Darwin's Undertaker on Duty - because Darwin is Dead

Mormons Christians? Romney: Oh yeah. Pastor Jeffress: Nope, cult. Joel Osteen: I guess so, not purest? Mormon history: A different universe than the Bible.

2011-10-25T23:45:00.000-07:00

I have been observing all the folks recently claiming that MA governor Mitt Romney has the Republican presidential nomination all wrapped up. But there is this elephant in the room that Texas pastor Robert Jeffress had the temerity to actually mention. That is, Romney is a Mormon and the underlying differences between Bible Christianity and the Mormon church are manifold and massive. If the Mormons wish to say they are just another religion like Islam, Buddhism, Shinto, Hinduism - or whatever - then so be it. But in the last 25 years the MC has engaged in an aggressive image-scrubbing which has been quite a thing to behold, trying to establish the MC as "Christian". So, if the MC wishes to be considered as Christian, then Christians are quite right to designate the Mormon Church as a cult.
And Christian pastors by and large (big-time guy Joel Osteen notwithstanding) agree with Pastoir Jeffress. According to a poll recently released by LifeWay Research, a majority of pastors surveyed agree with the Southern Baptist pastor. LifeWay Research director Scott McConnell says 75 percent disagree with the statement: "I personally consider Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) to be Christians." See:

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Church/Default.aspx?id=1457432

So what's up? Here is analysis recently sent by a friend:

= = = = = = = = = = =

Mormonism Christian? Absolutely not.

Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, is clearly a "false prophet" by Bible definition which says if a prophet misses in one thing, he is not a prophet of God. Among numerous bizarre and clearly disproven BOM claims is that of North American natives of Jewish descent. Y-Chromosome genetic tests and other genetic techniques comparing NA natives and world Jewry show Joseph Smith's dreamed up Book of Mormon is just that - dreamed up. Despite the blustering and tears of the "conservative" Mormon political commentator Glen Beck, try this:

http://www.godandscience.org/cults/dna.html

But why not Christian? Just a few:

(a) (Mormon founder) Joseph Smth's involvement with occult practice in New England got him booted from church,

(b) (Mormon founder) Joseph Smith had too many (waaaay too many) wives, plus adulterous relations with others. Brigham Young was an apple that did not fall far from Joseph Smith's tree.

(c) Smith and followers were chased out of Missouri because too many were cattle thieves and worse. After the death of Joseph Smith in Illinois (read the details in Richard Abanes book to see if this guy really was a "martyr"), a Mormon exodus from Illinois soon followed for much the same reason as their exit from Missouri. The Mormon Trail the Mormon church tries to dramatize as a path of flight from persecution was in fact a flight from prosecution,

(d) Mormonism claims God is evolving but Bible says God is unchanging,

(e) Mormonism claims Jesus is spirit brother of Satan, while Bible is clear: Jesus is Son of God and creator while Satan is a created being,

Summary of (d) and (e): Mormon god is not the Bible God, Mormon Jesus is not the Bible Jesus.

(f) Mormonism says we are becoming gods, while the Bible says the ultimate sin of Satan was desiring to be "like the most high." Really, this one is the most serious of all because it sets this most central of Mormon teachings at the center of Satan’s rebellion. .

(g) Bible says the blood of Jesus is sufficient to pay for all sin, including murder. So I and other Christians would affirm Texas axe murderer Karla Faye Tucker and Milwaukee serial murderer (plus homosexual abuser and cannibal) Jeffrey Dahmer would both be saved due to in-prison conversions before their deaths. Christians acknowledge that the physical death of the murderer is clearly and unquestionably required by scripture, but also affirm that (spiritual) salvation may be obtained even by the condemned murderer – but only by the blood of Jesus and by nothing else. On the other hand, Mormons claim that a blood crime (murder) requires the blood of the murderer be shed for salvation. Remember why Utah murderer Gary Gilmore requested execution by firing squad about 30-35 years ago? He followed Mormon teaching that his own blood shed was required for spiritual salvation along with the blood of Jesus. This is a few galaxies away from Christianity.

(h) The “eternal” doctrine of polygamy lasted until it was convenient to change it for political purposes. For example, President Brigham Young on July 18, 1855 (Journal of Discourses) said, “If any of you will deny the plurality of wives and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned.” But around 1891 this teaching was conveniently set aside so Utah could be accepted into the Union.

(i) About the “negro”, Joseph Smith Jr., founder of the Mormon Church, in 1843 said, “Had I anything to do with the negro, I would confine them by strict law to their own species …” (January 2, 1843. HC, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1976/1980, vol. 5, 217-218.) Blacks prior to 1978, according to Mormon doctrine, could not attain “godhood” or hold any church office. But in 1978 the Mormon doctrine regarding blacks conveniently changed to become more acceptable to mainstream America and to set the stage for the church’s push to change its image from clearly outspoken opponent of Christianity to begin to appear simply as one more Christian group.

(j) Are you aware of the Mormon Oath of Vengeance against the United States? This oath was required for the followers of Brigham Young. It was sent in 1850 to the U.S. Congress by none other than William Smith, brother of Joseph, after Brigham Young had ascended to the presidency of the church. It was printed by the Government Printing Office in 1905 as part of testimony received in considering if Utah Senator Reed Smoot should be fit to continue to serve. Perhaps the millions of Christians, decried by some as anti-Mormon bigots, may be merely well-informed. Here it is:

“You do solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God … that you will avenge the blood of Joseph Smith upon this nation, and so teach your children; that you will; from this day henceforth and forever, begin and carry out hostilities against this nation, and keep the same a profound secret now and forever, so help you God.”

..... and on and on it goes. And you wonder why I will not vote for Romney or any other Mormon. There it is. Not bigotry, merely following my duty to be part of an informed electorate.

.....

And I (D.U.) am aware that there is more to be said. All the above and more can be found in many books documenting the history and teachings of the MC. From No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), by Fawn McKay Brodie, to One nation under gods: A history of the Mormon Church (New York, London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002) by Richard Abanes. Abanes' unsanitized account of the Mountain Meadow Massacre (you can find sanitized accounts by the MC using any search engine) is a jaw-dropper.

Enough for now.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

P.S. And about evolution, the usual topic of this blog: Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, in reponse to Texas Governor Rick Perry's statements in support of divine creation, tweeted: "To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy."
Find the discussion on the ABC News post: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/08/jon-huntsman-comes-out-swinging/
Well, of course Huntsman can say that. If you are a Mormon believing God has evolved from man-like to God and man is evolving as well in the same way, why not say you believe in evolution? He can if he wants to - it is still a free country for a while. It's just not Biblical.

Deja vu all over again. Federal debt per family "improves" like WOW.

2011-08-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

Well - I am back after hiatus of more than a year. My slight bepuzzlement at the US congressional budget "deal", with R's and D's square dancing down Pennsylvania Avenue, has suckered me in yet again to blabbing here.

First, recall my post of June 30, 2009, as I considered the last federal FY of Bush (W) and the first nearly completed FY of Obama (H). Now archived in:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

I wrote June 30, 2009:

"So I thought I just might run the numbers as a quick intro to what I really want to get to today. Again using the 2007 number of 111.2 million households, that means that each American household was blessed with a one-year increase of a RECORD $4100 in the 2007-2008 Federal budget (ending September 30, 2008). That is about what my two old used cars are worth combined. But, hey, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. The projected 2008-2009 one-year Federal deficit pencils out to $16,600 per household. And you were worried about paying off that washer and dryer on your credit card? That is just dust on the scales compared to the Fed deficit numbers. It's like you just bought a new car and your kids signed the promissory note. Oh - and another new car next year, and the next, and ..."

Coming now to the 2011-12 budget deal, I find the picture has actually "improved" (from $16,600 increase in federal debt per year per household) to only an increase of $14,600 per household in the coming Fed fiscal year. So please forgive my prior cynicism - how insensitive it was of me.

Here are the numbers for the recent 2011-12 budget "deal":

Households 113 M (per census)
Federal budget (spending) $33,800 per household
Federal income $19,200 per household
Increase in federal debt (in one year only) $14,600 per hh.
And the "cuts" totaled $341 per family per year.

Shall we joyfully sing and dance? Maybe barefooot on the White House lawn? If the aforeused word "bepuzzlement" is a word, this is surely ...

Respectfully submitted - but with bepuzzlement,

D.U.

P.S. Darwin is still dead, his toxins linger. More soon I hope.
P.P.S. This post modified Aug 16 to correct Fed budget number and Fed spending figure. I left off one zero from each. But the $14,600 increase in family debt for the first FY of the budget "deal" was correct.

I guess I should apologize to the Oregonian, eh? How about 2035 vs 2350?

2010-01-21T09:49:00.000-08:00

WOW!

I just opened my daily Oregonian this morning. After searching through its august pages, I (Eureka!) stumbled across a column mentioning the phony Himalayan glacier melting projections published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report. Those absurdly outer-space projections were the subject of my last post.

So, OK, I was wrong.

How so? In yesterday's post, I admitted that I expected to NEVER see a fair admission of AGW scientific misconduct (or just a screwup if you will) in the Oregonian. And there it was in today's paper - a short column hidden on page A-7, just inside the back page splashed with Macy's ads.

Funny, though. The AP report datelined in Geneva made the IPCC's "poorly substantiated estimates of the rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers" to be, well, pretty ho-hum. The tone was more appropriate to discussing a hangnail than a glioblastoma.

And, even after searching and finally finding the report in the Oregonian, if you did not read the OneNewsNow article, you would never know about the lame excuse offered that they switcherooed a few digits to get 2035 instead of 2350 for the projected Himalaya-glaciers-a-bye-bye date. So if you only read AP stuff bylined in Genevea, you may never get a glimmer of how over-the-top some of this "expert" issued AGW propaganda really is.

Is AGW likely? Yes, of course. In fact almost certain. Is it a dire threat to mankind on this third rock from the sun? A very thin maybe, but surely not so likely. Some global warming would appear in fact to increase global food production (as admitted by the IPCC). On the long-term, the smaller CO2 "trigger" to produce humongous and disastrous H2O greenhouse gas warming is far far far from clear. Check with meteorologist Professor Emeritus William Gray at Colorado State U on that one before deciding what you really know.
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2009/12/agw-best-place-to-hear-both-sides-is-in.html

I think all we the public ask is OBJECTIVE information. Then we have a much better shot at good sound decision making. That is the way democracy should work. The pseudo-science aristocracy that has brought us Copenhagen and the global warming hysteria (and "Climategate") clearly has not served us well.

So, Oregonian, there is my apology, such as it is. Maybe the Daily Columbian across the river could start running other news sources and make up for internet-induced advertising income losses by selling papers in north Oregon to a fact-hungry public.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

UN Report on Himlayan glaciers bogus. 2035 or 2350?

2010-01-20T17:33:00.000-08:00

This one is just to good (or bad), too titillating (or too sad) to let it go by.

Here is a headline I just saw. Don't want you to miss it.

UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers

Read it here:
http://www.onenewsnow.com/AP/Search/US/Default.aspx?id=862752

And if you are wondering why your friendly Darwin despiser always manages to be on top of the global warming bubble, it is because I subscribe to a daily email from onenewsnow which provides links I can follow at my choosing. I see stuff which I will NEVER see in my local fishwrapper, the Oregonian.

Here is just a glimpse. The rest you can get at the link above..

UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers
SETH BORENSTEIN - 1/21/2010 12:56:34 AM

Five glaring errors were discovered in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on global warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists who wrote it to apologize and promise to be more careful.

The errors are in a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-affiliated body. All the mistakes appear in a subsection that suggests glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by the year 2035 _ hundreds of years earlier than the data actually indicates. The year 2350 apparently was transposed as 2035.

The climate panel and even the scientist who publicized the errors said they are not significant in comparison to the entire report, nor were they intentional. And they do not negate the fact that worldwide, glaciers are melting faster than ever.
But the mistakes open the door for more attacks from climate change skeptics.
"The credibility of the IPCC depends on the thoroughness with which its procedures are adhered to," Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, told The Associated Press in an e-mail. "The procedures have been violated in this case. That must not be allowed to happen again because the credibility of climate change policy can only be based on credible science."

The incident follows a furor late last year over the release of stolen e-mails in which climate scientists talked about suppressing data and freezing out skeptics of global warming. And on top of that, an intense cold spell has some people questioning whether global warming exists.
In a statement, the climate change panel expressed regret over what it called "poorly substantiated estimates" about the Himalayan glaciers.

"The IPCC has established a reputation as a real gold standard in assessment; this is an unfortunate black mark," said Chris Field, a Stanford University professor who in 2008 took over as head of this part of the IPCC research. "None of the experts picked up on the fact that these were poorly substantiated numbers. From my perspective, that's an area where we have an opportunity to do much better."
Patrick Michaels, a global warming skeptic and scholar at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, called on the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, to resign, adding: "I'd like to know how such an absurd statement made it through the review process. It is obviously wrong."

Well now, D.U suggests that if the IPCC's "gold standard" performance allows who-knows-how-many reviewers and editors to allow the year 2350 to be transposed to 2035 for melting Himalayan glaciers, it's just a fools-gold standard. Were they drinking Al Gore's intoxicating kool-aid? And note that it was three out of four digits misplaced, not a mere transposing of two digits out of four. Ummmm, how/why?

It's no longer time to ask for an apology. It is no longer time to accept a promise to be more careful. It's not even time to ask for explanations - unless it is before a criminal court. The time of "Oh, my bad" is long gone. It is time to issue pink slips. Maybe the big broom from the Massachusetts senatorial election can be used at NCAR in Colorado and GISS in New York - oh, and surely for the discredited and suspended Mann at Penn State as well. See
(http://toryardvaark.wordpress.com/2009/12/20/climategate-copenhagen-ends-and-discredited-climatologist-michael-mann-breaks-his-silence/).

The Brits can take care of their guy Phil Jones at East Anglia U themselves. Is "keelhaul" still an operational word in British English?

And is there any way I could do a short sale on carbon credits? I could use some spare change.

And now that I know whom I can not trust, could someone please tell me whom I can trust?

Submitted with overflowing gratitude to the East Anlgia mole, and overflowing scorn toward the cabal who have done unimaginable damage to the reputation of science in our time.

D.U.

Bad bed bugs more benign, but Alliterating "Boninite" Confounding

2010-01-15T21:52:00.000-08:00

Yo y'all.

Just a couple of brief items today as I peek at the most recent issue of Science News, January 16, 2010. Both items are reminders and corroboration of longstanding creationist talking points.

First item relates to the resurrected bedbug population in the USA. Today's newbie generation has likely never heard the old grunt generation's oft-heard "Sleep tight, and don't let the bedbugs bite" - unless the young'uns are enrolled to live on campus at a university. It seems the increasingly international student population in US universities has brought stowaway bed bugs galore from around the world in luggage and clothing. Maybe the upside of the high-resolution airport body scanners would be to detect lurking bedbugs in an incoming visitor's underwear - or wherever.

Anyway ... in the Science News article "Dry ice in a jug attracts bedbugs", (Science News, January 16, 2010, p.8), ends a very humorous yet interesting article with this:
"In North America, bed bugs are back after being dead for decades. 'We have lterally skipped a generation of knowledge with this pest,' said Stephen Kells of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul.
Long-ago studies may not help control today's pesticide-resistant strains coddled by centraol hating, said Andrea Polanco-Pinzon of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. But on the bright side, the modern strain she studies doesn't live as long without feeding as strains documented in earlier research, she said."

The point? For a long time, creationists have correctly been pointing out that mutation-driven population changes in an organism, for example in its ability to survive in a modified environment (for example with the introduction of an antibiotic), invariably result in a weakened and less viable organism. As Dr. John Sanford points out in Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome (FMS Publications, Waterloo, NY, 2008), a mutation-driven phenotype change (what the critter actually changes into) may be beneficial in a selected environmental niche while the genotypic change (what is the DNA change) will almost certainly be harmful in the overall range of all populations. This is precisely true in the note above - even for the lowly bedbugs who just can't go as long between meals as their forebears.

Second item: a spectacular underwater volcano eruption about 200 kilometers southwest of Samoa was caught in the act on video taken by a remotely operated submarine ("Sub records volcano video", Science News, January 16, 2010, p. 14). Especially interesting to your friendly blogger was the last paragraph:

"Rocks snatched from the volcano include boninite lavas, a chemically distinct type of lava previously found only around extinct volcanoes that erupted more than one million years ago."

Young earth creationists (YECs) have long pointed out discordant rock "ages" from recently appearing structures such as underwater volcanoes and island formations. So here is a lava type being formed even as the cameras were rolling, identical to lava types "known" to be a million years old. The question becomes, "since we know the age of the boninite formed today, can we really be sure the other appearances of boninite are really a million years old?"

Well, can we?

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

More on the recently outed pseudo-science phenomenon

2010-01-10T22:54:00.001-08:00

Greetings dear D-is-D readers wherever you may be.

Several of my recent posts have lamented the apparent deprivation of integrity in science, both in "Climategate" and in the origins controversy. So I just received an email from Mark Cadwallader, Board Chairman of Creation Moments lamenting the same. If my rusty brain is working correctly, I believe Mark was one of the student shakers and movers at the University of Californa - Santa Barbara in the Students for Origins Research group about 25 years ago. They published some really great stuff for a bunch of newbie students. So I am confident that Mark has been well informed of the controversies of science for more than two decades. I provide most of his email below, verbatim. Enjoy!

Respectfully copied from and credited to Mark Cadwallader,

D.U.

"Another Pseudo Science ExposedThursday, January 7th, 2010.

January 2010. Dear Friend of Creation, What a revelation! Distorting science to promote a political and ideological agenda! We creationists have known this to be true for years. Scientists can certainly be biased, or even dishonest in some cases. By now the story is well known. In late November thousands of e-mails and many important documents from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in Britain were exposed on the Internet. These documents revealed a determined effort by scientists to conceal data that undermined their hypothesis of man-made global warming, to blacklist other scientists who sought to test the theory or challenge their agenda, and to take control of and redefine the “peer-review” process for climate change research! The CRU has been a prime source for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which promotes and imposes the costly global-warming agenda upon the entire world. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE) have also based their regulations of carbon dioxide upon the IPCC’s reports. As with evolutionism, a pseudo-science is being used to support an agenda which grows out of the depravity of man. While evolution is a pseudo-science driven by man’s sinful desire to rid himself of accountability to his Maker, the pseudo-science that says we need to curb CO2 emissions (an atmospheric gas essential for life on Earth) comes from the lust for power, money, prestige and global control – as people turn their lives, liberty and wealth over to global power players. Billions of dollars are already being transferred as “carbon credits” with governments actively allocating tax credits and funds in attempts to supposedly manipulate Earth’s future temperature, creating what has become one of the world’s largest industries (and making Al Gore personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars). What I like about these “Climategate” revelations is that they give us credibility with people who may have had a hard time believing creationists when we claim the subversion of information by the so-called “scientific consensus.” With Climategate, they can see a modern example of a joint propaganda effort maintained by academics, government and media walking in lockstep to preserve a pet theory. It’s a great illustration for our case against evolution! In the case of Climategate, we have had the benefit of the Internet, so that the documents and correspondence between the key players have been made public to millions of people in a hurry. By contrast, the early frauds of Haeckel’s drawings, Piltdown Man, and other purported evidences of evolution remained hidden from the public for years, allowing the pseudo-science of evolution to become and remain entrenched. Now you can hardly read an official academic, government or media report in natural science without running into a just-so story of evolution being thrown in gratuitously and extraneous to the point. Scientists are human and, therefore, flawed and corruptible. They can be bought or intimidated. They can cleave to a pet ideology, special interest, club of coworkers or to the investment of time and money into their own training. They can manipulate their way through the Scientific Method to please the right people and qualify for funding, advancement, recognition and prestige. Let me quote Dr. William Gray, renowned hurricane forecaster and Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University (CSU), who has devoted his entire career of more than half a century to the study and forecasting of meteorological and climate events.Rising levels of CO2 are not near the threat these alarmists have portrayed them to be. There has yet to be an honest and broad scientific debate on the basic science of CO2’s influence on global temperature. The global climate models predicting large amounts of global warming for a doubling of CO2 are badly flawed. They should never have been used to establish government climate policy…. The last century’s global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit is not a consequence of human activities….1 It is a problem, arguably beyond the reach of science, to try to reconstruct the history of things from evidences in the present day, without a true witness of the history – whether it be the history of average temperatures or the history of life on Earth. We have to make assumptions about the past that will automatically influence our conclusions about the past. And so people tend to pick the assumptions which give them the conclusions they want – consciously or subconsciously. Data has been discarded, ignored, cherry picked or modified to bolster claims. Dissenting scientists have been marginalized, ostracized and ridiculed. Scientific journals have been co-opted so that dissenting research can be excluded under the rules of “peer review” set by the scientists in the seats of power. Sounds just like evolutionism doesn’t it? Pseudo-science invented by the depravity of man. Creation Moments is putting forth the message of honest debate in science. As with global warming, so, too, do we need honest debate for evolution. We need scientists to admit their biases. What we do not need is intimidation and censorship. And yet, that’s exactly what is happening. Those who believe in global warming and evolution are doing everything possible to silence the opposition. And they are successful because they have far more funding than we do.
...
www.creationmoments.com

An inconvenient untruth in Copenhagen gores Big Al's credibility

2009-12-20T19:13:00.000-08:00

OK, OK. ... So I said yesterday I was packing it in for Christmas. I just had to unpack for a few minutes to mention this one.

Al Gore claimed in Copenhagen on Monday, December 14, 2009, that according to "fresh" research, he could report that the arctic ice cap could be virtually ice-free in summer months within five to seven years. Problem was, the researcher he was citing happened to be in the neighborhood and kind of said (approximately), "Ummm ... Al, not sure how you got that."

When I heard this I Googled and got:

Results 1 - 10 of about 196,000,000 for in copenhagen al gore claimed polar ice caps melt in seven years

So I guess maybe I'm wasting my time blogging on this one since, with 196 million hits, it's not like I am sharing any secrets here.

Well, in case Google goes bankrupt and closes their portals, here is one post from The Times for you. For further bemusement, you may feel free to Google away the same.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6956783.ece

Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”
However, the climatologist whose work Mr Gore was relying upon dropped the former Vice-President in the water with an icy blast.
“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
Mr Gore’s office later admitted that the 75 per cent figure was one used by Dr Maslowksi as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Mr Gore.

Thanks to The Times and others for their reports, allowing us home folks to enjoy some of the more warming Copenhagen moments without overly expanding our carbon footprints.

Gratefully submitted,

D.U.

P.S. As I remember Al Gore walking over and smugly standing right in front of George W. Bush during the presidential debate, now I will be watching to see how the climate cartel throws Big Al under the bus as it pulls out of Copenhagen. You can bet it is already done.

AGW: the best place to hear both "sides" is in Fort Collins, Colorado

2009-12-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

Greetings global warming survivors wherever you may be.

Again I am posting only a few hours after my last post about the (allegedly) cherry-picked Russian climate data.

What now? I am clearing the decks for Christmas. Shutting it down. But if you are interested in the global warming controversy (more precisely, anthropogenic global warming, or AGW) and if you have a technical bent to sift through fluff versus substance, this is for you.

February 19, 2008, began a written "debate" in the Fort Collins (Colorado) Forum newspaper between Dr. Kevin Trenberth - head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder - and Dr. William Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. It is absolutely amazing to me that the best thorough exchange I have seen on the entire AGW controversy would be scooped by a small town newspaper in northern Colorado.

For your holiday reading, click on the link below and follow the links to read Dr. Gray's initial article, Dr. Trenberth's reply, and one more round of rebuttals:
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=4177

And watch with great discernment which argues more from the critical science of cloud physics and which attempts to fly beneath cover of the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority" (as in "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has spoken." ! ! ! ! ! ! ! )

Have a happy Jesus Birthday and a God-blessed 2010.

Submitted with the joy of the season,

D.U.

A Bowl of Unpleasant Cherries for Mr. Obama in Copenhagen

2009-12-19T03:48:00.000-08:00

Here it is mid-December and U.S. President Obama will soon be flying back from an Obama-adulating global warming conference in Copenhagen to land in a monster snowstorm in the northeastern US. Ironic, no?

So it is time to talk about picking cherries.

Just for reference, here are a few of Oregon's choice Hood River cherries - sweet and world famous.

But the topic is not picking cherries, but rather "cherry picking", as in selectively choosing what you want and ignoring anything less than the most desirable.

In my memory, the most delightful use of the term "cherry picking" was the Doonesbury cartoon a number of years ago that inferred that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney was cherry picking Iraq intelligence data like a man selecting lingerie for his wife.

That one has now been far outdone.

Be there any truth in the matter, the Russians are now accusing the global climate cartel member in Britain (recently and famously hacked) of cherry picking Russian climate data. The accusation?

"Meanwhile, a new climate scandal is gaining momentum. The Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA) has accused the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research of the British Meteorology Office of only using statistics from weather stations in Russia that fitted its theory on global warming, and ignoring those that did not."
http://rt.com/Top_News/2009-12-18/data-cherry-picked-climatologists.html?fullstory

Just to keep this in perspective, it is good to remember that RT.com is an English language Russian news port. And a country (Russia) that sends an assassin to Britain to poison someone they don't like with a lethal radioactive cocktail should be held somewhat suspect at times.

But I don't see this one going the way the global warming hysterionicals would like it to go. I know personally that Russia has had excellent and extensive climate data collection systems. Their published records may be checked against the claims the above article makes. But Hadley-CRU has been holding back release of the data used to compute their global warming figures. The November 20, 2009, sensational news of the hacking and release of East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) files and emails has forced some partial release of the Hadley-CRU data set. And it looks like that partial release is what has made the Russian IEA analysis possible - just in time to greet U.S. President Obama in Copenhagen.

While the Russian claim remains to be verified, it all tastes like a very delicious bowl of cherries to me, while Mr. Obama may find the aftertaste quite bitter. But then his insensibilty to go on to Copenhagen with the "Climategate" scandal growing by the day may indicate that his taster is not functioning very well. In his frenzy to offer up big chunks of U.S. taxpayer change (yes, "Change you can believe in" ) to support a $100 billion (per year) warming fix, the foul bowl of cherries may not even get his attention. Sensibilities be damned.

A bit more from the RT.com article (in case the link dries up):

"In a report this week, the IEA says the HadCRUT’s study of climate change ignored data from three quarters of the weather stations on the territory of Russia. This includes “more than 40% of the area,” which was not included, not due to missing data, but “for some other reasons.”
That means 40% of Russia’s territory is unrepresented in the world’s most important temperature record.

...

Moreover, of the data available for the same location, the British researchers chose incomplete sets of temperature with growth trends over complete ones that did not fit into the global warming model. Also, data from stations located in cities – which are always likely to be warmer due to waste heat generated by local industries and homes – were preferred over those in remote areas, the IEA says.
All in all, the institute evaluates the difference between the growth of average temperatures between 1870s and 1990s, based on all data available for Russia and those delivered by HadCRUT, as at least 0.64 degrees Celsius.
The report goes on to say that if similar practices, which the IEA bluntly calls “overstating the scale of the warming by HadCRUT”, were used in the selection of raw data from other regions of the world, global estimates for climate change should be seriously amended."

This one is going to fun to watch.

Submitted with a whole bunch of conflicted feelings,

D.U.

P.S. I am not a global warming denier, I am a global warming realist. And I have intimate understanding of the pitfalls of taking meteorological-hydrological-climatological models as infallible dispensers of truth. Like twenty-something gaming addicts for whom cyberspace becomes their real world, climate modelers chained to a computer terminal with the heady hope of saving the planet while modeling 100 years into the future can warp one's view of what is real and what is not. I suspect that many of the climate modeling warm-mongers have not been operational forecasters humbled by the occasional busted forecast. At Copenhagen, their arrogance remains unshattered. But tomorrow?

P.P.S. "But would not some warming increase global food production?" I have been wondering? You can look for the IPCC "admission" mentioned by Nigel Lawson, Energy Secretary in Margaret Thatcher's first government in the early eighties, in the UK Daily Mail opinion piece April 5, 2008, that:

"So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, 'globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase'. Yes: increase."

Read this and more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-557374/The-REAL-inconvenient-truth-Zealotry-global-warming-damage-Earth-far-climate-change.html

The oh-so-pure peer review process can get a little dirty

2009-12-13T01:55:00.000-08:00

Yo.

The concept of peer review has worked wonderfully for science and scientists for such a long time now. The basic premise of peer review is to get honest and qualified analysis and recommendation for publication or non-publication of academic papers. And it works very well - when the process is practiced with the intended integrity. But that is not always the case. Not all folks running around in white lab coats have hearts and hands as white as their lab coats.

In earlier posts I mentioned that the peer review process has long been rigged in the discourse over human origins. Lots of good technical material supportive of Biblical creation has been written by highly credentialed scientists but denied publication by the peer review process. Denied not because of poor science but because of viewpoint discrimination. Discrimination seemingly on behalf of of Mr. Charles Darwin but in reality designed to free mankind from the social mores of a Holy God. Discrimination against the Creator - the Creator who not only designed stuff with the greatest of complexities, but managed to fully integrate the whole package with profound robustness.

The nasty and snipy business that peer review can become was so beautifully outed by the global superhero CRU-HACKER. And following is a supporting comment (in the global warming venue but oh so applicable to the science of origins as well):

Dr. John Brignell, a UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton who held the Chair in Industrial Instrumentation at Southampton, accused the UN of “censorship” on July 23, 2008. “Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution. Through the power of patronage it rapidly attracted acolytes. Peer review soon rapidly evolved from the old style refereeing to a much more sinister imposition of The Censorship. As Wegman demonstrated, new circles of like-minded propagandists formed, acting as judge and jury for each other. Above all, they acted in concert to keep out alien and hostile opinion. 'Peer review' developed into a mantra that was picked up by political activists who clearly had no idea of the procedures of science or its learned societies. It became an imprimatur of political acceptability, whose absence was equivalent to placement on the proscribed list,” Brignell wrote.

Excerpted from:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/3308/Ignorant-Skeptics-UN-Scientist-Prof-Trenberth-says-only-poorly-informed-scientists-disagree-with-UN--Appeals-to-Authority-The-IPCC-has-spoken

Submitted in hopes of enlightenment of the oh-so-enlightened ones.

D.U.

The death of science in our generation

2009-12-09T14:04:00.000-08:00

Greetings all.

When the world has just been informed that Rihanna has a new tattoo, why would I be ruminating about such a trivial issue as the death of science?

Well, just 'cuz it's my thing I s'pose.

The EPA announced a finding of earthling endangerment from CO2 and cohort greenhouse gases a couple of days ago. Frankly, the arrogance and scientific bankruptcy of that "finding" just got my goat. And so I woke up this morning thinking about it.

I hope you in your life have had sun-splashed drives to Southern California beaches (or cruising Sunset after the sun goes down) with the radio blaring the 60's We Five song :
(get the ringtone: http://www.lyriczz.com/lyrics/we-five/14814-you-were-on-my-mind/ )

"When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind.
And you were on my mind.
I got troubles, whoa-oh, I got worries, whoa-oh,
I got wounds to bind;
So, I went to the corner, Just to ease my pain.
Said just to ease my pain
I got troubled, whoa-oh, I got worried, whoa-oh,
I came home again,"

So when I woke up this morning, I could not shake the thermageddon craze (global warming hysteria) driving the EPA announcement and stonewalling the opposition of so so many concerned scientists.

So to ease my pain I began to ponder, "What has happened to science?" And why in the world was I feeling compelled to blab away about global warming hysteriorthodoxy on a blog devoted to exposing phony Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolution? Suddenly, Eureka! Of course!

Science is dying.

And as evolution signals the death throes of science at the hands of amorality, so "Climate-gate" exposes the death-throes of science at the hands of political ideology and expediency.

But to understand death, you must first understand birth. Where and how did modern science develop? To set straight the science-versus-God dogma of historical science revisionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton published The Soul of Science (Crossway Books, 1994), explaining in convincing fashion that the Biblical Christianity was "not a menace but a midwife" to the birthing of modern science. Few understand how the Judaeo-Christian principles of the Bible provided the fertile ground necessary for the development of modern science when and where it appeared historically. Pearcey and Thaxton cover several necessary philosophical underpinnings for development of science in the first chapter of the book. In discussing Christianity and the scientific revolution, they clearly develop the idea that science is "an invented instituition." Modern empirical science did not just arise out of thin air or from a barren philosopical landscape. Here are a few of the connections they offer as examples of how a Biblical view of nature provides specific assumptions about nature that allow and encourage study of the natural world:

(1) nature is a reality => not an “appearance” or “illusion”;
(2) God made it => nature has value => it is worthy of study;
(3) Nature is good, but not a god => de-deification of nature;
(4) Rational Creator God => rational world capable of study;
(5) Belief in an orderly universe => “natural law”;
(6) “God saw that it was good” => precision, not “fuzziness”;
(7) “Man in image of God” => rational man can understand;
(8) Man must look and see (observation required);
(9) Must work “for glory of God and benefit of mankind.”
(10) “God’s ways higher than our ways” => we must seek to understand God’s rationality, do not impose our own;

As I read The Soul of Science about 15 years ago and then reread it only a few years ago, I wondered what the death of science might look like in a post-Christian society such as our own today. And I guess now we see the answer. It is not that Nature and Science cease publication. Not at all, since those and other prestigious journals continue to publish more and more wonderful discoveries weekly. But those journals, as all of our daily meaningful activities, depend on healthy functioning of certain social and economic structures to keep daily life moving along smoothly. It seems clear to me that it is in those necessary supporting structures that the piper must be paid. And the payment will indeed be painful.

First, the decay of social structures due to Darwin and friends:
Darwinian evolution gives mankind a somewhat respectable way to run away from God, even in the light of clear evidence of God's handiwork in the created universe. This opens the way for (not quite!) conscience-free exercise of pride, greed, and lust. The social fruit of a tree with such poisonous roots will not at all look like the bountiful blessing of a pleased Heavenly Father. Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea) describes Darwinism as a "universal acid" that eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view. Maybe that is Dennett's delight, but for sure, it's gonna hurt. It already does.

Second, the decay of economic structures.
Due to the exercise of earthly wisdom rather than divine wisdom in government, business, and personal finances, we have likely been tipped. What does that mean? It means going past the point of no return. Just like at some point Bernie Madoff knew that his financial pyramid was lost, he knew the day would come when it would all come down. Except by the merciful intervention of a gracious God, there go we as a nation as well. As I posted several months ago, "we will not get a grip on the dollar until we get a grip on the divine," referring to principles of Deuteronomy Chapter 28, The Holy Bible. The sub-prime bubble exposed a lack of integrity in the business and personal finance sectors (and likely in the government sector as well). And now "Climate-gate" and the EPA endangerment finding reveals our leadership's integrity impoverishment and how it seems destined to add to our growing fiscal impoverishment.

Now I'm done with this post.

I could go on and on and quote and copy all kinds of information about good scientists who are appalled at the cabal of climate "experts" that have fudged data, cornered the market on debate, and refuse in their own vainglorious pride to heed concerns raised by serious and technically sound researchers.

But you don't need me to do that. Just Google "Climate scientists skeptical of climate change", and then maybe go look for U.S. Senator Inhofe's 2008 U.S. Senate Minority Report from Environment and Public Works. The report gives over 650 (and growing) dissenting international scientists disputing anthropogenic (caused by man) climate fears.

And the beat goes on .... while B. H. Obama flies to Copenhagen with his "settled science" decision firmly in his pocket. Isn't that fine?

Listen carefully? Do you hear anything? Pause to feel - is anything shaking? Do you feel the very foundations shaking?

Sadly submitted,

D.U.

Where Oh Where is the Oregonian Newspaper ? ! ?

2009-11-23T18:42:00.000-08:00

Beginning with a corner of the world known as Oregon (but almost universally known as Ory-gone to the uninitiated).

(I) First the good news.

The Oregon State University Beavers football team will go up against the University of Oregon (also known as the University of California at Eugene to the granola and Birkenstocks crowd) Ducks in only 10 days with winner-take-all for the PAC-10 Rose Bowl berth. Is that so cool! In my young and foolish days, my must-see game was Trojans vs. Bruins (recall O.J Simpson versus Gary Beban 21-20?). But now that I am older and wiser, Beavs and Ducks it is. Go Beavs!

(II) Absent news coverage.

Now the puzzling news. Portland's Oregonian newspaper is AWOL (official lingo that means hiding in a dark corner somwhere) in reporting substantive news about the global-warming computer hacking scandal-outrage-coup-whatever.

Remember a few years ago when Oregon's U.S. Senator Bob Packwood's lady-groping under banquet tables was outed by the Washington Post while such shenanigans had apparently been known to local Oregonian news staff for quite some time? The bumper sticker said it all:
"If it matters to Oregonians, read it in the Washington Post."

Well, here we go again. It has been four days since the sensational release of files hacked out of England's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit raised stunning questions about professional misconduct, bias, and stonewalling. See my prior post:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2009/11/climategate-peer-reviews-precursor-to.html

But I have been looking in vain for anything of substance in the Oregonian about the whole affair. Are Los Angeles and Miami are still expected to go under water before too long? And, more immediately, are American families going to be expected to bear the $3,000 per year for the next 20 years to pay for the ill-advised cap-and-trade business if the global warming hysteria continues and we sign away our sovereignty in Copenhagen next month?

In Saturday's (Nov 21) edition I pored over section A looking for coverage. Result? Nada. Earthweek on page 2 had nary a peep. I did find something about overweight students and that Senator Burris got scolded.

Then came Sunday, Nov. 22. I actually looked for climate change scandal coverage before I read the game summary of the Ducks-Arizona contest. Oh look, there it is buried on page A-17 (could not go on A-18 since that was a full page ad for Macy's). An article "Hackers leak climate emails, stoking debate" with three and a half short columns. Not much ink and even less substance, but the most serious omission was making no mention of possible manipulation of the peer-review process. When you can control who gets to speak at the table and who can not, a lot of chicanery can come down. And so it appears.

And now today, Monday, Nov. 23. Since my expectations for Oregonian coverage had been abandoned, I read the comics and sports before looking for the Climategate coverage. Aha - there it is! All 5 column inches of it hiding on the bottom of page A-6. It is a London article giving the nonsubstantive reply of Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado. Trenberth "believes the hackers who stole a decade's worth of correspondence ... deliberately distributed only those documents that could help attempts by skeptics to undermine the scientific consensus on man-made climate change." My response? Hey, skip the outrage already. Answer the questions raised. Those questions are numerous and weighty, especially with the Copenhagen summit coming up next month as 191 nations will consider a new global treaty on limiting emissions of greenhouse gases. The Oregonian failed in colossal fashion to address and inform on a critical critical issue. Shame, shame.

But the Oregonian is not alone among U.S. media sleeping through the climate change inquiry. The "surreal scientific blunder" reported by the UK Telegraph on Nov. 16, 2008 [note this corrected from 2009 on Dec 4, 2009], was similarly underreported. If it was in the Oregonian, I missed it. And I usually at least skim headlines in Section A. See the Newsbusters Nov. 16, 2008 [corrected from 2009 on Dec. 4 2009] , coverage at:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2008/11/16/uk-paper-notes-surreal-scientific-blunder-global-temps-measurement-us-me

Oh, and WaPo had a substantive article Sunday, Nov. 22:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102186.html?nav=hcmodule

Shades of Senator Packwood. Maybe the names on desks at the Oregonian have changed but the result is the same. If it matters to Oregonians, check WaPo.

(III) And from a couple of my moles:

After the hacking was outed on November 20, I followed up with personal contacts to inquire. Quotes from "Climate Scientist A", with whom I had some professional contact in Washington D.C. a few decades ago, and from "Climate Scientist B", who is known to "Climate Scientist A":

Climate Scientist A: "With respect to the Gore/Mann hockey stick, I will quote Mark Twain, "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please." The follow-up is "Lies, damn lies and statistics."

Climate scientist B: Regarding the apparent global warming peer review abuses suggested in the hacked emails, "...what an amazing vindication this is. We knew all along that this was happening, but lacked proof. Now we have it."

Submitted rejoicing in amazing vindication indeed,

D.U.

More on "Climategate". Should NASA's Dr. James Hansen be "tried for high crimes against humanity and nature" ?

2009-11-23T16:24:00.000-08:00

Yo all.

Still about good science and a followup on my last post about "Climategate."

Backing up a year and a few days prior to "Climategate" to a "GISSgoof" outed November 16, 2008. And where to get some background for that?

Maybe by quoting chief global warming hysteriologist Dr. James Hansen, since 1981 serving as Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in NY. Dr. Hansen, speaking to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on June 23, 2008 ,

( http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,370521,00.html )

said that heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be "tried for high crimes against humanity and nature."

Sounds very authoritative. Well, it should be since GISS is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures. So what do we know about Dr. Hansen? According to the UK Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3563532/The-world-has-never-seen-such-freezing-heat.html

("The world has never seen such freezing heat" by Christopher Booker, 16 Nov 2008)

"If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)"

But Booker's Telegraph article exposes a slight blunder on the part of Hansen and GISS:

"A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.
So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running. (Emphasis mine. DU)

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

So by what standard should the GISS (and Dr. Hansen) performance be measured, in light of his zealously litigious and prosecutorial attitude toward major fossil-fuel companies? Jesus said this: "For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Luke 6:38, NIV).

Let's see, disinformation about global warming tantamount to "high crimes against humanity and nature" was it? And maybe put perpetrators of the infamous and thoroughly debunked Gore-Mann "hockey stick" graph on the hot seat as well.

Submitted with respect for the Watts(s) and McIntyre(s) of the world who demand truth, integrity, and transparency in science that impacts profoundly on public policy. Don't back down guys.

D.U.

P.S. The policy issue is the same in the life origins controversy - crying for integrity and transparency.

P.P.S. More on the American media AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave) on the hacker global warming revelations in next post. It's all so puzzlingly ugly.

P.P.S. (Added Nov 23, 2009, 9:18PM). UK's globalist PM Gordon Brown wrote an article for Newsweek (Sep. 26, 2009) entitled, "Copenhagen or Bust." He wrote "As scientists spell out the mounting evidence both of the climate change already occurring and of the threat it poses in the future, we cannot allow the negotiations to run out of time simply for lack of attention. Failure would be unforgivable. ... And if it is necessary to clinch the deal, I will personally go to Copenhagen to achieve it..." And your friendly blogger is wondering if the Brits have enough grit to clip GB's wings in light of the big big question marks about the science.

P.P..S. The "GISSgoof" outing date was mistakenly posted originally on this post to be Nov. 16, 2009. Corrected to Nov. 16, 2008 as of Dec 5, 2009. DU.

"Climategate" Peer Reviews Precursor to "Monkeygate" Peer Reviews ? ?

2009-11-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

Greetings to all you cyberspace seekers of truth. I hope today you land on solid ground in your search.

Mark this date on your calendars ... November 20, 2009 ... as the day global warming hysteria died. It may take a while to get to the funeral, but can the demise of the evolution fairytale be far behind?

Have you heard today how hackers got into email and record files of some climate change scientists in jolly old England and posted them on an anonymous internet server in Russia? The result - embarrassing exposure of conspiracy, collusion, professional misconduct, and whatnot on the part of folks at the very highest levels of scientific trust who want to wish dramatic global warming into reality instead of just oberving facts like good scientists should. Read a few of the more damning summaries here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

Or if you Google something like "Hackers release global warming emails and records on Russian website" you will likely find overloads of information.

And since your friendly darwin-is-dead blog is primarily devoted to seeking good sound science properly considered, I find this big news.

But, moreover,

what might be the implications for the creation-evolution controversy?

The telegraph.co.uk blogger commented:

"And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications (were) discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW (Al Gore's "Anthropogenic Global Warming") can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority."

Here is one quote mined from the hacked emails which revealed the conspiracy to squeeze out global warming skeptics :

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

The point? Viewpoint censorship is ominously alive and well at the highest levels of "science". How did they try to do it? By seeking to assure that dissenters to the global warming hysteria would not be able to publish in peer-reviewed journals, then claim that the great bulk of peer-reviewed literature was in agreement with the global warming scenario. How clever. How insidious. How lacking in the scientific integrity the public should and must demand.

But the same happens almost daily with the creation-evolution controversy. Good technical articles that may cast some doubt on the just-so tales spun by evolutionists are routinely dismissed in the peer review process. Do you doubt this? Go ahead and Google "Dr. Jerry Bergman, viewpoint discrimination" and you will find piles of affirmation before your eyes.

This might be a good time for an insider ( I would never suggest a hacker) get a peek at emails and files at Eugenie Scott's rabidly ideological U. S. Center for Science Education ( a phony appellation if there ever was one) or some other such defender of the Darwin-myth faith.

A "Monkeygate" might be a good sequel to "Climategate".

Gleefully submitted,

D.U.

P.S.
An enthusiastic tip of the hat to George Taylor, former Oregon State Climatologist in Corvallis, who was forced out of his position by the global warm-mongers a year or so ago. George was a straight shooter showing professional care, restraint, integrity, and responsibility in his response to the irresponsible disinformation that has infected the climate sciences in the last several years. George - I hope the next governor will give you a medal, a special governor's coffee cup, and some back pay. GBU.

P.P.S.
Just for fun, how about a 1979-2010 24-month running sum plot of global cyclone energy (supposedly related to global warming and more hurricanes and cyclones due to warmer feeder waters). This from Florida State University:

http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/

Maybe that Florida coastal real estate will not be such a bad buy afer all.

Bowing for Best - the Beavers at Their Best

2009-11-09T23:20:00.000-08:00

OSU OSU OSU OSU OSU

If you saw the November 7, 2009, football game between the Oregon State Beavers and the California Golden Bears, you likely saw the spectacular spill by Cal star running back Jahvid Best. Or maybe you saw it on highlight clips later. Or maybe you were on a different planet.

You can find still photos at:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindbeaversbeat/2009/11/looks_like_cals_jahvid_best_wh.html

I was watching the game - rooting for my "lunchbucket" Beavers. They had a great performance, downing a good Cal team 31-14.

But for my money, Oregon State's best performance came when the Beavers' defensive team took the knee in the end zone, praying as Best lay still following his spectacular crash.

Photo: AP, Oregonian, Paul Buker

I am thankful for the OSU athletes who had the sensitivity - and boldness - to pray.

'Nuff said.

With gratitude and appreciation to the OSU men who put a great face of compassion on a very violent game,

D.U.

Genome Fractal Globules Globs Globulets - Jagnormously Cool ! And Merry Christmas with the Mother of All Christmas Strands.

2009-11-09T14:44:00.000-08:00

Special greetings ( ! ! ) today to all you storage-challenged souls out there wandering in search of another closet or a better closet system. To the rest of you, a politely restrained "hello there".

Yes, I also am storage-challenged. Too much stuff, stored in linear vertical structures (stacks) with a storage retrieval system (my memory) in need of an upgrade.

So when I read the other day in Science News about the discovery that DNA appears to be stored in a fractal structure, I thought that was really really cool. But a shadow was cast over my topological joy as functional access to a linear structure within volumetric storage nudged my thoughts to the impending annual challenge- get the Christmas lights untangled.

(I) First the fractals:

See the article in Science News, Nov. 7, 2009, "New view reveals how DNA fits into cell; Map of 3-D structure of the entire human genome shows fractal folding is key," By Laura Sanders.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/48166/title/New_view_reveals_how_DNA_fits_into_cell

The work reported appears to be a very clever way to understand how linear DNA is packed ("folded") into the volume of a cell's nucleus. This is very important in order to understand the wonderful efficiencies of the transcription, replication, repair (and more) processes busily ongoing in each nucleus.

Laura Sanders' article reports:

"Cells are tidy packers, cramming DNA into nuclei to create a tangle-free, dense ball with pieces that are still accessible, researchers report October 9 in Science. The findings, based on a new three-dimensional view of the whole human genome, solve a long-standing biological mystery and may lead to a deeper understanding of how genes operate. ... a human cell’s two meters of DNA is jammed into an area about a hundredth of a millimeter wide. But researchers had been puzzled by how cells could pack the DNA, which is organized into 23 pairs of chromosomes inside the nucleus, so tightly without hopelessly tangling it and making it impossible to use." ...

"In the new study, Erez Lieberman-Aiden of Harvard University and MIT, Nynke L. van Berkum of University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and colleagues developed a trick to lock pieces of neighboring DNA to each other while they were still in the nucleus. After removing the pieces and sequencing them, the researchers could calculate how close each and every piece of DNA had been to the other pieces and could reconstruct the 3-D shape of the genome."

What did they find? It appears that DNA is stored in a "fractal" structure. What does that mean? "A fractal is a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Fractals are generally self-similar and independent of scale."
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/fractal-faq/section-2.html

Sanders reports that the researchers found the human genome "has a highly organized structure. Small pieces of DNA fold into globs, and those globs fold into larger globs and so on. The researchers report that this “globule of globules of globules” is fractal, meaning it is organized in such a way that it has the same pattern no matter how far you zoom in. This fractal shape is “super-dense, but has no knots.”

Here is the image produced by Leonid A. Mirny, Maxim Imakaev, and reproduced in the Science News article:

This reminds me a great deal of the vast improvement in computer programming languages (e.g., introduced in the "C" programming language) that came when "go-to-less" systems (code nested inside a nest of code nested inside a nest of code nested inside ... a nest of code) - with loads of recursive functions - replaced the "spaghetti code" in the FORTRAN II that I cut my teeth on . Sometimes topology really matters.

The "knot" in the fractal would correspond to my dinosaur "GO TO" that would jump from here to there without restraint from sound organizing boundaries. The image above looks considerably more organized than some code I wrote in the stone ages. Like, debug that and have a nice day!

(II) And now the Christmas lights:

I usually try to untangle three strands, each about 25 feet long with lights about every 0.2 m (approximately 8 inches), carefully placed in a box the prior season. If I take them down, each strand is unplugged from the next so each strand is individually wound up. If my son or son-in-law takes them down, maybe the whole plugged string is tossed in the box - quickly. But it seems no matter how much care in packing the lights last year, the unpacking becomes an ugly wrestling match more often lost than won.

So how about an analogy of the DNA storage with Christmas lights? Consider a strand with four colors of lights: Amber (A=>adenine), Turquoise (T=>thymine), Coral Red (C=> cytosine), and Green (G=>guanine). But this is a special strand since it is really two "uni-strands" twisted together to form one strand so that every Amber bulb on one "unistrand" corresponds to a Turquoise bulb on the other "unistrand", while every Coral bulb on one "unistrand" corresponds to a Green bulb on the other "unistrand." The two unistrands are twisted and twisted and twisted until we get lots of twists end-to-end (call this a "helix") to correspond to the wound up structure of DNA.

It seems like this is going to be the Mother Of All Christmas Strands (MOACS), with 3 billion lights in each unistrand (corresponding to the 3 billion base-pairs in the human genome). A little math determines the coverage we can get with this strand (ignoring practical matters of blown fuses and the like). The circumference of the earth is approximately 40,000 km, that is 40,000,000 m. With a bulb-pair every 0.2 m (about 8 inches), we can get 200,000,000 bulb pairs in each circumference of the earth. Hey, this little strand of lights can circle the globe 15 times ! ! !

How about the box this thing came out of ? We have to stuff MOACS back into the box after the Christmas ham is gone. Following the globule ... glob ... globlet fractal idea and ignoring the question of linear connectivity, consider a first small cubic box 0.2m x 0.2m x0.2m (about 8 inches on a side), and assume we can store 27 bulb-pairs (27=3 cubed) in the box. Call that B1. Then form B2 as a box composed of 27 B1 boxes in a cubic 3x3x3 configuration, B3 is composed of 27 B2 boxes recursively in the same fashion, and so on. If I get the math right, the box B7 should be able to contain 10.5 billion bulb-pairs, triple the space required. B6 of course can only store 1/27 of that, or 0.39 billion bulb-pairs (only about 13% of the volume needed to hold our MOACS).

So let's take B7 as our design box. This will leave some extra space for the hounds to get in and fetch copies of strand segments when needed. The length of one side of B1 is 0.2 m, one side of B2 is 0.2m x 3, one side of B7 is 0.2m x 3**(7-1) = 146 m, or about 160 yards. To envision that, consider a cubic box with one dimension equal to the full end-to-end field length of the Los Angeles Coliseum. Here is a photo (thanks to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Memorial_Coliseum ) from the 2008 USC vs. Ohio State football game to help your imagination:

Now go that wide and that high (far above the nosebleed seats) and you have the B7 box that holds our MOACS.

Oh, we have some critical chores to accomplish with our MOACS:
First chore, we need to send in - sometimes waaaaay in - our copyists with a bag of wire and a bag of bulbs to copy good-sized chunks of the MOACS and drag the copied strand back out. These daughter-of-MOACS (DOMOACS) ministrands correspond to RNA segments copied from DNA. One problem is that the copy wire must be attached to the MOACS while the DOMOACS is being constructed. And everything gets all tangled up unless the copy hounds take in a pair of pliers to occasionally cut the MOACS while going round-and-round. Also needed is a splicing tool to put the MOACS back together again with integrity. Here is a DNA-for-dummies description of the corresponding process in transcribing RNA from DNA:
"Transcription causes a problem: the movement of the polymerase through the interwound helical DNA causes the DNA ahead of the polymerase to become tightly overwound. This would cause transcription to slow down or halt completely except that another protein, called topoisomerase, untangles the DNA. It does this by a complicated maneuver - cutting one strand of the tangled DNA, passing the uncut DNA strand through the cut strand, and then resealing the cut." (Behe, M.J., Darwin's Black Box, The Free Press, New York. 1996, p 271.) Cool, huh?

Second chore, we need to make more copies of the coliseum-sized MOACS. In the DNA world, this chore is called replication. This calls for a bag of at least 6,000,000,000 bulbs (because when the strand is separated into unistrands, another unistrand is constructed attached to each of the original-but-now-separated unistrands. I will give you dear readers just the first bit of the biochemical process analagous to our MOACS duplication job:
"DNA replication begins at a certain DNA sequence, known appropriately as an "origin of replication" and proceeds in both directions at once along the parent DNA. The first task to be tackled during replication, as for transcription, is the separation of the two parent DNA strands. This is the job of the DnaA protein. After the strands are separated, ...."
If you are anxious to read the rest of this elegant replication story, see:
Behe, M.J., Darwin's Black Box, The Free Press, New York. 1996. p. 275.

(III) AND FOR MR. DARWIN ...

Pack, replicate, unpack, pack. Do you suppose Charles Darwin, if transported to the modern time along with his buddy dog pack:
Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog" - http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/huxley_darwins_bulldog.html ),
Richard Dawkins ("Darwins Rottweiler" - http://discovermagazine.com/2005/sep/darwins-rottweiler ), and
Eugenie Scott ("Darwin's Golden Retriever" - http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2009/06/05/darwin_s_golden_retriever_portrays_id_as )

would be able to make a duplicate copy of the MOACS described above? Well, maybe. But then let's see if they could pack all 15 earth-circumferences of it back in the coliseum-sized box. And then let's really see the smug faces fade as they try to get it back out next Christmas and untangle it. Maybe there is a corner of hell with that kind of task assigned - pack, replicate, unpack, pack, replicate, unpack .... ad infinitum. If so, I wonder who might be there.

It would be interesting to ask: "If Darwin's dog pack can pack MOACS packs. how many packs can the dog pack pack?"

(IV) FINALLY:

"Cells are tidy packers," Ms. Sanders says.

But let's get more real and say "The Creator God is a tidy packer of cells."

There. That's better.

What can I say to any man or woman who might smugly continue to contend that accidental natural processes have formed all living things?

What can I say to one who dogmatically insists that purposeless particles, through purposeless processes, produce purposeful people?

What can I say? Nothing. Just sigh, shrug, and move on. There are others who are willing to listen. By God's mercy may they be found.

We have Christmas coming up soon - an opportunity to celebrate the incarnation (via virgin birth) of the one about whom scripture says:

"13. For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son,
14. in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
15. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
16. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-- all things have been created through Him and for Him.
17. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
18. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.
19. For it was the Father's good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him,
20. and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
21. And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds,
22. yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach--
23. if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister."
Colossians 1:13-23 (NASB)

If you read verse 13 carefully, you will see that Jesus himself is not only Savior, but also Creator. Ooooohhhhhh! So He is the one who did the pack-replicate-unpack! But He also figured out how to do it in the first place. If you are wont to use the name of Jesus in a casual or disrespectful way, bite your tongue. You have to be really careful who you diss.

May you "continue in the faith, firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel that you have heard."

Have a blessed Christmas 2009.

Because of Jesus the Savior,

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Self-authorizing moralizers - enough already!

2009-11-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

Following is a letter which was submitted to the Oregonian newspaper's Opinion Editor a couple of weeks ago. Provided herein with permission of the writer for the Undertaker's readers without further comment:

[[
Ocober 20, 2009
To : Editor, The Oregonian
Subject: Self-authorizing moralizers

Recently, once I'm past the Sports section of the Oregonian, every week has brought a new example of self-authorized moralizers trying to tell me how I should think and what people of faith should or should not speak in the public square. Now the epidemic has even invaded your sports section. The problem is that these self-appointed self-anointeds have no basis in true moral authority, which is vested only in God Himself.

Example 1:
An essay by New York Times writer David Broder appeared in the Oregonian Sep. 30, 2009, p. B-5, with the caption, "ERODING ECONOMIC VALUES: The moral revival our country needs." Broder decried the recent erosion in the country's financial values while opining: "This erosion happened at a time when the country's cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet." Wrong, Mr. Broder. Not at all oblivious. And in fact I have observed that individuals with a commitment to the broad issues of moral integrity have been those with the most outspoken concern for economic integrity as well. And, yes, economic integrity is a moral issue. But when the immortal God of Heaven gives mortal man a moral compass, I have not noticed Him (Him with a capital "H") granting us the authority to cherry-pick our pet issues, but rather mandating responsibility for all. Unless Mr. Broder has demonstrated his own personal authority by creating a functioning universe somewhere recently, he should best humble himself before the Creator (Creator with a capital "C") of this one.

Example 2:
Charles Darwin's reigning high priest of chance, Richard Dawkins, recently rolled his snake-oil wagon into Portland for the Wordstock Book Fair October 10-11 and snagged an interview with Oregonian writer Joe Rojas-Burke (published Oregonian October 10). According to the article, "In his best-seller 'The God Delusion,' evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins attacked religious belief, arguing that faith in God is irrational and harmful." Leading the unsuspecting with a Pied-Piper-like deception, Dawkins glibly proclaims, "For me, the story of how we got here, how the trees got here, how the birds got here, how iguanas and dinosaurs and turtles got here, it is just so beautiful, and elegant, and thrilling, and enthralling. How could you resist trying to pass that on to anybody who will listen? If they don't want to listen that's fine, they can just shove off."

Hmmm. So he wants me to "shove off," does he? So I suppose I would not be welcome to hang around and mention the inconvenient truth that his cute search algorithm to reproduce the little Shakespeare phrase, "Methinks it is like a weasel" in his book The Blind Watchmaker uses intelligent selection toward a foreknown objective to "prove" the feasibility of evolution. The problem is that Dawkins is breaststroking in an intellectual cesspool as he uses both "intelligent" and "foreknown" features of his algorithm to support his argument that life arose by chance using neither intelligent selection nor foreknown objectives. And he even limited his algorithm to only consider letter sequences of the exact length required. Am I joking? Google it yourself. How absurd. How doubly absurd. How does this guy even rate an interview?

Further, would Dawkins stand quietly while I repeat back to him his seen-by-millions statement in the movie Expelled that living things on the Earth could be actually (and not just apparently) designed and that the design might be detectable? But Dawkins insists that the designer(s) must have been highly evolved space aliens. I guess he really wishes to say that our origins are from somewhere - anywhere - except from God with a capital "G." And this is science? This man has abused his position by intellectual deceit. So why should I bother for one second with his suggestion that I "shove off" from the public square of origins discourse? And why should not the Oregonian be more aggressive in exposing the nonsense? Maybe Dr. Dawkins would threaten to sue the Oregonian - as he later threatened to sue interviewer Ben Stein - for repeating to too many people what he actually said.

Example 3: Sunday, October 16, local writer/speaker Tom Krattenmaker invaded my Oregonian Sports page (p. B-2, "Athletes proclaim: God is my QB."). Mr. Krattenmaker oozes his distaste for the public witness of Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner as Warner gives God credit for his ability, opportunities, and accomplishments. Excuse me, but I am just kind of thinking that Miss Manners would suggest that spoken gratitude in all situations - whether some hearers want to hear it or not - is the greatest validation of a thank-you. Oh, and does Mr. Krattenmaker give God thanks for the air he breathes and the sunrises he sees? I did not see a hint in his Oregonian piece that he bows the knee to any but his own ego and book publishing royalties. If he does not choose to honor the God of creation, maybe his real issue is that he is misplaced - living in God's universe instead of his own.

I'm curious to see who or what comes down the pike next week.
]]

Respectfully copied,
D.U.

CFCs, HFCs, and ME and U: Man's Flailings Bring God's Glorious Creation Into Sharper Focus

2009-07-24T11:05:00.001-07:00

"Sometimes you just can't win for losing" goes the old adage.

The adage is validated yet again in the recent revelation that hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used to replace the ozone-layer-reducing chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as refrigerants are themselves not a freebie. It seems the HFCs are hundreds to thousands of times more effective than CO2 carbon dioxide in trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere.

Got it? Yep, the ozone layer saviors are greenhouse gas monsters.

You can find it in the recent David A. Fahrenthold Washington Post article:
"Chemicals That Eased One Woe Worsen Another"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071901817.html

Also published in The Oregonian, July 24, 2009, p. E6. "Chemicals that fixed ozone hole worsen Earth's warming"

So where does your faithful blogger go today with this technical tidbit? Simply this: the delicate balance of all aspects of the physical universe and the earth's life systems is so incredibly complex as to defy the God-hating scientism mystics who yet continue to proclaim - beyond all rationality - that all is a great cosmic coincidence.

Man's flailing and frustrations to fix stuff that seems broken only bring into sharper focus the great wonder of the original creation (now itself decaying and failing after the "fall of man" recorded in the Bible, Genesis chapter 3).

Bottom line: only a beyond-our-imagination great Creator God could bring into existence all the wonderful stuff we find as we look deeper in and look farther out to understand and discover the wonders of our world and of our cosmos. May all glory be to God the Creator and Father of all.

A few verses from Isaiah chapter 45 (spoken by God through Isaiah around 700 BC - note LORD is translated from the Hebrew tetragrammaton YHWH, spoken as Jehovah in English):

18. For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), "I am the LORD, and there is none else."
Isaiah 45:18 (NASB)

and
20. Gather yourselves and come; Draw near together, you fugitives of the nations; They have no knowledge, who carry about their wooden idol and pray to a god who cannot save.
21. Declare and set forth your case; indeed, let them consult together. Who has announced this from of old? Who has long since declared it? Is it not I, the LORD? And there is no other God besides Me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none except Me.
22. Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is no other.
23. I have sworn by Myself, the word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness and will not turn back, that to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance.
24. They will say of Me, 'Only in the LORD are righteousness and strength.' Men will come to Him, and all who were angry at Him will be put to shame.
25. In the LORD all the offspring of Israel will be justified and will glory."
Isaiah 45:20-25 (NASB)

By the way, did you notice in Isaiah 45:18 above that God says the earth was not created to be a waste place, but rather was formed to be inhabited? In the context of this post, let me just recall Professor Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet. Gonzalez was a highly-published hero to the space-science-type humanists as he described the wonder of our "habitable galactic zone" - until he dared come out to say he believed the cosmos was (GASP !) designed! That was when the God-haters at Iowa State University emerged to drive Gonzalez out of academia by engineering his tenure denial. See my post:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/05/maybe-i-should-have-waited-until-after.html
later migrated to:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html

Indeed, heed God as He speaks:

"Turn to Me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth;
For I am God,
and there is no other."

Indeed, for he also speaks of your future day:

" ... to Me every knee will bow,
every tongue will swear allegiance.
They will say of Me,
'Only in the LORD are
righteousness and strength.'
Men will come to Him,
and all who were angry at Him
will be put to shame."

Amen.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

What a week! May I sleep in until all this mess is over?

2009-06-30T18:06:00.000-07:00

Greetings all:

I'm kind of numb right now. The last week ... the last 24 hours ... it all just gets weirder and weirder. It is kind of tough to freak out seasoned Portlanders with weirdness - but here I am numbly clicking away. The weirdness seems to track more and more familiarly back to President Obama's desk and the Democratic tangle of doom surrounding him.

Again a bit tangential to the usual Darwin-hating rant, but a few consequences of the old boy's illogical logic have maybe intruded into our current politics and economy.

In my last post I mentioned we are looking at a U.S. federal debt in 10 years of $200,000 per household (double the current debt) - if our kids are lucky. A June 10, 2009, Bloomberg article says,
"For the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, the CBO forecasts the deficit to reach a record $1.845 trillion, almost four times the previous fiscal year’s $454.8 billion shortfall. "
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqoRjq0HIaME

So I thought I just might run the numbers as a quick intro to what I really want to get to today. Again using the 2007 number of 111.2 million households, that means that each American household was blessed with a one-year increase of a RECORD $4100 in the 2007-2008 Federal budget (ending September 30, 2008). That is about what my two old used cars are worth combined. But, hey, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. The projected 2008-2009 one-year Federal deficit pencils out to $16,600 per household. And you were worried about paying off that washer and dryer on your credit card? That is just dust on the scales compared to the Fed deficit numbers. It's like you just bought a new car and your kids signed the promissory note. Oh - and another new car next year, and the next, and ...

Now on to ...

THE WEEK THAT WAS ...

(1)The "Cap and Trade" bill (known to realists as the "Cap and Tax") squeaked by in the U.S. House of Representatives and now moves on to the U.S. Senate. This ecofreak darling is designed to rescue us from the imminent peril of global warming, at the cost of ... hmmm, how much? Let's see....

David Kreutzer, a senior policy analyst in energy, economics, and climate change at the Heritage Foundation, "estimates that House-approved legislation limiting greenhouse gas emissions will hit consumers with a 60-percent spike in gasoline prices and a 90-percent increase in electricity prices, after inflation. ... we find that the impact per household will be, for a family of four, about $3,000 per year for the first 24 years, and that's as far out as we analyzed it."
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=585140

All this at the same time that Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming. "The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/29/gop-senator-calls-inquiry-supressed-climate-change-report/

If your pants pockets are empty now, prepare to lose your pants. And you may need them even more since, recently, we have a cooling spell going on.

Maybe it will be easier just to call your U.S. senator now and fill him/her in.

(2) President Obama sided with Hugo Chavez and others to support a recalcitrant dictator wannabe in Honduras who was legally and constitutionally ousted by his own national congress and supreme court - and replaced by the successor called for by their constitution. I watched with fascination into the early hours of the morning as the Yahoo "Buzz" comments came in on the AP story, "U.N. Backs Ousted Honduran Leader" and a preceding article which it replaced. (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jAkMGKIUDg_ngUiZboxQbYj5_DPwD99553D00)
There were well over 200 comments, and all but a handful were very supportive of the Honduran government to throw the rascal out. If you watched those comments roll in, you would know there a lot of angry Americans and Hondurans (and American Cubans) out there watching our president. The theme was repeated again and again that the Honduran National Congress and Supreme Court carried out their responsibilities, according to their constitution! And even Hillary almost got it right. And why in the (%&# numerous expletives deleted) would Mr. Obama side with Chavez and other SA socialists to try to reinstate an ousted newbie-socialist who rapidly wore out his welcome with illegal actions in his own nation?

(3) The U.S. Supreme Court reversed a ruling against Connecticut firefighters who, after successfully passing an examination required for promotion, had been unfairly denied promotions because not enough minorities passed the exam. The firefighters sued and finally, at the end, the U.S. Supremes got it right - that discrimination is not lawful, no matter on which side of the ethnic divide you may be. What is really fascinating is that the Supreme Court justices threw out a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor had endorsed as an appeals court judge.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090630/ap_on_go_su_co/us_supreme_court_firefighters_lawsuit
After Judge Sotmayor's prima facie sexist/racist comments were outed by conservatives following her nomination by President Obama, now our highest court in the land agrees. That was the one sweeeeet spot of the week.

(4) Pesident Obama hosted a dinner and reception for the leading lights of the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered and Gay Pride Month folks last night. His statements reaffirm his outrageous opposition to the clearly stated (by votes) will of the majority of people of the majority of states in the USA. See:
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=585846

"At a White House celebration of Gay Pride Month, Obama said he hopes to persuade all Americans to accept homosexuality. 'There are good and decent people in this country who don't yet fully embrace their gay brothers and sisters -- not yet,' said the president. ... 'There are still fellow citizens, perhaps neighbors or even family members and loved ones, who still hold fast to worn arguments and old attitudes,' he stated. He added that Congress should repeal what Obama referred to as 'the so-called Defense of Marriage Act' "

Yes, I am one of those who hold those "worn arguments and old attitudes." Not because I decide on my own, but simply because the Bible, the Word of God, says so. This is kind of where we can get back to the Bible really quickly. If you think sodomy is so great, just remember what happened to Sodom - and why.

NOW I AM AT THE END OF THE WEEK THAT WAS , AND IT IS ONLY TUESDAY EVENING. SO ....

So what is the origin of marriage? It is the first institution ordained by the Creator God. In the Bible we can read,
"18 Then the LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him."
19 Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20 The man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.
22 The LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
23 The man said, 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.'
24 for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. " Genesis 2:18-24, The Holy Bible (NASB)

Maybe now you can see why it is so important to keep holding Darwin's feet to the fire, since his poisonous rebellion against the Almighty infects so many - and we are now bearing the consequences corporately as a nation in many seemingly unrelated areas.

I'm tired.

And if you are all reading the same news I am reading, then you also know that either full-scale repentance or full-scale bitterness lies ahead for what used to be a great nation - the United States of America..

Submitted with great respect for the brave who stand:
-- Honduran National Congress and Supreme Court;
-- Connecticut firefighters and five judges in our USA Supreme Court;
-- EPA global warming analyst Alan Carlin;
-- Republicans AND Democrats who voted against the outrageous Cap and Trade bill;
-- preachers in churches who do not compromise and so declare God's word boldly;
-- and more,

D.U.

P.S. Maybe I will get to the carbon-14 content of coal and diamonds one of these days. Got other stuff to do first. Hint - if the earth is even 100,000 years old, the C-14 should not be there in measurable and repeatable amounts. And it is NOT contamination from modern C-14. Oh ... and Accelerator Mass Spectrometry is cool.

Generational looting? Who is gonna pay for all the Dem's plans ???

2009-06-28T03:00:00.000-07:00

Well, it is late (3:00 AM), but I just got around to seriously asking ...

A couple of questions:

(1) How much additional debt is planned by the Obama administration over the next ten years? and

(2) How many households in the USA?

And found the results:

(1) Investor's Insight says:

"Using the Obama administration's own projections, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that, including the record 2009 budget deficit of $1.85 trillion, and huge annual deficits over 2009-2019 will result in an additional $11.1 trillion in national debt, on top of the current $11.4 trillion."

and

"During the first 100 days of his presidency, Obama has signed the $787 billion stimulus bill into law, proposed an eye-popping $3.6 trillion federal budget for the 2010 fiscal year, taken over a massive $700 billion Wall Street bailout program (TARP) and created other multi-billion-dollar government programs supposedly to help grease the economic wheels."

http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/forecasts_trends/archive/2009/06/16/obama-on-course-to-double-national-debt.aspx

(2) Wikipedia gives a 2007 figure for number of households:

"How many households are in the US? 2007 estimate: 111,162,259"

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_households_are_in_the_US

And then the math ...

So the additional deficit per household may be estimated to be:

$1.11 * 10**13 / 1.11 * 10**8, or $100,000 per household. But since this is on top of the existing debt which is already $11.4 trillion, this comes up to a very un-nice round figure of $200,000 per household.

And now the angst ...

Please tell me it ain't so. Please tell me I can't do math any more.

$200,000 per household federal debt in a mere 10 years from now!

Oh, and Oregon is going in the tank too - just a few steps behind California. Oregon can not even afford to collect water information data needed to meet development application requirements. I look at my children and my grandchildren and ask how can they repay this kind of onerous debt? I agree with those who call this "generational looting"

When will the Democrats and fellow-traveling Republicans end this mindless spend-a-thon? When you hear "shovel ready", just understand the shovels are digging the grave of the America we have known. When will the Obamamedia cease the Obamamania and get real? When will the people of the USA get a grip on these numbers and then get a grip on the collars of the big spenders and toss them out?

But we will not get a grip on the dollar until we get a grip on the Divine.

And the understanding ...

If you really want to understand what is going on, read the Bible, Deuteronomy Chapter 28. You will find that when a nation wears the name of God, that nation best not sully that great and Holy name YHWH - the name of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because God is not mocked and will not be mocked.

Here is a photo reminding that - like it or not - the USA does wear the name of God - the CREATOR GOD - before the world even on the dollar as we claim "In God We Trust". Credit: Graphic Night Photo

You will find that our financial insanity is a direct result of our spiritual profanity.

It is truly time for personal, corporate (churches as well as governments and businesses) and national repentance. And time is of the essence.

Signing off at 3:49 AM. Going to bed. Hope I can sleep.

D.U.

Storing hydrogen in carbonized chicken feathers to save the planet?

2009-06-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

Hey all:

This one is so cool, after I laughed at reading it I just had to pass it on.

It has been long obvious to me and to many (such as a personal friend and former Mechanical Engineering professor at Portland State University) that a hydrogen economy would be a boon to solve the world's concerns about fossil fuels for transportation - if only the storage problem could be solved.

The beauty of hydrogen gas as a fuel is that its combustion product is simply water vapor - preferable even to the carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) combustion product of natural gas. The problem is that extremely large tanks would be needed to store hydrogen gas even under high pressure. Some folks have succeeded in reducing the storage size significantly by storing hydrogen gas in carbon nanotubes, but the cost of the nanotube tank would be several times the cost of a car with today's nanotechnology.

And now today I saw on page one of the Oregonian that one potential answer may lie in carbonizing the lowly chicken feather:

http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2009/06/feathered_fuel_tank_soaks_up_h.html

The research, done at the University of Delaware, was reported in the university's paper a couple of days ago:

http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2009/jun/feathers062309.html

in which it was reported:

"Chicken feather fibers are mostly composed of keratin, a natural protein that forms strong, hollow tubes. When heated, this protein creates crosslinks, which strengthen its structure, and becomes more porous, increasing its surface area. The net result is carbonized chicken feather fibers, which can absorb as much or perhaps more hydrogen than carbon nanotubes or metal hydrides, two other materials being studied for their hydrogen storage potential, Wool says. Plus, they're cheap. Using carbonized chicken feathers would only add about $200 to the price of a car, according to Wool. By comparison, making a 20-gallon hydrogen fuel tank that uses carbon nanotubes could cost $5.5 million; one that uses metal hydrides could cost up to $30,000, Wool says."

So why would I blog on this today? First - yeah, even creationists are interested in the planet. Duhhhh. Second - the combined strength and light weight of feathers (due in part to the keratin protein and in part to structural design) have long been considered by creationists as a powerful example of design in nature. And not only are feathers a mechanical wonder, they can also be wonders of beauty. Here is my backyard photo of a peacock feather:

So - strength, functionality, and beauty - all are to be found in God's created world because they were created for those purposes. If you don't like that answer, go use your superior intelligence to make a better feather.

Recall again the words of Job 12:7-10 (Holy Bible, NASB):

7. "But now ask the beasts, and let them teach you; And the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you. 8. "Or speak to the earth, and let it teach you; And let the fish of the sea declare to you. 9. "Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this, 10. In whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind?"

Submitted with great pleasure and satisfaction,

D.U.

Speak to the earth and let it teach you ....

2009-06-23T14:49:00.000-07:00

Are you wondering about the beginnings of it all? Are you an observer of nature, seeking what may be learned about the nature of life?

I was just reading in the Bible this morning and decided to share these words of wisdom from Job. The Oregon sunset is an added bonus..

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Powerful proof that the creation account in Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 is historical narrative, not poetry

2009-06-22T11:16:00.000-07:00

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ..."
Historical narrative? Statistically certain.
Poetry? Statistically indefensible.

Just a followup today to my earlier post:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2009/04/affirmed-theistic-evolution-is-wimpy.html

I pointed out that Professor Karplus' claim that the text of Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 may be taken as poetic rather than as historical narrative was contrary to recent text analysis. The issue seems important enough that I now provide brief detail about that text analysis.

FIRST THE TECHNICAL STUFF:

Among other references, you may find one very thorough text analysis in:

Boyd, Steven. W., "Evidence for an Historical Reading of Genesis 1:1 - 2:3", pp. 631-734 in Vardiman et al, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth - II, Results of a Young-Earth Creationist Research Initiative. Institute for Creation Research, El Cajon, CA, 2005. 618 pp.

Here is Boyd's Figure 10 (p. 674):

The abscissa value represents the ratio of preterite verbs to total finite verbs in selected Hebrew Bible texts while the ordinate represents the probability of a text being a narrative as opposed to a poetic text. The preterite verb form for the most part is a sequential past tense (Boyd, p. 651). The sample to "calibrate" this classification analysis consisted of fourteen clearly narrative Hebrew Bible texts and fourteen clearly poetic Hebrew Bible texts (Boyd, p. 652). The Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 text had a ratio 0.655 preterite to total finite verbs. The classification analyis gives a probability between 0.999942 and 0.999987 at a 95.5% confidence level that the Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 text is historical narrative. I have highlighted the Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 text on the plot (the blue triangle) by pointing to it with the BIG RED ARROW.

NOW WHAT TO MAKE OF ALL THE TECHNICAL STUFF:

First, why all the numbers stuff? Because too many folks want to read allegorical or symbolic language into the Genesis creation account. They wave their hands and dismiss it as "poetic" despite what what the text on the face of it would convey. So the Boyd analysis is kind of numbers-in-your-face if you really want to insist that an apparently historical narrative is poetic/allegorical.

Now how to understand it. The statistical tools Boyd uses are in the general category of "classification." This is a common application of statistics in science. For example, a hospital diagnosis protocol for a person exhibiting certain symptoms may quantify a suite of symptoms and use a classification analysis (or discriminant analysis) to determine the probability that a person has "disease A" requiring extended hospital isolation and $20,000 for medications, as opposed to "disease B" which would require a few aspirin and a couple of days rest. This would be precisely analogous to the Bible text question.

For the case at hand, we only have to decide between two "classes": historical narrative or poetry. The very small overlap in the samples (almost all of the poetic texts have the preterite/total ratio less than 0.2, while almost all of the historical narratives have a preterite/total ratio greater than o.25) kind of jumps out at you suggesting that the "common sense" reading of the text as historical is backed up by the classification analysis.

Consider an analogy. Suppose at the Beijing Olympics the shoes from the American men's basketball team have been accidentally mixed in with the shoes from the Chinese women's table tennis team, and I have a job simply to look at the shoe size for each pair and toss the shoes into a bin for USA-Men-Basketball or into a bin for PRC-Women-TableTennis. The classification task might be similar to that shown in Boyd's Figure 10 above. There might be a few pair that could conceivably go into either bin and I might make a wrong decision or two. But generally the spread is so great that I am going to get the right answer almost all of the time.

So may I say it? For the folks who wish to insist that the Genesis 1:1 - 2:3 text is poetic, it might not be as bad as tossing Shaqille O'Neil's size 22 shoes in the women's shoe bin, but more like throwing LaBron James' 15.5 shoes to the ladies. Do you seriously want to do that?

BOYD'S CONCLUSION:

"The logistic regression model calculates the probability that a text is narrative. For Genesis 1:1 - 2:3, this probability is between 0.999942 and 0.999987 at a 95.5% confidence level. Thus we conclude with statistical certainty that this text is narrative, not poetry. It is therefore statistically indefensible to argue that this text is poetry."

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Trying to send good vibes and think positive thoughts? How about prayer? North Korea captive Laura Ling's friends on the wrong trail

2009-06-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Greetings today from a dreary drippy northwest day when I would prefer to see and smell cut hay drying in sun-kissed fields.

And if you have ever had the opportunity to compare taste-deprived commercially-grown California strawberries (they look great forever it seems - like souped up on botox) with fresh sweet succulent Oregon strawberries, you will understand why I am hoping for a last push of ripening weather before Sunday for our annual post-graduation outing.

For today I comment on the power of man's mind versus the power of God. And in immediate introspection I find that I also am being infected by our Oregon left-coast culture of "me not Thee." Did you notice in the paragraph above I wrote I am "hoping" for ripe berries. I know of no inherent "hoping" power to effect any result except self-inflicted anxiety. Knowing as I do that God is the God of details as well as the God of the largest picture, I should be praying for ripe berries instead of "hoping."

So what sparks today's blurb? I suppose you have heard of the recent spying convictions in North Korea of two American investigative reporters. I just read a few minutes ago in the Silicon Valley MercuryNews.com (http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12556506?source=most_viewed)
that friends of Laura Ling, one of the convicted journalists, are trying to help the situation in Korea by use of brain-waves from California. Ling's long-time friend Cheryll Marsh "is confident her friend of 20 years is coping with the ordeal. 'She is brave and courageous,' Marsh said. Still, 'having her thousands of miles away is just so heartbreaking. But we're all trying to send good vibes and think positive thoughts.'"

Is there any rational basis to suggest that "trying to send good vibes and think positive thoughts" will be causative in what comes down? I would say no. On the contrary, prayer to the omniscient omnipotent omnipresent and merciful Almighty God of Heaven and earth has been found effectual across centuries, across cultures, and across time zones. And if you, dear reader, are not aware of this reality then you are deprived of enlightenment. Find some good Christian books about real experiences of real people with real needs with real devotion to a very real God, and you will begin to scratch the surface of the great reality of God's willing merciful involvement in the minutiae of our lives if we will but welcome Him.

This is the great reality show that seems underappreciated in America today.

Here is what Jehovah God said to Solomon as he dedicated the temple in Jerusalem around 959 B.C.: "2 Chronicles 7:14 (NASB) "...if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

The power we have is not in our minds. Our power is in our free will submission the the will and law of the God who does have the true power.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Should I laugh then cry? Or cry then laugh? Missing link fossil IDA devolves rapidly, Texas Senate follows suit

2009-05-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

Today - where to begin? And when will it all end?

Darwin's dutiful defenders continue desperate digging to discover a/the "missing link" - any old link will do. In the meanwhile, the Senate of the grand state of Texas stuffs a guy who seeks inquiry about the sufficiency or insufficiency of evolutionary theory. Methinks there is a weasel in all this stuff.

Article first: IDA the "missing link" - is not.

News sites were humming with the news of a virtually complete fossil from Germany touted as a/the missing link. She even has a name, "IDA."

Here is IDA's mugshot,
courtesy of PLoS One,
Huram et al, via LiveScience

And here is the really fun three-day sequence of news post headlines May 19, 2009, to May 21, 2009.:

(1) LiveScience:
http://www.livescience.com/history/090519-fossil-primate.html
Ancient Human Ancestor 'Ida' Discovered
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 19 May 2009 12:23 pm ET

(2) LiveScience.
http://www.livescience.com/animals/090520-fossil-reactions.html
Amid Media Circus, Scientists Doubt 'Ida' Is Your Ancestor
By Clara Moskowitz
posted: 20 May 2009 02:13 pm ET

(3) FOX News:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,520886,00.html
Scientists: 'Missing Link' Fossil Not Worth Media Hype
Thursday, May 21, 2009 By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience
You know science has made it big when the Google homepage logo is changed to celebrate a fossil finding and the mayor of New York shows up at a press conference to unveil it.

So how many times have we seen this same scenario. And will it go on interminably? Thanks to Yogi Berra, we can say this seems like "deja vu all over again."

Article second: Texas Senate Democrats disdain asking students to "evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of the theory of evolution."

See: http://www.onenewsnow.com/Headlines/Default.aspx?id=546960
Head of state education board denied reappointment for supporting creationism
Associated Press - 5/29/2009 5:30:00 AM
"AUSTIN, TX - Democrats in the Texas Senate have blocked the reappointment of a creationist to head the state board that sets standards and policies for Texas public schools.
The 19-11 vote was one vote shy of the two-thirds approval needed to support Gov. Rick Perry's nomination of Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education. McLeroy has been chairman of the board since 2007 and will remain a member. He has supported requiring students to "evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency" of the theory of evolution."
.

And my question:

So dear Darwin-is-Dead readers, some characters are desperately trying to dig up the/a "missing link" to support the molecules-to-man myth. In the meantime, questioning the sufficiency or insufficiency of science to support the myth is a no-no to the Texas Democrats.

Are there no clear-eyed blue-dog Democrats in the Lone Star State? Or have the red-dogs invaded even Longhorn land?

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

AFFIRMED. THEISTIC EVOLUTION FAILED THE TEST OF SCRUTINY IN CORVALLIS

2009-04-07T13:57:00.000-07:00

Hey y'all.

Yup, I'm back.

Probably in part because tax returns are due in a week and a day and I dislike doing taxes even more than I dislike blogging on a rare sunny April day in Oregon.

But I'm really back today because I attended the Oregon State University Socratic Club meeting last night in Corvallis.
http://www.oregonstate.edu/groups/socratic

They had a debate-dialogue kind of thing going on to allow two Christian presenters to give different views of creation. Dr. Andrew Karplus, an OSU professor, came to explain why evolution is compatible with Christian belief. Dr. Kevin Anderson, director of the Van Andel Creation Research Center in Arizona, came to offer his view that evolution corrupts the creation story.

Bottom line:

Going in .... I went to the event pretty well convinced that scientific evidence in no way offers compelling evidence to accept the notion that evolution was "the way God did it". But I was curious to see if anything new might be injected into the debate.

Coming out ... Yes, I'm even more firmly outside the theistic evolutionist camp. The arguments offered for theistic evolution were limp, arbitrary, and poorly supported.

I am going to abbreviate this because there is much to do here on the home front and I should get this thing finished before the boss comes home and pulls the plug on the computer and starts the lawn mower and runs it into my office..

*******
I will touch on only a few of the items presented by Dr. Karplus as he favored theistic evolution:

(1) Dr. Karplus stated that we must not say "God did it - it's a miracle" simply because we don't understand how something works.
. I was insulted, and good honest Christian scientists involved in research should be insulted as well. Why? Because I know very well that Dr. Karplus was attempting to paint non-evolutionary creationists (including me) with a broad brush that says Biblical literalism is a disincentive to good scientific inquiry - that we just throw up our hands and say "God did it. Yessss!" and blissfully walk away from scientific challenges. This is the tragically flawed "God of the gaps" accusation often made against creationists.

But nothing is farther from the truth ! ! ! ! !

A fair reading of the history of science makes it abundantly clear that, to most of the great giants of the scientific revolution, scientific inquiry was a way to honor God by understanding His work - for His glory. And the more difficult the problem and exquisite the discovery, the greater God's glory is understood to be. "Thinking God's thoughts after Him" is the way it was most commonly expressed. If you wish to Google that quote, you will get a semester's worth of reading I'm sure. And go read The Soul of Science by Pearcey and Thaxton. Dr. Karplus should have done so before walking onto the stage.

Take home message from this point: a disingenuous straw man, insulting, inaccurate, and contrary to the history of science.

(2) In identifying four "pillars" of his presentation, Dr. Karplus listed the fourth as "The Bible", which he said "is an inspired and inspiring gift from God, a reliable revelation about spiritual truths."
. If you read this carefully, what Dr. Karplus omits is more critical than what he says. He clearly wishes to imply that the Bible is OK for spiritual truths, but physical truths are not within the scope of holy writ. I approached Dr. Karplus after the event and told him that seemed very arbitrary. Since we would both agree that God is creator/author of the spiritual world which we share, and also creator/author of the physical world in which we live, why would he choose to take scripture as authoritative in one area and not in the other. His answer was basically that he chooses to believe that is the way it is, and mentioned something about poetic language in Genesis chapters 1-3. First, his answer did not give me a reason why he chooses, he just stated that he does choose. His answer also ignored the last figure in Dr. Anderson's presentation, a Biblical text analysis giving powerful evidence that Genesis 1-3 is historical narrative, NOT poetic text.

Take home message from this point: absolutely arbitrary, and his weak reason given is powerfully contradicted by recent text analysis.

(3) After Dr. Anderson gave some figures and recent references on the seriousness of mutational loading and decline in fitness for each generation, Dr. Karplus (surprisingly) said that he would be surprised if the genome is degrading.
. I was disappointed because I came to Corvallis to see if I could hear something new injected into the debate, but this statement by Dr. Karplus clearly showed he is not up-to-date on much of the genetic research of the last decade or more relating to genomic degradation. A good book to read is Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome by Dr. John Sanford, a Cornell University career plant breeder and geneticist. The book has been out for at least two years and some of the figures and references presented by Dr. Anderson yesterday are also in Sanford's book.

Take home message here: theistic evolutionists would be well advised to read some good creationist literature occasionally. Especially before public debate.

(4) Dr. Karplus failed to make any distinction between operational/empirical science (scientific method with data observable and repeatable, hypotheses falsifiable) versus historical-forensic science which addresses the occurrence of a one-time event.
. Empirical science is primary in operational processes, but is incapable of FULLY evaluating events in which intelligence and purpose and creativity are interjected and superimposed upon structures and functioning in the physical world. The teleology inherent in structures and processes throughout nature can never be subjected to investigation by the (empirical-operational) scientific method. Even after being questioned, Dr. Karplus failed to recognize or to admit the limitations of empirical science looking at one-time historical events.
See:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2005/12/forensic-science-vs-empirical-science or
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2005_12_01_archive.html

The take-home message here: If you are going to talk as an authority about science, you'd best be clear precisely which science you mean, and what are the limitations of each.

*******
Now about a few things Dr. Anderson said.

(1) I was surprised and pleased when Dr. Anderson began his questioning session of Dr. Karplus by asking about his view of sin and death.
. The newcomer may greet this question with "Huhhh???? What does that have to do with evolution and creation?"
The answer is - MUCH.
The Biblical literalist would claim (as I do) that as animals and man were created, neither animals nor man were suffering and dying until the fall of man, and only experienced suffering and death AFTER the fall of man. The theistic evolutionary model would have animals experiencing suffering and death for millions of years BEFORE the fall of man arrives in Genesis chapter 3. Biblical literalists expect that the mercy of God, whose care extends also to the animal world, would not ordain, approve, and uncaringly watch over such cruelty and call it "good." Literalists would believe God is author of :

"A good man takes care of his animals, but wicked men are cruel to theirs."
Proverbs 12:10.

It is interesting that atheists and agnostics understand this far better than theistic evolutionists. Recall the complaint raised against God by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
"Man...Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law --
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed."

If theistic evolutionists such as Dr. Karplus are correct, then Tennyson's railing against God is accurate. But if there was no death in either man or animals until the fall of man, then "nature red in tooth and claw" has only man's sin to blame.

And for myself, I stood aloof from the theistic vs. literalist debate a few decades ago until one day the light came on and I finally understood this very precise argument. That was the definitive moment in my conviction that theistic evolution is seriously flawed and facilitates faulty but loud accusations against God's merciful nature. I encourage you, don't go there.

See my post:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/06/death-and-hope-versus-tennysons-nature
or
httpp://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

And Professor Karplus had no satisfactory answer to the question either.

(2) I just have to stop now. You can purchase a video of the event through the OSU Socratic Club (web site given above).

Thanks to the OSU Socratic Club for their effort to host the event.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Dark Matter Revisited - Before It Is Gone Forever With the Pioneer Deceleration

2008-12-29T01:21:00.000-08:00

Yo folks.

It is now 1:28 according to the little chronometer displayed at the lower right corner of my monitor screen. Unfortunately, that is 1:28 AM, not PM. So ... as usual, gotta try to make it short. But I am at it this awful hour because the topic seems important to me and a few fellow creationist nerds.

Why? Because some folks at Oxford University are sounding very very creationist-like in their cosmological thinking, publishing via the American Physical Society (but I think maybe failing to credit the creationist who came up with the idea.)

Where to begin? A bit over a year ago I commented on the comments of a newly-arrived physics grad student in NW USA from a country in east Asia:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/10/creation-cosmology-god-did-it-is-lookin.html

When I asked her if she was sure dark matter existed, she gave me a rather disdainful look and carefully (speaking slowly I think) explained to me that the existence of dark matter is well known by its gravitational effects. She did not appear to understand that the implications flowed from the "Copernican Principle", the ASSUMPTIONS that (1) we are in no special place in the universe (and in fact no really special places would even exist in the universe), and (2) that the universe is unbounded. These are hypothetical boundary conditions used to solve the General Relativity equations. That in fact means that dark matter inferred by application of those assumed conditions is itself hypothetical rather than demonstrated fact.

BTW, it puzzles me why a hypothesis, or assumption, would ever be called a "principle." Isn't that begging the question a bit?

Well, anyway .....

I mentioned in my October, 2007, post (above) a cosmology suggested by Russ Humphreys in 1994 based on Biblically-based boundary conditions which would give a very different result. What are those boundary conditions? Specifically, drawing from the account in Genesis of the creation in which God separated the waters below the "firmament" from the waters above the "firmament", along with numerous Bible passages that God "stretched out" the heavens, Humphreys inferred that: (1) the earth is approximately at or near the center of the cosmos, and that (2) the universe is bounded, with a "shell" of mass concentrated in the vicinity of the boundary..

There have been others taking a similar tack. For example Dr John Hartnett, a physicist at University of Western Australia, reported, using a space-time-velocity metric of the late Israeli physicist Moshe Carmeli, at the International Conference on Creationism held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, in August, 2008. With the Carmeli metric, the so-called "dark matter" effects may in fact merely be a property of space-time and not matter at all.

And it turns out that also in October, 2007, at almost exactly the same time the Asian physics grad student and I were having our conversation during our hike in the Cascade mountains, Dr. Russ Humphreys was publishing with a new metric including a gravitational potential term which would draw from the Bible's inference of a large mass "shell" (of water at the time of the stretching in Genesis 1) at the boundary edge of the universe and relatively insignificant mass density inside the "shell." See:

http://www.icr.org/article/3472/ (less technical)

and

Humphreys, D. R. 2007. Creationist cosmologies explain the anomalous acceleration of Pioneer spacecraft. Journal of Creation 21(2):61-70. Can be downloaded as a PDF document from the following page of the Creation Ministries International website: http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5181/.

The really interesting thing is that the anomalous deceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft (see the article) is explained by the Humphreys cosmology, but not by the big-bang cosmology.

So, now what about that team at Oxford? In September, 2008, an Oxford team published:

Timothy Clifton, Pedro G. Ferreira, and Kate Land. Living in a Void: Testing the Copernican Principle with Distant Supernovae. Phys. Rev. Lett., 101, 131302 (2008) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.131302

I tried to access the link this morning but could not reach it. But you can read the Science Daily summary at:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080926184749.htm

Dark Energy: Is It Merely An Illusion?
ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2008) —
"Dark energy is at the heart of one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics, but it may be nothing more than an illusion, according physicists at Oxford University."
... "Although dark energy may seem a bit contrived to some, the Oxford theorists are proposing an even more outrageous alternative. They point out that it's possible that we simply live in a very special place in the universe - specifically, we're in a huge void where the density of matter is particularly low. The suggestion flies in the face of the Copernican Principle, which is one of the most useful and widely held tenets in physics."
... "Dark energy may seem like a stretch, but it's consistent with the venerable Copernican Principle. The proposal that we live in a special place in the universe, on the other hand, is likely to shock many scientists. The maverick physicists at Oxford conclude their paper by pointing out that forthcoming tests of the Copernican principle should help us sort out the mystery in the next few years."

So it seems now that folks at Oxford are willing to point out that it is POSSIBLE that "we simply live in a very special place in the universe." But more than that, they propose a test. According the the original article abstract as published in :

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008arXiv0807.1443C

"...local redshift dependence of the luminosity distance can be used to test the Copernican principle that we are not in a central or otherwise special region of the Universe. Future surveys of type Ia supernovae that focus on a redshift range of ˜0.1–0.4 will be ideally suited to observationally determine the validity of the Copernican principle on new scales, as well as probing the degree to which dark energy must be considered a necessary ingredient in the Universe."

THIS ONE IS GOING TO BE REALLY INTERESTING TO WATCH!

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

More neo-Darwinian toxicity to science: "We have in vain spent much time" says Nobel Laureate Werner Abel

2008-10-08T14:56:00.000-07:00

Yo all.

Daylight is burning and I'm keyboarding. Ugh.

This is now number 8 in my list of neo-Darwinian toxicities to the advancement of modern science. See my prior post for 1-7.

If you have read much of anything about modern genetics, genetic engineering, genetically modified foods ... or whatever ... you have most likely heard mention of "restriction enzymes." And if you are a professional researcher in the field, you are likely shaking these little guys into your daily lab soup.

Restriction enzymes are to genetics what cut-and-paste software is to word processing. They are the genius little chemical machines that snip and clip and toss and insert segments of DNA to get recombinant sequences. And they were doing that long long before man got involved in biochemical research.

In 1978, microbiologist Werner Arber was co-recipient of a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to molecular genetics. Dr. Jerry Bergman in an article entitled:
"Werner Arber: Nobel Laureate, Darwin Skeptic"
http://www.icr.org/article/4095/
provides some keen insight into how a part of Dr. Arber's life was wasted (and considerably unpublished) as he pursued his work from a neo-Darwinian slant:
"Arber conducted extensive scientific research in genetics, evolution, and related areas. In his Nobel Prize autobiography, Arber described his research as long but fruitless attempts to document macroevolution with experimental evidence. For this reason, he wrote that much of his work in this area remains largely unpublished."

Bergman provides the following quotation from Arber:
"One could expect that mutations affecting the part of the enzymes responsible for recognition of the specificity site on the DNA might result in new members of the family, recognizing new specificity sites on DNA. We have in vain spent much time in search for such evolutionary changes both after mutagenization and after recombination between two members of the same family of (bacteria)." Emphasis mine. See:
Arber, W. 1979. Werner Arber: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1978 Autobiography. In Odelberg, W. (ed.), The Nobel Prizes 1978. Stockholm: Nobel Foundation. Also available online at Nobelprize.org.

And can you believe it? Arber is an advocate of (gasp) intelligent design! Continuing to quote Bergman:
"After a lifetime of research, Arber summarized his main conclusion about intelligent design (ID) in the following words:
Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about.... I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together, remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.3
He concluded that religion is important to help humans cope not only with the problem of biological origins, but also with the questions that we all encounter in life, noting that some ideologies "may take the place of a religion but science cannot, although some people tend to claim that it does."3 Arber wrote that his belief in God "helped me to master many questions in life; it guides me in critical situations," and his ID conclusions were "confirmed" by his research into the "beauty of the functioning of the living world."3
Bergman's refererence (3) is: Arber, W. 1992. The Existence of a Creator Represents a Satisfactory Solution. In Margenau, H. and R. A. Varghese (eds.), Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo sapiens. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 141-143.

Read the rest of the Bergman article at the link above. Then laugh or weep, depending on whether you are "one of us" or "one of them."

So, there you go again. If you are a researcher, just toss neo-Darwinism into the tank and get on with real research. Or, if you are a member of a state or local board of education somewhere trying to decide if you will permit the neo-Darwinian hegemony in your schools to inculcate failed and failing ideas into your little children's brains, just remember - neo-Darwinism has a long and consistent track record of hindering and obstructing real science.

Do you suppose that is because neo-Darwinism is simply NOT true science?

Go ahead - think it.

Go ahead - say it.

Go ahead - PROCLAIM IT!

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Yo all (take 2, updated October 29, 2008).
I need to add an additional note to the above post. After Dr. Arber wrote in his Nobel autobiography,
"One could expect that mutations affecting the part of the enzymes responsible for recognition of the specificity site on the DNA might result in new members of the family, recognizing new specificity sites on DNA. We have in vain spent much time in search for such evolutionary changes both after mutagenization and after recombination between two members of the same family of the above mentioned systems."
he then wrote
"That the basic idea for this search was good was recently shown by Len Bullas, Charles Colson and Aline van Pel (J. Gen. Microbiol. 95, 166- 172, 1976) who encountered such a new system in their work with Salmonella recombinants."
Well, this last sentence sounds like beginning with a Darwinian idea was not such a failure after all. When I contacted Dr. Jerry Bergman about that, he replied (Dr. J. Bergman, personal communication, October 29, 2008): (the) "authors (Bullas et al) concluded that the change in the restriction enzyme (the topic of the paper) was due to a recombinant event (page 167) and add 'perhaps' a 'mutation can produce a new active site' (page 171). I see nothing in this article that contradicts my paper. If someone finds something, please let me know!"
So number 8 in my list of Darwinian toxicities to modern science stands!

Epigenesis research victimized by neo-Darwinism's tyrannical toxicity to true scientific endeavor

2008-09-09T20:59:00.000-07:00

Hi there today friendlies and not-so-friendlies:

Today continues the saga of

Neo-Darwinism -- ENEMY OF SCIENCE

Glad to know you are on board today. Thank you kindly for your visit.

Just picked up another piece of flotsam (or is it jetsam - I don't know the difference) from the scientific shipwreck generously entitled "neo-Darwinism."

In a post several weeks ago I listed six items in which neo-Darwinism has been or continues to be toxic to the progress of science.
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2008/08/darwinism-and-neo-darwinism-toxic-enemy.html

(1) Darwinism retarded acceptance of germ theory as proposed by (creationist) Louis Pasteur;

(2) Darwinism tragically retarded the life-saving benefit of antiseptic surgery introduced by Joseph Lister, "father" of modern antiseptic surgery;

(3) Due to Darwinian portrayal of some organs as "vestigial", that is, remnant 'junk', lots of "vestigial" body parts were unnecessarily yanked out while increase of scientific knowledge was delayed.

(4) The neo-Darwinian notion of "junk DNA" has been a severe retardant to the advance of molecular biology, and could have even prevented mapping of the full human genome had not wiser heads prevailed;

(5) Darwin's idea of embryological development, later refined and polished and coined into a phrase by Ernst Haeckl as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," known as the "biogenetic law" or "recapitulation theory," has thwarted and delayed embryological research;

(6) The neo-Darwinian notion of ascendancy of life forms via mutation and natural selection led to a lot of wasted lives and money in dead-end plant "breeding" experiments in the first half of the twentieth century;

Let's add one more to the list today:

(7) Neo-Darwinism has been and continues to be retardant to scientific understanding of epigenesis.
The presence of identical genes in radically different cells, a phenomenon known as "genomic equivalence," is a paradox: If genes control development and the genes in every cell are the same, why are cells so different (see discussion in Wells, Icons of Evolution, p. 191). It seems that genes are being turned on and off by factors outside of themselves, i.e., epigenetic ("beyond the genes"). Wells points out that as the neo-Darwinian synthesis of genetics and evolution was becoming increasingly popular, biologists searching for epigenetic factors were suppressed. Wells quotes historian Jan Sapp that epigenesis researchers "seemed to threaten the significance of the merger of Mendelian genetics and selection theory and therefore had to be denied." Wells calls this the "rise of neo-Darwinian monopoly in genetics" as he cites [Sapp, Jan. Beyond the Gene: Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Authority in Genetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), quotations from pp. 59, 81, 85].

I think by the time we (meaning all you friendlies out there) finish this tally of neo-Darwinism's tyrannical toxicity to technical truth, the list is going to be really really really long. When this list is finally dumped on Sir Charles' cadaver, nary a whisker will show for his 150 year celebration.

Keep the faith - and keep on keepin' on.

With faithfulness and prayer to our Great Creator God, truth will trump tripe.

Respectfully,

D.U.

Sticks and stones, rage and rationality, discernment and disinformation

2008-08-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Hey all today .....

It's rainy and cool here and I am hoping for a spell of good HOT weather to ripen a few more peaches before this weekend. Maybe running out of time.

But I don't usually blog about weather, so what's up today?

Well, Anonymous just showed up today with a comment on my last post in which I exposed the toxicity of Darwinism upon true scientific progress.

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2008/08/darwinism-and-neo-darwinism-toxic-enemy.html

To save you having to go back and find it, here it is:

Anonymous said...
Hogwash! Pure hogwash.You are not even very creative in your creation of disinformation.It is clear why you filter comments. Nothing of disagreement will ever reach this blog.
August 20, 2008 10:16 AM

Thought I should respond a touch.

(1) First, thx to Anon. I was beginning to think nobody cares about this stuff. I am encouraged in a kind of Portland-weird way.

(2) Yeah, yeah, occasionally I don't publish comments. But always for specific reasons. One reason was a comment included a link which I will not in conscience pass on. The other reason is some are much much too long. Problem is, I have not figured out how to edit or truncate comments before publishing them on this blog. Also have not yet bothered to figure out how to complain to Google about that. So it is either up-or-down, yes-or-no, publish-or-perish. So I let a few perish. For example, when I posted about the role of Darwinism in Hitler's little piece of history as related to the movie "Expelled" (http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2008/04/few-initial-thoughts-on-ben-steins.html ) I got two comments back which were waaaay too long. One was a bajillion words of very good thoroughly documented agreement with my post going back to earlier twentieth century historians (including Hitler's biographers) and the whole shot. Sorry, too long. The other was a mere half bajillion words of disagreement giving links to stuff written by modern historical revisionists. Sorry, also too long - not to mention that it was significantly lacking in diligence and substance .
Note: I still have those comments in my unmoderated section and will publish them if there is a groundswell of demand to see both. It will either be both or none.

Thanks to all you blogospherites out there for your understanding.

(3) As regards the Anonymous comment quoted above:
C'mon, Anon. Get serious. I posted seven instances in which Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism have hindered the progress of modern science. And all you can say is "hogwash"? Please insert rationality instead of rage into the dialogue. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will ..." ... will what? ...will only influence the non-discerning. As I have said before, "Keep those facts a-comin' folks." The Undertaker is where disinformation comes to die.

And now Anon has suckered me into wasting my time replying to his/her vacuous comment.

I'm a bit resentful. But I hope you all have a good day anyway.

D.U.

Darwinism and neo-Darwinism: Toxic Enemy of Scientific Progress

2008-08-09T02:06:00.000-07:00

Hi All:

It's been a while since I dropped by to drop in my two cents worth on anything. Been busy - still busy. Should not be doing this post actually.

Just got back from the Sixth International Conference on Creationism in Pittsburgh. A rollicking raucous good time was had by all, except for perhaps a few clandestine Darwinians who may have slipped in for purposes of spying or reporting or maybe for getting ideas for new cutting edge science in order to hijack ideas and publish in recognized science journals without giving any credit to creationists. Hmmm, think that has not happened before?

Anyway, it was all cool and I suppose you can order proceedings of the technical sessions on DVD (maybe CD?) by going to
http://www.icc08.org

Now for today's post:

Materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea argues that Darwinism acts like a "universal acid," dissolving virtually all structures of morality and culture. And Dennett seems very comfortable indeed with the dissolution of Biblical world views and the accompanying sea-level shift in morality and culture. He is "one of them", not "one of us."

Maybe it really does not take much arguing to establish the "universal acid" nature of Darwinism because its toxicity to Western culture and faith is all-too-well demonstrated

But today's post is for benefit of (or observation about) the slippery folks we have lurking around who squeal with delight at Darwinism's profound success in dissolving fundamental elements of Judaeo-Christian culture. Those slimy slugs will virtually always fall prostrate and kiss the big toe of a "science" which they propose to supplant faith. I will offer a truncated list of areas in which Darwin's "dangerous idea" has been toxic - or at least severely retardant - to the advancement of true science. Enjoy.

(1) Darwinism retarded acceptance of germ theory as proposed by (creationist) Louis Pasteur. See:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-who-really-hijacked-louis-pasteur.html
So how many people suffered unnecessarily because Pasteur's contemporaries, with minds poisoned by Darwin's idea that life could come from non-life, opposed Pasteur's demonstrations that life could come only from pre-existing life. Conclusion: Darwinism was a retardant to acceptance of germ theory.

That brings us to ...

(2) Joseph Lister, father of modern antiseptic surgery, did accept Pasteur's germ theory and initiated antiseptic surgery to kill the bugs before they kill the patient. Lister was opposed for a decade or two in Britain because of the underlying resistance to Pasteur's germ theory. As a result, Lister's stunning success (survival) rates in surgeries were demonstrated first in Germany instead of in Britain. How many people died unnecessarily during surgeries in Britain during the time Lister was so successfully using the antiseptic surgical procedures on the continent?
Conclusion: Darwinism tragically retarded the life-saving benefit of antiseptic surgeries.

(3) The idea of "vestigial organs" is well recognized as a derivative of the notion of evolutionary history that would necessarily leave behind a bunch of scattered useless remnants as evolution continues its inexorable march to higher and higher life forms. Problem: it's not true. Many of the folks who had appendices or tonsils yanked unnecessarily in the last century are/were victims of a false Darwinian ideology. And true science likely suffered more than the innocent yankees at the hands of the yankers. The list of 180 organs alleged to be "vestigial" in 1890 has been virtually reduced to nil by today. See:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2008/03/junk-dna-and-kindra-grinsell-poster.html
Conclusion: Due to Darwinian portrayal of remnant 'junk', lots of body parts were unnecessarily yanked out while increase of scientific knowledge was delayed. (It's useless to study 'useless' organs - right?)

(4) The idea of "junk DNA" has been a severe retardant to the advance of modern biology. Why? 'Cause it ain't so. And where does the idea come from? Quite simply again that evolution has left useless remnants behind, a Darwinian prediction. Again see the link above for discussion.
But here is part:
Professor Chris Ponting, from the UK Medical Research Council's Functional Genetics Unit, told BBC News Online: 'Amazingly, there were calls from some sections to only map the bits of genome that coded for protein - mapping the rest was thought to be a waste of time.'It is very lucky that entire genomes were mapped, as this work is showing.' He added: 'I think other bits of 'junk' DNA will turn out not to be junk. I think this is the tip of the iceberg, and that there will be many more similar findings.'"

And here is a quote by Dr. John Mattick:
"The failure to recognize the full implications of [non-protein-coding DNA] may well go down as one of the biggest mistakes in the history of molecular biology." (Mattick, J., cited in:Gibbs, W.W., "The unseen genome: gems among the junk", Scientific American 289(5):26-33, November 2003; cited in Creation 29(2):p. 40, March-May 2007)

Conclusion: Darwinism has clearly hindered advances in molecular biology, and could have even prevented mapping of the full human genome had not wiser heads prevailed.

(5) Darwin's idea of embryological development, later refined and polished and coined into a phrase by Ernst Haeckl as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (the "biogenetic law"), has been shown to be (generously) misleading. British embryologist Gavin de Beer concluded that recapitulation is "a mental strait-jacket" that "has thwarted and delayed" embryological research. Find the above quote and read more about the continuing persistent promulgation of this downright wrong idea in high school and university textbooks even into the present (21st) century in:
Wells, Jonathan, Icons of Evolution, Regnery Publishing, Inc. 2000. p. 89 (citing De Beer, Gavin. Embryo and Ancestors, Third Edition [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958], pp. 10, 164, 172).

Conclusion: Haeckl's "recapitulation" theory, taken directly from Darwin's ideas on the subject, has thwarted and delayed embryological research.

(6) The neo-Darwinian notion of ascendancy of life forms via mutation and natural selection led to a lot of wasted lives and money in dead-end plant "breeding" experiments. As Dr. John Sanford, a Cornell University plant breeder, says:
"Because beneficial mutations are so central to the Primary Axiom (that mutation combined with selection have created all biological information), ... during the last century (20th), there was a great deal of effort invested in trying to use mutation to generate useful variation. This was especially true in my own area, plant breeding. When it was discovered that certain forms of radiation and certain chemicals were powerful mutagenic agents, millions and millions of plants were mutagenized and screened for possible improvements. Assuming the Primary Axiom, it would seem obvious that this would result in rapid "evolution" of our crops. For several decades this was the main thrust of crop improvement research. Vast numbers of mutants were produced and screened, collectively representing many billions of mutation events. A huge number of small, sterile, sick, deformed aberrant plants were produced. However, from all this effort, almost no meaningful crop improvement resulted. The effort was, for the most part, an enormous failure, and was almost entirely abandoned. Why did this huge mutation-selection experiment fail, even with a host of Ph.D. scientists trying to help it along? It was because, even with all those billions of mutations, there were no significant new beneficial mutations arising." (Sanford, John. Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, FMS Publications, Waterloo, New York, 2008. pp. 25-26.).

Conclusion: Decades of researcher lives were wasted, money lost, and who knows how many people did not have enough to eat because of the wrong-headed neo-Darwinian prediction of improvement by mutations.

Wow. For a truncated list, that is pretty healthy. And if you want scientific progress to be healthy, it surely looks like Darwin-think needs to be quarantined indefinitely to prevent the infection of our future generations.

Does all that make you a bit angry? It does me.

Respectfully, but with my back up a bit,

D.U.

Nitrogen Fixation: little dots in the dirt instruct PhDs in sustainable technology

2008-04-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

Greetings all.

Here is a great question for you and your futurist friends:

How do we feed the world's future population,

considering how tough it is today to feed a

mere 6 billion?

Much of the answer may lie in the process of nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen fixation is that process in living things in which abundant but not chemically available atmospheric nitrogen is changed into ammonia, a chemically accessible form of plant nutrition. The April 8, 2008, Science News has a very nice article on process and progress of nitrogen fixation:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/9571/title/Out_of_Thin_Air

In my view, this is a VERY IMPORTANT KEY in the entire issue of sustainability technology. But the reason I blog it today is just to pass on a picture and few nodules of of wisdom from the SN article. First, the picture of nitrogen fixing nodules on plant roots. SN says: ROOTS OF POWER. Plants by themselves can't use the form of nitrogen blowing around in the air, but they can recruit bacteria to set up nitrogen-processing hubs in nodules on roots.W. Eberhart, Getty Images

BEGINNING WITH THE OBSERVATIONS ...

From the wealth of good info in the article, I just want to pass along four gems followed by related creation-evolution questions, and then leave the rest of the reading to you.

First, how do plants get the nitrogen fixing job done?

By employing favorable BACTERIA to do the the job. SN says:

"Here's where humanity and their kin are routinely humbled by green slime. A roster of "simple" life forms, such as cyanobacteria floating in water or the rhizobia group of bacteria lurking in soil, breaks that bond. This feat, called nitrogen fixation, turns N2 into user-friendly ammonia.
Since 1920, the Haber-Bosch industrial process has let people sunder nitrogen's triple bond as long as there's energy available to raise temperatures to 400° to 500° Celsius and pressures to 200 atmospheres. Your basic pond scum fixes nitrogen at room temperature and everyday atmospheric pressure."

Second, there is an exploratory 'dance' between plant and microbe before the N-fixing partnership is established.

Not every relationship betwen plant and microbe is beneficial. There is an cautious and intimate 'conversation' between plant and microbe before the partnership is established:

"'We have a really eloquent conversation that we can't quite translate,' says Bruce Hungate of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
Ann M. Hirsch of the University of California, Los Angeles says, 'I think of it as a dance, but maybe that's because I studied ballet for so long.' She and colleague Angie Lee, now at the University of California, San Diego, described nodulation in terms of ballet in a 2006 paper in Plant Signaling & Behavior. The process begins, they say, with a pas de deux between the legume root hairs, which release flavonoid compounds into the soil, and hang-about bacteria that, in turn, secrete molecules called Nod factors. Even faint traces of these substances prompt dramatic calcium movements within the root hairs."

Third, the dots in the dirt are teaching the doctors of academe:

"Explorations of both plants and their microbes have found new, unsuspected diversity in nitrogen fixing and given scientists more partnerships to study for clues on how to engineer the process. Researchers are also refining their knowledge of how legumes use a chemical 'Craigslist' to find and negotiate with potential microbe workers. Science is apprenticing itself to the masters, crowding in to watch each nuance of the process. Even if the masters are just dots in the dirt." (italics D.U.)

Fourth, it is not just by one simple means that nitrogen fixing is accomplished:

""We were used to boring gray colonies, milky white colonies, and up come these pink things," says Howieson. His collection of new nitrogen-fixing bacteria includes "strange, pink, fast-growing, slimy things" as well as an unpublished prize: "an orange, slimy, yet-to-be-named thing."
Another specialist in nitrogen-fixing nodules, Janet Sprent of the University of Dundee in Scotland, remembers simpler times for systematists. 'From the orderly situation of a century ago,' she says, 'we now have something approaching chaos.'
And, Sprent points out, scientists have barely even begun to survey the many species of tropical plants, especially trees in the legume family, that could easily harbor new species of nitrogen-fixing bacteria."

ENDING WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR ORIGIN OF LIFE:

Actually, origin of life is not the only big question. The sustaining of life, which nitrogen fixing is all about, is equally important to keep in mind while considering the following key points:

(1) SYMBIOSIS in all of its forms are evidence of CREATION, not of gradual evolution, since it requires the simultaneous appearance in time, space, and function of multiple interdependent organisms. For example, the phenomenon of sexual procreation is one oft enjoyed but less oft appreciated as a creation-affirming example of male-female symbiosis. From now on, when you hear "it takes two to tango," just think symbiosis => creation.. The pas de deux (ballet, "step of two") of microbe and plant communication is one more example of such symbiotic relationships.

Favor: CREATION.

(2) CONVERGENT EVOLUTION is a term used by evolutionary biologists when organisms not closely related may independently demonstrate (or in doctrinaire evolutionist terminology, "evolve") similar traits. To the unbiased and fair-minded, the multitude of independent yet similar traits in nature shout "common origin from concept", which means "intelligence in design", which means creation! Evolutionists merely created the term "convergent evolution" to bluff and sound scientific while, in reality, saying, "Yeah, they really do look the same or do similar things in very divergent manners or with divergent biochemistry, and it is really cool, wow, yeah, but we don't know how or why."

When Janet Sprent said (above) that we now have a something approaching chaos, she means that there are many many new plant-microbe partnerships being identified. Instead of nearing completion of the N-fixing catalogue, they in fact are seeing that for every volume they complete, another ten volumes are identified which need to be filled. To borrow a doctrinaire evolutionist term, that would be "Convergent Evolution" with a capital "C" and "E."

Favor: CREATION

(3) WHO IS THE TEACHER, WHO IS THE LEARNER?

You must have heard of the "Intelligent Design" controversy by now. If you have not, maybe you are a student in a public school somwhere using textbooks designed to brainwash you and to shield your poor little brain from dangerous (i.e., important) ideas. NASA spends billions of dollars to perhaps maybe somewhere sometime infer intelligent origin from some minimal signals from space. Meanwhile, the reigning tyrannical establishment of "science" denies (and decries discussion of) the notion that a few billion bytes of intricately formed and multiply compacted information in the human genome could come from any form of intelligence. Well, if you are in that crowd, I really can't help you because I only deal with stuff at a rational level. I simply can not take on the role of rescue ranger for the resolutely irrational.

So let the following quote from above speak for itself:

"Science is apprenticing itself to the masters, crowding in to watch each nuance of the process. Even if the masters are just dots in the dirt."

Favor: CREATION.

AND WHAT GOD SAYS...

The Holy Bible, Revelation 14:6-7 (NASB), says :

"And I saw another angel flying in midheaven, having an eternal gospel to preach to those who live on the earth, and to every nation and tribe and tongue and people; and he said with a loud voice, 'Fear God, and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgment has come; and worship Him who made the heaven and the earth and sea and springs of waters.'" (bold D.U.)

Amen.

Respectfully submitted, with shock and awe,

D.U.

The Devil is in the Details. Revisiting "The Mormon Dilemma: Roots Come Back to Haunt in Texas."

2008-04-26T11:48:00.001-07:00

Just got two responding comments from folks who took exception to the prior post. I have published one of the comments and the other I declined to publish since it contained a link to a website I simply could never in conscience permit to be seen on my blog.

The posted anonymous responder said:

"Your post is VERY ignorant. Sorry you have gotten your facts wrong. From people who are bitter at the LDS church for things THEY have done. You sound very educated, but please don't comment on this religion until you have all the facts."

I'm sorry, anonymous, but my stating facts that you do not like simply does not equate to my being "VERY ignorant." In fact, quite the opposite. Over more than four decades I have had numerous conversations with Mormons and have read a number of very thoroughly documented books on the Mormon church in history and today. As I mentioned in the post, the references section of the book My Kingdom Come could constitute a book in itself. Same with One Nation Under Gods. Same with No Man knows My History. etc., etc., etc.

So, how about a bit of a quiz for Anonymous and friends?

?? True or false: Chapter 132 of the Mormon "scripture" Doctrines and Covenants, written by "prophet" Joseph Smith, contains detailed teaching about the law of polygamy. Verse 132:4 states "For behold, I reveal unto you a new and an everlasting covenant; and if ye abide not in that covenant, then ye are damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory...."

?? True or false: The polygamy aspect of Smith's "everlasting covenant" was modified by the "1890 Manifesto" by the Mormon Church in 1890 as a matter of political expediency.

?? True of false: Brigham Young, second "prophet" of the Mormon Church following Joseph Smith, stated in Journal of Discourses, Vol. 11, p. 269, "the only men who become gods, even sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy."

?? True or false: There is a university today in Utah bearing the name of the second "prophet."

?? Was Fawn Brodie (at the time of writing still a Mormon) correct or incorrect in her 1945 book No Man Knows My History that Joseph Smith had 49 women (or was it 50 counting first wife Emma)? Was Fawn Brodie correct in stating that at least twelve of those 49 were married women with living husbands? [Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 1945, pp. 335-336]

?? Does the Mormon Church teach that Jesus is a spirit-brother of Lucifer, the "Angel of Light"? (By the way, the answer is yes. By the way also, that is precisely contrary to the Holy Bible).

?? Does the Mormon Church teach the "Law of Eternal Progression" that their "God" is evolving into something greater and that we (Mormons only of course) are evolving into something like God is now? That is the reason Mormonism is not and can never be Christian. See my reference to Isaiah 14:12-15 in http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/12/satan-lucifer-spirit-brother-of-jesus.html

BTW, just to make sure all understand, this is not a blog AGAINST Mormonism. This is a blog FOR truth and facts. Chips fall where they may.

?? Do you wish people around the world to know about the September, 1857, Mountain Meadow Massacre and the role of the Mormon "blood atonement" law in relation to that? Note to the world reading this, just Google "Utah Mountain Meadow Massacre." If you want to really understand it, read One Nation Under Gods, pp. 243-254.

Speaking of "blood atonement", I recall that as the reason the murderer Gary Gilmore, a Mormon, chose his 1977 execution by firing squad instead of by hanging. The Mormon teaching of "blood atonement" (of blood other than that of Jesus) for some sins is absolutely contrary to the Holy Bible. The Bible, speaking of Jesus teaches:
"For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens; who does not need daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of the people, because this He did once for all when He offered up himself. For the Law appoints men as high priests who are weak, but the word of the oath, whch came after the Law, appoints a Son made perfect forever." [The Holy Bible, Hebrews 7:26-28, NASB]. Note that his death was once for all, not once for some.

Speaking of prophets, Jospeph Smith joins a long list of prophets (including Muhammed) who would seek to displace or replace Jesus the only begotten Son of God. In 1844 Joseph Smith proclaimed,
"I have more to boast of than any man ever had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a church together since the days of Adam. ... Neither Paul, John, Peter, or even Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away from him, but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet." [Reference: Documentary History of the [Mormon] Church, Vol. 6, pp. 408-409]. But in fact today Jesus is head of a church that numbers over one billion.
Also, according to the Holy Bible, Jesus displaced the prophets. The Bible says:
"God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high." [The Holy Bible, Hebrews 1:1-3, NASB].

..... Sigh. So much. Just go read it.

Respectfully yet sadly submitted,

D.U.

The Mormon Dilemma: The roots come back to haunt in Texas

2008-04-24T12:24:00.000-07:00

Greetings all.

This one I hope to be very brief. Just want to clear up a misinformation spinlet that has wormed its way into virtually every news article about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints following the recent detention of a few hundred members of one sub-branch near San Angelo, Texas.

But first, just to clarify, the name "Jesus Christ" in their name DOES NOT mean this is a Christian organization, just as the SLC Utah organization is NOT Christian. To Mormons, both LDS and FLDS, the "Jesus Christ" they refer to (a created being and brother of Lucifer, the Devil, or Satan) is far different from the Jesus Christ (Creator) of the Bible. And the God of both LDS and FLDS is NOT the God of the Bible.

And there is more, much much more, but not for here and not for today.

Crazy or wacko am I? Just look at the piles of documentation by folks who have escaped the Mormon church. See for example: http://www.saintsalive.com/

But that is not quite the topic today.

What is the question? Who "broke" from whom?

The San Angleo Standard-Times, in one early article on the detentions, said:
"The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a Mormon-based sect that broke away from the mainstream LDS more than 100 years ago and is not affiliated with the Mormon Church."

But the truth is that the modern LDS in fact broke from the original teachings of the first two leaders of Mormons, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

A good read is My Kingdom Come (published in 2007, a year before the San Angelo, TX, mess) by Ed Decker, a former temple Mormon. Chapter 10 of this book is revealing (see p. 227):
"Joseph Smith, the self-proclaimed prophet of God and founder of the Mormon Church, used the doctine of divine revelation to legitimize his polygamous marriages to many wives at the same time. He spiritualized the immorality of his plural marriages, and declared it to be 'a New and everlasting Covenant; and if ye abide not that covenant then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.' " [Doctrines and Covenants, Chapter 135:1-4]

Decker's book also reveals (Chapter 10, p. 228):
"Brigham Young, successor to Joseph Smith, and second prohet of the Mormon Church, vigorously proclaimed that 'the only men who become gods, even the sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.' [Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, Vol. 11, p. 269].

There you have it. The FLDS is in fact following the clear teachings and examples of the first two still-revered leaders of the Mormon Church.

They are in fact following what Joseph Smith called "a new and everlasting covenant."

And if you now scratch your head a bit, you will ask yourself how the "modern" Mormon Church could depart from a "new and everlasting covenant" and still revere Joseph as number one and carry their flagship university named after number two.

That, my friends, is just the teensy tip of the iceberg. In the meantime, be sure to question the potential conflict of allegiance should Mitt Romney ever ascend to national office in the United States. I won't try to give you all the dope here, becasue that work has already been done by numerous authors. You can just do the homework.

See: http://www.saintsalive.com/

Also, another recent and thorough books is:
Abanes, Richard. One Nation Under Gods, Published by FOUR WALLS EIGHT WINDOWS, New York/London, 2002. 651 pp.
Pages 475-651 of this book contains a wealth of notes and references, almost a book unto itself.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

P.S. You may wonder why an evolution despiser like me might take time for a note like this. I write because the Mormon Church (LDS and FLDS) teaches a radical form of evolution, in fact teaching that the one they call God has evolved, and that our own evolution is only a bit behind and following the same course. This is identical to the ultimate sin of Satan, who "desired to be like the Most High." See info on Mormonism's Law of Eternal Progression: http://www.angelfire.com/ms/seanie/mormon/adam_god.html

P.P.S. Read "Lillian's Story" in Decker, My Kingdom Come, pp. 234-249. Lillian grew up in a "fundamentalist" colony in northern Mexico, born in 1n 1955 as the fourth daughter of a polygamist named Ervil M. LeBaron. She approached Jeremiah Films in 1988 after her father had (successfully) ordered her husband killed. As Decker relates (p. 236), "She was his (her father's) secretary for ten years and worked closely with him until she realized that, in her own words, he was not only a 'pervert' but also 'demon possessed.' She recollected her earliest chldhood memories 'of secret meetings' and 'a lot of things going on behind closed doors, including wife swapping.' " On January 28, 1989, Lillian was found dead with a gun at her side. The official police report said that it was suicide. Read the book to see what Lillian said people should conclude if anything ever happened to her or to her children. Then think. Then inform.

Ben Stein movie "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed": Is it RADICAL to claim causation between Darwinism and Hitler? How about Dawkins the deluder?

2008-04-20T22:29:00.000-07:00

Greetings all.

Yesterday I watched Ben Stein's movie EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. I was overall very pleased. Stein does a good job to expose the nauseating hypocrisy of evolution's high priests and lackey practitioners as they mouth "academic freedom" while frantically strangling opposing free speech with a desperate crazed white-knuckled on-the-throat grip.

I encourage you to watch the movie. It the meantime, I offer comment on only two aspects of the movie.

(A) Richard Dawkins is still a stinker.

Dr. Richard Dawkins, who got a lot of time in the movie, continues as a pompous pontificating venom-spewing hypocritical illogical crooked-thinking religious zealot in his campaign against God. (Did I leave anything out?) I fear for his eternal soul. And yet more I marvel at the array of shining light minds who line up to kiss his big toe and give him homage, all the while knowing in their carpetbagging fellow-traveler hearts that he uses clearly flawed arguments in his rants against God.

In particular:

(1) Ben Stein brings delight to the discerning persons among the EXPELLED audiences as he coaxes out of Dawkins that Dawkins, the world-famous anti-creationist, finally has to resort to life being created and transported to earth from who-knows-where by who-knows-what (except surely not God with a capital G). "Science" indeed! How that warmed my heart to see the the reigning high priest of CHANCE with egg on his face in front of millions of moviegoers. Slither away into your slimy pit, Richard. Congratulations, Ben Stein!
BTW, have you heard that Dawkins is now livid and threatening a lawsuit because he claims Ben Stein did not fully reveal to him the nature of the movie before the interview(s)? Boooo, hoooo. Hooo, hawww.

(2) If you have not heard it before, Dawkins, in his uncritically acclaimed book The Blind Watchmaker, proposes to show how mutations plus natural selection really could produce some shred of living material in less than the bazillions of gadzillions of milenia which fundamental principles of probability clearly demand. How does he pull off this sleight-of-hand trick? He produces a computer algorithm which simulates mutations in a string of characters attempting to recreate Shakespeare's phrase, "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL." But the critical point is that Dawkins, in his shameless sham, uses the phrase as a TARGET which his cute little algorithm will finally arrive at in some reasonable number of mutations, hence implying some reasonable period of time instead of bazillions of gadzillions of years. Well, duhhhh, if you press him or any other ardent evolutionist, they will have to admit (or, perish the thought, defend) that the chance evolution process they worship as their "creator" can not have any foreknowledge. Their mindless god of chance cannot have a target, much less choose toward a target ! ! !

So, you think I am wacky on this? Thanks to Wikipedia we can find Dawkins' own damning words with ease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program
Here they are:

"We again use our computer monkey, but with a crucial difference in its program. It again begins by choosing a random sequence of 28 letters, just as before ... it duplicates it repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error – 'mutation' – in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the 'progeny' of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL."

So, dear Darwin-is-Dead reader, do you see how this duplicitous deceiver Dawkins desperately deigns to make dupes of the non-discerning? I hope you picked up on it. If you did not find the intelligence-demanding words "chooses" and "target" (which I have conveniently displayed in bold for you) in his explanation, there is no hope for you and you may as well stop reading here.

(B) Is it "radical" to relate Hitler and Darwinism?

One person who attended with us commented that it seemed "radical" to claim a causal relationship between Darwinism and the dreadful carnage wrought by Hitler and Nazi Germany. Let me recommend to you (and to her) a little book called "The Case for Creationism: Fallacies of Evolution", written by Dr. Arlie J. Hoover (Baker Book House, 1977, 85pp). It was my privilege to study world history under Dr. Hoover a few decades ago. The first time I read this book three decades ago, I laughed and cried all the way through, reading cover to cover like a child that won't let go of a cookie. Hoover, a scholar of philosophy and European history, engaged in the origins debate when he found numerous of the "arguments" put forth in support of evolution were egregious violations of simple sophomore-level logic. A "fallacy" is a violation of formal logic, hence the title of the book.
In a chapter entitled "SOCIAL DARWINISM and the GENETIC FALLACY", Hoover describes "THE ANATOMY OF SOCIAL DARWINISM":
"Social Darwinism comes into play when thinkers uncritically apply the principle of natural selection to the problems of human society. Darwinism in sociology leads to a vulgar justification of ruthless competition, struggle, brutality, and violence among men. Let's look at some historical incarnations of Darwinism.
(1) Lassez-faire capitalists used Darwinism to defend their system of unrestrained competition in the business world of the late nineteenth century. In England, disciples of Adam Smith such as Herbert Spencer argued against poor relief and all forms of social welfare by appeal to the doctrine of survival. ... George Nasmyth spoke accurately when he charged that, 'The new Social Darwinism was seized upon with enthusiasm by all men of violence because it permitted them to raise the basest instincts of greed and vandalism to the height of a universal law of nature.' [ Reference: George Nasmyth, Social Progress and the Darwinism Theory: A Study of Force as a Factor in Human Relations (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1916), Chapter 2]."
(2) Imperialists used Darwinism to justify the conquest and exploitation of non-western peoples in the last century. They exhorted their compatriots to 'take up the white man's burden' and carry the blessings of western civilization to the 'inferior' dark-skinned peoples of the globe. Many ruling classess of the western countries denied rights to their less-educated subjects simply on the grounds that they weren't sufficiently evolved. ... All of this imperialism, justified by Darwinian evolution, was a potent factor in bringing on the Great War of 1914. [Reference: cited in B. Farrington, What Darwin Really Said (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), p. 104].
(3) Exponents of war used Darwinism to justify military struggle among nations. Only the stern test of combat, militarists insisted, could reveal which nation was stronger than another. Nature shows us, they said, that war is the great winnowing process, the terrible final examination between nations. ...
(4) Champions of eugenics used Darwinism to push for eugenics legislation. ... Eugenics champions tended to be very critical of all forms of altruistic morality, toleration, humanitarianism, liberalism, democracy, or internationalism, because these sentiments, with their concerns for the unfit, were 'counterselective.' Nature wipes out the weak specimen; shouldn't sound legislation do the same? [ Reference: for a look at this strain in Hitler's background, see Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 54.]
(5) Racists found Darwinism especially useful in preaching their gospel of ethnic superiority. Racism asserts that the human family is hopelessly fractionalized and that the 'fractions' - the distinct races - have varying values. Racism asserts that struggle, not cooperation, is the normal, yea even the desirable, state of race relations and the competition proves some races superior to others in intelligence, creativity, and cultural capacity. ...

The ideology of Nazi Germany combined many of these Social Darwinian features just discussed- notably racism, imperialism, militarism, and eugenics. As Hitler's biographer, Alan Bullock, said, the core of Nazi ideology was 'a crude Social Darwinism.' Hitler stated,
'Man has become great through struggle.... Whatever goal man has reached is due to his originality plus his brutality... All life is bound up in these three theses: Struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive.'
Hitler took his cue from Nietzsche, who had insisted that since God is dead altruism is also dead, because altruism is based on theism. Hitler agreed that altruism or love is 'counterselective.' 'The whole work of nature,' he insisted, 'is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness - and eternal victory of the strong over the weak.' Any person or state that offends this elementary law will fail. 'Only force rules. Force is the first law.' But what about morality? 'History proves,' concluded Hitler, 'he who has not the strength - him the right in itself profits not a whit.' [Reference: Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), pp. 345-46.]
When the Nazis finally got down to putting this racism into actual legislation, they spelled out what they considered the logical implications of evolution. In the infamous Nuremburg Laws (1935), directed principally against the Jews, they asserted that 'there is a greater difference between the lowest forms still called human and our superior races (Aryan) than between the lowest man and monkeys of the highest order.' In other words, the Jews and Slavs, because they were vastly inferior to Aryans, were closer to apes than to their fellow humans!"

I hope this will help you understand better the clear causation link between Darwinism and some of the greatest social evils that have arisen (or have been encouraged) since his writing, and in particular those fomented by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party.

Is this a "radical" idea? Perhaps radical, but undoubtedly factual and historical.

Enough for now. Go see the movie.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

“Being an atheist is really scary. ... It was hard to sleep at night." Remembering Dr. Richard Lumsden

2008-04-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

“Being an atheist is really scary”

I mentioned in a recent post a comment from Dr. Richard Lumsden that there were no truly "vestigial" organs. It reminded me to share with you more about Dr. Lumsden.

I read in 1997 of the death of Dr. Richard Lumsden, a man I barely knew. In July, 1994, I attended the Third International Conference on Creationism in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At that time Dr. Lumsden was Chairman of the Biology Department at the Institute for Creation Research, where he served from 1991 to 1996. I had heard Dr. Lumsden give a paper on the "paradox" of the cell surface membrane, in which he concluded that "the integrated structural and functional complexity of extant plasma membranes provides yet further evidence of purposeful design."

Dr. Lumsden obtained his post-secondary and graduate education at Tulane, Harvard, and Rice Universities, where he received his doctorate in cell biology with postdoctoral training in medical pathology at the Tulane Medical School. He served more than twenty years on the faculty of Tulane University as a professor and research scientist. He had authored over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, a number of reviews, texts, and technical monographs. He had served on the editorial boards of several international journals and had received numerous professional awards, scholarships, fellowships, and research grants. His appointments had included those of panelist and/or reviewer of research grants and programs to the National Institutes of Health and other agencies.

After I attended Dr. Lumsden's paper presentation, I was hoping for a chance to meet and talk with him. A couple of days later, on July 21, 1994, I found Dr. Lumsden and myself in the conference cafeteria eating at the same table. I was curious about his life and how he wound up at ICR, so I started asking him questions. As he responded, I scribbled notes on napkins (three brown ones and one white one) pulled from the dispenser on the cafeteria table. It got more interesting as we went along.

DU: Dr. Lumsden, have you been a creationist very long?

RL: Oh, no. I was an atheist and evolutionist most of my life. I didn't view creationists very well, and gradualists were anathema to me. I was a professor at Tulane University. But I didn't treat creationists too rudely because, after all, I was raised a southern gentleman and southern gentlemen just don't do that.

DU: So, how did you become a Christian?

RL: One day around 1986 I gave a vainglorious lecture on the origin of life, all about evolution. It was kind of a thing of the times. It was during the Louisiana law business, so it was a topic of interest. I quoted Oparin and Huxley -- you know. The students ate it up. Students like blasphemy. After class, a girl came up to me and said she had some questions. She said she didn't want to argue with me. She just wanted to "get her science straight." After about three hours I had talked myself out of evolution - so I just put it out of my mind. But, you know, the more you try to put something out of your mind, the harder it is. It just keeps coming back - like a bad penny. In one year I found myself on my knees before a saving altar (accepting the Lord Jesus).

DU: What about the student who had spoken to you a year earlier?

RL: I knew she had taken a class in Evolutionary Biology, so I asked the professor in that class about her. He told me she had gotten an "A" in the class, but she had just driven him nuts. She graduated and then went on to complete medical school. I met her again one time. She had heard by the grapevine that I had become a Christian and, after our hugs and hallelujahs, she said, "You know, Dr. Lumsden, I prayed for all my professors, but you got extra time." Last I heard, she was a medical missionary in a jungle somewhere.

DU: What do you see as the key scientific evidence in support of creation?

RL: I think the key point is complexity of design. You know, Darwinism is not intuitively obvious. You have to be taught it. You have to be educated into believing stuff that only a PhD would believe.

DU: Since that time, how has your life changed?

RL: For the better.

DU: How has your science changed?

RL: It makes more sense now. Those (cell wall) membranes make more sense now, I'll tell you that.

DU: And your personal life?

RL: When you know where you are from, you know who you are, you know where you are going, and you know with Whom you are going, it changes life a lot. Being an atheist is really scary. There was a lot of tension that wouldn't go away. It was hard to sleep at night.

Submitted with great respect in memory of Dr. Richard Lumsden, scientist, Christian, and southern gentleman.

D.U.

I'm a Lenin believer - so keep DEMANDING the evidence !

2008-04-03T10:07:00.000-07:00

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

Greetings Truthseekers Out There:

I suppose you have heard of Lenin. No, not the Beatle. I mean Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Russian Communist politician and revolutionary, Father and first premier of the Soviet Union 1917-1924, head of Soviet Communist Party 1923-1924. See:

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Lenin/

For my usual daily delight (following the sports page), I read the comics in our local newspaper. I hope you, too, are culturally enlightened in this way.

Here is Mother Goose and Grimm today.

Now doesn't that precisely explain why a fact-defying religion like Darwin's evolution could ever be propagated to the point that it holds sway over the minds and destinies of millions (maybe Billions)?

The lie of evolution - that blind dumb purposeless CHANCE is the author of seeing reasoning purposeful life from fish to philosophers - is a fairy-tale for grownups.

Note: As accused by Dr. Louis Bounoure, Director of the Zoological Museum and Director of Research at the National Center of Scientific Research in France, who said, "Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grown-ups."

This fairy tale was spun by Darwin and is continually reinvented, repackaged, and respun by depraved deceivers. Sadly, to the earthly and eternal detriment of deluded dupes. And, sadly, they are legion.

How can this be? According to Lenin, all it takes is persistence and willingness to repeat the lie often enough (perhaps sprinked with necessary and ancillary fibs along the way). And a few hearts willing to raise a fist against the Almighty God of Heaven and Earth catalyze and stir the poisonous brew. Their fate is fearful.

And so it has been. And so what to do?

Just keep asking - no, DEMANDING - evidence for "the fact of evolution." You will be stonewalled by people who oppose the introduction of facts and logic which discomfit the flim-flammy DarwinDogma endemic in our public school texts. See my prior post:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2008/03/glimmer-of-light-in-florida-academic.html

and follow the link to find comments posted about the Tampa news article. You will see how deep the deception is.

Hey folks - just keep on asking. Just keep on DEMANDING. Just keep on keepin' on. No head hanging and no mumbled murmured apologetic apologetics.

Darwin is DEAD. Let's keep on tilting the old boy until he topples.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

A glimmer of light in Florida: "Academic Freedom" act would allow public school teachers to present science-based alternatives to Darwin

2008-03-31T12:47:00.000-07:00

Greetings all.

I just got a piece of good news here in the Pacific Northwest from an Idaho friend Doctor B telling of a spark of hope for truth and light. Where? Florida.

Doctor B says:
"Academic freedom is on the march in Florida, where an education committee approved a bill which would allow public school teachers to present science-based alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution. The bill would not prevent the teaching of evolution in Florida's classrooms. Characteristically, the only individuals who brought up religion in testimony were opponents of the bill. Supporters were content to talk about science and the glaring scientific weaknesses of Darwinian theory. The bill now goes to the Senate judiciary committee."

You can read it on Tampa Bay Online:

http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/mar/27/me-evolution-bill-moves-forward/

Tampa Tribune writer NICOLA M. WHITE writes:

"It's not about letting religion creep into science classrooms, Sen. Ronda Storms insisted.
It's about protecting the rights of students and teachers who don't agree with the science behind Darwinian evolution, the Republican from Valrico argued before the Senate's pre-k through 12 education committee voted 4-1 Wednesday to approve the bill.
Despite her argument, religion kept coming up anyway, as Storms pressed for her "academic freedom" act. Her bill would allow public school teachers to present science-based alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution, a theory written into Florida's curriculum standards and one that is held as a fundamental concept of biology by most members of the science community."

Congratulations to Senator Storms. It seems that there remains some intelligence on this third rock from the sun after all.

Submitted with great regard for the esteemed Senator,

D.U.

Life as a CREATIONIST just gets better every day. Mantis shrimp can see circularly polarized light (CPL)

2008-03-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

GO AHEAD. MAKE MY DAY!

Actually, my day is already made.

Glancing through my most recent copy of Science News (March 22, 2008, Vol. 173) did it for me. Maybe you can make your day the same way. Find it at:

http://www.sciencenewsmagazine.org/articles/20080322/fob2.asp

This one (pp. 179-180) is about the discovery that the mantis shrimp Odontodactylus cultrifer is able to detect circularly polarized light - the first creature known to do so.

As the SN article puts it:

"For love, some would twist the laws of physics. Short of doing that, mantis shrimp communicate with the other sex by spinning light waves, biologists find. The feat seems to be unique to this animal. "

Researcher Roy Caldwell of UC Berkeley says the skill, unknown in other animals, most likely helps the shrimp find mates. "It's the most private communication system imaginable," he says. "No other animal can see it."

Wanna see this cute little guy that is wired to find love? Here is SN's pic:

How does it do it? SN explains:
"The researchers found that some of the eyes' light-sensing cells doubled up as filters, explains Tom Cronin of UMBC. The cells have microscopic structures, like bristles of a toothbrush, that slightly slow light with electric fields parallel to the bristles, but not light with fields that are perpendicular. As a result, the twist of a circularly polarized wave will be flattened into a steady, linearly polarized wiggle, which another layer of sensory cells can then detect. Depending on their arrangement, bristled cells will select right- or left-handed polarization. This parsing enables mantis shrimp to distinguish the two types of light."

I mean, is that cool or what? For those who delight in the works of God, it just gets better and better.

But mantis shrimp detecting CPL is only one of many unique visual detection and communication systems in living things. If you only consider eye designs you may wish to peek at

http://www.eyedesignbook.com/

Eye Design Book author Curt Deckert, PhD, says:
"The frequency of similar but diverse eye designs of different sizes, shapes, and materials establishes persuasive evidence for a single designer, as compared to random events (designs) generating similar creatures. Random designs are more likely to be found in the form of non-living rock formations of Natural Parks, such as the Carlsbad Caverns, Zion, or Grand Canyon, rather than in discrete, functional, living, reproducible vision systems."

As mankind continues to uncover more and more of the mind-boggling features of nature, both living and non, the joy of creationists just continues to swell.

And the folks who insist that intricate complex systems exhibited in living things just somehow fall together by chance - again - and again - and again - just continue the weary broken-record mantra that:

"given enough time ... enough time ... enough time ... ,

all this stuff becomes

a sure thing ... a sure thing ... a sure thing ... a sure thing."

It simply rings more and more hollow. Anyone else out there weary of it?

Enough of the charade. Why don't the God-haters merely declare openly their scorn and hate of the almighty Creator God and be done with it? 'Cause it's not science, it's religion. Bad religion. For sure.

Submitted with great AWE and RESPECTFUL FEAR,

D.U.

The tuatara (Sphendon punctatus), Allan WIlson, and the age of stuff uncoupled.

2008-03-26T13:24:00.000-07:00

Greetings today to all.

Executive summary:
Evolutionists try to undermine the creation-proving power of "living fossils" and "living dinosaurs" by saying the animal you see is "decoupled" from underlying genetics. The genes just keep a-changin' while the critters just stay the same. Understand that the fatal weakness of the argument continues to be in the ill-founded assumption of millions and millions of years for fossil ages.

So here we go today:

Dynamic genotype, stasis in phenotype ????

I first met Professor Dr. Allan Wilson when I attended a lecture he gave at Oregon State University around maybe 1990 when he lectured on mitochondrial DNA and the "discovery of Eve", mother of all living. He explained that, as mtDNA comes pretty much all through the mother, it is clear that all humans living today come from the same mother. He explained away the creation implication merely by waving his hands and saying that we have all come from the "lucky mother." All the other evolving mothers were genetically "unlucky" since their mtDNA suffered extinction in the natural course of things, just as folks could suffer family name extinction in a place like Pitcairn Island, of "Mutiny on the Bounty" fame.

Well, I know a bit about statistics and random processes. I was (and I am) absolutely sure Dr. Wilson was bluffing and blowing smoke since such extinction would surely not occur in a population model with an expanding and spreading population in which subsequent generations are geographically and culturally and linguistically isolated from each other and from the remnants of the original population. But that was not my major, so I leave the grunt work to another to do the proof. But if you argue with this, I dare ya to crunch the numbers. And make sure your assumptions are reasonable or the Undertaker's gonna come getcha.

So again today I met Dr. Wilson, so to speak.

I just saw today that a New Zealand lizard-like creature, the tuatara (Sphendon punctatus if you are into Latin), is the fastest-known evolving animal - a "living dinosaur."

Well, if you know me, you know I had to stop and take a look.

First, because when I hear stuff like "living dinosaur" and "living fossils," it is usually in a creationist context. Why? As we continue to point out, stasis (NOT continual change) is a major characteristic of the fossil record and continues to reaffirm the creation view of origins. In particular, stasis supports the Biblical view in which the Creator God of the Universe created living things to reproduce after their own kinds, which is in fact a working definition of stasis in species. See:

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/11/todays-living-fossils-demonstrate.html

And of course I wondered how they came to this "fastest evolving" conclusion about the NZ critter. I especially was curious to see how they measured the rates of evolution, since DNA is not considered to survive in natural environments for more than 10,000 years absolutely positively tops.

I first saw about the tuatara on LiveScience on Yahoo! News:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080326/sc_livescience/fastestevolvingcreatureislivingdinosaur

Now LiveScience said,
"It is the only surviving member of a reptilian order Sphehodontia that lived alongside early dinosaurs and separated from other reptiles 200 million years ago in the Upper Triassic period. To make the estimate of evolutionary speed, researchers recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara. The team found that although tuatara have remained largely unchanged physically over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined."

The plot thickened. Saying "bones of ancient tuatara" did not tell me how old "ancient" really meant. And this paragraph seemed to imply that the evolutionary rate was actually measured over the 200 million years mentioned. That really had me curious since no one has come public (that I have seen) with DNA evaluation even for the 70-million year-old Montana T-Rex fossil with stretchy-squishy material announced a couple of years ago. Much less for 200 million-year-old DNA. I mean, who would even attempt such a measurement?

So I looked further and found:

http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/about-us/news/article.cfm?mnarticle=tuatara-evolving-faster-than-any-other-species-01-03-2008

Here the plot really thickened but then clarified. It seems that the research was done by Dr. David Lambert at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution in New Zealand, which appears associated with Massey University. The Massey U. article said:

"In a study of New Zealand’s “living dinosaur” the tuatara, evolutionary biologist Professor David Lambert and a team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution have recovered DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara up to 8000 years old. They found that although tuatara, have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving - at a DNA level - faster than any other animal yet examined. "

So they measured DNA changes over a period of as much as 8,000 years (if you wish to accept that number) up to the present time. But what about the 200 million years? Here is where it begins to clarify.

“Of course we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly – they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism – would have evolved slowly. In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution.” ... "Allan Wilson, who died of leukaemia in 1991, was a pioneer of molecular evolution. His ideas were controversial when introduced 40 years ago, but this new research supports them."

It is interesting that the results as published seem to support very keenly Allan Wilson's idea of uncoupled molecular evolution and morphological evolution. Why? Because if you EXTRAPOLATE the DNA rate of change measured over 8000 years out to the ASSUMED 200 million years, you would get lots and lots and lots of genetic change (genotype change). But the critter today still looks pretty much the same as fossils (morphological stasis). What does this "uncoupled" idea mean? It means the DNA (genotype) keeps changing and changing while the physical creature that you see with organs and limbs and whatnot all intact (phenotype) seems to change very little. You can see why such an idea would be controversial. On the face of it is illogical and would not be predicted.

But if you are an ardent Darwinian given enough time, the illogical magically becomes logical and the unthinkable becomes politically correct dogma. How is that? Because the 8,000 years (while maybe not precise from my view but OK for this discussion) has a measured rate. The 200 million years is grasped in a death grip of fanatical factophobic Darwinists who absolutely refuse to consider a much lower number for the age of the earth and the age of fossils seen.

And especially if you are working at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution , you are going to be happy to get a result that supports Dr. Wilson's decoupling theory. Even if you have to assume ages that fly in the face of logic and observation. So it goes in science sometimes, I guess.

If you go with the alternate (and reasonable) hypothesis that phenotype change should be closely coupled with genotypic change, the observed "living dinosaur" (stasis) provides strong evidence of relatively young fossils, not fossils 200 million years old.

It seems what we really have is a decoupling of researchers' minds from any possibility that the Bible record of a recent creation could be credible. But if this is new to any of you reading this, just go Google "Bible Apologetics" and you will find that the Bible record over and over again has been shown to be credible. I tried it and found:

http://www.provethebible.net/ plus another 578,000 links.

It is surely time to undo the decoupling of science from the Bible.

And it seems one more vote for a recent age of living things.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Exciting Biomimetics and Regretful Statements by a Physics Nobel Prize Winner

2008-03-18T13:24:00.000-07:00

Hi All :

I just popped the wrapping off my April, 2008, National Geographic (a continuing gift from my brother in Colorado who knows how to get something for the guy who has everything). You need to look at it too, and go for the article "BIOMIMETICS: design by nature" (p. 68).

In case you have not heard, biomimetics is the study of how things work in nature, with the potential goal of mimicking those features in new technology. Wow, look at all the great examples:
(1) boxfish contours inspire improved aerodynamics to boost auto gas mileage;
(2) the thorny desert lizard of Australia motivates a search for dry-region water-capture technology;
(3) the lowly cocklebur inspired velcro;
(4) the naturally self-cleaning and water-repellant lotus leaf inspired "Lotus effect" paints which "repel water and resist stains for decades";
(5) the humpback whale flipper's scallopped edge is inspiring tests of revised wind power turbine blades;
(6) sharkskin inspires synthetic fabrics and coatings which reduce drag, with applications from swimwear to Navy ship hulls;
(7) an insect (the fly) wing inspires new designs for wings;
(8) the gecko foot, with millions of "spatula-tipped hairs", inspires wall-crawling devices that would put Spiderman to shame;
(9) the nanoscale multifaceted eye of a moth is structured to reduce reflection, inspiring German engineers to develop a photosensitive lacquer to vastly reduce glare on a computer monitor.

And that is just the short list. An article in Science News some time ago ("Ocean Envy," Science News, September 4, 2004, Vol. 166, No. 10) took a look at a few "marvels of engineering" in describing locomotion of a variety of sea creatures. The SN article included the humpback whale mentioned in National Geographic, and discussed some biomimetic principles to develop improved watercraft:

"The tubercles significantly altered the flipper's performance in the fluid flow. Lift, comparable to the upward force on an airplane wing, was 8 percent greater on the scalloped flipper than on the smooth one. Drag, the counterbalancing force to lift, was as much as 32 percent less on the scalloped flipper than on the smooth one. The extra lift and reduced drag on the flipper turns a humpback's body more sharply than a smooth fin could.".

What to make of this? Golly, it sure looks like design! In fact, the cover page of the Science News, September 4, 2004, ran the byline "Marvels of Engineering."

Now the word "engineering" usually implies application of intelligence and design for a purpose. Pity the poor editors. When they know they are supposed to keep inferences of design out of their journals, it's just tough to keep out words like design and engineering when they seem so natural. It is just so natural to talk about the design or purpose of some structure in nature instead of merely referring to its function. Maybe discussion of teleonomy will come another day.

But the bottom line today is to contravene the regretful words of Eric Cornell, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Physics, adapted from a speech he gave at his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (see TIME, November 14, 2005, "What Was God Thinking? Science Can't Tell"). Dr. Cornell opines that,
"...as exciting as intelligent design is in theology, it is a boring idea in science. Science isn't about knowing the mind of God; it's about understanding nature and the reasons for things." Then he goes on to say, "My call to action for scientists is, Work to ensure that the intelligent design hypothesis is taught where it can contribute to the vitality of a field (as it could perhaps in theology class) and not taught in science class , where it would suck the excitement out of one of humankind's great ongoing adventures."

Well, belief in intelligent design was in fact THE MOTIVATION for the founders of many of the disciplines of modern science. Let's just take one example. A prayer of James Clerk Maxwell, who formulated the four laws of electomagnetic field theory, said this:
" 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."

James Clerk Maxwell does not sound "bored" and it does not sound like the excitement of his work had been sucked out. Actually he sounds highly motivated, as in "motivated by the Most High God (El Shaddai)".

And I would venture that James Clerk Maxwell will be remembered long after Eric Cornell is long forgotten.

Need more examples? Just go read some history of science. Maybe begin with The Soul of Science by Pearcey and Thaxton. Don't skip Chaper One.

And this biomimetics stuff - figuring out designs that are already there - is very exciting to some folks. The NG article quotes Andrew Parker, thorny devil lizard researcher:
"I could look through here and find 50 biomimetics projects in half an hour. I try not to walk in here in the evening, because I end up getting carried away and working until midnight."

Finally, beginning with the correct world view (that the world is designed by God, though since fallen to some degreee in the physical world) tends to guide research correctly. Read my recent post about "junk DNA" and "vestigial organs."

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2008/03/junk-dna-and-kindra-grinsell-poster.html

If you read it carefully, you will see that some folks would have had the Human Genome Project map only the protein-coding part of the genome and not "waste" time on all that non-coding "junk DNA". Maybe all that "micromanager RNA" was discovered only because the Director of the HGP was Francis Collins, who was and is a bold advocate for faith in God. He wrote the book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief." See:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html

Here is a guy who knows God does not make junk, and had good (theological) reason to look for "signal" in what another man considered "noise."

So... when Dr. Eric Cornell, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics , says "What Was God Thinking? Science Can't Tell," he is simply flat-out wrong. The hydraulics folks started to get clued in what God was thinking when they deduced that those cleverly crafted humpback whale fins increase force and reduce drag. The Human Genome Project folks figured out that God was thinking "micromanager RNAs" (and more) when he created the FULL genome. And there is surely much much more God was thinking in creation. For as much as we now know in modern science, we suspect there is much more that man is only now beginning to glimpse dimly.

And that is not exciting?

I feel sorry for Dr. Cornell that he can find only such earth-bound meaning in the research that he does. But I am much sadder that he deceives people. He deceives people by pompously proclaiming that his way is not only best, but the only way. His promising path for scientific inquiry is to first toss God off the boat and then vaingloriously man the helm to puff the pride of pretentious humanity.

That boat sounds a bit like Titanic to me.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

MORE ON THE T-REX "FRESH STRETCHY" FEMUR MATERIAL

2008-03-13T00:49:00.000-07:00

Hi there y'all. This one is about:

Inferring the obvious from the fact,
denying the inference from the obvious.

I posted about a year ago about the survival of protein in the "fresh stretchy" femur material of the Montana T-Rex.

http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/04/wow-i-guess-were-fonna-have-to-rethink.html

Well, "Tantalus Prime", who identifies him/her/it-self as a "misanthropic" something or another who also happens to study neuroscience, posted a link to my post on his blog berating my ignorance, apparently because my degreed training in physics, mathematics, and engineering lacks sufficient credentials in neurology.

It seems TP brags that he predicted some idiot creationist would jump on the intact protein as evidence of a younger age of T-Rex than 68 M years, and proudly pounds his(?) chest when I stumbled into his(?) prediction in a mere two days. See:

http://tantalusprime.blogspot.com/2007/04/i-have-to-admit-when-im-wrong.html

Let's figure this out.

TP immediately recognized that intact T-Rex protein could be taken as an evidence of a younger T-Rex. Congrats TP, you went properly from observation (fact) to inference.

Then TP says I, the Undertaker, am the simpleton in this game because I posted this inference.

Huh?

But it seems clear that mounting evidence such as the T-Rex femur material helps to establish the FACT of a younger T-Rex.

TP denies this conclusion. On what grounds? Maybe TP is a Gouldist - an ardent believer in the deity of Stephen J. Gould, who must have been speaking with infallibilty - ex-cathedra if you are Catholic - when he declared, "Evolution is a fact like apples falling out of trees."

I guess when you KNOW the fact of evolution, anything else is unthinkable.

I hope some of you who may read this will grasp the incongruity of TP's "logic". While true scientists would seek to come to understanding of facts from fair inferences, TP immediately grasps the inference (younger T-Rex) and runs off ranting against the fact inferred (younger T-Rex).

I fear for the future of neuroscience with such practitioners in the pipeline.

I may not be able to quote perfectly something I had tacked on my den wall a number of years ago, but here is a try at it:

"Nothing is more tragic and heart-rending than to see a beautiful theory assailed by a brutal gang of facts."

Keep those facts a-comin', folks.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

"Junk DNA", "vestigial" organs, and a poster child for California (mis)education

2008-03-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

Greetings to all you wanderers who land in the graveyard today. It is just good to know that not all who wander are lost.

You know, I have never met Kendra Grinsell. I don't know if she is smiley or frowny, don't know if she is a Miss or Mrs or Ms, don't know if Kendra has 2.5 children and a dog, or what. All I know is that I only today read a statement attributed to her by a 2004 article in the Sacramento Bee that qualifies her, in this blogster's humble view, to be the poster child of California (mis)education. And I don't always name names, but M. Grinsell, in a public position, put her name and words (and reputation) into the public square. So, here goes.

DUHH ...

It seems that in 2004, trustees of the Roseville (California) Joint Union High School District decided to keep anti-evolution ideas out of biology classes (see Sacramento Bee article:

http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/news/education/story/9195255p-10120592c.html ).

It is an interesting read, but most stunning to me was the last paragraph of the article:
"It's still an issue that they're saying we've got to teach strengths and weaknesses," said Kendra Grinsell, chairwoman of Woodcreek High School's science department. "It wouldn't be a theory if there were weaknesses."

I think it was Jesus who mentioned something about the blind leading the blind. If the Bee's quote and attribution are correct, here is a chairwoman of a high school science department who does not even understand that the scientific method begins with a hypothesis which is subsequently tested by observations which may then falsify or support the hypothesis. By a long long string of successes, a theory may be elevated to a "law" of science. If the Bee's attribution is correct, then serious miseducation in science in California is well into the second generation. If M. Grinsell is close to retirement, then California science miseducation is thoroughly embedded in the third generation and likely beyond.

So let's do just a little bit of the "testing" that M. Grinsell does not understand. We are not going everywhere with this. We are not going to run with the big dogs of genomic entropy or intelligent design or the fossil record. We are just going to peek at a teentsy slice. We will merely look at some implications of the growth of our knowledge of "junk" DNA and "vestigial" organs and see if Mr. Darwin's predictions will wash or wash out.

JUNK DNA:

My poking around today began as I read an article in Science News entitled "MICROMANAGERS: New Classes of RNAs emerge as key players in the brain." (Science News, March 1, 2008, vol 173, p. 136). This article was discussing the great importance of a certain class of "non-coding" DNA, i.e. segments of DNA which are not known to code for the synthesis of any known protein. I knew that 30 years ago most scientists considered that the great majority of DNA was "junk DNA', remnants of forms either attempted with failure or selected out by competition against subsequent new and improved forms. It was Professor Susumu Ohno who stated, “at least 90% of our genomic DNA is ‘junk’ or ‘garbage’ of various sorts” (Ohno, S. 1972. So much "junk" DNA in our genome. In Evolution of Genetic Systems (ed. H.H. Smith), pp. 366-370. Gordon and Breach, New York.). When I first heard that, I knew the good professor was way off base, because I know GOD DOES NOT MAKE JUNK. Now accumulations of mutations after the "fall of man" following a perfect creation may create a fair amount of excess baggage as time goes on. But 90%? Uh-uh! And I told that to many people doing research in our local medical university. The increased respect (even awe) now held by the formerly spurned and disdained "non-coding" 90% of DNA is a major story of modern science - and should be a major story of modern science education.

The Science News "MICROMANAGERS" article caught my eye as it said, "Some researchers estimate that as much as 98% of the human genome is copied into RNA ... That figure is vastly different from what was originally postulated." And it goes on to say, "Researchers now know that noncoding RNAs get involved in virtually everything that happens in or to a cell, St. Laurent says. The molecules are control freaks, touching every piece of cellular machinery. They monitor temperature, chemical conditions, electrical currents, and other signals from the environment and then tell the cell how to respond."

Recognition of the value of the entire genome has been building for a number of years, but especially since the completion of the Human Genome Project. See:
"Junk' throws up precious secret," BBC News Online , May 12, 2004.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3703935.stm

"Despite all the questions that this research has raised, one thing is clear: scientists need to review their ideas about junk DNA.
Professor Chris Ponting, from the UK Medical Research Council's Functional Genetics Unit, told BBC News Online: 'Amazingly, there were calls from some sections to only map the bits of genome that coded for protein - mapping the rest was thought to be a waste of time.
'It is very lucky that entire genomes were mapped, as this work is showing.' He added: 'I think other bits of 'junk' DNA will turn out not to be junk. I think this is the tip of the iceberg, and that there will be many more similar findings.'"

So why is there such an upward shift in respect for the "non-coding DNA"? Simply because the general acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary ideas earlier led to the PREDICTION (although rarely stated explicitly as such) that there must be and are useless remnants of DNA left over and left behind from mutations of the past, and that these "vestigial DNA" segments would have a substantial presence in the genome. And well, golly, 90% non-coding means 90% vestigial seemed to just feel kind of right if you were an ardent Darwinist.

The point here: Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory led scientists to believe that the 90% of DNA was useless. The Biblical Creation hypothesis suggested that likely a very large part of the DNA was still functioning as from the beginning, albeit with diminished utility because of natural decay processes active following the fall of man recorded in the Bible, Genesis Chapter 3. Which prediction verified? Without question, the Darwinian "prediction" failed miserably, and delayed the progress of science in the process. Without question, the Biblical Creation hypothesis verified. And the progress of science would have been accelerated had this hypothesis been functioning as the operative view.

Result? GOD, 1. darwin, 0.

VESTIGIAL ORGANS:

The same thing comes up with so-called "vestigial" organs - organs which are considered useless remnants of evolution - remnants of forms which failed or were selected out by subsequent competition. Same story as above. Only a bit more than 100 years ago, the number of organs considered "vestigial" exceeded 100. See:

http://www.creationinthecrossfire.com/Articles/VestigialOrgans.html

"While Robert Wiedersheim listed 180 alleged vestigial or rudimentary organs in 1895, today the list is down to a handful..l Vestigial organs were considered passé because of ignorance, but now we have discovered important biological functions and necessity for every one of them. At an ICR summer institute, Dr. Richard Lumsden stated emphatically that there are no vestigial organs. Creationists would do well to ask, "What was this made for?" when looking at a seemingly useless body part. Since God made the whole body, He had a reason for including every part."

I had the pleasure, by the way, to meet Dr. Richard Lumsden, sitting across from him in a cafeteria in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, about 10 years ago. It would take a lot of ink to print his resume, but what I remember most is that, in his later professional years, he came to consider creation - and then God - and then Jesus - as a result of challenges raised to him (after his class lecture on evolution) by a young pre-med student. She told him that she "just wanted to get her science straight." She later went to Africa to bring healing of both body and soul to that continent.

But why was there such a reigning presumption that so many organs (180 in 1895) were useless? Again, the presumption was made because the reigning Darwinian paradigm demanded that, as evolution marches onward, organs are left behind as well as species. Organs may be left behind with the remnant DNA continuing to express proteins that continue to make the useless organs generation after generation until some other mutation comes along to cease the waste.

But the creation hypothesis says that organs are made for a reason. Even if scientists, for a season, do not understand the function, we still presume the organ is useful until proven useless.

The summary here? Same as with "vestigial" DNA:

GOD, 1. darwin, 0.

THE FINAL TALLY: GOD, 2. darwin, 0.

So there is the result of our little tests of the hypothesis that M. Grinsell seemed to think needs no test. Her Darwinian hypthesis fell flat on its face by virtue of FAILED PREDICTIONS - in both cases.

The little picture shows how continued observation of both organ usefulness and DNA usefulness has led to clear agreement with the creation hypothesis: "In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth."

Respectully,

D.U.

SETI yada yada yada SETI

2008-03-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

Well, Seinfeld is gone. But will he ever be really gone? The wildly popular TV show added lots of stuff to Americana, so Seinfeld lives on vicariously. Have you heard - or used - the expression "yada yada yada" to imply talk-talk-talk without revealing any of the content of that talk? Thank you, Jerry.

WiIkipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yada_yada) informs that the April 24, 1997, Seinfeld episode had George's girlfriend relentlessly using the phrase "yada yada yada." Jerry says that at least she is succinct and that it is like "dating the USA Today."

So what is yada yada yada now? Yea, I guess I just have to admit it - I am irritated that the mindless Darwinian ideologues continue to mouth the mantra of evolution (by chance of course) to produce everything from aardvarks to zzebras, and we'uns tossed in there somewhere as well. And all that with pompous pontification, as if all you need to establish "TRUTH" is for one of THEM to simply speak the words. My now, aren't they quite the thing! I would be more impressed - and inclined to listen seriously - if one of these cerebrologues could merely speak a world into existence somewhere .... as in "And God said, 'Let there be light.' And there was light."

Hailing clear back to the Roseville (California) School Board hearings, reported in the Sacramento Bee, May 6, 2004, many objected to teaching the controversy of Darwinism, saying it should be opposed because detecting intelligent design in biology is "religion." I liked the Access Research Network description line (http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/newsarchives.htm), observing "SETI must then be 'religion' as well."

So ARN "gets it." I hope more people start to get this point about the inherent nature of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence). See your fearless blogster's punditification way back in November, 2007:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/11/nova-judgment-day-dover-pa-judge-would.html

Here is the repeat:
"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."

But as it stands now, from NASA to Roseville, a few bytes of ordered-appearing "information" might infer SETI? But billions of bytes of information in the nuclear DNA of one cell fail to infer intelligent origin? For matters of intelligence, how vacuous.

Vacuous indeed!

Yada yada yada.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

P.S. Wikipedia also informs that: "The word yada is Hebrew for intimacy, so technically, when Elaine says, we went back to his place and 'yada, yada, yada....' Ironically, this could mean (though almost certainly not to her knowledge) that they did have sex." So maybe the cerebrologistic ideologues with the "evolution yada yada yada" are all in bed together in a vast left-wing anti-God Anti-American atheistic conspiracy? ... Well, actually, yeah.

The unhappy gays insisted that sexual orientation laws on hate crimes and discrimination do not apply to ex-gays – only gays.

2007-12-26T08:57:00.000-08:00

"The unhappy gays insisted that sexual orientation laws on hate crimes and discrimination do not apply to ex-gays – only gays – and no tolerance should be extended to former homosexuals."

? ! ? ! ? ! ?

Greetings friends and others out there in the Darwinian fogosphere.

Again today, an item a step removed from Sir Charles D. Yet, his begrimed pawprints abound. Does he rest in peace now? Only the divine God knows for sure, but it is quite a stretch for us mortals to envision Darwin resting in peace while so many yet living are ensnared by his vile poisonous dogma and dwell in deep-soul torment.

Today? The homosexual agenda and those who practice and encourage it. And what does Darwin have to do with this? Quite elementary. Darwin's goo-to-you myth implies there is no authoritative origin, purpose, or definition of FAMILY. But God's word the Bible says that when God created man and woman, God also created the institution of FAMILY:
"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh." (Genesis 2:24, NIV)

The bumpersticker paraphrase says: "Marriage: one man, one woman."

As far as the sexual orientation "culture war", I am not about to try to cover the whole range, since there is no lack of blogosphere electrons expended on this topic. Somewhere down below I'll leave a link. But thanks to the American Family Association, doing much to keep American families concerned for America and the future of our children.

My take on it: the BIG LIE is in fact TWO BIG LIES:
(1) Those engaged in the homsexual activities were "born gay"; and,
(2) You can't change.

For the first, I recall clearly our next-door neighbors who had identical twin boys. We grieved with them as one of them was dying of sexually-acquired AIDS. Even to his last breath, this man appeared unrepentant of his long-practiced homosexual lifestyle. Meanwhile, his (straight) twin brother came from California to beg his brother to repent and receive God's mercy through Jesus even at the last hour. Same genes, very different lives.

Ed Vitagliano has an article "In search of the gay gene" (AFA Journal, January 2008, p. 15) for more discussion.

For the second, it is fact that many people have escaped and are escaping the homosexual lifestyle. I still remember clearly the young couple (one man, one woman) I met at a church service at Mammoth Mountain ski area in California about 1974. As naiive students at the University of California Santa Barbara, they had both been seduced into "trying" homosexual behaviors, and were entrapped for a few years. They finally found freedom and the power to escape in Jesus Christ, Savior of the world. As the woman expressed it, "When I got into homosexual behavior, I always felt dirty. I would shower and still come out feeling dirty. Nothing else except Jesus could ever help me to feel clean."

See AFA Journal, Nov-Dec, 2007, "Can Gays Change?":
http://www.afajournal.org/11-1207changes.asp
"Can Gays Change?
"A new study concerning the possibility of homosexuals leaving that lifestyle is roiling the waters of debate, challenging the dogma of mental health organizations who insist that homosexuality is immutable. Organizations like the influential American Psychiatric Association have steadfastly refused to admit the possibility that attempts to change sexual orientation through religious and/or psychological methods can work.
"In 1999, for example, then-APA President Rodrigo Muñoz, M.D., said: 'There is no scientific evidence that reparative or conversion therapy is effective in changing a person’s sexual orientation.' He added that 'there is, however, evidence that this type of therapy can be destructive.'
"A new study, however, claims to prove just the opposite. Conducted by psychology professors Stanton L. Jones of Wheaton College and Mark A. Yarhouse of Regent University, the study, Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation, was published in book form and scheduled for an October release.
"The authors examined individuals who were attempting to change their sexual orientation by participating in a program run by the religious ministry Exodus International. They said the study was “the most scientifically rigorous study of the possibility of sexual orientation change to date. …”
"The results were impressive: 38% of the participants in the Exodus program had either embraced 'chastity with a reduction in prominence of homosexual desire' or experienced 'a diminishing of homosexual attraction and an increase in heterosexual attraction with a resulting satisfactory heterosexual adjustment.'
"According to press reports, another 29% had had only partial success in leaving the homosexual lifestyle but were committed to continuing their efforts."

But the fact that many have changed and are changing out of the homsexual behavior and into a life of freedom absolutely enrages many in the homosexual movement. In the article linked above, there is a sidebar article "Ex-gays victimized by gay intolerance" by Regina Griggs, Executive Director, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays. Look there for the context of the quote:
"As happens every year, gay activists disrupted our booth activities. They screamed obscenities, threw our materials from the exhibit table to the ground, insisted we recognize their same-sex “spouses,” demanded that PFOX leave, and hit a PFOX volunteer because he is ex-gay.When we explained that the county’s sexual orientation law allows both the gay booth and our ex-gay booth to exhibit, the unhappy gays insisted that sexual orientation laws on hate crimes and discrimination do not apply to ex-gays – only gays – and no tolerance should be extended to former homosexuals."

BUT THE ALMIGHTY GOD WHO CREATED ALL THINGS AND GIVES LIFE TO ALL LIVING - HE WILL HAVE THE LAST WORD. He speaks from His eternal and almighty throne in Heaven through the Bible as He says:
"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
"Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator - who is forever praised. Amen.
"Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.
"Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." (Romans 1:18-32, NIV)

How about one more scripture? In the second Psalm, God says the nations will rage against Jehovah God the Father and against his anointed one (the Messiah, the Christ). But God will: (1) laugh, (2) scoff, (3) rebuke, and (4) terrify. But "blessed are all who take refuge in him (Jesus)." Read and heed:

"Why do the nations conspire (rage) and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against Jehovah and against his Anointed One. 'Let us break their chains,' they say, 'and throw off their fetters.'
"The One enthroned in heaven laughs; Jehovah scoffs at them. Then he rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, 'I have installed my King on Zion, my holy hill.'
"I will proclain the decree of Jehovah. He said to me, 'You are my Son; today I have become your father. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will rule them with an iron scepter; you will dash them to pieces like pottery.
"Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve Jehovah with fear and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him." (Psalm 2, NIV, YHWH as "Jehovah")

Submitted with fear and trembling at the Word of God,

D.U.

A Common Testimony Against Abortion: Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade fame) and 2007 Heisman Trophy Winner Tim Tebow

2007-12-26T00:55:00.000-08:00

So, what do Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade fame) and 2007 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow have in common? Answer: a testimony FOR life and AGAINST abortion.

First, who are these folks?

Norma McCorvey was pregnant in 1970, and now says,

"On March 12, 1970, I signed the affidavit that brought the holocaust of abortion into America. And I thought I was doing something right. I thought I was doing something good, and I was wrong."

The result of that affidavit was the infamous 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision which made on-demand abortion in America legal for the first time. For McCorvey's story, see "Playground of Her Soul" in the American Family Association Journal, January 2008, pp. 12-13.

http://www.afajournal.org/

http://www.afajournal.org/0108norma_mccorvey.asp

Read the article and weep for her and for the never-born as Norma McCorvey tells of her transformation from abortion sympathizer and promoter Jane Roe to "Roe no more" Christian and life-apologist Norma McCorvey. She now says,

"I love the Lord with all my heart and soul ... [and] it's beyond my comprehension that He can take someone like me who was a hippy and a drug addict and a fornicator and all the other stuff that I did and forgive me."

How about Tim Tebow? He is the favorite of University of Florida Gators football fans, as he won the coveted Heisman Trophy for 2007 - the first underclassman winner in the history of the award. However, "Tebow's accomplishments may never have been supported had his mother followed a doctor's recommendation to have an abortion" says LifeNews.com:

http://www.lifenews.com/nat3523.html

"Pam Tebow and her husband were Christian missionaries in the Philippines in 1985 and they prayed for 'Timmy' before she became pregnant. Unfortunately, as the Gainesville Sun reports, Pam entered into a coma after she contracted amoebic dysentery, an infection of the intestine caused by a parasite found in a contaminated food or drink. The treatment for the medical condition would require strong medications that doctors told Pam had caused irreversible damage to Tim -- so they advised her to have an abortion. As the Sun reported, Pam Tebow refused the abortion and cited her Christian faith as the reason for her hope that her son would be born without the devastating disabilities physicians predicted. Pam ultimately spent the last two months of her pregnancy in bed and, eventually, gave birth to a health baby boy in August 1987."

With son Timmy now (very) fully grown in 2007 passing for 29 touchdowns and rushing for 22 touchdowns, one might wonder, "devastating disabilities?" To some of the bruisers he bruised and opposing teams he thumped with his fearless style of play, it may seem more like "devastating abilities." How's that for a witness against abortion?

Soooo ...
Why do I mention these in a primarily Darwin-despising blog? Simply because, as scripture affirms, we are made in the image of God, invested with the dignity of His image. Darwin's poisonous notion of man as a product of chance has greatly cheapened the value of one individual life. To a big bunch of undiscerning folks in our society today, abortion is seen as an innocuous procedure to merely dispense with an inconvenient blob of tissue.

But "it" is not merely an inconvenient blob of tissue. He or she IS A LIFE.

BONUS: Now you get a third item when you were only promised two in the blog title. The same Jan. 2008 issue of AFA Journal has an article (p. 14), "Sorrow, pain speak at last," about "Operation Outcry". Operation Outcry (http://www.operationoutcry.org/) was started as a project of The Justice Foundation (TJF) so that post-abortive women could begin testifying to the harm of abortion. "If women and men who know the real pain of abortion do not tell their stories, then the lie that abortion is a safe easy solution will win," said TJF President Allan E. Parker Jr. AFA Journal reports:
"The affidavits and declarations obtained through Operation Outcry thus far number about 2,000 women since the project's inception. TJF encourages everyone to help the group collect one million such testimonies to take back to the Supreme Court."

Hallelujah!

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Satan-Lucifer Spirit Brother of Jesus? Why the powder-puff evasion of straightforward questions about the Mormon church in Mitt Romney Campaign?

2007-12-21T11:11:00.000-08:00

Today is not exactly about Darwin.

It is, however, about evolution. But only because the Mormon church teaches that God is evolving ("As we now are, God once was; as God now is, we are becoming.")

What is my problem with this? Quite a big deal it seems to me. The prophet Isaiah, in the Holy Bible, speaks of Satan in this way:
"How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.' But you will be brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit." (Isaiah 14:12-15)

The mormon church teaches that we are becoming gods ourselves just like the god who (they say) created this world. The Bible states that Satan's ultimate affront to God was that he (Satan) desired to be "like the Most High." Computing on those two facts should set off some very loud alarm bells in discerning minds. Does your computation not seem to imply that this very core doctrine of Mormonism lines up flawlessly with the ultimate sin of Satan - desiring to be like the Most High?

So today's question is "Why the powder-puff kid-gloves treatment of Mormon doctrine in the Romney campaign?" Have you noticed it? I have. Two of my preferred conservative radio talk show hosts (Hugh Hewitt and Michael Medved) have seemingly begun to shill (occasionally shamelessly) for Romney. Newsweek magazine (Dec 17, 2007, p. 33) gave a fairly soft comparison of Christianity and mormonism, and then the next week (Dec. 24, 2007, p. 16) said "when Mike Huckabee asked if mormons really believe Jesus and the Devil 'are brothers,' he was being duplicitous - or just plain dumb." Then, in the December 20, 2007, Oregonian, associate editor David Reinhard's op-ed piece dinged Huckabee for asking "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?" Reinhard's response: "You stay classy now, governor."

So how about the facts please.

For the first fact, let's just answer the question instead of dancing past it. Does the mormon church teach that Satan (Lucifer) and Jesus are spirit brothers? Answer: absolutely, YES.

But for this question and others, don't ask me. Ask the people who spent years in the Mormon church and then escaped (I think "escape" for them would be the operative word - ask them about how difficult it is to just walk out of the MC).

Try these links and then apply some thoughtful introspection and discernment:

Asking "Are Mormons Christians?"
http://www.exmormonsforjesus.org/Articles/are_mormons_christians.htm

Ex-Mormons for Jesus:
http://www.exmormonsforjesus.org/

Problems with the Bookof Mormon?
http://saintsalive.com/mormonism/bomproblems.htm

And then look for this very informative book (recent and thoroughly documented):
ONE NATION UNDER GODS: A History of the Mormon Church
byRichard Abanes. Published by Four Walls Eight Windows, 39 West 14th Street, Room 503, New York, NY 10011. 2002. 651pp.
http://www.abanes.com/

Then prayerfully ask for discernment and then ask, "If I consider that Satan is the 'father of lies' and I view all this stuff from a spiritual perspective, what might I deduce is going on?"

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Saturn's Hot Moon Enceladus Puzzles Thought-Imprisoned Evolutionists, Biz-As-Usual to Creationists

2007-12-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

Hi all.

Quick one. A November 2006 copy of ICR Acts and Facts just surfaced on my reading stack so it seems my reading backlog is down to only one year. But, with the idea of better late than never, here is a quick description and link of Institute for Creation Research article on Enceladus, one of Saturn's little moons.

But this little Enceladus guy is a hot one, puzzling astronomers. It seems that by November, 2005, Cassini mission (launched October 1997) evidence seemed unmistakable that this little moon was ejecting up to 375 kilograms of water per second at temperatures of up to 180 degrees K.

Author David Coppedge, who works in the Cassini program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says:
"The findings were reported in a special issue of Science 3/10/2006. It wasn't long until scientists began wondering how to fit the observations into 4.5 billion years, the assumed age of the solar system. At current eruption rates, Enceladus would have ejected 1/6 of its mass and recycled its entire mass in that time. Neither radioactivity nor tidal flexing appear sufficient to sustain the activity."

Coppedge concludes:
"Planetary scientists are actively reworking their models in light of these surprises. The simplest explanation, that Enceladus might be young, does not even enter the mind of most of them. It's a sure sign of dogma when no observation, no matter how anomalous, challenges an accepted belief. The assumed age of the solar system has become a thought prison. Creation scientists, unhindered by such notions, should go forth and discover the fountains of youth."

You can read it for all the fun at:
http://www.icr.org/article/3112/

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute - SHAME! SHAME! ; Reuters reporter - DUH! DUH! 1984! 1984!

2007-12-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

Happy Jesus Birthday (or seasons grittings if that is your cheery choice) to all out there in darwinisdeadsvilleosphere ...

Did you know that evolution is a creepy religion whose adherents seemingly morph into Vulcan brain-melded zombies?

If you just stumbled into here by chance, be forewarned. Maybe you should back out now ... very .. very .. slowly. 'Cause continuing to read postings on this blog may cause you to THINK . And that might be dangerous to ... to ... your income?

Or so it seems.

I just read a Reuters new article about Nathaniel Abraham, an Indian national and "zebrafish specialist", who was fired after a brief employment at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusaetts. See:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071210/od_nm/evolution_lawsuit_dc

His problem? He told his employer, those nice WHOI folks, that he was willing to do research using evolutionary concepts. But those nice WHOI folks insisted that he was required to accept Darwin's theory of evolution as scientific fact or lose his job.

So he lost his job.

Why? According to a now-pending lawsuit, Abraham says his civil rights were violated when he was dismissed shortly after telling his superior he did not accept evolution because he believed the Bible presented a true account of human creation.

Now is that sweet? Doing the job as they ask in the research framework they ask is not enough. Now the loyalist researcher must subrogate the mind to the Party of WHOI, and dismiss the soul to the rubbish heap. Non-zombies need not apply to WHOI.

That is not sweet. That is a big bunch of WHOI.

Side note: "hooey", acording to the Urban Dictionary
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hooey
has comparable meanings as "bunk", "rubbish", "bs", "bullshit", "malarkey", "nonsense", and "pish tosh." "Bullshit" is the primary alternate term contributed to the Urban Dictionary by The Grammar Nazi. The Russian transliteration is a bit more deprecating.

Oh, and a lawsuit is pending. But don't hold your breath, Abraham. There likely is not a judge in the land with the technical discernment and intestinal fortitude to right this wrong.

SHAME SHAME WHOI !!

But the story does not end with the pink slip. In the Reuters article, written by Jason Szep, we find this:

"The case underscores tension between scientists, who see creationist views as anti-science, and evangelical Christians who argue that protections of religious freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution extend to scientific settings."

Can you see how journalist Szep is an unwitting (generously - maybe actually witting) agent of the mind-zombie brigade? The mid-zombie brigade would ask - no, DEMAND - that anyone who does not bow down to Darwin's god of chance which allegedly created (oops, XXXXX, can't say "created" - er, caused to result; oops, XXXXX, can't say "caused" becaue it implies agency. Oh, shucks, just leave it. There is no operative word because chance can't operate) all life and stuff - is not a scientist! Do you see journalist Szep's clear implicit assertion in this sentence that there is a great gulf between "scientists" and "evangelical Christians", and evangelical Christians are not scientists? By definition, so it seems. Academic credentials? No matter. Earned PhD? Nope! Published research in peer-reviewed journals? Nyet!

It seems that the WHOI people are not the only ones who don't get it. Reuters doesn't get it. Jason Szep doesn't get it.

DUH DUH DUHHH Reuters reporter !!

Is this Orwellian or what?

George Orwell's 1984 in Oceania is actually 2007 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Just for a refresher, you can find a list of George Orwell's "Newspeak" terms:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Newspeak_words

We need not go deep in the list to find a couple of terms for our subject at hand. Let's just start with the first two and leave the rest to you blogvestites for further application..

"bellyfeel" : The word "bellyfeel" means a blind, enthusiastic acceptance of an idea. The word likely comes from the idea that any good Oceanian should be able to internalize Party doctrine to the extent that it becomes a gut instinct - a feeling in the belly.

"blackwhite": Blackwhite is defined as follows: “...this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that white is black, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

Applications:

Any worthy Woodsholian must be able to bellyfeel evolution, to internalize - or maybe even be born with, i.e., internatalize - the notion that purposeless particles through purposeless processes can produce purposeful people. And - of course - without a moment of hesitation. Nary a flicker of the eye nor a twitch of the lips.

Further, any worthy Woodsholian must be able to logodaedalically blackwhite sciencefaith. That is, when evolutionists believe only by faith that complex systems come together by chance, that = SCIENCE (!! all bow down). Conversely, when a nonbeliever dares observe that complex systems often fall apart by chance but are never observed to fall together by mere chance, that = FAITH (hoot, hoot).

Could I ever be a Woodsholian? Likely not. Could I even be a Reutersian? Not much chance.

I am not worthy.

Respectfully submitted,

D.U.

P.S. If any Woodsholian Party Members or Loyalists read this post, I will be immediately blackwhited (see definition above). Since they blackwhited zebrafish specialist Abraham to blackwhite any thoughts of causation in living systems, I expect no free ride either. I further expect that they will surely joycamp me as soon as they can get their hands on me. See Newspeak definitions link above, "j" section. Oh well, I guess it comes with the territory. DU.

P.P.S. I guess I should define "the territory" as referenced in P.S. above. "The territory" is adherence to the Bible, the Word of God, in which God speaks through Isaiah to say (Isaiah 42:5-8):
"This is what God Jehovah says - he who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and all that comes out of it, who gives breath to its people, and life to those who walk on it ... 'I am Jehovah; that is my name! I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols.' "
Before God, truly I am not worthy. But He is worthy of all praise and honor. DU

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

2007-11-26T04:45:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-20T13:11:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-14T03:52:00.000-08:00

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.

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

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?

2007-11-12T11:01:00.000-08:00

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.

(1) Oops - not dark matter; (2) Required initial singularity implies creation of the universe by a causative power

2007-10-30T13:08:00.000-07:00

Hey all - 2 quick ones.

(1) Nope. Not dark matter after all.

See: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20071020/fob5.asp
Science News, October 20, 2007, reports that the "maybe axion" sighting of last year appears likely to merely be a relic of equipment malfunction. The axion is a hypothetical subatomic particle that's been mentioned as a possible constituent of cosmic dark matter. Note your fearless blogger's earlier post mentioning that "dark matter" is not seen but only inferred by a supposed gravitational effect, and that in fact that the supposed gravitational effect may in fact be instead a property of space-time consistent with a creation-apologetic cosmology. See:
http://darwin-is-dead.blogspot.com/2007/10/creation-cosmology-god-did-it-is-lookin.html
Does this mean no dark matter exists? No, but it does mean that men of vision do not use tunnel vision. If your personal cosmology is limited only to the BB unbounded/no-center universe (axiomatic) boundary conditions, maybe you have tunnel vision.

(2) Singularity in inflationary model universes implies creation.

I just received an announcement from a friend about an event in Seattle tonight (October 30, 2007). This goes back to DU's recent posting about boundary conditions for cosmological models. I am passing it on to you without further comment but this:

ALL PRAISE TO THE CREATOR - GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH - WHOSE EVEN GREATER WORK IS THE SALVATION OF MANKIND HOPELESSLY LOST IN OUR OWN WILLFUL SIN AND PRIDEFUL REBELLION AGAINST JEHOVAH, THE ALMIGHTY KING OF THE UNIVERSE.

Here is the announcement:

Tuesday, October 30, 2007, 07:30 PM Seattle Pacific University in Falcon
Chesterton Society with Rober Spitzer on "The Virtual Inevitability Of a Singularity in Inflationary Model Universes: Implications for the Creation of the Universe"

Location: Lounge on the top floor of Royal Brougham Pavilion at the corner of W. Nickerson & 3rd Ave, Seattle. For links to a campus map and directions, please see the Events Calendar at:
www.seattlechesterton.org

Spitzer is the president of Gonzaga University and a trained physicist. He will speak about recent developments in cosmology.

Classical Big Bang theory was altered significantly by the prospect of universal inflation and a “pre-big-bang quantum cosmological or string condition.” Recent work by Borde, Vilenkin, and Guth shows that mathematical modeling of such universes requires an initial singularity, which in turn implies a creation of the universe by a causative power transcending space-time asymmetry. Fr. Spitzer will discuss the history of this remarkable development and its theological implications.

Fr. Spitzer has been involved in teaching about the intersection of physics, metaphysics, and faith for many years. He is co-founder and director of the Institute for Christian Philosophy and the Natural Sciences at Gonzaga University, and co-organizes an annual lecture series entitled Physics and the God of Abraham. Fr. Spitzer is also founder of the Philosophical Foundations of Physics institute at Georgetown university: a group of physicists, chemists, ongoing discussion of underlying conditions of space, time and energy from physical and philosophical perspectives.

Respectfully passed on to friends of Jehovah God, praying that we all may be friends of God through our last breath and beyond.

D.U.

P.S. Doubters of God - read the Bible, Revelation chapter 20. You will find out that in the end, God wins, satan loses. Do you want to go with the winner or the loser? No mulligans and no excuses later (Romans chapter 1, also in the Bible).