Month: February 2022

More Information on Each Page

            One idea to create more user-friendly plans is to use the open space on each page of the plans for adding details and schedule tables that apply to that page. 

            Why should field people flip back and forth from the floor plans to a back page containing details and schedules, when plenty of room on the floor plan page itself exists for this information?

            If the architectural plans first floor has a note saying: “see structural S6.4”, why not have this structural detail cut-and-paste on to some open space on this architectural first floor page?

            And why can’t printing occur on both sides of a page?  The floor plan, for example, could be on the right side of an opened set of plans, and the applicable details and schedule tables could be printed on the reverse side of the previous page.

            These details, tables, and schedules can be reduced in size to fit around the open spaces to suit each particular page, yet still retained in their correct scale in their normal location in the plans. 

            With some new and original re-thinking in terms of plans layout, the total number of pages of building plans might be cut by one-third, making each set of plans cheaper, lighter, and easier to use on the jobsite.

Mass/Energy and Information 2

            Science has revealed that information transcends above the material medium.

            The actual writing of a new murder mystery novel changes character as Agatha Christie puts her ideas down on paper, making the fundamental transition from the abstract and intangible nature of informational ideas to the physical materials of paper and ink. 

            The interesting observation here is that the letters, words, punctuation marks, spaces, paragraphs, and book chapters could be on any subject.  It could be a murder mystery, foreign-agent suspense thriller, romantic comedy, historical biography, or a cookbook filled with recipes.

            The mediums of the ink and paper, the ones and zeros of the laptop computer word-processing code, and the English language are entirely indifferent and neutral as to the genre category of the information being presented.

            The material medium does not dictate or guide the outcome, but is merely the means for expression.

            But then another interesting transition takes place. 

After the murder mystery novel is completed and enters the published book phase, physical print copies now sit on shelves in bookstores waiting for someone like me to see it in its material form, buy it, and take it home to read.

            Then another amazing thing happens. 

            I open up the physical book and begin to read the text in the form of letters arranged as words and sentences in the English language, and the information that Agatha Christie created has passed through the material medium of ink on paper to become once again information that is the engrossing murder mystery that keeps me up reading late into the night, the who-done-it story And Then There Were None.    

            Without hitting this nail on the head too many times, this recognition of the fundamental essence of creative information in literary fiction writing has huge implications for a more accurate and up-to-date scientific understanding of the causal mechanisms behind the phenomena in the natural world.

            The non-material nature of information should tell both professional scientists and laymen like me that a purely materialistic worldview of the universe, absent the input of creative agency, is unnecessarily and illogically limited. 

            The organized complexity of the system of information that comprises a murder mystery story is not the same thing as that same story in physical print form in a book I can hold in my hands.

            The abstract and intangible creative thought behind the murder mystery story is not the same as the hands and fingers of Agatha Christie physically typing-out the story day-by-day using the materials of ink and paper.

            This seems to me to be a workable analogy to the material universe we study through science, and the abstract, non-material information this research reveals.

            Agatha Christie could just as easily tell her murder mystery story verbally to a small group sitting around a camp-fire, maybe over the course of two or three nights, in a shorter abbreviated and abridged version.

            Scientifically studying how our throats and mouths form the individual sounds of the words of human speech, how these sounds are carried as sound-waves across the distance of seemingly empty space to another person, and how our ears instantly translate these words/sounds into intelligible information within our minds is simply another material medium for passing along information.

            This scientific, fact-based information understood today in terms of the hard physics and chemistry of speech, sound, and hearing will still not explain the creative mental ingenuity that can invent a new suspense-filled murder mystery story from scratch out-of-nothing.  

            Telling the story verbally merely uses the mediums of speech, sound-waves, and hearing instead of paper and ink.

            But the distinctive thought-process is still the same mystery. 

            Its origin still has no material explanation in terms of the basic question of where does information come from in the first-place.

            Information by definition is abstract and non-material.  Mass/energy by contrast is physical and material.  

            Information and intelligent agency go together.

            Mass/energy is incapable of creating information, because mass/energy does not possess the ability to think.

            The worldview of scientific materialism is illogically limited because it attempts to tell modern audiences that And Then There Was None typed itself.  Scientific materialism illogically postulates that it did not need the intelligent agent Agatha Christie as the dynamic explanation of its origin.

            The independent yes/no feature of targeted brilliance has to come from somewhere other than material causations.

            This is ingeniously and concisely summarized in the question posed by some modern physicists in this Age ofInformation: Is the universe it before bit, or bit before it?[1]

            In this question, it is material in the form of mass/energy.  Bit is non-material in the form of the “bits” of ones and zeroes comprising the information in computer software language code.

            Did mass/energy come first before information, or did information come first followed by mass-energy?

            Did Agatha Christie conceive of her murder mystery book in her mind before it became typed words and sentences?

            That some combination of material objects like a typewriter, laptop computer, paper, and ink could create a murder mystery book on their own…without a mind…is inconceivable.

            The narrative can be spun to seemingly support the notion that the functionality of the mind/brain can be reduced to its material parts.

            But the transcendent feature of the independence that can navigate through the innumerable “yes” choices and “no” rejections to reach the end-point outcomes of specified function, argues compellingly that the sophisticated complexity of the thought-processes of the human mind/brain exists above the material mediums of quarks, atoms, and neural network connections alone.

[1] John Lennox: Socrates in the City in Labastide, France Part 1, published Jan. 12, 2018 on You Tube.

User-Friendly Design Plans

            As a construction superintendent or project manager, one of the activities I typically did at the start of a new project is to cut-up an entire set of plans.  I then make reduced copies of architectural and structural details, make reduced copies of door, window, shear panel, and other schedule tables, and then clear-tape them judiciously on the appropriate backside pages of another clean set of plans.

            I use colored pencils to color-code and highlight detail call-outs on the plans such as anchor bolt spacing, hold-downs, post anchors, shear-panel nailing, 3” thick mudsills, similar door sizes, similar window sizes, structural beams and posts, etc.

            Finally, I would sketch various parts of the building that I think are more clearly illustrated in three-dimensions, make reduced copies, and clear-tape these illustrations on to the appropriate backside pages of the working set of plans that I am also adding reduced details to with color highlighting.

            I do this cut-and-paste operation at the start of a new project because it prevents having to continually flip pages back and forth from the floor plans to the architectural and structural details, with the possibility of missing some important information. 

            This process of mine tells me that building design plans as traditionally formatted are not organized to provide the optimum clarity and ease of use for the people who count the most: the supervisors, forepersons, and tradespeople in the field who assemble the buildings.

            At the start of every new project, many mistakes occur simply because someone did not follow the chain of information all the way through five or six different pages of the plans, and thus missed a particular detail or note.

            If our goal is to improve the construction by minimizing potential construction mistakes, then the format and layout of the physical building plans needs to become more user-friendly.

            People in the field are using physical print sets of plans, and are not carrying around a laptop computer or a tablet device containing the plans in digital form on a screen.

            Considering the costs of correcting construction mistakes in terms of time and money, everything possible should be done to make building plans clear and easy to follow. 

            Why should assembly instructions for children’s $20 or $30 plastic model airplanes or battleships be better illustrated and more foolproof than design plans for a $20 million tract housing project?

Mass/Energy and Information 1

            When a famous author like Agatha Christie sat down at her typewriter, or today at a laptop computer, and began to write a classic murder mystery novel such as And Then There Were None, the initial creative inspiration inside her mind was abstract, non-material, and in the form of being information only.

            Over the course of the writing of this fictional novel the creative mental process remained informational and not physical. 

We know that Agatha Christie did not have to commit real murders as part of the research protocol to inspire the story as it progressed chapter-by-chapter.

            The human faculty of creative imagination alone was sufficient to craft the story.

            But possibly the deepest, currently unresolved mystery in the universe is that as Agatha Christie composes each one of her books, she is adding new information that never existed anywhere before.

            The creative literary mind is not pumping-out the same story over and over again like a repetitive machine.

            The human mind/brain is not a mass-production, manufacturing assembly-line limited to replicating the same identical product in large numbers…like the automobile I drive.

            The imaginative capacity to write And Then There Were None, and Murder on The Orient Express, in each case is adding a novel product that did not previously exist.

            Here lies one of the basic questions to ponder regarding our existence in this physical universe, of whether our human minds/brains are explainable through purely materialistic causations, or are they instead the product of a superior Mind/Being having unlimited mental boundaries similar to our own capacity for creative invention.

            By discovering complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated[1] systems of information everywhere we look in the natural living and non-living world, modern science has placed this question of the origin of information front-and-center in our search for purpose and meaning in the universe.

            One of the fundamental tenets of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is that “nature makes no sudden leaps.”

            But in this new Age of Information, modern science now tells us the exact opposite.

            Nature makes sudden and clear-cut leaps forward everywhere and in everything, through the timely introduction of new and previously non-existent, grouped packages of functionally complete information.

            Prior to the immergence of dinosaurs millions of years ago, the concept of a dinosaur did not previously exist.

            Prior to the immergence of life on earth roughly dated 3.8-billion years ago, the concept of a single-cell bacteria did not previously exist.

            Prior to the Big Bang creation of this universe 13.7 billion years ago, at least according to the current empirical evidence at-hand, the concept of a universe did not previously exist.

            Prior to the writing of the storyline plot of And Then There Were None, this information did not previously exist anywhere…not even in the mind of Agatha Christie until it immerged chapter-by-chapter in its final and completed form.

            Certainly, the creative inspiration for the writing of a fictional story must at least partially correspond somewhere to the trillions of neural network connections inside the mind/brain.

            So, I think it is fair to say that given more time, better computers and software programs, and brilliant investigative techniques, that modern science will someday pinpoint the location in the human mind/brain where a Chopin Etude, a Shakespeare play, or a murder mystery novel comes from.

            But the brilliance of the scientific method of research into the workings of the phenomena in the natural world confuses description with explanation,[2] which cannot be bridged through the investigative techniques of hard, “bench” science alone.

            Description and explanation are not the same.

            Modern science can now describe how at the Big Bang, gamma rays collide to form matter and anti-matter, and how in the first three minutes of the universe hydrogen, helium, and lithium were created…and not the rest of the elements of the Periodic Table which came later.[3] 

            But science cannot provide the deeper explanation of what is a universe and why it originated in this way.

            Science can describe how the microscopic molecular machinery inside living cells produces proteins that then build new and different cell-types, that then construct the architectural body-plans of living organisms.

            But science cannot explain the deeper question of where did all of these architectural body-plan designs and their instinctual lifestyle habits come from in the first-place.

            Science cannot explain the fundamental, chicken-and-egg dilemma of how it is that proteins are required to produce DNA, yet DNA is required to build proteins.

            This would appear to require the need for an outside arbitrator managing the required inputs of information.

            I sense that the frontier of the human mind/brain is even more complex than the coordinated functionality of the microscopic machinery inside the living cell, because the mind/brain exhibits the inexplicable freedom of creative thought.

            The human mind/brain displays the non-deterministic feature of independent decision-making that differentiates choices between a near infinity of “yes” options and “no” rejections to achieve the sweet-spots of functional outcomes.

            This independent decision-making is evident at the beginning of the universe in the complex sets of conditions that can form hydrogen, helium, and lithium…but not oxygen and carbon until a later point in time.

            This decision-making process moderates between a myriad of binary yes/no choices in the creation of the shape and function of my body, of the well-defined essence of a rose flower, and of the singular capacity of Agatha Christie to write a best-selling murder mystery book.

            The existence of this reality of independent, yes/no thought-processes integral within the structural framework of the physical universe, displays deliberate intention indivisible from the perceived function of the final end-product.

            In my opinion, as science progresses in this 21st-century the term scientific materialism is approaching or has already reached the point of becoming an oxymoron.

            The commendable research methodology of scientific materialism in the late 20th and early 21st-centuries has run head-on into a purpose-driven universe, always trending towards function.

            The organized complexity of the information content at the Big Bang, at the origin of life, in the double-helix DNA strand, in the molecular machinery inside the living cell, in the delicate balance between biodiversity and ecosystems, and in the human capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning…this purpose-driven intentionality towards well-defined end-points does not match-up with the concept of a mindless and indifferent Mother Nature.

            Trial-and-error, experimental progression using small, incremental steps no longer matches the reality in the natural living and non-living world, which instead exhibits organized complexity functioning in fully mature, completed states everywhere we investigate.

[1] A term coined by William A. Dembski in Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999).

[2] John Lennox: Socrates in the City in Labastide, France Parts 1 and 2, published Jan. 12 and 23, 2018 on You Tube.

[3] “The Origin of the Elements” by Jefferson Lab, Nov. 20, 2012 with Dr. Edward Murphy, University of Virginia.

City Plan Checks and Quality

            Another common misconception regarding the accuracy of design plans is the assumption that a stamped set of approved plans is buildable simply because they passed a city plan check looking for building code and planning department violations.

            This misconception is fueled by the natural economic impatience of the builder to break ground, an over-confidence in the accuracy level of a typical set of plans, and a misunderstanding of the extent of a city plan check.

             During the preconstruction phase, the builder and the architect often over-emphasize getting the plans through city plan check, as if that is the acid-test of the accuracy and buildability of the design plans. 

            Although the city plan check is very important, it is not all-inclusive.

            The city plan check focuses only on the building codes and standards of construction that involve life and safety considerations, along with issues such as zoning, planning, building heights, view corridors, tree preservation, and artistic restrictions (such as exclusive use of clay barrel tiles on all roofs).

            The city plan checker does not verify whether dimensions add up correctly across the page, whether a wood or steel beam is placed directly below a bathroom toilet, whether windows are designed too close to wall corners that built-in cabinet bookshelves will crash with ceiling crown molding, and whether or not stairs are positioned correctly to provide enough legal vertical headroom, and hundreds of other quality related issues that fall outside of the scope of a city plan check.

            These potential mistakes are design and construction concerns rather than code problems (except when they surface as code corrections during building inspections), and are assumed to have already been checked by the architect and builder.

            They fall outside the parameters of the city plan check.

The Cambrian Explosion…and the Abraham Explosion 2

            The sudden appearance of the highly sophisticated and complex information contained in the life-script of Abraham, created the novel and innovative concept of God displacing our plans with His higher ways and thinkingthrough a life-script inserted into our lives. 

            This can accurately be called the Abraham Explosion in relation to the similar occurrence 535-million years ago in the natural world during the Cambrian Explosion.

            These two events are similar in that they represent a top-down, actualized manifestation of complex information having functional coherence[1] coming suddenly into existence in a moment of time without evolutionary, gradual progression.

            An Abraham Explosion could not occur in a past geological era, because human beings are the only known living organisms that possess the capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning.

            A key outcome of a journey of faith following God for Old Testament Jews of faith and for New Testament Christians in the early church and today, is that we are supposed to be able to look back in reflection at some point in time about the course and direction of our lives. 

            We should be able to say in hindsight: “God knew what He was doing in guiding and directing my life, better than I could possibly have known about or orchestrated on my own.  He led me through a narrow path that was right and correct, in a way I could not have foreseen or anticipated ahead of time.”

            This concept is categorically different from human fiction-writing.

            The suspense-filled story endings for Jack Ryan, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, James Bond, Tom Sawyer, Elizabeth Bennett, and even for Sidney Carton in Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities are that they knew what they were doing, that theyresolved their particular conflict through human ingenuity, persistence, technology, and the application of their unique talents or their unique positions at the time.

            The Bible is the only work of literature in all of history that has stories with endings that resolve with the realization that God knew and knows what He is doing.

            Through the recent discovery in this new Age of Information, that the natural world is filled with complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information, this now clearly exhibits the realization that the Intelligent Designer of the natural world, knew and knows what He is doing.

            In creating living organisms and non-living material things, God displays skill far and away above anything that we can manufacture.

            This now makes the leap from science to theology that closes the gap between science and biblical-quality faith, a hypothetical gap that should never have been fabricated.

            We now understand both in the natural world through science and in the composition of the biblical narrative stories of faith the modern fact-based evidence that God correctly knows what He is doing in everything.

            God is a bridge that we can safely cross from the concrete material realities of the natural world to the abstract thought of precisely how human beings created in the image of God, can best conduct our lives at the peak of intellectual and moral reasoning.

            The connecting of the dots between the natural world, and the biblical narrative stories of faith, both equally display the brilliance of God.

            This dovetails with the idea that after living a journey of faith within our God-composed life-script, after the pattern given in the biblical narrative stories of faith, we can look back in hindsight and conclude that God knew what He was doing. 

            God knew what He was doing long before our own personal story-endings bring to light the foresight of God, having set us early and punctually on-time upon a course that made our life-scripts beneficial to ourselves and to others, having well-defined purpose, meaning, dignity, and worth.

            That God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours, now connects beautifully and seamlessly with the entirely secular field of science, which turns-out after closer inspection, to not be secular and faith-free at all.

            The key point, the central tenet in the biblical narrative stories of faith is that God displaces our ways with Hishigher ways for the highest, noblest, and most unselfishly love-filled reasons. 

            God composes life-scripts for us that we can willingly enter into through the narrow gate of faith, precisely because He alone possesses the best ways of doing things at the peak and the pinnacle of perfect precision.

            Today’s Christians should no longer be suspicious of science.  The truth of the existence of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world, now eliminates the plausibility of naturalistic explanations for the origin and operation of the phenomena in the living and non-living natural world.

            This provides our modern culture with a sharp U-turn to the pre-Darwin period where belief and unbelief were balanced between moral, metaphysical decisions…unweighted by atheistic materialism falsely claiming the support of science on its side.

[1] Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed (with Dr. Douglas Axe), published Nov. 26, 2016 by Apologetics Academy on You Tube.

Debriefing Meetings and More

            Debriefing meetings with field personnel after the completion of each project, can be one of the best sources of debugging information. 

            Field people are in the best position on a daily basis to observe, record, and then pass along their hard-earned knowledge of what problems and mistakes to avoid on future projects.

            For the builder to be in a positive position to receive this information from the field, assembly-line type bugs must be recognized for what they are: unforeseeable problems and not the result of human error.

            A debriefing meeting at the close-out of every project should have some financial bonus or salary raise attached to the information given from the field to the builder, and not an occasion to point fingers and place blame.

            Otherwise, the field superintendents and project managers will simply keep this information to themselves, improving their own expertise. 

            This does help the builder. 

            The goal here is to download the information from the field and then integrate it into the next upcoming projects in order to proactively prevent design and construction mistakes while the projects are still on paper.

            The idea for the builder is to transfer valuable information from the field into the overall company at-large, so the company possesses this information as well as their best and brightest field supervisors.  

City Plan Checks and Quality                                 

            Another common misconception regarding the accuracy of design plans is the assumption that a stamped set of approved plans is buildable simply because they passed a city plan check looking for building code and planning department violations.

            This misconception is fueled by the natural economic impatience of the builder to break ground, an over-confidence in the accuracy level of a typical set of plans, and a misunderstanding of the extent of a city plan check.

             During the preconstruction phase, the builder and the architect often over-emphasize getting the plans through city plan check, as if that is the acid-test of the accuracy and buildability of the design plans. 

            Although the city plan check is very important, it is not all-inclusive.

            The city plan check focuses only on the building codes and standards of construction that involve life and safety considerations, along with issues such as zoning, planning, building heights, view corridors, tree preservation, and artistic restrictions (such as exclusive use of clay barrel tiles on all roofs).

            The city plan checker does not verify whether dimensions add up correctly across the page, whether a wood or steel beam is placed directly below a bathroom toilet, whether windows are designed too close to wall corners that built-in cabinet bookshelves will crash with ceiling crown molding, and whether or not stairs are positioned correctly to provide enough legal vertical headroom, and hundreds of other quality related issues that fall outside of the scope of a city plan check.

            These potential mistakes are design and construction concerns rather than code problems (except when they surface as code corrections during building inspections), and are assumed to have already been checked by the architect and builder.

            They fall outside the parameters of the city plan check.

The Cambrian Explosion…and the Abraham Explosion 1

            In the Cambrian Explosion of 535-million years ago the genetic information that went into the formulation of the new and varied body-plans of complex creatures appearing suddenly in the fossil record, requires explanation.

            The fossil record reveals no transitional, trial-and-error intermediates found in the Precambrian rock layers below the Cambrian geological strata. 

            These missing intermediates would otherwise provide a continuous linkage of incrementally developing life-forms leading-up gradually and seamlessly into this Cambrian Period date of 535-million years ago.

            If in existence they would essentially remove the perplexing phenomenon of this being a sudden and isolated event, of being an abrupt explosion of new life-forms exhibiting newly actualized genetic information at a very specific and definite point in time.

            The Cambrian Explosion is undisputed, universally accepted, scientific fact-based evidence acknowledged by professional paleontologists, biologists, microbiologists, and biochemists around the world.

            If we are a biblical creationist, we can see this new appearance of genetic information and its accompanying physical characteristics in life-forms, as a top-down arrangement of information and body-plan architecture, producing fully functional living organisms in a very brief span of geological time “right out of the box” with no assembly tools required.

            Biblical creationists see the infusion of new genetic information at the Cambrian Explosion as an extension of the same brilliantly creative and ordered input of information that brought the universe into being at the Big Bang in a split-second moment of time around 13.7-billion years ago, and that started complex life going on earth about 3.8-billion years ago.

            These are two events that required unimaginable quantities and qualities of coordinated information to produce the organized complexity, beauty, and functionality we observe in the natural world.  

            One thing that must be included in this discussion is the need for a complimentary level of biodiversity to be in-place to support a new system of living organisms coming into existence, which can be termed as prior fitness.[1]

            This would include the varied lifestyle habits of the many predator/prey relationships, along with the functional coherence of the surrounding ecosystems. 

            This is an integration and coordination of complementary realities that when viewed as a whole, stretches beyond credulity the belief that all of this came into being through materialistic causation, through the self-assembling properties of matter and energy alone.

            Solve the question of the sudden appearance of new genetic information in action in the introduction of new architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits springing into life during the Cambrian Explosion, and only a fraction of the total ensemble of interacting realities has been explained.

            For example, in the 1930’s wolves were unwisely exterminated from Yellowstone National Park in the state of Wyoming, being the prime predator within the biodiversity of a fine-tuned natural ecosystem.

            Without wolves, elk became over-populated, that then over-grazed the vegetation and created serious erosion problems. 

            But equally problematic, coyotes then became the new highest-ranking predator, preying mostly on small rodents, which is also the prey of hawks and owls.  These majestic birds of prey drastically reduced in numbers until wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone decades later, reinstating biodiversity and ecological balance back to the park.[2]

            In the Cambrian Explosion, we not only need to explain the origin of the genetic information that gave rise to this varied group of suddenly immerging new creatures, but also their coordinated lifestyle environment of biodiversity, and the prior fitness set-up within equally complex ecosystems, all requiring information on a quantifiably unimaginable scale.

            If we are a scientific materialist, we must interpret the new appearance of genetic information and its accompanying life-forms during the Cambrian Explosion as a bottom-up arrangement of information. 

            This viewpoint endorses the introduction of novel genetic information building-up in gradual steps sequenced over time in the preceding Precambrian Period over several hundred million years, slowly progressing in the positive direction from the simple to the complex.

            This hypothesized, bottom-up arrangement from the simple to the complex, is currently theorized to be achieved through malleable, developmental gene regulatory network molecules that have the flexible capacity to build-up and store the required body-plan information over the long span of the Precambrian time-period. 

            This genetic information is released by these regulatory networks that are “re-wired” at the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary.  This creates the varied and complex life-forms we see radiate-out in the Cambrian Explosion.[3]

            The developmental gene regulatory networks (DGRN’s) instruct the different cell-types where to position themselves during embryonic development, to perform their particular functions as bones, muscles, tendons, and organs, for example.

            DGRN’s are the molecular control circuits that guide cells in living organisms during the embryonic development phase to reach the end-point, body-plan architectures of becoming a Trilobite, Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia, Opabinia, Marrella, Anomolocaris, and several other creature types, in the Cambrian Period.  

            DGRN’s and other epigenetic factors perform this same function today in crafting unique, differentiated, and discontinuous architectural body-plans in the ten-million different living species on earth.

            The current theory being researched of the possible flexibility of DGRN’s proposes that this body-plan information was latent and hidden at the molecular level, ready and waiting to produce the new physical characteristics in life-forms rapidly emerging suddenly at the Cambrian Explosion. 

            For millions of years this genetic information was building-up in successive phases inside living cells, being visually undetectable in the simpler life-forms prior to the Cambrian Period, all through purely naturalistic processes.

            At this present time, neither theists nor atheists can point to empirical scientific evidence that supports a materialistic or a creationist explanation for the origin of the vast amount of highly specified, genetic information required to get complex life going to initiate the start of single-cell, self-replicating, living bacteria cells on earth around 3.8-billion years ago.

            Origin of life research has been stuck roughly in the same place for sixty-plus years now[4] ever since Watson and Crick discovered the doubled-stranded DNA molecule in 1953, and its enormously complex and highly specified code of approximately 3.5-billion bits of information (1957), spelled-out using a four-letter chemical alphabet. 

            This is the longest single word in existence, which has been called the language of life.

            The fundamental question facing theists and atheists regarding the explanation of the Cambrian Explosion is how full function could be reached at the start of life…of existence…in a widely varied group of complex organisms that require a minimum of coordinated and integrated parts.

            This requires sophisticated programs of information that exhibit functional coherence that must be simultaneously up-and-running at a very high plateau for new life to survive and replicate itself.

            The organized complexity of the dynamics of gene regulatory networks interacting with DNA and the protein driven molecular machines inside living cells, to produce new and different cell-types, their unique locations inside living organisms, and their specific functions to perform in coordination with other cell-types…already makes the compelling case for the existence of intelligent agency.

            For the biblical creationist, this dilemma is brilliantly sketched-out in the book Darwin’s Black Box (1996) by Michael Behe in the concept he coined as irreducible complexity, that every complex thing has to have a minimum of its parts in-place to produce a well-defined functional essence…whether a skateboard, tennis racket, hair brush, or a full-grown African elephant.

[1] Michael Denton: The Miracle of the Cell, published Oct. 28, 2020 by Discovery Science, on You Tube.

[2] Helene Grimaud: Living With Wolves, 2002 podcast on You Tube.

[3] Stephen Meyer & Charles Marshall: Darwin’s Doubt, debate hosted by Premier Radio, Nov. 30, 2013 on You Tube

[4] James Tour: The Mystery of the Origin of Life, published Mar. 18, 2019 by Discovery Science, on You Tube. 

Red-Lined Plans and More

            Red-lined sets of plans are plans (blueprints) that have been corrected or modified in the field because of errors or owner’s changes.

            For multi-unit production tract housing and condominiums, red-lined plans are usually generated during the construction of the sales models which constitutes the trial-run phase before full-scale production begins.

            The construction of the sales models provides the time-period in the project when the construction is debugged and the owner makes interior floor plan and exterior elevation changes.

            The red-lined plans are then given back to the architect and engineers for revision so that a correct, updated set of plans can be used for the remainder of the construction.

            Red-lined plans enable the builder to identify common mistakes to look for on future plans.

            For example, laundry closets typically dimensioned 30 inches deep by the architect might be too tight for some brands of clothes dryers when the inclusion of the dryer vent hose and the gas pipe are taken into consideration, resulting in the wood bi-fold door bottom metal guides rubbing against the fronts of the appliances, for lack of space.

            I have seen plans that mistakenly show a bedroom wardrobe closet opening width of 5’-6”, when standard 2’-9” wide closet doors do not exist.

            These types of errors should become part of a growing checklist the builder uses as they analyze the plans before the start of every new project.

Homebuyer Walkthrough Sheets                            

            Homebuyer walkthrough sheets are a source for identifying quality-control items that slipped past the final phase of the construction, but were noticed by the homebuyer at the walkthrough.

            Some of these items are minor like missed paint touchup that are the result of time-crunch of completions, escrow closings, and move-ins that occur as closely sequenced events.

            But other items are actual bugs that show up repeatedly on several walkthroughs, and therefore require identification and attention in order to be eliminated going forward. 

Warranty Complaint Letters                        

            Warranty complaint letters are a source of quality-control and debugging information noticed after the homebuyers move into their homes.

            These letters are a means for evaluating the quality of the materials and products that were used, the construction methods, the warranty repair service of subcontractors in terms of response time and effectiveness, and the functional utility of some architectural designs.

            Warranty complaint letters also tell the builder how accurate in the homebuyer walkthrough in identifying issues that need to be resolved at or before homebuyer move-in. 

            If the walkthrough sheet lists only 4 minor items to repair at walkthrough, yet 60 days later the builder receives a customer service complaint letter listing 30 items that would or should have been obvious during the walkthrough, for example, and this is not an isolated, one-time occurrence but is the repetitive experience, this then tells the builder that something is wrong at the delivery phase of the new units.

Subcontractor Extras                                   

            Subcontractor extras tell the builder where money was spent to solve problems that fell outside the scope of work sections in the contracts.

            Extras tell the builder where design plans are incomplete or incorrect…and where contract language is loose.  Extras are a source of information for tightening the budget on future phases of an existing project and formulating more accurate budgets.

Advice from Subcontractors                        

            Advice from subcontractors is another valuable source of information for figuring out how to improve the construction.

            Subcontractors have a unique viewpoint close to the construction. 

            Because many subcontracts are awarded through negotiation involving the same subcontractors, design and construction improvements can be solicited from a builder’s regular group of subcontractors, in technical jargon called value engineering. 

Debugging Before, During, and After Completed Assembly

            Even though the mechanical and robotics engineers, production assembly-line experts, and project engineers may have designed several automobile manufacturing assembly-lines in the past, new innovations in the automobile require additional changes in new assembly-lines.

            Such things as power steering, anti-lock brakes, fuel injection, engines placed in the rear-end of the car, GPS screens built into the dashboard, hands-off backwards steering for parallel parking, Bluetooth© telephone systems, openable sun-roofs, hybrid gas-and-electric fueling, all-electric cars, and a number of other innovations…add new features to be considered and analyzed in terms of the debugging of the mass-production assembly-lines to manufacture new models of automobiles.

            Genetic mutations in living plants and animals, defined as random accidental mistakes (manufacturing assembly-line bugs) being put-out as variant traits to be chosen or rejected by natural selection, is the hallmark, common ancestry feature ofDarwinism, the essence of the theory of macroevolution. 

            But as covered briefly in the essay Are Science and God in Conflict, Dr. Michael J. Behe has written a book entitled Darwin Devolves[1] in which he discusses the recent discoveries in molecular biochemistry that now more accurately describe the mutation/selection processes in biology. 

            Thanks to the recent progress made in gene mapping, scientists can now identify the genetic mutations on the DNA strand and track these specifically to the beneficial traits they put-out to be chosen by natural selection. 

            This explains the variations in finch birds on the Galapagos Islands that Darwin observed in the 1830’s, being innovative variations that do not extend farther than the two lowest taxonomic categories of genus and species.

            This evidence from molecular biochemistry now limits Darwinian evolution to devolution.

            This is an extremely important finding that demonstrates at the gene molecular level of specifically how each living organism puts-out variant traits to better adapt to different ecological environments.

            This scientific discovery that Darwinian evolution is in actuality a process of devolution, shows-up the fallibility of mankind in our original perceptions and assessments. 

            At the same time, it reveals the unimaginable brilliance of design in the creation of the natural world which compellingly argues for the existence of an Intelligent Agent God.

            The sun appears phenomenally to go around the earth, and human intellect can take credit for eventually finding the right answer with Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, that the earth spins as it rotates around the sun. 

This gives the true explanation for the appearance that the sun is going around the earth, from the vantage point of someone standing upon the earth watching as the sun hourly travels across the sky from east to west.

            The stars in the night sky appear to be unmoving, the universe giving all indication of being static and therefore intuitively eternal and unchanging.

            “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1) was confirmed by the discovery of the Big Bang creation of the universe at a moment in time about 13.7-billion years ago. 

            The reality of a Big Bang beginning of the universe that existed from the first moments of creation was waiting for science and technology to invent new telescopes large enough to peer deep into outer space.  This produced the empirical evidence to overturn the conventional wisdom of a static and unchanging universe, which was wrongly based upon phenomenal appearances.

            Since Darwin, the controversial but growing consensus in biology was that genetic mutations could go in a positive direction, accumulating over time to form the creative masterpieces of winged flight, the eyesight of a night owl, the running speed of a cheetah, the bi-pedal upright walking of human beings, human speech, the singing of birds, and human intellectual and moral reasoning.

            Prior to this new Age of Information, it was assumed that genetic mutation and natural selection must have the creative power to sustain the ever-growing proliferation of the vast diversity of life we now see in the natural world.

            Like the incorrect orbital arrangement of the planets in our solar system started by Aristotle through the phenomenal observation of the apparent movement of the sun, and like the appearance of the static and unchanging nature of the universe based upon looking up at the stars of the night sky, Charles Darwin created the momentum of the macroevolutionary thinking of major innovative change over time in biology.

            This produced a blind-spot to the entirely counterintuitive idea that intelligent agency could intentionally build into the manufacturing assembly-line process of life a small number of “bugs” brilliantly designed to produce a limited amount of beneficial variation.  These bugs facilitate adaptability within species through the actual “breakage” or degrading of existing genes.

            Until the very recent time that science and technology could empirically question the Darwinian orthodoxy that beneficial mutations were entirely random, I do not believe that anyone including theists anticipated this new development coming from the field of molecular biochemistry.

            The idea that the mutation/selection process was not a result of mindless and undirected processes based upon the phenomenal, observed output of beneficial traits, but counterintuitively could intentionally have been the built-in product of intelligent agency…was a concept that escaped everyone.

            Previously stuck for decades in the theoretical paradigm of Darwinian macroevolution of always progressing incrementally forward from the simple to the complex, this new concept of devolution of how genes could be broken in order to put-out beneficial mutations…is engaging scientific researchers to this day. 

            Intelligently designing-in “breaks” in the DNA, of damaged genes randomly placed throughout a population of organisms to produce the in-built variation in the finches that could then adapt and survive on the varied islands of the Galapagos Archipelago…is novel ingenuity “squared.”

            It runs entirely counter to the mass-production assembly-line trial-runs to debug the process of the manufacture of numerous identical products.

            Human manufacturing of identical repetitive products attempts to identify and remove bugs through trial-runs, but it now appears that cells intentionally use broken and degraded genes to produce beneficially adaptive variant traits, the opposite of what we might expect.

            This goes back to the lessons-learned over the course of the Scientific Revolution thatwe have to dig deeper beyond obvious phenomenal appearances to discover the real truth about things.

            This reveals a Creator God in the Bible that has set-up the natural world in such a way as to provide not only an orderly and intelligible environment to scientifically investigate, but also our innate capacity to be able to conduct science in an effort to find real and genuine truth, no matter how phenomenally counterintuitive things initially appear going in.

             That modern scientific investigation could discover at the molecular level that genetic mutations are the cause of the beneficial physical variation within species, as a result of the breakage and loss of information on the DNA double-helix strand of genetic code, is mind-boggling to contemplate.    

            This discovery takes macroevolution off-the-board as a viable player, as a purely materialistic explanation for the origin and diversity of life.

            This elevates a true reality that has always been there in the natural world, the existence of an Intelligent Agent God who created a world of reality that often requires digging deep to find real truth.

“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.”                                                   (Jer. 29:13)

            Mother Nature could never take the proactive debugging of mass-production, manufacturing assembly-lines and morph this into beneficial genetic mutations chosen by natural selection to better facilitate adaptation.

            Here is where the modern industrial manufacturing idea of debugging before, during, and after the assembly of products on mass-production assembly-lines inside large factories sets-up the backstory context for understanding the counterintuitive quality of the recent discovery in molecular biochemistry…that evolution is actually a process of devolution.  

[1] Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2019).

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