Tag: Science

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.

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.

Neither God Nor Man Can Write Laws that Guarantee Good Moral Choices

            After his road to Damascus experience, Saul/Paul could have said to Jesus that yes, he had been entirely wrong and mistaken about persecuting the early Christian church, but that he was too offended that God had allowed him to go this far in error, to then step into this new mission-calling to preach Jesus as the risen Christ.

            After his exceptional education in Jerusalem under the acclaimed teacher Gamaliel, Saul/Paul could have complained to Jesus that God should have told him earlier about looking both ways before crossing the street, before being allowed to proceed in ignorance to create so much havoc in attacking the Christian church in Jerusalem.

            Saul/Paul could have reasonably responded to the new calling of Jesus to go out into the larger sphere of the Greco-Roman world to preach the gospel truth of a risen Christ, that he was both too mad at God and at the same time totally unable to forgive himself for being ignorant about the preeminence of faith in the biblical narrative stories, and in the proper role of the Law of Moses in Judaism.

            Saul/Paul could have justifiably complained that God should have given him the needed discernment upfront to be able to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, without the extreme measure after-the-fact of a revelation by way of a blinding light on the road to Damascus, to learn this truth the hard-way.

            But this reveals possibly the whole point God is making in the creation of this physical universe, that in the Garden of Eden we were unable to parse the malicious half-truth that eating a piece of fruit from a specific tree would render us into gods having the knowledge of good and evil.

            God did not rescue us at that critical juncture because non-divine, free-thinking beings lacking timeless foresight are susceptible to the persuasively clever arguments delivered by a charismatic, outwardly beautiful liar…and this particular truth has to be demonstrated over time through human history in a variety of laboratory-type, empirically investigated lessons-learned.

            Whether it is Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Jim Jones of Jonestown, Guyana, or Satan in the holographic guise of a beautiful talking serpent, in the vast eternity of reality some of the moral concepts in the knowledge of good and evil are difficult to nail-down without the benefit of first-hand field research. 

            The divine brilliance revealed in the method of the calling of Saul/Paul through the road to Damascus experience, was that God was able to flip Saul into Paul the apostle in a moment of time, creating in an instant an exceptionally qualified rabbinical Pharisee yet having the super-humility to engage with the Gentiles without looking derisively down his nose at their ignorance about God.

            Without Saul/Paul’s colossal blunder in persecuting the early Christian church in Jerusalem, within the environment of a world having evil and suffering, there is no Paul the apostle to the Gentiles, and no Paul a new creature in Christ beloved widely in the early Christian churches he was instrumental in founding, as revealed in Romans 16.

            This conversion story of Paul the apostle displays at the very heart of the matter our deep need for Jesus Christ to be “the way, the truth, and the life” in our lives, to approach the deepest meanings in the broad array of moral concepts at their end-points of understanding.

            These arguments are not subservient to the factual empiricism of science, but are humanly understandable to be at the higher level of ultimate and eternal reality.

            The reason why Jesus the Son of God and the Second Person of the Trinity, the humble God/man from the obscure town of Nazareth, was on the cross that fateful Friday as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin, was missed by everyone including His disciples.

            The fact that we all missed this as a group is one of the main points God is trying to make through the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

            We need God to tell us to look both ways before crossing the street, and to show us how to use the brakes on our bicycles.

            We need this broken world with all of its evil and suffering, for exceptional goodness and brilliant virtue to immerge.

This is epitomized in the cross and resurrection of Jesus that inaugurates at the highest imaginable level God sacrificing Himself so that we can embark on a guided research program into the knowledge of good and evil, through the lens of a fallen yet redeemed, imperfect moral character.   

Even Peter has difficulty with discernment as he tries to figure-out his right course of action at the night trial of Jesus (Mt. 26:34-35, 69-75).

Before Damascus, Saul/Paul could not conceivably have imagined a way that God could extend to the undeserving, totally misguided, polytheistic and idol-worshipping Gentiles, salvation by grace through faith.

This brilliant creativity of imaginative insight in crafting this life-script for the apostle Paul to enable him through super-humility to become the missionary evangelist to the larger Greco-Roman world at this time-period of the start of the Great Commission (Mt. 28:19-20), to my thinking is uncannily similar to the brilliance of the Big Bang creation of the universe, the origin of life, the nanotechnology inside living cells, and human thought that we examine through science.

            Saul/Paul made the right moral choice independent of the Law of Moses he knew so well, because the law that he revered so much had little to say about the right choice to follow Jesus Christ into an adventure of faith that was so profoundly at the outer edge of the knowledge of good and evil, beyond anything Saul/Paul could have previously imagined.

            Laws, rules, and precepts can only take Paul so far in contrast to the discernment of subtly shaded right and wrong in thinking he was in God’s will when he persecuted the early Christian church.

            Again, we need the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth including parsing the subtleties in the broad array of moral concepts contained within the knowledge of good and evil.

            The revelation on the road to Damascus that Jesus was the Christ was a priceless gift to Paul that was beyond the human perception of one of Jerusalem’s young rising stars within its tight rabbinical group.

            This need for God’s light in this critical area of discernment was not lost upon Saul/Paul as he took the gospel message out to the Greco-Roman world in the first-century, that Jesus as the truth active in our lives will set us free beyond our wildest imagination.

            People have to want to do the right things from the heart.

            Create humans with free-will choice, and the bent of the heart then becomes key.

            Paul the apostle is the epitome of the Christian salvation by grace through faith message to the world, because he more than anybody recognized that he should have known better, but missed it.

            This revelation on the road to Damascus eliminates forever for Paul the program of self-salvation through the effort of performing good-works, because with all of his education and knowledge about the Law of Moses, he lacked the needed discernment to see that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Christ (Mt. 5:17).

The fundamental question having eternally cosmic implications is why isn’t reaching the truth much easier than it is?

This is why Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (Jn. 3:3).

This is why modern science is a search for truth regarding phenomena in the natural world.

This is why God-composed, adventure of faith life-scripts displace our ways with God’s higher ways and thoughts (Is. 55:8-9), a concept that is anathema to the philosophical worldview of humanism.

This is why, to be able to adjudicate the question of the competence of either Satan or God to be the King and ruler for an eternity of time to come, God has given to the believer the indwelling of His Spirit as a personally accessible PhD theology and life-coach professor, guiding believers through our research program into the knowledge of good and evil (Rev. 3:20; Heb. 11:6).

This is why there must be a fallen, broken world that contains evil and suffering, that with tragically unavoidable consequences is nonetheless necessary to separate-out the outcomes between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty, being the fundamental, primary issue within the broad array of moral concepts, first introduced at the temptation in the Garden of Eden.

The materialistic worldview has no explanation for the existence of good and evil in the human experience, and no explanation for the universal existence of imperfect moral character in every human person who has ever lived (with the exception of Jesus Christ), which the Bible calls sin, which is defined as missing the mark.

Redemptive salvation by grace through faith in Christ, that provides the impunity of being able to enter into a research program into the knowledge of good and evil, utilizing the lens of an imperfect yet redeemed earthen vessel to comprehend the subtle nuances contained within the broad array of moral concepts…to my thinking is the epitome of the concept of being an inference to the best explanation, based upon the evidence currently on the earth today.

            The cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ enables believers to surgically investigate the knowledge of good and evil without ruining ourselves or the world.

            The bottom-line in the Bible is that we need God to craft life-scripts for us to lead and guide us into all truth (Jn. 16:13), assisted by spiritually born-again, new hearts and minds that have eyes to see and ears to hear (Jn. 3:3; Mt. 11:15).

            From the Christian viewpoint, this is one of the reasons why God created the universe. 

This is one of the seemingly inexplicable mysteries within human intellectual and moral reasoning for why some people succumb to the deceptive appeal of personality cult leaders (2 Sam. 15:6; Rev. 12:9). 

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

God-Sovereignty Exemplified on the Cross…Revised

            One area therefore where we can clearly and unambiguously authenticate the divine nature of Jesus Christ is in His perfect compliance with the biblical concept of God-sovereignty, in His life-script and performance.

            On the cross, Jesus is demonstrating God-sovereignty actualized to absolute perfection in staying within His God-composed life-script calling to become the Savior of the world.

            On the cross, Jesus exemplifies purely consistent, non-rebellious, sinless unity-of-purpose within the Godhead of the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

            The divinely brilliant, creative originality of the cross is that Jesus is experiencing the most acute outward display of worldly failure, while at the same time achieving the greatest single accomplishment for mankind in all of history as the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for sin.

            God combines on the cross two contrasting elements: extreme worldly failure and brilliantly divine success, on the broadest possible range of human experience because the cross at Calvary involves the divine Son of God in a human body (Isa. 7:14, 9:6-7) the breadth of which no human literary writer could ever imagine or invent.

            Jesus Christ on the cross as the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for mankind’s sins in perfect demonstration of God-sovereignty, is such a brilliantly divisive yet subtle issue surgically separating truth from error, that many modern Jews even today use this perceived failure of Jesus to be the expected Moses, Joshua, or King David type Messiah ushering-in world peace…as still serving as the main reason for why they reject Jesus Christ as Messiah, disqualifying Him on these grounds alone.

            Many Jews in the first-century and today would say that their Messiah would never suffer the indignity of being crucified by the Romans, of being a curse “hanged on a tree.” (Dt. 21:23; Gal. 3:13).

            Yet redemptive salvation by grace through faith in Christ creates the singular brilliance of a joint-venture with God into the exploration of the knowledge of good and evil, utilizing the research vehicle of our fallen yet redeemed imperfect nature.

God-composed journey of faith life-scripts starting with Abraham anticipate by roughly 3,500 years the scientific method of basic field research inaugurated at the start of the Scientific Revolution.

            As we ourselves stand at the cross looking up at Jesus, we either see the Passover Lamb of God performing His God-composed life-script in perfect God-sovereignty, or we see the worst failure of a person that can be imagined in life, the utter humiliation of first being scourged, then afterwards ending their lives through the shame and defeat of Roman crucifixion.

            This is the most modern, up-to-date, sophisticated use of the broad array of moral concepts at the outer edge of their real-world, practical utility.

            As we look up at Jesus hanging on the cross, we either see a life-script that was perfectly written to match the unique capacity of the God/man Jesus Christ to take upon Himself the sins of the world as foreshadowed centuries before at the start of the Exodus[1],[2] (Ex. 12:21-28).

            Or we see a life-script that falls so far short of the positive ideals and aspirations of the American Dream ancient or modern, that our best option then is to choose to go our own way in a journeyof self, according to the tenets of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking, and reject Jesus Christ altogether.

            The insightfully piercing dichotomy between the perfect God-sovereignty of Jesus Christ, and the self-sovereignty of going our own way of the religious elites and political rulers in Jerusalem, at the cross is exposed by God alone as no human literary genius could of being as wide apart as the Grand Canyon.

God alone has the ability to highlight on that one day atop Calvary Hill, the huge contrast between self-sovereignty versus God-sovereignty…to perfection.

            This is a key element that separates-out for us amidst the sea of multiple competing narratives the singularly unique, divine quality of the biblical narrative in today’s modern world.

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

[1] 20161030 The Oldest Yahweh Inscription 2 Kings Joel Kramer, published on Oct. 30, 2016, by Lighthouse Church-Twin Falls on YouTube…at Joel Kramer Archaeologist.

[2] Historical Evidence for the Exodus from Egypt (with Titus Kennedy), published on Jul. 19, 2022 on the YouTube channel Dr. Sean McDowell.

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.

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.

Science and God are Not in Conflict, revised Part 1

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.  Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.”                                  (Ps. 19:1-2)

            A recent scientific discovery now illuminates our understanding of genetic mutations, which can be chosen by natural selection in the wild or by the artificial selection of human breeding. 

            Some genetic mutations produce helpful variant traits, which can now be tracked in a broad range of living organisms, thanks to the hard work of the 10-year project to map the human DNA genome.

            What initially took years of painstaking effort mapping the 3.5-billion letters of DNA letter-by-letter in humans, now can map the DNA sequence of a particular breed of dog, for example, in an afternoon as a result of faster computers and specialized software programs.

            Thanks to improved technology, we are now able to track-down helpful changes/mutations in the DNA, and match these mutations to their actualized traits…the physical characteristics they produce.

            This new research has revealed that Darwin’s theory of evolution is in actuality a process of devolution.[1] 

            This is discussed in an interview of biochemist, professor, and author Dr. Michael Behe in Socrates in the City, by Eric Metaxas.

            It turns out that genetic mutations do not add new informationto the DNA strand that if so, might support Darwin’s theory that the mutation/selection process is capable over long periods of time of producing enough complex, innovative new features to explain the origin of species. 

            Developments like the fully functional winged flight of birds, the visual sight of an owl, the running speed of the cheetah, the underwater sonar capacity of a dolphin, bipedal upright walking, human speech, and the human mind require vast amounts of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information.

            Molecular biochemistry is now telling us that devolution is instead a process that breaks individual genes in the existing DNA sequence of chemical letters, not adding new creative information but subtracting information from the DNA code.

            This is much different from adding blocks of new and different cell-types in clustered groups to create the one-step leap from a Precambrian jellyfish to a Cambrian Trilobite or Wiwaxia, which I am proposing in this book as the explanation for biological development.

            But devolution does brilliantly explain the microevolution that enables adaptation to differing geographical and ecological environments, without the need to extrapolate this process into the much larger theoretical concept of macroevolution to explain the vast diversity of life progressing over the course of geological history.

            The human breeding of a prototype wolf to produce the variant forms of a Golden Retriever, Great Dane, or Black Labrador dog over many generations, involves at the molecular level in the cell the breakage of particular genes that code for specific characteristics. 

            Scientists can now identify and track these broken genes from wolf to new breed of dog, resulting in a reduction rather than an addition of genetic information creating damaged genes that will not go back in the reverse direction to recover this original lost information.

            This means according to modern genetic biochemistry that the entire program of Darwinian evolution is in reality a process of conservative change around the margins, and not radically progressive macroevolution as originally theorized.

            Instead, biology has strict boundary limits around the change-effects of beneficial genetic mutations, which we can now track through empirical scientific investigation.

I especially like the description of how we can now trace the outward physical changes from a grizzly bear to a polar bear, at the level of specific genes in the cell being broken and damaged, thus identifying the removal of information (devolving) rather than adding new innovative information.

Breaking certain genes within the cells of the polar bear not only removes the brown color of the grizzly bear’s fur to produce white fur, but creates an ensemble of newly grouped broken genes that produces the polar bear’s ability to metabolize the high fat content of seals, and also adds all of the accompanying new lifestyle habits that polar bears need to survive and reproduce in the extreme cold weather of the arctic environment.

The combination of traits that differentiates the grizzly bear from the polar bear, using the Darwinian gradualism of “nature makes no sudden leaps” no longer stacks-up when all of the evidence is examined as a whole.

The incredibly tight engineering tolerances of selecting just the right genes to break at the cellular level to create the completed life-form of a polar bear, when combined with the totally independent factors of the prior fitness of the arctic environment in terms of biodiversity and a complex ecosystem, logically cancels-out the materialistic assertion that raw nature can coordinate these factors into function and fit on its own.

The inference to the best explanation now points to an intelligent designing agent who can identify the specific DNA code letters contained in gene sequences, and break the genes in blocks of clustered groups to produce the new cell-types to create a polar bear from a grizzly bear.

            Quoting two passages from Dr. Behe’s book:

“The molecular parts of the cell are elegantly arranged to fulfill many subsidiary purposes that must blend together in service of the large overall purpose of forming life.  As we’ll see in this book, no unintelligent, undirected process—neither Darwin’s mechanism nor any other—can account for that.”

“It seems, then, that the magnificent Ursus maritimus (polar bear) has adjusted to its harsh environment mainly by degrading genes that its ancestors already possessed.  Despite its impressive abilities, rather than evolving, it has adapted predominantly by devolving.  What that portends for our conception of evolution is the principal topic of this book.”[2] 

            The devolution that occurs in living cells that produces the suite of broken and damaged genes that in turn produce the variation of physical traits that changes a grizzly bear into a polar bear, does not explain how a bear comes into existence in the first-place.

            The information content in living cells that produces the architectural body-plan and lifestyle habits of a bear is much larger and more sophisticated than the microevolutionary processes that put-out variant traits for natural selection to choose from to enhance survivability, to create the differences between a grizzly bear and a polar bear.

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

[1] Michael Behe: Darwin Devolves…Socrates in the City interview, on You Tube dated March 29, 2019

[2] Michael J. Behe, Darwin Devolves (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 9, 17.

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