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The journal New Scientist has recently run an article called Born Believers: How your brain creates God (especially in hard financial times)1… Towards the latter end of the article is a disclaimer that ‘All the researchers involved stress that none of this says anything about the existence or otherwise of gods.’ However, the tenor of the article, including the title, militates strongly that the author’s preferred reality is that, yes folks, “your brain creates God.” The article initially suggests that “God” is created in our brains as a result of “an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive”....

Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest. No matter what their religious beliefs, college-educated adults frequently agree with purpose-seeking yet false explanations of natural phenomena - finches diversified in order to survive, for instance. "The very fact of belief in purpose itself might lead you to favour intelligent design," says Deborah Kelemen, a psychologist at Boston University, who led the study Kelemen has documented the same kind of erroneous thinking - called promiscuous teleology - in young children. Seven and eight-year olds agree with teleological statements such as "Rocks are...

March 9, 2009 — The Permian extinction – one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on Earth, in which some 90% of species went extinct...is now being interpreted as a “nonevent” by four geologists. ... Robert Gastaldo and two geology colleagues from Colby College in Maine, and geologist Johann Neveling from Pretoria, studied the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and published a paper in Geology this month,1 titled, “The terrestrial Permian-Triassic boundary event bed is a nonevent.” ... Well, isn’t this an upset.  How much lag time will it take to change...

Stem Cells Does Their Origin Matter? Preserving life—it is extremely important in the Christian faith. But what is the biblical definition of life, and how does this definition affect stem cell research?God clearly commands in Exodus 20:13: “You shall not murder [the intentional, predatory killing of another]” (NIV; see also Matthew 19:18; Romans 13:9). A big controversy today is that of determining when life begins. In the field of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR), this determination is especially crucial. Because technology is advancing faster than society’s ethics, we are left to solve such dilemmas in the midst of active...

Critics of the Bible have often said that the writings of Genesis reflect an “unscientific view” of the universe—one that reflected the cosmology of the ancient world. One of these criticisms centers on the Hebrew word raqia used in the creation account of Genesis 1. Several Bible versions, such as the New King James, translate this word as firmament: Genesis 1:6–8, NJKV Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from...

Fish Studies Answer Flood Question by Brian Thomas, M.S.* According to the Bible, the world before Noah’s Flood, including the oceans, must have been idyllic. That was destroyed by the year-long global deluge, during which the earth’s land mass broke into continents, massive amounts of sediment were deposited and then partially eroded, and new and perhaps deeper oceans became more salty from continental runoff. If this historical picture is accurate, then at least one area of confusion needs to be addressed: How did “saltwater fish” live through all that?...

Elect Obama, Get Embryonic Stem CellsMarch 8, 2009 — President Obama is about to fulfill one of his campaign promises: lifting restrictions on creating new embryonic stem cell lines (see Fox News).  The question now is, are they really needed?  They have yet to show any successes, while adult stem cells are enjoying an accelerating boom of amazing discoveries that could provide hope for some of mankind’s worst disorders. (Note: ESC = embryonic stem cells, ASC = adult stem cells). Muscular dystrophy:  Children and adults plagued by the muscle-wasting malady of muscular dystrophy may now have hope thanks to...

That religious instruction constitutes child abuse is another theme of contemporary militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins and A. C. Grayling. Consider the competing 'truths' taught by different faith-based schools, e.g. that Jesus is the Son of God, that he is not, etc. Grayling complains that . . . in schools all over the country these antipathetic 'truths' are being force-fed to different groups of pupils, none of whom is in a position to assess their credibility or worth. This is a serious form of child abuse. It sows the seeds of apartheids capable of resulting, in their logical conclusion,...

What stopped Darwin discovering the laws of inheritance? Darwin devoted a large part of his life to understanding heredity. He wrote books on the subject. However, his views fluctuated with time, and historians have spent much time analysing the different ideas he entertained. "Darwin's conclusion from his studies on inheritance was always the same, that the rules and mechanisms of inheritance were complex and not ready for a definitive analysis." Darwin's conceptual model of evolution meant his experiments on inheritance were quite different from those of Mendel (source here)In a helpful analysis of the issues, Jonathan Howard of the University...

...Embarrassed Darwinists The next for consideration is Jonathan Wells and his Icons of Evolution. A stinging critique of ten familiar textbook evidences for evolution, Wells’ book provoked shrill cries of dismay from Darwinists, including Jerry Coyne and Eugenie Scott. Wells’ reply is highlighted as a rhetorically powerful rebuttal in which he catches his critics in scientific carelessness and in the debate tactic of ‘shifting the goalposts’. An example is the issue of embryonic homology—the Darwinian claim that embryos in various vertebrates look alike at various stages of development, and that this indicates common ancestry. Wells pointed out the extensive dissimilarities...

Expelling Design from Biology Professor Walter Bock introduces his short essay by referring to the letter Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1860: "I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design". Ernst Mayr took up the challenge and he also found a tension between his understanding of evolutionary theory and the need to use terms like "design" and "purposefulness". Mayr concluded: "Given all this, the conclusion is inevitable:...

In this issue: 1. ScienceNOW: “Early Humans Toed the Line” A fossilized footprint found in Kenya—thought to be 1.5 million years old—doesn’t look its age. 2. ScienceNOW: “The Catastrophe That Wasn’t” An ancient extinction wasn’t as sudden and catastrophic as once believed. Now, how does that reinforce the Flood model? 3. National Geographic News: “Oldest Fossil Brain Found in ‘Bizarre’ Prehistoric Fish” What’s so “remarkable” about the fossil preservation of a fish brain? 4. LiveScience: “Mars Volcano Could Harbor Life” After years and years of searching for life on Mars, scientists have finally found it. 5. BBC News: “The Danger...

Answering another uninformed atheist: Galileo, Miller–Urey, probability Published: 5 March 2009(GMT+10) Last week, we answered a poorly informed atheist about DNA complexity, and cited Gordy Slack, an evolutionist himself, agreeing that “some proponents of evolution are blind followers”. This week, we provide another example. Varun S. of Switzerland makes a number of false assertions that he could have corrected with a little study of our website. The letter is first posted in its entirety, then answered point by point by Dr Jonathan Sarfati. For my part, I’m a biologist first but more so an atheist. I see you are hell...

ROME — A Vatican-backed conference on evolution is under attack from people who weren't invited to participate: those espousing creationism and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, says it was shut out from presenting its views because the meeting was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, a major U.S. nonprofit that has criticized the intelligent design movement. Intelligent design holds that certain features of life forms are so complex that they can best be explained by an origin from an intelligent higher power, not an undirected process like natural selection. Organizers of...

A leading intelligent design proponent said Friday that views expressed this week at a Darwin conference in Rome should not be confused with the Vatican's position on intelligent design and Darwinism. Organisers of the March 3 to 7 conference, Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories, at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome had declined to invite intelligent design speakers because they felt the theory lacked scientific merit. Bruce Chapman, president of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, an intelligent design think tank, said he believes the Pope remains in serious "fruitful dialogue" with intelligent design even though speakers of the conference, sponsored by...

Creation: antidote for depression by Tas Walker ‘Now I realize why I’ve been depressed for so long’, a man with dishevelled hair, baggy clothes and unkempt beard told me after a meeting one evening. He said he had always accepted evolution was a fact. That night he realized that this evolutionary belief was the reason for his dark despair and feeling of emptiness....

Tubular Fish Eyes Defy Evolution by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Fully-functional and distinct eye designs are found throughout the animal world. They are diverse, and yet each one contains such highly specified interconnected parts that evolutionary scientists have admitted that they had to have evolved separately.1 Perhaps the most bizarre ocular structure is in the barreleye fish Macropinna microstoma.Recent research found that not only are these fish eyes shielded behind a crystal clear dome, the eyes can also rotate!2 Remarkable video of this unusual but functional visual setup is available on the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute’s website.3 The eyes typically are...

Are You Cereous?  Life Came from an Asteroid?March 5, 2009 — Ceres is an icy asteroid way out in space that has a lot of ice.  The DAWN spacecraft is heading there.  When it arrives in 2015, maybe it will find out if a substantial part of the water is in liquid state under an ice crust.  Say the word water, and some think... life.     Space.com reported that an astrobiologist has a new idea: life started on Ceres and then moved to Earth.  Believe it or not, it’s a radical new theory Joot Houtkooper told the International Society...

A Vatican-backed conference on evolution is under attack from people who weren't invited to participate: those espousing creationism and intelligent design. The Discovery Institute, the main organization supporting intelligent design research, says it was shut out from presenting its views because the meeting was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, a major U.S. nonprofit that has criticized the intelligent design movement. … Organizers of the five-day conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University said Thursday that they barred intelligent design proponents because they wanted an intellectually rigorous conference on science, theology and philosophy to mark the 150th anniversary of...

Ancient Human Footprints Look Modern by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Some scientists have estimated that sets of human footprints found on two separate but close sedimentary layers in Kenya are around 1.51 and 1.53 million years old1 and were made by humans like the “Turkana Boy,” an anatomically human fossil discovered within the same general area in 1984.2 But do these footprints clarify or confound the standard evolutionary explanations? The obvious “humanness” of these footprints highlights the fact that clear distinctions exist between humans and other creatures. LiveScience reported that these prints have “modern foot features such as a rounded heel,...