Thursday, July 20, 2006

Truth Versus Fact

Science is the pursuit of facts, not truth. A scientist leaves the ownership of truth to philosophers and theologians. The currency of science is the provable, not the believable.

This is the kind of mumbo-jumbo you'd hear if you were a pupil in thousands of biology, archaeology, and paleontology classrooms. But this kind of thinking is a rejection of the concepts of both truth and fact.

Truth is, by definition, the extent of all truisms. Everything that is true is part of truth. In every trial, the man is either guilty or innocent, never both, never neither. Despite what the fallible court may rule, a truth exists. Hidden from all human knowledge, perhaps, but true nonetheless. The thing that is true is also a fact. Fact, in scientific terms is something that is *observably* true, but not different in substance from truth.

The purpose of this rhetorical slight of hand is to disarm the still under-developed critical thinking abilities of young university students. What better way to supplant the truth that the students know than by convincing them that there is room for two truths in their world view: one under the banner of truth, the other flying the flag of fact.

As the impressionable students make space in their minds for the second truth, they never realize that they are doing so at the expense of the first. After several years of thinking this way, they come to realize that the notion of truth versus fact was nothing more than another way to say that whatever is not proven is false. Thus the conclusion: whatever is believed by faith is false!

Secular university can be a dangerous place for young people of faith. Like a minefield, knowing the devices of one's enemy can arm him with knowledge enough to neutralize that advantage.

Facts are always true, and all that is true is also factual. Everything that is not true is false or fiction. That there is a God is not only true, it is fact. Everything that suggests there is no God is false, untrue.

Critical mass is achieved in a compression type fissile reaction when two solid objects are forced together to occupy the same space at the same time, beyond natural mass. This redefines the composition of both in terms of each other. Neither survives in its original state. It's a messy process, I understand.

It is no less messy when two mutually exclusive truths attempt to occupy the same mind at the same time. The composition of both is decomposed, and the subject is left with the belief that there is no truth.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Genetics: Our Greatest Common Mother


For those of you who are familiar with the raging battle between creationists and evolutionists, you have probably heard the argument put in terms of a young versus old earth. Well, an interesting discovery has been made, which I've discussed with some of you over the past few months. It seems that geneticists have found a long strand of DNA that allows them to determine relationships between people without having to delve into history, genealogy, etc. This strand of DNA proves that mankind is a young species!

The kind of relationships I'm talking about sound something like this: "These two boys shared a common mother back five generations, which would put their common mother in roughly 1850, assuming a 21 year generational cycle."

They've discovered a strand of DNA along the human genome that appears to serve no real purpose. It is simply copied from mother to son/daughter, over and over, throughout the generations. This strand is supposed to be an exact replica of the mother's DNA along the same place on the same chromosome. The problem is that almost like a scribe copying a book by hand, there are copy errors, slight deviations from the original. Well, it turns out that these copy errors happen at a fairly predictable rate. Therefore, you can use the actual differences, and number of differences between any two people on earth to conclude how many generations ago these two individuals shared a common mother. Sisters will have around the same number of differences from their mother, though different differences. The child of sister A will have her mother's variations from her grandmother, as well as a few variations from her own mother. The accumulated differences going backwards can be extrapolated to determine how many generations ago, they shared a common mother.

For you data people out there, this is a flat representation of a tree model.

Now the most interesting thing is that they have already taken this technique and applied it to a sampling of people from all the major races and people worldwide. The result: (drum-role) everyone on earth shared a common mother as little as 5,000 to 7,000 years ago.

Now where have I heard those numbers before? Oh, yes!! It's the approximate number of years since Adam and Eve lived as recorded in Genesis, if you take all genealogy data from the Bible, put it on a timeline and trace it back to the beginning, forward to known historical times (c.200 A.D.), and add the known number of years from then till now using historical sources!

It also corresponds to the date that evolutionists claim that two amino acids formed the first complex protein, and thus started the chain of life!!! Oh wait, no it doesn't.

The fact is this is a slam-dunk against evolution and for Biblical creationism.

No, you ready for a bold prediction? They're going to find the same generally corresponding dates (i.e. 5-7000 years) for elephants, horses, birds, fish, cats, dogs, and oh yes, monkeys! When they do, watch them spin it!

The fact is, God designed the genome, and He put this segment in there as an irrefutable proof against what God knew, would become one of the most powerful of Satan's illusions, employed to draw many away from God, and toward "science" (falsely so called - I Timothy 6:20-21), and that is Evolution.

Read the full release of this Associated Press story here:
http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,71298-0.html?tw=wn_index_9