My Favorite Scene

I try to educate my three growing boys, not only on what the Bible says, but what the world is stating in opposition to the Bible.  One day they're going to run into a true believer in Darwinian Evolution, or Social Justice, or Keynesian Economics, or some other evil, who will present them with a piece of knowledge that, by my own ignorance or mere oversight, I did not teach them.  When a person learns, from some new source, something they didn't formerly know, the human mental bias is to think that the new source of information is more reliable or informed than their previous sources of information (teachers, professors, parents, pastors).  As much as possible, I want my children to already know what the world is teaching, and be able to anticipate their deceptive tactics because I, as their father, have already pulled back the curtain on the history, side-effects, costs, and anti-God claims of those worldviews. 

For Christians that might doubt the wisdom of this opinion, the only defense I would offer is that it is in imitation of the Pauline Epistles, where Paul warned his beloved in the faith of the many evils that were lurking about them, seeking to derail the churches before they had even reached their prime.  For example, I Corinthians 15 finds Paul taking the position, "Suppose the Sadducees are right and there is no resurrection, then what?"

There are many opportunities to take this same approach in our day with the equally un-Biblical worldviews in our day.

For example, communism would be fine if, you didn't have to steal from one to give to another, and if it hadn't been proven over time to cause the people to assume a status of "equally-poor", and if it didn't uniformly result in absolute tyranny in all cases, and if it didn't elevate the role of the state to that of God, and if it didn't prove itself to be the natural enemy of religion, and if it hadn't been the driving force behind the violent or starvation deaths of 100 million people in the last 100 years!  ...and Sean Penn is one.

Little things like that help put things in perspective.  And all of these are true things the pro-Communist would never tell my sons about the Communist cause.

So I do want my children to learn about Communism, but I want them to know the REAL Communism, not the one subtly promoted nightly on CNN and MSNBC, where collectivism, self-sacrifice, being green, and grandiose government are always applauded, somehow, and individual initiative, the profit motive, industrialism, and smaller government always get the step child treatment.

Pursuant to my goal, I often take my children down to a museum near our house and watch the latest science films on the oceans, planets, space travel, the cosmos, animals, dinosaurs, and other topics.  The films are often on huge screens (IMAX), in 3D, with dozens-channel audio, and with ever-increasing graphical quality.  If the dinosaurs did live 100 million years ago, and you could capture it on film, then that's what it would look like!  If the picture is convincing, then for children, it hardly matters if the storyline isn't.

Perhaps the most grating of these films are the more modern, ecologically-minded ones, which try to hero the cause of the natural world, not as an environment for man to live within, as God ordained, but rather as an end unto itself, over which man ought to exercise no dominion.  Rather, man's alpha position within this world, brought on by the luck of his extraordinary cranial size, is precisely the reason given for why man ought to understand what damage he is doing to the creatures and delicate systems around him, causing him to curb his appetites, reproductive rights, and life-long pursuits, from house and vehicle size, down to how much water it should take to flush a toilet.

But my favorite scene in these films comes, predictably, at the end, when the film moves from the common predators such as coyotes, and great white sharks, to the "most deadly predator on earth"....you guessed it, MAN!

Now, as Paul does with the Sadducees, let us suppose for a moment the eco-scientists are right. 

• If, as they say, their goal is to merely preserve nature for nature; encourage the circle of life, and marvel at the creativity of evolution
• If, as they say, man is merely the most evolved animal; 

...then a few things must follow.
First, evolution cannot be trusted produce a superior creature, if as they say, all experience is to the contrary.

Second, if the goal is really to preserve nature, for nature's sake, and not for man's exploitation, then it would seem that all offenses against the creatures, their environment and their habitat must be engaged, not only those committed by man.  This is true because man is not separate from the creatures, but is merely the most evolved of them, right?  Therefore, predatory tendencies in all creatures, and the tendency to get while the getting is good, and not only within the bounds of what is required for survival, ought to be offensive to the environmentalist, no matter the species guilty of the great transgression.

But environmentalists tend to defend all other predators of the land, sea and air, as though their waste is not only unoffensive, but admirable.  When a bear kills an elk, the carcass feeds mice, coyotes, wolves and scavenging birds, we are reminded.  Their scraps and droppings feed insects and new plant life...and the circle of life goes on!  Yet, when man eats a hotdog at a national park, he can be cited with a crime for feeding the animals with the scraps.  No circle of life, here!  The reason of protecting future tourists from begging bears seems, to me, rational enough; but then what is the rational for barring the feeding of birds and chipmunks?  Somehow the modification of their behavior from merely scrounging for nuts, to dependent upon the more evolved, and ever-present predator, homo-sapien, is less offensive to them than the coyotes depending upon the bear.

Again, if mankind is, as they say, merely the most evolved of the creatures, then why are his actions not counted as natural, his behavior attributed to instinct?  The evolutionist environmentalists actually share with the Biblical Creationist the core belief that man is somehow exceptional to all else that is happening in the world.  They place upon that man, moral laws to which he alone is bound, and no other, even if those laws are said by the evolutionist to originate from another source.  And, as men, they give to themselves, just as God originally deeded to Adam and his seed, the oversight of all creatures great and small, just don't call it dominion.

So if preserving nature is the goal, then the movement of a few pounds of dirt from here to there ought to be a problem whether done by the treads of an ATV or the hooves of a bison.  If man is merely the most evolved of the creatures, then his behaviors ought also to be classified as "instinct", and his wasteful tendencies seen as contributing to the "circle of life"!  Even his predation on other species ought to be classified as the "survival of the fittest", and his status of "apex predator" admired like that of the Great White Shark!  His wide habitat ought to be applauded as "ensuring the survival of the species".

That the various leftist groups don't think or talk this way shows that they sacrifice one of their primary tenants every time they levy their eco-policies against us as fellow humans, just innocently circle-of-lifin'...the most evolved, ...us apex predators...just following our instincts...in our wide habitat.

In My Fantasies, I'm the Hero Too!

I know just what to do if the Russians invade. I know this because I spent a substantial portion of my childhood thinking about it. Ask my brothers. I've shot camouflaged commies from every angle. I've taken the weapons off their still-warm corpses and continued the fight until I saved the country from certain tyranny and destruction! And then I woke up.

Many, many scientists need a similar awakening, even though sleeping is so pleasant. Most scientists are taught an anti-God worldview during their formative years in high school and college. Those that go into research (as opposed to applied sciences, such as chemical engineering or national defense) never escape the scholastic environment that taught them their humanist faith. Humanism, of course, teaches folks everything should be judged on how it benefits mankind. Ultimately, it teaches that man is God.

It should be no wonder, then, that in scientists worldview, they are the super hero.

If you're a microbiologist or some variant working at the CDC, then you're trying to find the next super bug that will wipe out half of earth's population. Even relatively benign viruses like Swine Flu are good candidates to underscore your importance to all of humanity!

So we must: Cover out mouths, wash our hands, don't drink after anyone, use a paper towel to open the bathroom door, use hand sanitizer!

If you're a climatologist, then you're sacrificing a quiet life to convince the hordes of distracted sheeple that they need to dramatically change the way they live in order to avoid consigning humanity to the fossil record!

So we must: Recycle, walk, car-pool, buy a hybrid, drink tap water, don't eat beef (I choked here), buy offsets, sell your private jet (to whom? Al Gore?) and fly coach, drip irrigate your garden, install solar panels, turn your thermostat to 80 degrees during the Summer, use electric hand dryers, don't consume electricity...with..your..electric hand dryers!

If you're a astronomer, then you want obscene amounts of money and political clout in order to find the next big rock flying through space that might wipe out all life on earth! In your worldview, you're the hero and can't understand why the world doesn't see how important your work is.

So we must: Strangely, I don't think there's anything you can do. Good bye, then.

At least the astronomer will have the satisfaction of being right, just one last time. Super!

So this Halloween, when many of the super-hero costumes aren't returned to the costume shop, you might want to run down to the college campus an check the science department. They don't like to wear white lab coats! That's just a cover up to conceal their secret identity!

Altered Beast: So Much From So Little 2

Story telling is a gift to those that have that talent. Story writing is even more of a gift, for I've never seen someone who couldn't tell a story they themselves wrote.

Some stories fascinate me. Without having had the experience of being marooned on an island, how could one sit in his attic and write a book like Robinson Crusoe? Even less likely, how could a man from the 20th century write a series of books like the Chronicles of Narnia? As a side note, how could he sell them given and odd name like "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe"? It must be intrigue...Anyway. But C.S. Lewis and Daniel Defoe must bow their heads in reverence to the talents of our next authors.

In a recent article in the National Geographic, scientists published their findings gleaned from a newly found insect. The insect was the largest insect on record: larger than a man! The scorpion-like insect was a heavy-weight champion weighing in at 8.2 feet in length! It fed on fish, and even each other. It was the alpha predator of its day! Its legs were too weak to lift its body without the buoying effect of the water. Contemporary sea creatures, such as fish, developed hardened heads and mouths to contend with the pressure from these mammoth sea scorpions! These terrible claws were designed for shooting out and grabbing any nearby prey, much like the Praying Mantis of today! The largest lobsters of our day would be mere bite-sized morsels for Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, the given name of this ancient insect!

Now, wait a second here. What did they say they found? A fossil? So a rock, then? It must have been a big rock, since Jaekelopterus rhenaniae was 8.2 feet in lengh and all. Oh, wait a second, they didn't find the whole creature...just an 18 inch claw. Hm. Well, all the flourishes did make it more readable! I might not have even read the article were it not for all the made-up parts. I kinda' think that was the point. Intrigue, I guess.

This is the first novel I've read from this emerging author, but he has a bright future, especially as much as the world of evolutionary biology appreciates good fiction these days!

The Forgiving Darwinist: Hope for Me!

In reading a recent article on the National Geographic Online website, I came across a startling admission. In previous posts, I've protested the sub-sub-categorization of fish species. Every time Evolutionary biologists come across a specimen who's fin is slightly smaller or dots are slightly lighter, they want to declare it to be a new species, give it a Latin surname and celebrate the onward march of evolution, right before our very eyes!

Now, my argument, and that of many others, has been that this is not an example of evolution, but is only a slight variation in what the Bible calls a 'kind'. God proclaimed that each should reproduce after it's kind. Evolutionists haven't been able to show that to be untrue, and never will. The variation between trout species does not make them each their own 'kind', just variations within a single 'kind'.

Now this article continues to push the evolutionary faith just like everything else on the National Geographic website. But it also contains a shocking admission that I've never seen before: that out of zeal for the evolutionary faith, past scientists tended to find many species in the fossil record where few or one actually existed. Here's the full text of the admission in question:

Mistakes Made

Andy Currant is a paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

"Most large fossil herbivores tend to tune down to a smaller number of taxa [biological classifications] when you look at them closely," he said.

But, he added, the mistakes made by early investigators are easy to forgive. Researchers used to be hypersensitive to variation in specimens and did not really understand how much variation there can be between males and females within a population, he said.

Marcelo Sánchez, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said: "Solving such a specific taxonomic problem may not seem important. But individual-species research like this is ultimately what major claims about evolution depends[s] upon."

Now let's quickly break down what this man is saying.

First, he's pointing out that when paleontologists and taxonomists look "closely" at the evidence, what was once thought to be evidence of many species is found to be very few. There is a pressure on paleontologists to discover new species of dinosaurs to fill in the "gaps" in the evolutionary tree! Their theory is not benefited by fewer unique animals. They need more!

But, thankfully, Kaplan has struck a conciliatory tone with past scientists for skewing scientific evidence to support their evolutionary presuppositions. Magnanimity on this scale is rare to the scientific community. Perhaps it's part of a rising trend of a traditionally Christian valu...er...never mind.

I haven't found the website where you register to be forgiven by the scientific community, but perhaps there is now hope for me!

Software and Genetics: A Comparative Analysis

As I've been reading about and discussing evolution over the past year or so, I've noticed a disconnect in people's minds concerning genetic variation and origins. People seem to gleefully state that variation in a species over time somehow shows that evolution is happening, and thus, the Theory of Evolution must be true!

But there's just one problem. The Theory of Evolution does not simply state that lifeforms change over time. It states that these changes, going backward in time, account for the origins of the species. As I count it, however, these folks have not thought through things very thoroughly.

I'd like to make a comparison between two things. The one must be genetics, since that's what contains the data being passed onto the offspring of a specimen. The other is computer software. At first, this might seem like too simplistic a comparison, but I think you'll see where I'm going with it if you'll persevere.

The genome of any species is merely an extremely long set of repeating chemical sequences known as base pairs. These base pairs are arranged in a certain order that is meaningful to some interpretive mechanism that uses these base pairs to know how to build all the building blocks of a particular cell, and indeed, the entire organism. Even though each cell has only one "type" (with the obvious exception of stem cells), every type of cell has all the information contained in it to rebuild the entire organism if called upon (which it's not).

Now, these base pairs aren't consumed while building the pieces of the cell such as the chloroplasts or the golgi vesicles. Rather, they are interpreted the way a builder uses a blueprint. After the vascuole of a new cell is constructed using the DNA, the DNA is still 100% intact, having all the base pairs in place and in the same sequence.

The many, intricate parts of the cell are described by DNA in a method known to geneticists and bioinformaticists as "coding". They use this term because the way DNA codes for the body is very similar to the way the binary numbering system, the building blocks of all computer programs, codes for software. The user of the software thinks in terms of windows, buttons, pictures, menu items, etc. The organism thinks in terms of fingers, toes, ears and eyes. But beneath each set of abstractions (windows and toes), lies a language that describes to an interpreter how to build them. The interpreter for computer software is called the CPU or Central Processing Unit, manufactured by Motorola, Intel or AMD. The interpreters for DNA coding are several fold. Most internal components of the cell (15 or so categories) in some way interpret either the DNA or the biproducts of the DNA produced by other interpreters.

"Coding" is a good word for the information contained in DNA, because just like the 1's and o's of computer code are not windows, buttons, images, and browsers, so the A, C, T and G of the human genome are not fingers, eye balls, lungs, or brains. But where the computer code needs and interpreter and a hundres or so external hardware devices to manifest anything meaningful, the DNA is interpreted, literaly, by things produced by...DNA! So DNA is the code, the interpreter, the manufacturer of the interpreter, the manufacturer of the whole organism and the source of new DNA!

Software development is a very involved and deliberate process that takes years to master, is fraught with pitfalls and is very much a trial and error process. It can take years to develop a complex software system into something that is featured, performant and robust enough to deploy into a production environment.

The comparison between DNA and Software breaks down at some point. The place where DNA and software breaks down is that the software running on the CPU does not describe how to make, maintain, repair and alter the CPU. That is a whole different level of intelligence which modern technology has not been able to broach.

Science fiction often imagines a world where thinking machines improve themselves and "evolve" independently of their creators. They suppose that once a machine reaches a certain level of complexity, it will be able to continue its upward progress independent of its designers.

While that assertion is yet to be proven, it's interesting that they assume that a very high degree of complexity is required before a machine is able to change independent of its original programming. And they are correct. An even higher degree of complexity would be required for a machine to reproduce itself and upload a copy of its own software to the new unit. Interestingly, if you copied computer software with random copy errors, it would cease to function. DNA doesn't. It manages to cope in nearly all cases. Only when the copy errors are large and dangerous to the offspring does it react defensively and cause the offspring to be sterile, preserving life, but ensuring these errors don't further promulgate into the larger populace. This tendency towards defensive sterilization is also a design feature, not intended by the specimen, but engineered into it's very fiber by its designer.

To pause a moment, consider that when arguing that variation in a modern form shows the origin of that form, one must assume that the unit of life was already at a sufficiently complex state so as to begin the upward progression to its current form. Without that assumption, you have no explanation for how that cycle of creation, variation, reproduction got started. It's like saying, "If I was really smart, I wouldn't have to go to school!" You have to assume the first part for the second part to be true. But the debate on origins is not a discussion of how mankind lost control of some futuristic robotic monster which reproduced and took over the world (i.e. how environmentalist talk of humans), it's a question of how the futuristic robotic monster came together in the first place without the aid of a designer?! How did it achieve the level of complexity and sophistication where it had the ability to decide on its own, envision a more capable self than its current form and design a sequence of events that would lead to that improved state.

When one begins to understand the unfathomable complexity of the inter workings of even a single cell, then the idea of it coming together without an intelligent designer is shown to be a simple impossibility. Bringing a machine (organism) from crude materials (iron, silicon, water, carbon, etc) to the level of being able to recognize non-toxic foods, adjust its behavior to match its environment, consume matter to produce energy, repair itself, reproduce itself and improve in reproduction is ALL of the problem of explaining origins. Once it has reached that level of complexity, variation is a matter of carrying out its original design, whether in direct obedience to its programming or as a byproduct of unintended side affects.

With millions of engineers adding their lives, experience and expertise to the problem of making autonomous machines, we are just now beginning to produce what is called "semi-autonomous" machines which can make simple decisions of navigation with only occasional guidance from humans, but without the ability to self-repair, reproduce or self-improve. We are not even close to this level of sophistication, and the self-improve part is only theoretical. It is not certain that it is even possible. And sophistication alone does not automatically bequeath the abilities listed above. Those machines that have these semi-autonomous characteristics were designed with those abilities in mind. It has never happened accidentally. Most sophisticated machines and systems have none of these traits.

My whole point is this: Many people accept and offer observable variations in species as proof of origins. This is a false assumption. Variation is a deliberate design feature that is currently beyond the technology of or even the dreams of modern scientists and engineers. To think that any entity, mechanical or biological, could achieve this level of targeted sophistication is far beyond faith, its belief in the mathematically impossible. Those that have this faith despite this fact either rebelliously wish to orphan themselves from their Designer or haven't thought things through very well.

Evolution of Evolution: "The New Theories of Evolution"

A recent post at telegraph.co.uk purported to offer updated "proof" for the theory of evolution. You know, the "utterly proven" theory about the origin of the species that millions of scientists have dedicated their life to re-proving, much the way they do other "Laws" of science such as gravity, entropy, and displacement...er...oh, wait.

Be sure to read his article before continuing.

As proof, the author offered several contrived examples: from modern technology to insect and bacterial behavior to show how the evidence is mounting in such a way that, soon, even the "most hardened skeptics" will become convinced of the truthfulness of evolution. Waiting...waiting...hm...still no.

The first absurd claim comes when the author claims that, "Computers have long been used to model biological evolution." Since I am a computer programmer, let me offer my opinion on this. The computer that could truly model even the splitting of a single cell into two cells has not yet been invented. No computer existing today has the memory or processing power that it would take to even begin the insanely complex task of modeling biological reproduction, the foundation for "evolution". Though you may read about today's super computers being used to simulate "protein folding", keep in mind that protein folding is to single-cell division what memorizing your ten decimal digits is to quantum physics and doctorate level calculus. The two can hardly be compared, even though the first is a building block to the second. Secondly, all digital system that simulate physical systems must do so a pre-determined "resolutions". In the world of 3D graphics, for instance, as a car speeds towards a wall, the picture of the car and wall may be drawn 10 times, 100 times, or 1000 times depending on how fast the "real time" engine is capable of satisfying the "geometry engine's" will to keep the car in the right place given the amount of time elapsed. For instance, if the computer can re-draw twice every second the complex vertices and shaders that make up one frame, then a very choppy presentation will show the car hitting the wall in 3 seconds. If the computer can draw 10 frames per second, the display will show a much smoother rendition of the car hitting the wall, but still in just 3 seconds. If the display can render 32 or more "fields" (half-frames, every other "scan line"), then the display will actually fool the human eye into believing that it is watching a "full-motion" rendering of the car hitting the wall. However, this isn't actually true. In fact, in 3 seconds time, only about 100 frames could be rendered at 32 fields per second. But it you've ever seen high-speed photography of a crash dummy hitting an air-bag or a bullet flying from the barrel of a gun, then you know that even at a million frames per second, small changes are reflected in EVERY FRAME! So how many states you choose to measure in a second determines how many states you capture, and take into account. In biological and physical systems, these states are the moments in time that you are watching. But between these moments, the vast majority of time passes without observation. If you're watching a tortoise crawl through the sand, then 32 frames per seconds will certainly suffice. You can pretty much guarantee that the tortoise didn't run off and get a burger and fry between frame 17 and 18. If, however, you're watching the blindingly fast reaction between molecules that make up proteins that make up a strand of DNA interacting with an mRNA strand, then a million frames per second doesn't really do it justice at all. The only way to model such complexities in our day is to elongate time.

A former manager of mine used work for Amdol designing I/O bus architectures. He said that they ran a weeks-long software simulation of one of their chips, but only simulated a total of 6 seconds worth of actual I/O once the chip was finally constructed. Software is much, much slower than hardware. Even much more so, software is infinitely slower than the real world. No matter what resolution you choose to measure a physical system, virtually all time passes between your measurements. Any attempts to circumvent this method of modeling and optimize the output is merely a model of one's assumptions, not of the real world. The more optimized the output, the less of a true model it is and the more of a model of one's assumptions it is.

All that to say this: if someone today claims to use computers to simulate evolution, you must parse their words. They purport to have modeled unspeakable numbers of creatures over eons of time and arrived at a result in short order. In order to do that, your "model" would have to be nothing BUT assumptions. Thus, if you write a program to tell you that evolution is true, then don't be surprised if it does!

The second absurd claim is that network and telephony networks exercise "evolution" when passing data through them. Now, every network programmer knows what a "trace route" is. In windows, the tracert command echoes back the "route" used for data to travel from your computer to some remote computer and back and the elapsed time between each hop. Most also know that if you tracert the same host on different days, it will often result in a different route than before. If I'm getting data from a computer in India, the data might make 20-30 "hops" from one router to another along the internet backbone. The request for the data goes from my computer to my local router, usually in the same building. From there it "hops" to my internet service provider: Comast, Earthlink, AOL, or some other provider. After a couple 2 or 3 "hops" at Comcast, it goes out to the real internet and finds it's way to the host computer via a series of hops that tend to move it geographically closer and closer to it's destination. Finally it's received by their internet service provider, forwarded to their company's router and finally to the specific computer that has the data I want. The data then takes the reverse route, usually, but not always identical to the request route. But all those "hops" hit routers in between Comcast and say, Bangalore Electronics's routers. Those public routers are "learning" systems in that they are constantly measuring the response times from various other routers and re-routing packets of data around slower or over-burdened routers to keep the total "latency" (response times) rather low. When routers fail to auto-optimize routes, human administrators can go in and define "static routes" to override the router's artificial intelligence and assert a better plan.


Breathe! Ok, now what Dr. Chimp is trying to hoist on the public is that this auto-optimization, similar in all digital networks, is proof of evolution!!! These systems were designed from the ground up to do exactly what they do, and this is proof of evolution! Yikes!

The third absurd claim is that the behavior of colonies of ants proves evolution! Now admittedly, when he claims it proves evolution, he's talking about the tendency of randomness to produce an improved system. The problem is that the things he states as randomness could easily be rephrased as "applied design". The scent trail, foraging specialists, carriers, and sudden, mass, hunger-based movements of colonies that he observes are all programmed responses using intricate instruments that pre-exist the duration of his experiment. In this clever, misleading way, the bar for "proving evolution" gets set so low that a child cutting across a field to get home proves evolution!!!

The fourth example is not any better. That bacteria in clusters suddenly change their behavior in a way that kills their host and thus, ultimately themselves is, by no means, producing a better system. I think he kind of lost focus towards the end of his chat.

If this is what passes for proof of evolution amidst the echoes of learned professors in the higher halls of learning these days, then I'm not all that worried about a sudden shift towards the hopeless world view of evolution. And by the way, Steve, your article is misnamed.

P.S. - Keep an eye out for Ben Stein's new movie, Expelled. It is documented proof of the slight of hand and scholastic intimidation that is commonplace in the scientific community today.

Irreducible Complexity: Three Species Wide

I've written before about the topic of Irreducible Complexity: the idea that some systems in nature are too complex and interdependent to have come together by method of gradualism. Each part of the system relies on all the other parts of the system to have any function or meaning. Therefore, this system can't have come into existence by slow gradual improvement. This still hasn't stopped researchers from trying to compose a story line for how it happened anyway.

Irreducible Complexity is bad enough a problem for Evolutionists to try to explain; but researchers have stumbled upon an even greater challenge to the evolutionary faith. What do you do when the irreducibly complex system in question spans three different species!?!

A species of ant called Cephalotes atratus was discovered looking much like a berry of the bush it was climbing. This seemed odd to the researchers since his million or so cousins and nephews had black abdomens. As it turns out, the berry-ant was infected with a certain round worm's eggs that made it's abdomen inflamed and reddened. What else is odd is that the ant tended to stick it's abdomen up in the air each time it stopped, which had the effect of making it look even more inviting to passing birds. The birds would come by, eat the infected ant thinking it was a berry. The bird would excrete the digested ant a day or so later, and the eggs previously occupying the ant's abdomen would be hatched in a fertile pile of the bird's droppings, where they would mature, wallow a bit, and lay new eggs (very high ik factor).

This involuntary symbiosis was destructive to the ant, irrelevant to the bird and critically important to the roundworm. But the question is, how does a system like this get started? A keen observer would see that the ant and bird would naturally have existed before this entire symbiosis existed if evolution were true. But then how could the reproductive cycle for the roundworm have gotten started. There's no reason to believe that the roundworm couldn't have live elsewhere in other conditions as well, pads of bat guano, for instance would provide large fields of persistent housing for these dung-fairing roundworms. The ants might have wandered into a cave where they sampled a bit of the bad guano smörgåsbord and become infected. Thus, the cycle could have come together gradually!! A victory for evolution!

But wait. Then how come the eggs make the ant's abdomen look like host berries? A roundworm on the outside of the ant's abdomen could see what the abdomen of the ant looked like, but didn't stand to effect the ant's appearance. A roundworm on the inside could affect the ant's appearance, but couldn't see what change he might affect from in there! Besides, the roundworms don't even have eyes, let alone know what the berries look like, or how an ant could be made to look like a berry, especially to passing birds! And even if it could, how does this worm coax the ant into sticking his abdomen way up in the air to appear like a stemmed berry, y'know, like the rest of the bush's berries? Perhaps one of the worms wiggles his way to the ant's eardrums and sings Elvis hits into his ear? Do ants have ears? Hmm. It does beg some questions.

Some systems in nature are so obviously the handiwork of a Designer that any attempt to explain them in other terms sounds desperate; bias, might one say?

If the ants worms and birds could talk and reason (like in Narnia), then scientists would congratulate them on their cooperative intelligence and ingenuity. Since they can't, scientists mysteriously detect no intelligence at work at all. How convenient. My recommendation to the scientists, don't look down the barrel of your intelometer, you might not like what you find.

Feathered Dinosaurs: That Didn't Last Very Long

Have you ever met someone who is impulsive? I suppose we all have impulsive tendencies about some things. Some guys have a different girl friend every time I see them. Others are driving a new car every time I talk to them. A friend of mine got a new, black 2007 Mustang, a lightly driven, black Hummer H2, and a new black 2008 Mustang in about 5 months. (I just wanted to draw out how consistent he was in his love of the color black).

But paleontologists have, once again, tweaked...er...altered...er...swapped out their theory on the whole feathered dinosaur issue. In a recent article from the National Geographic Online (the only one I read consistently when time is tight), paleontologists have unearthed a dinosaur whose skin was fossilized intact. They even believe that they can make out teeth marks in the skin of this "130 million year old" dinosaur named Psittacosaurus (last name not provided).

Now normally a grand dino showing a little skin wouldn't excite even evolution-espousing paleontologists all that much, but this one tends to refute the recently acquired, but deeply-held belief that dinosaurs had feathers (especially around 130 million years ago!)

So what's the big deal? Scientists swap out the pillars of their evolutionary faith about as often as Hollywood actors adopt African children against their parents' will. But this time is a little different. The article entitled "Amazing" Dino Fossil Found With Skin, Tissue in China states that:

The research also suggests that some dinosaurs had thick, scaly skin like that of modern-day reptiles, refuting the theory that dinos had primitive feathers.

So dinos didn't have feathers, big deal. But this discussion impacts more than simply whether dinosaurs carried combs or sunscreen. The whole point of gluing feathers to dinosaurs was to account for the rise of modern birds!

This new discovery effectively orphans all birds everywhere as surely as being adopted by Madonna or Tom Cruise orphans an African child!! Help! Help! ...Man! There's never a PETA member around when you need one!

Upon the topic of dinobirds, wikipedia has this quote in one discussion of feathered dinosaurs:

“The presence of unambiguous feathers in an unambiguously nonavian theropod has the rhetorical impact of an atomic bomb, rendering any doubt about the theropod relationships of birds ludicrous.”[3]

However, not all scientists agreed that Caudipteryx was unambiguously non-avian, and some of them continued to doubt that general consensus. Paleontologists like Alan Feduccia, who opposes the theory that birds are theropods, sees Caudipteryx as a flightless bird unrelated to dinosaurs.[7] Jones et al. (2000) found that Caudipteryx was a bird based on a mathematical comparison of the body proportions of flightless birds and non-avian theropods. Dyke and Norell (2005) criticized this result for flaws in their mathematical methods, and produced results of their own which supported the opposite conclusion.

Setting aside my guilt about being "ludicrous", I guess my question is this: if the issue is still unsettled, then why did the I-Max here in Utah show a lengthy, multi-million dollar movie about how birds evolved from dinosaurs? The movie was targeted at young children and included cute scenes of affable, feathered dinosaurs hopping around the Barremian age. The advanced, computer graphics were stunning and convincing to young eyes and the story line was explained in no uncertain terms to educate someone with a first grade understanding of the world (that translates to 8th grade for most public schools). They even named the dinosaurs with cute, child-like names and gave them endearing personalities. The movie, like all modern scientific material for public consumption, left no room for discussion as to whether dinosaurs evolved into birds over the course of 50 or so million years!

As is typical in the scientific world, consensus is easier to establish than proof. People are fascinated by dinosaurs for the same reasons that they liked the Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings: it stimulates the imagination (and ten million dollars of computer graphics doesn't hurt either).

So where did the birds come from? Do we have any eye witnesses? Hmmmmmm. Oh, here's one, yes, You, on the back burner of society:

Gen 1:20-23 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

To accuse evolutionists of simply lying is like accusing Judas of trespassing on temple property. These snakes are actively trying to heist a fabricated account of our origins on the public, and particularly undiscerning children, so that they can accomplish their ends of destroying God and turning men against God.

The lesson from all this? Hold your head high and speak with confidence and a percentage of people will buy what you're selling (thus "cat people"). But...

Gal 6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

Sorry to those of you who bought "authentic dinosaur feathers" from the travelling paleontologist. I fear they're doomed to the same devaluation as Beanie Babies, and stock in Countrywide.

Rapid "Evolution": New Fish Sighted!!

Evolutionists get all excited about the strangest things. Of course, often the only reason they're even surprised is because they believe in evolution and all it's presuppositions and derivative axioms.
Publish Post
One such supposition is that "evolution" (variation) happens very slowly, over the course of millions or even hundreds of millions of years. In a recent article by the National Geographic Online, scientists show themselves, once again, to be all bubbly about the mundane. The opening paragraph states:

It's a miracle! Blind cavefish, despite having adapted to their lightless environment for more than a million years, can produce sighted offspring in just a single generation, a new study reveals.

Um............duh!

They mated blind fish from one cave with blind fish from another cave and whala...the offspring could see!! Evolutionists weren't surprised simply by the fact that blind fish could produce sited fish. They expected to find that. What surprised them was that it could be done in a single generation, undoing some million years of evolution!!!

Of course, they're wrong about the million years of evolution. They could alway acknowledge that God created the world 6,500 years ago, and so all variations seen today happened during that time (I'm just sayin'). Lately, it seems that what is provable is true; what is unprovable is science. Hardly anything in the scientific world gets much press and attention unless it is unprovable and believed only by faith.

Evolutionists need to acknowledge that variation happens much more rapidly than they have convinced themselves. They need to acknowledge that they will continue to find more and more examples of this as time progresses. Whomever of them embraces this truth first will be an early adopter, cutting edge, so to speak. The remainder of them will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, across the flat earth to the finish line. Just kidding about that flat earth part.

Note: I've renamed the article entitled Like Watching Water Boil to Rapid "Evolution" Like Watching Water Boil to align with this post and start a new category of posts. It looks like there will be plenty of them coming.

Lazarus Effect: Goblin Shark

We reported a while back that a rare "Frilled Shark" was found swimming around in the coastal waters off Japan. Once again, another "Lazarus" species has been spotted, as reported by National Geographic Online. For review, a Lazarus species is one that is "back from the dead", thought extinct, but now found swimming/walking/crawling around: a creative choice of names by someone who doesn't believe in God or the Bible.

This species closely resembles sharks that have been unearthed long before in the fossil record. Antique biological journals record that it went extinct around 57 million years ago in the Eocene epoch, until, that is, it was found swimming around the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic oceans. Twelve breeding grounds have been identified spanning the globe. Evolutionists had grand ideas about how it evolved and why it became extinct. But their ideas have shown to be mere speculation.

The Goblin Shark is remarkable in that it can grow, some believe, to a maximum length of around 6 meters! Species of 3.9 meters have been caught in deep-ocean nets or washed up on shore. At that size, you'd think someone would have seen one before the last century or so. But it's no real surprise they've been able to escape humanity's attention for the last 6,500 years; they live and die at depths below 200 meters, where no sunlight can penetrate.

If you are interested in the topic of Biology and species identification, then the oceans and Indonesia are, by far, the hottest places to look. Dozens of new species are being identified each month.

While many species remain known only from the fossil record, similar methods were used to identify their origins and status as were used for the Frilled and Goblin sharks. One could expect that an equal amount of artistic license and subsequent inaccuracy plagues those species' biographies as well. These many Lazarus species, so called, demonstrate that evolutionary biologists really have no special powers of post-constructing the pre-historic past any more than Sister Destiny has the power to pre-tell the future.

More Slight of Hand: Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering happens when one group of engineers takes the finished product of other engineers, say a missile, and disassembles it, noting the size, shape, weight, materials, color, density and other properties they find along the way. Done thoroughly, the reverse engineer is able to produce blueprints that may be used to build many more missiles without having to do the normally requisite research and development work. The one thing the reverse engineer is not able to reproduce is the manufacturing processes necessary to fabricate the component parts.

Reverse engineering is a well-known technique in the technology world. If the Chinese can't steal the process documentation to build a Stinger missile, they will simply try to acquire a working missile through shady channels and reverse engineer it. Their final product will look a little different and have slightly different behavioral characteristics than the superb U.S. Stinger missile, but will do most of the same job as the stinger.

One problem that evolutionists have is explaining how complex systems like the human eyeball, the bombardier beetle's explosive defense mechanism, or the amoeba's flagellum came into existence by gradual and accidental means. The flagellum on an amoeba has some 27 components (plus or minus) that had to exist all at the same time for the flagellum to work in the job of propelling the whole amoeba through a liquid medium. If only one of those components were missing, the flagellum would not function. So did all the components come into existence at once? Wouldn't that kinda' hint at design rather than accident? Well, yes, but...

This problem for scientists is called irreducible complexity. Now don't get too excited and call up your evolutionist buddies. Evolutionary biologists treat anything exuding irreducible complex characteristics as merely a matter of time. Because their faith precludes the existence of God, they will never yield because of it. Rather, they "hold judgment" until science gets around to solving the problem. One technique they've used for defeating irreducible complexity is to say that the complex system must have served other purposes in the past than it does now. They'd say that only when all the components were in place did the complex system serve the purpose it does today. They couldn't say what, but it musta' been!!

Another mechanism evolutionists use to defeat the problem of irreducible complexity is reverse engineering. Evolutionary Biologists are renown reverse engineers. They'll start by breaking they eyeball into it's component parts and dissecting each of them. They'll catalog all of the unique chemical compounds that make up the part. Then they'll go in search of other natural means that produce those chemical compounds. When they've done all their research, they'll start a "musta' been" story line that explains how the human eyeball came into existence. Whatever they come up with (which is usually completely different than another group of scientists on the other side of the world), MUST be the truth! That's how it happened. Never mind the amount of human input into the formula, never mind the unlikely or impossible nature of many of the steps in their hypothesis, never mind the total lack of evidence to support their claims!! It's settled! To argue with them would be...well...unscientific.

Sound exotic? It's exactly what's happening in a laboratory near you! The most unlikely mechanisms are being used to explain what we see (or see with) in today's organisms. Their only merit: They did it without having to admit that there is a God who designed these extraordinarily complex systems.

Now to illustrate their technique, let me explain how the H3 Hummer came into existence:

The hummer has an impressive cam shaft weighing approximately 65 pounds. It's made of heat tempered iron, chrome alloy and can withstand extreme temperatures. This kind of metal mixture was discovered in 1892 in South Bend, Indiana. Therefore the most logical assumption as to where the modern Hummer rose is that approximately 420 million years ago, a volcano erupted spewing lava over a cliff hang that would some day be South Bend, Indiana. The lava super-heated the granite in the cliff until the iron ore inside the granite liquefied and dripped onto the valley floor below making a crudely shaped metal spike pointing upwards. Tens of thousands of years later, a rock came crashing down from the cliff above, smashing the spike into a tempered-iron bar. The rock on top of the bar slowly eroded over the course of a hundred thousand years and left the bar there exposed. During a flood shortly thereafter, it was washed off the face of the hill into the stream at the floor of the valley where it was tumbled over and over for tens of thousands of years, giving it the shape we now see. (The Journal Hummer, Issue XXXIV, vol. 12, p. 87)

Get the picture? The fiction I just made up follows the same reverse logic they use, but my invention is MUCH simpler than the ones evolutionary biologists come up with. You see how absurd it is. Yet this is just the kind of slight-of-hand they employ in explaining away what they can't explain. They'll drown you in details too obscure and impossible to test, so field-specific, that anyone reading couldn't possibly substantiate or refute their claims. Readers can only choose to believe it or not believe the scientist.

Hey, that dilemma seems familiar somehow! Oh, yes, that's what God asks of us concerning His Word!! We can either choose to believe It or not believe It: Believe God or not believe God. No refutation, no substantiation, just believe.

In digesting the nonsense that scientists publish, a little logic goes a lot farther than years of book study. The techniques alone that evolutionists employ to prop up their claims should make them the targets of much scrutiny and suspicion. King David proved more educated than all Evolutionary Biologists when he cried out to God: "I am fearfully and wonderfully made"!

Missing Link! A Trip Through the Woods

An recent story by the National Geographic magazine online proudly announced the discovery of a new dinosaur species with the never before heard headline of "Missing Link" Dinosaur Discovered in Montana!

First, the title. According to evolutionists, EVERY species is a "missing link" species! Can we stop saying "missing link" at the beginning of every sentence?! Missing link, missing link, missing link! There, it's been said, can we drop the prefix???

Second, they dropped in a couple Freudian slips into the article. The first one was in this paragraph:

An unusual new species of dinosaur discovered in a Montana fossil provides a long-sought link between a primitive group of dinos in Asia and those that roamed North America, experts say.

Now how can this fossil be a long-sought link, when it had never been seen before? Isn't this what we call "pre-judging the evidence"? It's like a defense attorney hired to defend a murderer: he's already decided that the knife, the footprints, the gloves, the blood in the white blazer...oops, am I betraying my thoughts? Anyway, he's already decided that they were planted and fabricated by the police. These guys have already decided.

Also, note how they only tell us about the "missing link" that they "knew" was there when they find it! How do we know they knew? Have you ever been lost in the woods following someone who claims to know where he's going? It's like that. Every so often, he lets out an "Oh, yes, there we go!" and then marches boldly toward some tree or rock. After about ten OhYes's, you start to catch on that this guy has no clue where we are! Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch?

The second gem was in this paragraph:

"We knew that [the two groups] were related, but we didn't have any fossils that showed a mixture of characteristics like this and thus [demonstrated] the split between the Asian group and the North American group."

So, if you didn't have any fossils showing characteristics of both groups, then how did they know they were related?!? Oh, that's right, we're all related, I forgot. How about this:

"We knew that [humans and Pediculus humanus (body louse)] were related, but we didn't have any fossils that showed a mixture of names like this and thus [demonstrated] the split between the tiny insect group and the North American, listening-to-ipod group."

There. Mine is as valid as theirs. Filled with slight of hand, self-aggrandizing affirmations, and ridiculous, unproven assertions. And, best of all, now everyone thinks I'm smart!

Rats! One More Extinction

In a recent article published by Reuters, the author dropped a scientific bomb while discussing the need to wipe out rats on one of the Aleutian islands. What did he say that was so stunning to read? Here goes!

Once informed about the environmental destruction wrought by rats, citizens are generally determined to avoid them. Rats are blamed for causing about half the extinctions of various species worldwide since the 1600s and are persistent nuisances once established, said Clarke.

Did you catch it? Now I thought that mankind was the chief evildoer in our delicate ecosystem! But it appears we've been playing second fiddle for quite some time now!

Now with species like cockroaches and skunks and termites still plaguing the planet, I think that mankind must redouble his efforts to reclaim his dominion over the pests of the world.

So I'd like to applaud these scientists for their role of improving the planet by means of unnatural selection.

Rapid "Evolution": Like Watching Water Boil

Something very interesting has been simmering in the world of evolution fantasy.

First some groundwork. We, at least I, believe in variation and a tiny bit of natural selection. I believe that the great-great-great-great grand lizards of today's lizards may look slightly different than today's lizards. Longer tongues, shorter noses, more brown, less green, larger scales, rounder claws, etc...

What I don't believe in is evolution: the belief that the great^60,000 grand lizards of today's lizards will be butterflies.

Now one tenant of evolution is the belief in the old age of the earth (anything longer than 10,000 years would fall into that bucket, but normally it's hundreds of millions to hundreds of billions of years). This belief is in stark contrast to the Biblical truth that states that mankind is only a couple days younger than his primate and especially his eukaryotic, earthly co-habitants, somewhere around 6,500 years. By hanging all evidences upon a framework of many millions of years, evolutionists try to circumvent the presuppositional belief that the universe has far more ancient origins than it actually does.

Using Biblical chronology and genealogies, the Bible sets forth a world around 6,500 years old. Many evidences in science corroborate this rough age, but they don't get much press because of the agenda of atheistic scientists. After all, the whole point of teaching evolution is to establish as consensus a world view that excludes the possibility of a literal Biblical Creator. Certainly, if there is a Creator, then homosexuality and other moral blights are sins, rather than evolutionary aberrations; and homosexuality is a deliberate act of rebellion rather than a natural behavior out of our hands.

Thus, one front in the battlefield of creation versus evolution has long been the age of the earth.

Closely tied to that issue is the argument about how rapidly living things change generationally. The extreme variation seen in living things can only be explained in a hand full of ways. Biblically, God created the world in 6 literal days. We know this to be true from God's Hold Word. But evolutionist believe that the living things we see in the world are the survivors of a huge tree of living things dating back to the first living thing that came together accidentally in the primordial goo.

Within the big-tree crowd, there are two camps: the Gradualists and the Punctuated Equilibrium...ists. The Gradualists believe the species changed ever so slowly into their current form. The Punct...the other guys believe that stable ecosystems tended to keep the species stable for millions of years, and then suddenly, cataclysmic events (volcanoes, asteroids, ice ages, Democratic takeovers of congress) caused abrupt changes in ecosystems which forced anatomical and genetic changes in hosted species.

The punctuated equilibrium theory is useful to Darwinists because it helps explain what they've coined the "Cambrian Explosion". The Cambrian Explosion is a time way back there, when supposedly, after hundreds of millions of years of relatively slow evolution producing only algae, nematodes and trilobites, suddenly in 53 million years or so (yes, that little), nearly all known types of life suddenly appeared, presto chango!! They attribute this explosion to a sudden and abrupt change in the worldwide ecosystem. But does that hold water?

One factor I've never seen them take into account is migration. They assert that ecosystems had to change in order for host species to change. But I noticed something recently to which I've never seen them pay much attention, but I think is very relevant! In walking a short distance here in Utah, the kind of ecosystem changes very rapidly. You can go from deciduous forests (leaf bearing trees), to conifer forests (pine trees) in a hour's walk. You can move from high stony mountains to low sandy deserts in a short walk. You can go from lush river-side fauna to scorched, broken earth where nothing grows in a short drive. In a few minutes you can ascend above the tree line on surrounding mountains.

What's my point? There are many different ecosystems in a relatively small area. If ecosystems played the central role in punctuated equilibrium, then wouldn't migration tend to be a far more prominent player in speciation (multiplication in species) than global climate change?

I think that scientists that hold to global climate change as the primary mechanism of speciation show, not only that they are easily fooled, but a tendancy to play to whatever modern political correctness dictates.

Additionally, studies (here, and here [read both]) have shown that species can change very quickly, though always within boundaries. A single species of lizard placed on several different islands developed short or long legs depending on the type of vegetation on each island. The entire study lasted only 10 years, yet the results were conclusive and apparent. Migration was the mechanism; the changes were sudden, by evolutionary biologists' expectations.

If migration is a more powerful means of speciation and speciation is vastly more rapid than evolutionists think, then 6,500 years should be plenty to turn the thousands of "kinds" created in Genesis into the millions of "species" we see today.

Darwinists measure evolution in terms of "darwins". The changes that occur in an organism in millions of years may amount to only 1 darwin in traditional, evolutionary thinking. The studied lizards evolved at a rate of 2000 darwins!! Clearly, evolutionists are wrong on this count. The original reason for insisting upon billions of years is because they thought they needed that amount of time to explain the changes in the species through gradualism.

If evolutionists would invent a term like, say, "ecos" that measured how much the climate was changing globally, then you could conclude that there are areas here in Utah that are thousands of "ecos" different from each other.

What is observable is rapid change due to varied ecosystems, exclusively observed by means of migration, not global ice ages and meteor strikes. The thousands of species God created have, each of them, the ability to vary according to the climate, diet, vegetation and cohabitants in any particular ecosystem. By the time the Eden butterfly reached the other end of the globe, it may have speciated into thousands of distinct species. But this isn't evolution. It's variation. As some men are midgets and others giants, so the potential exists in all living things to survive in a broad spectrum of ecosystems and vary accordingly.

God made it that way. Evolutionary Biologists have yet to even discover it.

Scholastic Intimidation

Scholastic intimidation is rampant in colleges and in the professional scientific community. Students, professors, researchers; few dare break ranks with the party for fear of the retaliation they'd suffer.

In several of my past posts, I've made statements that presuppose that a scientist would be excoriated by his peers and funding sources if he were to propose anything outside the accepted dogma. If, for instance, a scientist were to purport that there was no ice age, or that the effects currently attributed to an ice age were possibly the effects of a global flood, he would suffer all forms of intimidation and protest. Un-Darwinistic ideas aren't even allowed to be considered as possibilities in the scientific community. Proposing something potentially Christian would draw even greater ire. The message they send: "It's not worth it! Just tow the line!" And the message could not be clearer. Don't debate contrary ideas upon the merits. Ridicule the authors and the ideas. Accuse them of being unenlightened. State that they probably think the earth is flat or that leeches should be used by surgeons!

This casts a shadow of doubt on all scientists. Which are conducting themselves ethically, reporting their observations, and which are cow towing to their own interests, or at least their own fears? Which ones are intimidated and which are intimidators?

I've seen many stories like this, but it finally occurred to me to post these things on my blog. This story is of a scientist who is being called every kind of Hitler for simply stating that trans gender behavior is a product of one's own perverted mind (that's not what he says, but I think anyone with brain can recognize the symptoms in this article) rather than being "born a woman in a man's body", thus making it God's fault if there is a God (Even Christians are buying this sort of garbage these days!).

When I come across other links, I'll post them here as well. In the mean time, Oh be careful little mouth what you say!

National Geographic Corroborates Bible...Accidentally.

I know this is a little off topic for an evolution blog, but I found it too interesting to ignore.

In a recent article by the National Geographic, archaeologists have discovered substantial evidence of a "volcanic eruption" around 1500 BC that leveled several cities in or near Sinai. They don't document precisely where the volcanic rock came from, a known volcano or eruption. Rather, they have different theories about how the Mediterranean Sea washed the lava rock onto Egyptian soil, either through a tsunami caused by the alleged eruption or gradually over many years. I think this second theory arose when they realized that tsunamis are Japanese (I looked it up), and that back then tsunamis weren't so fashionable the way they are today.

The Bible tells of the Hyksos king that was not of the previous dynasty which knew of Joseph. The Hyksos are known historically as Egypt's 15th dynasty.

Exo 1:8 Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.

The actual plague is recounted in Exodus 9.

Exo 9:22 And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch forth thine hand toward heaven, that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt, upon man, and upon beast, and upon every herb of the field, throughout the land of Egypt.
And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the LORD sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt.
So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it became a nation.
And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the field, and broke every tree of the field.

Some date the plagues of Egypt at 1491 B.C. That's fits pretty well with their description "around 1500 B.C.". Of course they will try to explain everything in natural terms, and I can't say that God didn't use some volcano to cause this plague (though it makes the hail hard to explain), but I do believe that these guys have uncovered evidence of God's hand of judgment on Egypt in the days of the Hyksos Pharaoh.

They've pegged the place, the time and the plague, but I'm sure it's all just a coincidence.

You just gotta' laugh...

First, read this article.

Sometimes you just gotta' laugh at the reasoning of evolutionary biologists (formerly scientists), in how they choose to interpret new archaeological findings. In this article about a recently uncovered Mastodon, learned team leader Evangelia Tsoukala of Aristotle University expresses her high hopes in this paragraph:

The scientists hope the rare find might shed some light on why mastodons went extinct in Europe about two million years ago, even though the mammals continued to roam North America until about 11,000 years ago.

Did you catch it?

This Mastodon was found in Greece. Greece is in Europe, in case you didn't know.

The learned scientists are of the firm persuasion that Mastodons went extinct 2 million years ago in Europe. Yet here one is buried in 4-5 feet of dirt. "But it's 2 million years old!", right? Wrong. Look at the tusks. They are laying right where they were uncovered (thus the red and white scaling bar above the tusks). They are inverted (pointing in opposite directions, yet parallel)! This Mastodon was buried by human hands! But...in Greece...2 million years ago???

No, this animal was buried much more recently than that. They'll never admit it, but this find dashes their belief that the Mastodon became extinct in Europe 2 million years ago. Again, they've disproved their previous assumptions but dare not say so for the retaliation they'd suffer.

The theories that evolutionary biologists entertain might as well be Dinotopia for the little light they shed and fiction they contain.

Extreme Variation: Alot of explaining to do!

In a recent visit to Fairhaven Baptist Church, the church/college I attended in Chesterton, Indiana for many years, I discovered I had at least one reader left. That being true, I felt bad for my long sabbatical from writing on the topic of evolution versus science. So here is my next installment, I hope you (singular) enjoy it.

One thing that has been holding my attention recently is the number of highly unusual anatomical features, behaviors and other facets that must be explained in terms of gradual development if we are to believe evolutionists fairy tale about the origin of these species.

For a simple example, consider nest-building instincts. How did the inclination, ability and proficiency to build a nest come to any one set of animals? Would the inclination mean anything without the ability (strength, dexterity, skill)? Would the ability mean anything without the inclination? Even more, how did the inclination, ability and proficiency to train their offspring come to them? How did the offspring develop a mechanism by which to learn and remember the behavior once demonstrated?

A nest must be made of certain materials, constructed a certain way, at a time right for the offspring, not too early not too late. It must be located in a place safe from predators and accidental injury to the offspring. The temperature must be just right. Not in the direct sunlight, nor if full shade. It must be sturdy, and constructed of materials that don't attract the attention of unwanted eyes. And what's the point. If I (the parent bird) got here alright, then why do I need to build a nest for my eggs? Nest building is akin to basket-weaving, but with only a vague sense of symmetry. Where would one go to school for weaving? How will I transport the materials? And how will I secure them in the tree until they are all collected? Should the edges of the nest go up or down? Will this branch sway too much in the wind? It's not so simple as it seems!

Even if you come up with a story that explains all these problems, what is the mechanism of memory? If you say that it is simply mental memory, then how do you explain orphaned animals that exude the same basic characteristics and behaviors as their parents without ever having known them? If you say that it's genetic memory, then the problem only worsens! Since evolution's storyline relies upon accidental changes in the genome, then how could a learned behavior possibly be accidentally coded into the genome within the same generation as it was learned, so as to pass that behavior on to the ensuing generation. I'm not a gambling man, but I'd take odds on that one!

If the genetic alteration came before any learned behavior, then why aren't we seeing birds attempting to speak and elephants attempting to fly....without Disney? If they hold to the genetics-first method of passing on behavioral characteristics to offspring, then their whole theory on "gradual improvements" is lost. A thousand deleterious changes should occur for every one beneficial change!

Evolutionary Biologists would certainly come back with the ol', "only beneficial changes get passed down, because non-beneficial changes cause the host to die out" line. But these people have never raised children. Any parent knows that both good and bad behavioral characteristics are passed to our children without either dying out. And scientist can's explain any reason why that would be different in the rest of the natural world.

But if the God of Heaven created these creatures by special creation, then none of these things present any problem. As God is infinite, so do we see His infinite nature reflected in the natural world He created. Through the vastness of space, the speed of light, the complexity of life and the power of the atom, we see things so vast that our mortal eye cannot discern between these and things infinite. Truly, "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." Psalm 19:1

To Come on the topic of Extreme Variation:

• Vastly differing habitats of extant species (extremophiles and the like)
• Vastly differing forms of communication of extant species
• Vastly differing forms of navigation of extant species (where are the bees going?)
• Vastly differing diets of extant species (You eat what?)
• Vastly differing forms of housing of extant species (You built that....yourself?)
• Vastly differing forms of predation of extant species
• Vastly differing defense mechanisms of extant species (zap, kaboom, vanish, bloat, poke, and die)
• Vastly differing methods of reproduction of extant species (hover-craft)
• Vastly differing interdependencies of extant species (I'd lichen it to co-habitation)
• The vast number of fully unique behaviors and mechanisms found in extant species (this one's very interesting!)

Lazarus Effect: Frilled Shark

I came across another Lazarus species that I thought I'd try to chronicle for the sake of those who care. I've posted a link at the bottom of this post.

If you recall from past posts, the Lazarus Effect is the phenomenon that happens when our learned evolutionary biologists discover a species that was known only from the fossil record until someone found one walking/swimming/crawling around. Lazarus species often appear not to have changed in the past hundred million years or so. Evolutionists often try to say that these species have changed very little over the eons, but that is merely an exercise of their faith. In fact, they can't easily quantify how they've changed. Typically what they call "little changes" are far less in magnitude than the variations present in, say, modern humans.

Of course, we know that God created these animals less than 8,000 years ago pretty much as they are today. When we read that the fossil record appears identical to a walking, breathing (swimming) creature, it comes as no surprise to us. The flood of Noah covered the earth. Entire regions were covered in sediment and mud in a cataclysmic event that changed the face of the entire earth.

Evolutionists also try to appear somewhat composed when this kind of news comes out. They straighten their jacket, put on a good face and pretend they expected that. They merely lack an explanation! Give them time, they'll concoct something.

A recent, anonymous reader accused me of being "against science". Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that science is a worthy profession. But science gives solutions, not answers. I debated fellow a few weeks ago who believed that science was owned by Illuminati types and we weren't hearing the whole story. He said that everything we've been told is a lie. I pointed at my Ford pick-up truck and said, "My truck is a product of a thousand concrete scientific inventions! And it runs!!" Science is real. It gives us useful solutions to nagging problems. But only faith gives answers. In order to find answers in science, you have to read into things a bit. Better to do your soul searching with someone who believes you have a soul!

Hopefully I'll have time to comment on my recent trip to the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. It's a hoot!! Wait till you find out how asexual reproduction swerved into sexual (2 part) reproduction!

It takes a big man to admit when he is wrong. In modern science, there aren't many big men.

Shark Species Filmed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frilled_shark

Global Warming: Mankind = .04 % of the problem?

In a recently published article, global warming alarmists have discovered that huge amounts of Methane are being ejected from soil and ice deposits they believe to have been frozen for 40,000 years. While we all know the earth was created by God just 6.5-8,000 years ago, they don't.

One more detail we know about global warming, and why we must combat it now by exchanging our Hummers for bicycles, right? Not quite. What the article inadvertantly does is to show how slight a contribution fossil fuel burning vehciles and power plants make to the overall "greenhouse gas" mixture. How slight? Well, the article points out that the Methane leak could be as much as 100 times more than all fossil fuel burning on earth. So during a single year, that means that only 1% of all greenhouse gasses come from energy-greedy humans, and 99% (roughly) from innocent old permafrost.

To complicate things further, it turns out that where the "global warming" effect is concerned, Methane is 23 times as potent as Carbondioxide! What does that mean? Well, not only is man putting out 1% as much gas, but the gas he's putting out is 1/23 as potent for global warming. So the end result is that mankind contributes only four hundredths of a percent to the overall global warming picture (which to be clear, is not happenning).

See the article here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060906/ap_on_sc/warming_permafrost

Isomorphic Instantiation

Isomorphic Instantiation is a term that describes what happens when a complex, man-made technology is subsequently found to exist in nature. One such example is echo-location. It's the means by which bats find their way in total darkness by sensing the echo resonance of their own high-pitched chirps bouncing off cave walls. It is different in no substantial way from advanced submarine sonar systems that can identify the class and displacement of ocean-going vessels miles away.

Another such example is what we know as Light Emitting Diodes or LED's. LED's are a form of electro-luminescence that occurs when narrow spectrum light is emitted from a semi-conductor which has been electromagnetically stimulated in the "forward direction". Among other uses, this technology has put nickel-sized lights on the key chains of many Americans. These lights can last ten years without a need for replacement batteries. Yet, this same technology was found to exist in a form of southern butterflies.

Additionally, bacterial flagellum that serve to propel bacteria through a liquid medium, are no different than outboard motors that have spelled death for so many large-mouth bass.

There is no shortage of examples of this observation of advanced design in nature. A wasp that build himself an echo chamber to attract a mate. Ants that farm other species of insect, or grow their own crops for food. There are hundreds of known examples, and many yet to be discovered.

All of these are evidence of our all-knowing God who designed machines of unimaginable, incomprehensible complexity. Scientists have only begun to understand the full inner-workings of single-cell creatures such as amoebas. What hope do they have of fully understanding our own human bodies?

If they were honest, scientists would make their lab verse:

Pss.139:14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

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.

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