Defending Creation

Category: Uncategorized

  • The Story of Everything

    The movie “The Story of Everything” is out. It’s an excellent documentary that covers the arguments in the book “The Return of the God Hypothesis”.

    The documentary challenges viewers with this question: What is the best explanation for the universe we observe?

    Does what we observe indicate purposeful action or blind, impersonal forces?

    The key observed evidences that are part of the argument:

    1. There is scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning. The implications of this are enormous. Things that begin to exist have a cause….and that cause has to be separate from and outside of the universe.
    2. The universe is fine tuned for life. Hundreds of physical factors must be precisely tuned or life doesn’t exist. Fine tuning implies a fine-tuner.
    3. Life, at the cellular level, is comprised of systems of molecular machines that work together in an integrated system. Integration implies an integrator.
    4. DNA is digitally encoded information. The only known source of digitally encoded information is an intelligent mind.
    5. The staggering difficulty of a Darwinian origin of life.

    There are other arguments as well, such as gratuitous beauty.

    I’m happy to report that the film didn’t break any new ground for users of this website. None of the content presented conflicts with the content of this website, although I don’t emphasize the fine-tuning much (because I’m a critic of the Big Bang theory).

    Great Documentary. Highly recommended.

  • Answering a Smear

    Vaughn Mancha is an Old Earth Creationist who frequently posts on Facebook.

    Here are snaps of three of his posts, in which he smears Young Earth Creationists. In them he locates the foundation of Young Earth Creationism in the visions of a New England woman some 160 years ago. In another post, he finds that the work of young earth creationist Henry Morris is also rooted in these same visions.

    Mr. Mancha implies that people who think the earth is less than multiple billions of years old are kooks and heretics, or lack the discernment to know this.

    In Mr. Mancha’s world, Young Earth Creationists are not trying to interpret the Bible as best they can; instead, they are merely automatons following delusional people.

    Young earth creationists take the Bible seriously. If you take the Word of God seriously, you would look to it for clues on how old the earth is. An honest evaluation of the text of scripture might generate a range of possible ages of the earth.

    But Old Earth Creationists obediently limit their estimates to a range acceptable to the secular, pagan culture.

    They let pagans determine how the Word of God is to be interpreted.

    It isn’t surprising that the secular, pagan culture wants to set the delimiters.

    But it is mystifying to me that there are professing Christians who are eager to comply with the opinions of people who are devoted to a narrative that excludes the God of the Bible.

  • Science: Dispassionate, rational and logical — right?

    “Scientists often insist that they follow the data wherever it leads. A study has suggested, however, that their politics may often also guide them.”

    In a study of the effect of political outlook on science, 71 teams of academics were independently given the same data set and asked to develop findings based on that data.

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/do-scientists-follow-data-or-politics-0pc30zqmr

    What the academics did not know is that they were grouped by political philosophies.

    The academics ended up developing “wildly different results” based on the same data set.

    The point is that even when a scientist claims to be operating purely in the realm of ideologically neutral science, the scientist’s world view always pokes through.

    Even when dealing with hard data sets, there are always judgement calls to be made. The world view strongly influences these judgements.

    This study was on the politics of immigration in Britain, but the point is equally valid for historical science efforts such as estimating the age of the earth.

    The critics of young earth creationists essentially claim that their science is trustworthy and those who oppose them are ideologically biased.

    Truthfully: everyone’s science is biased. Some of us are willing to admit it.