Today's "Living Fossils" Demonstrate STASIS - a Powerful Discriminant in Selection of Creation as the Right Answer in the Origins Debate

Greetings to faithful friends, passionate foes, occasional casual observers, and surfers who may have simply landed here on a freak wave ...

Where to begin today?

First I suppose I am hoping the Oregon State Beavers football team defeats the Oregon Ducks this coming weekend and puts them out of their misery. As I watched a mediocre UCLA Bruins team grind the justly proud but injury-riddled Ducks into the Rose Bowl turf Saturday, I was thinking that if the game had been a Las Vegas prize fight, it would have been stopped halfway through. Maybe the barely limping Ducks can be rewarded with a bowl game that can't afford television cameras so they can close out what had been a stunningly entertaining and successful season in merciful solitude. I mean, mercy killing is still legal in Oregon, isn't it?

Now, REALLY where to begin today?

So much to say, let's just cut to the chase. The dead deluder Darwin's delusional nonsense continues to be exposed in the light of observed fact. Sir Charles mused that nature's way was continual - you might even say dynamic - change over time to transform bugs into linebackers. In fact, when folks by their Darwinian religion choose to exclude purposeful divine creation from the origins debate, then the only choice left is that nature's way must be continual dynamic change. But the existence of bazillions - give or take a few - of life forms that remain virtually unchanged over alleged millions of years are powerful proofs joined in flesh and stone that Darwin is not only dead, but Darwin is DEAD WRONG.

Note that purposeful exclusion of fiat creation by Darwin and his fanatically factophobic followers is NOT inherently scientific. It is inherently religious. The difference is that Christianity is religion with revelation (lots of light) while Darwinism is religion without revelation (lots of dark).

BTW, "fiat" creation means (approximately) that God did it all with a six-day snap of the fingers.

And now ...

On to the details ....

The truly wise will seek to understand the nature, purpose, and destiny of mankind, and these must be ultimately grounded in our origin. The list of choices is not overwhelmingly long. In fact, it really is pretty simple.

Choice # 1 (preferred): From God's Word the Bible we learn that life and the history of life can be characterized by (1) fiat creation (abrupt appearance), and (2) God's sustaining power in a fallen universe (stasis with gradual decay).

Choice # 2 (you can go this way but the eternal consequences are quite grim): Darwin's idea of (1) gradual appearance and (2) continual change.

If you are interested in an earlier touch on this, go to:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/08/these-chemical-responses-have-been.html

So you can now say, "Hey, Undertaker, this is cool. With the characterizations so clear, we can now begin to apply a decision-theoretic framework like modern edjicated engineers. We can apply well-defined discriminants (abrupt appearance, stasis) in order to select good-better-compelling answers from bad-worse-fugeddaboudit non-answers." And the Undertaker replies, "Now you got it, kid."

And the answer comes stunningly simply and swiftly. Any fair characterization of the history of life as found in both the fossil record and in living things is: (1) abrupt appearance (e.g., the so-called "Cambrian explosion"), and (2) stasis ("living fossils", now also known as Lazarus taxa).

Poof! Darwin is gone. Voila! God wins.

Whispering ... actually, there was never really any contest. Some people just thought there was.

And if you have questions about characterizing the fossil record by abrupt appearance and stasis, see:

Gish, Duane T., Evolution: The Fossils Still say NO!, Institute for Creation Research, 1995. 391 pp.

...

My motivation for engaging in this post? I am sitting here with my recent (November 17, 2007) copy of Science News open to an article titled "BACK FROM THE DEAD? 'Resurrections' of long-missing species lead to revelations." You can find it on the web (but you will need to be a SN subscriber to read the entire text) at:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071117/bob8ref.asp.

The article discusses species that are known from the fossil record and have now been found living today virtually unchanged. SN says:

"The apparent resurrections ... long-missing species have led scientists to give such living fossils another name: Lazarus taxa, after the beggar who was raised from the dead in a biblical parable. In the strictest sense, the modern representative of a Lazarus taxon belongs to the same species that disappeared from the fossil record many years ago. More loosely, researchers apply the term Lazarus taxon to the extremely close kin of ancient apparent extinctions."

Examples in the article include:

(1) the coelacanth is a lobe-finned fish known from fossils in rocks (allegedly) more than 75 million years old. Scientists were stunned to discover a living coelacanth pulled out of the Indian Ocean in 1938. Since then, the coelacanth has been observed or caught in waters from South Africa to Indonesia.

(2) One of the world's rarest trees was discovered in Australia in 1994. "The trees, dubbed Wollemi pines, were later identified as surviving relatives of a species long presumed extinct - in other words, a Lazarus taxon."

(3) "Glass sponges are so called because their skeletons are built from glasslike silica minerals, not carbonates. ... Such reef-building glass sponges disappeared from the fossil record about 120 million years ago, about the same time that daitoms ... first appeared." Living glass sponges have now been discovered in deep ocean waters off the coast of Canada in the 1990s and off the coast of Wshington State in 2005.

When I read the SN article, it definitely had a familiar ring to it. I had already read about the coelacanth from numerous creationist sources over the last 30 years (see for example Creation 15(4):45,September 1993):

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v15/i4/livingfossils.asp

Also, the discovery of the "living fossil" Wollemi pine I read about in Creation magazine in 1995: Creation 17(2):13. March 1995. See also:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/tree.asp

So this "living fossil" business is not something new at all. In fact, for a period in the 1990s, each issue of Creation magazine showed examples of living fossils, courtesy of Dr Joachim Schevenin in Germany. Dr. Schevenin, as of 1993, was overseeing the world’s largest collection of living fossils in his faith-funded creation museum Lebendige Vorwelt at Unterm Hagen 22, D-58119 Hagen, Germany. As I recall, Dr. Scheven had several hundred examples of "living fossils" on display.

So is all this just religion-crazed creationist fanatics trying to use smoke and mirrors to create a sense of creation in the origins debate? Nope, not me. I am religion-motivated - but enthused rather than fanatic, rational and in-right-mind rather than crazed.

Even the modern king of evolutionary flim-flam, Richard Dawkins, reluctantly admitted that abrupt appearance gives substantial credence to the creation hypothesis. The prominent British evolutionist, speaking of the Cambrian fauna, made the following comment:

"And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists". Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1987), as quoted in Creation 15(4):45, September 1993.

This by the Professor Dawkins who had to resort to a deceitfully flawed argument in his infamous "Methinks it is a weasel" synthesis to argue the reasonableness of chance evolution. Enough of this fraudulent fellow. See point B.1 in:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/04/gimme-break-man-i-really-do-have-life.html

So is belief in creation important to be a Christian?

Absolutely. The message of the Bible is that we have been created in the image of God with the express purpose of reflecting that image. God desires that we live with Him in eternity, and gave his Only Begotten Son, Jesus, as a sacrifice to redeem us from our own sins and failures. And the one who gave himself, Jesus Christ, is called "The Author of Life" by Peter as he spoke to the the Jews in Jerusalem:

"You killed the Author of Life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this." (Acts 3:15).

And speaking about Jesus to the Christians in Colosse, Paul wrote:

"For by him (Jesus) all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. And he is the head of the body, the church." (Colossians 1:16-17a).

So to reject creation is to reject the Creator. Does that make these discriminants (abrupt appearance and stasis) important? Yeah, very important. May the wise heed.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

LIARS ALL? The New Atheists (like Dawkins) Want to Make Lemmings of Our Children

Greetings friends, acquaintances, and unknown visitors.

Bottom line of today's post: Don't let your kids go see the "Golden Compass" movie. And don't give the "Golden Compass" folks your money.

So, who can ya trust these days? Especially when lots of shady characters seem to be lurking about in all sorts of places watching for times and ways to exploit and deceive us - or to spirit away our kids. Well, it seems that there is a special and very vocal bunch who very openly are seeking to lure our children into a lemming-like plunge over the cliff of personal or spiritual destruction.

Topic today is about ....

Liars all?

Remember when Jesus talked about the source of lies? Speaking to the Jews who opposed him, he said:
"You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies." (John 9:44)

Well, it seems the devil's disciples flourish yet today with the greatest lie of all - that God Himself either does not exist or does exist but is irrelevant. Or, more recently, that he is a weak god who is going to be killed in the end. Part of and parceled with this great lie is today's "new atheism," being fiercely and feverishly promulgated by such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Remember Richard Dawkins, the fundamentally dishonest fool (the Bible says that the fool says in his heart that there is no God)? Dawkins purposely uses a cleverly flawed argument to try to make evolution a done deal and God simply a done gone god.

BACKGROUND:
See point B.1 in the following link:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/04/gimme-break-man-i-really-do-have-life.html.
Also, you can read more about Dawkins in his exchange of views with human genome researcher Francis Collins in the TIME magazine article November 13, 2006. Or in the informative Newsweek article of September 11, 2006:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14638243/site/newsweek/


So be forewarned ... the cunning of snake-oil purveyors of the past can't hold a candle to the the new atheists who are promoting their damning fraud with zeal and relish.

In the dirty tricks department, sucking young children into fantasy stories which suddenly morph into faith-toxic fiery darts of evil, English atheist Philip Pullman seems to be riding the crest of the wave of darkness with his book series His Dark Materials and an upcoming "kids' movie, The Golden Compass, due for release December 7, 2007. The term "Day of Infamy" seems heading for tragic redefinition.

You should take the time to update yourself on "the new atheists." But be sure to pray for sound discernment. Otherwise, you may just think, "Huh? What's the big deal?"

Here are some good links by which you can begin to inform yourself:

(1)
http://www.onenewsnow.com/2007/10/perspectives_does_the_golden_c.php

(2)
http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=7254

(3)
http://store.afa.net/pc-10000106-13-shedding-light-on-his-dark-materials.aspx


Now, with all due respect to Dr. Laura, GO DO THE RIGHT THING.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

P.S.
Just to whet your appetite and to tantalize your taster, here is part of the Rebecca Grace commentary in link (1). Note the last words are "don't be deceived."
"According to CNSNews.com, leading atheist writers and intellectuals are engaged in a "scientific" quest to ultimately destroy organized religion, particularly Christianity. Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, author Sam Harris and journalist Christopher Hitchens are some of the big names leading this "new atheism" initiative. Evidence of their agenda is seen in efforts such as the Out Campaign and the Blasphemy Challenge.
CNSNews.com defines the Out Campaign as "a movement started by Dawkins to encourage Americans to proudly display their atheism." ABC News describes the Blasphemy Challenge as a way "to challenge people to make videos of themselves denying, denouncing or blaspheming the Holy Spirit, and then post them on YouTube." ABC News also calls it "the cutting edge of a new and emboldened wave of atheism."
The Blasphemy Challenge targets teens while an upcoming movie that may have a similar agenda is likely to appeal to families, especially children.
The Golden Compass is a film from New Line Cinema based on the first book of a series, His Dark Materials, written by English atheist Philip Pullman. It is set to release December 7 in theaters nationwide. From watching the trailer, it's easy to see that the film has a C. S. Lewis/Narnia feel to it, but don't be deceived."

NOVA Judgment Day: Dover PA judge would sentence us to no hygiene, no antiseptic surgery, no electronics, no labor-saving devices, no gravity

Ted Mahar, writer for the Oregonian newspaper, wrote a review of the NOVA program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial." See:

http://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/entertainment/119490270485010.xml&coll=7

Following is a letter of response sent to the Oregonian by a friend of Darwin's Undertaker.

==============================================

Letter to Ted Mahar, The Oregonian, November 13, 2007.

I was saddened to read your review of the NOVA program "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" (Oregonian, November 13, 2007, p. B8). Oregonian readers would have been well served by a good dose of critical thinking instead of your swallowing and regurgitation of the NOVA piece. While ostensibly a documentary, "Judgment Day" applies a transparently selective pro-evolution bias in the quantity and depth of material presented. You aid and abet this propagandist wolf dressed in sheep's documentary clothing in both your introductory paragraphs (e.g., "Earth is not the center of the universe") and by the gushingly glowing description ("clear, eloquent, and thorough") of the opinion rendered by Judge John E. Jones III.

Well, you can put "clear, eloquent, and thorough" perfume on a skunk, and the thing will still stink. I thought the Jones decision stunk even more than the no-whistle travesty near the end of the OSU-Washington football game last week. The only difference is that (a) the Pac-10 referee crew was rebuked and (b) the good-guy Beavers still got the win. We still await the day of redemption for the Dover debacle

It really is time to blow the whistle on Judge Jones III and put his play up for review, but NOVA just swallowed the whistle. In reply, I do not have the time to repeat the volumes of material readily available in a multitude of sources, and I doubt if you would want to read it all. So at least here are a few items to slide under your thinking cap.

(1) You pontificate that the earth is not at the center. Why aren't many wide-distribution media informing folks that "quantized redshifts" support some creationist cosmologies? The quantized redshifts suggest that our home galaxy, the Milky way, is in fact at the center of the universe. This, by the way, is a "galactocentric" concept, not a geocentric concept. But earth still wins the cosmos lottery by winding up in the one-in-a-million galaxy that happens to be at the inferred center. You can read about it at: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1570
or
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/10/creation-cosmology-god-did-it-is-lookin.html

And if you get bored down there on Broadway (or Cesar Chavez Avenue or whatever), why not publish a frontpiece article mentioning that quantized redshifts are supportive of certain creationist cosmologies. Then double your inbox size and watch the hate mail roll in. And keep an updated resume in your coat pocket just in case our friendly Oregonian turns nasty on you.

(2) Was science served by the Dover trial? In particular, were logic and substance front and center in the intelligent design debate? Or did Dover school board opponents, in the end, finally resort to technicalities and jurisprudential diversions to dump God? I vote for the latter. As much as the expression "breathtaking inanity" rankles me, it is fair to apply to school board members who misrepresented ("lied"?) about their motives and prior knowledge. But it seems that substance of science was displaced and that motives and prior knowledge became the substance of the case. Now that was too bad.

(3) So is Intelligent Design (ID) science? To get some traction on this question, let's ask if all the money the US is spending on "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" (SETI) is for "science". My take on it is that the ID folks are the first to really try to synthesize a science framework to discern whether things we observe are sourced in intelligent or in non-intelligent entities or processes. If there is no formal framework to do so, all our SETI money is down the rathole since whatever we observe can not be objectively ("scientifically") identified as inferring intelligent origin. If congress would threaten to eliminate SETI funding because it can produce no verifiable "scientific" result, there will be a whole bunch of salary-threatened folks out at NASA and elsewhere jumping on the ID bandwagon.

Now that would really be fun to watch.

Can you catch even a wisp of the irony that detection of 100 "characters" emanating from some place in outer space would produce three-inch high headlines in world newspapers the following day, while the existence of one human DNA molecule (information equivalent of about one billion characters) is viewed with awe yet denial of intelligent origin? The Wall Street Journal had a piece about three years ago pointing out this obviously flawed thinking. If you get serious about this, I will dig up the reference for you. But I don't want to put too much into something you may not even read.

(4) Why did the NOVA program quote the first amendment only partially? The salient text is:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
The NOVA program presented the trial as all about the non-establishment clause, while the non-prohibition clause was swept under the table. All operational-empirical science is axiomatic, that is, it begins with an assumption of truth which is then evaluated under criteria of observability, repeatability, and falsifiablity. But if you boil down the Dover decision to its essence, it establishes a tragic precedent that engaging in science with a faith-motivated axiom invalidates the process. That would seem to be a clear violation of the non-prohibition right we are all guaranteed. I am a scientist with a PhD in engineering, and I also believe absolutely in Biblical creation (for very good reasons I might add). I have been very pleased over the years of my life to discover again and again that the Bible record is in marvelous accord (NOT discord) with observations of our natural world. If I have a faith motive to investigate the marvels of the natural world, that absolutely should not invalidate any discoveries I make. In fact, that is where most of the founders of modern science began. Examples:

(a.) Isaac Newton said, "We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane (non-Biblical) history whatsoever." Maybe if Sir Isaac Newton had been on the Dover school board, he also would have been voted out of office during a trial at which his three fundamental laws of mechanics would have been junked. Oh, and trash that law of gravitation as well. Calculus? Out! Numerical calculus? Gone!! Reflecting telescope? Wait for another genius to come up with it who won't yap about God.

(b.) Louis Pasteur saw no conflict between science and Christianity. In fact, he believed that "science brings men closer to God." In his work as a scientist, he perceived evidence of wisdom and design, not randomness and chaos. Pasteur stated that: "The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator." So would Pasteur's germ theory be thrown out of court by our enlightened Judge Jones III?

(c.) In The handwritten prayer of James Clerk Maxwell, found after his death, he wrote: "Almighty God, Who hast created man in Thine own image, and made him a living soul that he might seek after Thee, and have dominion over thy creatures, teach us to study the works of Thy hands, that we may subdue the earth for our use, and strengthen the reason for Thy service; so to receive thy blessed Word, that we may believe on Him Whom Thou hast sent, to give us the knowledge of salvation and the remission of our sins. All of which we ask in the name of the same Jesus Christ, our Lord." So, accordingly, it seems that Judge Jones III would, with breathtaking obtusity, toss Maxwell's four laws of physics describing electromagnetic fields.

NOVA's spinmeisters would assure that viewers would never know anything about these things. Now that is true "breathtaking inanity".

Sooooo … there you go, Ted. Due to the faith motive of some special folks, the essence of Judge Jones III's "clear, eloquent, and thorough" ruling would have sentenced us to a world devoid of modern public health practices, devoid of antiseptic surgery (a derivative of Pasteur's work by James Lister), devoid of modern communications, and devoid of a vast array of labor-saving devices which give us time today to read the Oregonian. And in fact maybe we would all be floating around in space somewhere since gravitation would be suspended, presumably on appeal.

Speaking of floating around in space, maybe that is where truth ("TRUTH") resides nowadays.

So much more to say, so little time.

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Copied for D-is-Dead blog followers for your enlightenment.

Hoping for more light than heat, respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Naaman the leper, a dirty Jordan River, and ... clay?

Can clay heal leprosy? How about water-borne clay?

This one today again is not precisely about evolution. Just a mind teasing, intriguing, thought provoker.

My most recent issue of Science News has an article entitled "Clay That Kills: Ground yields antibacterial agents." Following are the link and reference:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071103/fob4.asp

Science News, Week of Nov. 3, 2007; Vol. 172, No. 18 , p. 276.

SN says (in part):
"A fistful of slimy green clay may be just what the doctor ordered. Researchers studying a special type of French clay found that it smothers a diverse array of bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant strains and a particularly nasty pathogen that causes skin ulcers in some parts of the world. ...
The researchers found that the clay, which they refer to as CsAg02, is strongly alkaline, with pH ranging from 9.4 to 10. It's also rich in a chemical form of iron that gives it a characteristic green color. But many other clays have similar properties, says Williams.
To assess the effects of the clay on different microbes, the scientists incubated a variety of bacterial cultures with either CsAg02 or a similar clay. CsAg02 completely stopped the growth of Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium, common causes of food poisoning, and of various strains of mycobacterium that lead to skin infections and ulcers."

So why is your fearless blogger blathering about clay? Because in the Bible, a great many texts report on both the suffering and healing of persons afflicted with leprosy. According to Wikipedia, "Leprosy, or Hansen's disease, is a chronic infectious disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae."

One of the most famous stories in the Bible is found in II Kings 5:1-18, the healing of Naaman, a commander of the army of Aram (approximately Syria today), a nation that at that time (around 800 BC) oppressed Israel. But Naaman was a leper. When he was told by a young Jewish slave girl that the prophet of God in Israel could cure him of his disease, Naaman received permission from his boss, the King of Aram, to go to Israel to be healed. When he was finally led to the door of Elisha, the prophet of God, Elisha sent a messenger to say to him,
"Go, wash yourself seven times in the (river) Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed."

As pride would have it, the great man Naaman initially refused to go into the waters of the Jordan. He said,
"I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call on the name of Jehovah his God, wave his hand over the spot, and cure me of my leprosy. Are not Arbana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than any of the rivers of Israel? Couldn't I wash in them and be cleansed?"

So he turned and went off in a rage.

But Naaman was finally persuaded by his servants to put away his pride. The result is recorded in the Bible:
"So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy. Then Naaman and all his attendants went back to the man of God. He stood before him and said, 'Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.' "

So there you have it. Once pride was put away, obedience to the command of God led to an unthinkable healing.

So did God use divine intervention, contravening natural chemistry at that point to heal Naaman? Or did He provide the prophet Elisha with divine supernatural knowledge of how to use the natural order of God's created things to effect the healing? Either way, it is God's work to God's glory.

But it sure is intriguing to know if maybe some of that "dirty" Jordan River water contained loads of bacteria-squelching clay. Evaluating Jordan-borne clays for antibacterial properties could be an intriguing research project, eh?

A corollary (which in actuality is primary) to this story is to consider the question of how, 2800 years after Naaman, our personal pride can cause us to refuse submission to God. Due to pride do we ... refuse to admit we are sinners, refuse to confess Jesus as Lord, refuse to put on Jesus in baptism, refuse to let Him lead our lives? Here is the greatest story ... that our obedience can lead to a far greater healing than that of Naaman's diseased flesh. Humbling ourselves before God can lead to the healing of our sin-diseased souls and lead to reconciliation with the great God of Heaven and Earth who is the Giver, Sustainer, and Final Judge of our eternal souls.

And, like the cleaner but ineffectual rivers of Damascus, the healing of our souls does not come by some more convenient (or socially comfortable or politically correct) way which we might desire. As Jesus said in John 14:6,
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me."

By God's grace and by God's mercy, may we put away our own willful pride so that God's greatest work may be accomplished in us.

In awe, respectfully submitted,

D.U.