Sheep and Goats

Category: Evolutionists

  • How do Jehovah’s Witnesses View Evolution?

    For the most part, Witnesses can coexist with Darwin. The things he observed on the Galápagos Islands are but examples of  ‘animal husbandly,’ which has been around forever and is not controversial. Where Witnesses might speak against Darwin, it is because of (correctly) anticipating the truckloads of dogma that atheists will drive through the door he cracks open. But Darwin himself is not too controversial. His examples, what he wrote of, is called “micro-evolution.”

    Witnesses look more moodily on “macro-evolution,” the notion of all species deriving from common ancestors. They don’t like it. But, generally speaking, they have the attitude: “Let scientists be scientists and Bible students be Bible students.” It’s not the hill they choose to die on. A book on macro-evolution, written in 1985, has never been replaced or updated. Macro appears to violate the “kinds” of Genesis, and for this reason it is looked upon skeptically. But the Watchtower has written that this wording in Genesis “implies” macro is wrong. Whenever I see “implies,” it is an indication to me of not being dogmatic. When push comes to shove, many who believe in God have said, ‘Okay, God did create the diversity of life we see today and evolution is how much of it happened.’ Frankly, life programmed to adapt via accumulation of genetic change strikes me as no less miraculous than potter-made life.*

    The only aspect of evolution remaining is abiogenesis, which is technically not evolution at all. It is a matter how finding how life arose in the first place. Was it the ‘spark of God’ or was it the gradual accumulation of random chemical and physical circumstances? Jehovah’s Witnesses allow no place for the last option at all. Their most recent offering, “The Origin of Life—Five Questions Worth Asking,” downloadable at JW*org, is exclusively on this topic.

    Written in 2010, it is cutting edge for its time. The questions it addresses have not changed, so it still comes across as cutting-edge. One wonders who wrote it. It will not have been the GB member who got straight A’s in high school science. I explored the idea in the book ‘Tom Irregardless and Me.’ Every once in a while, there is some top-notch scientist who becomes a Witness. My guess is that after a certain ‘trial period’ so they know he or she is going to stick, they ask him to look over their science department with observations and even updates. My book tells of a certain scientist who became a Witness, who taught at Cornell, a published author on aspects of evolution, whose book comprised curriculum for some courses, to explore that conjecture.

    ***

    By default, most persons not in Cornell suppose Hebrews 3:4 to be valid, that “every house is constructed by someone.’ They have never encountered anything different—not just of houses, but of anything. If it seems like it has been designed, it has been. They know of no exceptions. Therefore, they readily extends the idea to “but he that constructed all things is God.”

    It actually takes a substantial dose of “education” to pound this bit of common sense out of a person. The school system is relentless at the task. Yet, even when it has succeeded, there are some who come to regard their efforts as brainwashing and revert to the common sense they once knew.

    *On one of Nita’s Bible studies with Jade, a series that debuted at a summer convention and ran several episodes, Jade says something like, ‘You think he’s got a little factory up there where he just cranks them out?’ Nita doesn’t say that he does, and the study slides on to other things. The series seems to have come to an end. The apocryphal word is that the sister who played Jaded tired of the publicity—people stopping her everywhere to ask about it and her. Thus, she is like another sister I wrote about in Tom Irregardless and Me who was featured in a Memorial advertising campaign, on flyer, magazine cover, and video. Worried that the publicity might have gone to her head, I phoned her to find out. Her publicist said that it hadn’t.

    There is also a report in the book of when Prince would attend conventions, dressed in a suit, hair not all frizzed up, blending in far better than anyone would expect. Some Witness was interviewed after his death who said his appearance would cause a “mild stir,” but for the most part, people would leave him attend in peace. But, what is a mild stir for him might have been overwhelming for anyone else. 

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Cool Hand Luke: ‘He Beat You with Nothin!’ Atheist search for the Origin of Life. Part 7

    For best results, see Part 1:

    To the great atheist rank and file, Charles Darwin is science—far more so than Anthony Fauci said he was when he wanted to win over the general rank and file and silence detractors. You can even purchase ‘Stand Up for Science’ merchandise in his honor. I see a coffee mug advertised on Facebook all the time. It is emblazoned with six statements, each supposedly settled once and for all, each uttered with equal authority: “The earth is not flat, vaccines work, we’ve been to the moon, chemtrails are not a thing, climate change is real, and evolution is a fact.” You can get a tee shirt with the exact same artwork. Modeling that tee-shirt is a fellow with a great long Darwinian beard. Yes, you can drink your coffee in your Stand up for Science mug while wearing your Stand up for Science tee-shirt and look just like Charles Darwin, your hero! 

    Imagine: Darwin is the face of science! Not Mendel, who discovered the mechanism for how Darwin’s ideas worked but who believed in a higher power, nor Einstein, nor Newton, nor Galileo, nor Copernicus—all of whom believed in a higher power, but Darwin, who also nominally did (in his younger days, he trained to be a clergyman) but who smoothed the way for those who would not. Frankly, Jehovah’s Witnesses will have little issue with Darwin, insofar as the specific findings he points to. Finch modifications to meet changing conditions are no surprise at all to anyone familiar with animal husbandry. Witnesses only get squeamish from correctly anticipating the truckloads of dogma that atheists will drive through the door he cracks open.

    Darwin certainly has not lost his place in the subset of science that is origin-of-life, but every subset needs its own tee shirt and coffee mug star. That honor falls to Stanley Miller, who in 1952 created a few amino acids in the lab among contrived conditions and thereafter held firm that such conditions must have prevailed in primordial earth—otherwise his findings could not have happened. If that seems like somewhat circular reasoning, consider that Dr. Hazen says as much: “Most previous origin researchers have fallen into a kind of trial and error approach to devising hypotheses; they would cook up some likely geochemical recipe and run an experiment. If the experiment did something interesting, they patched together a theory around those observations.”

    Well–surely the field’s own ‘Darwin’ didn’t do this. Yes, even he: “Stanley Miller’s experiment is a case in point. the Miller-Urey experiment produced amino acids, so his followers became convinced that that’s how it happened long ago in nature.” In fact, what he did was not even new. The Great Courses professor tells of another scientist who did exactly the same thing 50 years earlier, Walter Loeb, a German chemist. But Loeb didn’t frame it as searching for life’s origin; he just said he was mixing chemicals. Nor was he a self-promoter. Moreover, he was German, and in the years just following the World Wars, nobody wanted to hear anything from Germany.

    So they just find something that works and say, ‘Ha! Early earth must have been that way! Otherwise, my experiment would have flopped!” It is not exactly rigorous science, most neutral parties would conclude. So typical is this slipshot guesswork passing for science that when someone comes along who actually details his work, it’s a big deal! “You don’t mind if I brag a little” Gunter Wachtershauser says many years later, “but something like this has never been done in the entire field.” It hasn’t?! All he did was provide “more than 100 pages of specific chemical reactions. each of these reactions is a testable step.” Aren’t they all supposed to do that? Instead, they just spin guesses and gullible atheists lap it all up as ‘science!’

    “We’re going to take a much closer look at Gunter Wachtershauser’s theory in lecture 20,” Dr. Hazen says, and when he does, he finds other things not to like, but at least Wachtershauser did what you would think all scientists would do.

    So, Stanley Miller is top dog, the Darwin in his field. He does not want to lose his place. Of a competing hypothesis, he mutters: “the vent hypothesis is a real loser. I don’t understand why we even have to discuss it.” The reason ‘we’ do is that, for all the euphoria, his hypothesis has some gaping holes that sink it. The early ‘primoridal soup’ is far too dilute, by all accounts, to host steps necessary for abiogenesis. Not to mention that water, the ‘liquid of life,’ and carbon, the ‘framework for all biomolecules,’ don’t mix. Not to mention that certain steps essential to life never work in water at room pressure.

    So, maybe some areas of high pressure are where life originated, Hazen lectures, and he considers oceanic vents where weird life has been discovered since Miller’s time. Maybe life originated there! and there are a host of researchers going under in that direction. Presently, however, Hazen uncovers just as many difficulties there as with Miller’s soup. The non-scientist can get a rough idea of the troubles crushing pressure might pose to newly developing delicate life by smashing his thumb with a hammer. [my proposed experiment, not Dr. Hazen’s]

    Since both scenarios post intractable problems, many others emerge. Maybe the earliest cells formed, not in the high pressure ocean depths nor the low pressure primordial soup, but on some material that served as a ‘scaffold’ to pin the early molecule to, and after so serving, disappeared. There is a hypothesis that maybe life emerged, not as carbon-based, but as something-else based—clay, says one, minerals, says another—and only later transitioned to carbon-based. Maybe it started silicon-based, the outer shell of silicon offering the same connections as carbon, there being only an extra shell within. Like those Star Trek aliens who bored through solid rock—not a problem if you are rock-based yourself—to attack humans who had mistaken their eggs for bowling balls or some such thing.

    Look, they’re all great guys and all. I wish them well—well, I guess I don’t—but it doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. They are impossible to discourage. Every match that doesn’t burn their fingers is the one they are convinced will light the next rocket ship to Mars. (and yes, there is also an hypothesis that life originated on Mars and came here via asteroid.) Well into the course, after he has discussed hypothesis after hypothesis and found them all wanting, he doesn’t conclude what anyone of common sense would conclude, that they’re all wrong. Bizarrely, he concludes that they are probably all right and all that is needed is further experimentation to corroborate them!

    Tell me this fellow hasn’t drunk too much of his own Kool Aid:

    “Look, I understand it may seem a little frustrating to have so many scientific cliffhangers but by the time you’re through with this lecture series you’ll be poised to share in all the incredible discoveries that are about to come, and I absolutely guarantee there will be exciting discoveries in the quest for life’s origins!” Tell me a guy like this can be discouraged.

    Still, greatly thrilled at all the “incredible discoveries that are about to come,” I checked out from the library the most recent origin-of-life book I could find, a top choice of the nasa.gov list of life-emergence works: The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, by Nick Lane, published in 2015, ten years more recent than Hazen’s lecture series. Had any of the “incredible discoveries that are about to come” come? Not as far as I could see.

     

    *Urey was the overseeing professor to Stanley Miller, then a graduate student. Bucking conventional practice, he graciously withdrew his name from the paper because he, a former Nobel Prize winner, knew if his name was mentioned, people would forget all about Miller, who had come up with the idea and done the work, to heap all honors on him. You can almost picture the My Fair Lady song sung by atheists, praising scientists “who, when you win, will always give your back a pat. Well, why can’t a deist be like that?”

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Cool Hand Luke: ‘He Beat You With Nothin!’ The Atheist Search for the Origen of Life, Part 6

    For best results, see Part 1:

    If you venture beyond the purely material realm to peer into the spiritual, if you venture there WITHOUT EVIDENCE, and so the scientism/atheist/philosopher/cheerleaders will forbid that course, but if you tell them to kiss off and do it anyway, you will discover a prime reason for worshipping God.

    “You are worthy, Jehovah our God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, because you created all things, and because of your will they came into existence and were created,” says Revelation 4:11.

    What if you could demonstrate that God did not create all things? What if you could demonstrate that he actually caused nothing at all to come into existence, that it all happened by itself? Wouldn’t the prime reason for giving God the glory and the honor and the power vanish? Can we think of anyone in the supernatural realm who would love for that to happen? (Hint: he has horns.)

    No, he doesn’t have horns. It’s an image from medieval times, if not before; no where does the Bible depict him with horns. But as an opponent of God? Oh, yeah. Satan is a word that literally means ‘resister.’ Its Greek derivative ‘devil’ literally means ‘slanderer.’ He, the one who noted the glory and honor and power going to God, said, ‘Hey, I’d like me some of that,’ and maneuvered events in the garden to lay his claim. James 1:14 tells the power of each one being drawn out and enticed by their own desire.

    Granted that the origin-of-life scientists are good and honorable people, or at least they have the same mix of traits that typify the general population. They are not evil incarnate. Don’t go taking any nasty shots at them. But that does not mean they might not be pawns in a game much greater than they consciously play—the game that the Great Unhorned One cheers from his easy chair every bit as much as you cheer for the area sports team.

    Who are these origin-of-life scientists? Are they easy to track? Are there a lot of them? Surprisingly, no. In a move that is reassuring for the reputation of science as a reasonable endeavor, the Great Courses lecturer says they number only about 500. Why reassuring? Because it suggests that the vast majority of scientists are not comfortable holding Cool Hand Luke’s 4, 10, and deuce of clubs, jack of hearts, and 9 of diamonds, let alone try to bluff themselves and others that they really hold something. They stick to areas more amenable to the scientific method.

    “It’s actually pretty easy to keep track of the origins of life community because there’s one principle scientific society: the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. Or ISSOL.” Of that tiny number of scientists belonging to the society, worrisomely, by far the largest contingent is the United States, contributing over half the membership. Why worrisomely? It is in the same vein as what was said early on about Jesus: “Can anything good come out of Nazarus?” Of course, iPads come out of the United States, as well as Teslas—they’re certainly good—but this is applied science. When we get into pipe-dream science, watch out! as the ‘land of the free’ is also the land of the free thinkers, even the unhinged free thinkers who are the ones quickest to overturn the traces, convinced something better will emerge on the other side.

    “Most scientific societies have open memberships. but not ISSOL,” Dr. Hazen tells us. “Early on, when the society was small, there was a real concern that the membership could be taken over by crackpots and fringe scientists with their own agendas,” (as though the mainline itself has none) “The origins of life field has from time to time attracted people with ideas that are, to say the least, a bit odd.” (as though the mainstream one isn’t). “There’s one contingent, for example, that’s convinced that life on earth was planted by aliens and that we’re all just one big experiment.” Well, yeah, that is a little odd, but no odder than cutting-edge notions that currently permeate atheist society. For example, maybe we and all that we think we experience are merely bits on the hard drive of a superior intelligence! Hmm, yes, indeed plausible, nod the atheists—it comes from outer space—whereas if you mentioned anything about God to them, they’d hurl. The Matrix movies inspire them just as much as Star Trek did their forebears.

    Every year and a half for these 500 luminaries, there is the Gordon Research Conference to look forward to, apparently as Hollywood looks forward to the Emmys. Yet, says the professor, “these week-long meetings are restricted to about 120 scientists and they’re quite unusual in that everything said is strictly off the record. You actually have to sign a statement that you won’t reveal what was discussed.” Not even all 500 get in, only the elite 120! And once in, their doings are as hush-hush as a meeting of top Masons. (one of whom once confided to me what the G in the central figure stands for. It stands for—gasp!—God)

    “Our understanding of life’s origins and evolution probably has a better chance of getting into these journals [Nature and Science] than almost any other topic,” says Dr. Hazen in Lecture 1. Imagine! There’s only 500 of them at the time of the lecture series. Only 500! I have to refrain from calling them a cult. Yet they beat out all the rest of the world’s two million scientists when it comes to prestigious publication!

    They’ve just got a good gig going, they know it, and they’re plugging away at what they love to do—experiments and test tubes. No agenda beyond that, most likely. But a person could be forgiven for supposing they are tools of a Greater One, evil indeed, who does have an Agenda: prove God unnecessary and thereby his own claim to invisible godship is enhanced. I would never go there, of course, because I need EVIDENCE. But I could understand if you did.

    To be continued:  here

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Cool Hand Luke: ‘He Beat You with Nothin!’ The Atheist Search for the Origin of Life, Part 5

    For best results, see Part 1 here

    This post is an aside. ‘Origin of Life’ science, as discussed in the lecture series, might easily strike a non-enthusiast as so speculative as to challenge the all-time king of speculation in the guise of science: evolutionary psychology. So it is that I diverge into that other cutting-edge field.

    ***

    The circuit overseer was visiting. It was a week of special activity. We reconvened to plan our afternoon. Nosmo Jones had unexpectedly cancelled his study to bail one of his kids out of jail, so I was open. “Does anyone have any calls?” the circuit overseer asked. “I have – Mr. Strawman out on Pretensia Pond Road,” I said. “You remember him from your last visit.”

    “Does anyone else have any calls?” Silence. I knew Bill Ding had several, and also Sally Shinspits, but they would likely not be home at this time of day. “Are you sure nobody else has any calls?” the circuit overseer repeated. I reminded him again about Bernard Strawman. “He’s told me since our last call that he could believe in God!” I said. “We could build on that foundation.” He’d also said something about climate change in hell, but I hadn’t understood what he had meant by that.

    “Check carefully. Nobody has any return visits?” the circuit overseer asked again, looking desperate. “Maybe we can do street work,” he pleaded. But Brother Bruno’s wife, Brunette, had done street work all morning and her feet were sore. She wanted to ride around for a while.

    Twenty minutes later we pulled into Mr. Strawman’s driveway. A Mercedes was already there, in addition to the Jaguar that Mr. Strawman drove. I rang the doorbell with the circuit overseer in tow. Mr. Strawman answered. He invited us in, told us to take off our shoes, and introduced us to his visitor, Dr. Adhominem. I’d never met Dr. Adhominem, but I’d heard Mr. Strawman speak of him glowingly.

    Mr. Strawman asked us to be seated. He asked us if we would like some orange juice. When we said yes, he explained that he didn’t have any. I settled in my chair for a stimulating discussion that was sure to come! The circuit overseer mentally reviewed his notes for the talk he would give that evening: “Are You Following the Lead of the Angel in Your Ministry?’

    Mr. Strawman and his visitor explained to me the research paper they were preparing to submit to Wonderful Scientist Magazine. It was to be their contribution to the exciting field of evolutionary psychology. “Much of the cutting-edge work in science is in this field,” Mr. Strawman told me. The paper he was co-authoring with Dr. Adhominem, he explained, was on the evolutionary origin of boisterous flatulence. “Back in the stone-age eat-or-be-eaten days,” Mr. Strawman explained, putting the concept in a nutshell, “you wanted to evolve everything you possibly could to scare off predators. And nothing would do the job like boisterous flatulence. It quickly cleared the area, the same as it does in modern times.”

    I was very impressed with this crock of insight. But the circuit overseer said: “Got any evidence of that?” He had heard of something called the Scientific Method. I was so embarrassed. Dr. Adhominem smiled and explained that to become obsessed with such matters was to chase a red herring. The very reason such rapid progress was being made in evolutionary psychology, he continued, was that researchers could work without that sort of distraction. He asserted the time for his breakthrough had come because similar research had been accepted by the scientific community. To tell the truth, I was becoming more than a little mortified by that circuit overseer. Clearly, the man doesn’t know much about science.

    For example, Dr. Adhominem told us about the evolutionary origin of faulty reasoning, something which had long puzzled scientists because it seemed to fly in the face of survival of the fittest. But the April 5, 2010 issue of Newsweek summarized the latest scientific thinking. “Faulty reasoning is really our friend! It enabled our ancestors to learn argumentation!” If there was no cockeyed reasoning, Dr. Adhominem explained, nobody would have anything to argue about. Throw any issue before the masses, and they’d all instantly agree! How could survival of the fittest take place? Smart people can only evolve if they have blockheads to stomp into submission with their clever argumentation. So stupidity has proven to be essential to our evolutionary advancement!

    The circuit overseer said: “That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.” Dr. Adhominem gently suggested the reason: evolution had selected people like the two of us to enable people like himself and Mr Strawman to become brilliant. I felt privileged to have such a role in science! The circuit overseer asked to use the bathroom. “Eighth door on the left,” Mr. Strawman said.

    The three of us remaining strolled out into the back yard. Next door, Mr. Strawman’s neighbor was drooling over his curvaceous girlfriend prancing about in a micro-bikini. I instantly turned away. “Interesting how evolutionary psychology accounts for this phenomenon,” Mr. Strawman remarked. “Indeed,” Dr. Adhominem said. I drew a blank, so he patiently enlightened me. “You’re not going to get far in the struggle for survival if your wife keeps dropping your babies and killing them, are you? Decidedly not!” Pleased with himself, he continued: “But that knockout bombshell of a competitive wife has convenient shelves upon which she can balance as many babies as you can give her. Thus, over the eons, our ancestors began to prefer curvy women and to think them beautiful.” How could I have been so stupid for so long?

    We seated ourselves again inside and the circuit overseer said something about God. Mortified, I slid down into my chair! Mr. Strawman had already explained to me the evolutionary origin of God: “See, any group of individuals will have some riffraff who must be kept in check so as not to disrupt the clan. The trouble is, the riffraff doesn’t like being kept in check. They fight back, and this spills the primordial soup of even the most peaceful clan, spewing evolutionary ripples everywhere. What you need is a superhuman cop, one with whom you can’t fight back! Then those ne’er-do-wells will behave. That’s how the concept of God evolved, with all its quaint notions of right and wrong.”

    “Homosexuality? Surely that has to be a fly in the ointment of your race to procreate,” the scientifically ignorant circuit overseer said, much to my dismay. “Not at all,” Bernard Strawman replied with a smile. “Homosexual men tend to be nurturing, and so they nurture everyone in the tribe, including themselves, giving the entire tribe a competitive advantage,” he said.

    We discussed other interesting things as well. Seeing that he was getting underneath the circuit overseer’s skin, Mr. Strawman asked us as we were leaving how we knew that we were there? “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, how do we know that it makes a noise?” What a fascinating question! “Because the squirrels go crazy!” the circuit overseer said. “I’ll be in the car, Tom.” He’s a fine brother but he really doesn’t know anything about science.

    “What a wonderful experience in the field ministry!” I exclaimed to all as we entered the Kingdom Hall after field service was over. I suggested that the circuit overseer might use it for his upcoming part in the circuit assembly, but he said he already had participants.

    [The boisterous flatulence hypothesis is (for now) made-up nonsense, but all the other ideas have found acceptance among evolutionary psychologists. I predict boisterous flatulence will also be embraced one day soon, since it is only slightly more ridiculous than what has already been accepted by these characters.]

    The circuit overseer said he would never ever EVER go back with me on this call and changed the title of his talk that evening from ‘Are You Following the Lead of the Angel in Your Ministry?’ to ‘Look, Sometimes You Have to Learn How to Take a Hint.’

    However, three years have just about elapsed. He is soon to depart for a new assignment; a new circuit overseer will soon arrive, hopefully one with better appreciation for science. He will thus be the ninth one to aid me in assisting Mr. Strawman in his progress.]

    “The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.” G K Chesterton

    To be continued: here

     

    ******  The bookstore

     

  • Don’t Go Talking Adam and Eve at the Zoo Reptile House

    Eve found plenty of fault with Adam during their sabotaged marriage but one charge she was never able to make stick was, ‘You never listen to me.’ Nor, for that matter, was a certain snake ever able to say that of her.

    It’s not every day that a snake talks. Even if you are new on the planet, encountering surprises each day, it still seems that a talking snake would knock your socks off, assuming you were wearing any. It’s why I like the snake depiction in Paradise Lost, by the poet John Milton, published in 1667.

    It’s not really the snake speaking; it is a rebellious spirit creature using it as though a ventriloquist his dummy. Milton’s twist on the snake is that it is anything but dumb. Persuading Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, it says, ‘Look what it did for me. And if it can give speech to me, a common snake, just think what it can do for you!’ Oh, yeah. It’s all speculative; you can’t go there with any certainty, but it does make good sense. You can picture it happening this way.

    At the reptile house of any modern zoo, however, you will find no attendants to tell about Eve and the snake. They would be fired if they did, most likely, though it’s a little hard to tell; probably that statement has never been tested. They’ve all been through college and have emerged with degrees in zoology, marine biology, conservation biology, wildlife management, and animal behavior, and the like. They are all strictly evolution-oriented. Every vestige of creation-belief has been pounded out of them. Don’t go telling them about Eve.

    Not that the animals suffer on that account. They do far better than when I found a downed robin chick as a boy and tried to nurse it back to health with grass to sit on, hot dogs to eat, and a few twigs to remind them of trees. The zoo care is first rate, and it was not long ago that I heard a tiny child discussing with its mother about ‘habitat’—a word I certainly never knew as a child. But don’t even think about original serpents pulling the wool over Eve’s eyes here. It is not allowed.

    The wildlife graduates that don’t find zoo employment find it instead in video production. There, they employ powerful AI tools to detect just when you are about to cry out in astonishment ‘Creation!’ ‘Design!’ at some breathtakingly dazzling animal behavior. Heading off the words while they are yet in your throat, the narrator gushes: “How absolutely incredible that natural selection works to produce such amazing behavior!”

    Others present animal packs and herds as though criminal gangs, killing, maiming, and eating each other. ‘Don’t you dare even think of Bambi!’ they glower. ‘The fight for survival is all you need to know about.’

    All the same, zoos are light years ahead of what they were when I was a boy, back when they were essentially jails for animals. ‘They are still jails for animals,’ my brother mutters, who will not visit on that account. But if you take into account their endeavor to save the nature that their fellows destroy, they’re earn one’s appreciation. It’s not everything, but it’s a fine stopgap until Revelation 11:18 is realized and the time comes for God to “bring to ruin those who are ruining the earth.” Zoos slow them down a little bit. Just like my cousin says about the vintage Mustangs he restores. If you put such-and-such a price on them, people come beating down your door, but if you add 20K to it, “that slows them down a little.”

    At the Columbus zoo, the elephants roam through a huge U-shaped enclosure, with spectators peering from the peninsula thus formed in the middle. Zoo workers call them from one end of the enclosure to another—keep them moving, is the idea, just like in the wilds. Also like in the wild is food that requires them to use their ‘problem-solving skills.’ Some is suspended. Some must be unraveled or opened in various tricky ways. They will show their feet on command, and the idea here is so those foot bottoms may be inspected for health. They all respond to their names. The elephant named Rudy has a slinking aspect to its gait that, combined with a bobbing head, makes him look like a teenager trying to act cool. Just a mannerism, the volunteer told me. He does it especially when excited or glad.

    Creative people are hard at work. “How do you know if an animal is venomous?” asks posters in the Columbus reptile house. “If it bites you and you get sick, the animal is venomous” is the chipper heads-up. And when workman were building something or other at the Syracuse zoo, the accompanying legend described their habitat: coffee and donuts during the day; television in the family room during the evening.

    They’ll tempt you with zoo membership upon entering most of them. The fee is more than for a single entrance, but you afterwards get in as many times as you like for free. Moreover, half-price is the fee at any other participating zoo. That’s how we came to be in both Columbus and Syracuse. Periodically, my wife and I have to get away and plot a course to some new locale. We don’t go just for the zoo, but while there we always check out that zoo.

    Are we the only ones to ever have had that idea? Not at all. Here is a site that even undertakes to rate all the zoos.

     

    ******  The bookstore

     

  • Cool Hand Luke: He Beat You with Nothing! The Atheist Search for the Origin of Life, Part 2: There Oughta be a Law

    (For best results, start with Part 1 here

    ‘There oughta be a law!’ is what you say when something doesn’t go your way but you think it should. It’s a complaint. You often say it in jest or in a tongue in cheek manner.

    It is what Robert Hazen says (though not in jest) about the two laws of thermodynamics. There ought to be another one. Therefore, there is–it just hasn’t been discovered yet. Why does he say it ought to be out there somewhere? Because otherwise his quest to find life’s origin (or origins) is going nowhere. Why doesn’t he consider that maybe God created all things, as religious people have almost universally believed? Because he’s not a theologian. He doesn’t go there.

    [Note: I have nothing against Hazen in particular. I have simply selected him as representative of a certain approach. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else. Kudos to him for being the point man of his field. It is not as though Great Courses has ever tapped me to lecture on anything.]

    The first law of thermodynamics states that energy may change form, but the net total stays constant. The second states that it doesn’t change form in just any direction, but always toward disorder. “Another way of stating the second law is that all natural systems tend to spontaneously to become disordered, or messier, if you will” he says in Lecture 1 of his Origins of Life series. “It turns out that any collection of atoms, including your shiny new automobile, a pair of new shoes, or even your body, gradually deteriorates.”

    This observation will strike most people as a big Duh, but scientists have attached a name to this deterioration: entropy, a “measure of disorder.” Thus, as disorder increases, so does entropy. “There’s a lot of entropy in this room,” I used to tell my son, hoping to instill in him a love of science, before demanding he clean it up so as to placate my wife–ignoring his non-sequitur plea of, “Well, what about your room?”

    “A lot of people find the second law of thermodynamics more than a little depressing,” Hazen says. Another Duh—especially when applied, as he does apply it, to “even your body.” It is why I prefer the term Golden Rule to Human Rights. The latter may contain a measure of good stuff, but even our own bodies do not respect our human rights, crapping out on us just when we need them most, ultimately shutting down altogether. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” preserves all that is noble while discarding all that is pretentious about Human Rights.

     But for Hazen, the greatest reason that second law is “more than a little depressing” is because it louses up his theory on life originating spontaneously. There oughta be a law to countermand that second one. Therefore, he assumes there is. For the rest of the course, he continues to speak of the concept of “emergence,” which he hopes will someday be recognized as a law.

    As evidence for his proposed theory, he urges people to “look around you. You see houses, you see holly trees, hummingbirds, all of them remarkably ordered systems. And so, in spite of the second law’s pronouncement that entropy inexorably increases, it’s obvious that disorder is not the only endpoint in the universe.”

    Any child knows why, when you “look around you,” you see houses. The Bible, which favors the child-like ones over the “wise and intellectual,” opens the topic with a self-evident “of course:”

    “Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God.” (Hebrews 3:4)

     The other “ordered systems” mentioned, holly trees and hummingbirds, and later, “a single living cell or an ant colony or your amazing conscious brain,” are among the “houses” constructed by God, per the reasoning of Hebrews 3:4. Why doesn’t Hazen consider this possibility? Because he is not a theologian, he explains in his opening lecture. With that pronouncement, the reasoning of most of the human race is dismissed.

    He expounds on his concept of emergence in Lecture 8. Are there things clearly not alive that counter the second law of thermodynamics, that is, things that build up rather than tear down? There are! and he goes on to consider how water can sculpt sand.

    Then follows a discussion of four factors at work in the shifting sand—and also in more “complex systems” such as the cell, the ant hill, or the human brain. There’s the “concentration of interacting particles, the degree of those particles interconnectivity, the energy flow through the system, and the time variation of that energy flow, and perhaps other variables as well.” Yes, maybe, he postulates, the same factors that formed the sand ripples and dunes also formed the emergence of life!

    However, as he and everyone else instantly realizes, the brain, and other components of life, is more complicated than a sand sculpture. How much more? Alas, “we don’t know how to assign numbers to different degrees of complexity. What is the complexity of an ant hill or the human brain? And what are the units? Every scientific measurement needs to have units, like kilograms or meters per second. We need to be able to say that [comparing] this system with that system has a complexity of so-and-so many hundreds of thousands of some complexity unit, and nobody knows how to do that.”

    With no measurable units, who can say just how much more complex is the living cell from the sand dune? It will have to be in the eye of the beholder. The Hebrews 3:4 people will say ‘infinite.’ Hazen and his crew will say ‘a gazillion,’ though he concedes it could be near-infinite. “Oh, about 5 or 6,” say the philosopher-atheist-scientism-cheerleaders plaguing the social media community, who are quick to call anyone “stupid” who disagrees.

    “It’s clear we don’t know everything,” he understates in his first lecture. “In spite of the labor of countless thousands of scientists over the centuries we don’t understand one of nature ‘s most transforming phenomena, the emergence of complexity.” That’s a pretty big thing not to know, methinks, seeing that his entire vision depends upon it, seeing that he has to presuppose a new law to propose it.

    Toward the end of their first contentious presidential debate in 2016, Trump and Hillary were challenged to say nice things about each other. Both rose to the occasion. Hillary complemented Trump’s family. Trump said of Hillary that she is tenacious—she doesn’t give up.

    Let us say that of the Origins community, too, as represented by Hazen. They are tenacious. They don’t give up as they search for the law that oughta be. Probably, they have nice families, too.

    To be continued: here

    ******  The bookstore

     

     

  • “He Beat You With Nothin!” Cool Hand Luke and the Atheist Search for Life’s Origin: Part 1

    God’s goose is cooked if atheist scientists can show that life came into existence all by itself, without any intelligence required. For that reason, atheist scientists are working around the clock to show just that. I figured I’d better take a look and see how they’re doing. 

    The Great Courses company landed Robert M. Hazen in 2005 to give a lecture series entitled ‘Origins of Life.’ He’ll do. Great Courses doesn’t hire losers. The company says at the outset of every course that it seeks out academic professors stellar in their respective fields and stellar in teaching ability. Hazen has written a few books on the topic. He’ll represent the field well.

    Nonetheless, I soon found myself thinking of the movie Cool Hand Luke. “Nothin’! A handful of nothin’. You stupid mullet head, he beat you with nothin!’—the derisive words of the senior jailbird.

    Luke didn’t exactly have nothing. He held the 4 of clubs, the jack of hearts, 9 of diamonds, 10 of clubs, and the deuce of clubs. Call that nothing? Never mind that they didn’t add up to anything. He still bluffed his way to the top with ‘nothin.’

    “Yeah, well sometimes nothing is a real cool hand,” he drawled, and was thereafter called Cool Hand Luke.

    Is it too dismissive, even unkind, to say that the origins of life people have ‘nothing?’ They work very hard and become very enthused. They give every appearance of having something. To the scientism/philosopher/cheerleader/atheists promoting their cause, seeking to ram atheism down everyone’s throat as the be-all and end-all, as though it, too, were good news, they are always two centimeters away from clinching the deal. So how can anyone conclude they have ‘nothin?’

    One can start by hearing out Hazen’s opening lecture. “In this lecture series I make a basic assumption, that life emerged by some kind of natural process.” It’s an assumption! Not something he will look into to see whether it is true or not He assumes it is true. “I propose that life arose by a sequence of events that was completely consistent with the natural laws of chemistry and physics. and in this assumption, I’m like other scientists.” They all assume it! All those in his orbit do. Isn’t science supposed to be a process of discovery?

    But wait! Is there not a competing model that holds God created the heavens and the earth and all life on it? How does he come to grips with that? “Let me say now for the record: I’m a scientist. I’m not a theologian nor am I a philosopher. This course focuses exclusively on the scientific approach to the question of life’s origins.”

    Of course! That’s how he deals with competing models—he ignores them! My legal career would have truly taken off if I could have just persuaded the judge to ignore the other side! It just may be that Hazen and those he represents should incorporate those other two disciplines into their work, since the urge to both worship and philosophize is near universal.

    No wonder he is not disheartened by his subsequent words—he admits to no other possibility for life’s origin. In that first lecture, he goes on to say: “I have to confess the nitty gritty details of that transformation remains a deep mystery. . . I have to be honest: Even with the scientific approach there is a possibility that we’ll never know, in fact that we can’t ever know how life emerged. That’s because it’s always possible that life emerged by an almost infinitely improbable sequence of difficult chemical reactions.. . . it’s even possible that earth is the only living planet in the entire universe. and if that’s true that any scientific attempt to understand life’s origins is doomed to failure.”

    Doesn’t that sound pretty close to nothin? Does that bother him unduly? Not at all. He admits to no other channel for life’s emergence! In his view, he may never prove his answer, but it is the answer, nonetheless.

    Thus we hear of many things that “must have” happened. Such as: “At some point a collection of molecules must have begun to make copies of itself. Then, those self-replicating cycles of molecules must have experienced competition, which quickly drove the evolution to even more complex assemblages.” Did those things in fact happen? They must have, he concludes, otherwise his pie in the sky research falls flat on its face!

    And they say religion is where the dogmatists hang out!

    It gets worse. Hazen tells of attending conferences in which half the name badges incorporate the phrase ‘Origin of Life’ and the other half ‘Origins of Life’—plural. What’s with that? Well, it used to be just ‘Origin of Life.’ But, in time, due to a “fascinating shift in attitudes . . . many researchers began to argue that life has arisen frequently in the universe.” Why would they reason that way? Is there good (or any) evidence to that effect? Hazen’s answer: “Without such an assumption [another assumption!] the scientific study of life’s origin is probably a waste of time.” Fascinating, indeed, to realize that. Nobody wants to waste their time. Cool Hand Luke didn’t want to, either. So he bluffed that the nothin he had was really somethin and he outfoxed all the other jailbirds!

    [Note: I have nothing against Hazen, as will be explained subsequently. I have simply selected him as representative of a certain approach. If it wasn’t him, it would be someone else. Kudos to him for being the point man of his field. It is not as though Great Courses has ever tapped me to lecture on anything.]

    To be continued: here

     

    ******  The bookstore

  • Deciphering the Code of Life and the Human Immune System: Part 1

    There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA. Each is a rung on the latter of the double helix structure. But it is not as though each rung is a gene. Instead, a collection of them will define a single gene, of which there are over 20,000. The feat of mapping them all was accomplished in 2000. “Today we are learning the language in which God created life," President Clinton said at a White House ceremony celebrating the deed, reported in the New York Times. It is both an echo and update of Galileo’s quote from long ago: “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.” It may be that Clinton’s statement was said for expediency, as Galileo’s certainly was not—the latter meant it. But I like when people are respectful toward God.

    At about the same time, beginning with single-celled organisms like bacteria, other researchers were finding identical segments of DNA that didn’t seem to do anything and were interspersed among the segments that did. Says the above New York Times article: “. . . human DNA is full of repetitive sequences—the same run of letters repeated over and over again—and these repetitions baffle the computer algorithms set to assemble the pieces.”

    Sean Carroll, in his 2007 book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, incorrectly called these sequences ‘fossil DNA,’ though he surely knows what they are by now. At almost the exact time of his book’s writing, that DNA was being revealed as anything but ‘fossil.’

    Things must be given a snappy acronym for memory’s sake. CRISPR did the trick: “clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic (reads the same backward and forward) repeats.” Now—just what were they, those repetitions that would “baffle the computer algorithms?”

    One researcher ran the middle sections of such repeats through a database. He found that they were exactly the same as the DNA segments of attacking viruses!—as though the host ‘remembered’ its attacker. Walter Isaacson uses the analogy of copying and pasting a mug shot. That way, should that virus ever show its ugly mug again, it will immediately be spotted. Without fail it will be spotted, since the mug shot is not just there once at the post office, but interspersed again and again throughout all the DNA corridors!

    Adjacent to these clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) are enzymes* that not only do the copy and paste, but also the search and destroy. They’ve been dubbed ‘CRISPR-associated enzymes’—‘Cas enzymes’ for short. Since there are several of them, and they all perform different functions, they are numbered: Cas1, Cas2, and so forth.

    *Enzymes are proteins that initiate chemical reactions but are not consumed themselves. The Cas enzymes molest an invading virus, one targeting it, one holding it down, one cutting it up into harmless bits, one posting the mug shot for future reference. What all this means, and this with the Cas enzymes only in 2008, is the structure and mechanism of the immune system is revealed!

    Now, before progressing to what is annoying, let’s stop and savor the accomplishment, for it is monumental. You don’t have to right away reveal yourself an old codger forever posting signs ‘No turn-arounds in this driveway!!’ It’s proper to savor the accomplishment first. That’s what ‘The Code Breakers’ does, subtitled ‘the Future of the Human Race,’ the Walter Isaacson book completed in 2021. Isaacson has make it his specialty to write biographies of the world’s memorable innovators—even geniuses—such as Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, and just now, Elon Musk. The Code Breakers is more of a collaborative story. The names are not as recognizable. Isaacson wrote a similar book on the digital revolution in which most names are not as recognizable. Jennifer Doubna is the main focus of The Code Breakers. She is not the one who gave CRISPR its name, though. That fellow is Francisco Mojica.

    It’s all very proper to name names when relating a human play, and Isaacson’s book is a must-read for anyone wishing to be brought up to speed on the topic. Only the Watchtower does not name names, and that is because it is a superhuman play that they follow and relate. You don’t have to know the names of the actors to follow the play; it can even be a distraction if you do. Besides—it is a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle—because they’re not following the human actors, but the play itself, they don’t always know just who the actors are. With just mild exaggeration, Elon Musk reduces to ‘one wealthy businessman,’ Vladimir Putin to ‘one Russian politician.’

    But that’s an aside. Isaacson is telling a human story, and he does relate the names and the interplay between them. For an interesting read, you must relate the names. Besides, it’s risky if you don’t. There is no sweeter sound to a person than the sound of his own name. “Libraries and museums owe their richest collections to men who cannot bear to think that their names might perish from the memory of the race,” writes Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book that is largely forgotten today but shouldn’t be. His observation is true enough. I can’t walk though a park without passing benches emblazoned with the names of those contributing to it.

    But that’s another aside. The works of the code-breakers are truly momentous. Name them all—not a problem with that. Now—on to what is aggravating:

    To be continued:

    ******  The bookstore

  • How Does it Work that ‘Jesus Died for Our Sins?’

    One reason I became and remain a JW is the gift of explaining just how Christ’s death works. Everyone else must settle for a sloppy “Jesus died for our sins to show he loves us.” Pulls on the heartstrings, I guess, but it seems more than a little fuzzy intellectually. Only JWs (to my knowledge) can explain just how that death benefits us. It is right to highlight it:

    https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/questions/jesus-sacrifice-ransom/

    Note how it all hinges on Adam. You can’t throw away Adam to chase after the evolutionists, tempting though that may be. Keep him as a metaphor if you absolutely must, but keep him. Maybe seeing how everything hangs together by keeping him will be enough to reconsider the “science” that says he is fairy tale.

    I’m all for science. I really am. Pour me a double shot of it. E5BE6D8E-3D75-48C2-A2BD-A44A39B42FD3But it is supposed to serve us, rather than we serve it. I hope I can think a little out of the box when “science” says nothing remains beyond the grave. Why the “science” in italics? Because it remains a tool of discovery, a valuable tool indeed, but not the only tool, nor even the most important one.

    Writing of certain branches of alternative medicine, Dr. McCabe states (roughly): “These methods, thousands of years old, are unproven by science not because they are untrue, but because of the limitations of science.” Exactly. When you can gather material into contrasting groups, the only difference between them being a single variable, and perform repeatable experiments upon those groups, science is at its best. Not all things lend themselves to such easy classification and repeatability. “Science” in the absence of such attributes becomes little more than speculation, hardly worth discarding the spiritual things which carry far greater benefit.

    You don’t even have to toss out all that the evolutionists say. Let scientists be scientists and Bible students be Bible students. Micro-evolution, that essentially amounts to variation within a “kind?” Sure, why not? It is little different than animal husbandry, which people have known about for ages. Maybe you can even play with macro-evolution some. More dicey, but maybe some aspects of it can be accepted. But life arising from non-life, “abiogenesis” it is called? No.

    Just make sure you keep Adam in the mix some way, some how, and you retain the key for unlocking just how Christ’s death works to save humankind.

     

    ***The bookstore

  • The Far Side and the Spoofing of Science

    A scientist pours one liquid after another upon a duck placed on the table. His companion carefully calibrates the results on a chalkboard. Beneath the heading “Like” is “Milk off a duck’s back,” followed by “water off a duck’s back,” followed by “orange juice off a duck’s back.” Next on the list is “acid off a duck’s back,” but this is crossed out. Afterward, there is “syrup off a duck’s back.” More ingredients on the table remain to be tested. The caption: “It’s all rather scientific. Then we publish our results.”

    I think I did not reflect until now on how Far Side consistently spoofs “science.” This fits in so well with reality today, when any yo-yo says anything and calls it “the science.”

    ”Scientific studies” have come to be a standing joke. If a study doesn’t go your way, just hold out for the next one that may.

    It is as though a parlor trick vastly over applied. Very effective if confined to a narrow field of focus. But ridiculous when relied upon to evaluate all of life. 

    An underreported experiment several years back, to me reveals it all. Volunteers were asked to remember a certain number, then they walked down a corridor to another room in which another researcher awaited to take down that number. 

    On the way down, each was met by a woman who thanked them for taking part in the study. To show the researcher’s gratitude, she offered each participant a choice of two snacks—a fruit salad or a slice of chocolate cake.

    Now, unbeknownst to each participant, some had been given 2-digit numbers to remember, and others 7-digit numbers. When results were tallied, those who had been given 2-digit numbers were twice as likely to choose the fruit salad as those who have been given 7-digits. What could possibly account for that?

    The conclusion researchers drew was that if our minds are not heavily taxed, we choose fruit. We make the rational assessment that it is healthier for us. But if our minds are taxed, rationality goes right out the window! We say, “Yummy! Cake!” and grab for the chocolate. Read it here.

    The fatal flaw in relying upon “science” is us. Unless things are very very simple, emotion immediately trumps “critical thinking.” This weakness sabotages most of what passes for science. It make reliance on science the most foolhardy of endeavors. It’s okay as a supplemental tool. But no more than that. It must always be in subjection to superior methods.

    To the extent possible, science seeks to address human bias. But the extent possible is often not sufficiently much. In an ideal experiment of discovery, you line up two groups with identical attributes barring just one. Then, by tinkering through repeatable experiments with the one variable attribute, you make your discoveries as to its significance. Trouble is, very few things can be reduced to such simplicity. Humans, life, and reality itself is far too complex. You can applaud the efforts of science as you draw tentative conclusions. But you should never lose sight of how easily those conclusions can be overturned. 

    Those who rely upon science as the be-all and end-all generally do just that. Upon reaching a conclusion, they circle the wagons and decry new or contrarian evidence as ‘fake news.’ 

    Humans don’t have the integrity to handle science. It is not a moral failing, but it is built into how we are, as the cake-fruit experiment shows. To be sure, moral failings can and do exacerbate the problem, and ours is an age of much moral flexibility. The staunchest proponents of science never seem to notice when money trumps their science. 

    There was once a more modest time when medicine was called the ‘healing arts.’ Today it is called ‘evidence-based science.’ The first is a recognition that life is far too complex to imagine its individual components can be isolated and played against one another. The first allows for all laudable human attributes to come into play, not just deduction, but also intuition, empathy, even (or perhaps particularly) love. The second eliminates all these things for cold thought. Nothing wrong with cold thought in itself, but to elevate it over all else creates vulnerability and allows for the baser qualities of humans to rise.

    Is it not a bi-product of the evolutionary “science” that is abiogenesis, the idea that life could arise on its own? If you realize life could not do that, you maintain a certain awe of it. If you think it can, you say, “Well, how hard can it be? If blind chance can bring about life, culled only by natural selection, just think what can be done if focused powers of deliberate engineering are brought to bear!”

    Thus, scientists are unafraid to tinker with what any godly person would have the common sense to stay far away from. ‘Gain-of-function’ research becomes a nifty tool of of scientific endeavor. Then when it unleashes an unnatural pandemic—that is when such human inventions escape the lab, they do what morally depraved people have done since the beginning of time. They muddy the waters to hide what they’ve done. We are all undone by the modern “worship” of science.

    ***Yikes! all you who merrily reproduce Far Side cartoons. Look what I’ve just spotted on Wikipedia:

    “Since 1999, Larson has objected to his work being displayed on the internet, and has been sending takedown notices to owners of fan websites and users posting his cartoons.[25] In a personal letter included with the requests, Larson claimed that his work is too personal and important to him to have others "take control of it".[26][25] In 2007, he also published an open letter on the web to the same effect.[27] Larson has been criticized for not providing a legitimate online source for the Far Side series and negatively compared to cartoonists who have embraced the internet.[28]”

    He wishes you wouldn’t.

    ***Visit the Amazon bookstore: