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July 31 - October 29, 2018
The concept of life arising from non-life by random chance is called “abiogenesis”. This concept is the “creation story” of Darwinian Evolution.
The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness. Given such odds, the time until the black holes evaporate and the space to the ends of the universe would make no difference at all. If we were to wait, we would truly be waiting for a miracle. (2)
1. According to a leading Darwinist, the odds of component parts in close proximity assembling into a single-celled creature are 1 in 10339,999,866. 2. According to probability theorists, anything with lower odds than 1 in 1050 is mathematically impossible. 3. Therefore, the spontaneous generation of life is mathematically impossible.
almost a miracle,
Note the use of the word, “almost.”
Philip Johnson observed, "When a scientist of Crick's caliber feels he has to invoke undetectable spaceman, it is time to consider whether the field of prebiological evolution has come to a dead end.” (4)
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. (5)
Surely this standard has been met.
1. According to leading Darwinists, odds of humans evolving from a single-celled creature are 1 in 1024,000,000. 2. According to probability theorists, anything with lower odds than 1 in 1050 is mathematically impossible. 3. Therefore, Darwinian evolution of human beings is mathematically impossible.
the idea of God is unacceptable, so science cannot consider even the possibility that God created this universe and all that is in it.
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. [The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997].
One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material
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I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. (8)
God has indeed left His signature in nature in its irreducible complexity and fine-tuning.
1. The odds of the genetic information required to make the proteins for a minimally complex single-celled creature arising by chance are 1 in 1041,000. 2. According to probability theorists, anything with lower odds than 1 in 1050 is mathematically impossible. 3. Therefore, a single-celled creature arising by chance is mathematically impossible.
The problem with this standpoint is that bad mutations outnumber good mutations by such a staggering ratio. 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. The fact that it is not speaks volumes.
I’ve read elsewhere that this is one of the things that Darwin expected to see and said would be the downfall of his system if they don’t exist.
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 reality,”
they have no idea that many scientists are horrendous philosophers, and don’t even notice the prevailing mistake of drifting from Methodological Materialism (the presumption in Science that supernatural causes are not to be considered) to Philosophical Materialism (the idea that therefore the supernatural cannot possibly exist).
I think Psychological and Sociological factors are in play here. Human Beings have a tendency to conform, so as not to be “left out” or ostracized. “Groupthink” is a powerful force.
When Richard Dawkins made the following quote, for example, he was echoing decades of elitists’ attempts to rid the earth of Theism: “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Charles Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” [The Blind Watchmaker, p. 6].
The fact that the likes of Richard Dawkins think it should actually be made illegal to teach evidence-based Intelligent Design should not be missed or ignored. The rights spoken of by America’s founders were seen to be “inalienable” because they were secured by Nature’s God; The Creator. In order to “alienate” these Natural Laws, tyrants must first convince people that God doesn’t exist.
Going back to hard Science, another one of the problems that Darwinism must solve (ha ha) is summed up very well by biophysicist, Hubert Yockey. The “problem” is that the genetic code has error-minimization abilities built into it that are astonishing. The particular question addressed in his book Information Theory and Molecular Biology is: “If the genetic code could change over time to yield a set of rules that allowed for the best possible error-minimization capacity, then is there enough time for this process to occur?” Yockey determined that natural selection would have to explore 1.4 x
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Darwinian evolutionists claim that we are nothing but particles of matter in a specific arrangement, but the self-awareness and consciousness of our minds provide prima facie (“on its first appearance”) evidence that we consist of much more than that.
The denial of free will may be the king of all self-refuting positions, but surprisingly, there are people with PhD’s who believe in it.
Ten of Jesus Christ’s disciples, plus Paul and His half-brother James, were tortured and killed for believing in Him and not recanting their belief in Him.
This should have a caveat that says, “according to tradition ...”
it; if the resurrection of Christ did not happen, these individuals would know that fact, since they claimed to be eyewitnesses to it. Although people such as terrorists often die for things that are untrue, in those events, the individuals believed that particular lie to be true (such as the 9/11 terrorists believing that they will be rewarded for their actions). Throughout recorded history, there is no other record of people ever dying for something that they know is a lie—human instinct for self-preservation is too strong.
Throughout recorded history, there is no other record of people ever dying for something that they know is a lie—human instinct for self-preservation is too strong.
It’s be good to cite something for this. Of course one cannot cite *all* recorded history, so this is an unverifiable claim. Though it is certainly a reasonable assumption.
Take a look at how they died:
Again, there should be a caveat about these facts not being recorded outside of Church history/tradition.
Remarkably, many of the loudest critics of the Bible have not actually studied the book, but rather have relied on excerpts and hearsay to attack it. If they were to actually do so, they’d be in for a surprise.
In the fifth century B.C. a prophet named Zechariah declared that the Messiah would be betrayed for the price of a slave—thirty pieces of silver, according to Jewish law-and also that this money would be used to buy a burial ground for Jerusalem's poor foreigners (Zechariah 11:12-13). Bible writers and secular historians both record thirty pieces of silver as the sum paid to Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus, and they indicate that the money went to purchase a "potter's field," used—just as predicted—for the burial of poor aliens (Matthew 27:3-10).
Hawking is in a tiny minority here.
Unfortunately, because of Hawking’s own popularity, this seems to be the popular view.
So to recap, at some time adjacent to the publication of A Brief History of Time, Hawking began vacillating back and forth between public statements suggesting that the universe began to exist and that it was past-eternal. He has not consistently held that time had no beginning however; for example, in a 1996 book he co-authored with Roger Penrose called The Nature of Space and Time, he made the memorable quote, "Today virtually everyone agrees that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang.”(16) This idea of a finite past comports with what the vast majority of scientists
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“the demarcation problem”),
Elsewhere in the book, they make the jarring claim that “because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing…”. (18) Whoah – doesn’t this put the “cart before the horse”?! I think it can be easily deduced that gravity (as well as the other fundamental forces) are features of the universe; not features that preceded the universe. If gravity preceded the universe, where did gravity come from? Indeed, Hawking himself makes the statement on page 83 of the book that “the laws of nature in our universe arose from the big bang”. So which came first, the laws or
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Hawking and Mlodonow seem to want to smuggle in the presupposition that there is no objective reality, and hence, no God. As I have noticed time and time again, their worldview seems to be steered by what they want to believe, rather than being steered by the truth into the best inference. I see no reason to accept either their stated or implied worldviews based on the incoherent flailings in this book.
I’ve read several reviews, and listened to several podcasts critiquing it,
You really should read something before criticizing it ... especially if you’ve only read/heard critical reviews!
Let’s review what we’ve gone over in a summarized form:
I love this chapter! Such a good idea to summarize each chapter from the book to reinforce each point.
