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June 24 - June 26, 2017
Consider the words of Ilya Prigogine, a Chemist-Physicist and recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry: The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero. (3)
The “nanotechnology” that we observe functioning at this incredibly tiny level is overshadowed only by the immense complexity of the language and encoding which orchestrates it, and is built into it. I’ll let Dr. Don E. Johnson sum it up: Information is something that is useful that you can use to make predictions that have meaning, and the only way to get that is by intelligence. There is absolutely no way that ever has been shown to produce information other than by intelligence. And therefore, you have life, you have the complexity of the DNA structure and the amount of information that it
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your body has literally hundreds of quadrillions of computers in it, some operating with triple layers of encryption! Also: the genetic system IS a pre-existing operating system; the specific genetic program (genome) is an application; the native language has a codon-based encryption system; the codes are read by enzyme computers with their own operating system; each enzyme’s output is to another operating system in a ribosome; codes are decrypted and output to tRNA computers; each codon-specified amino acid is transported to a protein construction
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Consider this quote in New Scientist: A single gene can potentially code for tens of thousands of different proteins... It's the way in which genes are switched on and off, though, that has turned out to be really mind-boggling, with layer after layer of complexity emerging. (~Le Page, "Genome at 10," New Scientist, 6/16/10). Arguably the most prominent atheist of the 20th century, Antony Flew (Professor of Philosophy, author, and debater) announced in 2004 that he had become convinced that there is no way these things could have evolved by chance,
In a bit of news breaking just recently, a joint scientific project called “ENCODE” has determined that a staggering 80% of what was previously considered “junk” DNA actually has purpose.
Shortly after the draft sequence of the human genome was published, researchers’ initial estimates determined that only 1 percent of the human genome consisted of functional sequences, with the rest categorized as junk.
However, after careful review, it looks as if the play on the field stands. First off, it’s hard to accept the claim that the popular science reports are hype. The science journalists who reported on the ENCODE results are among the best in the world—and
On September 5, ScienceDaily published a news item based on a press release issued by NIH/National Human Genome Institute (NHGRI), in which Eric D. Green, director of NHGRI, is quoted as saying,4 “During the early debates about the Human Genome Project, researchers had predicted that only a few percent of the human genome sequence encoded proteins, the workhorses of the cell, and the rest was junk. We now know that this conclusion was wrong.”
It seems that the distinction between biochemical activity and function is a “sleight of hand”—a ploy to detract from what Christian apologists are saying about the significance of ENCODE.
Richard Dawkins for example, stated the following in response to this puzzle: "It's as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history" (The Blind Watchmaker, p. 229).
One of the world’s most respected Darwinists, the late Stephen Jay Gould, once remarked: “All paleontologists know that the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt”, and "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record contains precious little in the way of intermediate forms; transitions between major groups are characteristically abrupt.”
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology…the evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils.” (Evolution’s erratic pace, Natural History, Vol. LXXXVI[5], May, 1977, p. 14).
If the Darwinian paradigm were true, the earth would be littered with not just transitional forms, but a cornucopia of sad mutations which didn’t live long.
A recent cover story in the journal New Scientist called “Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life” expressed it this way: For a long time the holy grail was to build a tree of life,” says Eric Bapteste, an evolutionary biologist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. A few years ago it looked as though the grail was within reach. But today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded. “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a
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The complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude. Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA — what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA — has been fascinating and befuddling...the signaling information in cells is organized through networks of information rather than simple discrete pathways. It’s infinitely more complex.”-- Erika Hayden, “Life is Complicated,” Nature, 3/31/10, p. 664-667
Yet ironically, atheism is actually still not the prevailing metaphysical view among American Scientists.
According to a recent Pew poll, less than half of The AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science; the world’s largest general scientific society) are atheists
In fact, only 17% of those Scientists identified themselves as atheists! While it’s true that many of these Scientists are Theistic Evolutionists, many of them don’t seem to understand that the reason Darwinism got traction in the first place is because it was seen as a lever with which to dislodge God from culture.
It’s amusing that many of these same atheists will bray about “hegemony” when criticizing things like Western Civilization, but they engage in brazen and amateurish cultural hegemony when it comes to metaphysics.
The maximum time available for it to organize the universal code-of-life was estimated 6.3 x 10 to the 15th power seconds or 200 million years. Darwinian processes would have to evaluate roughly 10 to the 55th power codes-per-second in the available time to find the one that’s universal. Put simply, Darwinism lacks the time necessary to find the universal genetic code by many billions of trillions of years (literally).
Nobel Laureate (and co-discoverer of DNA) Francis Crick argued that the genetic code can't evolve in any substantial way, because if the rules of the code were altered in any direction, it would result in a catastrophic condition for the cell.
So what do the super-intelligent say about all this? I did a little bit of research on the highest IQ’s on earth, and to my surprise found indications that four out of the top five were not atheists.
Mental states may be caused by physical states, and physical states may be caused by mental states. A feeling of pain (mental state) may be caused by being stuck with a pin (physical state), and one's arm going up (physical state) may be caused by an intention to vote (mental state). But just because A causes B, that does not mean that A is the same thing as B!
The fact that a state of one's mind can affect physical states and the fact that physical states can affect the state of one's mind do not mean that corresponding mental and physical states are identical to each other.
Second, many mental states have intentionality; "ofness" or "aboutness" which is directed towards an object. A thought, for instance, is about the moon. But no physical state is about anything.
Third, mental states are internal, private and immediately accessible to the subject having them. A scientist can know more about my brain than I do. But I have direct knowledge of my mind which is not available to anyone else.
Fourth, mental states fail to have crucial features that characterize physical states. Unlike physical states, they have no spatial extension (it doesn't make sense to ask how tall or wide someone's thoughts are) and they have no location either (which is why it doesn't make sense to ask where someone's thoughts are). In general, mental states cannot be described using physical language.
yet brains seem too similar to other parts of the body (both brains and bodies are collections of cells totally describable in physical terms). How can like causes produce radically different effects?
Mental states possess four features not owned by physical states, and evolutionary theory seems fundamentally incapable of explaining the existence of mental states. This means not only that the evolutionary argument fails but also that there will never be a complete naturalistic account of the nature and origin of human consciousness.
