Tag: Examining Origins

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. ↩︎

Does Starlight Take Billions of Years To Reach Earth?

I posted the following as a comment on this video:

This is the clearest presentation of the distant starlight (non)problem that I have heard to date. We cannot use distant starlight to tell us how old the universe is given relativity physics. So, we will have to find other evidence to estimate the age of the universe. Radioactive decay might be one, but those rates aren’t reliable based on conflicting erosion rates, the discovery of soft tissue in fossils and the rates of dispersion of decay particles from zircon crystals. What we are left with is historical evidence, but that takes us back only about 5000 years which is surprisingly close to the time of the flood in the Septuagint chronology.

The video is almost two hours long, but John Hartnett does a good job of describing three rejected solutions to the distant starlight problem to arrive at the anisotropic synchrony convention proposed by Jason Lisle.