Robert Bowman's attempt to slant the playing field .

 Robert Bowman:If you want to disprove the doctrine of the Trinity, you must disprove one of the following propositions:

1. There is one God (i.e., one proper object of religious devotion).

AservantofJEHOVAH: the Nicene creed teaches that this one/ most high God is essentially tri-personal so I merely need to demonstrate from scripture that the one/ most high God is not tri-personal to falsify the Nicene creed,and most other mainstream versions of the trinity. Most Trinitarian arguments also have the unintended consequence of falsifying the creeds for they center on demonstrating that the unipersonal Christ is the supposedly tri-persinal most high God 

2. The one God is a single divine being, the LORD (Jehovah, Yahweh).

3. The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is God.

AservanofJEHOVAH:The God and Father of Jesus is, according to scripture, the most high God/the only true God and thus has no co-equals as a matter of fact the unqualified ho Theos i.e is used exclusively of him throughout the scriptures a real problem for Christendom's creeds 

Luke ch.1:32NIV"He will be great and will be called the Son of the MOST HIGH. The LORD God will give him the throne of his father David,"

John ch.17:3NIV"Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the ONLY TRUE GOD, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."

AservantofJEHOVAH:Thus the God and Father of Jesus is both the distinct person and the distinct utterly falsifying bowman's conception of the trinity.

4. The Son, Jesus Christ, is God.

AservantofJEHOVAH:Very vague thus allowing Trinitarians room to be slippery. I am sorry but you will need to be tighter than this if you want to be taken seriously. Is Jesus the most high God . This would necessarily exclude his having any co-equals and of course if the most high God is necessarily tri-personal it would necessarily rule out any unipersonal Christ or logos being numerically identical to the tri-personal Most High God.

 

5. The Holy Spirit is God.

aservantofJEHOVAH,:No it/he is not.

6. The Father is not the Son.

AservantofJEHOVAH:Since we have established that the God and Father of Jesus is the MOST HIGH God This seems like a moot point.

7. The Father is not the Holy Spirit.

AservantofJEHOVAH;Well okay does this prove that he/it is coequal with the God and Father of Jesus though?

8. The Son is not the Holy Spirit.

Anyone who affirms all eight of these propositions without equivocation is affirming the doctrine of the Trinity, since this is just what the doctrine of the Trinity says.

AservantofJEHOVAH:The propositions are too vague and need some tightening up the central concern of biblical theology is the identity of the MOST HIGH GOD i.e JEHOVAH Christendom's creeds render a positive identity most high impossible. Only in scripture do we see the most high clearly identified as the God and Father of Jesus.

In order to dispute the doctrine of the Trinity, then, you *must* take issue with one or more of the propositions stated above. Anything else is tangential to the issue.:

AservantofJEHOVAH:In order for us to take the trinity seriously a forthright statement as to who /what Trinitarians identify as the MOST HIGH GOD must be issued one that leaves no room for the usual trinitarian slipperiness.

Then a comparison with the bible as to who the bible identifies as the most high God so as to demonstrate that Christendom's most high God is numerically identical to the Bible's most high God.

The thumb print of JEHOVAH cosmic edition vs. biological edition..

 Comparing Design Evidence in Physics Versus Biology — Is One Stronger than the Other?

David Klinghoffer

I really enjoyed physicist Brian Miller’s two-part ID the Future interview with Rabbi Aaron Zimmer and Rabbi Elie Feder about support for intelligent design from physics (see here and here). Both are gifted explainers, as you know already that Dr. Miller is. I was not familiar with their podcast series, Physics to God, but of course I checked it out, in particular the episode “Physics vs. Biology,” where they weigh differences between the case for design in biology and the case in physics. They don’t come down one way or the other about the former, which is fair enough. (Their backgrounds are respectively in physics and mathematics, not that you have to be a biologist to have a view on ID in biology.) In the episode, though, they argue that the evidence for design in physics is necessarily the stronger of the two. 

Why? Because the fine-tuning of the physical constants underlying the existence of the universe has no evolutionary history. We have no reason for thinking they were other than what they are now, very precisely, at the Big Bang. As Zimmer and Feder say in the podcast, there are no “fossils” indicating previous sets of constants that could have been somehow naturally winnowed or otherwise tuned by unguided, unintelligent forces. With fossils of previously existing life forms, on the other hand, there is at least a suggestion of evolution — whether that was guided (intelligent design) or unguided (Darwinian theory). With the physical constants, there’s no ground for arguing against design other than by appealing to purely speculative ideas of other universes that can never be scientifically detected. (And even then, as Stephen Meyer shows in Return of the God Hypothesis, whatever mechanism might generate universes would itself demand an explanation pointing to ID.)

Nakedly Versus Less Nakedly

The multiverse is nakedly an attempt to save atheism from science. Darwinian theory is less nakedly so. On that I’d agree. In fact, Paul Nelson recalled here the other day watching atheist physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg thinking about the cosmological constant, and visibly troubled by it: “[H]e paced the stage from one end to the other, not looking at the audience, muttering to himself and staring at his feet.”

It’s an interesting point and I’d never heard it put quite that way. The podcast is definitely worth listening to and considering.

The issue for Trinitarians'.

 Luke ch.1:32NIV"He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,"

The God and Father of Jesus is ,according to scripture, THE MOST HIGH GOD. This what Trinitarians' need to address the God and Father of Jesus has no co-equals in absolute contradistinction to any of the members of Christendom's trinity.

Indeed the identity of the most high God on the whole is a Trinitarian issue because none of the entities name in the trinity is without numerous co-equals and thus none of them match the designation most high which the scriptures gives to the Lord JEHOVAH.

The Cambrian explosion was nuclear.

 From Bad to Worse for Darwinism, as New Cambrian Explosion Finds Arrive

David Coppedge

More bad news for Darwinism arrived after my last article about Cambrian Explosion. I showed there that taphonomic conditions should have produced Precambrian animal fossils had they existed. Now, some of the other props for Darwin’s House of Cards have been removed. Tom Bethell had said in that book, “The near-instant explosion of body plans is the opposite of what Darwin’s theory predicts” (p 134)

Oxygen Theory Deflated

“No, oxygen didn’t catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth’s first multicellular organisms,” begins some news from the University of Copenhagen. “Life on Earth didn’t arise as described in textbooks.” What? Textbooks wrong? Shocking!

“The fact that we now know, with a high degree of certainty, that oxygen didn’t control the development of life on Earth provides us with an entirely new story about how life arose and what factors controlled this success,” says the researcher, adding:

“Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten.”

Textbooks had been saying, “increased oxygen levels triggered the evolutionary arrival of more advanced marine organisms.” Scientists at the university, with international peers, claim that the oxygen theory “is being disproved” by measurements of oxygen levels in rocks dating from “the Avalon explosion, a forerunner era of the more famed Cambrian explosion.” The Avalon Explosion they date at “between 685 and 800 million years ago.” 

Defying expectations, the result shows that Earth’s oxygen concentrations had not increased. Indeed, levels remained 5-10 times lower than today, which is roughly how much oxygen there is at twice the height of Mount Everest.

Evolutionists have a strained relationship with oxygen. They don’t want it at the origin of life, but they were relying on it to power the Avalon and Cambrian Explosions. And in modern times, they struggle with the complexity of molecular machines that protect life from Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS). Current atmospheric oxygen levels appear finely tuned for complex life, as biologist Michael Denton argues in Fire-Maker. We have a Goldilocks value that balances the advantages of oxygen for metabolism against the disadvantages of too much or too little.

Time Squeeze

A different paper last month in PNAS, by Lyle Nelson and scientists from Canada and the U.S., has more bad news for those who want to stretch out the duration of the Cambrian Explosion.

The early Cambrian Period marks the important interval when most major groups of animals first appear in Earth’s sedimentary record. The tempo of this biological diversification is still poorly defined because, globally, there are few absolute age constraints that calibrate early Cambrian fossil occurrences or the carbon isotope perturbations used to correlate the biostratigraphy of different continents. In this study, we present high-precision age constraints for strata in the southwestern United States, which suggest the early Cambrian animal radiation was significantly faster than currently recognized. Accurately constraining the timing and rates of early animal evolution is a critical step toward better understanding this milestone in Earth’s history.

The authors measured “precise zircon U–Pb dates for the lower Wood Canyon Formation, Nevada,” which lies in the southeastern Death Valley region. Their measurements constrain the onset of the explosion to “younger than 533 Mya, at least 6 My later than currently recognized.” Out with 540 Mya; in with 533 Mya as the new official “onset of infaunalization” (the sudden appearance of complex animal body plans).

Formally, the base of the Cambrian is now defined by the first appearance of an ichnofossil assemblage that includes Treptichnus pedum, a distinctive branched, bilaterian trace fossil, interpreted as potentially formed by priapulids. The inclined branches of T. pedum are the earliest examples of systematic probing of the substrate, thus marking the onset of infaunalization that is pervasive in the Phanerozoic sedimentary record.

Priapulidae are complex animals, still extant today, that reproduce sexually and have a true coelum (body cavity), muscles, nerves, and a through gut. If the trace fossils are from one of these phylum members, they represent a significant level of “infaunalization” indeed.

Phylum Squeeze

The famous Burgess Shale (pictured above), the showcase of early Cambrian animals, has produced another taxonomic group: the earliest swimming jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria, subphylum Medusozoa). The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) announced this month the discovery of “well preserved” fossils of Burgessomedusa phasmiformis, a newly-named jelly complete with a medusa (free-swimming) stage — the most advanced type. Other cnidarians (the phylum that includes corals and anemones) are known in lower Cambrian strata, but medusozoans are “the most efficient swimmers in the world” (here). Was this a primitive cnidarian?

Jellyfish belong to medusozoans, or animals producing medusae, and include today’s box jellies, hydroids, stalked jellyfish and true jellyfish. Medusozoans are part of one of the oldest groups of animals to have existed, called Cnidaria, a group which also includes corals and sea anemones. Burgessomedusa unambiguously shows that large, swimming jellyfish with a typical saucer or bell-shaped body had already evolved more than 500 million years ago.

Burgessomedusa fossils are exceptionally well preserved at the Burgess Shale considering jellyfish are roughly 95% composed of water. ROM holds close to two hundred specimens from which remarkable details of internal anatomy and tentacles can be observed, with some specimens reaching more than 20 centimetres in length. These details enable classifying Burgessomedusa as a medusozoan. By comparison with modern jellyfish, Burgessomedusa would also have been capable of free-swimming and the presence of tentacles would have enabled capturing sizeable prey.

The date given (505 Mya) is not significantly different from earlier estimates for medusozoans mentioned in my 2013 article about “instant body plans,” but it points to an even earlier first appearance:

“Although jellyfish and their relatives are thought to be one of the earliest animal groups to have evolved, they have been remarkably hard to pin down in the Cambrian fossil record. This discovery leaves no doubt they were swimming about at that time,” said co-author Joe Moysiuk, a Ph.D. candidate in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, who is based at ROM.

If it was already swimming like a modern jellyfish, it had parents who swam, and ancestors who swam. This is among the earliest identifiable medusae, but its date necessitates earlier ancestors. One of those must have (in Darwinism) won the mutational lottery to start swimming freely. But it would have needed muscles, nerves, and sensory equipment to avoid floating off into evolutionary oblivion. Given that jellyfish rarely fossilize, being 95 percent water, it’s within the realm of possibility that earlier specimens may turn up some day even closer to biology’s big bang.

Majoring on Minors?

Graham Budd and friends had a little spat with Nicholas Strausfeld about details of a Cambrian animal. The give and take in Science at the end of June concerned whether a lower Cambrian lobopodian named Cardiodictyon had a tripartite brain and thus represented the origin of euarthropod brains, euarthropods being the most complex group within the panarthropods. (Strausfeld et al. responded here). 

But surely there is a forest in these trees. Brains! Are they products of unguided natural processes? A look at the figures in their respective papers should astonish anyone that creatures with legs, antennae, mouth parts, guts, muscles, and central nervous systems should appear in rocks suddenly without precursors. Darwinians waste time trying to connect details of one tree to details in other trees, when the forest is shouting, “We were designed!” 

As new discoveries continue putting the squeeze on the Darwinian scenario, proponents of intelligent design feel no pressure. Complex life appearing suddenly, operating from day one with exceptionally rich functional information, is just what we would expect from engineering genius.

Why our Al overlords will never possess a "Logos".

 Human Exceptionalism — Why Artificial Intelligence Will Never Tell a Story

Peter Biles

One of the biggest contentions in the current debate over OpenAI’s new Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT is its purported ability to create a story, to speak and communicate narrative like a human storyteller. If you ask ChatGPT to write an Edgar Allan Poe-esque story, it will generate something spooky, gothic, and darkly poetic. Ask it to write a Shakespearean sonnet, and out comes a fourteen-lined poem about nature and romance. Need a horror thriller like The Shining or It by Stephen King? You got it.

For all its scary impressiveness, and the guarantee that the technology will only get better, the chatbot extraordinaire fails and will always fail to tell a story. In fact, it can’t be expected to generate meaningful art and literature whatsoever. Why? In short, ChatGPT isn’t a person.

AI Lacks Understanding

Critics might interject and say that LLMs are starting to match the dexterity and even beauty of human poetry and art. AI can crank out verse in the spirit of Milton and Donne (or maybe not quite, but it can approximate the style) and write your freshman composition paper for you. To be fair, it can do a lot. And some entry-level writing jobs may inevitably fall to AI. The technology journal CNET has already employed an AI system to generate articles, although the results have been a bit disastrous, to say the least.

But while AI can generate poems, stories, and essays, it can never grasp the meaning of what it produces. It’s not a sentient mind (despite former Google employee Blake Lemoine’s claim to the contrary) intent on communicating truth, goodness, and beauty to you. Instead, it’s pulling from a preexistent database and giving you approximations of what you’re asking for. It’s algorithmic. The AI optimists (and those declaring doom for all writers and artists) might just be misunderstanding the purpose and nature of language and art.

Josef Pieper on the Purpose of Language

Josef Pieper, a 20th-century philosopher, outlined the two primary functions of language. In his excellent little book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, he writes:

First, words convey reality. We speak in order to name and identify something that is real, to identify it for someone, of course — and this points to the second aspect in question, the interpersonal character of human speech (p. 15).

For Pieper, language has a “two-fold purpose”: it conveys reality through the word and establishes relationships among persons. It connects us through shared meaning. Can AI do this? Sort of. It can scrape the Internet and produce a coherent sentence. However, Pieper would be skeptical of its ability to fulfill either function, since AI cannot be interested in “reality.” He writes further, “Because you are not interested in reality, you are unable to converse. You can give fine speeches, but you simply cannot join in a conversation; you are incapable of dialogue” (p. 17). Here, Pieper is talking about the “sophists” in Plato’s era. They were witty rhetoricians but had more interest in persuasion and manipulation than in telling the truth.

So, is ChatGPT simply technological sophistry, drawing on a bizarre Internet landscape, designed to give you fancy distortions of the world? Robert J. Marks, Senior Fellow at the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, writes in his book, Non-Computable You:

When discussing artificial intelligence, it’s crucial to define intelligence. Computers can store oceans of facts and correlations; but intelligence requires more than facts. True intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding; the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning, and symbolism; and the ability to recognize and disentangle ambiguities. It requires creativity (p. 16).

The Question of Consciousness

Christina Bieber Lake, Clyde Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College, expresses a similar conviction about the limits of computed “intelligence,” particularly in relation to literature. She writes in her book Beyond the Story:

Computers can be programmed to “write” stories, but since they do not have first-person consciousness, they cannot reasonably be said to have intended them. Whatever meaning such stories can be said to have is limited by the parameters of the programmer — who is necessarily a language animal (p. 14).

Bieber Lake turns the issue into the fundamental question of consciousness. “First-person consciousness,” she contends, is a uniquely human quality, and in Robert Marks’s terms, it can never be “computed.” No algorithmic complexity will ever be able to generate consciousness, regardless of how humanoid our robots become. She writes:

All art, and especially story, depends on a relationship between conscious persons. For any story to exist, much less to have meaning, conscious persons must be intentionally interacting with each other. There is always an I and a you and a thing — usually another you — for the I and the you to focus on.

She further notes that intent is always shared “by one person with another person.” The personal, communicative nature of storytelling rules out AI as a legitimate author. It can’t intend meaning and can’t speak to you as a person to a person.

The Person Behind the Word

Her comments lead to the perennial question of authorial “intent,” or whether the author’s intended meaning in a text should have any bearing on its interpretation. Robin Phillips writes that if language is common, comprised of words with definite meanings (although words can change meaning, and their combinations be subject to differing interpretations), intent matters significantly. He observes:

If we were attending only to the meaning of a poem as an isolated collection of words rather than as a work of communication and art, then it would not make any difference whether it was written with artistic intent, that is to say, by a human being rather than a computer or an ape. Hence, all the predicates we might apply to the meaning of the poem we should be able to use whether or not it had a human creator. But this is not how we engage with art, for many aesthetic predicates that we commonly apply to poems would be meaningless when predicated to the computer-generated poem. Consider such predicates as “witty,” “intelligent,” “insightful,” “controlled,” “suppressed,” “overdone,” etc., which presuppose a creative intelligence behind them. To attend to the poem as an artwork is, therefore, to already be aware of more than merely the meaning of the words themselves: it is to be aware of their meaning as an intended artwork.

If we consider ancient oral cultures, where storytelling and myths were primarily communicated by mouth and received by ear, we might get a better sense of the human uniqueness of language. When we read a story, or a poem, or study a painting, we might come away with different impressions, or even various interpretations, but one aspect is evident: a personal consciousness was responsible for creating it, affirming the wisdom of a quote often attributed to C. S. Lewis, “We read to know we are not alone.”