Analysis, comments and some sound advice from a seasoned skeptic
Tag Archives: creationism
Discussion relating to the creationism vs. real science controversy. This can include reviews of creationist books, counter-creationism books, critiques of creationist writings and actions, political activity related to creationism, legal action.
And… Finally these people have gone off the deep end. When you get this crazy, there is no going back. Here it is.
After Death — A Riveting Glimpse of the Hereafter
David Klinghoffer October 18, 2023, 6:38 AM
I’ve just watched a remarkable, riveting documentary that releases in theaters on October 27 – After Death. It’s too bad the famous line from Hamlet has become a bit of a cliché — “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” — since it so perfectly captures what I took away from the film. There sure are a lot more things about reality than are captured by a narrow naturalistic view.
The message of the film, by directors Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke, is extremely well conveyed. It’s beautifully photographed, produced, and enacted, making use of actors and ordinary people who describe what they say happened to them while briefly dead, before being revived in a medical setting. No small number have died, only to be brought back thanks to advances in healing unknown to past generations. Of these, some number offer reports of an otherworldly realm, beyond yet somehow connected to our own. For those who go and come back, there is both joy and grief. Make of it what you will.
The “evidence” for life after death is both vague and misleading. What is the definition of death? Defined loosely coming home from Thanksgiving dinner with your Trump Critter relatives can be likened to life after death. But read the article posted to the Evolution News site and view the video. They are going to tell of people thought to be dead and came back alive. Really? Let’s look at actual death from a skeptical angle.
George Washington is dead. He will never come back alive. That’s a pretty good definition of death. We are born, we are alive, we live our lives, and then for all of us there comes a time. The body gradually or suddenly transforms from a living organism to a part of the environment. It is a process. At a certain point the process cannot be reversed. That is death.
Tales of people thought to be dead but coming back to life are legion. The heart stops. No blood flows to the brain. The world goes away. I have a friend who experienced this. He was sitting in the doctor’s office, and the next thing he was in bed recovering from cardiac arrest. We do not call that resurrection. But that is the kind of thing these religious nuts will claim in their proof of life after death.
About as silly are tales of reincarnation. See the story of Bridey Murphy and other tales of past life regression. For over 30 years the North Texas Skeptics Paranormal Challenge offered $12,000 to anybody who could demonstrate reincarnation. But we wanted proof. I mean real proof. We did not want anybody’s tale of a shining light. We wanted a medical report showing the cause of death. We wanted an autopsy report. Sorry to say, with these jokers you are not going to get anything resembling proof of life after death.
This one brings back memories. Three decades ago Scientific American considered Forrest Mims for the job as editor of their monthly Amateur Scientist column. My memory is Mims published at least one item for the magazine, but then Scientific American began to have second thoughts.
The magazine flew Mims to New York to discuss details but the editor had second thoughts after he learned that Mims was a practicing Christian who rejected Darwinian evolution and abortion.
More specifically, from The New York Times, 24 October 1990:
Forrest M. Mims 3d has been a science writer for 20 years. His articles on scientific and technical topics have been published in more than 60 magazines and newspapers, including National Geographic World, a sister publication of National Geographic, Science Digest and The American Journal of Physics.
He is also, by his own description, a conservative Christian who accepts the biblical account of creation and rejects the idea of evolution. Because of this, Mr. Mims says, he was denied a job: writing the popular “Amateur Scientist” column for Scientific American magazine.
A creationist? You better believe it. A fool in that respect? Come to your own conclusion. After all that there is no denying Mims’ accomplishments and science creds. Follow the link and read his Wikipedia entry. Here is an excerpt.
For more than thirty years, Mims has made accurate and detailed atmospheric measurements. These include measuring the ozone layer, haze (aerosol optical depth), and the total column water vapor.
The project began in May 1988, when Mims started experimenting with making UV-B measurements using homemade equipment. In 1989, Mims designed and built the first Total Ozone Portable Spectrometer (TOPS) to monitor ozone, and instruments to measure haze and water vapor. The first TOPS (Total Ozone Portable Spectrometer) ozone instrument earned a 1993 Rolex Award.
On February 4, 1990, these instruments were first used at solar noon to measure the ozone layer, haze (aerosol optical depth) and total column water vapor. The photograph at left by Mims wife Minnie was made February 4, 2016, the 26th anniversary date.
The various sun photometers, radiometers and cameras on the table are used every day at solar noon when the sun is not blocked by clouds. See Wikimedia and http://www.forrestmims.org for 25-year charts of total ozone, total water vapor and optical depth (haze). Mims’ original LED sun photometer (placed in service during fall 1989) is in his left hand. Two Microtops II are in his right hand. One is among the first (1997) and the other is the only MicroTOPS II with LED’s as photodetectors.
Mims first LED sun photometer is still in use (he is shown holding it in the 26th anniversary photo above). It has dual LED’s acting as narrow band sensors, one at 830 nm and another at 940 nm (near-IR). The 830 nm LED is for optical depth. The ratio of the photocurrents from the 830 nm and 940 nm LEDs provides total water vapor.
All that, and “He is also a global warming denier.”
Now comes the creationist Discovery Institute. From their Facebook posting:
Join legendary scientist Forrest Mims as he discusses his new book, Maverick Scientist, November 28. Mims, with no formal academic training in science, nevertheless forged a distinguished scientific career he calls “one continuous science fair project.” Tuesday, November 28 at 4 pm PT on Make: Magazine’s Facebook page. There is no need for pre-registration, just go to this Facebook page at the time of the webinar to watch the livestream – https://www.facebook.com/makemagazine
Yes, “Mims is a Fellow of the pseudoscientific organizations International Society for Complexity, Information and Design and Discovery Institute which propagate creationism. He is also a global warming denier.” [from Wikipedia]
Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? Maybe not even The Shadow.
The above is a screen shot from the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News site. From the article:
Editor’s note: We are delighted to welcome the new and greatly expanded second edition of The Design Inference, by William Dembski and Winston Ewert. The following is excerpted from the Introduction.
What this is all about is a book, The Design Inference, by Dembski and Ewert. This was posted by Dembski and Ewert. They quote from their own book:
Tacitly in the first edition of The Design Inference and explicitly in its sequel, No Free Lunch, I argued that natural selection and random variation could not create the sort of complexity we see in living things. My approach in applying the design inference to biology was to piggyback on the work of design biologists such as Douglas Axe and Michael Behe. They had identified certain subcellular systems (e.g., bacterial flagella and beta-lactamase enzymes) that proved highly resistant to Darwinian explanations.
Our joint task was to put plausible numbers to these systems so that even factoring in Darwinian natural selection, the probability of these systems arising was exceedingly small. Note that the specification of these systems, as in their exhibiting the right sort of pattern for a design inference, was never in question. The issue was always whether the probabilities were small enough. In using specified improbability to draw a design inference for biology, I therefore needed to argue that the probabilities for Darwinian processes producing certain biological systems, such as those identified by Axe and Behe, were indeed small.
Dembski, William; Ewert, Winston. The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities (pp. 38-39). Discovery Institute Press. Kindle Edition.
This has been previously addressed. The creationists’ argument stated simply is if a thing is highly improbable then there must be some intelligence behind the thing. Earlier I gave the example of the Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah, that did not happen by accident. But what about other improbable things? They mention “design biologists such as Douglas Axe and Michael Behe.” All right. Let us concede neither of these two are actually biologists. Axe has a degree in chemical engineering, and Behe is a biochemist. So it will be interesting to look at one of Michael Behe’s key assertions. From Behe’s Wikipedia page:
In 1996, Behe published his ideas on irreducible complexity in his book Darwin’s Black Box. Behe’s refusal to identify the nature of any proposed intelligent designer frustrates scientists, who see it as a move to avoid any possibility of testing the positive claims of ID while allowing him and the intelligent design movement to distance themselves from some of the more overtly religiously motivated critics of evolution.
As to the identity of the intelligent designer, Behe responds that if, deep in the woods, one were to come across a group of flowers that clearly spelled out the name “LEHIGH”, one would have no doubt that the pattern was the result of intelligent design. Determining who the designer was, however, would not be nearly as easy.
In 1997, Russell Doolittle, on whose work Behe based much of the blood-clotting discussion in Darwin’s Black Box, wrote a rebuttal to the statements about irreducible complexity of certain systems. In particular, Doolittle mentioned the issue of the blood clotting in his article, “A Delicate Balance.” Later on, in 2003, Doolittle’s lab published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which demonstrates that the pufferfish lacks at least three out of 26 blood clotting factors, yet still has a workable blood clotting system. According to Doolittle, this defeats a key claim in Behe’s book, that blood clotting is irreducibly complex.
And it is not necessary to belabor the point. Dembski and Ewert have hitched their wagon to a faded star. Follow the link and read the Evolution News posting. Comments solicited.
Three decades ago the creationists saw the handwriting and started to make a concerted effort at dressing creationism up in a fancy suit. We call that suit “Intelligent Design,” and it does involve serious academics, people with real degrees and people doing what they want to pass off as real research. A big push—actually the central theme—is to infer intelligence from curious aspects of nature. Curious to them.
The above is a screen shot from a posting to the Discovery Institute’s Evolution News site. Follow the link. Read the posting. Here is an excerpt.
Paul Nelson speaks to the pervasive use of design detection in how we infer intelligent agency in various fields of investigation, from archaeology to arson:
What turned my head around about ID — in a good way — in 1991, well before I met Bill Dembski, was a single paragraph in one of his early papers. He pointed out that design detection, far from being an esoteric and inscrutable inference, lay in fact at the center of many normal human inquiries and activities.
That will do for a fair overview of the Evolution News post. The argument goes that if something appears to be massively improbable by chance, then there must be some sort of intelligence behind it. This is not one of their examples, but if you look at the Golden Gate Bridge, then you are bound to conclude a bunch of engineers were involved to make it happen. You would safe in coming to that conclusion, because the bridge is something we see being designed and built by people every day.
What the creationists want to focus on is stuff not designed and built by people. Stuff like how the Universe works. Serious thinkers rightly conclude if any of the values that describe how our universe works were tweaked ever so slightly, then you would not be reading this posting. Yes, somebody must have planned the Universe from the very beginning.
For a long time the creationists refused to associate the designer with any of society’s favored gods. That has changed. The gloves are off. A reading of creationist literature over the past decade will inform you the designer is no less than YHWH, the chosen god of the ancient Jews. Christians and Muslims buy into this particular god, giving great weight to the need to prove YHWH’s existence.
Yeah, that thinking does not go very far. The first lines of the Bible have YHWH creating the Universe, but if you want to be objective about the matter, then any one of the many imaginary gods could have been the creator. My perspective is the creationists want to get the camel’s nose inside the tent and eventually get the entire camel. You will accept there was a creator, and next you must accept YHWH as the creator.
As noted previously, the Discovery Institute people have ramped up their publicity campaign over the past few years. It is beginning to look like a full-court press. From past experience we note the creationists’ first line of attack is to infiltrate public schools—private and religious schools are already there—with Intelligent Design teachings. Fact is, recent hearings on science texts for Texas public schools involved a push for these teachings. A later post will dive into that matter.
I sign up for it, and I get mail. Here is something recent.
Science, Scripture, and the beginning of the universe
Hugh Ross, Reasons to Believe <updates@engagedemails.com> To: jf_blanton@yahoo.com Tue, Nov 7 at 7:06 AM
Dear Friend,
The first chapter of the Bible may be the most hotly disputed of all its passages. Some describe its creation story as fictional and fantastic. Others say it’s mythical or allegorical. Still others insist it’s completely and concretely literal.
Genesis 1’s inexplicable accuracy captured my attention the first time I read it, and I’ve spent most of my professional life delving into its mysteries to find clear answers.
I’m eager to share this FREE e-book, Genesis 1: A Scientific Perspective. You can request your copy right now by clicking on this link: https://get.reasons.org/genesis-one-ebook
You’ll learn how all of creation, the entirety of the natural realm, came into existence by the design and power of the transcendent Creator. You’ll discover strong, solid scientific evidence that creation had a beginning—an intentional, purposeful beginning—from a reality beyond itself.
You’ll see how science and Scripture come together in harmony, showing beyond all doubt that the God of the Bible is the Creator of the universe.
The Bible opens with two different creation stories. The accounts are similar in that they both describe the creation of animals, plants, and humans. But they are distinct in several ways and even contradict each other on key issues.
For example, though the stories describe some of the same events, they order them differently. In Gen 1, God creates plants, then animals, and then simultaneously creates man and woman. In Gen 2, God creates a human, plants, then animals, and later he divides the human into female and male. Additionally, the two stories employ different names for the deity. The first account uses the Hebrew word Elohim, meaning “God,” whereas the second uses the tetragrammaton, YHWH (often represented by “Lord”).
The stories are also very different in literary style. The first account appears neatly organized into three days of preparation followed by three days of actual formation. Each day concludes with the formulaic expression “and there was X.” By the seventh day, all creation exists in its proper sphere, and God rests. This orderly pattern suggests an orderly universe. The second story (beginning in the second half of Gen 2:4 and continuing through the end of chapter 3) lacks both the structure and the focus of the first creation account. It is much less formulaic; rather, it is a dramatic narrative in a series of seven scenes.
Because of these and other divergences, it is likely that separate authors with distinct theological views and agendas wrote these myths. The differences in the accounts reflect the unique way each author conceptualizes the deity. In Gen 1, God is distant, creating through speech according to a master plan. This image contrasts with Gen 2, where the author depicts God as a human-like figure who walks in the garden and, like a potter working with clay, has a hands-on, trial-and-error approach to creation. God in this version seems more accessible than the transcendent creator of Gen 1.
So how is that for “inexplicable accuracy ?” But wait. I have not gotten to the part where snakes and donkeys can talk and where a global flood supposedly wipes out all life on Earth and where the sun stops in the sky. I am thinking about writing a science fiction story. I now have the needed inspiration.
The above is from a posting on Facebook by the Discovery Institute. Yes, it is David Coppedge again, soldiering on in the relentless campaign to prop up an aging deity. Follow the link to review his history of challenging science.
Jay Storz at the University of Nebraska was hiking with colleagues on one of the most godforsaken habitats on the planet: windswept, low-oxygen volcanic peaks in Argentina. It was like exploring Mars. That was until they found carcasses of mummified mice beside a rock pile. How did they get there? It’s freezing. There’s no food. There’s no water. Everywhere one looks there is only bare rock. Phys.orgquotes Dr. Storz:
“Well-trained mountain climbers can tolerate such extreme elevations during a one-day summit attempt, but the fact that mice are actually living at such elevations demonstrates that we have underestimated the physiological tolerances of small mammals.” [Emphasis added.]
Once they knew what to look for, they found over a dozen other mice remains on 18 summits above 6,000 meters (19,500 feet). Radiocarbon dating showed they had died within the last few hundred years.
Follow the link and read the full article. Here is Coppedge’s final word on the matter.
Moreover, design advocates are not surprised by seeing organisms that are over-engineered for survival, like the mountain mice and the Nepal sherpas. Darwinism has a problem with over-engineered things since it cannot see past the immediate present. We can make this prediction for design theory: fewer human mummies in the Himalayas with desperate expressions on their faces, waiting for the lucky mutations to arrive.
I am thinking this represents the level of science done at the Discovery Institute.
The Coconino Sandstone is one of the most well-known formations in Grand Canyon. The blond-colored sandstone, just three layers down from the rim, forms a distinctive cliff that can be traced as far as the eye can see. It is noted for its large, angled cross-beds that many scientists believe represent ancient desert sand dunes. In fact, some have said that this formation alone is sufficient to prove the Bible is wrong about Noah’s Flood. Arthur Strahler claims, “In itself it [the windblown origin of the Coconino] is sufficiently weighty to totally discredit the biblical story of the Flood of Noah as a naturalistic phenomenon occurring in one year.”1 Strahler correctly reasoned that you cannot have a desert during Noah’s Flood.
Methods
As part of ICR’s FAST (Flood Activated Sedimentation and Tectonics) project, Paul Garner, Ray Strom, and I sought to overturn the reigning conventional desert paradigm for the Coconino. The project was funded by ICR, Cedarville University, Calgary Rock and Materials Services Inc., and some private individuals. It involved many years of field work, sample collection, library study, and laboratory work. The results were presented to both the conventional and creation science communities as abstracts and papers.
When we first started this project, the task was daunting. How could we ever find evidence to overturn a paradigm that had been well-established for over 75 years? What we found was surprising— the rocks had not been carefully studied in outcrop or under the microscope, and no significant work on the formation had been completed in decades.
And there is some more, but first it is helpful if we see what we are talking about.
Coconino Sandstone is a geologic formation named after its exposure in Coconino County, Arizona. This formation spreads across the Colorado Plateau province of the United States, including northern Arizona, northwest Colorado, Nevada, and Utah.
Vertebrate tracks known as Chelichnus gigas from the Coconino Sandstone in Grand Canyon. This rock formation is particularly prominent in the Grand Canyon, where it is visible as a prominent white cliff-forming layer. The thickness of the formation varies due to regional structural features; in the Grand Canyon area it is only 65 feet (20 m) thick in the west, thickens to over 600 feet (180 m) in the middle and then thins to 57 feet (17 m) in the east. Either the Kaibab Limestone or Toroweap Formation overlies the Coconino Sandstone. The Coconino Sandstone is typically buff to white in color. It consists primarily of fine well-sorted quartz grains, with minor amounts of potassium feldspar grains deposited by eolian processes (wind-deposited) approximately 275 million years ago. Several structural features such as ripple marks, sand dune deposits, rain patches, slump marks, and fossil tracks are not only well preserved within the formation, but also contribute evidence of its eolian origin.
Chapter 23 of Strahler’s book Science and Earth History addresses this creationist argument extensively. Follow the link to find a copy on sale through Amazon. It is a large and impressive book, and people serious about creationists’ arguments will do well to read it. If you are interested in getting my copy for free, let me know. I will make arrangements.
Caught me again. I was napping, and this morning I did not have the Tuesday posting done. Creationists to the rescue. Always reliable. It’s almost like cheating. This is from the ICR.
Planetary Magnetism
BY D. RUSSELL HUMPHREYS, PH.D. * | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
In 1971, Dr. Thomas Barnes publicized a then “trade secret” of scientists studying the earth’s magnetic field, which is that the main part of the field has been decaying steadily at about 7% per century since it was first measured globally in 1829.1 He showed how the decrease would be caused very simply by a decrease in the electric current in the earth’s core due to its electrical resistance. He also showed that the rate of decrease was fast enough to prohibit the current from having started more than a few dozen millennia ago, implying that the earth is young.
However, he did not show how to determine the initial amount of current in the core so we could determine the date of creation more exactly. Also, he did not explain how the current and field reversed direction many times during the year of the Genesis Flood, nor why the field fluctuated strongly up and down during the millennium after the Flood.
Lastly, he did not try to extend the theory to the other bodies in the solar system that either have a magnetic field now or had one in the past. So, I set about a decades-long program of research to try to answer these questions.
Some points to make first. I am long acquainted with Barnes and Humphreys. They are old line creationists. First Barnes.
Barnes obtained three degrees in Physics: an AB from Hardin-Simmons University in 1933, an MS from Brown University under Robert Bruce Lindsay in 1936, and an honorary Sc.D. again from Hardin-Simmons University in 1950. His detractors have questioned his credentials based on the fact that his doctorate was honorary.
At the time that Barnes joined the Creation Research Society (CRS) in the early 1960s, he was the head of the Schellenger Research Laboratories at Texas Western College (now University of Texas at El Paso), where he was completing a textbook on electricity and magnetism, and on whose faculty he served from 1938 until he retired in 1981. Barnes headed one of the first projects of the CRS, to create a creationist high school biology text. Barnes served as the president of the CRS in the mid-1970s.
Earth’s magnetic field decay
Barnes claimed to calculate the half-life of the earth’s magnetic field as approximately 1,400 years based on 130 years of empirical data.[6][7] Some creationists have used Barnes’ argument as evidence for a young earth, less than 10,000 years as suggested by the Bible.[8] His critics have challenged this concept, claiming that Barnes failed to take experimental uncertainties into account and used an obsolete model of the interior of the earth.
David Russell Humphreys is an American physicist who advocates for young Earth creationism. He holds a PhD in physics and has proposed a theory for the origin of the universe which allegedly resolves the distant starlight problem that exists in young Earth creationism.
Education and affiliations
Humphreys graduated with a B.S. from Duke University and was awarded his Ph.D in physics from Louisiana State University in 1972. He has worked for General Electric and Sandia National Laboratories where he received a patent and a science award. From 2001 to 2008, he was an associate professor at The Institute for Creation Research. He currently works for Creation Ministries International (USA).[1] Humphreys is a board member of both the Creation Research Society and the Creation Science Fellowship of New Mexico
Follow-up visits in June of this year turned out to be worth the effort. Although Baugh again was not present in person, he still manifested his presence through the workings of modern technology. The interior of the museum has been thoroughly remodeled with new and expanded exhibits, and Baugh speaks to visitors as a recorded voice, and the recording operates spotlights in the room, highlighting in turn the particular features being discussed. What a story he has to tell. Here is a synopsis created from my notes, with some of my interpretations within brackets. My apologies to Mr. Baugh if I have missed some of his finer points:
Day 1: Electrolysis by the spirit of God moving on the waters separates water into its components, oxygen and hydrogen.
Day 2: Oxygen and hydrogen crystallize into a spherical “canopy” around the Earth. The canopy glows a magenta color under sunlight [producing a light that is very beneficial to things living on the planet].
Day 3: Robert Gentry has previously demonstrated that granite was created in about 0.164 second. The evidence for this is the presence of pleochroic halos [which indicate the prior existence of short-lived radioactive isotopes in the stone at the time it was formed]. [Arthur Strahler discusses this subject in his excellent book Science and Earth History.[3]hu
Day 4: God stretched out the heavens. The fabric of the universe was stretched out in a manner which, according to Einstein’s equations and the equations of quantum mechanics, caused a few hours time to give the appearance of millions of years. Russell Humphreys, a Ph.D. physicist working at Sandia National Laboratory has published equations that demonstrate that if the dimensions of the universe were stretched in this manner, then millions of years in outer space would be equivalent to only thousands of years on Earth.
Day 5: There is still a pinkish glow on the Earth. The canopy 10 miles above the Earth’s surface has compressed the air to produce this effect. Also, the Earth’s electromagnetic energy is stronger and there is no UV radiation [because of the canopy] to cause free radical damage, allowing living organisms to express their optimal genetic information.
Day 6: The fabric of the universe continued to stretch out.
Hundreds of years later: From science we know that the thought processes of man in discord can affect nuclear decay. The discord and violence in man during this time would disrupt the nuclear reactions within the Earth, causing enormous heating and causing 70-mile-high fountains of water to burst through the granite crust and to penetrate and disrupt the canopy above the Earth. This would result in the rain that drowned all but Noah’s family and the animals on his ark. Also during this time the creator bowed the heavens, further stretching the fabric of the universe. [There is some mention of the Moon bringing the waters into resonance, but I could not follow the explanation.] Baugh also reminds the audience of the quantum interconnection between all parts of the universe. [See Roger Penrose for more on this.]
About 200 years after the flood was the Peleg episode[4] during which the Earth expanded and divided. There was a 10% expansion in the Earth’s radius due to internal thermonuclear reactions. During the original creation and during the Peleg episode the continental land masses were thrust upon each other producing the ice ages, which lasted 100s of years instead of 1000s of years. This and the previous episode of thermonuclear expansion are confirmed by geophysics. Since the canopy was gone, the Earth’s electromagnetic field could not be contained, and it dissipated into space. Likewise a portion of the Earth’s gravitational attraction was lost, and there was [and has been since] a smaller oxygen ratio resulting in compromised and shorter-lived life forms. Also, the spring 1995 issue of Scientific American contains a report that in 1500 years all of the Earth’s electromagnetic field will be lost unless there is a return of the creator. [Since Scientific American did not publish a spring 1995 issue, I have had a hard time tracking down this reference.]
Finally, there will be in the future a millennial sphere in which people will live in utopia. Music will play in the heads of the inhabitants.
[emphasis added]
Andrew Snelling Ph.D. of Australia is another creationist famous for tugging at magnetic field decay to prop up creationism.
Snelling has a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Sydney from 1982.
He was, for a decade, the geology spokesman for the Creation Science Foundation, the coordinating center for creationism in Australia.[4] He started working for Answers in Genesis in 2007 and serves as AiG’s director of research.
Snelling has been published in standard geological publications estimating the age of geological specimens in billions of years, but has also written articles for creationist journals in which he supports a young-earth creationism viewpoint. He worked in the RATE project.
Snelling appeared in the 2017 creationist documentary film Is Genesis History?
[link added]
The truth is our planet’s magnetic field is constantly changing, surging, receding, reversing. Making hay out of this to argue for biblical age of Earth is silly and is an abuse of science.
This was posted to Facebook by The Comical Conservative. I am guessing this is supposed to represent the politically conservative perspective. It certainly is comical. The original is from Savage Takes.
Proof of the Bible: Excavation Reveals Major Discovery
By David Rufful – September 10, 2023
Startling news regarding the Pool of Siloam | via The Holy Land by Zahi Shaked
OPINION | This article contains commentary that reflects the author’s opinion.
A recent excavation has revealed the location where Jesus of Nazareth performed a miracle over 2,000 years ago.
Researchers uncovered the steps that led to the Pool of Siloam where Jesus healed a blind man.
The pool and its greater surroundings have been uncovered in the project, making it a major excavation in the world of Biblical history.
Right! Allow me to add. “Recent discovery of the Sea of Galilee provides proof of the Bible.”
This is the depth of argument for the validity of the Bible in some parts of our society. Folks, keep your heads down until this blows over.
These people make it up faster than you can read it. For example:
Were Dinosaurs on the Ark?
Dinosaurs must have been Ark passengers. Most dinosaur fossils were formed by the Flood, and God told Noah to take two of every land vertebrate alive before the Flood. There were far fewer dinosaur kinds than species or genera, and the average size of a full-grown dino was about the size of a bison/buffalo. But Noah probably boarded much smaller juveniles a year before their growth spurt.
The Ark had an equivalent volume of 340 semitrailers, so there was plenty of room for all the animals, water, and food.
This episode features Dr Jonathan Sarfati and Joel Tay. Creation.com Talk is produced by Joseph Darnell out of the CMI-USA studios. Become a monthly contributor at our donation page. Share your thoughts in the comments and share the video with your friends!
This is from Creation Ministries from their posting on Facebook. John Sarfati we have seen before. Here is a clip from the North Texas Skeptics site.
Jonathan Sarfati has contributed a scathing critique of creationist Hugh Ross’s The Genesis Question. [5] He writes:[6]
The astronomer Hugh N. Ross now seems to be the world’s most prominent ‘progressive creationist’ (PC). While he is insistent about distinguishing himself from ‘theistic evolutionists’ (TEs), Ross adopts the same basic philosophical approach. That is, he makes uniformitarian (i.e. essentially materialistic, billions of years, etc.) ‘science’ his authority over Scripture.
You may want to follow the link and watch the video. I will be watching it later.
Coming up with these posts I knock on a number of doors, but when I go to these people it’s always like opening Fibber Magee’s closet door. All kinds of weird stuff comes tumbling out. Here is something from Creation Ministries International.
A modern replica of Zhang Heng’s seismoscope housed at the Chinese Museum in Calgary, Canada. Invented in the second century AD, the Zhang Heng1 seismometer (more accurately ‘seismoscope’, as it didn’t make a time record of the earth-shaking it detected 2) represented a significant scientific development of that day. It was almost lost to Chinese history and is only known from historical records and later reconstructions based on these.
So what does all of this have to do with creationism? I’m getting to that. Follow the link and read the article. Here is the pertinent excerpt.
Earthquakes are part of the fallen creation
Genesis 1–2 describes a perfect world, free of death and suffering. Earthquakes were therefore not part of that original, “very good” creation (Genesis 1:31), prior to the Fall. They are now part and parcel of life on Earth. The Flood itself was associated with globally widespread seismic events.6 Zhang Heng’s device was the first we know of to record and warn of such events.
Dragons represent cultural memories of dinosaurs
At this time in Chinese history, dragons were considered just as real as any other animal, including toads, as Zhang Heng’s seismoscope suggests. The Chinese Zodiac confirms this, where a cycle of 12 years is represented by 12 animals—the dragon is one, the 11 others are all commonly known animals (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, snake, horse, goat, monkey, chicken, dog, pig).7
The Chinese are known for decorating many objects with dragons; some early examples are reminiscent of recognizable dinosaur species;8 later ones become increasingly stylized. All this is no surprise when we recognize that the stories and depictions of dragons derive from memories of the dinosaurs of history, which survived on board Noah’s Ark. After the Flood, various types of dinosaurs, some more successful than others, dispersed across the earth. As a result, stories and depictions of dragons occur in virtually every culture—including China. Yet evolution teaches that dinosaurs all supposedly died out long before people walked the earth.
And I am not kidding. There are people walking this planet who believe this stuff. Bear in mind, these are people who are allowed to operate heavy machinery, to vote, and to possess sharp objects. Keep your eyes open. They are among us.
-a Based in the United States Jul; 27 a! 1 29,9a.;
Do Rivers Erode Through Mountains? A Look into Water Gaps and the Evidence for the Genesis Flood
Ever noticed rivers that, after flowing through valleys, suddenly turn and cut through mountain ranges, ridges, or plateaus? These are called water gaps. Lets dive into some intriguing insights!
¨ What’s a Water Gap?
Rivers that travel through valleys and then cut through mountain ranges form these mysterious gaps.
If rivers carved landscapes over eons, shouldn’t they just flow around these barriers?
¨ Water Gaps are Everywhere!
From Europe, Australia, and the US to Africa, these gaps are present worldwide.
The Himalaya Mountains have some of the world’s deepest water gaps, with rivers like the Arun River cutting over 6 km deep!
¨ Mysteries of the Zagros Mountains:
Unique and geologically ‘young’, the Zagros Mountains in Iran have an astonishing 300 water gaps.
Rivers here seem to prefer crossing mountains instead of flowing around them. Why?
¨ Water Gaps in the United States:
Plenty can be found, with the Shoshone River in Wyoming and the Hells Canyon in Oregon and Idaho as notable examples.
The Shoshone River, instead of flowing around, cuts straight through the Rattlesnake Mountains!
¨ Australia’s Ancient River?: 0 Australia boasts many water gaps. The Finke River is thought to be the world’s oldest due to its erosive journey across three aged ranges.
¨ Origin Mystery:
Although many believe water gaps formed due to slow erosion over millions of years, evidence supporting this is scant.
The Genesis Flood offers an alternative explanation. As floodwaters retreated, they carved these gaps rapidly.
¨ Evidence from the Lake Missoula Flood:
The Lake Missoula flood shows how rapidly water gaps can form, as witnessed by the formation of the Palouse Canyon in Washington State.
¨ Genesis Flood Implications:
The presence of water gaps worldwide indicates that the Genesis Flood was global in nature.
Remember, the next time you see a river cutting through a mountain, you might be looking at evidence of the Biblical Flood!
The above image is from Creation Ministries, showing one of those unexplainable water gaps. Supposedly those were caused by a world-wide flood that overwhelmed the mountain ranges and eroded canyons straight through. Or else, there is a better explanation.
This image shows the formation of the Rocky Mountains as the Pacific Plate slid beneath the North American Continent. The surface of North America was shoved upward, not in the form of the sharp peaks and the deep canyons we see today, but as rounded domes. As the domes rose higher, rainwater ran off from the slopes, beginning the formation of the canyons we see today. There was never any necessity for a mountain of water to wash over a mountain ridge and form the canyons in one fell swoop.
Keep following Creation Ministries. I promise they are a hoot.
Globally extensive Cenozoic coals indicate high post-Flood boundary
by Timothy L. Clarey, Davis J. Werner, and Jeffrey P. Tomkins
[excerpt]
Placing the post-Flood boundary at the Neogene–Quaternary, near the top of the Cenozoic, better explains the rock and paleontological data (figure 1).15-17 Our conclusion is that all the onshore and the offshore Cenozoic coal beds were produced by the runoff processes late in the Flood. Vast forests of trees living on the pre-Flood uplands were ripped from the land as the floodwaters crested on Day 150. These huge mats of vegetation were trapped in subsiding Cenozoic basins buttressed by adjacent mountains that were simultaneously rising as the water began to recede. Other vast mats of vegetation may have been transported en masse off the various continents and buried in the ocean as the Flood continued to recede, creating vast Cenozoic coal beds offshore. This scenario best explains the Cenozoic coals found both onshore and offshore.
BY FRANK SHERWIN, D.SC. (HON.) * | MONDAY, JULY 10, 2023
A fascinating discovery of a fossil insect has recently been made by evolutionists in Colorado. The description once again points clearly to the effects of the Genesis Flood thousands of years ago.
50 million years ago in what is now northwestern Colorado, a katydid died, sank to the bottom of a lake and was quickly buried in fine sediments, where it remained until its compressed fossil was recovered in recent years. When researchers examined the fossil under a microscope, they saw that not only had many of the insect’s hard structures been preserved in the compressed shale, so had several internal organs and tissues, which are not normally fossilized.1
The compressed shale was sedimentary rock laid down by running water that creationists suggest was part of the Genesis Flood 4,500 years ago. Indeed, the Colorado Formation, where the fossil katydid (family Tettigoniidae) was found, is part of the famous Green River Formation that also extends into Wyoming and Utah. This tristate Eocene formation was evidently formed by much more than just a local flood.2
Evolutionists understandably attempt to put a secular spin on this contemporary insect fossil discovery.
“Obviously, having a fossil species of a modern genus is really significant because it confirms the antiquity of this lineage,” [Prairie Research Institute paleoentomologist Sam] Heads said. “Now we know that about 50 million years ago, this genus had already evolved and already had a morphology that mimics the grass in which it lives and hides from predators.” The find will help scientists understand how this group of insects evolved and when they developed their unique physical structure, he said.1
The “antiquity” of this lineage is hardly confirmed! The only thing this fossil find tells scientists is this is a katydid just like the kind we find today. It says nothing about “how this group of insects evolved.” The specimen shows it had to be rapidly and catastrophically buried, “[b]ut perhaps the most striking feature of this fossil is the really exceptional, remarkable preservation of internal organs–organs that you just don’t see in fossils.”1 We do see remarkable and exceptional preservation of creatures, both of this fossil and increasing numbers of soft tissue ensconced within dinosaur fossils.3 Interestingly, original soft tissue has been found in none other than a Green River Formation fossil.4
Regardless, the public is expected to believe there has been no evolution (i.e. stasis) of this insect for 50 million years: “To double-check his analysis, Heads dissected several katydid specimens of the same genus [Arethaea] to match what he was seeing in the fossil. “They look exactly the same,” he said.”1 Creationists are not surprised. Katydids have always been katydids. Paleontologists, however, cannot let go of, or even question, deep evolutionary time even when confronted with physical evidence such as this fossil.5-6
God designed the katydid, it has no evolutionary ancestors, and it was suddenly caught up and buried by the great Flood described in Genesis thousands of years ago.
And that will about do it for the creationist argument for biblical inerrancy. Anything discovered, anything published by scientists, is grist for their mill.
More anti-science from the Discovery Institute people. They are an easy mark for this stuff. So I’m getting lazy.
Long Necks in Sauropod Dinosaurs — By Neo-Darwinism or Intelligent Design?
Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig June 28, 2023, 9:47 AM
Read the article. Here is the pertinent excerpt.
Comparing ID with Neo-Darwinism
Applying Dembski’s Explanatory Filter to this question, we get the following answers:
Law: There is no law that produces long necks inevitably under any defined ecological conditions.
Vast improbability: Fulfilled — chance to be excluded.
Specification: Fulfilled.
In comparing neo-Darwinism with the theory of intelligent design, we find the latter to be definitely the superior explanation.
That is what is most strange, because biologists have long ago addressed special adaptations such as long necks in giraffes and such. For example:
Sadly, the last plank is particularly bogus, since it completely ignores and displays no knowledge of a massively relevant and quite brilliant paper, published just back in January 2007 in American Naturalist, that constitutes an experimental demonstration of the relative feeding advantage of giraffe height:
Abstract With their vertically elongated body form, giraffes generally feed above the level of other browsers within the savanna browsing guild, despite having access to foliage at lower levels. They ingest more leaf mass per bite when foraging high in the tree, perhaps because smaller, more selective browsers deplete shoots at lower levels or because trees differentially allocate resources to promote shoot growth in the upper canopy. We erected exclosures around individual Acacia nigrescens trees in the greater Kruger ecosystem, South Africa. After a complete growing season, we found no differences in leaf biomass per shoot across height zones in excluded trees but significant differences in control trees. We conclude that giraffes preferentially browse at high levels in the canopy to avoid competition with smaller browsers. Our findings are analogous with those from studies of grazing guilds and demonstrate that resource partitioning can be driven by competition when smaller foragers displace larger foragers from shared resources. This provides the first experimental support for the classic evolutionary hypothesis that vertical elongation of the giraffe body is an outcome of competition within the browsing ungulate guild.
Read that article, as well, then decide for yourself whether long necks of giraffes and prehistoric animals are due to environmentally driven conditions or whether some mysterious and unseen entity decided to give these animals long necks. What is even more ridiculous is the entity these creationists propose to be behind long necks and also just about everything. When they think about Intelligent Design, they are thinking about YHWH (Jehovah), the god of the Jews. A closer reading reveals YHWH was a political convenience of the ancient Jews.
In Judah, this was the time of King Josiah. The idea that YHWH would ultimately fulfill the promises given to the patriarchs, to Moses, and to King David—of a vast and unified people of Israel living securely in their land—was a politically and spiritually powerful one for Josiah’s subjects. It was a time when Josiah embarked on an ambitious attempt to take advantage of the Assyrian collapse and unite all Israelites under his rule. His program was to expand to the north of Judah, to the territories where Israelites were still living a century after the fall of the kingdom of Israel, and to realize the dream of a glorious united monarchy: a large and powerful state of all Israelites worshiping one God in one Temple in one capital—Jerusalem—and ruled by one king of Davidic lineage.
Finkelstein, Israel. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts (pp. 69-70). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
And that is about all that needs to be said about that.
For this story I had to go back over 20 years. In the April 2001 issue of The Skeptic I reported on a presentation at MIOS, the Metroplex Institution of Origin Science. I will recap.
A few years ago Jeff Umbarger and I followed up on this theme of creationist lies after attending a session with the Metroplex Institute of Origin Science (MIOS). Speaker Don Patton entertained us that evening with a presentation of his arguments for a young Earth. MIOS, it must be remembered is a young Earth creationist (YEC) group that meets monthly in Dallas.
Don, who to our knowledge has never obtained a degree from an accredited academic institution, carries business cards that appear to make him a Ph.D. geologist. This night his presentation included a number of quotes from legitimate scientists to give his talk a little more credibility. We obtained a copy of some of these quotes, and afterwards Jeff dropped into the UT Dallas library to run them down. He found out of context and misleading to be the prevailing adjective applying to Don’s quotes of famous scientists. I will bore you by repeating my favorite, which appeared in the May 1992 issue of The Skeptic, the previous version of this newsletter.
Here is the critical text of the 2001 report.
From the MIOS text headed “DATING OF MOON SAMPLES: PITFALLS AND PARADOXES” we have:
What complicates things for the uranium-lead method is that non-radiogenic lead 204, 206, 207 and 208 also exist naturally, and scientists are not sure what ratios of non-radiogenic to radiogenic lead were early in the moon’s history. … The problem of how much lead was around to begin with still remains. … If all of the age-dating methods (rubidium-strontium, uranium-lead and potassium-argon) had yielded the same ages, the picture would be neat. But they haven’t.
The quote is from Science News, and it appears to be saying radiometric dating of moon rock samples is flawed due to the indeterminate amount of non-radiogenic lead. The numerous ellipses (…) were puzzling at first. They certainly represented omitted text, but what had been left out? Jeff filled in the gaps from the original issue. As we did in 1992, I am putting the quoted text in bold. I even left out some of the original just to save ink. See my own ellipses:
Trying to unravel lunar history by long distance, or even by sampling six or seven areas of the surface, is a precarious job and subject to much interpretation. Much controversy during the past two years has centered around the interpretation that should be given to the ages of the lunar material — ages yielded by studying its radioactive history. If all of the age-dating methods (rubidium-strontium, uranium-lead and potassium-argon) had yielded the same ages, the picture would be neat. But they haven’t. The lead ages, for example, have been consistently older.
…
In addition to uranium 238 converting to lead 206, uranium 235, with a half-life of 713 million years, decays to form lead 207, and thorium 232, with a half-life of 14 billion years, decays to form lead 208.
What complicates things for the uranium-lead method is that nonradiogenic lead 204, 206, 207 and 208 also exist naturally, and scientists are not sure what the ratios of nonradiogenic to radiogenic lead were early in the moon’s history. Wherever there is nonradiogenic lead 204, however, there is usually nonradiogenic lead 206, 207 and 208.
To arrive at the percentage of nonradiogenic lead present on the early moon, one can take the ratios of nonradiogenic lead 206 to 204, 207 to 204 and 208 to 204 found in meteorites (these ratios are 9.5, 10.5 and 20 respectively); but the question unanswered is, are these meteoric lead ratios the same as those that existed on the moon? Those scientists who are willing to accept the 4.6-billion-year-old age of meteorites and apply that to the moon are often not willing to apply the lead ratios found in meteorites to the moon.
…
Another example is with sample 14163. This sample, says Silver, has already shown that some parts of the lead could not have formed more recently than 4 billion years ago, and it probably includes some components considerably older than 4.0 billion years. Silver heated the sample. At 550 degrees C. the lead that came off had very high lead 207 to 206 ratios. One would have expected to see a ratio of 0.6 lead 207 to 206 for lead that had been forming continuously since 4.5 billion years ago. But what he saw were ratios of 1.2 or 1.3. “This isotopic composition has never been observed anywhere in the material of the solar system,” says Silver.
If these lead ratios were interpreted as other ratios, the lead would have apparent ages as high as 5.5 billion years. But, says Silver, “We are probably looking at lead 207 made very early in the solar system before it could be diluted with lead 206, and this large amount of lead 207 has had more time to move around.” Lead that is similarly bound comes off at the same temperatures. There is usually a correlation with the age of the lead, but the implications of this are not fully understood.
Tatsumoto and Doe have been working with lead at different temperatures (1,000 to 1,350 degrees C.), and they are getting similar results. The most significant has been isolating lead that consistently dates at 4.6 billion years old (SN: 12/18/71, p. 423).
The Problem of how much lead was around to begin with still remains. This could be partially solved by dating all of the soil samples from the moon, determining the over-all effects on each soil sample and getting a convergence point.
The broader implications of the history of volatile metals are apparent even if not all of the results and answers are yet. Volatile metals such as mercury, lead, zinc, cadmium, bismuth, rubidium and potassium are important to man. If scientists could unlock the history of these chemical reservoirs — what the chemical pot started from, how it evolved and what makes it work — says Silver, and if they could understand these processes on the moon, they might know how to use them today on earth and predict for tomorrow. “We don’t know the total chemistry for the earth, but our best chance of understanding it is on the moon.”
The presentation seeks to refute the science behind dating moon samples. It quotes from an article by Everly Driscoll: “Dating of moon samples: Pitfalls and paradoxes
The movement of volatilized metals over the surface of the moon could be confusing interpretations of the ages of lunar samples”
Everly Driscoll was an American science journalist. As an aside, in 1981 he was killed by a gunman who shot into the car he was riding in.
The problem is Don Patton’s presentation lifted selective quotes from the Driscoll article and quoted them out of order to make his own interpretation. I scanned the handout from Don’s talk, and here is a look at the first part.
I circled the quoted text Don used in his presentation. Note the third quote appears first in the Driscoll article, and the first quote (upper right in the image) appears two columns over.
Here is the second excerpt from the scan.
This comes on a following page after the first and third. Call me cynical if you want, but I detect some subterfuge going on. This is the kind of stuff the young Earth creationists did for years. I have not been in contact with any of these groups recently, so I don’t have any insight into what they are currently up to.
Go back to earlier posts to get the background. Here is another presentation from MIOS, the young Earth creationism organization. The image above is creationist Don Patton, who seemed to host most of these presentations.
Fossilized Human Finger
The Creation Evidences Museum acquired a fossilized human finger in the mid 1980s. It was found by a landowner where road gravel was being quarried from the Cretaceous Walnut Formation of the Commanche [Comanche] Peak limestone. Recent advances in C.T. scanning techniques have yielded some astounding pictures of the interior of this fossil. These pictures and other studies show that this is indeed the finger of someone who was rapidly buried in a catastrophic event long ago.
Of course this is not a real finger fossil. The best any serious person can make of it is it formed by a worm hole in some sediment. There is an online link posted on the Creation Evidence Museum in Dallas. This, and “evidence” such as this, illustrate what happens when people push faith ahead of real science.
For the background, go to the previous posts. Here is an excerpt from one of the MIOS presentations.
THE SUN DID STAND STILL
Did you know that the space program is busy proving that what has been called “myth” in the Bible is true? Mr. Harold Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Co. in Baltimore, Maryland, and a consultant in the space program, relates the following development:
“I think one of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and space scientists at Green Belt, Maryland. They were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space where they would be 100 years and 1,000 years from now. We have to know this so we don’t send a satellite up and have it bump into something later on in its orbits. We have to lay out the orbits in terms of the life of the satellite, and where the planets will be so the whole thing will not bog down! They ran the computer measurement back and forth over the centuries and it came to a halt. The computer stopped and put up a red signal, which meant that there was something wrong either with the information fed into it or with the results as compared to the standards. They called in the service department to check it out and they said, “It’s perfect.” The head of operations said, “What’s wrong?” “Well, they have found there is a day missing in space in elapsed time.” They scratched their heads and tore their hair. There was no answer!
This is the all but classic story of how science cannot account the missing day when God caused the sun to stand still. Here is the pertinent part. “The computer stopped and put up a red signal, which meant that there was something wrong either with the information fed into it or with the results as compared to the standards.” Uh, yes. Computers do not do that. This is about the dumbest thing I ever saw from these young Earth creationists. Besides, the story appears to be phony. Here is the conclusion.
*I have not yet located these three publications, mentioned in works consulted. I would be grateful for information about them, and for copies of “Missing Day” fliers or tracts.
Jan Harold Brunvand Department of English University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112
This is a continuation presentations from MIOS, the Dallas-based Metroplex Institute of Origin Science. The nominal head was Duane Huffman, but local pastor Don Patton seemed to do the presenting. The second in the series is a blurb by D. Russell Humphreys. Ph D. The title is “Evidence for a young world,” and it purports to present just that.
HERE is a list of natural phenomena which conflict with the evolutionary idea that the earth and universe are billions of years old. Each item imposes a maximum possible age which is much less than the required evolutionary age. Evolutionary scenarios must explain these serious discrepancies if we are to consider them.
Much more young-universe evidence exists, but I have chosen these items for brevity and simplicity. Some of the items on this list can be reconciled with an old universe only by making a series of improbable and unproven assumptions; others can fit in only with a young universe.
David Russell Humphreys is an American physicist who advocates for young Earth creationism. He holds a PhD in physics and has proposed a theory for the origin of the universe which allegedly resolves the distant starlight problem that exists in young Earth creationism.
There are 15 items in the presentation, and they are easily rebutted. For example:
Galaxies wind themselves up too fast
The stars of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, rotate about the galactic centre with different speeds, the inner ones rotating faster than the outer ones. The observed rotation speeds are so fast that if our galaxy were more than a few hundred million years old, it would be a featureless smear of stars instead of its present spiral shapeda
Yet our galaxy is supposed to be at least 10 billion years old. Evolutionists call this ‘the winding-up dilemma’ and try to resolve it with a complex theory of ‘density waves’.’ The wave theory has conceptual problems, and is not confirmed by observation. The same dilemma also applies to other galaxies. No such dilemma exists if the galaxies are accepted as recently created.
The idea is we see spiral galaxies that appear to have originated as spokes radiating out the center, only now the center part has rotated beyond the outer parts, as expected, leaving a spiral shape. Given the time the galaxies have been in existence they should have been wound completely up by now.
As a physicist, Humphreys should be aware the spoke appearance is attributed to recent lighting up of regions of the galaxies, and they are wound up from these recent events.
My source for these posts is a collection of handouts from MIOS meetings. I scanned them to PDF images and used a free on-line utility to generate Word documents. Here is a link to this presentation.
People at the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture can be counted on to supply material for this column. Here is a nice example.
Meyer, Shermer, Callen: “Can Science Find God?”
David Klinghoffer June 5, 2023, 4:12 PM
On the heels of another recent debate between a theist and an atheist, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer debated skeptic Michael Shermer in company with host Bryan Callen. Their topic: “Can Science Find God?” This is a very different sort of discussion from the one at Rice University about the origin of life — contentious, yes, but also cordial, lucid, and informative.
The pertinent section is this.
Every way of thinking about the universe and its origins ultimately traces all of existence back to a prime reality. That could be a mind, or it could be matter and energy. Either way, the prime reality is self-existent. It doesn’t exist because of something else. It just is. The question for Meyer is whether mind as prime reality makes better sense of what we find in the cosmos — from the Big Bang to the origin of life to the rise of complex and intelligent life — as compared with the alternative explanation. The subject is covered in his book Return of the God Hypothesis, where Meyer accepts the framing of the God question offered by atheist Richard Dawkins.
Meyer’s book appears to be the first concession from Intelligent Design that it really is about God. Then comes the inevitable matter of, “If God designed the universe, then who designed God?” In his book Meyer relates a debate he had with Lawrence Krauss that touched on this matter.
For the debate I had planned, first, to explain my core argument for the intelligent design of life and then, in the ensuing discussion, to address a question I am often asked: “Who is the intelligent designer that you think is responsible for life?” I also meant to address a closely related question: “What does scientific evidence imply about the existence of God?”—or as the organizers of the forum put it: “What lies behind it all?”
Krauss answers that question with an emphatic “Nothing”—or at least nothing but the laws of physics. Though he denounces philosophy as a vacuous enterprise, he publicly advocates a philosophy that scholars call scientific materialism—an atheistic worldview affirmed by those who claim that science undermines belief in God.
Meyer, Stephen C.. Return of the God Hypothesis (p. 7). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Krauss says exactly that in his book.
The lesson is clear: quantum gravity not only appears to allow universes to be created from nothing—meaning, in this case, I emphasize, the absence of space and time—it may require them. “Nothing”—in this case no space, no time, no anything!—is unstable. Moreover, the general characteristics of such a universe, if it lasts a long time, would be expected to be those we observe in our universe today.
Krauss, Lawrence. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (p. 170). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.
Meyer brings in the the issue of the soul and the mind.
Similarly, materialists hold that matter and energy organized themselves by various strictly naturalistic processes to produce all the complex forms of life we see today. This means scientific materialists also deny that a creator or designing intelligence played any role in the origin of the universe or life. Because materialists think that matter and energy are the foundational realities from which all else comes,2 they deny the existence of immaterial entities such as God, free will, the human soul, and even the human mind conceived as an entity in some way distinct from the physiological processes at work in the brain.
Meyer, Stephen C.. Return of the God Hypothesis (p. 8). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
On this point Meyer is correct. Examined objectively, the soul, and certainly the mind, do not exist separate from the body, generally considered to be the human body. Putting aside all prior assumptions, the mind is a chemical process that goes on inside the head, and nothing more. Without the body the mind ceases to exist. Likewise the soul. Upon death there is nothing left of the person that looks down on the world going forward. There are nice philosophical arguments for this, and they will be covered in a subsequent post.
Not to put a fine point on it… Actually, I will put a fine point on it. Even the creationists will accept only people have minds. That excludes other apes and other animals. So at one time there were animals without minds, and eventually their descendants had minds. At one point the mind as a concept came into being.
But wait! The Earth was around billions of years before people. If the concept of a mind came into being with advent of people, what was the mind doing all that creating?
We know how to recognize a mind. It manages a number of advanced activities and is self aware. It is a product of evolution on this planet. Then what existed before the universe, before there were planets and people? It certainly was not like the human mind, because that was to come much later. The creationists need to rethink this origins business. Right now they are showing their stupid side.
Skeptical Analysis 