Neopaganism: a brief history.

 Modern Paganism, also known as Contemporary Paganism and Neopaganism, is a collective term for religious movements influenced by or derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of pre-modern peoples. Although they share similarities, contemporary Pagan religious movements are diverse, and do not share a single set of beliefs, practices, or texts. Most academics who study the phenomenon treat it as a movement that is divided into different religions; others characterize it as a single religion of which different Pagan faiths are denominations.

Adherents rely on pre-Christian, folkloric, and ethnographic sources to a variety of degrees; many follow a spirituality that they accept as entirely modern, while others claim prehistoric beliefs, or else attempt to revive indigenous, ethnic religions as accurately as possible. Academic research has placed the Pagan movement along a spectrum, with eclecticism on one end and polytheistic reconstructionism on the other. Polytheism, animism, and pantheism are common features of Pagan theology.

Contemporary Paganism has sometimes been associated with the New Age movement, with scholars highlighting both their similarities and differences. The academic field of Pagan studies began to coalesce in the 1990s, emerging from disparate scholarship in the preceding two decades.

Yet more on natures engineers vs. Darwin.

 

Insects and Design: Ant and Honeybee Engineers

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Yesterday we began looking at arthropods that engineer things. Another arthropod family displays enviable skill at architecture. If you’ve ever watched ants busily tunneling in an ant farm, you may have noticed that the intricate finished product rarely collapses. Why is that? Engineers would like to know, since cave-ins pose a serious threat to miners’ safety. It turns out that ants, with no foreman or architect, instinctively build on the principle of natural arches as they remove sand grains one by one. This was found by scientists at Caltech, who wrote about “The Science of Underground Kingdoms.” A short video in the article notes that ant colonies can extend down 25 feet, host millions of inhabitants, and last for decades. 

Jose Andrade, a Caltech mechanical engineer, was impressed with the intricate casts of ant tunnels that have been made by pouring molten metal into them and retrieving the architecture (see photo in the article). He asked, “What are ants thinking (if anything)?” Do they dig blindly, or just “know” what to do? He teamed up with biologist Joe Parker to investigate. What they figured is that the know-how is not in the individual ant, but in the colony. They call it a “behavioral algorithm.” 

“That algorithm does not exist within a single ant,” he says. “It’s this emergent colony behavior of all these workers acting like a superorganism. How that behavioral program is spread across the tiny brains of all these ants is a wonder of the natural world we have no explanation for.” 

To survive, ants have to build according to the laws of physics. It might be that ants have sensors that help them avoid removing particles that provide load bearing, much as Jenga players pull out sticks that keep the pile from collapsing. The remaining sticks create a “force chain” that stabilizes the pile.

As ants remove grains of soil they are subtly causing a rearrangement in the force chains around the tunnel. Those chains, somewhat randomized before the ants begin digging, rearrange themselves around the outside of the tunnel, sort of like a cocoon or liner. As they do so, two things happen: 1.) the force chains strengthen the existing walls of the tunnel and 2.) the force chains relieve pressure from the grains at end of the tunnel where the ants are working, making it easier for the ants to safely remove them.

The research was published in the PNAS by de Macedo et al., “Unearthing real-time 3D ant tunneling mechanics.” The Abstract says that natural arches form as the ants instinctively know which grains to remove.

We discover that intergranular forces decrease significantly around ant tunnels due to arches forming within the soil. Due to this force relaxation, any grain the ants pick from the tunnel surface will likely be under low stress. Thus, ants avoid removing grains compressed under high forces without needing to be aware of the force network in the surrounding material. Even more, such arches shield tunnels from high forces, providing tunnel robustness.

Honeybee Engineering

One more example of arthropod architecture is the honeycomb. Everyone is familiar with the hexagonal cells that honeybees build, but bees (and engineers using fabricated honeycomb material) face a problem building the hexagons around corners and curves. A photo in the Cornell Chronicle shows the problem: the growing honeycombs start in different locations and will eventually merge. One cannot use perfect hexagons at the junctions, but prefab materials, used in “everything from airplane wings, boats, and cars, to skis, snowboards, packaging and acoustic dampening materials,” tend to be manufactured in straight lines, not curves. Because bees are good at solving this interface problem, “Engineers may learn from bees for optimal honeycomb designs.”

Challenges arise when space constraints or repairs require engineers to keep a structure mechanically strong when linking together industrial honeycomb panels that each have cells of different sizes. High performance computers used with 3-D printers may solve this problem in the future, but could bees provide a more efficient and adaptable strategy?

A new study finds they can. It turns out that honey bees are skilled architects who plan ahead and create irregular-shaped cells and a variety of angles to bridge together uniform lattices when limited space constrains them.

By careful observation, Cornell engineer Kirsten Petersen noticed that bees are as frugal as possible with their “expensive” material, beeswax.

As a result, the bees employ other shapes — pentagons or heptagons — in order to link together panels of perfectly hexagonal drone and worker cells. Along with building cells of different shapes, the bees also build irregular-sized cells, and sometimes even combine multiple types of irregular cells. The authors refer to these pairs and triplets of irregular cells as “motifs” and show that particular combinations occur more often than expected by chance.

The bees even seem to be “thinking ahead” as they construct “intermediate cells” to link dissimilar combs together. All the while, they keep the structure strong and robust around curves and corners. As part of the study, 

Coauthor Nils Napp, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, developed a theoretical computer model that allowed them to analyze configurations, and test optimal ways cells might fit together in a continuous manner under the space constraints. They used the model to ask, how much better could the bees do? “And it turns out, not that much better,” Petersen said.

Petersen attributes this engineering know-how to evolution, but those in the design community know to expect that kind of narrative gloss added like whitewash on the engineered structure. Is any gloss needed? Not really. One can observe these ingenious arthropod engineers, understand what they do, and apply it. The whitewash can be sandblasted off without damaging the structure.

Nevertheless, the origin of these capabilities in arthropods must be addressed at some level. If the arthropod body plan mystically “emerged” by evolution, did the engineering expertise of a spider, ant, or honeybee also emerge by unguided natural processes? The same answer applies that Stephen Meyer gave in Darwin’s Doubt: complex specified information is a hallmark of design. Only an intelligent cause provides the best explanation for it, wherever it is encountered. Chance never does. By default, then, intelligent causes should be preferred for the origin of engineering expertise in arthropods.

Yet another look at the thumb print of JEHOVAH.

 

Oxford’s John Lennox: Why Science and the Universe Itself Call for a Creator

David Klinghoffer

Oxford mathematician John Lennox is a star of the new Science Uprising episode, “Big Bang: Something from Nothing?” He’s also priceless as a character: brilliant scientist, the Irish grandfather you wish you had, amiably listing off fact after fact about the universe to confound any scientific atheist. In bonus material from the episode, Professor Lennox discusses problems including that the universe has a beginning, that it was wonderfully fine-tuned for our existence from the start, or indeed before the start. Also that there is something at all rather than nothing, a truth that atheists Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and others have sought to smooth other. Lennox tells here why they fail. None of this is what you would expect given a materialist picture of reality. But a Biblical one? That’s a different story.

 Watch Episode 7 of Science Uprising, if you haven’t already, and then enjoy more from Dr. Lennox as he explains why science and the universe call for a creating deity:

Barbarians at the gate?

 

In Science — But Not Just in Science — Who Can Still Believe the “Elites”?

David Klinghoffer

Mark Tapscott at Instapundit enjoyed the new Science Uprising episode, “Big Bang: Something from Nothing?”:

‘SCIENCE UPRISING’ AND THE ELITES: Just as there is a gathering revolt against the political elites in this country, so there are a growing number of smart folks with lots of PhDs on their walls who have had it with being blackballed, denied tenure, kicked out of research granting because they dissent from the current secular materialist orthodoxy.

Discovery Institute’s latest episode of “Science Uprising” provides an introductory summary of Intelligent Design evidence, but more importantly, it also makes clear that this debate isn’t going away any time soon. If anything, like the Flat Earthers of the past, the secular materialists could be in for some surprises. And don’t miss those ‘Chicken and Egg’ dilemmas, either.

That is a smart connection to draw. Whether in science, medicine, politics, or other areas, the comforting old assumption — how elites can be trusted to tell the truth and look out for our best interests — seems more hollow by the day. Who can really believe that anymore? Watch Episode 7 now:

Natures engineers vs. Darwin.

 

Arthropod Architects Amaze Engineers

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC

Arthropods are often described as the most diverse phylum of animals, and the most numerous, too. There are well over a million species of arthropods known today, and other extinct ones in the fossil record. 

Three traits define arthropods: an exoskeleton, paired jointed appendages, and a body plan segmented into head, thorax, and abdomen (but sometimes the thorax and abdomen are fused). Arthropods (phylum Euarthropoda, or true arthropods) are subdivided into in five subphyla: Trilobites (extinct), Chelicerates (horseshoe crabs, spiders, mites and scorpions), Myriapods (millipedes and centipedes), Crustaceans (lobsters, crabs, crayfish, shrimp), and Hexapods (insects). Children are most familiar with chelicerates and hexapods; they learn early that spiders have eight legs and insects have six legs (generally speaking). An occasional centipede or millipede or “pill bug” arouses their fascination, too. They soon recognize spiders, but may have trouble realizing that flies, beetles, butterflies, praying mantises, honeybees, crickets, gnats, and aphids are all classified as insects. Today and tomorrow we’ll offer some news about insects and spiders whose architectural skills fascinate scientists.

The earliest arthropod body plan “explodes” onto the scene in early Cambrian strata, meaning that by their first appearance, arthropods had brains, nerves, muscles, a gut, locomotion, sensory equipment, and the ability to reproduce. The most famous of the Cambrian arthropods, the trilobites, with their complex eyes and coordinated legs, inhabited every part of the world. Other Cambrian arthropods, known from Canada’s Burgess Shale and from China, include Marrella, Anomalocaris, and some bivalve forms, although classification of extinct species is sometimes contentious. Some of these are “brought to life” in Illustra’s film Darwin’s Dilemma and further scrutinized in Stephen Meyer’s work, Darwin’s Doubt). Except in some details, the Cambrian species look familiar and would appear at home in the world today. If their complex body plans could emerge in a geological instant, why stop there? Did some of these extinct arthropods also possess complex behaviors and engineering know-how? We may never know, but we know what we can observe today.

Chelicerata: Spider Engineers

Bioengineers already envy spider silk for its exceptional strength and flexibility. A lesser-known but enviable quality is web architecture. Orb webs are admirable for their symmetry, but what about the irregular “tangle webs” that look chaotic, with silk strands going every which way? The tangle web, it turns out, is functionally beautiful; “it filters in prey and protects the spider from predators.” It is also well-built to be strong and resilient.

Seven researchers at MIT and one from Berlin investigated “In situ three-dimensional spider web construction and mechanics” and wrote up their findings in PNAS. Calling spiders an “evolutionary success” but also “nature’s engineers,” they say,

Learning how spiders used their silks and webs to adapt to environmental pressures have fascinated many fields of research such as biomedicine, biology, and engineering. Because of silk’s nanoscale size and the complex web architecture, little is known about the architecture and mechanics of three-dimensional (3D) spider websduring construction. This work comprehensively investigates the structure, mechanics, and functionality of a 3D spider web under construction, using consistent imaging and computational simulations methods. This work could inspire efficient spider-inspired fabrication sequences or fiber geometries in engineered materials, as demonstrated here for 3D-printed prototype materials. [Emphasis added.]

Of interest to them was a spider’s ability to build “lightweight and high-performance web architectures often several times their size and with very few supports.” This ability would be helpful for spacecraft, for instance, where light weight is a priority. Human construction often takes advance planning, collection of materials and a large team of workers to put a structure together. A spider does all the work herself.

The MIT research team took careful photographs of a 3D web under construction from different angles, and then 3D-printed the parts and put them together. What they found is that the spider first builds an escape route, and then keeps the growing web architecturally sound throughout construction. The spider continues to reinforce the original plan. A tangle web also must withstand the force of a prey hitting it. Because stress is localized at all times, the web is robust against failure. If a fiber breaks, 

the load is transferred to its connecting fibers. Because of redundancy in the structure and the nonlinear behavior of dragline silk, the spider web does not fail catastrophically at any stage of construction.

The paper waxes eloquent about the web-building spider’s skill set, too much so to quote it all here. Suffice it to say they were excited at what they observed and how the information might be used by engineers.

Expanding our knowledge of spiders’ web construction, silk recycling, web monitoring, and repair methods could inspire novel self-sufficient, self-repairable, and self-monitored smart structures. This knowledge can also inspire artistic, design, and architectural interventions — such as complex and large-scale tensile structures — via creative collaborations that both engage and inform materials and engineering sciences.

Already ruling as kings?

  1Corinthians4:8NWT2013"Are you already satisfied? Have you begun ruling as kings  us? I really wish that you had begun ruling as kings, so that we might begin ruling as kings." 

The true church is pursuing no 'dominion' over the present civilisation.

1Corinthians6:2,3NWT2013"Or do you not know that the holy ones will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you,are you not competent to try very trivial matters? Do you not know that we will judge angels..."

It is clear that some have allowed ambition to color their interpretation of this text. The context clearly indicates that this is referring to the millenium when the true church is united with her Lord in heaven, it is then that we receive dominion over angels and men(see revelation20:1-3). From the earlier cited text it is clear that our brother Paul ,and those of like mind did not consider themselves as being entitled to any dominion in the present age.

Galatians6:14NIV"May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,through which the world has been crucified to me,and I to the world."

Through the sacrifice of our Lord the true Christian is dead to the present civilisation ,i.e he is of no value to its ambitions, just as it is of no concern to him. Thus when it comes to its corrupt and corrupting politics,less is more.

1John2:17NIV"The world and its desires pass away,but whoever does the will of God lives forever"

The present civilisation is doomed by divine decree. That being the case how could the Christian make common cause with human attempts to ,in effect, frustrate the divine will. For lovers of righteousness the removal of the present failed civilisation to make way for Jehovah's kingdom is the very best news see Daniel 2:44.

Jeremiah7:16NIV"So do not pray for this people nor offer any plea or petition for them;do not plead with me,for I will not be listening to you."

The true church has not been set up to give any aid or comfort to doomed attempts at patching up the present civilisation. Indeed it would be cruelty of the worst sort to participate in such deception, rather we urge men to abandon such false hopes and turn to the JEHOVAH the one true hope see revelation14:6,7.

Genesis19:14NIV"So Lot went out and spoke to his sons in law, who were pledged to marry his daughters. He said"hurry and get out of this place,because the LORD is about to destroy the city. But his sons in law thought he was Joking."

For more than a century now the brothers have been warning Christendom that her political ambitions are going to be her doom (see Revelation17:16,17). Like Lot's sons in law Christendom as a class has chosen to take lightly the warning of Jehovah's servant ,and are thus setting themselves up for a similar outcome.

JEHOVAH the barbarian?

  In this post I would like to treat with the issue of Jehovah's destruction of the Canaanite nations as recorded in the old testament of the holy bible see Deuteronomy9:1-6.This account is often advanced some as a defeater for the Bible's claim of divine inspiration the argument being that the Israelites were instructed to engage in conduct now universally (or at least largely) regarded as abhorrent and hence said instructions could not have originated from the morally superior being Jehovah God is proclaimed be in those same scriptures see exodus34:6,7.

  First I'd like to point to what I regard as a bit of a fudge on the part of most who advance this line of reasoning i.e their failure to treat the bible narrative as a united whole.Basically what happens in these rants is that parts of the account are rejected as unhistorical and then the remainder is attacked as immoral or senseless.If the consistency/morality of any narrative is to be properly appraised then that narrative must be examined as a united whole,to attack a watered down version of said narrative is to be misleading.

 We all know that morality is context specific.For instance if my neighbour is late on his car payments and the institution that is his creditor sends its agents to repossess his car both his creditor and their agents would be blameless before the law,if I however decided to take possession the same vehicle (though I may employ the same methods as the aforementioned creditors)I would be in breach of law.

 So then can we really properly evaluate the Bible's narrative while excising the main character and his actions from that narrative.The narrative begins by revealing Jehovah as the creator of life and all that is necessary to sustain and render it enjoyable see Genesis1.Hence Jehovah is the owner of life it is his property to give and to repossess according to his own righteous standards.

  So where does this leave us?Has the bible given a warrant to any self-styled religious teacher to call for the death of anyone who ruffles his feathers?

  The Bible's narrative tells us that Jehovah God revealed himself so spectacularly to Moses and Israel that even the nation's  enemies were forced to confess his superiority see exodus8:19.

 e.g deuteronomy4:32-34" “For ask now concerning the days that are past, which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth, and ask from one end of heaven to the other, whether any great thing like this has happened, or anything like it has been heard. ³³ Did any people ever hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard, and live? ³⁴ Or did God ever try to go and take for Himself a nation from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs, by wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?"

  So we are not here talking about voices in anyone's head or long winded debates among academics.The epistemic warrant for Israel's and the surrounding nations' concluding that Moses and Israel were being led by the angel of the original God,the creator of the earth and sky was of a far higher order.The Canaanites made themselves the target of God's righteous wrath because their wickedness was regarded by him as a spiritual contaminant to the land he had designated as a sanctuary for true worship not because of their race see Deuteronomy9:5,6.That is why when the then prostitute Rahab and some the Hivite peoples decided to switch allegiances they became objects of Jehovah's mercy see Joshua2:9-13,Joshua9:3-9.

  Noteworthy here is the fact that the miracles wrought by Jehovah's angel through Moses were universally acknowledged.But only a minority were able get past their pride and stubbornness to realise that taking up arms against the deity amounted to collective suicide but those who did turn to Jehovah were not rejected on grounds of race.I also want to point out that the option of fleeing was also available so it was not even necessary to adopt the religion of the Hebrews if one found that unpalatable.

  The Canaanites of their own free will decided that that piece of dirt was worth dying for at the hands of its creator and real owner.

 When the Israelites turned around and adopted the same disgusting mores as the Canaanites they too were expelled from the holy land,as they were warned,see Leviticus18:25-28,2kings25:27-30,further demonstrating that Jehovah's actions are never ethnically motivated.So the Canaanites were given fair warning and the opportunity to avoid destruction.Jehovah is certainly not to blame for their poor decision making.  

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.