Wednesday 20 September 2023
Tuesday 19 September 2023
Monday 18 September 2023
Sunday 17 September 2023
Saturday 16 September 2023
John Adams and the trinity.
JOHN ADAMS WAS NOT A THEISTIC RATIONALIST – PART 8: ADAMS AND THE DEITY OF CHRIST
In regards to John Adams’ view of the deity of Christ, Frazer wrote:
However, like the deists, Adams did not believe in the deity of Jesus … For Adams and the other theistic rationalists, Jesus was an exemplary man who left an example to follow and who deserved to be imitated, but He was not God.
Frazer is partly correct in this statement. Adams was a committed Unitarian who rejected the orthodox concept of the Trinity. In other words, he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the same being as God the Father. However, there are a very wide range of Unitarian views of Christ, and Frazer is mistaken to conclude that Adams believed Jesus to be just an exemplary man.
The idea that Jesus was just a good man sent from God is known in theological circles as Socinianism. It is the most extreme of the Unitarian views of Jesus, and it was the view held by Joseph Priestley of whom Adams wrote:
I shall never be a disciple of Priestley. He is as absurd inconsistent, credulous and incomprehensible as Athanasius.
Frazer probably assumed that Adams was a Socinian because of Frazer’s mistaken belief that Adams viewed Priestley as “the authority in religious matters,” but there is another (and a much more common) form of Unitarianism that Adams may have accepted.
The most prominent form of Unitarianism in 18th and 19th century America was Arianism. This form of Unitarianism follows the teachings of Arius who wrote:
We say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted because we say that the Son has a beginning but that God is without beginning.
other words, the Arians believed that Christ was the first being that God the Father created, that He was created as part of the Godhead, and that He with the Father then created everything else. This view of the Deity of Christ was expressed a little more clearly by one of Arius’ disciples, a missionary to the Goths named Ulfilas. Ulfilas wrote:
I believe there is one God the Father, alone unbegotten and invisible, and I believe in His only-begotten Son, our Lord and God, Creator and Maker of the whole creation, not having any like unto Him – therefore there is one God of all, who is also God of our God.
From Ulfilas’ statement, it is clear that Arians agreed with the concept of the Deity of Christ, but they rejected the idea that Christ was co-eternal with God the Father. To the Arians, the idea that an eternal being could die was preposterous, but they could accept the idea of Christ as God dying for us because they did not view Christ as an eternal being. In their reasoning, Christ could die even though He was part of the Godhead because of the fact that He had a beginning.
All of John Adams’ statements about Christ are consistent with the Arian form of Unitarianism, but he made several statements which are not consistent with Socinianism. For example, Adams made several references to Christ as his Savior which he would never have made as a Socinian. He once wrote to his wife that:
Our Saviour taught the Immorality of Revenge, and the moral Duty of forgiving Injuries, and even the Duty of loving Enemies.
And in his diary, he penned:
By this said our Blessed saviour shall all Men know that ye are my diciples, if ye have Love to one an other; how many inducements does the Christian Religion offer to excite us to universal Benevolence and Good will towards each other, and yet how often do we suffer the vilest of passions to Dominer over us and extinguish from our Bosoms every generous principal.
A Socinian would not have referred to Christ as the Savior, for Socinians viewed Jesus as nothing more than “an exemplary man who left an example to follow.” An Arian on the other hand would not have hesitated at all to speak of Christ as his Savior, for Arians agreed with the orthodox view of Christ’s atonement for sins.
In his lectures, Frazer refers to one of Adams’ statements about the Trinity as “the saddest, most incredible thing I found in thirty years of research.” The statement that Frazer is referring to is found in one of Adams’ letters to Jefferson in which Adams wrote:
Had you and I been forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai and admitted to behold, the divine Shekinah, and there told that one was three and three, one: we might not have had courage to deny it, but we could not have believed it. The thunders and lightenings and earthqu[ak]es and the transcendant splendors and glories, might have overwhelmed us with terror and amazement: but we could not have believed the doctrine. We should be more likely to say in our hearts, whatever we might say with our lips, this is chance. There is no God! No truth. This is all delusion, fiction and a lie: or it is all chance.
According to Frazer, this statement is an admission that:
Adams was so opposed to the doctrine of the Trinity that he said he would not believe it if directly told of it by God Himself ... Adams thought his reason more reliable than direct revelation from God.
But that is not necessarily the case. What Adams actually said was that he would be more likely to deny that he was being spoken to by God than he would be to believe that God was telling him that 2 plus 2 equals 5 and that the number 1 is equal to the number 3. According to Adams the idea that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and the idea that 1 is not equal to 3 are mathematical truths which cannot be disputed or doubted. Just prior to making his statement about Mt. Sinai, Adams said:
We can never be so certain of any Prophecy, or the fullfillment of any Prophecy; or of any miracle, or the design of any miracle as We are, from the revelation of nature i.e. natures God that two and two are equal to four. Miracles or Prophecies might frighten Us out of our Witts; might Scare us to death; might induce Us to lie; to Say that We believe that 2 and 2 makes 5. But We Should not believe it. We Should know the contrary.
This is a true statement. There are very few people in this world who would believe that 2 plus 2 equals 5 even if a powerful, spiritual being were to shout it to them while claiming to be God with the accompaniment of thunder and lightning. There is a term for people who would accept such a belief, and that is the term “fideist.” A fideist is one who believes that all knowledge is dependent on direct revelation from God, and Frazer may share that belief. The vast majority of humanity, however, (including most Christians) would be more likely to conclude that no being proclaiming that 2 plus 2 equals 5 can possibly be God regardless of how much he may claim to be so with thunder and lightning.
This is all that Adams was saying in his letter to Jefferson. He was not saying that he would still deny the Trinity even if God Himself were to explain it to him. What he was actually claiming was that he would still deny the Trinity even if some being claiming to be God offered him the same explanation of the Trinity as that which was given by its orthodox defenders. To Adams, the explanation given by orthodox Trinitarians was just as absurd as saying that 2 plus 2 equals 5, and he refused to believe such an explanation even if he were to hear it proclaimed from heaven. He would sooner believe that his senses were playing tricks on him than that God would say something false.
Now, many Christians would still conclude that Adams could not have been both a Christian and an Arian, but there is no Scriptural support for this view. Arianism has never been conclusively disproven, and there is no passage of Scripture which declares that Christians must hold to the Athanasian view of the Trinity. Personally, I think that the Athanasian formula is correct, but I recognize that it is just a man-made formula. It is just one of many attempts to explain a very large collection of passages in Scripture which touch on the nature of Christ. I think that Athanasius was correct, but there remains a possibility, however remote, that he may have been wrong. God has not deigned to give us an exact explanation of the natures of the Father, the Son and the Spirit, and until He does, I don’t see that we have any grounds to pronounce anathemas against those who accept a view different from our own.
Friday 15 September 2023
The protolife continues to troll Darwinism
First Life Must Have Had a Minimally Reliable Replication System — A Conundrum for Materialists
We have often considered the difficulties inherent in the popular RNA world scenario that is envisioned for primitive life. According to this model, prior to the emergence of DNA and proteins, RNA ribozymes served as the first replicators. The model is intended to circumvent the problem of causal circularity — that DNA must be copied by proteins, which are themselves coded for by DNA. Problems abound for the RNA world theory. Chief among those are the inherent instability of RNA (being single stranded, and possessing an additional 2’ OH group, rendering it prone to hydrolysis) and the fact that ribozymes have not been shown to be capable of complete self-replication.
A Physical Limitation
Indeed, on this latter point, when RNA forms complementary base pairs to fold back on itself, part of the molecule no longer presents an exposed strand that can serve as a template for copying. Thus, there is a physical limitation on the capability of RNA to self-replicate.
Another problem that has not received as much attention is the problem of replication fidelity. What do I mean by this? An important requirement of life is a means of minimally accurate self-replication. Biologist Jack Szostak explains that “In order for RNA to have emerged as the genetic polymer that enabled protocells to evolve in a Darwinian manner, the process of RNA replication must have been accurate enough to allow for the transmission of useful information from generation to generation, indefinitely.”1 Indeed, as biochemist Sy Garte observes, when the replication fidelity falls below a certain threshold, “modern organisms undergo an error catastrophe from which they cannot recover, as has been shown in the cases of viruses, aging, in evolution and in macromolecular replication in early life.”2 Viruses, particularly RNA viruses, are close to this critical threshold, with approximately one mutation per replication — and, in fact, increasing the rate of mutations to result in an error catastrophe has been proposed as an anti-viral strategy.3,4,5
A Minimum for Life?
What is the minimum level of replication fidelity needed to sustain life? This “has been estimated to be equal to 1-(1/L), where L is the length of the information molecule polymer.”6 The size of the smallest ribozymes is in the ballpark of around 50 ribonucleotides.7 For a string of ribonucleotides of this length, Jack Szostak concludes that “the error rate during template copying should be less than ~2% at each position, assuming that only about half of the nucleotide positions need to be specified, but each position must be copied twice for full replication.”8 But what is the average error rate during RNA copying? According to one study, this was estimated to be around 17 percent, which is significantly higher than the error rate threshold given above.9 With optimized nucleotide ratios, however, this may be reduced to less than 10 percent. And (since U residues are the biggest contributors to error rate, resulting from G:U mismatch formation) it may be even further decreased to around 5 percent on GC-rich templates.10 This, however, suggests a finely tuned and optimized sequence of ribonucleotides. And, yet, 5 percent is still too high — more than double what it needs to be for survival and evolution. Thus, Szostak concludes, “Clearly, a robust means of further reducing the error rate is critical if non-enzymatic RNA replication is to serve as the means for initiating Darwinian evolutionary processes.”11 Again, though, this will require additional levels of fine-tuning and design.
“A Sort of Phase Transition”
Sy Garte, in a paper published in BioCosmos, invites us to consider that the minimum threshold of replication fidelity needed to sustain life “represents a sort of phase transition” — values below this threshold cannot be increased by evolutionary mechanisms.12 This presents a significant challenge to naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios, since natural selection is impotent to produce the high replication fidelity needed for life to thrive and for evolution itself to take place. The earliest life must therefore have had a minimally reliable replication system right from the beginning. This is extremely difficult to account for on the hypothesis of naturalistic evolution. This fact, however, becomes much less surprising on a design-based view, since intelligent agents can optimize and fine-tune engineered systems.
Garte concludes his paper by noting,
While the concept of emergence is a useful phenomenological description of what happens at phase transitions, it is quite likely that further progress into elucidating the emergence of biology from chemistry might require the use of radically new perspectives on possible biological mechanisms, including teleology, which are beyond the scope of this report.
On a Design-Based View
Thus, Garte expresses an openness to teleological explanations with regard to the origin of life. How might such a teleological inference be expressed? As a Bayesian, I conceive of evidence in terms of a likelihood ratio — the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis (on the numerator) against the probability of the evidence given the falsity of the hypothesis (on the denominator). The top-heaviness of this likelihood ratio (referred to as the Bayes factor) corresponds to the evidential value of the observation under consideration. On a design-based view, it is not particularly surprising that the first life would be finely optimized to reduce copying errors sufficiently for survival and evolution. On the other hand, it is really quite surprising on the falsity of the design hypothesis. Thus, this data tends to confirm a design-based framework.
Notes
Szostak, J.W. The eightfold path to non-enzymatic RNA replication. J Syst Chem. 2012 3(2).
Garte S. Evidence for Phase Transitions in Replication Fidelity and Survival Probability at the Origin of Life. BioCosmos. 2021 1(1):2-10.
Bull JJ, Sanjuán R, Wilke CO. Theory of lethal mutagenesis for viruses. J Virol. 2007 Mar;81(6):2930-9.
Anderson JP, Daifuku R, Loeb LA. Viral error catastrophe by mutagenic nucleosides. Annu Rev Microbiol. 2004;58:183-205.
Eigen M. Error catastrophe and antiviral strategy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2002 Oct 15;99(21):13374-6.
Garte S. Evidence for Phase Transitions in Replication Fidelity and Survival Probability at the Origin of Life. BioCosmos. 2021 1(1):2-10.
Ferré-D’Amaré AR, Scott WG. Small self-cleaving ribozymes. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2010 Oct;2(10):a003574.
Szostak, J.W. The eightfold path to non-enzymatic RNA replication. J Syst Chem. 2012 3(2).
Leu K, Obermayer B, Rajamani S, Gerland U, Chen IA. The prebiotic evolutionary advantage of transferring genetic information from RNA to DNA. Nucleic Acids Res. 2011 Oct;39(18):8135-47.
Szostak, J.W. The eightfold path to non-enzymatic RNA replication. J Syst Chem. 2012 3(2).
Ibid.
Garte S. Evidence for Phase Transitions in Replication Fidelity and Survival Probability at the Origin of Life. BioCosmos. 2021 1(1):2-10.
Tuesday 12 September 2023
Monday 11 September 2023
Friday 8 September 2023
Sunday 3 September 2023
JEHOVAH The immortal God.
And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, “There will be no more delay!
1Timothy ch.1:17 NIV"Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen."
Malachi ch.3:6ASV"For I, JEHOVAH, change not; therefore ye, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed."
Christendom's lies notwithstanding the Lord JEHOVAH is unchangeably immortal and hence can never be mortal in whole nor in part.
If time is a finite creation then JEHOVAH has not lived forever.
In the bible time and space are abstractions and hence neither cause nor effects they merely qualify causes and effects.
The great first cause the Lord JEHOVAH is qualified as eternal having neither beginning nor end.
Cancelled by natural selection uncancelled by artificial selection?
What “Resurrecting” the Woolly Mammoth Would Mean for Darwinism
Image credit: Thomas Quine, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.
From the Financial Times, “Wooly idea: start-up’s wild plan to resurrect the mammoth”:
George Church has co-founded almost 50 companies based on experiments in his genetics lab, from tackling age-related diseases to creating pig organs to be used in human transplants.
But his latest project, Colossal Biosciences, is his most outlandish yet. The Texas-based start-up is aiming to spin off businesses and license technologies to fund bringing the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger, and the dodo back from extinction.
Its plan is to use gene editing to change the embryos of familiar animals until they resemble the lost species and it wants to create its first version of a mammoth — a gene edited elephant embryo born to an elephant mother — by 2028. Church said the timeline was “ambitious” but “not impossible”. …
In 2018, Church travelled to the Pleistocene Park experimental nature reserve in Siberia, where he was working with Russian scientist Sergey Zimov on a plan for the mammoths to eventually be released into the wild.
Colossal believes that bringing back mammoths could help restore the arctic tundra, preventing the thaw and release of stored greenhouse gases.
The project faces two huge challenges in particular. The first is to increase the number of gene edits that can be done at once, a process known as “multiplex editing”, to get as close as possible to creating a mammoth from an elephant embryo.
The second is to create a system to incubate mammoths in artificial wombs.
Of course, if they do succeed, it will be against everything Darwin told us. Species no longer appear from common descent, but now include designed horizontal gene transfer which should make a mess of inheritance trees and ghost lineages. It shows that speciation no longer has to use breeding, but simply genetic vectors — like viruses — to deliver the novel information. It says that intelligent design can be used to bypass all the glacially slow random ways to modify the genome. In other words, ID becomes the most likely hypothesis to abductively explain the data.
How will they wiggle out of that one?
Saturday 2 September 2023
Yet more on why the origin of life = the origin of information.
Introducing the Unknome, Biology’s Black Box
"Ome” is not a mantra in science, but it is an increasingly common suffix in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. We all know about the genome. Then there was the epigenome, followed by the proteome. Now there is the interactome, the metabolome, the transcriptome, and others. More “omes” seem to pop up in the literature from time to time. As in the genome representing the set of genes of an individual or species, the suffix -ome denotes a “body” or set of parts that can be described together: the proteome consists of all the proteins in a cell. The transcriptome is the set of DNA transcripts. The interactome is the set of all interacting parts in a process, and the metabolome is the full complement of metabolites in a cell, tissue, or organism at a particular state. A new one is the “unknome” — the set of all components we know nothing about. More on that later. The -ome suffix has also long been used on individual units like ribosome, cytochrome, cryptochrome, and chromosome. Poets should have an easy time writing verses about biochemistry.
The study of all omes can be called Omics, with family members like genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics. Omics is not just a taxonomical exercise; it is an attempt to get a handle on the bewildering complexity facing cell biologists. And just when they think they’ve got all the members corralled in an ome, complications set in.
Your Genomes (Plural)
For example, the journal Science announced recently that “Your cells don’t have the genome you were born with.” Contrary to what most people were led to believe by 23andMe, none of us have “a” genome, except at conception. From then on, the genome changes cell by cell, tissue by tissue, throughout life. These can add up to tens of thousands of changes per somatic cell. Modifications to the genome by mutations or by developmental processes turn us into universes of genomes!
As a result, every person is actually a mosaic of genomes, varying across the body and often within the same organ or tissue. These DNA changes introduce a diversity to the body’s somatic, or nonreproductive, cells that may be as important to health as the more pervasive alterations inherited from parents. Now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a 5-year, $140 million project to map this universe of genomic diversity — and probe why it matters.
Dan Landau calls this “a huge revolution in human genetics.” He is eager to see the results. “We are just at the beginning of this incredible adventure.”
Omics in 3-D
Another review article in Science announces “The Dawn of Spatial Omics.” The editor’s review says,
All of biology happens in space. In living organisms, cells must interact and assemble in three-dimensional tissues. The position of each cell is just as important as its intrinsic nature in determining how a tissue functions or malfunctions in a disease. Recently, many technologies have been invented to profile cells without removing them from their natural context, measuring gene expression and the regulatory landscape of a cell’s genome alongside its spatial location within a tissue. In a review, Bressan et al. describe the features of these methods, collectively named spatial omics, and discuss what is missing for them to unlock their full potential.
The authors, Bressan, Battistoni, and Hannon, begin with a fanfare: “Just as single-cell sequencing has revolutionized many fields of biology, spatial ‘omics,’ in which molecular parameters are measured in situ on intact tissue samples, is set to empower a new generation of scientific discoveries.”
Spatial molecular profiling at the tissue level (and sometimes at the cell level) with “multi-omic” technologies will allow researchers to study the genome, transcriptome, and proteome simultaneously in situ within an organ, tissue, or cell. This adds another layer of information that was hidden from earlier studies
One of the first steps along this journey was the emergence of single-cell “omics” technologies that operate on disaggregated tissues. These methods enabled the discovery of new cell types, cast new light on organismal development, and launched the process of creating comprehensive catalogs of human and mouse tissues. However, biological processes happen in a spatial context, and the three-dimensional (3D) arrangement of cells in a tissue has a profound effect on their functions…. Regardless of their undisputed power, measurements made on disaggregated cells or nuclei lack this layer of information. The need for such knowledge has driven the development of “spatial omics”: methods capable of measuring the molecular characteristics of cells in their native 3D context.
The authors say that “we are at the very beginning of the spatial omics revolution” and that “progress is happening at breakneck speed” that will undoubtedly give scientists “a much deeper understanding of biology in context.”
As an example of the profound effect of spatial and environmental influences on an organism, researchers at Harvard found that specific neurons become active when a mouse makes an error navigating a virtual reality maze.
The researchers found that when a mouse made and corrected a mistake while navigating, the subtype of neurons became active. This held true even when they guided the mouse to err, either by rotating the maze or changing the color cues. However, if the mouse didn’t make a mistake, or made a mistake but didn’t correct it, the neurons didn’t fire.
When the neurons became active, they did so in unison, prompting a follow-up experiment in which the researchers stimulated the cells with light. They found that the neurons are essentially hardwired to each other, meaning that the electrical current telling them to fire can flow directly from one cell to the next.
Studying these neurons in isolation would not have revealed this concerted, dynamic activity
Interactome Sentries
Scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands found that the “cytosolic interactome protects against protein unfolding” with a continuous process of “biological origami at the molecular level.” According to Phys.org, the
Group leader, Alireza Mashaghi, said, “When a cell experiences stress, a protein can unfold to a completely unfolded chain. Once that has happened, it’s very hard to reverse. But we noticed the cytoplasm puts a break on this process, not allowing the unfolding to go all the way. This protects the proteins and ensures a proper functionality, and also makes it easier for proteins to refold once the stress in resolved.”
Unknome: The Final Frontier
From the Public Library of Science comes word of “The ‘unknome’: the set of gene transcripts we know almost nothing about.” This black box consists of “thousands of understudied proteins encoded by genes in the human genome, whose existence is known but whose functions are mostly not.”
The sequencing of the human genome has made it clear that it encodes thousands of likely protein sequences whose identities and functions are still unknown. There are multiple reasons for this, including the tendency to focus scarce research dollars on already-known targets, and the lack of tools, including antibodies, to interrogate cells about the function of these proteins. But the risks of ignoring these proteins are significant, the authors argue, since it is likely that some, perhaps many, play important roles in critical cell processes, and may both provide insight and targets for therapeutic intervention.
Echoed by Phys.org, this news says that researchers in the UK are putting together a public database of these proteins that they trust will shrink over time. The Unknome [Unknown Genome] Project has started at http://www.unknome.org. The proteins are ranked by how little is known about them, stimulating researchers’ curiosity to find out what they do.
It’s clear that Omics is discovering additional layers of biological information in living systems. Antiquated 1960s-era concepts of genes and proteins, like the Central Dogma, are being overwhelmed by this new vista of multi-dimensional dynamic organization. If the earlier geneticists were looking at a 2-D flat map, the new generation is looking at a thriving city. Old dogmas about Darwinian evolution seem woefully inadequate to understand complexity at this level. Science in the 21st century will require a theoretical framework equipped to handle information flow in time and space. There is one. It’s known as intelligent design
Reviewing a "win" for Darwinism.
An Impressive Instance of Unguided Evolution? Not So Much
On a classic episode of ID the Future, host and biologist Ray Bohlin interviews biophysicist Cornelius Hunter, author of Darwin’s God, about an article in the journal Science concerning a virus invasion of E. coli bacteria. The article subtitle announces “Natural Selection Caught in the Act,” and suggests that an impressive instance of unguided evolution has been directly witnessed. Not so fast, Hunter says. The results were intelligently designed (by the lab scientists), he notes, and the changes are less impressive than they may appear at first glance. Hunter also explains protein-protein binding and counters evolutionist Dennis Venema to argue that the way the vertebrate immune system drives change is not at all analogous to the evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection. Moreover, Hunter says, the mammalian immune system is itself an enormous challenge for evolutionary theory.
Unfortunately, it’s common for studies such as this one to be hyped up by the scientific community and the establishment media. “Evolutionists are driven by non-scientific factors, non-scientific influences,” says Hunter. “There is a desire for the theory to be true in spite of the science, not because of the science.” Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Ecosystems vs. Darwinism
Ecosystems — A Tribute to Intelligent Design, or to Chance and Adaptation?
Although intelligent design is evident in the biochemistry of the cell and the physiological systems of the body, living organisms are not independent but exist in a web of life, interdependent upon other living things in an ecosystem.
As we think about all the species of animals, birds, and fishes on Earth, it becomes apparent that each one requires a certain type of food, suitable for its anatomy. Domestic livestock, including cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, can be nourished through grazing on grasses and broadleaf weeds, although each has different preferences.1 Among the wild animals, carnivores have varying needs for prey that match their size and abilities. With the thousands of species of birds, the preferred menu selections stretch from sips of nectar to berries, insects, smaller animals, carrion, or fish.
Variety and Quantity
Considering that water covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, it’s not surprising that the variety and quantity of fish inhabiting oceanic and freshwater ecosystems is legion.
The total number of living fish species — about 32,000 — is greater than the total of all other vertebrate species (amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) combined.2
Fish species include herbivores and carnivores (smaller fish get eaten by bigger fish). The largest marine species include baleen whales that are uniquely outfitted to obtain their nourishment from the smallest organisms:
[Baleen whales] are the largest animals on Earth, yet they live off some of the smallest. They can grow to lengths of 30 meters (90 feet), but it is the microscopic zooplankton, krill and small fish that sustains them.3
The main point here is not a lesson on what different creatures eat, but that the multiplied billions of creatures on Earth all need to be fed according to their specific dietary needs and their physiological and anatomical specifications. Anyone who has taken care of animals knows that concern over providing sufficient food of the right type never takes a vacation. Not many of us have pet hummingbirds, but if we did, we might lose weight just making sure they didn’t:
Hummingbirds have a very high metabolism and must eat all day long just to survive. They consume about half their body weight in bugs and nectar, feeding every 10-15 minutes and visiting 1,000-2,000 flowers throughout the day.4
Caring for more prosaic animals is also demanding
Cows are natural grazers, preferring to eat 5 to 9 meals a day, plus drinking. For this reason, cows have free access to fresh food and water throughout the day….So just how much does a cow eat? While each cow is different, a typical milk-producing dairy cow, weighing around 600kg, eats around 29kg [64 pounds] of feed each day and may drink about 100L of water (about a bathtub’s worth).
Apart from domesticated animals, wildlife depends upon an ecosystem in which the lives of multiple species are interconnected. We can observe how many species of living things thrive in a given ecosystem, but to take for granted the finely tuned balance within these life-nourishing habitats is to overlook layered evidence for design.
Let’s Look at a Few Specific Examples
In the wild, an apex predator such as a lion is equipped to hunt prey, but of course an abundance of suitable prey must exist within its territory. The prey, typically herbivores, need sufficient grassland to graze upon and water to drink. Seasonal weather changes must be moderate, so that vegetation and surface water are available year-round. The perspective of naturalism takes it for granted that these requirements are simply adaptations that occurred in time and location without any thought or foresight.
Consider another example. A raptor such as a red-tailed hawk is equipped with the ability of flight, sight and talons to hunt and capture small creatures. Rather than ascribing the sophisticated, finely tuned characteristics of such a bird of prey and its ecosystem to unguided evolutionary adaptations, purposeful design provides an explanation more consistent with the specific, interdependent functionality in this and other examples.
Design or Adaptation?
Surviving a cold winter that can last four to six months or longer, when no plant growth occurs and insects vanish, would seem impossible for many types of birds. However, several species of songbirds manage just fine, even when the average temperature falls well below freezing, eating seeds, nuts, and berries. Is this evidence for design, or is it just natural adaptation?
If the ability of birds to thrive across the Earth is just a matter of adaptation, the process works unbelievably well with the thousands of species of birds. “New research estimates there are between 50 billion and 430 billion birds on Earth.”5 The sheer number and variety of birds thriving in multiple environments on every continent argues that something far more than luck and unguided nature is behind it all.
Our increased understanding of the biochemical complexity within any living organism, coupled with a growing awareness of the delicately balanced ecosystems sustaining life on Earth, suggest ingenious foresight, planning, and design with every type of life we observe.6
Fish far outnumber birds on our planet, with estimates of 3.5 trillion fish inhabiting the oceans,7 and each one of these trillions of creatures needs a regular supply of food accessible to it in a suitable form and quantity. Let’s imagine an experiment: given a planet with oceans empty of life, how much intelligence would it take to design an interdependent ecosystem capable of supporting thousands of species of fish over a time frame stretching across hundreds of millions of years?
From Molecules to Gills
Oh, and if you, as a designer substitute, think of a type of fish to introduce into the pond, you’ll have to design everything about it, from molecules to gills. “Trial and error will save the day!” you say? “Once life gets going as a single-cell organism, chance and natural selection will succeed where human intelligence falls short.” Ah, yes. That makes sense.
Notes
“Understanding Working Rangelands — Cattle, Sheep, Goats, and Horses: What’s the Difference for Working Rangelands?” Univ. of California, Agriculture and Natural Resources, publ. 8524 (July, 2015).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/fish .
Jon Lapidese, “Baleen Whales — The Gentle Giants of the Ocean,” https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/blog/baleen-whales-the-gentle-giants-of-the-ocean
https://www.adirondackcouncil.org/page/blog-139/news/10-facts-about-hummingbirds–and-other-interesting-tidbits-1101.html .
How many birds are there in the world? | National Geographic .
Marcos Eberlin, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, https://www.discovery.org/store/product/foresight/ .
“How Many Fish Live in the Ocean?” WorldAtlas.
Friday 1 September 2023
Thursday 31 August 2023
Wednesday 30 August 2023
Tuesday 29 August 2023
The chain of Command.
But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, a and the head of Christ is (The)God.
Our brother Paul is taking us back to the garden with this exposition
Note please:
1Corinthians ch.11:7-9NIV"A man ought not to cover his head, b since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. 8For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; 9neither was man created for woman, but woman for man."
So there are two bases for seniority in this chain ,temporal priority, the man was created before the woman and Christ was created before all others and of course His God is eternal.
Also of note there is a widening of the gap has one ascends the chain the one atop this particular chain of command is infinite in both capability and in due authority so he transcends the rest of the chain. Any comparative gaps between the other members of the chain are relatively insignificant.
Two the transmission of life JEHOVAH the God and Father of Jesus is the ultimate source of life which he transmitted to humanity through his living logos beginning with the first man and through him the first woman. Only one member of this chain of command is called Ho Theos and he is the same one who is ALWAYS called Ho Theos,the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ JEHOVAH God.
The riot act: for those who missed it the first time
There will be no anonymous commenting on this site period.
Against unknown?III
Unknown: Scripture also teaches that, in a certain sense, the Father also "receives" something from the Son (e.g., Jn 16:15.23). Jesus submitted himself (hypotasszó) to the Father (1 Cor 15:28), "that God may be all in all", but this in no way implies inferiority, as he also subjected himself (hypotasszó) to Mary and Joseph (Lk 2:51), and Col 3:11 claims that "Christ is all, and in all".
Aservantof JEHOVAH:John ch.16:23NIV"In that day you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. "
John ch.16:15NIV"All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.”"
Colossians ch.3:11NIV"being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, "
So nothing about the most high God receiving any authority from his Son
He did submit to to his human parents why?
Galatians ch.4:4N8V"But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law,"
The law of course was made for man not angels or God-men. So the human not God-man Christ in obedience to the law honored his Father and mother
Exodus ch.20:12 ,Mark ch.2:27
The God and Father of Jesus is the MOST HIGH God and thus has no co-equals
Luke ch.1:32NIV"He will be great and will be called the Son of the MOST HIGH. The LORD God will give him the throne of his father David, "
John ch.10:29NIV"My Father, who has given them to me, is GREATER than ALL c ; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand"
So the union of Father and Son is not a union of co-equals
Only the God and Father of Jesus is ever called Ho Theos in an unqualified way so the God and Father of Jesus is not merely a unique person but a unique God which falsifies the trinity no member of the trinity is supposed to be the unique God in and of himself.
1Corinthians ch.15:28NIV"When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that(The) God may be all in all."
Also consider:
Matthew ch.24:36KJV"But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my FATHER ONLY. "
So even if we buy your utterly unscriptural God-man fudge how come the holy spirit does not know.
ID is perfectly natural?
The Return of Natural Theology
Influenced by a long line of materialist thinkers, Charles Darwin proposed the mechanism of natural selection as a substitute for God. But how does his evolutionary theory’s explanatory power measure up to recent scientific discoveries? On a new episode of ID the Future, physicist Dr. Brian Miller discusses the resurgence of natural theology in modern science with Pat Flynn, co-host of the Philosophy for the People podcast. Natural theology advances arguments for God based on reason and the discoveries of science. It’s an ancient pursuit that fell out of favor in the 19th century as a materialist account of life’s origins took center stage. But modern scientific findings point to mind, not a mindless process, as the likeliest explanation for a life-friendly universe. As a result, the pendulum is swinging back to teleology, ushering in a new heyday for natural theology.
In addition to giving a historical overview of natural theology, Miller and Flynn also discuss fundamental problems in origin-of-life studies that demand a better explanation than materialists can offer. “Here’s the fundamental challenge,” Miller says. “All natural processes tend to create greater disorder (entropy)…The origin of life requires chemicals to go into a state of both high order and high energy. That never happens without help!”
What about the multiverse as an escape hatch from the evidence of a universe intelligently designed to allow for life? That proposed design-defeater, Miller argues, also faces a huge problem.
Tune in for all this and more in a lively, wide-ranging conversation between Miller and his philosopher host Pat Flynn. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Monday 28 August 2023
The receipts of the Darwinian pathway to the blood clotting cascade?
Has Russell Doolittle Provided an Evolutionary Explanation of the Blood Clotting Cascade?
In two previous articles (here and here ), I reviewed the process of vertebrate blood clotting and summarized why it cannot readily be explained by naturalistic unguided processes, such as those proposed by neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this final installment, with the foregoing challenges in mind, let us inspect Russell Doolittle’s paper on the evolution of vertebrate blood clotting1 to determine to what extent his analysis assuages these concerns. Since Doolittle has also published a book dealing with this subject2, in which he elaborates on the arguments expressed in the paper in more detail, I occasionally will refer to things said in the book as well.
Do Gene Duplications Explain Vertebrate Blood Clotting?
Doolittle contends that “Many of the proteins involved [in coagulation] are clearly related to one another by gene duplications, and in the past, sequence-based phylogenies have offered insights into the relative order in which certain factors appeared.”3 But sequence similarity does not necessarily imply common ancestry (due to the possibility of common design) and common ancestry does not necessarily imply a stepwise evolutionary pathway. Michael Behe explains this point:
Although useful for determining lines of descent… comparing sequences cannot show how a complex biochemical system achieved its function—the question that most concerns us in this book. By way of analogy, the instruction manuals for two different models of computer put out by the same company might have many identical words, sentences, and even paragraphs, suggesting a common ancestry (perhaps the same author wrote both manuals), but comparing the sequences of letters in the instruction manuals will never tell us if a computer can be produced step-by-step starting from a typewriter… Like the sequence analysts, I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?4
This aside, however, Doolittle’s proposed mechanism runs into the problem enumerated above — namely, that duplicating a gene coding for one of the blood clotting factors would lead to that factor becoming over-expressed, disrupting the cascade’s delicate balance and leading to excessive clotting. This difficulty is nowhere even acknowledged in Doolittle’s paper, let alone addressed.
Doolittle raises a valid concern: “The question may be asked, how can new factors be introduced into an existing pathway?” Good question. How does Doolittle respond? He writes, “It was long ago suggested that in the case of clotting pathways, new factors that are the products of gene duplications could easily be sandwiched into the middle of pathways where they initially were only performing the same operation as the original gene product. Only a few amino acid replacements were likely needed to broaden the proteolytic specificity to the point where the duplicon could itself activate the other surviving gene product.”5 In support of this thesis, Doolittle notes that “all of the vitamin-K dependent proteases (prothrombin, factors VII, IX, and X, and protein C) cleave after arginine residues in the same general regions of their homologous substrates.”6 This, again, however, runs into the problem described above — namely, that gene duplication events would be likely to upset the delicate balance of the system, increasing the risk of thrombosis. Such duplicate genes are thus unlikely to be preserved by selection. Moreover, a few specific amino acid replacements in animals such as vertebrates (assuming none of them are beneficial until all have arisen) are unlikely to happen on a realistic timescale. As has been much discussed at Evolution News in the past, and in the academic literature, evolution depends on prohibitively long times to attain and fix multiple co-dependent mutations, where none of them confer a fitness benefit until all have arisen.7,8,9,10,11,12 Doolittle gives a time window for the emergence of the coagulation cascade of approximately fifty to a hundred million years, since fibrin clots have never been detected in any protochordate (i.e., organisms lacking a backbone but possessing a notochord at some stage during development) though it has been identified in the earliest vertebrates — that is, jawless fish. Thus, he argues, blood clotting must have arisen between the emergence of protochordates and jawless fish. As he writes in his book,
Because fibrin clots have never been observed in our nearest non-vertebrate relatives, the protochordates, we must accept that the clotting system was assembled in the relatively brief interval since protochordates diverged from the lineage leading to vertebrates and the appearance of creatures like the hagfish and lamprey. In years, the available time is estimated to have been 50 to 100 million.13
Given that it is highly probable that each step in the evolution of coagulation would require multiple co-dependent mutations (since each proenzyme would have to evolve in a coordinated way with its activating enzyme), this time window appears to be quite brief. Compounding this is the fact that the mutations in the evolving gene duplicate would need to occur in a coordinated way with its own activating enzyme to ensure that the new factor is active only when needed.
Simpler Blood Clotting Systems in Jawless Fish
There are two extant genera of jawless fish — hagfish (pictured above) and lamprey. Doolittle predicts, from an evolutionary framework, that jawless vertebrates would have a simpler blood clotting cascade than the human system described above. Doolittle limits the scope of his analysis to the lamprey, for which there was better genomic data than for hagfish. Doolittle’s research has revealed that lampreys lack both factor IX and factor VIII.14,15 It may thus be concluded that factors IX and VIII are not essential, at least in the jawless vertebrates. Why are jawless vertebrates not hemophilic, unlike humans who lack these factors? Without knowing more about how coagulation works in jawless vertebrates, it is impossible to say for sure. Clearly, there are other differences as well — since apparently there are two factor X genes in lamprey. Is it possible that one of those is functioning as a factor IX gene? There are also three factors VII. Unfortunately, the precise mechanisms of coagulation in lampreys have yet to be elucidated. Given that humans who are deficient in factors IX or VIII suffer from hemophilia, this provides an indirect justification for believing that there are, quite probably, compensating mechanisms in lampreys that have yet to be uncovered.
Failing to Address Behe’s Argument
A crucial point is that, even if Doolittle’s entirely evolutionary scheme were correct, it would not even address — much less refute — Behe’s original thesis about the blood clotting cascade. In Darwin’s Black Box, Behe only argued that the common pathway is irreducibly complex — he does not give an assessment of whether the intrinsic pathway (to which these factors IX and VIII, missing in jawless fish, belong) or the extrinsic pathway are irreducibly complex as well.16 To summarize, in Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe only argued for irreducible complexity of the common pathway — i.e., the pathway after the convergence of the extrinsic and intrinsic initiation pathways, or what Behe calls the components “after the fork.” Behe made this very explicit in his book, where he wrote:
Leaving aside the system before the fork in the pathway, where some details are less well known, the blood-clotting system fits the definition of irreducible complexity.17
The system “before the fork in the pathway” is the intrinsic and extrinsic initiation pathways highlighted by Doolittle. But Behe explicitly leaves this part of the system “aside” and does not argue it is irreducibly complex. Thus, even if Doolittle’s arguments held merit, they would still not refute, even address, the portion of the pathway that Behe argues is irreducibly complex.
Regarding the systems “after the fork,” to my knowledge, there are no vertebrates with a functional coagulation system that lack thrombin, fibrinogen, factor X, or factor V. Clearly, there also has to be some way of activating factor V in response to tissue damage. Thus, to be conservative, blood coagulation must require a minimum of five parts (and probably more) – the very components which Behe argues comprise the irreducibly compelx portion of the blood clotting cascade. Behe’s argument has not been refuted. This same mistake was made in response to Behe by Kenneth Miller, as has been previously noted at Evolution News by Casey Luskin.
Co-Option of Thrombin / Fibrinogen
Doolittle concedes that “it seems unlikely that thrombin and fibrinogen would appear simultaneously,” and posits that “one already existed with an alternative function.”18 He suggests that “fibrinogen may have had a role in cell-cell interactions, a property of many proteins with fibrinogen-related domains.”19 Doolittle postulates that “a more likely scenario, however, is that thrombin had an early role in agglutinating thrombocytes by proteolyzing cell surface proteins, something it is known to do today, attacking a set of G-protein-coupled receptors called PAR proteins.”20 On this hypothesis, “a tissue factor would become exposed during the course of injury, activating prothrombin that would then clump cells which were the ancient ancestors of mammalian platelets. A GLA domain could have helped to keep thrombin localized on the surface of the thrombocytes.”21 The emergence of fibrinogen “would allow thrombin to broaden its attack, generating a more durable clot composed of fibrin. Duplications of the prothrombin gene would lead to the appearance of factors VII, X, and eventually IX.”22
Such a scenario, however, presents a number of problems. One is acknowledged by Doolittle himself: “Besides the GLA domain, thrombin has two kringle domains, usually thought to have an affinity for fibrin. The kinds of domains that interact with tissue factor, however, are the EGF domains found in factors VII, X, and IX.”23 He, therefore, has to postulate that “there was much domain shuffling in the early stages and that thrombin originally had EGF domains, or no peripheral domains at all.”24 Second, he makes no attempt to estimate how durable a clot composed of nothing more than clumped cells would be — though, if the initial flow rate was relatively low, this issue could be less of a concern. Finally, a duplication of a prothrombin gene would result in a second prothrombin gene. Doolittle makes no attempt to determine how difficult it would be for factors VII, X and IX to arise from a duplicated prothrombin gene (and evolve in a coordinated way with their corresponding activating enzymes), nor how the overexpression problem described above may be overcome.
Doolittle’s Four Stage Scenario
In his book, Doolittle proposes four stages in the evolution of vertebrate blood clotting, based on the presence or absence of coagulation factors in various animals.
The first stage, according to Doolittle, “existed in the last common ancestor of jawless and jawed vertebrates and was characterized by the presence of only six different proteins, three of which are vitamin K-dependent proteases.”26 These six proteins included tissue factor, factor VII, factor X, factor V, prothrombin and fibrinogen. The second stage, Doolittle suggests, involved the emergence of factors VIII and IX prior to the evolution of jawed fish. The third stage was characterized by the acquisition of prekallikrein and factor XII. A duplication of the gene coding for prekallikrein, resulting in the origins of factor XI, led, according to Doolittle’s scenario, to the fourth stage.
Notice that even the primitive system that constitutes stage one contains all of the four components that Behe claimed to comprise the irreducibly complex system — that is, thrombin, fibrinogen, factor X and factor V — in addition to tissue factor and factor VII (key components of the extrinsic pathway, required for initiating coagulation in response to tissue damage). Behe’s hypothesis predicts that every coagulation system will contain these four proteins (or equivalents), in addition to there being some way of activating factor V in response to tissue damage. This is preciselywhat the data show. The only aspect of the coagulation cascade that emerged subsequent to the origins of coagulation itself, then, so far as can be told by the data, are the components that make up the intrinsic pathway. That the intrinsic pathway is redundant is not particularly surprising, since there only needs to be one mechanism by which factor V is activated. Adding the intrinsic pathway is certainly helpful, though not necessarily essential. The intrinsic pathway serves to amplify the coagulation response initiated by the extrinsic pathway, and provides additional layers of activation and enzyme generation. Again, Behe’s fundamental thesis about irreducible complexity of the blood clotting cascade has not been refuted or even touched by Doolittle’s arguments.
But perhaps the most damning problem confronting Doolittle’s proposed scenario is that his analysis entirely ignores all of the clotting inhibitors (such as antithrombin, protein C, and protein S) that prevent excessive clot formation, as well as those factors that dismantle clots (as he himself acknowledges27). And this even though he correctly notes elsewhere that “this suppression of activity is very important; there is enough prothrombin in one milliliter of plasma to clot all the fibrinogen in the whole body if the prothrombin were all converted to thrombin.”28 Thus, the emergence of the pathway for coagulation along the lines suggested by Doolittle would likely result in runaway thrombosis without the simultaneous advent of inhibitors.
A Formidable Challenge
In summary, the coagulation cascade presents a formidable challenge to evolutionary theory. While Doolittle is to be commended for his work in attempting to provide an evolutionary account for coagulation, the failure of those attempts underscores the difficulty of the problem. They simply do not address the issues at the heart of Behe’s argument in Darwin’s Black Box, which remains untouched by Doolittle’s thesis.
Notes
Doolittle RF. Step-by-step evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2009;74:35-40.
Doolittle RF. The Evolution of Vertebrate Blood Clotting. University Science Books 2013.
Doolittle RF. Step-by-step evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2009;74:35-40.
Behe, Michael J. (1996). Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Free Press, kindle.
Ibid.
Doolittle RF. Step-by-step evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2009;74:35-40.
Hössjer O, Bechly G, Gauger A. On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences. J Theor Biol. 2021 Sep 7;524:110657.
Sanford J, Brewer W, Smith F, Baumgardner J. The waiting time problem in a model hominin population. Theor Biol Med Model. 2015 Sep 17;12:18.
Durrett R, Schmidt D. Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution. Genetics. 2008 Nov;180(3):1501-9. Erratum in: Genetics. 2009 Feb;181(2):819-20; author reply 821-2.
Behe MJ, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism. Free Press 2007.
Behe MJ, Snoke DW. Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues. Protein Sci.2004 Oct;13(10):2651-64. doi: 10.1110/ps.04802904. Epub 2004 Aug 31. PMID: 15340163; PMCID: PMC2286568.
Axe DD. The Limits of Complex Adaptation: An Analysis Based on a Simple Model of Structured Bacterial Populations. Bio-Complexity2010.
Doolittle RF. The Evolution of Vertebrate Blood Clotting. University Science Books 2013, 184.
Doolittle RF, Jiang Y, Nand J. Genomic evidence for a simpler clotting scheme in jawless vertebrates. J Mol Evol. 2008 Feb;66(2):185-96. doi: 10.1007/s00239-008-9074-8.
Doolittle RF. Bioinformatic Characterization of Genes and Proteins Involved in Blood Clotting in Lampreys. J Mol Evol. 2015 Oct;81(3-4):121-30.
Behe, Michael J. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Free Press 1996, kindle.
Ibid.
Doolittle RF. Step-by-step evolution of vertebrate blood coagulation. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2009;74:35-40.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 185.
Ibid.
Doolittle RF. The Evolution of Vertebrate Blood Clotting. University Science Books 2013, 196.
Ibid., 17.
Sunday 27 August 2023
Christendom's genius for explaining away obvious logic
1Corinthians ch.15:27NIV"For he “has put everything under his feet.” c Now when it says that “everything” has been put under him, it is CLEAR that this does not include God himself, who put everything under Christ. "
The word of JEHOVAH is addressed to the wise, those who know that humility and logic are necessary prerequisites to clear thinking. It ought to be clear that the God who put everything under Christ feet is not his equal or that one who always had everything under his feet would not need anyone else's authorisation to wield that authority ,and yet some apparently loose a grasp of basic logic when it comes examining the bible. The most plain manifestation of this malaise for me is failure to grasp the concept of supremacy.
Supremacy according to Merriam Webster:: the quality or state of being supreme
especially : a position of unquestioned authority, dominance, or influence
2:ultimate authority or power.
So Supremacy excludes equality. The two concepts are mutually exclusive one who is equal to even one other than himself is not supreme/ does not possess supremacy, our Brother Paul might say that this should be clear.
But the trinity doctrine causes brain damage especially that part of the brain responsible for our grasp of basic logic.
Luke ch.1:32NIV"He will be great and will be called the Son of the MOST HIGH. The LORD God will give him the throne of his father David," (we'll bypass the Trinitarian style proof of David's Godhood) Note that the God and Father of Jesus Christ is Supreme.
He is both the greatest person and the greatest God. This totally excludes there being any other person or God being his equal by definition. Yet Trinitarians ignore what ought to be clear and claim that the God of Jesus is not the most high God and that in fact there are three distinct entities that are a least equal to him . Indeed as I have pointed out the trinity doctrine blinds its adherents to a clear identification of the MOST HIGH God JEHOVAH If the trinity is true there is no most high God.
Saturday 26 August 2023
On secular occultism.
J. P. Moreland on the Contradictions of Scientism
Are the hard sciences the only source of truth about reality? On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Michael Keas begins a conversation with philosopher J. P. Moreland about Moreland’s book Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology. As Moreland explains, scientism is the belief that only the hard sciences can provide any reliably true knowledge. It’s a claim that also gets applied to other disciplines outside science as well, suggesting that claims of reality in any field of human knowledge cannot be known one way or another. “It’s in the drinking water,” Moreland says, but it’s also self-refuting, and therefore irrational — and very damaging besides. Moreland gives examples. This is Part 1 of a conversation. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Speaking of ID some more
An Intriguing Conversation with Casey Luskin About Intelligent Design
Ha, well this is a new frontier for intelligent design. Live Life in Motion is a podcast with Sam Kleckley about personal fitness, sponsored by, among other fine products, Rebel Rabbit, which I had not heard of. Sam shares enthusiastically that Rebel Rabbit is a cannabis-infused soda drink that comes in two strengths, billed as a healthier alternative to alcohol. Which it may well be! It’s news to me that there was such a thing. Anyway, Sam is also a thoughtful and curious individual who put aside his accustomed subjects and had on our geologist colleague Casey Luskin for an hour to talk about ID — everything, and I mean everything, about ID — biology, cosmology, education, and more. They had a great conversation, really quite charming, made more intriguing by the fact that Sam is evidently a searcher, uncertain, as he says, about what he believes about god or gods. Find the podcast on Apple (here) or Spotify (here). God bless the curious and the open-minded.
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