Category: Essay

Evolutionary Magic vs Mutation Rates

To pull a rabbit out of a hat you need a rabbit, a hat and a lie. The lie of abiogenesis provides the rabbit – if you believe the lie.

But where did the hat come from?

To get the hat dark matter magically guides stuff the big bang blew up down gravity rabbit holes to produce stars by overpowering the normal functioning of the natural law of hydrostatic equilibrium. Then stars blow up again only to coalesce again and again. After a gazillion years a hat appears in the magician’s hand.

There are easier ways to get a hat, but what does the magician really have up his sleeve? And why are we watching the show?

Rebekah Davis of Examining Origins interviews Matt Nailor of Standing For Truth

How To Look

I added the following time markers with my notes to the video above because it is rather long. These parts stood out for me in this battle between evolutionary magic and evolution-refuting mutation rates.

0:50 Mutation rates are FAST. They are based on observed pedigree data, but evolutionists need them to be SLOW so their calibrations fit the long phylogenetic chronology they have read into the fossil record.

14:45 Genetic diversity is measured by mutations in the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). However, not all regions of the mtDNA mutate at the same rate. The most accurate regions as far as a clock goes are the two hypervariable regions.

20:15 Thomas Parson’s pedigree study using the FBI blood bank filled with samples from diverse people groups focused on the two hypervariable regions of the mtDNA. They provide the most useful data for forensic science. From this data our earliest female ancestor, Mitochondrial Eve, was estimated to have lived about 6,500 years ago.

40:55 Other pedigree studies confirmed Parson’s results. Genealogical rates also aligned with the pedigree studies.

50:55 Slowing the mutation rate by 15% to add in selection that evolutionists need only pushes Biblical Eve from 6,500 years to a maximum of 7,657 years ago. It fits the Septuagint biblical chronology even better covering the date for Creation at 5554 BC which would be 7,578 years ago (where 7,578 equals 5554 BC plus 2025 AD minus 1 overcounted zero year).

52:30 The genetic diversity for whales, thoroughbred horses, cats and chickens all align with human mtDNA data. There is no time for anything to have evolved from a single common ancestor that evolutionists predicted had occurred.

1:09:00 Everything we see around us that can be historically dated only goes back about 5,000 years. That includes written records, pottery, astronomy, mathematics, metallurgy, brewing beer, irrigation, or the oldest leather shoes. Claims that there are sites which are much older, such as Göbekli Tepe, are easily discredited. This fits nicely in the Septuagint flood date of 3298 BC which was about 5,322 years ago (where 5,322 equals 3298 BC plus 2025 AD minus 1 overcounted zero year).

1:15:00 All of this lands right on the biblical timeline and even in the biblical places after the flood. The only thing that disrupts this are the conflicting, but old, radiometric measurements of the ages of rocks that evolutionists hang onto like a life raft. But rocks aren’t alive. As far as life is concerned, the creationist model is the only one that can handle the data.

1:16:40 Genetic diversity across species varies much less than expected or needed by evolutionists. These species emerged about the same time as humans from what evolutionists see and need as a global bottleneck since species also have genetic boundaries that are too distinct for evolutionist tastes. It was almost as if all species got in a boat two by two which saved them from a global catastrophic flood in order to replenish the earth once more. Evolutionists need some global bottleneck to account for the lack of genetic diversity, but they insist it was NOT the biblical flood.

1:46:00 Why not the flood? Now we are positioned to look up the magician’s sleeve. The theory of evolution started as a lie with an agenda. The goal was to free science from Moses by discrediting the historicity of the biblical record. That is why evolutionists will not consider the biblical flood as their needed bottleneck. If they did, that would credit the Bible with providing accurate information suggesting that creation itself might have occurred.

2:06:00 Bottom line: Evolution is “pseudo-science to the max”. Even as magic, evolution is not very convincing once one looks up the magician’s sleeve.

When a rabbit pops out of a hat
stay alert. Check those sleeves looking at
what might harbor a lie.
Keep on looking. Pass by
that sly grin gracing Alice’s cat.

Theological Naturalism and the Elephants in One’s Living Room

Most people don’t want elephants in their living rooms. If we have any and we don’t know they are there, it’s because we have a blind spot. It’s not that we don’t bump into those elephants multiple times. We do, but we can always come up rationalizations to explain why the walls keep moving about without having to admit that there are elephants in our living rooms.

While chasing out my own elephants, I ran into Cornelius Hunter whom Rebekah Davis has interviewed multiple times on her YouTube channel, Examining Origins. Hunter is a philosopher of science and a biologist. He is also a Christian, but for scientific reasons he is neither a creationist nor an evolutionist.

That means evolutionists don’t like him, because he allows for evolution to be false. They think he is compromising with creationism. That also means creationists don’t trust him, because he allows for evolution to be true. They think he is compromising with evolutionism even though he has shown that evolution has been scientifically falsified so many times that it is useless as a model of origins.

Theological Naturalism

Theological naturalism is neither atheism nor skepticism. Rather, it is a naturalism that arose out of Judeo-Christianity polluted over the millennia with Gnosticism and Greek philosophy. It is a naturalism justified by ideas of God as too omnipotent, too good, or too omniscient to be bothered with our messy (think, evil) world. Such involvement would damage His dignity.

Theological naturalism puts God on a pedestal. It is a theological position that removes God from His messy creation by handing His creation over to the idols of natural law and chance. It is a theological position that rejects Genesis 1-11 where we are told how evil entered the world.

As Hunter puts it in his book, Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism:

The move to [theological] naturalism is neither atheism in disguise nor a scientific discovery. Instead, the move to naturalism was mandated largely by thinkers within the church. Religious skeptics gladly accepted the move, but their position has always been a parasitic one.1

Hunter notes that in spite of evolution being a failed scientific model, few want to reject it. They reason (correctly) that if they did reject it, the only alternatives would be some form of creationism, but any form of creationism, biblical or not, would bring God too close to the messiness of the universe.

Science As Useful Modeling

Hunter wants to separate science from theology or metaphysics. He points out that science is much easier to do than metaphysics. In science you make a public statement. Then you make vulnerable predictions from that statement, that is, predictions which are falsifiable. Others check the predictions against reality. If the model survives these checks, it can be provisionally accepted – not as true, but as useful – until a better model with tighter predictions comes along.

Bottom line: a scientific model or theory makes useful predictions.

Metaphysics and theology on the other hand go after a bigger prize that is more difficult to achieve. They want truth. Often they only rely on reason to get that prize. That is, they don’t want to rely on revelation such as that provided in the Bible. All they are willing to use to ground their rationalizations are mere assumptions that they think must somehow be true. But mere assumptions lead one into all kinds of nonsense.

Getting back to those elephants, my take away from Hunter is to recognize the difference between science and metaphysics. As soon as I confuse them, I’ve got an elephant in my living room. To get rid of these elephants I have to see them for what they are: theologically motivated rationalizations masquerading as useful science.

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  1. Hunter, Cornelius. Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism (p. 32). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ↩︎

The Hebrew Invention of the Alphabet

An important chronological study is Douglas Petrovich’s Origins of the Hebrews published 2021. He traced biblical events from Joseph’s being sold into slavery to the Exodus aligning them with Egyptian history.

Before finishing that study Petrovich realized that he had evidence from Egypt and Sinai that the first alphabet was created by Joseph’s eldest son, Manasseh, after the Israelites arrived in Egypt in 1876 BC. Manasseh knew how to write the Egyptian language and provided a way for the Israelites to now write their own language without having to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics. Those findings led to Petrovich’s first book, The World’s Oldest Alphabet, published in 2016, where he provided evidence that the letters of our alphabet came from the Hebrews.

Not everyone agrees with this idea. For the last few centuries there has been way too much theorizing assuming that little to nothing of what was written in the Bible could have actually happened. These skeptics demanded corroborating evidence outside of the Bible before they would take the Bible seriously as history.

Those promoting such beliefs justified them using arguments from silence. Since they knew of no evidence (except what was in the Bible which they refused to accept), they assumed the Bible must be false. They reasoned: How could some guy named “Moses” – if he ever existed – in the 15th century BC write the Torah without having a script to write it in?

But theories based solely on reason quickly lose touch with reality, because they are grounded not on evidence but assumption. Petrovich brings us back to reality. By the time Moses was writing the Torah after the Exodus in 1446 BC the Israelites already had a script that they had used for hundreds of years since nearly the beginning of their 430 years of sojourn in Egypt.

This evidence of Hebraic writing is also evidence to skeptics that the Israelites did indeed spend centuries in Egypt just as the Bible said they did.

In the video below Petrovich provides an overview of the evidence for these claims.

Petrovich concludes at the end of this video:

So all of this demonstrates that it’s the Israelites who are the inventors of the alphabet and there are amazing inscriptions that attest to this. 58:51

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For those seeking more information, the Associates for Biblical Research provides articles on Douglas Petrovich, reviews of his books, interviews with him and even articles by him. As archeologists they also provide chronological information linking events in the Bible with the history of the Ancient Near East validating the historical reliability of the Bible for those who refuse to take the Bible seriously without such corroborating evidence.

The Book of Daniel Was Written By Daniel In The 6th Century BC

The Associates for Biblical Research is the first place I go for chronological information about the Bible. In this video 10 pieces of archeological evidence summarize support for the view that the Book of Daniel was written by the prophet Daniel in the 6th century BC.

Henry B. Smith Jr, who interviewed Bryan Windle, authored the 2018 paper that is often referenced supporting the Septuagint’s version of the Genesis 5 and 11 genealogies. The Septuagint version provides a date of creation that is about 1500 years older than that provided by James Ussher in 1650.

Double Minded Spiritual Warfare

If you feel like there’s an angel on one shoulder arguing with a devil on the other, that’s double mindedness.

The only reason the devil’s there is because he’s offering you something you want that you shouldn’t want. Command the devil to leave until he no longer wastes his time on you. You are then victorious.

The only reason the angel’s there is because God has not given up on you.

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The Praise Cure

In her book, Healing from Heaven1, Lilian B. Yeomans spoke of many cures such as the barefoot cure, the grape cure or the mud cure and some of them even worked to some extent. However, she claimed that the only sure cure is the praise cure.

She also mentioned that some of these cures are very expensive and the praise cure is the most expensive of all, but the full cost of the praise cure was paid by Jesus.

How do you apply the praise cure? Start giving praise in words and song for what Jesus has done for you. And there is no reason to stop even after whatever ails you has disappeared.

One song of praise among many including many of the psalms

Be healed
in Jesus name.
The kingdom of God
has come near
to you.

  1. This book is one of four by Yeomans collected in His Healing Power, Harrison House Publishers, 2003. The original book was published in 1935 by Gospel Publishing House. The 1973 edition can be viewed online from Internet Archive. The chapter, “The Praise Cure” starts on page 53 in that edition. ↩︎

Six Sentence Story: Apple Poof Delight

When his wife with a tone more of annoyance than concern reported that Professor Weissalles did not return home again last night, campus security questioned Evie, the teaching assistant at the University of Noital assigned to his Advanced Nescience class.

He pushed all my buttons, she said.

What happened to him?

Poof!

Knowing Evie held a BA with honors in nescience they didn’t expect to get much out of her until she began what would end up being a needlessly lengthy confession, but they only heard the first sentence before they, too, vanished.

OK, I’ll admit I gave him the apple, but it was his own fault that he ate it just like the two of you did.

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Denise offers the prompt word “tone” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.

Genesis 3:6 KJV – 6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

It looks like there’s a snail on the white half of the wall, center left.

Your Get Out Of Hell Free Card

When I think of C.S. Lewis the first thing that comes to mind is his novel, The Great Divorce. In that novel one of his characters, the Teacher, has the following to say which I formatted below as a poem:

There are only two kinds of people in the end:
those who say to God:
‘Thy will be done,’
and those to whom God says, in the end,
‘Thy will be done.’
All that are in Hell, choose it.
Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.1

So, assuming you do not want to be in hell, how do you get out of whatever hell you might be in? By hell I mean addiction, sin, or even illness. The Holy Spirit provides the way.

I am grateful to Diane Marshall for linking to this video.
The Holy Spirit is your Get Out Of Hell Free card.
  1. C.S. Lewis: Five Books in One Volume, 1969, page 156. ↩︎

The Beatitudes and the Woes

I listened to all 28 chapters of the Gospel of Matthew one after the other today. Some parallels stood out like Peter’s denial and the betrayal of Judas. They both bitterly regretted what they did.

I remember well the beatitudes and the woes. However, I didn’t associate them with each other until now. The structure of this gospel is well crafted as one would expect. It was inspired by no ordinary muse, after all, but by the Holy Spirit Himself.

The Nine Beatitudes

Matthew 5:3-12 KJV – 3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

The Eight Woes

Matthew 23:13-31 KJV – 13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.
15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.
16 Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple, he is a debtor!
17 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?
18 And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.
19 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift?
20 Whoso therefore shall swear by the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.
21 And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him that dwelleth therein.
22 And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of God, and by him that sitteth thereon.
23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.
24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.
25 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess.
26 Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.
27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
29 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous,
30 And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.
31 Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.