Censorship is for the greater good?

My problem with Postmillenialism.

 Daniel2:35KJV"Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth."

Daniel2:44KJV"And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever."

Revelation20:11KJV"And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them."

Note please that the Rule of JEHOVAH'S kingdom over this earth takes place after the destruction of the present human kingdoms there is to be no millennium of parallel rule between JEHOVAH'S kingdom and Satan's empire.

Revelation20:6KJV"Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years."

1Corinthians15:23KJV"But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming(Parousia)."

John6:39KJV"And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day."

Note that the millenium Follows the first resurrection which follows the beginning of Christ parousia Paul makes it clear that the present age is not the time for Christians to seek any dominion over the earth or any part thereof."Now ye are full, now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you."

Hebrews2:8KJV"Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see NOT YET all things put under him." 

Evidently Paul did not think that Christ millenial reign had begun. 

Why the Origin Of Life remains darwinism's unicorn. III

Frankenstein and His Offspring

Neil Thomas

 

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the sixth article in the series. Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).

I have been writing about the neologism “abiogenesis” (see earlier posts here and here). Like “panspermia,”¹ it is but one example of an old concept (it was first mooted by Svante Arrhenius in 1903) which periodically undergoes a curious form of (intellectual) cryogenic freezing only to reappear after a decent lapse of time and memory to be presented afresh under a revamped name² as an idea claimed to be worth a second look. 

In essence it seems to draw its strength from pseudo-scientific folk-beliefs that life could somehow be made to emerge from non-life, a conception most notably exploited (and obliquely criticized) in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In another example of the literary/media intelligentsia being ahead of the curve, the refusal of the discredited spontaneous generation to give up the ghost gave that anarchic auteur Mel Brooks ample raw material to ridicule the atavistic misconception in his inspired 1974 comic movie, Young Frankenstein.

Two American Scientists

For those who did not catch this laugh-out-loud film: the engaging anti-hero, played by the inimitable Gene Wilder, scion of the notorious Baron Frankenstein, at first does everything possible to put distance between himself and his notorious ancestor, whom he memorably dismisses before a class of his students as a “kook,” and thereafter insists on his surname being pronounced Frankensteen. However, the temptation to attempt the impossible “one last time” proves too much either for “Dr. Frankensteen” (whom the film shows reverting to type when he latterly de-Americanizes his surname to Frankenstein) or, it appears, for two American scientists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, to resist. 

Most of us probably remember Brooks’s oeuvre as being of a somewhat variable standards, but in amongst the pure goofery of Young Frankenstein, as Brooks himself put it in an interview, the film contained an unmistakably satirical thrust because “the doctor (Wilder) is undertaking the quest to defeat death — to challenge God.”³ That is a not inappropriate epitaph for the Miller-Urey experiment as well as its later avatars, it might be thought.

Next, the final post in this series, “Existential Implications of the Miller-Urey Experiment.”

Notes

1. The (unfounded) notion that life was “seeded” on Earth after having been wafted to here from distant planets — a much-derided notion but one which still re-emerges from time to time as a somewhat desperate kite-flying exercise on the part of some scientists who, now as ever, remain at a loss to account for the emergence of animal and human life on earth.
2. Aristotle had termed it spontaneous generation.
3. Cited by Patrick McGilligan in his biography, Funny Man: Mel Brooks (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), p. 355.

 

Why the Origin Of Life remains darwinism's unicorn II

Imagining “Abiogenesis”: Crick, Watson, and Franklin

Neil Thomas

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the fifth article in the series. Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).

I wrote here yesterday about the Miller-Urey experiment at the University of Chicago in 1953 as an effort to investigate the possibility of spontaneous generation. To be fair to both distinguished collaborators, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, this was no desperate shot in the dark to bolster materialist thinking. They had clearly done all the requisite preparation for their task. Miller and Urey (a later recipient of the Nobel Prize) theorized that if the conditions prevailing on primeval Earth were reproduced in laboratory conditions, such conditions might prove conducive to a chemical synthesis of living material. 

To Produce Life

To abbreviate a long, more complex short, they caused an electric spark to pass through a mixture of methane, hydrogen, ammonia, and water to simulate the kind of energy which might have come from thunderstorms on the ancient Earth. The resulting liquid turned out to contain amino acids which, though not living molecules themselves, are the building blocks of proteins, essential to the construction of life.¹ However, the complete chemical pathway hoped for by many was not to materialize. In fact, the unlikelihood of such a materialization was underscored in the very same year that the Miller-Urey experiment took place when Francis Crick, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin succeeded in identifying the famous double helix of DNA. Their discovery revealed, amongst other things, that even if amino acids could somehow be induced to form proteins, this would still not be enough to produce life. 

Despite over-optimistic press hype in the 1950s, which came to include inter alia fulsome eulogizing by Carl Sagan, it has in more recent decades been all but conceded that life is unlikely to form at random from the so-called “prebiotic” substrate on which scientists had previously pinned so much hope.  To be sure, there are some biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, who still pin their faith in ideas which have resulted only in blankly negative experimental results.² Some notions, it appears, will never completely die for some, despite having been put to the scientific sword on numerous occasions — as long of course as they hold out the promise of a strictly materialist explanation of reality.

Next, “Frankenstein and His Offspring.”

Notes

1. Inside human cells, coded messages in the DNA are translated by RNA into working molecules of protein, which is responsible for life’s functions.
2. “Organic molecules, some of them of the same general type as are normally only found in living things, have spontaneously assembled themselves in these flasks. Neither DNA nor RNA has appeared, but the building blocks of these large molecules, called purines and pyrimidines, have. So have the building blocks of proteins, amino acids. The missing link for this class of theories is still the origin of replication. The building   blocks haven’t come together to form a self-replicating chain like RNA. Maybe one day they will.”  (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, London: Penguin, 1986, p. 43)

 

Why the Origin of Life remains darwinism's unicorn.

Considering “Abiogenesis,” an Imaginary Term in Science

Neil Thomas

 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a series by Neil Thomas, Reader Emeritus at the University of Durham, “Why Words Matter: Sense and Nonsense in Science.” This is the fourth article in the series. Find the full series so far here. Professor Thomas’s recent book is Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design (Discovery Institute Press).

Words are cheap and, in science as in other contexts, they can be used to cover up and camouflage a multitude of areas of ignorance. In this series so far, I have dealt summarily with several such terms, since I anticipated that they are already familiar to readers, and as I did not wish to belabor my fundamental point. 

“Just Words”

I would, however, like to discuss in somewhat more detail a term which is well enough known but whose manifold implications may not even now, it appears to me, have been appreciated to their full extent. This is the historically recent neologism “abiogenesis” — meaning spontaneous generation of life from a combination of unknown chemical substances held to provide a quasi-magical bridge from chemistry to biology. This term, when subjected to strict logical parsing, I will argue, undermines the very notion of what is commonly understood by Darwinian evolution since it represents a purely notional, imaginary term which might also (in my judgment) be usefully relegated to the category of “just words.”

The greatest problem for the acceptance of Darwinism as a self-standing and logically coherent theory is the unsolved mystery of the absolute origin of life on earth, a subject which Charles Darwin tried to bat away as, if not a total irrelevance, then as something beyond his competence to pronounce on. Even today Darwinian supporters will downplay the subject of the origins of life as a matter extraneous to the subject of natural selection. It is not. It is absolutely foundational to the integrity of natural selection as a conceptually satisfactory theory, and evolutionary science cannot logically even approach the starting blocks of its conjectures without cracking this unsolved problem, as the late 19th-century German scientist Ludwig Buechner pointed out.¹

Chicago 1953: Miller and Urey

Darwin famously put forward in a letter the speculation of life having been spontaneously generated in a small warm pool, but did he not follow up on the hunch experimentally. This challenge was left to Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, two much later intellectual legatees in the middle of the 20th century who, in defiance of previous expert opinion, staged an unusual experiment. The remote hinterland of this experiment was as follows. In the 17th century, medical pioneer Sir William Harvey and Italian scientist Francesco Redi both proved the untenability of spontaneous generation: only life can produce life, a finding later to be upheld by French scientist Louis Pasteur in the latter half of the 19th century; but the two Americans proceeded on regardless. 

Far-Reaching Theological Implications

There is no getting away from the fact that the three-fold confirmation of the impossibility of spontaneous generation by respected scientists working independently of each other in different centuries brought with it far-reaching theological implications. For if natural processes could not account for life’s origins, then the only alternative would be a superior force standing outside and above nature but with the power to initiate nature’s processes. The three distinguished scientists were in effect and by implication ruling out any theory for the origin of life bar that of supranatural creation. So it was hardly surprising that there emerged in later time a reaction against their “triple lock” on the issue.

In what was shaping up to become the largely post-Christian 20th century in Europe, the untenability of the abiogenesis postulate was resisted by many in the scientific world on purely ideological grounds. The accelerating secularizing trends of the early 20th century meant that the outdated and disproven notion of spontaneous generation was nevertheless kept alive on a form of intellectual life-support despite the abundant evidence pointing to its unviability.

For presently both the Russian biologist Alexander Oparin and the British scientist John Haldane stepped forward to revive the idea in the 1920s. The formal experiment to investigate the possibility of spontaneous generation had then to wait a few decades more before the bespoke procedure to test its viability in laboratory conditions was announced by the distinguished team of Miller and Urey of the University of Chicago in 1953. Clearly the unspoken hope behind this now (in)famous experiment was the possibility that Pasteur, Harvey, and Redi might have been wrong to impose their “triple lock” and that mid 20th-century advances might discover a solution where predecessors had failed. If ever there was an attempt to impose a social/ideological construction of reality on science in line with materialist thinking, this was it.

Next, “Imagining ‘Abiogenesis’: Crick, Watson, and Franklin.”

Notes

1. For the reception of Darwin in Germany, see Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwin in Germany, 1860-1914 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1981).

 

And still yet even more on why I.D is already mainstream.

SETI Activists Still Don’t Get the Irony

David Coppedge

 

 

SETI is on a roll again. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence oscillates in popularity although it has rumbled on since the 1970s like a carrier tone, waiting for a spike to stand out above the cosmic noise. Instrument searches are largely automated these days. Once in a while somebody raises the subject of SETI above the hum of scientific news. The principal organization behind SETI has been busily humming in the background but now has a message to broadcast.

The SETI Institute announced that the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico has been outfitted to stream data for “technosignature research.” Technosignatures are the new buzzword in SETI. Unlike the old attempts to detect meaningful messages like How to Serve Man, the search for technosignatures involves looking for “signs of technology not caused by natural phenomena.” Hold that thought for later.

COSMIC SETI (the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) took a big step towards using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) for 24/7 SETI observations. Fiber optic amplifiers and splitters are now installed for all 27 VLA antennas, giving COSMIC access to a complete and independent copy of the data streams from the entire VLA. In addition, the COSMIC system has used these links to successfully acquire VLA data, and the primary focus now is on developing the high-performance GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) code for analyzing data for the possible presence of technosignatures. [Emphasis added.]

A “Golden Fleece Award”

Use of government funding for SETI has been frowned on ever since Senator William Proxmire gave it his infamous “Golden Fleece Award” in 1979, and got it cancelled altogether three years later. The SETI Institute learned from that shaming incident to conceal its aims in more recondite jargon, and “technosignatures” fills the bill nicely. So how did they succeed in getting help from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to use a government facility? Basically, it’s just a data sharing arrangement. COSMIC will not interfere with the VLA’s ongoing work but will tap into the data stream. With access to 82 dishes each 25 meters linked by interferometry, this constitutes a data bonanza for the SETI Institute — the next best thing to Project Cyclops that riled Proxmire with its proposed 1,000 dishes costing half a billion dollars back at a time when a billion dollars was real money.

Another method that the SETI Institute is employing is looking for laser pulses over wide patches of the night sky. Last year, the institute announced progress in installing a second LaserSETI site at the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii with the cooperation of the University of Hawaii. The first one is at Robert Ferguson Observatory in Sonoma, California. No tax dollars are being spent on these initiatives.

Initial funding for LaserSETI was raised through a crowdfunding campaign in 2017, with additional financing provided through private donations. The plan calls for ten more instruments deployed in Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and Chile. When this phase is complete, the system will be able to monitor the nighttime sky in roughly half of the western hemisphere.

Unprecedented Searches

This brings up another reason for growing SETI news: technological advancements are making possible unprecedented searches. “Each LaserSETI device consists of two identical cameras rotated 90 degrees to one another along the viewing axis,” they say. “They work by using a transmission grating to split light sources up into spectra, then read the camera out more than a thousand times per second.” This optical form of search differs from the traditional radio wave searches of the past, and is once again a hunt for technosignatures.

Writing for Universe Today, Evan Gough connected the search for biosignatures, such as microbes being sought by Mars Rovers, with technosignatures being sought by the SETI Institute. 

The search for biosignatures is gaining momentum. If we can find atmospheric indications of life at another planet or moon — things like methane and nitrous oxide and a host of other chemical compounds — then we can wonder if living things produced them. But the search for technosignatures raises the level of the game. Only a technological civilization can produce technosignatures.

NASA has long promoted the search for biosignatures. Its Astrobiology programs that began with the Mars Meteorite in 1997 have continued despite later conclusions that the structures in the rock were abiotic. In the intervening years, astrobiology projects have been deemed taxpayer worthy, but SETI projects have not. That may be changing. Marina Koen wrote for The Atlantic in 2018 that the search for technosignatures has gained a little support in Congress, boosted by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets from the Kepler Mission. SETI Institute’s senior astronomer Seth Shostak has become friends with one congressman.

“Kepler showed us that planets are as common as cheap motels, so that was a step along the road to finding other life because at least there’s the real estate,” says Shostak. “That doesn’t mean there’s any life there, but at least there are planets.”

Decadal Survey on Astronomy

Gough mentions the Decadal Survey on Astronomy, named Astro2020, that was released in 2021 from the National Academies of Sciences (NAS). It contained initiatives that could overlap astrobiology with SETI by extending searches for biosignatures to searches for technosignatures. Worded that way, they don’t seem that far apart. One white paper specifically linked the two:

The Astro2020 report outlines numerous recommendations that could significantly advance technosignature science. Technosignatures refer to any observable manifestations of extraterrestrial technology, and the search for technosignatures is part of the continuum of the astrobiological search for biosignatures (National Academies of Sciences 2019a,b). The search for technosignatures is directly relevant to the “World and Suns in Context” theme and “Pathways to Habitable Worlds” program in the Astro2020 report. The relevance of technosignatures was explicitly mentioned in “E1 Report of the Panel on Exoplanets, Astrobiology, and the Solar System,” which stated that “life’s global impacts on a planet’s atmosphere, surface, and temporal behavior may therefore manifest as potentially detectable exoplanet biosignatures, or technosignatures” and that potential technosignatures, much like biosignatures, must be carefully analyzed to mitigate false positives. The connection of technosignatures to this high-level theme and program can be emphasized, as the report makes clear the purpose is to address the question “Are we alone?” This question is also presented in the Explore Science 2020-2024 plan1 as a driver of NASA’s mission.

The most likely technosignature that could be seen at stellar distances, unfortunately for the SETI enthusiasts, would have to be on the scale of a Dyson Sphere: a theoretical shield imagined by Freeman Dyson that collects all the energy from a dying star by a desperate civilization trying to preserve itself from a heat death (see the graphic in Gough’s article). The point is that such a “massive engineering structure” would require the abilities of intelligent beings with foresight and planning much grander than ours. 

Hunting for technosignatures is less satisfying than “Contact” — it lacks the relationship factor. It’s like eavesdropping instead of conversing. We can only wonder what kind of beings would make such things. Maybe the signatures are like elaborate bird nests, interesting but instinctive. Worse, maybe the signatures have a natural explanation we don’t yet understand.

A unique feature of intelligent life, SETI enthusiasts often assume, is the desire to communicate. We’ll explore that angle of SETI next time.