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Wednesday, 15 June 2022

Sacrifice without cost?

Chronicles21:24KJV" And king David said to Ornan, Nay; but I will verily buy it for the full price: for I will not take that which is thine for the LORD, nor offer burnt offerings without cost."


King David realized that a cost free sacrifice is in effect no sacrifice at all. Yet is this not the effect that Christendom's theology re: Christ being the God-man and unconditional immortality have on the supposed atonement. Christendom's reductive spiritualism has the effect of rendering the physical body (somos) worse than useless, a prison of rotting flesh that anchors our "real selves" to the ground during our probation on this earth. Surely being liberated from any prison is a blessing and not a sacrifice.


Matthew20:28KJV"Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life(gk.psyche) a ransom for many." 


Obviously if Christ's real self(soul) was immortal or if he was god-man or both he could not give his soul as a ransom. The mere liberation of his true self from its prison of flesh would constitute no genuine sacrifice. For Christ atonement offering to be genuinely  substitutionary his death would have to be identical in nature to that of the first Adam.


1Corithians15:21KJV"For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. "


And as to nature of the first Adam's death, let's not speculate, but let JEHOVAH'S word be the authority.


Genesis3:19KJV"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou RETURN unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou RETURN."


Thus Adam was to RETURN to his pre-creation state. That is what death meant to Adam. For the second Adam to to serve as a genuine substitute to the first and thus effect an atonement his death MUST have the same significance. 

Why we must give the members of Christendom's trinity a 'fail' in Godhood.

 What is meant by the expression fully God? The bible tells us that there is just one who is autotheos and thus entitled to absolute worship.

1Corinthians8:6NIV"yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came..."

John17:3KJV"And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God,..."

Biblical theology tells us that there are four qualities that set the Lord JEHOVAH apart as uniquely qualified to receive absolute worship.

1. He is both necessary and sufficient as the source and sustainer of life and everything required for its flourishing.

2. He is superlative in authority being without equal or even approximate.

3. He is totally immutable.

4. He is omnipotent/omniscient.

Can any member of Christendom's trinity thus be considered fully God in any meaningful sense?

Obviously no member of Christendom's triad can be both necessary and sufficient, as a first cause if any of the three are sufficient as a first cause the other two are made unnecessary and if all three are necessary none are sufficient.

As per the dictionary definition of superlative one can either be superlative or coequal but not both, thus none of Christendom's triad would qualify as superlative.

Malachi3:6ASV"For I, Jehovah, change not; therefore ye, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed."

According to Christendom, JEHOVAH'S plain declaration that he is not subject to even the least change actually means he is subject to infinite change thus he could become a creature subject to death. We reject the fantastic leaps of logic and mental contortions needed to concur with such nonsense. Thus here too, the members of Christendom's triad fail the test of Godhood as determined by Scripture.

Genesis17:1ASV"And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, Jehovah appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be thou perfect."

The declaration that JEHOVAH is the almighty God does not merely suggest that the Lord JEHOVAH is mightier than any other but that he is mightier than all others combined. Indeed he is bottomless reservoir of potential energy.

Isaiah40:28ASV"Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard? The everlasting God, JEHOVAH, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of his understanding."

If their are in fact two(or is it three) others as mighty as one then one is clearly not the mightiest thus we are forced to give the members of Christendom's triad another fail in the test of true Godhood.

The 'R' word?


Yet more evidence that I.D is already mainstream.

 Carl Sagan: “An Intelligence That Antedates the Universe”

Paul Nelson

The late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) is often seen as an exemplar of a certain attitude on the relationship of science and theology: skeptical, anti-religion, pro-naturalism. Abundant evidence supports this view of Sagan, but there are fascinating hints in both his technical and popular writings that Sagan’s understanding of design detection was far subtler and more open-ended than many realize. Like his British contemporary, the astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), Sagan left evidence that he might well have enjoyed conversations with intelligent design theorists. Such historical counterfactuals are tricky at best, of course, so let’s look at some of the available evidence, and the reader can speculate on her own.


Design Detection in the Galileo Mission

As a scientist on the Galileo interplanetary mission, Sagan designed experiments to be carried on the spacecraft to detect — as a proof-of-principle — the presence of life, but especially intelligent life, on Earth. During Galileo’s December 1990 fly-by of Earth, as the craft was getting a gravitational boost on its way out to the gas giants of the outer Solar System, its instruments indeed detected striking chemical disequilibria in Earth’s atmosphere, best explained by the presence of organisms.


But it was Galileo’s detection of “narrow-band, pulsed, amplitude-modulated radio transmissions” that seized the brass ring of design detection — where “design” means a pattern or event caused by an intelligence (with a mind), not a physical or chemical process. Sagan and colleagues (1993: 720) wrote:


The fact that the central frequencies of these signals remain constant over periods of hours strongly suggests an artificial origin. Naturally generated radio emissions almost always display significant long-term frequency drifts. Even more definitive is the existence of pulse-like amplitude modulations…such modulation patterns are never observed for naturally occurring radio emissions and implies the transmission of information. [Emphasis added.]


Only someone who conceived of “intelligence” as a kind of cause with unique and detectable indicia would bother setting up this proof-of-principle experiment. But it’s the evidence from Sagan’s popular writings that is especially provocative.


Design Detection in Sagan’s Novel Contact

The last chapter (24) of Sagan’s novel Contact (1985; later made into a film [1997] starring Jodie Foster) is an unmistakable example of number mysticism and design detection, using pi — the mathematical constant and irrational number expressing the ratio between the circumference of any circle and its diameter. Entitled “The Artist’s Signature,” the chapter opens with two epigraphs, as follows:


Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. 


1 COR. 15:51

The universe seems…to have been determined and ordered in accordance with the creator of all things; for the pattern was fixed, like a preliminary sketch, by the determination of number pre-existent in the mind of the world-creating God.


NICOMACHUS OF GERASA, ARITHMETIC I, 6 (CA. AD 100)

This passage, from the very end of the chapter — and the book — bears quoting. Sagan places the whole section in italics for emphasis:


The universe was made on purpose, the circle said…As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you’ll find it. It’s already here. It’s inside everything. You don’t have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. [Emphasis added.]


Design’s Narrative Power

Of course, Contact is a novel, not a scientific or philosophical treatise. Sagan was writing for drama (Contact actually started out as a movie treatment in 1980-81). But rather like his contemporaries Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, Sagan loved to play around with concepts of design detection and non-human intelligence. Their narrative power was undeniable.


And that sentence — “there is an intelligence that antedates the universe” — come on, that’s being deliberately provocative. In any case, mathematical objects such as pi, or prime numbers, have long held a special status as design indicia. The atheist radio astronomer and SETI researcher Jill Tarter, the real-life model for the Elli Arroway / Jodi Foster character in Contact, has said that she would regard the decimal expansion of pi, if detected by a radio telescope, as a gold-standard indicator of extraterrestrial intelligence.


Sagan and Intelligent Design

In 1985, when Contact was first published, intelligent design as an intellectual position was largely confined to the edges of academic philosophy, in the work of people such as the Canadian philosopher John Leslie, and a few hardy souls in the neighborhood of books like Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen, The Mystery of Life’s Origin (1984).


So Sagan (and Fred Hoyle, whose sci-fi novel The Black Cloud was credited by Richard Dawkins as the book having the greatest influence on him; the story opens with a design inference) could afford to play with notions of design detection, non-human intelligences, and the like. These ideas, which are exciting and full of fascinating implications, posed little risk to the dominance of naturalism in science. Detecting non-human intelligence made for good sci-fi.


When ID appeared to become a real cultural threat, however — as it did starting in the mid 1990s in the United States — the dynamic shifted. Still, while Sagan was anti-religious, he was decidedly not anti-design, in the generic sense of the detectability of intelligent causation as a mode distinct from ordinary physical causation. In any case, he died in 1996, and therefore missed the coming high points of the ID debate. Others took up the skeptical mantle, to make sure that design never found a footing in science proper.


As boundary-pushers, both Sagan and Hoyle caught plenty of flak during their lifetimes. Sagan, for instance, was never elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Both paid a price for their popularity and willingness to write novels toying with non-human intelligences. It is interesting, then, to wonder how Sagan would have responded to ID, as articulated by Michael Behe, William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, etc., and how he might have separated his own views from it.


Historical counterfactuals are a playground. Play fairly, and share the equipment.


molecular clocks to the rescue?

 Molecular Clocks Can’t Save Darwinists from the Cambrian Dilemma

David Coppedge

To explain away the Cambrian explosion has been and remains a high priority for Darwinists. Current Biology published one such attempt. On reading certain parts, you might think the authors, including Maximilian Telford, Philip Donoghue, and Ziheng Yang, have solved the problem. Indeed, their first Highlight in the paper summary claims, “Molecular clock analysis indicates an ancient origin of animals in the Cryogenian.” (Cryogenian refers to the Precambrian “cold birth” era about 720 to 635 million years ago.) By itself that statement would be misleading, because the title of the open-access paper is pessimistic: “Uncertainty in the Timing of Origin of Animals and the Limits of Precision in Molecular Timescales.”


Yang appeared briefly in Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt with bad news. Meyer cited a paper Yang co-authored with Aris-Brosou in 2011 showing that molecular clock analyses are unreliable. They “found that depending on which genes and which estimation methods were employed, the last common ancestor of protostomes or deuterostomes (two broadly different types of Cambrian animals) might have lived anywhere between 452 million years and 2 billion years ago” (Meyer, p. 106). 


Nothing has changed since then. The bottom line after a lot of wrangling with numbers, strategies, and analyses is that all current methods of dating the ancestors of the Cambrian animals from molecular clocks are imprecise and uncertain. They cannot be trusted to diffuse the explosion by rooting the animal ancestors earlier in the Precambrian.


Although a Cryogenian origin of crown Metazoa agrees with current geological interpretations, the divergence dates of the bilaterians remain controversial. Thus, attempts to build evolutionary narratives of early animal evolution based on molecular clock timescales appear to be premature. [Emphasis added.]


Check Out the Euphemisms

Translated into plain English, that means, “We can’t tell our favorite evolutionary story because the clock is broken, but we’re working on it.”


In the paper, they provide an analysis of molecular clock data. It’s clear they believe that all the data place the root of the divergence in the Ediacaran or earlier, 100 million years or more before the Cambrian, but can they really defend their belief? They have to admit severe empirical limits:


Here we use an unprecedented amount of molecular data, combined with four fossil calibration strategies (reflecting disparate and controversial interpretations of the metazoan fossil record) to obtain Bayesian estimates of metazoan divergence times. Our results indicate that the uncertain nature of ancient fossils and violations of the molecular clock impose a limit on the precision that can be achieved in estimates of ancient molecular timescales.


Perhaps, a defender might interrupt, the precision, admittedly limited, is good enough. But then, there are those pesky fossils! The molecular clocks are fuzzily in agreement about ancestors in the Precambrian, but none of them has support from the very best observational evidence: the record of the rocks. Even the phyla claimed to exist before the explosion are contested:


Unequivocal fossil evidence of animals is limited to the Phanerozoic [i.e., the modern eon from Cambrian to recent, where animals are plentiful]. Older records of animals are controversial: organic biomarkers indicative of demosponges are apparently derived ultimately from now symbiotic bacteria; putative animal embryo fossils are alternately interpreted as protists; and contested reports of sponges, molluscs, and innumerable cnidarians, as well as putative traces of eumetazoan or bilaterian grade animals, all from the Ediacaran. Certainly, there are no unequivocal records of crown-group bilaterians prior to the Cambrian, and robust evidence for bilaterian phyla does not occur until some 20 million years into the Cambrian.


This severely limits their ability to “calibrate” the molecular clock. Meyer granted the possible existence of three Precambrian phyla (sponges, molluscs, and cnidarians). But there are twenty other phyla that make their first appearance in the Cambrian, many of them far more complex than sponges. What good are the molecular methods if you can’t see any of the ancestors in the rocks?


Missing Ancestors

The authors admit that the Precambrian strata were capable of preserving the ancestors if they existed. 


No matter how imprecise, our timescale for metazoan diversification still indicates a mismatch between the fossil evidence used to calibrate the molecular clock analyses and the resulting divergence time estimates. This is not altogether surprising since, by definition, minimum constraints of clade ages anticipate their antiquity. Nevertheless, it is the extent of this prehistory that is surprising, particularly since the conditions required for exceptional fossil preservation, so key to evidencing the existence of animal phyla in the early Cambrian, obtained also in the Ediacaran.


The only way they can maintain their belief that the ancestors are way back earlier is to discount the fossil evidence as “negative evidence” and to put their trust in the molecular evidence. But how can they trust it, when the answers vary all over the place, depending on the methods used? One clever method is called “rate variation.” Would you trust a clock that has a variable rate? How about one fast-ticking clock for one animal, and a slow-ticking clock for another? 


When rate variation across a phylogeny is extreme (that is, when the molecular clock is seriously violated), the rates calculated on one part of the phylogeny will serve as a poor proxy for estimating divergence times in other parts of the tree. In such instances, divergence time estimation is challenging and the analysis becomes sensitive to the rate model used.


They try their trees with steady rates and with varying rates (“relaxed clock models” — amusing term). They try data partitioning. They try Bayesian analysis. None of them agree. Meyer discussed molecular clock problems in detail in Chapter 5 of Darwin’s Doubt. There’s nothing new here. “Here we show that the precision of molecular clock estimates of times has been grossly over-estimated,” they conclude. “….An evolutionary timescale for metazoan diversification that accommodates these uncertainties has precision that is insufficient to discriminate among causal hypotheses.” In the end, these evolutionists have to admit that fossils would be much, much better:


Above all, establishing unequivocal evidence for the presence of metazoan clades in the late Neoproterozoic, as well as for the absence in more ancient strata, will probably have more impact than any methodological advance in improving the accuracy and precision of divergence time estimates for deep metazoan phylogeny. Realizing the aim of a timescale of early animal evolution that is not merely accurate, but sufficiently precise to effect tests of hypotheses on the causes and consequences of early animal evolution, will require improved models of trait evolution and improved algorithms to allow analysis of genome-scale sequence data in tandem with morphological characters.


Wait a Minute

Isn’t that what Darwin provided — a model of trait evolution? Wasn’t it natural selection of gradual variations? Let’s parse this interesting quote that mentions Darwin:


The timing of the emergence of animals has troubled evolutionary biologists at least since Darwin, who was sufficiently incredulous that he considered the abrupt appearance of animal fossils in the Cambrian as a challenge to his theory of evolution by natural selection. There has been, as a result, a long history of attempts to rationalize a rapid radiation of animals through theories of non-uniform evolutionary processes, such as homeotic mutations, removal of environmental restrictions on larger body sizes, through to the assembly of gene regulation kernels — proposed both as an explanation for rapid rates of innovation followed by subsequent constraint against fundamental innovation of new body plans after the Cambrian. Indeed, there have been explicit attempts to accommodate rapid rates of phenotypic evolution in the early Cambrian, compatible with these hypotheses and a semi-literal (albeit phylogenetically constrained) reading of the fossil record.


And yet our results, as have others before them, suggest that there is no justification for invoking non-uniform mechanisms to explain the emergence of animals and their phylum-level body plans.


That phrase “semi-literal (albeit phylogenetically constrained) reading of the fossil record” is curious. How else are you supposed to read it? They are saying that you have to read the fossil record with Darwin-colored glasses to see it correctly. 


But they’re trying to have it both ways. They want a slow-and-gradual fuse leading up to the Cambrian explosion (disliking “non-uniform evolutionary processes”), which requires a non-literal reading of the fossil record with Darwin glasses on, but they can’t take the molecular data literally either, because it is so method-dependent. You can almost hear them crying out for fossils. As Meyer’s book shows, the fossil record is more explosive now than it was in Darwin’s time.


The Information Enigma Again

Notice how they mention “the emergence of animals and their phylum-level body plans.” How do you get the information to build a phylum-level body plan? Once again, these authors ignore the information issue completely. They say, “Much of the molecular genetic toolkit required for animal development originated deep in eukaryote evolutionary history,” skirting past that with a lateral reference to a paper about a microbe that had no animal body plan. Talk of “emergence” just doesn’t cut it. What is the source of the information to build an animal body plan composed of multiple new cell types and tissues, with 3-D organization and integrated systems like sensory organisms, locomotion, and digestive tracts? Is there an evolutionist who will please answer Meyer’s primary challenge? 

As we’ve seen over and over again, many Darwinian evolutionists think they have done their job if they can just push the ancestry back in time. The fossil record doesn’t allow it, but even if it did, it wouldn’t solve the information problem. Calling it “emergence” is unsatisfactory. Calling it “innovation” is unsatisfactory. Calling it latent potential waiting for environmental factors like heat or oxygen is unsatisfactory. Answer the question: what is the source of the information to build twenty new animal body plans that appeared suddenly in the Cambrian without ancestors? We have an answer: intelligence. What’s yours?

Reductive materialism fails to account for mind.

 Can Self-Organization Theory Account for Consciousness?

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian, author of The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity (2022), offers a self-organization theory approach to the reality of the mind:


Most neuroscientists believe that consciousness arises when harmonized global activity emerges from the coordinated interactions of billions of neurons. This is because the synchronized firing of brain cells integrates information from multiple processing streams into a unified field of experience. This global activity is made possible by loops in the form of feedback. When feedback is present in a system, it means there is some form of self-reference at work, and in nervous systems, it can be a sign of self-modeling. Feedback loops running from one brain region to another integrate information and bind features into a cohesive perceptual landscape.


When does the light of subjective experience go out? When the feedback loops cease, because it is these loops that harmonize neural activity and bring about the global integration of information. When feedback is disrupted, the brain still keeps on ticking, functioning physiologically and controlling involuntary functions, but consciousness dissolves. The mental model is still embedded in the brain’s architecture, but the observer fades as the self-referential process of real-time self-modeling ceases to produce a “self.” 


BOBBY AZARIAN, “THE MIND IS MORE THAN A MACHINE” AT NOEMA (JUNE 9, 2022)

One difficulty that arises is that many human beings produce a “self” with split brains, a brain missing key components, or only half a brain, (or maybe less). That’s real but not consistent with the materialist model that Azarian outlines.


“The Missing Puzzle Piece”?

He goes on to say,


Could self-reference be the missing puzzle piece that allows for truly intelligent AIs, and maybe even someday sentient machines? Only time will tell, but Simon DeDeo, a complexity scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the Santa Fe Institute, seems to think so: “Great progress in physics came from taking relativity seriously. We ought to expect something similar here: Success in the project of general artificial intelligence may require we take seriously the relativity implied by self-reference.”


BOBBY AZARIAN, “THE MIND IS MORE THAN A MACHINE” AT NOEMA (JUNE 9, 2022)

But wait. What’s this about “self”-reference? Machines, as we know them, don’t have a self.


Read the rest at Mind Matters News, published by Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.