Monthly Archives: March 2018

The Irony of Stephen Hawking

Atheist Pseudo-Science, ,

Stephen Hawking was exceptional. He fought ALS for 55 years, perhaps longer than any other person. Despite being confined to a wheelchair for most of his life, and unable to communicate fully, he made significant contributions to physics.

But Hawking had a blind spot when it came to God. Even though his own discoveries pointed to God, he refused to believe.

He died March 14 at age 76. When he was born, most people thought the universe was eternal – that it had always existed. Hawking helped change that view, helped convince others the universe had a beginning. As I show in Chapter 7 of Counting to God, this now undeniable scientific conclusion points to a first cause, a cause outside of time and space. It points directly to God. Yet Hawking refused to accept his own evidence. In an interview, he stated:

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation.

But his problem, and the problem of every other Atheist, is that there is no scientific experiment or fact-based theory that can explain a universe created from nothing. One of the most respected laws of physics, the First Law of Thermodynamics, states that mass/energy cannot be created or destroyed. Hawking denied the First Law. He wrote “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.”

Voltaire wrote: “To the living we owe respect, to the dead we owe only the truth.” The truth is Hawking’s statement is one of the most illogical statements ever made. As English mathematician John Lennox pointed out, it is triple nonsense. First, where did gravity come from? “Who put it there? And what was the creative force behind its birth?” Second, how can a law of physics create something from nothing? “The laws of physics can explain how the jet engine works, but someone has to build the thing, put in the fuel and start it up.” Third, what was the torch, the first cause, to start the process? “Who lit it, if not God?”

Hawking’s books sold millions, but many languished unread on coffee tables. It wasn’t just because they were difficult; it was because in key ways they didn’t make sense. Hawking tried to use math and geometry to avoid the question of how time began. He compared asking what happened before the universe was created to asking what’s south of the South Pole. He invented a concept of “imaginary time,” where time has multiple dimensions like the surface of the Earth. But imaginary time is just that, imaginary. It’s cute math to deny God, but without a shred of scientific evidence.

The fine-tuning of the laws of physics, Chapter 8 of Counting to God, was another major problem for Hawking’s Atheism. In his youth, he developed a formula that showed how fine-tuned gravity had to be for the universe to not fly apart and to not collapse on itself. Paul Davies used that formula to compute that the gravitational constant was fine-tuned to at least one part in a number with 60 zeros. Getting that precision by chance is like picking a special, marked marble out of a pile of marbles 100 light years in diameter, big enough to include thousands of stars. Hawking knew that. He wrote:

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. . . . The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.

Yes, fine-tuning is a “remarkable fact.” It is also remarkable, and ironic, that Steven Hawking could prove fine-tuning but not accept God.

His story was worthy of a movie, and indeed became one in the award-winning 2014 film The Theory of Everything. But because Hawking rejected God, he missed the true theory of everything. It has three letters: G O D. Only God can explain a universe created from nothing. Only God can explain the fine-tuning of the universe. Only God can explain the enormous amount of information needed to build every living creature.

Thanks for reading. Have a blessed Easter.

Doug

The Glory of the Peacock

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Have you ever seen a peacock? The tail – “train” – opens like a fan, and explodes with colors and patterns. Here’s a short video:

The sight is glorious.

How did the peacock get its tail? The secular world insists all creatures “evolved” by a process of keeping the best mistakes, by mutations that just, “accidentally,” happened to create incredible technology. I’ve shown mathematically why that theory, Darwin’s “goo-to-you” theory of evolution, is nonsense, why mutations only destroy information; they can’t create it.

Darwin knew nothing about DNA and genes, but he did know his theory did not explain the peacock. The oversized, glorious tail of the peacock slows it down. The tail does not help the peacock get food, avoid predators, or otherwise survive. How did such a beautiful tail “evolve” without God? In 1860, a year after he published his theory, Darwin wrote:

“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

Eleven years later Darwin tried to solve the problem. He invented a “theory of sexual selection.” The basic idea was that the peacock’s tail had the value of attracting females (peahens), and therefore had “evolved” without God. In other words, Darwin claimed that peacocks with sexier tails had better luck with the peahens, and passed on their genes to the next generation. It’s a “just-so” story worthy of Kipling, and does nothing to explain how the whole process got started, where the information and technology came from to build the first peacock tail, but it was enough of a fig leaf to satisfy generations of Darwinists that the problem had been solved.

Until a research team tested it. After a seven year study, researchers announced in 2007 that “the peacock’s train is not the object of female sexual preference – contradicting Darwin’s theory of sexual selection.” In other words, females mated with “poor-quality” peacocks as often as with “flashy, high-quality” peacocks. Darwin’s ‘theory of sexual selection’ fails to explain the very thing Darwin concocted it for! More hard scientific evidence (like the rejection of “junk” DNA and the absence of intermediary forms in the fossil record) that Darwin was wrong.

And the colors! Those brilliant, iridescent colors of the peacock don’t come from dyes. They are produced by super small geometric structures of atoms, designed to intensify certain wavelengths of light. To design that structure, and to build the factories to produce and assemble it, is stunning, futuristic technology.

Just like Darwin in 1860, evolutionary biologists today should feel sick looking at the glory of the peacock. A glory that reflects, in a very small way, the glory of God.

Thanks for reading. Please share the good news of true science. Together we can change the world.

Doug

The DNA of Eve

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One spectacular achievement of modern science is the ability to sequence DNA. We can now “read” the exact DNA code of you, me, and every other living creature. Human beings have about 3.2 billion letters of DNA code in almost every cell. By “reading” the code, and comparing differences, we can trace genealogy and recreate the history of the human race. When we do that, we get fantastic confirmation of the Bible.

You may have heard of “mitochondrial Eve.” It is now commonly accepted, even by Atheist scientists, that all human beings are descended from a single female. This woman, this mother of all humanity, they call “mitochondrial Eve.” Of course, people who believe in molecules-to-man evolution aren’t suggesting the Bible is true, but they are agreeing with the Bible that we are all descended from a single female. Secular scientists will tell you that mitochondrial Eve lived about 200,000 years ago. The Bible tells us Eve lived around 6,000 years ago.

Mitochondria are energy factories in cells. They have their own DNA, and each person receives their mitochondria DNA, also called mtDNA, only from their mothers. By measuring differences in mtDNA from one person to another, we can measure the “genetic drift” from mutations over generations, and get an idea of how closely people are related. If we know the total number of mtDNA differences in human beings, and know how fast mutations/differences pile up over generations, we can estimate the time back to Eve, Biblical or otherwise.

The original studies assumed that mtDNA mutations occurred as at the same rate as mutations in normal DNA. The data now reveals a much faster rate of mutations in mtDNA than in normal DNA. If Eve lived 200,000 years ago, the total number of differences in mtDNA among humans living today should be around 470. If Eve lived 6,000 years ago, as the Bible tells us, the total number of differences in mtDNA should be around 80. Guess what — the measured number is 80!

Science again proves the Bible is correct. You might also be interested in an earlier post noting that, using differences in DNA from the Y chromosome, which men inherit only from their fathers, the data indicates that all men are descended from a single man who lived about 4,500 years ago. (Hint – there was a big flood.) You can find it here: https://countingtogod.com/memories-of-the-flood/

Going back to Eve, the mtDNA analysis confirms the Bible in a second important way. If you look at a chart (Answers magazine, Jan-Feb 2018, Vol. 13 No. 1, page 59) connecting related individuals according to their mtDNA, you will find three points, or “nodes,” from which all mtDNA is related. These nodes represent the wives of Noah’s three sons. They are close to each other on the chart, because they were each possibly 10th generation descendants of Eve. From these three nodes the chart spreads out, as the mtDNA of all humanity is descended from one of these three women.

Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard in cell and developmental biology, recently published an excellent book titled “Replacing Darwin.” I hope to write more about this exciting book. Dr. Jeanson has studied mtDNA differences in a variety of species. In every case, from chickens to fruit flies roundworms to bakers yeast, the data contradicts the predictions of millions of years of evolution. The actual number of mtDNA differences is much less than those predictions.

It is sad that our “popular” media purposely ignores scientific results that confirm the Bible. Instead, our biased media hypes stories intended to make the Bible look unreliable. I noted a few months ago where it was reported, and read by hundreds of millions of people, that DNA testing of people living today in Lebanon contradicted the Bible. These stories got it absolutely backward, because the DNA findings were exactly what the Bible says, that, despite God’s instructions to kill all Canaanites, the Israelites disobeyed, and let some live. Here is my post on that: https://countingtogod.com/dna-and-the-bible/

How are we to overcome this enormous bias, this deliberate withholding of the truth? I am not aware of a single major newspaper, magazine, or TV channel that reported the new data on mtDNA mutations, this stunning discovery, this scientific revelation that Eve lived about 6,000 years ago. Perhaps the only way to fight this bias is through the combined efforts of ordinary people, people like me and you. Friends don’t let friends be Atheists, at least not without exposing them to science that reveals God.

We need to spread the good news of true science. Together we can change the world.

Thanks for reading.

Doug