to his belief that as the result of the verification of his theory of General Relativity, God exists. (Good book on Einstein’s extensive discussions of religion and theology: Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology by Max Jammer -Ed) God created the universe and God is intelligent. Today, we don’t deny that God is personal. Einstein died too soon.

If he had lived to the late 1980′s, he’d have seen direct scientific proof for the personality of the creator. But he acknowledged as a result of the confirmations of his equations and his theory that God is transcendent. That God exists, he is intelligent, he is creative and he is responsible for the universe.

But he didn’t know the details of that transcendence. The details of that transcendence had to equate to a deeper solution of those equations of General Relativity. They are non-linear, which means they’re hard to solve.

Stephen Hawking and Friends Solve The Equation

By 1970, three British astrophysicists had combined to produce a deeper solution of the equations of General Relativity. They culminated the paper, The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology, published in 1970. You should all go get it – its exciting reading.

It closes with the Space-Time theorem of General Relativity, which states that if the universe is governed by the equations of General Relativity, not only are we faced with an ultimate origin, we are all of the matter in the universe, and all of the energy in the universe. But we’re faced with a coincident ultimate origin for even the dimensions of length, width, height and time.

Even Time Itself Was Created

As Steven Hawking, one of the three authors, boasted many years thereafter, we proved that time was created. We proved that time has a beginning. But through his contacts with certain Christians like his wife Jane, who’s an Anglican, as a friend of mine from Cal Tech, Don Page, who had daily Bible studies with Steven and Jane Hawking while he was doing research pointed out, if you prove that time has a beginning, that it was created, it eliminates all theological possibilities but Jesus Christ.

Of all world religions, only Judeo-Christian theology says Time has a beginning

Why? Because if you were to open up the Holy books of the religions of the world, only one of them would describe God as a being that creates the universe independent of time, space, matter and energy.

The other Holy books describe God as creating within time. The Bible states that God creates independent of time. That’s the difference.

Some verses that you might be familiar with: The first verse which states, “In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth…” The Hebrew words for heavens and Earth literally refer to the entire physical cosmos of matter, energy space and time. The universe.

Hebrews 11:3 makes it more specific stating, “The universe that we detect was made from that which we cannot detect.” We can make detections within matter, energy, length, width, height and time, but not beyond.

Eight places in the Bible tell us that God created time. I’ll give you two examples: 2 Timothy 1:9 which states, “The Grace of God that we now experience was put into effect before the beginning of time” and Titus 1:2 which states, “The hope that we have in Jesus Christ was given to us before the beginning of time.”

The three things that the Apostle Paul was saying in those two verses were that time is beginning, that God created the time dimension of our universe and, most importantly, that God has the capacity to operate through cause and effect before the time dimension of our universe even exists.

Your friendly neighborhood physicist will tell you that time is defined as that dimension or realm in which cause and effect phenomena take place. What the Apostle Paul is telling us in these two places and in the six other portions of Scripture, is that we are confined to a single dimension of time.

In fact it’s worse than that. We’re confined to half of a line of time. Time, for us, is a line that goes forward only. Have you ever noticed that you cannot stop or reverse the arrow of time? No matter what you do, it just keeps going forward in one direction.

Any entity confined to half of the line of time, must have a beginning and must be created. I can walk home tonight, and that’s it. It’s the simplest, most rigorous proof of the existence of God.

We’re confined, and the entire universe is confined to half of the line of time. Therefore, the universe must be created and we must be created. But God is not so confined.

When I present this evidence to atheists, their most frequent response is the same one I got from both of my sons when they were three years of age. It’s, “If God created us, then who created God?”

God: Not Confined by Time

My sons and the atheists are assuming that God is confined to time in the same way that we are. But the Bible and the equations of General Relativity tell us that the entity that brought the universe into existence is not confined in time like we are, or the way that the universe is.

God can move and operate in at least two dimensions of time. In two dimensions of time, time becomes a plane, like a sheet of paper, length and width. In a plane, you can have as many lines as you want and as many directions as you want.

It would be possible for God to dwell on a time line running through a sheet of paper that’s infinitely long, and that never crosses or touches the timeline of our universe. As such, God would have no beginning, no end and he would not be created. Sound familiar?

Why the God of Modern Physics Matches the God of the Bible

Both John Chapter One and Colossians Chapter One make that claim about God; He has no beginning, no end and He is not created. The Bible is the only Holy book that makes that statement about God.

What I’ve done for you in these few minutes is to establish the doctrine of the independent transcendence of the Creator. But we can go beyond this abstract, rigorous proof of the existence of the God of the Bible. It’s Jesus Christ because we proved that the Creator must be an independent, transcendent being.

What I’ve discovered, even on the University campus, is that audiences much prefer tangible proof for the existence of God, to the abstract proof of the existence of God.

Today we have that, thanks to the efforts of astronomers in measuring the universe. Ours is the only generation of man that has ever lived to witness the measuring of the universe. This wasn’t the case 15 years ago.

Measuring The Universe

Ours is a privileged generation because we have seen the measuring of the universe. The theological significance is that if you can measure the universe, you are measuring the creation. If you can measure the creation, you are measuring the Creator himself. Not all of his characteristics, of course, but many that are theologically significant.

What we’ve discovered in measuring the universe is that the third assumption of Emanuel Kant; that we have infinite time, the universe is static and that we have an infinite supply of building blocks for life isn’t true.

We proved that the universe isn’t static, that time isn’t infinite. It’s finite. The age of the universe is only 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds (10 to the 18th power).

We also discovered that we do not have an infinite supply of building blocks. In fact, we discovered that it takes exquisite design to get any building blocks at all. Molecules, without which, life is impossible.

Atoms must be able to assemble in the molecules in order to gain sufficient complexity for life chemistry to proceed. That applies to any conceivable kind of life.

The Extreme Precision of Physical Constants

Unless the force electromagnetism takes on a particular value, molecules won’t happen. Take the nucleus of an atom. There’s an electron orbiting that nucleus. If the force electromagnetism is too weak, the electron will not orbit the nucleus.

Electromagnetism

There won’t be sufficient electromagnetic pull to keep that electron orbiting the nucleus. If electrons cannot orbit nuclei, then electrons cannot be shared so that nuclei can come together to form molecules. Without molecules, we have no life.

If the force electromagnetism is too strong, the nuclei will hang onto their electrons with such strength that the electrons will not be shared with adjoining nuclei and again, molecules will never form. Unless the force electromagnetism is fine-tuned to a particular value, the universe will have no molecules and no life.

Strong Nuclear Force

We also have a problem in getting the right atoms. Now take a neutron and a proton. Protons and neutrons are held together in the nucleus of an atom by the strong nuclear force, which is the strongest of the four forces of physics.

If the nuclear force is too strong, the protons and neutrons in the universe will find themselves stuck to other protons and neutrons, which means we have a universe devoid of Hydrogen.

Hydrogen is the element composed of the bachelor proton. Without Hydrogen, there’s no life chemistry. It’s impossible to conceive of life chemistry without Hydrogen.

On the other hand, if we make the nuclear force slightly weaker, none of the protons and neutrons will stick together. All of the protons and neutrons will be bachelors, in which case the only element that would exist in the universe would be Hydrogen, and it’s impossible to make life if all we’ve got is Hydrogen.

How sensitive must this strong nuclear force be designed for life to exist? It’s so sensitive that if we were to make this force 3/10 of 1% stronger or 2% weaker, life would be impossible at any time in the universe.

Mass of the Proton and Neutron

We also have a problem with the protons and the neutrons themselves. The neutron is 0.138% more massive than the proton. Because of this, it takes a little more energy for the universe to make neutrons, as compared to protons. That’s why in the universe of today we have seven times as many protons as neutrons.

If the neutron were 1/10th of 1% less massive than what we observe, then the universe would make so many neutrons that all of the matter in the universe would very quickly collapse into neutron stars and black holes, and life would be impossible.

If we made the neutron 1/10th of 1% more massive than what we observe, then the universe would make so few neutrons, that there wouldn’t be enough neutrons to make Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, etc. These are the elements that are essential for life. So, we must delicately balance that mass to within 1/10 th of 1%, or life is impossible.

Electrons

With electrons we see an even more sense of the balance. In order for life to exist in the universe, the force of gravity must be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 40th power) times weaker than the force of electromagnetism. It’s essential that the force of gravity be incredibly weak compared to the other three forces of physics.

Gravity

Yet planets, stars and galaxies will not form unless gravity is dominant in the universe, so the universe must be set up in such a way that the other forces of physics cancel out and leave gravity, the weakest of the forces, dominant.

It’s necessary for the universe to be electrically neutral. The numbers of the positively charged particles must be equivalent to the numbers of negatively charged particles or else electromagnetism will dominate gravity, and stars, galaxies and planets will never form. If they don’t form, then clearly life is impossible.

The numbers of electrons must equal the numbers of protons to better than one part of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 37 th power). That number is so large that it’s difficult for laymen to get a handle on it. So I compare that number with another very large number – the national debt.

The National Debt

The national debt stands at $5,000,000,000,000 (At the time of his writing that is, NOW its much bigger). One way to visualize this is to imagine we cover one square mile of land with dimes piles 17 inches high. We can pay off the entire national debt with a pile of dimes 17 inches high in one square mile.

That’s truly a lot of dimes. Out national debt problem is serious. But to get 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, we would have to cover the entire North American continent with dimes, but 17 inches high won’t do.

We’d have to cover the entire North American continent from here all the way to the moon. That’s a 250,000-mile high pile of dimes covering 10,000,000 square miles, and you’d have to do that with a billion North American continents from here all the way to the moon. That is one chance in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 37 th power).

To give you an idea, imagine that in those piles of billions of dimes, there’s one dime colored red. If you were to randomly shuffle your way through those billions of dimes blindfolded, and you choose one dime, the odds that you would pick up that one red dime is one chance in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 .

God’s Fine-Tuning vs. Man’s Fine-Tuning

Another way of looking at this incredible fine-tuning of the universe in this one characteristic is to compare it with the very best that we humans have achieved. It’s not built yet, but towards the end of this year, a machine will come online at Cal Tech. This machine will have the capacity to make measurements to within one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 23rd power). The best machine man has ever designed.

But the very best machine that man has ever designed, with all of our money, technology and education, falls one hundred trillion times short of the level of fine-tuning that we see in just this one characteristic of the universe.

Purposefully, I didn’t choose the best example. In my book, The Creator and the Cosmos, I describe two other characteristics of the universe that are much more fine-tuned than the balance of electrons to protons. Some of these characteristics reveal more than what I’ve described here.

If the universe is fine-tuned in one part to the 10 to the 37th power, one part in 10 to the 40th power and one part in 10 to the 55th power on three different characteristics, then that tells us that God must be personal; that He’s not only transcendent, he’s personal!

God: 100 Trillion Trillion Times More Precise than Man

Why do we say this? Because only a person is capable of fine-tuning to the degree that we’ve observed, and that person must be orders of magnitude more intelligent and creative than we human beings. One hundred trillion times more intelligent and creative than we human beings, just based on that one characteristic. But he’s also creative and loving.

Earth: An Insignificant Speck?

When I was a young man, questioning the holy books of the religions of the world, I knew God must exist because of the Big Bang. There’s a beginning, there must be a beginner. But I doubted that God was personal and caring because I felt that planet Earth was just an insignificant speck in the eyes of a God that created a hundred trillion stars. What could we matter to such an awesome God?

Mass of the Universe

Astronomers have discovered that the total mass of the universe acts as a catalyst for nuclear fusion and the more massive the universe is, the more efficiently nuclear fusion operates in the cosmos. If the universe is too massive, the mass density too great, then very quickly all the matter in the universe is converted from Hydrogen into elements heavier than iron, which would render life impossible because the universe would be devoid of Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc.

If the universe has too little mass, then fusion would work so inefficiently that all that the universe would ever produce would be Hydrogen, or Hydrogen plus a small amount of Helium. But there again, the Carbon and Oxygen we need for life would be missing.

What does this tell me about the Creator? That God so loved the human race that he went to the expense of building one hundred billion stars and carefully shaped and crafted those hundred billion trillion stars for the entire age of the universe, so that for this brief moment in time, we could have a nice place to live.

It’s the same logic that my five and eight year old sons use on me. They measure my love for them by how much money I spend on the gifts that I buy for them. We can use the same kind of logic to draw the conclusion that the God who created the universe must love we human beings very much, given how much he spent on our behalf.

We live in a Special Solar System, Too

We can extend this argument of design from the universe to the solar system itself. When we look at the solar system, we discover that we have a heavenly body problem. It’s not that easy to get the right galaxy.

Life can only happen on late born stars. If it’s a first or second-generation star, then life is impossible because you don’t yet have the heavy elements necessary for life chemistry. There’s a narrow window of time in the history of the universe when life can happen.

If the universe is too old or too young, life is impossible. Only spiral galaxies produce stars late enough in their history that they can take advantage of the elements that are essential for life history, and only 6% of the galaxies in our universe are spiral galaxies. Of those 6%, you must go with galaxies that produce all of the elements that are essential for life. It’s not that easy.

Besides Hydrogen and Helium, the other elements are made in the cores of super giant stars. Super giant stars burn up quickly; they’re gone in a just a few million years. When they go through the final stages of burning up their fuel, they explode ashes into outer space, and future generations of stars will absorb those ashes.

Births & Deaths of Multiple Stars Required to have Metals in Earth’s Crust

When those stars go through their burning phase, they will take that heavy element ash material. This time when they explode, they make a whole bunch of material, capable of forming rocky planets and supporting life chemistry.

But we want these supernovae exploding early in the history of the galaxy. We don’t want them going off now. If the star Cereus goes Super Nova, we’re in serious trouble because it’s only eight light years away. It would exterminate life on our planet.

We observe in our galaxy that there was a burst of Super Nova explosions early in its history, but it tapered off to where it isn’t a threat to life that is now in existence. The Super Nova explosions took place in the right quantity and in the right locations so that life could happen here on Earth.

What does location have to do with it? Life is impossible in the center of our galaxy, or in the heel of our galaxy. It’s only possible at a distance 2/3 from the center of our galaxy.

Mormon Astronomy – Accurate or not?

That’s why I’m not a Mormon. Mormons tell us that life originated on a master planet right smack at the center of our galaxy. That’s probably also why I’ve never met a Mormon astronomer.

The stars at the center of our galaxy are jammed so tightly together that the mutual gravity would destroy the planetary orbits. Moreover, their synchrotron radiation would be destructive to life molecules. But we don’t want to be too far away from the center, either. If we get too far away, then there aren’t enough heavy elements from the exploded remains of supernovae to enable life chemistry to proceed.

There’s one life essential element that the supernovae do not make, however, and that’s Fluorine. Fluorine is made only on the surfaces of white dwarf binaries. A white dwarf is a burned out star. It’s like a cinder in a fireplace, just glowing.

Orbiting this white dwarf is a star that hasn’t yet exhausted its nuclear fuel. It’s an ordinary star, like our Sun. The white dwarf has enough mass relative to the ordinary star orbiting around it that it is capable of pulling mass off of the surface of the ordinary star and dragging it down so that it falls on its surface. When that material falls on the surface of the while dwarf, it ignites some very interesting nuclear reactions that produce Fluorine.

We need a white dwarf binary whose gravitational interactions between the white dwarf and the ordinary star are such that a strong enough stellar wind is sent from the white dwarf to blast the Fluorine beyond the gravitational pull of both stars, putting it into outer space, so that future generations of stars can absorb it. Then we have enough Fluorine for life chemistry.

A Trillion Galaxies – but as far as physicists know, only ours can support life

Two American astrophysicists concluded about a year ago that rare indeed is the galaxy that has the right number of this special kind white dwarf binary pair in the right location, occurring at the right time, so that life can exist today. The universe contains a trillion galaxies. But ours may be the only one that has the necessary conditions for life to exist.

The right star is needed. We can’t have a star any bigger than our Sun. The bigger the star, the more rapidly and erratically it burns its fuel. Our Sun is just small enough to keep a stable enough flame for a sufficient period of time to make life possible. If it were any bigger, we couldn’t have life on planet Earth. If it were any smaller, we’d be in trouble, too.

Smaller stars are even more stable than our star, the Sun, but they don’t burn as hot. In order to keep our planet at the right temperature necessary to sustain life, we’d have to bring the planet closer to the star.

Tidal Forces

The physicists in the audience realize that when you bring a planet closer to its star, the tidal interaction between the star and the planet goes up to the inverse fourth power to the distance separating them. For those of you who are not physicists, that means that all you have to do is bring that planet ever so much closer to the star, and the tidal forces could be strong enough to break the rotational period.

That’s what happened to Mercury and Venus. Those planets are too close to the Sun; so close that their rotational periods have been broken, from several hours to several months.

Earth is just barely far enough away to avoid that breaking. We have a rotation period of once every 24 hours. If we wait much longer, it will be every 26 or 28 hours, because the Earth’s rotation rate is slowing down.

Going back in history, we can measure the time when the Earth was rotating every 20 hours. When the Earth was rotating once every 20 hours, human life was not possible. If it rotates once every 28 hours, human life will not be possible. It can only happen at 24 hours.

Speed of Earth’s Rotation

If the planet rotates too quickly, you get too many tornadoes and hurricanes. If it rotates too slowly, it gets too cold at night and too hot during the day. We don’t want it to be 170 degrees during the day, nor do we want it to be below –100 at night, because that’s not ideal for life.

We don’t want lots of hurricanes and tornadoes, either. What we currently have is an ideal situation, and God plays this. He created us here at the ideal time.

We need the right Earth. If the Earth is too massive, it retains a bunch of gases such as Ammonia, Methane, Hydrogen and Helium in its atmosphere. These gases are not acceptable for life, at least, not for advanced life. But if it’s not massive enough, it won’t retain water. For life to exist on planet Earth, we need a huge amount of water, but we don’t need a lot of ammonia and methane.

Remember high school chemistry? Methane’s molecular weight 16, ammonia’s molecular weight 17, water’s molecular weight is 18. God so designed planet Earth that we keep lots of the 18, but we don’t keep any of the 16 or the 17. The incredible fine-tuning of the physical characteristics of Earth is necessary for that.

Jupiter Necessary, too

We even have to have the right Jupiter. We wrote about this in our Facts and Faith newsletter a few issues back, but it was also discovered by American astrophysicists just this past year. Unless you have a very massive planet like Jupiter, five times more distant from the star than the planet that has life, life will not exist on that planet.

It takes a super massive planet like Jupiter, located where it is, to act as a shield, guarding the Earth from comic collisions. We don’t want a comet colliding with Earth every week. Thanks to Jupiter, that doesn’t happen.

What these astrophysicists discovered in their models of planetary formation was that it’s a very rare star system indeed that produces a planet as massive as Jupiter, in the right location, to act as such a shield.

We Even Need the Right Moon

The Earth’s moon system is that of a small planet being orbited by a huge, single moon. That huge, single moon has the effect of stabilizing the rotation axis of planet Earth to 23½ degrees. That’s the ideal tilt for life on planet Earth.

The axis on planet Mars moves through a tilt from zero to 60 degrees and flips back and forth. If that were to happen on Earth, life would be impossible. Thanks to the Moon, it’s held stable at 23 ½ degrees.

Just as with the universe, in the case of the solar system, we can attach numbers to these. In this case, I’ve chosen to be extremely conservative in my estimates. I would feel justified in sticking a few zeros between the decimal point and the one. I would feel justified in making this 20 percent, 10 percent, for example, and on down the line.

We Even Need the Right Number of Earthquakes

I’ve got so many characteristics here, and I let the Californians know that you have to have the right number of earthquakes. Not too many, not too few, or life is not possible. I share them with my wife, who doesn’t like earthquakes, but I just tell her that when you feel a good jolt, that’s when you have to thank God for his perfect providence.

At Least 41 Fine-Tuned Characteristics, to have One Planet that Supports Life

The bottom line to all of this is that we have 41 characteristics of the solar system that must be fine-tuned for life to exist. But even if the universe contains as many planets as it does stars, which is a gross overestimate in my opinion, that still leaves us with less than one chance in a billion trillion that you’d find even one planet in the entire universe with the capacity for supporting life.

This tells us that we’re wasting valuable taxpayer money looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Worse than that, we’re wasting valuable telescope time. In the words of William Proxmyer, “It would be far wiser looking for intelligent life in Washington than looking for it in other galaxies.”

Planet Earth: Not an Accident

It also tells us that God wasn’t wandering throughout the vastness of the cosmos saying, “Wow, that’s the best one, I’ll use that”. No. With odds this remote, we must realize that God especially designed and crafted, through miraculous means, planet Earth, so that it would support life and human beings. Planet Earth is not an accident; it is a product of divine design.

I would also say that’s true of life on Earth. The fossil record testifies of life beginning on planet Earth 3.8 billion years ago. Over those 3.8 billion years, we have more and more species of greater and greater complexity and greater and greater diversity. But there’s no fossil tree. We have no evidence for the horizontal branches.

Peculiarities in the Fossil Record

All we have is evidence that a certain species exists for a certain period of time without significant change, which then goes extinct to be replaced at a different time with a radically different species, with no connection from the previous species to the next one.

What the textbooks don’t mention is that there’s been a reversal of this fossil tree; it’s only true up until the creation of man. Since the creation of man, the whole thing reverses. As time proceeds, we have fewer and fewer species with less and less diversity and complexity, and it’s the land mammals that are being impacted in the worst way.

There were 30,000 land mammals on planet Earth when God created Adam and Eve. There are only 15,000 remaining today. In just a few thousand years, 15,000 species of mammals have disappeared.

Admittedly, man has a lot to do with that.

As Paul and Ann Erlich pointed out in their book on extinctions, though, even if we were to get rid of every vestige of humanity and civilization on planet Earth, a minimum of one species would still become extinct every year. How many species do we see appearing?

No New Species

Paul and Ann Erlich say we have yet to document the appearance of a single animal species in the world of nature, and in the vast majority in the world of species, we cannot even detect any genetic movement. It’s a virtual zero.

The Bible offers the perfect explanation for this. For six days (periods of time), God created. On the seventh day, he rested. For six days, he replaced the species that were going extinct with more complex and diverse species. For six days, he created through special, miraculous means, the evidence of which we clearly see in the fossil record.

But the Bible tells us that when He created Eve, He ceased from his work of creating new species of life. God is at rest. We’re now in the seventh day, where God is resting from his work of creating. All we see today is the natural processes. The natural processes tell us that the planet is heading to a culmination in death.

When Will God Create Again?

Revelation 21 tells us that the very instant that God conquers the problem of evil in man, he will create again. There is an eighth day of creation coming. It’s exciting to think about the fact that God may have many weeks of creation planned for the future. We’re simply through the first week.

Can you imagine what’s going to happen in the second, third of fourth week, etc? It would be exciting news if we could be a part of that work with him.

Creation vs. Evolution?

Whenever I discuss this whole issue of creation evolution, everyone wants to talk about what we know the least about – the origin of man. You know the story. We begin with a primitive bipedal primate species, and wind up with an advanced character.

The truth of the matter is that the evidence of the bipedal primates that God created before Adam and Eve fills only one coffin full of bones. We don’t have a lot of evidence. It’s not like the dinosaurs. In no case are any of those bi-pedaled primate finds more than 30% complete; that’s the most complete fossil find that we have.

Fossil Record: Not a Fraud!

The Basic Creation Series Evolution: Challenge of the Fossil Record 

Darwin's Dilemma 

Some Christians like to claim that this is all fraudulent, but that’s not true. There are bones. They can be seen in museums and they are definitely bipedal species. But they existed long ago. They are extinct, and there’s no relationship between those bipedal primates and human beings.

The Bible tells us that God created only one species of life on planet Earth that is spiritual in nature: Adam and Eve, and their descendents. All other species of life are either body only, or body and soul, like the birds and the mammals. Only the human species is comprised of body, soul and spirit.

You can go to any secular anthropologist and ask him to provide you with the most ancient evidence for spirit expression. They will confess that the most ancient evidence dates back to only 8,000 to 24,000 years ago. In the form of a moral code or religious relics, the most ancient finds have been these primitive Venus Idol figurines from 10,000 years ago.

What’s the Biblical date of the creation of Adam and Eve? The genealogies are useless for giving us the creation date of the universe or the Earth, but they are effective for giving us the creation date of Adam and Eve. It was the very last event on the sixth day of creation.

I should say only slightly effective because there are gaps in the genealogy. The genealogies of Luke and Matthew contain names that are not in Genesis 5, but the best Hebrew scholars that I’ve spoken to say that it’s about a factor of ten.

When Did Man Appear?

Six thousand to 60,000 years ago, God created Adam and Eve. That 6,000 to 60,000 encompasses the secular date of 8,000 to 24,000. Even at this most controversial level, we have so little data to work with that we see fundamental agreement between scientific evidence and the words of the Bible.

I close with a quote from Revelation 3:8, “See I place before you an open door that no one can shut.” In my book, The Creator and the Cosmos, I have a whole chapter filled with quotes from astronomers and physicists in response to this evidence.

Fine Tuning of the Universe: Proof Positive of the Existence of God

Let me read you one from the British cosmologist, Edward Harrison, who says, “Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God. The design argument of William Paley updated and refurbished. The fine-tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence for theistic design. Take you choice: blind chance that requires an infinite number of universes, or design that requires only one.”

Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline towards the theistic or the design argument, and for good reason. It’s because the appeal to an infinite number of universes where ours by pure chance out of that infinite number takes on the conditions essential for life, is committing the gamblers fallacy.

To Assume it Happened By Chance = “The Gambler’s Fallacy”

You’re assuming the benefit of an infinite sample size, when you can only provide evidence for one. Let me give you an example. If I were to flip a coin 10,000 times and it were to come up heads 10,000 times in a row, you could conclude that the coin has been fixed with a purpose to come up heads. That’s the rational bet.

But the irrational better would say that conceivably, two to the 10,000 coins could exist out there. And if those two to the 10,000 coins are like my coin, but all getting different results than I see here, then this coin could be fair.

It’s the gamblers fallacy because you have no proof of the existence of those other coins or that they take on similar characteristics of the coin that you’re flipping, and you have no evidence that those coins are producing different results.

The equations of General Relativity guarantee that we will never discover another universe. God may have created two, but we’ll never know about it because the equations of General Relativity tell us that the Space-Time manifold of universe A will never overlap the space-time manifold of universe B.

Other Universes? No Way to Know

That means we will be forever ignorant about the possibility of other universes, because the sample size will always be one. Therefore, the appeal to infinite chances rather than to the God of the Bible is the gambler’s fallacy.

Q&A from the Audience

Moderator: Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t he tell us something that we don’t already know? Right? Why do we keep doing all this mental cotton candy stuff, why don’t we get to something deep?

Actually, I’m sure there are a lot of questions, so I’m going to make my way around with the mike, and I’ll try to get around to the sides. We want to give you the chance to ask Dr. Ross some questions, and we’ll do that for about 20 minutes.

If we have any spiritual seekers here, who have some questions, I’m especially interested in your perspective.

Why do we need earthquakes? Can you explain that a little more?

Hugh: Before I begin, let me just say that if you think of a question two hours from now, the ministry I work for, Reasons to Believe, maintains a daily hotline. You are welcome to call, two hours per day, to ask your questions. The number is (626)335-5282, 5:00pm to 7:00pm Pacific Time. You are also welcome to write, and we’ll respond to your questions in writing. The service is available, free of charge, to anyone who’d like to take advantage of it. [Website is www.reasons.org – ed.]

In response to your question about earthquakes, without earthquakes or plate tectonic activity, nutrients that are essential for life on land would erode off of the continents and accumulate in the oceans. After awhile, life would be impossible on land, though you’d still have life in the oceans.

Thanks to earthquake activity, that stuff in the oceans gets recycled into new continents. We see here on earth precisely the right number and intensity of earthquakes to maintain that recycling, but not to such a degree that it’s impossible for us to live in cities.

If it’s any comfort to you, the risk of earthquake damage here in Chicago is greater than it is in Los Angeles . But that’s only because we have stiffer building codes.

How do you account for the difference in time as described in Genesis for creation in a week, versus the vast span of time you describe since the Big Bang?

Hugh: You need to get a copy of my book Creation and Time that was just released a few days ago. In it, I point out that the idea that the days of creation in Genesis One are six consecutive 24-hour periods arose from the King James translation, not from church history or tradition.

Augustine and other Church Fathers: “Day” in Genesis is a long period of time

If you read the early fathers of the church, the vast majority of them adopted the view that these days of creation were long time periods, not 24-hour periods.

Why King James? The English language is the largest vocabulary language that man has ever invented. There are 4,000,000 nouns in the English language. The Hebrew language, by contrast, is one of the most noun poor languages that man has ever invented.

English vs. Hebrew

So, the English reader has a difficult time appreciating that in the Hebrew Old Testament, there are very few words to describe periods of time. The Hebrew word Yom, for “day long” can mean 12 hours, 24 hours or a long time period. You have to examine the context, to determine which of the three definitions to use.

Incidentally, we have the same problem with the word “heaven”, for which the Hebrew language has three different definitions. In Genesis One, you have to examine the context in order to determine which heaven is being used in which place. That’s why Paul referred to the third heaven. So you’d know which one he was talking about.

Day 7: No Evening & Morning

I didn’t know Hebrew when I first read the Bible. But I immediately recognized that they must have been talking about a longer period of time, because there is no evening or morning for the seventh day. Notice that the first six days are closed off with an evening and a morning. The seventh day is not, and there’s a good reason for that.

When you read into the Bible, Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4, you discover that God’s seventh day, the day of rest, is still proceeding, through the present and on into the future. Live your lives so that you will enter God’s seventh day, day of rest.

Seventh Day is Now

We’re still in the seventh day. If the seventh day is a long time period, then the first six days must likewise be long time periods. I also saw as a 17 year old that the fact that we’re in the seventh day answers the enigma of the fossil record. Why we see it in the past but we don’t see it today.

In the book, Creation and Time, I give you 21 biblical arguments for why the days must be long, and not 24 hours. It’s helpful to realize that there is no Hebrew word to describe a long period of time. The only option is to use the word yom. Likewise, the words evening and morning also mean beginning and ending.

If you want the details, they’re covered in the book. This opens an opportunity, because there are many non-Christians out there who are convinced that Christianity has no credibility because it speaks of the universe as being a mirage.

A Young Universe could only be an Illusion

If the universe is only thousands of years old, then it would have to be an illusion, because astronomers measure it to be a tremendous size and that size speaks of the billions of years. Non-Christians say that if the Bible has no credibility with respect to astronomy and physics, why should they trust it for anything else?

The Bible: Speaks of Billions of Years, Consistent with Astronomy

One reason I wrote this book was so that non-Christians would realize that the Bible is not speaking in terms of thousands of years; it’s speaking in terms of billions of years. In speaking in terms of billions of years, we realize that there’s no basis for claiming that the Bible is filled with scientific error.

On the contrary, in Genesis One, we see a testimony to scientific perfection. When, as a 17 year old, I compared the Bible to other holy books of the religions of the world, I noticed that only the Bible gets a perfect score on the creation account.

Biblical Account: 14 Statements, all 100% Consistent with Modern Observations

It gives three initial conditions and 11 creation events, and describes all 14 perfectly and puts them in the correct chronological sequence. The best I’ve found outside of the Bible is the New Militia of the Babylonians, which scores two to 13 correct.

The only reason it got such a high score is because the Babylonians weren’t too far culturally from the descendents of Abraham. They probably heard a little bit about their story from them.

Do you differ with the scientists at the Institute for Creation Research?

Hugh: Yes, I differ with them about the age of the universe. I would agree with them on the recency of the creation of man. Though, we both hold that we are all descendent from Adam and Eve and that God created Adam and Eve only thousands of years ago.

Where we disagree is on the age of the Earth and the age of the universe, but I’d like to point out that it really doesn’t matter. I believe that the universe is 17,000,000,000 years old [that was the best figure available in 1994; today we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old – Ed] and they believe that the universe is less than 10,000 years old. We only differ by a factor of 1,000,000. That’s only six zeros.

I say this because I’ve brought another book here with me, written by an agnostic, Hubert Yockey, who founded the field of information theories that apply to molecular biology. He and others, including atheists, point out that in order for life to arise by natural processes, you would need an Earth in excess of 10 to the one hundred billionth power, years old. That’s a hundred billion zeros after the one. It would fill 25,000 Bibles with zeros to write that number out long hand.

The fact that I differ with the Institute of Creation Research by only six zeros has no bearing on the creation evolution debate. Nor does it have any bearing on salvation. When God created is doctrinally insignificant.

I say that because in my opinion, there has been far too much emotion invested in what I consider to be a trivial issue in terms of creation evolution and basic viable doctrine. If we can get away from the emotion, I think we can resolve it.

How do you respond to the theory that the Big Bang that you’re studying now is merely one of a series of Big Bangs? That the matter of the universe is constantly exploding, accelerating, decelerating, concentrating and re-exploding?

Hugh: I whizzed right past that in my talk, thinking no one would pick up on it, but you did. If the universe has sufficient mass, then it’s expansion will stop. Two massive objects tend to attract one another. The universe contains enough galaxies and quasars and other material that the mutual attraction would eventually take the steam out of the expansion of the universe, forcing the universe into a subsequent period of collapse.

There have been those of the Hindu persuasion who first began to believe 3,000 years ago that when the universe collapses, it will go through a bounce. It will rebound into a second stage of expansion, collapse, expansion, collapse, etc.

Then we’re back to infinite time. If there are an infinite number of bounces of the universe, then you can postulate that this just happens to be that lucky bounce of the cosmos in which conditions were just right for the formation of life.

The truth of the matter is that it’s physically impossible for the universe to bounce. In 1983, Alan Guth and Mark Sher published a paper in the British Journal of Nature titled, “The impossibility of a Bouncing Universe”.

The reason it’s impossible for the universe to bounce is because of its enormous entropy. It has a specific entropy of 1,000,000,000. That translates into a mechanical efficiency for the universe of 1/100,000,000 of a percent.

In terms of a bounce, if I have a ball in front of me, and I let if fall towards the carpeted floor, we can measure it’s mechanical efficiency by how far it bounces off of the floor compared to the height from which I drop if. It’s about 30% efficient.

The universe has a mechanical efficiency of 1/100,000,000 of a percent. Engineers in the audience will tell you that anytime an engine falls below a 1% mechanical efficiency, it will not oscillate. The universe falls 8 orders of magnitude short of that limit. Therefore, it’s impossible.

This impossibility has not only been demonstrated in the classical physical sense, it’s also been demonstrated under the conditions of quantum mechanics. Even if we’re talking about a bounce in that period of time in which the universe is compressed smaller than a quantum entity, there too, it’s impossible.

The universe could collapse, but we’re still talking about only one creation event, only one beginning. Therefore, we pull the rug out from under Hinduism, Buddhism and New Age philosophy, because all of those religions preach that the universe reincarnates. The fact that astrophysicists have demonstrated the impossibility of reincarnation scientifically demonstrates the fallibility of Hinduism, Buddhism and New Age philosophy.

I’m still savoring the fact that since this is the seventh day, every day is Sunday and I’m living in a day of rest. I ask this somewhat naively, because I don’t know much about astrology, but what relevance does your work have to do with astrology and the planets, etc? Or does it? Have you done any study in that?

Hugh: Are you trying to contrast astrology with astronomy?

Participant: No, I mean astrology, since it is very related to the planets and their placement and all that.

Hugh: The effect of the obstetrician is six times greater than the effect of all of the planets, the sun and the moon combined. On that basis, there is no scientific credibility to the claims of astrology. I’ve written a little paper called, “Astrology: Science or What?” in which I very carefully document the scientific incredible claims of astrology.

I’m not saying astrology has no validity. It has no physical validity. It may have some spiritual validity, but it’s easy to prove that its spiritual validity is dangerous, and coming from the adversary of God, rather than from God himself. If you want to get it, it’s a free handout that we make available for people who have questions on astrology.

It’s my understanding that quantum mechanics, the quantum theory, is the latest method to shove God out of the way. Could you elaborate on the quantum theory?

Hugh: I have a whole hour lecture prepared on the quantum challenge to Christianity. It’s exactly the opposite. Quantum mechanics does not provide a challenge to the Christian faith; it provides support. The reason people perceive it as a threat is because quantum mechanics is such an esoteric physical study that the vast majority of laymen have no clue what it means.

Therefore, when some New Age philosopher tells us that it establishes that we human beings can create independent of God, some of them actually believe it. But what quantum mechanics actually tells us is that the human observer or experimenter, is even more limited in his capacity to influence cause and effect than we thought, under the conditions of classical mechanics and physics. It makes the human condition worse, not better.

Quantum mechanics, rather than demoting God and elevating man, does exactly the reverse. If you have a specific question on quantum mechanics, I’d be happy to deal with it.

Let me just share this. There are a couple of chapters on this in my Creator and the Cosmos book. Quantum challenges to the Christian faith were first proposed in 1983 and culminating in some claims that were made a few months back, have moved in the direction of progressive absurdity.

In 1983 Paul Davies said, “The universe was created though a quantum fluctuation.” The problem with that is that the smaller the time interval in quantum mechanics, the smaller the probability the quantum fluctuation will occur.

If we’re talking about the beginning of the universe, the time interval is zero, so the probability is zero. So we know for sure that quantum mechanics doesn’t do it.

The latest challenge coming from quantum mechanics is that the universe is evolving together with the human race, and the fossil record gives the evidence for this. If you look at the fossil record, you see improvement with respect to time.

Since the author of this theory doesn’t believe in God, and he believes that there’s some kind of self-ordering factor in nature that explains that fossil record, he concludes that the universe is improving with time, and that we human beings are improving in time.

He believes that if we wait long enough, we’ll meet at one another at the Omega point, where we’ll become omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. Then we become God and we’ll be able to create in the past, which explains why we’re here today. God doesn’t exist yet, but he will. When he exists, he’ll create the universe 17 billion years ago.

Skeptic Martin Gardener analyzed this theory a few months ago, and said, “This is not the FAP theory. This is the CRAP theory.” It was called the Final Anthropic Principle (FAP). He called it the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP).

The thing I’ve noticed in quantum mechanics in an attempt to refute the Christian faith, is as time goes on their attempts to bypass the God of the Bible get progressively more absurd. The analogy of that would be the flat Earth society, which has been in existence for 100 years.

During those 100 years, the rationale for defending a flat Earth has become progressively absurd. They’ll never run out of evidence for a flat Earth, but the fact that their evidence is being demonstrated as becoming progressively more absurd tells us that they don’t have a strong case.

Likewise, I would say atheists pushing through quantum mechanics do not have a strong case. You can read the details in my book.

Can you tell us what your thoughts are on Eric Lerner’s book The Big Bang Never Happened ?

Hugh: I have a few pages on it in both of my books. The book is passé now because he was assuming that there’d be no resolution to the problem of the clumping of the galaxies and the smoothness of the radiation from the creation event. That was his basis for saying the Big Bang model is in trouble.

With the discovery of exotic matter, we’ve dealt with that puzzle. Eric Lerner overlooked independent measures for the date of the creation. He was pushing for creation date in excess of quadrillions of years. He assumed that our only basis for establishing the age of the universe was its expansion velocity.

In fact, we have several methods for age dating the universe. The burning of the stars, the ages of the oldest stars, the radiometric elements, and how we still have Uranium and Thorium in the universe. If the universe were one quadrillion years old, there’d be no Uranium or Thorium left at all. The fact that they exist tells us that the universe is relatively young.

That’s a quick response to Eric Lerner’s book. It had some following before the COBE satellite discoveries, but that following has since evaporated.

Dr. Ross, my question is about the order of creation described in Genesis, which seems to teach a geocentric view of the universe in that the Earth is created and then the lights are created, the lesser lights, and the greater light, the Sun. Could you talk about that?

Hugh: Genesis One follows the scientific method, in that it doesn’t begin to describe the sequence of creation events until it first identifies the point of view in the initial conditions. That’s not strange because that’s where the scientific method came from, so of course the Bible follows the scientific method.

We see in the second verse of Genesis, chapter one, that the spirit of God was brooding on the surface of the waters. We’re told the account of creation from the point of view of the observer at the surface of the waters, below the clouds, not above the clouds. That’s makes all the difference in how you interpret the text.

If you put the point of view up in the heavens, almost everything you get in Genesis One is wrong, compared to the record of nature. If you place it on the surface of the ocean, below the cloud layer, then everything is a perfect fit.

What happens on the first day of creation is not the creation of light, but the appearance of light. It says, “Let there be light”, and uses the Hebrew verb meaning “to be”. It doesn’t say God created the light. The light was created in the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

The Hebrew word for heavens & Earth refers to the entire physical cosmos, the stars, galaxies, matter, energy, space and time. Light was created in the beginning. It was dark on the surface of the waters because Earth had an atmosphere that was opaque to the passage of light at that time.

There was an intense interplanetary debris cloud and the gases in the Earth’s atmosphere itself combined with that debris cloud to prevent the passage of sunlight to the surface of the Earth.

On the fourth day of creation, we again see the Hebrew verb meaning, “let there be”, the sun, moon and stars. The observer on the surface of the waters, for the first time, sees the objects that are responsible for the light that came through in the first stage of the fourth day.

It was not until the fourth day of creation that the Earth’s atmosphere became transparent. Before the first day, it was opaque. From the first day to the fourth day, it was translucent, permanently overcast, and on the fourth day the clouds broke and the observer could now see the objects responsible for the light.

The problem is the 16th verse, which says, “So God made the sun, moon and stars.” The Hebrew verb for “made” means to manufacture or fabricate. What the English reader often doesn’t pick up on is that the Hebrew language does not have verb tenses. They have strange forms which mean the action is either complete or has not yet been completed.

The 16th verse has the verb in its “completed” form, meaning the action was completed at some time in the past. It could have been completed on the fourth day, the third day, the second day, the first day, or in the beginning.

That sentence itself doesn’t tell us which of those five options we should choose. We think, wouldn’t it be nice if Moses told us? Well, he did. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” and that [Hebrew word for heavens and Earth] would include the sun, moon and stars. They were made in the beginning, but the observer doesn’t see them until the fourth day.

What’s fascinating is that the fifth and sixth days of creation, for the first time, mention species of life that require the visibility of the sun, moon and stars to regulate their biological clocks.”

©1994-2007 Cosmic Fingerprints and Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois

Einstein’s Big Blunder

100 years ago this year, Albert Einstein published
three papers that rocked the world. These papers
proved the existence of the atom, introduced the
theory of relativity, and described quantum
mechanics.Pretty good debut for a 26 year old scientist, huh?

His equations for relativity indicated that the universe
was expanding. This bothered him, because if it was
expanding, it must have had a beginning and a beginner.Since neither of these appealed to him, Einstein introduced a ‘fudge factor’ that ensured a ‘steady state’ universe,
one that had no beginning or end.

But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the furthest
galaxies were fleeing away from each other, just as the Big Bang model predicted. So in 1931, Einstein embraced what would later be known as the Big Bang theory, saying, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.” He referred to the ‘fudge factor’ to achieve a steady-state universe as the biggest blunder of his career.

As I’ll explain during the next couple of days,
Einstein’s theories have been thoroughly proved and
verified by experiments and measurements. But there’s an even more important implication of Einstein’s discovery.
Not only does the universe have a beginning, but time
itself, our own dimension of cause and effect, began
with the Big Bang.

That’s right — time itself does not exist before
then. The very line of time begins with that creation
event. Matter, energy, time and space were created
in an instant by an intelligence outside of space
and time.

About this intelligence, Albert Einstein wrote
in his book “The World As I See It” that the harmony
of natural law “Reveals an intelligence of such
superiority that, compared with it, all the
systematic thinking and acting of human beings is
an utterly insignificant reflection.”He went on to write, “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe–
a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in
the face of which we with our modest powers must feel
humble.”

Pretty significant statement, wouldn’t you say?

“Bird Droppings on my Telescope”

The Big Bang theory was totally rejected at first.
But those who supported it had predicted that the ignition of the Big Bang would have left behind a sort of ‘hot flash’ of radiation.If a big black wood stove produces heat that you can feel, then in a similar manner, the Big Bang should produce its own kind of heat that would echo throughout
the universe.

In 1965, without looking for it, two physicists at
Bell Labs in New Jersey found it. At first, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were bothered because, while trying to refine the world’s most sensitive radio antenna,they couldn’t eliminate a bothersome source of noise.They picked up this noise everywhere they pointed the antenna.

At first they thought it was bird droppings.The
antenna was so sensitive it could pick up the heat
of bird droppings (which certainly are warm when
they’re brand new) but even after cleaning it off,
they still picked up this noise.

This noise had actually been predicted in detail
by other astronomers, and after a year of checking
and re-checking the data, they arrived at a conclusion:
This crazy Big Bang theory really was correct.In an interview, Penzias was asked why there was so much
resistance to the Big Bang theory.

He said, “Most physicists would rather attempt to
describe the universe in ways which require no explanation.And since science can’t *explain* anything – it can only*describe* things – that’s perfectly sensible.If you have a universe which has always been there, you don’t explain it, right?

“Somebody asks you, ‘How come all the secretaries
in your company are women?’ You can say, ‘Well, it’s
always been that way.’ That’s a way of not having
to explain it. So in the same way, theories which
don’t require explanation tend to be the ones
accepted by science, which is perfectly acceptable
and the best way to make science work.”But on the older theory that the universe was eternal, he explains: “It turned out to be so ugly that people dismissed it. What we find – the simplest theory – is a creation out of nothing, the appearance out of nothing
of the universe.”

Penzias and his partner, Robert Wilson, won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of this radiation. The Big Bang theory is now one of the most thoroughly
validated theories in all of science.

Robert Wilson was asked by journalist Fred Heeren if
the Big Bang indicated a creator. Wilson said, “Certainly there was something that
set it all off.Certainly, if you are religious, I can’t
think of a better theory of the origin of the universe
to match with Genesis.”
Part 3: Why the Big Bang was the most precisely planned event in all of history!
In your kitchen cabinet, you’ve probably got a spray
bottle with an adjustable nozzle.If you twist the nozzle
one way, it sprays a fine mist into the air.You twist
the nozzle the other way, it squirts a jet of water
in a straight line. You turn that nozzle to the exact
position you want so you can wash a mirror, clean up
a spill, or whatever.If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like fine mist from a water bottle – so fast that a gazillion particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even form a single star.

If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the
material would have dribbled out like big drops of water,then collapsed back where it came from by the force of gravity.A little too fast, and you get a meaningless spray of fine dust. A little too slow, and the whole universe collapses back into one big black hole.
The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference
is.To strike the perfect balance between too fast and
too slow, the force, something that physicists call
“the Dark Energy Term” had to be accurate to one part in ten with 120 zeros.

If you wrote this as a decimal, the number would
look like this:

0.000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000001

In their paper “Disturbing Implications of
a Cosmological Constant” two atheist scientists
from Stanford University stated that the existence of
this dark energy term “Would have required a miracle… An external agent, external to space and time, intervened in cosmic history for reasons of its own.”
Just for comparison, the best human engineering
example is the Gravity Wave Telescope, which was built with a precision of 23 zeros.The Designer, the ‘external agent’ that caused our universe must possess an intellect,knowledge, creativity and power trillions and trillions of times greater than we humans have.

Absolutely amazing.

Now a person who doesn’t believe in God has to find some way to explain this. One of the more common explanations seems to be “There was an infinite number of universes, so it was inevitable that things would have turned out right in at least one of them.”

The “infinite universes” theory is truly an amazing theory. Just think about it, if there is an infinite number of universes, then absolutely everything is not only possible…it’s actually happened!

It means that somewhere, in some dimension, there is
a universe where the Chicago Cubs won the World Series last year.There’s a universe where Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t get cement shoes; instead he marries Joan Rivers and becomes President of the United States.There’s even a universe where Elvis kicks his drug habit and still resides at Graceland and sings at concerts.Imagine the possibilities!
I might sound like I’m joking, but actually I’m dead
serious.To believe an infinite number of universes
made life possible by random chance is to believe everything else I just said, too.

Some people believe in God with a capital G.

And some folks believe in Chance with a Capital C.

Part 4: “If you can read this sentence,
I can prove to you that God exists”

See this email I just sent you, that you’re reading
right now? This email is proof of the existence of God.

Yeah, I know, that sounds crazy. But I’m not asking you to believe anything just yet, until you see the evidence for yourself. All I ask is that you refrain from disbelieving while I show you my proof. It only takes a minute to convey, but it speaks to one of the most important questions of all time.So how is this email proof of the existence of God?:


This email you’re reading contains letters, words and
sentences. It contains a message that means something.As long as you can read English, you can understand what I’m saying.

You can do all kinds of things with this email.

You can read it on your computer screen. You can print it out on your printer. You can read it out loud to a friend who’s in the same room as you are.You can call your friend and read it to her over the telephone.

You can save it as a Microsoft WORD document.You can forward it to someone via email, or you can post it on a website.

Regardless of how you copy it or where you send it,the information remains the same. My email contains a message.It contains information in the form of language.The message is independent of the medium it is sent in.

Messages are not matter, even though they can be carried by matter (like printing this email on a piece of paper).

Messages are not energy even though they can be carried by energy (like the sound of my voice.)

Messages are immaterial. Information is itself a unique kind of entity. It can be stored and transmitted and copied in many forms, but the meaning still stays the same.Messages can be in English, French or Chinese.Or Morse Code. Or mating calls of birds. Or the Internet. Or radio or television. Or computer programs or architect blueprints or stone carvings. Every cell in your body contains a message encoded in DNA, representing a complete plan for you.
OK, so what does this have to do with God?

It’s very simple. Messages, languages, and coded
information ONLY come from a mind. A mind that
agrees on an alphabet and a meaning of words and sentences. A mind that expresses both desire and intent.

Whether I use the simplest possible explanation,
such as the one I’m giving you here, or if we analyze language with advanced mathematics and engineering communication theory, we can say this with total confidence:
“Messages, languages and coded information never,ever come from anything else besides a mind.No one has ever produced a single example of a message that did not come from a mind.”
Nature can create fascinating patterns -snowflakes,
sand dunes, crystals, stalagmites and stalactites. Tornado’s and turbulence and cloud formations.
But non-living things cannot create language. They*cannot* create codes. Rocks cannot think and they cannot talk. And they cannot create information.

It is believed by some that life on planet earth arose
accidentally from the “primordial soup,” the early ocean which produced enzymes and eventually RNA, DNA, and primitive cells.But there is still a problem with this theory: It fails to answer the question, ‘Where did the information come from? ‘DNA is not merely a molecule. Nor is it simply a “pattern.”
Yes, it contains chemicals and proteins, but those chemicals are arranged to form an intricate language, in the exact same way that English and Chinese and HTML are languages.DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and structures very similar to words, sentences and paragraphs. With very precise instructions and systems that check for errors and correct them.

To the person who says that life arose naturally, you need only ask: “Where did the information come from? Show me just ONE example of a language that didn’t come from a mind.”

As simple as this question is, I’ve personally presented it in public presentations and Internet discussion forums for more than two years. I’ve addressed more than fifty thousand people, including hostile, skeptical audiences who insist that life arose without the assistance of God.
But to a person, none of them have ever been able to
explain where the information came from. This riddle is “So simple any child can understand; so complex, no atheist can solve.”

You can hear or read my full presentation on this topic at http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htm

For a high-school level, layman’s version, go here: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/information.htm

Matter and energy have to come from somewhere. Everyone can agree on that. But information has to come from somewhere,too! Information is separate entity, fully on par with matter and energy. And information can only come from a mind. If books and poems and TV shows come from human intelligence, then all living things inevitably came from a super-intelligence. Every word you hear, every sentence you speak, every dog that barks, every song you sing, every email you read,every packet of information that zings across the Internet, is proof of the existence of God. Because information
and language always originate in a mind.

In the beginning were words and language.

In the Beginning was Information.

When we consider the mystery of life – where it came from and how this miracle is possible – do we not at the same time ask the question where it is going, and what its purpose is? Respectfully Submitted by Perry Marshall

Further reading:

-”If you can read this, I can prove God exists” – listen to my full presentation or read the Executive Summary here:

http://cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htm

-The Atheist’s Riddle: Members of Infidels, the world’s
largest atheist discussion board attempt to solve it
(for well over a year now!), without success:
www.cosmicfingerprints.com/iidb.htm

-”OK, so then who made God?” and other questions about information and origins:

http://cosmicfingerprints.com/infotheoryqa.htm

Design theorists offer extensive evidence that blind, material causes are incapable of building irreducibly complex and information-rich systems. They then point out that whenever we know how such systems arose such as with an integrated circuit, a car engine, or a software program invariably a designing engineer played a role. Design theorists then extend this uniform experience to things like molecular machines and the sophisticated code needed to build even the first and simplest of cells. An increasing number of leading scholars attest that increased scientific knowledge about such things has greatly strengthened the argument for design.

This could be tomorrows headline, it’s ALREADY IN ETERNITY’S MIND!

“Thine are the heavens, and thine is the earth: the world and the fulness thereof thou hast founded: the north and the sea thou hast created.” —Psalm 88:12-13

“For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: And will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.” —2 Timothy 4:3-4

“By the word of the Lord the heavens were established; and all the power of them by the spirit of his mouth: gathering together the waters of the sea, as in a vessel; laying up the depths in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord, and let all the inhabitants of the world be in awe of him. For he spoke and they were made: he commanded and they were created.” —Psalm 32:6-9

“Thou in the beginning, O Lord, didst found the earth: and the works of thy hands are the heavens. They shall perish, but thou shalt continue: and they shall all grow old as a garment. And as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the selfsame, and thy years shall not fail.” —Hebrews 1:10-12 THIS IS WHY WE MUST NEVER STOP FIGHTING EVOLUTION & ATHEISM ! It was an atheist named, Renan,who predicted that the collapse of the supernatural would lead to the collapse of moral convictions. Evolution’s naturalism has ousted supernaturalism, and we can see moral convictions collapsing. The Christian culture is crumbling; and the “Post-Christian era” has begun. That is the final fruit of evolutionism.

In 1859, Professor Sedgwick of Cambridge warned Darwin that, through his evolution ideas, “Humanity would suffer a damage that might brutalize it and sink the human race into a lower state of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.” Many Christians have attempted to harmonize the theory of evolution with the Bible. 

They say that the Genesis account of the creation of man is merely allegorical; that Adam was not a direct creation of God, but was the end result of millions of years of evolution from the ape and was, in fact, a monkey-man; that mankind has been evolving upward ever since and steadily developing higher physical and mental qualities, until, in the far distant future, the human family will have attained perfection. But this conception, besides being contrary to known facts, is diametrically opposed to the Bible. The two cannot be reconciled. 

# Century-Old Evolutionary Rule Disproved #

A long-held rule in evolution called “Cope’s Rule” has apparently bitten the dust. Cope’s Rule, developed a century ago by dinosaur bone hunter Edwin Cope, stated simply that plants and animals evolve into larger and larger sizes. According to the Chicago Tribune (1/16/97), Cope’s Rule has been taught as true in high schools and universities for the past century.

However, David Jablonski, a paleontologist from the University of Chicago, had the audacity to actually collect data to see if Cope’s rule was true. He spent 10 years measuring fossils from 1,086 species of snails, oysters, and clams. In all, he made over 6,000 measurements with his trusty calipers. His conclusion: Cope’s Rule is not true.

How could such a rule, widely believed and taught by a century’s worth of eminent scientists, not be true? How were the experts in biology, paleontology, and evolution hoodwinked for a century? Surely such learned men and women would have easily recognized Cope’s Rule as bogus. Explanations given by two of the current crop of eminent scientists for the acceptance of this century-long evolutionary boo-boo were telling.

Steven Jay Gould, the noted Harvard paleontologist, wrote the following in a commentary in the same January 16, 1997, issue of Nature magazine where Jablonski’s research was published:

“One would think that issues so fundamental, and so eminently testable, had been conclusively resolved long ago — except for a pervasive trait of the human psyche,” Gould wrote. “We tend to pick most ?notable’ cases out of general pools, often for idiosyncratic reasons that can only distort a proper scientific investigation.”

Translation: Evolutionists tend not to look at all the data as a whole, but are happy to selectively search for data that supports their theory.

Douglas Erwin, Smithsonian paleontologist:

“I think it’s going to be a classic demonstration of the fact that a lot of what we think of as trends aren’t trends at all,” Erwin said. “There is, instead, some sort of perceptual bias that wants to find trends.”

Translation: Evolutionists see trends and processes where none actually exist. Could it be — dare we say — that perhaps the whole general theory of evolution is a “classic demonstration of the fact that a lot of what we think of as trends aren’t trends at all?”

Although we laud science when it corrects its mistakes, and evolutionists are not the only ones who tend to see what they want to in data, why do so many scientists {And their followers} arrogantly claim evolution is a fact? Perhaps this latest egg on the face of evolutionists will instill a bit of humility in the “evolution is a fact” breed of scientists. (I can dream, can’t I?) If they were wrong for a hundred years about such an easily testable thing such as Cope’s Rule, teaching it as a “fact”, could they be wrong about the virtually untestable general theory of evolution?

The author of the Tribune article said, “The findings are not only certain to give the field of evolution a good shake, but also serve as a reminder that not all the dusty relics lying around museums and universities are bones and stones. Some are ideas.” Yeah, like the idea of a blind and random evolutionary process creating order, design and complexity out of nothing.

One thing is for sure, someone should take away Jablonski’s calipers before he starts collecting more data. Who knows what more damage can be done to the theory of evolution when its adherents actually look at all the data! 

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.“

Albert Einstein