Posted on 07/28/2013 3:57:08 PM PDT by spirited irish
American Christian author Dr. Frank Turek notes that Cambridge-trained Ph.D. Stephen Meyer's New York Times best-seller, "Darwin's Doubt," is creating a major scientific controversy. Because Darwinists absolutely hate it, Meyer's well-reasoned argument that an intelligent designer is the best explanation for the evidence at hand elicits irrational accusations that Meyers is anti-scientific and guilty of endangering sexual freedom everywhere. (Darwin's Doubt, Turek, Townhall.com, July 09, 2013)
Meyer writes,
"Neo-Darwinism and the theory of intelligent design are not two different kinds of inquiry, as some critics have asserted. They are two different answers formulated using a similar logic and method of reasoning to the same question: 'What caused biological forms and the appearance of design in the history of life?'" (ibid.)
The real issue here is not "anti-scientific" intelligent design or for that matter, the Genesis account of creation ex nihilo ("special creation" as evolutionary materialists call it) versus "scientifically enlightened reason and science," but about creation account vs. anti-creation account (Darwinian materialism).
The reason Darwinists on one hand, and intelligent design and Genesis account proponents on the other, arrive at radically different answers is because Darwinists are neo-pagan materialists and the other two are not.
While intelligent design proponents are open to intelligent causes (just like crime scene investigators are), Genesis account creationists hold that our Creator, the living, personal Triune God, the Divine Source of life who exists outside of the space/time dimension is Jesus Christ, the angel who spoke with Moses at Sinai.
Foremost of His miracles is creation out of nothing six days of creation rather than the billions of years of evolutionary process out of already existing or spontaneously generated matter:
"The first moment of time is the moment of God's creative act and of creation's simultaneous coming to be." (Philosopher and New Testament scholar William Lane Craig, quoted in "If God created the universe, then who created God?' by Jonathan Sarfati, Creation Ministries International)
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." (Genesis 1:27)
As all men are the spiritual image-bearers of the Triune God, it logically follows that each male and female is a trinity of being of soul, spirit, and body:
"The essence of the human is not the body, but the soul. It is the soul alone that God made in his own image and the soul that he loves....For the sake of the soul...the Son of God came into the world...." (Incomplete Work on Matthew, Homily 25, Ancient Christian Devotional, Oden and Crosby, p. 153)
For fifteen hundred years, Christendom and then later Protestant America had followed St. Augustine (AD 354-430) in affirming that all men are three part spiritual image-bearers of the transcendent Triune God (Gen. 1:27). This unique view of man was affirmed by the brilliant French economist, statesman, and author Frederic Bastiat. Man as God's spiritual image-bearer is the precious gift from God, which includes the physical, intellectual, and moral life:
"He has provided us with a collection of marvelous faculties. And He has put us in the midst of a variety of natural resources. By application of our faculties to these natural resources we convert them into products, and use them. Life, faculties, production in other words, individuality, liberty, property this is man (and) these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place." (Bastiat, "How Evil Works," David Kupelian, p. 8)
Vishal Mangalwadi, India's foremost Christian scholar, writes that this unique concept of man as God's spiritual image-bearer gave birth to the "belief in the unique dignity of human beings," and this is
"...the force that created Western civilization, where citizens do not exist for the state but the state exists for the individuals. Even kings, presidents, prime ministers, and army generals cannot be allowed to trample upon an individual and his or her rights." (Truth and Transformation: A Manifesto for Ailing Nations, pp. 12-13)
Neo-pagan, anti-human God-haters
Darwinian materialists are anti-Triune God:
"The irony is devastating. The main purpose of Darwinism was to drive every last trace of an incredible God from biology. But the theory replaces God with an even more incredible deity omnipotent chance...." (T. Rosazak, Unfinished Animal, pp. 101-102, 1975)
They hate the very thought of Him as their Father and seek escape to a nowhere land, an impersonal, collective communal unconscious where man as God's spiritual image-bearer, immutable truth, order, moral law, sexual ethics, authority, hell, heaven, angels, demons, meaning, and purpose do not exist. For these reasons and others, such as Original Sin and the two created sexes, they fiercely reject intelligent design but viciously hate creation ex nihilo, and choose rather to embrace evolutionary and materialist conceptions. The truth of this can be seen in the following quotes:
"The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary...reasons for holding doctrines of materialism...may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of Lamettrie...or predominantly political as they were in the case of Karl Marx." (Aldous Huxley, "Ends and Means," p. 315, from Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, E. Michael Jones, p. 27)
"...one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched.... The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin's theories." (One Long Argument, 1991, p. 99, Ernst Mayr (d. 2005), Professor of Zoology at Harvard University)
"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." ("Billions and Billions of Demons," Richard Lewontin, PhD Zoology, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard University)
Metaphysical nihilism: everything and nothing
Metaphysical nihilism (all that exists is matter and energy) is the metaphysics of both physical materialism and nonphysical materialist conceptions.
What chiefly separates these two is whether matter is physical or nonphysical. If physical, then the Triune God, heaven, hell, soul/spirit, angels, and demons do not exist. But if nonphysical, then for example, spirits, ghosts, divine sparks, Transcended Masters, intra-cosmic deities, Orobouros, astral planes, divine impersonal mind, and Christ consciousness exist but the material world is an illusion.
Brooks Alexander, the founder of The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP), an evangelical ministry and think-tank in Berkeley, California, identifies both physical and nonphysical materialist conceptions as the two sides of pagan monism. Because they are from the same root, they tend to cross-pollinate and mingle,
"...producing a brood of offspring that exhibits the genetic heritage of its parents in a confused and confusing array. Soon it becomes impossible to say whether a given movement, trend or school of thought is a secular impulse that has absorbed Eastern/occult values, or an Eastern/occult teaching that has dressed itself in secular language." (The Rise of Cosmic Humanism: What is Religion?" Brooks Alexander, SCP Journal, 1981-82, p. 2)
In other words, for many years secular-human physicalists have been quietly crossing over into spiritual or cosmic conceptions of matter and embracing for example, Zen Buddhism and Teilhards idea, which leapfrogs off of Darwin's theory.
The apostate French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) taught that an impersonal god-force emerges from spontaneously generated matter. According to Teilhard, this evolution of a god-force results in evolution becoming "conscious of itself" and ultimately, in the transformation of all physical matter into nonphysical divine matter defined by Teilhard as "Christ consciousness" or "pure spirit." Teilhard called this final stage of evolution the "Omega Point" and "the cosmic Christ."
You can be as God
The perennially persuasive Big Lie underlies both physical and nonphysical conceptions. This thought is expressed openly in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and Dr. Beverly Galyean, leading exponent of occult Luciferian New Age confluent education:
"The Buddhists and the Jains do not depend on God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion: to evolve a God out of man." (Inspired Talks, Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center, 1958, p. 218)
"Once we begin to see that we are all God, that we have the attributes of God, then, I think the whole purpose of human life is to reown the Godlikeness within us...So my whole view is very much based on that idea." (Galyean quoted by Francis Adeney, Educators Look East, Radix 12, No. 3, Nov-Dec. 1980, p. 21)
This same idea expressed in secular terms such as self-realization and self-actualization (a term coined by Abraham Maslow) underlies many contemporary psychotherapies.
Nihilism: You are of nothing
"Behold, you are of nothing, and your work of that which hath no being: he that hath chosen you is an abomination." Isaiah 41:24
Though evolutionary materialists congratulate themselves for being scientifically enlightened, cutting edge 'elite' free thinkers, the truth is otherwise, meaning that materialists, whether of the secular physical or occult spiritual school are miserable self-deceived nihilists for whom there is neither source for "self" (conscious life, psyche, individual mind) nor for meaning and purpose in life. They are "of nothing" and the unreality of their own existence is the devastating price they have paid the devil, the father of death and nihilism, for "saving" them from the living God.
The misery inducing "salvation" of "nonself" is not something new but something ancient. It began with Buddha who craved God-like power to deconstruct and reinterpret the soul. Taking power not only requires the murder of God but the teaching of lies.
Jesus to Buddha,
"....you took God away from them (and) your espousal of an absence of self is the most unique and fearsome claim you made...You turned from Hinduism because it said there was an essential self, which they called the atman." (The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, Ravi Zacharias, pp.59, 67)
Six centuries before Jesus Christ, the Buddha already knew that if all that exists is matter then the human self cannot exist either:
"Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one's psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one's being. Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman). You don't exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence." (The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 6)
If all that exists is matter and energies working on and through matter, then it logically follows that there is no source for life, conscious life (soul, spirit and will), the two sexes, human dignity and worth, or for unalienable constitutional rights beginning with the right to life, liberty, and property. Without the Triune God, meaning drains into meaninglessness and man is reduced to less than nothing, a conclusion Buddha reached long before Marxist Communists attempted to scientifically re-engineer human beings after the fashion of metaphysical nihilism.
"Thought crime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for awhile....but sooner or later they were bound to get you." George Orwell, 1984
After seizing control of Russia, Marxist materialists utilized propaganda of the lie, re-education with major emphasis on Darwinism, revision of history, and other confusion-inducing, mind-and-thought-control techniques in connection with brain-altering drugs, electro-shock therapy, terror, and other brutal measures to
"...liquidate all expressions of individual identity in favor of an impersonal collective, communal consciousness." (The Book that Made Your World, Vishal Mangalwadi, p. 74)
Following in Buddha's footsteps, Western and American evolutionary materialists took our Creator away and replaced Him with nihilist Darwinian materialism. Then they conceptually reduced His spiritual image-bearers to less than nothing, taught monstrous lies as scientific fact, morally corrupted Westerners and Americans, and brutally ridiculed and demonized anyone who dared speak truth to their lies. By these means they set Western and American civilization adrift in infinite nothingness.
Nihilism is spiritual, moral, intellectual, and cultural suicide. It is the devil's inferno here on earth, the void of everything and nothing in which death is life, evil is good, lie is truth, up is down, male is female, female is male, rolling in filth is good clean fun, bad is good but evil better, and the father of nihilism is god.
Choose eternal blessing and not cursing
The unreality of "self" is a waking nightmare fueled by horrors of conscience, obsession with death, and hellish terrors of mind that make suicide, murder, abortion, euthanasia, and genocide into virtues.
"...I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing, therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life...." Deuteronomy 30:19-20
"Thou hast brought forth, O Lord, my soul from hell: thou hast saved me from them that go down into the pit." Psalm 30:3
The Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Living Word become Flesh, Jesus Christ the Physician, came to heal the spiritually sick and dying, to save their immortal souls. Just as we are on the verge of going down into the pit, ready to depart to the unseen world, if we will repent and turn back to Him, then by His providence and grace our Lord will revive our souls and deliver us from those accursed horrors of conscience and ghastly terrors of mind which by reason of our sin are as hell searing itself into and possessing our very minds. (Psalm 116:3)
But whoever rejects the Physician, the Divine Source of life and soul, rejects His prescription, thereby destroys him or herself. So we ought to turn back to Him right now, before it is too late.
;-) !
I'm sure you can figure out the point of the imaginary scene. The 2D being does not have the complete knowledge of the entire system at work in order to understand that the filing imprints did not randomly collect into a single imprint.
There is growing evidence that branes other than our 4D brane exist and effect our 4D brane. It is sort of like the analogy offered above. The crystallography photos of non-stick coatings appear to be showing how another brane is influencing the disposition of the coating crystals, as one example of the growing body of data regarding 'other' branes which effect our 4D brane. [You can read about this topic in Lisa Randall's recent book: pp 18 19, Warped Passages, Harper Collins, 2005] It is currently being tossed around theoretical circles that gravity in our 4D brane is a sort of shadow effect leaking into our brane from a higher dimensional brane.
That's "random" from a human point of view.
But if you will permit me to speculate -- from an omniscient "G*d's eye" point of view, nothing but nothing is "random", since, first, G*d does precisely know every force and factor influencing a particular outcome, and second, since all was planned out by G*d from the beginning, nothing is a surprise to Him.
No, I'm not talking about predestination, because we don't know anything about that -- that's G*d's realm, not ours.
Our role is to do the best we can, hope for the best, and keep the faith that all will be for the best, even when things look worst.
Nobody could say that better than this:
So "random" is a human idea, sufficient unto the day... ;-)
BroJoeK's answer works for me; namely:
For Lurkers, metals are examples of isotropic materials - they have the same strength in every direction - whereas woods have different strengths in different directions, e.g. against the grain versus with the grain.
Neither isotropy nor anistropy are "random" in the meaning of mathematics. Rather, they are pseudo-random because they are the effects of prior deterministic events.
Statistical randomness (the property being described in the physical sciences with the use 'random' - the unpredictability) is not the same as algorithmic randomness. Under Kolmogrov complexity, for instance, a numeric sequence must be incompressible to be considered random. Indeed most views in algorithmic randomness would insist on that property as well as the inability to make money betting on it (Martin-LöfChaitin Thesis et al).
Indeed, where I was headed was to expound on the apparent and observed anisotropy of our universe, as illustrated by the CMB measurements, and in its current state -- as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey:
AND THEN, to marvel that our very survival depends on the fact that we are generally surrounded by an isotropic atmosphere, and that many things (including the water we require for life) also behave isotropically.
(Of course, our atmosphere can get a bit anisotropic at times (think, "F5 tornado")... '-)
Of course, if the "primordial soup" had remained isotropic ("without form and void"), this
could not be observed -- and we could not exist to observe it...
Yet... our very existence depends on local, isotropic conditions.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Without anisotropy we could not exist;
without isotropy we cannot survive.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Almost makes one tend to believe in "Divine Providence" or an "Intelligent Designer", eh?
~~~~~~~~~~~~
QUESTION: how can one explain (mathematically or otherwise) that both isotropy and anisotropy coexist in our universe -- without invoking an external "Cause"?
Your reasoning will no doubt be seen again and again when we are conversing with atheists. As you say,
BTW, one of the things I find quite annoying with multi-verse physical cosmology theory is the presumption that the physical laws and constants of this universe would apply to prior ones. That is a statement of faith not reason.
Thank you also for that beautiful link to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey!
The webpage source for your second image from SDSS, BOSS: Dark Energy and the Geometry of Space explains the project as follows:
Well I would say that any property is the result of entities acting in accordance with their nature and in accordance with natural laws. The fact that science can’t explain, yet, some phenomenon does not give us permission to invoke a supernatural explanation. What is solved by doing that? It doesn’t explain anything. God by definition is unknowable and incomprehensible. That conception is an attack on reason itself. Far from clarifying anything it puts an end to any rational inquiry.
When looking for the “why” of anything you have to start someplace right? You can’t have an infinite regress of causes, that’s the first cause argument. As soon as you allow for a something that just is and needs no explanation there is no rational reason to exclude nature from that list of things that just are and always have been. So by invoking a supernatural cause you are saying “I know the universe exists with certain natural laws but I don’t like that answer so I am going to jump to some unknowable, undefinable, incomprehensible being instead as an explanation. Something that is unknowable and unexplainable can’t be an explanation for anything.
As for M theory, scientists are proposing it because the big bang theory is limited by the fact that relativity as a theory is incomplete and that is why scientists are looking for a unified theory or quantum theory of gravity. But here is the difference between a theory and a supernatural being as an explanation: Once science has a theory it does not stop there. In fact a theory is only the beginning of the inquiry. It has to be tested and verified and that process never stops. 300 years from now we will still be verifying the theory of relativity or whatever new theory encompasses it and goes further. When you say “God did it” that is the end of any further investigation.
I totally reject the dichotomy between matter and spirit (consciousness). I reject materialism. We know that both matter and spirit exist together in nature, that man is an integration of the two and there is no reason to separate them. All the evidence points to consciousness being a result of biology, of our brains, but even if we never understand where it comes from, an inquiry into the origins of anything can not go outside of existence (nature) to look because there is by definition nothing there.
Talk about "GMTA"! I'll just go into my HTML editor and start deleting...
...or, maybe I'll just go ahead and post it as drafted. If nothing else, it will certainly demonstrate dramatic convergence in our lines of thought!
Later... '-)
I must however disagree that "God did it" alone halts the investigation. Either "God did it" or "Nature did it" is a cop-out. It is enough to say that a question cannot be answered by the scientific method at this time, e.g. "why this instead of something else or nothing at all?"
It was the most theological statement ever to come out of modern science (Jastrow.) Scripture begins, "In the beginning, God created..."
With the notable exception of Tegmark's theory, all other physical cosmologies known to me (multi-verse, multi-world, ekpyrotic, cyclic, imaginary time) all lead to the infinite regress with the presupposition that prior universes have the same physical laws/constants as this one.
The only closed physical cosmology known to me, Max Tegmark's Level IV Parallel Universe, posits that 4D space/time is a manifestation of mathematical structures which actually do exist outside of space and time.
Newer Geometric Physics theories also illuminate physical cosmologies, e.g. f-Theory (Vafa), 5D2T (Wesson.) Both of these theories call for additional dimensions of time. Vafa's continues the compactification (string theory) model of Kaluza/Klein whereas Wesson's is a higher dimensional dynamic.
Without anisotropy we could not exist; without isotropy we cannot survive.And yes, it certainly should cause people to recognize "Divine Providence" - i.e. that God is the Creator.
QUESTION: how can one explain (mathematically or otherwise) that both isotropy and anisotropy coexist in our universe -- without invoking an external "Cause"?I don't see how they can explain it away. It would be interesting to watch and I'm pinging a few from a thread about atheism to solicit their response to the challenge, if they have a response.
I do not identify as an atheist, but regardless, I don't understand the value of this argument. It seems as though you've chosen a phenomenon that you don't think science will ever be able to explain and said, "See? That means God must have done it." But what do you do if science does explain it? What if there turns out to be a perfectly reasonable, all-nature explanation for the existence of both isotropy and anisotropy? What does that do to your confidence in Divine Providence? Why make God dependent on what we understand and don't understand about how His universe works?
By His own choice, there will be no logical proofs or empirical tests to "find" Him.
Where [is] the wise? where [is] the scribe? where [is] the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: - I Cor 1:19-22
Nevertheless, we can observe and be amazed at His creation and see His hand in everything!
Others may be in awe of God by seeing a newborn child, a cathedral, a mountain range, a glimpse of deep space, hearing certain sounds and so on.
God is not a hypothesis. He lives. His Name is I AM. I've known Him for a half century and counting.
Indeed, I know Him better than I know my older brother. No one doubts me when I tell them about my older brother, but yet some doubt me when I tell them about God. LOLOL! Go figure...
Thank you for your response and thank you for pinging me to this thread. You have given me a lot to think about, which is good. I carve wood all day which leaves a lot of my brain free to think so I’ll be mulling what you said over all day and I’ll get back to you.
No they do not! Not "all" of them!
Evolutionists and chrstian creationists apparently have one thing in common: they completely forget about the existence of Judaism, which gave Genesis to the world in the first place. What ignorance and/or arrogance!
Yes, we can. Which is why I don't get the attempt to single out one part of creation and insist that that should "cause" people to recognize that God is the creator. You held out the coexistence of istropy and anisotropy as a "challenge" to atheists, asserting that if they couldn't explain it, they had to recognize Divine Providence. And my question is, what if they can explain it--if not now, someday? Does that somehow diminish the idea that God is the Creator? If there are no logical proofs to find Him, why do you propose one?
A person who will not look, cannot see.
I think part of it is to answer the challenge. If we say nothing ever, it makes it appear we cannot answer the challenges with a sound response. Again, we have nothing to fear against science, science is on our side. God is the master of “science”. What passes for “science” today is a joke. It is not objective, it is dogmatic and cannot handle objectivity. I give you global warming. I give you in the 1970s, the coming global ice age. I give you eggs (good, bad, good again), I give you butter (good, bad, better than margarine good again). I give you the appendix and the coccyx. and a whole host of other organs ad structures once considered vestigial by the biggest and brightest minds of “science”.
I think part of it is to educate and strengthen the belief of our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially those that may have weaker faith and don’t know how to respond to the attacks of the evolutionists. Or anyone trying to undermine the faith of others. They don’t have to feel stupid or embarrassed if they have a reasonable answer that they can understand and explains it for them.
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