The physical soul and the God's promise of the resurrection.

  Genesis2;7KJV "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

According to the Judeo-Christian scriptures man does not possess a non physical soul he is in fact physical soul(Hebrew nefesh) in this he is indistinguishable from the animal life with which he shares the planet.

  Ecclesiastes3:19-21 NASB "For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. 20All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. 21Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth?"

 Man and beast live and die via the same breath(Hebrew Ruach).

  However unlike the beasts the prospect of an unending life and divine sonship has from the beginning been held out to loyal members of the human species.

Genesis2:9 mentions the tree of life in the original paradise a sign of the divine promise of perpetual life for the physical son of God.Man was thus assured that although physical in nature he was as much a son of the creator as his elder siblings in the spirit realm.

 We note though that this pledge of a perpetual and ideal life was conditioned on the man's demonstrable loyalty to his creator's rightful sovereignty over his creation. Genesis216,17 KJV "And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 17But of the tree of the knowledge of good and  evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

 It remains a basic principle of natural morality that whatever one invents/designs/produces on ones own time is ones lawful possession and that any proprietor has the right to stipulate the terms and conditions for the use of his property.

 Basically then the creator was insisting on fair treatment from his intelligent creation in return for a covenant relationship that guaranteed their possession of divine sonship.So man's continued existence as an individual was conditioned on divine favour and not the unconditional guarantee of his immortal nature.

The resurrection of the dead was initially not an issue it certainly was not God's purpose that the man betray him to say otherwise is to make the creator responsible for man's sin and thus take Satan's side of the cosmic argument.So initially man's continued life in physical perfection would not require a resurrection, but now that it does some are presuming to set  arbitrary limits on the creator's power and wisdom claiming that God cannot possibly resurrect an intelligent physical soul,but merely create a convincing replica to substitute such a soul.

 Jesus had to respond to some of like mind in the first century his response is instructive Matthew22:229NASB "But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God"

 I mean how arrogant can you get.Note firstly neither Jesus' first century deniers of God's power to effect a physical resurrection nor their modern counterparts deny that God could in fact produce a physical soul capable of human level intelligence,and indeed scriptures indicate that in the case of man this is exactly what he did see Genesis2:7.Now if God can cause a material form to become a conscious self.Bearing in mind that his power and consciousness transcend time and space themselves.What is there to prevent him  from completely mapping any particular self and reproducing the exact same self some time in the future in a body of his choosing.I'm guessing nothing but the limits of his would be correctors' imaginations.Here is how the apostle Paul explains Jehovah's power as manifest in the resurrection 1Corinthians15:35-38NASB " But someone will say, “How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?” 36You fool! That which you sow does not come to life unless it dies; 37and that which you sow, you do not sow the body which is to be, but a bare grain, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38But God gives it a body just as He wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own."

   Paul's theology is very commonsensical if one is immortal then certainly one would not need a resurrection a disembodied spirit person would simply need to be re embodied not resurrected.So it is the physical soul that is resurrected not the body.God gives this self/soul a body that suits his place for it in his purpose.

  Consider further Revelation20:4NASB "Then I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony of Jesus and because of the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received the mark on their forehead and on their hand; and they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. "

  Note that the souls are spoken of as coming to life this time in a body suitable for life in the spirit world where they rule with Christ over a reformed global civilisation.The tech that caused my self to emerge from this particular form can cause this same self to re: emerge in the future in a perfect sinless form.I certainly am not brave(or is it stupid)enough to pit my imperfect understanding of reality against the creator's perfect understanding of same.

 

How chance and necessity became new Gods.

 

Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection Has Left a Legacy of Confusion over Biological Adaptation

Brian Miller

In recent articles, I summarized lectures at CELS (Conference on Engineering in Living Systems) that described the design-based assumptions prevalent in systems biology and that outlined an engineering model for adaptation (here, here). Now I will summarize a third CELS lecture that revealed how Charles Darwin shifted the conventional understanding of biological adaptation as an internal capacity of an organism to the belief that it is the product of the environment acting on a species externally. 

Darwin’s Positive Legacy

Evaluating the legacy of Charles Darwin is a complex task. On the positive side, Darwin helped biologists to appreciate how organisms change with time to better survive in shifting environments. Before his views became popular, many saw species as static entities, so they did not fully appreciate the historical factors shaping such observations as diminished eyes in cave fish. 

In addition, Darwin illuminated how variation in populations (e.g., differences in size and coloration) enabled species to better adapt to their surroundings. This insight was later integrated with genetics and mathematics in one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century, known as population genetics. The resulting set of tools has proven invaluable in such fields as virology and environmental science. 

On the negative side, Darwin asserted that adaptation is driven by natural selection, which he portrayed as a creative force that reshaped organisms. This illusion has consistently confused biologists over adaptation’s true nature.

Turning Paley on His Head

The problem originates with Darwin’s fascination with natural theologian William Paley. He was deeply impressed by Paley’s argument that life demonstrates clear evidence for design, pointing to an all-powerful Creator. Paley famously compared the design of living structures to the intricate complexity of a watch. Darwin mimicked Paley’s logic and style in his own writings, but he replaced the Creator with natural selection. 

Famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould commented in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory:

I was struck by the correspondences between Paley’s and Darwin’s structure of argument (though Darwin, of course, inverts the explanation). Darwin did not exaggerate when stating to Lubbock that he had virtually committed Paley to memory. The style of Darwin’s arguments, his choice of examples, even his rhythms and words, must often reflect (perhaps unconsciously) his memory of Paley.

P. 119

Internalism to Externalism

Before Darwin, all theories of adaptation focused on how organisms adapt to their environment through internal mechanisms (aka internalism). Temperature regulation is a classic example. Complex animals possess sensors that measure their internal temperature. An integrated process sends the sensors’ readings to analyzers that detect when the internal temperature rises beyond a predetermined set point. The analyzers can then trigger mechanisms that release body heat as, for example, through sweating. An animal’s ability to adapt to increasing environmental temperature results from internal capacities that were designed to achieve that goal.  

Darwin’s theory of natural selection changed the source of creative agency from a Creator who engineered internal mechanisms to the environment that reshaped an organism externally (aka externalism). In the new framework, the environment “instructs” a population on how to expand its variation and use it to craft novel innovations. In the process, it exerts “selection pressures” on an organism to “mold” it as passive clay. Biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhard explain (here, here):

He accepted the view that the environment directly instructs the organism how to vary, and he proposed a mechanism for inheriting those changes.

THE PLAUSIBILITY OF LIFE: RESOLVING DARWIN’S DILEMMA, P. 3

The organism was like modeling clay, and remolding of the clay meant that each of the billions of little grains was free to move a little bit in any direction to generate new form. … If an organism needed a wing, an opposable thumb, longer legs, webbed feet, or placental development, any of these would emerge under the proper selective conditions, with time.

THE PLAUSIBILITY OF LIFE: RESOLVING DARWIN’S DILEMMA, P. 31

The central problem with such claims is that the environment is not conscious, as depicted, e.g., in the Disney movie Pocahontas. It cannot select, mold, tinker, instruct, or perform any such actions reserved to intelligent agents. The most astute philosophers of science and biologists have called for the purging of such pseudoscientific thinking from biology. Philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini bluntly stated:

Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly naturalistic — indeed a thoroughly atheistic — theory of phenotype [trait] formation; but he didn’t see how to get the whole way there. He killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents [selection] got away scot-free. We think it’s now time to get rid of them too.

JERRY FODOR AND MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI, WHAT DARWIN GOD WRONG, P. 163

Many have traced the confusion back to Darwin’s mistaken analogy between artificial breeding and undirected evolution. Geneticist Richard Lewontin commented:

Darwin, quite explicitly, derived this understanding of the motivating force underlying evolution from the actions of plant and animal breeders who consciously choose variant individuals with desirable properties to breed for future generations. “Natural” selection is human selection writ large. But of course, whatever “nature” may be, it is not a sentient creature with a will, and any attempt to understand the actual operation of evolutionary processes must be freed of its metaphorical baggage.

RICHARD C. LEWONTIN, “NOT SO NATURAL SELECTION,” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Others have pointed out that evolutionists’ employment of the term “selection pressure” is often equally misleading and intellectually vacuous. Evolutionary biologist Robert Reid stated:

Indeed the language of neo-Darwinism is so careless that the words ‘divine plan’ can be substituted for ‘selection pressure’ in any popular work in the biological literature without the slightest disruption in the logical flow of argument.

ROBERT G. B. REID, BIOLOGICAL EMERGENCES: EVOLUTION BY NATURAL EXPERIMENT, PP. 37-38

To fully comprehend the critique, one simply needs to imagine attempting to craft an evolutionary barometer that measures the selection pressure driving one organism to transform into something different (e.g., fish into an amphibian). The fact that no such instrument could be constructed highlights the fictitious nature of such mystical forces. 

Central Importance of Traits

Any accurate analysis of adaptation must change the focus from the environment to an organism’s traits. The environment simply represents the conditions external to an organism (e.g., chemicals present, available food, local predators). The extent to which organisms flourish or perish in those conditions depends on individuals’ traits such as their ability to degrade toxins or avoid threats. 

To appreciate this shift, one simply needs to read news articles related to natural disasters. After a hurricane devastates a town, no one examines the surviving homes and states that those that withstood the storm were selected by nature to survive and those that did not were selected against. Instead, architects and structural engineers discuss which homes were designed properly to withstand flood waters and high wind velocities and which were not.

Often, imprecise evolutionary language causes little harm. If an epidemiologist speaks about certain bacteria being selected for resistance to an antibiotic, everyone knows that the doctor or researcher means that those bacteria have some genetic distinction that enables them to evade the antibiotic’s toxic effects. The real problem arises with the more grandiose evolutionary narratives. 

The story that selection pressures directed the brain of an ape-like creature to transform into the human brain to better survive in an unpredictable environment is pure fiction. The schematics for the neural networks undergirding such complex traits as human vocalization and language (here, here, here) were not hidden under some rock, such that Mother Nature instructed human ancestors on how to slowly instantiate them over millions of years. Instead, thousands, if not millions, of neural connections had to have been meticulously engineered and integrated into other neural networks in a single moment, or such complex systems would not have functioned at even the most basic level. Yet, the available time is insufficient for mutations and differential survival to generate even one mid- to long-range targeted neural connection (here, here). More generally, our ability to adapt to fantastically diverse circumstances did not result from the happenstance of environmental conditions. It is, instead, the result of our being fearfully and wonderfully made

Buddhism: a brief history.

 Buddhism (/ˈbʊdɪzəm/, US: /ˈbuːd-/)^[1][2] is an Indian religion based on a series of original teachings attributed to Gautama Buddha. It originated in ancient India as a Sramana tradition sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, spreading through much of Asia. It is the world's fourth-largest religion^[3][4] with over 520 million followers, or over 7% of the global population, known as Buddhists.^[5][6] Buddhism encompasses a variety of traditions, beliefs and spiritual practices largely based on the Buddha's teachings (born Siddhārtha Gautama in the 5th or 4th century BCE) and resulting interpreted philosophies.

As expressed in the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, the goal of Buddhism is to overcome suffering (duḥkha) caused by desire and ignorance of reality's true nature, including impermanence (anicca) and the non-existence of the self (anattā).^[7] Most Buddhist traditions emphasize transcending the individual self through the attainment of Nirvana or by following the path of Buddhahood, ending the cycle of death and rebirth.^[8][9][10] Buddhist schools vary in their interpretation of the path to liberation, the relative importance and canonicity assigned to the various Buddhist texts, and their specific teachings and practices.^[11][12] Widely observed practices include meditation, observance of moral precepts, monasticism, taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, and the cultivation of the Paramitas (perfections, or virtues).

Two major extant branches of Buddhism are generally recognized by scholars: Theravāda (Pali: "The School of the Elders") and Mahāyāna (Sanskrit: "The Great Vehicle"). Theravada has a widespread following in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand. Mahayana, which includes the traditions of Zen, Pure Land, Nichiren Buddhism, Tiantai Buddhism (Tendai), and Shingon, is practiced prominently in Nepal, Malaysia, Bhutan, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. Vajrayana, a body of teachings attributed to Indian adepts, may be viewed as a separate branch or as an aspect of Mahayana Buddhism.^[13] Tibetan Buddhism, which preserves the Vajrayana teachings of eighth-century India, is practised in the countries of the Himalayan region, Mongolia,^[14] and Kalmykia.^[15] Historically, until the early 2nd millennium, Buddhism was also widely practised in Afghanistan and Pakistan; it also had a foothold to some extent in other places including the Philippines, the Maldives, and Uzbekistan.

In defence of the argument from anology re:design.

  Basically the argument is based on our universal experience accross our entire history re:the source of sophisticated engineering (for that matter even unsophisticated engineering).Its presupposition is simply that an item would require at least as much expertise to engineer as to reverse engineer,this conclusion is based on our observations ,without exception, accross our entire history. Now, engineering expertise is not something that grows on trees but is always the product of a mind of some kind,whether subhuman,human (superhuman?). Some though, are uncomfortable with the idea of the existence of superhuman intelligences (for them man must remain at the top of the food chain) and have arbitrarily ruled that science cannot be allowed enquire into the possible existence of such,thus they seek to find fault with the argument from analogy claiming e.g that living things and the ecosystems that support them are too dissimilar from any device or structure engineered by humans to be regarded as truly analogous. Of course items compared in analogies are almost never totally similar. They merely need to have in common that quality about which one is attempting to make ones point. And then not necessarily to a comparable degree,the point design advocates are seeking to highlight would be ease ,or lack thereof,of reverse engineering. 

Manmade structures and devices are not so dissimilar from living things, that no comparison can be made re:ease of reverse engineering,indeed the very differences that opponents of the argument from analogy tend to highlight such as growth , reproduction,capacity for self repair etc.seem to be making design advocates' point. Imagine if you will, the kinds of accolades that would be heaped upon the technologist who invented a device that can even crudely mimic such qualities.

The French revolution: a brief history.

 The French Revolution was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in November 1799. Many of its ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy, while phrases like Liberté, égalité, fraternité reappeared in other revolts, such as the 1917 Russian Revolution, and inspired campaigns for the abolition of slavery and universal suffrage. Its values and the institutions it created dominate French politics to this day.

The causes are generally agreed to be a combination of social, political and economic factors, which the existing regime proved unable to manage. In May 1789, widespread social distress led to the convocation of the Estates-General, which was converted into a National Assembly in June. The Assembly passed a series of radical measures, including the abolition of feudalism, state control of the Catholic Church and extending the right to vote.

The next three years were dominated by the struggle for political control, exacerbated by economic depression and social unrest. External powers like Austria, Britain and Prussia viewed the Revolution as a threat, leading to the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in April 1792. Disillusionment with Louis XVI led to the establishment of the First French Republic on 22 September 1792, followed by his execution in January 1793. In June, an uprising in Paris replaced the Girondins who dominated the National Assembly with the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Maximilien Robespierre.

This sparked the Reign of Terror, an attempt to eradicate alleged "counter-revolutionaries"; by the time it ended in July 1794, over 16,600 had been executed in Paris and the provinces. As well as external enemies, the Republic faced a series of internal Royalist and Jacobin revolts; in order to deal with these, the French Directory took power in November 1795. Despite a series of military victories, the war caused economic stagnation and political divisions; in November 1799, the Directory was replaced by the Consulate, which is generally seen as the end of the Revolutionary period.