Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 425

September 30, 2019

Discovery: Spiders fly hundreds of miles using electricity

They sense and manipulate Earth’s electric fields:

When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air. And spiders can increase those forces by climbing onto twigs, leaves, or blades of grass. Plants, being earthed, have the same negative charge as the ground that they grow upon, but they protrude into the positively charged air. This creates substantial electric fields between the air around them and the tips of their leaves and branches—and the spiders ballooning from those tips.
Ed Yong, “Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity” at The Atlantic

Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd

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Published on September 30, 2019 15:53

Re Jeffrey Epstein: Let’s not complicate the issues

We encounter musings about how to prevent another Jeffrey Epstein from compromising science:

In the aftermath of the Epstein revelation, students, faculty, and the general public have been calling on universities to place more transparency and ethical considerations into their donor policies. As the important conversation takes place, it should not be limited to individual donors, much as that is needed, but also grapple with more complex issues, including corporations that engage in unsavory practices, as well as governments that employ oppressive policies, foreign and domestic.

MIT, one of the universities embroiled in the Epstein scandal, signed a five-year collaboration agreement in 2018 with iFlytek, the Chinese artificial intelligence firm that provides its government with voice recognition tools for public security, including operations in Xinjiang. Over the past few years, the Chinese government has turned the northwestern region into an open-air prison, with high-tech surveillance, mass collection of biometric data, and more than one million Muslim minorities in concentration camps. Technology from iFlyTek brings many benefits to society and civic life, but it is also a powerful weapon in the Chinese government’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and build-up of a nationwide police state. Meanwhile, government contracts and subsidies underwrite much of its business. In addition to MIT, the company has also funded research at other North American institutions, including Rutgers, Princeton, and York University in Canada.

YangYang Cheng, “Hands That Feed” at supchina

Okay. But don’t let the big story get away here. Many ethics issues in science are way more complex than the Jeffrey Epstein implosion. Epstein was not, for example, a Nazi who happened to be holding hostage a genuine cure for cancer. Epstein was a big time molester and creep who was courted because he had money and perhaps in some cases because he had access to illicit entertainments. That’s just low down vulgar, bad wrong, not agonizingly difficult wrong, as if we should all need a big ethics seminar about it.

Michael Egnor has it right:

There were whispered questions, undeniably. Obvious questions. There must have been daily whispers in labs and hallways and coffee rooms. ‘Why is Dr. So-and-So taking trips with this guy?” “What do you think is happening with all of those little girls?” “Where does the money come from?”

The answers were in broad daylight. Epstein’s life was an open Internet page. Thousands of scientists and administrators — even those not directly involved with Epstein and the children he trafficked— asked these questions and knew the answers.

No one said a word. Why?

Michael Egnor, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Silence of the Scientists” at Evolution News and Science Today:

The Epstein story is way different from trying to manage the Chinese Politburo. China’s a problem,sure, but it is also a world power. Epstein wasn’t.

Actually, the connection between science and most virtues is rather tenuous. Many scientists have been awful people:

Imre Lakatos (1922–1974) after whom a prestigious philosophy of science award is named, worked hard to demolish intellectual freedom in his native Hungary. As an agent with a Party code name, he informed on his own mentor and searched his wastebasket. Much is made of his time in a labour camp but he was put there for being too Stalinist. Then there was the unpleasant business of forcing a girl to commit suicide. Moral philosopher Bernard Williams considered him “kind of a thug” and a “psychopath.”

The fact that these eminent thinkers ended up in the United States is sometimes taken to imply that they were resolutely anti-totalitarian. But in the digital age, we might best describe their biographers’ art as reputation management. Biographers go to great lengths to protect their subjects’ reputations, creating ambiguity, casting doubt on their support for totalitarianism, and offering distractions. For example, we are told by elite philosophy source Stanford Plato that Lakatos was a “warm and witty friend” as well as an inspiring teacher.

Denyse O’Leary, “The illogic of famous logicians,” at MercatorNet

Epstein wasn’t even a scientist. It wasn’t like trying to figure out how to deal with a Nazi who has a cure for cancer. Don’t let the people who are implicated invoke high and difficult questions to cloud over plain old wrongdoing.

See also: This also came up re the “March for Science”: Reflecting On The March For Science After The Death Of Reason. The reality is, science problems are back at the desk, not out in the streets.

On China: Further reading on high-tech surveillance/digital oppression in China by Heather Zeiger:

Hong Kong is tech savvy and the protesters are adept at defeating high-tech assaults

Some protestors use umbrellas to block the view of newly installed surveillance cameras while others dismantle the electronics. Others place traffic cones over tear gas canisters and then neutralize the gas with water.

The unadvertised cost of doing business with China: It’s a big market, with one Big Player, and some strange rules. In China, censorship includes democracy, human rights, sex, George Orwell’s 1984, and Winnie-the-Pooh (because the stuffed literary bear has been compared by some Chinese bloggers to their President). Such censorship, say many, minimizes the value of the internet.

China: What You Didn’t Say Could Be Used Against You An AI voiceprint could be used to generate words never said.

In China, high-tech racial profiling is social policy. For an ethnic minority, a physical checkup includes blood samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and voice recordings. The Chinese government seeks a database of everyone in the country, not only to track individuals but to determine the ethnicity of those who run up against the law.

The internet doesn’t free anyone by itself. China is testing 100% surveillance on the Uighurs, a strategically critical minority.

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Published on September 30, 2019 14:47

How Materialist Fundamentalists Are Like Islamic Fundamentalists

A few weeks ago I posted How Materialist Fundamentalists Are Like Christian Fundamentalists in which I argued that Christian and Materialist fundamentalists are alike in this respect: Their religious/metaphysical commitments come first and the evidence comes second. If the evidence seems to contradict conclusions compelled by their faith commitments, they will either reject the evidence or try to explain it away.

A few weeks after I posted my article, O’Leary for the UD News Desk posted an article about a philosopher who had dumped Darwinism because of its proponents’ open advocacy of using deception to push the Darwinian line. She linked to “I’m with stupid” by J. Budziszewski in which he wrote:

Philip Kitcher, a philosopher of biology and a supporter of natural selection, chastises Darwin for “appeasing his critics,” writing that “If the presence of particular goals can interfere with the epistemic evaluation of a novel proposal, then it is epistemically desirable for the proposer to respond to those goals, even if it requires deception.”

In other words, you may have to lie to the stupid people to get them to take Darwinism as seriously as we smart people do.

A more elaborate argument in favor of deception is offered by philosopher Phillip L. Quinn, who says that sometimes, in public debate over Darwinism, the only arguments that have a chance of convincing policymakers are bad ones. He argues that presenting arguments one knows to be faulty is morally permissible, but only “provided we continue to have qualms of conscience about getting our hands soiled.” He does worry that after presenting effective but bad arguments has become easy and second nature, one’s hands “become dirty beyond all cleansing and one suffers from a thoroughgoing corruption of mind.” But perhaps scholars could “divide up the labor so that no one among us has to resort to the bad effective argument too frequently.” That way, “we can succeed in resisting effectively without paying too high a price in terms of moral corruption.”

This got me to thinking. Where have I heard “it’s OK to lie to further the true religion” before? Oh, yes, some Islamic fundamentalists say this.

Reliance of the Traveler and Tools of the Worshipper
(also commonly known by its shorter title Reliance of the Traveler) is a
classical manual of Islamic jurisprudence written in the 14th century
by scholar Shihabuddin Abu al-‘Abbas Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri. In a famous passage al-Misri writes:

Speaking is a means to achieve objectives. If a praiseworthy aim is attainable through both telling the truth and lying, it is unlawful to accomplish through lying because there is no need for it. When it is possible to achieve such an aim by lying but not by telling the truth, it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible (N:i.e. when the purpose of lying is to circumvent someone who is preventing one from doing something permissible), and obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory . . . it is religiously precautionary in all cases to employ words that give a misleading impression . . . One should compare the bad consequences entailed by lying to those entailed by telling the truth, and if the consequences of telling the truth are more damaging, one is entitled to lie.

Reliance of the Traveler, sec. r8.2, 745-746.

For the Islamic fundamentalist, truth is a conditional good at best, and whether to tell the truth or lie in a given situation is a prudential consideration driven by larger objectives, most importantly, the propagation of the faith.

For the Materialist fundamentalist, truth is a conditional good at best, and whether to tell the truth or lie in a given situation is a prudential consideration driven by larger objectives, most importantly, the propagation of the faith. (I use the same word advisedly).

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Published on September 30, 2019 13:53

Life’s building blocks may have formed in interstellar clouds

Essential building blocks of DNA — compounds called nucleobases — have been detected for the first time in a simulated environment . . .

See the story here. Presumably, one can create a simulation in which one may “detect” anything one wishes. Meanwhile, tucking the origins of life inside simulations of environments several light years away certainly serves a purpose (a baleful or sanguine purpose, depending on one’s point of view) if one wishes to insulate one’s conclusions from empirical testing and possible falsification.

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Published on September 30, 2019 11:16

September 29, 2019

Fields medalist says math really exists

Presumably, that means medalist Alain Connes was never drafted into the current war on math.

Among a number of mathematicians who think that math really exists we find him quoted:

Alain Connes, Fields Medalist 1982:
“Two extreme viewpoints are opposed in relation to mathematical activity. The first, to which I completely subscribe, is of Platonic inspiration: it postulates that there exists a mathematical reality, raw, primitive, which predates its discovery. A world which exploration requires the creation of tools, as it was necessary to invent vessels to cross the oceans. The second viewpoint is the one of the formalists; they deny any preexistence to mathematics, believing that they are a formal game, based on axioms and logical deductions, thus a pure human creation.”
Then he adds,
“This viewpoint seems more natural to the non-mathematician, who refuses to postulate an unknown world of which he has no perception. People understand that mathematics is a language, but not that it is a reality external to the human spirit. The great discoveries of the twentieth century, especially the works of Gödel, have shown that the formalist viewpoint is not tenable. Whatever the exploratory medium, the formal system used, there will always be mathematical truths that will elude it, and mathematical reality cannot be reduced to the logical consequences of a formal system.”
Antoine Bret, “ I’d say math exist” at Antoine’s Blog

Bret, who describes himself as a Christian and a physicist, offers a number of other quotable quotes on the reality of math.

The “formalist” idea that math doesn’t really exist helps account for Big Brother’s world in which 2+2=5 if the Party says so.

So okay, if math really exists, it undermines a great deal of the nonsense barked about consciousness as an evolved illusion. That is, if consciousness enables us to apprehend what really exists, there is good reason for believing that consciousness itself exists.

Ridiculous theories about consciousness also exist but, like unicorns, they are abstractions that do not coincide with reality.

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: The progressive war on science takes dead aim at math

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Published on September 29, 2019 16:23

Discredited paper claiming that religious children are less generous is still cited in media

For example,

In fact, Decety’s paper has continued to be cited in media articles on religion. Just last month two such articles appeared (one on Buzzworthy and one on TruthTheory) citing Decety’s paper that religious children were less generous. The paper’s influence seems to continue even after it has been shown to be wrong.
Last month, however, the journal, Current Biology, at last formally retracted the paper. If one looks for the paper on the journal’s website, it gives notice of the retraction by the authors. Correction mechanisms in science can sometimes work slowly, but they did, in the end, seem to be effective here. More work still needs to be done as to how this might translate into corrections in media reporting as well: The two articles above were both published after the formal retraction of the paper.
Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D., “Does a Religious Upbringing Promote Generosity or Not?” at Psychology Today

We love it. “Correction mechanisms in science can sometimes work slowly… ” Why does that remind us of “Nature has retracted a major oceans warning paper, after ten months of mass freakouts? The suspicion raised—and it is not unreasonable—is that the harm that wrong information does is useful to some parties.

It’s almost like we sense the retraction coming conveniently after the damage is done, when even the media aftershocks count. The winner in the game won’t be respect for science.

Incidentally, one reason that religious people are more likely to be generous (as most reliable data show) is that they are more likely to be in venues where they are urged to contribute generously, as part of their lifestyle. That fact alone should have resulted in more curiosity about the supposed findings in the first place.

See also: Skeptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition? Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising

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Published on September 29, 2019 06:32

Michael Egnor: Did consciousness evolve to help us “find love”?

Michael Egnor

He continues to look critically at yet another theory of the evolution of consciousness, this one by neuroscientist Michael Graziano:

If consciousness (and specifically man’s capacity for reason) evolved by natural selection, then the trait selected would necessarily lead to success in reproducing oneself. The evolutionary purpose of consciousness would be, so to speak, to rut more successfully. But if the purpose of consciousness is to rut, then any correlation between consciousness and truth about the natural world would be coincidental to effectiveness in the mating game.

In a world where consciousness can only evolve as a mating strategy, a correspondence between consciousness and discernment of truth would be a spandrel—mere icing on the cake.

How tight a link might we expect between reproductive success and the contemplation of truth? Not a lot, it would seem, if the experience of philosophy majors on the dating scene is any measure. “Hey, baby—wanna’ read some Nietzsche with me?” is considerably less effective as a dating strategy than “Hey baby—wanna… ?” Well, you get the point.
Michael Egnor, “Did consciousness evolve to find love?” at Mind Matters News

Here are neurosurgeon Michael Egnor’s two earlier articles on Michael Graziano’s approach to consciousness:

Neuroscientist Michael Graziano should meet the p-zombie. A p-zombie (a philosopher’s thought experiment) behaves exactly like a human being but has no first-person (subjective) experience. The meat robot violates no physical principles. Yet we KNOW we are not p-zombies. Think what that means.

and

Did consciousness “evolve”? One neuroscientist doesn’t seem to understand the problems the idea raises. Darwinian evolution must select physical attributes. If consciousness evolved as a mere byproduct of physical brain processes, it is powerless in itself. Thus Graziano’s theories of consciousness are themselves mindless accidents.

And here is a selection of Dr. Egnor’s articles on consciousness:

In one sense, consciousness IS an illusion. We have no knowledge of the processes of our consciousness, only of the objects of its attention, whether they are physical, emotional, or abstract

Does Your Brain Construct Your Conscious Reality? Part I A reply to computational neuroscientist Anil Seth’s recent TED talk

and

Does Your Brain Construct Your Conscious Reality? Part II In a word, no. Your brain doesn’t “think”; YOU think, using your brain

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Published on September 29, 2019 06:12

“Spengler” speaks out on David Gelernter (the Yale computer guy who dumped Darwin)

Lots of people seem to want to talk about the Yale computer scientist who admitted that he is past all that approved Darwin flapdoodle.

“Spengler” is David Goldman, who writes about a number of international issues, and he had this to say:

The paradoxes, contradictions and utter weirdness [of current science] have been with us for so long, and have proved so resistant to investigation, that physics has lost its ability to make grand statements about the nature of reality.
Biology hasn’t fared any better. An enormous literature documents the collapse of Charles Darwin’s theory in light of evidence (or lack of it), artfully summarized in Claremont Review of Books by the distinguished computer scientist David Gelernter. The Cambrian explosion of new species, Darwin’s critics observe, should have been preceded by pre-Cambrian forms, but those simply do not exist…
And that is not the worst of it. The new science of DNA proves mathematically that the odds of a random mutation leading to an improvement in the adaptability of a living organism are effectively zero, Gelernter shows. Even a small protein molecule has a chain of 150 amino acids. If we rearrange them at random we mostly obtain gibberish. In fact, “of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 1074 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 1074 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller,” Gelernter explains. That is Establishment science, not the murmurings of the Creationist fringe.
Spengler, “Pseudo-science, the Bible and human freedom” at Asia Times

So there he is, discussing these questions as if evidence mattered, rather than thumping the tub for approved opinion. Hey, it takes me (O’Leary for News) right back to 1996 when a poli sci prof asked me to read David Berlinski’s article (The Deniable Darwin) that had just appeared in Commentary and get back to him as to what I thought of it.

I had not thought much about these matters before. But I read it and got back to him. So far as I could see, Darwinism was in big conceptual trouble but was very much the fixed belief of an entrenched establishment.
In that case, evidence means nothing and refutation is a punishable insult to one’s betters. And so it proved. Facts don’t change because we don’t like them. But they can cease to matter to us, as they have ceased to matter to popular establishment Darwinism.

Responding to Goldman, David Klinghoffer writes,

So then, against the backdrop of materialist science’s failure, what accounts for the rise of modern determinist mythologies, led by astrology and transhumanism, that have captured the imagination of Generation X and Silicon Valley? Read Goldman’s article, but I’ll try to summarize: Behind the phenomenon is a resurgent paganism, with its shamans like Yuval Harari, “this strange little vegan who spends two hours a day in meditation,” exciting the tech elite “because he visualizes them as a new class of demigods,” and with its repellant, narcissistic moral perspective: “The New Atheism turns out to be the old idolatry packaged into a smartphone app.” :
David Klinghoffer, “David Goldman on Gelernter’s Darwin Apostasy” at Evolution News and Science Today

Well, that would explain the current boom in witchcraft and astrology. See Skeptic asks, why do people who abandon religion embrace superstition? Belief in God is declining and belief in ghosts and witches is rising.

But here’s a question: When the smart people abandon Darwinism, who’s left and what does that mean for what happens next?

See also: Brit Commentator Melanie Phillips Weighs In On David Gelernter Dumping Darwin

and

David Gelernter in a more accustomed role… asking rude questions about Facebook’s $billions

Also: Spengler writes a good deal about demography. Here’s a review that I (O’Leary for News) wrote of his work.

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Published on September 29, 2019 05:46

Sean Carroll: “Nowadays, when a more scientific worldview has triumphed and everyone knows that God doesn’t exist . . . ” — really?

Carroll, here, was responding to a Weekly Standard cover article on the reactions to philosopher Nagel’s publication of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False :

What I find particularly interesting in the captioned clip is the laudatory reference to “a more Scientific WORLDVIEW” which is immediately problematic, as worldviews are matters of philosophical points of view and linked cultural agendas. That is, they are categorically distinct from science in any proper sense.

A clue for what is really meant comes from what immediately follows: “and everyone knows that God doesn’t exist.” Really, and how can science actually establish such a thing, especially in a world with literally billions of theists, many being reasonably educated and informed? Plainly, what is actually implied is that in the academy and among the post-Christian Western chattering classes, evolutionary materialistic scientism is a dominant and in fact domineering ideology.

One that, in fact, rather inconveniently has had a 100+ year track record of not just marginalising, silencing or expelling critics or doubters, but a body count northwards of 100 millions. (So much for the snide characterisation of the West’s Christian heritage by the Torquemada standard. [Cf. here on in context on the sins and blessings of Christendom.])

We could make reference to a well known cat out of the bag remark in NYRB by Richard Lewontin on how a priori materialism has been imposed on science, or the like. However, that is liable to simply invite troll rants, let the link stand for those who need to re-familiarise themselves with the record.

Instead, let us simply note that in the captioned, Carroll more than amply confirms the point regarding the cat Lewontin let out of the bag. Where, too, scientism — the notion that, roughly, evolutionary materialism dominated, Big-S “Science” is “the only begetter of truth [and thus, knowledge]” — is immediately self-refuting. For, this claim is a claim about philosophy that tries to discredit such claims. Unfortunately, that is not going to help those trapped in the evo mat cave escape their bonds and delusions. The issue is how to move the Overton Window:

Of course, we have already taken step 1, by headlining and briefly exposing immediately fatal errors on the public record for one of the better known spokesmen for evolutionary materialistic scientism [= “naturalism,” more or less].

What can we do for step 2?

We have to look at warrant for theism (at least at intro to 101 level), and in my view a good place to start is an article responding to a dismissive article that popped up here in the Caribbean about a year ago. Here we go:

>>Over the years, many millions have met and been transformed through meeting God in the face of Christ. This includes countless Jamaicans [and many other people across the Caribbean and wider world]. It also includes many
famed scholars, eminent scientists and leaders of powerful reformations.
Logically, if just one of these millions has actually been reconciled with God through Christ, God must be real and the gospel must be true. (Where, if instead so many are deeply delusional, that would undermine the rational credibility of the human mind.)

However, for some years now various voices have tried to dismissively question God, the gospel and Christians. So, it is not unexpected to see Mr Gordon Robinson writing in the Gleaner recently (on Sunday, August 26, 2018), about alleged “dangerous dogma promulgated by the Church and its many brainwashed surrogates,” “perverse propaganda spread by Christian churches,” “sycophants” and the like.

Along the way, he managed to ask a pivotal question: “Who/what is God?”

Regrettably, he also implied outright fraud by church leaders: “Either the Church has NO CLUE about who/what God really is, or it deliberately misrepresents God’s essence in order to frighten people into becoming church members and tithing. Nothing else makes sense.”

Fig 1 DNA, Showing the Genetic Code (HT ResearchGate)

In fact, a simple Internet search might give a better answer. For, thinkers such as a Thomas Aquinas or an Augustine of Hippo or a Paul of Tarsus or even a Wayne Grudem or a William Lane Craig have long since credibly addressed the idea of God and systematic theology at a little more sophisticated level than Sunday School lessons or Internet Atheist web sites. In so doing, they have made responsible cases that rise above the level of caricatures of the art on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling.

We may begin with Paul in Romans 1, 57 AD: “Rom 1:19 . . . what can be known about God is plain to [people], because God has shown it to them. 20 For [God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So [people] are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” [ESV]

Here, one of the top dozen minds of our civilisation first points out how our
morally governed interior life and what we see in the world all around
jointly call us to God our Creator. But, too often we suppress the force
of that inner testimony and outer evidence. (This, predictably, leads to unsound thinking and destructive deeds stemming from benumbed consciences and en-darkened minds.)

For one, consider how for sixty years now we have known that the DNA in the cells of our bodies has in it complex, alphanumeric, algorithmic code that is executed through molecular nanotechnology to build proteins, the workhorses of biological life. That’s why Sir Francis Crick wrote to his son Michael on March 19, 1953 that “we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page of print is different from another).”

Crick’s letter

Figure 2: Crick’s March 19, 1953 letter, p. 5 with a highlight (Fair use)

Yes, alphanumeric code (so, language!), algorithms (so, purpose!), i.e. intelligent design of life from the first living cell on. Including, us.
No wonder the dean of the so-called New Atheists was forced to admit
that Biology studies complicated things that give a strong appearance of
design.

1947 saw the advent of the transistor age, allowing storage of a single bit of information in a tiny electronic wonder. We have since advanced to computers based on silicon chips comparable in size to a thumb-nail, with millions of transistors. These microchips and support machinery process many millions of instructions per second and have storage capacities of many gigabytes. Coded electronic communication signals routinely go across millions of miles through the solar system. Every one of these devices and systems required careful design by highly educated engineers, scientists and programmers. The living, self-replicating cell’s sophistication dwarfs all of these; yet we question the all-knowing God, the author of life.

A nerve cell

Next, Mr. Robinson and others inevitably appeal to our known duty to truth, right reasoning, fairness, prudent judgement, etc. But, where did that inner moral law (testified to by our consciences) come from? Surely, it is not a delusion; or else responsible, freely rational discussion would collapse into nihilistic chaos: might and manipulation (= “power and propaganda”) make ‘right,’ ‘rights,’ ‘justice,’ ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge’ etc. Instead, our conscience-guarded hearts and minds clearly show the Creator’s design that we freely live by the light and law of truth and right.

Such considerations – and many more – point us to the only serious candidate for the source of reality that can bridge IS and OUGHT: the inherently good (and wise) Creator God, a necessary and maximally great being. Who is fully worthy of our loyalty and of humble, responsible, reasonable service through doing the good. Then, we may readily draw out the classic understanding of God described in scripture and studied in systematic theology: all-good, eternal, creator and Lord with sound knowledge and full capability to work out his good purposes in the right way at the right time. [Cf. Grudem, at Web Archive, here.]

Moreover, what we most of all need to know about God is taught by Jesus the Christ, recorded in scripture within eye-witness lifetime then accurately handed down to us for 2000 years now, at fearsome cost: the blood of the martyrs. Martyrs, who had but one incentive: that they directly knew and must peacefully stand by the eternal truth – cost what it will. They refused to be frightened by dungeon, fire or sword, much less mere rhetoric. Why would thousands die horribly to promote a known lie?

[I add, Strobel on the Case for Christ:]

Their record is that Christ is the express image of his Father, Logos – Cosmos-ordering Reason himself, prophesied Messiah, the Saviour who in love died for us on a cross. He rose from the dead as Lord with 500 eye-witnesses, precisely fulfilling over three hundred prophecies that were long since recorded in the Old Testament. (See esp. Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, c. 700 BC.) He ascended to his Father in the presence of the apostles. He shall return as eternal Judge, before whom we must all account. (Yes, professing and “backsliding” Christians too.) The Bible also records Jesus’ prayer for us: “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and [“thy Son”] Jesus Christ, whom thou has sent.” [John 17:1- 5, cf. 3:16.]

That is the truth witnessed by the church, whether it was 33 AD in Jerusalem before an angry Sanhedrin, or 50 AD before the laughing Athenians (who had built a public monument to their ignorance of God), or today . . .>>

So, Mr Carroll, no, it is not so that “everyone knows that God doesn’t exist.” Indeed, just the opposite is true: arguably, millions, having met and been transformed by God, know God. They don’t just know about him.

Perhaps, it is time for a more sober-minded discussion on the roots of reality. END

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Published on September 29, 2019 02:25

September 28, 2019

Rob Sheldon on the renewal of 3.5 billion-year-old life claims

They’ve gone back ad forth with the Western Australian stromatolites (= life/not life) but recent evidence suggests life. Our physics color commentator Rob Sheldon, author of Genesis: The Long Ascent (Vols 1 & 2), offers some background:

Kranendonk has been doing stromatolite work since at least 2003, so he’s not a newcomer to the field. Generally speaking, everyone acknowledges that stromatolites are fossilized blue-green algae communities that have grown pillars over a couple of centuries. Shark Bay Australia is a famous site of stromatolites that are still growing.

Usually the debate circles around whether an old rock is an authentic stromatolite or not. Some less reputable astrobiologists have claimed that striated cherts from Australia were 3.85 billion year old stromatolites, but I don’t think that claim has held up.

Kranendonk is really happy to have isolated some organic compounds from a 3.5billion year stromatolite. His academic page at New South Wales university says that the paper is “in press”. I could not locate it from Google Scholar or arXiv.org. My best guess is that he has found something organically simple such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), if only because 3.5 billion years is a long time for organics to survive, and PAHs are the sort of keratonized (turned into keragen) that is stable. But then he says he found it under the electron microscope, which measures only atomic abundances. So I’m guessing these PAHs are found as a “carbon sheath” or layer surrounding fossilized blue-green algae, which just happens to be the same discovery as Richard Hoover on meteorites.

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Well, keep digging!

See also: Stromatolites from 3.5 bya really ARE microbial life, say researchers.This doesn’t leave a lot of time for Darwinian evolution (natural selection acting on random mutation). Not nearly enough, in fact.

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A bit of history (life to non-life, then back to life):

Researchers Suggest: Life Began On Land Not Sea. And Nearly 600 Mya Earlier Than Thought (2017)

World’s “Oldest Microfossils” Are Not Life Forms After All (2015)

Microbial Mats Show Fossil Structures From 3.5 Billion Years Ago (2014)

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Published on September 28, 2019 15:41