Science News

[Gumpngreen]

Apparently the latest Creationist thread was deleted so I'm starting a new one. I named it Science News primarily because I'm going to be posting anything that catches my interest; not just creationist vs evolutionist topics.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3788673.stm

I always considered the grey goo scenario fairly improbable mainly because it would be fairly easy to destroy by force and also because you would have to DESIGN your nanomachine to do such a thing (making it an out-of-control weapon).

[wgjones3]

Gump,

You ever considered making a creationist / Christian science website?

I really wish I was smart enough to contribute here.

By the way, did you ever come across the name of that company that was going to develop crude oil from food industry by-products?

[Gumpngreen]

Unfortunately not. It's been over a year since I read about the company. I do remember making a post about it at another forum but they had reorganized topics and I think my thread was lost in the shuffle. I've also tried searching for it but anything about oil and animal byproducts brings too many hits...

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.arc.nasa.gov/aboutames-pressrelease.cfm?id=15000129

First off, what they're describing is not Darwinistic evolution but Intelligent Design. It's pretty obvious why...

With that out of the way, wgjones recently asked if it could be possible for DNA to have been programmed to "self-evolve". I responded that DNA would need a separate evolution "controller" that overlooked the progress of the rest of the DNA, specified certain parameters, stored basic structures, and also rejected bad results (my original answer wasn't this detailed). It would actually have to do a lot more various functions but those are the basics. This separate program would have to be a fairly large portion of DNA and I'm sure if it existed scientists would have noticed it by now.

In any case, the reason I posted this news article was to give a real-life example of this.

[wgjones3]

Like I said, I wish I was smart enough to jump into this, but...

However, I will leave it at this. DNA is like a computer program, basically. On a biological level at least. Who's to say God didn't script a base code, modify it to each need, and by doing so, populate a planet with life? If you think of the planet as the actual hardware, the biological systems as an operating system, and the DNA as a biological program defining how those biological systems grow and interact within the organism, it could put some perspective to the idea of creation. Perhaps Gump could take that annalogy and make more sense out of it. Or perhaps it's garbage; after all, I'm just an armchair philosopher.


My comparison of DNA to a computer program was more or less to put a metaphorical frame of reference to creation. Rather than stating that DNA was programmed to evolve (like I've said before, I believe in genetic variation, not evolution), what I meant to say is that the similarity that exists in DNA--as touted by evolutionists as proof of a single-cell origin of life--exists because DNA follows a logical sequence of construction, just like a computer program.

Just as a program designed to decode mp3 files would vary significantly from a word processor, so do life forms--say a fish and a dog. If you look at the source code for those computer programs, I would think there would be enough similarities to determine whether or not they were from a single author, just as looking at the DNA from a fish and a dog will yield enough similarity to find common authorship. My point was to suggest this as a reason why so many sings the evolutionists point out as proof of evolution exist, and their existance is not a sign of the validity of evolution, but rather evidence of a common authorship.

In terms of "modifying the code for each process," my thinking was that if I wrote a program that had a menu feature, I wouldn't write new code each time, I would use that same menu code, modify it to each need, and fit it within the overall code. Now, if somebody were to see that code and assume that because it was the same from program to program that all those programs were "mutations" from one single program, then it would be because of the similarity of that snippet of code. This all stems from my limited understanding of DNA, but I've heard it often touted that man evolved from apes because the DNA is 85% similar or something of the sort. Well, if the biological systems are similar, that just means that the DNA coding that defines those system were constructed by the same author, in a sense. I still don't think I'm coming across right but I definately am not promoting a self-evoloving theory of DNA.

All I was trying to do was create a model for understanding creation better. Guess I failed at that.

[Gumpngreen]

DNA actually uses modular design, (genetic) algorithms, compression, encryption, multiple secure backups, exception handling, self-compiling, gradients and switches that allow its operations to be context-sensitive, feedback loops, and self-generated ‘test patterns’ that allow the system to tune itself, etc. so your computer analogy is fine. :)

It even uses object-oriented programming which allows the creation of hierachical classifications. Using "inheritance", DNA has "classes" that define traits common to a set of related items. This "class" can then be inherited by other, more specific classes, each adding structures and data that are unique to it. As a real life example according to an article in a Science magazine I read a while ago DNA has a "superclass" that specifies the basics for limbs. Then there are two separate classes, one for arms and legs, that builds upon this superclass.

Of course, I'm simplifying all that and using programming terms that I'm familiar with which DNA researchers may or may not actually use. But from all that I've read the terms I use are applicable.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/uocs-ndt061004.php

String theory is all mathematical models and no real empirical evidence as of yet. But the real problem is since it's a tower of assumptions (building upon the Big Bang model's assumptions) it's still quite possible they could detect gravitational waves and yet be completely wrong in many ways at the same time! Then again, if they don't detect what they're expecting they'll probably just continue on their merry way.

Sorry about being so cynical but I'm the type of person that likes to work with something real; not the theoretical.

This should also be kept in mind:

http://www.icr.org/pubs/btg-a/btg-183a.htm

That's another reason for my cynicism. An integral part of all this research is a desire to come up with a model by which God doesn't have to exist.

[Gumpngreen]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1894&e=1&u=/ap/20040616/ap_on_sc/communicating_atoms

Personally I agree with Einstein that the relativistic view of quantum mechanics "could" be wrong from an overall perspective.

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/demo0704.asp

[Gumpngreen]

Recently I saw the latest version of "Around the World in 80 Days". What surprised and disturbed me the most was that the screenwriters went out of their way to portray Lord Kelvin as an arrogant, self-serving, psychopath (the bad guy). They even had a little joke about evolution designed to make him sound foolish.

I realize most people probably don't see this as a big deal (or even know who Lord Kelvin IS) but I'm sick of revisionist history and petty attacks on great Christian scientists of the past. Call it one of my pet peeves.

In any case, here is the truth:

William Thomson, Scottish physicist, mathematician and engineer, later awarded the barony Kelvin of Largs which gave him the more familiar title “Lord Kelvin,” was the most eminent scientist of his day in the British Isles. He was professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow in Scotland for over 50 years. Lord Kelvin was largely responsible for the rise of engineering, taking the meteoric discoveries being made by 19th century scientists to practical uses for man. He supervised the first successful transatlantic cable that brought instantaneous communication across the ocean for the first time. This succeeded only with his invention of signal amplifiers and sensitive receivers. With James Joule, he discovered the Joule-Thomson effect that ushered in the invention of refrigerators. His name is also commemorated in the Kelvin temperature scale, that begins at absolute zero (a concept he originated), which is widely used in physics and astronomy. Perhaps Lord Kelvin’s most significant achievement was defining the concept of energy and formalizing the laws of thermodynamics. Applying the Second Law to the universe as a whole, he predicted the heat death of the universe in the future, which also ruled out an infinitely-old universe.

As a Christian, Lord Kelvin was a gentle, wise and generous family man, faithful in his church, an ardent student of the Scripture and a promoter of Christian education. He believed church members should study the maps in the back of the Bible and understand history. He often expressed awe at the beauty, design and orderliness of creation and natural law. But he also recognized the rise of Darwinism both for its bad science and evil influence. Accordingly, he contested the arguments of Huxley and others that the earth was millions of years old. In a well-known interchange with Huxley, he calculated mathematically that the earth and the sun could not be that old, based on his own knowledge of thermodynamics. His argument for a maximum age for the earth was made before the discovery of thermonuclear reactions, and has been largely discounted unfairly on that basis. (In actuality, the age of the earth and sun are difficulties for evolution even today, and his arguments are largely ignored.) Nevertheless, Lord Kelvin was respected even by “Darwin’s bulldog” Thomas Huxley as a gentleman, a scholar, and a formidable opponent: he called him “the most perfect knight who ever broke a lance.” Known for his self-confidence, Kelvin held the Darwinists’ feet to the fire of scientific rigor and didn’t let them get by with mere storytelling. His students respected him for his skill at demonstrating underlying, unifying principles (rather than requiring memorization of facts), and motivating them to do their best.

Lord Kelvin published over 600 research papers and served as president of the Royal Society. Showered with 21 honorary doctorates from around the world, he had right to more letters after his name than any of his contemporaries. He received numerous awards and was knighted by the queen. Not only did he advance science in fundamental ways himself, he mentored Joule, Maxwell, Tait and other eminent scientists. He was buried in Westminster Abbey after a long and successful career.

More on Kelvin's arguments:

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-016.htm

I should note that this article was published in 1974 and since then enough information has been gathered to indicate that the Earth's magnetic field is not failing but moving towards a polar flip. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the rest of the Kelvin's arguments are still valid (unless someone knows otherwise?).

A more detailed biography:

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Thomson.html

So if you know anyone who has gone to see that movie now you can tell them the truth!

[Merry]

Sir:

I must say I share your disgust with the movie industry over things like this. Look at the power of a simple written script. In one movie thousands of people will walk away with a horribly skewed image of Lord Kelvin, one which few of them will bother to check out and correct. For many children,that foolishness may be all they ever learn about the man. If there is truly 'nothing' to the creation/evolution debate, then I must confess myself both amazed and confused that Hollywood and others would continue trashing such brilliant men as Lord Kelvin, because he was also a faithful man for God. How dare one say God created the universe......

This only serves to magnify the tremendous need for creative works of our own to permeate the culture as much as possible.

Which reminds me, will you be posting your Genesis novel with the writers'
groups?

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

I'll see if I can attach a zipped copy of the first novel when the password-protected area is set up. Otherwise I'll be making posts on what I have done in the second.

[Merry]

Saw this article about a stumblingblock someone was having with scripture and thought the response was interesting.
http://www.drdino.com/QandA/index.jsp?varFolder=Bible&varPage=Unicorn.jsp

Merry

And while I was looking at Dr. Dino.com I thought the tail end of his newsletter deserves attention. I know this was blasted way out of proportion in my own local paper.

http://www.drdino.com/Ministry/NewsLetter/index.jsprry

[wgjones3]

I know it's not science related, but I stumbled on this yesterday and I thought some of you might be interested:

http://cmradio.net/creation/

Creation '04 -- a celebration of our Creator. If you can't be there in person, you can listen live via any number of online media programs.

It starts June 23 and runs through June 26, and yes, I desperately wish I could be there for this, but the online stream ought to be pretty cool.

[Gumpngreen]

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/109082709/HTMLSTART

They're attempting to explain that old "handedness" problem that's been around for over a hundred years. Ultimately it's not good enough; proteins require 100% pure one-handed amino acids. The enantiomeric excess has to be 100%. The addition of one wrong-handed link in a protein can destroy its function.

[Gumpngreen]

New creationist site I just found:

http://www.nwcreation.net/index.html

Let's fill that Wiki! :D

[Merry]

Hey, today I had reason to hunt down sites from the us bureau of mines(lucky me) and kept seeing words like 'pressure and petrol' and I tried navigating through some of them but they are obvious examples of government work...long and tedious. I thought I had stumble onto the info you and wg were looking for earlier about petroleum being made under pressure in the lab. If they have the documents, I bet they're from the seventies, big gas shortage time. But the closest I came was a document they wanted to charge for http://www.ntis.gov/search/product.asp?ABBR=PB93235752&starDB=GRAHIST. I thought maybe somewhere in their overwhelming mess of info, the US Bureau of Mines might have the info you're looking for. Personally, I was glad to exit.....

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040623-3922.html

http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040623-3921.html

[Merry]

You know, individually those articles are both amazing. But if you meshed them together, then maybe the answer as to why the spaceship malfunctioned would be that the piolot didn't eat enough Oreo's. j/k

(Oh, man, must adjust computer brightness....my kid has been home today playing a game called 'Eternal War.' When he does, {about everyday lately) he always cranks up the lighting. Oww...)

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.msfc.nasa.gov/news/news/releases/2004/04-169.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5278028/

Genetics researchers boast a lot when it comes to their progress with DNA but really they're the "script kiddie" version of scientists, limited to changing simple variables while not truly understanding the code they're messing with.

Of course, these people would find my statement very insulting... but it's basically the truth.

[Merry]

Whoa....! What? Are they still looking for the 'beneficial mutation?' I always get this chill when the DNA guys start talking about toying with chromosomes, strictly for our benefit, of course.

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

Well, that isn't exactly "beneficial", unless you LIKE the idea of dying young but being very physically strong during that short period. But as the article rightly points out if myostatin could be CONTROLLED INTELLIGENTLY (not mutated randomly) it could be put to good use.

More news:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/yu-ysd062204.php

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_tvspiders.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3826731.stm

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-06/plos-tui061504.php

Heh, trying to understand the code by "commenting out" functions...

http://www.dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=7671

Amazing how often convergent evolution occurs. ;)

[Merry]

Yes, I down-loaded a 24-page paper a few weeks ago about experiments with fruit flys and the different mutations the scientist was coming up with(should have been titled, 'How to Torture a Fruitfly and Earn Grant Money While Doing It) and bottom line, the entire theme of it was nothing but divergent evolution......

Now, on that one article about different DNA functions, could you compare that to trying to understand a computer by shutting part of it down? Perhaps I misread it, but it did seem perplexing.

On a less serious note. I am not an expert on spider's, but I was reading an account by a former missionary to Africa and he described an incident where he saw a huge, shambling creature meandering across a dirt path. Thinking it was some kind of dog, he went to investigate and to his horror realized it was a spider approximately the size of a pygmy! I know reptiles never stop growing, but is the same true of spider's? Yikes! The gentleman certainly saw something strange, but could there really be a scenario where this lucky spider manages not to be eaten or squished for so long that he grows up to be the baddest bug in the jungle? (Okay, I know they're not bugs, technically.) Four foot spiders? EWWWW..... :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:

Merry

[Mr. Otis]

Four foot spiders? EWWWW.....

THAT is why I live far enough north to guarantee at least one hard freeze a year!

[wgjones3]

Speaking of spiders, I left my car at church this afternoon. It sat there for eight hours or so. I come back, and it's completely covered in spider webs and there's over a dozen brown spiders crawling all over it. :eek: :eek: :eek:

[Merry]

Spiders? All over your car? *Cringe* Ooooh Noooo! Actually, the small ones aren't so bad, but where I live there are these huge wolf spider's, they have a 'leg-span' like a trantula's, but their body isn't as big. Once, I had newspapers spread all over the floor to protect against a project we were doing and when all the kids had piled outside for recess, it was very quiet, until I heard something rustling the paper. I looked up and saw this huge wolf spider strolling towards me...and that was the end of the silence. I tell you there is something WRONG when a spider is so big and heavy you can hear it COMING! AHHHH! I envy Mr. Otis's weather! Once it got down to 20 degree's here, but that was 13 years ago, so the spider's continue on their merry way...after Merry!

Merry :eek: :eek: :eek:

[Merry]

Hey Gump,

Could you name some of the bands used on the background for Eternal War?
I've been requested to find out, cool music.

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

I'm not actually sure who wrote that music but I sent an email to ask for you. We're going to try and make a deal with a Christian punk/metal/industrial/speed metal band for the sequel (no responses in that regard as far as I know).

In related news:

By SARAH LINN, Associated Press Writer

In the world of Christian video games, players sport the armor of God, the best weapon is a ball of holy energy known as a "smite," and demon-possessed Roman soldiers drop to their knees in prayer when they're hit.

Christian video and computer games currently make up a tiny fraction of the $11 billion gaming industry. But developers expect the market to grow as movies such as Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" and books like the "Left Behind" series prove consumers are hungry for faith-based entertainment.

How to find producers for such games and get them on store shelves is the focus of the third annual Christian Game Developers Conference in Portland, July 30-31. About 100 people are expected to attend.

Event organizer Tim Emmerich said Christian game developers want to provide a clean, safe alternative to shoot-'em-up games like "Grand Theft Auto" -- and spread the gospel without boring or alienating players.

The target audience ranges from Christian gamers eager for new thrills to teenagers and 20-somethings who have never picked up a Bible, said Emmerich, a software engineer who attends Circle Church of Christ in Corvallis.

"We're salt and light where we're at," he said, referring to the Biblical admonishment that Christians lead the world by example.

For Canadian developer Mackenzie Ponech, that means creating a fun, entertaining game that doesn't condescend to its non-Christian players.

"It's not about taking a Bible, rolling it up and shoving it down the person's throat who's playing the game," said Ponech, who co-founded Two Guys Software in Edmonton, Alberta.

In the company's most popular game, "Eternal War: Shadows of Light," players assume the role of Mike, an angel charged with saving a suicidal teen. They battle demons -- and the teen's own doubts -- with spiritual weapons that include razor-sharp "soul disks," "trinity blasts," and the "smite," a ball of liquid holy energy that blows bad guys away.

"Eternal War" also references the "armor of God" mentioned in the book of Ephesians. "It's almost like your meat-and-potatoes for a Christian game," Ponech said.

Unlike some of their secular counterparts, Christian video games avoid "all that blood and guts and gore," said Ralph Bagley, CEO of N'Lightning Games in Medford.

Enemies vanish, vaporize, or, in the case of the Roman soldiers in N'Lightning's "Catechumen," start praying as Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" rings out. Most games incorporate Bible verses, and story lines often focus on spiritual struggles.

Religion expert Larry Eskridge says the emerging Christian video game industry marks the latest effort by people of faith to put their own imprint on popular culture.

Evangelical Protestants have led the charge since World War II, Eskridge said, seeking sanctified versions of everything from board games and television to rock 'n' roll.

"The real ascetic 'Don't do this, don't do that' has passed out of favor. Evangelicals have started saying, 'God wants me to have a fulfilling life here (on Earth) as well,"' said Eskridge, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

But some in the industry question whether consumers will be as eager to embrace Christian games as they are to play secular versions.

Most retailers are reluctant to pick up Christian video games because the products don't have a proven track record, said Dave Tanner, senior buyer for Christian Supply Centers. The retail chain has 16 stores in Oregon, Washington state and Idaho.

"As a buyer, I want to see past sales. I want to see a forecast," Tanner said. That's difficult with the relatively new Christian video games, which make up such a small portion of the market that the Christian Booksellers Association doesn't track sales.

Companies also struggle to find investors for game development, said Bagley, the N'Lightning CEO. His game "Catechumen" took 15 months and $830,000 to create -- often demanding 16-hour days from his 11-person team.

To boost interest, the Christian video game industry is pinning its hopes on established properties such as "Left Behind" and "Veggie Tales" -- based on the children's video series in which singing, talking vegetables act out Bible stories.

"There's a huge void and a tremendous opportunity for growth," said Troy Lyndon, who helped found the Murietta, Calif.-based Left Behind Games Inc. in last October.

Left Behind Games' first effort, "Eternal Mission," will follow the plot of the apocalyptic thriller series, allowing players to plan strategy in real time. It's set to be released in late 2005.

Lyndon hopes that "Eternal Mission" and its successors can avoid one criticism of the industry -- that Christian video games lag behind secular games in terms of visual quality and fast-paced action.

"If you're going to put out a video game, don't stereotype Christian games as horribly lame games," said Arron Daniels, 29, an avid gamer and former youth minister.

Although industry giants like Electronic Arts Inc. have yet to add faith-based titles to their lineups, Daniels said the potential for growth is there -- provided that Christian developers continue to improve graphics and gameplay.

"When Christian music started 20 years ago, all you had were different versions of 'Amazing Grace.' Today we can compete with the big boys," said Daniels, who works at the Christian radio station KBNJ in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Eventually, Christian video game developers hope to see their games sold by mainstream retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target -- perhaps as part of a special Christian interest section.

"We just have to pray," said Tim Emmerich, the conference organizer. "If God wants us to succeed, we'll succeed."

[Merry]

Cool! I know some older, unchurched children who are avid fans of Eternal war and the comments I hear from them are insteresting. They're used to the bloody shoot-em ups like Grand Theft Auto, etc, and going into the game you hear things like, "Oh, yeah, :rolleyes: a Christian game.... :rolleyes: :rolleyes:" And then they start playing and the comments become more like, "MAN, THAT'S INTENSE!!" And then there are the interesting observations like, "Whoa, this is all going on in this guys head?"
And of course, there's the cool music. So we're having a lot of fun with it here. I can't wait to see what the regular crew thinks about it come August.

Thanks

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

Turns out it was just some royalty free music that Mack found on the internet. I also reminded him he needed to check on the status of our sound guys who haven't produced anything as far as I know...

[wgjones3]

Merry,

Have you introduced the kids to Tourniquet yet? :D

[Merry]

What do you take me for!? Of course I have. :D :D And they like it! :cool:

Merry

[Merry]

Gump,

Okay, good Eternal War story: I have mostly little kids during the summer so I don't let them play the game for long periods, about 20 minutes at a time because, it really is pretty intense. Except this one kid, and I'm actually watching him to learn how to play the thing. Yes, I admit it. His Mom is a fine Christian lady, his Dad is undecided. Mom informed me the kid and Dad play tons of super gory video war games together and it has become a point of contention. Dad rationalizes, Aw, it's just a game....(Note on this particular boy: he was a public school discard. Very hyperactive. Failed third grade F-cat so he was supposed to stay back a year. F-CAT is a very long, test consisting primarily of essays. Like many ADHD kids, he has terrible handwriting. They just couldn't read his test! She brought him here, I put him in a typing tutorial,[though he is still working on his cursive] and the boy has shown himself as, not just smart, but EXTREMELY smart! He writes on a 12th grade level, and he was going to fail 3rd grade? (I figure when he owns his own software company someday he can hire someone to write in cursive for him.)

SO this kid is on level five in the game, he's hit a problem he's till working through, but he'll get it. Not bad for 10 years old. All that to say, the other day when his Dad came to pick him, this kid bounced up to him (he bounces everywhere) and announced, "DAD! I'm God's Eternal WARRIOR!" Then he went off into this explanation of how he's going to work through the problem sounding like this: "....and I think the way to get around it is you have to think how demons would act and how they can sneak into someones head, and you know what I think Dad, I think they would use anything maybe games maybe books maybe TV so it's like you always have to be on guard when you're walking through there and it's like you have to reason things out, but then you go into prayer mode and..." Anyway, after Dad retireved his ear, they left. Today, Mom called me. Said her husband told her it was the most amazing moment of his life to hear his son refer to himself as God's Warrior and he went to church last night with his wife!! Too cool! Good work!

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/305/5680/46

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996092

I have a feeling that textbooks will eventually say that the speed of light is variable in the unobservable past precisely because these people WANT it to be variable (thus endowing them with the ability to "story-tell" around any pitfalls in their ideas).

I'm growing cynical in my young age...

[Merry]

The sad thing about the 100 year old evolutionist is that you know he's soon on his way to becoming a believer in Jesus, I.D., creation science, not to mention, the inerrancy of scripture, but just shy of a miracle this will be happening on his way to hell. Intriguing observations...like in Germany there was no fundementalist movement around to question evolution. I wonder, if there had been would we have been saddled with eugenics? Would there have been a holocaust? Hmmm...

I read the speed of light article honestly looking for a positive spin, but they made the same assumption that Biblical scoffer's have been making since IIPeter chapter three, in believing that the creation has remained unaltered from the beginning. I think your observation summed it up. I know it is difficult not to sound cynical when it comes to science because so much of it today is truly 'science falsely called.' However, it always amplifies the need to raise up Christian youngster's who will want to go into these fields and produce 'real' science. I've been in Churches where a kid could get the impression that biology or chemistry is not a calling of God. I would have liked to hear them make that claim to Gregor Mendel or Francis Bacon...never a dull moment, eh?

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

I was having a discussion on another forum and I made a post on the subject of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. I decided to copy that post over here:

this is how the typical argument goes:
1. Christian gives basic argument based upon entropy.
2. Atheist responds with the straw man that the Earth isn't a closed system.
3. Christian raises the topic of argument to the whole universe.
4. Atheist invokes the M Theory.
5. Christian points out that the energy within the branes must have come from somewhere.
6. Atheist says it's possible that the laws of physics are different in various branes and inter-dimensional friction transfers energy.
7. Christian points out that so far there isn't any empirical evidence for the M Theory and that it's just a mathematical model at this time. The speed of light would also need to be variable for the current model to work (which, coincidentally, would play havoc with the rest of "known" science).
8. Atheist says that a test is tentatively being planned for 2006/2007 to test a postulate of String Theory (which the M Theory is derived from).
9. Christian points out that this experiment may produce the expected results but it still isn't enough evidence for the Atheist to sustain his argument.
10. Atheist says that further research is needed.

Stalemate.

[Merry]

:D 'Further research is needed...' :D

Merry

[wgjones3]

Stalemate?

Sounds like check to me.

[Merry]

Seriously, Bill. :D I like the part where light speeds up and slows down to make everything fit. ;)

Hey Gump! In an open system doesn't entropy just happen faster??? You know, like the old example of a boiling tea kettle: take the lid off (open system) energy escapes faster, cooling occurs more quickly. (I did notice you called it a 'straw man.')

And I appreciated the number six argument. Nothing like a good stretch. :)

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-07/jhu-gae070104.php

We're definitely a "Privileged Planet": http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996123

Amazing how these complex biological systems managed to evolve twice...

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040705/full/040705-2.html

Another example:

A team of Yale biochemists investigated a proofreading mechanism in one-celled organisms from the kingdom Archaea and found it different, but just as effective, as its counterpart in kingdoms Bacteria and Eukarya (the latter including all plants and humans). Their work was published online in PNAS July 6.1
The particular instance involved the ability to edit between two similar amino acids, threonine vs. serine, on the molecule that connects the amino acid to the transfer RNA (aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, or aaRS). Members of archaea have an enzyme that bears no sequence similarity, but is “functionally conserved” (i.e., does the same thing), to that of the other kingdoms. The archaeal gene is “unrelated to, and absent from,” bacterial and eukaryotic genomes. The authors term this an instance of “functional convergence of unrelated domains” that “assures specificity” of the correct amino acid to the tRNA molecule. This “appears to be the first aaRS found to use two evolutionarily unrelated editing domains,” they state. “The functional convergence between the two ThrRS editing domains is highlighted by the observation that both depend on an absolutely conserved set of histidine residues for their function.”

[Merry]

Gump:

I have young David Burns(10)here and he strongly desires that I deliver a message to you about Eternal War. He proudly wishes to say he is on level 6 now, he has wiped out all the demons, but has no idea how to get out, but he promises he will figure it out!!! I'll get out of the way and let David put in his own comment.

Dear Mr. Frye,

I REALLY LIKE THIS GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you,

David Burns

He's a little excited.

Merry

[Gumpngreen]

At first, they weren’t sure it was real or they were just seeing things. Now, it’s inescapable. As far back as cosmologists can see, there were already mature galaxies. That’s the thrust of two papers in the July 8 issue of Nature1,2 and a commentary on them by Keck Observatory astronomer Greg Wirth3, who says in the subtitle, “The discovery of massive, evolved galaxies at much greater distances than expected – and hence at earlier times in the history of the Universe – is a challenge to our understanding of how galaxies form.” But then in his opening paragraph it’s hard to disentangle the optimism from the pessimism:

Over the past two decades, astrophysicists have been spectacularly successful [sic] in explaining [sic] the early evolution of the Universe. Existing theories can account well [sic] for the time span from the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago [sic] until the Universe began to cool and form the first large structures less than a million years later [sic]. But detailed explanations of how the original stew of elementary particles subsequently coalesced over time, to form the stars and galaxies seen in the present-day Universe, are still being refined. As they report on pages 181 and 184 of this issue, Glazebrook et al.1 and Cimatti et al.2 have discovered the most distant ‘old’ galaxies yet. But the existence of these objects at such an early epoch in the history of the Universe seems inconsistent with the favoured theory of how galaxies formed.

According to Wirth, these new studies provide the “first solid evidence” “as far back as 10 billion years ago there were already many old massive galaxies,” and “it is clear that even the best models can’t fully explain the evolution of galaxies.” Do galaxies grow much faster than predicted in the hierarchical models, that assume they coalesced from smaller objects? Or did the stars in these galaxies form “in a substantially different way from our expectations” We may have to wait a decade for the next generation of larger telescopes, he concludes.
Glazebrook et al. found that up to a third of massive galaxies formed within 3 billion years of the Big Bang. Cimatti’s team found four mature, fully-assembled, massive spheroidal galaxies at redshift 1.6 to 1.9. They remark, “The existence of such systems when the Universe was only about one-quarter of its present age [sic] shows that the build-up of massive early-type galaxies was much faster in the early Universe than has been expected from theoretical simulations.”

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v430/n6996/full/nature02667_r.html&filetype=&dynoptions=

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v430/n6996/full/nature02668_r.html&filetype=&dynoptions=

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v430/n6996/full/430149a_r.html&filetype=&dynoptions=

[Merry]

Gump;

After young David bounced away I found time to read the articles from yesterday and found them rather exciting. I wonder how they will explain all of these 'mature' galaxies. It will be interesting to see.

[Allie Webster]

You know Gump the more they try to explain the more they remind me of the painters painting themselves into the corner. :D

[Merry]

I found this rather interesting... http://www.icr.org/headlines/weedevolution.html

And this is why I tell my students that 'extinct' is a terribly arrogant word...
http://unmuseum.mus.pa.us/coelacan.htm

[Merry]

http://www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=264

Quote:

A team led by Lawrence Bottomley in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Jonathon Colton in the School of Mechanical Engineering found that the mechanical response of a multi-walled carbon nanospring was **remarkably similar** to the rules that govern the mechanical properties of springs on the macro scale. The results are published in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters, Volume 4, Number 6.



You know Gump, I can appreciate that something like a simple spring may obey physical law much like it's macro-counter part, but similar things DO NOT equal 'same' things. And I will happily point to darwinist training for this error: all their scientific lives these guys have been taught to think similar equals same and it simply isn't so. This is where mistakes begin.....

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-07/uoc--gso071304.php

"These findings do not support Homo erectus developmentally as an intermediate between chimplike ancestors and modern humans."

That's the pertinent information. Otherwise, a good portion of the article is speculation and, quite frankly, damage control.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3887285.stm

Just goes to show how much we don't know.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996151

I'm mainly interested in this because it might provide further insight for D. Russell Humphrey's "White Hole Cosmology". Then again, it might be another case of mathematical models that have nothing to do with reality (though of course some scientists will stress that these models ARE reality... at least until proven wrong by evidence).

[Merry]

Whew! I read the black hole article first...that will be intersting to see what Hawking has to say and what triggered his reversal. Of course, I didn't like what that one bloke immediately began to do: he was all set to re-arrange black hole theory to fit with string theory! Oh please!

And yes, I think this might help out Humphrey's model. Using mathematics is NOT a bad way to theorize and gain an idea of what might be, but as you pointed out there are too many willing to say mathematical model equals reality. Once again, things similar are not identical....

On the chimp article...and speaking of not calling theory reality too quickly, it's amazing how one theory has otherwise intelligent men rounding in circles.

Are your wrists feeling better?

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_040714cnsm.shtml

I've always found it amazing that so much money from Christians is put into college systems that are under control by evolutionists.

[Merry]

Sorry about all the noise, but I just read the article you posted about the school and sound you heard was me losing my temper.......right now, I can not respond to such mental vacuuity without a lot of yelling so... :mad:

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_monday_040712.html

Hmmm... so they need dark matter/energy for it to be possible for galaxies to form by completely naturalistic means? I wonder if it's just possible that there isn't such a thing and what they're missing is the "G-Factor". ;)

I also didn't realize Cosmologists had started using Einstein's fudge factor again.

I'll be keeping a saved copy of this article on my HD just in case I might another person saying the Big Bang model has no problems.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040717/bob9.asp

The photo on the cover of the July 17 Science News, labeled “silicon jewels,” is a microphotograph of a diatom, a one-celled organism that lives in the sea and builds itself a glass house too small to see with the naked eye. There are thousands of species of diatoms, each with a unique shell design. The article has more diatom photos: one that looks something like a bent sombrero made out of a collander with two goblets sticking out, another that looks for all the world like an Indian tom-tom, complete with stitching, and another that looks like a sunflower head complete with Fibonacci spirals. Others look like sieves, gears, triangles, stars, and many other shapes both common and extraordinary.
Scientists dreaming of nanotechnology can’t get over the skill of diatoms in glass manufacturing. Diatoms are inspiring world-wide efforts to probe their secrets, so that engineers can mass-produce useful molecular devices like photonic crystals and lenses, gas sensors, miniature reaction tubes and other microscopic structures of high tensile strength. Though focused on scientists imitating nature, author Alexandra Goho shares some amazing facts in passing about diatoms (emphasis added in all quotes):

Ecology: Scientists have long prized diatoms... because they remove large amounts of a greenhouse gas—carbon dioxide—from the atmosphere.

Glass: The cell wall of this unicellular organism is made entirely of glass. More precisely, diatom shells consist of silica, or silicon dioxide, the primary constituent of glass.

Art: Many shells are ornately patterned with features just tens of nanometers in size.

Efficiency: Joanna Aizenberg of Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., says, “We can think of diatoms as living silicon chips.” Semiconductor-chip manufacturers carve micro- and nanoscale features out of blocks of electronic and optical materials—a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Diatoms build structures out of silicon much more efficiently.
Throughput: Once researchers figure out how to engineer useful devices out of diatom shells, they could enlist the reproductive capabilities of diatoms to generate trillions of silica structures in a matter of weeks. Some species of diatoms can replicate up to eight times a day. Sandhage says, “For a fairly small number of reproductions, you could get incredibly large numbers of the exact-same three-dimensional structure.”

Flexibility: Diatoms can make just about any structure you can imagine.
Technique: It begins when the algal cell divides, forcing it to split its shell into two halves. The new cells, each now bearing only half a shell, begin to reconstruct their missing halves by taking up silicic acid—a simple compound of silicon, oxygen, and hydrogen—from the surrounding water. Each new organism deposits the silicic acid in a compartment called the silica-deposition vesicle. There, the chemical is converted into silica particles, each measuring about 50 nm in diameter. These then aggregate to form larger blocks of material. Researchers speculate that a set of special proteins guides the formation of the silica particles and their subsequent assembly into larger structures. Hildebrand says that other cellular proteins outside of the vesicle stretch and mold the compartment to shape the silica inside. Once the half shell is complete, the vesicle merges into the cell’s membrane, exposing the newly created structure.

Genome: Scientists are searching for the protein-coding genes among the diatom’s approximately 11,000 genes....

Programming: Diatoms of the same species consistently form shells with exactly the same pattern, suggesting that the designs are genetically programmed.

Catalysis: Nils Kr?, a diatom biologist at the University of Regensberg in Germany, was the first to identify the silica-forming proteins in diatoms. The molecules of this class, which he calls silaffins, are unusual among proteins in that many of them have long side chains of organic molecules known as polyamines. The proteins are also decked out with an assortment of other molecules, including sugars and phosphates.
When Kr? and his colleagues added silaffins to a test tube containing silicic acid, tiny silica spheres formed in a matter of minutes. In contrast, a solution of silicic acid without any proteins “can take hours or even days to form hard silica,” says Kr?.... “we don’t completely understand how it works.”

Individuality: Each protein does something different: One produces spheres, one makes porous shapes, and the third forms platelike structures.
Moving beyond these simple shapes will require a greater understanding of the diatom’s molecular machinery. What’s more, dozens or even hundreds of proteins may govern the shell-formation process. Mapping the myriad interactions among all the components could be a daunting task.

Green and Clean: Fabrication of silicon chips and other electronic devices currently requires harsh chemicals and generates much waste. Diatoms and sponges know how to produce materials under ambient conditions without these harsh chemicals,” says Aizenberg. “And yet the end result is the same.”

Goho’s article is seasoned with high praise for the abilities of these miniature factories. “We’re just scratching the surface” to understand them, says one, and another wants to “harness the power of biological materials.” But they stand humbled at the creative power of these little organisms:

“It will be impossible to reproduce this process in a test tube because it’s such a complicated cellular process,” says [Mark] Hildebrand [of Scripps Institute].
[Joanna] Aizenberg [of Bell Labs] adds, “The question is, ‘Will we be able to bridge the gap between what goes on in nature and what we can do in the lab?’”

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996162

Fractal sets "simple"? Right... tell that to Computer Science students who use recursion all the time.

"There is no randomness in the Mandlebrot set. There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandlebrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex." - Hubbard

[Merry]

Gump, I've started posting some of these articles on another website where, quite honestly, it seems using the creation as a witnessing tool will be the only way to navigate around some of the odd thinking there.

Hey, on map 15 of the easy level of Eternal War some of the guys said they ran into normal pictures hanging on the wall (like Johnny's getting his life back) and I was requested to ask if you zapped a picture of yourself into the game. I guess a couple of shots of a young guy at a computer prompted the question.

Just for fun I tried the nightmare setting and couldn't even make it past the first corner! Yikes!

[Gumpngreen]

Several members of the TGS crew had their pictures put into the game but none of them are me.

[Merry]

In a corner of my summer school class one can almost cut the air with a knife. Two ten-year old boys have teamed up to beat Eternal War. They are surrounded by a crew of other nine and ten year olds, who tried the game, but had too much trouble or kept gettting scared while playing, but found themselves perfectly fine watching.

One is David, of whom I wrote earlier, and the other is Tim, my little boy. They started working together because individually they found themselves getting a bit freaked out at times, because a walk through Johnny's mind is a bit like touring a haunted house.. But what impresses me as they go along is how they are picking up on the way to win, which is to think spiritually about what is going on around them. When these little guys get going they sound like a couple of theologians, it's wild! There was this one part on map 16 I believe where Michael has to jump across these rocks or something and there is a white light that flashes on some, but on others it's constant.
This is what they sounded like figuring out their plan: Dave: "We keep losing him, but that can't be, because he's jumping into the light of Christ, so how can he be hurt?"
Tim: "Let's pray then try again."
Dave: "Okay, this try didn't work either. But 'can't be! God HAS to be his refuge."
Tim: "Oh man! Look! Some of the light is like flickering! The parts where it keeps shining have to be the places where he's sure about Christ. The flickering has to be doubt, so that's why he still get's hurt! Just don't jump on the ones that flicker.."
They follow this plan and make it.
They are somewhere on map 17 I think. But they have reached a tough spot. Mike has become trapped in a completely dark room, save for one white light which keeps trying to shine. There are no buttons or keys, no apparent way out. Some kids have suggested they throw in the towel, but the Dave/Tim team have concluded: "He only looks alone, but the light of Christ is there, so he isn't. If the light is there then there has to be a way out. we just have to find it..."
With that, the intrepid team decided to call it a day. Definitely not your typical computer game, Gump.

[Merry]

Okay, here's where to find the info wg was looking for way back when:


Experiments by the U.S. Bureau of mines showed that petroleum (oil) can be produced from organic material in only 20 minutes.” Hayden R. Appell, Y.C. Fu, Sam Friedman, et al, “Converting Organic Wastes to Oil,” RL-7560 (Washington, D.C., United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1971.)
Yep, this means that while said documents do exist, they are somewhere under a huge, pile of beaurocracy.

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1266356,00.html

No real information (data) on the speech Hawking gave but at least it includes an overview of his new view on Black Holes.

Also, considering how close CGDC is I thought I'd give a sneak peak:

http://www.e-doodle.com/tgs/final2.jpg

[Merry]

Tim was looking over my shoulder at your new character. His inistial reaction: "WHOA!!! WHOA!!!" And then he called Dave.

[Gumpngreen]

If you've been around the origins debate for any time I'm sure that you've heard the term vestigial organ thrown around on occasion. Vestigial organs are commonly cited as a central proof of the theory of evolution. A vestigial organ is one that is a historical remnant of a structure that had a function in a distant evolutionary ancestor but today holds little or no valuable purpose. I like to describe it as baggage from an evolutionary trip through time. Common human organs that have been discussed in this context are the appendix, tonsils, and the coccyx (tail bone). In this article I will analyze the construct of vestigial organs, describe how well it's holding up to scientific advancement, and draw parallels to its modern day counterpart - "Junk DNA.".

It may be obvious, but it's first important to state that a key underlying assumption behind claiming that a biological entity is vestigial is that one has the ultimate understanding of all of the potential uses of a given organ or structure. Ascribing vestigiality to an organ presupposes the notion that there are no possible undiscovered uses for that given organ. It's a fairly bold claim and in general is one that is not fairing well against scientific progress.

In 1895 Robert Wiedershiem listed about 100 vestigial organs in his analysis of the human body. Today, after a century or so of increasing scientific knowledge, the list has dwindled to a mere handful. Reconsider the appendix, tonsils, and the tail bone; all previously deemed vestigial. Now we know that the appendix has atleast two purposes: the secretion of a mucous that aids in digestion and the containment of lymphoid tissue that protects the intestines from infection. The tonsils have been found to help the body fight off infections and the coccyx serves as an anchor to muscles in our pelvic diaphragm that support many of the organs in our abdominal cavity. In summary, what once was considered useless has been found to be useful.

Now unlike many of my fellow creationists, I will not argue that there are no vestigial organs in existence. The genetic code of living organisms is clearly subject to random mutations and natural selection and therefore is capable of the occasional production of vestigial organs. The textbook example is blind cave fish. The eyes of these fish are indeed vestigial but examples like this are not of the common theme that many evolutionists would want to make you believe exists. In addition, this example doesn't really help evolution where evolution needs it. Few argue that random mutations are incapable of degrading the functionality of a given organism. We unfortunately face it often in birth defects. But the key point of contention regarding evolution is whether or not evolution alone can create the operational and quite complex eye of the fish that could later be degraded in ability by that same mechanism. This ultimately shows that although vestigial organs could be evidence for the theory of evolution, they are not absolute proof of the correctness of the complete and full theory of evolution. (ie. common descent)

Irrespective of this, due to scientific progress the notion of vestigial organs is fading away into the backdrop of this great origins debate. It is becoming less and less the choice weapon of evolutionists. Interestingly enough however, there's a replacement and it's name is "Junk DNA." This stems from the fact that only a small portion of a species DNA actually codes for proteins during biological development. For example, the latest estimate in humans is that only 3% of our DNA actually codes for proteins. Through the evolutionary looking glass this is a perfect example of the random and useless build-up of DNA from the non-deterministic process of Darwinism. In fact one of my good friends used this argument against me a few years ago and I did not have a whole lot to say in response. However, just like in the case of many vestigial organs as science has advanced we have discovered that there are indeed uses for this non-coding DNA. We can find an example from a scientific study of non-coding DNA in the single-celled photosynthetic Crytomonads that has shown that the non-coding DNA helped the nuclei maintain its large structure (Eukaryotic non-coding DNA is functional: evidence from the differential scaling of cryptomonal genomes. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B. 266:2053-2059). In addition there have been many other scientific studies demonstrating that "Junk" DNA is not "Junk" (See references below).

From a technical point of view this information contained within this article is really old news but I want to use it to make a key point regarding the power of ideas. The theory of evolution is a powerful paradigm in which to interpret data just as is the theory of special creation. It has the ability to lure its followers into a reverse "God of the Gaps" causing them to draw conclusions based upon scientific ignorance. And worse yet, sometimes the consequences of following an incorrect or unverified theory can be extraordinarily damaging. The theory of evolution falls into a class of scientific theories that have a profound impact on how we view ourselves and how we live our lives. From a medical perspective, consider the number of tonsil and appendix extractions that were performed due to how those organs were viewed from an evolutionary perspective. It goes without saying that it's certainly true that sometimes these organs (especially the appendix) can cause us problems and it is better off that they be removed but the same is largely true for just about any other body part if it becomes infected badly enough.

The theory of evolution troubles me on another accord as well. The logical extension to theories like vestigial organs and "Junk" DNA is what I call the theory of "Junk" humanity. This is the theory that states that there's nothing special about you and me as people. This is the theory that leads millions of people into depression each year. This is the theory that causes thousands each year to consider suicide. This is the theory that allows people to use abortion as birth control. This is the theory that in the end erodes the value of human life.

Now contrast this theory of "Junk" humanity with the theory of God's humanity. The theory of God's humanity states that you are a unique and extraordinary creation of the God of the universe. This theory says that God loved you so much that he entered time and space to die spread eagle on a cross for you. It's the theory that is not just taught in the Bible, but written into the sky and into the complex and intricate development of the human baby.

I implore you to weigh the two theories and their consequences and consider the evidence for each. Could the sort of specified complexity found in life be the result of random natural causes? Could the extremely fine-tuned physical characteristics of the universe be the result of chance? Today we don't have the ability to answer these questions definitively but even if the evidence for each theory is let's say even, what do you gain by living a life without true purpose. Think about it.

[Merry]

A persuasive, well thought out article, Gump. Nice work. :cool:

[Merry]

Gump:

I received a letter which I considered rather whiny from a very well-knowm evolutionist who complained that the only thing creationists do is attack evolution. May I use your article as part of my response?

[Gumpngreen]

Actually, I would respond with real scientific research like RATE: http://www.icr.org/research/misc/aguconference.html

Is this the same "very well-know evolutionist" as before?

[Merry]

Yup, my old buddy. I faxed his letter to one of my favorite creationists. Sounds like the guy has become 'married' to the evolution theory and now, apparently, changing his mind would be too costly. I spoke to my "buddy" on the phone and his last words, which I know will hold 'special meaning' for you were, "...If you continue on the creationist tract, then of the two of us, professionally speaking, only one of us is going to walk away from this..." So help me, I almost asked him if he's played 'Eternal War.' Not to worry, I know what smoke sounds like. I rather enjoyed the call....Thanks for the website! :D

[Gumpngreen]

Ask your "buddy" what he thinks of this article:

http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18132/article_detail.asp

[wgjones3]

his last words, which I know will hold 'special meaning' for you were, "...If you continue on the creationist tract, then of the two of us, professionally speaking, only one of us is going to walk away from this..."

At least he knows and has admitted that you're gonna win this debate :D !thumbsup!

[Gumpngreen]

In her inimitable way, Science reporter Elizabeth Pennisi has once again portrayed a scientific controversy undergoing active ferment. This time it’s about the evolutionary origin of cell nuclei, which she terms “specialized, DNA-filled command centers.” At the conclusion, she gives prominence to a “provocative, but circumstantial and controversial” suggestion that viruses taught cells how to wrap their DNA in double membranes with controlled access. Since the idea presupposes that viruses preceded all three domains of life – prokarya, eukarya and archaea – “If this is true, then we are all basically descended from viruses,” as a believer puts it. The idea is unpalatable to some. “I do not believe [it],” a German molecular biologist retorts. “The idea of the viruses ‘inventing’ [eukaryotic cells] from scratch is hard for me to conceive.”
Pennisi treats the new viral theory as tentative at best. What’s more revealing in her article are the problems with previously-popular ideas, and why. According to her, the key insight at a meeting in France last month on the subject was: “They had underestimated the complexity of the eukaryotic cell’s 1.5-billion-year-old [sic] precursor. The data presented indicated that this ancestral cell had more genes, more structures, and more diverse biochemical processes than previously imagined” (Emphasis added in all quotes.) For a glimpse why, look at Pennisi’s brief description of the nucleus:

Each nucleus in a eukaryotic cell consists of a double lipid-based membrane punctuated by thousands of sophisticated protein complexes called nuclear pores, which control molecular traffic in and out of the organelle. Inside, polymerases and other specialized enzymes transfer DNA’s protein-coding message to RNA. Other proteins modify the strands of RNA to ensure that they bring an accurate message to the ribosomes outside the nucleus. The nucleus also contains a nucleolus, a tightly packed jumble of RNA and proteins that are modified and shipped out of the nucleus to build ribosomes.

Eukaryotes are distinguished from bacteria by their double-membrane nuclei. “The nuclear distinction between prokaryotes and eukaryotes shaped early speculation about the development of complex life,” Pennisi says about ideas floating around up to the 1970s. Some thought eukaryotes were evolved prokaryotes, and others thought prokaryotes were degenerate eukaryotes. But then Carl Woese created new woes by identifying bacteria-like cells that were distinct from both prokaryotes and eukaryotes: so different, in fact, to warrant classification in their own domain – archaea. Others soon were surprised to find that eukaryotes appeared to have genes from both bacteria and archaea.
So another story was born, the endosymbiont or merger hypothesis. This proposed that eukaryotes arose from “the ancient symbiotic partnership between bacteria and archaea.” That theory came under fire from the discovery of faint but distinct nuclei in an unusual group of bacteria, named planctomycetes, that live in soil and fresh water. Some of these planctomycetes have organelles and double-membraned sacs of DNA and RNA. According to a critic of the merger model, these observations “turn the dogma that ‘prokaryotes have no internal membranes’ upside down” Now, it seems no one is sure which way is up.
There’s more to cause vertigo for evolutionists: the complexity of the nuclear pore complexes (NPCs). “Explaining these structures has always posed a sticking point for nuclear evolution [sic].” For one thing, “without pores, the nucleus can’t function.” But for another thing, Pennisi continues, the same planctomycetes, and possibly some other archaea and prokaryotes, apparently possess structures resembling these complex traffic-control gates. “Bacteria with nuclear pores and internal membranes, features typically considered eukaryote-specific, suggest that the nucleus was born much earlier than traditionally thought.”
For some, that leaves as the leading contender the controversial theory that viruses first invented the nucleus. This, however, only pushes the complexity of nuclei and their pores farther back in time, and foists a huge design problem on earth’s most primitive biological entities. That is why the molecular biologist quoted earlier can’t believe that simple viruses created such complex structures from scratch. Pennisi shares a few speculations, based on circumstantial evidence, how it might have happened. But when she ends by pushing the answer to the future, it underscores the fact that no current theory accounts for the origin of the nucleus:

Did a virus provide [sic] the first nucleus? Or was it something an early bacterial cell evolved [sic], either on its own or in partnership with an archaeum? To resolve the origin of the nucleus, evolutionary biologists are exploring new techniques that enable them to determine relationships of microorganisms that go much further back in time....

The biologists in France argued and discussed many ideas. “But when it came to accounting for how the nucleus was born,” Pennisi admits, “no single hypothesis bubbled to the top.” She quotes French molecular biologist Patrick Forterre who said, “It’s like a puzzle. People try to put all the pieces together, but we don’t know who is right or if there is still some crucial piece of information missing.”

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/305/5685/766

[Merry]

I've heard zero-population growth types refer to mankind as a virus upon the earth, so I'm sure they'll love this. (Even Prince Philip once said if he could he'd like to come back as a virus to help kill off 'excess' humans. Maybe he'll consider himself as having 'arrived.')

And if we are basically, a virus, created in the image of God, then it's like calling God a disease. Which, could be what some of these brilliant people think, anyway.

[Gumpngreen]

ATP synthase, the miniature rotary motor that powers our cells, has been a subject of great interest since the elucidation of its rotary function won three scientists a Nobel prize in 1997. As an example of a precision-crafted, true electric rotary motor in living systems (another being the larger bacterial flagellum), it also provides a classic case study in intelligent design vs. evolution. It has been the subject of frequent updates in these pages. Now, another discovery about this ATP-synthesizing engine has revealed a deeper level of fine tuning. Japanese scientists publishing in PNAS found a precision coupling between two components that was unexpected, yet apparently essential.
For review, recall that ATP synthase has two functional domains, named F0 and F1. The F1 part that actually synthesizes ATP from ADP + P is now fairly well understood. It is composed of three pairs of lobes that spring-load ATP with every 120o turn of the camshaft, each pair of lobes either loading, catalyzing or ejecting an ATP molecule. The F0 domain, however, has been harder to study. Scientists knew it looks like a carousel of identical proteins, labeled c subunits. Linked to it is a camshaft, named the gamma subunit, that drives the synthesis of ATP in F1. Scientists knew the F0 carousel runs on protons delivered by a gumball-like mechanism named the a subunit. But up till now, they were not sure how many c subunits comprised the carousel – or even if the number mattered. Some studies had hinted that the F0 motor contained anywhere from 8 to 13 c subunits, depending on the species. Now, the team of Mitome et al. found the answer: it is 10, and it must be 10 and only 10. Other numbers don’t work. That’s strange. It means that F0 needs 10 protons per revolution, but F1 produces 3 ATP per revolution. The ratio 10:3 is not an integer. How can that be?
The scientists arrived at the number 10 by customizing F0 rings with fixed numbers of c subunits, 2 through 14. Then they linked them to the F1 domains and watched how much ATP was synthesized. Results were obtained for only c=2, 5, and 10, which is interesting, considering that 2 and 5 are factors of 10. The c=2 and c=5 cases produced a little ATP, and c=10 produced the maximum. All the other numbers produced none. The team deduced, therefore, that 10 (or one of its factors) is essential to match the proton-loading mechanism of the a subunit.
The scientists also measured the proton flow through their custom carousels when disengaged from F1 and found, again, that 10 was the only number that worked. Without 10 c subunits, no protons flowed. Divide a circle of 360o by 10, and you get a 36o angle per c subunit during a complete revolution of the F0 motor. The F1 domain, by contrast, produces ATP for each 120o turn, or 3 ATP per complete revolution. The scientists seemed surprised that the proton-ATP ratio, “one of the most important parameters in bioenergetics,” is not an integer. It’s as if three protons are sufficient to generate an ATP sometimes and four other times, because one cannot have a third of a proton. Wouldn’t it be more logical if the number of c subunits was a multiple of three, say 6, 9, or 12? With c=9, for instance, the camshaft angle would regularly line up with the F1 lobes every 3 protons, yielding one ATP every time, nice and neat. The fact that it does not means that the coupling between F0 and F1 is not strict, as with toothed gears, but “permissive” – as if the two domains rotate according to their own structural needs, and are coupled together by a adaptor mechanism that has some degree of freedom to either twist or slip.
The scientists ruled out slippage. They knew that the camshaft can only produce an ATP in the F1 domain when it is lined up perfectly at the 120o steps. Instead, they found that there is enough elastic flexibility in the camshaft to permit twist up to 40o during its rotation. This flexibility allows the two domains to work separately, each according to its optimum configuration, with the twisting camshaft able to rock back and forth a little to give the F1 lobes time to complete their work. In scientific lingo, “The flexibility of gamma allows both the F0-gamma and F1-gamma interfaces at the free-energy minima to stay in conformations adequate for the proton transport in F0 and the catalysis in F1 despite the step-size mismatch, providing sufficient time for those events to take place.” (Emphasis added in all quotes.)
One more thing. There isn’t much tolerance for error in this system. The team found that a single point mutation at a spot named E56 in the c subunit was enough to quench all proton flow and all ATP synthesis: “This result provides evidence that each of all 10 E56 in the c-ring is indispensable.” Also, the quantity of 10 subunits in the c-ring is critical, because 8, 9, 11, 12 and other numbers did not fit the gumball proton-delivery system of the a subunit: “Thus, the proton transport through F0 requires very strict arrangement of contact surface between F0-a and F0-c in the F0 assembly and even a rotary displacement as tiny as 3.3o (360o / 10 – 360o / 11) seems to be enough to disable a proton transfer between them.”
The team made their measurements on ATP synthase motors from a species of thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria. They feel they have found a coupling strategy in living systems that could demonstrate a general principle: “Here, we report the permissive nature of the coupling between proton transport and ATP synthesis of F0-F1, but such nature of the coupling can be general among other biological motor systems to connect critical well tuned microscopic events in the large domain motions.”

This discovery reveals a deeper level of design even more difficult to explain by evolution. (As expected, these authors make no reference to evolution in their paper.) A simple, easy-to-fathom machine would use the integer ratio; 3 protons yields one ATP. The 10:3 ratio, puzzling at first, actually shows superior engineering. It enables two disparate components with different operational requirements to be coupled together for the maximum efficiency of each. In software, it would be like the driver that allows a device to work with any operating system. In hardware, it would be like a tractor with a power-takeoff adapter that allows the engine to operate an attachment running at a different RPM.

[Merry]

Okay, this was one of those things I've had to read four times to get it, but once it sank in, the report still begs the same question: how do they miss the design? Someone who has studied this so closley and can express the mechanics of it so clearly still....thinks this could be by accident? Apparently there is need to visit every college in the country make them quit passing out blindfolds in the science classes. Nice work, Gump.

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.winespectator.com/Wine/Daily/News/0,1145,2563,00.html

Personally I thought the article quite funny... in an odd sort of way. :rolleyes:

Of course, it's kind of sad somone would waste their life researching something like this.

[Merry]

I can't figure which is worse, the guy writing the article or the guy who is now going to take time to write an evolutionary based re-buttal. Amazing.

[Gumpngreen]

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/040811.Guo.scaffold.html

When they mention RNA breaking down that is only when it is outside the protective shell of the cell it's contained within. Kind of puts a kink in the evolutionary theory that RNA formed first.

Anyways, these are the types of articles I like referencing for my book. So far my futuristic idea that "scientists may get to the point where they can produce nanomachines but they fail due to the complexity involved" is looking pretty good.

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1137&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Whenever you listen to the just-so stories of the evolutionists (planetary or biological), always watch for the data. Watch for something that was observed or measured in some way. The radar scans from Magellan revealed a terrain remarkably uniform around the entire globe, with lava flows everywhere and few craters. Its paucity of terrestrial diversity is very unlike the Earth, with its rich array of mountains, oceans, moving continents, rivers, weather systems, canyons and dynamic landscapes.
On Venus, based on crater counts alone, the surface appears to be the same age, with nothing much having happened since some global resurfacing episode. That is about all that can be said with any certainty. Deducing what that age is from crater counts is a risky business based on assumptions of cratering rates which cannot be observed in the present. The models and suggestions about water loss, early plate tectonics on Venus, periodic burps and so forth is just handwaving in the dark, assuming that the planet had a 4.5-billion year history.
That number, the Sacred Parameter of Planetary Evolution, 4.5 billion years, is the assumed Age of the Solar System (acronym omitted for the sake of propriety). What kind of a model has error bars as large as those he just admitted? Is there any evidence for any of the model prior to the current observation of a uniformly cratered, resurfaced globe? Is there any evidence of a missing 3.9 billion years? No. Science is supposed to be about what you can see, not what you can’t see. When you need to visualize the unseen to keep your worldview from collapsing, it isn’t planetary science yet, just planetary mythmaking.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040816/D84GD8U80.html

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/rcfd-gtt081204.php

[Gumpngreen]

http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/8/162004a.asp

What are they scared of? That kids might actually think for themselves instead of believing the textbook information that even most knowledeable evolutionists know not to be true?

http://www.newtonproject.ic.ac.uk/

If they go under I'll make sure to save all of Newton's documents to my HD.

[wgjones3]

Gump, here's a little program that might help you copy the Newton Project files: http://www.download.com/HTTrack-Website-Copier/3000-2377-10277606.html?tag=lst-0-8

[Merry]

My 'special friend' always maintains that one can not debate creationists because all they do is 'slam' evolutionists. I'm sending him a copy of this article.

A very well known creationist has advised me to keep putting the idea out to him of a debate...about every six months or so....'glad to.

I'm so sick of the whole evolutionist mind-set, I could scream. I'm particularly ticked-off right now because school has started and I have refugees from public school who look hollow-eyed and haunted as if they just survived a real-life 'Lord of the Flies.' Without an acknowledgement of God and adult supervisor's who have their hands tied when it comes to spiritual matters the kids become real savages. And it all goes back to Darwin delivering his excuseto get rid of God. The result of which has been a cultural entropy so deep, and far-reaching, we barely know it's there.

Right now is one of those times I couldn't debate this subject if I tried. I'd be too apt to sum up my opponent with something like, 'Man, you're stupid.' And that's just not terribly adroit, I'm afraid.

[Gumpngreen]

Just saw this article: http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/405.asp

Normally I don't reference AiG since they tend to over-simplify but at least in this case they explain the basic theory behind Starlight and Time better than Humphrey could in his own book.

[wgjones3]

:eek:

That all makes perfect sense. Now I only wish I had the mathmatical background to understand relavity.

[Merry]

Ok, an evolutionist actually said this to me the other day: 'Can't Dr. Hovind see that thousands of accidents over eons of time could result in the bio-diversity necessary to create new species....?' This is the sort statement that makes my head feel numb from the sheer weight of it's stupidity. I asked him to please go back and think about what he said because surely he could come up with something more logical. That was as nice as I could handle being at the time. Another good one, self-righteously spoken: 'All Dr. Hovind wants to do is bring people to Christ! That's just not science!' (Bad Dr. Hovind ! Bad! :D ) I asked what god he was leading people to and his response was, "There is no God, only science." Gump, since this is your 'crowd' one can imagine you daily walking around in daily amazement. But I guess sin shouldn't surprise us, neither should blessings, but both often do. Yeowww...

[Gumpngreen]

http://www.mtblanco.com/

Some very interesting finds by Mr. Taylor. T-Rex bones that are less fossilized than nearby cow bones? I wonder if they could get a good carbon dating reading out of that... I also saw mention of preserved T-Rex skin.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3573914.stm

Pretty quick to make that conclusion considering we don't even truly understand how our own sun works. Not to mention that the value of 13.6 billion is pretty, darn close to the supposed Big Bang (how exactly was it given time to form??). Still, it's not a problem with the white hole cosmology.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1092712291328

I wouldn't be suprised if the results are as biased as the supposed "official conclusion" for the John ossuary.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/sri-ng081704.php

The deeper we dig the more complexity found.

[Merry]

Hmmm, have you heard of the Colorado T-Rex? There is actually this lizard people have seen, but not captured yet, which stands on it's hind legs, looks about 3 feet high, and has tiny front forelimbs. But if they do catch one and it is a T-Rex, we'll most likely never hear about it....sigh...
I'm getting quite jaded in my old age.

Speaking of old fossils, I had the misfortune of speaking with the discoverer of LUCY this week. He sent me an e-mail complaining about my stupidity in voicing creatioinst 'dogma.' :D Yeesh. :rolleyes: I wish there had been something fun to respond to, but it was only arrogant, nothing else. Oh well. Sometimes the compliment is when certain people DON'T like you. ;)

[wgjones3]

You ever ask any of these people why they're spending so much time trying to disprove a God they don't even think exists?

[Merry]

Oh yes, and the answer is that they must 'proclaim the truth.' Like witnesses for hell. But you expect that from the spirit-less athiest crowd. you know what really strikes me as terrible are the people who describe themselves as 'Theistic-Evolutionists.' They argue the same things as the athiests, but insist they are Christian. It makes you just shake your head.

One of my 'friends' was quite critical of the credentials of Dr. Morris, a noted creationist, so I wrote up a little 'thing' on the 'credentials' of Charles Darwin. Evolutionists should NEVER go there because Darwin had the opposite of credentials. It's historically documented that this guy was a loser propped up by a rich family.(Failed grammar school, described as lazy, flunked out of med school, played cards and drank too much at night. Flunked out of seminary, same reason. Hated biology class, wrote that he never listened. Couldn't find a job, only got the 'gig' on the SS Beagle because an influential relative got it for him. Father insisted he go to keep him from becoming 'an idle, rich, lazy man.) (For the record, the aforementioned info comes from biographies that are 'pro-Darwin.' Just tell the truth about the man and one need not be 'anti-Darwin.')

And he stole his theory from his grandfather, never even assigned the man credit. Man, I dread to think what they would say if Morris or Hovind had 'credentials' like Darwin. With his straight 'A's' my teenage son already has a better academic background than he did. So far the response has been utter silence. :D

[wgjones3]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Darwin "convert" to Christianity and decry his theory in his waning years?

[Gumpngreen]

Nope, apparently that is a myth.

[Merry]

I have a number of people tell me he was the father of modern germ theory. Any idea where they get that?

[Gumpngreen]

No idea. Another popular myth is that the Miller-Urey experiment was capable of producing life. Did a quick search and here is some background:

http://www.facingthechallenge.org/urey.htm

I didn't read the whole page so I don't know if they mention it but one thing in particular that textbooks don't mention has always stuck in my mind. That experiment's product consists of around 98%+ tar... which would of course kill off any life even if it did occur.

http://www.worldmag.com/newsite/content/displayarticle.cfm?id=9546

Perhaps that's why atheists are becoming so systematicly hateful in their attempts to put down any dissent?

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/19aug_blood.htm

Struggling with the techniques, Dr. Alan Gerwitz says, “It’s hard to beat millions of years of evolution for picking out what works, and works well.”

:confused:

http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/22/wnean22.xml

Stories like this tar and feather the credibility of both radiometric dating and anthropology.

[Gumpngreen]

Speaking of theistic evolutionists, we have one over at christiancoders.com who is being rather persistent. Fortunately he's not being rude and insulting us but it's rather obvious he considers creationists models stupid. Problem is his total lack of knowledge on modern creationist theories, not to mention most of his "knowledge" is based upon college textbooks that even most evolutionists know are outdated and wrong (read his posts and you'll see what I mean), and I'm not going to write a book's worth of posts just to fill him in.

[wgjones3]

For some reason I'm reminded of the story of Thomas shortly after Christ's ressurection.

[Gumpngreen]

A biography of Charles Babbage that also contains the historic root of today's old earth creationists and theistic evolutionists:

There’s a humorous scene in the movie Back to the Future III, in which Doc operates a crazy contraption he had built in a barn. He and Marty had been transported back from 1985 to the Old West. He asks Marty to turn a valve, then he pulls a lever on the large wooden machine. Marty watches quizzically as wheels turn, gears engage, steam hisses, and all kinds of racket ensues. Finally, as Doc proudly smiles, an ice cube tumbles down a chute into his cup of tea. Go back even further in time, and a contraption even more amazing, though never built, was conceived in the mind of our scientist of the month, a genius named Charles Babbage. Like Doc, he appears like a man trapped in the wrong century, because he envisioned not the first ice cube maker, but the first general purpose computer– in 1832!. This is one of history’s classic “if only” stories. If only Babbage had finished it, if only the British government had approved the funding he needed, then Windows 98 might have been Windows 1898. Despite this failure, Charles Babbage did succeed in many things, and was always strong in his Christian faith during a period of tremendous intellectual and social change in Britain.
Born in 1791 as son of a wealthy banker, young Charles grew in love with mathematics, a subject he nearly taught himself: in fact, he could have taught his tutors. He excelled to the point of occupying the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge for 11 years, the same position Newton had held. In personality, Babbage was too smart for the common people. Like cowboys trying to “figger” a scientific genius, they thought him stuffy, arrogant and eccentric. His obsession with facts, figures and statistics contributed to his “geek” reputation; he might be found measuring the amount of food consumed by zoo animals, the proportion of sexes among poultry, or the causes of broken windows, which he wrote up in a “Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breaking of Plate Glass Windows” (conclusion: drunks and boys cause 3%). Like a good Baconian, Babbage believed facts were worth collecting and preserving, because “the preservation of any fact might ultimately be useful” and he wanted to set an example others might emulate. Unfortunately, he expected everyone to possess his basic civility and honesty; such naivete predisposed him to victimization. Socially, Babbage had friends in high places and got along with his intellectual colleagues, but stupid and thoughtless people irritated him: street musicians, especially. When he tried to get them outlawed, because they ruined his concentration, the townspeople retaliated by tormenting him mercilessly, purposely playing out-of-tune violins, tin whistles, and brass instruments outside his windows. This went on for years. The rabble who considered him a grouchy recluse or an “old villain” did not know they were harassing one of the intellectual geniuses of the 19th century, a man their descendants would honor (too late for Babbage’s own satisfaction) as a seminal figure in the development of the computer.
Charles Babbage turned his mathematical genius to many things. He believed in practical science. A railroad aficionado when the technology was young, he invented the first cowcatcher in Britain, and applied his statistical knowledge to argue for standardized wide gauge track. The industrial revolution was in full swing during his prime. Babbage became the world’s first “efficiency expert.” He is considered a pioneer of a field that, 100 years later during World War II, became extremely important for industry and the military: Operations Research, the mathematical study of how to get the most productivity in the shortest time at the lowest cost. Babbage was hired to advise the government on postal rates. His analysis, like modern “time and motion studies,” demonstrated that a flat rate stamp was the best fee for moving mail efficiently. The idea seems contrary to common sense; why should someone sending a letter across town have to pay the same price as someone sending it across the country? Nevertheless, he showed that it made economic and practical sense, and today we still enjoy the benefits of that research. Babbage also invented an opthalmoscope (a device for examining the interior of the eye), a skeleton key, and a speedometer.
The story of his computer is a tale often told. It’s an interesting and complex mix of genius, politics, love and frustration. In 1827, Babbage received government funding to build a machine for the construction of mathematical tables. As construction began on the project, he found he had to design many of his own tools. Disputes with contractors frustrated him. Worse, before he completed a working model of his proposed Difference Engine, he conceived of an even better one, which he dubbed the Analytical Engine, and changed plans midstream. By this point he calculated it would cost more to complete the old model than to begin the new one, but this was a hard sell in Parliament; politicians were understandably reluctant to release more funds when there was nothing to show for the money already spent. Though Babbage never profited monetarily from the invention, one politician railed, “We have got nothing for our £17,000 than Mr. Babbage’s grumblings.” (What Babbage possessed in intelligence, apparently, he lacked in diplomacy and the art of persuading politicians.) “We should at least have had a clever toy for our money,” his political enemy continued. Sir George Airy, an astronomer, dubbed the contraption “worthless” and it didn’t help that Britain was in the woes of a depression in the 1840s.
Babbage did have one ardent supporter, however. After his wife died at age 35 in 1827, Babbage developed a Platonic friendship with Lady Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron. Her enthusiasm for the project matched his, and she helped him keep the dream alive. Some have called her the first computer programmer (a bit of a stretch), since she wrote some sample problems the engine might solve. And what an engine it would have been: a complicated contraption of gears, levers, wheels, rods, cylinders and racks, all driven by steam. Babbage was inspired by the Jacquard Loom, a French invention that wove complex patterns in cloth with the use of punched cards. Babbage incorporated punched cards into his design. He envisioned his engine as being programmable such that it could solve any problem, even calculus using Newton’s method of numerical approximation. Lovelace envisioned it someday composing music or generating graphics. Consider how far ahead of his time his design was: it would be fully programmable, have input, a central processor, memory, and a printer for output— all worked out in Babbage’s head long before these became everyday concepts. Despite 50 years of work on this idea, Babbage was to die in obscurity in 1871, nearly forgotten by his countrymen. His drawings and descriptions gathered dust despite a feeble posthumous attempt by his son to build the Analytical Engine. (It is rumored that Bill Gates bid on this device when it was auctioned recently for $300,000.) Babbage, though embittered in old age at short-sighted politicians, never lost confidence that his idea was a good one and that it’s eventual success and benefit for humanity was only a matter of time.
Steps toward fulfillment of the general-purpose computer were slow at first. Punched cards became important in the early 20th century after Herman Hollerith employed them for the U.S. Census in 1890, and later founded a company that in later years defined the cutting edge of computer technology: International Business Machines, or IBM. John Hudson Tiner describes the delayed renaissance of Babbage’s vision:
In 1937, Howard H. Aiken, a student at Harvard University, came across Babbage’s description of the analytical engine. He caught the enthusiasm Babbage had for creating a calculating machine.
Technology had improved enough to do it. Aiken, working with IBM, constructed Mark I, the first general-purpose calculating machine. An electronic computer replaced it a few years later. Charles Babbage had been a hundred years ahead of his time.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
As for his personal faith, Charles Babbage believed the Bible and was convinced that science and faith were not in conflict. He was close friends with other Christian intellectuals of the day, including John Herschel and William Whewell. Sadly, he was also undiscerningly cozy with liberal religious scientists like Charles Lyell, whose work he admired, unaware of the erosion of faith Lyell’s doctrine of uniformitarianism and long ages would cause for many believers, especially the young Charles Darwin. Nevertheless, Babbage strongly supported the pre-Darwinian belief in Natural Theology, the proposition (as fully expounded by William Paley) that design in nature demands a Designer. That Babbage identified that Designer as the God of the Bible is clear, because he fully accepted the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ. Tiner says that “While a student at Cambridge, Charles Babbage met with others who were Christians. They resolved to dedicate their lives to God.”
The Earl of Bridgewater had left a sum of money in his will to direct leading scientists to write treatises “for the purpose of advancing arguments in favour of Natural Religion.” By the time Babbage was 46 and fully involved in developing his calculating machine, eight prominent British scientists had published their entries in what had become a well-known and popular set of books, the Bridgewater Treatises. The suite included works by the Rev. Dr. Thomas Chalmers on “The Adaptation of External Nature to the Intellectual and Moral Constitution of Man,” William Buckland on geology, William Whewell on astronomy and physics, William Kirby on zoology, John Kidd on the same subject as Chalmers, Charles Bell on design in the human hand, and Peter Mark Roget on animal and vegetable physiology. Perhaps Babbage felt the series need a ninth, like the Beethoven Symphonies, so in 1837 he added his own unofficial submission. He said, “I have, however, thought, that in furthering the intentions of the testator, by publishing some reflections on that subject, I might be permitted to connect with them a title which has now become familiarly associated, in the public mind, with the evidences in favour of Natural Religion.”
Employing his skill at mathematics and statistics, Babbage tackled the subject of the Biblical miracles: specifically, to counter the arguments of David Hume who had called miracles violations of natural law, and therefore impossible. Though slightly off topic from the rest of the series, Babbage felt “I was led so irresistibly, by the very nature of the illustrations employed in the former argument [of the first eight treatises], to the view there proposed, that I trust to being excused for having ventured one step beyond the strict limits of that argument, by entering on the first connecting link between natural religion and revelation.” In other words, he wanted to take the arguments of natural theology beyond the conclusion of an unspecified Designer, and link them to the historical accounts in Scripture. Babbage set out to prove mathematically that the Biblical miracles were not necessarily violations of natural law.
Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (hereafter, NBT) is available online and makes for interesting reading, especially for those who admire the recondite and embellished prose of the Victorian intelligentsia. Some caveats must be noted, however; with the benefit of historical hindsight. It is obvious that Babbage was (as we must confess ourselves to be) a product of his times.
First, as mentioned before, Babbage uncritically accepted the old-earth arguments of Lyell, which were becoming popular at the time, as irrefutable scientific facts. He speaks, for instance, of “the facts in which all capable of investigation agree—facts which it is needless to recite, they having been so fully and ably stated in the works of Mr. Lyell and Dr. Buckland” that indicate “distant and successive periods.” Babbage conflates the “facts of nature” with the interpretations imposed on those facts. To Babbage, the existence of fossils and geological strata provided a clear, unmistakeable record of vast ages of time that was so obvious, one would have to make leave of his senses to deny it. If Babbage could have learned contrary evidence that large deposits of strata and fossils could have formed rapidly, indeed must have, including formations that some geologists long claimed must have required millions of years, such as the Redwall Limestone in Grand Canyon, it might have tempered his dogmatism. Instead, jumping on the Lyellian bandwagon forced Babbage to conform the Bible to these “facts of nature” rather than trust the authority of Scripture and doubt the fallible interpretations of man – a fallacy made by some creationists today. Predictably, therefore, we find Babbage in NBT making excuses for why the Genesis creation account might not mean what it clearly says. In Chapter IV of his treatise, he argues that we cannot trust the transmission or translation of the ancient texts of Genesis to be accurate. Arguments like this, unfortunately, hand skeptics the rope to hang all of Christianity: if we cannot trust what the Bible says about the history of the world, how can we trust its claims about eternal life? Though his doubt apparently applies only to the early chapters of Genesis, since he appears to find the rest of the text reliable, he should have known that science has very limited interpretive validity when investigating the unobservable past, and is frequently wrong. And why did he not tremble to contradict Jesus Christ, who treated the writings of Moses, including the creation account, as historically fact?
This leads to a second caveat: the myth of scientific progress. Babbage wrote like a positivist, assuming, as was common in Victorian Britain, that science was an upward, progressive path to nearly infallible truth. It was easy to fall into this assumption, seeing the progress taking place rapidly all around during the Industrial Revolution. Victorians were obsessed with progress, and since so much of the progress was due to scientific discovery, it was easy to grant science more powers than it can muster. Babbage did not have our vantage point, with two world wars, the atomic bomb, the Darwinian Revolution, Social Darwinism, eugenics and many other fatal evidences that science is not the value-free, objective, progressive enterprise he assumed it to be. Babbage knew nothing of Kuhn, Popper and the revolutions in scientific philosophy that have made moderns (and post-moderns) demote science from unwarranted exaltation. Nor did he foresee how the Darwinian Revolution and the rise of Big Science institutions would trample the very Biblical faith he professed. One must read the NBT, and any other writings of the time, with the maturity of hindsight.
A third caveat regards Babbage’s position on natural law. Nineteenth century scientists were obsessed with natural law; Newton, the British hero, had demonstrated that nature ran with clockwork regularity that could be described in mathematical terms. Newton’s successors extrapolated the faith far beyond what Newton himself believed, to the point where Enlightenment scientists and thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries subjugated all of reality to natural laws, inviolable, and presumably as simple and straightforward as Newton’s laws of motion. The search for natural laws got out of control. By the end of the 19th century, Freud was searching for natural laws of human behavior; others were seeking to describe biology and earth history with equations. They could not have known that the 20th century would bring quantum mechanics, relativity, and chaos theory. Ultra-Newtonianism, expressed in LaPlace’s claims that could one know the motions of all particles, one could predict the future, was dealt a death blow by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which revealed a fundamental unpredictability in the very fabric of the physics. Scientists today despair of finding laws of planet formation or animal behavior or human psychology that would allow them to predict such phenomena with any meaningful degree of accuracy. The faith lives on among some cosmologists who believe that one day scientists will derive a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, a set of physical laws that will describe the universe. Many philosophers today, however, believe this to be a chasing after wind.
A bizarre example of Babbage’s faith in Newtonianism can be seen in chapter IX of NBT, in which Babbage claims that every word we utter is indelibly impressed on the earth, according to the law of action and reaction. He believed anything anyone ever said could be retrieved if we had instruments sensitive enough. Working just before Thomson, Maxwell, Carnot and other scientists who were developing the laws of thermodynamics and entropy, Babbage was unaware there could be limits on the reversibility of natural processes; therefore, as one biographer notes, “information cannot be shuttled between mill and store without leaking.” The law of increasing entropy leads to irreversible processes, one consequence being that information uttered into the world can be irretrievably lost.
When the reader understands where Babbage is coming from, he can find much of value in the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. Most interesting is his rebuttal to the arguments of David Hume (1711-1776), the skeptical philosopher who had created quite a stir with his seemingly persuasive argument against miracles. Again, it was based on the Newtonian obsession with natural law. Hume argued that it is more probable that those claiming to have seen a miracle were either lying or deceived than that the regularity of nature had been violated. Babbage knew a lot more about the mathematics of probability than Hume. In chapter X of NBT, Babbage applied numerical values to the question, chiding Hume for his subjectivity. A quick calculation proves that if there were 99 reliable witnesses to the resurrection of a man from the dead (and I Corinthians 15:6 claims there were over 500), the probability is a trillion to one against the falsehood of their testimony, compared to the probability of one in 200 billion against anyone in the history of the world having been raised from the dead. This simple calculation shows it takes more faith to deny the miracle than to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses. Thus Babbage renders specious Hume’s assertion that the improbabiliy of a miracle could never be overcome by any number of witnesses. Apply the math, and the results do not support that claim, Babbage says: “From this it results that, provided we assume that independent witnesses can be found of whose testimony it can be stated that it is more probable that it is true than that it is false, we can always assign a number of witnesses which will, according to Hume’s argument, prove the truth of a miracle.” (Italics in original.) Babbage takes his conquest of Hume so far that by Chapter XIII, he argues that “It is more probable that any law, at the knowledge of which we have arrived by observation, shall be subject to one of those violations which, according to Hume’s definition, constitutes a miracle, than that it should not be so subjected.”
The heart of NBT is an argument that miracles do not violate natural law, using Babbage’s own concept of a calculating machine. This forms an engaging thought experiment. With his own Analytical Engine undoubtedly fresh on his mind, he asks the reader to imagine a calculating engine that might show very predictable regularity, even for billions of iterations, such as a machine that counts integers. Then imagine it suddenly jumps to another natural law, which again repeats itself with predictable regularity. If the designer of the engine had made it that way on purpose, it would show even more intelligent design than if it only continued counting integers forever. Babbage extends his argument through several permutations, to the point where he convinces the reader that it takes more intelligence to design a general purpose calculating engine that can operate reliably according to multiple natural laws, each known to the designer, each predictable by the designer, than to design a simple machine that mindlessly clicks away according to a single law. So here we see Babbage employing his own specialty – the general-purpose calculating machine – to argue his point. He concluded, therefore, as he reiterated in his later autobiographical work Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), miracles are not “the breach of established laws, but... indicate the existence of far higher laws.” (Note again the obsession with natural laws.)
Since some might argue his view is just as deterministic as Newtonianism, Babbage devotes a chapter to explaining why his view does not lead to fatalism. He also briefly touches on the question of free will (Chapters III, XV), though he declines to become embroiled in “that abstruse discussion.” His calculating engine analogy is intriguing despite possible theological problems it might raise. Today it might best be suited for convincing a modern Newtonian that miracles can be scientific; they are not necessarily violations of natural law. Otherwise, NBT is very much a product of its time, with a weak view of Scripture, but valuable for its thought experiments and glimpses into the mind of Charles Babbage himself. At the more mature age of 73, Babbage wrote, “Almost all thinking men who have studied the laws which govern the animate and inanimate world around us, agree that the belief in the existence of one Supreme Creator, possessed of infinite wisdom and power, is open to far less difficulties than the supposition of the absence of any cause, or of the existence of a plurality of causes.”
Charles Babbage stood shoulder to shoulder with the leading scientists of Britain. He was a leading founder of the Royal Astronomical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and promulgated the improvement of British science and mathematics. John Hudson Tiner says of him, and his Cambridge fellow students who had resolved to dedicate their lives to God, that “They agreed to strive to leave the world a better place than they had found it.” Babbage certainly did that. He had his idiosyncrasies, as would be expected of a visionary and genius, and modern creationists might decry what his Victorian weak view of Scripture did to Christianity in later years. but there can be little doubt Charles Babbage intended his words and his works to glorify God as Creator, and that he tried to live and work according to his sincerely held Christian principles. His life also exemplifies the point of this series. Look at the most eminent and influential scientists in history, and they overwhelmingly were Christians and creationists. Let the computer you are using to read this story be an ever present reminder of that fact.

[Merry]

What a great little biography! I know a few people I'll share it with. I read a little of your TE's ramblings. Sure he's polite, but do these guys believe the Bible? Yikes.

[Merry]

Insigth into TE'S: Bad teaching. One TE just mailed me and said that when he studied theology his teacher told him they had to ignore the Bible as a work holding any historical or scientific merit and just look at it as stories written to expound spirtual Truth. Of course, this places Jesus right up there with the Cat in the Hat.............

[Gumpngreen]

Science, Education, and the Subject of Origins
- IMPACT No. 375 September 2004

http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-375.htm

That's one method of attack I've been using a lot lately whenever I get into an argument with an atheist. If you can get them to admit that their belief in evolution, Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism, etc. is a RELIGIOUS belief not based in fact then it's a whole lot easier to continue. At the very least most will consider becoming a Deist. If so, it's that much easier to convince them Christianity is the only logical choice. Even if they're stubborn and still want to be a theistic evolutionist or an old earth