BEAVER FOR THANKSGIVING

I know most of you had turkey and ham for Thanksgiving. I did also, but had an additional taste: beaver.  We were in Oklahoma at Nancy's son's home. He had trapped a beaver that was boring into the dam on his large pond. He BBQed some and cooked some on the stove. I had a bite and it did taste like beef. Sunday he took it to his church that is the oldest Choctaw Baptist church in OK. They loved it.

I am recovering from the TURP operation and feeling a lot better. Nancy takes good care of me.

TURP

Thursday I had a TURP TransUrethalRecession of the Prostate surgery in Granbury. I went in at 11:30. Nancy, Rev. Al Munger, Bobbe &Yvonne Hightower, and Nancy's son, John, saw me going into surgery for support. Nancy brought my prayer blanket from Cross Plains FUMC. One of the nurses explained to another nurse how the prayer blanket had a knot tied by each person who prayed for me.

I was anesthetized by 12:30 and woke up around 2:30. The surgery uses a laser to burn out the extra tissue that had grown back in the urethral track since 1997 when I had my first surgery. I went home with a catheter. The first night was rough due to the wearing off of the anesthesia. I was trying to drink a lot of water as ordered but it all came up as I was trying to go to sleep.

Each day has gotten a little bit better. Friday I had the catheter removed. I drink a lot of water and am beginning to clear up but still have some blood coming thru. Friday and Saturday I felt like I had been run over by a truck with every muscle complaining just getting in and out of bed. That has cleared up today and I feel better. I skipped church and ate breakfast at 11. Mark and Kathy brought me gifts that they bought at the CPFUMC Lord's Acre. Mark had to get back home to leave for Taiwan tomorrow. I walked to the gate twice today and hope to get more exercise tomorrow. Should be good to go by then.

EVOLUTION HUMOR

I copied this from Creation Revolution:

When evolution is seen as a storytelling game rather than a serious attempt at scientific explanation, it suddenly makes sense.

The goal in evolutionary theory is to fit any observation into a predetermined narrative – one of universal common ancestry by blind, unguided processes.  Since no human ever sees functioning, complex, specified information coming into being that way, evolutionary theory is guaranteed to generate implausible stories.  The stories only seem plausible when evolution is first assumed, and all other possible explanations are excluded.  If this seems backward to science’s ideal of letting the evidence speak for itself, it has one redeeming virtue: it’s funny.

Kissing may be evolution’s matchmaker:  Sex sells; it sells evolution.  Look at the picture on Live Science’s article.  Mesmerized, the reader allows Stephanie Pappas to turn a fairy tale into support for Darwin:

You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, as the saying goes. New research suggests the cliché is true on an evolutionary level.

Kissing might have evolved as a way to assess the quality of potential mates, according to two new studies.…

The details of the studies are less important than the marks of storytelling: profuse use of “if,” “might,” and “may have” escape clauses that substitute for scientific evidence.  Since “Kissing exists in virtually every culture on Earth,” there is no control group against which to assess the fitness of kissers vs. non-kissers.  Even if there were, singling out that one behavior against all the other factors involved in successful mating would be near impossible.  Is the first kiss the crucial one?  Is a peck on the cheek as naturally selective as an alfalfa kiss?  Who could ever scientifically test that, without interfering in the data collection process?

The Oxford researcher wants to go beyond the evolution of kissing into the “murkier depths” of sex, Pappas says.  “I’m interested in doing more research on what love is in humans.  What is it that makes us so intimately attracted to one specific person?”  Must be a fun job.

Evolution of Catwoman:  Feminists, get on the case of Tia Ghose.  In Live Science, she claimed “Women evolved to be catty” – meaning, “rumor spreading, shunning and backstabbing” according to the “mean girls” stereotype, claiming that “the behavior is rooted in humans’ evolutionary past.”  How sexist!  Demand equal time for men evolving to be like wolves.

Ignorance is bliss:  Readers can evaluate the evolutionary value of ignorance in an article on Science Daily.   In a nutshell, it gives more evidence against Hamilton’s kin selection theory.  If “ignorance is bliss” is a law of evolution, it would explain a lot about current political debates.

A sauropod walks into a bar: ‘Why the long neck?’  That headline on Science Daily introduced an evolutionary tale of convergent and divergent evolution.  “While convergently evolving many features seen in large terrestrial mammals, such as upright, columnar limbs and barrel-shaped trunks, sauropods evolved some unique features, such as the extremely long necks and diminutive heads they are famous for.”  Trouble is, the joker asked the riddle but never gave the punch line.  The evolutionists haven’t figured one out yet.  Maybe that’s the joke:

The unique gigantism of sauropod dinosaurs has long been recognized as an important problem in the evolution of vertebrates, raising questions as to why no other land-based lineage has ever reached this size, how these dinosaurs functioned as living animals, and how they were able to maintain stable populations over distinct geological periods.

Snakes on the Brain:  Almost all the science media repeated a plot line introduced on PNAS, typified by this question on Science Daily: “Was the evolution of high-quality vision in our ancestors driven by the threat of snakes?”  The international authors of this plot took monkeys and showed them images of snakes, angry monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometric shapes, measuring the response time of particular neurons in their brains.  Naturally, the response was quicker to snakes.  They concluded:

Our findings are unique in providing neuroscientific evidence in support of the Snake Detection Theory, which posits that the threat of snakes strongly influenced the evolution of the primate brain. This finding may have great impact on our understanding of the evolution of primates.

It “may” have impact, but where is an unbiased judge, if everyone is an evolutionist?  A look at the paper shows poor scientific controls.

• The scientists did not compare the monkey results with response times of unrelated animals, like birds, mice, or squirrels.  (Why?  Because those animals are not in the evolutionary lineage of primates.)
• The test monkeys were shown pictures of a variety of snakes, but no tigers, spiders, or hunters with guns.
• The monkeys were not shown live snakes along with pictures.

The authors, further, did not connect the dots, to find whether a specific mutation for greater visual acuity and response time was connected to survival of snake encounters.  Worst of all, the authors merely assumed an evolutionary cause for highly complex effects (visual acuity and quick response), instead of considering whether the design of those traits is beyond the reach of blind, unguided processes. 

The media, though, lapped up the story uncritically.  PhysOrg called it “new evidence to support the notion that primates evolved keen vision skills so they could survive the threats snakes pose in the jungle.”  Science Magazine rewarded this as one of the biggest news stories of the week, saying the paper supports the “controversial hypothesis” that “primates as we know them would never have evolved without snakes.”  National Geographic said “it might be those slithery serpents that helped us evolve to see as well as we do.” In storybook land, anything “might be”.   Science Daily quoted the lead author saying, “I don’t see another way to explain the sensitivity of these neurons to snakes except through an evolutionary path.”  Naturally; she invented the “notion” in 2006, following it up in 2009 with a book ironically entitled,  The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent.

Is a legless lizard a snake?  Speaking of snakes, “legless lizards” provide an interesting case study in the philosophy of classification.  Lizards are not snakes, but there are lizards that look like snakes.  Mike Wall explains for Live Science how to tell them apart:

For example, snakes tend to have relatively longer bodies and shorter tails than their limbless reptilian cousins. Further, serpents don’t have eyelids or external ears, while most lizards do. And many “legless” lizards actually have tiny vestigial limbs, while snakes generally sport no external appendages at all.

Trouble is, there are exceptions to all these rules.  Pythons and boas are snakes, but have “rudimentary hind limbs.”  Dr. Wall mentions a legless lizard that looks like a snake (no eyelids) and eats like a snake.  Why shouldn’t it be classified as a snake?  What does the word “snake” mean if shared traits don’t apply?  Enter the evolutionary story:

The answer, of course, lies in ancestry. Legless lizards are not snakes. Rather, functional limblessness has evolved independently perhaps a dozen times in the squamate reptiles — lizards, snakes and amphisbaenids, or worm lizards — suggesting that the body plan offers many advantages.

If that were a law of evolution, we should see legless badgers, legless prairie dogs, and legless ants.

Which part of the Darwin Comedy Show did you like?  The sauropod walking into the bar?  Ignorance is bliss?  Catwoman?  Snakes on a brain?  This is what they love to do: spin yarns and tell jokes.  It’s so much fun.  It’s kind of like being stoned.

- See more at: http://crev.info/2013/11/evolutionary-stories/#sthash.rDIGNmAK.dpuf

Thomas Nagel on the existence of God

Thomas Nagel on the existence of God

"I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind.... This is a somewhat ridiculous situation.... [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one's beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist." 1


Nagel, Thomas, The Last Word, pp. 130-131, Oxford University Press, 1997. Dr Nagel (1937- ) is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University.

Note: Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics.

HIGGS BOSON

This is the latest news report: "The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two physicists, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs, who independently proposed the mechanism that gives subatomic particles their mass. Without this mechanism, physicists say, subatomic particles would ping around the universe at the speed of light without interacting and forming atoms and molecules, the building-blocks of matter."

Supposedly one experiment using the Hadron cyclotron observed the Higgs boson. Other researchers are skeptical of it. I think the whole idea is questionable.

This confirms my belief that the Big Bang theory is made-up story with no physics support. If you had a Big Bang that released atomic particles like electrons and protons, in my mind they would just expand into the vast expanses of space forever. There are no forces to cause the particles to come together and form larger molecules. I don't understand why intelligent physicists can't see the obvious. The Higgs boson is their answer. That is why it is called "the God particle". They need intelligence to make their theory work, but deny that God had anything to do with it.

The whole concept of immense times and evolution forming matter, stars, galaxies and eventually living plants and animals is so far-fetched as to be completely ridiculous.

KILLING JESUS

I just finished reading Killing Jesus by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. I was dreading reading it because of a book I had read by Kathleen and Richard Gear that created a fiction based on their research that had Jesus living after the crucifixion married to Mary Magdalene with children. I was afraid O'Reilly would use the "historical" material they had used.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book follows the Biblical story closely but adds a lot of material about the persons who were in his life like Tiberius and the other Roman rulers. They also told about the life of Jesus and the apostles. He tells how the toilet was a hole in the ground outside homes with a shovel near a pile of dirt. He details the horrendous actions of the crucifixion that were illustrated in the movie about Christ.

I am feeling great and my oncologist upped my Gleevec dosage from 200 to 300 mg, still below the recommended dose of 400. He wants to see whether it has any more bad effect on my kidneys. My creatinine jumped when I started but I have increased my water intake and reduced my sodium intake and the creatinine came back down some. I now have a kidney doctor along with the oncologist and have a urologist that I will meet with Monday.  I had a CAT scan and a Sonogram in the last couple of weeks. My tumor hasn't decreased, but it also hasn't increased. The sonogram was for my kidneys that look OK but found I have an enlarged prostate. Thus the urologist appointment. I am not experiencing the problems I had years ago before my prostate resection operation so I feel all right about the current situation.

COMMON SENSE

I would like to see some common sense applied to the evolution argument. Why does anyone think that if brilliant scientists can not create life from inorganic molecules by creating complex DNA molecules that would direct the reproduction of the life that Mother Nature, who has no intellect, could create life. Ever since Darwin scientists have been trying to generate life unsucessfully. It is impossible. Doesn't that make sense? Evolutionist claim evolution is a proven science because biological scientists can manipulate existing life forms to create mutations and examine life forms in the laboratory. But we can't create life. Only a creator, either from some remote planet or maybe from a spiritual realm, can create life. The current belief, by those who don't believe there is a God, is that aliens have deposited life on earth that has evolved to the current condition. They use Bible citations that seem to be from outer space and drawings of what seems to be space suits on people in Egypt. They have admitted that Nature can't create life forms. Why then does the science activists fight so hard against any teaching in school of possible creation science subjects?

I need to be active in the current textbook fight in Texas but haven't had access to the books under question. The letters in the FWST are the usual rants against religion vs. science without citing any scientific arguments.

I would like  to see design engineers take on the Science group and support a creation approach.

FORT WORTH MUSEUM OF SCIENCE

For my birthday, after my son with his wife and my granddaughter with her two daughters treated us to lunch at La Madeleine, we went to the Fort Worth Museum of Science and Technology where we were bombarded by evolution science. Starting with the dinosaur exhibits which is the main focus of the museum with their large dinosaur statues outside the explanation was always about the long times explaining that fossils are dated by index fossils. None of which is true. The displays are focused on kids with an interactive dinosaur dig display ourside.
We chose the IMAX movie Space Junk. Again it had nothing to do with the actual facts of space junk, but the movie started with the Big Bang and creative displays of how galaxies and planets formed using their unscientific ideas. Because I worked on the Apollo program with the charge to prevent astronauts from being killed by meteoroids during the flights to the moon I was familiar with all of the space debris being a problem for the International Space Station and future satellite launches. I didn't know that NASA has a hypervelocity impact laboratory. I do know that my papers on hypervelocity impact studies have been quoted in science papers. I found this out when I Binged my name the other day. The Big Bang had nothing to do with the problem that we have created by destroying satellites in space creating thousands of parts that can impact other satellites creating more  debris. A real problem for the future.

To counteract the bad taste, we took a trip back to the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose this morning where we heard a 30 minute film on their belief in creation science as supported by their dinosaur excavations and footprints of humans with dinosaurs. The museum obviously need financial support. It has added a new exhibit of a scale model of Noah's Ark built by a messianic Jew from the Dallas area, but the hyperbaric chamber experiment has not been repeated. They are waiting to buy copper wire to wind the chamber to simulate the electormagnetic field of the pre-Noah atmosphere.

I picked up a copy of IN THE BEGINNING: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood by Walt Brown, who holds a PhD from MIT and worked in the aerospace industry with a stint teaching at the Air Force Academy. I had given away a couple of copies of the book and wanted to read it for myself. I have started it and find it compelling. He was mentioned in the film at the Glen Rose museum. Walt's web sire is www.creationscience.org. The museum web site is: www.creationevidence.org/

AFTER CRUISING ALASKA

I reached a record high weight of 183.5# by having ice cream every day on the cruise ship. And eating all I wanted didn't help. But I have lost nine pounds since so I am back to my normal weight. Also after meeting with a new doctor, who is a kidney specialist, on his recommendation to reduce salt, my wife has placed me on a low sodium diet. As a result my food choices have been strictly limited. Everything you buy has sodium. Even milk! The good news is that my creatinine was lower on the last test. The big news will come after they read my next CAT scan scheduled for September 17 to see whether the tumor has shrunk.

My creation research since I got back has been looking at evolution sites trying to understand where they are coming from. I can't believe what I read. The basic question is how nature can create life. The proof of evolution is shown to be how modern biologists have been able to manipulate changes in genetic makeup. They argue that that "proves" evolution. But no one has shown how natural processess could have created the complicated DNA information that controls biological activity. Living organisms have the chemical makeup of inorganic chemicals and when they die they revert to basic chemicals, but in order to be classified as a living organism there must be a highly organized information gene that controls how the organism will reproduce.

The possibility of this occuring naturally is statistically impossible and many evolutionists have recognized this problem. So they now postulate that living organisms on earth were planted here by aliens from outer space. Big problem. We have been trying to contact these extraterrestrials for years and they won't reply. Could it be that they don't exist? Is it possible that earth was created as a unique experiment by an intelligent designer? I see no other good answer. None of our science fiction stories of men on the moon, Venus, Mars or any other planet in our solar system have come true. The more we learn about the other places the more we realize that to colonize the planets will require habitations for humans.

I can't believe people have signed up to go to Mars. Mars has an average temperature of -84 degrees. That is cold. No oxygen in the atmosphere requires breathing equipment. It is very dusty, even for a West Texan that has no appeal for me. Why are we going? I give up. NASA says that they want to know what happened to all of the life that was on Mars millions of years ago. No one seems to understand that there wasn't any life there then or now. We want to believe in myths.

CRUISING ALASKA

We will be cruising Alaska without computers so my next post will be after 8/19.

RECENT RESEARCH

Apparently I failed to publish Common Sense. I did that just now.
I have been looking at more publications. One thing I found was a 2002 article that responded to an editorial by Penne, the editor of an evolutionary magazine who attacked creation science. Their response has many excellent references. You can read it at: http://www.apologeticspress.org/pdfs/reprints_pdf/dc-02-safull.pdf
At the same time I have been reading a blog by a Christian Evolutionist, Dennis Venema, that teaches biology. He presented the following argument:

“Basically every gene, every new protein fold… there is nothing of significance that we can show [that] can be had in that gradualistic way. It’s all a mirage. None of it happens that way.”

The importance of this line of argumentation for the IDM can be seen clearly in Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell (published in 2009). In this book, Meyer claims that an intelligent agent is responsible for the information we observe in DNA because, in his words, natural mechanisms “will not suffice” to explain it:

Since the case for intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of biological information necessary to build novel forms of life depends, in part, upon the claim that functional (information-rich) genes and proteins cannot be explained by random mutation and natural selection, this design hypothesis implies that selection and mutation will not suffice to produce genetic information … (p. 495)

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this argument for Meyer in Signature, and for the IDM as a whole. In the conclusion to a pivotal chapter entitled “The Best Explanation” Meyer presents the following summary of his case:

Since the intelligent-design hypothesis meets both the causal-adequacy and causal-existence criteria of a best explanation, and since no other competing explanation meets these conditions as well –or at all–it follows that the design hypothesis provides the best, most causally adequate explanation of the origin of the information necessary to produce the first life on earth. Indeed, our uniform experience affirms that specified information … always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind, and not a strictly material process. So the discovery of the specified digital information in the DNA molecule provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA. Indeed, whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source. It follows that the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is that it too had an intelligent source. (p. 347)

Put more simply, Meyer claims that if we see specified information, we infer design, since we know of no mechanism that can produce specified information through an unintelligent, natural process. As a logical argument, Meyer’s position only works if (and this is a big if) – his premises are correct.
The issue is that Meyer’s case is open to refutation by counterexample, and even one counterexample would suffice. If any natural mechanism can be shown to produce “functional, information-rich genes and proteins”, then intelligent design is no longer the best explanation for the origin of information we observe in DNA, by Meyer’s own stated criteria. His entire (500+ page) argument would simply unravel.
The obvious problem for Meyer’s case is that biologists are well aware of a natural mechanism that does add functional, specified information to DNA sequences (and in some cases, creates new genes de novo): natural selection acting on genetic variation produced through random mutation. Not only are biologists aware of some examples of natural selection adding functional information to DNA, this effect has been observed time and again, and in some cases it has documented in exquisite detail. When I reviewed Signature for the American Scientific Affiliation journal Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (PSCF) what struck me, repeatedly, was that Meyer made no mention of the evidence for natural selection as a mechanism to increase biological information. I fully expected him to dispute the evidence, certainly – but the surprise for me was that he simply denied it to be sufficient without addressing any evidence.

His argument that natural mechanisms do add information ignores the problem that Meyer stated that you can't add information to non-living minerals. It is well-known that genetics produce mutations, but they don't produce new organisms. The mutations and new genes are always like the progenitors. Millions of fruit flies have been produced in the laboratory and they are always fruit flies. No horse flies have appeared. Another lab test described by Biologos is their ongoing Ecoli tests. Looking at their data they still have Ecoli after thousands of tests.
Their argument that evolution happened just can't be justified by their experiments as far as I can see.

COMMON SENSE

I wonder what has happened to common sense as I review evolution ideas. I was reading the Big Bang theory. I would think that if a sudden release of energy from a point occurred that the energy in any form would expand forever. I can think of no physical concepts that would have made the elementary products coalesce, much less join together to form atoms, molecules, complex molecules, galaxies and planets. The idea is so absurb it defies common sense. And the concept of inorganic molecules suddenly receiving the enormous information contained in DNA to control life would happen due to lightning striking a mud puddle boggles my mind.

We are gathering more and more scientific facts that point to a young earth. But the scientists finding such evidence refuse to even harbor the possibility of a young earth and can not see how the evidence supports such a theory. We have a lack of common sense.

MUSINGS

I was searching for two men that were given to me as being creation speakers. I was given only the names Dr. Jackson and Thomas Sharpe. When I did the computer search I found that both are Drs. and have a creation ministry out of Noble, OK. They also have a creation museum in Dallas, TX. One of the links in the search brought up a blog by a Ph.D. that excorciated creationists. Based on the news that a scientist had found viable DNA material in a fossil dinosaur, creationists had jumped on the fact to declare that the find demonstrated that a young earth. The author used sarcastic comments to excorciate the creation statements. He declared that the material had to be millions of years old because it was found in rocks that were dated by radiometric dating. I argue that rocks that have old radio dating can encase fossil objects that are only a few years old. For example, the 1959 earthquake in Yellowstone buried cars and vans but radio dating the rocks would provide ancient ages according to current thinking. St. Helens and Paricutin rocks would date very old but the volcanic activity is very recent. Another problem is that using radioactive dating assumes that there were no daughter atoms in the original formation of the rocks. We have no idea what the original composition was in either an evolutionary or creation model.
You might look up Dr. Jackson and Dr. Sharpe on the net.

CATCHING UP

I apologize for not posting more often. My New Year's resolution has fallen by the wayside. I don't really have an excuse but for the last several weeks have been dealing with a "slow growing cancerous tumor" on the back side of my stomach next to the pancreas. It was picked up in a CAT scan three months ago, and confirmed by a specialist in endoscopy. I have since talked to an oncologist who recommended an oral chemo called gleevec. I then talked to a surgeon who specializes in this surgery. He also recommended gleevec to shrink the tumor before surgery. I had a followup CAT scan today for a meeting Friday with the oncologist to evaluate whether it is growing or not. I asked friends to pray that the tumor will shrink and we will see if one week of prayer has had any effect.

I gave my friend from church the article where Henry Morris II backed down on his belief that the foot prints in the Paluxy river were human. In response he gave me a number of pages from his computer of attacks on the academic qualification of some outspoken creation scientists. Nothing about the science or facts. He also included a definition of evolution that only spoke of mutations as being evidence of evolution. Creation science acknowledges mutations and even argues that they are causing further deterioration in the development of humans and animals. One argument that I find interesting is that we are getting smaller. Even though Japanese have grown taller after WWII due to better nutrition, looking at mankind as a whole, we are not becoming giants. Even though we prize 7' basketball players, why don't we have 8', 9' and 10' giants in our athletics? Another article I read recently argued that the size of the human skull has decreased for the last several generations. Biblically there are stories of giants before the flood and after. When the Israelites went into the promised land the scouts reported the land was filled with giants, but they were able to defeat them with God's help.

The second law of thermodynamics leads us to believe that the world is running down. There are a number of scientific facts that confirm that direction. The magnetic field of the earth is decreasing, for example. I will try to find other examples.

NEW DISCUSSION

One of the members of my church challenged me on my beliefs in creation. I had asked him about the Creation Museum in Glen Rose. He volunteers at the Wildlife Center there. I gave him a copy of Biblical Creationism by Dr. Henry M. Morris. He responded with about six different articles he had collected from the Net. He uses a Bible with Hebrew and one of the articles was about how we form our ideas about the six days of 24 hours from our English translations and that the Hebrew can be interpreted as long ages. I have read other arguments against this concept. I think the last one was the book by Safarti questioning Hugh Ross' idea of long times. I was amused by one book that explained that the Hebrews were nomads who lived in the desert with primitive ideas but the Greeks were city dwellers who had ideas based on science and facts. I would argue with that. Abraham came from Ur, a large city of the time, but did travel with his family with large herds that was typical of rich people. Later when the Hebrews occupied the land they moved into and built cities. Jerusalem is a good example. Also it is interesting that today the Jewish people hold the majority of prizes for scientific and technical knowledge. I don't know that the Greeks have the same reputation today, although in the Western world we give them credit for many early scientific and technical advances.
It will be interesting to see where our conversation goes. I would invite him to comment on this blog.
I will abandom my computer for a week so don't expect updates for a while.
Thank those who are reading but not commenting.

O'REILLY SYNDROME

      Bill O'Reilly commented on the new TV show, The Bible, by saying that he considers the Old Testament to all be allegory. He questioned the story of Adam and Eve as well as Noah as being historical fact. He challenged the pastor of the Dallas Baptist Church by asking him if he believed in Adam and Eve and all of that incest story and asked him if he believed in science and Carbon 14 dating that challenges the idea of a young earth.
       The pastor said he believed in Adam and Eve but not a young earth. I am looking forward to reading O'Reilly's book Killing Jesus. There have been a lot of books lately challenging our beliefs in the New Testament about the life of Jesus and I am interested in how much O'Reilly has been taken in by those stories.
      This is the problem that I see. We no longer believe in the basic Bible story. We don't think that God created the heavens and the earth and we really don't think that He did it in six days and rested on the seventh. We don't believe that God continues to control the weather: that is what TV forecasters do. Therefore we really don't believe that Christ controlled the weather when he calmed the storms on the seas, or that he was able to feed thousands of people from a few scraps of bread and fish.
     Why don't we believe? Because we have bought into the evolution story and now believe the lies that have been told for the last couple of hundred of years that the cosmos is billions of years old. (In my lifetime it has been doubled and tripled in length.) What is amazing to me is how many facts are discovered daily by modern science but they refuse to see and believe. Carbon 14 dating is the one thing that I first thought of when I was introduced to the idea of a young earth. I was taking nuclear engineering graduate courses at the time and immediately said that we could solve the time problem with radioactive dating techniques. That was when I discovered that all the dating techniques assume long times as a given. For C14 in 1959 they assumed that the atmosphere and high intensity solar radiation had been constant for 100,000 years. I immediately saw a problem with my assumption of an early creation atmosphere that had a water canopy protecting the atmosphere from solar radiation. The thought occurred to me that the C14 dates should have a discontinuity. They should be fairly accurate for the most recent couple of thousand years and then the dates should have a jump that would be interpreted as much longer times. And if you look at the dates you will see that happens. What has really thrown a kink in the geological time scales is the discovery of small amounts of C14 in diamonds, coal, gas, and oil deposits. Any amount at all would show that those carbon sources are only a few thousands and could not be the millions of years that are accepted as fact by modern geologists. The use of other radioactive decay observations again make an assumption that the original material was deposited with no daughter atoms. We have no idea what the composition of the original depositions were whether we use an evolutionary or creation model. We just don't know.
    Recent discoveries of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils again support the idea of a recent creation, but scientists just can't see it that way. Our exploration of the other planets have shown that there are no other creatures that have evolved on any of them. But just a few years ago our science fiction writers had strange creatures on the moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and when Star Wars came out we just knew that there were other civilizations and that they must be more advanced than ours. But we have listened carefully for over 40 years for any transmission from intelligent extraterrestrials and have heard nothing. We just can't believe that God would have created this planet and then created the universe around us. I look at the universe in all of its beauty (and all of those beautifully colored images have been colored by artists, not nature, who imagine what the colors should be) and I am even more impressed with the natural beauty of DNA, the new flowers, butterflies and sunsets that are prepared by God and much more complicated than anything man has been able to create, build or paint.

O'REILLY AND THE MOVIE THE BIBLE

Bill O'Reilly commented on his TV show that the movie The Bible was fundamental and questioned whether Adam and Eve were real, whether The Flood occurred and other old testament stories. He called the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and asked him if he believed in a recent creation or believed in Carbon 14 dating. The pastor said he didn't believe in a 6000 year history of the world, but argued for Adam and Eve. Bill commented that the Adam story meant that there was incest because only the family were available for families. In the next segment he stated that he believes that all of the old testament is allegorical.

I had to put in my two cents with the following email to Bill:

Bill,

Thousands of scientists believe evolution is impossible and the Bible story of creation may be correct.

You mentioned carbon 14. Carbon 14 has been found in coal, natural gas, oil, and diamonds which means they can not be millions of years old.

Evolution can not produce complicated life DNA required in all living matter that contains explicit information on reproduction and how to survive. Therefore we must reject evolution and all of the science that is attached to it.

Read creation science literature.

Adam and Eve could have resulted in all of the people today and Noah and his family could also produce all the people today in 4000 years.

MORE ON NASA

This is part of my next Livestock Weekly column:

Speaking of space, NASA is still concentrating on looking for signs of life on Mars. I can’t believe that there are still grown people who think that life will occur if you have water with chemicals like hydrogen and carbon along with some energy source like solar radiation or lightning. For many years we have known that life forms are highly complex DNA molecules containing an enormous amount of information in the cells that control the growth, life and reproduction. These complexities do not occur naturally. They must be the result of a really smart engineer who designed them in the first place. Apparently only the earth contains life forms. We have looked with all of our scientific tools for life elsewhere and found absolutely nothing. We have listened for messages from extra-terrestrials and heard nothing for 40 years. And yet we can’t believe that we earthlings are unique in the cosmos. The latest theory of how life got here on earth, since it could not have evolved, is that life came from space travelers years ago. The History Channel shows document graphic representations of beings clad in space suits on Egyptian and Mayan tombs supporting their idea of ancient extraterrestrials bringing life.

     It just may be that we are unique living plants and animals and there are no other planets with life forms in spite of all of the science fiction stories and movies to the contrary. The big question is whether we have been here for millions of years or for only 6,000. Which leads to the next question of how long we will continue to be here. Will the Sun play out in millions of years or will electromagnetic storms suddenly blast off from the Sun next week and wipe out all electric power and all computer driven vehicles in one storm rendering the modern world helpless? Only the subsistent farmers will be able to survive if they don’t get too sunburned. The end of the world has been argued forever and I enjoy listening to the ideas.

DATING ROCKS

The accepted method of dating rocks is to use radiometric dating. There are several problems with this approach. One is that we don't know the initial composition of the rocks. Were they formed originally with daughter atoms or formed with radioactive atoms that then decayed so that we can measure the daughter atoms and calculate an age?  From the creation revolution web page I copied the following comment: "rocks observed to form on a particular date often show radioisotope age estimates far exceeding their actual ages. For example, when the fresh lava dome at Mount St. Helens was only ten years old, it showed a radioisotope age estimate of 340,000 years!² Many such examples cast doubt on the entire dating method.^3"

Read more: http://creationrevolution.com/2013/02/doesnt-radioisotope-dating-prove-rocks-are-millions-of-years-old/#ixzz2M8tdMEHX -

SHOW ON TV

I have started recording an interesting show on TV about creation.
Channel 264 KTV has the show on from 8:30-9.
It is interesting with cartoon illustrations of pre-flood conditions. I don't agree with all of his approaches but he has a lot of interesting information. One show discussed the finding of giant fossil skeletons that confirmed the Biblical stories of giants during the pre-flood time. Another argument is that the finding of man-made objects in coal deposits confirms that people lived during the time the deposits were formed rather than a carboniferous time line. I argue that the carbon 14 dating of coal also indicates it is of recent formation.

EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE COSTS BILLIONS

I was looking at the reasons and cost for our Mars exploration program. Curiosity cost 2.5 Billion. The current plan presented to Congress is for 1.5 Billion for a similar rover but with the capability of launching samples of the soil into orbit where they could be retrieved by later missions to Mars. The primary focus of the program is for a science/human exploration plan with an initial goal of determining if life evolved beyond earth in the solar system.
We just can't believe that there isn't life "out there" because there is life here on earth. They can't believe that life was created here. It must have evolved and for years we have believed that other planets have life and that some of them must be more advanced that us because they have had a few millions of years to develop their technology.
And yet all of our science has found no signs of extra-terrestrial beings after 40 years of searching with all of our technology. However we still have cartoons of aliens in space ships looking for our leader. We love to believe in Buck Rogers and all of the Starship movies as fact.
It is costing us real dollars to support this fantasy.
I favor sending scientific experiments  to the other planets to determine their composition and atmosphere. It is obvious that Venus, Jupiter and the other planets would never permit human life to survive, but we still believe that someday in the future we need to colonize the other planets. This was the theme of a science fiction story written by a woman in 1865 published in LET'S HEAR IT. Mohl wrote about a man going to sleep and waking 500 years in the future with space travel. In her story all Africans had been sent to Mars to raise cotton for us earth dwellers. We have had this belief for many years.
I do believe in creatures from outer space that will change our planet. But it will be the second coming of Christ that will make the changes.

NEW THEORY ON MAMMALS

Dr. R. L. David Jolly wrote the following after examining the new story evolutions have produced about mammals coming from a rat like animal 100 million years ago:
I’ve studied biology for 50 years. Most of that time was studying the myriad of evolutionary theories that are all supposed to be fact, but which can’t all be fact by the very nature of how they differ from each other. The more I study evolutionary biology, the more convinced I am that it is 100% impossible for all of life to be the result of billions of years of random chance mutations. Every aspect of biology defies virtually every law of science – biology, information, chemistry and physics. The more I study biology, the more convinced I am that the only plausible explanation for all of life is the creator God of the Universe.

Read more: http://creationrevolution.com/2013/02/earliest-mammal-ancestor/#ixzz2KpdEz34D

NO EXTRATERRESTRIALS

My latest news from the AIAA:

SETI's First Directed Search Fails To Find Evidence Of Aliens.

Ian O'Neill at Discovery News (2/8) writes, "SETI astronomers have completed their first 'directed' search" of candidate exoplanets found by the Kepler telescope using the Green Bank radio telescope, but "turned up no evidence of transmitting aliens." Former SETI chair Jill Tarter headed the search. While nothing was discovered, it "represents a critical step forward in the detection of intelligent civilizations beyond our solar system" by targeting the search more than in the past. O'Neill believes "the next logical step would be to probe exoplanetary atmospheres for spectroscopic traces of a biosphere, a path Kepler has started to lead us down."

They just can not believe that we are the only people that God created.

ASTRONOMICAL LIES

I saw this post in my AIAA newsletter. I am constantly amazed at the Buck Rogers scenarios that drive the search for extraterrestrial life just because we evolved so someone else out there must have evolved also. These are the stories that drive the funding for our NASA programs.

Closest Earth-Sized Planet May Be Around Red Dwarf Star.

The AP (2/7, Dunn) reports, "Astronomers reported Wednesday that the nearest Earth-like planet may be just 13 light-years away - or some 77 trillion miles. That planet hasn't been found yet, but should be there based on the team's study of red dwarf stars." Using data from the Kepler space telescope, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led by Courtney Dressing determined that 6% of the galaxies 75 billion red dwarf stars could have Earth-like planets. According to the article, this "should simplify the search for extraterrestrial life."

And this story that would have a different finding if posted by a creation scientist:

Bacteria Found In Antarctica Could Have Implications For Astrobiology.

The New York Times (2/7, A18, Gorman, Subscription Publication) reports, "For the first time, scientists report, they have found bacteria living in the cold and dark deep under the Antarctic ice, a discovery that might advance knowledge of how life could survive on other planets or moons and that offers the first glimpse of a vast ecosystem of microscopic life in underground lakes in Antarctica." John Priscu of Montana State University led the team that made the discovery in Lake Whillans, although the article notes more study is needed to determine exactly what type of bacteria was discovered. NASA's Chris McKay "said in an e-mail that such analysis could determine if the bacteria in Lake Whillans have implications for the possible discovery of extraterrestrial life." He said, "If it was using a local energy source, it would be interesting. ... If it's just consuming organics carried in from elsewhere, it is of much less interest."

It may be that the bacteria was there from before Noah's flood caused the ice caps at the poles.

NEANDERTHALS

My AOL news had a Huffington-Post story about a recent discovery of Neanderthals in Spain that changed the date and supposedly made them older that previously thought. What got my attention was the drawings of the "creatures" that accompanied the story. I have a couple of friends who are married and I have argued that they should sue National Geographic and the Smithsonian museums for their portrayal of neolithic people. The couple look like they stepped out of the drawings. There are people today who look just like the ones portrayed in the drawings that are always someone's idea of what the person would look like when they dig up a skull. My friends are very intelligent, one had a PhD in literature and the other is a journalist but have the facial features that looked just like the drawings.
Today I got a notice from the Creation Research Society that they are trying to fund a new project iDINO that is digging up dinosaur fossils with the purpose of identifying Dinosaur Intact Natural Osteo-tissue using their electron scanning microscope. Preliminary results of examining a Triceratops horn has found what appears to be intact osteo tissue still containing blood cells. Plus some other interesting results. This would prove that dinosaurs could not possibly be millions of years old but could only be a few thousand years old.
Personally I believe that dinosaurs existed before the flood with people and other animals and that after the flood like other animals they began to die at younger ages and become smaller in size with the larger "dragons" becoming extinct fairly recently and some still existing as horned toads and other such animals. I think we have dinosaur fossils from both eras of their existence. The ones found that seemed to eat other animals were those who died in the catastrophic floods that occurred after Noah's flood during the formation of the continents as the world was divided and subjected to large tectonic forces.

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

I resolved to post to this blog every few days this year and failed until today. I don't think anyone reads this blog even though I have advertised it widely. But it is a very personal for me and I want to continue to to post my thoughts.

I have just finished reading a book that Nancy bought me that she thought supported my belief in Noah's Flood. It was David Montgomery's THE ROCKS DON'T LIE: A Geologist Looks at Noah's Flood. The book is a bashing of creation science but is a very thorough look at the history of the controvery between old ages and a young earth view. He assumes that rocks are billions of years old without questioning that assumption. He does look at the evidence of floods and finds lots of support. He argues that the evidence doesn't support Noah's flood, although he isn't sure. He claims that modern geology has a good understanding of the separation on the continents and argues for catastrophic geology as forming mountains and causing huge local floods like the one that formed the scablands in western Washington and Oregon. He then attacks the Creation Research Society for the thinking that the earth is a young earth.

I still contend that the earth could be only 6000 years old, with a period of time with the canopy. We have no idea of the landscape at that time or whether there were high mountains for the flood to cover. After the flood the atmospheric changes could have contributed to the shortened life spans of both men and animals. Then during the days of Peleg the earth was divided. I argue that could have been when the continents seperated and that in a few days or weeks the continents could have drifted to their present locations. This would have been accomplished by catastrophic geological events including floods, tsunamis, mountain creation, folding, uplifting, volcanic activity that lasted for centuries and has only settled down fairly recently. His book records that cataclysmic geology exists. We just disagree on the time line. He did read Morris and Whitcomb's book THE GENESIS FLOOD. He disagrees with it. He also visited a Creation museum in Kentucky and was amused by their thesis. The book is a good history of the conflict in thinking, but I still question the geological ages that have been created by geological folklorists. They have written an evolutionary script to agree with those who formulated the Big Bang theory out of whole cloth.