Category: Science and Faith

Is and Out—Abraham the Father of Faith

            One contention I want to make in this book is that the biblical narrative stories of faith, starting with the detailed life-script of Abraham, are roughly 3,500 years ahead of modern science in recognizing this subtle dichotomy between the status quo “is” of studying the material world, and the abstract ideal of what “ought” to be as applied to the destiny and direction of a human life-script.

            One of the main themes of the biblical narrative stories of faith is that as Abraham travels south towards Canaan, God’s new life-script for Abraham displaces whatever Abraham might otherwise have done, living in the city of Haran.

            Fundamental to eternal reality, Abraham could never have closed the gap between the “is” and the “ought” of becoming the father of faith, through a humanistic approach of self-reliant, worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The concept of the God of the Bible displacing our ways with His higher ways and thoughts, to close the gap between an “is” and an “ought,” cannot by definition exist within the self-reliant, “I did it my way” approach of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The revolutionary concept starting with the life-script of Abraham is that God-sovereignty is unimaginatively superior to self-sovereignty, inserting the discernment of a divinely better moral compass that is unattainable through worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            The constrained optimization in the engineering of a fulfilled human life, had a targeted trajectory towards the ideal end-point “ought” of my optimum destiny living in Christ, starting at the beginning point “is” of being lost and directionless in my unredeemed, fallen nature at the time of my Christian conversion. 

This is the epitome of well-defined purpose.

The Dichotomy of “Is” and “Ought,” is Present Today at the Outer Edge of the Universe.

            As the universe expanded outward following the Hot Big Bang explosion out of nothing previously material, the circular bubble internally containing all of the laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics including the fourth dimension of time, and all of the materials in the Periodic Table of fundamental particles, along with all of the information that would comprise the organized complexity within that expanding bubble…has always been tangentially connected to the timeless, physically immaterial nothingness (the eternal God of the Bible is a non-material, self-existent Spirit-Being)…located at the outer edge of the still expanding universe.

            If we could travel to and catch-up with the expanding envelope of the universe, we could observe the current transition-line between the “is” of the timeless, nothing-physically-material, existing before and since the Big Bang beginning of the universe 13.7-billion years ago, and the expanding interior of the universe containing all of the incredible realities of time, matter, and energy that exhibit and define the “ought” of either a purposeless or a purposeful universe, the question that modern mankind is attempting to answer.

            A fundamental truism to try to comprehend here, is that as the presently expanding universe pushes outward its leading boundary-edge, there exists the most profound demarcation-line between absolutely nothing timely or material outside the universe, and absolutely everything material inside the universe including everything non-materially conceptual in the form of abstract ideas, intellectual and moral reasoning, animal instinct, and the fourth dimension of time.

            At the outer edge of this universe exists as stark a contrast between an “is” and an “ought,” as is imaginable.

            The “is” of a non-spatial reality containing nothing material exists just outside the bubble of the universe, and the “ought” of absolutely everything exists just inside this line separating nothing physically material with everything physically material.

            Modern mankind now has the empirical database of facts garnered through the Scientific Revolution to make an informed decision of how an “is” of nothing physically material could become the “ought” of this remarkable universe we inhabit and study.

            From the Christian viewpoint, the “is” to “ought” journeys from Abraham to Paul in the biblical narrative stories of faith, bears an uncanny similarity to the same journey of an expanding material universe out of nothing previously material, pushing outward the boundary-line between nothing physically material from everything physically material.

            From the Christian viewpoint, this is unmistakable evidence for the existence of the non-deistic, fully engaged, intelligent designing agent God of the Bible.

            This is a reality that no purely naturalistic explanation can plausibly traverse.

This is an excerpt form my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

The Scientific Method…Revised

            The application of a formal method to investigate the workings in the natural world is correctly recognized and credited as the start of the modern Scientific Revolution.

This begins with the discovery and use of the scientific method of research, universally applied from that time going forward to today.

            Borrowing from a classic illustrative example, if someone in the late 1500’s wanted to investigate the behavior of various objects having different weights, sizes, and shapes free-falling through space, the scientific method might have that person dropping these various objects off the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, being an excellent research platform at that time. 

This would be accompanied by another researcher positioned as an observer on the ground using a mechanical timing device that could determine elapsed time, preferably divided into fractions of a second (a sand hour-glass would not work).

            The new scientific method of doing formal research would record the physical description of the shape and size of the objects being dropped, the number of times each object was dropped, the measured distance from the top of the tower to the ground, and the elapsed time duration for each free-fall through space. 

Secondary information might be the air temperature, time of day, wind speed, and wind direction.

            These “findings” could then be recorded in a written field journal that could be copied and read by other people in the growing body of natural scientists around the world, who could then repeat similar follow-up experiments at their local regions using different conditions from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, to generally confirm or disconfirm these findings and to improve upon the accuracy of the research methodology.

            The precise recipe of the sequential steps the first pair of researchers followed at the Leaning Tower of Pisa can be repeated and improved-upon by each successive group of researchers investigating this particular phenomenon of free-falling objects in space.

            Both the sequential steps of the research protocol and the data produced in this example are entirely naturalistic, as long as we are talking about generating measurable, quantifiable, fact-based evidence alone.

            This is the feature of the Scientific Revolution that enabled mankind to replace “old-wives” tales, magic, witchcraft, mythology, superstition, first-glance appearances, and wild speculation with true explanations for the causations of the phenomena in the natural world.

Combined with the two modern Industrial Revolutions that introduced the new advancements of technological inventions, this produced over the past four to five centuries the modern world we inhabit and enjoy today.

When I listen to the debate over whether the scientific method excludes divine agency, I sense that people are simply talking past one another, not recognizing that the scientific method is only one-third of reality, be it divine or human.

            What is not obvious in the Leaning Tower of Pisa example given above of the research program devised by people attempting to find empirical answers to how and why objects fall to the earth, is that it assumes the ingenuity of the human thinking process in devising the sequential steps of a research program going in the direction of discovering truth about reality.

But it does not, as a matter of research protocol, identify the greater ingenuity of the cognitive thinking coming from the other direction that created the truth of the thing in existence that humans are researching.

            We perform the experiment of dropping objects off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which eventually leads over time to Isaac Newton discovering mathematical equations that describe the force of gravity.

            The historical trajectory of research in this one area of explaining gravity is in the direction starting from near total ignorance to the ability to successfully send and return men to the moon and back. 

The laudable appreciation in this human research program to get from A to B should have an equal recognition and appreciation for what it took to come from the other direction of B to A, of the greater ingenuity to create the reality of gravity in the first place. 

This requires admitting the contemplation of divine agency subsumed within the design of organized complexity in the natural world.

            The ingenuity of James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 to unravel the mystery regarding the structure of DNA, by connecting the dots of information from other researchers, the technology of x-ray infraction through DNA fibers, and their own dogged persistence, reads like a suspenseful spy-thriller novel (see chapter 3 The Double Helix in Stephen C. Meyer’s 2009 book Signature in the Cell).

            The takeaway here is that the ingenious methods leading-up to our understanding of the structure of DNA as an information bearing molecule capable of explaining both the variability and the continuity of genetic heredity, pales when compared to the actual performance of the double-strand helix of DNA inside the cell nucleus having a four-letter chemical alphabet 3.5-billion characters long (six-feet in length when stretched-out), which forms the basis of the vast diversity of life on earth.

This is an excerpt from my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

Mount Improbable

            There are enumerable examples in the natural living world of genetic mutations chosen by natural selection to introduce innovatively beneficial traits to improve survival and reproductive advantage, and to modify fit in reaction to changing environments.

            But matter and energy do not possess the capacity to think-ahead and plan-out strategies.

            Matter and energy are indifferent to self-assembly in targeted trajectories spanning a series of small steps to reach some future ensemble of parts having coordinated function.

            A single mutation/selection process part-way up the gradually sloping side of Mount Improbable using one small step at a time as illustrated in Rickard Dawkins’ book Climbing Mount Improbable[1], cannot logically enlist the overall program of starting at the bottom of the hill then rising upward in a straight line to the top of the mountain to achieve function, in his analogous example.

            It takes a different class of information for this secondary operation to climb up the slope, having a targeted final outcome “in mind” over a number of connected steps, rather than isolated genetic mutations as single, unrelated events.

            Setting-up a series of coordinated steps leading towards well-defined, mature function involves informational thought that matter, energy, or natural selection do not have.

            A fundamental issue that Richard Dawkins misses here is that it takes an additional source of managerial information to climb the gradual slope of Mount Improbable in the upward direction to reach the top in terms of biological development.

            This is similar to the fallacy of the example of 100 monkeys over a period of years producing a Shakespeare play while randomly hitting the keys of typewriters.

            This example of typing monkeys invalidly starts with a narrowly targeted and specified means to communicate information in the English language as a baked-in, upfront given.

            The Mount Improbable explanation in biology for the concept of starting with the simple then progressing to the complex, subtly ignores the starting-point of a mountain having a steeply vertical face on one side, and a gradually inclined slope on the other side.

            This then stealthily imports the premeditated program of progressive development from the bottom of the slope to the top of the mountain, which has no correlation to the entirely different reality of single, isolated genetic mutations producing a beneficial new trait chosen through natural selection in isolated small steps.

            Having a mountain with steps going up a gradually sloping side is anything but starting-off with the simple.

            Neglecting the complementary puzzle-piece that connects all of the small mutation/selection events going up the mountain towards a final, well-defined outcome, is a theory killing oversight.

            Genetic mutations chosen by natural selection do not provide the informational protocol or instructions to climb up the gradually sloped side of the mountain.

            We can’t just assume that mutation/selection will automatically have the beneficial trajectories to eventually combine and coordinate into a positive vector that takes a developing organism to the top of the mountain.

            This might be the case of researcher/investigator bias unconsciously rigging the system upfront toward some anticipated outcome.

            But I recognize that the argument being made here by Dawkins is that when enough genetic mutations coalesce into a positive trait or an entire new organism to reach the top of the mountain to achieve function, it does not matter how many wrong turns or how much time it took.

            If, in our experience a laboratory chemist follows the sequential steps to reach an end-point outcome of a particular desired chemical compound or solution, it is clear that in this scenario the directional trajectory of the protocol is governed by intelligent agency to guide the process to generate the outcome.

            The assertion that is made in Climbing Mount Improbable is that natural selection is capable of integrating and coordinating the series of small steps to achieve function, in essence replacing the intelligent agency of the laboratory chemist with the process of natural selection instead.

            But this Mount Improbable example is not the same thing as starting from scratch with absolutely nothing…with no mountain, no small steps going upward, and no encompassing instructions connecting-the-dots of isolated mutation/selection events to proceed upward in the right direction.

            Finally, the difficulty of creating a new planet Earth-2 from scratch due to the practical limitations of physically material human beings being unable today of transcending the vastness of outer space and time, strangely limits us going in the other direction from being able to create life due to the microscopic size of the nanotechnology in living cells.

            The DNA molecule having 3.5-billion bits of information in the form of a four-letter chemical alphabet, when stretched-out is only 6 feet long.

            When we add 20 amino acid types, thousands of different proteins, and the molecular machinery in the typical living cell being about the size of the head of a pin, we are limited by this small size containing unimaginable complexity to the same extent that the planetary largeness of space in our solar system inhibits human beings from creating a nearby new planet Earth-2.

            Today, if we give chemists all of the materials needed and the ideal laboratory conditions to attempt to produce life, we cannot do it.

            These are not pie-in-the-sky, theoretical, crazy-headed concepts I am presenting here.

            They eliminate as possible candidates any version of physically material beings having the practical capacity to produce planets, solar systems, galaxies, universes, or such things as time, light, energy, gravity, conscious thought, and the architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits of the ten-million living species on earth.

            If matter and energy alone are not up to the job, then the only remaining choice is a non-material, Spirit Mind/Being having incredible architectural and engineering acumen coupled with a sublimely artistic imagination.

            This is why the question: “Is there empirical evidence for the existence of God?” is outdated now by about two to three decades.

            The empirical evidence for the existence of God is found in every physically material entity in the known universe, consisting of the complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of non-material information needed to produce these physically material entities.

            The findings of contemporary science now tell a sophisticated modern culture through the process of elimination, that any solely materialistic causation is incapable of spanning across the great divide from point A to point Z, in producing the coordinated and sequential steps to create a functioning universe, life on earth, and the reality of a perfect summer day in sunny Southern California.

This is an excerpt from my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

[1] Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996).

Taking Things Too Much for Granted as We Look Backwards from an Orderly World

            One example of badly missing the big-picture as limited by an atheistic worldview, is to not recognize and factor-in the need for agency to overcome the difficulties in terms of directionally targeted trajectories and prior fitness, that the beginning Hot Big Bang is an explosion. 

            The fundamental question is not just how does something come out of nothing, but more precisely and profoundly how does something explode out of nothing.

            The more knowledgeable and informed question today is how does matter and energy explode out of nothing previously being non-material into physically existent matter and energy.

            If our materialistic, agency-excluding worldview requires that self-assembling matter and energy produced the orderliness and intelligibility we observe today in the natural world, how does non-existent matter and energy explode into existing matter and energy at the beginning of the physical universe? 

Explosions do not create intelligible order, but instead create chaotic disorder.

            We only see order coming out of the Big Bang by looking backwards in hindsight from the vantage point of the perfected order we observe today in the natural world.

            I live one street away from the Pacific Ocean in Southern California.  Today I am enjoying a clear blue sky, a moderate summer temperature, and a cooling, slight sea breeze.

            It is easy for me to take this for granted, having never lived farther than a mile from the beaches in Southern California.

            But how many factors must align and be properly sequenced to go from a massive explosion at the Big Bang origin of the universe, to a post-card perfect day along the beach in Southern California?

            Science correctly prides itself in saying that it questions and examines everything analytically without prejudice, that it digs deeper than surface appearances, and that it bases its conclusions and axioms on empirical, fact-based evidences.

            But the atheism in scientific materialism cannot crossover into contemplating the intelligent designing agency that is required to span the enormous gulf of 13.7 billion years from a beginning Hot Big Bang explosion, by definition being a chaotic event, to arrive at the pleasantness of a clear sunny day along a beach in Southern California.

            The number, coordination, and integration of the factors that must be fine-tuned to an inconceivable fit and function outcome of a beautiful sunny sky and pleasant weather at the beach, corresponding to our ability to appreciate this, defies any plausible explanation that leaves God out of the process. 

            From our current viewpoint looking backwards in time it is easy to take for granted, that of course order arose out of the Big Bang explosion 13.7-billion years ago, because today we observe orderliness actualized in the natural world, that otherwise should be entirely counterintuitive originating out of a massive explosion.

            From the time of the Big Bang looking forward, to arrive at the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world today is asking too much of a random, undirected, accidental, and chance-based, purely materialistic process.

            A massive explosion in a book publishing, printing press factory will not generate a dictionary.

            A tornado going through a junkyard will not assemble a 747 commercial jetliner.

            Italian spaghetti sauce will not make itself.

            The old example that 100 monkeys sitting at typewriters randomly banging on the keys for years would eventually by chance alone produce a Shakespeare play, is a bad analogy because 100 monkeys are not the same thing as starting from scratch with absolutely nothing.[1]

            Monkeys have the physical body-parts and dexterity to perform random typing, and typewriters are highly engineered and sophisticated instruments for communication.

            Time plus chance here is invalid even if successful because the experiment is rigged upfront to propel forward in a certain direction having the built-in means to communicate information.

            100 monkeys in a group all talking for a trillion years cannot possibly produce a Shakespeare play because spoken monkey-talk cannot reach the level of information understandable by humans that a typewriter might possibly generate (unless humans devise a way to translate monkey-talk into English).

            What should be an obvious fallacy in this analogy to monkeys by sheer chance typing Shakespeare is that we are starting with things that are already extremely complex.

            How difficult would it be to create a monkey from scratch capable of being trained to hit typewriter keys?

            The typewriter, that a monkey would produce a Shakespeare play on, is an ingeniously complex invention.

            This is a fundamental point that needs more attention in the evolution/creation debate that starting from absolutely nothing is not the same thing as progressive development from the simple to the complex.

            This is especially true when the simple is not simple at all.

            This argument imagining a pathway through time and chance for Darwinian evolution starts by assuming as a given the existence of complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated entities like monkeys and typewriters.

            The real question is how to create a Shakespeare play starting with absolutely nothing.

            Chance cannot work with nothing.

            The concept of the Big Bang origin of the universe is that matter and energy materially arose out of nothing previously material…no monkeys and no typewriters in existence yet.

            The concept of the origin of life must start with the reality that DNA and the molecular nanotechnology inside the first living bacteria cell arose out of zero DNA, and no life previously existing on earth.

            In our normal experience, explosions do not produce the ordered complexity of coordinated things to the point of being discernable as such, to human investigation through science, like our universe amazingly is.

            But equally telling, explosions do not occur out of nothing.

            The late scientist Stephen Hawking can brilliantly investigate the origin of the universe through quantum mechanics, looking backwards through an intelligibly ordered, present-day reality.  

            This is all well and good, and scientists will continue this investigation.

            But the narrow focus of the atheism of scientific materialism precludes the fuller picture that would include the obvious question once we see it, of how a massive explosion at the beginning of the universe could over billions of years arrive at an end-point outcome in this 21st century of cognitive, thinking human scientists. 

These scientists explore the physically material universe, exploiting with great success this feature of orderliness and intelligibility, arising out of the chaotic disorder of a massive explosion.

            Another clear example of atheism blindly sweeping the obvious under the rug, once we see it, is the idea that extra-large stars are needed to condense in size and implode through gravity to produce the exceptionally high heat to make carbon and oxygen, just before exploding to spread these critical elements throughout the cosmos that are essential to enable complex life like ourselves to exist.

            The chemical bonding properties of the carbon atom are critical to form the numerous compounds that enable living organisms to exist, yet again a massive explosion of giant stars is required to translate over billions of years this physically material reality into living organisms on earth.

            The Big Bang creation of the universe is dated to 13.7-billion years ago, and the first appearance of life on earth is dated to around 3.8-billion years ago.

            Doing the math, this equates to a gap of time of nearly 10 billion years from the first existence of the material universe to the beginning of life on earth.

            What quality of targeted foresight, absent intelligent designing agency, would be capable of spanning this period of time to connect-the-dots beginning with carbon and oxygen created within exploding supernova stars, to arrive at exquisite end-points of function in the ten-million different species living on earth today exhibiting unique architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits?

            The common layman on the street would and does say as the majority opinion that these directionally targeted outcomes of complex, specified, and coherently integrated living organisms could not come about through random and undirected processes commencing with giant, supernova stars exploding 13-billion years ago.  

            I can easily recognize in this 21st century through the most general understanding of the various parts of my body, through a non-technical introspection of how precisely everything internally works, that I am vastly too complex to be the product of a mindless, blind, accidental, indifferent to outcomes, trial-and-error, and undirected process.

            Ask most people the same thing, and given a moment of reflection would agree that we are too complex and too highly specified in terms of function to be the product of a solely matter and energy universe.

            As stated in the introduction in this book, the more we learn about the phenomena in the natural world, the weaker becomes the argument for naturalistic materialism.

It is the philosophical element of atheism within scientific materialism that generates the outdated question: “Is there empirical evidence for the existence of God?”

            The correct answer is that of course there is no physically material evidence for the existence of the God of the Bible, because God is a non-material, Spirit-Being…but this is not the end of the story.

            The difficulty of assembling all of the various parts in the right amounts to create another duplicate planet Earth-2, again highlights the impracticality of physically material creatures like ourselves marshaling the required knowledge and practical means to put together a functional, life-sustaining planet.

            The difficulty of building a planet from scratch highlights the inescapable reality that a transcendent, non-material, Spirit-Being of unimaginable capacity would be needed to create our planet earth, unencumbered by the practical limitations of physical existence. 

            Provisional conclusions, that are abstract concepts attached to scientific research programs, can no more exclude divinely intelligent agency than they can support materialistic atheism as the only worldview acceptable to pure science.

            The inference to the best explanation today has only one option.

The creator of this universe has to be a non-material, Spirit-Being possessing the wherewithal to produce a physically material universe, massive sized galaxies, and exquisitely magnificent planets like our earth.

This is an excerpt from my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

[1] See the discussion of starting with truly nothing in The Science & Faith Podcast – James Tour & William Dembski: Information Theory, on the Internet, May 3, 2021 on DrJamesTour.

Science and God: The Giant Asian Hornet

            The 2009 book Why Evolution Is True by Dr. Jerry A. Coyne…an emeritus professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, is a well-written, interesting, and up-to-date expose in support of Darwinian macroevolution.

            But one of the colossal ironies of our modern times is that when I read this book by around page 80 and thereafter, his descriptions of the wonders of nature have put forth so much brilliant detail that I begin to sense that he is unwittingly making a cumulative case argument in favor of intelligent agency. 

            Yet as a Darwinian evolutionist, intelligent design in nature is the very thing he is trying to disprove.[1]

            So coordinated and integrated are the architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits of living organisms, so well “thought-out” are their instinctual programs for fitness that as our modern understanding of them increases, then the more implausible becomes the naturalistic explanations for their conceptual origin and design.

            In other words, the more we learn about the natural world through science, the less plausible becomes the gradualistic, trial-and-error, self-organizing, secular story for the creation of the universe and all of its natural phenomena.

            In this new Age of Information, increasing knowledge is narrowing the worldview choices down to intelligent agency as the only plausible explanation for the origin of the complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information we now see operative everywhere in the natural living and non-living world.

            One example of the paradoxical dilemma for scientific materialists of having to harmonize the marvels of the living world with purely naturalistic causations, absent designing agency, is found in Dr. Coyne’s book of the description of the havoc that is created when the giant Asian hornet (wasp) on its home turf attacks a colony of European honeybees imported by humans into Japan.[2]  

            The giant Asian hornet is the world’s largest hornet…about two inches long, having a three-inch wing-span that can fly 25 miles per hour and travel up to 60 miles a day…and is “a predatory wasp especially common in Japan.”

            When a lone hornet scout finds a honeybee colony, it marks the nest with a drop of pheromone scent which then guides a group of 20 to 30 attacking hornets which can decimate in a couple of hours honeybees numbering up to 30,000.

            The giant Asian hornet has large jaws that can bite the heads off the smaller honeybees at the rate of 40 per minute.

            But the native honeybees in Japan have an incredible defense tactic that defies naturalistic explanation.

            These native honeybees send-out an internal alarm within the nest when they first detect the hornet intruder.  They then quickly form a group of around 100 honeybees at the entrance into the nest, and when the lone scout first enters through the beehive opening to begin its investigation these 100 honeybees form a tight cluster around the now immobilized giant Asian hornet. 

            In coordinated unison the honeybees in this cluster all flap their wings, before the giant Asian hornet can mark the beehive with a scented pheromone.  This raises the temperature to around 115º F within this cluster, but also produces carbon dioxide (CO²) that further raises the temperature up to as high as 122º F[3]…which is not lethal to the honeybees but kills the giant Asian hornet scout.  

            But the recently imported European honeybee colonies lack this initial defense strategy to kill the roving scout, and are quickly and completely overwhelmed by a marauding band of attacking giant Asian hornets, guided by a drop of liquid pheromone scent placed at the opening of the beehive by the hornet scout as the result of a successful reconnaissance.

            The question then arises of how the native Asian honeybees could acquire this novel instinctual defense tactic of a brilliantly functional, coordinated approach of just the right high-temperature of 117-122º F and the accumulation of CO² gas that would kill its enemy. 

            Using the accidental trial-and-error approach of mindless and undirected materialistic mechanisms would have to produce catastrophic honeybee failures along the incremental, small-step transitional route of gradual progression at successive rises in temperature.

            For argument’s sake, if we start with an ambient temperature inside the honeybee’s nest at 100º F, and go upward at 2º F increments over the 16-20 minutes needed to kill the giant Asian hornet scout, this results in 8 failed trials…catastrophic defeats…until the temperature in the honeybee cluster can reach the successful goal of 115-117º F (100º, 102º, 104º, 106º, 108º, 110º, 112º, 114º, 115º F).

            This defense mechanism of the Asian honeybee is an all or nothing affair.

            At the developmental, trial-and-error test phase thousands or millions of years ago, the Asian honeybees upon reaching the mid-point of 108º F in their group clustering, would have to “know” through foresight to keep going until they reached the deadly temperature of 115º F. 

            Our modern Age of Information tells us that the only thing capable of the engineering concept of constrained optimization of a sequential series of decisional yes/no choices aimed specifically at reaching targeted end-point outcomes in the future, using foresight…is intelligent agency.

            This is not fact-based evidence that supports the loosely termed “behavior adaptation” used by Jerry B. Coyne to enlist the defense strategy of the native Asian honeybee into the doctrinal camp of Darwinian macroevolution.

             The more plausible analysis of this remarkable reality in nature is that the balanced predator/prey relationship between the giant Asian hornet and their native honeybee counterpart cannot be explained through an incrementally escalating “arms war” of competing features over time. 

            The materialistic approach to explain developmental progress can only produce an oscillating back-and-forth battleground failure for one side or the other until they both reach the balanced stand-off we observe today between these two native, insect Asian combatants.

            We therefore do not have to uncritically swallow the idea that the European honeybees imported into the foreign environment of Japan will over time (thousands of years?) through the accidental method of trial-and-error likewise discover this one successful defensive strategy on their own in isolation, all the while suffering heavy losses in route to finding the very specific information that 117º F combined with CO² will defeat this otherwise unstoppable predator.

            This complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated information is intelligently designed upfront into the DNA and the gene regulatory networks of the native Asian honeybees, but is clearly absent in the European honeybees, evidenced when they are imported across the continent to Japan.

            This highlights the original intent found in this molecular biochemical information that must reside within the living cells of the honeybee…being “unnaturally” overridden through the independent intervention of the agency of unknowing human beekeepers in Japan and Europe.

            How exactly would a naturalistic Mother Nature provide the intentional foresight and directional determination to persist through the enumerable lethal failures of a hypothetical trial-and-error process…to reach a successful outcome for the honeybees defending themselves? 

            This information-based defensive strategy by the native Asian honeybee colonies is successfully functional and universally operative in Japan. 

            We do not currently see an experimental progressive transition part-way in development within the imported European honeybee colonies pointing towards the future perfected use of this defense tactic commonly utilized by their Asian cousins.

            Word has not spread through the natural “gossip” of inter-breeding and genetic drift from the successful Asian honeybees to the unsuccessful newcomer European honeybees imported into Japan (if this is even possible).  This vital genetic information for survival would then be actualized through the mechanisms of molecular biochemistry within the cell.

            But behavioral adaptability, inter-breeding, and genetic drift do not take us back the necessary one-step to explain the introduction of this information-based, novel defense strategy of the Asian honeybee…in the first place.

            At this point someone will logically impose the Darwinian mindset that given millions of years for development, would not a series of trial-and-error failures and successes eventually lead to the perfected defense strategy of the Asian honeybee?

            The skeletal explanatory framework upon which to connect the various factual data-points used in the standard methodology for all scientific research…is in scientific jargon called a theoretical hypothesis. 

            This hypothetical framework says from a philosophically naturalistic viewpoint that the only acceptable route for the Asian honeybee to achieve function over time is through the small steps of gradualistic development.

            The obvious problem that should shout-out to us here in this example is that given millions of years, the Asian honeybees in route towards a functional defense strategy this brilliantly original and well-conceived, would be annihilated in the naturalistic process of gradually incremental progressive steps before ever reaching successful function.

            Time plus chance does not lead to function when the systems of information are as complex as the defense strategy of the Asian honeybee.

            The fundamental problem in looking at the myriad of diverse instinctual lifestyle habits prolific in the natural living world is that from a materialist worldview it presumes on philosophical grounds that these end-point maturities can be arrived at through the gradualistic process of small incremental steps.

            The skeletal explanatory framework connecting the factual data points is what is wrong here…when the philosophical worldview of scientific materialism is utilized.

            The causal explanation of gradual, incremental, small-step, transitional progressive development does not fill-in this gap of how the Asian honeybee colony obtained this critical survival strategy…because we do not see gradualism universally in action as the mechanism of progressive development in the natural living world.

            There is a reason why there is zero evidence of incremental progressive development in an “arms-race” between the Asian honeybees and the giant Asian hornet…in the past or today.

            The reason is that it simply did not happen that way.

            There is a reason why there is zero evidence of transitional intermediates between mammals, amphibians, fish, birds, reptiles, and insects…in the fossil record.

            The reason is that the ever-increasing complexity of life from single-cell bacteria 3.8-billion years ago to human beings today, did not come about by the process of incremental progressive development.

            It simply did not happen that way.

            This is one of the key points of this book.

            There is no factual evidence for behavioral adaptation for how the Asian honeybees and the giant Asian hornet reached the equilibrium of their advance lifestyle-habits, because this is entirely theoretical based upon the philosophical worldview of naturalistic materialism.

            But there is clear empirical evidence for the functional coherence of the end-point performances of these two insect combatants, because we observe this in action today.

            The facts are not on the side of theoretical behavioral adaptation, but the facts are on the side of creatures universally exhibiting full functionality at their end-points of development.

            The fundamental question for modern science is where does the genetic information in living cells come from that produces the incredibly varied, instinctual predator/prey relationships that actualize though architectural body-plans of mind-boggling specificity and function…that produce a “fit” within biodiversity and ecosystems…in the first place.

            Science is legitimately allowed to use “just so” stories…like Rudyard Kipling’s fanciful story of how the tiger acquired its stripes…to theoretically connect-the-dots between data-points in their initial working hypotheses, until further investigation fills-in more facts.

            This is simply a part of the scientific method that encompasses the human psyche…the methodology of constructing a skeletal explanatory framework upon which to hang the varied pieces of data.

            These “just so” stories theorized by professional scientists are sometimes given an uncritical pass in their simple-to-complex explanations characteristic of scientific materialism.

            Just because Dr. Jerry Coyne explains the defense tactic of the native Asian honeybee colonies against the attack of the giant Asian hornet as behavioral adaptation…as Christians we do not have to buy into this based on the authority of a scientist’s word alone.

            We have the intellectual license to think this through and to arrive at a different conclusion…regarding the skeletal explanatory framework that is being used.

            The fields of the history of science and the philosophy of science have shown that no person is ideology-free…that no person conducting science is free of bias and prejudice.  Every person enters into a science research program having preconceived ideas and some form of a directional agenda.

[1] Jerry A. Coyne, Faith Versus Fact: Why Science And Religion Are Incompatible (New York: Penguin Books, 2015).

[2] Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 111-113.

[3] Wikipedia.org, Asian giant hornet, updated May 20, 2021.

Science and God: Human Development and Evolution

            Modern evolutionists adopt and incorporate the Latin axiom of Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species: “natura non facit saltum”…nature makes no sudden leaps.

            A continuous chain linking together Australopithecus (4-7 million years ago), Homo habilis (2 million years ago), Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago), and Cro-Magnon man which are early Homo sapiens (200,000 years ago)…requires the logical consistency of a uniformly straight, gradually moderate, upward sloping, horizontal graph-line.

            This should clearly illustrate historically recordable milestone events along this progression.

            Darwinian macroevolution applied to human development requires incremental improvements chopped-up into small enough pieces in order to easily progress through the process of genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection. 

            This has to occur over a long, drawn-out period of time.

            This evolutionary progression would reveal human transitional improvements as historically evident milestones spaced-out along the way, both in terms of recognizable physical characteristics and intellectual/lifestyle advancements.

            We cannot adopt gradualism as the axiom that nature makes no sudden leaps over a long period of time in the advancing anatomical and intellectual development of human beings, without some tangible evidence in the intellectual/lifestyle arena to show for it. 

            This should be a non-negotiable presentation of evidentiary fact required of modern evolutionists in support of progressive development, especially as historical time ticks downward in the very recent past decades at 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 thousand years ago.

            In plain words, we would expect to see a quarterly report-card…a historical audit report…of humanity’s physical and intellectual progress at mid-stride points in time in the distant past. 

            We cannot have sudden leaps forward and a progress report of gradually improving human attributes both at the same time.

            In the hypothetical progression from ancient ancestors to modern humans, a mindless and undirected natural world can provide no preferential leaps forward for mankind. 

            Darwinian macroevolution allows only a slow-moving naturalistic gradualism.   

            Large advances of development in living organisms in biology are called saltations.  They are considered outside the reach of random and undirected processes to bring into being within single creative events.  Saltations require the combination and coordination of too many small genetic mutations to coalesce into one large, beneficially functional trait…to then successfully be chosen by natural selection.   

            If the historical development of human beings was in-fact gradual, this would apply not only to physical traits but also to lifestyle/intellectual advancements.  These advancements must be in a relatively close one-to-one correspondence to the physical traits being put-out by the advancing complexity of new and different cell types introduced over time.  

            Otherwise, the only option left is to have a lump-sum addition of advanced intelligence to human beings at a late, singular point in time…which could only occur through divine creation. 

            The lump-sum addition of human intellectual acuity late in development would create a dichotomy between physical and mental advancements…a reality that becomes more difficult to explain through random and undirected processes.

Human writing as an indicator

            The human invention of writing is a critical, date-stamp indicator of human intellectual progress.

            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 writing of the first five books of the Old Testament…called the Pentateuch…is dated by conservative scholars at around 1,450 B.C.

            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 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 sapien is generally placed at around 200,000 years ago, which inaugurates the start of what is considered to be modern man.

            It would follow then that the invention of writing, by some exceptionally gifted persons having forwardly progressing I.Q’s above and out in-front of the pack, 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.

            If Darwinian macroevolution encompasses human development, which it must for the overall theory to be true, we should expect to see the gradual progression of writing, the invention of paper and books, farming, villages, towns, politics, institutionalized civilizations, and other signs of creative intellectual advancements in technology, music, creative writing, and the arts…pioneered in the long ago.

            We should expect to see milestone advancements pushed way back in time, actualized by exceptionally gifted people with higher IQ’s and innate talents according to genetic variation, in relatively small numbers yet producing great effects.

            Charles Lyell, a contemporary and a friend of Darwin, posited the research methodology for the historical sciences such as geology of using the present phenomena to reconstruct events in the past.

            I would suggest here that the wide range of intellectual acuities we observe in humans today, if extrapolated backwards in time according to Lyell’s dictum that the present explains the past, overrules Darwin’s materialistic requirement that nature makes no sudden leaps.

            Intellectual development in human beings does not have to keep pace with physical development on a perfectly precise one-to-one correspondence, one or the other lagging behind slightly at times.

            But if the macroevolutionary scenario put forward by Darwinists is true…which I do not think it is…then the recent time-crunch for the observably rapid intellectual development of human beings, must be spread-out backwards over a much longer period of time.

            We should expect to see preview fore-glimpses of an Alexander the Great, Shakespeare, Stradivarius, Isaac Newton, Rembrandt, Mozart, Darwin, Edison, and Einstein, at repetitive intervals of time counting down the decades between 200,000 B.C. to around 5,000 B.C., for example. 

            This would reveal an unmistakable, upward sloping, gradual ascending progression to the high elevation of our modern era today.

Humans are unique

            Homo sapiens are the only species on earth capable of producing history…of creating a record of the events of advancing civilization.

            The one area where we can track the accuracy of the linkage procedure used in common descent…is in the intellectual progress of Homo sapiens.

            This cannot be tracked in the same way looking at the lifestyle habits of ancient fossils of other creatures, because woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers are incapable of writing histories documenting their instinct-based, lifestyle progress.

            We can easily tell whether or not the intellectual progress of human development keeps pace with the hypothesized linkages that could demonstrate advancing anatomical progress over vast periods of time.  

            Near-mature intelligent human beings getting close to full-development…would be the only living species capable of leaving behind a written history that would enable a parallel tracking of both advancing anatomy and intelligence…the critical comparative tracking of architectural body-plans to lifestyle habits.

            Creating common descent linkages between Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens on anatomical grounds, using the straight-line Darwinian formula of nature makes no sudden leaps, cannot then exclude and ignore the evidence of the exponential, upward spiking graph-line track of human intellectual progress.

The on/off switches of gene regulatory networks

            Could the concept of developmental gene regulatory networks (DGRN’s) in pre-human living cells build and store-up the future capacity for modern human intellectual moral reasoning to explode on to the scene recently within a short time-span?

            This is one research program currently underway in molecular biochemistry trying to explain the near instantaneous immergence of complex living creatures during the Cambrian Explosion between 535-515 million years ago.  If answered, this could then apply to the apparent singularity of the near instant appearance of human intellectual and moral reasoning.  

            Researching the matter-and-energy mechanics of the sudden immergence of complex life-forms at the Cambrian Explosion still does not address the fundamental question of where did the genetic information come from in the first place…no matter how it was then translated into the reality of architectural body-plans.

            Whether or not the supporting genetic information is built-up gradually over long periods of time, and then released into physical actuality through the on/off mechanism of a controlling regulatory switch, is a brilliant scientific inquiry.

            But the answer to this question still does not address the fundamental questions of where would this information come from that guides DGRN’s, and how could it be so precisely timed and coordinated with specific geological eras of complimentary biodiversity and supportive ecosystems?

            Answer this question definitively through DGRN matter-and-energy mechanisms or through some other system of epigenetic information (a controlling informational system outside of DNA)…and we only push the fundamental question of the creative origin of genetic information…back one step. 

            We have then only answered more deeply the physics and chemistry of how ink bonds to paper, but have gone nowhere near solving the mystery of the intelligent agency that arranges the ink to convey the specified information of the headlines in the New York Times newspaper.

            The fact-based evidence of modern science does not support the traditional Darwinian process of small-step incremental gradualism as the causal explanation for human development, which must exhibit intellectual milestone improvements as well as anatomical advancements in an upward sloping linear progression.

Science and God: Did God Leave Fingerprints?

            The ideological divide between scientific materialists and Christian theists starts with the fact that the biblical God hasnot made His personal location amenable to scientific discovery…through a solely materialistic pursuit within the realm of matter and energy.

            For Christians this ideological divide is by the deliberate intention of God…God being a Spirit Mind.

            The God of the Bible has not allowed His personhood to be reduced down to the level of being merely one of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, or mathematics.  He is not a part of the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world that we can only make an impersonal connection with at best, intellectually with our minds but not personally with our hearts.

            The God of the Bible is the brilliantly insightful composer of the biblical narrative stories of faith from Abraham through Paul.  He is not the deistic god who created the universe then removed Himself to a safely detached and non-participative distance from His creation.

            We can clearly see the awe, wonder, and beauty displayed in the natural world, which for Christian theists must be an accurate reflection of God’s character, intelligence, and personality.  And we have the innate capacity to admire the organized complexity in nature phenomenally apparent to the ancient Greek philosophers…and even more so today through the discoveries of modern science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 

            But all of these remarkable physical things cannot really tell us who God is as a person, a fact of reality which God understands better than we do.   

            Having instead bypassed a physical revelation of His personhood (other than the incarnation and life of Jesus Christ the Son of God for about 33 years in the first third of the first-century A.D. in Israel), God went straight to the heart-of-the-matter by inventing biblical-quality journeys of faith as the means by which we can enter into individualized mission-plans for our lives.

            This approach has the elevated goals of highly specified purpose, meaning, and direction…but most importantly along the way also getting to know God personally (Gen. 12:1-3, 37:5-11; Ex. 3:2-12; Jud. 6:11-16; 1Sam. 16:12-13; Jer. 1:4-6; Lk. 1:28-33; Mk. 1:16-17; Acts 9:3-16).

            In a few of my other Christian books I ask the question: Why didn’t God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit take full advantage of the most opportune time to have the risen Jesus walk down the center of Main Street in Jerusalem and straight into the Temple sanctuary, on Tuesday or Wednesday of the first week following His resurrection?

            In clear view of everyone, God could have made the definitively empirical statement that Jesus is the Messiah and divine Son of God, and to worship only Him as settled fact and not of faith.

            But upon reflection, the Creator God of the entire universe has the capacity to make His true identity empirically known at any time during human history…in any number of clearly obvious and indisputable ways, repeatable on a daily basis if He wanted to.

            Also in some of my other Christians books, I introduce the related concept in the Bible of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief.  This is a very subtle, fine-tuned, and long-standing reality that could only come from the mind of God, having no other plausible source of origin coming out of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.

            There is no conceivable motivation for imaginative inspiration for the delicate balance between belief and unbelief to be invented within the storylines of human fictional mythology.    

            Yet the faith element of biblical Judaism and Christianity that produces the unique religious context for the development of a personal relationship with God, creates this dynamic of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief, that has been set-up and fine-tuned to exist for over four thousand years. 

            This is a spiritual engineering feat that shouts-out for the most fundamental brilliance of the real living God who can differentiate between the high value of a personal relationship, contrasted with the lower counterfeit of a mere physically factual revelation.  This feat of spiritual engineering leaves in-place our humanistic ability to push God away to the safe distance of being a detached, deistic god…of having no potential “interference” or impact upon the way we want to run our lives.     

            The humanism of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking would like to confine God to the category of an impersonal being that we acknowledge as existing through the hubris of our scientific investigation of matter and energy…and leave it there. 

            Relegated to being mere head-knowledge about a harmless God we can safely set-aside, this eliminates the risk of His performing the proper role and function as God, that He might insist upon radically altering the terms of our self-sovereign control over the course and direction of our lives.          

            But it would be the pinnacle of brilliant insight if the Creator God of the living and non-living natural world, in order to create the precise context within which to correctly introduce Himself to mankind, did this by initiating personal relationships. 

            In the Spirit…God introduces Himself to people through the biblical invention of God-composed journey of faith life-scripts (Gen. 12:1-3) made possible through redemptive salvation by grace through faith and not by “the works of the law” (Rom. 4:3, 16; Acts 15:11).

            The God of the Bible is currently not physically present in a corporal body.  He is not in a material form at a specific location on earth or in the universe.  Hedoes not live at an address and does not have a zip code.  God is therefore not findable by scientific materialists searching through the microscopic world of atoms, protons, and electrons all the way up to viewing through a telescope the vast expanse of the galactic cosmos.

            This “negative” finding crosses over the ideological divide into fodder for atheistic unbelief…as the prime evidence that God is non-existent.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”                                                     (Heb. 11:1)

“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.”                      (Heb. 11:6)           

            Some professional scientists assert through their atheistic worldview that the universe is without ultimate purpose or meaning.  The modern irony here is that their chosen career of science itself is saturated with purpose.

            The mission-plan proposed by the philosopher Francis Bacon…a contemporary of Shakespeare…to simplify the scientific method by stripping away purpose from the study of matter and energy alone, is itself a mission-statement having a clearly delineated purpose.

            In this new Age of Information, modern science has identified complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world.  This has essentially overtaken and passed-up any reasonably believable explanation for the origin of these complex systems of information coming from a purely materialistic mechanism.

            There is no such thing as “straight science” that is entirely divorced from the abstract and intangible nature of information.

            The ground rules of scientific investigation are material, but they include the abstraction of immaterial information in order to produce meaning, in order to put meat on the bare bones of scientific discoveries and knowledge.

            I am arguing here for the recognition of the immaterial transcendence of the mind…of abstract information…in the exercise of the analysis and judgment integral within scientific research.

            The thing to comprehend here within the delicate balance between belief and unbelief is that when applied to the human scientific enterprise, the initial set-up of a research program, the collection of data, and the analysis and conclusions after the research is completed…is laced and infused with the abstract thinking of information.  This is expressed through the communication mediums of words, drawings, photographs, and numerical equations. 

            These research programs are not confined exclusively to the discovery of raw data alone, but necessarily involve the scientifically undefinable essences of good faith, integrity, honesty, and trust guiding the accuracy of the research and the reporting of its findings. 

            This suite of additional moral and philosophical elements creates a much broader overall product than just the raw evidentiary facts alone.

            From the perspective of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief, science is rife with faith and trust integral and inseparable from its initial logic in crafting a research program, making observations, and then inferring conclusions and theories from the data.

            In this sense, information and evidence are inseparable in the scientific method.   

            Scientific materialists…atheists…want “evidence” for God…but information is evidence.

            Scientific materialists want to insist on a faith-stopper by asserting that matter and energy are the only real means by which we can generate truth.

            Phillip E. Johnson makes the salient point in his public talks[1] that once the paradigm of materialism is established as the working model for scientific investigation, then critics of macroevolution are admonished to stay within the confines of the study of matter and energy only, to “pony up” with fact-based evidence that pushes only the materialistic database of information forward.

            This insistence upon naturalistic materialism only…disallows taking stock of the current evidence and then drawing contrary conclusions as to the truth or falsity of the evidence for macroevolution…on the merits of the evidence. 

            The method of falsification of hypotheses is historically scientific for everything other than the atheistic materialism of macroevolution.

            Insisting upon naturalistic materialism as the working model for scientific investigation is pure philosophical subterfuge.

            As has been said in several places in this book, Intelligent Design is a skeletal explanatory framework on equal standing with scientific materialism…both viewpoints crafting explanatory storylines connecting the exact same data points of information.

            Atheists Insist that professional scientists who are Christians “pony up” with more arguments in favor of naturalistic materialism in order to do acceptable science.  This exhibits a prejudicial bias that is in the worst sense unscientific.   

            For scientific materialists…it is: “Play by our rules of materialism or don’t play at all.  If you theists want to question macroevolution…do it solely through the means of matter and energy, and leave aside logic, argumentation, and reasoning.   Take our word on the authority of scientism that God does not exist until we tell you otherwise.”

            Scientific materialists say: “In science, we study matter and energy…and that’s the end of it.”

            But this is not true. 

            Science is infused with abstract and conceptually intangible information, of raw factual data and beginning theoretical assumptions and philosophically derived conclusions, all of which are open to evaluation and analysis by any number of perspectives and viewpoints.

            The vast amount of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world…as a whole taken as evidence…can reach the conclusion that these systems of information point to the need for intelligent agency to explain their origin. 

            But this is an inference from the data that is clearly a non-materialistic conclusion.

“I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14; Isa. 43:11-15; Jn.8:58)

            One brilliant argument coming from Christian apologists in this area of discovering the identity of God as being a separate issue from the evidence for His existence is that the four faces of American Presidents accurately and unmistakably depicted on Mount Rushmore are easily and immediately attributed to a sculptor rather than the erosion of wind and rain.[2]

            Yet the question of who the sculptor is or was does not have any bearing upon the evidentiary impression of intelligent design in the creation of Mount Rushmore. 

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

[1] Grand Metaphysical Story of Science–Phillip E. Johnson, April 21, 2012 by Izzy Invasion, on You Tube.

[2] 20161030 The Oldest Yahweh Inscription 2 Kings Joel Kramer, published on Oct. 30, 2016, by Lighthouse Church-Twin Falls on You Tube…at Joel Kramer Archaeologist.

Science and God: Can Science Falsify Biblical Miracles?

            In this new Age of Information, the concept of the required perfection of information systems is now broadly understood thanks to the immergence and widespread use of the personal computer. 

            The common awareness that computer software programs from spreadsheets to games must be thoroughly debugged in order to function error-free before they are put-out into the marketplace, has entered into popular knowledge.  This was not the case a few decades ago prior to the invention of the writing of computer software language code. 

            In this new Age of Information, everything has changed.  Science has changed, and our cultural outlook has changed.

            Arguments that were reasonably compelling 50, 100, or 200 years ago now no longer hold water, when viewed from the perspective of a universe that is information-based requiring intelligent agency.  This is contrasted with the opposite perspective of a universe that is solely based upon mechanism…a wholly materialistic universe without intelligent agency.

            There are three or four major concepts that come to mind, that have been simplified and clarified as a result of the prioritizing of information above matter-and-energy.

            The first such centuries-old concept is that biblical miracles can and will be falsified through science. 

            This was a compelling argument historically made through the scientific investigation and description of matter-and-energy mechanisms in the natural world that produce empirical, fact-based evidence.

            But when understood in terms of information, the God of the Bible performing a miracle is no more incredulous than the modern architect or a homebuilder changing the location of a large walk-in closet to become a bathroom…and vice-versa, part-way into the construction at the preliminary rough-framing phase, to improve the floor-plan layout at the request of the homebuyer.

            This is an example of conceptual, creative information being translated into physical matter and energy, after the construction of the new house is already in progress.

            The God of the Bible performing a miracle, is no more incredulous than this same buyer of a custom-built new home requesting the architect or the builder to reframe a particular door opening to be wider, or to install a larger window at a particular bedroom, or to move a non-bearing wall 12-inches this way or that way…being common events that occur somewhere in the world every day in new housing construction.

            An information-based universe allows flexibility for the input of revisions, in the form of purposeful miracles recorded in the Bible, as long as the Architect/Builder possesses the means to bring this information into physical reality without violating structural engineering or the “local building codes.”

            Jesus can change water into wine at the marriage at Cana because Jesus invented water (Jn. 1:3, 2:1-11).

            This does not mean that the architect or the builder is required to explain to the new homebuyer precisely how they intend to accomplish these requested changes…in the detailed terms of the “means-and-methods” of building construction.

            The complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information we see everywhere in the natural world, required not only an Intelligent Designer God who had perfectly exhaustive and comprehensive access to information, but a God who invented from scratch all of this information in the form of matter, energy, time, and the laws of physics and chemistry.

            This is analogous to the same way that an architect starts with a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer screen, inventing the design information for a new building by using illustrated lines, spaces, and text/word notes.

            Because we now popularly have a sense of the complexity component involved in debugging thousands of lines of computer software language code for a business application or a game…of getting these lines of code right so that their applications are operatively functional…we now also have a popular sense of the organized complexity of the architectural and engineering design of a physical new building.

            This then easily translates into the concept of the requirement of intelligent agency in formulating the information in the design and construction of this physical, material universe that we study through scientific investigation.

            The complex, specified, and coherently integrated mechanisms in the natural world are somewhat analogous and similar in character to the standardized technology of the physical construction “means and methods” building trades techniques utilized in assembling a new house.

            Like the complexity of the writing of computer software language code, and the complexity of the architectural and engineering design of a new building, this now gives us a commonplace and popular sense of the inescapable role of agency in relation to the invention and organization of complex information systems.

            The old-fashioned idea that the study of mechanism through science would automatically preclude the existence and function of agency, because agency is information-based, no longer holds water, does not stack-up.

            The best refutation of the famous David Hume argument that biblical miracles violate natural laws, that I have heard, is given by John Lennox as an illustration in an interview entitled “Can science explain everything?” on You Tube[1]…which I will paraphrase and Americanize below:

            If while vacationing in California, I place in the top drawer of the dresser cabinet in my hotel room $100, and the next day I place another $100 in this same drawer, and the third day after sight-seeing I come back and open this dresser drawer and find that $150 is missing…then have the laws of nature been broken…or the laws of California?

            We would immediately conclude that the laws of California had been broken…telling us that the laws of nature and the laws of the state of California are different.

            But how are they different? 

            My hotel room is not a closed-system.  Even though I lock the door when I leave…an outside agent can gain entrance into this room (pick the lock, climb through a window, have a master key, etc.), open the top drawer of the dresser, reach-in and take out $150.

            The other explanation for the disappearance of the $150 would be a miracle that violates the laws of nature, according to the argument put forward by Hume.

            But nothing in the laws of nature tell us scientifically that these laws are a closed-system, that an outside agent cannot come into the hotel room, reach into the dresser drawer, and alter the dollar amount, in this illustration.

            The requirement that the laws of nature are somehow closed systems is an added philosophical assumption that is not evidenced within these laws themselves.

            In other words, the laws of nature tell us in this illustration that according to what normally occurs money does not by itself disappear into thin-air in a puff of smoke.  But these laws of nature do not and cannot tell us that an outside agent is absolutely barred from entering the room and taking money from the drawer. 

            The laws of nature that describe what normally occurs, and an agent who can act independently from what normally occurs are two different things, a reality that undermines Hume’s objection to biblical miracles.

            David Hume has to first assume the non-existence of God as the capable, independent, outside agent who can enter into the hotel room of nature and “take the money”…to make his case that “thefts” in nature called biblical miracles are unscientific and therefore also non-existent. 

            This is a case that devolves into a circular argument… that because God cannot violate the closed-system of the laws of nature then the laws of nature are a closed-system, thereby concluding that biblical miracles are unscientific and therefore do not exist.

            The correct starting assumption is that my hotel room is not an absolute closed-system…and that it is possible for an outside agent (thief) to gain entrance and alter the dollar amount in the dresser drawer.

            The parallel analogy of God being absolutely barred from entering into the closed-system of the natural world as an outside agent to perform a miracle is erroneously based upon the circular argument that science tells us that the natural world is a closed-system. 

Simple-to-complex is a mindset over-used to support gradualism and naturalistic materialism

            To suggest that the Big Bang creation of the universe was a simple event is as unscientific as is imaginable.

            The creative events involved in the beginning of this universe are open to scientific investigation, revealing organized complexity occurring in a split-second, of systems of information far in excess of the writing of any computer software language code, or the architectural and engineering design of the most complex building.

            The identity of the Intelligent Designer God of the universe is a separate issue.  The main point here is that the complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world easily identify the presence of agency.

            Agency can no longer be pushed aside by the focused study of mechanism in the name of science, no more than the role of the architect as designer can be set aside and displaced by the mechanism of the actual building construction in progress.  The role of the computer software engineer as designer cannot be set aside and displaced from the functional application of the mechanism of the software program in use.

            The existence of agency follows from the organized complexity observed.

            Looking back in time, what have we learned through the scientific investigation of matter and energy…of concrete, physical mechanisms…in the twentieth century?

            At the beginning of the twentieth century…in 1916…we learned through the General Theory of Relativity that the speed of light was a fixed quantity, and that time was therefore relative to motion in relation to a fixed point of reference.

            In 1929, the scientific investigation of matter-and-energy mechanisms in the cosmos led to the discovery that the universe was expanding rapidly outward. 

            This was evidenced in the spectral red-shift of the light coming towards us from distant galaxies in the universe, viewed through the massive-sized telescope atop Mt. Wilson in Pasadena, California.  This generated the revolutionary idea of a beginning point in time of our universe…popularly coined the Big Bang.

            In 1953 and 1957, the discovery first of the double-helix structure of the molecule DNA in living organisms, and then the inconceivably vast and organized complexity of its specified information content, has to be one of the top three to five revelations in all of human history…this particular revelation coming from the investigation of matter-and-energy mechanisms through the scientific method.

            In 1973, the submission of a technical paper at a scientific conference by the British cosmologist Brandon Carter, on the apparent fine-tuning of the mathematical constants in several key areas of the physics of the universe to support carbon-based life like ourselves, has grown into the field of study known as the Anthropic Principle.[2]

            But the entirely unexpected, counterintuitive conclusion that the scientific investigation of matter-and-energy mechanisms in the natural world has produced, is that the understanding of mechanisms does not lead to atheism.

            Modern science does not rationally displace old-fashioned theism with a modern version of enlightened atheism…but instead unmistakably points towards the existence of a brilliantly ingenious God. 

            After centuries of the most intense investigation of the phenomena of the natural world it turns out that the fundamental conflict is not between God and science…but instead is between agency and mechanism.

            This is at bottom an illogically nonsensical dichotomy, because the two realities of agency and mechanism fit smoothly together rather than being separate and apart.

            Whatever and whoever we decide is the cause of the phenomena of the natural world, it should now be abundantly clear in our modern understanding of information that complex mechanism cannot create complex mechanism…cannot create itself.  The chemistry and physics of how ink bonds to paper is not the explanation for how this ink gets arranged into the letters of the English language to convey the specified information in the headlines of the New York Times newspaper.

            This is a good place to discuss the term “creation science.”

            There is no such thing as creation science.

            This has to be one of the worst abuses of the concept of creating a straw-man that is easy to knock down.

            Intelligent design is a competing skeletal-explanatory-framework hypothesis utilizing the exact same set of empirical facts arranged by scientific materialists in their explanatory secular storylines.

            Philosophical materialism has no more right to the empirical facts than does fiat creationism.  These are two opposing constructions…spins…placed upon the same set of facts in a similar way to two opposing trial lawyers arguing for guilt or innocence in the same court of law.

            When scientific materialists insist that proponents of intelligent design come up with an alternate program of “creation science,” they are making an incredibly short-sighted appeal based upon the idea that scientists who are Christian theists would have access to special information outside of the “standards of the industry” database that comprises modern science.

            When understood as a skeletal explanatory framework competing on the same level playing field as naturalistic materialism, utilizing the same set of facts, the insistence that intelligent design should produce an alternate program of “creation science” again can be seen as being illogically nonsensical.

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

[1] Can science explain everything?  An interview with John Lennox.  RZIM, Jan. 31, 2019.

[2] Patrick Glynn, God The Evidence (New York, Three Rivers Press, 1997), 7-9.

Science and God: The Copernican Principle

            A major concept that can be clarified through the critical analysis of equally competing skeletal explanatory frameworks, is the notion popularized by Carl Sagan in his book The Pale Blue Dot, coined as the Copernican Principle or the Principle of Mediocrity.

            The Principle of Mediocrity says that because the earth is smaller in size compared to the vastness of the cosmos…that simply because our earth is inhabited by humans…it nonetheless merits no special significance in the universe.

            To paraphrase, Carl Sagan said that our earth was a small speck in the great cosmic dark, enjoying no special or preferred place in the universe, the essence of the concept of the Principle of Mediocrity.

            The arguments unwinding this concept begin by saying that the universe has to reach its current size in order to have a large enough “sample size” of rapidly receding galaxies to mathematically calculate in reverse-time going backwards, to precisely pinpoint an accurate average of 13.7 billion years ago for the Big Bang beginning of the universe.

            The relative ratio between a hypothetically smaller universe and a larger earth would not improve the accuracy of these calculations, and are therefore seen as being irrelevant in determining the importance of the earth in terms of relative size.

            The vast size of the universe appears not to be an impediment in calculating a beginning point in time for the universe…an extremely important scientific discovery.

            This line of reasoning would be easily recognized by a cosmologist or physicist.

            Having this starting point in time established, we can ask some questions relating to this issue of mediocrity.

            After the first billion years of the existence of the universe…at 12.7 billion years ago…would our Milky Way galaxy exist and how developed would it be?

            Could an early universe that had expanded to roughly 7% of its current size (using a linear expansion of 13.7/100 = 7%)…be able to produce our Milky Way galaxy to the point where our galaxy would then be able to produce and sustain our solar system and planet earth?

            The beginning of the universe at 13.7 billion years ago minus the beginning of the earth at 4.5 billion years ago…equals roughly 9.2 billion years of the expanding universe before our local solar system and earth are formed.  Another 4.5 billion years of expansion occurs before humans come along and begin to investigate the natural world through science.

            If time and space were compressed to make the earth “more significant” in terms of relative size compared to the universe at large…would we still have an earth located within the dark space between two spiral arms within the comparatively safe “goldilocks zone” a little more than half-way out between the center and the outside edge of the Milky Way galaxy?

            Would we have the clear atmosphere of the earth to explore the cosmos through telescopes and outer-space probing satellites?

            Would an initial expansion rate of the universe that was less than it was at the Hot Big Bang produce the enormous universe compared to the seemingly insignificant planet earth, having all of the right proportions, sizes, and fine-tuned constants in the laws of physics? 

            The precisely accurate mathematical calculations fit together like a Swiss watch…including a definitive starting point in time for the beginning of the universe.

            Carl Sagan saying that our earth is mediocre within the grand scheme of things, because the worldview of scientific materialism has no place for intelligent agency and thus no purpose or meaning in the universe, is a totally philosophical assumption.  It has no empirical support coming from the fact-based evidence of science itself.

            We could ask what alternative size and scope for the universe would provide an equal quantitative and qualitative sample size to produce the current accuracy of our determinations of the laws of physics and the characteristics of the elements of the Periodic Table.

            There is a host of reasons why the Principle of Mediocrity is no longer valid, beyond the scope of this book (see the book Why the Universe Is The Way It Is, by Hug Ross, 2008).

            The Principle of Mediocrity reveals the peril that occurs when scientists leave their specialty and from the elevated platform of scientific authority make assertions about worldviews that are entirely philosophical…which I am now doing in the statement in bold and italics directly below this paragraph.

Modern science today points towards intelligent agency, and not towards the insignificance of mediocrity

            Modern scientific investigation was always going to arrive at a point in time when it reached the inescapable recognition of the need for a Designing Intelligent Agent.

            The organized complexity of the information content now reveals scientifically an architectural and engineering artisan of incomparable precision at the highest standards of craftsmanship, having complete mastery of the database of information to create everything material and non-material in existence in the universe… because He Himself created all of this information.

            Because the natural world was always this complex…starting at the Big Bang creation of the universe 13.7-billion years ago and the formation of our planet earth 4.5-billion years ago…this paradigm-changing epiphany was waiting all this time for human scientific discovery to catch up. 

            The functional coherence of organized complexity now points to intelligent design as the only remaining plausible option. 

            This returns full-circle from the theistic conceptual beginnings of the Scientific Revolution…of a rational Creator God of the Bible producing a natural world that is orderly, intelligible, and accessible to human scientific investigation…to discover the truth as to how all of this came into being.

            Not everyone will become PhD scientists, able to navigate through the technical facts spanning several disciplines of research, now supporting design and thus agency in nature.  

            Not everyone has a college degree in philosophy…able to parse the subtle arguments for and against theism and atheism.

            Winning a consensus that favors design in today’s scientific and philosophical communities, thereby rejecting the atheistic version of materialism, would be without question a monumental event in human history.

            But the discovery by modern science of the inescapable presence of design in the natural world, based upon a fuller understanding and appreciation of information in this new Age of Information, and thus the existence of an intelligent designer God…expands a million-fold when filtered through the biblical narrative stories of faith. 

            Making a compelling argument to the general populace that a faith-journey following the perfectly precise and accurate God of the Bible as the one true worldview narrative excluding all others (Mt. 7:13-14; Jn. 11:25, 14:6)…is a bottom-line conclusion immerging from both science and Christian living today.

            The final end-point purpose of the scientific research epiphany in nature of the existence of a designing agent, having the indescribable foresight to capably marshal all of the varied components needed to fashion this functional universe, must rightfully make the logical connection to validate this same high competence of the God of the Bible in composing journeys of faith life-scripts.

            The mislabeled controversy between God and science then boils-down to the correctly identified contest between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty…which can only be fought-out within the confines of faith, trust, and personal relationships.

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

Science and God: The Survival of Fittest

            If we are to arrive at the truth regarding this natural world and our place in it, if we are to discover evidences that point toward ultimate purpose and meaning in life, then we will have to approach the current fact-based data produced through the modern scientific enterprise today…with an open mind. 

            But getting free of past biases and prejudices is difficult.

            There are things in our worldviews that we take totally for granted, that we cannot even see as issues that we need to dig a little deeper into.

            One such issue within the Darwinian story is the survival of the fittest.

            Survival of the fittest is one of the important components in the argument for the mindless and undirected processes of macroevolution through mutation/selection…that Darwin postulated to produce the vast diversity of life on earth

            But the concept of the survival of the fittest as articulated by evolutionists has been criticized as being merely only a tautology…of being a circular argument devoid of telling us anything useful.   

            The survival of the fittest concept within the Darwinian story says that the fittest is defined as those organisms that produce the most offspring…those organisms producing the most offspring being the fittest.  This is a circular re-statement telling us nothing except X = X…a tautology.[1] 

            The larger question is why did Charles Darwin enlist and integrate this obvious phenomenon of the survival of the fittest in the living world into his theory for macroevolution?

            And why has countless philosophical materialists after Darwin adopted survival of the fittest as an argument in favor of macroevolution, when this concept is saturated with the directional trajectories of purpose aimed at definitive outcomes…in a materialistic universe supposedly devoid of purpose and meaning?

            Darwin enlists this concept of the survival of the fittest into his theory for the origin of the vast biodiversity of life on earth, without first questioning how and where this incredibly innovative idea would originate from. 

            Darwin placed it in the column of random and undirected cause/effect explanations…seemingly without giving it much thought.

            If Darwinian macroevolution uncritically adopts into its theory the notion of the survival of the fittest, which is universally apparent in the natural world…then how and why would a blind Mother Nature be the originator of this very strange reality?

            In my opinion, this has to be one of the worst cases of taking things for granted, in the history of human thought. 

            This has to be one of the worst examples of critically unexamined evidences…in the marketplace of ideas.

            In a random and undirected reality created by a blind and indifferent Mother Nature, produced solely through materialistic causations…how would the balanced predator/prey relationships in the natural living world arise by accident? 

            By a process of accidental happenstance, how would these relationships become so coherently integrated into an exceedingly complex biodiversity and an independent system of equally complex ecological niches?

            How and why would some creatures eat plants, and other creatures eat each other…in a natural living world so coordinated that it shouts-out for intelligent design and not self-assembly through accidental chance?    

            After the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species, the new Darwinists did not “bat an eye” over the idea that the survival of the fittest…the fight for survival…could be a reality originating solely from a naturalistic explanation instead of coming from intelligent agency.

            But the clear question should hit us in the face…as to how matter-and-energy alone could invent such a reality?

            Darwin enlisted this reality of the survival of the fittest as the motivating fuel behind the mutation/selection process to produce the vast diversity of life…but the fight for survival is overflowing with directional purpose…purpose supposedly being left-out of pure science.

            The function of fighting for survival is nothing if not purpose-driven.

            If we are looking for a blind, mindless, unguided, indifferent to outcomes, trial-and-error, and purpose-free program to fuel the naturalistic mechanism in support of the theory of macroevolution…the very last thing we should choose is the purpose-saturated concept of the survival of the fittest. 

            The argument here is that Darwin actually goes against the Francis Bacon imperative of leaving purpose out of the scientific method, in adopting the survival of the fittest as one of the central planks in his theory of macroevolution.  The idea that survival pressures would naturally push organisms towards ever improving function is an idea saturated with directional purpose.

Methodological materialism

            In 1859, the obvious go-to default choice would be to side with a program that fits within a naturalistic worldview, in conformity to the direction that all other scientific discoveries appeared to be heading through the research format of methodological materialism. 

            This is a lengthy term that merely describes the generally accepted methodology of science focusing upon matter-and-energy explanations of phenomena in the natural world. 

            The irony here is that science cannot divorce raw data from purpose.  Methodological materialism cannot operate within a purpose-free zone.  

            Science requires skeletal explanatory frameworks to connect the dots of specific data, to formulate hypotheses that have meaning.

            The concept of the survival of the fittest appears to be a critical piece of data that has been mistakenly placed within the wrong hypothesis of naturalistic materialism, when it should rightly be placed within the skeletal explanatory framework of theistic creative agency.

            Darwin could not possibly peer into the future to see that modern science would eventually discover complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information everywhere in biological life.

            One of the contentions of this book is that the intelligently designed mechanisms in living cells incorporate the on/off switches of gene regulatory networks that correctly explain the gradually increasing number of different cell types. 

            This then produces new architectural body-plans within a program of common descent over time.

            The intelligently planned release of genetic information contained within living cells, more plausibly replaces the component of the survival of the fittest married to mutation/selection as the prime motivating force behind the vast diversity of life.

            The concept of the survival of the fittest needs to be looked at a little more deeply, as something that does not fit smoothly within a naturalistic program, but rather is plausibly explainable only through the creative intelligence of a mind.

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

[1] Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, 3rd Edition (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 2010), 39-43.

%d bloggers like this: