Monthly Archives: November 2014

Let’s Be Thankful

Journey of Faith, Science,

In this week of Thanksgiving, let’s give thanks to God.

We don’t normally put our lives in historical perspective, but the average person in the United States today has a quality of life superior to that of even royalty as recently as 100 years ago. We have better food and nutrition, better entertainment, better medical treatment, better transportation, and on and on. Personally, I’m not willing to give up modern dentistry.

Compared to earlier generations, we are incredibly spoiled and easily annoyed. We drive around in our modern cars, with radios and GPS and heated seats, and get annoyed if we get delayed in traffic. We complain if our restaurant meal is not hot enough or exactly what we ordered. We get enormous benefits from our society and government yet love to complain about taxes. Consider that, for almost all of human history, when the sun went down, there wasn’t a lot to see. Average life expectancy in the Bronze and Iron ages was 26. In medieval England, even if you made it to age 21, and even if you were a member of the aristocracy, you could only expect to live to age 64.

So let’s be thankful for what we have. Let’s also be thankful for a universe that reveals evidence of a Creator in so many ways, such as the fine-tuning of the constants of nature, the origin of life, and the creation of new species. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible attributes – his eternal power and divine nature – have been understood and observed by what he made, so that people are without excuse.” Romans 1:20

Thanks for reading.

New Evidence Against “Junk DNA”

Atheist Pseudo-Science, Science, , ,

Only 1.5% of your DNA is used to build proteins. Proteins are the machine parts of life. Followers of Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution claim that the rest of your DNA, your “noncoding” DNA, is mostly “junk,” and that this supports Darwin’s theory that human beings were created through accidental mutations and natural selection. They predict that a haphazard, unguided process should produce large sections of useless DNA.

My book has five pages on this subject. Science has now found that most and likely all of our DNA serves a purpose. That stunning announcement was made in September 2012 by scientists working on the ENCODE project. It made the front pages of newspapers around the world. ENCODE found biochemical functions for 80% of our DNA. “It’s likely 80 percent will go to 100 percent,” stated one of their lead researchers. “We don’t really have any large chunks of redundant DNA. This metaphor of junk isn’t that useful.” The front page of the New York Times announced: “The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as ‘junk’ but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave.”

This week the prestigious science magazine Nature published new evidence that “noncoding” DNA serves a purpose. The authors “highlight a potentially large and complex set of biologically regulated translational events from transcripts formerly thought to lack coding potential.” In other words, we’re finding out what the other 98.5% does. The authors of this new study point out that just because we may not have figured out yet what the purpose is, doesn’t mean it is junk.

This is a huge problem for Darwinists. “If ENCODE is right, then Evolution is wrong,” admits one, using “Evolution” here to refer to neo-Darwinian theory. But ENCODE is not some fringe group. It is an international collaboration of 450 of the world’s most respected scientists, working together, with no religious agenda whatsoever, “to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome.” The 11 authors of this new study also have no religious agenda.

How did we get 3.2 billion letters of working DNA? Science continues to reveal the existence of God.

Thanks for reading.

Lafayette, Louisiana

Atheist Pseudo-Science, Science, , , , , ,

I was invited to Lafayette to talk about my book, and last Sunday I went. Did you know the National Bureau of Economic Research rates Lafayette the “Happiest” city in the United States? (All of the top five and seven of the top 10 were in Louisiana; New York City got the lowest rating). I sensed I was headed to God’s country when I got on the plane. A Roman Catholic priest sat next to me and a young man with a T-shirt quoting a line from the Book of Proverbs sat in front of me.

I was met at the airport by Wayne Taylor, a wonderful man who is Executive Director of the Louisiana Baptist Foundation. Wayne introduced me to a number of Baptists attending a convention, and allowed me to speak to a youth group that night. Some of them related to me the usual sad stories of being bullied about false science by atheist professors.

The next morning we headed off to Baton Rouge, to meet some more people and a key aide to Governor Jindal. Louisiana has enacted the Science Freedom Act:

(1) The State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, upon
request of a city, parish, or other local public school board, shall allow and
assist teachers, principals, and other school administrators to create and foster
an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes
critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of
scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the
origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.

(2) Such assistance shall include support and guidance for teachers
regarding effective ways to help students understand, analyze, critique, and
objectively review scientific theories being studied, including those enumerated
in Paragraph (1) of this Subsection.

You would hope that encouraging teachers and students to examine scientific theories critically would be welcomed. Of course, that has not been the case. The law has been very controversial and the ACLU and other groups are constantly seeking to repeal the law and constantly threatening litigation whenever a teacher dares to reveal recent evidence contradicting Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. How very sad for all of us that students are denied access to the true facts of science, simply because those facts contradict the atheist worldview. I signed a copy of my book for the Governor. I offered my help, perhaps by appearing at a state hearing, to further the cause of scientific freedom. I hope they take me up on that.

Thanks for reading.

Pope Francis

Journey of Faith, Science, , ,

As you may have read, Pope Francis recently made some interesting remarks on evolution and the Big Bang. The media coverage of those remarks has been pretty confused, to say the least, and often hostile.

Here’s what I believe the Pope actually said (translations may differ):

“When we read in Genesis the account of Creation, we risk imagining that God was a magician, with such a magic wand as to be able to do everything. However, it was not like that… And thus creation went forward for centuries, millennia and millennia until it became what we know today, in fact because God is not a demiurge [demigod] or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities.”
“The Big Bang, which is today posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creation; rather, it requires it. Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve.”

Now the Pope is not a scientist, but I think he got it pretty right. The Big Bang is a theory of creation. It stuns me how often people don’t get that. I was on a syndicated radio program, and the host said to me something like – “Religious people believe in creation, but scientists have the Big Bang Theory.” The Big Bang is all about creation – all of time and space and matter and energy created in a single instance from absolute nothingness. It is scientific verification of the first words of the Book of Genesis. Until the 1965 discovery of relic photons from the Big Bang, many scientists objected to the Big Bang Theory because they said it was too religious. Now that it is mainstream, accepted science, atheists somehow want to pretend that it is contrary to God.

As for evolution, the key point to keep in mind is that the Pope is using that word in its normal sense – as a process of change. He certainly isn’t referring to Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution. What the Pope is saying is that life evolved over billions of years into what we see today, that all of life was not teleported onto this planet, that God worked over billions of years to create each species. That is absolutely consistent with the scientific evidence. As I’ve noted before, Darwin’s theory of unguided evolution has been emphatically disproved in recent years, although you won’t find much evidence of that in the popular media. But mainstream evidence, such as the findings of 450 scientists working on the ENCODE project to map the human genome, that our DNA is mostly or entirely functional and has more than one level of information buried in it, clearly disproves unguided evolution.

So the Pope got it right. I’m not a Roman Catholic, but I’m finding a lot about Pope Francis to like.

Thanks for reading.