Tag Archives: unguided evolution

Reality and the Monarch Butterfly

Journey of Faith, Science, , ,

This week I have another amazing animal story, this time about the Monarch butterfly. Monarchs are gorgeous, and found in most parts of the United States and Canada.

Scientists didn’t know where Monarchs went in the winter. We now know Monarchs from the Eastern United States and Canada spend the winter in Mexico. They migrate thousands of miles, and often know exactly what tree they are looking for, just as salmon return to the stream of their birth, and loggerhead turtles return to lay their eggs on the beach where they were hatched.

All of these species, and some other species like birds, have this impossible-to-obtain-by-chance technology built in. They know the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field (birds can “see” it with their eyes), and they can feel the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field (birds have this technology in their beaks). They have the ability to process this information, and to adjust to changes in the Earth’s magnetic field. We humans have learned how to do this only recently, using sophisticated measuring instruments and complex computer programs. All of these animals, including tiny Monarchs, have this technology built in, and are born knowing how to use it.

Complex technology in unrelated species proves the existence of God. Clearly a common designer placed it there for a purpose. As I have shown before, it is mathematically impossible to get technology this complex by any chance-based process, such as Darwin’s theory of natural selection acting on random mutations and gradually, slowly, with very small steps, each one of which has some survival advantage, improving species.

What really shocks me about Monarch butterflies is that, in this migration of thousands of miles, no butterfly has ever made the round trip. Monarchs typically return to the same tree where their great-great-grandfathers were hatched. There are at least four generations involved. Each generation goes from egg to caterpillar to butterfly. The fourth generation, the generation that spends the winter in Mexico, typically lives about 6 months, the other three generations each live about two months.

It appears Monarchs have built-in technology that stores memories – information – from their great-great-grandfathers. This technology is way beyond human understanding. We don’t know how to begin to modify life to do this. It is absolutely stunning technology.

Two key points: First, this four-generation migration pattern, apparently using technology to remember what your great-great-grandfather did, and different life spans for different generations, absolutely shatters Darwin’s theory. It couldn’t have arisen from gradual, small changes.

Second, is it possible the Monarch Butterfly gives us a glimpse of God? We don’t know how our brains store memories. The popular perception is that memories are electrically coded into our brains, much like computer memories have information stored in them. Maybe so, but with Monarchs I wonder whether there might be more, whether memory is stored in the “cloud,” so to speak, meaning outside our space-time reality. We don’t understand consciousness. To me, the thousands of similar near-death experiences, with bright lights, fantastically beautiful colors and sounds, meeting deceased relatives, and often meeting Jesus, prove we have eternal souls. So I ask you whether, just possibly, the Monarch Butterfly is giving us a glimpse of something eternal, of a new reality.

Thanks for reading!

A New Dawn

Atheist Pseudo-Science, Science, , , ,

How do you explain the miracle of dawn? With heavenly clockwork, an immense fireball rises over one horizon and marches inexorably toward the other, bringing light and heat, making all life possible, and astonishing the sentient beings who stand witness. My best dawns were after sailing through the night, and seeing the darkness slowly conquered by the rising Sun. If you’ve ever watched a dawn, from first rays to final glory, you know it is a miracle.

In the ancient world, dawn, like every other mysterious thing, happened at the will of the gods. Over thousands of years, and most impressively in the last few hundred years, we’ve come up with different stories. We now say the Sun is a ball of burning stuff, of hydrogen atoms in a controlled ten-billion-year thermonuclear explosion. We now say the predictable march across the sky, and all other clockwork of the heavens, are the result of gravity, a fundamental force of nature where objects interact over great distances. Many extend this progress story – this “grand progress narrative” of “natural” causes replacing divine causes – to the origin of humans, we sentient creatures who observe the dawn. Many will tell you we are here because life arose by accident, and that, through blind, unguided evolution, the continual process of natural selection preserving the best mutations, those first cells eventually transformed into human beings.

This “grand progress narrative” supports a philosophy called Scientism. Scientism is the belief that everything can be explained by so-called “natural” causes, without God. Scientism is clearly not science, but it masquerades as science, and many can’t tell the difference. The grand progress narrative is scientism’s main theme. Scientism says there will always be a natural, materialistic explanation, and that if we just wait long enough we will figure it out. Scientism claims that natural causes alone can and will explain the dawn, and even how we came to be here.

Most people aren’t aware that in the last few decades this grand progress narrative has been proven false. Scientific progress has not slowed; fortunately for us new discoveries continue. But this thousand year old story of “natural” causes replacing divine causes has been reversed. To see why, let’s look at the dawn piece by piece.

We know the Sun is made of “stuff,” mostly burning hydrogen. We now also know that, without God, there is no explanation why stuff, or anything else, exists. All of true science – observation, experimentation, and reasoning – now leads us to a unique event – a universe created out of nothing, all matter and energy, even time and space itself, created in a single “big bang” instant. This “big bang” theory forced Atheists to retreat and claim, with absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever, that our universe somehow popped out of an infinite, eternal, and perpetually inflating “multiverse.” This infinite multiverse theory was disproven by the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin singularity theorem of 2003, what I have previously called the “God Theorem.” As one scientist put it, “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”

We know that the clockwork of the heavens results from gravity. We have learned that gravity, along with dozens of other constants and features of our universe, is “impossibly fine-tuned,” set just perfect for life. If the force of gravity were stronger or weaker by one part in a number with 60 zeros life would not exist. That’s a greater precision than throwing a dart randomly and hitting a bulls-eye on the other side of the universe. Other features of our universe are even more precisely set. Without God, we have absolutely no explanation for this fine-tuning, and the amazingly perfect design of our universe.

Some say the first life arose by accident. Science now tells us that’s a fantasy. Harvard’s “Origin of Life Initiative” crashed and burned, its scientists crushed by the enormity of the problem. We now know that even the most “simple” life is a fantastically designed collection of micro-miniaturized factories and roads and storage facilities. Without God, we cannot explain the origin of life.

Some say, most of our popular culture will insist, that human beings arose solely through blind, unguided evolution. Yet we have found massive amounts of original information in every species on Earth. Throughout all of science, all of human history, all of our human experience, we have never found meaningful information that did not arise from a mind. This information – unique DNA coding in each species – proves the existence of a transcendent intelligence.

At this time in human history, we are witnessing a new dawn. Scientism’s grand progress narrative has been exposed. Without God, there is no explanation why anything exists. Without God, there is no explanation for the incredible design and fine-tuning for our universe. Without God, there is no explanation for the origin of life. Without God, there is no explanation of the creation of new species, including and especially human beings. It is a new dawn for belief, and if we as a culture can grasp the wonder, and work together as God wants, there may be hope for us yet.

Thanks for reading.

A Confused Legal System

Atheist Pseudo-Science, , , , ,

Why is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) anti-faith? I supported them when they fought for the underdog and against discrimination. Now they attack any teacher who dares to suggest that life was designed. See this recent news item from Maine.

Our legal system is confused. It treats Atheism as the preferred and protected religion of the United States. If you suggest design, and discuss the new scientific evidence of design, you are considered to be imposing your religious beliefs on Atheists. But if an Atheist distorts the evidence to champion Darwin and his theory of unguided evolution, his religious views (Atheism) are protected. To me, your religion is your belief system when it comes to God. As I read the Constitution, ALL religions, ALL belief systems about God, are protected. We are free to choose any one. So we should be free to discuss scientific evidence of design in classrooms, to offer alternatives to Darwin. We should be intellectually free. Surely our founding fathers, who all believed in God, did not mean to prohibit discussion of evidence for God.

If I could find the right case/client for this, this is something I would love to take on in court.

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.

Perfection and Whale Hips

Atheist Pseudo-Science, Science, , , ,

One so-called “scientific” argument against the existence of God is that there are organs or features that appear unnecessary or imperfect. The argument is that this somehow shows that species evolved through a purely unguided process. Darwin wrote:

“On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility … should so frequently occur.”

This is nonsense. To borrow a phrase from a friend who teaches physics at MIT, this argument “is so bad it’s not even wrong.” It makes no sense on several levels. First, we are not able to judge God. What we think of as useless or imperfect may make sense in God’s plan. Second, who says everything has to be perfect or even useful? You don’t have to show that everything is perfect to have a scientific basis for belief; all you have to show is clear evidence of design in the universe and in life. (My book shows overwhelming evidence for that in seven areas of science.)

That’s all old news. What’s new, and amazing, is that organ-by-organ, feature-by-feature, scientists are discovering that items once thought useless are absolutely necessary. Take the appendix, cited by Darwin himself as useless. We now know the appendix is a “safe house” for helpful bacteria that may be otherwise destroyed in our stomachs, and serves other critical functions. About fifty species of mammals have an appendix, and those species are so diverse that, to quote one scientist, the appendix “must have evolved separately at least 32 times, and perhaps as many as 38 times.” Wow! So some blind, unguided, and ultimately chance-based process produced the same organ dozens of times in different species – or a common designer placed it there for a reason. Draw your own conclusion.

Take the myth of junk DNA – the argument that human beings were not designed because the majority of our DNA code was thought to be useless “junk.” This myth was destroyed in 2012 by 450 scientists worldwide as part of the ENCODE project.

And now whale hips. Whale hips were said to be the “marquee example” of a useless feature. Guess what? A recent scientific article explains why they are still necessary. Details aside, without whale hips you’re not likely to get baby whales.

I think baby whales are cute. Perhaps they’re perfect.

Thanks for reading.