For materialists the obvious remains a bridge too far.

Biologist in TEDx Talk: Life's "Complex Interacting Molecular Machines" Appear "Built by an Engineer"

Casey Luskin June 10, 2015 8:02 AM | 

Recently a friend sent me a link to a TEDx talk, "Digital biology and open science -- the coming revolution," which affirms that life's "complex interacting molecular machines" reveal "molecular clockwork is real and pervasive" and appear to be "built by an engineer a million times smarter than" we are. The speaker is biologist and engineer Stephen Larson, who holds a PhD in neuroscience from University of California, San Diego, and is CEO of MetaCell, a systems biology research and consulting company that seeks to understand biology through computation.

Now I don't think that Dr. Larson is pro-intelligent design, which makes his descriptions of biology all the more striking. In fact, after recounting some complex features of biology that appear designed, he immediately throws in the disclaimer that "what we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years." Nonetheless he admits that he finds the extremely "well organized" nature of life's "technology" to be "unsettling." He even says, "I've got to be honest with you, I kind of hate this." Here's the transcript of the relevant section, from most of the first 4:30 of the talk:

[A]s science continues to reveal how life works, we find again and again that the magic that seems to distinguish between things that are alive and things that are not [is] actually created by complex interacting molecular machines. These microscopic machines are as precise and intricate as a mechanical watch, but instead of being run on gears and springs, are powered by the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry. Our understanding of the precise coiling and uncoiling of the DNA molecule, or the way that one molecule can literally walk almost robotically along the tightrope of another molecule, continue to show us again and again, this molecular clockwork is real and pervasive.

Now what's most unsettling to me about this is that we didn't build these machines. As someone originally trained as an engineer, I've got to be honest with you, I kind of hate this. As the most clever species on the planet, we kind of like to think of ourselves as the builders of the most sophisticated technology in the entire universe. We invented written language and the printing press. We cured polio and sent a man to the moon. Heck, we even took savage beasts and turned them into kittens, and then built a global communications network to share pictures of them. That's pretty impressive.

And yet when I look through a microscope at a humble bacterium -- by the way its ancestors were on the planet a billion years ago, billions of years ago -- I still wonder how it really works. Because the mechanical watch that is life is not like any watch we've ever built. It is biological gears and springs, but they fill rooms and buildings and cities of a vast microscope landscape that's bustling with activity.

On the one hand it's extremely well organized, but on the other hand the sheer scale of all of this unfamiliar well-organized stuff that happens in there makes me feel that I've stumbled onto an alternate landscape of technology that's built by an engineer a million times smarter than me. The more that I search for principles beyond the ones we've already learned, the more I am overwhelmed with the feeling that this stuff was built by aliens.

OK, not literally. I don't literally mean that I think little green men and women came down to the earth and seeded life here a billion years ago. What we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years. But the results of evolution confuse even our smartest engineers when we try to understand how we could build what biology has evolved.

What if life has good engineering principles and we just haven't figured them out yet? Could studying biology give us the ability to extract new engineering principles that maybe then we could use to solve the world's intractable problems? Our experiments only give us glimpses into what happens in these tiny spaces, but what happens there has huge implication for the future, in the 21st century, and beyond.

Now Larson is a systems biologist, which means he is trained to see life from an engineering point of view. In such a perspective, scientists treat biological systems as if they are infused with teleology -- built from the top down to achieve some goal, not blindly from the bottom up as Darwinian evolution sees them. This doesn't mean that systems biologists have doubts about Darwinian evolution (doubts that they'll admit) or that they support intelligent design. They hold their extremely fruitful systems biology viewpoint in tension with the origins-models they otherwise endorse. Here's how physicist David Snoke describes the field with its sense of cognitive dissonance:

Opponents of the intelligent design (ID) approach to biology have sometimes argued that the ID perspective discourages scientific investigation. To the contrary, it can be argued that the most productive new paradigm in systems biology is actually much more compatible with a belief in the intelligent design of life than with a belief in neo-Darwinian evolution. This new paradigm in system biology, which has arisen in the past ten years or so, analyzes living systems in terms of systems engineering concepts such as design, information processing, optimization, and other explicitly teleological concepts. This new paradigm offers a successful, quantitative, predictive theory for biology. Although the main practitioners of the field attribute the presence of such things to the outworking of natural selection, they cannot avoid using design language and design concepts in their research, and a straightforward look at the field indicates it is really a design approach altogether.

(David Snoke, "Systems Biology as a Research Program for Intelligent Design," BIO-Complexity, Vol. 2014 (3).)

Larson talks further about the machine-like nature of many biological systems, how we can use computers and an engineering-based view of biology to better treat diseases, and even how we can understand complex biological mysteries like love. He says we can only understand biological feelings like love as "a series of complex but specific and knowable events that happen inside your body." Complex and specified -- sound familiar?

I highly recommend watching the talk in full.

A flame flickers in the gloom.

JUNE 3, 2015
RUSSIA

Ministry of Justice Registers Jehovah’s Witnesses in Moscow

On May 27, 2015, the Russian Federation Ministry of Justice registered the Local Religious Organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Moscow. The registration came nearly five years after the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that a Moscow court decision to liquidate the Witnesses’ legal entity was illegal.

After years of legal proceedings, the Golovinskiy District Court of Moscow ruled to liquidate the Witnesses’ legal entity in 2004. In 2010, the ECHR ordered Russia to remedy the violation by restoring the community’s registration and paying moral damages. The Russian government paid the fine but only now registered the religious community.

Fuzzy math or heads Darwinism wins tails I.D. loses.

BIO-Complexity Paper: Why Chaitin's Mathematical "Proof" of Darwinian Evolution Fails

Casey Luskin April 7, 2014 5:08 AM | 

 new peer-reviewed paper in BIO-Complexity, "Active Information in Metabiology," reports on the further investigations of the Evolutionary Informatics Lab into the ability of unguided evolutionary mechanisms to produce new information. This time, authors Winston Ewert, William Dembski, and Robert Marks show that the budding field of metabiology only produces creative outputs through active information -- i.e., informational inputs donated by an intelligent source -- and does not truly demonstrate that unguided processes can produce new information.

What is "metabiology"? According to the paper, it's "a fascinating intellectual romp in the surreal world of the mathematics of algorithmic information theory" where "halting oracles hunt for busy beaver numbers and busy beaver numbers unearth Chaitin's number, knowledge of which in turn allows resolution of numerous unsolved mathematical problems, many of whose solutions would earn large cash bounties." That description may not help most of us very much. The field of "metabiology" was developed by the Argentine-American computer scientist and mathematician Gregory Chaitin. In his 2013 book Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical, Chaitin describes metabiology as an "answer" to David Berlinski's "stinging critique of Darwinism" in The Devil's Delusion. "Metabiology" is Chaitin's attempt to use mathematics and (hypothetical) computer simulations to formally prove that Darwinian theory can create new information. It relies on an inherently gene-centered view of evolution, where a simulated "genetic code" (i.e., a computer program) can be "mutated," and when the program "halts" or stops running, it outputs a number that correlates with the program's "fitness." If the number goes up as the evolutionary simulation proceeds, Chaitin thinks he's shown Darwinian processes can increase fitness over time.

There are many reasons why Chaitin's model does not accurately reflect how Darwinian evolution works, if it does work, in the real world of biology (some of which are summarized nicely over at Theory, Evolution, and Games Group). Not the least of such problems is the fact that the simulation basically grants itself infinite probabilistic resources (actually, computing resources, but that's analogous to probabilistic resources in biology).

As Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

Because metabiology programs have unbounded length and can run for an unbounded amount of time, the unboundedness essentially undermines the creativity required to solve the large-number problem. With unbounded resources and unbounded time, one can do most anything.

In the real world, probabilistic resources are limited. Time is finite, and populations have finite sizes, and this imposes limits on what traits can evolve especially (as Stephen Meyer shows in Darwin's Doubt) when traits require multiple mutations before providing some advantage. Metabiology uses a population of one single "digital organism," which then "evolves" over time, but it grants itself essentially infinite computing resources to do this. With such a generous endowment, sure, anything can eventually evolve. But we don't live in an unlimited world, which is precisely why Darwinian evolution faces major theoretical problems. They thus write:

Although elegant in conception, metabiology departs from reality because it pays no attention to resource limitations. Metabiology's math obscures the huge amounts of time required for the evolutionary process. The programs can run for any arbitrarily large number of steps. Additionally, programs can be of any length with no penalty imposed for longer programs.

Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain that Chaitin's program uses a halting oracle as a source of "active information." A halting oracle is a hypothetical meta-program that can tell you if a given program will ever stop running. As they explain, such an oracle could be useful in disproving certain mathematical conjectures, such as Goldbach's conjecture, "which hypothesizes that all even numbers greater than two can be written as the sum of two primes." They discuss how a halting oracle could determine if the conjecture was false:

Suppose a program X can be written to test each even number sequentially to see if it were the sum of two primes. If a counterexample is found, the program stops and declares "I have a counterexample!" Otherwise, the next even number is tested. If Goldbach's conjecture is true, the program will run forever.

If a halting oracle existed, we could feed it X. If the halting oracle says "this program halts," Goldbach's conjecture is disproved. A counterexample exists. If the halting oracle says, "This program never halts," then Goldbach's conjecture is proven! There exists no counterexample.

The difficulty for Chaitin is he admits that for metabiology, "[The halting oracle] is where all the creativity is really coming from in our program," but also admits that such an oracle is "mathematical fantasy." Ewert, Dembski, and Marks thus aptly observe, "A computer tool proven not to exist is admittedly at the outset an obvious major strike against a theory purporting to demonstrate reality."

Now at this point, one might reasonably ask, "If a halting oracle is a hypothetical fantasy, how can Chaitin claim to use one in metabiology?" The answer is that Chaitin isn't actually creating a computer program. He's seeking a mathematical proof of the Darwinian model, where he's allowed to indulge thought experiments that invoke hypothetical entities. All he needs to be able to do is to prove what might happen if he theoretically had a halting oracle. But it doesn't help that one could never exist.

That problem aside, they explain that the "halting oracle" used by Chaitin's program has three different options of how to find a search target: "

• Exhaustive Search (poor)
• Random Evolution (good)
• Intelligent Design (better)

Metabiology uses "random evolution" but not in a manner that is biologically realistic. The program is capable of systematically simulating all possible programs, which in effect allows it to totally rewrite itself instantly -- something that simply doesn't happen in biology -- and thereby grants unrealistic access to the equivalent of unlimited resources in an organism's developmental process. This unrealistically guarantees the program could never get stuck on a local fitness peak because it can keep trying out entirely new "genetic codes" indefinitely until a better one is found.

Which, again, is nothing like how the real world of biology, where an organism is forced to rely on the genome it receives, which at best will have just a few small mutational differences from its parents. Darwinian evolution in real biology requires a grueling ascent of mount improbable, but Chaitin's program can fly wherever it wants at any time. To put it another way, metabiology cheats by giving a digital organism unrealistic access to any program at any time which will lead to a higher fitness state. As Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

As any computer programmer will tell you, landscapes of computer program fitness are the opposite of smooth. We would therefore not expect Darwinian evolution to fare well. Chaitin notes this when he writes [3], "The fitness landscape has to be very special for Darwinian evolution to work."

The environment for evolution to occur, therefore, has to be carefully designed. Indeed, in the paradigm of conservation of information, smooth landscapes can be source of significant active information [14]. Metabiology's construction of smooth landscapes is accomplished by running all viable programs, a computationally expensive approach that is only possible because there are no resource limitations.

Chaitin also presents a different model that uses what he calls "intelligent design" to find a search target. This obviously doesn't help show what unguided evolutionary processes can accomplish. The author of the blog "Theory, Evolution and Games Group" critiques Chaitin's model, writing that metabiology uses "a teleological model -- a biologist's nightmare." Ewert, Dembski, and Marks explain:

Like AVIDA and ev, metabiology makes use of external information sources to assist in the search. Like the simple Hamming oracle, the halting oracle can be mined for information with various degrees of sophistication. Evolution thus requires external sources of knowledge to work. The degree to which this knowledge is used can be assessed using the idea of active information.

They conclude: "In order for evolution to occur in these models, external knowledge must be imposed on the process to guide it. Metabiology thus appears to be another example where its designer makes an evolutionary model work. ... Consistent with the laws of conservation of information, natural selection can only work using the guidance of active information, which can be provided only by a designer." Properly understood, in other words, these programs demonstrate that evolution requires intelligent design.

The dead rebuke Darwin defenders

Fossils Don't Lie: Why Darwinism Is False

Jonathan Wells April 27, 2009 3:18 PM 

Coyne goes on to discuss several "transitional" forms. "One of our best examples of an evolutionary transition," he writes, is the fossil record of whales, "since we have a chronologically ordered series of fossils, perhaps a lineage of ancestors and descendants, showing their movement from land to water."⁹

"The sequence begins," Coyne writes, "with the recently discovered fossil of a close relative of whales, a raccoon-sized animal called Indohyus. Living 48 million years ago, Indohyus was... probably very close to what the whale ancestor looked like." In the next paragraph, Coyne writes, "Indohyus was not the ancestor of whales, but was almost certainly its cousin. But if we go back 4 million more years, to 52 million years ago, we see what might well be that ancestor. It is a fossil skull from a wolf-sized creature called Pakicetus, which is bit more whalelike than Indohyus." On the page separating these two paragraphs is a figure captioned "Transitional forms in the evolution of modern whales," which shows Indohyus as the first in the series andPakicetus as the second.¹⁰

But Pakicetus--as Coyne just told us--is 4 million years older than Indohyus. To a Darwinist, this doesn't matter: Pakicetus is "more whalelike" thanIndohyus, so it must fall between Indohyus and modern whales, regardless of the fossil evidence.

(Coyne performs the same trick with fossils that are supposedly ancestral to modern birds. The textbook icon Archaeopteryx, with feathered wings like a modern bird but teeth and a tail like a reptile, is dated at 145 million years. But what Coyne calls the "nonflying feathered dinosaur fossils"--which should have come before Archaeopteryx--are tens of millions of years younger. Like Darwinists Kevin Padian and Luis Chiappe eleven years earlier, Coyne simply rearranges the evidence to fit Darwinian theory.)¹¹

So much for Coyne's prediction that "later species should have traits that make them look like the descendants of earlier ones." And so much for his argument that "if evolution were not true, fossils would not occur in an order that makes evolutionary sense." Ignoring the facts he himself has just presented, Coyne brazenly concludes: "When we find transitional forms, they occur in the fossil record precisely where they should." If Coyne's book were turned into a movie, this scene might feature Chico Marx saying, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"¹²

There is another problem with the whale series (and every other series of fossils) that Coyne fails to address: No species in the series could possibly be the ancestor of any other, because all of them possess characteristics they would first have to lose before evolving into a subsequent form. This is why the scientific literature typically shows each species branching off a supposed lineage.

In the figure below, all the lines are hypothetical. The diagram on the left is a representation of evolutionary theory: Species A is ancestral to B, which is ancestral to C, which is ancestral to D, which is ancestral to E. But the diagram on the right is a better representation of the evidence: Species A, B, C and D are not in the actual lineage leading to E, which remains unknown.

It turns out that no series of fossils can provide evidence for Darwinian descent with modification. Even in the case of living species, buried remains cannot generally be used to establish ancestor-descendant relationships. Imagine finding two human skeletons in the same grave, one about thirty years older than the other. Was the older individual the parent of the younger? Without written genealogical records and identifying marks (or in some cases DNA), it is impossible to answer the question. And in this case we would be dealing with two skeletons from the same species that are only a generation apart and from the same location. With fossils from different species that are now extinct, and widely separated in time and space, there is no way to establish that one is the ancestor of another--no matter how many transitional fossils we find.

In 1978, Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of Natural History wrote: "The idea that one can go to the fossil record and expect to empirically recover an ancestor-descendant sequence, be it of species, genera, families, or whatever, has been, and continues to be, a pernicious illusion."¹³ Naturescience writer Henry Gee wrote in 1999 that "no fossil is buried with its birth certificate." When we call new fossil discoveries "missing links," it is "as if the chain of ancestry and descent were a real object for our contemplation, and not what it really is: a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices." Gee concluded: "To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story--amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."¹⁴

Next time, I'll address Coyne's mistakes on embryos.

Notes
⁹ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, p. 48.
¹⁰ Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 49-51.
¹¹ Kevin Padian & Luis M. Chiappe, "The origin and early evolution of birds,"Biological Reviews 73 (1998): 1-42. Available online (2009) here.
Wells, Icons of Evolution, pp. 119-122. 
¹² Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, pp. 25, 53.
Chico Marx in Duck Soup (Paramount Pictures, 1933). This and other Marx Brothers quotations are available online (2009) here.
¹³ Gareth Nelson, "Presentation to the American Museum of Natural History (1969)," in David M. Williams & Malte C. Ebach, "The reform of palaeontology and the rise of biogeography--25 years after 'ontogeny, phylogeny, palaeontology and the biogenetic law' (Nelson, 1978)," Journal of Biogeography 31 (2004): 685-712.
¹⁴ Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time. New York: Free Press, 1999, pp. 5, 32, 113-117.
Jonathan Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2006). More information available online (2009) here.

On decanonising Darwin

How to Teach the Evolution Controversy

Granville Sewell June 1, 2015 12:39 PM | 

If you are a biology teacher who feels that Darwinism should not enjoy special legal protection from scientific criticism in the classroom, here is an idea for you. I suggest you distribute the news story below to your students, word for word. You then have two alternatives:

1. Identify the report as a 1980 New York Times News Servicearticle (a photocopy is here). If you identify the source, you may be safe from direct persecution, in which case you have found a way to "teach the controversy" without losing your job. But be prepared to suffer the consequences to your career in the long term.
2. Do not identify the source of the report. Then at an appropriate point during your dismissal proceedings, you can reveal that the story is actually a New York Times News Service article. I can't guess what will happen to you then, but whether the charges are dropped or not, this will be a dramatic way to bring out how badly academic freedom laws are needed around the country. Any volunteers?

Here is the news story:

Biology's understanding of how evolution works, which has long postulated a gradual process of Darwinian natural selection acting on genetic mutations, is undergoing its broadest and deepest revolution in nearly 50 years.

At the heart of the revolution is something that might seem a paradox. Recent discoveries have only strengthened Darwin's epochal conclusion that all forms of life evolved from a common ancestor. Genetic analysis, for example, has shown that every organism is governed by the same genetic code controlling the same biochemical processes. At the same time, however, many studies suggest that the origin of species was not the way Darwin suggested or even the way most evolutionists thought after the 1930s and 1940s, when Darwin's ideas were fused with the rediscovered genetics of Gregor Mendel.

Exactly how evolution happened is now a matter of great controversy among biologists. Although the debate has been under way for several years, it reached a crescendo last month, as some 150 scientists specializing in evolutionary studies met for four days in Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History to thrash out a variety of new hypotheses that are challenging older ideas.

The meeting, which was closed to all but a few observers, included nearly all the leading evolutionists in paleontology, population genetics, taxonomy and related fields.

No clear resolution of the controversies was in sight. This fact has often been exploited by religious fundamentalists who misunderstood it to suggest weakness in the fact of evolution rather than the perceived mechanism. Actually, it reflects significant progress toward a much deeper understanding of the history of life on Earth.

At issue during the Chicago meeting was macroevolution, a term that is itself a matter of debate but which generally refers to the evolution of major differences, such as those separating species or larger classifications. Most agree that macroevolution is, for example, what made crustaceans different from mollusks. It is the process by which birds and mammals evolved out of reptiles. It is also what gave rise to major evolutionary innovations shared by many groups, such as the flower in higher plants or the eye in vertebrates.

Darwin suggested that such major products of evolution were the results of very long periods of gradual natural selection, the mechanism that is widely accepted today as accounting for minor adaptations. These small variations, considered products of microevolution, account for such things as the different varieties of finches Darwin found in the Galapagos Islands. Under human control, or "artificial selection," microevolution has produced all the varieties of domestic dog, all of which remain members of a single species.

Darwin, however, knew he was on shaky ground in extending natural selection to account for differences between major groups of organisms. The fossil record of his day showed no gradual transitions between such groups but he suggested that further fossil discoveries would fill the missing links.

"The pattern that we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist," declared Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Eldridge reminded the meeting of what many fossil hunters have recognized as they trace the history of a species through successive layers of ancient sediments. Species simply appear at a given point in geologic time, persist largely unchanged for a few million years and then disappear. There are very few examples -- some say none -- of one species shading gradually into another.

Granville Sewell is professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso, and author of a new Discovery Institute Press book, In the Beginning and Other Essays on Intelligent Design, 2nd edition.

Revelation1-3 NWT(2013 Edition)

1 A revelation* by Jesus Christ, which God gave him,+ to show his slaves+ the things that must shortly take place. And he sent his angel and presented it in signs through him to his slave John,+ 2 who bore witness to the word God gave and to the witness Jesus Christ gave, yes, to all the things he saw. 3 Happy is the one who reads aloud and those who hear the words of this prophecy and who observe the things written in it,+ for the appointed time is near.

4 John to the seven congregations+ that are in the province of Asia:

May you have undeserved kindness and peace from “the One who is and who was and who is coming,”+ and from the seven spirits+ that are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, “the Faithful Witness,”+ “the firstborn from the dead,”+ and “the Ruler of the kings of the earth.”+

To him who loves us+ and who set us free from our sins by means of his own blood+— 6 and he made us to be a kingdom,+ priests+ to his God and Father—yes, to him be the glory and the might forever. Amen.

7 Look! He is coming with the clouds,+ and every eye will see him, and those who pierced him; and all the tribes of the earth will beat themselves in grief because of him.+ Yes, Amen.

8 “I am the Al′pha and the O·me′ga,”*+ says Jehovah* God, “the One who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty.”+

9 I John, your brother and a sharer with you in the tribulation+ and kingdom+ and endurance+ in association with Jesus,+ was on the island called Pat′mos for speaking about God and bearing witness concerning Jesus. 10 By inspiration I came to be in the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a strong voice like that of a trumpet, 11 saying: “What you see, write in a scroll and send it to the seven congregations: in Eph′e·sus,+ in Smyr′na,+ in Per′ga·mum,+ in Thy·a·ti′ra,+ in Sar′dis,+ in Philadelphia,+ and in La·o·di·ce′a.”+

12 I turned to see who was speaking with me, and when I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands,+ 13 and in the midst of the lampstands someone like a son of man,+ clothed in a garment that reached down to the feet and wearing a golden sash around his chest. 14 Moreover, his head and his hair were white as white wool, as snow, and his eyes were like a fiery flame,+ 15 and his feet were like fine copper+ when glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. 16 And he had in his right hand seven stars,+ and out of his mouth a sharp, long, two-edged sword+ was protruding, and his countenance* was like the sun when it shines at its brightest.+ 17 When I saw him, I fell as dead at his feet.

And he laid his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First+ and the Last,+ 18 and the living one,+ and I became dead,+ but look! I am living forever and ever,+ and I have the keys of death and of the Grave.*+ 19 So write down the things you saw, and the things that are, and the things that will take place after these. 20 As for the sacred secret of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden lampstands: The seven stars mean the angels of the seven congregations, and the seven lampstands mean the seven congregations.+

2 “To the angel+ of the congregation in Eph′e·sus+ write: These are the things that he says who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands:+ 2 ‘I know your deeds, and your labor and endurance, and that you cannot tolerate bad men, and that you put to the test those who say they are apostles,+ but they are not, and you found them to be liars. 3 You are also showing endurance, and you have persevered for the sake of my name+ and have not grown weary.+ 4 Nevertheless, I hold this against you, that you have left the love you had at first.

5 “‘Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent+ and do the deeds you did at first. If you do not, I will come to you, and I will remove your lampstand+ from its place, unless you repent.+ 6 Still, you do have this in your favor: that you hate the deeds of the sect of Nic·o·la′us,+ which I also hate. 7 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations:+ To the one who conquers+ I will grant to eat of the tree of life,+ which is in the paradise of God.’

8 “And to the angel of the congregation in Smyr′na write: These are the things that he says, ‘the First and the Last,’+ who became dead and came to life again:+ 9 ‘I know your tribulation and poverty—but you are rich+—and the blasphemy by those who call themselves Jews and really are not, but they are a synagogue of Satan.+ 10 Do not be afraid of the things you are about to suffer.+ Look! The Devil will keep on throwing some of you into prison so that you may be fully put to the test, and you will have tribulation for ten days. Prove yourself faithful even to death, and I will give you the crown of life.+ 11 Let the one who has an ear hear+ what the spirit says to the congregations: The one who conquers+ will by no means be harmed by the second death.’+

12 “To the angel of the congregation in Per′ga·mum write: These are the things that he says who has the sharp, long, two-edged sword:+ 13 ‘I know where you are dwelling, that is, where the throne of Satan is; and yet you keep holding fast to my name,+ and you did not deny your faith in me+ even in the days of An′ti·pas, my faithful witness,+ who was killed+ by your side, where Satan is dwelling.

14 “‘Nevertheless, I have a few things against you, that you have there those adhering to the teaching of Ba′laam,+ who taught Ba′lak+ to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality.*+ 15 In the same way, you also have those adhering to the teaching of the sect of Nic·o·la′us.+ 16 So repent. If you do not, I am coming to you quickly, and I will war against them with the long sword of my mouth.+

17 “‘Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations:+ To the one who conquers+ I will give some of the hidden manna,+ and I will give him a white pebble, and written on the pebble is a new name that no one knows except the one receiving it.’

18 “To the angel of the congregation in Thy·a·ti′ra+ write: These are the things that the Son of God says, the one who has eyes like a fiery flame+ and whose feet are like fine copper:+ 19 ‘I know your deeds, and your love and faith and ministry and endurance, and that your deeds of late are more than those you did at first.

20 “‘Nevertheless, I do hold this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jez′e·bel,+ who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and misleads my slaves to commit sexual immorality*+ and to eat things sacrificed to idols. 21 And I gave her time to repent, but she is not willing to repent of her sexual immorality.* 22 Look! I am about to throw her into a sickbed, and those committing adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of her deeds. 23 And I will kill her children with deadly plague, so that all the congregations will know that I am the one who searches the innermost thoughts* and hearts, and I will give to you individually according to your deeds.+

24 “‘However, I say to the rest of you who are in Thy·a·ti′ra, all those who do not follow this teaching, those who did not get to know the so-called “deep things of Satan”:+ I am not putting on you any other burden. 25 Just the same, hold fast to what you have until I come.+ 26 And to the one who conquers and observes my deeds down to the end, I will give authority over the nations,+ 27 and he will shepherd the people with an iron rod+ so that they will be broken to pieces like clay vessels, just as I have received from my Father. 28 And I will give him the morning star.+ 29 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’

3 “To the angel of the congregation in Sar′dis write: These are the things that he says who has the seven spirits of God+ and the seven stars:+ ‘I know your deeds, that you have the name* that you are alive, but you are dead.+ 2 Become watchful,+ and strengthen the things remaining that were ready to die, for I have not found your works fully performed* before my God. 3 Therefore, continue mindful of* how you have received and how you heard, and go on keeping it, and repent.+ Certainly unless you wake up, I will come as a thief,+ and you will not know at all at what hour I will come upon you.+

4 “‘Nevertheless, you do have a few individuals* in Sar′dis who did not defile their garments,+ and they will walk with me in white ones,+ because they are worthy. 5 The one who conquers+ will thus be dressed in white garments,+ and I will by no means blot out* his name from the book of life,+ but I will acknowledge his name before my Father and before his angels.+ 6 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’

7 “To the angel of the congregation in Philadelphia write: These are the things he says who is holy,+ who is true,+ who has the key of David,+ who opens so that no one will shut and shuts so that no one opens: 8 ‘I know your deeds—look! I have set before you an opened door,+ which no one can shut. And I know that you have a little power, and you kept my word and did not prove false to my name. 9 Look! I will make those from the synagogue of Satan who say they are Jews yet are not,+ but are lying—look! I will make them come and bow* before your feet and make them know that I have loved you. 10 Because you kept the word about my endurance,*+ I will also keep you from the hour of test,+ which is to come upon the entire inhabited earth, to put to the test those dwelling on the earth. 11 I am coming quickly.+ Keep holding fast to what you have, so that no one may take your crown.+

12 “‘The one who conquers—I will make him a pillar in the temple of my God, and he will by no means go out from it anymore, and I will write upon him the name of my God+ and the name of the city of my God, the New Jerusalem+ that descends out of heaven from my God, and my own new name.+ 13 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’

14 “To the angel of the congregation in La·o·di·ce′a+ write: These are the things that the Amen+ says, the faithful and true+ witness,+ the beginning of the creation by God:+ 15 ‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were cold or else hot. 16 So because you are lukewarm and neither hot+ nor cold,+ I am going to vomit you out of my mouth. 17 Because you say, “I am rich+ and have acquired riches and do not need anything at all,” but you do not know that you are miserable and pitiful and poor and blind and naked, 18 I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may become rich, and white garments so that you may become dressed and that the shame of your nakedness may not be exposed,+ and eyesalve to rub in your eyes+ so that you may see.+

19 “‘All those for whom I have affection, I reprove and discipline.+ So be zealous and repent.+ 20 Look! I am standing at the door and knocking. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into his house and take the evening meal with him and he with me. 21 To the one who conquers+ I will grant to sit down with me on my throne,+ just as I conquered and sat down+ with my Father on his throne. 22 Let the one who has an ear hear what the spirit says to the congregations.’”