Would you bet on Evolution?

I have been told by believers in Darwinian evolution that it is a fact and that it is how life came about from non-life. So in an effort to research it as fairly as possible I went to that secular source of all knowledge; Wikipedia. I thought that if anywhere would provide a pro-evolution view Wikipedia would be the place, and Wikipedia lived up to my expectations in that regard.

To get started I simply went to the evolution page on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

To find the very origin point of life according to evolutionary theory, the starting point if you will, the very first organism, I thought the best place to look is on the evolutionist "tree of life" which is supposed to graph the accent of life from its first origins according to evolutionary theory.

So here is the evolutionist's supposed tree of life as presented by Wikipedia.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5b/Tree_of_life_with_genome_size.svg/2000px-Tree_of_life_with_genome_size.svg.png

You may need to zoom in to read the text on the picture.

Even when you do you will find it confusing because the tree does not actually tell us what is at the root. Yes thats correct, the first life form is unidentified by evolutionary theory.

So if you try to take the next step and see what that first life-form evolved into next, you will find that it is going in two different branches, but the forks in those branches which represent the next step in evolution are not identified either, so you don't know what is the first step and you don't know what the second step is either, then you go to the next branch and you find that fork is not identified either. In fact NONE of the the forks in the branches of the evolutionist “tree of life” are identified to show what the alleged common ancestors are of the eventual final life forms.

Well lets ignore that obvious hole in their evidence, and go to the lowest identifiable life form in the tree presented to us.

It is the the Nonoarchaeum Equitans and here is what Wikipedia has to say about it. (and remember they are pro-evolution)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoarchaeum_equitans

“Nanoarchaeum equitans is a species of tiny microbe, discovered in 2002 in a hydrothermal vent off the coast of Iceland by Karl Stetter. Since it grows in temperatures approaching boiling, it is considered to be a thermophile. Nanoarchaeum appears to be an obligatory symbiont on the archaeon Ignicoccus; it must be in contact with the host organism to survive. Its cells are only 400 nm in diameter, making it the next smallest known living organism, excepting possibly nanobacteria and nanobes, whose status as living organisms are controversial. Its genome is only 490,885 nucleotides long; the smallest non-viral genome ever sequenced next to C. ruddii's in 2006.” (emphasis added)

Now considering that it has 490,885 nucleotides, and there are four types of nucleotides (A,T,G & C) then the chance of getting these connected in the right sequence by accident is 4 to the power of 490,885. which is a number big enough to blow up my calculator, so I could not calculate it exactly but it is something in the order of 10 to the power of 30,000. which means a 1 with 30,000 zeros added after it.

Here is the details on its symbiont partner organism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignicoccus

Now what about that even smaller proteobacterium the C.ruddii? I hear you ask.

Well here is the article about it on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carsonella_ruddii

It lives in a symbiotic relationship with psyllids (plant sap eating insects)

But hold on, this is the smallest non-viral genome ever sequenced and the closest to that all important first life form, so why is it dependent upon its survival for a higher life form to first exist that it can be in symbiotic relationship with? And also how can the psyllid have come about before the arrival of the C.Ruddi which it needs to digest its food?

Now the C.Ruddi only has a DNA nucleotide sequence of 159,662 pairs so the chances of getting this to happen by chance are much better at just 4 to the power of 159,662.

Again the number is big enough to blow up my calculator but it comes out to something like 10 to the power of 9000, which is a 1 with 9000 zeros added after it.

Then when you look at the psyllid (plant sap eating insect) you will find that it first requires plants to have existed that they can feed from. (sounds logical to me)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyllid

Well maybe we are barking up the wrong tree with these symbiont forms of life. What we need is to look at the smallest free-living form of life.

It is the Mycoplasma Genitalium and here is the article about it on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma_genitalium

The following is a quote from that article:

“Mycoplasma genitalium is a small parasitic bacterium which lives on the ciliated epithelial cells of the primate genital and respiratory tracts. M. genitalium is the smallest known free-living bacterium, and the second-smallest bacterium after the recently-discovered endosymbiont Carsonella ruddii. Until the discovery of Nanoarchaeum in 2002, M. genitalium was also considered to be the organism with the smallest genome.[1]” (emphasis added)

Well well well, it is not symbiotic, but it is parasitic, and so it still needs higher forms of life to survive. In fact it is living in the genitalia of a higher life form which means that it is parasitic on sexually reproducing life forms; so was it the ancestor of the sexually reproducing animal or was it a descendant of them? Considering that it needs the host in order to survive, it must have waited a long time for these sexually reproducing life forms to come along before it could first evolve.

Additionally to this nightmare of logic, the number of nucleotide base pairs for the Mycoplasma Genitalium is 582,970.

Sorry but thats worse than all the others. There is statistically no chance of its DNA sequence being randomly generated by evolutionary processes; and it owes me a new calculator!

For point of reference, your chances of winning the lottery are 1 in 45,379,620 which is 4.5 times 10 to the power of 7.

So compare that with 10 to the power of 9000 (or more) to win the evolutionary lotto.  Realistically you got no chance at all.

You wouldn't bet your life on winning the lottery, so don't bet your life on evolution; its a long odds horse, and a nag which is sure to die before it finishes the race. In fact with odds like that it will probably die before it reaches the starting gate.

Is there a divine Creator of life? You can bet there is.

Proof that Evolution fails - Dean Kenyon

Even though abiogenesis had been proven false by Ferdinand Cohn within 20 years of Darwin’s The Origin of Species being released, evolutionary theory not allowing itself to acknowledge design, still needed to come up with a theory how the very first life could have come about in the absence of an Intelligent Designer. Over 100 years later in 1969 Dean Kenyon with co-author Gary Steinman became the darlings of evolutionary discussion with their book Biochemical Predestination. In that book Kenyon proposed that the chemical properties of amino acids caused them to be attracted to each other forming the long chains that became the first proteins and, this proposed that life was, effectively, inevitable. Predestined by nothing more than chemistry. Evolutionists ate up the idea and for at least the next decade biochemical predestination dominated evolutionary theories of abiogenesis.
Dean Kenyon received a BSc in physics from the University of Chicago in 1961 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Stanford University in 1965. In 1965-1966 he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Biodynamics at the University of California, Berkeley, a Research Associate at NASA-Ames Research Center. In 1966 he became Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University until 1969.
In 1969, Kenyon and coauthor Gary Steinman published Biochemical Predestination, a book on the origins of life advocating a theory of natural chemical evolution. The book gained international attention putting well and truly abiogenesis back on the map of evolutionary theory. Kenyon was promoted to Associate Professor at SFSU from 1969 to 1974. In 1974 he was a Visiting Scholar to Trinity College, Oxford. 

In 1976 Prof Kenyon was confronted by one of his students with the challenge of how abiogenesis worked in the absence of DNA. Prof Kenyon concluded upon deep consideration that it couldn’t work. The reality that Professor Kenyon had to face was that DNA is the instructions of how to build life, and without those instructions just having the basic elements available could not produce the end product of life, so one needs to explain where the instructions came from. Dr Kenyon realized that his theory of biochemical predestination simply could not work and that the information found in DNA could only be generated from an intelligent source. DNA could simply not be produced by random processes. In 1980, the SFSU Department of Biology had a dispute with Prof Kenyon over a presentation of Intelligent Design theories in Biology module 337 Evolution. The ID theories provide a solution to the source of DNA design by simply proposing the obvious, that an intelligent source designed the DNA. At that time, Kenyon challenged anyone and everyone on the faculty to debate him. But a vote was had instead to prevent teaching of Intelligent Design theories. 

In 1989 Professor Kenyon released with co-author Percival Davis the book “Of Pandas and People” providing arguments in support of Intelligent Design. The book caused a great controversy, not least because of Prof Kenyon’s previously idolized status within the evolutionary camp. Having its lead proponent pull the rug from under abiogenesis theory has sent shock waves throughout the evolutionary camp and reactionary elements have sought to prevent any further questioning of evolutionary theory. To this end evolution supporters have gone on a campaign to attempt to ban the teaching of Intelligent Design theories in schools and universities.
Regardless of the efforts of evolutionists to keep Darwinian theory alive in some likeness of artificial life support, it appears that Darwin's theories are breathing their last breath and will soon be relegated to the shelf along side of so many other theories that have come in and out of favor over time.

Proof that Evolution fails- Ferdinand Cohn

Ferdinand Cohn – the Jewish microbiologist and plant physiologist in 1876 disproved the idea that life could evolve from non-living materials.

Ferdinand Cohn started his higher studies at the University of Breslau where, as a Jew, he could not be admitted to the candidacy for the doctor’s degree. So instead he received his Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, at the young age of 19. In 1850 Cohn was named lecturer at the University of Breslau. He became extraordinary professor there in 1859 and finally became ordinary professor of botany at the university in 1871.

In 1866 Cohn founded and in 1872 became the director of the Institute of Plant Physiology at the University of Breslau; this was the first institute of plant physiology in the world. Cohn’s early research centred on the unicellular algae, the simplest forms of plant life. He applied to these organisms the principle that the phases of growth of microscopic plants could be learned only by observing every stage of their development under the microscope.

Just as differences in the youthful and adult appearance of an oak or a fern are traced by direct observation, so he studied the growth patterns of unicellular algae. His accounts of the life histories of a number of algae species were of permanent value, and in 1855 he helped to establish the existence of sexual processes in algae, specifically in Sphaeroplea. He also instituted marked reforms in the classification of algae.

About 1868 Cohn started to study bacteria. From his accurate studies of their bodily form he was among the first to arrange the different varieties of bacteria into genera and species on a systematic basis. In 1870 Cohn founded a new journal entitled Beiträge zur Biologie der Pflanzen (“Contributions to the Biology of Plants”), in which he played such a large part that it came to be known as “Cohn’s Beiträge.” Many of the founding papers of bacteriology were to be published in this journal.
Among Cohn’s most striking contributions was his discovery of the formation and germination of spores (called endospores) in certain bacteria, particularly in Bacillus subtilis. He was also the first to note endospores’ resistance to high temperatures, and by his observations he was able to refute contemporary experiments that seemed to lend support to the theory of “spontaneous generation”.

Spontaneous Generation as defined at the time meant the ideas both that; life could generate from non-living matter (eg: primordial soup), or that life could generated from dead organic matter, (eg: random protein strings or dead DNA matter). Cohn explained the quick reappearance of bacteria in thoroughly boiled flasks of hay and turnip–cheese infusions by speculating that the bacteria within them had thermo-resistant spores and were thus able to survive the boiling intact, after which they reverted to their normal reproductive stages. This theory was later proved to be correct. He was thus able to refute other bacteriologists’ assumptions that all the bacteria in the boiled infusions had been killed by the heat, and he showed the fallacy of their reliance on abiogenesis & heterogenesis as the only remaining explanations.

Ferdinand Cohn’s testable and repeatable experiment proved that abiogenesis (as proposed in the primordial soup theory) does not work. Furthermore his experiment also proved that heterogenesis (self generating life from proteins like those in the Urey/Miller experiment) also does not work. It may be possible to get some useless assorted proteins (and toxic bi-products) but they won’t come to life.

This same principle is employed every day by companies in packaging food products in cans. Canned meat or vegetables are packed into tin cans and heated up enough to kill off even the thermo resistant bacteria. Irradiation is sometimes used also. These cans of veritable “primordial” soup contain lots of proteins, amino acids, DNA, & chromosomes, but when you open it up there is no life. This is because neither abiogenesis nor heterogenesis work. Open a can of tinned soup and see for yourself. There is no life in the can because evolutionary theory cannot explain the existence of life.

Here is a definition of Abiogenesis from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/abiogenesis

a·bi·o·gen·e·sis IPA
–nounBiology.
"the now discredited theory that living organisms can arise spontaneously from inanimate matter; spontaneous generation."

To put it simply, life was created, and created with such intelligence that it is adaptable to survive.
Christians agree that changes within species occur. Christian and Jews have been selectively breeding animals for thousands of years to get particular desirable traits. This speciation is fact, but there is not evidence at all to support wild theories like Darwin's claim that all life came from some primordial soup.
Let us not forget the sound science of Ferdinand Cohn that disproves abiogenesis each time we open a can of food.

G20, Climate Change, and the New World Order

In 2009 the G20 Pittsburgh summit revealed the G20 as being the leading group of controlling interests in the world economy. So to understand where the world is heading we should understand a little about what the economic and political vision is among the G20 leaders.

Protestors against the G20 claim that the G20 represent global capitalism, and they the protestors are opposing big corporate greed, but do the G20 really represent this political position of extreme capitalism portrayed by protestors?

Well first lets look at what capitalism means
Definitions vary, but the following from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism seems a reasonable summary.

"Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital, the non-labor factors of production (also known as the means of production), is privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in markets; and profits distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries."

So Capitalism might be summarised with the following basic principals:
1. Commodities, materials, property, and money belong to individuals and individuals decide how, when and where they want to use, or spend their wealth
2. People are able to freely trade with others with their labour, goods, materials or wealth
3. Governments should have minimal interference in the first 2 principals

So now lets look at a definition of Socialism.
Again definitions vary but here is one from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

"Socialism refers to the various theories of economic organization which advocate either public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources. A more comprehensive definition of socialism is an economic system that directly maximizes use-values as opposed to exchange-values and has transcended commodity production and wage labor, along with a corresponding set of social and economic relations, including the organization of economic institutions and method of resource allocation; often implying a method of compensation based on individual merit, the amount of labor expended or individual contribution."

So Socialism might be summarised with the following basic principals:
1. Commodities, materials, property, and money belong to the community, and the community should decide how, when and where they want to use, or spend the wealth.
2. The community will decide who gets what based on who is the most needy.
3. Governments (in a role of representing the community) will strictly control and administer principals 1 and 2 so that individuals don't seek their individual interest above the collective interest of the community.


Now that we understand Capitalism and Socialism, let's cast our gaze back at the G-20.

The G-20 is made up of the finance ministers and central bank governors of 19 countries:

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Republic of Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America; The European Union, who is represented by the rotating Council presidency and the European Central Bank, is the 20th member of the G-20.

Of the 19 countries in the G-20, only 7 could be said to be ruled by conservative governments, which means that 12 of the 19 are libertarian or left central governments that are disposed to favouring the incorporation of strong elements of socialist principals into governance.
The European Union is governed by the European Parliament which consists of 736 members including 7 major parties, and other non-party members. The balance of conservative to libertarian members in the European Parliament is approximately even, so this does not change the great imbalance of libertarian to conservative representation in the G-20.

Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world's population. The G-20's economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.

These factors have allowed the socialist libertarian movement to initiate a push for world governance which will redistribute the world's wealth in a socialist manner. Taxing richer nations to redistribute their wealth to poorer nations.

The mean by which this is to be achieved is the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen Agreement, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which will allow the United Nations to tax green house gas producing nations and give that money over to non-producing nations.
There is no agreement among scientist that climate change is either at problematic levels or that it is caused by human generated carbon emissions.

Leaders around the world including Kevin Rudd, Barack Obama, and Gordon Brown are all talking about a New World Order. This New World Order with global governance by the United Nations has been proposed for decades and is only now coming to fruition as socialist libertarians have gained the balance of global power.
This New World Order turns the whole world into one community and shares the wealth among that whole community, not on the basis of supply and demand, but upon the socialist principal of who has the most need.
This New World Order grants power supreme to those at the top that are enforcing this new global taxation of carbon emissions.

If there really was a problem with humans burning carbon based fuels, then the logical solution would be to stop issuing mining licenses, drilling licenses, export licenses, approvals for port expansions, because the amount of carbon being consumed can only be as much as we dig or drill out of the ground. Governments are not slowing down production of coal and oil, but they are increasing production. That is as plain evidence as you should need to know that carbon fuel use is not a problem.
The only reason that the politicians of the world are promoting the climate changes "crisis" is to give them an excuse to implement a socialist New World Order and a global taxation system.

Vladimir Lenin, drawing on Karl Marx's ideas of "lower" and "upper" stages of socialism defined socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and communism.


Shouldn't Lenin's words ring warning bells among the free world, that the current push toward socialism is actually a transition to communism?

If you reflect upon history then you will know what happens when you give socialists absolute power.
Should we really risk giving socialist libertarians control of the world?

What is Scientism?

Scientism is a word that many people may not have heard of, but it is fast becoming a hot topic as its use is growing and more people as starting to understand what it means.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines Scientism as:

"The collection of attitudes and practices considered typical of scientists; or The belief that the investigative methods of the physical sciences are applicable or justifiable in all fields of inquiry."
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Recently as the term is becoming more used Evolutionists are showing themselves to be defensive of having this label applied to them.

The AHD definition does not seem particularly offensive, so it may lead you to wonder why Evolutionists can be so defensive when the term Scientism is directed at them.

This may be because the definition given by The American Heritage Dictionary has been written with a politically correct non-offensive style to it, but the origins of the term in philosophical writings of people like Sir Karl Popper show that the word Scientism was created to imply a religiously blinded view of science by means of applying Methodological Naturalism or Empiricism as a rule to all science and to the exclusion of any other.

So in the AHD definition, the emphasis that is missed is that Scientism is trying to claim exclusivity to truth, reason and science and in doing so it is making metaphysical claims by convention.

Another element of the argument about Scientism is the applicability in science of Inductive Reasoning and Deductive Reasoning.

Deductive Reasoning takes 2 premises (assumed or apparent facts) and combines them to reach a conclusion. So in example you are walking along and you feel that there is a strong wind blowing in your face, then some dirt gets in your eye, so you deduce by taking the premise that wind can blew dirt around, and the premise that you got dirt in your eye whilst the wind was blowing, and from that you conclude that the wind blew the dirt into your eye.

Inductive Reasoning will take a set of common facts to establish a premise, and from that premise it will assume a conclusion (theory). So in example again the dirt gets in your eye, but this time you don’t have a prior knowledge that the wind can blow dirt around so instead you examine many different possibilities of how the dirt could have got into your eye. eg: maybe it dropped out of your hair into your eye, or maybe it was on your eyelash and dropped in, or maybe someone threw it into your eye. If you are able to observe the same thing happening many times then this will start to eliminate some of the potential causes until you reach the premise that each time you go out in a strong wind you get dirt in your eye. From that premise you make the conclusion (theory) that a strong wind will blow dirt in your eye.

So the Methodological Naturalist argument against Christians/Theists is that they are using deductive reasoning, and the Naturalists claim that deductive reasoning is not scientific because there might be millions of other possible explanations (regardless of the improbability of those other explanations) which should be considered.

The other aspect of the Methodological Naturalist's argument against Christians/Theists is to assert that God cannot be a natural/empirical cause for things. They always refer to God as being purely in the realm of metaphysics and not to be discussed in the natural realm.

So when you take these two assertions together that only inductive reasoning can be used and that God cannot be considered a natural/empirical cause of anything, then you have essentially determined that God has no place in logic or reason regarding anything in the natural world.

In this way, the useful method of scientific analysis which is Methodological Naturalism can be hijacked by people that have religious/philosophical motivations to remove all consideration of God as being involved in the natural world. That is what is being described when the term Scientism is directed at Evolutionists today.

The irony of the Evolutionist argument is that they are actually using deductive reasoning themselves, because they always have the following two premises as the basis of every theory and the conclusion is always the same also:

Premise 1. (Whatever happened) God did not do it
Premise 2. (Whatever happened) Something must have caused it
Conclusion - Theory. (Whatever happened), happened by purely naturalistic means

Evolutionary theory changes so much (which even Evolutionists confess) because premise 1 and premise 2 are always the same, and the conclusion/theory is always the same, so therefore what has to change is the (whatever happened) part inside the brackets. eg: if evolution didn't happen slowly then it must have happened fast. If we did not evolve from this animal then we must have evolved from a different animal. They just won't consider that fact that it could not have happened.

It is easy to demonstrate how Scientism is applied by the following steps;
1. Pick something that God is supposed to be involved in. (eg: creation of the universe)
2. Falsely assert that God cannot be considered as a natural or empirical cause of anything
3. Make a rule that Mythological Naturalism and Empiricism are the only valid forms of scientific enquiry
4. Now that you have ruled God out of any scientific reason for things happening, turn your eye back to point number one and start coming up with theories of how that thing which God is supposed to be involved in might be able to happen without Him by some other Natural or Empirical cause.
5. Get a bunch of people to come up with any possible naturalistic reason they can.
6. Pick the conclusion which is least ridiculous and claim that it is what "we" (asserting that you speak collectively for all intelligentsia) now understand to be the truth of the matter as revealed by science
7. Take all the other crazy theories that have been based on your Premise 1 and Premise 2, stick then in a draw and save them for a rainy day because when the current best theory is proven wrong you get out the next best theory and claim that it is now what science has revealed to be true because now technology has advanced.

In this way the gullible masses will be waiting on your every Evolutionist word, not knowing what to believe from day to day because each theory is about good enough for another 10 years. But they can rest assured that each variation of the theory will have essentially the same premises and conclusion as predefined by Scientism.

Now I think it worth addressing the common assertion that God cannot be considered in naturalistic/empirical science as a cause for something.
    First: Naturalistic or empirical causes can be anything which has existence or influence in the material world. Considering that Christians acknowledge Jesus Christ as both a materially existing man as well as being God the assertion that such a God cannot have a material influence in the natural world is patently false. Jesus Christ is recorded in history both by Christian and non-Christian scholars and no reputable historian would deny that He existed as a man in Palestine in the first century AD. Therefore it is perfectly scientifically valid to claim that Jesus walked and talked and did things in this world that would have been observable in an empirical sense at the time that they occurred. The New Testament gospels are written on this basis of written accounts of empirically evidenced events.
    Likewise considering that the Genesis account of God's act of creation are written as documenting the oral accounts of eye witness testimony, this too is able to be accepted as a premise of God's material influence in this natural world. In no way does the Bible claim that God is unable to influence the natural world and therefore the assertion that God should be treated as someone outside of the zone of natural influence is again patently false.
    Considering that the debate between evolutionists and Christians is significantly about how to interpret past events, it a must be acknowledged that to assert that God can have no scientifically valid influence in the world or to be considered by science as a cause for anything is as ridiculous as claiming that Pontius Pilate cannot be considered a scientifically valid cause for anything that ever actually happened.

Now let’s look at the second premise of Scientism and Evolutionism which is to claim that something must have caused things to become the way they are now. In other words they invoke Reductionism to try and go back further and further, because to them there is no start of something existing in its natural form, no point of creation prior to which we need not go.

The theory of Intelligent Design which includes the strong argument of Irreducable Complexity in nature has raised the point in scientific reasoning that if something can’t go back any further in simplicity then it is scientifically valid to accept that it started out that way, and if that implies that someone designed or made it to be the way it is then so what? Tell us why that is so objectionable.
The answer to why it is so objectionable is because it breaches both the first and second premises of Scientism and Evolutionism.

It does seem that in the broader community and in many scientific communities the cat is out of the bag about the nature of ideological Scientism and Theists are starting to reply to the ideologues of Scientism that Theists will not longer accept having such restrictions placed on their freedom of scientific enquiry, and freedom of religion.

Make no mistake about it, Evolutionism and Scientism are inseparable, they are religious philosophies started by religious men. The Atheists assert their claim to be free of Christian dogma, and now has come the time that Christians and Theists are claiming their right to be free of the dogmas of Evolutionism and Scientism.