On the devaluing of the body.

Nature Worship Advances as Human Dignity Retreats 

Wesley J. Smith 

The New York Times has a long article out promoting human composting as a means of final disposition. The idea is to quickly turn bodies into dirt and then plant flowers in the remains or return the compost to the forest as fertilizer.

I have no objection to composting the dead being legal, as it now is in five states, and soon, apparently, in New York. But the story illustrates how profoundly traditional Christianity has collapsed in the West, and indeed, the meteoric growth of what might be called a nature worshipping neo-paganistic ethos: Per the Times:

I visited another forest in Southern Washington. After decades of depletion by logging, this forest had been taken over by a conservation organization with a special mission. A golf cart drove me along a re-wilding logging path, up to a field of dark-brown compost. The soil in this compost had once made up the bodies of 28 different humans: now, all were one, part of the woods around them. These 28 people chose to donate their soil to help regrow native trees and eventually bring shade to a salmon-spawning stream. 

Notice the anonymity of the deceased. Notice that, unlike traditional Christian burial practices, with human composting, the body itself has no real meaning. 

Body and Soul 

Yes, Christianity understands that, as Ash Wednesday has it, dust we were and dust we shall be. But that’s not all we are or will be in traditional Christian practice. Indeed, the dead body has value because the human person does. For example, the Orthodox Church believes: 

Not only do the Orthodox revere the body, but we also acknowledge the part our physical bodies play in our salvation. Our bodies are just as valuable as our souls. According to Holy Tradition and Scripture, we will be resurrected in our physical bodies at the Second Coming of Our Lord. We must take care of our bodies, feeding them properly, getting adequate rest, and healing them with the Holy Mysteries.

Today, many Western Christians now allow cremation, in light of the fact that its association with paganism or Gnosticism is no longer a reality. However, the Orthodox Church asserts that voluntary cremation, regardless of its detachment from pagan thought or ritual, in every instance denies the value of the human body and of material creation in general. Hence, we as Orthodox Christians are to avoid it. 

Human Life and Human Dignity 

How we treat our dead reflects our views on what we think about the living. In this sense, human composting — and even more so, another growing practice of liquifying bodies and pouring the remains into the sewer — reflects a disturbing mindset that denies ultimate meaning to human life and views us, essentially, as just another animal in the forest. At the very least, these innovations reflect a lamentable, accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian values that undergird Western Civilization. 

Ps. The lack of self awareness on display here compels me to rant some more about Christendom's thought leaders' inability/reluctance to take the premises of their theology to it's logical conclusion ,acts17:32NIV"When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, " why? Because they took the premise of an immortal true self to its logical conclusion. If the self is concretely distinct from the physical form and immortal it is absurd to speak of a resurrection. 

1Corinthians15:36NIV"36How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." 

No death no resurrection. There can be a re-embodying or a reincarnation but not a resurrection. 

All neo pagans are doing is reclaiming a doctrine expropriated from its palaeo-pagan forbearers by Christendom's theologians and taking its premises to their logical conclusions 

 

The failure of Darwinism as a predictive model V

 By Cornelius G Hunter 

Protein coding genes make up only a small fraction of the genome in higher organisms but their protein products are crucial to the operation of the cell. They are the workers behind just about every task in the cell, including digesting food, synthesizing chemicals, structural support, energy conversion, cell reproduction and making new proteins. And like a finely tuned machine, proteins do their work very well. Proteins are ubiquitous in all of life and must date back to the very early stages of evolution. So evolution predicts that proteins evolved when life first appeared, or not long after. But despite enormous research efforts the science clearly shows that such protein evolution is astronomically unlikely.

One reason the evolution of proteins is so difficult is that most proteins are extremely specific designs in an otherwise rugged fitness landscape. This means it is difficult for natural selection to guide mutations toward the needed proteins. In fact, four different studies, done by different groups and using different methods, all report that roughly 1070 evolutionary experiments would be needed to get close enough to a workable protein before natural selection could take over to refine the protein design. For instance, one study concluded that 1063 attempts would be required for a relatively short protein. (Reidhaar-Olson) And a similar result (1065 attempts required) was obtained by comparing protein sequences. (Yockey) Another study found that from 1064 to 1077 attempts are required (Axe) and another study concluded that 1070 attempts would be required. (Hayashi) In that case the protein was only a part of a larger protein which otherwise was intact, thus making for an easier search. Furthermore these estimates are optimistic because the experiments searched only for single-function proteins whereas real proteins perform many functions.

This conservative estimate of 1070 attempts required to evolve a simple protein is astronomically larger than the number of attempts that are feasible. And explanations of how evolution could achieve a large number of searches, or somehow obviate this requirement, require the preexistence of proteins and so are circular. For example, one paper estimated that evolution could have made 1043 such attempts. But the study assumed the entire history of the Earth is available, rather than the limited time window that evolution actually would have had. Even more importantly, it assumed the preexistence of a large population of bacteria (it assumed the earth was completely covered with bacteria). And of course, bacteria are full of proteins. Clearly such bacteria would not exist before the first proteins evolved. (Dryden) Even with these helpful and unrealistic assumptions the result was twenty seven orders of magnitude short of the requirement.

Given these several significant problems, the chances of evolution finding proteins from a random start are, as one evolutionist explained, “highly unlikely.” (Tautz) Or as another evolutionist put it, “Although the origin of the first, primordial genes may ultimately be traced back to some precursors in the so-called ‘RNA world’ billions of years ago, their origins remain enigmatic.” (Kaessmann) 

References 

Axe, D. 2004. “Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds.” J Molecular Biology 341:1295-1315.

Dryden, David, Andrew Thomson, John White. 2008. “How much of protein sequence space has been explored by life on Earth?.” J. Royal Society Interface 5:953-956.

Hayashi, Y., T. Aita, H. Toyota, Y. Husimi, I. Urabe, T. Yomo. 2006. “Experimental Rugged Fitness Landscape in Protein Sequence Space.” PLoS ONE 1:e96.

Kaessmann, H. 2010. “Origins, evolution, and phenotypic impact of new genes.” Genome Research 10:1313-26.

Reidhaar-Olson J., R. Sauer. 1990. “Functionally acceptable substitutions in two alpha-helical regions of lambda repressor.” Proteins 7:306-316.

Tautz, Diethard, Tomislav Domazet-Lošo. 2011. “The evolutionary origin of orphan genes.” Nature Reviews Genetics 12:692-702.

Yockey, Hubert. 1977. “A calculation of the probability of spontaneous biogenesis by information theory.” J Theoretical Biology 67:377–398.

On acknowledging the thumb print of JEHOVAH.

God Hypothesis: In Defense of Stephen Meyer’s Book Title 

Michael Egnor 

A friend and interlocutor, the philosopher Edward Feser, takes exception to the title of Stephen Meyer’s recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis.

Responding to a tweet from David Klingoffer, Dr. Feser writes: 

With all due respect, the phrase “the God hypothesis” gets my hackles up. If X is something on which the world might merely “hypothetically” depend then X isn’t God. An argument gets to God only if it establishes the reality of an X on which the world couldn’t fail to depend.

Hence arguments that present theism as a “hypothesis” are — qua arguments for theism — time-wasters at best and indeed cause positive harm insofar as they yield a distorted conception of God and his relation to the world.

That is not to rule out a priori the possibility that considerations of the kind raised by Meyer point to real difficulties with some particular naturalistic theory, or indeed with naturalism as such as it is generally understood today. And that’s important.

But to criticize naturalism is not by itself sufficient to establish theism. The relationship between the two sets of issues is more complex than that. Moreover, the arguments that explain the rationale of theism take the form of demonstrations (not mere hypotheses), and proceed from premises that go deeper than particular facts about this or that empirical phenomenon (adaptation, fine-tuning, or whatever). For the interested uninitiated reader, these are matters I set out in Five Proofs of the Existence of God. 

I think Dr. Feser is exactly right in this sense: God’s existence is not a scientific theory on a par with Darwin’s theory of evolution or Big Bang theory or General Relativity. It is certainly possible that Darwinism or the Big Bang or Relativity could be wrong in a fundamental way — in fact, it is obvious that each of these theories is far from an exhaustive explanation of nature. 

A Necessary Predicate 

God’s existence, as Feser has brilliantly shown in several of his books (e.g., here, here and here ), is a necessary predicate for the existence of anything, including the natural world. God is the ground of existence — the Necessary Existence — on which existence itself utterly depends.

But in defense of Dr. Meyer’s book title, there is another perspective that I think is important. Natural theology is a branch of theology (and properly a branch of natural science, in my view) that demonstrates God’s existence from evidence in nature. Feser is an expert in the thought of the great Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274). In Aquinas’ view, all demonstrations of God’s existence are natural theology, because existence is absolutely distinct from essence.

The implication of this is that any valid demonstration of God’s existence must begin with evidence and proceed to the most satisfactory explanation that accounts for that evidence. This is the basis for Aquinas’ refutation of Anselm’s Ontological Argument: the Ontological Argument is a purely formal deductive argument, and you can’t prove the existence of anything by logic alone (essence) without invoking evidence (existence) of some sort. 

Aquinas’ Metaphysics 

Thus, as I understand Aquinas’ metaphysics, God’s existence is a theory in natural science, and (aside from revelation) it is only via natural science (i.e., natural theology) that His existence can be demonstrated. Of course, when you look carefully at the natural demonstrations of God’s existence, His existence is absolutely undeniable, because to deny His existence is to deny the reality of change in nature (The First Way), causation in nature (The Second Way), the existence of anything in nature (The Third Way), degrees of perfection in nature (The Fourth Way), teleology in nature (The Fifth Way), interconnectedness of processes in nature (The Neo-Platonic Proof), the reality of universals (The Augustine Proof), the real distinction between essence and existence in nature (The Thomistic Proof), the existence of sufficient reason for nature (The Rationalist Proof), and the reality of Moral Law.

To deny God’s existence is to admit abject ignorance or, if the denier is conversant with these proofs, insanity. But nonetheless, by Aquinas’ own criterion, these proofs are hypotheses in natural science, in the sense that they are inductive arguments that begin with natural (scientific) evidence and proceed to inference to best explanation. 

Science Correctly Understood 

It is in this light that I see Dr. Meyer’s book title — the validity of the God hypothesis is demonstrated by modern science correctly understood. Of course, the arguments presented by Dr. Meyer are not Thomistic or classical philosophical proofs, but his arguments are accessible to the public and to scientists in ways that classical natural theology may not be.

I suspect that more people in our philosophically innocent modern culture will be convinced of God’s existence by the Big Bang, the genetic code, and anthropic coincidences than will be convinced by the Augustinian Proof or the Neo-Platonic Proof. Dr. Feser makes excellent points — particularly the point that it is dangerous to use atheists’ own metaphysical presumptions in this debate — but what Dr. Meyer did was enter the atheist camp, take up their flawed tools, and defeat them with their own weapons.

Dr. Meyer’s brilliant book is a 21st century Areopagus Sermon, fitted to the scientistic world in which we live and move and have our being.

 

On the crux of the design debate?

 Luskin on the Heart of Intelligent Design Theory 

Evolution News 

On a classic episode of ID the Future, intelligent design geologist Casey Luskin sits down with podcast host Dr. Jeff Myers to explain the heart of intelligent design theory and why it should matter to Christians and to anyone who prizes a culture committed to the view that life is meaningful and human beings more than matter in motion. Dr. Luskin also responds to evolutionist attempts to explain the origin of exquisite molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum motor, and he offers some advice for pro-ID college students facing professors hostile to anything that challenges mainstream evolutionary theory.  

Download the podcast or listen to it here