Month: September 2022

Human Development and Evolution, revised Part 2

Human Writing as an Indicator

            The human invention of writing is a critical, date-stamp indicator of human intellectual progress that helps to pinpoint when humans acquired their full complement of 215 cell-types and 100 brain nerve-cell types.

            The invention of writing is dated to as recent a time as 3,200 B.C. in the wedge-shaped cuneiform lettering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.  The cuneiform alphabet in Syria is dated to around 2,000 B.C., and the invention of the 22-sign Phoenician alphabet is dated to around 1,000 B.C.

            The start of the writing of the first five books of the Old Testament called the Pentateuch, is dated by conservative scholars at around 1,450-1,410 B.C., at the time of the Exodus.[1]

            The Greeks adopt the Phoenician writing script around 800 B.C.   

            The invention of human writing is therefore placed at only 5,200 years ago.

            There is no evidence of sophisticated, written communication using an alphabet 15,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, or 150,000 years ago in the very recent past as a milestone event in human intellectual development.

            The boundary-line between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens is generally placed at around 200,000 years ago, which inaugurates the start of what is considered by paleontologists to be modern man.

            It would follow then that the invention of writing, by some exceptionally gifted persons having forwardly progressing IQ’s above and out in-front of the general populace as is common today, would have occurred at least as far back as sometime around 200,000 B.C.

            To have a smooth transition of beneficial, variant physical traits moving incrementally forward in a positive direction from the start of Homo erectus at 1.8-million years ago to the start of Homo sapiens at 200,000 years ago, yet have human writing start around 3,200 B.C., is illogically nonsensical.

            For humans to invent writing in 3,200 B.C. and then be standing on the moon in 1969 A.D. is fact-based evidence that argues for the near instantaneous introduction of intellectual capacity.

            This is in stark contrast with Darwin’s notion that nature makes no sudden leaps, in the one and only area where the developments of advancing physical traits and lifestyle habits can be compared side-by-side in the common descent theory of human beings.

            When Charles Darwin wrote in his classic 1859 book The Origin of Species “nature makes no sudden leaps,” he locked himself into the paradigm of changein relation to time applied to biological development, which in my opinion is wrong because he was working within the limited constraints of the materialistic worldview.

            According to what seemed reasonable at the time in 1859, Darwin thought that by hypothesizing small-step changes put-out by living organisms as variant traits through random and undirected processes, that natural selection could arbitrate between the comparative values of these traits for survival and reproductive advantage, and favor the most beneficial. 

            In fairness to Darwin, it would be asking too much to expect that he could rise above the conventional thinking of change occurring over time, because the modern discoveries of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world of biology were little known in 1859.

            But today the concept of an instantaneous rate of change occurring in a “width-less” moment of time t=0 is entirely understandable when we ponder the Big Bang, the origin of life, the Cambrian Explosion, the immergence of human intelligence, and elementary calculus.

            The outdated skeletal explanatory framework based upon naturalistic materialism will pump-out a program of incremental, progressive, evolutionary development in biology.

            But there is an alternative skeletal explanatory framework that is more logical and fits the facts “on the ground” much better today.

            Here the concept of instantaneous rates of change enters into the choice of worldviews, this term being an oxymoron[2] within the limited context of a materialistic universe, but not at all inconsistent in a universe created by an intelligent agent existing outside of time.

            When I am driving in my car from a dead-stop at a traffic light that has turned green, to the next traffic light turned red one-half mile down the road, going from zero velocity to 30-mph to zero velocity again, over a 10-second duration…my velocity can be graphed on a two-dimensional x/y-plane as a standard bell-curve, and my acceleration and deceleration as a standard S-curve.

            I exist in the four dimensions of time and space, and it takes me 10 seconds in this example to go from one street intersection to the next street intersection, reaching a top-speed of 30-mph before slowing down to a dead-stop again.

            A photographic snapshot of me driving part-way along this short journey will not reveal how fast I am going.  To determine my velocity, I need the distance traveled divided by the time duration, which is not obtainable in an instant of frozen time having zero duration.

            In order for Darwin to make the extrapolation from microevolutionary change to macroevolutionary change, he needs the materialistic factors of measurable change over measurable time.

            But a timeless God can turn-on the gene regulatory network switches in existing living cells to release the 10 or 20 new and different cell-types to support the Cambrian Explosion of innovative, new architectural body-plans…in an instant of “time” having zero duration.

            The correct explanation for the immergence of the biblical Adam and Eve may then simply be the release of the on-switch of DNA information already contained within upright, bi-pedal primates (Gen. 2:7) to create the new amino acid folds, proteins, and new cell-types in number up to the minimum required 215 (and 100 brain nerve-cell types) to produce the functional architectural body-plan and lifestyle habits of modern humans at a certain point in time.

            This is an example of the relationship between distance (change) over time, expressed in this case as miles per hour driving a car…being distance divided by time…illustrating the huge practical difference between a purely agent-free, material universe contrasted with a material universe having a timeless God as its Creator.

            In this example, the God of the Bible driving in His car takes zero seconds to cover this same distance from one traffic light to the next. 

            In this analogy, the God of the Bible can drive across America from coast to coast in zero-time, because He is a timeless Spirit-Being outside of the four dimensions of time and space.

            “Instantaneous rates of change” is an oxymoron having no meaning in our reality, because “instantaneous” means no lateral movement of time on the horizontal x-axis depicting duration of elapsed-time (Figure 1).

            In the relationship of distance over time…of distance divided by time, zero elapsed time in the denominator is meaningless.

            Basic arithmetic tells us we cannot divide by zero.

            Humans invented calculus in mathematics to get around this problem.

            By choosing a materialistic worldview (a modern interpretation being inconceivable at the time), Darwin eliminated the possibility of “instantaneous rates of change” applied to biological progressive development, a possibility which provides a better explanation for the massive inputs of information as singularities at the Big Bang, the origin of life, the transition from single-cell to multi-cell organisms, the Cambrian Explosion, and the sudden appearance of the human capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning.

            The God of the Bible driving across America in zero-time would be shown on a two-dimensional x/y-plane graph as a vertical line parallel to the y-axis, starting at the bottom of the line on the West Coast to the top of the line on the East Coast for the distance traveled, but with line thickness zero (“width-less”) as measured along the horizontal x-axis depicting time.

            It makes little difference whether the elapsed time-period of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana is a split-second as time t approaches zero or is actually zero.  The change from water to wine would be so fast as to be imperceptible.

            The use of the concept of limits in calculus to determine the rate of change as time t approaches zero is used in many applications in science.

            In my opinion, this analysis presents a much more plausible explanation for the near instantaneous creation of the dimensions of time and space, the speed of light, the force of gravity, and the expansion rate of the universe at the Big Bang (see Figure 1 below).

[1] 2061030 The Oldest Yahweh Inscription 2 Kings Joel Kramer, published Oct. 30, 2016 by Lighthouse Church-Twin Falls on YouTube…at Joel Kramer Archaeologist.

[2] The paradox of the derivative/Chapter 2, Essence of Calculus in the 3Blue 1Brown series on You Tube, published April 29, 2017.

Science and God are Not n Conflict, revised Part 4

The Physical Universe Requires a Timeless Creator

            Darwin’s fundamental condition that nature makes no sudden leaps locks his theory into the materialistic dynamic of change over time, which no longer works when applied to the complexity we find in the living world.

            But a timeless, Spirit-Being God can input the new information or turn-on a gene regulatory network switch to release 5, 10, or 20 new and different cell-types together to produce new architectural body-plans in time t=0.

            This can be represented by a “width-less”[1] vertical line on the two-dimensional x/y-graph of change (vertical axis) over time (horizontal axis) over the course of geological history.

            Common descent in biology can be true without utilizing Darwin’s model of small, incrementally progressive steps fueled by random and accidental serendipity.

            Common descent can simply have another and better explanation, being a divinely timeless God inputting massive infusions of information in the form of new and different cell-types in clustered groups at various points in time…represented by “width-less” vertical lines on the two-dimensional x/y-graph, these lines having zero-time durations.

            For a brilliant refutation of Darwinian evolution see Gunter Bechly Explains What The Fossil Evidence Really Says, hosted by Discovery Science, published November 23, 2021 on You Tube.

Moravec’s Paradox

            Moravec’s Paradox (footnoted below) makes the insightful observation that because modern machines can perform complex calculations like finding the square-root of 3,492 in a spit-second, we naturally make the incorrect assumption that machines can also perform “simple” functions that a one-year-old child can do.

            A one-year-old child giggles and laughs when I play “peek-a-boo” by taking my hand away momentarily from covering my face and saying “peek-a-boo!”, then putting my hand back to cover my smiling face.

            A young child instantly grasps the nature of this game.

            But this is many times more complex in the individual instructions that must be broken-down for a machine to duplicate this same child’s game…to even begin to approach a smiling face and cheerful voice that could elicit laughter from a child.

            Ask this one-year-old to tell you the square-root of 3,492 to an accuracy of three decimal places, and they will look at you with a blank stare.

            The one-year-old sitting on the floor building a small tower using square wooden blocks is an activity that seemingly is so simple that a child can do it. 

            Yet for a machine this child’s play is many times more complex, requiring the computer code language instructions that must be programmed into the machine involving the concepts of the recognition, grasping, positioning, balancing, and not knocking over the other blocks as the tower is built.

            A human-like machine using artificial intelligence would have to be able to create the physical expressions for a child to correctly recognize that “peek-a-boo” is a humorous game. 

            How is it that we are programmed from birth with the innate capacity for analytical thinking to be able to quickly perceive the humor in a game, and to be able to stack wood blocks one upon another to build a small tower to see how high we can go before the whole thing falls over, yet as adults we need machines to perform complex mathematical operations?

            Is the yes/no decision-making of deliberate, intentional design apparent in this human capacity?

Does Matter and Energy Alone Define the Whole of Reality?

            When a person today objects that they cannot believe the Bible, because they live in the modern Age of Science, they are voicing a storyline narrative that is based upon a 20th-century philosophy that is obsolete and no longer currently credible.

            Here I am borrowing heavily from a podcast[2] I listened to on You Tube entitled: Science and Faith in a Secular Society with J. P. Moreland, hosted by Think Biblically, through Biola University, downloaded by me on 3/24/2020.

            It turns out that scientism is a concept that is self-refuting. 

            Examples of concepts that are self-refuting might be: “No statement is longer than three words,” or “I can’t utter a word of English,” or “There are no truths,” each of which makes itselffalse, is self-refuting.

            To quote Dr. Moreland from this podcast: “The statement: ‘The only way that you can know truth is through the hard sciences,’ is not something that itself could be known to be true through the hard sciences.”

            In this sense, scientism makes itself false, is self-refuting by its own definition.

            It also turns out that scientism, as a worldview adopted uncritically and for the most part unknowingly by many people in our modern world, is as false a narrative as can be. 

            Upon closer inspection it is actually an enemy ofscience, undermining the very field of science it purports to defend.

            It is widely understood that scientific discovery is dependent upon several general assumptions, essential to conducting science, that do not meet the high-definition test that scientism itself cannot reach.

            These fundamental assumptions are: that the natural world is orderly and intelligible, that the laws of mathematics and logic are true, that truth has a correspondence to reality, and that human beings are endowed with the mental capacity to be able to understand things external to ourselves…paraphrased by me from this podcast.

            Without first accepting each and every one of these fundamental assumptions as being true, assumptions themselves lacking formal proofs, the empirical enterprise of human scientific investigation of the natural world cannot proceed forward, does not exist.

            This is part of the gaping hole of inconsistency in the modern narrative of naturalistic materialism that makes the untrue and unscientific suggestion to modern mankind, to rely solely upon the hard sciences as the only sure standard by which to identify truth. 

            The fact is that all of science is built upon the foundation of philosophical assumptions we accept “by faith” to be true, without hard scientific, backup proofs of their truth-value.

            One of Dr. Moreland’s main themes of this podcast is that scientism is one of the most corrosive and destructive ideologies in our modern social culture. 

            Scientism erroneously contributes to the post-modernrelativism regarding truth, which attempts to reduce all of the things we know to be true, down to the narrowly limited database of only those things that can be demonstrated as true through hard science alone.

            This then downgrades everything else asserted to be true to the relative opinions of my truth or your truth, neither one being able to rise to the standard of repetitive laboratory testing for truth as defined by scientism, including all philosophical assumptions.

            Because the fundamental, underlying assumptions that form the basis for all scientific research are philosophical in nature, and therefore cannot meet the standard of verification through the hard sciences, the narrow worldview philosophy of scientism ironically undermines by definition the very foundational assumptions of science itself.

            This narrowly crafted approach to categorizing genuineknowledgewould also reduce the obvious existence of well-defined, discretionary choice-making down into the inconsequential category of scientifically unsupportable data not amenable to being quantified or tested physically in a laboratory.

            Scientism is therefore a logically incoherent philosophical program that dissolves itself by being self-refuting, and by undermining the very edifice of the science it purports to defend.

            The irony here is that the complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural living and non-living world point towards the need for intelligent agency.

            The skeletal explanatory frameworks that define the distinctive essences of these systems of information are similar in character to the four basic assumptions underlying science listed above…being abstract, intangible, philosophical realities needed to conduct science.

            A reasonable argument could be made that if scientific materialism insists upon excluding intelligent agency based upon the abstract nature of some of the implications of its findings, then much of science should also be abandoned because the scientific method itself relies upon informational assumptions that are abstract and intangible, assumptions that are conceptually philosophical in nature.

From Pondering Our Creation: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

[1] See on the Internet Moravec’s Paradox – Why are machines so smart, yet so dumb? On Up and Atom published July 8, 2019, and The Essence of Calculus, sections one and two, describing change over time and the concept of limits, in 3Blue 1 Brown.

[2] https://www.biola.edu/blogs/think-biblically/2018/science-and-faith-in-a-secular-society

Approved Swimming Pool Plans

            The builder needs to consider that the swimming pool plans must be approved by the city and usually the health department, before the pool contractor can calculate the gallonage and equipment for the pool.

            These calculations must be made to determine the size and number of risers coming up through the ground into the pool equipment room.

            Here the builder needs to avoid a timing conflict that could occur between building the swimming pool clubhouse, which may contain the swimming pool equipment maintenance room, and getting an approved set of swimming pool plans in time for the pool contractor to size the risers coming up through the concrete slab floor.

            Because the swimming pool is usually one of the last items to be completed in the sales model complex, the builder can mistakenly think that decisions required to finalize the pool plans can be delayed.

            The lack of an approved set of pool plans can then hold up the construction of the poolside clubhouse, thus throwing off the entire model complex completion schedule.

From Lessons-Learned for Builders, Architects, and Interior Designers in Housing Construction, Book 6.

Science and God are Not in Conflict, revised Part 3

Definition Automatically Creates Gaps of Exclusivity

            In the two Socrates in the City interviews of John Lennox in Labastide, France[1], the interviewer Eric Metaxas makes the point that the atheistic worldview of naturalistic materialism creates a false zero-sum game in science.

             Each new discovery made by science adds to the increasing database of valid human knowledge on one side of the ledger sheet, and creates an equal and opposite subtraction of human ignorance on the other side of the ledger sheet. 

            This beneficially decreases the number of explanations of the phenomena in nature based upon “old-wives” tales, superstition, black magic, witchcraft, unfounded speculation, and the unfathomable whims of the ancient gods.

            Human scientific investigation is the one and only research methodology that can move the innumerable mysteries regarding the phenomena in the natural world from the ignorance column over to the knowledge column.

            But for atheists, in a closed-system worldview consisting only of material things, the more we know about the workings of the natural world discovered through the reliability of the hard sciences, the less our need by default to ascribe the things we do not yet understand to the random serendipity of unknown causes. 

            This artificial, zero-sum dynamic from ignorance to knowledge has created the erroneous concept of a god-of-the-gaps explanation, of a god that does nothing else but exists to perform the role of a temporary placeholder for ignorance. 

            The contrived god-of-the-gaps fills-in as a “nothing burger” explanation until scientific investigation can uncover the real, empirical truths underlying the particular phenomena in nature.

            Until we scientifically understood the physics of lightning, for example, in ignorance mankind historically ascribed the mystery of lightning to be an act of God, which in one sense it is, for the Christian theist lightning being the natural creation of God.

            In these two episodes of Socrates in the City, Lennox and Metaxas arrive at the brilliant observation that the God of the Bible is entirely unique amongst other gods…is not a material entity.  The God of the Bible is not like the gods of the ancient world descended from the primeval “stuff” of the universe, but instead is an eternal, immaterial Spirit Being (Jn. 4:24).

            One problem with a zero-sum approach to judging the advancing achievements in science is that it requires a materialistic universe having a finite total number of available, objectively knowable facts that can be moved from the ignorance side of the ledger sheet to the knowledge side of the ledger sheet.

            But a universe having a transcendent Creator God…an eternal Mind…being a living Spirit, radically differs in that this theistic worldview infinitely broadens the possible biological diversities of the architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits of the ten-million living species on earth. 

            A non-material God who is a living Spirit broadens beyond human imagination the possible scope and diversities of the life-scripts that can be composed and orchestrated for human beings, from Abraham through Paul recorded in the Bible, and into our present-day.

            This is one of the outstanding features exhibited in the biblical narrative stories of faith.  

            An Intelligent Spirit Being is a superior explanation for the origin of information in our universe, because both the Bible and modern science tell us that all of the universe-related matter, energy, and information all came into existence at the Big Bang.

            Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1-3 tell us that God inventedthe information and created the physical matter and energy through the medium of His spoken words, through information in the form of divinely uttered speech. 

            This is a metaphorical medium not currently amenable to scientific investigation, but has outcomes that can be empirically recognized and appreciated through its complex, specified, and coherently integrated function, a concept commonly referred to as organized complexity.

            Paraphrasing John Lennox, the Bible has the priority of creation in the right sequential order, in saying that immaterial, universe-building information generated by the Word of God Jesus Christ is primary, and matter/energy in the universe is secondarily derivative.

            Naturalistic materialism has it backwards, saying that matter/energy comes first…is primary…and information is derived secondarily from matter and energy.

            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?[2]

            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.

            One of the most brilliant takeaways I got from watching these John Lennox interviews is that for much of the phenomena in the natural world, the best that science can do is to offer descriptions only but not full explanations.

            Isaac Newton’s mathematical descriptions of motion and gravity, called the laws of gravity can get us to the moon, but Newton himself admitted that he had no idea what gravity actually is.  Newton attempts to offer no explanation of gravity beyond his description of it.

            Even today we do not understand what gravity, energy, and many other things in the natural world actually are, even though we can describe them in terms of mathematical equations and the laws of physics.  

            John Lennox tells the story about his 2008 debate with Richard Dawkins, who asked Lennox the question: “If God created you, then who created God?”

            In answer to which John Lennox asked the question: “If you believe that the universe created you, then who created the universe?”

            The Bible tells us that God is not a created Being, but is eternal.

            This seemingly paradoxical dilemma of who created God becomes easy to answer, if we simply jettison the notion that the dimension of time created at the Big Bang must apply to God going backwards for an eternity. 

            A more straightforward explanation is that God lives in a timeless reality, rendering the question of a moment in time when He Himself would have been created or come into existence as being mute and inapplicable.

            Unlike the ancient fertility gods that humanity invented, being derived from material things like the sun, the moon, the sky, mountains, and wild beasts that can be reduced to idol-gods of wood, stone, or precious metals…the God of the Bible is the Creator of the universe (Gen. 1:1; Jn. 1:1-3).

            The God of the Bible was not created by the universe, and therefore is transcendent and outside of the zero-sum reality that scientific materialists have limited themselves to through their closed-system philosophy.

            John Lennox goes on to say that the God of the Bible is far above being a mere placeholder for temporary ignorance, for mankind the invented god-of-the-gaps, who can be displaced by the empirical findings of science.

            Lennox gets a laugh from the audience when he recites a materialistic revision of the first verse in the Bible: “In the beginning God created the bits of the universe that we do not yet understand.”

            He then recites the correct first verse in the Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1), which says that God created everything.

            The materialistic zero-sum approach leaves out the Intelligent Designer who invented the information content of the phenomena we investigate through science.

From Pondering Our Creation: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

[1] Socrates in the City with John Lennox…in Labastide, France…Part One on Jan. 12, 2018…and Part Two on Jan. 23, 2018…interviewed by Eric Metaxas, on You Tube.

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

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