The author swerves back and forth between origin of life, which is only dimly perceived, and evolution, which is verifiable.
Ten Strawman Arguments.
I followed the links to the book- “More than a Myth”. The book has several chapters by well respected authors..
I dabble in science and what I discover is this. Not ONE useful idea or invention has come about because of evolutionary or uniformitarian philosophy. The motivation behind all of this scientism is god-hating. They do not want to admit that there is a sovereign God with demands on their life, So, no matter the field, Astronomy, biology, geology, genetics, etc. they substitute man’s ideas for a divine creator.
If an “evolutionist” could spend a few minutes, actually a lot of minutes, listening to guys like David Berlinski and Phillip Johnson they would/should re-consider their position of their certainty on the evolutionary question.
They are “NOT” preaching the bible.
They are questioning the scientific claims in an objective manner.
David Berlinski: Rebelious Intellectual Defies Darwinism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89IskZI740
Darwinism on Trial - Phillip E. Johnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8meWGZ_e_Y
The extent of the atheist rebuttal generally goes like this;
Phillip Johnson is dead and Berlinski looks like he will be joining him soon.
For me the Irreducible Complexity argument is the nail in Darwin’s coffin.
The genetic code is evidence of a high order of intelligence. It shows design and purpose. That kind of information encoding and embedding just doesn’t happen all by itself no matter how much time you allow. Scientists are people first and scientists second (or maybe 3rd or 4th, etc.). All humans have a tendency to find evidence of their own presuppositions in their search for truth. Even in religion, sincerity only counts for so much. Rightly dividing God’s word takes a life time and look how easy it is for error to creep in. Look how many different denominations of churches there are! It’s an indication that there are lots of interpretations of the same Book and the same God. Science suffers in the same way. Well intentioned, smart people can get led astray. Some are not well intentioned. Some have Mt. Everest hight pride because they “know” they are absolutely brilliant. Some are brilliant but pride has a way of destroying a lot of the good they might be able to do. Some are in it for the grant $$$ or other nefarious reasons. Today... science seems almost totally politicized. Can anyone say Global Warming? Or anyone remember Haecke’sl “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? It was called a “Biogenetic Law”. And check this out, “In seeking to understand why the Haeckelian view persisted so long, we have also to consider the alternatives. We often are highly conservative and will hold to a viewpoint longer than is justified when there is no alternative or, worse, when the logical alternative upsets the rest of our world view.” quote from Keith Stewart Thomson, “Marginalia Ontogeny and phylogeny recapitulated”, American Scientist Vol. 76, May-June 1988, p. 274 - (reference source #1). “...when the logical alternative upsets the rest of our world view,” perhaps they should have been studying cognitive dissonance theory instead. I only sight this to show how easily we forget the mistakes of science and to show how, once a theory is put forth that holds promise for showing what we really, really want, it is very hard for it to DIE and people to say, “Gee we were wrong.” It also shows that for some people the evidence can ONLY lead in one direction. This nonsense about following anywhere the evidence may take them is just a lie. Evolution is one of those beloved theories. It will never die in the minds of those that want there to be NO God that they have to be accountable to (I have very bad news for those people). Bill Whittle has a great video on this idea. It’s about liberals and their cock-a-mamy theories of how the world is suppose to work. It goes by two names but the only one I can remember is The Train Set. Some folks can generate endless ideas - and we need those types of people. The flip side is ideas, at the end of the day, need to be grounded in reality. Those ideas that are not - and the people that come up with them, need to be kept far, far away for positions of power. B.H. Obama, Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler come to mind. Flame away!
This goes along with my other post. It’s here on freerepublic
Please at least read down to the quote by Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, 1937 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3259337/posts
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate?
Furthermore, DNA contains multi-layered information that reads both forward and backwards - DNA stores data more efficiently than anything we've created - and a majority of DNA contains metainformation (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data). The design inference is obvious.
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings with find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus of itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine – that is one single functional protein molecule – would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.
What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle.
To gain a more objective grasp of the level of complexity the cell represents, consider the problem of constructing an atomic model. Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid.
Copying nature, we could speed up the construction of the model by using small molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides rather than individual atoms. Since individual amino acids and nucleotides are made up of between ten and twenty atoms each, this would enable us to finish the project in less than five million years. We could also speed up the project by mass producing those components in the cell which are present in many copies. Perhaps three-quarters of the cell’s mass can be accounted for by such components. But even if we could produce these very quickly we would still be faced with manufacturing a quarter of the cell’s mass which consists largely of components which only occur once or twice and which would have to be constructed, therefore, on an individual basis. The complexity of the cell, like that of any complex machine, cannot be reduced to any sort of simple pattern, nor can its manufacture be reduced to a simple set of algorithms or programmes. Working continually day and night it would still be difficult to finish the model in the space of one million years.
- Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985)
And let me add my two cents to this astounding picture. The model that you would complete a million years later would be just that, a lifeless static model. For the cell to do its work this entire twenty kilometer structure and each of its trillions of components must be charged in specific ways, and at the level of the protein molecule, it must have an entire series of positive and negative charges and hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts all precisely shaped (at a level of precision far, far beyond our highest technical abilities) and charged in a whole series of ways: charged in a way to find other molecular components and combine with them; charged in a way to fold into a shape and maintain that most important shape, and charged in a way to be guided by other systems of charges to the precise spot in the cell where that particle must go. The pattern of charges and the movement of energy through the cell is easily as complex as the pattern of the physical particles themselves.Also, Denton, in his discussion, uses a tennis ball to stand in for an atom. But an atom is not a ball. It is not even a ‘tiny solar system’ of neutrons, protons and electrons’ as we once thought. Rather, it has now been revealed to be an enormously complex lattice of forces connected by a bewildering array of utterly miniscule subatomic particles including hadrons, leptons, bosons, fermions, mesons, baryons, quarks and anti-quarks, up and down quarks, top and bottom quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks, virtual quarks, valence quarks, gluons and sea quarks…
And let me remind you again, that what we are talking about, a living cell, is a microscopic dot and thousands of these entire factories including all the complexity that we discussed above could fit on the head of a pin. Or, going another way, let’s add to this model of twenty square kilometers of breath taking complexity another one hundred trillion equally complex factories all working in perfect synchronous coordination with each other; which would be a model of the one hundred trillion celled human body, your body, that thing that we lug around every day and complain about; that would, spread laterally at the height of one cell at this magnification, blanket the entire surface of the earth four thousand times over, every part of which would contain pumps and coils and conduits and memory banks and processing centers; all working in perfect harmony with each other, all engineered to an unimaginable level of precision and all there to deliver to us our ability to be conscious, to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to experience the world as we are so used to experiencing it, that we have taken it and the fantastic mechanisms that make it possible for granted.
My question is, “Why don’t we know this?” What Michael Denton has written and I have added to is a perfectly accurate, easily intelligible, non-hyperbolic view of the cell. Why is this not taught in every introductory biology class in our schools?
- Matt Chait
Consider this, to remove any ‘creator’ from our very existence including the beginning of our universe is to remove any ‘thought or intelligence’ from the equation. By definition, you are ultimately left with an existence from stupidity.
“Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?” – Charles Darwin
