The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation That Proves the Ultimate Truth

Dr Stephen D Unwin (phd theoretical physics)

Theory:
An explanation for some phenomenon that is based on observation, experimentation, and reasoning.
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/glossary.php3

hypothesis: a tentative insight into the natural world; a concept that is not yet verified but that if true
would explain certain facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives experimental testing
becomes a scientific theory";

An extremely well-substantiated explanation of some aspects of the natural world that incorporates
facts, laws, predictions, and tested hypotheses. (Eg, Einstein's Theory of Gravitation, 1916)
www.nmsr.org/wrkshp9.htm

A scientific theory is an established and experimentally verified fact or collection of facts about the
world. Unlike the everyday use of the word theory, it is not an unproved idea, or just some theoretical
speculation. The latter meaning of a 'theory' in science is called a hypothesis. -
http://www.whatislife.com/glossary/t.htm

a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted
knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena;
- http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=theory

compared to :

"The history of organic life is undemonstrable; we cannot prove a whole lot in evolutionary biology,
and our findings will always be hypothesis. There is one true evolutionary history of life, and whether
we will actually ever know it is not likely. Most importantly, we have to think about questioning
underlying assumptions, whether we are dealing with molecules or anything else." Jeffrey H. Schwartz,
Professor of Biological Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, February 9, 2007
------------------------
No-design is science while actual design is an untestable religious appeal to the supernatural.
------------------------
The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and
dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. A Heavenly Master governs all the world as Sovereign
of the universe. We are astonished at Him by reason of His perfection, we honor Him and fall down
before Him because of His unlimited power. From blind physical necessity, which is always and
everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created
objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its
original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.
Isaac Newton: Principia
--------------------------
In the Conclusion, on page 136, Jones says Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs scientific experts
testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the
scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine
creator [emphasis added]. I have not read the scientific experts testimony, and I wonder if Judge
Jones has slightly distorted what they said. If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts
with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The
theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine
creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there
is one, it (He?) neednt have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care
of all that. Would the good judge similarly agree that when a defense team in a murder trial shows that
the victim died of natural causes, that this in no way conflicts with the states contention that the death
in question had an author, the accused? Whats the difference? ~ Daniel Dennett
--------------------
Creationists are disqualified from making a positive case, because science by definition is based upon
naturalism. The rules of science also disqualify any purely negative argumentation designed to dilute
the persuasiveness of the theory of evolution. Creationism is thus out of court and out of the classroom-
before any consideration of evidence. Put yourself in the place of a creationist who has been silenced
by that logic, and you may feel like a criminal defendant who has just been told that the law does not
recognize so absurd a concept as "innocence." ~ Phillip Johnson
---------------
Darwin did more to secularize the Western world than any other single thinker in history. ~ Niles
Eldredge
--------------
The Astonishing Hypothesis is that "You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased:
"You're nothing but a pack of neurons." This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today
that it can truly be called astonishing. (p. 3) -Francis Crick (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The
Scientific Search for the Soul. New York: Charles Scribners Sons

---------------
I can't answer with a simple yes or no. I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist.
We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different
languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child
dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it
seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe
marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited
minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's
pantheism, but admire even more his contributions to modern thought because he is the first
philosopher to deal with the soul and the body as one, not two separate things. Einstein - Denis Brian,
Einstein, A Life, New York, 1996, p.128

"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to
recognize, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they
quote me for the support of such views." Einstein

--------------
"The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at
by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order." Sir F.
Hoyle
----------------------
More disquieting still is Professor D. M. S. Watson's defense. "Evolution itself," he wrote, "is accepted
by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent
evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." Has it
come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but
simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice. Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God? ~
C.S. Lewis
--------------------
Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented. ~ William Provine
----------------
Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet,
because you're being had.
- Michael Crichton - Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD
from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological
Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He has taught courses in anthropology at
Cambridge University and writing at MIT.
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"Modern scientific theory compels us to think of the creator as working outside time and space, which
are part of his creation, just as the artist is outside his canvas. 'Non in tempore, sed cum tempre, finxit
Deus mendum'."
Sir James Jeans: The Mysterious Universe. NY MacMilllan 1930
---------------------------------
Darwin (1881) wrote in a letter, "With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of
man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at
all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions
in such a mind?"
-------------
Richard Dawkins once wrote that it appears almost as if "the human brain is specifically designed to
misunderstand Darwinism."
------------------
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the
entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
- Robert Wilensky

In 2003, scientists at Paignton Zoo and the University of Plymouth, in Devon in England reported that
they had left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Sulawesi Crested Macaques for a month; not
only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, they started by
attacking the keyboard with a stone, and continued by urinating and defecating on it.
---------
Shapiro quotes Richard Dawkins on his worship of the first self-replicating molecule and says "[a]t
some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident. We will call it the Replicator."
But, as Shapiro explains, the real explanation is not nearly so simple:

Unfortunately, complications soon set in. DNA replication cannot proceed without the assistance of
a number of proteins--members of a family of large molecules that are chemically very different from
DNA. Proteins, like DNA, are constructed by linking subunits, amino acids in this case, together to
form a long chain. Cells employ twenty of these building blocks in the proteins that they make,
affording a variety of products capable of performing many different tasks--proteins are the handymen
of the living cell. Their most famous subclass, the enzymes, act as expeditors, speeding up chemical
processes that would otherwise take place too slowly to be of use to life. The above account brings to
mind the old riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? DNA holds the recipe for protein
construction. Yet that information cannot be retrieved or copied without the assistance of proteins.
Which large molecule, then, appeared first in getting life started--proteins (the chicken) or DNA (the
egg)?
 (Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007)

Shapiro also takes aim at the hypothesis that Miller-Urey type chemistry may have led to life's building
blocks meteorites:

By extrapolation of these results, some writers have presumed that all of life's building could be
formed with ease in Miller-type experiments and were present in meteorites and other extraterrestrial
bodies. This is not the case. A careful examination of the results of the analysis of several meteorites
led the scientists who conducted the work to a different conclusion: inanimate nature has a bias toward
the formation of molecules made of fewer rather than greater numbers of carbon atoms, and thus shows
no partiality in favor of creating the building blocks of our kind of life. (When larger carbon-containing
molecules are produced, they tend to be insoluble, hydrogen-poor substances that organic chemists call
tars.) I have observed a similar pattern in the results of many spark discharge experiments.

(Robert Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific American, February 12, 2007)
---------------------
I'm a Darwinist because I believe the only alternatives are Lamarckism or God ... ,
- Richard Dawkins
--------------
James L. Powell, professor of geology and the former director and president of the L.A. County
Museum of Natural History. In a video urging scientists to tell the public what's what regarding
intelligent design, he makes this ahem, incisive argument against intelligent design (HT: Paul
Nelson):

We have to say that if creationism is right and if there is an intelligent designer, then almost
everything else we know about science is wrong. Then your flu vaccine wouldn't work, your car
wouldn't start, there was no Hiroshima, and on and on and on. http://telicthoughts.com/professor-of-
geology-cars-disprove-intelligent-design/
How did this guy get a degree!?!?!? - GH
-----------------------------
"The formation within geological time of a human body," Kurt Godel remarked to the logician Hao
Wang, "by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution
of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into
its components." Godel
--------------------
On January 12th, 1982, Sir Fred Hoyle delivered the Omni Lecture at the Royal Institution, London,
entitled "Evolution from Space," ... In it he discussed the overwhelming improbability of getting the
enzymes needed for even the simplest form of life to function by chance.

... The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the
Rubik cube, and merely random shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that
would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare's plays with its zeros. So if one proceeds directly and
straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific
opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be
the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of in pondering this
issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything like as high a possibility of being true. (27-
28)
---------------------------
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods
worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no
ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent. ~ William Provine

[Darwinss notebooks] include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose
something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism the
postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-
products. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection
of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and
under which they marched. When Hull claimed that "the Darwinians did not totally agree with each
other, even over essentials", he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed.
Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon or
something controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of
natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians
together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwins theories. ~ Ernst Mayr
-----------
Evolution by natural selection...has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover
up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at
worst not even wrong. Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005)
----------------
Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches
outer space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A scientist.

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches
inner space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A religious nut.

---------------------
Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of
anything else. ~ Colin Patterson
--------------------
Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University
of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster:
"I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the
only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and
airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are
divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really
designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at
all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide
whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

(Phillip Johnsons comments): So birds, like airliners and submarines, and unlike rocks and mounains,
"look designed" Then it cannot be unreasonable to judge that they really are designed, unless there is
positive proof that Darwinian natural selection can and did do the job. There isn't. The designing
power of the Darwinian mechanism is always presumed, never demonstrated.
-----------------
Richard Lewontin- Harvard geneticist:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its
failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the
scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a
commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us
to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by
our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the
uninitiated. Moreover the materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
--
Scientists, like others, sometimes tell deliberate lies, because they believe that small lies can serve big
truths. -
Lewontin, R.C., The Inferiority Complex, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1981, p. 13.

----------------
"Galileos conflict with the church could have probably been avoided if he had been endowed with less
passion and more diplomacy; but long before that conflict, he had incurred the implacable hostility of
the orthodox Aristotelians who held key positions at the Italian universities. Religion and political
oppression play only an incidental part in the history of science; its erratic course and recurrent crises
are caused by internal factors. One of the conspicuous handicaps is the conservatism of the scientific
mind in its corporate aspect. The collective matrix of a science at a given time is determined by a kind
of establishment, which includes universities, learned societies, and, more recently, the editorial offices
of technical journals. Like other establishments, they are consciously or unconsciously bent on
preserving the status quo partly because unorthodox innovations are a threat to their authority, but
also because of a deeper fear that that their laboriously erected intellectual edifice might collapse under
the impact. Corporate orthodoxy has been the curse of genius from Aristarchus to Galileo, to Harvey,
Darwin and Freud; throughout the centuries its phalanxes have sturdily defended habit against
originality." (Koestler, The Act of Creation, 1969, p. 239)
---------------------
The truth is that once you embark on Darwinian nihilism there is no resting place. If there is no point in
life, everything in the end has to go duty, laws, arts, letters, society and you are left with nothing,
except 'proceeding'.
Paul Johnson (The Spectator, 23 April 2005)
-----------------
The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question...
- Richard Dawkins, the God Delusion (p. 58-59) (2006)
"Well... it could come about in the following way: it could be that uh, at some earlier time somewhere
in the universe a civilization e-evolved... by probably by some kind of Darwinian means to a very very
high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto... perhaps this... this planet.
Um, now that is a possibility. And uh, an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you
might find evidence for that if you look at the um, at the detail... details of our chemistry molecular
biology you might find a signature of some sort of designer." R. Dawkins to Ben Stein in Expelled.
----------------
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit
a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of
elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and
our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is
reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would
formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly
injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to
the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so
ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
[Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871 edition), vol. I, p. 168); emphasis added]

"[a]t some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will
almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
[Darwin, Descent (1871), vol. I, p. 201.]
--------------
ENV editor, Anika Smith, has a delightful column in the SPU Falcon newspaper titled Beware of
'Darwin Day'. In describing some of the more humorous elements of Darwin Day celebrations (carols,
Darwin look-alike contests and even an incredible, edible tree of life) Smith notes the holiday's familiar
trappings.

If you're wondering what a secular humanist does to commemorate such an occasion, it turns out that
these particular humanists stand on street corners and hand out leaflets about evolution in an attempt to
reach passers-by.

In Victoria, B.C., a philosophy of religion professor organized a Darwin Day celebration for his
students where they decked the halls with humanist style. Participants decorated an evolution tree,
exchanged Darwin cards and even sang evolution carols.

If this sounds familiar to you, that's because it was designed that way. This celebration, like so many
others, was styled as a "light-hearted satire" of Christmas. Had the celebration taken place in a culture
with a different religious history, such as Turkey, it might look something more like the Feast of
Sacrifice.
-----------------------
"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men
equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is
no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."
-----------------------
IOW [in other words], if its unconstitutional for students to be informed that science doesnt know
how life began, or that many of lifes forms and functions apparently dont arise by chance, or that the
appearance of design in nature might not be illusion, then they cant be informed that science makes
deities superfluous, that biologists are mostly metaphysical materialists who do not believe there is
creative agency, or (as Dawkins insists) science proves there are no deities. - telic thoughts blog - joy
----------------
In Johnsons formulation, which I like, atheism/materialism, and its creation story, Darwinism, serve to
answer these questions. My editorial comment is that the answers provided by this "religion" represent
inescapable philosophical nihilism:

Where we came from: Chance and necessity.

Where we are going: Eternal oblivion.
Our place in the grand scheme of things: There is no grand scheme of things.
- Gil Dodgen
------------------
Writing an editorial in the magazine Science, the frontispiece of the prestigious National Association
for the Advancement of Science, Stephen Jay Gould launched a direct attack on religion thereby
exposing the true religious nature of Darwinism. After quoting Psalm 8 "Thou has made him a little
lower than the angels...thou madest him to have dominion...thou has put all things under his feet."
Gould went on to state, "Darwin removed this keystone of false comfort more than a century ago, but
many people still believe that they cannot navigate this vale of tears without such a crutch." Ending the
article, Gould admonished his readers, "Let us praise this evolutionary nexus, a far more stately
mansion for the human soul than any pretty or parochial comfort ever conjured by our swollen
neurology to obscure the source of our physical being, or to deny the natural substrate for our separate
and complementary spiritual quest."
-----------------
as a matter of fact, creationism should be discriminated against. No advocate of such
propaganda should be trusted to teach science classes or administer science programs anywhere or
under any circumstances. Moreover, if any are now doing so, they should be dismissed. Patterson,
J.W., Do scientists and scholars discriminate unfairly against creationists? Journal of the National
Center for Science Education, p. 19, Fall (Autumn) 1984.
----------------
The only appropriate response should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the
public firing of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy, far-right
politiciansI say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. Its time for scientists to break out the
steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. - PZ
Meyers UoM
---------------------------------
"If we've defined science such that it cannot get to the true answer, we've got a pretty lame definition of
science."
Douglas Axe
--------------------
"There is no God and Richard Dawkins is his prophet" - Dembski
-------------------
"Complexity kills, it sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test."
- R. Ozzie - MS director.
---------
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation
after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.
- Nikola Tesla
---------------------
to avoid saying how far I believe in materialism, say only that emotions, instincts, degrees of talent
which are hereditary are so because brain of child resembles parent stock. - Darwin - private notes
-----------------
they still do not know how many species exist. Estimates range from 3 million to 100 million or even
more.

Taxonomists--biologists who specialize in identifying and classifying life on the planet--have named
approximately 1.7 million species so far. Each year, about 13,000 more species are added to the list of
known organisms
...
Published in 1995, the United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment is the most ambitious such
undertaking to date. The document proposes a "working estimate" of 13.6 million species on Earth.
------------------------
What sort of idiot wants to prove he came from a monkey? - dog
Hard to see how we could improve further isn't it? - star headed sea creature
- Creature Comforts - british evo question clay animation - Aardman
-----------
Future of Darwinism:

History will ultimately judge neo-darwinisim as "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the
sprawling religious persuation of Anglo-Saxon biology." - Lynn Margulis - professor of biology,
University of Massachusetts

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied,
will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very
flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."
-Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University of
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

"Scientists who go about teaching that evolution is a fact of life are great con-men, and the story they
are telling may be the GREATEST HOAX ever." Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, Physiologist. Atomic Energy
Commission. As quoted in: Evolution and the Emperor's New Clothes, 3D Enterprises Limited

"I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science."
-Dr. Soren Lovtrup, Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth (New York: Croom Helm, 1987), p. 422.
(Note: Lovtrup is an evolutionist, albeit not an "orthodox" one.)
------------
Natural selection is not random, but it does not create anything; it only throws stuff out. Natural
selection is a garbage disposal. Garbage disposals dont engineer anything.
- Gil Dodgen
-----------------
A. Lunn summed up the curious faith of the evolutionist as follows: "Faith is the substance of fossils
hoped for, the evidence of links unseen." (The Collapse of Evolution, by Dr. Scott Huse)
------------
Post by Elizabeth Craig, of Kansas Citizens for Science, about their strategy to defeat the attempt to
open the teaching of evolution to critical analysis.

http://www.kcfs.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000017
posted February 10, 2005 06:53 PMFebruary 10, 2005 07:53 PM

Pat,

I admire your attitude. I feel the same way. However, the BOE answers to no one. They have no reason
to resign. They are in the cat-bird seat, they have all the power, and they will do what they want to do.
My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999: notify the national and local media about what's
going on and portray them in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists,
ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.

There may no way to head off another science standards debacle, but we can sure make them look like
asses as they do what they do.

Our target is the moderates who are not that well educated about the issues, most of whom probably are
theistic evolutionists. There is no way to convert the creationists.
----------
Here, for example, is the concluding paragraph of Larry Laudan's famous article, "The Demise of the
Demarcation Problem:"

Through certain vagaries of history, ...we have managed to conflate two quite distinct questions:
What makes a belief well founded (or heuristically fertile)? And what makes a belief scientific? The
first set of questions is philosophically interesting and possibly even tractable; the second question is
both uninteresting and, judging by its checkered past, intractable. If we would stand up and be counted
on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like "pseudo-science" and "unscientific" from our
vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases which do only emotive work for us.... Insofar as our concern is
to protect ourselves and our fellows from the cardinal sin of believing what we wish were so rather than
what there is substantial evidence for (and surely that is what most forms of "quackery" come down to),
then our focus should be squarely on the empirical and conceptual credentials for claims about the
world. The "scientific" status of those claims is irrelevant.(16)

Surely Laudan is on the right track. For example, whether mutation and selection can create complex
organs like wings and eyes is a question to be resolved by evidence. To insist that belief in the creative
power of natural selection is "scientific," and doubt on the subject is inherently "religious," or even an
instance of the thought crime known as "creationism," is simply to try to prejudice the inquiry with a
tendentious use of labels. Perhaps those who attribute creation to a Creator are committing what
Laudan called "the cardinal sin of believing what they wish were so rather than what there is substantial
evidence for." On the other hand, perhaps this is still more true of Darwinists, who are so eager to
believe on slight evidence that natural selection can do all the work of creation.

The points in dispute can only be settled by an unbiased examination of the evidence. Those who have
confidence in their evidence and their logic do not appeal to prejudice, nor do they insist upon
imposing rules of discourse that allow only one position to receive serious consideration, nor do they
use vague and shifting terminology to distract attention from genuine points of difficulty. Still less do
they heap abuse and ridicule upon persons who want to raise questions about the evidence and the
philosophical assumptions that underly a theory. When an educational establishment has to resort to
tactics like that, you can be sure that some people are getting desperate. - Phillip Johnson
---------------
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/1186 :

"Darwinists haven't figured out how to evolve irreducible complexity because irreducible complexity is
in principle impossible to evolve. Irreducible complexity is a fundamental falsfier of Darwinism."

The lack of testable step-by-step accounts of the evolution of irreducible complexity testifies to the fact
that, regardless of the state of who has published or said what, evolution fundamentally cannot evolve
irreducible complexity.

Table 1. Ways Designers Act When Designing (Observations):

(1) Take many parts and arrange them in highly specified and complex patterns which perform a
specific function.
(2) Rapidly infuse any amounts of genetic information into the biosphere, including large amounts,
such that at times rapid morphological or genetic changes could occur in populations.
(3) 'Re-use parts' over-and-over in different types of organisms (design upon a common blueprint).
(4) Be said to typically NOT create completely functionless objects or parts (although we may
sometimes think something is functionless, but not realize its true function).

Table 2. Predictions of Design (Hypothesis):

(1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures will be found.
(2) Forms will be found in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.
(3) Genes and functional parts will be re-used in different unrelated organisms.
(4) The genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless "junk
DNA".
---------
Scientists are complaining that the new Dinosaur movie shows
dinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years.
They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression.
What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?
--Jay Leno
---------
Athough all my training was peppered with fleeting references to Darwinist myths, all the useful stuff
in our training assumed design. Nothing in biology makes sense without ID. Evolutionary biologists
generally specialise in imagination, hand waving and a lot of talk.

The new field of systems biology is forcing the biologists back to school to study engineering. Why do
we need engineering to understand the results of Darwins simple idea? - a Medical Doc.
----------
Sadly, my experience is that universities are the most dogmatic and oppressive places in our society.
This becomes progressively worse as they receive more and more funding from governments that
demand a particular viewpoint.
...
Until you have challenged the prevailing wisdom you have no idea how nasty people can be. Until you
have re-examined any issue in an attempt to find out all the information, you cannot know how much
misinformation exists in the supposed age of information. Climatologist Dr. Tim Ball - on global
warming.
-------------
No ultimate foundations for ethics exist, no ultimate meaning in life exists, and free will is merely a
human myth. ...

Free will is not hard to give up, because it's a horribly destructive idea to our society. Free will is what
we use as an excuse to treat people like pieces of **** when they do something wrong in our society.
We say to the person, "you did something wrong out of your free will, and therefore we have the
justification for revenge all over your behind." We put people in prison, turning them into lousier
individuals than they ever were. This horrible system is based upon this idea of free will. - Dr. W. B.
Provine, evo bio prof, Cronell - 1994.
************
El Hitcho says:
I would also suggest you take a look at canadian forces General Romeo D'allaire's "Shake hands with
the devil" book (The Rwanda massacres). Get a good idea of just how evil, devilish evil humans can
be. If it's all just genetic defect and biologically provoked then there is no "evil" in genocide at all -- it's
just another evo adaptation for the survival of the fittest.

The Moral Law exists. Morality is a question of conduct by free choice. No free choice = no possibility
of morality. Rocks don't have will => Rocks have no morality.
Humans have free choice, volition or the ability of self-determination. Therefore they are moral agents.
All conscious beings with these attributes are moral agents. However, If there is no such thing as
ultimate moral law then there is no such thing as morality itself.

Therefore, if morality is a human invention or an evolutionary adaptation for mere survival purposes,
the moral law does not exist and nothing is either right or wrong.

"The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled
alike."
"If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake,
nothing is obligatory at all."
"The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or
a new primary colour in the spectrum..." - Lewis

What law is.

Law is a rule of action, and in its most extensive sense, it is applicable to all actions, whether of matter
or mind.

Define Moral Law.

1. Moral law is a rule of moral action.
2. It is the law of motive, and not of force.
3. Moral law is a rule, to which moral beings are under obligations to conform all their actions.
4. ....
No being can make law.
1. God's existence and nature are necessary.
2. Moral law is that course of action which is in conformity with the laws of His being.
3. It is, therefore, obligatory upon him.
4. God could make moral agents, but not moral law; for when they exist, this rule is law to them, and
would be, whether God willed it or not.
5. Law is that course of action demanded by the nature and relations of moral beings.

*************************
Suppose our body is lacking the CFTR gene (or it is not yet functional), which produces a trans-
membrane protein which regulates chloride ion transport across the cell membrane. Or suppose that it
is missing the RB gene on the 13th chromosome, whose job it is to identify abnormal tumour growth,
especially in a childs rapidly growing retina, and kill such tumours. If one tiny piece of the puzzle is
missing all the other thousands of functional genes become worthless, since the organism cannot
survive.

How sensitive is our human copy machine to error? The CFTP gene has 250,000 base pairs. Over 200
mutations have been described which lead to cystic fibrosis (CF). The most common mutation, -F508
at position 508 on the peptide chain involves the deletion of three nucleotides.[52] Three out of
250,000 nucleotides are not copied correctly and the gene cannot function! It is simply not correct to
pretend that nature offers endless degrees of freedom to monkey around with the highly interdependent
and very sensitive machinery of cell duplication. Furthermore, as discussed above, time is the greatest
enemy for evolutionary theory, since most mutations are recessive and for the time being non-lethal.
These accumulate from generation to generation and increase the genetic burden. R Truman.
-------------------
Living things have by far the most compact information storage/retrieval system known. This stands to
reason if a microscopic cell stores as much information as several sets of Encyclopdia Britannica. To
illustrate further, the amount of information that could be stored in a pinheads volume of DNA is
staggering. It is the equivalent information content of a pile of paperback books 500 times as tall as the
distance from Earth to the moon, each with a different, yet specific content.
---------
"Yet Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no
transitional fossils. As a palaeontologist myself, I am much occupied with the philosophical problems
of identifying ancestral forms in the fossil record. You say that I should at least 'show a photo of the
fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the linethere is not one such
fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry
and descent are not applicable in the fossil record." Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist, British
Museum of Natural History, London "Darwin's Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems," [1984], Master
Book Publishers: El Cajon CA, Fourth Edition, 1988, p89
--------------
IF the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on
this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our
present thoughts are mere accidents the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this
holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone elses. But if their
thoughts i.e., Materialism and Astronomy are mere accidental by-products, why should we believe
them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct
account of all the other accidents. Its like expecting the accidental shape taken by the splash when you
upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.
C. S. Lewis
----------
'No-design is science while actual design is an untestable religious appeal to the supernatural.'
---------
# Evolutionists do not fully understand their own theory and its incredible flexibility.
# Evolutionary theory is a structureless smorgasbord.
Berlinski
---------
"[The cell is] essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals.
In terms of their basic biochemical design no living system can be thought of as being primitive or
ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary
sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth." Dr. Michael Denton,A Theory in Crisis,
Adler and Adler, Bethesda, p. 250, 1986
---------
"As the arrangement of a printed page is extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the base
sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule. It is this
physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces the improbability of any particular sequence and
thereby enables it to have a meaninga meaning that has a mathematically determinate information
content." Michael Polanyi,"Lifes Irreducible Structure", Science 160:1308, 1968
---------
"It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is
intelligence - an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever
uttered - 'In the beginning, God.'" Dr. Arthur H. Compton,Nobel Laureate (Physics).
---------
"Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted
myself to a fantasy."
Charles Darwin, Life and Letters, 1887, Vol. 2, p. 229

"I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science."
Charles Darwin,In a letter to Asa Gray, a Harvard professor of biology. Quoted in N.C. Gillespie,
'Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation' (1979), p.2

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries,

the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout
the
world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked (18.
'Anthropological Review,' April 1867, p. 236.), will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man
and
his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we
may
hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro
or
Australian and the gorilla. Darwon - The Descent pf Man p. 98
----------
"Paleontology (study of fossils) cannot be regarded other than as a hostile witness (against evolution).
"It is not possible to draw up a pedigree showing the descent of any species, living or extinct, from an
ancestor belonging to a different order. The earliest know fossils of each class and order are not half-
made or half-developed forms, but exhibit, fully developed, all the essential characteristics of their
class or order. . . .It is not possible to arrange a genealogical series of fossils proving that any series has
in the past undergone sufficient change to transform it into a member of another family.

All the changes proved by fossils to have taken place in animals are within the limits of the family."

In the book "IS EVOLUTION PROVED?" Douglas Dewar quoted Sir J. William Dawson (1820-
1899), F. R. S., of McGill University (Montreal), a trained geologist. Prof., Dawson said in his day:
"The evolutionist doctrine is itself one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. . . .that in our day a
system destitute of any shadow of proof. . . .should be accepted as a philosophy, and should enable
adherents to string upon its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge is
surpassing strange." - Sir J. William Dawson
--------------
"Subspecies are actually, therefore, neither incipient species nor models for the origin of species. They
are more or less diversified blind alleys within the species. The decisive step in evolution, the first step
toward macroevolution, the step from one species to another, requires another evolutionary method
than that of sheer accumulation of micromutations" (GOLDSCHMIDT 1940).
------------
Jonathan Marks, (department of anthropology, University of California, Berkeley) has pointed out the
often-overlooked problem with this "similarity" line of thinking.
Because DNA is a linear array of those four basesA,G,C, and T only four possibilities exist at
any specific point in a DNA sequence. The laws of chance tell us that two random sequences from
species that have no ancestry in common will match at about one in every four sites. Thus even two
unrelated DNA sequences will be 25 percent identical, not 0 percent identical (2000, p. B-7).

Therefore a human and any earthly DNA-based life form must be at least 25% identical. Would it be
correct, then, to state that daffodils are "one-quarter human"? The idea that a flower is one-quarter
human is neither profound nor enlightening; it is outlandishly ridiculous! There is hardly any biological
comparison that could be conducted that would make daffodils humanexcept perhaps DNA. Marks
went on to concede:

Moreover, the genetic comparison is misleading because it ignores qualitative differences among
genomes.... Thus, even among such close relatives as human and chimpanzee, we find that the chimps
genome is estimated to be about 10 percent larger than the humans; that one human chromosome
contains a fusion of two small chimpanzee chromosomes; and that the tips of each chimpanzee
chromosome contain a DNA sequence that is not present in humans (B-7, emp. added). Marks,
Jonathan (2000), "98% Alike? (What Similarity to Apes Tells Us About Our Understanding of
Genetics)," The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12.

The truth is, if we consider the absolute amount of genetic material when comparing primates and
humans, the 1-2% difference in DNA represents approximately 80 million different nucleotides

Biologist John Randall admitted this when he wrote:

The older textbooks on evolution make much of the idea of homology, pointing out the obvious
resemblances between the skeletons of the limbs of different animals. Thus the "pentadactyl" [five
boneBH/BT] limb pattern is found in the arm of a man, the wing of a bird, and flipper of a whale
and this is held to indicate their common origin. Now if these various structures were transmitted by the
same gene couples, varied from time to time by mutations and acted upon by environmental selection,
the theory would make good sense. Unfortunately this is not the case. Homologous organs are now
known to be produced by totally different gene complexes in the different species. The concept of
homology in terms of similar genes handed on from a common ancestor has broken down...
---------
"Evidently nature can no longer be seen as matter and energy alone. Nor can all her secrets be unlocked
with the keys of chemistry and physics, brilliantly successful as these two branches of science have
been in our century.
A third component is needed for any explanation of the world that claims to be complete. To the
powerful theories of chemistry and physics must be added a late arrival: a theory of information.
Nature must be interpreted as matter, energy, and information." Jeremy C. Campbell, Journalist,
"Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life," [1982], Penguin Books:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex UK, 1984,
----------
"I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know."
Stephen Jay Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory," Discover 2(5):34-37 (1981)

Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not true by definition; it is neither an ethical
principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked
out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other
results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didnt happen - Gould (from Human
Equality Is a Contingent Fact of History, p. 186).
-----------
"The scientific establishment's acceptance of worldwide catastrophism and mass extinction does not
signify their abandonment of materialistic evolution.

Neither has their grudging acquiescence to the fact that great catastrophes caused the deposition of
many of the fossils forced them to consider that virtually no fossils are in the process of forming on the
bottom of any lake or sea today. This is a verboten subject. When I asked the editors of several of the
most prestigious scientific journals the reasons for this silence, I was met with more silence."
Luther D. Sunderland,"Mass Extinction & Catastrophism Replace Darwinism & Uniformitarianism
----------------
1. All languages, codes, protocols and encoding / decoding mechanisms come from intelligence - there
are no exceptions.
2. DNA contains a language, a code, a protocol, and an encoding / decoding mechanism
3. Therefore DNA came from an intelligence.
----------
"... as Darwinists and neo-Darwinists have become ever more adept at finding possible selective
advantages for any trait one cares to mention, explanation in terms of the all-powerful force of natural
selection has come more and more to resemble explanation in terms of the conscious design of the
omnipotent Creator."
Mae-Wan Ho & Peter T. Saunders, Biologist at The Open University, UK and Mathematician at
University of London respectively. Eds., 'Beyond Neo- Darwinism: An Introduction to the New
Evolutionary Paradigm,' Academic Press: London, 1984
----------------
The great fallacy of evolution is that it claims all the benefits of design without the need for actual
design. In particular, evolution attributes intelligence, the power of choice, to a fundamentally irrational
process, namely, natural selection. But nature has no power to choose. Real choices involve
deliberation, that is, some consideration of future possibilities and consequences.
But natural selection is incapable of looking to the future. Instead, it acts on the spur of the moment,
based solely on what the environment right now deems fit. It cannot plan for the future. It is incapable
of deferring success or gratification. And yet, so limited a process is supposed to produce marvels of
biological complexity and diversity that far exceed the capacities of the best human designers. Theres
no evidence that natural selection is up to the task. Natural selection is fine for explaining certain small-
scale changes in organisms, like the beaks of birds adapting to environmental changes. It can take
existing structures and hone them. But it cant explain how you get complex structures in the first
place. Thats why molecular biologist Franklin Harold writes, "there are presently no detailed
Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful
speculations."

Remember the phrase "wishful speculations" whenever anyone starts touting the wonder-working
power of natural selection.

"Living things are so much part of everyday experience that we scarcely realize how strange they are,
and how sharply they differ from inanimate objects. All organisms, from bacteria to humans, are
exceedingly intricate molecular systems that have the unique capacity to make themselves. On the level
of the individual, each one grows and reproduces its own kind. Collectively, on a timescale of
millennia, they continuously make themselves over, adapting to changes in their external and internal
environments. Nothing else in the known universe has such powers. Living things obey all the laws of
chemistry and physics, and we have learned an enormous amount about the molecular mechanisms that
underlie all biological operations. We know much less about how these components and processes are
organized in space, and almost nothing about their origin when the world was young. Our knowledge is
vast, but our understanding is partial and full of gaps; for all its familiarity and ubiquity, life remains
fundamentally mysterious."
- molecular biologist Franklin Harold - the way of the cell
----------
Jonathan Wells comments in response to the question, How do you explain the Cambrian explosion of
life?
 How did it happen? We dont have the foggiest idea how it happened. Assuming a jellyfish was the
common ancestor I dont believe that but how do you turn a jellyfish into a trilobite? How do you
turn a jellyfish into a fish with a backbone? How do you do it? I dont just mean taking a scalpel and
rearranging the parts like youre doing a collage in third-grade art class. Were talking about a living
animal here, that reproduces itself and makes more things like itself. How do you do it? We dont have
the foggiest idea.

To try to explain this away by saying Darwins theory accounts for it is a science-stopper. Its the
biggest science-stopper of modern history. It stops your inquiry right there. You have no more
questions. Oh, all these animals just appeared. Thats not science.

---------
Comments Dean Esmay, self-proclaimed liberal and atheist:

There are people right now in Dover, Pennsylvania fighting to ban a completely harmless book
called Of Pandas And People from public school science classes, against the express wishes of a
majority of the parents. Tap-dance around it all you want, that is an attempt to ban a book from the
classroom and censor ideas. You can put all the lipstick you want on this pig, with armwaving
generalizations about "separation of church and state," but the pig won't get any prettier. It is
censorship that is being advocated here, period. It will belong right on the ALA's Banned books list,
alongside The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn. If the Stalinist ACLU and the self-proclaimed
"defenders of science" have their way, anyhow.

And if they do get their wish and manage to get the book banned, the message will be loud and clear
once again: believers in evolution are intellectual tyrants, and science teachers are liars who hide ideas
from their students.

The courts did a tremendously stupid and destructive thing back in the 1980s when they banned so-
called "creation science." The impression was made loud and clear to tens of millions of parents and
students: scientists are intellectual bullies and cowards, and science teachers are liars who censor
arguments that don't fit their prejudices.

You deny that was the intent? No matter. That was irrefutably the result.
----------
But how could these organic inventions, these small tools, appear? It seems most improbable that a
single mutation could have given rise simultaneously to the various elements which compose, say, a
press-stud or hooking device. Several mutations must therefore be assumed, but this implies the further
assumption of close co-ordination between different and distinct mutations. Such indispensable co-
ordination is a major stumbling block, for no known mutations occur in this way.
----------
Other examples of irreducible complexity abound, including aspects of protein transport, blood
clotting, closed circular DNA, electron transport, the bacterial flagellum, telomeres, hotosynthesis,
transcription regulation, and much more.
-------
http://www.expasy.ch/cgi-bin/show_thumbnails.pl - biochemical pathways diagram
-------
HAHAHA !: http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/041117_running_humans.html
"Those who ran well separated themselves from the pack of apes and became the earliest humans,
eating protein that enlarged their brains.

Running got us out of the trees and made us smarter.

We are very confident that strong selection for running -- which came at the expense of the historical
ability to live in trees -- was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form," said
University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble.

The idea is presented in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

"So is walking going to be what suddenly transforms the hominid body?" Bramble asks. "No, walking
won't do that, but running will."

Bramble and Harvard University anthropologist Daniel Lieberman examined 26 human traits that
contribute to our ability to give chase. They compared many of these to fossils of our ancestors.
Compared to us, Australopithecus had long forearms, short legs, and terrible arches. It walked around
with a permanent shoulder shrug ill suited for jogging.

So why would evolution have selected for the development of these features?

Biologist David Carrier, also of the University of Utah, provided a possible answer in previous
research. Before humans had invented the bow and arrow, Carrier reasons, it would have been
advantageous to wear down prey with an endless pursuit.

Carrier, who was not involved in the latest study, showed that differences in how humans breathe and
sweat suited them for endurance. Further, he found evidence that Navajo Indians and other primitive
cultures were able to run down very swift animals.

The new study provides more detailed anatomical evidence to support Carrier's earlier hypothesis, he
told LiveScience.

"I think it's very well thought out," Carrier said of the Bramble and Lieberman study. "I think there's
strong support for their arguments."

Importantly, the food that early humans could catch by simply outlasting their prey -- meat -- would
have changed everything.

"What these features and fossil facts appear to be telling us is that running evolved in order for our
direct ancestors to compete with other carnivores for access to the protein needed to grow the big
brains that we enjoy today," Lieberman said.

Other things that make you born to run, according to the study:

Compared to apes, your flat face, small teeth and short snout shift the center of mass of your head
back, so it doesn't bob up and down when you jog.

Your height and, ahem, narrow physique create more skin surface for sweating and cooling.
 Human heels, toes and arches are well designed for pushing off and absorbing shock.

A ligament ties the back of your skull to your vertebrae, acting like a shock absorber. Large
vertebrae and disks assist in allowing a less-jarring gait.

Your upper and lower body move independently, making it easier to balance while your legs swing.
Short forearms help, too.

When your head sweats, blood in veins near the surface is cooled. The veins pass near carotid
arteries, helping cool blood on its way to the brain.

The human backside helps, too. A good-sized hiney stabilizes your trunk. Bramble asks: "Have you
ever looked at an ape? They have no buns."
-----------
SETI & ID :

Narrow-band signals, say those that are only a few Hertz or less wide, are the mark of a purposely built
transmitter. Natural cosmic noisemakers, such as pulsars, quasars, and the turbulent, thin interstellar
gas of our own Milky Way, do not make radio signals that are this narrow.

The Targeted Search System looks for signals in the range 1,000 MHz to 3,000 MHz, with a frequency
resolution of 1 Hz.

Any signal less than about 300 Hz wide must be, as far as we know, artificially produced. Such narrow-
band signals are what all SETI experiments look for. Other tell-tale characteristics include a signal that
is completely polarized or the existence of coded information on the signal.

If the signal is intentional, it might be decipherable. In order to send or receive a signal over interstellar
distances, a civilization must understand basic science and mathematics. Hence, a message from
another civilization might use science and math to build up a common language with other socieites.
Signals sent by a civilization for its own purposes may be impossible for us to unravel. But one thing
we would know irrespective of content is that another intelligent civilization is out there.

---
When Does SETI Throw in the Towel?

By Seth Shostak
SETI Institute
posted: 18 January 2007
06:38 am ET

"At what point would you abandon the search?"

Thats a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as
futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from
extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope to
tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with
a simple, if disappointing message: "There are no aliens"?
The question seems fair, since SETIs obvious analogsthe historical voyages of discovery made in the
centuries following the Renaissancewere completed in considerably less time than SETI has been
beating the cosmic bushes. Columbus spent five weeks finding North America (and he wasnt even
looking). Captain Cook, a true paragon of explorers, and a man who mapped places that Europeans
didnt even know were places, never mounted an expedition that lasted more than three years.

But those analogs are false. The South Pacific, for all its watery wastes, is comprehensible in size. Even
Cooks unimpressive Whitby collier, powered by sailcloth, could cross the Pacific in a matter of
months, come about, and cross again in a different direction. His quarry, the islands peppering the
ocean like coins scattered onto a living room carpet, signaled their presence by clots of clouds even
when the islands themselves were below the horizon.

The SETI wilderness is incomparably larger, obviously, and its quarry is cryptic. Even if there are ten
thousand transmitting societies nestled in the arms of the Milky Way, we might need to search millions
of star systems before we find one. The actual number of star systems that radio SETI experiments
have carefully examined is fewer than a thousand.

Its a simple truth, although one not universally acknowledged, that SETI is still in its early stages.
Consequently, many of its practitioners will tell you that this is a multigenerational experiment, akin to
building cathedrals in medieval Europe. In other words, a lot of SETI scientists will answer the
question that began this article by saying "not in my lifetime, nor in that of my children or
grandchildren."

Fighting words, but could they be hyperbolic? To begin with, SETI experiments will have examined
millions of star systems within a generation. And within two, we could carefully check every star in
the Galaxy. The SETI ship has a lot of ocean to cover, but thanks to new technologies, its picking up
speed. So clearly, if we havent found something by mid-century or so, it will be hard to argue that its
still "early stages."

And frankly, its conceivable that SETIs basic assumptions might be proven wrong. Imagine that the
new space-based telescopes (COROT and Kepler) currently being deployed to hunt for Earth-size
planets around other stars come up empty. That would be a premium-grade bum
mer. But even if (as widely expected) they do discover rocky worlds, its possible that a decade or so
down the line, their telescopic successorsatmosphere-sniffing instruments such as the Terrestrial
Planet Findermight fail to find any extrasolar worlds on which life has taken hold.

Spacecraft of the future might return to us the news that neither Mars, Europa, nor any of the other orbs
of the solar system with liquid water have ever produced a microbe. If these are headlines of the
futureif the local cosmic neighborhood turns out to be as sterile as prime-time televisionthen that
would certainly put me on the defensive.

But the fact is that none of this incites me to break out the worry beads. Not yet. The various factors in
the well-known Drake Equation, which is often used to estimate the chances of SETI success, haveat
least until nowbecome more encouraging with time, not less. The more we learn about the universe,
the more it seems disposed to house worlds with life. It didnt have to be that way.

Somewhat more disquieting is the possibility that our approach is wrong. SETI today is
overwhelmingly a search for narrow-band electromagnetic transmissions, or in fewer syllables, a hunt
for beamed radio or light. We search with straightforward telescopic techniques, but its possible that
alien broadcasts could be encoded in ways that were not set up to find. Im not talking about how they
construct their messagesor whether theyre broadcasting in Standard American English or a lilting
Klingon dialectbut the technical scheme they use. For instance, Walt Simmons at the University of
Hawaii has suggested that garrulous aliens might wield two widely separated transmitters and use
quantum mechanical effects to encode their messages. The advantage would be that if we opened this
type of alien mail, it would be impossible to tell from which direction it came, thereby protecting the
anonymity of the sender. This sort of approachstill somewhat beyond our technical abilitiesmight
make our present receiving schemes seem nave.

In addition, theres always the chance that the discovery of new physics will reveal some
communication mode thats either faster than light and radio, or requires less energy to use. This
doesnt seem likely, but science is all about surprises.

Indeed, my personal feeling is that if SETI hasnt turned up something by the second half of this
century, we should reconsider our search strategy, rather than assume that weve failed because there is
nothingor no oneto find. Would I ever conclude that weve searched enough? Would I ever truly
give up on SETIs bedrock premise, and tell myself that the extraterrestrials simply arent out there?
Not likely. That would be to assume that weve learned all there is to know about our universe, a
stance that is contrary to the spirit of explorers and scientists alike. We might yearn, or even need to
believe that we are special, but to conclude that Homo sapiens is the best the cosmos has to offer is
egregious self-adulation.

------------
Live Science :
Perhaps most troubling of all, Darwin's theory of evolution tells us that life existed for billions of years
before us, that humans are not the products of special creation and that life has no inherent meaning or
purpose.
- Ker Than, Live Science staff writer, 22 September 2005
------------
All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for
instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud
chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists conclusions less certain.
-------------
AR Wallace came to believe that natural selection acting on random variations could not explain a
number of things in biology, especially the development of the human brain. He concluded instead that
"a Higher Intelligence" guided the process:

[T]here seems to be evidence of a Power which has guided the action of those laws [of organic
development] in definite directions and for special ends. And so far from this view being out of
harmony with the teachings of science, it has a striking analogy with what is now taking place in the
world...
---------
"I reject evolution because I deem it obsolete, because the knowledge, hard won since 1830, of
anatomy, histology, cytology, and embryology, cannot be made to accord with its basic idea.
The foundationless, fantastic edifice of the evolution doctrine would long ago have met with its long
deserved fate were it not that the love of fairy tales is so deep-rooted in the hearts of man." Albert
Fleischmann, University of Erlangen
------------
"I would rather believe in fairy tales than in such wild speculation. I have said for years that
speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far
too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their
attempts to explain the unexplainable. God cannot be explained away by such naive thoughts." Sir
Ernst B. Chain, Nobel Laureate (Medicine, 1945), as quoted by Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Ernst
Chain (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1985), pp. 147-148
------
"Today, a hundred and twenty-eight years after it was first promulgated, the Darwinian theory of
evolution stands under attack as never before. ...
The fact is that in recent times there has been increasing dissent on the issue within academic and
professional ranks, and that a growing number of respectable scientists are defecting from the
evolutionist camp.
It is interesting, moreover, that for the most part these 'experts' have abandoned Darwinism, not on
the basis of religious faith or biblical persuasions, but on strictly scientific grounds, and in some
instances regretfully, as one could say.
We are told dogmatically that Evolution is an established fact; but we are never told who has
established it, and by what means. We are told, often enough, that the doctrine is founded upon
evidence, and that indeed this evidence 'is henceforward above all verification, as well as being
immune from any subsequent contradiction by experience'; but we are left entirely in the dark on the
crucial question wherein, precisely, this evidence consists." Wolfgang Smith, Mathematician and
Physicist. Prof. of Mathematics, Oregon State University. Former math instructor at MIT.
-------------------
"One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, was ... it struck me that I had been
working on this stuff for twenty years and there was not one thing I knew about it.
That's quite a shock to learn that one can be so misled so long. ...so for the last few weeks I've tried
putting a simple question to various people and groups of people.
Question: 'Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true?'
I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only
answer I got was silence.
I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a
very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one
person said, 'I do know one thing it ought not to be taught in high school'." Dr. Colin Patterson,
Senior Palaeontologist. British Museum of Natural History, London. Keynote address at the American
Museum of Natural History, New York City
--------

--------
A

In his book In the Beginning Was Information, Dr. Werner Gitt, an expert in information systems,
deduces certain conclusions from the information found in DNA. Here is a summary:

Since the DNA code has all the essential characteristics of information, there must have been a sender
of this information.

Since the density and complexity of the DNA information is millions of times greater than man's
present technology, the sender must be supremely intelligent.

Since the sender must have encoded (stored) the information into the DNA molecule and constructed
the molecular biomachines to encode, decode and run the cells, the sender must be purposeful and
supremely powerful.

Since information is a nonmaterial entity and cannot originate from matter, the sender must have a
nonmaterial component (spirit).

Since information cannot originate from matter and is also created by man, man's nature must have a
nonmaterial component (spirit).

Since biological information can only originate from an intelligent sender and all theories of chemical
and biological evolution are based on the premise that information comes solely from matter and
energy (with no sender), then the theories of chemical and biological evolution are false.

--------
the theory stipulates that Nature in effect must transmute a motorcycle into an automobile while
providing continuous transportation. S. Vogel
------
time and again, biologists do explain the survival of an organism by reference to its fitness and the
fitness of an organism by reference to its survival
--------
"When we examine the visual mechanism closely," Karen K. de Valois remarked recently in Science,
"although we understand much about its component parts, we fail to fathom the ways in which they fit
together to produce the whole of our complex visual perception."

These facts suggest a chastening reformulation of Gould's "excellent" question, one adapted to reality:
could a system we do not completely understand be constructed by means of a process we cannot
completely specify?
--------
DARWIN CONCEIVED of evolution in terms of small variations among organisms, variations which
by a process of accretion allow one species to change continuously into another. This suggests a view
in which living creatures are spread out smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities,
like colors merging imperceptibly in a color chart.
Life, however, is absolutely nothing like this. Wherever one looks there is singularity, quirkiness,
oddness, defiant individuality, and just plain weirdness. The male redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti),
for example, is often consumed during copulation. Such is sexual cannibalism -- the result, biologists
have long assumed, of "predatory females overcoming the defenses of weaker males." But it now
appears that among Latrodectus basselti, the male is complicit in his own consumption. Having
achieved intromission, this schnook performs a characteristic somersault, placing his abdomen directly
over his partner's mouth. ...

It might seem that sexual suicide confers no advantage on the spider, the male passing from ecstasy to
extinction in the course of one and the same act. But spiders willing to pay for love are apparently
favored by female spiders (no surprise, there); and female spiders with whom they mate, entomologists
claim, are less likely to mate again....

This explanation resolves one question only at the cost of inviting another: why such bizarre behavior?
In no other Latrodectus species does the male perform that obliging somersault, offering his partner the
oblation of his life as well as his love. Are there general principles that specify sexual suicide among
this species, but that forbid sexual suicide elsewhere? If so, what are they?
Once asked, such questions tend to multiply like party guests. If evolutionary theory cannot answer
them, what, then, is its use? Why is the Pitcher plant carnivorous, but not the thorn bush, and why does
the Pacific salmon require fresh water to spawn, but not the Chilean sea bass? Why has the British
thrush learned to hammer snails upon rocks, but not the British blackbird, which often starves to death
in the midst of plenty? Why did the firefly discover bioluminescence, but not the wasp or the warrior
ant; why do the bees do their dance, but not the spider or the flies; and why are women, but not cats,
born without the sleek tails that would make them even more alluring than they already are?

Why? Yes, why? The question, simple, clear, intellectually respectable, was put to the Nobel laureate
George Wald. "Various organisms try various things," he finally answered, his words functioning as a
verbal shrug, "they keep what works and discard the rest."

But suppose the manifold of life were to be given a good solid yank, so that the Chilean sea bass but
not the Pacific salmon required fresh water to spawn, or that ants but not fireflies flickered enticingly at
twilight, or that women but not cats were born with lush tails. What then? An inversion of life's
fundamental facts would, I suspect, present evolutionary biologists with few difficulties. Various
organisms try various things. This idea is adapted to any contingency whatsoever, an interesting
example of a Darwinian mechanism in the development of Darwinian thought itself.

A comparison with geology is instructive. No geological theory makes it possible to specify precisely a
particular mountain's shape; but the underlying process of upthrust and crumbling is well understood,
and geologists can specify something like a mountain's generic shape. This provides geological theory
with a firm connection to reality. A mountain arranging itself in the shape of the letter "A" is not a
physically possible object; it is excluded by geological theory.

The theory of evolution, by contrast, is incapable of ruling anything out of court. That job must be done
by nature. But a theory that can confront any contingency with unflagging success cannot be falsified.
Its control of the facts is an illusion.

In a superbly elaborated figure, the Australian biologist Michael Denton compares a single cell to an
immense automated factory, one the size of a large city:
On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship,
opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one
of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering
complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every
direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus
and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical
chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see,
all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecule....

We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules,
were, astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery....Yet the life of the cell depends on the
integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different
protein molecules.

And whatever the complexity of the cell, it is insignificant in comparison with the mammalian nervous
system; and beyond that, far impossibly ahead, there is the human mind, an instrument like no other in
the biological world, conscious, flexible, penetrating, inscrutable, and profound.
--------
A sentence obeys the laws of English grammar; a sequence is lawless
How on earth could the sentences be discovered by chance amid such an infernal and hyperborean
immensity of gibberish? They cannot be discovered by chance, and, of course, chance plays no role in
their discovery.
The eerie and unexpected presence of an alphabet in every living creature might suggest the possibility
of a similar argument in biology. It is DNA of course, that acts as life's primordial text, the code itself
organized in nucleic triplets, like messages in Morse code. Each triplet is matched to a particular
chemical object, an amino acid. There are twenty such acids in all. They correspond to letters in an
alphabet. As the code is read somewhere in life's hidden housing, the linear order of the nucleic acids
induces a corresponding linear order in the amino acids. The biological finger writes, and what the cell
reads is an ordered presentation of such amino acids-a protein.

Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents. On average,
proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a long
biochemical word, one of many.

The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, something
comparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at
hand: there are no sentences in molecular biology. Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted
by Richard Dawkins: "The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of the
theoretical animals that could exist." It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has
expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.

A COMBINATORIAL COUNT is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this
argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw
material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing
turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionary
failures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of
time have performed some useful function, with "usefulness" now standing for the sense of
sentencehood in linguistics.

As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of
possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of a
fixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th
power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of
the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea.

It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, "was directed
toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ," the word "directed" conveying, at
least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search
-------
This need is met in evolutionary theory by natural selection, the filter but not the source of change. "It
may be said," Darwin wrote, that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the
world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that
is good: silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, as the
improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Natural selection emerges from these reflections as a strange force-like concept. It is strange because it
is unconnected to any notion of force in physics, and it is force-like because natural selection does
something, it has an effect and so unctions as a kind of cause.

The same pattern of intellectual displacement is especially vivid in Daniel Dennett's description of
natural selection as a force subordinate to what he calls "the principle of the accumulation of design."
Sifting through the debris of chance, natural selection, he writes, occupies itself by "thriftily conserving
the design work . . . accomplished at each stage." But there is no such principle. Dennett has simply
assumed that a sequence of conserved advantages will converge to an improvement in design; the
assumption expresses a non sequitur.

Nature presents life with no targets. Life shambles forward, surging here, shuffling there, the small
advantages accumulating on their own until something novel appears on the broad evolutionary screen-
an arch or an eye, an intricate pattern of behavior, the complexity characteristic of life. May we, then,
see this process at work, by seeing it simulated?

"Unfortunately," Dawkins writes, "I think it may be beyond my powers as a programmer to set up such
a counterfeit world."(7)

[(7) It is absurdly easy to set up a sentence-searching algorithm obeying purely Darwinian constraints.
The result, however, is always the same -- gibberish.
--------
I IMAGINE THIS story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.

His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses,"
mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote."

I raise my eyebrows.

Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his
hands to the saucer.

"The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden,"
he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo."

Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.

"As you know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of
French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576."

I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.

"Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal
Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility
for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is
now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not
unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of
course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus
they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying
errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same
means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French,
Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed
down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the
monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and
psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame
Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into
Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th
century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then
the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the
Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then
mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a
circumstance whose significance remains to be determined."

I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your understanding, then," I ask, "that every
novel in the West was created in this way?"

"Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly
from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."

D. Berlinski - The Deniable Darwin

------
Some might say that crystal formation is an example of the spontaneous formation of self-replicating
complexity. However, crystal formation is not an example of a language system where the collective
function of the parts is greater than the sum of all the parts. The information needed for the order of a
crystalline structure is entirely contained by each molecule within that structure. This is not the case
with the information contained in a molecule of human DNA. The information for the specific order of
this molecule is not contained by any of the individual molecules that make up this strand of DNA.
The information content is more complex than the molecules themselves. The information carried by
DNA is greater than the sum of its parts. The same thing is true of the English language system. The
letters in this sentence that you are reading now do not know how to self-assemble themselves to form
this sentence in a meaningful way. Clearly then, the information in a crystalline structure does not
even come close to the most simple language system, much less the information content of DNA or
living systems of function.

In other words, the final structure is not really any more complex than the sum of its parts. This is not
like DNA and other symbol-based language systems where the information carried by the parts is much
greater than the total sum of the information carried inherently within the parts themselves
Dr. sean pitman
----
The essential difference between naturally occurring pattern and an intelligent design is language. All
language comes from a mind. Therefore all things containing language are designed
------
The Subjectivity of Scientists and the Bayesian Approach
Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics (Volume 001)
Short description
This book illustrates scientific methodology through descriptions of how actual scientists "create
science." The authors present a novel point of view, arguing that the popular perception of science as
being strictly objective is untrue and that knowledge is often acquired through very personal means.
-------------------
QUOTES
-------------------
Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist): "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a
superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no
blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so
overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." (2)

George Ellis (British astrophysicist): "Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this
[complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult
not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word." (3)

Paul Davies (British astrophysicist): "There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going
on behind it all....It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned natures numbers to make the
Universe....The impression of design is overwhelming". (4)

Paul Davies: "The laws [of physics] ... seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design... The
universe must have a purpose". (5)

Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy): "I find it quite improbable that such order
came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the
explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing." (6)

John O'Keefe (astronomer at NASA): "We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted,
cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we
could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was
created for man to live in." (7)

George Greenstein (astronomer): "As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that
some supernatural agency - or, rather, Agency - must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without
intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God
who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?" (8)

Arthur Eddington (astrophysicist): "The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly
plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory." (9)

Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics): "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was
created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions
required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say 'supernatural') plan." (10)

Roger Penrose (mathematician and author): "I would say the universe has a purpose. It's not there just
somehow by chance." (11)

Tony Rothman (physicist): "When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange
coincidences of nature, it's very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure
many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it." (12)

Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist): "The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of
the physical world calls for the divine." (13)

Robert Jastrow (self-proclaimed agnostic): "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of
reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to
conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians
who have been sitting there for centuries." (14)

Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics): "When I began my career as a cosmologist some
twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I
would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in
fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand
them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of
physics." (16)

Alexander Polyakov (Soviet mathematician): "We know that nature is described by the best of all
possible mathematics because God created it."(17)

Ed Harrison (cosmologist): "Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God - the design
argument of Paley - updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie
evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or
design that requires only one.... Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the
teleological or design argument." (18)

Edward Milne (British cosmologist): "As to the cause of the Universe, in context of expansion, that is
left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him [God]." (19)

Barry Parker (cosmologist): "Who created these laws? There is no question but that a God will always
be needed." (20)

Drs. Zehavi, and Dekel (cosmologists): "This type of universe, however, seems to require a degree of
fine tuning of the initial conditions that is in apparent conflict with 'common wisdom'." (21)

Arthur L. Schawlow (Professor of Physics at Stanford University, 1981 Nobel Prize in physics): "It
seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not
just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my
own life." (22)

Henry "Fritz" Schaefer (Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and director of the Center for
Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia): "The significance and joy in my
science comes in those occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So
that's how God did it.' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan." (23)

Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer) "I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does
not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to
comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science." (24)

Carl Woese (microbiologist from the University of Illinois) "Life in Universe - rare or unique? I walk
both sides of that street. One day I can say that given the 100 billion stars in our galaxy and the 100
billion or more galaxies, there have to be some planets that formed and evolved in ways very, very like
the Earth has, and so would contain microbial life at least. There are other days when I say that the
anthropic principal, which makes this universe a special one out of an uncountably large number of
universes, may not apply only to that aspect of nature we define in the realm of physics, but may
extend to chemistry and biology. In that case life on Earth could be entirely unique." (25)

References

1. Jim Holt. 1997. Science Resurrects God. The Wall Street Journal (December 24, 1997), Dow Jones
& Co., Inc.
2. Hoyle, F. 1982. The Universe: Past and Present Reflections. Annual Review of Astronomy and
Astrophysics: 20:16.
3. Ellis, G.F.R. 1993. The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments. The Anthropic Principle, F.
Bertola and U.Curi, ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 30.
4. Davies, P. 1988. The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability To Order
the Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, p.203.
5. Davies, P. 1984. Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature. (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1984), p. 243.
6. Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times,
p. B9.
7. Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 200.
8. Greenstein, G. 1988. The Symbiotic Universe. New York: William Morrow, p.27.
9. Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 233.
10. Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p.
83.
11. Penrose, R. 1992. A Brief History of Time (movie). Burbank, CA, Paramount Pictures, Inc.
12. Casti, J.L. 1989. Paradigms Lost. New York, Avon Books, p.482-483.
13. Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p.
52.
14. Jastrow, R. 1978. God and the Astronomers. New York, W.W. Norton, p. 116.
15. Hawking, S. 1988. A Brief History of Time. p. 175.
16. Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface.
17. Gannes, S. October 13, 1986. Fortune. p. 57
18. Harrison, E. 1985. Masks of the Universe. New York, Collier Books, Macmillan, pp. 252, 263.
19. Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 166-167.
20. Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 223.
21. Zehavi, I, and A. Dekel. 1999. Evidence for a positive cosmological constant from flows of
galaxies and distant supernovae Nature 401: 252-254.
22. Margenau, H. and R. A. Varghese, eds. Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God,
and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo Sapiens (Open Court Pub. Co., La Salle, IL, 1992).
23. Sheler, J. L. and J.M. Schrof, "The Creation", U.S. News & World Report (December 23,
1991):56-64.
24. McIver, T. 1986. Ancient Tales and Space-Age Myths of Creationist Evangelism. The Skeptical
Inquirer 10:258-276.
25. Mullen, L. 2001. The Three Domains of Life from SpaceDaily.com

-----------------------------
Why Do We Invoke Darwin?
by Philip S Skell

Darwins theory of evolution offers a sweeping explanation of the history of life, from the earliest
microscopic organisms billions of years ago to all the plants and animals around us today. Much of the
evidence that might have established the theory on an unshakable empirical foundation, however,
remains lost in the distant past. For instance, Darwin hoped we would discover transitional precursors
to the animal forms that appear abruptly in the Cambrian strata. Since then we have found many
ancient fossils even exquisitely preserved soft-bodied creatures but none are credible ancestors to
the Cambrian animals.

Despite this and other difficulties, the modern form of Darwins theory has been raised to its present
high status because its said to be the cornerstone of modern experimental biology. But is that correct?
"While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhanskys dictum
that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, most can conduct their work
quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal
BioEssays, wrote in 2000.[1] "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the
same time, a highly superfluous one."

I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no
guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Flemings discovery of
bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have
done their work differently if they had thought Darwins theory was wrong. The responses were all the
same: No.

I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix;
the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug
reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and
others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to
have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as
elsewhere, I found that Darwins theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after
the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

----------------------------
*********************** BIBLE *********************
There exists no document from the ancient world witnessed by so excellent a set of textual and
historical testimonies, and offering so superb an array of historical data on which an intelligent decision
may be made. An honest person cannot dismiss a source of this kind. Skepticism regarding the
historical credentials of Christianity is based upon an irrational (i.e., antisupernatural) bias. -- Dr. Clark
H. Pinnock, professor of systematic theology at Regent College

we may quote the verdict of the late Sir Frederic Kenyon, a scholar whose authority to make
pronouncements on ancient MSS was second to none:
'The interval then between the data of original. composition and the earliest extant evidence become so
small to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scripture have come down
tous substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general
integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.'

The History of Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) is known to us from eight MSS, the earliest belonging to c.
AD 900, and a few papyrus scraps, belonging to about the beginning of the Christian era The same is
true of the History of Herodotus (c. 488-428 BC). Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument
that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works
which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals.
---------------------------
"I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed."
 - Frank Deford
"I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but
nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her."
- New York City detective
-----------------------
World Christians 33.03% (of which Roman Catholics 17.33%, Protestants 5.8%, Orthodox 3.42%,
Anglicans 1.23%), Muslims 20.12%, Hindus 13.34%, Buddhists 5.89%, Sikhs 0.39%, Jews 0.23%,
other religions 12.61%, non-religious 12.03%, atheists 2.36% (2004 est.) - www.cia.gov
------------------------
The universe is intelligible because it was made by an intelligence. The structure is dicoverable and
knowable because it is structured by a knowing mind.

---------------------
I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and
doing the exact opposite.

If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might
possibly have gone wrong.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but
not of keeping his temper.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are
generally the same people.

The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points,
exactly like a small mob.
* G. K. Chesterton
---------------------------
Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.

I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place.

What's another word for Thesaurus?

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, 'Did you sleep good?' I said 'No, I made a few
mistakes.'

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

Steven Wright
----------------------
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you
deserve.
Bilbo Baggins
--------------------
Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too
eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all
ends. Gandalf
---------------
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human nature.
Charles Dickens
----------------
Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always
been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a
toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.
Dave Barry
--------------
He could refuse to receive his mother when she asked to see him. He might tell his followers that they
are unworthy of him if they do not hate their mother and their father. He might kill pigs by the
hundreds. He might whip people out of church precincts.
"He was never that thing that all politicians wish to be esteemed respectable. At various times in the
Gospels, Jesus is called a devil, the devil's agent, irreligious, unclean, a mocker of Jewish law, a
drunkard, a glutton, a promoter of immorality.
Gary Wills
------------------
New York now leads the world's great cities in the number of people around whom you shouldn't make
a sudden move.
- David Letterman
-------------------
When the eagles are silent, the parrots begin to jabber.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been
tried.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Sir Winston Churchill
---------------
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is
accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)
------------------
The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is
not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Mark Twain
---------------
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however improbable, must be the truth?
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 - 1930) (Holmes)
-----------
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 - 1882)
I always admired atheists. I think it takes a lot of faith.
Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Seoul Mates, 1991
If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.
Henny Youngman (1906 - 1998)
Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God.
Heywood Broun (1888 - 1939)
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
John Buchan (1875 - 1940)
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and
said, "Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?"
Quentin Crisp
-------------
How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric
typewriter?

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is
that basically he's an underachiever.

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.
Woody Allen (1935 - )
---------------------
What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?
Irv Kupcinet
--------------
We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God's creative pulse itself.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
Mary Daly
-------------------
Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and
gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and
weary.
Martin Luther (1483 - 1546)
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what
the water bath is to the body.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
-----------------
It was an initiatory 'mystery religion,' passed from initiate to initiate, like the Eleusinian Mysteries. It
was not based on a supernaturally revealed body of scripture, and hence very little written documentary
evidence survives.
Soldiers appeared to be the most plentiful followers of Mithraism, and women were apparently not
allowed to join.

Tertullian demonized Mithraism as a perverted truth planted by the devil.

----------------
Sir Frederick Kenyon:

It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to
strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scripture, and our conviction that we have in our hands,
in substantial integrity, the veritable Word of God.

-------------------
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY HAS revealed that whatever else a living creature may be -- God's creation,
the locus in the universe of pity and terror, so much blubbery protoplasm -- a living creature is also a
combinatorial system, its organization controlled by a strange, a hidden and obscure text, one written in
a biochemical code. It is an algorithm that lies at the humming heart of life, ferrying information from
one set of symbols (the nucleic acids) to another (the proteins). An algorithm? How else to describe the
intricacy of transcription, translation, and replication than by an appeal to an algorithm? For that
matter, what else to call the quantity stored in the macromolecules than information? And if the
macromolecules store information, they function in some sense as symbols.

Some two hundred years ago, the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet - a contemporary of Paley's -- asked
for an account of the "mechanics which will preside over the formation of a brain, a heart, a lung, and
so many other organs." No account in terms of mechanics is yet available. Information passes from the
genome to the organism. Something is given and something read; something is ordered and something
done. But just who is doing the reading and who is executing the orders, this remains unclear.

THE TRIPLE CONCEPTS of algorithm, information, and symbol lie at the humming heart of life.
How they promote themselves into an organism is something of a mystery, a part of the general
mystery by which intelligence achieves its effects. But just how in the scheme of things did these
superb symbolic instruments come into existence? Why should there be very complex informational
macromolecules at all? We are looking further downward now, toward the laws of physics.

By now we know, or at least suspect, that materialism will not make it. And not simply because
symbols have been given a say-so in the generation of the universe. Entre nous soit dit, physics is
simply riddled with nonmaterial entities: functions, forces, fields, abstract objects of every stripe and
kind, waves of probability, the quantum vacuum, entropy, and energies.

Darwin's theory of evolution is widely thought to provide purely a materialistic explanation for the
emergence and development of life. But even if this extravagant and silly claim is accepted at face
value, no one suggests that theories of evolution are in any sense a fundamental answer to Paley's
question.

"The formation within geological time of a human body," Kurt Godel remarked to the logician Hao
Wang, "by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution
of elementary particles and the field, is as unlikely as the separation by chance of the atmosphere into
its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which
they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation] -Kurt Gdel, quoted in H. Wang. On
`computabilism and physicalism: Some Problems. in Natures Imagination, J. Cornwall, Ed, pp.161-
189, Oxford University Press (1995)."

This is a somewhat enigmatic statement. Let me explain. When Godel spoke of the "field" he meant, no
doubt, the quantum field; Schrodinger's equation is in charge. And by invoking a "random distribution
of elementary particles," Godel meant to confine the discussion to typical or generic patterns -- what
might reasonably be expected. Chance, again.

Under the double action of the fundamental laws and chance, Godel was persuaded, no form of
complexity could reasonably be expected to arise. This is not an argument, of course; it functions
merely as a claim, although one made with the authority of Godel's genius. But it is a claim with a
queer prophetic power, anticipating, as it does, a very specific contemporary argument.

"The complexity of living bodies," Godel observed, "has to be present either in the material [from
which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]." In this, Godel was simply echoing
Paley. Complexity must come from somewhere; it requires an explanation.

Using very simple counting arguments, Hubert Yockey has concluded that an ancient protein such as
"cytochrome c" could be expected to arise by chance only once in 10<44> trials. The image of an
indefatigable but hopelessly muddled universe trying throughout all eternity to create a single
biological molecule is very sobering. It is this image that, no doubt, accounted for Francis Crick's
suggestion that life did not originate on earth at all, but was sent here from outer space, a wonderful
example of an intellectual operation known generally as fog displacement.

Berlinski.
--------------------------------------
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!

-Reginald Buller
---------------------------------
Against logic there is no armor like ignorance.
- Laurence J. Peter
--------------------------------
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the
only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
- Stephen Hawking
----------------------------------
When they discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be disappointed to discover they are
not it.
- Bernard Bailey
----------------------------
We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected
results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of
its own necessary construction.
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs
for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and
tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by
hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer---but none exists. [Stephen Jay Gould, quoted
in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught,
Prometheus Books, 1996]

Stephen Jay Gould

---------------------------
We shall show that although some favourable variations are caused by single mutational events and,
hence, can be produced by chance alone the probability of this happening in bacteria is 1 in 10^7),
others are caused by two or more mutational events occurring simultaneously at different gene loci and
therefore, cannot be produced by chance (the probabilities of their being produced by chance are 1 in
10^14, 10^21, 10^28, etc.)." (Opadia-Kadima G.Z.*, "How the Slot Machine Led Biologists Astray,"
Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1987, Vol. 124, pp.127-135, pp.127)
------------------------
"The main reason why the origin of life is such a puzzle is because the
spontaneous appearance of such elaborate and organized complexity seems
so improbable. In the previous chapter I described the Miller-Urey
experiment, which succeeded in generating some of the building blocks of
life. However, the level of complexity of a real organism is stupendously
greater than that of mere amino acids. Furthermore, it is not just a matter
of degree. Simply achieving a high level of complexity per se will not do.
The complexity needed involves certain specific chemical forms and
reactions: a random complex network of reactions is unlikely to yield life.
The complexity problem is exacerbated by the mutual functional interplay
between nucleic acids and proteins as they appear in Earthlife. Proteins
have the job of catalyzing (greatly accelerating) key biochemical processes.
Without this catalysis life would grind to a halt. Proteins perform their
tasks under the instructions of nucleic acid, which contains the genetic
information. But proteins are also made by nucleic acid. This suggests that
nucleic acid came first. However, it is hard to see how a molecule like
RNA or DNA, containing many thousands of carefully arranged atoms,
could come into existence spontaneously if it was incapable, in the absence
of proteins, of doing anything (in particular, of reproducing). But it is
equally unlikely that nucleic acid and proteins came into existence by
accident at the same time and fortuitously discovered an efficient symbiotic
relationship. The high degree of improbability of the formation of life by
accidental molecular shuffling has been compared by Fred Hoyle to a
whirlwind passing through an aircraft factory and blowing scattered
components into a functioning Boeing 747. It is easy to estimate the odds
against random permutations of molecules assembling DNA. It is about
10^40,000 to one against! That is the same as tossing a coin and achieving
heads roughly 130,000 times in a row." (Davies P.C.W.*, "Are We Alone?:
Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life,"
Penguin: London, 1995, pp.18-19)
---------------------
"But even if there was no oxygen, there are further difficulties. Without
oxygen there would be no ozone layer in the upper atmosphere which
today protects the Earth's surface from a lethal dose of ultraviolet
radiation. In an oxygen-free scenario, the ultraviolet flux reaching the
Earth's surface might be more than sufficient to break down organic
compounds as quickly as they were produced. Significantly, the absence of
organic compounds in the Martian soil has been widely attributed to just
such a strong ultraviolet flux which today continuously bombards the
planet's surface. What we have then is a sort of `Catch 22' situation. If we
have oxygen we have no organic compounds, but if we don't have oxygen
we have none either. There is another twist to the problem of the
ultraviolet flux. Nucleic acid molecules, which form the genetic material of
all modern organisms, happen to be strong absorbers of ultraviolet light
and are consequently particularly sensitive to ultraviolet-induced radiation
damage and mutation. As Sagan points out, typical contemporary
organisms subjected to the same intense ultraviolet flux which would have
reached the Earth's surface in an oxygen-free atmosphere acquire a mean
lethal dose of radiation in 0.3 seconds." (Denton M.J.*, "Evolution: A
Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, pp.261-262)
--------------------------------
"Despite the infrequency of any useful mutation, it can always be postulated
that the appropriate mutations came along by accident and were selected,
bringing about the adaptation in question. For example, it is hypothesized
that natural selection has led the female sedge warbler to prefer full-
throated males because they should make good foragers for the family. On
the other hand, the female lyrebird supposedly has been selected to prefer
the male who neglects his offspring and so avoids bringing the nest to the
attention of predators (Alcock 1988, 80-81). The female spotted hyena, in
the opinion of some, has a set of external genitals like those of the male in
order the better to greet her friends (Kruuk 1972, 229). Some weaverbirds
are monogamous because food is scarce, others because food is abundant
(Crook 1972, 304). Marmot families say together longer at high altitudes
because there is less vegetation (Barash 1982, 59); if the young ones
dispersed sooner at high altitudes, it would probably be because where
food is scarce they have to seek new pastures." (Wesson R.G.*, "Beyond
Natural Selection," [1991], MIT Press: Cambridge MA, 1994, reprint, p.17)
-----------------------
"Thanks to relentless pursuit, scientists have established the antiquity of
man and his precursors. An acceptable solution must recognize ancient
human ancestry. Also, any such theory should not crumble if a genetic link
is ever proven conclusively between man and other higher primates. The
solution tendered in the following pages recognizes the existence of
prehistoric man. Those old fossils that have been unearthed are not part of
some demonic plot to lead us astray. Early man not only existed, but was
well established long before God introduced the first covenant human
being, a man called Adam. ... It will be demonstrated from the words of
Scripture and confirmed by the testimony from nature that Adam did not
start our species, but was inserted into an already populated world. We can
establish not only the place and time of Adam's appearance with a fair
degree of certainty, but also there are clues concerning the surrounding
culture." (Fischer D.*, "The Origins Solution: An Answer in the Creation-
Evolution Debate," Fairway Press: Lima OH, 1996, pp.22-23)
----------------------
Jesus himself taught that 'at the beginning the Creator "made
them male and female"' and then instituted marriage; (Mt. 19:4ff, quoting
Gn. 1:27) Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God had made every
nation 'from one man'; (Acts 17:26) and in particular Paul's carefully
constructed analogy between Adam and Christ depends for its validity on
the equal historicity of both.
--------------------
"The argument of this book, then, is that the ancient materialist Epicurus
provided an approach to the study of nature-a paradigm, as the historian
of science Thomas Kuhn called it-which purposely and systematically
excluded the divine from nature, not only in regard to the creation and
design of nature, but also in regard to divine control of, and intervention in,
nature. This approach was not discovered in nature; it was not read from
nature. It was, instead, purposely imposed on nature as a filter to screen
out the divine. How did the views of an ancient Greek form the materialist
paradigm of modern science? To be brief, Epicurus's approach to nature
was revived in the Renaissance, and became the foundation of modern
materialist science. The Western view of science was secularized, not (I
shall argue) out of some inner historical necessity, but because it accepted
the view of nature designed by Epicurus to exclude the divine. This
secularization culminated in Darwinism because it was with Darwin that
materialism, which had been slowly but surely permeating and re-forming
the predecessor Christian culture, finally reached and devoured God the
creator and the immortal human soul, leaving behind a completely Godless,
soulless universe." (Wiker B.*, "Moral Darwinism: How We Became
Hedonists," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 2002, p.20. Emphasis
in original)

9/07/03
"In regard to Epicurus's motivations for clinging to materialism, we need
not make an abstruse and tenuous argument to prove that his goal was the
exclusion of the divine from the universe. As we shall see, he himself
confessed it boldly. The entire aim of the study of nature, asserted
Epicurus, should be to liberate us from the belief in gods, in the immortal
soul, and in the afterlife, and so make it easier for us to live in this life. ...
Epicurus ... realized that .... A universe without gods (or at least, without
gods who interfere in human affairs) and without immortal souls (which
can suffer in the afterlife) is a universe with much less anxiety. A godless,
soulless universe is one without judgment, one without peril, one in which,
rather than our every thought and movement being watched by an
omniscient deity whose claims for absolute justice are unremitting
(although Christians believe his mercy is unfathomable), we are instead free
of any such brooding, unblinking divine eye. Epicurus's goal was to close
that divine eye, so that we could make the most of this world without the
anxiety brought on by its imperious stare." (Wiker B.*, "Moral Darwinism:
How We Became Hedonists," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL,
2002, pp.21-22. Emphasis in original)
9/07/03
To turn again to the arguments of Epicurus, it might seem, from what has
been said so far, that he would have been an atheist. There was some
debate about this in antiquity, 24 but if we take Epicurus at his word, then
he was very pious-after his own fashion. His new form of piety is worth
noting because it became all the fashion in the Enlightenment 2,100 years
later. Even more important for the present purposes, his account of the
gods provided a bridge to his account of morality. For Epicurus, the gods
were rendered harmless because they were a part of nature, made of atoms
just like everything else in the universe. The point of having them as
corporeal was not to uphold the anthropomorphism of Greek and Roman
religion but to undermine it and replace it with his new and innocuous form
of piety." (Wiker B.*, "Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists,"
InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove IL, 2002, p.43. Emphasis in original)
------------------
"So out of all the possible forms, which ones actually occur in real
molluscs? The remarkable fact illustrated on the next page is that
essentially all of them are found in some kind of mollusc or another. If one
just saw a single mollusc shell, one might well think that its elaborate form
must have been carefully crafted by some long process of natural selection.
But what we now see is that in fact all the different forms that are observed
are in effect just consequences of the application of three-dimensional
geometry to very simple underlying rules of growth. And so once again
therefore natural selection cannot reasonably be considered the source of
the elaborate forms we see." (Wolfram S., "A New Kind of Science,"
Wolfram Media: Champaign IL, 2002, First edition. Third printing,
pp.415,417)
---------------------
"Certain issues must be clarified before we can proceed. For one thing,
consider the following propositions: 1. By its very nature, NS [natural
science] must adopt MN [methodological naturalism]. 2. Theistic science is
religion and not science. It is important to remember that these claims are
not first-order claims of science about some scientific phenomenon.
Rather, they are second-order philosophical claims about science. They
are metaclaims that take a vantage point outside science and have science
itself as their subject of reference. Thus the field of philosophy, especially
philosophy of science, will be the proper domain from which to assess
these claims, not science. Scientists are not experts in these second-order
questions, and when they comment on them, they do so qua philosophers,
not qua scientists." (Moreland J.P., "Theistic Science & Methodological
Naturalism," in Moreland J.P., ed., "The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific
Evidence for an Intelligent Designer," InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove
IL, 1994, p.43. Emphasis in original)
----------------------
"While the hierarchic order may not be jewel-like in its perfection, it is not
easy to see how a random evolutionary process could have generated such
a highly ordered pattern. ... if the pattern is to be ordered, one condition
that mu
st be met is that character traits once acquired during the course of
evolution can never subsequently be lost or transformed in any radical
sense and that the acquisition of new character traits must leave, therefore,
previously acquired character traits essentially unchanged - to presume, in
other words, that evolution is a conservative process such that each
phylogenetic lineage gains a succession of what are essentially immutable
character traits. Only if diagnostic character traits remain essentially
immutable in all the members of the group they define is it possible to
conceive of a hierarchic pattern emerging as the result of an evolutionary
process. ... It is surely a matter of debate as to what extent the existence of
invariant character traits is really compatible with the notion of evolution as
a random radical process of change. For if it is true, as the Darwinian
model of evolution implies, that all the character traits of living things were
gained in the first place as a result of a gradual random evolutionary
process, then why should they have remained subsequently so
fundamentally immune to that same process of change, especially
considering that many diagnostic character traits are only of dubious
adaptive significance? It was precisely this fundamental constancy of the
unique character traits, or homologies, of every defined taxon which led
nineteenth century biology to the theory of types!" (Denton M.J.,
"Evolution: A Theory in Crisis," Burnett Books: London, 1985, pp.134-135)
----------------------
"The neo-Darwinian theory of evolution claims to be able to explain this
type of evolution in terms of random mutations, Mendelian genetics, and
natural selection. But even within the mechanistic framework of thought, it
is by no means agreed that this type of small-scale or micro-evolution
within a species can account for the origin of species themselves, or genera,
families and higher taxonomic divisions. One school of thought holds that
all large scale or macro-evolution can be explained in terms of long-
continued processes of micro-evolution; the other school denies this, and
postulates that major jumps occur suddenly in the course of evolution. But
while opinions within mechanistic biology differ as to the relative
importance of many small mutations or a few large ones in macroevolution,
there is general agreement that these mutations are random, and that
evolution can be explained by a combination of random mutation and
natural selection. However, this theory can never be more than speculative.
The evidence for evolution, primarily provided by the Fossil Record, will
always be open to a variety of interpretations. For example, opponents of
the mechanistic theory can argue that evolutionary innovations are not
entirely explicable in terms of chance events, but are due to the activity of a
creative principle unrecognized by mechanistic science. Moreover, the
selection pressures which arise from the behaviour and properties of living
organisms themselves can be considered to depend on an inner organizing
factor which is essentially non-mechanistic. Thus the problem of evolution
cannot be solved conclusively." (Sheldrake R., "A New Science of Life:
The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance," [1981], Park Street Press:
Rochester VT, 1995, reprint, p.24)
--------------------
22/07/03
"Modern apes seem to have sprung out of nowhere. Molecular evidence
suggests that they are surprisingly close relatives of ours, but they have no
established yesterday, no clear fossil record. And the true origins of modern
humans-of upright, naked, talking, big-brained beings-is, if we are to be honest
with and about our selves, equally mysterious. No one disputes the fact that
modern humans and the living great apes had a common ancestor. We have
enough characteristics in common for it to be clear that our lives diverged
comparatively recently. We still share something like 98 percent of our genetic
material with chimpanzees. The similarities between us and the apes are
evident and easily understood. It is the differences that are perplexing. Why
should our backs be straight, our skins bare, and our lives laced together with
webs of words? Somewhere in the genetic 2 percent that makes us uniquely
human lie reasons to account for the fact that our posture, our locomotion,
and our intellect should be so different from theirs. We seem to have spent a
large part of the last 10 million years rushing through a series of evolutionary
adaptations while the apes changed relatively little. Why? What was it that
made such changes necessary? Something must have happened to us that didn't
happen to the chimps and gorillas. But what? Theories abound and range,
according to your taste, from environmental factors that drove our ancestors
out of the forest, to banishment from the Garden of Eden by divine decree. In
other words, we became erect, naked, and intelligent either because of a
change of climate or due to an act of God. Both theories are tenable.
Scientists, of course, tend to favor the former, but it is important to understand
that, in the absence of appropriate fossil evidence, it is actually no more
susceptible to proof than any of the more traditional accounts of creation."
(Watson L., "The Dreams of Dragons: Riddles of Natural History," William
Morrow & Co: New York NY, 1987, p.127)

23/07/03
"Thus the problem of evolution cannot be solved conclusively. Vitalist and
organismic theories necessarily involve an extrapolation of vitalist and
organismic ideas, just as the neo-Darwinian theory involves an
extrapolation of mechanistic ideas. This is unavoidable; evolution will
always have to be interpreted in terms of ideas which have already been
formed on other grounds." (Sheldrake R., "A New Science of Life: The
Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance," [1981], Park Street Press: Rochester
VT, 1995, reprint, pp.24-25)

23/07/03
"The Origin of Life. This problem is just as insoluble as that of evolution,
for the same reasons. First, what happened in the distant past can never be
known for certain; there will probably always be a plethora of speculations
on the circumstances of the origin of life on earth. Current ones include the
terrestrial origin of life within a Primaeval Broth; the infection of the earth
by micro-organisms deliberately sent on a space ship by intelligent beings
on a planet in another solar system; and the evolution of life on comets
containing organic materials derived from interstellar dust.
Secondly, even if the conditions under which life originated could be
known, this information would shed no light on the nature of life.
Assuming it could be demonstrated, for example, that the first living
organisms arose from non-living chemical aggregates, or 'hypercycles' of
chemical processes, in a Primaeval Broth, this would not prove that they
were entirely mechanistic. Organicists would always be able to argue that
new organismic properties emerged, and vitalists that the vital factor
entered into the first living system precisely when it first came to life. The
same arguments would apply even if living organisms were ever to be
synthesized artificially from chemicals in a test tube." (Sheldrake R.,
"A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance," [1981],
Park Street Press: Rochester VT, 1995, reprint, p.25)

24/07/03
"The common feature of all living organisms is the DNA code. As there is
only one language used in it, the instructions must come from one source,
and as the instructions for the simplest viable unit of life are complex, that
source must be an adequate one with an intelligence equal to that required
to invent a computer-automated factory." (Pearce E.K.V., "Who Was
Adam?," Paternoster: Exeter: Devon UK, 1969, pp.127-128)
-----------------

Other problems :
[ul]
[*] The origin of the high coded information content of DNA
[*] The "billions of missing links" in the fossil record - evolution of the gaps
[*] The nature of information and it's coding/decoding, translation, error correction mechanisms in
DNA/RNA
[*] The existence of hundreds of complex, synchronized, multi-tasking machines in living cells
[*] The existence of thousands of symbiotic relations amongst life forms (life forms that can only
survive if another specific life form exists)
[*] The total failure of Darwinian researchers to find a genuine common ancestor for humans
[*] The existence of genetic "zip codes" in cell orientation and function -
http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-
document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0020119
[*] ....
[/ul]

---------------------------
Those who affirm Darwinism often have a heavy emotional investment in it, in a way that they do not
have in, say, continental drift. People notice this fact (its hard not to). That raises the justifiable
suspicion that many arguments for Darwinism are put forward to boost faith, far beyond the arguments
actual strength.

One can easily demonstrate this process from popular science magazines. Minor demonstrations of
Darwinism are enthusiastically announced; major problems are downplayed or ignored. Wild
extrapolations (evolutionary psychology, for example) and concepts far too vague to be science (e.g.,
the meme) are treated with a respect that would never be accorded to other sources.

The public is quite smart enough to see what is happening here.

- D O'Leary
--------------
Wells notes, they have done so since 1864, when Darwin's bulldog, T.E. Huxley was first recorded
using the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Wells, p. 10).

Wells notes that Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould used the term "extensively" in their writings and a
host of biology hopefuls have also applied Darwinism's sacred name in the titles of their articles.

But come to think of it, while I was researching By Design or by Chance? "Christian evolutionists"
used to fret when I used the term casually, in the very way that the Darwinists themselves use it.

Christian evolutionists, so far as I can tell, live in a sort of unreal world where one espouses Darwinism
while pretending not to know what it means. So Ms. Churchcrat may have been honestly misled after
all. She would be foolish to be more angry with me than with those who misled her, but you never
know.

But if Darwinism is not failing, why would Darwinists now want to evade the name they accepted for
nearly 150 years?
- D. O'Leary
------------------
"All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural
theology--that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal
and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of
water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact." Michael Denton Natures Destiny (p.
389)
--------------
On Denton's Natrues Destiny -
Evolutionism has survived partly because of the compartmentalization of science, whereby each
scientist, assuming evolution to be proven outside his own field of expertise, discards or explains away
his own contradictory findings (the "knowledge filter" again).
As we read about the ingenuity employed at the molecular level for the sending of nerve signals,
manipulation of electrons, conveyance of oxygen, and so on, and the many such contrivances that are
essential for life, we are struck by the overwhelming, mind-boggling complexity of it all, and the
sneaking suspicion that much is taken on faith in evolutionistic circles. And we see immediately that it
cannot be an informed faith based on any scientific evidence, but rather a wishful, forced belief that
such nanomachines could have arisen by chance. By the time we have recovered from our revelations
about water and carbon, how wonderfully fit they are for our existence, by the time we are finished
reading about proteins and the cell, it seems an impossibility that life, being so complex as it is, could
have arisen at all, even if it were created by some supernatural being; for this being would have to be
possessed of an intellect that beggars our minds
However, details even creationists take for granted are scrutinized, leaving us with a sense of awe (or
gnashing of teeth): the fitness of the visual spectrum for vision; the design of the hand; our body
dimensions and bipedal gait, allowing us to use fire and thus develop technology; our capacity for
language; and so on. In doing so he shows us that the "chance" so casually spoken of in evolutionism
quickly diminishes to absurdity upon open-minded examination of our cosmos; and that, indeed, we
were meant to discover this fact.
---------------
Basically, Im pointing out that the claimed analogy between known designers with whom we have
experience and unknown designers operating in unknown ways is illegitimate. Wesley R. Elsberry
I responded with:
Are there known designers to these artifacts? If you know who is the designer please enlighten us, the
world would like to know.
[Pictures of Stone Henge, Crop Circles,...]

The fact is you don't know who the designers are for these artifacts and yet I am sure you would agree
they are designed. Do you know how they were designed? The answer again is no. There are a lot of
speculation and some of them are pretty good but the fact again is that no one knows for sure how they
were design, constructed and for what purpose. So again how is it legitimate for you to compare these
artifacts to known designers and claim that they are designed?

There is not enough data to make any determination of who designed the designer. When and if we can
identify the designer of organic life on this planet we might have some data to work with in
determining the origin of that agency.

Who was/ is the designer?

If we knew the designer we wouldnt have a design inference- ID would be a given. The only way to
determine anything about the designer(s), in the absence of direct observation or designer input, would
be to study the design.

Knowing who designed something adds nothing to the understanding of the design unless the designer
conveyed all that information to you.
We can use known examples of designed objects to show that we dont need to know the designer in
order to understand the design.
Obviously knowing who designed something the detection process can be skipped.

In any investigation of a dead body, first you would attempt to determine the cause of death and
attempt to identify the body. If homicide is inferred then you use the evidence to run an investigation to
determine the killer(s). If they knew the killer before the investigation, what an easy job they would
have.

Who designed the designer?

Who designed the designers of Stonehenge? We can only study what we can observe.

Think of another, familiar example: that black monolith on the Moon, which astronauts discover in the
science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The characters, the audience, everyone, recognize the
structure is designed, and isnt just a really self-disciplined Moon rock. The movie never identifies the
agent who constructed the object and buried it on the Moon. We assume that it is an artifact of an
extraterrestrial intelligence. But the identity of the objects designer has little or no bearing on the
strength of our inference that it is designed. That conclusion is the same whether the designer is an
Alpha Centurian, a being from another dimension, an Olympian god who put it there as a practical
joke, or the God of theism who created it ex nihilo for unknown reasons. The basis by which we
discern that the monolith is designed remains the same: we study the object and look for features that
indicate design. And even if it were created ex nihilo by God, the inference that it was designed by
some intelligence doesnt suddenly become mysterious, or a parochial religious conclusion that
violates the separation of church and state.
//////////////////////
Its the same old cause and effect paradox. People keep asking, if everything is caused, who caused the
cause? What they're missing is that the law of cause and effect does not stipulate that all causes must
have a cause, only that all effects (or events) must have a cause.

--------------------------
fbeckwith

05/02/2005

10:03 pm

This reminds me of a parable Michael Scriven once told me when he was visiting UNLV in the mid-
90s and I was on the faculty there. Heres what he said. Suppose someone asks you, wheres 7-
Eleven, and you answer, 4th and Vine. And then you are asked, wheres 4th and Vine. And you
answer, In Los Angeles. You then answer every subsequent where question in the following way:
Wheres Los Angeles? In California
Wheres California? In the U.S.
Wheres the U.S. In Norht America
Wheres North America? On Earth
Wheres Earth? Third planet from the sun in our solar system.
Wheres the solar system? In the Milky Way Galaxy.
Wheres the Milky Way Galaxy? In the universe.
Where the universe? Uhhh!
See, I knew you couldnt tell me where 7-Eleven is.

Frank
----------------------
when Darwinist asks for mechanism of ID (as it often happens) it actualy shows poor understanding of
ID claims. ID is the mechanism! When will they understand that ID is about detecting design and NOT
about describing the process (mechanism) of design

if we knew designer, it wouldn't be an inference.

- we can learn about the designer in study of the design.
-- I add, we can learn much about the universe in study of the design: the design tells us what works in
the environment in which the design is implemented. -input/output study -reverse engineering -why
does the design work? could the design be improved? if not, why not? -what would have been the
specifications list for this design? (Science pursued in this direction looks promising.)

- how was design implemented? When an artist finishes a painting or when a contractor finishes a
building, the tools and methods used by the artist/contractor are no longer part of the finished product
and are not available for examination. Investigators may surmise, but short of having been there to see
construction or meeting and asking the artist/contractor for an explanation, methods and tools cannot be
known positively.
----------------------------
"Pre-biotic natural selection is a contradiction in terms." T. Dobzhansky.

------------------------------
ACCORDING TO MANY RESEARCHERS, the neo-Darwinist paradigm of biology leaves many
unanswered questions when it tries to address the many anomalies of experimental data
(Eldredge and Gould, 1972; Sheldrake, 1981; Lovelock, 1982; Cairns et al., 1988; Ho et
al., 1983; Ho, 1994). Part of the problem of neo-Darwinism arises from the use of a
material realist ontology--that matter is the ground of being. With such an ontology, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to account for the many phenomena of biology that seem to call
for "downward causation," causal efficacy emanating from higher levels of the biological
hierarchy acting on lower levels.
In a previous article, Goswami (1997) revealed how an idealist consciousness-based
ontology--that consciousness is the ground of being--working in the context of quantum
measurement theory applied to the living cell, can be used to rescue neo-Darwinism from
many of the anomalies. In the quantum approach, gene mutations are regarded as quantum
processes of sufficient ambiguity that propagate as coherent superpositions of possibilities.
The possibilities are amplified by the cellular mechanisms (acting as measurement
apparatuses) to the macrolevel, but cannot be collapsed into actualities by these mechanisms
because a quantum measurement requires self-referential action of consciousness
(Goswami, 1989; 1990; 1993). The wave functions collapse and the genetic material
becomes fixed in one configuration only when consciousness sees a meaningful pattern
emerge that merits phenotypical expression. Note that the operation of consciousness here
involves cellular epigenetic processes (Strohman, 1994) which, while correlated with the
genome, have outcomes not comprehensible or predicted by genetic informations alone.

AMIT GOSWAMI AND DENNIS TODD ; Is There Conscious Choice in Directed Mutation,
Phenocopies, and Related Phenomena? An Answer Based on Quantum Measurement Theory
-*---------------------------
Sagan's Implicit Endorsement of Specified Complexity as a Design Detector
In The Demon Haunted World Carl Sagan debunks a number of claims about purported instances of
design. For example:

'There was a celebrated eggplant that closely resembled Richard M. Nixon. What shall we deduce from
this fact? Divine or extraterrestrial intervention? Republican meddling in eggplant genetics? No. We
recognize that there are large numbers of eggplants in the world and that, given enough of them, sooner
or later we'll come upon one that looks like a human face, even a very particular human face.' (p. 47.)

Notice that the suggestion of design here is based upon the fact that the eggplant in question exhibits a
specification - an independently given pattern. In this case, the specification is looking like a human
face, and more than that, looking like a particular human face (Nixon - although it is hard to believe
that the resemblance can have been all that tight). That the eggplant exhibits this specification is
implicitly accepted by Sagan. So why does Sagan reject the idea that the correspondence between the
eggplant and the Nixon specification is the result of design? Because the example lacks complexity.
Given the number of human faces and eggplants that have existed Sagan argues that it is not all that
unlikely that we'd come accross an eggplant that bore a resemblance to a human face, even to Nixons.
Hence we don't have to deduce divine, or extraterrestrial, or Republican design from the eggplant. Note
that Sagan's argument for rejecting a design inference from the eggplant implicitly accepts that if the
eggplant exhibited a specification at a sufficient level of complexity then a design inference would be
justified. In other words, Sagan recognized that a design inference is warranted when faced with an
example of 'complex specified information' or 'specified complexity'. This is why, in order to debunk a
proposed instance of design which he admits exhibits specification, Sagan argues that the proposed
example lacks sufficient complexity.
Note also that Sagan implicitly endorses the point made by many ID theorists that while specified
complexity warrants an inference to 'intelligent design', it does not in and of itself warrant an inference
to any particular designer: 'Divine or extraterrestrial intervention? Republican meddling in eggplant
genetics?' All three explanations would be possible candidates if a design inference in this case were
justified.

Sagan goes on to discuss the infamous so-called 'face on Mars', first photographed by one of the Viking
orbiters in 1976. Sagan argues against a design inference in this instance as well. How does he do it?
By arguing that the 'face' is neither very complex nor tightly specified. First he examines the
complexity of the 'face':

'Mars has a surface area of almost 150 million square kilometers. Is it so astonishing that one
(comparatively) postage-stamp-sized patch in 150 million should look artificial - especially given our
penchant, since infancy, for finding faces?' (p. 56.)

In other words, it is not all that unlikely that a small area of Mars should look sufficiently like a face to
make it appear face-like to casual observation. Then he goes after specification:

'If we study the original image more carefully, we find that a strategically placed 'nostril' - one that
adds much to the impression of a face - is in fact a black dot corresponding to lost data in the radio
transmission from Mars to Earth. The best picture of the Face shows one side lit by the Sun, the other
in deep shadow. Using the original digital data, we can severely enhance the contrast in the shadows.
When we do, we find something rather unfacelike there. The Face is at best half a face... the Martian
sphinx looks natural - not artificial, not a dead ringer for a human face.' (p. 56, my italics.)

In other words, while at first glance the 'face' seems to exhibit a specification, a closer look shows that
it doesn't. In Richard Dawkin's terminology, the supposed face on Mars is 'designoid'; it gives a
superficial impression of design at first glance, but the more we investigate its salient features, the less
designed it looks. Hence Sagan concludes: 'It was probably sculpted by slow geological processes over
millions of years.' (p. 56)

The important point here is that in order to justify this conclusion Sagan seeks to undermine precisely
those twin features of things that design theorists recognize as jointly sufficient conditions for
justifying a design inference: namely complexity and specification.

If Sagan is right to argue that the 'face' is not designed because it fails to exhibit specified complexity
(indeed, because it is neither sufficiently complex nor tightly specified) then design theorists must be
right to argue that anything which does exhibit specified complexity should be attributed to intelligent
design.

For example, Sagan wouldn't argue that the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore were 'sculpted by
slow geological processes', because unlike the Nixon eggplant and the 'face' on Mars, Mount Rushmore
does exhibit specified complexity.

Although he doesn't use the terminology of 'specified complexity' Sagan implicitly endorses specified
complexity as an adequate criterion of intelligent design, arguing that design inferences cannot be
supported when the putative designed object lacks complexity or speficiation or both. This negative
argument implies the positive argument that when a putative designed object exhibits specified
complexity then a design inference is warranted.
--------------------------------
The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are
best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is
thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of
living systems is an illusion.

In a broader sense, Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection -- how to recognize
patterns arranged by an intelligent cause for a purpose. Design detection is used in a number of
scientific fields, including anthropology, forensic sciences that seek to explain the cause of events such
as a death or fire, cryptanalysis and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). An inference that
certain biological information may be the product of an intelligent cause can be tested or evaluated in
the same manner as scientists daily test for design in other sciences.

ID is controversial because of the implications of its evidence, rather than the significant weight of its
evidence. ID proponents believe science should be conducted objectively, without regard to the
implications of its findings. This is particularly necessary in origins science because of its historical
(and thus very subjective) nature, and because it is a science that unavoidably impacts religion.
------------------------------------
And I point out the difference between data [or complexity] and information. Information is something
that is useful that you can use to make predictions that have meaning, and the only way to get that is by
intelligence. There is absolutely no way that ever has been shown to produce information other than by
intelligence. And therefore, you have life, you have the complexity of the DNA structure and the
amount of information that it contains, which is something that boggles very intelligent people. It
makes absolutely zero sense to say it happened by chance. Things had to have been intelligently
designed, they could not have happened by chance.
...
In my estimation, evolution is counter-productive to the scientific endeavour. Because we have
confined science to that which is natural with no direction, no purpose, then we are limiting
ourselves. And if we cant consider that there is an intelligence out there who created these things and
they have purpose, then we limit science. The early scientists saw purpose in Gods creation and they
sought to follow thatNewton spent more time studying the Bible than he did his scientific
endeavours. If you imply that there might be a purpose or some supreme being or even some
[unidentified] intelligence, they wont publish your papers because they are not scientific. But on the
other hand, people like Francis Crick can publish in scientific journals on panspermia2 [life was seeded
here from outer space, perhaps by aliens] and it gets published because he doesnt involve God.
Dr. Don Johnson - 2 Phds - chemistry & Information Sciences
: Don worked for 10 years as a senior research scientist in the pharmaceutical and medical and
scientific fields, served as president and technical expert in an independent computer consulting firm
for 12 years, taught for 20 years in universities in Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Europe, and
has presented Intelligent Design/Science and the Bible sessions in many locations including the USA,
Europe, New Zealand, Australia and Asia.

Dr. Johnson believed in evolution for many years before examining the evidence and coming to the
conclusion that the Biblical account of creation is in better agreement with scientific data.
----------------------------------------
Positive evidence of design in living systems consists of the semantic, meaningful or functional nature
of biological information, the lack of any known law that can explain the sequence of symbols that
carry the "messages," and statistical and experimental evidence that tends to rule out chance as a
plausible explanation. Other evidence challenges the adequacy of natural or material causes to explain
both the origin and diversity of life.
------------------------------------

In his book Why is a Fly Not a Horse? Giuseppe Sermonti has a chapter (VIII) titled I Can Only
Tell You What You Already Know, which examines this very thing- how do organisms know to
migrate and to where?

An experiment was conducted on birds-blackcaps, in this case. These are diurnal Silviidae that
become nocturnal at migration time. When the moment for the departure comes, they become agitated
and must take off and fly in a south-south-westerly direction. In the experiment, individuals were raised
in isolation from the time of hatching. In September or October the sky was revealed to them for the
first time. Up there in speldid array were stars of Cassiopeia, of Lyra (with Vega) and Cygnus (with
Deneb). The blacktops became agitated and, without hesitation, set off flying south-south-west. If the
stars became hidden, the blackcaps calmed down and lost their impatience to fly off in the direction
characteristic of their species. The experiment was repeated in the Spring, with the new seasons stars,
and the blackcaps left in the opposite direction- north-north-east! Were they then acquainted with the
heavens when no one had taught them?

The experiment was repeated in a planetarium, under an artificial sky, with the same results!
---------------------
He calls the human body the ultimate machine. People have invented all kinds of efficient machines,
like the automobile, he says, but compared to this the human body is ultra superior.

It adapts to stress; it thrives and survives, he says. It can even heal itself within certain limits.
Certain cells regenerate; wounds and fractures naturally heal, and the immune system can often
overcome infections. And if you use this machine, it develops; if not, it shrinks and loses its functions.
Whenever we use an auto, it wears out a little, and finally malfunctions. But physical exercise causes
humans to perform better at work or sports. And I havent even begun to mention the bodys amazing
feats of data processing, analysis, synthesis, reasoning, inventing and creating.

He summarized it as follows:

The human body is a carbon-based, chemically fueled, force-liquid-and-air cooled, bipedal,

communicative, photochromatic, binocular, cellularly self-replicating, self-diagnostic, self-repairing
tissuewise, multidexterous, continuously adaptive, computer-controlled, biodegradable exhaust system
machine, capable of short and long-term memory with conceptual retrieval and integration, and precise
decision-making and creativitytruly the Ultimate Machine.

We know that to plan and construct something vastly inferior, like an automobile, says Dr
Kaufmann, it takes an intelligent human designer. An unbiased observer would have great difficulty
denying the rational conclusion that the Ultimate Designer made the Ultimate Machine, the human
body!
- Dr David Kaufmann
-----------------------------
Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single
sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely
cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals That you and a tiger are one may
be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being cruel as the tiger. It is one way to
train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution
tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate
reminder continues to recur: only the supernaturalist has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of
all pantheism, evolutionism and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our
mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a stepmother. The
main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud
of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but
not to imitate.

Chesterton, G.K., Orthodoxy, John Lane, London, pp. 204205, 1927.

--------------------
Take Drosophila melanogaster, the humble fruit fly, for instance. Under ideal conditions (Eden), a
generation can take a little less than two weeks so up to twenty-five generations a year are possible.
Every female can lay at least 100 eggs. So, even on the conservative side, starting with a single pair of
fruit flies, assuming all offspring survive and all female offspring produce 100 eggs, in only one year
there will be 10^41 fruit flies.
Packed tightly together at 1,000 per cubic inch, these flies would form a bail 96 million miles in
diameter, a distance approximating that from the earth to the sun (Borror et al. 1976)
---------------------
Paul L. Maier writes at (www.mtio.com/articles/aissar28.htm): "Bethany, where he [Jesus] raised
Lazarus from the dead, according to John II, is still called 'Betanya' by Israelis. But to the majority
Arab population of that Jerusalem suburb, the name of the town is El-Lazariyeh, 'the place of Lazarus.'
That name change was known as far back as Eusebius (church historian, A.D. ca 260-339), and exactly
what one would expect if indeed Bethany had witnessed so great a miracle as the dead being raised."
------------
Any living being possesses an enormous amount of 'intelligence,' very much more than is necessary to
build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this 'intelligence' is called 'information,' but it is still
the same thing. It is not programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale
in the chromosomal DNA or in that of any other organelle in each cell. This 'intelligence' is the sine
qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem
which concerns both biologists and philosophers and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it.
-- Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation, (New
York: Academic Press, 1977)

When we consider a human work, we believe we know where the intelligence which fashioned it
comes from; but when a living being is concerned, no one knows or ever knew, neither Darwin nor
Epicurus, neither Leibniz nor Aristotle, neither Einstein nor Parmenides. An act of faith is necessary to
make us adopt one hypothesis rather than another. Science, which does not accept any credo, or in any
case should not, acknowledges its ignorance, its inability to solve this problem which, we are certain,
exists and has reality. If to determine the origin of information in a computer is not a false problem,
why should the search for the information contained in cellular nuclei be one?
***************
An extensive study of around 250 fossil bones from 600 to 50 000 year old herbivores showed that
mitochondrial DNA from freshly excavated, untreated fossil bones was amplified with a success rate of
46%. However, the rate is a mere 18% for fossil bones from collections which have been washed, dried
and stored.
------------------------
Judging the thing by sheer body count alone, an atheist is far safer in a Judeo Christian ruled society
than a Jew or a Christian is in an atheist ruled society.