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.