Tag: Darwin

How Do You Get a Perfect Person All the Way to the Cross?…Revised

            Skeptics and critics of Christianity raise the question of why Jesus Christ is not more prominent in the secular histories of the first-century, outside of the New Testament gospels.

            One observation that can be made historically about the Roman Empire during this time-period is that it was relatively tolerant of the diverse religious beliefs of the geographies and peoples it controlled, as long as this tolerance did not encourage political unrest.

            The New Testament gospels record as early as the ministry of John the Baptist that some Roman soldiers came to listen to his teaching (Lk. 3:14), and presumably participated personally in being water baptized, without risk or harm in any way to their careers in the Roman army, in the same way that soldiers in Ephesus might attend temple services honoring the goddess Diana (Acts 19:27-28), without jeopardizing their military careers.

            The gospel of Matthew records early in the ministry of Jesus a Roman centurion asking Jesus to supernaturally heal a servant sick of the palsy (Mt. 8:5-13; Lk. 7:1-5).

            Early in the ministry of Peter, another Roman centurion named Cornelius in the city of Caesarea is described as being a devout man who was a Gentile “God-fearer” along with all of his house, who sent for Peter to come and preach to them about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (Acts 10).

            It can be reasonably assumed that some Roman soldiers were assigned to all large gatherings of Jews in Jerusalem going out to hear Jesus teach outdoors, and would have witnessed first-hand and up-close the miracles of multiplying the few fish and loaves of bread to feed thousands of people gathered on a hillside (Mt. 14:15-21, 15: 32-39).

            So, what would it have taken to get a contingent of Roman senators to travel all the way from Rome to the distant and unimportant province of Israel to view the supposed supernatural activities of an obscure prophet in the city of Jerusalem?

            What magnitude of notoriety would produce such international acclaim as to capture the interest of the world-at-large in the first-century, within the broad cultural tolerance of religious beliefs allowed to be practiced in the Roman Empire, that would generate more than only the small notice and slight concern over events occurring in Jerusalem, for the governing body then in Rome? 

            Even Pontius Pilate the Roman governor of Judea saw no threat in the ministry of Jesus, and proclaims after his first interview of Jesus: “I find in him no fault at all.” (Jn. 18:38).

            The fundamental point here for why the life of Jesus Christ is not a biography splashed all over the secular histories of the day, is that the humanism of going our own way (Isa. 53:6) that is central to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking…does not and never will mix with the concept of God displacing our ways with His higher ways in picking-up our crosses to follow God into journeys of faith.

            At the close of Paul’s ministry, as he awaits his trial in Rome, the local Jews who come to visit Paul say: “But we desire to hear of thee what thou thinkest: for as concerning this sect, we know that everywhere it is spoken against.” (Acts 28:22).

            This raises one of the most profound questions regarding the rise of Christianity in the first-century, of how do you get a perfect person all the way to the rejection of the cross of Calvary?

            How is it that the long-awaited Messiah of the Jews must be the person who is crucified for the sins of the world, and resurrected to be the brazen serpent for salvation fore-glimpsed by Moses in the Exodus in the desert (Num. 21:5-9; 2 Ki. 18:4).

            What this demonstrates for people today, is that the same Creator God in the Bible who utilizes prior fitness throughout the geological eras in natural history, to set-up prior conditions for living organisms to flourish, can also coordinate human moral reasoning capacity, the broad array of moral concepts, and the divine life-script for Jesus Christ the Son of God, and moderate all of these factors to get the Messiah to also be the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sins.

This actualizes into real-world experience the saying: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (Jn. 8:32).

            For people to know the truth they need to first have the intellectual and moral reasoning capacity to recognize truth, next the broad array of moral concepts active and in-play within human relationships, and finally “the way, the truth, and the life” demonstrated in the life of Jesus Christ the Son of God incarnate, all coming together in the first-century.

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

God-Composed Journey of Faith Life-Scripts are Too Deep for a Naturalistic Explanation for Their Origin…Revised

            The recent modern recognition in philosophy is that the human mind when reduced down to only a materialistic “brain” alone, made up of circuits and neurons, devolves into nonsensical relativism.

            The radical reduction into materialism undermines confidence in the reliability of all human thought, and thereby destroys rationality, scientific investigation, and even worldview philosophies such as atheism itself.

            Yet by simply asking the question and examining the evidence, this in and of itself declares at the outset that Jesus Christ the person we are investigating is in fact within the zone of moral perfection and sinless virtue by reason of the question being seriously entertained at all. 

            We would not even open such an investigation into the life of any other exceptional person past or present, because we already correctly acknowledge that only one person in all of history has made a credible, serious claim to have lived a perfect life, and that one person is Jesus Christ.  

            No sane person in all of recorded history has made a viable and well-substantiated claim to embody and demonstrate the moral attributes of brilliant pure light, absolute goodness, and perfect virtue, of being, speaking, and acting like a Deity.

            Jesus Christ as Messiah is proactively anticipated for centuries in the biblical Old Testament messianic prophecies fulfilled in the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus Christ recorded in the New Testament gospels.

            This raises the probing apologetics question into the divine origin of the composition of the Bible, Old Testament Judaism, and New Testament Christianity, of how in the first-place we would “come by” the capacity to accurately judge whether the life and ministry of Jesus Christ exhausts the extent of the possible outer-limits of moral perfection.

            How would we determine that our current tool-kit of known virtuous characteristics, of well-defined moral attributes, is absolutely exhaustive, adequate, and complete enough for the in-depth moral reasoning needed to evaluate the life of Jesus Christ? 

            How would we know whether there are not some additional, outstanding moral characteristics that we are unaware of, in this current earthly context, above and beyond those demonstrated and exemplified in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ that would raise the bar higher?

            How would we know there are not some missing moral attributes in our reality that might call into question the impeccable qualifications of Jesus to be the blemish-free and sinless atoning sacrifice for our sins?

            The point here is not whether God has some additional, divine characteristics applicable in heaven that would not concern us presently, that are not relevant here on earth, but whether or not Jesus the Son of God in a human body (Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7) exhausts the limits of moral perfection as the God/man in order to qualify as the Passover Lamb of God, one-time atoning sacrifice for sin.

            The question is how this full and varied palette of moral concepts had an origin and came into existence within the reality of human life, to be able to make this assessment.

            The important point in this discussion is the fantastic notion that we would have the moral reasoning tools in terms of human mental capacity, but also in the complementary existence of the broad array of abstract moral concepts defined through the language of discrete and distinctive words, to be able to make a valid decision for or against salvation faith in Jesus Christ at this highly advanced level.

            The connection between the human capacity for intellectual and moral reasoning, with an external array of independent moral concepts is similar to what is called prior fitness in the scientific study of how biodiverse living species fit-in, in-the-moment to complex, pre-existing, environmental ecosystems.

            This connection that we so easily take for granted, argues compellingly for a human mind capable of recognizing and parsing the subtleties of informational concepts, that transcends above a mere, materialistic brain.

            But this well-timed connection in history between human capacity and an external array of independent moral concepts, also argues compelling for the presence of intelligent designing agency having the foresight to bring these two realities into existence at the same moment in time.

            Dr. John Lennox, Oxford mathematician and author suggests in some of his interviews and discussions online on the Internet, that the sudden immergence of human intellectual and moral reasoning capacity might be considered another example of being a singularity, in the same manner as the Big-Bang creation of the universe and the sudden immergence of life on earth can be understood as singularities.

            The mental capacity to technologically problem-solve at the advanced level to take us to the moon in 1969, and the moral reasoning capacity to differentiate and comprehend complex moral concepts, are two realities that define the essence of human beings.

            The point here is that human beings possess a complete and exhaustive array of tools within the broad assortment of moral concepts from which to make an intelligent and reasoned judgment as to the divine quality of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ.

            Just as orderliness and intelligibility are indispensably coordinated with our human capacity to conduct successful scientific investigations of the natural world, it would be pointless to be presented with the decision-making imperative regarding the truth-claims of Jesus Christ regarding His qualifications as Savior, King, and eternal Ruler if humans did not possess the incredible capacity to make an informed decision.

            It is therefore plausible to recognize that the origin of the entire array of moral characteristics appearing suddenly and fully defined in scope, that this recognition represents a sharp, near-instant vertical upwardspike on any conceivable graph-line for the time-duration of the human race.

             This is not anything remotely like incrementally gradual, small-step, evolutionary development.

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

Scientific Information is Easily Accessible Today…Revised

            In doing the research for this book, I sense that the general populace in countries like the United States are two or three decades behind where science today actually is.

            I sense that the general populace is still somewhere back in the 1990’s, accepting the assertion by Carl Sagan promoting the idea of the Principle of Mediocrity that the earth is an insignificant, pale blue dot lost in a vast universe, and the assertion by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould that science and God cannot overlap, but belong in entirely different, non-overlapping categories of reality.

            A person needs to invest only about two hours to get caught-up with where science is today, in some of the key critical areas that influence our worldview philosophy for life.

            This can easily be achieved for those people who have access to the Internet (via smart phone, computer, or other electronic device), and are willing to watch in succession, with coffee or tea breaks in-between, the presentations by Edward Murphy discussing the standard theory of the origin of the elements of the Periodic Table[1], then Gunter Bechly describing the discontinuities in the fossil record[2], and Stephen C. Meyer explaining the quantum mechanics at the Big Bang[3], to see that the evidences for random and undirected processes still being put-forward by the philosophy of scientific materialism, are no longer reasonably plausible.

            But for a real jolt forward by several decades to reach the current science in the field of molecular biochemistry (what it takes to create life), watch Scientists Are Clueless on the Origin of Life, Lecture @ Andrews University (Sept. 11, 2020) featuring Dr. James Tour on YouTube.

            When I watch on the Internet the 2014 presentation by Aoife McLysaght[4] in defense of modern Darwinian evolution, I run into the same brick-wall I encountered reading Jerry A. Coyne’s book.

            About five minutes into this excellent presentation, I sense that Dr. McLysaght is unwittingly making a cumulative case argument for intelligent agency rather than historical Darwinian evolution, so brilliantly marvelous is the scope and breadth of the natural world she is describing.

            To a modern, discriminating audience using critical-thinking, merely exchanging the phrase “intelligent designing agency” with the substitute word “evolution” is a semantics slight-of-hand card-trick that is apparently undetectable to scientific materialists.

            If intelligent agency is disallowed according to the philosophical worldview of naturalistic materialism, then the only word capable of expressing the secular version of agency is evolution.

            But merely saying something, does not make it so.

            The classic statement made in 1988 by Francis Crick to scientists that they must “constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,”[5] in just a few short years has now become obsolete.

            Information about the natural world has exponentially exploded that quickly.

            Whenever phenomena in nature are described thoroughly using their full informational content discovered through science, the more and more obvious becomes the design element requiring agency, that transcends above and pushes out a purely materialistic explanation through evolution.

            How do you get multi-cellular green algae floating on top of the ancient oceans, having whatever small number of different cell-types biologists and paleontologists agree upon today, to make the leap from there to branch-off into becoming the next iteration of being a Precambrian jellyfish floating near the surface of the ancient oceans, considered by some scientists today to possess around 10 to 12 different cell-types[6] to support their architectural body-plans? 

            How do you get from there to the introduction of the new and different architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits of the creatures of the Cambrian Explosion, exhibiting the dynamic movement of predator/prey relationships within more complex biodiversity and ecosystems, that appear suddenly in the geological record around 535-million years ago?

            These new and novel creatures are estimated to have between 30-40 different cell-types in support of their new and active body-plans and lifestyle habits, without any lead-up, intermediate precursors found in the Precambrian rock/sediment strata, or in imaginative fictional contemplation.

            Imposing a skeletal explanatory framework over the fossil record, of gradually continuous biological development chopped-up into introducing one new cell-type at a time, is unsupported by the fact-based evidence we see all around us today in the natural world of well-defined living organisms having discontinuous gaps between them, that even children can recognize.

            In a learning game with young children, we point to various animals in a book as they answer that this picture is of an elephant and that picture is of a dog, cat, or horse.  They recognize the well-defined differences between each animal type even before they stumble over correctly pronouncing the names hippopotamus or rhinoceros.

            As we look out at the natural living world today, we do not see a multitude of forms all blending together into continuous linkages, that would prevent young children from being able at first-glance to separate them into their unique names. 

            This was the case in 1859 as it is today.

            An argument can be made that it was the atheism within naturalistic materialism that falsely interpreted the data at that time-period, and not the empirical, fact-based evidence itself.

            To suggest instead an alternative skeletal explanatory framework over the geological data and the fossil record of functional end-point outcomes in biology that are achieved by the input of blocks of information in clustered groups, this requires the existence of an Intelligent Designing Agent as the architect and builder of the natural living and non-living world.

            Again, this is unacceptable to the worldview of scientific materialism.

            In the final analysis, if possession of the facts does not lead to near-perfect conclusions clearly apparent to nearly everyone, this introduces a gray area of discretionary judgment into the equation of the search for truth in science and in human living, which is inexplicable in a purely material universe.

            If the final takeaway after five-hundred years of the Scientific Revolution is that after most of the evidence regarding the natural world is in…has been acquired…that as smart as we humans think humans are, if we still need a smarter God to lead and guide us into genuine truth in all of the realms of existence (Jn. 16:13), this would truly be a colossal discovery.  

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

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

[2] Fossil Discontinuities: Refutation of Darwinism & Confirmation of Intelligent Design—Gunter Bechly, published Oct. 11, 2018 on You Tube by FOCLOnline.

[3] Watch the Internet interview on You Tube: The Return of the God Hypothesis: Interview with Stephen Meyer.  Streamed live on May 13, 2020, Dr. Sean McDowell.

[4] Copy number variation and the secret of life—with Aoife McLysaght, produced by The Royal Institution, May 27, 2014, on You Tube.

[5] Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 138.

[6] On the Origin of Phyla—Interviews with Dr. James Valentine, by Access Research Network, published on Oct. 22, 20`4, on You Tube.

Scientists Speaking Outside of Their Specialty are Laymen…Revised

            Some scientists have been telling us for decades that God is dead, and that the only reliable route to obtain truth is by the empirical evidences acquired through hard, bench-top science.

            Some scientists have been saying for decades that the clear evidence of design that we see in the natural world is not real, but is an illusion.

            The term-of-art popularly used by scientific materialists here is to say that the appearance of design in nature is an artifact…an artificially produced appearance created through human imagination.

            I can look through an electron microscope and see the nanotechnology of the molecular machinery at work inside a living cell, and conclude that the organized complexity I see occurring in action before my eyes is design-produced.

            To draw this reasonable conclusion, I do not have to produce an alternate database of facts to support the non-existent notion of “creation-science.”

            For the Bible believing Christian the existing database of scientific, fact-based evidences is the creation science that supports an intelligent designing agent God, whether we classify these evidences as being secular or theistic.

            No alternative set of facts is required of creationists.

            I simply draw a different conclusion in contrast to scientific materialists.

            I am not sure our modern culture has recognized clearly how potentially dangerous viewpoint bias is if carried to an extreme.

            The anti-god, materialistic worldview of Darwinism is on the brink of destroying the credibility of all human analytical ability because Darwinism exposes our susceptibility to the intimidating force of imposed group-think consensus that can even exist in science.         

            Confidence in the reliability of the reasoning capacity of the human mind/brain to arrive at genuine truth in science and in life, from the Christian viewpoint connects directly to a divine, non-material Mind/Being.

            From the Christian viewpoint, the God of the Bible created human beings with the capacity to enter into highly specified and detailed life-scripts as patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith from Abraham through Paul, based upon a dependable and reliable confidence in our innate intellectual and moral reasoning ability.

            Atheism extended to its logical end-point reduces the human mind/brain to a mere material entity produced through blind, random, undirected, and accidental processes, having no firm basis to rely upon its reasoning capacity. 

            One contention of this book is that 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/God of incomparable precision at the highest standards of craftsmanship.

            This Artisan has 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 specified complexity now points to intelligent design as the only remaining plausible option, in contradiction to the reasonableness of scientific materialism thrust forward by Darwinian evolution in 1859 based upon the database of knowledge understood at that time. 

            One point that is easily overlooked in the evolution versus creation debate, is that by making the natural world orderly and intelligible, and by having human beings with the capacity to do science, God is taking the risk that we might discover that He was sloppy, slip-shod, and incompetent as an architect and engineer.

            A God who was not completely confident about the quality of His workmanship credentials, would never open-up the first sentence in the Bible by saying: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” knowing full-well that a beginning point in time for the creation of the universe would not be validated by science, until at the relatively late point in time in 1929 in the discovery of an expanding universe.  

            In my career in building construction, I learned early in the customer service phase of new housing construction as a jobsite superintendent, that if a particular condominium unit or house was not ready to be shown to the homebuyer during the formal walkthrough prior to occupancy, that the best approach was to ask the sales staff to reschedule the walkthrough to a time a few days later.

            This gave myself and the customer service prep-crew time to fine-tune the unit, so that the walkthrough would produce from zero to two or three minor repairs at most, creating satisfied new homebuyers and general good-will throughout the remaining warranty period.

            There was no point in prematurely conducting the walkthrough with a unit that was not ready, producing two or three pages of needed repairs identified by the disappointed and dissatisfied new homebuyer.

            There is no reason in a purely matter and energy universe that the natural world would be orderly and intelligible to human beings having the capacity to do science.

            The God of the Bible has in essence invited us to do a walkthrough utilizing the human scientific enterprise.

            One of the key observations coming from modern science today is that everywhere we look, as science digs deeper and deeper into the causations behind the phenomena in the natural world, that the specified complexity exhibited in nature wins the awe and admiration of atheist and theist alike.

Skeletal Explanatory Frameworks Enable Spinning the Narrative…Revised

            At this point someone will logically suggest the Darwinian explanation 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?

            This assumes that length of time is the beneficially determining factor.

            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, but is always based upon the known factual evidence available at that time-period in human history.

            In defense of Charles Darwin in 1859, he was basing his theoretical hypothesis upon the idea that the physical universe was eternal, that he had unlimited time to work with to extrapolate microevolution into macroevolution.

            Darwin did not know that in 1929, an expanding universe would be discovered by Edwin Hubble peering through the massive telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, that looking backwards in time would pinpoint a beginning of the physical universe that now limits the length of time for progressive development down to a finite amount. 

            But the issue isn’t length of time, but instead philosophical interpretations as selected by humans to create skeletal explanatory frameworks…being theoretical hypotheses. 

            One of the themes of this book is to say that the theorizing and conceptualization that is an essential part of science, is disconnected from the quite-different empiricism of the scientific method of research that follows sequential step-by-step protocols, that produce raw databases of fact-based evidence.

            The theorizing and conceptualization part of the scientific enterprise is philosophically analytical, and produces provisional conclusions that are not themselves empirical, fact-based, raw data. 

The theoretical hypothesis from a philosophically naturalistic viewpoint says that the only acceptable route for the Asian honeybee to achieve defensive survivability against the giant Asian hornet, over a long time-period is through the small steps of gradual, progressively continuous development.

            But length of time as the controlling factor in the equation unjustifiably assumes that change without aimed guidance will always go in a positive direction, leading eventually to function.  This is a reasonable philosophical projection based upon the factual evidence that change in the geological record of life on earth actually does go in a positive direction over time.

            But time cannot be the explanatory causation here, because change in a random and undirected process could go forwards, backwards, sideways, or in endlessly repetitive circles.

            An ever-increasing, upward incline of complexity in life-forms over time can best be explained through intelligent agency rather than genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection.

            This is because an overall program is needed that has the inherent foresight to connect the mutation/selection events from isolated occurrences into an integrated series from A to Z.

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

            Time plus mutation/selection does not lead to function when the systems of information for survival are as complex as the defense strategy of the Asian honeybee.

            Time plus mutation/selection cannot reach a successful outcome when there is too much complexity, specificity, and coordination required to get there.

            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 must be arrived at through the gradual process of small incremental steps…assuming that time plus mutation/selection equates to an unbroken chain of continuity in a positive direction to reach function.

            The skeletal explanatory framework (theoretical hypothesis) connecting the factual data-points is what is wrong here, when the philosophical worldview of scientific materialism is imposed.

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

Blocks of New Cell-Types in Clustered Groups…Revised

            I would also argue from the evidence that the introduction of the genetic information and the new and different cell-types to create a functional Asian honeybee, to survive in an environment that contains the giant Asian hornet, must occur through the addition of a block of new cell-types in a clustered group to an existing, intermediate precursor insect, or introduced in-mass to produce a honeybee instantaneously by fiat creation within a zero-time duration, and not doled-out one new cell-type at a time in succession in a blind search for function through the trial-and-error processes of materialism.

            The mature functionality and precise fit of the honeybee in Asia, I would also argue is factual evidence for designing agency that is not illusory.

            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? 

            To do this Mother Nature would have to rise to the level of being a conscious, deliberative deity herself, possessing the overall picture to be able to connect a series of isolated physical improvements that confer reproductive and survival advantage, at each small step of the way to reaching the high level of actualized self-defense.

            We can substitute natural selection for Mother Nature in this example, and still have the same result.

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

            The question can be asked, do we currently see a positive move forward by the European honeybee colonies imported into Japan, exhibiting a trial-and-error start of clustering around the intruder scout wasp and in unison flapping their wings, exhibiting the first signs of a developing defense in support of the behavioral adaptation theory?

            Can we identify an experiential transition part-way in development within the imported European honeybee colonies pointing towards the future perfected use of this successful defense tactic commonly utilized by their Asian cousins?

            Has word begun to spread through the natural, molecular language of inter-breeding and genetic drift from the successfully armed Asian honeybees to the unsuccessfully unarmed, 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 adaptation, 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.

            Blind chance here is a poor substitution for intelligent agency.

            Long before a back-and-forth, escalating arms-race campaign can commence towards achieving these two incredible military-quality strategies of attack and counterattack, the fundamental question must be asked-and-answered as to the original source of this complex information.

            How could a purpose-free and meaningless material universe produce such a complex, fine-tuned, and coordinated relationship, exclusive to these two species of insects alone, falling-short of an all-hands-on-deck, all-out warfare but instead focuses and stops at the predetermined sweet-spot of the limited goal of taking-out the lone scout only?

            This has the constrained optimization of ecological balance written all over it, which chooses between multiple competing objectives to reach the optimum sweet-spot in the Asian insect-world, of neither the giant Asian hornet nor the Asian honeybees being able to completely wipe-out the other in all-out, major combat. 

            I would posit that the inference to the best explanation here is not the mechanism of random genetic mutations putting-out beneficial physical traits chosen by natural selection through trial-and-error, that can over time reach the balanced equilibrium between these two insect combatants we observe presently.

            A much more plausible explanation is immediate function and fit actualized through the input or release of new cell-types in a clustered group, being an infusion or an activation of a massive amount of innovative information through an intelligent designing agent God…producing a completed organism or a number of completed organisms simultaneously outfitted for survival and reproduction.

            No other current, living insect species that I know of clusters around a captured lone spy and flaps their wings to raise the temperature and create CO² gas to kill this roving scout on reconnaissance, before the scout can communicate back the whereabouts of the honeybee beehive.

            The materialistic mechanism of random genetic mutations producing variant traits chosen by natural selection, must apply post-birth, trial-and-error, feedback testing for viability to some extent and in some form for the ten-million living species on earth.

            Is this the observed paradigm of transitional development in the living natural world today?

If true this would display enumerable examples of architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits at mid-span points towards future iterations, like the theoretical, oscillating, back-and-forth arms-race between the giant Asian hornet and the Asian honeybee according to the concept of behavioral adaptation.

In the predator/prey relationship, synchronized developmental gradualism is not only absent observationally from the natural living world, but is conceptually unworkable.

The concept of incremental development in small steps towards complex life-forms is not well thought-out.

It is an inarguable fact that the history of life on earth goes from a single-cell bacteria to human beings today, in a gradual incline of complexity over a 3.8-billion-year time-span.

But this ever-increasing complexity does not have to occur exclusively through gradual small steps.

The small-step gradualism that must be the engine that drives the program of naturalistic materialism, does not hold-up as a satisfying explanation for the vast diversity apparent in the natural world.

Excerpt taken from my book Pondering Our World: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.

Timeless Foresight Needs Explaining 1

            Animal instinct in the natural living world does not possess, does not exhibit, timeless foresight.

            The reality of life is experienced in-the-moment for absolutely every living organism, including humans.

            A leopard on the African savanna plains resting comfortably in the noonday shade, hidden up underneath the canopy inside a large tree cannot thoughtfully plan several hours ahead-in-time until the evening sunset at 8 o’clock, when the leopard knows through timeless foresight that its unsuspecting prey a gazelle will conveniently stop to graze directly below this tree.

            A leopard does not possess timeless foresight. 

            Within the program of natural instinct, constrained and channeled into the narrow, forward march of time the leopard hunts its prey in-the-moment.

            Hypothetically, human beings possessing timeless foresight combined with the knowledge of good and evil, yet lacking a third component of absolute moral goodness, would potentially be perfectly successful criminals in being able to plan perfect robberies.

            One problem here is that the police would also possess the timeless foresight to be able to anticipate the robbery and take perfect steps to prevent it, when the future moment in time came.

            If humans possessed the timeless foresight of knowing in advance future outcomes, then gambling in casinos or at race tracks, entering into a civil lawsuit against another person, and reading a murder mystery book or a romance novel would no longer have purpose and meaning. 

            This is because the outcomes, the endings, would already be known ahead of time in advance.

            Lack of timeless foresight is one reason why we like reading murder mystery books, spy thrillers, and romance novels because we do not know the outcomes.

            But we can cheat, turn the pages to the end of the book, and take a sneak-peek at the story ending.  I confess I have done this sometimes, when the story is so full of suspense, I cannot wait to see how it will end.

            Motion pictures capture our attention for two hours in the movie theater because they condense the events of a larger story like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars down into a two-hour long feature film. 

            This reduces the story down to as short a time-period as we can achieve yet still tell the full story.  A two-hour movie is typically as close to zero-duration timeless foresight as we can humanly produce.

            We have to watch the entire movie from start-to-finish for two hours because we do not possess the timeless foresight to be able to take-in the whole movie in a split-second flash of time.

            The same thing occurs in reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace over a six-week period (I am a slow reader).  The interest is generated, is artistically created by the book writer based upon the absolute certainty of the absence of timeless foresight of the book reader as long as the book is read from front to back without skipping ahead.

            Two things here we know for sure: that human beings do not possess divine timeless foresight, and that we do not possess absolute moral goodness.

            All three complimentary components: the knowledge of good and evil, timeless foresight, and absolute goodness must be in-place and functioning simultaneously for free-will, thinking life-forms like human beings to have lives that operate at the highest optimum level of perfection.

            The knowledge of good and evil, if only timeless foresight is added to the mix without the third component of absolute goodness, creates a nightmarish reality of competing multiple foresights good and evil in an exponentially broadened cat-and-mouse scope of interacting outcomes.  This would produce a complexity well beyond the cause/effect stability experienced in our current one-dimensional time trajectory.

            This would be a reality too complex to follow even in the classic television series The Twilight Zone.

            But absolute goodness without the independence of free-will choice inherent within the knowledge of good and evil, of not having the capacity to freely choose between the broad array of moral concepts, would produce the equally undesirable reality of human beings that are mere robots.

            The third possible option of having timeless foresight alone, without the knowledge of good and evil and without absolute moral goodness, would be a bizarre reality that is unimaginable.

            Yet curiously, human beings do clearly possess one of the legs of the three-legged stool, the knowledge of good and evil, without possessing either timeless foresight or absolute moral goodness.

            From the standpoint of illuminating biblical-quality faith, the fact that humans have the knowledge of good and evil eliminates the atheistic philosophy of naturalistic materialism from consideration as a plausible explanation for reality.

            Naturalistic materialism is eliminated from reality because of the dilemma of how and why a material causation alone could produce the incredible human possession of the knowledge of good and evil, without also including the components of timeless foresight and absolute moral goodness as complimentary to the knowledge of good and evil.

            Having one the three legs of the stool without the other two, points to deliberate, intentional design.  It does not point to random and mindless happenstance of trial-and-error.

            Of equal power arguing for intelligent design, is the fine-tuned moderation of time narrowly advancing in a one-dimensional direction forward, yet lacking the all-important feature of the foresight to be able to see ahead into the future. 

            Timeless foresight is of invaluable worth.

            Its curious absence from the reality of human existence points towards thoughtfully planned, scaled-back moderation that has brilliant intelligent design written all over it. 

            Darwinism assumes by definition zero intelligent design utilizing foresight. 

            Traditional Darwinian evolution allows absolutely no architectural and engineering design through premeditated forethought, because to allow design into the mix also invites a super-intelligent Designer God into human scientific investigation, which is anathema to the materialistic worldview.

            Yet the one and only area in human experience where we do exercise extremely accurate, pinpoint timeless foresight is in the design and assembly of complex systems. 

            We exercise timeless foresight in manufactured products like hybrid cars, computer software applications, the construction of commercial buildings and residential houses, and in storyline scripts for movies, television, and fiction and non-fiction books, for examples.

            People are by nature prolific intelligent designers and can see ahead in time to visualize the final outcomes of human created things.

            How does this square with Darwin’s tree-of-life based upon common descent linked by an unbroken hypothetical chain of ancestors, when in-the-moment animal instinct shows no signs whatsoever of being able to go beyond the strict limitations of time? 

            Animal instinct shows no capacity to step-up into the cognitive, creative freedom of timeless foresight to envision future, inventive productions.

            Bee hives, beaver dams, and spider webs are produced by instinct and not by deliberative, free-thinking, flexibly creative contemplation.

            This reality between thought and instinct creates a huge gap between human beings and the rest of the natural living world, a gap that is unbridgeable by materialistic processes, by any stretch of the imagination.

            Human beings can design and manufacture an automobile, a physically tangible thing, that functionally operates for years and for hundreds of thousands of miles of driving, using the future-looking vision of timeless foresight and foreknowledge.

            But a young man and woman getting married at age 20 cannot see ten or twenty years ahead into the future, of either the husband or the wife or both entering into extra-marital affairs, sadly and tragically ending the marriage. 

            We cannot foresee our kids going off to college and falling-in with the wrong crowd, becoming addicted to alcohol or drugs.

            We cannot see into our future the contracting of a deadly disease that takes our life before reaching the age of 40 or 50.

            There is an old axiom that applies here: “If we don’t know where we are going then any road will take us there.”

            We know precisely where we want to go when we design an automobile, a new house, or a computer software application.  We know where we want to go when we start-out to write a murder mystery, biography, or technical book because we can visualize a rough outline in our mind’s-eye, in the creative area inside our heads.  

            But the capacity for timeless foresight for human beings stops at a certain point. 

            This is something that argues for the participation of an intelligent designer God and for the over-the-top brilliance of creative imagination in terms of intent and impact in the targeted, moderated, purpose-driven crafting of the dimension of time in service to mankind.

            Time as we currently know it creates the singularly unique context for the exploration and discovery of a fuller understanding of good and evil, which would not be possible if the other two legs of the three-legged stool were added of timeless foresight and absolute goodness.

            I do not think an answer to the question of why God cannot create human beings who possess divine timeless foresight and foreknowledge, and possess the divine attribute of absolute moral perfection, exists in this present world. 

            This might involve the impossibly unachievable goal of creating billions of junior-level divine gods, like the impossibility of creating square circles, or one-ended sticks, or married bachelors, or making two-plus-two equal five.

            But only premeditated intention, the thoughtful choice-making between multiple possible realities of intelligently guided moderation could produce something as well-defined and having a targeted function as precise as time.

            Trial-and-error, hit-and-miss, accidental dumb-luck, fall-into-place on its own, or some form of directional self-assembly could not plausibly be the explanation for the fine-tuned essence of time.

            Time is an intelligently designed thing, a created reality for a definite purpose.

Limited Physical Terrain

            Comparative anatomy also becomes a non-issue today as an argument in favor of Darwinian evolution.

            This issue only has relevance if we start with the materialistic program of small-step, continuous biological development, one new and different cell-type at a time.

            Once we admit into the discussion the evidence of forward leaps in nature that produce end-point fit and function at the first introduction of new architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits, this requires blocks of new and different cell-types in grouped clusters that in practical terms transcends above materialistic causations.

            That Darwin would propose the comparative anatomy of similar features as an argument for gradual continuity reveals a mindset limited to the factors of distance traveled in terms of beneficial features, divided by measurable time within our four-dimensional reality.

            This approach will not allow for the possibility of blocks of cell-types in grouped clusters as the explanation for the vast diversity of life, because this entertains the input of information by a timeless Mind/Being who can only be identified through circumstantial evidence, curiously being the same type of evidence used by Darwin.

            Adding blocks of cell-types in grouped clusters still maintains true relationships, just not according to the worldview of naturalistic materialism.

            As has been said elsewhere in this book, adding new genetic information in blocks of grouped clusters to effectuate fit and function, is entirely consistent with common descent.

            The accurately generous thing to say about Darwin’s use of comparative anatomy as an argument in favor of macroevolution is that it was close but still off-target.

            The same can be said for many scientific hypotheses at their inception.

            Today we can save ourselves a lot of time by side-stepping all of the arguments put forward in the last 160-plus years of Darwinism regarding the importance of comparative anatomy…either confirming or not confirming the small-step, gradual continuity of common descent.

            Agatha Christie may type her book Murder on the Orient Express one letter at a time, but her daily writing output of 500-1,000 words or more is created as a block of grouped story-telling information.

            In tract housing construction, the first-floor wall framing proceeds one 2×4 stud at a time, but daily progress is evaluated on the number of houses having the first-floor wall framing completed as a grouped output.

            When we look at the natural living world, why would we not recognize the same presence of intelligent designing agency in a functioning elephant that we acknowledge to exist within an automobile driving past us down the road?

            The comparative anatomy of similarly common features has nothing to say whether common descent was achieved one new cell-type at a time, or by blocks of new and different cell-types introduced in grouped clusters.

            What if Darwinism is wrong?

            The idea of a vast amount of time for chance to produce biological diversity, is the opposite of a timeless God of the Bible downloading or switching-on the release of blocks of genetic information in width-less durations of zero time.

            In terms of the Cambrian Explosion, what is the difference between biological development spread-out over ten-million years starting at 535-million years ago, or the instant introduction of new creatures fit and functional for survival in a moment of time?

            I can envision new creatures initially immerging into existence at the prototype level of being 98 or 99 percent complete for fit and function, but like Darwin’s finches having the genetic capacity for mutation/selection to adapt more perfectly to changing environments.

            The God of the Bible producing new creatures all at 50 to 75 percent capacity, with the remaining process of development left up to chance, does not make much sense to me.  

            What is not compatible in biology is not God versus science, but the materialism that requires small-step, incremental progression one cell-type at a time, versus blocks of new and different cell-types introduced in grouped clusters to produce instant fit and function within complex biodiversity and ecosystems.

            If Darwinism is wrong, it could not be more wrong.

            At the fundamental level of a skeletal explanatory framework, Darwinian evolution in 1859 could not be more inaccurate and misleading.

            If the fossil record is one of sudden appearance, the longevity of unchanging stasis, and again the sudden disappearance of extinction, then the concept of gradually increasing complexity using the accumulation of functional features to produce the diversity of life we see today, is not factually evident.

            Why can’t an elephant or a finch-bird be derived from an amoeba through chance spread-out over even an eternity of time?

            This requires a coordinated series of complex, specified, and coherently integrated blocks of genetic informational inputs, that mesh somehow within the counter-productive realities of sudden appearance, the unchanging longevity of stasis, and the sudden disappearance through extinction.

            These are two dichotomies that are irreconcilable in a materialistic program, but easily understood within the program of a free-will thinking, divine Creator introducing and then removing life-forms according to His will, while maintaining ever-increasing complexity through the gradual incline of new and different cell-types to support new architectural body-plans and their accompanying lifestyle habits.

            Comments?

Limited Physical Terrain 3

            Typology and Increasing complexity in biology are not in conflict.

            Blocks of new and different cell-types in clustered groups, each assembled genetically in the arrangement and folding of amino acids to build proteins using the blueprint information in DNA, reaffirms and maintains the typological worldview prevalent before Darwin.

            The ideological difficulties that appeared inexplicable in 1859 to Darwin, inherent in individual creation, over the advances of the past 160-plus years in science, now disappear.

            These difficulties disappear through the character and quality of the complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information absolutely everywhere we look in the natural living and non-living world.  

            If God exists as the Creator of the universe, then there is no ideological dichotomy between the supernatural and the natural.

            Because of the explosion of information about our natural environment available today, the difficulties in explaining the causations of the phenomena in nature, have from 1859 to 2022 switched from arguing against intelligent agency to arguing for intelligent agency.

            The issue of the fixity of species disappears today when the concept of nature makes no sudden leaps, in support of amaterialistic worldview, is jettisoned overboard.

            As a Christian, I admit to being a vitalist, but not in the manner of ascribing biological development to undefined, occult-like inner forces.

            Empirical, fact-based information is not occult.

            Information that defines the architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits of elephants according to their genetic make-up…as to type…is as factually evidential as the mechanical engineering of an automobile.

            The mystery involved in DNA or mechanical engineering is no longer the mechanics, but the origin of the structured organized complexity that produces end-point fit and function.

            Where does the ability to design an automobile using mechanical engineering come from?

            The complex, specified, and coherently integrated character of information is the mysterious underlying force, that used to be pre-Darwin vitalism.

            But this underlying database of information is now so   complex and interwoven that it has passed-up the agency-free, research methodology of scientific materialism.

            A multitude of forms makes perfect sense if blocks of new and different cell-types in groups of 10 or 20, are manufactured in the cell using DNA and developmental gene regulatory networks, then released by Intelligent Agency within width-less durations of zero time to produce functionally mature organisms ready to enter into existence into biodiverse ecosystems.

            This is the diametric opposite of gradual biological development using the method of blind trial-and-error over vast periods of time.

            Goldschmidt’s hopeful monster made no sense because it was stuck within the paradigm of scientific materialism.

            Replace this mindset of naturalistic materialism with intelligent designing agency, enabling saltation-like inputs of genetic information in blocks of grouped clusters to produce the common descent of end-point fit and function along the expanse of geological history, absent the need to find non-existent transitional intermediates, and many of the great mysteries in biology are resolved.

            For Darwin the choice of the skeletal explanatory framework of atheism is what was defective in his theory of biological evolution.

            Typology works beautifully in this alternate program of blocks of cell-types coordinated in clustered groups, because the essence of each type of living organism is always introduced at its completed and functional iteration.

            The continuity of common descent, the fixity of species, change over time, and the vast diversity of life on earth, no longer makes sense within Darwinian evolution, but now makes sense only within the worldview of admitting an intelligent designing agent.

Mass/Energy and Information

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

            During the entire time of the writing of this fictional novel the creative process remains informational and not actual, Agatha Christie not having to commit real murders as part of the research to inspire the story as it progresses chapter-by-chapter.

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

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

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

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

            Then another amazing thing happens.  I open up the physical book and begin to read the text in the form of letters arranged as words and sentences in the English language, and the information that Agatha Christie created has passed through the material medium of ink on paper to become once again information that is the fascinating and engrossing murder mystery story And Then There Were None.    

            This has huge implications for a more accurate and up-to-date scientific understanding of the phenomena in the natural world.

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

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

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

            Information is abstract and non-material…and mass/energy by contrast is physical and material.  

            Information and intelligent agency go together.

            Mass-energy on its own cannot create complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information.

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

The present is the key to understanding the past

                The great geologist Charles Lyell in the 1820’s provided the general methodology for doing research in what are now called the historical sciences, of making reasonably accurate inferences about the past by observing what occurs in the natural world today…because the past is not directly accessible to us.

            Thanks to the present-day understanding of molecular biochemistry due in large part to the unraveling of DNA through the ten-year long Human Genome Project, and the advancement of computers and computer programs, we now can identify in living cells the developmental gene regulatory networks that instruct the molecular machines inside cells to assemble the different cell types and then tells them specifically where to go in the developing embryos…to produce elephants, lions, hawks, and human beings.

            The material properties of the typewriter keys, the ink ribbon, and the sheets of paper that translate the abstract creative storytelling from the mind of the book writer into the physical medium of paper and ink, is an easily understood reality analogous to the translating of the abstract creative information from the genetic code in DNA into the material “flesh and bones” of living organisms.

            Scientists correctly study the material mechanics of the processes taking place inside living cells, and we can make reasonably accurate inferences going back in time regarding the increasing complexity of life-forms on earth following the gradually linear addition of differing new cell types to support increasingly more complex architectural body-plans.

            But in the same way that the physics and chemistry of how ink bonds to paper to create the rough drafts typed by Agatha Christie cannot explain the inspired artistic creation of the fictional murder mystery story itself, a complete understanding of how the material mechanics of the nanotechnology occurring within living cells will not explain the translation of the material parts of flesh and bones coordinating together as a whole functioning unit, into the adult instinctual lifestyle habits of a charging African bull elephant chasing lions away from a watering hole.

            Not only do developmental gene regulatory networks and epigenetic factors now tell us how different cell types are constructed on-time and in the proper sequence from the DNA code and then sent-off to their specific xyz-coordinate locations in their unique body-plans during embryonic development, but there is another source of information that matches flesh and bones with extremely fine-tuned lifestyle habits…to successfully function as mature organisms within differing past geological eras, within the interrelated biodiversity of predator/prey relationships, and within the unimaginable complexity of diverse ecosystems. 

            Like Charles Lyell’s program of using the present to study the past in geology, we now today have a large part of the understanding of the molecular biochemical processes in living organisms.

            During a particular season every year in Africa functional baby elephants are born.  This is just one amongst enumerable examples of the present-day phenomena we can scientifically study, extrapolating backwards through the embryonic development phase to genes, chromosomes, and DNA.

            In other words, science has an enormous sample size of finished products in the form of ten million living species to study, working backwards through the completed architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits…to the initial genetic information contained in the paired chromosomes of the male and female parents.

            In plain language, we know that the material mechanisms in operation inside living cells can produce finished organisms that can survive and reproduce, because we see these living organisms all around us in action.

            The challenge since Darwin in the scientific field of biology is to figure-out how this all works.

            But the worldview of scientific materialism that attempts to reduce the charge of a full-grown African bull elephant to its flesh and bones material parts is as nonsensical as saying that the book And Then There Were None can write itself.

            Science cannot exclude agency and still be fully explanatory.  The creative origin of information cannot be reduced to a mass/energy causation.

            The charge of an elephant or a lion is a very physical action having a purely empirical outcome for whatever creature is being chased, but this full-speed charge at its fundamental essence is information-based…is an intangibly abstract form of an instinctual lifestyle habit in action.

            We therefore make a categorical mistake when we confuse abstract information with material mass/energy.

            One of the themes of this book is that no matter where the current research in the field of molecular biochemistry finally lands in terms of a more complete understanding of the material mechanisms at the genetic level in living cells, the complexity of these coordinated and integrated mechanical molecular systems has already left the unguided and undirected program of naturalistic materialism miles behind.

            Intelligent agency is not only required at the front-end to furnish the information needed inside living cells to produce over time the vast diversity of material life we see in the natural world, but also the abstract and intangible end-point functions that differentiate between the instinctual lifestyle habits of an elephant, lion, leopard, cheetah, zebra, wildebeest, water buffalo, rhinoceros, and giraffe…to name some of the large mammals in Africa.

            Returning to the analogy of the writer Agatha Christie, abstract creative information not only enters in at the front-end of the process, passing through the required material medium of ink, paper, and the finished book form, but then expresses itself to the book reader as again the creative storyline of the murder mystery Agatha Christie intended, as the intelligent designing agent.

            The God of the Bible, who can introduce all of the material mass/energy and the non-material laws of physics, chemistry, and mathematics in the first split-seconds of the creation of the universe at the Big Bang, into the incredibly operational realities of the force of gravity, the speed of light, and the expansion rate of the universe…to my thinking is also therefore capable of inputting all of the information, the instructions, and the timetables inside living cells to create the remarkable material mechanisms now being studied by molecular biochemists.

            I need to say here at the outset of this book that I am not a theistic evolutionist, and I am not a deist. 

            Having worked in building construction as a career, I am skeptical of complex things falling into place on their own, especially living organisms that must be up-and-running with operational function in-place at a minimum just to be able to survive and to reproduce.

            To my thinking, the informational package within living cells beginning 3.8-billion years ago has the preprogrammed agenda to pump-out increasing complexity starting with the single-cell bacteria, by adding new and different cell types over time to support new and innovative architectural body-plans.

            But one of the themes put forward in this book is that this ever increasing complexity that has produced the vast diversity of life-forms we see today…is always introducing living organisms that are at the leading edge of specified refinement within what could otherwise conceptually be within a possible range of incomplete and unfinished expression on one side of a continuum-line…to functionally complete and fully operational at the other side of the continuum-line.

            What is staring us in the face, when we look at biology, is the reality that human designed and manufactured products are always complete and functional…are at the forward edge of specified, refined completion for their intended use.

            Human agency universally produces functionally complete objects, from fully cooked baked lasagna at our favorite Italian restaurant, to a bicycle that has two wheels, to a new automobile that has brakes, to computer software programs that are debugged and operational, and to completed murder mystery books that are spell-checked.

            We do not see in the vast diversity of life today any organisms that are in major transitional development part-way towards some future outcome.  We presently do not see “works-in-progress.”

            Using Charles Lyell’s dictum of using the present to interpret the past in the historical sciences like geology, this present-day evidence then tells us that living organisms enter into existence with specified, refined maturity at the forward edge of their conceptual essence…functionally complete enough to smoothly fit into their biodiverse and ecologically balanced niches, to be able to survive and to reproduce “right out of the box, no assembly tools required.”

            This line of thinking is in direct contrast to the simple-to-complex ideology of scientific materialism that must, in order to plausibly work, replace intelligent agency with the gradual small steps of incremental progressive development over time, through the Darwinian mechanism of accidental, trial-and-error, unguided, and undirected naturalistic processes.

            I see the nearly saltational (miraculous) transitions of early life at 3.8 billion years ago from the single-cell bacteria to multi-cellular algae floating on top of the oceans, to the Precambrian jellyfish having 10 to 12 new and different cell types, to the radiation of new creatures with architectural body-plans having 30 to 40 different cell types during the Cambrian Explosion at 535 million years ago, throughout geologic history to our present day…always occurring at the guided and directed level of putting-out functionally mature organisms able to adapt and survive at the first moments of their introduction…factoring-in the genetic mutations that also over time put-out beneficial variant traits to be chosen by natural selection to enhance adaptation to changing environments.

            This non-Darwinian thinking encompasses large leaps in development without transitional intermediates, which empirically is the fact-based evidence in the fossil record.

            This non-Darwinian approach requires the well-timed, physical expressions of information that consistently produce fully functional living organisms…of strategically released inputs of information coming from within living cells, that could not plausibly be explained through an accidental, trial-and-error, naturalistic gradual process over long stretches of time that would be easily detectable to molecular biochemistry today.

            Because we see in the present the “miracle” of information in living cells using material molecular mechanisms to build and place the different cell types in architectural body-plans to create such diverse organisms as hawks, spiders, sea crabs, whales, wolves, and humans…conceptually we can extrapolate backwards to envision this same high quality of functionality producing new phyla types in their completed form through the introduction of massive inputs of information released according to prearranged timetables…the same quality of actualized information that can produce the architectural body-plan of the African bull elephant but also the instinctual lifestyle habit of its intimidating full-speed charge. 

            Again, this line-of-reasoning rejects the trial-and-error, incremental small steps of gradual development progressing from the simple to the complex…which is the accidental, unguided, and undirected methodology of the atheistic worldview of naturalistic materialism applied to the living and non-living world…absent intelligent agency.

            It is inconceivable that Agatha Christie would sit in front of her typewriter or laptop computer and randomly hit the keys with her eyes closed and her mind on other things, hoping through a trial-and-error, accidental process that she could produce a classic murder mystery who-done-it story.    

            It is inconceivable that the complexity and specificity we find inside living cells could be the product of random and undirected processes.

            Finally, the sequential logic of writing a book using arrows…goes from abstract information from the author→to physical ink on paper in the form of a book→to abstract information being read by the book reader.

            Another way of expressing this is to say that the “ought” of the potentially captivating storyline progresses to the actual “is” of the story in print-form, and again back to the “ought” of the unfolding story being read by the book reader late into the evening beyond bedtime.

            In a nutshell this philosophically sums up the human enterprise of scientifically investigating the natural world…encompassing the two realities of mass/energy and information.

            Even the skeptic David Hume said that the “is” of how things actually are cannot transition to the “ought” of how they should be…the actual existence of an ”is” and the moral concept of an “ought” being in two entirely different realms of reality.[1]

            Boiling this down further, another way of expressing this is to say: that the abstract information of DNA and developmental gene regulatory networks inside cells→translates into the architectural body-plan of an African bull elephant→expresses itself materially in the instinctual lifestyle habit of an intimidating elephant charge.

            In understanding how we get from biological embryonic development to full physical maturity the arrows go in only one direction…forward.

            But by adopting the program of Charles Lyell for use in the historical sciences, in which the field of biological origins belongs, the arrows describing the process can go in both directions backwards and forwards…in the same way that a published book on the shelf in a bookstore tells us that the author of it exists, but also gives us their name on the front cover of the book and the date of printing on the copyright page…pointing backwards in time when the book was in its creative writing phase.

            That there are no partially completed books for sale in bookstores, or on the bookshelves in university or public libraries…also tells us that for new books to be able to enter into the marketplace of ideas, they must be functionally complete.

            That the gradualism of unfinished projects part-way along their progressive development toward becoming fully functional, is not what we observe in the natural living and non-living world, then we can reasonably conclude that naturalistic materialism cannot be the ruling paradigm that is workable in either scientific investigation or in our philosophical worldview.

            Darwin’s brilliant extrapolation in 1859 from microevolution to macroevolution in his book The Origin of Species as an explanation for the vast diversity of life on earth…no longer works because the discovery of the complexity and specificity of information in the natural world is now recognized and understood in this modern Age of Information.

            This is how science works.  New more correct information clarifies or replaces earlier theoretical hypotheses.

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

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