DNA DAY

"We have to keep reminding ourselves that what we're seeing was not designed."
Francis Crick

Ladies and Gentlemen - Richard Dawkins!

"In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and  you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." Richard Dawkins 

If you disagree with Richard Dawkins on this point. If, when someone harms you, you think that what they've done is “wrong,” then you have good reason to also believe that atheism itself is a bogus world-view. For on atheism, what that person has done, at most, is flout social convention. 

"If there are objective values, they make the existence of God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus there exists a defensible argument from morality for the existence of God."

philosopher J.L.Mackie 

It's My Body!

No actually. It isn't. When you hear a woman state that she has every right to do what she wants with her body, that is a stretch, to say the very least. When it comes to abortion, what she is attempting to do is take the life of someone who has her own fingerprints, her own unique DNA, her own heart beat, her own blood type, her own character and deny that person life. At conception what has been created is a human being unlike anyone else in the world. The woman seeking an abortion is intending to hire someone to kill this unique human life. The person being killed is not the woman's body!

Here is the direction our society is headed. Some see this as progress.

“The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.”

Q: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children?
Singer: It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they're not doing something really wrong in itself.
Q: Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale?
Singer: No.
Q: Would it be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities?
Singer: [This question] should be raised as soon as possible after birth

Q: Would you kill a disabled baby?

Singer: Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole. Many people find this shocking, yet they support a woman's right to have an abortion. One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby.

• Peter Singer, Princeton ethicist, "Peter Singer: You Ask The Questions".Belfast Telegraph (November 9, 2006).

I find that sooooo tragic. We are losing all ability to see the value of human life. A whale stranded on a beach engenders more sympathy than a child whose life is about to be terminated. If you are one of those who says, “But it's not a Human Being until it's born,” try this. Take a person, any person of any age and ask, “Was this a human life yesterday?” Go back one more day and ask, “Was this a human life yesterday?” Keep doing that until you can answer, “No. This human life did not exist on that day.”

Do that and you will find that the day being referred to is the day before conception.

Do that and you'll find when human life begins, a life that has a right to exist.

And then make your decision about what to do with this life that's been created.

And in case you think I'm some sanctimonious moralizer, judging others from my holy perch, let me tell you, I understand the feelings that drive abortion. I understand them firsthand. Back in the day when a “girlfriend” thought she was pregnant, my first thought was – abortion. Kill it. Get rid of it. Hide the evidence. We were teenagers in high-school, completely unprepared to raise a child. There was only one option. Right?

Of course not, there were several options, every one of them better than killing the child that we'd created. But there was only one option that wouldn't involve other people knowing what we'd done. One option that wouldn't make school more difficult. One option that wouldn't involve a semblance of responsibility. Luckily it was a false alarm, but had she been pregnant and had we gone through with it, just because I was the one involved wouldn't have made it anything less than killing a human being.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating a return to back-ally abortions. We have to help those who need help. The issue here is that as I've become older, I've grown into someone who is strongly pro choice. But the choice needs to be made before conception. We can't continue to lie to ourselves about what we're doing. We can't continue to act as though casual sex isn't a big deal. It is a big deal and pretending it isn't is destroying our souls. Or is it that because our souls are already destroyed that we pretend it isn't a big deal?

Either way, wouldn't it be nice if some day we could all be honest on this issue? Honest enough to say, “Look, I know that I'm pregnant with a living human being. But I am not willing to carry this child to term. Adoption is not an option because – well, just because - so I'm going to kill my child.” Just admit it. Be honest. None of this pretending that your baby isn't a human until she's out on the delivery table or a certain number of weeks old. Honesty. Clear, beautiful honesty. What a wonderful thing that would be. Make a decision based on clear-headed honesty.

The last generation may have been able to feign ignorance on the issue of when life begins, but not us, not any more. You and I both know very well that if the DNA was examined at three hours, or three days, or three weeks, or three months that the genetic code would not show a tree, or a pig or a walrus or a virus. It's a human life that's been created and that human life is developing within you as it's genetic code says s/he should.


Remember: “If it's not a human life, then you're not pregnant.”

And for the gutless wonders like I was, I mean, come on guys. You know that you created this life. Deal with it like a man. Or at least like a man should deal with it. The world won't end if you allow this person to live. God knows there are enough people waiting to raise h/her for you. And if living a life of self-honesty is asking too much of we modern sophisticates, how about if we just stop screwing around? How about if we stop creating situations where we feel the need to kill our children? How about if we stop having affairs? How about if we become men and women of integrity? Men and women who are responsible, even with our sexuality?

Are we not able to stop being desperate, pathetic predators who use our sexuality to snag a partner or – ah, forget it. It will never happen.

We're too corrupt.

Too self-obsessed.

Too pitiful.

Contrary to what atheists would like to believe, we are not able to be good without God transforming our character.

I'm done talking about this subject. Interacting with a pro-abortion individual this last week has been like wading through raw sewage. Deeply disturbing, disgusting, offensive to a degree that surprised me.

Good luck on your journey

Darwinism - Dead In The Water

Atheists of course have committed themselves to promissory materialism (we don’t have an answer today but I have faith that there will be a material answer at some point in the future) and its extravagant and unfulfillable claims that the origin of both the universe and life itself had a natural cause. “The Cambrian explosion, in which a dazzling array of new life forms suddenly appears fully formed in the fossil record, without any of the ancestors required by Darwinism - is powerful evidence of a Designer.

The reason: this phenomenon would have required the sudden infusion of massive amounts of new genetic and other biological information that only could have come from an intelligent source. The fossils of the Cambrian Explosion absolutely cannot be explained by Darwinian theory or even by the concept called “punctuated equilibrium,” which was specifically formulated in an effort to explain away the embarrassing fossil record. When you look at the issue from the perspective of biological information, the best explanation is that an intelligence was responsible for this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon. According to Darwinism, new biological forms are created from mutations in DNA with natural selection preserving and building on the favourable ones.

But if DNA is only part of the story, then you can mutate it indefinitely and you’ll never build a fundamentally new body architecture. So when you encounter the Cambrian explosion, with its huge and sudden appearance of radically new body plans, you realise you need lots of new biological information. Some of it would be encoded for in DNA - although how that occurs is still an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. But on top of that, where does the new information come from that’s not attributable to DNA? How does the hierarchical arrangement of cells, tissues, organs, and body plans develop? Darwinists don’t have an answer. It’s not even on their radar.

Paleontologists now think that during a five-million-year (or shorter) window of time, at least thirty-five of the world’s forty phyla, the highest category in the animal kingdom, sprang forth with unique body plans. In fact, some experts believe that all living phyla may have originated by the end of the explosion. Before then, life on Earth was pretty simple - one-celled bacteria, blue-green algae, and later some sponges and primitive worms or mollusks. Then without any ancestors in the fossil record, we have a stunning variety of complex creatures appear in the blink of an eye. For example the trilobite - with an articulated body, complicated nervous system, and compound eyes - suddenly shows up fully formed at the beginning of the explosion. And this is followed by stasis, which means that basic body plans remained distinct until now.

The big issue is where did the information come from to build all these new proteins, cells, and body plans? For instance, Cambrian animals would have needed complex proteins. Where did the genetic information come from to build those four hundred amino acids required for lysyl oxidase, for example, a very complicated molecule? This would require highly complex, specified genetic information of the sort that neither random chance, nor natural selection, nor self-organization can produce.

Geneticist John F. McDonald has called this “a great Darwinian paradox.” the kind of mutations that macroevolution needs - namely, large-scale, beneficial ones - don’t occur, while the kind it does need - large-scale mutations with harmful effects or small-scale mutations with limited impact - do occur but terribly infrequently (According to Dennett - Once in 500 Trillion copyings). Keep in mind that these mutations would have had to occur by random chance, since natural selection can’t preserve anything until it confers a positive benefit on the organism. The problem is that the odds of creating a novel functional protein without the help of natural selection would be vanishingly small. There’s really only one explanation that accounts for all the evidence. In any other field of endeavour, it would be obvious, but many scientists shy away from it in biology. The answer is an intelligent designer.

Once a Creator is allowed as an explanatory option, even one of the Cambrian explosion’s most vexing features - its so-called “top down” pattern of appearance - is efficiently explained by intelligent design. Darwinism predicts a “bottom up” pattern in which small differences in form between evolving organisms appear prior to large differences in form and body plan organisation. Instead, fossils from the Cambrian explosion show a a radically different “top down” pattern major differences in form and body plans appear first with no simpler transitions before them. Later some minor variations arise within the framework of these separate and disparate body plans. This has completely stumped Darwinists. Others have tried to explain it away by proposing big leaps of evolutionary change - the “punctuated equilibrium” idea - but even this can’t account for the “top down” phenomenon. In fact, punctuated equilibrium predicts a “bottom up” pattern; it just asserts that the increments of evolutionary change would be larger. Yet if you postulate intelligent design, the “top down” pattern makes sense, because it’s the same pattern we see in the history of human technological design.

Once you allow intelligent design as an option you can quickly see how it accounts for the key features of the Cambrian phenomenon. No other entity explains the sudden appearance of such complex new creatures. No other entity produces top down patterns. No other entity can create the complex and functionally specific information needed for new living forms. No other explanation suffices.

Evolutionists are still trying to apply Darwin’s nineteenth-century thinking to a twenty-first century reality, and it’s not working. Explanations from the era of the steamboat are no longer adequate to explain the biological world of the information age. Darwinists are under some sort of epistemological obligation to continue trying. We should not be looking for only the best naturalistic explanation but the best explanation, period. And intelligent design is the explanation that’s most in conformity with how the world works. The information revolution taking place in biology is sounding the death knell for Darwinism and chemical evolutionary theories. The attempt to explain the origin of life solely from chemical constituents is effectively dead. Naturalism cannot answer the fundamental problem of how to get from matter and energy to biological function without the infusion of information from an intelligence.

Stephen C. Myer, in conversation with Lee Strobel - “The Case for Creation”