Well, they apparently have the 60 votes needed to get the Senate’s bill passed. Whoopee.
We might just have a new law on the books early next year. How do you feel about that? Are you pleased overall? Or do you want something else?
Here is your chance to tell me how you feel about some things. You can “vote” on as many as you like, you’re not limited to just one. Feel free to tell me whether you would add questions to this poll. But for now, take a shot at this.
And if you think I should include something else, some other question, just comment at the bottom.
Maybe it will go nowhere. But who knows, maybe we can make somebody listen after all.
There is still plenty of debate over whether man-made global warming is threatening life as we know it. In the minds of many, it is an absolute certainty that we are dooming ourselves. I don’t want so much to talk about that, though. I want to talk about the scientific community, and their worldview.
Apparently, they are not as interested in scientific discovery of important truths, as they are clandestine cover-ups, collusion and group-think. Many have leaped to the conclusion that they were hiding a truth that was different than what they wanted the rest of the world to believe. That may be true, but it may just be that they have become so used to this kind of science-vs-the-world mentality, that they behaved the way they did even though it was not necessary.
What am I talking about? Consider the fact that this thing has been called The Greatest Scandal in Modern Science. That’s a bit of an overstatement, in my view. It was a scandal, to be sure. The revelation of the emails did not reveal the whole global warming idea as a falsified concoction. Not at all. Yet it did reveal something. It revealed a conspiracy to cover up facts – a conspiracy to protect the “favored hypothesis.”
Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a “unified” view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the “common cause”; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to “hide the decline” of temperature in certain inconvenient data.
Inconvenient data?
Favored hypothesis?
Wow.
Some see this as one incident – one isolated occurrence of inappropriate behavior. But what if this were to be seen as just the latest evidence that something unsavory is being cooked up? What if we were to discover a similar pattern of conspiracy to promote another one of science’s most favored hypotheses? What if we were to discover a similar pattern covering not just a brief moment in time, but a period of time covering several generations of human population? And what if the favored hypothesis being “protected” is the grandaddy of them all? What if we were to see it in the real “greatest scandal in modern science? What if we were to see it in the grand doctrine of Darwinian evolution by natural selection?
The pattern has been there for decades. We have allowed them to pull the wool over our eyes. We have allowed them to tell us that we are not to teach children to think – not when doing so would put their favored hypotheses up to the light of questioning and examination. “Evolution is science!”, we are told, and “Intelligent Design is just religion masquerading as truth!” And we buy it. We buy it because we are ignorant of the unalterable fact that every scientific hypothesis starts with at least one unscientific presumption. And we buy it because we are ignorant of the distinction between religion and faith. It is impossible to live at all without taking some things on faith. We know that to be true. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the misdirection that reminds us of the separation of church and state. It’s time to snap out of it.
The favored hypothesis is that life, after having started by some unknown natural means, evolved from one species to another using a mechanism called natural selection. There are two presuppositions built into that sentence. Neither is or ever will be testable, so both are assumptions built not on cold, logical, empirical data, but on faith. Scientists who assume life started naturally, do so not based on observable data, but by faith. They simply do not believe that anything supernatural exists, so only a natural explanation is possible. Likewise, even when examining evidence suggesting that one species has evolved into another, they can only assume that the mechanism at work is natural selection. It’s a nice theory. The evidence fits the hypothesis – reasonably well anyway. But that is not a proof.
What if there were some other explanation? What if the Biblical version of creation really is the explanation of not just all of life, but all of everything? And what if life was actually designed? What if the mechanism at work in getting one species to evolve into another is not natural selection, but the operation of a designed mechanism not yet fully understood – a mechanism that could be observed at work in the natural world? Or what if the Creator actually existed not only in the spiritual (non-material) world, but in the material one as well. What if the mechanism at work is God’s actual creative work, still going on, moment by moment, millions of times every day?
These questions are not really being subjected to any real scientific thought. That’s because, in the greatest scandal in modern science, the favored hypothesis has been covertly guarded and protected for decades.
The Washington Post editorializes what it calls “the coming debt panic,” generated by a realization that
Getting the debt back down to a reasonable level will require extraordinary, almost unimaginable, fiscal discipline and political cooperation. Failing to do so will lower the national standard of living and ultimately threaten America’s economic stability.
The Post cites the Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform recommendation that Congress move to stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio at 60 percent over the next decade, as opposed to the 85 percent projected by the Congressional Budget Office, then reduce debt to 40 percent over the longer term. But what would this require?
The deficit level leading to a sustainable ratio of debt to GDP equals the rate of economic growth multiplied by the target debt/GDP ratio. In this case, the target ratio of debt/GDP is 40 percent and the CBO projects an average nominal rate of GDP growth of around 4.6 percent. The result is a budget deficit of 1.8 percent of GDP.
Now consider the budget deficits we’re looking at: CBO projects an average annual deficit over the next 10 years of more than 5 percent of GDP under President Obama’s budget, implying significant tax increases or spending cuts would be needed now. In the following decade, when entitlement spending really kicks in, things will only get more difficult.
If you can’t believe this can be done—and I here expressed some skepticism that our elected officials are capable of doing it—then we have two choices. First, a commission approach to reforming entitlements and potentially the tax code, with representation from across the political spectrum and an expedited process for legislative consideration. Or second, ultimately a true panic situation when it becomes clear that the federal government is unable to get its borrowing under control and our lenders attempt to limit their losses. I sketched out what this might look like here.
Left-leaning groups protest that an entitlement commission bypasses the legislative process. But the alternatives may be even worse.
The above is from an article by Andrew Biggs at the American Enterprise Blog entitlted Our Coming Debt Panic.
Here’s my two cents worth.
The government, as Ronald Reagan told us, IS the problem. We need to get them to stop trying to fix what’s wrong, stop tying our hands behind our backs, and let us get to work fixing things.
The US Debt is now over $12 trillion. You probably knew that. What you may not realize is that we have another cute little item called “unfunded liabilities” on our balance sheet, and that number absolutely dwarfs the debt! It’s over $106 trillion.
If the government promises to pay you something later, rather than now, it’s not called a debt. It works like a debt, but it’s not counted as one. Still, it is money the government is going to have to pay out some day. And if they can’t pay it, guess what they do? There are only three things: Raise taxes, borrow more money, or (gasp) default on the debt. I do not believe we are anywhere close to that nightmare. But it is not a pretty picture.
Check it out for yourself. The US National Debt Clock is now online. It’s too big to fit here, so you’ll have to leave this page. But spend some time with it. It’s fun watching the numbers roll by.
Is it really any wonder we are struggling to maintain our superiority in world commerce? We have met the enemy, and he, to paraphrase Pogo, is us. Will we regain our role of the world’s leading nation in commerce? Alas, I do not believe we will. Worse, I fear we are headed for fates far worse than of losing our competitive edge. Why? Because we have trashed the ideals that made us great.
When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they laid the cornerstones for a new kind of country: one governed not by a monarchy, but by “We the People”. By way of review, it starts thus:
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitles them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of governments. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
That first paragraph isn’t quoted nearly as often as the second. But pause just a second and consider: their purpose was to declare themselves “separate but equal” and that doing so to them was given “by nature” and by “nature’s God”. This they saw as something to which they had been entitled not by the mere act of declaring themselves independent, but by the God of nature.
Then come those ringing words that are unique among the world’s most famous and significant documents. But let’s see what we believe as contrasted against the Declaration’s noble ideals.
We hold these truths to be self-evident – What do we as a society hold to be self-evident? Not much. We have come to believe that all things are relative. There are no absolute truths anymore. What’s true for you is not necessarily true for me, and you have no right to declare my truth untrue, even in the face of objective verifyability.
…that all men are created equal – We give this one lip service. Sure, we have finally given black people the rights they were denied for so long. But slavery remains rampant. It’s just underground. We believe in Darwin, not God, and that gives the strong the right to do with the weak as they please.
…that they are endowed by their Creator – What creator? We weren’t created at all. We evolved.
…with certain unalienable rights – So if there is no creator, there are no rights that have been endowed upon us by one. We give ourselves rights. Or the government gives us rights. Sadly, many of our elected leaders actually believe that they are the givers of rights, and that they have the power to take them away.
…that among these are life – We have the right to live. That’s a right given to us by our creator. Without God, we as a society or as a government can deny this right. All we need to do is deny that certain groups are really not people at all. The Nazis did it with Jews, Stalin and Pol Pot did it with dissenters, and we do it with unborn babies. We just “thank god” that our mothers didn’t abort us.
…liberty- There is a distinction between freedom and liberty. Your freedom, it has been said, ends where your fist meets my face. Freedom is the unrestricted ability to act as one will. The trouble is that freedom without restraint is anarchy, because no one is guided by any overriding ethical or moral framework. If I have liberty, I along with the people I owe allegiance to, have the freedom to determine our own courses of action.
…and the pursuit of happiness. – In today’s society this is taken as the right to do whatever makes me happy, so it is much like freedom. I believe that what the framers meant here was more like a right to pursue that which would be good not just for ones self, but for society in general. Unfortunately, we too often don’t make the distinction.
To paraphrase the next section, people consent to be governed only so long. Inevitably, if they are not governed under just laws rather than the whims of the powerful, they will rise up in revolution. Indeed, it is their duty to do so. So after a litany of despotic actions by the King of England, they declare themselves independent thus:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliance, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
What do we hold sacred? Would we make such a pledge, knowing as they did that it could be put severely to the test, and that they, each one, would be called upon to give up their lives and their fortunes. But “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence”, they knew without doubt or reservation that they would never be called upon to give up their sacred honor.
Dorothy Sayres once said
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, It’s the accomplice of the other sins, and their worst punishment. It’s the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
John Lennon sings to a rapturous generation:
Imagine
Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
It sounds beautiful, but like all dreams of utopia, it’s a myth. We simply cannot ever achieve such a wonderful state, because evil is real, and the line between good and evil, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, runs through the heart of every human being. That’s why Pogo was right.
We aren’t all that. We are incapable of governing ourselves without allegiance to a higher power. And since we refuse to bow, as our forefathers did, we are toast.
Oh, it will take a few generations. We may even wake up one day and pledge to each other all that we are and all that we hold sacred in order to recapture what we once had. But until then, future generations will look at us and ask “What were they thinking?”
It’s amusing how we Christians are often accused of being intolerant. We keep insisting that there is right and wrong, that there is one way, and one way only, to “come to the Father”, and that Jesus is that way. Many people who are not Christian want us to accept their belief that many paths lead to salvation, and label us as intolerant that we don’t believe that.
But who’s really the intolerant one? Those who insist that some things are mutually exclusive, or those who insist that all things can coexist, and anyone who doesn’t agree with that is intolerant?
The term “mutually exclusive”, of course, means that if one thing is true the other must be false, and that’s true regardless of whether A or B is the one that is true. So we believe that Jesus actually said that He was (is) the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6). We believe He believed that to be true. And we believe He was speaking not as a man, but as God Himself. Scripture testifies to that. (Luke 24:25-27 says “He said to them, ‘How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory? And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.’”). So if He said it, and if He was who He claimed to be (I and the Father are one – John 10:10), then it would be folly not to take Him at His Word. So, yes, that’s intolerant. We do not tolerate the idea that we should accept a lie as the truth.
Ironically, those who call us intolerant don’t see themselves as being intolerant. Yet they are. They say ‘Hey, we should all just get along, and anyone who tells me I am wrong about such an important idea is doing me wrong by being intolerant of me’. And they’re right in a sense. But importantly, there is a distinction. We tolerate the person, but we don’t accept as true something we believe to be untrue. So they misinterpret our intolerance of their belief as intolerance of them. They take it personally.
But here’s the thing. If you were driving along at 60 miles an hour, and I was right behind you and you made a turn onto a road that I knew led to a collapsed bridge, what would you have me do? Should I be tolerant, and let you continue on as if nothing was wrong, or should I do whatever I could to get you to pull over so I could explain the situation? You might say, sure, keep me from going over the cliff. But what if I told you that I wasn’t really sure the bridge was down? What if I only believed it was down, because I read it on a blog earlier in the day? I might believe the source to be completely reliable, and believing that, would feel that my failure to act would send you to your death.
So I honk my horn, wave and yell from behind, but you pay no attention. Then I get up real close and yell and wave. Then I pull alongside and yell and wave. You go ‘What is this, a crazy person?’ So I try to cut you off, but fail to do so. Now road rage kicks in and you start trying to cut me off.
At that point, I’d probably give up, not being willing to die trying to protect your life. And as I fade into your rear view mirror, you mutter something like ‘What a jerk!’, and continue in your anger toward me and your intolerance of me right up to the point when you crash through the barricades and plummet to your death.
Some time ago, George Gilder (surprise, he’s not just a technology guy) wrote the following:
Our high schools are among the worst performers per dollar in the world – especially in math and science. Our biology classes, in particular, espouse anti-industrial propaganda about global warming and the impact of DDT on the eggshells of eagles while telling just-so stories about the random progression from primordial soup to Britney Spears. In a self-refuting materialist superstition, teachers deny the role of ideas and purposes in evolution and hence implicitly in their own thought.
The Darwinist materialist paradigm, however, is about to face the same revolution that Newtonian physics faced 100 years ago. Just as physicists discovered that the atom was not a massy particle, as Newton believed, but a baffling quantum arena accessible only through mathematics, so too are biologists coming to understand that the cell is not a simple lump of protoplasm, as Charles Darwin believed. It’s a complex information-processing machine comprising tens of thousands of proteins arranged in fabulously intricate algorithms of communication and synthesis. The human body contains some 60 trillion cells. Each one stores information in DNA codes, processes and replicates it in three forms of RNA and thousands of supporting enzymes, exquisitely supplies the system with energy, and seals it in semipermeable phospholipid membranes. It is a process subject to the mathematical theory of information, which shows that even mutations occurring in cells at the gigahertz pace of a Pentium 4 and selected at the rate of a Google search couldn’t beget the intricate interwoven fabric of structure and function of a human being in such a short amount of time. Natural selection should be taught for its important role in the adaption of species, but Darwinian materialism is an embarrassing cartoon of modern science.
What is the alternative? Intelligent design at least asks the right questions. In a world of science that still falls short of a rigorous theory of human consciousness or of the big bang, intelligent design theory begins by recognizing that everywhere in nature, information is hierarchical and precedes its embodiment. The concept precedes the concrete. The contrary notion that the world of mind, including science itself, bubbled up randomly from a prebiotic brew has inspired all the reductionist futilities of the 20th century, from Marx’s obtuse materialism to environmental weather panic to zero-sum Malthusian fears over population. In biology classes, our students are not learning the largely mathematical facts of 21st-century science; they’re imbibing the consolations of a faith-driven 19th-century materialist myth.
I have been making the assertion lately that the materialist-atheist worldview is incoherent. In saying so, I am not calling names or just being antagonistic. I am saying that is does not cohere. I am stating an opinion that I am hoping will invite some intelligent exchange.
What are the possible explanations for “human consciousness” that support an atheistic worldview? Does the mere fact that we have bigger brains than “other animals” explain how thought itself comes about? If abiogenesis can explain (and I do not believe it ever will) how the first life forms came to be by natural forces, how will we explain human thought? How will we explain the information coding present in every cell – coding so complex that no existing computer technology even comes close.
And what explanation can there be for the cause of the so-called big bang? And how can we ignore the elephant in the room that no explosion ever produced order. Yet in our universe, we have mind-boggling degrees of order.
So why do we persist in twisting ourselves up into knots in order to make reality fit into our “God is myth” view of reality? Intelligent design is at least worthy of further scientific study. Darwinism requires at least as much faith as Deism. By their abject refusal to accept either possibility, well-intentioned groups of people stifle creative thought and keep the world engaged in the biggest wild goose chase of all time!
You’ve done it again, Maranda. Are you even aware that you are arguing against points I did not raise in this post? I never said that I would like to teach creation in public schools (I wouldn’t). I never said that they should stop teaching evolution (they shouldn’t). And twice you have invoked the talking snake, whereas I never mentioned it or even alluded to it.
What I advocate is teaching kids to think. That’s a horse of a far different color than teaching them “facts”. They tell you, for example, that we evolved up from lower species, and that the more evolving we did, the more sophisticated and intelligent and downright attractive we became. Then before you have a chance to ask how that’s even possible without some force or entity or intelligence at work, guiding the process, they tell you that the mechanism that caused it to work is “natural selection”. Somehow we’re supposed to just accept natural selection as a done deal – a closed case. But is it?
A friend of mine says this about natural selection:
Natural selection isn’t even a mechanism. By definition, a mechanism is something that does something. NS, doesn’t qualify because at best it is merely a descriptive term to describe certain observations after the fact. That doesn’t tell us a thing about what mechanism caused something to be the way we observe it. And all those supposed successive slight modifications haven’t been observed either….they’ve been supposed, proposed and speculated upon, but never observed.
What we have observed is adaptation which merely means that organisms have a remarkable ability to adapt to changes in thier environment. One of the interesting things about adaptation is that in nearly every case, those adaptations tend to ocillate around a mean depending on what environmental pressures are present or absent over some period of time. None of that explains how the organism came to posses adaptability in the first place.
And then we have some rather insurmountable problems for Darwinian evolution, such as irreducible complexity found in many biological systems, especially at the cellular level. Or specified complexity. Neither of these can be explained by Darwinian evolution, but are explained by intelligent cause.
So without the doctrine of natural selection, Darwinists are exposed as emperors without any clothes. They are left to say in effect, ‘OK, if natural selection is not a mechanism, or if it is a mechanism, but can’t be proven scientifically, can’t we just accept that it’s a reasonable thing to assume? ‘
The answer is yes, it is reasonable to build a hypothesis on that assumption. But that’s not what they do. What they do is to obfuscate the fact that they did that little slight of hand and simply move on, as if they had just made an irrefutable statement. Red is a color. Jet engines are loud. All living things eventually die. Those are all statements of fact. We would have a hard time proving any of them true scientifically. But it is reasonable to assume they’re true, because we have seen them to be true every time we have observed them, and we know of no exceptions to them being true. But no such claim could be made of natural selection. So it’s completely bogus to assume it’s fact.
Meanwhile, the main point of the Stephen Meyer article is that information always has an intelligent source. Here again, we can’t prove that, but it’s reasonable to assume it’s true because each and every observation has seen it to be true, and it seems reasonable to assume its complexity and non-random arrangement required something more than the working of nature.
What’s your answer to that Maranda?
While I’m at it, I want to also suggest that there are a few important points you seem to be ignoring. One is this: If Darwinian evolution is true, why do we care what other people think of us? Natural selection seems to work by getting the strong to overpower the weak – by having the strong and fast eat the weak and slow. If I steal your purse, you yell ‘Stop thief!’ and have me arrested for doing you wrong. But Darwin says I was just doing what came naturally – trying to survive. Listen to what Annie Dillard had to say on the subject in her Pulitzer prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. While trying to commune with nature, she saw that evolution loves death, not life. She saw a waterbug sting a frog and suck its brains out. it was one of the most horrifying and brutal things she had ever seen. She wrote:
Cock Robin may die the most gruesome of slow deaths, and nature is no less pleased. The sun comes up, the creek rolls on, the survivors still sing. I cannot feel that way about your death, nor you about mine, nor either of us about the robin’s… We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit. It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all? Either this world – nature – is a monster ,or I am a freak, because I believe that the strong should not eat the weak, but everything in nature says it should.
All right then. It is our emotions which are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.
The point is that we know down deep inside of us that people matter. I matter. So do you. So does your neighbor. If we act on that, if we protect our neighbor from harm rather than eating him, we are acting counter to what evolution tells us we must do to survive.
Steven C. Meyer is one of the brightest lights in the known universe when it comes to articulating the concept he calls intelligent design. I say he calls it that, because when he uses that term, he means something very specific. It may not mean what you think it does.
I believe in evolution. I believe it explains a lot of what many scientists say it does. But I do not believe that the evidence is there for a few of the important elements of Darwin’s grand theory. The first is natural selection.
The following article, from the Boston Globe (read the source here) is a pretty good case in point.
IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson’s demand for a “separation between church and state’’ has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson’s principle of separation, many critics of intelligent design assume that this visionary Founding Father would agree with them.
But would he? For too long, an aspect of Jefferson’s visionary thought has been ignored, hidden away as too uncomfortable for public discussion – his support for intelligent design.
In 1823, when materialist evolutionary ideas had long been circulating, Jefferson wrote to John Adams and insisted that the scientific evidence of design in nature was clear: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.’’ It was on empirical grounds, not religious ones, that he took this view.
Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.’’
The “ultimate cause’’ and “fabricator of all things’’ that Jefferson invoked was also responsible for the “design’’ of life’s endlessly diverse forms as well as the manifestly special endowments of human beings. Moreover, because the evidence of “Nature’s God’’ was publicly accessible to all and did not depend upon a special appeal to religious authority, Jefferson believed that it provided a basis in reason for the protection of individual liberty. Thus, the Declaration of Independence asserted that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.’’
Of course, many people assume that Jefferson’s views, having been written before Darwin’s “Origin of Species,’’ are now scientifically obsolete. But Jefferson has been vindicated by modern scientific discoveries that Darwin could not have anticipated. For example, in 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions – the information – for building the crucial protein molecules and machines the cell needs to survive. Francis Crick later developed this idea with his famous “sequence hypothesis,’’ according to which the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. As Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.’’
This discovery has made acute a longstanding scientific mystery that Darwin never addressed or solved: the mystery of how the very first life on earth arose. To date no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information in DNA needed to build the first living cell on earth. Yet modern scientists who argue for intelligent design do not do so merely because natural processes have failed to explain the origin of the information in cells. Instead, they argue for design because systems possessing these features invariably arise from intelligent causes.
DNA functions like a software program. We know that software comes from programmers. Information – whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal – always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides a strong scientific reason for concluding that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source.
Design is an inference from biological data, not a deduction from religious authority. Jefferson said just that, and based his political thinking on it. The evidence for what he presciently called “Nature’s God’’ is stronger than ever. Our nation’s existence, with its guarantee to protect each person’s “inalienable rights,’’ may be counted among the fruits of Jefferson’s belief in intelligent design.
Stephen C. Meyer is director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. His new book is “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.’’
Information…always arises from an intelligent source. I repeat that here just in case you missed it. There are no exceptions. Information by its definition requires an inform-er and an inform-ee. An intelligent designer does the arranging of a message and the means of transmission, and someone or or something thing receives it, processes it, and exhibits some resulting behavior. Why is that so hard to get?
Yogi Berra said that you can observe a lot just by looking. If we look, we see information present in DNA. By logic, we should be looking for the intelligent source of that information, not twisting ourselves up in knots trying to explain how it came to be by random fluctuations.
Google sponsored the video that appears below. To my mind, Dr. Tim Keller’s explanations are exceptionally clear and persuasive. The video is over an hour in length, so let me recap some of the strong points here.
Belief in God can be seen as requiring faith, but belief in ‘No God’ does too. In fact, Keller says belief is like a ladder with three rungs. Rung one is belief that it’s a draw – it takes as much faith to believe in God is to not believe. Rung two is belief that it takes more faith to disbelieve than to believe. And rung three is that you come to realize that you can reason to a point of probability, but it takes personal commitment to get to certainty.
All of the arguments that purport to prove that God does not exist fail. For example, the argument from evil and suffering. There can’t be an all-powerful and loving God. Either He is not loving and therefore chooses not to stop it, or he is loving, but not powerful enough to do so. This is an old argument, but the effort to prove that evil disproves God is now acknowledged on almost all sides in philosophy to be completely bankrupt. How do we know it’s senseless? How do we know there isn’t a good reason for it? The only answer is we can’t think of any good reason. If there is a God big and powerful enough to be mad at for allowing all the evil and suffering, then He has to be big and powerful enough to allow it to continue for reasons we can’t think of. So it’s a tie. It can neither be proved or disproved.
What about this one: If there really was a God, why have believers in Him perpetrated so much violence? The answer is that there must be something in the human heart that is so prone to violence and oppression that it can twist any worldview or philosophy into violence. Out of the soil of Buddhism and Shinto grew the Japanese militarism of WW2. Out of Islam comes global terrorism. So that’s a tie too. [I would add that out of the soil of secular humanism comes the belief that a baby in the womb is not really a person, with the result that since Roe v Wade, over 50,000,000 babies have been denied the right to life in the USA alone.]
Maybe we invented human rights in order to give ourselves something the rest of the animals don’t have. Or maybe we were made in the image of God, who attaches great value to each and every human life. There’s no way to prove that either way, so that one’s a tie too.
There are those who say that Christians make universal truth claims, and that nobody can know what’s true. Fair enough. How do you know THAT’s true? Isn’t that statement a universal truth claim itself? So that’s a tie too.
You can’t prove there’s a God (or that there’s no God). In fact, you can’t prove anything. I can’t prove I’m not a butterfly dreaming I’m a man. There are no non-circular arguments for the proposition that your memories work. Your memory could have come into existence 5 minutes ago and you think its farther back than that. How can you prove otherwise? And that includes your moral convictions. You can’t prove any of your moral convictions. Humans are valuable? People have rights? You can’t prove that. So how can you say to God, prove you’re there, or I have no responsibility to you?
We’re still on the first rung. If you can’t prove that there is no God, then you’re living your life as if there is not, and that’s an act of faith.
For rung two, he uses two examples: The fine tuning of the universe, and human rights.
The universe is so finely tuned that life would not be possible in it if any one of over 200 variables were off by the tiniest of margins. Here are just 10 of them:
Strong nuclear force constant
Weak nuclear force constant
Gravitational force constant
Electromagnetic force constant
Ratio of electromagnetic force constant to gravitational force constant
Ratio of proton to electron mass
Ratio of number of protons to number of electrons
Ratio of proton to electron charge
Expansion rate of the universe
Mass density of the universe
Another 83 can be seen on the Reasons to Believe website. So the point is that even though that is not proof that “God is”, it seems pretty persuasive to say that it would be more reasonable to believe that the universe was designed by a powerful being than to say that, in spite of the astronomical odds against all of those factors coming together by chance, that it’s just the result of time and chance.
Then he turns to the human rights argument. There is something fundamentally goofy about the notion that human beings have any value. That is, if you’re a materialist-naturalist. All we see in nature is the strong eating the weak. Nature loves death far more than life. And it is destructive, not creative. The very grand idea Darwin had was that life evolved from simple to complex – and that in so doing, only the strong and fit had any ‘right’ to live.
So how do we derive the notion that humans have value? Where did we get the idea that humans have rights?
Annie Dillard, in the classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, after watching as a waterbug stung a frog and sucked its brains out before her very eyes, said this:
Cock Robin may die the most gruesome of slow deaths, and nature is no less pleased. The sun comes up, the creek rolls on, the survivors still sing. I cannot feel that way about your death, nor you about mine, nor either of us about the robin’s… We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit. It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all? Either this world – nature – is a monster , or I am a freak, because I believe that the strong should not eat the weak, but everything in nature says it should.
All right then. It is our emotions which are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed.
You first.
He then adds this: A man who slipped and finds himself falling off a cliff spies a small branch growing out of the cliff face. He does not know whether it will prove to be strong enough to hold his weight, but he grabs it anyway. We would all agree that he made the right choice. After all, not grabbing it will result in certain death. He may die anyway if he grabs and it does not hold, but what is there to lose? The point is that a weak faith in a strong object is better than strong faith with a weak object.
Finally, he points out that Hamlet can only know Shakespeare if Shakespeare were to write himself into the story. God knew that, so He did just that. By giving us Jesus, he wrote himself into the story.
So I would add this: Belief in the God of the Christian bible is the only reasonable way to live. Try it. You’ll discover way more than you ever thought was there.
My blog-friend Regis Nicoll is a gifted writer. He just posted this on Breakpoint.org, and I want to pass it on to you in its entirety. Before we get to the article, here’s a preliminary comment from Regis:
In November, the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to resume operation after its magnets were destroyed in an operational malfunction that occurred over one year ago. As media attention turns its focus back on this ambitious project, I thought it might be useful to re-run a piece that I wrote September, a year ago, during the initial start-up of the LHC.
The Large Hadron Collider
By Regis Nicoll|Published Date: September 12, 2008
“It’s called the Large Hadron Collider, and its purpose is simple but ambitious: to crack the code of the physical world; to figure out what the universe is made of; in other words, to get to the very bottom of things.” (Joel Achenbach, National Geographic)
THE ANSWER MACHINE Ever since man began marveling at the grandeur of the universe, he’s been itching to know what it is made of and what makes it tick. Now, after millennia of wondering and theorizing, there is hope that answers to some of nature’s most tightly held secrets may be just around the corner.
On September 10, researchers cranked up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and sent a beam of protons racing around a mammoth underground track. It is all in preparation of some “smashing” experiments that will begin on October 21.
Located in Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is the world’s largest experimental machine. Buried 300 feet down in a 17-mile circular tunnel, the $9 billion apparatus includes thousands of tons of magnets, detectors, cryogenics, and structural steel. The leviathan proportions are needed to accelerate opposing beams of protons to near the speed of light, so that they will crash into each other and recreate the extreme temperatures and energies that existed within the first moments of the big bang.
The hope is that by mimicking the conditions of our newborn universe, the “answer machine” will crack the lid on some vexing riddles of the cosmos, like:
WHAT IS DARK ENERGY AND DARK MATTER? In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered the constant expansion of the universe, as revealed by stellar redshift measurements. Nearly 70 years later, light spectra measurements of supernovae indicated that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating! Scrambling to identify the cosmic power source, physicists dubbed it, “dark energy.” Subsequent measurements revealed that dark energy accounts for 70 percent of all the stuff in the universe.
On top of that, gravitational anomalies observed in stellar objects indicated that there is a sizeable source of invisible (“dark”) matter affecting their movements. When “dark matter” is added to dark energy, it turns out that dark stuff makes up 95 percent of the cosmos.
Prominent physicists Lawrence Krauss, Ed Witten, and Steven Weinberg have all called this cosmic “darkness” the biggest mystery in physics.
DOES THE UNIVERSE CONTAIN EXTRA DIMENSIONS?
The standard model of physics is one of the biggest triumphs of science. Yet for all of its success in describing the building blocks of nature, researchers haven’t a clue as to why those “Legos” have the properties they do—nor how the quantum processes that govern them relate to the large scale structure of the universe shaped by general relativity.
A growing cadre of investigators believes that string theory may hold answers to these questions. One of the more provocative features of that theory is the requirement for at least 10, rather than three, spatial dimensions.
The extra seven or so dimensions are thought to be tightly enfolded into 3-D spacetime, and detectable with probes that are many orders of magnitude more powerful than LHC. Nonetheless, it is hoped that maybe, just maybe, LHC will provide a hint of their existence.
WHERE’S ALL THE ANTIMATTER? According to sacrosanct laws of conservation, there should be equal amounts of anti-matter and matter; such that for every elemental particle, there should be a corresponding anti-particle. For instance, for the electron, there is the anti-electron (or positron); and for the proton there is the anti-proton. These particle pairs are identical in every way, save for their equal and opposite electronic charges and magnetic spins.
Problem is, the known cosmos appears to be comprised almost solely of matter. What happened to all of the anti-matter? Why is our cosmic home partial towards matter?
But perhaps the most fundamental question that investigators hope to answer is, “What is matter?”
WHAT MAKES MATTER MATERIAL? Matter is the stuff of everyday common experience. Trees, rocks, flesh, planets and stars are all made of matter. Matter, in turn, is comprised of quarks, electrons and neutrinos—distinguished from other particle types by their mass.
Commonly associated with weight, mass is the measure of an object’s resistance to an applied force. But two questions that have plagued researchers are “What gives an object its mass?” and “Why do some particles (like electrons) have mass, and others (like photons) do not?”
String theorists propose that mass is a byproduct of the tension and vibration patterns of Planck-sized strings. String theory skeptics think otherwise.
In 1964 physicist Peter Higgs conjectured that mass was caused by an invisible field that pervades the entire universe. Comprised of what were later dubbed “Higgs particles,” this field can be thought of as a kind of cosmic molasses that preferentially inhibits the motion of certain particle types. Because of its ubiquity and its importance to the standard model of physics, many pundits refer to Higgs as the “God Particle.”
As it turns out, the energy of the LHC is sufficiently large to detect the Higgs if, indeed, it exists. Thus, of all the mysteries that the LHC is hoped to solve, verification of Higgs is the most promising.
REAL FEARS Without question, the LHC is one of the boldest and most expensive scientific ventures ever undertaken. And with all the money and hope riding on it, there is real fear that the “answer machine” could fail to deliver. As writer Joel Achenbach explains:
Such a big machine needs to produce big science, big answers, something that can generate a headline as well as interesting particles. But even an endeavor of this scale isn’t going to answer all the important questions of matter and energy. Not a chance. This is because a century of particle physics has given us a fundamental truth: Reality doesn’t reveal its secrets easily.
Actually, Mr. Achenbach understates the situation. For the “fundamental truth” is that the recipe of Reality is impenetrable. It’s not a matter of accelerator power, experimental design, or data handling; it’s a matter of ontology.
Ever since Werner Heisenberg stunned the scientific community with quantum uncertainty, reductionistic materialism—which holds that Reality consists of “things” all the way down—has been “on the ropes.” Physical objects can broken down to a certain point, but beyond the quantum curtain lies “a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things and facts.” The inconvenient truth for reductionists is that what we find in the quantum mysterium depends on how we look, not on what is actually there.
Imagine that there is a mystery object in a black wooden box. Also imagine that you are told to reconstruct the object by firing bullets into it and examining the resulting shrapnel.
Riddling the box with a .22 automatic yields only sparks; strafing it with an uzi produces whiffs of smoke; and blasting it with a 50-caliber machine gun sends chunks of dented, gnarled, and twisted metal flying helter-skelter across the room.
After your “Lucky Luciano” melee, you collect the debris and start piecing it together. But hard as you try, you can’t arrange it into any recognizable object. That’s because the shrapnel—not to mention the sparks and smoke—does not reflect what is actually there; but rather, distorted, deformed artifacts created by your frenetic fusillade.
THE EVER-RECEDING CORRIDOR The same is true for particle-smashing experiments. If we fire an electron into a target with a certain energy, we produce neutrinos. If we change the energy of the electron, we detect pions. If we change the beam to protons, we see muons. But that does not mean that those particles exist in any objective sense. Instead, they were created out of the quantum foam by the ordnance of our investigation.
Nevertheless, Joel Achenbach expresses towering hopes for the LHC: “By smashing pieces of matter together . . . the LHC could reveal the particles and forces that wrote the rules for everything that followed.”
I have little doubt that the experiments in Geneva will make history with some unexpected and, possibly, groundbreaking discoveries. But even should those experiments rise to the level of Mr. Achenbach’s expectations, investigators will soon find themselves descending the ever-receding corridor of materialism, wondering: Where did those primordial “Legos” come from, and how did they come to “write rules”?
LHC enthusiasts would do well to ponder the words of quantum pioneer, Max Planck:
“All scientists who have any depth to their work will find the hand of God in Nature or else a mystery that they refuse to identify with God.”
Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a BreakPoint Centurion. His “All Things Examined” column appears on BreakPoint every other Friday. Serving as a men’s ministry leader and worldview teacher in his community, Regis publishes a free weekly commentary to stimulate thought on current issues from a Christian perspective. To be placed on this free e-mail distribution list, e-mail him at: centurion51@aol.com.
Couldn’t have said it any better myself, Regeis.
In November, the Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to resume operation after its magnets were destroyed in an operational malfunction that occurred over one year ago. As media attention turns its focus back on this ambitious project, I thought it might be useful to re-run a piece that I wrote September, a year ago, during the initial start-up of the LHC.
the assertion lately that the materialist-atheist worldview is incoherent. In saying so, I am not calling names or just being antagonistic. I am saying that is does not cohere. I am stating an opinion that I am hoping will invite some intelligent exchange.
Google sponsored the video that appears below. To my mind, Dr. Tim Keller’s explanations are exceptionally clear and persuasive. The video is over an hour in length, so let me recap some of the strong points here.