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CREATION CORNER
Introduction
How and why are we here?
On the one hand is Evolution that says a speck of dead matter sprang into life, grew, divided, and after innumerable years evolved through a series of unguided accidents to result in the millions of species, including humans, that exist today. Evolution is now taught as proven fact and has itself taken on many aspects of being a dominant religion.
As the direct opposite to evolution is a being writing in the Bible who claims he created not only humans but all things
(1) This being further claims He is the giver of life Strong claims indeed! Unfortunately humans are not able to see this being. What are we to do then?
There is an answer. This Being assures us
(3) that the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made .So looking in depth into some of the things around us is what these articles do.
Proving this Creator is fundamental for Christians. Notice Paul used creation
(4) when introducing God to the pagan philosophers at Athens. He did it again at Lycaonia.(5). Moreover in the near future an angel is scheduled to preach the creation message to all nations and peoples(6).. One of the major differences between Christianity and other religions is this important aspect of the creator communicating with his human creatures.
The goal of these articles is to offer some creation evidence to believers in evolution, but who are open minded enough to investigate the alternative. A secondary goal is to help reinforce the faith of those who are already Christian believers.
Perhaps the best way to add credibility to one’s arguments, and to persuade others, is to use material outside of one’s own persuasion. That is why about 95% of the information that follows is from the "other sides" material, from evolution supporting sources.
(Italics, bold or underlining may be added to many of the quotes)
Notes:
(1)
Psm 95: 3-5; 115:3-8; 135: 5, 15-18; Isa 44:all; Jer 10:2-15(2) (Job 33:4,; Pro 4:4; 7:2; Rom 6:23, Jn 1:3-4
(3) Rom 1:20
(4)
Acts 17:24-25(5) Acts 14:15
(6)
Rev 14:7
The Material World, Non-Matter, and Information
We are physical beings living in a material world.
The idea of creation implies that there is an unseen, eternal spiritual world in addition to the physical created one.
One of the objections evolutionists raise against a creator being is the question - "Where is he? Since we can’t see this being, he doesn’t exist."
Yet wind, gravity, electricity, and magnetism, come to mind as non-material forces that are not seen. Nevertheless, because their results are evident, all acknowledge these forces in fact exist.
Information is Non-matter
Likewise with information. It is non-matter, yet its results are seen everywhere. I am typing this on a computer that is made from physical matter. My words are printed on a material piece of paper. What the words tell us, however, is not matter. The computer, the ink and piece of paper are the medium by which my thoughts or information are shown, but they are not the thoughts. The actual thoughts originated in my mind and no scientist has ever seen the thoughts of any human being. Yet, we don’t doubt that our thoughts are very real.
Let’s consider what an evolution author says about information being non-matter. George C. Williams is quoted by Philip E. Johnson
(1), Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two or more incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter….. Just the fact that fifteen years ago I started to use a computer may have something to do with my ideas here.
The constant process of transferring information from one physical medium to another and then being able to recover the same information in the original medium brings home the separability of information and matter."
Author
(2) James Perloff puts it very well, "Matter is not intrinsically informative. To say that a human cell was built by its chemicals is like saying a book was written by its paper and ink, or that a typewriter was constructed by the iron in its frame."
In the book, "Quantum Healing"
(3) it is reported this way, "English neurologist and Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles was asked to address a conference of parapsychologists… who were discussing psychokinesis … the ability to move physical objects with the mind. If you want to see real psychokinesis, he told his audience, then consider the feats of mind-over-matter performed in the brain. It is quite astonishing that with every thought, the mind manages to move the atoms of hysrogen, carbon, osygen, and the other particles in the brain’s cells.""It would appear that nothing is further apart than an insubstantial thought and the solid gray matter of the brain.. The whole trick is somehow done without any apparent link."
So there you have it. A description of thought, which cannot be seen or handled, something "non-material", yet somehow these thoughts are able to move matter, to move things that are physical! Does that seem remarkable to you? It does to me. Doesn’t it seem that between our non-matter thoughts and our physical fingers, arms, legs, etc. there has to be some sort of connection?
We have to wonder, if thoughts, which are non-matter, are able to make physical objects move and function, can there be a realm other than the strictly material one? If so, isn’t this more along the lines that creationists and the Bible propose?
Even right this minute my thoughts (unseen, non-matter) are directing my fingers (seen, matter) to type. Thus through the material mediums of keyboard, computer, ink and paper, my non-matter thoughts can be seen.
In "Defeating Darwinism"
(1) it is expressed this way, "First, life consists not just of matter (chemicals) but of matter and information. Second, information is not reducible to matter, but is a different kind of "stuff" altogether."
How Important is Information?
Very important indeed. As we will learn the difference between living matter and dead matter is organization….information…. intelligence. Upon death, the information which has kept the creature alive, ceases; the creature’s atoms immediately stop functioning together and start to revert to their natural state of dis-organization, which we recognize as death. What then keeps living creatures alive?
The answer is intelligently organized atoms and molecules driven by information.
"In "Quantum Healing" it is explained like this, "…that intelligence is more important than the actual matter of the body, since without it, that matter would be undirected, formless, and chaotic. Intelligence makes the difference between a house designed by an architect and a pile of bricks."
Widely acclaimed evolutionist Richard Dawkins
(6) eloquently explains, "Living things are collections of molecules, like everything else. What is special is that these molecules are put together in much more complicated patterns than the molecules of non-living things, and this putting together is done by following programs, sets of instructions of how to develop, which the organisms carry around inside themselves.
…. "What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a "spark of life".
"It is information, words, instructions."
…. If you want to understand life,… think about information technology."
The author sees information, words involved in keeping living things alive.
Regardless, the information present in living things are much more than mere words aren’t they? They are words that have serious meaning, they are information, instructions are they not?
Discover magazine, which supports evolution, prints various quotes throughout each issue. One from March, 2003 quotes physicist Heinz Pagels who put it this way:
"
The visible world is the invisible organization of energy."
We have to wonder, could words of information, of instructions, have evolved, have organized, themselves from nothing?
Beyond Matter
s scientists advanced into micro-biology, the study of smaller and smaller into the tiniest beginnings of matter, they studied atoms, then molecules, to quarks, finally, as one scientist put it, it seems as if matter comes from pure energy.
Christians have no problem with this, because their creator God is a consuming fire (Deu 4:24, Heb 12:29) Could "consuming fire" be a description of a being who is composed of pure energy? We also know Rev 4:5 says lightnings, proceed out of the throne of God. Couldn’t lightnings be a good way to describe pure energy as it pulsates and issues from a source?
"Quantum Healing"(3) explains the very beginnings of matter like this, "When you get beyond atoms and start subdividing DNA into electrons, protons, and smaller particles, a quantum event must take place. Otherwise, you are left in the embarrassing position of claiming that life is made out of nothingness [we might call it spirit] - empty space devoid of matter and energy - which is all you get if you divide solid particles beyond a certain point."
The author adds more about this subject,
"… modern physics has turned to somewhat more tangible alternatives, such as invisible matter called "virtual" particles, as well as energy fields. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc squared proved that matter can be transformed into energy.
No one can confidently say what builds a quark, but it is certainly not a piece of matter in solid form - the quark is already outside the limit that anyone can "see" or "touch", even using scientific instruments to extend our senses; its building block may very well be merely a vibration that has the potential to turn into matter."
The above quote points out one of the newer ideas in science; that smaller than atoms and quarks, the real building "blocks" of matter may be……vibrations.
What happens when words are spoken? They make vibrations don’t they? And isn’t it those vibrations resounding on our ear drums that bring about our hearing things? So another interesting speculation is this: If vibrations are the source of matter, aren’t we told in
Jhn 1:1-3 that all things were created by the Word? Could this be describing a creation where matter was created by speaking words - words that caused vibrations?
The Universe is More Than Just Matter.
Modern day scientists have been amazed to learn that the universe they study, what they can see, is actually only a small portion of the universe that is actually out there.
Scientific American magazine
(15) explains it like this.
"The universe around us is not what I appears to be. The stars make up less than 1% of its mass; all the loose gas and other forms or ordinary matter, less than 5%. The motions of this visible material reveal that it is mere flotsam on an unseen sea of unknown material. [Nicely poetic here.] We know little about that sea. The terms we use to describe its components, "dark matter" and "dark energy", serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance."
Recently a whole book
(16) was published on the search going on to explain this vast unseen part of the universe. Notice this statement from the book:
"If we accept the argument and the emerging evidence that the universe is flat, then we must confront the fact that there must exist, not ten to twenty times, as is inferred from observation, but almost one hundred times as much dark matter or energy in the universe as visible matter."
An article in "Discover"
(4) magazine tells us "All of the matter we can find accounts for only about 4% of the universe. We know this by calculating how much mass would be needed to hold galaxies together and cause them to move about the way they do when they gather in large clusters. Another way is to weigh the unseen matter is to look at how gravity bends the light from distant objects. Every measure tells astronomers that most of the universe is invisible."
What a startling statement from scientists, "
most of the universe is invisible." The matter that can be seen accounts for a small portion only of the universe, the other 90% or more is invisible.. Could this possibly be some kind of scientific support for Christianity? Is there an unseen universe along side of the material one we see and inhabit? If so, could it be spiritual, just as Christianity proposes? Notice scientists, not knowing exactly what it is, say this "dark matter" can also be "dark energy". We might call that "spiritual". An interesting speculation indeed.
Maybe Christian spirit or non-matter is closer to our physical world than we realize.
More Questions
As we ponder which makes more sense, evolution or creation, let’s consider this question: Where did information come from?
Everywhere we look in our physical world we see exhibited "information" which is intelligence or knowledge. Yet information of itself is like thoughts, not physical, it cannot be seen or handled.
Take the common example of birds who construct nests from the lowliest of materials. Where did that information come from? If there was in fact a first evolved 100% bird, how did this first bird go about learning to build the first nest? Under evolution, a lot of trial and error had to be involved. And yet there would be only a few days to experiment and learn.
Let’s assume that amazingly enough the first bird perfected nest building within her short lifetime. We are then confronted with another question in logic. How was this knowledge passed on to her babies? We know it is not by "show and tell", so how did the first baby bird, and how do all subsequent birds, get that nest building information? We have to ask the same question for all of nature, spiders who engineer webs, beavers who engineer dams, and on and on.
How Did I Miss Out?
My grandfather built his own house around 1900. It was all done by hand, long before rural electricity. His planning and carpenter skills are evident. None of that was passed down to me. My dad re-built the engine in my first car, a 1934 Plymouth. (Hydraulic brakes and coil springs - a car well ahead of its time!) I cannot do anything mechanical like my dad did.
But as evolution author Philip Whitfield(5) explains how evolution works, "… the fact that the mix of variation in every generation of every living plant and animal is tested against the conditions in which those organisms live. They also blur the crucial condition that advantageous characteristics must be inheritable and inherited for natural selection to occur."
So we are told that for natural selection to occur advantageous skills and characteristics should have been inherited by me. In fact doesn’t our author tell us such is a crucial condition for evolution? Doesn’t evolution in general tell us that all of nature, in bird nests, spider webs, beaver dams, and on and on, those skills are routinely passed on from generation to generation?
If it doesn’t work for humans, could it be that the inherent information present in every bird generation, and all other species, was not evolved as we are told happened, but were put there by a creator, and is passed on by some means the creator has devised?
It is also interesting that our evolution author sees testing taking place. If so, wouldn’t that require decisions; some sort of intelligence at work?. And yet all have to acknowledge there is no decision making intelligence in the evolution scenario.
Information in Awesome Amounts
A widely acclaimed evolution author
(6) informs us about cells, "Each one can be thought of as a chemical factory which, in the course of delivering its primary product of usable energy, processes more than 700 different chemical substances, in long, interweaving assembly lines strung out along the surface of its intricately folded internal membranes."
"Quantum Healing"
(3) informs us, "Of the liver cell’s many functions, over five hundred at latest count…"
This all happens in one cell, and is repeated all the time in the trillions and trillions of similar cells in the universe. Doesn’t it seem to you that there has to be a tremendous amount of knowledge, of information involved?
We are told evolution happened a cell at a time. So a lone liver cell had to learn to do 500 different functions These functions evolved by mindless accident. Then that lone cell, after learning its 500 functions, either (1) somehow found other liver cells to team up with who had also learned the same 500 functions, or (2) divided itself again and again to become a blob of millions of liver cells. Either way, this mass of liver cells then became a whole liver in some animal. As we consider which is true, evolution or creation, we have to ponder, how logical is that scenario?
The author
(6) tells us more about information in each cell, "Each nucleua…contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells put together…. The total number of cells in the body (of a human) is about 10 trillion."
A database with more information than 30 encyclopedia volumes? Does this sound like a massive amount of information to you? It sure does to me.
But wait a minute. It’s more than just information written in 30 volumes, isn’t it? What our authors have told us about is information with meaning, with purpose. More like instructions, more like complicated, purposeful knowledge.
A Boeing 747, a Skyscraper, and a Fruit Fly
"The Encyclopedia of Evolution"
(5) might sum it up for us as it informs, "A Boeing 747 airliner, a 30 story office block, and a fruit fly are all complex structures pieced together from simpler components according to pre-existing plans." Then follows this startling conclusion:"Of these three examples the fruit fly is by far the most complex."
You might like to ponder that for a moment, remembering that this did not come from a creation biased book, but from one that explains evolution.
What Would Convince Scientists of Other Life in the Universe?
Our government is spending millions of dollars searching the universe for a sign of intelligent life. What would convince them they had found it? Actually something quite simple. Perhaps a mere radio signal with a basic pattern to it, say one, two, three, one, two, three, repeated over and over.
On a light note when it made the point, the book "Just Six Numbers"
(12) said, "As Richard Feynman noted, he could tell extraterrestials that he was "seventeen billion hydrogen atoms high" and they should understand him." (I couldn’t resist . Only one of my heroes, Richard Feynman, would think of putting it that way.)
The author further explains the signals scientists are looking for,.
"A manifestly artificial signal - even if it were as boring as lists of prime numbers, or the digits of "pi" - would imply that "intelligence" wasn’t unique to the Earth and had evolved elsewhere."
Do you sense a major inconsistency here?
On the one hand very simple radio signals would be needed to convince scientists of intelligence. On the other hand evolutionist scientists can see and acknowledge 30 volumes of information in every tiny cell, or a chemical factory processing 700 chemicals, or a liver cell performing 500 functions, but those massive amounts of "signals" do not constitute an intelligent life source, they all evolved by themselves from nothing. Does that really make sense to you?
Where did Information Come From?
Previous "Creation Corner" columns have pointed out the classic evolution scenario that life started with a massive lightning bolt striking a blob of algae floating in a seething ocean. The question was then asked, Is there information present in lightning, algae, or ocean water? A straight answer seems to be "No". Let’s look at what some evolutionists say was the beginning of life to see if can detect any information in their scenarios.
One evolution author
(5) writes, "When Earth was formed it was a lifeless planet among other lifeless planets circling our sun. It was not until about one billion years later that there were life forms of sufficient complexity to leave their microfossil traces in rocks of the time. But the real origins of life-the origins of self-replicating chemical entities -must have predated these aerliest fossils by a considerable period."
Two other evolution authors put it this way
(7), ""Imagine a period hundreds of millions of years long in which the Earth is awash in the building blocks of life.… There are pools and lakes undergoing wild fluctuations in conditions - now warm, bright, and bathed in ultraviolet light, now frozen and dark. Out of this varied and changeable landscape, and this rich organic brew, life arises."
Another evolution scenario is this one
(8), "Draw back more and the first multicellular organisms appear, which made the transition from solitary cell to collective. And finally microbes - the archea and bacteria - now loom"
Another evolution writer
(9) explain our beginnings this way, "The thrust of that same evolution, from the Big Bang to the emergence of intelligent life, has been a constant movement from the simple to the increasingly complex: the first particvles, the atoms, the molecules, the stars, the cells, the organisms of living beings, until we arrive at the curious creatures we call human….All stages follow one another… We descend from monkeys and bacteria, but also from the stars and galaxies."Two others
(10) tell us about our beginnings, "The oldest rocks on the planet, found in Greenland and southern Africa, suggest that some 4 billion years ago… Life too already had a foothold, in the form of heat-loving bacteria clustered around bubbling mud pools."
Another
(11) tells us this, "We said that the initial building blocks in the primal soup were produced when pulses of energy from the sun or the Earth’s interior made possible the chemistry of joining atoms together into molecules."
The evolution supporting book, "The Secret Life of Germs"
(13) tells us, ""Over the course of perhaps three billion years, the oxygen produced by algae and the oxygen spewed out be volcanoes changed the atmosphere, creating an oxygen blanket that allowed higher life forms to evolve from germs."
Go Ahead and Pick One
So according to various evolution authors, life had its beginning in - take your choice - algae, chemical entities, organic brew, entities sufficiently simple, bacteria, atoms, or germs. Again, we have to wonder, is information present in any of them? Aren’t they just the tiniest and simplest bits of mere chemicals?
Does Information come from Matter?
"Quantum Healing" answers this for us
, "You may find it easy to think of DNA, with its billions of genetic bits, as an intelligent molecule; certainly it must be smarter than a simple molecule like sugar. How smart can sugar be? But DNA is really just strings of sugar, amines, and other simple components. If these are not smart to begin with, then DNA couldn’t become smart just by putting more of them together."
There is more about DNA,. "
Why does it initially divide on the second day after conception and begin to make a nervous system on day eighteen?…. As we saw before, DNA is not made out of anything special. Its strands of strands of genetic material can be subdivided into simpler molecules like sugars and amines, and these into atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on.
When it is not tied into DNA, a hydrogen or carbon atom doesn’t have anything like timing built into it! In billions of other combinations, hydrogen and carbon simply exist; yet in DNA, they contribute to a mastery over time.."
So our author makes the point that the physical elements of matter that make up evolutionary beginnings, do not have information inherent in them. Where did the information/instructions found in every DNA code come from then? Where did the timing apparatus we are told operates in DNA come from?
As we ponder those questions, let’s consider this from the book by Larry A. Witham
(14). The author quotes the master programmer familiar to all of us, Bill Gates:"
DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created."
In Summary
We have considered the following:
A Final Question
So information, instructions, knowledge are seen all over in nature. We have to ponder, is it all the result of:
Evolution, which admittedly is:
mindless,
purposeless,
accidental chance?
Or is all of it more logically the result of:
planning,
intelligence,
a Creator God?
Which one makes more sense to you?
C. Frazier Spencer
www.fraziernow@wmconnect.com
Notes:
(1) "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds" by Phillip E. Johnson, published 1997 by Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL
(2) "Tornado in a Junk Yard" published 2001 by Refuge Books, Arlington, Mass.
(3) "Quantum Healing" by Deepak Chopra published 1989 by Bantam Books, NY.
(4) "Discover" magazine, Feb, 2002, page 38.
(5) "From so Simple a Beginning: the Encyclopedia of Evolution" by Philip Whitfield, 1993 by Macmillan Publishing Company, NY
(6) "The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, published 1996 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., NY.
(7) "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, published 1992 by Random House, Inc. New York.
(8) "Origins" by Hubert Reeves, Joel De Rosnay, Yves Coppens, and Dominiques Simonnet, published 1998 by Arcade Publishing, NY
(8) "Earth Story" by Simon Lamb and David Sington, TV series and 1998 book published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
(9) "Sacred Depths of Nature" by Usrula Goodenough, published in 1998 by Oxford University Press, Oxford, NY.
(12) "Just Six Numbers" by Martin Rees, published 2000 by Basic Books, a division of the Perseus Books Group.
(13) "The Secret Life of Germs" by Philip M. Tierno, Jr. published 2001 by Pocketbooks division of Simon & Schuster, NY.
(14) ""Where Darwin Meets the Bible" by Larry A, Witham published 2002 by Oxford University Press, Oxford and NY.
(15) "Scientific American", March 2003, page 52.
(16) "Quintessence" by Lawrence Krauss, published 2001 by Basic Books.