In part 1 of my comprehensive book review of preeminent paleoanthropologist, Ian Tattersall’s book, Masters of the Planet – The Search For Our Human Origins, we discussed many of the blind assumptions and uncertainty that attempted to fill the gaps in his lack of evidence for human evolution. As we pick up in Chapter 6, we’ll see much of the same speculation and story-telling
Chapter 6 – Life on the Savanna
He continues in his evaluation of Homo Ergaster
And in the absence of substantial evidence of technological change, we have to fall back on physical and other indirect indicators…these indicators are highly suggestive even though we are hard put to draw specific conclusions
The uncertainty and speculation persists. He’s staying true to the evolutionary story even with the absence of substantial evidence
There is no shortage of ideas; and although there is little evidence to substantiate any of them, a circumstantial case can be built
So much religion. Not so much evidence
Perhaps
may have been more important than the material evidence indicates
suggested
may have been
so it seems likely
Whatever their origin
would have
would not have been
would also have necessitated
possible
It is impossible to know for sure
is thought to have been
seems to be
the assumption
estimate
begs a number of important questions
as to leave lots of room for doubt
in which case there should be more and better evidence of it
almost entirely circumstantial
could have
may have
may have been
and if you are prepared to pile on a few more assumptions
probably
may
we are unable to say much more than this with any confidence
probably
probably
purely hypothetical
has to remain a guess
perhaps
we can’t be entirely sure
fairly sure
only indirectly reflected in the material record
must have
probably
Uncertainty. Assumptions. Speculation
Backing up a little to pages 110 and 111 we see
And we can’t take absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Beyond this, it is fair to point out that there is nothing we know or can reasonably infer about Homo ergaster cognition that would rule out the possibility that these creatures used simple containers
The absence of evidence for evolution is the norm. Evolutionists are excellent story-tellers, and they fill the gaps of this missing evidence with wonderful stories. I’m just not persuaded by their stories
Chapter 7 – Out of Africa and Back
Many people may not know that the “Out of Africa” theory was concocted in an effort to hide the inherent historical racism of Darwin’s theory of evolution. When Darwin fabricated his theory he lived in a time when it was perfectly acceptable to be openly racist. He had nothing to hide by presenting his new theory as praising the white race for being more evolved and pointing out that he thought the darker-skinned people were less evolved. From his work Descent of Man:
Sadly this kind of thinking had real and dire consequences built into the foundation of the theory of evolution. People have chosen to be racist for millennia, but with the advent of the new evolutionary paradigm that was deemed scientifically advanced, people felt they had a scientific justification for mistreating people of different ethnicities. The scientific racism went so far as to actually display an African in a zoo as if he were an animal
As the 20th century progressed, racism (thankfully) fell out of favor among the scientific elite, but because evolution had vise-like grip on academia, a new story was needed to hide the racism. Enter the “Out of Africa” model. The idea is that since humans were now said to have evolved in Africa first, Africans now had the GREATER claim to being the MOST human of all. Dr. Marvin Lubenow exposes the fabrication in his book, Bones of Contention
Now, what does Tattersall have to say about “Out of Africa”?
The human family was born in Africa, and many millions of years passed before we have any evidence that hominids had managed to escape the continents confines. For a long time it was believed…now though, things are looking a lot more murky; for the initial dispersal out of Africa appears to have occurred as early as 1.8 million years ago, or possibly more
Claims and murkiness. No science there. He follows with “suddenly” “it was felt” and “suggested” before throwing out this beauty:
Shortly before the early age of the Dmanisi was verified in 2000 and 2002, dates had been published from Java that hinted at the very early (1.8-to1.6 million-year) presence of Homo erectus in eastern Asia; together, these dates placed beyond dispute that the hominid exodus from Africa had begun almost immediately following the appearance there of the new hominid body form-vastly earlier than anyone had previously suspected.
“Beyond dispute“…please! Dates from evolutionists are presented as SET IN STONE when they speak to detractors, but as time goes by, the dates are as pliable as jello on a trampoline. New evidence requires evolutionists to constantly revise dates to keep the story from falsification as evidenced by the last line: “vastly earlier than anyone had previously suspected.” Because prior to that point, the evolutionists would have expelled anyone for suggesting the the dates that Tattersall says are “beyond dispute”. This book was published in 2012. As of the time of this blog post, the proposed (Darwinian) dates for the Dmanisi fossils have changed 3 times since 2012. There’s nothing to prevent future discoveries from forcing evolutionists to change these “beyond dispute” dates yet again to keep the theory from extinction
On page 127 he continues
Limited as our speculations have to be, however, the conclusion is inescapable that the invention of the handaxe must be represented-or at least have reflected-a cognitive leap of some kind
Unfortunately for Tattersall, the argument from his entire book hinges on this phrase, which we will see again: “a cognitive leap of some kind”. No evidence of natural selection acting on random mutations to produce cognition…just an interpretation of bones and stones to fabricate a story. This story includes (not science) but ever-increasing speculation:
Must have been
if for no better reason than there was nowhere else for them to iccur
must have been
remains a bit hazy
we have no idea
especially since there is no evidence that more than 1 hominid grade was involved
strongly suggests
suggestion
quite controversial
remains pure speculation
but it is possible
it is quite possible
we have so little supporting evidence
how we interpret it
suggestive
is at least highly suggestive
regrettably unknown to us
just as likely
a scenario
suggests
maybe about a quarter million years ago
perhaps most bizarrely of all
enormous controversy
Chapter 8 The First Cosmopolitan Hominid
Scattered throughout this chapter, we see the continued howls from Tattersall that the fossil record of human evolution is deficient
The systematic picture among fossil hominids of the period around a million years ago remains rather unclear, because relevant fossils in the African center of innovation are few and far between and widely scattered“
On its own the Mauer jaw was a bit puzzling
Dating is rather poor for most of these fossils
we can’t say much about the body structure of Homo heidelbergensis, since bones of the body skeleton are few and far between.
Some 380 thousand years ago the terrace on which Terra Amata lies was an ancient beach, to which a small group of hunters repeatedly returned (alas, without leaving any evidence of themselves)
Notice the speculation, uncertainty, arguing, and wagering of guesses on which paleoanthropology is built. Yet, when anyone questions the evolutionary narrative, the rebuttal is inevitably “you’re a science-denier!!!!” In their books and papers, to their evolutionary audiences, they drop their filter and expose the tentative nature of their view. Evolution isn’t built upon mountains of evidence; it’s built upon the predetermined ideology that natural selection acting on random mutations can produce all biological traits.
Chapter 9 Ice Ages and Early Europeans
In chapter 9 Tattersall tells the terrifying tale of intrepid travelers traversing frosty terrain as they transformed from Tanzanian apes into tempered Turks. It’s a great fable, with lots of conjecture.
There is thus no way in which we can realistically think of hominid evolution during the Pleistocene as a matter of steady adaptation. Instead, the story is a much more dramatic one
Ice Age conditions were often tough for the hominid individuals concerned; but never had circumstances been more propitious for meaningful evolutionary change than among our highly mobile, adaptable, and resourceful Pleistocene ancestors. Taken together, this combination of internal and external factors may well account for the amazing rapidity with which hominids evolved during the Pleistocene…rapid evolution…rapidly…quite unexpected…may have been
Propitious?!? You mean lucky? What exactly he means by evolutionary change, he never really says, but the implication is that “change happened, therefore evolution did it! Praise evolution almighty!” Again we see that Tattersall is proposing this strange and unnatural view of ‘rapid evolution’. We’ll see in chapter 14 why he’s pushing so hard for this idea that is so far outside the orthodox teachings of evolution: slow & gradual accumulation of mutations filtered over millions of years by natural selection
And very recent findings have also pointed to something quite unexpected: the possibility that, under fluctuating Pleistocene conditions, new genes may have been introduced into hominid populations by occasional intermixing between closely related and poorly differentiated hominid species
He’s saying that beastiality built humanity. Yuck! Too bad we didn’t end up with the monkey’s prehensile tail or the Orangutang’s strength.
But the problem was that each glacial advance scoured away much of the evidence left behind by its predecessors, and the resulting observations were a nightmare to interpret
No kidding. Your modified theory of evolution has staved off extinction despite the scouring away of much of the evidence. How convenient that the evidence is missing.
chronology is based on modern geochronological and geochemical analyses of long cores drilled through sea-floor sediments, or through the Greenland or Antarctic ice caps.
It is not easy to date a pile of bones at the bottom of a pit
Chapter 9 ends with lots of open questions and plenty of room for open skepticism about the story that we are forced to swallow despite the lack of evidence.
Chapter 10 Who Were the Neanderthals
Maybe we’ll get more answers in chapter 10
we know so little about it due to the effects of repeated glaciation and deglaciation in the region
Again, evolutionists know so little because the evidence is missing…supposedly and conveniently by glaciers. Funny how today, the progressive left (which would undoubtedly include evolutionists) pray to, fight for, and weep for glaciers.
As far as we can tell from a less-than-perfect postcranial fossil record
More lamentations at the dearth of evidence
evolutionary time
What is evolutionary time? How is it different from regular time? The pervasive use of ‘evolutionary’ as an adjective shows how religious is their devotion to the theory. They use evolution as a noun, a verb, an adjective, and adverb…it’s just evolutionary evolution of evolution-like evolvement. And if you’re skeptical of the evolutionary evolutionism by evolutionists, you’re deemed to be a “science-denier”.
Perhaps…appeared to have been…suggested…might have been…might have been…probably too early to know what to make of observations…it is not out of the question…may have had
All of these words of ambiguity appear in the same paragraph
Chapter 11 Archaic and Modern
In this chapter Tattersall talks about evidence of artwork and tools. He tries to build a distinction between what he considers to be archaic fossils and modern fossils. Not much to critique in this chapter
Chapter 12 Enigmatic Arrival
In ch 12, Tattersall intends to build the case that Homo Neanderthalensis is distinct from modern humans – not in phenotype, but only in cognition. He admits several times that the fossils are virtually indistinguishable, but because of the different layers in which the fossils are found, he calls 1 fossil Neanderthal, and the other human. Let’s review
Homo sapiens was emerging
This again is the common lingo among evolutionists. They don’t want to say that it was magic, but their justification for these emergent changes sounds very much like an appeal to magic
Still, this is not the whole story, for as far as Homo sapiens is concerned it appears that the body for was one thing, while the symbolic cognitive system that distinguishes us to greatly from all other creatures was entirely another. The two were not acquired at the same time, and the earliest anatomical Homo sapiens appear right now to have been cognitively indistinguishable from the Neanderthals and other contemporaries
Recognizing species from their bones is often a tough proposition among close relatives: in some cases, much physical diversity may accumulate within a population without speciation occurring, while in others, the bones of members of two species descended from the same ancestor may be virtually indistinguishable. In the absence of a good morphological yardstick we thus can’t be absolutely sure that Aterians or the Jebel Irhoud people would not have been able to exchange genes with anatomically mainstream Homo sapiens.
If nothing else from this book, we see that “recognizing species from their bones is often a tough proposition”, and then when evolutionists cancel/expel/dismiss anyone, who is skeptical of evolution, we see that they are simply protecting their religion. Those presuppositionalists, who read my blog, will recognize the Tattersall’s lament of not having a standard when he says “in the absence of a good morphological yardstick”. By What Standard indeed? Evolutionists can NEVER have absolute surety because some new discovery can (and almost always does) change their whole paradigm.
Chapter 12 finishes out with an overabundance of “maybe”
These tools were more or less identical
probably
spectacularly obscure
One possibility
there is no independent reason to believe that they were around at exactly the same time
other possibilities
Notice from the screenshot of pg 192 how many underlined words leave the reader with the idea that there’s no reason to hold tightly to the evolutionary beliefs. The following page includes these gems
in light of the frustratingly little we know, it seems reasonable to see the initial excursion of anatomical Homo sapiens out of Africa and into the neighboring Levant as the fortuitous product of circumstance, facilitated or even spurred by a benevolent change in climate…quite likely…But whatever the ultimate identity…tantalizing hints…we have no evidence
Speculation based on fortuitous circumstance (luck). And “benevolent change”?!!? Are you kidding me? There’s no reason to take this paragraph seriously when he proposes that the climate was “benevolent” to the proto-humans. Let’s move on to chapter 13
Chapter 13 The Origin of Symbolic Behavior
In 2013 Living Waters ministries released a documentary titled ‘Evolution vs. God’, and at about the 33 minute mark UCLA professor, Dr. Gail Kennedy remarked “You know the problem with those who are unable to see evolution, I think, is they don’t have imaginations.” Indeed. To believe in evolution, you must have a vivid imagination. Tattersall agrees:
Our ancestors made an almost unimaginable transition from a non-symbolic, nonlinguistic way of processing and communicating…it is a qualitative leap in cognitive state unparalleled in history. Indeed, as I’ve said, the only reason we have for believing that such a leap could ever have been made, is that it was made.
He states that the ONLY reason to believe that humans evolved from their indistinguishable contemporaries is that humans are here. No evidence of this event. No prediction by evolutionists that it could have happened. No other reason whatsoever other than: humans are here. That’s nearly exact wording for an example of the Post Hoc Fallacy.
Some scholars have suggested that the dazzling Cro-Magnon art represented such a break with the past that a recent genetic modification must have been acquired in the Cro-Magnons’ lineage to make all this creativity possible: a modification whose effects were confined to their neural information processing, and were not reflected in the fossil bones which are all the physical evidence we have of them.
Suggestions…must have been. These evolutionary beliefs are thrown into the conclusions without demonstrative evidence. And regarding the evidence, notice from the last highlighted sentence that the EVIDENCE IS MISSING!
Chapter 14 In the Beginning Was the Word
The reason I bought and reviewed this book was the quote just below. When I heard Dr. Christopher Rupe (who himself is a paleoanthropologist) read this quote during his presentation, I had to see it for myself. You can see the whole video from Dr. Rupe here. He reads the quote at about 58 minutes in. I found it on page 207 in Tattersall’s book:
Evolutionists teach that numerous successive slight modifications over millions of years allow creatures to gain new traits to outcompete their unfit counterparts in the struggle for survival. Slow and steady accumulations. But Tattersall is admitting that this kind of evolutions is not supported in the fossil record. He has to invent NEW evolution, and while he doesn’t use the word, notice how easily you could plug in the word miracle as a synonym for each green word below
As I have already observed, this suggests that the physical origin of our species lay in a short-term event of major developmental organization, even if that event was likely driven by a rather minor structural innovation at the DNA level. Such an occurrence is made more plausible by the fact that genetic innovations of the kind that probably produced us are most likely to become “fixed” (i.e., the norm) in small and genetically isolated populations…In other words, conditions in the late Pleistocene would have been as propitious as you could imagine for the kind of event that would necessarily have had to underwrite the appearance of a creature as unusual as ourselves.
Evolutionists say they don’t believe in miracles. They only believe in science…
But notice how they just avoid the word “miracle” with synonyms…and it continues
But the results of this acquisition were revolutionary: in today’s jargon, they were “emergent,” whereby an adventitiouschange or addition to a pre-existing structure led to a whole new level of complexity and function. Exactly when our amazing capability was initially acquired is something we cannot read directly from the fossil record: the paleoneurologists, those specialists who specialize in the form of fossil brains as determined from the impressions they leave inside the cranial vault, cannot even agree in principle if there us any functional significance to the minor external shape differences
Emergent = miracle
adventitious = miracle
Tattersall admits that the fossil evidence is missing…and his field of expertise is looking at fossils. He assumes that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE MUST have the evidence for evolution, it’s just not in his field
some believe
speculation
sometimes it seems like a miracle
The specifics still evade us, and we as yet have no idea what the genetic rearrangement was that gave rise to the unique anatomy of Homo sapiens. All we know for sure is that this event did indeed occur. But it seems overwhelmingly likely that….our new cognitive ability was acquired as a byproduct of the hugely ramifying genetic accident…Happily for us
The speculation and miracles continue. I don’t see any reason to accept the idea that humans evolved by means of natural selection acting on random mutations…the theory of evolution, which is what this book was an attempt to explain
The story-telling continues
I’ve already briefly mentioned the classic example of feathers, which were possessed by the ancestors of birds many millions of years before these modified dermal follicles were ever recruited as essential components of the flight mechanism. Similarly, the ancestors of terrestrial vertebrates had already acquired the rudiments of legs while they were still fully aquatic, and a terrestrial existence was still far in the future. You simply wouldn’t have predicted their future function when they first appeared. What is more, evolutionary novelties often persist if they don’t actively get in the way; and in the case of Homo sapiens the potential symbolic thought evidently just lurked there, undetected, until it was “released” by a stimulus that must necessarily have been a cultural one-the biology, after all, was already in place.
If you read that paragraph and know anything about evolution, you will declare: “That’s not how evolution works!” Evolution is said to work by reproductive fitness. Essentially, this means that whatever new traits that random mutations can provide, natural selection can judge whether or not to preserve that trait by how well it improves the ability to produce more offspring. Partially formed feathers can’t be preserved because there’s no evidence that they provide any increased fitness. It’s not just that these proto-feathers had to improve fitness in a single individual. These non-flight (what evolutionists think were broken dermal follicles) proto-feathers had to get fixed in an entire population of non-flying reptiles (as the story goes) and after millions of years get converted to the supremely well-designed flight feathers that we see today. Remember, there is no evidence that feather-like broken dermal follicles ever existed. But even if we grant that they did, they could not be preserved by natural selection if they didn’t provide a reproductive advantage for an entire population of reptiles! Same with rudimentary legs (stumps). Their wild assertions of stumps and follicles surviving millions of years of natural selection ruthlessly streamlining the phenotypes is absurd and definitely NOT evolution. They are appending a NEW story onto evolution in an attempt to explain the inexplicable. Now Tattersall invents the idea that “symbolic thought” just emerged miraculously even though the components were supposedly there all along too. In their attempt to prove evolution, they have to redefine evolution to include non-evolutionary (or in this case anti-evolutionary) mechanisms
believe
sparking speculation
has done nothing to quell the argument
suggestion
We can expect debate
notion
It’s anybody’s guess
Maybe
maybe
will require a lot more information than we have at present
suggests
almost unimaginable
remains a subject of pure speculation
If you asked an assortment of scientists interested in this question what that stimulus might have been, two clear frontrunners would probably emerge
we can guess
Some scientists believe
This is an attractive idea momentous event
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe
But this has proved a tricky endeavor, for individual words change quite rapidly over time: so rapidly that beyond a time depth of about five thousand years, or ten at the very most, it turns out to be fairly hopeless to look for substantial traces of relationship
5000-10000 years ago? Sounds very much like a biblical timeframe. At least I agree with Tattersall above
In figuring out just what it is that makes our brains special, we always have to keep in mind that our controlling organ is a rather untidy structure that, from very simple beginnings, has accreted rather opportunistically over an enormous period of time. So perhaps we shouldn’t be looking for one single major “keystone” acquisition. Instead, the extraordinary properties of the human brain are likely emergent, resulting from a relatively tiny-and altogether accidental-addition or modification to a complex structure that was already , and exaptively, almost prepared for symbolic thought.
As Darwin admitted in his autobiography: “Can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”, Tattersall too is left admitting his belief that the human brain accreted accidentally. Why should an accidental accretion of neurons be trusted to provide reasonable conclusions? Would you trust the results of a calculator that was accidentally thrown together? I wouldn’t, and neither should you.
To sum up, Tattersall is a talented writer, and he is an excellent apologist for evolution. I’m sure he does a great job digging up bones. But I find that his attempt to convince critical thinkers that humans evolved (natural selection acting on random mutations) from lower animals is based – not on evidence – but on a religious commitment to naturalism. Evolution fails to explain the origin of humans.
For other areas where evolution has failed to explain the origin of:
In these series of posts: “Can Evolution Explain…” we have seen that the LOUD and TRIVIAL mantra: “there are mountains of evidence for evolution” rings hollow. What the internet evolutionists believe as gospel because it has passed through the peer-review process, is really just an accumulation of assumptions and artwork. The links to all of my review articles in this series are at the end of this post
Who would know the story of human evolution best? Dr. Ian Tattersall is regarded as one of the top 5 paleoanthropologists of the last 100 years and has served as the Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History. Surely, if the evidence strongly supports the belief that humans are the result of natural selection acting on random mutations from creatures that were not human, we should be able to learn this information from his book, Masters of the Planet – The Search For Our Human Origins. So I bought the book and read it.
Writing a book is a monumental task, and Tattersall is an excellent writer. He has done a great job in his research, and I was never bored reading through his book. Tattersall attempts to make the case that the emergence of language is the defining trait that led to humanity.
As you will see, my contention is with his assumptions, his supposed evidence, and his conclusions. As with the other reviews, Tattersall’s comments will appear in red with my comments in the default black. Any bold or italics in his quotes are added by me to highlight many of his problems. Let’s get to it
perceived in the apes a bestial savagery that served as an unwelcome reminder of humanity’s feared and (usually) repressed dark side
This is the 2nd sentence of the prologue. Right from the beginning, we see the assumption of common ancestry tied to chimpanzees. It is his right to make and state his assumptions, but as we will see, there’s no reason to be persuaded by his assumptions
Most importantly we have learned a great deal about the diversity and behaviors of our precursors on this Earth: certainly enough to allow us to begin speculating with some confidence about how, when, and in what context humankinds acquired its extraordinary habits of mind and communication
This is a common theme. There is speculation based on Tattersall’s basic assumption throughout the book.
Again from the Prologue, Tattersall proposes the idea that instead of natural selection (evolution) designing an “optimal” and predictable brain:
the long and untidy process that gave rise to the human brain…it is the very messiness and adventitiousness of our brains that makes them-and us-the intellectually fertile, creative, emotional, and interesting entities that they and we are
This perspective conflicts with the view of evolution that most of us were taught in school-where. if it was mentioned at all, this most fundamental of biological processes was usually presented as a matter of slow, inexorable refinement, constantly tending toward achieving the perfect.
Tattersall takes the view that instead of the typical evolutionary story of natural selection bending the human brain to be more rational and more optimized, the untidy and random nature of evolution that produced human thought. It’s similar to what Charles Darwin himself said in his autobiography as to why human reasoning (if the result of evolution) ultimately has no logical reason to produce trustworthy thought:
Incredibly, Tattersall inadvertently recognizes the case that Dr. John Sanford made in his magnificent book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, that natural selection CANNOT preserve or remove traits at the genetic level. Natural selection can theoretically only act against the phenotype, which is why degratory mutations accumulate in the slippery slope towards extinction. Devolution is the norm.
In the end, natural selection can only vote up or down on the entire individual, which is a real mash-up of genes and of the characteristics they promote. It cannot single out specific features to favor or disfavor
Evolution is a myth
And there are yet other reasons for not expecting that evolution should produce tidy perfection. As I’ve already suggested, change can only build on what is there already, because there is no way that evolution can conjure up de novo solutions to whatever environmental or social problems may present themselves
If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought a creationist wrote that paragraph. This is true! Evolution CANNOT conjure up novel traits by means of natural selection acting on random mutations. It was very fulfilling to read this admission from a staunch evolutionist. They DO rely on the idea of miracles to produce new traits and human reasoning, but they have to imagine that nature can benevolently give them these miracles. He gives voice to this in this next section
Of course, it’s also true that not all mutations are equal. Some will have little or no effect on the adult organisms; but a few may have a radical influence on the developmental processes…for all of these reasons we should not expect significant evolutionary change in physical form to happen always, or even usually, in tiny and incremental steps. As we will see, sometimes a very small change in the genome itself can have extensive and ramifying developmental results, producing an anatomical or behavioral gap between highly distinct alternative adult states.
He can’t call them miracles, and he can’t point to any evidence, but he imagines a mutation to have been the magical step from brutish to cognitive ape. There’s no evidence for this, but for his worldview to be true, he has to imagine it. Notice too how to dismisses the standard evolutionary story of “tiny and incremental steps”, which undergirds to the whole theory of evolution in order to make his case for a fantastical unscientific leap in human development. It’s not evolution or science…it’s pure imagination
chapter 1 Ancient Origins
There is much speculation in this chapter, and I’ll list some of the many examples
luckily
as fate would have it
most remarkable
probably
may actually have
Given this reality, it is hardly realistic to expect that we’ll ever find an anatomical “silver bullet” that will by itself tell us infallibly if an ancient fossil is a hominid or not
there’s always an element of human judgment involved
the materials attributed to Orrorin are fragmentary, consisting of some bits of jaw and teeth and several limb bones believed (but not demonstrated) to have belonged to members of the same species
might be
Ar. kadabba is represented only by miscellaneous materials from sites scattered in time and space, and their association in the same species is even less secure than in the case of Orrorin
a lot of subjective judgment
Ardi is a mysterious beast
are not hugely obvious
These elements all add up to a great story, and they may well have been important individually
Presumably
must have
But exactly how and in what precise context the in-line terrestrial foot was acquired remains tantalizingly obscure
This deficit in our knowledge is hugely unfortunate because, given that everything that happened later was dependent on the fateful transition from the trees to the forest floor, it presents us with one of the most fundamental mysteries on all of paleoanthropology
host of questions
Most of the known fossils of this species are teeth and bits of jaws
acquired
acquired
plausible
potential
would have
probable
point to
After the 24 pages of chapter 1, Tattersall has build only a foundation of speculation and story-telling to fill in the canyon-sized gaps. He uses the verb “acquired” several times without any explanation. Just acquired as if the protohuman creatures got a Prime delivery from Amazon. As I have contended from the beginning, chapter 1 was simply a collection of assumptions; no evidence for evolution
Chapter 2 The Rise of the Bipedal Apes
There’s no improvement for the case for evolution in the second stanza
It’s interesting to speculate how differently we might interpret hominid evolutionary history today had the older fossils been discovered first…the order of discovery of our fossil relatives has deeply influenced their interpretations
So often in discussions about evolution, advocates claim that “evolution is science”, but Tattersall – in preaching to the choir – drops the facade to reveal that what is commonly claimed to be evidence is really speculation based on interpretations
But it should never be forgotten that everything we believe today is conditioned in some important way by what we thought yesterday; and some current controversies are caused, or at least stoked, by a reluctance to abandon received ideas that may well have outlived their usefulness
If for 150 years, academia has solely and tyrannically taught evolution as true, it’s no wonder that the last 4 generations of professors believe evolution to be true…and since any evolution dissenters are vehemently removed from academia, there’s no reason to believe that evolutionism will be challenged in the next few generations. Only the most steel-spined critical thinkers do not cave to the pressure from the evolutionists
So, a tolerably complete skeleton from this incredibly remote period in time was an almost unimaginable piece of luck
Given the evolutionary view – millions of years of slow and gradual natural processes – there should be practically no fossils at all. Dead creatures would be exposed to scavenging and decay as they wait for slow accumulation of sediments to protect them such that no creatures should be expected to be preserved as fossils. In any case, the key fossils that should have been available to show the smooth transition of 1 kind of creature to another (the mountains of evidence for evolution) are certainly “missing”. Conversely, since the Bible is true, and there was a global flood about 4500 years ago, we would expect to find billions of dead creatures, buried in water-sorted rock layers all over the Earth. The evidence strongly affirms the Bible, while the evolutionists call the finding of fossils to be “an almost unimaginable piece of luck”
Regarding the Laetoli footprints found in layers which evolutionists believe to be 3.8 million years old (about 3 million years too early to be human footprints)
seems to reflect the way we walk…The feet that made the prints were structured essentially like ours…strikingly modern…remarkably humanlike bipedality
Because of evolutionary assumptions, the Laetoli footprints, although exactly like humans, were dismissed as human ancestors because of the layers in which they were found. Evolutionists did NOT follow the evidence where it leads but have let their preconceived biases color their conclusions. Regarding the A. afarensis fossils from Hadar, Tattersall had this to say:
Frustratingly, it has no foot bones, leaving lots of room for speculation
Speculation indeed
But you need to know that all interpretation of the Middle Awash materials by their discoverers has been conditioned by the underlying belief that the story of human evolution has essentially been a linear one. The idea is that a central lineage gradually transformed under natural selection from one species into the next, until the primitive Ardipithecus had been transmuted into the finely burnished Homo Sapiens
Whether the underlying belief in evolution of some group of evolutionists or the “new” underlying belief in evolution from Tattersall, the underlying belief is clearly just a story. A story that dismisses the revelation of God in the Bible in favor of a naturalistic novel.
Our (human) hands, with their broad palms, long thumbs, and the ability to oppose the thumb to the tips of all the other fingers, are ideally structured to manipulate objects
“Ideally structured”?!!? You mean designed perfectly for their intended purpose by the Creator of the universe.
Chapter 3 Early Hominid Lifestyles and the Interior World
Going through this chapter, I’m again going to point out the ubiquitousness of uncertainty
would have been
would not have been
possibility
unlikely
must have
must have been
possibility
no good evidence
some authorities think
have been made possible
must have been
might well have
while this story…
possibilities
may well have been
may have
may have
possibility
would have been
possibility
suggests
might have been
not at all a sure bet
might have become
if they did
would be
would have
might have
of some kind
Sadly, at present there is much less to say about these ancient precursors than we’d like, although it’s a good bet
Perhaps
probably
would have been
hazy and incomplete
is not something we can hazard with any confidence at this point
seem to
There is no way to answer this question
approximate
presumably
The temptation is to assume…Yet the truth is that we simply cannot know
seemed to indicate
as far as one can tell
plausible
suggest
You can see from this chapter that there is little science going on, but lots of assumption and story-telling. And EVERY chapter is filled with these speculations and story-telling. Where’s the evidence?
Chapter 4 Australopith Variety
In this chapter, Tattersall builds that case in which he believes there is a great deal of variety among creatures that he thinks are not human ancestors. Just a few lines from this chapter that solidify the guessing game that goes into the story of human evolution based on rare and fragmentary fossils
nobody knew…Neither did anybody know exactly how old these early hominids were, although from the accompanying faunas is was guessed…the ankle joint looked fresh…perhaps…This fits nicely with the interpretation…Despite their strikingly different histories of interpretation…early biped species were actively experimenting with ways to exploit their hominid heritage…The unfortunate truth, however, is that this specimen also is so poorly preserved that it is difficult to know what to do with it…The hominid stage was packed with actors, all pushing and shoving for the limelight
Interpreting fossils is just that. Interpretation. To get an evolutionary interpretation of the fossils, one must first believe in evolution and that evolution by means of natural selection acting on random mutations can produce functional cohesive interrelated interdependent systems first. Anyone, who recognizes the truth that evolution cannot do produce systems is not persuaded by the interpretations of the “experts”. Regarding the last sentence of the above quote, these paleoanthropologists don’t actually produce anything that generates income. They rely on the donations of others in the forms of academic grants or benevolence to dig up fossil bones. What better way to generate interest in your work than to claim that you have discovered a human ancestor fossil? Whether the claim turns out self-aggrandizing or ultimately rejected doesn’t matter as long as there is enough interest to fund the next digging season.
Chapter 5 Striding Out
In this chapter, Tattersall tries to build the case that non-human human ancestors are related because of skull shape and bipedality. He focuses mainly on some fossils that have been named Homo Erectus and Homo Ergaster.
People have referred themselves to human since long before anyone had the faintest idea that our species is connected to the rest of the natural world by an extended series of long-vanished intermediate forms
“long-vanished” indeed. And the fossils are STILL missing. It’s why this we all use the term ‘Missing Link’. And notice how evolution by means of common ancestry is ALREADY assumed to be true. He’s made no case for the idea that humans are related to minerals, plants, and fish…just assumed it.
there is not one fossil among all those known in the period before about two million years ago that presents itself as a compelling candidate for the position of direct progenitor of the new hominids to come…This uncertainty is partly due to the fragmentary nature of the evidence…it is difficult to make sense of the abundant but frustratingly incomplete evidence that we have at our disposal
Not one. So, it’s not just a single link that is missing…but hundreds. Thousands. Millions of missing links. It takes critical thinkers (like Christians) to hold the overwhelming proselytizing of the evolutionists at bay long enough to dig deep into their literature like this to uncover their uncertainty and admissions of wild speculation
under the guiding hand of natural selection
I know that Tattersall does not believe in a literal hand of natural selection, but this is the ultimate conclusion of evolutionists. They believe that evolution was unguided. They see the necessity of guidance in forming functional cohesive interrelated interdependent systems, so they reify natural selection as if it is a prescriptive “divine” force rather than just the description of creatures without certain traits being culled. Evolution is inherently religious even though evolutionists despise being reminded of their religious-in-nature claims
Some of you might not believe that evolutionists would be so frank with their admissions with the problems of evolution, but Tattersall clearly thinks he’s ‘preaching to the choir’, and he willingly lets down the facade.
p94 Masters of the Planet
…whether or not “Nature makes jumps.” Darwin focused on slow, incremental change, while Huxley was worried by the many discontinuities he saw in the fossil record-and in nature in general-that were inconsistent with this pattern…as well as in a host of other apparent discontinuities.
Evolutionists teach their theory as if it is the slow and incremental change over time. Single, successive, slight modifications, but Tattersall recognizes the problem with the theory because the fossils don’t show this. The fossils instead show abrupt appearance and then stasis. The Theory of Evolution MUST be slow and gradual, but the evidence is inconsistent with this pattern because of a HOST of discontinuities. So much for the “mountains of evidence for evolution”.
Tattersall released this book in 2012 when almost every evolutionist believed in Junk DNA. He spends a few pages talking about how Junk DNA is what evolutionists would expect if evolution were true. Unfortunately for him (and all evolutionists), the ENCODE project was released between 2013-2015, and completely buried this argument for them.
Strange though: why would a paleoanthropologist spend any time on genetics if his expertise is in fossils? I’ve found this is often the case amongst evolutionists. They believe that since the theory of evolution has staved off extinction this long then SOMEBODY must have the evidence since there’s none in their own field.
On pg 97 he does reveal some evidence, but it’s not for evolution; it’s for devolution
subtle genetic modifications might produce large phenotypic differences…As a result the bottom-livers have lost the spines…The modification is not trivial, involving as it does the elimination of an important part of a complex structure…a small stretch of regulatory DNA has been deleted. This left the basic gene intact to do its essential task, but it has eradicated the development of spines by reducing its activity in a specific area of the body…Most changes on this scale will actually be disadvantageous
You can’t get from bacteria to Bach with this kind of deleterious evolution. He does return to fossils shortly thereafter…sorta
Perhaps the Turkana Boy’s radically new bodily conformation can be attributed to a genetic event of a similar kind…So maybe…Perhaps there simply weren’t any such intermediates-or at least none that we could reasonably expect to find on the coarse time scale that the fossil record represents. Something routine and unremarkable on the genomic level had occurred…it just happened to change the course of hominid history
No fossils. No evidence to record this monumental event that they need to make their case. It’s a grand story filled with ‘maybes’ and ‘perhaps’, but what’s missing is the actual mountains of evidence for evolution
This post has gotten pretty long. Check back next week for Part 2 of the book review
We’ve got 2 more chapters to go through. In chapter 3, Dr. Ball took the opportunity to look at some evidence (that in the past) was presented to support a young earth. What happens when a scientist, who believes in evolution, views evidence through their lens of evolution? You guessed it, they see evolution and deep time everywhere. Let’s looks specifically at Dr. Ball’s statements about evidences for a young Earth. His comments are in red, with my reply following directly in the default black
At this point, it may appear to the reader that conspicuously missing from the list of scientific evidences are the evidences for a young Earth. I can assure you that it isn’t an oversight.
I addressed this kind of thinking in my article which scrutinized Dr. Ball’s work in Chapter 2. Essentially, there’s no “evidences for an old Earth” or “evidences for a young Earth”. There’s just evidence. Everyone interprets evidence in accordance with their worldview. For Dr. Ball, his worldview is that the Bible is pliable to whatever the latest conclusions from the modern academic paradigm tell him. For Young Earth Creationists, we hold the Bible to be the highest authority, and we view the evidence through the lens that what God has revealed in the Bible as true.
Short Period Comets
Short period comets appear to suggest that the solar system is only a few thousand years old, since comets actually burn away each time they pass close to the Sun, where they interact with the solar wind in producing the fiery tails we observe
Yes, I covered this in Chapter 2. And as expected, Dr. Ball proposes an unseen hypothesized ring of extra solar system objects. Unscientific.
Thickness of Lunar Dust
estimates (if billions of years old) of dust accumulation both on the Earth and on the Moon had been made as early as 1960, using mountain measurements of nickel dust fall [31], which suggested that there may well be an extensive layer of Moon dust, as much as 145 feet…In fact, only about two inches of Moon dust was found at the landing site…This was then hailed as evidence for a young Moon (since accumulation would have only been happening for about 6000 years)…This was then hailed as evidence for a young Moon
This argument has not been used by young Earth creationists in over 30 years. In 1993 (a decade BEFORE Dr. Ball wrote his book), the preeminent young Earth creation organization, Answers in Genesis, wrote an article telling Christians not to use this argument, as it is flawed. Since Dr. Ball considers himself a man of science, there’s no reason that in the next edition of his book, he will have been able to address the latest and most advanced arguments from AIG, Creation.com, and ICR.org rather than trying to defeat an argument that has not been used since before Al Gore invented the internet.
Decay of the Earth’s Magnetic Field
At the present rate of decay, the magnetic field may actually go to zero in a few tens of thousands of years from now…Since the field appears to dying, one can attempt to extrapolate backwards in time to some plausible upper limit to the field strength to calculate an age for the Earth. As expected, such estimates lead to an age for the Earth no more than 10,000 years
Dr. Ball cites the work from Paul Taylor, p50 in the Illustrated Origins Answer Book in 1992. Much work has been done regarding this field of research since 1992. This article from CMI directly addresses Dr. Ball’s objections and shows that rather than the conclusions to which Ball came to, the conclusions of a young Earth are more appropriate. Another from AIG shows that the problems of the old earth models persist given the assumptions that Dr. Ball takes. Dr. Ball’s primary objection to the conclusion of a young Earth with regards to the Magnetic decay relies on radiometric dating, which as we discussed in Chapter 2, are both filled with assumptions and are wildly inaccurate
The rock layers can also be radiometric dated, so that we can determine when the magnetic north pole was near which geographic pole
There’s no reason to accept the conclusions about magnetic decay from Dr. Ball as they are both discordant with the biblical timeline and the conclusions from scientific evidence
Radio Halos in Primordial Rock
Dr. Ball explains the reason why young Earth creationists think that the decay of Polonium in granite is evidence for YEC
The discovery of radio halos by Oak Ridge laboratory scientist Robert Gentry was touted as a clear counterexample to the claims of antiquity made for the oldest primordial rock layers in the Earth. Such halos were claimed be formed from the decays of Polonium-218, which has a halflife of only 3 minutes. They can only form in hardened or crystallized rock. If such halos were found in the oldest rock layers, which as we’ve discussed in the last chapter required a long period of time to cool off sufficiently before solidifying, then how did the Polonium-218 get inside of the rock after it formed? Young Earth proponents claim this is clear evidence that God instantly formed the rock layers of the Earth
Then Dr. Ball explains why he doesn’t like this evidence:
To examine this evidence properly is difficult, since the discovery of various types of halos in rock is still being investigated
Of course it is still being investigated. Those, like Ball, who hold to an old Earth belief, do not like the obvious implications of the rapid cooling of pre-Cambrian rock and the presence of halos from fast-decaying radioactive elements. In the same way that Dr. Mary Schweitzer did not like the implications of finding soft tissue in dinosaur bones, so she repeated the experiment SEVENTEEN times before finally accepting the results. To protect their worldview, they have to try to find a rescue device. Dr. Ball continues with the proposed rescue devices:
Geologist Jeffrey Richard Wakefield carefully examined the locations indicated by Gentry and concluded that each one was actually a younger infusion of igneous rock into the older primordial rock layers…At least one recently discovered mechanism involves a slow gradual process, favoring a much longer period of time in their development
The panic is real. Dr. Ball says that the location is particularly a problem and there might be other ways to explain the data…though he gives no details. Dr. Ball continues:
But the bigger problem I see here is the attempt at using some complex phenomena, without the benefit of a more thorough investigation into its mechanisms, to support a particular age of the Earth
I’ve been told that creationists aren’t REAL scientists, yet Dr. Ball says here that Dr. Gentry is examining “complex phenomena” to make conclusions. Dr. Ball may not like the conclusions, but the research is definitely being done my qualified scientists with qualified investigative methods. I also find it somewhat rich for an old Earther to criticize a scientist making conclusions about the age of the Earth based on the perceived lack of “thorough investigations” considering the failed evolutionary arguments from the last few decades given thorough investigations:
It is a common question of young Earth creationists: “how did light get to Earth in only 6000 years if the light source is billions of light years away?” Dr. Ball asks this question without a very careful investigation of the 1 possibility he critiques or the other possible solutions
Finally, we consider a recent cosmological model claiming support for a young Earth, a model proposed by Gerald Humphries in 1996 in his book, “Starlight and Time”
“Gerald Humphries”?!!?!? Perhaps he means Dr. Russell Humphreys, who wrote the book in question.
Dr. Ball was critical of Dr. Humphrey’s model, but he used arguments, that if applied consistently to his own Big Bang model, would have destroyed it. He didn’t mention how he solves the problems:
Obviously, Dr. Ball could not have known about the fulfilled YEC prediction that was confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope in 2022 since Dr. Ball wrote his book in 2003. But I added it to the list a a further complication for his foundational assumptions for this article. Dr. Humphreys has been met with fierce opposition to his proposal and has answered many of his critics with technical papers. Dr. Ball may not have known that the answers to many objections have been forthcoming since he didn’t even know Dr. Humphrey’s name.
Neither did Dr. Ball address the many other solutions to the light time travel “problem” that have been proposed by creationists:
Again, I will note that Dr. Ball couldn’t have known about all of these proposals since many of them have emerged as valid solutions in the last few years. The point is that scientists, who hold the Bible as the highest authority, have done and continue to do real scientific work without compromising the fidelity of the specially-revealed Word of God
Here lies the problem with Creation Science. It is not an attempt to understand the physical universe through application of basic laws and principles
This is not the problem, but the foundation. While the shifting conclusions from naturalistic assumptions will constantly change as new paradigms come and go, the eternal word of God will never change. It doesn’t need to change. Because God knows everything, his revelation cannot be overturned. The comment from Dr. Ball could be better said as: “Here lies the beauty of Creation Science. It is not an attempt to understand the physical universe through the eyes of unbelievers, but by accepting the history of the universe that God revealed in his word, creation scientists employ the application of basic laws and principles to make discoveries and solve problems.” As this graphic the humorously represents this principle, the universe has aged faster than the “speed of light”. Notice that the believed age (according to the reigning paradigm of the time) of the universe has changed through the decades and most times, the changes have been outside the previous supposed “error bars”:
Looking through the lens of evolution and the modern academic paradigm, Dr. Ball and other old Earthers will always see old Earth. When we look at the world through the lens of the Bible, we will be able to make sense of what God intended. Reality makes sense and the evidence is fully affirming of the YEC view. There is no logical reason for Christians to think that the constantly-changing theories/stories from old Earthers need to be used as counterfeit authorities to redefine the clear teaching of the highest authority: the Bible.
Dr. Steven Ball is a physics professor at LeTourneau University, a Christian university in Texas. He has written a few papers advocating for old earthism, that could use some cross-examination. His first paper is titled “A Christian Physicist Examines the Age of the Earth”. I will note his comments in red with my comments directly underneath in the default black. Any bold or underline in Ball’s quotes are my own and not in the original. Each of his chapters will be divided into a distinct blog post to keep the posts from being too long. You can read my review of chapter 1 here.
You don’t have to have an eyewitness account from someone to determine when something in the past occurred. You simply need sufficiently trustworthy evidence left behind in order to make an intelligent determination. For example, a coroner can determine when a person may have died based on the body condition and its temperature compared to both the surrounding environment and the original living body temperature. Although there may be complications, which increase the uncertainties in the actual time of death such as a changing temperature of the environment, it is still possible to make reliable estimates. In fact, the evidence left behind can be a more reliable source than a living eyewitness with a watch, as the next example will show.
I have 3 key issues with Dr. Ball’s assertion about evidence.
The myth of neutrality. Dr. Ball tacitly asserts that evidence just speaks for itself and any observer can come to evidence and just make an unbiased conclusion to determine truth. This is not true, because there are no unbiased observers. EVERYONE has a worldview through which they view evidence. Christians should view evidence through the lens that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Author of the historical account of his revelation in the Bible. Christ is LORD over everything, and even those, who claim to be neutral or unbiased have a bias denying Christ’s definitive claim as Lord. Dr. Bahnsen has a tremendous lecture series on this which I recommend for all Christians to inject.
“sufficiently trustworthy evidence” – By what standard does a person determine what is sufficiently trustworthy? While it sounds reasonable on the surface, when pressed even a little, the claim devolves rather quickly into item 1 addressed just above. A person can easily say that such-and-such evidence (or source) isn’t sufficiently trustworthy due to an arbitrary or biased standard. That’s not to say that all evidence has equal weight or that every eye-witness is equally trustworthy, but the claim itself (if it were to have universal applicability) must have a transcendent standard by which to compare which Dr. Ball leaves unanswered.
This is verifiably untrue as was pointed out in the Chapter 1 review regarding Mt. St. Helens. In 1992 the rocks from Mt St Helens were radiometrically dated anywhere from 350,000 years old to 2,800,000 years old depending on the method. But the ACTUAL date of the rocks was 12 years. The eye-witness account is dozens of orders of magnitude more accurate than the radiometric dating extrapolations from the forensics practitioners. Just considering Ball’s assertion about the ability of a coroner to determine the when a body died would only be possible within the first few hours after death when the temperature would equalize with the surrounding environment
In experimental high energy physics research, it would be rather absurd to stick a person inside of our detector region, near where high energy particles are collided and numerous new particles are generated from this energy. Beyond the problem of intense radiation exposure, this person would be a completely worthless witness.
He makes an analogy to a worthless human eye-witness, but Ball is unfortunately trying to compare this worthless human eyewitness to the Almighty. God is the One, who revealed his creative acts to Moses. Why would Ball work so hard to demean the original Eyewitness to the creation? Strange indeed for a self-professing Christian.
One can calculate the rate of fuel being burned inside the core of a star and estimate its lifetime, approximately 10,000,000,000 (10 billion) years for our Sun, of which present indicators reveal that nearly half of its lifetime supply of fuel is exhausted
Speaking of extrapolation, how does Ball solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox? Essentially, in the old earther’s view, as Solar has aged, it radiates more light and heat. In their view 3.8 billion years ago when they presume that life emerged and began to evolve, there was not enough light or heat on earth to preserve light. Extrapolation eviscerates old earther’s expectations. The point is that extrapolating deep into the past requires many assumptions and the further back in time, one hopes to predict, the more assumptions need to be made and the greater the error is probable.
The reliability of the evidence can be determined in a number of ways. First of all, since our universe obeys certain laws and principles, the evidence should be examined in light of these well-established laws and principles.
When one presumes to reject what God said in the Bible (“For in 6 days the LORD made the heavens the earth, the sea, and all that is in them”) in favor of the modern academic paradigm (MAP), to be consistent that person must reject other parts of the Bible. For instance, it would be consistent for someone to say:
“The science says the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, so we have to reinterpret what the Bible says”
“The science says that virgins cannot birth children, so we have to reinterpret what the Bible says”
“The science says that dead people do not come back to life, so we have to reinterpret what the Bible says”
“The science says that water does not turn into wine, so we have to reinterpret what the Bible says”
“The science says that axe heads do not float, so we have to reinterpret what the Bible says”
But I’m sure Dr. Ball accepts at least a few of those. It’s inconsistent to deny the historical passages in the Bible because of some outside authority . As Christians, we mustn’t let MAP be an authority at the expense of the Bible. His next quote is ironic as he desires consistency in scientific work (something everyone should want).
Secondly, when several independent sources are all giving very similar answers, it increases the measure of confidence we have in the results. Good science requires both the measures of self-consistency and consistency with other independent, yet equally valid methods
So let’s look at the specific “independent sources” from different fields of science to see how they measure up to scripture itself, and offer a little scrutiny to his conclusions
Geology of the Earth
Just one glimpse of the multitude of layers of rock exposed in the Grand Canyon…The shades of color from one layer to the next going down over one mile deep from the canyon rim down to the Colorado River tells us that there is an incredibly vast and changing history associated with how these layers were deposited…We find fossils in many of these layers, showing the history of life forms going backward in time as you go down through the successive layers to earlier time periods…It is not easy to estimate the rate of rock layering, since this fluctuates greatly in time…However, it is clear that vast intervals of time are necessary to produce the layers of rock we do observe
There are indeed a multitude of layers exposed in the grand canyon. Water-sorted layers. Dr. Ball makes no mention of the effects of the global flood that is recorded in Genesis 6-9. Fossil-bearing water-sorted layers is EXACTLY what biblical creationist would expect to find in the Grand Canyon. Dr. Ball (not a geologist) is completely unfamiliar with the evidence against his view, which is that erosion/bioturbation in and between the water-sorted layers is so rare as to declare them virtually absent from the entire Canyon. Follow the link below listen to Dr. Ron Neller, who is a fluvial geomorphologist, explain why the geologic column is disconfirming evidence for an old earth…and instead affirms the biblical account of a global flood
Notice from Ball’s comments that he assumes that the accumulation of the layers takes “incredibly vast” amounts of time and the “vast intervals of time are necessary”. He completely ignores the Biblical account of the global flood in his question-begging claims of extended time. Never does he consider that the layers formed rapidly during and shortly after the year-long flood. Were Dr. Ball’s view true, then there would be no distinct layers. If the layers were indeed exposed to the elements for millions of years of wind/water erosion and the affiliated periods of bioturbation, the layers would be indistinct as in figure 4 below. Be instead we find that each layer is perfectly distinct as if it were never exposed to erosion or bioturbation as in figure 1 (like we would expect from the global flood)
He did however notice that the layers were sedimentary (laid down by water) and bearing marine fossils…just as Bible-believing Christians would expect since they were deposited by the waters of the global flood
steady marine sedimentation during below sea-level periods…sedimentation rates
Fossils? Let’s discuss fossils
Only the painstakingly slow process of replacement of bone tissue with minerals from the surrounding soil can produce a true fossil…fossils can very rarely form. And since there appears to be an abundance of fossils in the Earth, it is clear that there has been an incredibly long history of life preceding us
He did say 1 correct sentence from above: “fossils can very rarely form”. Why is that? Because fossils only form in very specific conditions: flood conditions. Biological material must be buried rapidly do avoid the scavengers and corruption processes, so that fossilization (mineral replacement of biological material) can occur. He incorrectly concludes that because there are billions of dead things buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the Earth – that it took an incredibly long time. The opposite is true. Because we have a correct historical account given to us in Genesis 6-9, we know that all of the air-breathing creatures not on the ark were buried by catastrophic deluge in judgment for the sin of mankind. Contrary to what Dr. Ball has claimed, ALL of the evidence is in strong support of the Biblical account of a global flood. I cover this evidence in a blog post, here. Those, who deny this catastrophic worldwide flood, are described as “scoffers” by Peter
Other geological studies have examined processes believed to be rather constant in time such as rates of coral reef build-up, tectonic plate motion, mountain building, certain weathering and erosion rates, and even the rate of continental mass build-up
Unfortunately, Dr. Ball is wrong about ALL of these items. They not only disconfirm the old earth paradigm, in which he believes, they are STRONG confirmation of the biblical timescale held by young earth creationists
Coral Reef Buildup – “Pandora Reef is approximately 10 metres in thickness; 1.8 metres of this coral has grown in the last 118 years. On this basis the whole 10 metre thickness of coral that makes up this reef would have taken only about 660 years to grow!”
Mountain Building – All mountain ranges in the world are evidently young. Were they millions of years old, they would be smoothly rounded by the erosion forces of wind/water/ice
Erosion Rates – The continents are definitevely NOT billions of years old as has been claimed. “At the present rate of erosion, all of the continents would be reduced to sea level in 10 Ma (10 millions years)”. 10 million years is the UPPER limit. If you take into account the monumental erosion rates after the global flood, the continents look exactly as we would expect if the global flood took place about 4500 years ago.
Exactly opposite of what Dr. Ball claimed, the evidence is strongly in favor of biblical creation and disconfirms the assertions of old earthers. It’s doubtful that Dr. Ball has researched the overwhelming scientific evidences of a young Earth/universe that corresponds with the biblical account, but if you’re interested, so can see 101 of them here.
Radiometric Dating
Radiometric dating is the method of using nature’s natural clocks to date events such as when rocks were first formed
Radiometric dating has many problems of which advocates are completely unaware. I covered many of the problems with radiometric dating in this article, so there’s no need to duplicate the effort here. But in short, since radiometric dating shows itself to be completely wrong on the samples that we have seen formed, why should we trust the dates that this extrapolation gives for unknown/unseen samples?
Lunar Geology
Precise dating of the birth of our Earth is difficult based only on knowledge of the Earth’s geology and radiometric dating of its rocks, primarily since primordial rocks may not have formed until long after the Earth’s initial formation
True. Based on his presuppositions (extrapolations), dating Earth is difficult. Based on my presuppositions (The Truth of the Bible), dating the Earth is much easier.
So while no rocks can be found older than about 3.8 billion years old on Earth, the Earth itself is older than this. We must go outside the Earth to get a more accurate measurement, namely the Moon
This line of reasoning is related to his assumptions about radiometric dating, but notice how even before he applies a “scientific test”, he assumes (in bold above) “the Earth itself is older than this.” Not for scientific reasons, but ideological ones
Rocks brought back from these missions (Apollo) have been dated up to 4.3 billion years old, confirmed through measurements using several different isotopes
Again, you see how even though he categorized this Lunar argument as separate from the others, it is a regurgitation of the radiometric dating argument with its unwarranted assumptions.
On the contrary, the moon is actually strong evidence that the Earth/moon system is NOT billions of years old. Because the moon recesses (moves away) from the Earth at a measurable rate in accordance with Kepler’s third law of planetary motion (conservation of angular momentum), we know that the moon could only be as old as 1.5 billion years since at that time, the moon and Earth would be touching. Again 1.5 billion years is the UPPER limit of time. Life on Earth would be impossible for much less time than that if the the distance to the moon were 1/4, 1/2, or even 2/3 of its current distance, the tides gravitational effects on the Earth would be too destructive to sustain life. So, instead of proving a billions of years old creation, the moon specifically refutes that belief and is affirmation of a young Earth.
Meteorites
While iron meteorites have been found not to have the long-lived radioactive isotopes needed for dating, they are invaluable for dating the Earth, since they provide us with pristine samples of primordial lead, whose isotopic ratios yield the original lead isotopic ratios on Earth, which have since then been modified by the daughter products from Uranium and Thorium decays. By this method we find the Earth to be 4.6 billion years old
Dr. Ball again relies on radiometric dating for this line of evidence. So there’s nothing new here. But if we’d like to talk about the philosophical implications of objects orbiting the sun, how do they scientifically account for short-term comets? Many comets disintegrate completely in only a few trips around the sun, yet these short term comets persist. If the solar system were truly billions of years old, there would be no more short term comets. Their rescue device for their old universe view is that some unseen source provides new comets every now and then. It’s unscientific, but they try to protect their worldview from falsification.
Stellar Astronomy
Are there non-radiometric methods, which can be used to determine such vast ages? Yes, and the natural clocks they depend upon are very reliable…Nuclear fusion is a powerful source of energy we can understand…This energy conversion has been occurring steadily in the core of our Sun, where temperatures are sufficiently high enough, for as long as Earth has been around, thus bathing the Earth with heat. From the rate of energy produced and the supply of fuel initially inside the reaction core of the Sun, we can determine its lifetime. As mentioned previously, this is approximately 10 billion years
What were the initial conditions? What was the Hydrogen:Helium ratio when the sun was created by God on Day 4? How do you know that the rate of fuel consumption has always been the same for nearly 5 billion years? How do you overcome the Faint Young-Sun Paradox?
Other stars have been dated to be much older than ours, up to 14 billion years old. In fact, innumerable stars have already exhausted their supply of fuel and met their deaths. A star dies by running out of the very fuel that sustains an outward pressure to prevent its own self-gravity from collapsing it. The larger stars die rather violently, in a process called a supernova
The remnants of supernova are supposedly visible for many millions of years after their demise. Over time astronomers have measured the rate at which supernova occur, and can make predictions on how long a galaxy has existed based on that rate. If the Milky Way is billions of years old as Dr. Ball and the atheists think, there should be about 7500 super nova remnants in various stages of decay. If the Milky Way galaxy is only as old as the Bible says (about 7000 years old) then there should be only about 125. How many do we actually observe? About 200. By this “clock” the biblical predictions are much closer, while Dr. Ball’s predictions are off by a factor of about 40
The Universal Expansion
How do we extract an age for the universe? Astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated in the 1920’s that the universe is expanding; by showing that the further away a galaxy is from us the faster it appears to be moving away from us. This expansion rate tells us how long the universe has taken to expand to the immense size it is today. But it has been very difficult to determine this expansion rate accurately until recently…Combining measurements of several different distance indicators such as variable stars and distant supernovae, we have narrowed down the age of the universe to approximately 14 billion years old, uncertain to 0.5 billion years
I’m not quite old enough to remember when the scientific consensus agreed with the Bible that the universe was about 6000 years old, but the scientific community believes that the universe is aging faster than anything else in existence. I asked Grok to collect data from around the planet across time on how quickly the universe has been (supposedly) aging, and this is what is has come up with:
1800AD – the universe was 6000 years old
1840AD – the universe was ~100,000 years old
1850AD – the universe was ~1,000,000 years old
1860AD – the universe was ~10,000,000 years old
1870AD – the universe was ~20,000,000-100,000,000 years old (±10-50 million)
1880AD – the universe was ~20,000,000-100,000,000 years old (±10-50 million)
1890AD – the universe was ~20,000,000-100,000,000 years old (±10-50 million)
1900AD – the universe was ~100,000,000-1,000,000,000 years old
1910AD – the universe was ~1,000,000,000-2,000,000,000 years old (±.5-1 billion)
1920AD – the universe was ~1,000,000,000-10,000,000,000 years old (±1-5 billion)
1930AD – the universe was ~2,000,000,000-10,000,000,000 years old (±1-5 billion)
1940AD – the universe was ~2,000,000,000-5,000,000,000 years old (±1-2 billion)
1950AD – the universe was ~3,000,000,000-6,000,000,000 years old (±1-2 billion)
1960AD – the universe was ~10,000,000,000-20,000,000,000 years old (±5-10 billion)
1970AD – the universe was ~10,000,000,000-20,000,000,000 years old (±5 billion)
1980AD – the universe was ~10,000,000,000-20,000,000,000 years old (±3-5 billion)
1990AD – the universe was ~10,000,000,000-15,000,000,000 years old (±2-3 billion)
2000AD – the universe was ~13,000,000,000-14,000,000,000 years old (±1-2 billion)
2020AD – the universe was ~13,800,000,000 years old (±.02 billion)
2025AD – the universe is 13,800,000,000 years old (±.02 billion)
The parentheses in the above notes are the error bars. Error bars are the estimated error possibilities on either side of the possible date range. I do think it’s extremely humorous how the error bars in 1960 included the original Biblical timeframe of about 6000 years and how each new “age”, was outside the previous “age” error bars. It confirms that as biological evolution began to have a greater effect on the modern academic paradigm, the universe/Earth had to age at an appropriate rate to accommodate its assumptions. In 2019 a scientific paper claimed that the universe was only 11.4 billion years old. The error bars at this time was only 20 million years, but suddenly over 2 billion years went missing?!?!?? How could billions of years suddenly go missing? They must have found those years, because the it’s back to 13.8 billion. In 2024, there was a peer-reviewed paper saying that the latest findings showed that the universe is a whopping 26.7 billion years old…almost 14,000,000,000 years OUTSIDE the error bars. What’s a few billion years between scientific allies? To be fair, this paper has not been widely accepted, but it goes to show that atheists, naturalists, and sadly some Christians are always looking for more time in the universe to accommodate their evolutionary (whether galactic, chemical, stellar, planetary or biological) beliefs.
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
Additional evidence of a beginning 14 billion years ago is the leftover remnant of the initial explosion nicknamed the “Big Bang”, which was discovered first in 1965, nearly 20 years after it was predicted. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), which pervades all of space. It is the radiation released near the beginning of the universal expansion, and has been cooling off gradually ever since, until today it is now a chilly 2.73 degrees above absolute zero temperature.
Chilly indeed, but not nearly enough. There are MANY problems with the Big Bang Theory, but #3 in the linked list shows the CMBR to be evidence NOT of an ancient universe but of a light time travel problem for naturalists. Based on their assumptions, the universe should not be so thermodynamically balanced.
So, what we have found as we’ve critically analyzed the claims of Dr. Ball is that instead of supporting an ancient universe like the atheists believe, we find that the observations are correctly seen to affirm the biblical timeline of only about 6,000 years. There’s no reason for Christians to capitulate to the modern academic paradigm. God’s Word is absolutely trustworthy as written and needs no injection of worldliness in order to accommodate their beliefs about origins. The Bible is NOT a science textbook, and that’s a good thing so that it doesn’t need to be completely rewritten every few years as new discoveries change the theories. God’s revelation cannot be refuted. I’m sure Dr. Ball is a friendly Christian professor, but his writings about Christianity trying to accommodate worldliness are unnecessary at best and deceptive at worst.
“The mind is a terrible thing to waste” – Frederick Douglass Patterson
“… a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.” – G. Martin
“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” – Gandhi
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” – Plutarch
“Mind over matter” – Unknown
“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!” – Mark Twain
Minds are indeed amazing! But how did we, as humans, get our minds? From where do minds arise? Did God give us minds in order to praise Him, contemplate/discover the mysteries of his creation, and be creative…or did the natural forces of evolution cobble together particles such that these particles could comprehend the cosmos and even itself?
After posting these “Can Evolution Explain…articles, I inevitably hear evolutionists respond with some form of: “get your paper peer-reviewed and only then can you get your Nobel Prize for disproving evolution. Until then STFU!”
To be clear, these “Can Evolution Explain…” articles are NOT intended to disprove evolution. They are simply meant to analyze the assertions of evolutionists to see whether the subject matter is actually evidence for evolution by their own standards. It’s an internal critique. What I find in all of these articles is that what’s been proclaimed as “mOuntAinS oF eVidenCe” for evolution is really just story-telling and assumptions. We’ll see if Dennett’s book is more of the same bluster or actual evidence.
Another objection that I anticipate from the faithful evolutionists is “Dennett is a philosopher…not a scientist. If you want to prove creationism, you need to address the scholarly works.” I refer you to the last paragraph AND Dennett cites the latest of the scientific works that address this topic. AND Dennett’s own Wikipedia page calls him a “cognitive scientist”. There will be no shortage of “papers” that the devout evolutionists will propose that I must analyze. I don’t have the time or the desire to expose EVERY single article, but I do analyze the top authors and the articles that evolutionists THINK is actually evidence as shown above. Hopefully, given the example of my analysis, other Christians will be motivated to expose how the “mOuntAinS oF eVidenCe” for evolution are really massive canyons. These articles are not intended to prove creationism or anything else. They are meant to push back against the dominant paradigm rather than just blindly accepting what is being taught. If these works of evolution can survive scrutiny, then so be it, but so far, I’m finding that their claims are impotent.
Let’s see if the powers of evolutioncan explain the origins of mind. In objections to some of my previous articles, some skeptics have erroneously claimed that I did not review the most eminent authorities on the subjects, but what will they say of Daniel Dennett? From the Wikipedia article, Dr. Dennett “is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.” In 2017 he wrote “From Bacteria to Bach and Back – The Evolution of Minds” which is his case for how evolution can produce minds. I’ll review this book below to see if the case for evolution being able to explain minds is in fact airtight
Here’s how this works: I will post the quotes from the book in red and then just below the quote, I’ll post my analysis in the default black font. I have added bold to key words from Dennett throughout, so this is just a note to say that the bold does not appear in the original work.
How come there are minds? And how is it possible for minds to ask and answer this question? The short answer is that minds evolved and created thinking tools that eventually enabled minds to know how minds evolved, and even to know how these tools enabled them to know what minds are.
It is a difficult question for naturalists to answer. If the cosmos were just a collection of particles, then by what mechanism or principle do aggregated particles perceive themselves or something outside themselves? Perhaps Dennett will explain more than just his wild assertion: “eVolUtiOn dUn iT!” as the book progresses.
p7
Then an amazing thing happened: two different prokaryotes…collided. Collisions of this sort presumably happened countless numbers of times, but on (at least) one occasion, one cell engulfed the other, and instead of destroying the other and using the parts as fuel or building materials…it let is go on living, and, by dumb luck, found itself fitter
An amazing thing as Dennett put it is a synonym for magic. God-deniers think that it’s a pejorative to attribute God’s amazing works in creation to magic, but they too require unexplainable magic/miracles for their view. I highlighted the word “presumably” above and throughout the book we see this words and its synonyms ubiquitously. The evolutionists have no evidence for their view that nature can produce life or multi-cellular life or consciousness or minds or morality but since all of these things exist now, they are FORCED to assume that nature somehow “presumably” did it. Need I even make a comment about Dennett’s use of the phrase “by dumb luck” in his comprehensive book explaining how evolution produced minds?
Also on pg7
We read almost every day of Google or Amazon or General Motors gobbling up some little start-up company…but the original exploitation of this tactic gave evolution its first great boost
There are three items in this short paragraph worth discussing because Dennett makes use of these fallacies throughout his book:
Dennett recognizes how intelligent entities (Google, Amazon, GM) make decisions based on foresight, purpose, and profit. The processes of evolution have access to NONE of these tools. Dennett’s use of applying intelligent agency and intelligent design as if evolution can do the same things, is a fallacy that persists throughout his book
Tactic: “A plan or action for achieving a goal; a maneuver.” – American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The processes of evolution does not plan, has no goals, and has no purpose. Yet throughout his book Dennett imbues evolution with these powers. It’s a shame that a philosopher of his caliber would lazily write his book on the powers of evolution using such specious reasoning
Reification Fallacy: “a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.” Another of Dennett’s common fallacies is his ubiquitous use of the reification fallacy. He gives the abstract concept of evolution anthropomorphous and sometimes divine powers. This fallacy appears so often in his book that during my reading & annotating, I started writing an RF with a circle around it to denote the prevailing use of the reification fallacy
If at this point, you’ve run out of time and cannot read this tome of a post, you’ve got the substance of Dennett’s book. Nowhere is Dennett able to provide evidence for or verification of Evolution’s ability to produce minds. While his book is well-written and Dennett is both well-read and a skillful writer, his book fell drastically short of his intended purpose. But there’s plenty more review if you have the stamina.
“Over time these eukaryotes grew much larger, more complex, more competent, better.”
What mechanism increases size, complexity and competence? Dennett leaves the answers to these questions to the imagination and the ambiguous nature of the word “evolve”
So, it is claimed, evolution cannot get started without a helping hand from an Intelligent Designer. This is a defective argument, a combination of misdirection and a failure of imagination as we shall see.
For Dennett to rely on imagination for evolution to create minds rather than evidence, lets us know right away that he will wish his views into existence throughout.
In a highly influential essay, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) coined the phrase “Panglossian paradigm” as a deliberately abusive term for the brand of biology-adaptationism-that relies on the methodological principle of assuming, until proven otherwise, that all parts of an organism are good for something.
This concept is completely at odds with one of the primary assumptions of materialism: purposelessness. How can purposelessness produce “good for something” (purpose) let alone ALL parts of an organism being good for something? It’s essentially, “assume nature did it unless proven otherwise.” This is a core doctrine of naturalism.
P31 was a particularly juicy use of fallacies, incompatible ideas, and guesses
I went into this book looking for evidence of the evolution of minds. What I found between the covers was Dennett’s temporal subjective opinion, fallacies, and imaginations of evolutionary powers. No evidence was forthcoming
The space of reasons is bound by norms, by mutual recognition of how things ought to go-the right way, not the wrong way, to play the reason-giving game.
God-deniers have a penchant for stealing moral language from Christians although their worldview cannot account for them. How do you know what is “right”? What is the “wrong way”? How do you get an “ought” from what is? “Norms”?!?!?? How did an amoral purposeless blind pitiless indifferent cosmos produce “norms”?
P43
Nature has endowed us with…
This is isn’t just the reification fallacy, this is the divination fallacy. Dennett gives nature divine powers several times throughout the book.
Some of you may think I’m making this stuff up at this point, which is why I’m sprinkling in a few screenshots of his book
On pg 48 Dennett employs the imagination-of-the-gaps in an effort to build his case for the evolution of minds, and on page 49, he invokes the phrases “dumb luck” , “just lucky” and “lucky-to-be-gifted” in place of scientific evidence for his case.
On p55 Dennett introduces his readers to the Turing machine. He talks knowledgably about Alan Turing’s computer, which deciphered the German code, developed during WW2. Turing’s machine had no comprehension of the code that was developed, so Dennett felt it reasonable to apply this concept to biology. He writes on pg 57
What Darwin and Turing did was envisage the most extreme version of this point: all the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more competent-and hence comprehending-systems.
It’s an embarrassing conflation for Dennett. He’s essentially claiming that because Turing could intelligently design & engineer uncomprehending machines, then nature can too. All Dennett is doing is building up the overwhelming case for intelligent design. Unfortunately, for Dennett, he builds his case on the Turing machine and references throughout the rest of the book how nature just does whatever intelligent designers do…just without the intelligence. It’s lazy and an unjustified attribution to nature.
Another unfortunate (for evolutionists) analogy the Dennett proposes is the way that elevators can travel from the bottom floors to the top without comprehension, so nature can uncomprehendingly grow in complexity. Again, he builds his case on intelligently designed machines. This whole time, I thought he was going to describe how purposeless, unguided forces could construct reasoning minds from numerous successive slight modifications, but Dennett continually invokes intelligence as the source. And he rationalizes this writing by just adding in the disclaimer (p52) “their excellent designs are not products of an intelligent designer” as if his disclaimer carries weight.
p74 is filled with more equivocation of intelligently designed tools with natural forces. Dennett compares the programming of artificial intelligence, the accumulation of knowledge in encyclopedias, and the internet to things that he feels that nature can do although he offers no actual evidence for these assertions…just empty comparisons.
On the following page, Dennett invokes the sciency-sounding phrase: “emergent effect” rather than providing evidence of the evolution of minds. You may have heard evolutionists and naturalists employ “emergent properties” or “emergent effect” when trying to explain logic, or life, or consciousness, or minds, or morality with the dismissive quip: “Well, an aggregation of sand particles produces sand dunes, so an aggregation of stardust produces minds”. It’s a monumental and illogical leap, but they present it as if it’s factual. Don’t let their bluster distract from the fact that there is no evidence for particles producing minds. Dennett would have been more persuasive in his case had he demonstrated step-by-step how natural selection acting on random mutations (actual evolution) could have produced minds rather than relying on intelligent design analogies
Could something as intellectually sophisticated as a digital computer, for instance, ever evolve by bottom-up natural selection?
A consistent evolutionist must believe Yes as the answer to that question. They believe that humans are the result of natural selection, so the ultimate source of computers, smart phones, and all technology was ultimately brought about by natural selection.
If an evolutionist is inconsistent and like Dennett, dismisses the idea outright, that natural selection can produce something as intellectually sophisticated as a computer, they are being ignorant of the fact that the simplest biological cell is far more sophisticated than a computer.
Lastly, natural selection is a destructive force. Natural selection never produces anything. It can only thin the population of the unfit. Several times throughout the book, Dennett incorrectly describes natural selection as some sort of creative force.
It’s not just the reification fallacy – Dennett give deification powers to nature as he uses words like “gifted…bestowed…blessed.” Naturalism literally uses religious worship language when talking about nature. He capitalizes Nature several times in his book. Paul’s letter to the Roman church couldn’t be anymore prescient than when he wrote “claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling moral man and birds and animals and creeping things…they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”
P98-99
Next come the Skinnerian creatures, who have, in addition to their hard-wired dispositions, the key disposition to adjust their behavior in reaction to ‘reinforcements’; they more or less randomly generate new behaviors to test the in the world…The merely Darwinian creature is ‘hard-wired‘, the beneficiary of clever designs it has no need to understand…it has been designed by evolution…learns by trial-and-error…and is hard-wired to favor forays that have ‘reinforcing’ outcomes. It doesn’t have to understand why it prefers these trial-and-error behaviors when it does; it is the beneficiary of this simple design-improvement ratchet
Notice all of the ‘design’ words from above. It sounds like a computer manual. Dennett gives nature the power to design with a wave of his pen. These creatures just “have” foundationally necessary features?!?!? Where did they get them? Where did these “hard-wired dispositions” come from? He never explains, but he builds on these unjustified foundations. I expected more evidence and fewer unjustified assumptions, but Dennett’s assertion game is strong!
Interestingly, Dennett’s chapter 6 is titled “What is Information?” The absolutely weakest link in the evolutionary chain garners a whole chapter that reinforces the theory of intelligent design. Dennett refers to DNA, JPEG digital photo compression technology, exquisite paintings, Mathematical modeling, economic analysis, poker, & empiricism, but you’ll notice that the key element to all of these is intelligence…not unguided numerous successive slight modifications. If nature could produce design without a Designer, why did he use intelligent design analogies as his foundation?
But ch6 is an important chapter for Dennett as he tries to build a key concept in his theory, Memes, as abstract progenitors of information. Dennett doesn’t tie information to memes until chapter 10, but it’s important to see how he recognizes the foundational nature of information…even though he is never able to hide the fact that information always comes from minds and (even though he never says it) from the eternal Mind. Dennett defines a meme from the Oxford English Dictionary as “an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means.”
As noted earlier, <reification fallacy next> evolution by natural selection is astonishingly good at finding needles in haystacks, almost invisible patterns that, when adventitiously responded to, yield a benefit to the responder. Just as the origin of life depends on getting the right “feedstock” molecules in the right place at the right time, there has to be raw material in the variation in the population that includes, by coincidence) some heretofore functionless (or underutilized or redundant or vestigial) feature that happens to be heritable and that covaries with the potentially useful information in the world.
You can see above that Dennett both reifies natural selection and then grants power to that abstract concept that it outside the scope of its supposed abilities. We’ve been told that natural selection can preserve that which assists in reproductive fitness and culls organisms without the fittest traits. But Dennett claims that natural selection can preserve “potentially useful information” as if there is somehow foresight and planning for future use of this potential information. And he does it again on the very next page: 121
Natural selection cannot preserve traits that have no effect on reproductive fitness.
This may be the most important question that Dennett asks in the whole book. Sadly, his answer is sorely lacking:
Evolution is all about turning bugs into features, turning noise into signal and the fuzzy boundaries between these categories are not optional; the opportunistic open-endedness of natural selection depends on them. This is in fact the key to Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning: creationists ask, rhetorically, “where does all the information in the DNA come from?” and Darwin’s answer is simple: it comes from the gradual, purposeless, nonmiraculous transformation of noise into signal, over billions of years.
It makes a cool bumper sticker for someone to claim that evolution can turn bugs into features, but the knowledge claims of empiricism is a bug, not a feature. Several things to note about this paragraph:
If it were true that minds could be constructed by natural selection acting on numerous successive slight modifications (random mutations), there would be evidence and Dennett would have demonstrated this evidence. But he never does. The book is empty of demonstrable evidence. It has only just-so-stories with reification fallacies and assumptions built on intelligent design analogies
Charles Darwin did not have an answer for information or genes of DNA because he lives in a time before the discoveries of genetic information.
Perhaps Dennett intended to speak for the all Darwinists when he claimed “Darwin’s answer”. Gradual keystrokes cannot be preserved by natural selection since the accumulated code would be too slow. Purposeless keystrokes could not be preserved because they do not create functional code, and functionless code cannot be preserved. The assertion that gradual, purposeless keystrokes can create instruction code that has greater complexity than mobile phone operating systems is both undemonstrable and unreasonable.
P125-126
Even the loss of organs and their functions counts as improvement when the cost of maintaining them is factored in. The famous cave fish that have abandoned vision are engaged in cost cutting, which any company executive will tell you is design improvement.
But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to hear Dennett herald the powers of evolution to produce NEW traits…specifically the mind. Sure, continual losses of information, organs, and functionality can count as “improvement” in the same way that taking the doors off, stripping out the air conditioning system and removing all of the seats in a car will improve gas mileage. But you can’t get from an automobile to a starship will continual losses. You can’t get from bacteria to Bach with loss after loss after loss. Dennett is supposed to be explaining the opposite of loss. Where’s the evidence for the massive gains of information that would permit a bacteria to produce beautiful music????
Chapter 7 had some interesting figures regarding “Darwinian Spaces”. There’s no evidence presented, but it does help to see the way that evolutionists think
P149
There is much more to be explored in this evolution of cultural evolution and its role in creating our minds, but first we should look more closely at how it got started. Like the origin of life, this is an unsolved problem, and a very difficult one.
This is a stunning admission from the man who was supposed to be telling us how minds evolved. Like the origin of life problem for naturalists, the evolution of minds is an unsolved and very difficult problem. I agree, and there is a vast list of problems for which naturalism has no answers.
P151-153
An oviparous fish has not time for swimming lessons in it youth and has no parents to teach it; it has to have a swimming “instinct” built in…One way or another, brains develop competences…The glory of programming language is that once you get your design clearly written in the language of choice-Java or C++ or Python-you can count on the compiler program to take it from there, creating a file in machine language that can be executed. Computer programming is thus not so much top-down design as top-halfway-down design; the grubby details of the “bottom” of the design (the engine room if you like) is something you can ignore, unless the program you are writing is a new compiler.
Exactly. The information has to come from somewhere. Dennett never does demonstrate the origin of the built in instincts of the oviparous fish, but he knows that this information is needed, so he assumes nature must have done it sometime in the past and then preserved it.
I couldn’t help adding Dennett’s continual use of intelligent design as an analogy for evolution. Even compilers were written by intelligent programmers. There’s just no evidence for him to draw from in his attempt to build a case for evolution producing minds, so he gives the analogy of intelligent computer programmers working hard writing thousands of lines of code, and just expects his readers to imagine evolution doing the same thing…just without intelligence. It’s dreadful science, but it’s humorous reading
P164-165
Top-down intelligent designs depend on foresight, which evolution utterly lacks…Foresightless, backward-“looking” evolution by natural selection is not intelligent design but still powerful R&D, sufficiently discerning so that the general division of labor in the brain can be laid down in the genetic recipes that have been accumulated and refined over the billion years or so of mobile life.
True, evolution lacks foresight. But he goes from something that is true, right into the reification fallacy by attributing discernment to the abstract concept of evolution. This is a common theme in Dennett’s work.
P195-200
Perhaps…Perhaps…might…might be…somehow…perhaps…perhaps…it is possible…perhaps…in any case…probably…Almost certainly…we can imagine…may be…perhaps…probably…probably…possible
You may have thought you were reading a science book where Dennett will show demonstrations of his claims, but you can see from the caveats, it’s not really very compelling. It’s just “maybe/perhaps” all the way down
Microsoft Bing AI-generated art
P239
“Genetic evolution (“instincts”) can’t operate fast enough to do the job, leaving a yawning gap to be filled by memetics”
According to Bickerton, “The cognitive gap between humans and nonhuman animals is evolution’s Achilles heel” (p.5), and it cannot be explained, in his opinion, by any account of the straightforward natural selection of increasingly powerful communication behaviors leading eventually to language…this is reminiscent of the familiar creationist arguments that until the eye, say, or the wing, or the bacterial flagellum is fully designed it is useless and hence will not be sustained over generations, a you-can’t-get-here-from-there challenge to the evolutionist. But Bickerton is no creationist…he provides his solution to the “paradox of cognition” (p.79) “If we rule out selective processes and magical versions of evolution, what’s left? The answer is just two things: words and their neural consequences. The invention-for it can only have been an invention albeit it not a conscious or even an intentional one-of symbolic units had crucial consequences for the brain.” I relish the irony of the passage, with its dichotomy between evolution and invention, and its postulation of an unconscious Promethean leap of creativity”
Both Derek Bickerton (in his book “More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution”) and Dennett recognize the unfathomably massive gap in reasoning/cognition between animals and humans for which evolution must account. They strip away the things they see won’t work: natural selection, and have to propose something for which the purposeless universe is incapable: purposeful invention.
Regarding this same paragraph, notice Dennett’s use of the phrase “Promethean leap“. This is in reference to the Greek mythology of the god of fire, Prometheus, defying the Olympian gods by stealing fire from them and bestowing it to man. This provided a huge leap in technological advancement for humanity for which humanity (according to Greek mythology) could not possibly have solved on their own. Just 11 pages prior, Dennett admits that the evidence for the evolution of minds could not have been preserved in the fossil record (and I agree), so to solve the paradox, he must speculate a giant leap forward…a miracle of invention. But he cannot call it a miracle. He must just call it irony and a dichotomy…a paradox and a Promethean leap. It’s reminiscent of the problem that paleontologists encountered when searching for missing transitional fossils that would confirm evolution. Since those fossils were completely missing, they proposed a rescue device called Punctuated Equilibrium, which asserts that evolution goes through cycles of short periods of “lightning fast” change, which don’t get preserved in the fossil record – and all of the confirming fossils just didn’t get preserved, because evolution happened too fast. The evidence for evolution remains missing, but it is (they claim) really just more evidence for evolution, because it’s got a sciency-sounding moniker: punctuated equilibrium. Don’t fall for the bluster of fancy monikers.
On P264 Dennett continues this discussion with Bickerton’s book where he says “must-have…probably…must have…Somehow” leading to the hinge point of this review and the final death-knell admission for Dennett’s case on p265. I had to include a screenshot of the page, because you might not believe me if you don’t see it with your own eyes:
It is indeed a dilemma, but more than that, as Dennett admits, his foundation for the origin of humans minds (language) is still an “unsolved problem”, and the proposed solutions have been and continue to be “just-so stories”.
When I read this paragraph above, I literally laughed out loud. Did you catch what he said? “We are getting confidently more uncertain” and Dennett says of this confident uncertainty: it’s “an embarrassment of riches” for researchers to find a solution. It would be comedy at its finest if Dennett didn’t believe that knowing nothing is an embarrassment of riches. It is an embarrassment for them, but there are no riches; it’s the-emperor-has-no-clothes of evolutionary evidence. What else need be said? The case is closed. Evolution cannot solve the unsolvable.
One final screenshot to reinforce Dennett’s misuse of language and understanding of evolution. On P339, he again reifies evolution as if it has special powers:
But as we all know, natural selection is a culling force. It destroys the information of the unfit, and this descriptive ‘force” has no inherent creative powers to generate anything.
There are many more pages that could have been included in this review, but none of them solve the evolutionist’s problem. The case presented by the leading evolutionary philosopher, while entertaining & including the latest scientific searching, included grand story-telling but no evidence.
Evolution is false because it is in conflict with God’s eternal Word. And as we have seen, from even their top word-smiths, evolution cannot account for minds or anything else in reality BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS.
Dr. Steven Ball is a professor at LeTourneau University in Texas and has written several papers criticizing the historical Christian position of young earth creation. In many of my online interactions, I have had self-identifying atheists post links to his papers as if they are the final word on how Christendom must deny the Biblical account in favor of the secular narrative of origins. This and maybe other blog posts will review and address Ball’s papers
His first paper is titled “A Christian Physicist Examines the Age of the Earth”. I will note his comments in red with my comments directly underneath in the default black. Each of his chapters will be divided into a distinct blog post to keep the posts from being too long
Dr. Steven Ball is a physics professor at LeTourneau University. He has written a few papers advocating for old earthism, that could use some cross-examination. His first paper is titled “A Christian Physicist Examines the Age of the Earth”. I will note his comments in red with my comments directly underneath in the default black. Each of his chapters will be divided into a distinct blog post to keep the posts from being too long
In a nutshell, the premise of Creation Science is that the Bible gives us answers to many questions also addressed by science
Right from the beginning, he subtly elevates the modern academic paradigm (which he conflates with science throughout) as superior to the Bible. This position of authority that he grants gives him the interpretive permission to redefine the words and concepts of the Bible in order to accommodate his interpretation of the modern academic paradigm (MAP). Authority is the BIG issue in this discussion, and young earth creationists have the epistemic understanding that the Bible is the authoritative principium rather than MAP.
Secondly, Ball like many, who are familiar with this discussion, think that the age of the earth is a question that is answered by science. This is wrong in at least two ways
The Bible is not a science textbook. The Bible is mostly a history book. Orthodox Christianity recognizes that the Bible is the inerrant inspired Word of God. So, what God has revealed about the past cannot be refuted. Since what God has revealed about the past is in conflict with what is currently being taught about origins in (what some people call) the scientific community, there is tension. Christians who wish to be faithful to the scientific community are then faced with the need for reconciliation between what is taught in the Bible with MAP. So, they choose to redefine Genesis as some figurative myth and say “oh, the Bible isn’t a science book” and “the Bible tells us how to go to heaven and science tells us how the heavens go” These are cute bumper stickers, but it is again as subtle dismissal of what the Bible has revealed about history
Age is not a question that is best answered by science. Science measures in the present. To get information about the past, which would be more accurately termed forensics, one measures items in the present and then (in combination with assumptions) EXTRAPOLATES into the past to form a theory. The further back in time one extrapolates, the greater the margin of error. The BEST way to determine age is historical documentation. If I want to know how old I am, I do not radiometric date the elements in my body and extrapolate into the past based on the ratio of radiometric particles. The best way would be for me to check my birth certificate or ask my Jedi father. In 1992 the rocks from Mt St Helens were dated anywhere from 350,000 years old to 2,800,000 years old depending on the method. But the ACTUAL date of the rocks was 12 years. When was the Statue of Liberty brought to NY harbor? You can measure the amount of rust on the surface and extrapolate into the past, or you can check historical records. That’s not to say that forensics cannot be of assistance in determining age, but as shown, if there is documentation of age, it is more reliable that extrapolation into the unknown past.
Ball began his argument by standing on his credentials
As a Christian physicist, I’ve been blessed with the freedom and opportunity to examine the scientific evidence for the age of the Earth in some detail, and have concluded that it emphatically points to an age of around 4.6 billion years
But as we have just discussed, scientific fields like physics can only (at best) assist as a forensics tool to find past ages. The most useful tool for finding past ages is documentation and the Bible provides this. Ball’s acclamation of his credentials for determining the age of the earth is like a Formula 1 driver coming to an NBA court and telling the 7 foot basketball players how to run faster because he drives really fast. Forensics has its place, but historical documentation trumps extrapolation for answering age questions.
But then again, a massive conspiracy of manufactured false evidence from many fields of scientific research for an older Earth and universe is a bit farfetched even for conspiracy fans
Although there have been fraudulent assertions, persistent peer-reviewed articles retracted, and monetary incentives to remain within the bounds of the modern academic paradigm, most who hold to biblical creation do not assert that there is a massive old-earth conspiracy. Biblical creationists simply recognize that the question of the age of the earth comes down to authority of the Bible and assumptions. I have already discussed the issue of authority above, but origins theories are rife with unrecognized assumptions
Uniformitarianism – The belief that processes have continued from the beginning exactly as they always have. There is an implicit denial of catastrophism including the global flood. Old earthers tend to deny the global flood, so they interpret the evidence from the global flood as if all accumulated soil layers, erosion, tectonics movements, and radiometric decay rates have never changed. It is an assumption that purposefully denies or incorrectly reinterprets Genesis 6-9 as if it were a minor flood in the middle east. There are HUGE theological problems with this view that have been covered here
Popularity – Because the idea of old earth is so popular amongst academics, then it mUsT be true. This leads to an a priori assumption that old earthism is true because popular
So it follows that science and the Bible should be giving us consistent messages by virtue of the same authorship. When they appear to conflict, it could be a problem in our understanding of science or of the Scriptures
This is true. It is the very heart of the matter. It’s a shame that he did not spend more time elucidating his views here, but we can see from his arguments from whence his views are birthed. Ball grips firmly to the modern academic paradigm and thusly feels justified in redefining the Bible to accommodate it
Sadly, Ball not only believes in old earthism, but has swallowed the Neo-Darwinian lure that is so pervasive today:
From a scientific perspective, Darwin’s theory appears to have supporting evidence from a number of fields (comparative anatomy, the universal genetic code of DNA, geographical distributions of species, the overall progression of life in the fossil record, among others)
None of the interpretations of the “number of fields” has greater weight than what God revealed in the Bible – and the Bible clearly does not teach the same history as the evolutionists. In an attempt to reconcile the obvious differences, Ball and other old earthers redefine what is clearly history to a poetic figurative myth.
Using Dr. Ball’s argument, someone could just as easily say “From a scientific perspective, since there is strong supporting evidence from a number of fields of science, there was no virgin birth, parting of any seas, water to wine, or resurrection. Trust the science.” Elevating something else as the magisterial interpretive authority yields serious heretical problems. Those, who would elevate culture as authoritative, could say “Modern culture recognizes that homosexuality is very normal and should be celebrated, so those who read the Bible as if homosexuality should be condemned do not understand the Bible correctly. The Bible encourages people to be homosexual since Jesus was a homosexual.” As shown, it is reprehensible and inconsistent to propose an magisterial authority OTHER than the Bible.
As a scientist, I support further research into the origins of life. Darwin’s theory should stand or fall on the basis of scientific evidence.
Shouldn’t truth stand or fall on the BASIS of what God has revealed? Notice too that Ball has committed the unpardonable sin (according to the internet atheists): He combined the theory of the origin of life with the Darwinian theory. If he were to try this online, you can be sure that the Darwinists would be shrieking alongside the abiogeneticists. As a Christian, I would have expected for him to start with John 1:3 “All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made” and Colossians 1:16 “For by him (Jesus) all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” From this, we can know with certainty that life (ALL LIFE) was created by God. Searching for an naturalistic origin goes against what God has already told us. There’s no need to “reinvent the wheel”. Ball would be a better scientist if he accepted God’s revelation rather than straining against the goads
“Crises have served to overthrow some of the most deeply entrenched (and incorrect) theories in the past, simply because there were enough thinking people who cared about establishing the truth”
One knowledgeable about the history of scientific thought should be skeptical of the dominant paradigm. Notice how the dominant scientific paradigms of the past have all been refuted. Holding onto Darwinism as if it provided truth since its proponents choose to censor and expel any dissidents is bound for extinction in the same way
1500s Geocentrism – Falsified
1600s Phlogiston – Falsified
1700s Bloodletting – Falsified
1800s Spontaneous Generation – Falsified
1858 Darwinism – Falsification Inevitable
1900s Steady State Theory – Falsified
1980s Inevitable Ice Age – Falsified
2000s Eat mostly carbs (food pyramid) – Falsified
2020s CV19 originated in a wet market from bats. CV19 will kill most of earth’s human population – Falsified
Much of this fighting has been viewed very negatively by the nonChristian community. Forcing the public schools to teach Creation Science would not win nonChristians over to Christ. Certainly not when the premise itself is that science is wrong when it seems to disagree with the Bible. While the scientific community can be faulted for harboring contempt for those who don’t accept the commonly held theories, I would hold my fellow Christians to a higher standard. It does no good to belittle the scientific community. In fact Christians everywhere would benefit from a more healthy respect for science in general
No one wants or is advocating for public schools to teach creation science. Ball is fighting against an argument that no one is making. Even though Ball doesn’t hold himself to the highest standard of accuracy by conflating the modern academic paradigm with science, he blames the Bible-believing Christians for not upholding the “higher standard” of yielding to the modern paradigm
Many scientists who accept an older Earth have clear Christian faith commitments
This is true, but they are inconsistent in their epistemology. At this point, I want to note that Christians can believe in evolution and old earthism since we know from the Bible that salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus alone. We are not saved by the amount of correct information that we believe but by the gift of God’s steadfast mercy. But Christians have been warned by Paul in his epistle to the Colossians “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ”. Old earthism and Darwinism were birthed by worldly thinking not by a commitment to Christ. We must start with the Bible and then see the world through the lens of what God has specially revealed. Conversely, Dr. Ball is telling us to see the Bible through the lens of the modern academic paradigm. It’s exactly backwards to what we as Christians should be doing
As the now popular Christian saying goes, we should not put God in a box. Many miracles described in the Bible may not be understood scientifically, but they are accepted by faith. Likewise, the hand of God may be evident even when science provides us a measure of understanding
With the 1st sentence, I can heartily agree. We ought not put God in the box *of naturalism*, which is what Ball is doing. This is the goal of Ball: teach Christians to question the historic/orthodox Christian understanding of the Bible in favor of the naturalistic explanations. Speaking of miracles – using the same interpretive methodology that Genesis cannot be true because the “science says” that it cannot be done, a skeptic could reject the parting of the Red Sea, a floating axehead, the virgin birth and the resurrection because “science says” that they cannot be done. A consistent methodology would elevate science above everything in scripture. Since I’m sure that Ball accepts the resurrection of Jesus, he is teaching an inconsistent view of scripture.
This author proposes that we try to look at the scientific evidence without any theological filter
This is the naïve assumption that there is no way to view evidence without a bias. It’s the pretended neutrality fallacy. Everyone comes to the evidence with a worldview. One’s worldview can have a basis on revelation from God OR on the basis of something lesser. Ball has chosen to view the evidence through the naturalistic worldview with a theological rider. It’s exactly backwards from what we are told to do in Colossians 2:8 “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ”
We should not deter people from this search by requiring them to reject the very science that is prompting them
Two things here
He is conflating the modern academic paradigm as science again. Science is the pursuit of knowledge, but Ball views it instead as however the naturalistic practitioners of empiricism view the evidence through their presuppositions
If people reject what the Bible says, then no amount of evidence will convince them. Don’t believe me? Then take it up with Jesus from Luke 16: “He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead’”
We’ll pick up Dr. Ball’s arguments from chapter 2 in the next blog post. Until then:
Let me start by saying that I REALLY like the Marvel Avengers story arc (from Iron Man to the Spider-Man: No Way Home). The production quality, the humor, the coherent story arc, the heroism, the casting, the writing, the defeat of the fictional evil that is manifest in reality as the radical environmentalists – ALL are of the highest order. The Marvel movies (if they are not already) will be the defining saga of this generation, in the same way that the original Star Wars movies (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back & Return of the Jedi) were the defining stories of the end of the 20th century.
Having said all of that, there are worldview assumptions buried in the midst of these movies. The worldviews are both naturalism and paganism. And with an unskeptical eye, viewers can adopt these worldviews as basic to the way one sees the universe rather than what God has revealed. My purpose in analyzing these movies for worldview implications is not to bash the stories. Instead, I want my readers to begin to watch movies with the recognition that media creators are NOT unbiased. They put out creative material, but there is always an underlying worldview through which they desire their consumers to see the world. It’s ok to enjoy modern fictional stories, but always be careful to recognize the “message” of the author. It’s not just the Marvel movies, the teaching of naturalism and paganism has become ubiquitous in modern media, but a short analysis of the stories with which most people are familiar should be a good start. As a bonus there are some extra movies/shows beyond the Marvel franchise from which I added a few thoughts.
NOTE to fathers: You are responsible for the content that enters your home. If you allow secular movies into your home, be sure to preview movies before your kids have access and make sure to point out the underlying motivations and worldviews expressed in these movies. There’s a great place for art and entertainment, but be sure that the message of the world is subjected to the revelation of God because of your influence on the messaging in your family.
Now on to the reviews. Any bold, underline or italics is not included in the original. These features are used to highlight what I recognize as the key elements in the worldview being promoted. The original quotes are in red with my thoughts in black immediately beneath the quote
The Amazing Spider-Man
Cross-species genetic integration. This is just a note that the authors simply assume that because humans and arachnids are related via a continuum along the “tree of life” that spider DNA can simply be added to humans to provide spider-like qualities. The assumption of a common ancestor drives the narrative
Tree of life – the assumption of common ancestry is now assumed by the media
“Many of these wonderful creatures are so brilliantly ADAPTED that they can regenerate entire limbs at will.” – Osborn
“This (scientific advancement) is no longer about curing ills, this is about finding perfection” – Osborn
This is both a pagan assumption and a naturalistic assumption. Humanity does rightly seek perfection. But because we are sinners, perfection can only be found by grace through faith in Christ alone. The modern academic paradigm (which some call science) cannot bring perfection to humanity.
“Names are sacred. They connect us not only to ourselves but to everyone who came before”
There is an element of ancestor worship (paganism) in this quote
“We have cities…rich with culture and history. Thousands of years ago, our people lived in peace and prosperity.”
The assumption is that mankind lived for generations in a Utopia and that mankind is basically good. While this may sound like the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, the distinction would be that in reality the original couple (Adam/Eve) disobeyed God almost immediately. People did not live in peace and prosperity for generations. Adam’s sin brought corruption/death/suffering into the universe that God originally created as God (Romans 8), and since that time, humans have been born into sin. But thanks be to God that because of what Jesus has done (fulfilled scripture, perfectly kept the law, died for the sins of the repentant, rose again) there is hope for abundant life in Him.
Iron Man
There is glorification of rampant sexual immorality in the opening scene (12 for 12 with cover models) – the consistent conclusion of naturalism is either hedonism or nihilism. Tony Stark embodies both of these unholy worldviews. The soldiers in the Humvee think that Stark’s hedonism is worthy of praise
Glorification of gambling
Glorification of sexual immorality
“Thank you for saving me” – Tony Stark to dying assistant. Only Jesus saves
“I know in my heart that it’s right” – Tony Stark
The only way to know whether something is TRULY right is not how it feels in someone’s heart. Only by revelation from God, who is perfect and has revealed his expectations for humanity, can someone know what is TRULY right. Isaiah 45:19
Iron Man 2
“Technology holds infinite possibilities for mankind, and will one day rid society of all its ills.” – Howard Stark
Transcendent power has been attributed to mankind through science/technology. As Romans 1 tells us, if we are not thankful to God, we will inevitably worship something lesser/created…in this case: technology
“I will serve this great nation at the pleasure of myself. And there’s one thing that I’ve proven – it’s that you can count on me to pleasure myself.” – Tony Stark (to loud applause)
More glorification of hedonism
“If people could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him” – Vanko
Because the Avengers story arc is at base naturalistic, there is no God and the superheroes stand in the place of the Almighty. So in this case, when the villain is able to make the little deities bleed, he feels he has displaced the “god” of the time
“Everything is achievable through technology” – Howard Stark
More false attribution of omnipotence to human ingenuity. If the skeptical viewer extrapolates this thinking outward, Stark is deifying humans. That’s idolatry
In the movie, Tony Stark creates a new element with powerful lasers and some “elbow grease”. Creating a new element is portrayed as simply a “matter” of some effort and advanced technology. This is a minor point, but many people believe in naturalistic chemical evolution, and this is a just a continuation of that idea that matter/energy is all that is. And the cosmos was able to create itself in a process of continued chemical evolution
Secondly, Tony Stark was able to save himself from his degenerative condition. This is a common theme in today’s movies: that with enough focused effort, denial of desires (Buddhism), & extremely hard work a person can save themselves. The gospel of Jesus is that we are completely unable to pay our sin debt. But by grace through faith in Christ alone, there is forgiveness for sins and abundant life. Praise God that He does not rely on human effort to save us. If I was responsible for my own salvation, it would be an utter failure.
Was it a coincidence that Elon Musk, the prime advocate of uniting humanity with technology, appeared in this film that advocates the uniting of humanity with technology? While I appreciate Musk’s innovations in batteries, cars, and space travel, his goal is to achieve human consciousness immortality with technology rather than by grace through faith in Christ alone.
Making of Bonus Feature: “That we can imbue it (making of IronMan 2) with a sense of humanity and naturalism” – Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey admits the aim of the films is exactly what I am warning against. Watch with a skeptical eye
Thor
“Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet…If there is an Einstein Rosen Bridge then advanced beings could have crossed it. A primitive culture like the Vikings may have worshiped them as deities”
You’ll recognize this inherent push to naturalize everything. With enough time/discovery then everything will be seen to have a naturalistic explanation. The Bible identifies God as the Revealer of mysteries (Daniel 2:47), but the Marvel universe puts technology/discovery and ultimately humans in God’s rightful place.
Captain America
At the end end of the movie, Captain America is “flash frozen” in Artic waters. The assumption is that because humans are simply a collection of particles, life, mind, consciousness can simply be frozen and thawed in a continuum. Rather than recognizing that humans have spirits as we are told in the Bible, the writers would have us believe that like the monster of Frankenstein, technology can revive the aggregation of human particles from death
Avengers
Consciousness is simply a product of the correct aggregation of matter. When Loki is “transferred” through the portal from one end of the universe to earth, it is implied that he was reconstructed particle by particle (like Star Trek’s beaming process) to retain his consciousness/memories/behavior/powers after reconstruction. This is a very naturalistic idea: “humans are just a collection of particles”
“The Tesseract has shown me so much. It’s MORE than knowledge. It’s truth”
Whether accidentally or purposefully, Jesus has been dethroned from his rightful place in the Marvel movie franchises. Jesus said “I AM the way, the TRUTH, and the life”. Colossians 2:2-3 says “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ.” Neither knowledge nor truth can be known without revelation from the One, who knows everything: God Himself.
“These guys are basically gods” -Agent R
There is only one God (Isaiah 45). On a positive note, Captain America responds: “There’s one 1 God maam, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that”
“How much dark energy did the Allfather have to muster to conjure you here.” – Loki.
Is Loki referring to some dark energy from the Marvel Universe, or the mysterious dark energy floated around science communities as a significant component of the material cosmos? It is not clear, but it is humorous that they attempt to tie the concept of dark energy which is science fiction in the science world to science fiction in the science fiction world.
There are all kinds of alien life forms in the Avengers movie. The assumption is that life must have evolved all over the universe because of the assumption that life evolved on earth. As if evolution is ubiquitous even through there’s not 1 shred of evidence in favor of evolution.
“I thought humans were more evolved than this.” – Thor
Again the assumption that humans simply evolved from lower forms of life. Thor’s assumption was that humans should be more empathetic, but evolution cannot explain empathy. Evolution has never been observed, but the Marvel franchise assumes it as basic throughout
Iron Man 3
Without direct quotes of naturalism, there was the continuation of assumptions that evolution throughout the universe (through aliens) persists. Also the idea that humans are just a collection of particles that can be manipulated rather than body/spirit created in the image of God is a strong theme throughout
Thor: Dark World
“Long before the birth of light, there was darkness. And from that darkness came the dark elves. Millenia ago, the most ruthless of their kind sought to transform our universe into 1 of eternal night.”
There are origins stories in all sagas. This origins story further dilutes the true origins story that God revealed in the Bible: In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth
When Frigga (Thor’s mother) dies, it is inferred that her spirit is released from her body to be reabsorbed by the cosmos (pantheism)
Captain America: Winter Soldier
1:16:11 The consciousness of the German scientist from CA was uploaded to a primitive computer as if consciousness is simply a function of the correct assemblance of ones and zeros. This is a very naturalistic assumption. Remember Elon Musk (and his desire to upload human consciousness to the internet) appearing the Iron Man 2? Interesting
“I am not a recording, Fraulein. I may not be the man I once was. The captain took me prisoner in 1945. But I am alive. First correction, I am Swiss. Look around you. I have never been more alive. Science could not save my body. My mind, however, that was worth saving, on 200,000 feet of databanks. You are standing in my brain.”
Given naturalism, brains are just an highly organized aggregation of particles, and the Marvel writers push this assumption as if it is just a lack of technology holding humanity back from experiencing eternal life through unity with technology.
Guardians of the Galaxy
This is not an identification of paganism, just a terrible plot hole: After 26 years of traveling around the universe, where did Star Lord find AA batteries for his walkman? And how did magnetic tapes on which the music was stored fight off the forces of friction and entropy to provide such excellent sound quality?
“I’m going to be totally honest with you. I forgot you were here.” – StarLord
Pink-skinned female is dismissed as being just a sexual tool for StarLord. Hedonism
14:00 blood sacrifice (pagan). There is something about blood which pagans recognize. While the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin, pagans try to dilute the meaningfulness of Jesus’ sacrifice by showing it in the context of horror and ritual
From Wikipedia – “Taneleer Tivan (The Collector) is one of the Elders of the Universe and is close to his fellow Elder En Dwi Gast (the Grandmaster). He apparently came to self-awareness billions of years ago”
“Before creation itself there were 5 singularities. Then the universe exploded into existence. Then the remnants of these systems were forged into concentrated ingots. Infinity Stones.”
Even naturalists recognize the need for an infinite root cause for the universe. Rather than accepting God’s revelation that He is the source of the universe, life, morality, consciousness, truth, goodness, justice, minds, beauty, information…they would rather assume an infinite universe, or self-aware stones. It’s a ridiculous origins story, but if you reject God’s word, one is left only with ridiculous origins stories and absurdity.
This bullet point is not so much about naturalism, but paganism: In the western world, it is not just rare but unheard of that someone be named after a villain in the Bible: Judas, Cain, Herod, Pilate, Satan…but the heroine of this story is Gamora, which sounds exactly like Gomorrah. They are de-stigmatizing the wickedness of Gomorrah by naming the heroine after that wicked place.
Speaking of de-stigmatizing abnormalities, we are seeing more and more abnormalities being accepted as normal. The Guardians of the Galaxy is filled with abnormal humanoid skin colors, abnormal attire, abnormal behaviors, feminization of men (Collector)…all in an effort to dilute God’s created or
Avengers: Age of Ultron
In the movie, one of the infinity stones combines with a computer program (Jarvis) to bring technology to life. The idea that artificial intelligence can be enveloped and/or created by the correct arrangement of atoms is naturalistic. Naturalists do not realize the abiogenesis is like a perpetual motion machine – impossible
The idea that consciousness could escape through the internet as if electricity defines minds is extremely naturalistic
“The human race will have every opportunity to improve (evolve in the face of selection pressure)” – Ultron
Improve? By what transcendent standard does Ultron consider improvement? Towards what eternal goal defines said improvement? Ultron has made a claim for which his limited understanding cannot account
“There were a dozen extinction level events before even the dinosaurs got theirs.” – Ultron
Assumptions abound here, but this is the worldview of the naturalist. From God’s eternal word, we know that there has been only 1 extinction-level event: The Worldwide flood of Noah’s day.
“When the Earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it” – Ultron
This is petty and sarcastic as though rather than God’s work being to restore his creation through Jesus, the naturalist views God as a mythical character of hate
“We have to evolve. There’s no room for the weak.” – Ultron
While I know that evolution is false, THIS is a consistent understanding of evolution. Those atheists and naturalists, who want to be consistent, must think like Ultron. The weak and unfit should be euthanized to protect the overall gene pool if the theory of evolution is true. This is contradictory to the Christian worldview, which holds that humans have dignity because we are created in God’s image.
“Who decides the weak?” – SpeedGuy
“Life. Life always decides” – Ultron
Again, naturalism is the idea that everything came about without God. And Ultron declares this fable that natural selection determines what’s right. It is a baseless claim and essentially a tautology: “the survivors survive. Whoever/whatever survives is right”
“I think a lot about meteors. The purity in them. Boom! The end! Start again. The world made clean for the new man to rebuild. I was meant to be new. I was meant to be beautiful. The world would have looked to the sky and seen hope. Seen mercy. Instead they’ll look up in horror because of you. You’ve wounded me and I give you full marks for that. But like the man said: What doesn’t kill you just makes me stronger (Neitzke)” – Ultron
Naturalists like to talk about asteroids a lot: “An asteroid collision with the earth created the moon…an asteroid collision with the earth killed the dinosaurs…” None of those things are valid, but believed on faith nonetheless.
“I am” – Vision
Taking the words of the Almighty for himself, Vision’s character is blasphemous
Antman
“The laws of nature transcend the laws of man. And I have transcended the laws of nature” – YellowJacket
It is unusual for naturalists to speak of transcendence as transcendence makes no sense in their worldview where “matter is that is or was or ever will be (Carl Sagan)”.
“Solenopsis mandibularis known for their bite, the fire ants have evolved into remarkable architects” – Pim
Again evolution is reified as if it is a creative force that can produce “remarkable architects”. In real life, evolution cannot even account for the software needed to produce anything, but the writers of the Marvel series embed their worldview into the franchise
Dr. Strange
“There is no such thing as spirit! We are made of matter and nothing more! You’re just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe!” – Dr. Strange
This is the mantra of the naturalist. Dr. Strange’s monologue sounds very familiar to the one from the eminent biologist, Richard Dawkins:
“This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end. Some benevolent and life giving. Others filled with malice and hunger. Dark place where powers older than time lie ravenous and waiting. Who are you in this vast multiverse, Mr. Strange?”
The multiverse is an unscientific rescue device devised by those who have faith in naturalism. Because this universe exhibits obvious and irrefutable teleological fine-tuning, naturalists have postulated an infinite number of universes all with different laws and parameters. They think that we just happen to live in lucky universe where all of the laws/parameters are JUUUUUST right for life, mind, consciousness, justice, love, beauty, symbiosis, water cycles, sodium cycles, continental plate tectonics…It’s a completely unscientific proposal as it’s both unfalsifiable and unobservable. It’s a silly story
“The language of the mystic arts is as old as civilization. The sorcerors of antiquity called the use of this language spells. But if that word offends your modern sensibilities, you can call it a program. The source code that shapes reality. We harness energy drawn from other dimensions of the multiverse to cast spells. To conjure shields and weapons. To make magic.”
I realize that this is science fiction. But in an effort to push their naturalistic worldview, they pull from what they view as scientific and throw it into their story as basic. It can never be known if there were a multiverse. It is ridiculous to call it scientific
“But the dark dimension it’s a place beyond time. This world doesn’t have to die. This world can take it’s place along side so many others as part of the One. The great and beautiful One. We can all live forever.“
This is paganistic pantheism: Everything is just part of the unified deity of nature. Paganism
“Really? What do you have to gain out of this New Age dimensional utopia?”
“The same as you. The same as everyone. Life. Eternal Life. People think in terms of good and evil when really time is the true enemy of us all. Time kills everything.”
God defines good/evil. Naturalists do not want to recognize goodness or evil, so it’s not a surprise to see them vilify time. It’s also contradictory that although time is the hero for evolution, but here they recognize that time is an enemy for naturalists.
“What about the people YOU killed?”
“Tiny. Momentary specks in the within an indifferent universe. You see what we are doing. The world is not what it ought to be. Humanity longs for the eternal. For a world beyond time because time is what enslaves us. Time is an insult. Death is an insult. Doctor. We do not seek to rule this world. We seek to save it to hand it over to Dormammu, who is the intent of all evolution the why of all existence.”
To naturalists, humans are just “momentary speck” so there is no real injustice for humans to be unjustly killed. The speaker promptly switches from naturalism to paganism by honoring a false deity
Thor: Ragnarok
Thor praying to his ancestor: “Odin, I bid you take your palace in the halls of Valhalla. Where the brave shall live forever. Nor shall we mourn but rejoice for those who have died a glorious death.”
Ancestor worship is pagan.
Guardians of the Galaxy II
“I’m what you call a celestial, sweetheart. Like a God? Small ‘g’ god”
There is only 1 God.
“I don’t know where I came from exactly. The 1st thing I remember is flickering. Adrift in the cosmos…utterly and entirely alone. Over millions of years I learned to control the molecules around me. I grew smarter and stronger. And I continued building from there. Layer by layer the very planet you walk on now. But I wanted more. I desired meaning. There must be some life out there in the universe besides just me. I thought. And so I set myself to task to find it. I created what I imagined biological life to be like. Down to the most minute detail. I wanted to experience what it truly meant to be human. Until I found what I sought. I was not alone in the universe after all.”
While science fiction, this character describes what many believe happened in reality: “over millions of years, molecules organized themselves into more and more complex arrangements, until finally, some collections of particles came to life. And some of those particles began to create movies and demand justice. It is taught in schools and universities that like this “divine” character, and despite evidence & universal laws, life has evolved smarter and stronger over time.
“Over the millions and millions of years of my existence, I’ve made many mistakes Peter, but you’re not one of them.”
Like almost every nature documentary, this science fiction show shouts the mantra: “over the millions and millions of years”. It’s part of the dogma of naturalism and it is being taught as though it were fact in almost all media.
“Only we can remake the universe. Only we can take the bridle of the cosmos and lead it where it wants to go”
Both pagans and naturalists think that humans can control the cosmos and give the purposeless cosmos some sort of subjective purpose
Black Panther
“Millions of years ago a meteorite made of vibranium, the strongest substance in the universe struck the continent of Africa. When the time of man came, 5 tribes settled on it and called it Wakanda”
Most every nature documentary begins exactly the same way: “millions of years ago”. Just like above when we talked about how naturalists love asteroids…again, they propose an asteroid as the source of “meaning”. It’s more hilarious than anything
“Praise the ancestors” 21:50
Pagan ancestor worship
“TChaka (dead king) we call on you to come to your son”
More pagan ancestor worship
Not pagan but actual wisdom and an accidental recognition of reality: “If you let the refugees into Wakanda, they bring their problems with them, and then Wakanda is just like everywhere else.”
“Don’t scare me like that colonizer (to white man)”
Wokeness has infected everything. As if all white people are racist and colonizers, the writers added that bit of poison to the movie.
“Didn’t all life start right here on this continent (evolutionary Out of Africa theory), so aren’t all people your people?”
The evolutionary story teaches that all humans emerged from the continent of Africa after a small group of homonids evolved enough traits to make them human. That story is in direct contradiction with the Bible, which reveals that humans are all related through both Adam and Noah after being created in God’s image.
“Everybody dies. It’s just life around here“
A consistent naturalist/atheist will be a nihilist as they declare that there is no purpose or meaning in the cosmos
“We got spies embedded in every nation on earth. I know how colonizers think. So we’re gonna use their own strategy against them. We’re gonna send vibranium weapons out to our War Dogs. They’ll arm oppressed people all over the world, so they can finally rise up and kill those in power. And their children. And anyone else who takes their side. It’s time they know the truth about us. We’re warriors. The World’s gonna start over (Build Back Better), and this time, we’re on top. The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire (Marxism)”
Again, we see the same seeds that the World Economic Forum are planting: critical theory. Sadly, there is a strong movement in today’s world to kill and destroy society, so that it can be rebuilt in the image of those, who feel “repressed”.
“Soon it will be the conquerors or the conquered (Marxism)”
“I call upon the ancestors. I call upon the Bast. I am here with my son, TChalla. Heal him
Pagan ancestor worship
“Praise the ancestors! Praise the ancestors!”
More Paganism
Avengers: Infinity War
“Allfathers, let the dark magic flow through me one last time”
Paganism
“At the dawn of the universe, there was nothing. Then Boom the Big Bang sent 6 elemental crystals hurtling across the virgin universe. These infinity stones each control an essential aspect of existence. Space. Reality. Power. Soul. Mind. Time”
The story of naturalism is taught in this science fiction as being sparked by stones, but we recognize the same story (without the stones) being taught in universities, high schools, and media
“He (Vision) is more than that. He’s evolving.”
The assumption that matter and power can produce life and then evolve is simply religious in nature: the religion of naturalism
“You might have a choice. Your mind is made up of a complex construct of overlays. Jarvis. Ultron. Tony. Me, the stone. All of them mixed together. All of them learning from one another. You’re saying that Vision is not just the stone? I’m saying that if we take out the stone, there’s a whole lot of Vision left. Perhaps the best parts.”
These lines assume that mind/consciousness is simply an accidentally aggregated and complex arrangement of particles. It is a religious (naturalism) assumption that part of the blind, pitiless, indifferent cosmos came alive, but this is exactly what the writers of this epic saga believe
“I’m only alive because fate wants me alive. Fate wills it so”
Personification of fate as having purpose and foresight is the reification fallacy. It is an expression of both Paganism and naturalism
“We all think that at first. We are all wrong”
Essentially, they are saying that truth cannot be known. This is a post modern relativistic thinking. However Truth can be known in the person of Jesus
“To ensure that whoever possesses it understands its power. The stone demands a sacrifice. In order to take the stone, you must lose that which you love. A soul for a soul.”
Paganism
“The universe judged you and you failed”
Reification fallacy and deification of the cosmos. It’s both pagan and naturalistic
“I’d watch the sun rise on a grateful universe”
More reification of the particles of the cosmos
Antman 2
“Molecular disequilibrium”
As if mind & consciousness are determined by an arrangement of particles rather than God’s breathing of life into a person. It’s naturalistic
“This place it changes you. Adaptation is part of it, but some of it is evolution”
Captain Marvel
“No one can look upon the Supreme Intelligence in its true form. Our subconscious chooses the way they appear to us. So it’s sacred. It’s personal.”
Paganism
“Supreme Intelligence: A. I. Leader of the Kree Civilization”
This assumes that AI (or bits of matter) can become conscious
“We must all be ready to join the Collective if that is our fate”
The collective is implied to be a pantheist divineness, and fate (yet again in the Marvel universe) reified as purposeful.
Avengers: End Game
“I know what I must do. I will shred this universe down to the last atom. Then with the stones you’ve collected for me, I create a new one – teeming with life. That knows not what it has lost, but only what it has been given. A grateful universe.”
While this is not specifically naturalistic or pagan, it is an affront to the LORD of glory, who HAS given breath and life to this universe. Those, who suppress the knowledge of this Creator, are ungrateful. They love darkness rather than light.
One final note on the Marvel franchise: The real life version of Thanos is the World Economic Forum. They are the enemy, so whatever they promote should be rejected!
Fantastic 4
“My research suggests that exposure to high energy cosmic storm borne on solar winds might have triggered the evolution of early planetary life. In 6 weeks, another cloud with the same elemental profile will pass earth’s orbit. A study conducted in space could fundamentally advance our knowledge about the structure of the human genome, cure countless diseases, extend human life. Give kids a chance to live longer stronger healthier…”
The origin of life, the origin of the human genome, the origin of ALL genomes remain a complete mystery, but superhero movies like to preach that if there were just more funding, more vision that scientism could come up with the answer even though they fail to understand that the problem is like the perpetual motion machine. The only solution is the one that God already solved: His life-giving breath
The whole idea of the Fantastic 4 is that intense selective pressure (radiation) drives new traits of evolution…in their case super powers
Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer
“When the universe began, it was no bigger than a marble and then bam – It exploded. And in a trillionth of a second, it expanded exponentially to what became the universe we know today.”
Naturalism. This quote is religious in nature as is cannot be known – only assumed
“I’ve been cross referencing the Surfer’s radiation through every astronomical database, Altair 7, Rigel 3, Vega 6. And now they’re lifeless. Barren. Some even shattered. Everywhere the Surfer goes, eight days later, the planet dies.”
The Silver Surfer appeared to have power over death to bring Storm back to life. – Paganism
Alive (History Channel show)
In show after show, participants feeling great emotions of gratitude, rather than thanking the Almighty Creator, thank:
The land
Dead animals
Rivers
Lakes
Rocks
Wood
Ancestors
They exhibit the exact actions one would expect since Romans 1 is true
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”
Halo
S1 E6
“I was planning the future…The future of our species. Natural evolution is failing us. Human beings are still hardwired for conflict and selfishness. I knew years ago that if we were going to survive we needed a force. A force that could intervene – that could prevent conflict before it started. So, I created the Spartans. A groups who would protect us from ourselves.”
S1 E9
“We are born. We live and we die according to the rules of blind and unguided evolution. As a result our species are simply not equipped to survive what comes next. It is time for us to take control of our evolution, to push past our narrow ignorance and venture out into the wide unknown, where we will discover our true potential.” – Dr. Halsey
This is the definitive FAITH of naturalism: evolution is blind faith, but humans want to control an unguided blind process.
“Much has been lost and there will surely be more sacrifices to come. But I believe our species will soon spread its wings and soar to new heights, that we will rewrite what it means to be human. That we will achieve transcendence.” – Dr. Halsey
Do you now recognize the blending of paganism that is built upon naturalism which is being taught a fact?
The Sixth Day
“If you believe that God created man in his own image, then you also believe that God gave man the power to understand evolution. To exploit science. To manipulate the genetic code. To do exactly what I’m doing. I’m just taking over where God left off.”
The entire idea that memories and feelings can be saved to memory is materialistic. And then the assumption that memories can then be “written” to the brain of a cloned human as some sort of duplicate is materialistic as if memories and feelings are reproducible.
This movie promotes the idea that eternal life is achievable to the never-ending reproduction of clones
“We don’t have to die. I’m offering you the chance to live forever. Never aging. Perfect in every way.”
The faith of naturalistic paganism
John Wick
“There’s no rhyme or reason to this life. It’s days like today scattered among the rest”
The consistent naturalist is bound to see life like John Wick: through the eyes of the nihilist.
Edge of Tomorrow
“The thing you gotta understand is that perfectly evolved world-conquering organism. For all we know there are thousands or millions of those asteroids floating around in the cosmos like a virus. And they’re just waiting to crash land into a world with just the right conditions. All they need is for the dominant life form to attack.”
“eVoLutiOn!!!! eVoLutiOn EVERYWHERE! eVoLutiOn dUn iT!!!”
Robocop 2014
“Consciousness is nothing more than the processing of information”
“Human beings have no more right to safety or liberty than any other creature on this planet. We not only lack dominion over nature, we are subordinate to it. And now here we are with the opportunity to rewrite life at our fingertips. And just like nuclear power, nobody knew what to expect with genetic engineering, but they pressed the button and hoped for the best. Just like you are doing now. Yep. You. You control the future of our survival on planet earth. According to you, the solution is genetic power. But that same power could devastate the food supply, create new diseases, alter the climate even further…In order to instigate revolutionary change, we must transform human consciousness” -Ian Malcolm
If ever there was a perfect ending to the teachings of paganism resulting from an assumption of naturalism, this is it. Malcolm’s character assumes that humanity is no more than a collection of particles rather than image bearers of the Almighty. And the consistent result of this irrational thinking is that nature is worthy of praise. In direct opposition to what God tells mankind to accomplish (“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”” – Genesis 1:26) Malcolm’s character tells his class that humans are subordinate to nature. It is both blasphemous and irrational. The writers of the Jurassic Park franchise couldn’t help but add their mantra of “gLobaL wArmiNg” into the Malcolm’s little diatribe. They believe that the planet (Gaia) is in danger of destruction by the activities of mankind, so the best solution (for them) is reducing the global population
The Jurassic Park franchise is full of naturalist teachings regarding evolution and other fanciful origins stories
What are some examples of naturalism and paganism in modern media that you’ve seen?
This is a response to the online book, The Best Religion For the Task At Hand by Damien Harrison, whose online personality is The Tall Friendly Atheist Dad. Writing a book is a huge task and Harrison should be commended for making the effort to write and publish his book. The book can be purchased for $10.99 Australian here. Should anyone read this review, it should be noted that critiques are of ideas, application (or misapplication) of reason, and not of the author himself
This will be a strange book review as the book that Harrison wrote was in response to an article that Lita Cosner (Sanders) of Creation Ministries International wrote in response to a conglomeration of online videos by God-deniers. So, this is a response, to a response to a response.
You’ll see throughout this response that Harrison is not solely responding to Cosner. He is attacking Christianity at large. I’m not interested in defending any arguments by Cosner, but I will be pointing out throughout that Harrison has no grounds for judging others because of his assumptions on origins and his failed epistemology. There are many times Harrison purposefully mischaracterizes Christian teachings and displays no more than a surface-level understanding of the Bible. You can see his quotes from his book in red italics below with my responses in the default back text
In the Foreword Harrison begins with an uncharitable definition of creationism that only God-deniers hold. It’s not just uncharitable, before taking on her arguments, Harrison has poisoned-the-well. He’s taken Cosner and painted her with a brush of derision so his audience will see her as incompetent
“Creationism – the strand of Christianity that dismisses the findings of numerous fields of science simply because the conclusions reached by the evidence don’t line up with a literal reading of the Bible…Furthermore, creationism is wrong for the reasons it thinks it is correct.”
Those, who hold to creationism (The Bible should be interpreted contextually) do not dismiss findings as is asserted, but are skeptical of the assumptions with which naturalists interpret facts. Harrison is hypocritical and irrational in his thinking, because shortly thereafter, he falsely accuses Cosner of engaging in the poisoning-the-well fallacy
Harrison misquotes her and then falsely accuses her of a fallacy. Costner did NOT poison the well. She presented the case that atheists have no logical ground and linked to an article that explains step-by-step why. It’s not clear why Harrison would leave out that crucial bit of information in his response, but atheists have no logical ground for holding to standards of honesty. It’s not a good start (or a good look) from Harrison to lead off with poisoning-the-well fallacy and then falsely moan when he feels poisoned
This misrepresentation persists. The difference is in the presuppositions. The science is not disputed. To say that what can be known about the distant past (millions of years ago) has the same veracity as arithmetic and physics that can be measured in the present is a false equivocation. We find this conflation in many online discussions and Harrison builds his case upon this false assumption. To assert something to be “wrong”, one must have an epistemology that can justify knowledge, morality, logic…which atheism/naturalism does not. How can the accidental aggregation of stardust declare anything to be absolutely right/wrong?
“To make myself clear, the purpose of this book is not to defame, slander, belittle or impugn any particular person or organisation. Its purpose is to criticise BAD theology by demonstrating how MORALITY and governance based on socially-restrictive theology leads to DETRIMENTAL outcomes on both a personal and societal level.”
We’ll just have to stick around to see if he can indeed make sense of words BAD, MORALITY and DETRIMENTAL. If he maintains his atheistic naturalism, we can expect only an inconsistent sermon about things that he finds icky or personally distasteful since that’s all that atheism can conjure up
“However, I do hope that this book becomes one data point among many in a body of opinion that slowly turns the cultural tide away from beliefs in magic and superstition, and towards a more HUMANE approach to culture and politics.”
Magic? You mean like the naturalistic explanations of the cosmic evolution, dark matter (sciency-sounding moniker for superstition), 1st star, abiogenesis, the emergence of consciousness, the emergence of morality/altruism, the emergence of reasoning from non-reasoning source, purpose… ALL of those are magic for the naturalist since nature does not produce any of those.
Humane? I guess we’ll have to read ahead to see why one clump of cells (Harrison) thinks that other clumps of cells (Cosner) are worth protecting in a universe “that exhibits the properties one would expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, just blind, pitiless, indifference”
It’s rich that Harrison would project his own Nazi propaganda onto Cosner as if Christianity were simply “propaganda”. When in reality Harrison who dislikes the Germans for claiming that “Jews weren’t persons” literally claims that developing humans in the womb are “not really persons”. The irony is completely lost on Harrison when out of 1 side of his mouth he denounces the Nazis then with a forked tongue he uses the Nazi dehumanization of millions and millions of tiny unborn victims
Doubling down on a bad argument, Harrison then poisons the well with a false attribution of “Hitler was a Christian”. His citation of this long refuted fiction is based solely on the top half of his link. Should one venture to the second half of the link, a rational person will see that Hitler loved manipulating the church for his own Darwinistic purposes, but hated the actual teachings of the Bible and Christianity. As long as the term Christian served his propaganda, he was willing to hold the moniker. Harrison would have shown himself to be a diligent scholar rather than something of a propagandist himself by showing the actual scholarly writings of the Nazi leader by Richard Weikart. But his research was as deep as a hair’s breadth and as wide a particle from which he thinks consciousness arose.
P38 “Humanists take an active stance against slavery, genocide and torture and specifically because Humanists understand the needless harm, suffering and risk to life that these things have been shown to cause. When your goal is human well-being, when you know that certain actions result in harm and suffering, and when you have the power to reduce harm and suffering by neither participating in nor endorsing those actions, it’s simple – your morality is already superior to that of the Bible”
Defining the goal would be the appropriate place to start. He stated that the goal of humanists is to reduce harm and suffering of humans. That’s not a bad goal. In fact, most people would agree, but we have to dig a little deeper to see if there are any internal contradictions within this religion and how they handle mutually exclusive situations.
P41 “Bible actively endorses and celebrates things like slavert, genocide, and torture”
What Harrison fails to address is the slavery has existed since sin entered the world. People have treated others cruelly so long as they can get away with it. Outside of God’s revelation there are no justifiable transcendent limitations placed on humanity for how to we should treat one another. Throughout the Pentateuch limits were placed on masters that ultimately ended up being “Love your neighbor”. Outside of Israel, there were no restrictions on indentured servitude or slavery. For a more detailed understanding of the “active endorsement if slavery” see
P45 Harrison takes the least charitable and least contextually-relevant reading of all texts to support his perpetual caricature of Christian theology
P47-48 “If a religious text happens to endorses (insert bad things) … that religious text deserves to be roundly criticised”
Using what transcendent standard should the criticism be based? If those doing the criticism hold the same view (atheism) that has caused more death, suffering, and hatred than any other view, why should that criticism be heeded?
Chapter 4 was the personal incredulity fallacy and essentially said “Since some Christians failed to keep the Sabbath, then Christianity is false.”
It’s a ridiculous chapter
Chapter 5 “Is God a Homicidal Maniac?”
With a title like that, (sarcasm font begin) there’s SURE to be no emotional or inflammatory arguments made by the author (sarcasm font end)
Cosner’s Actual argument: False Atheist Premise: That God routinely orders killing, and for arbitrary reasons”
Harrison criticizes Cosner for moving the goalposts but misquotes her argument leaving out the weightiest element of the argument
Harrison (partially) quoting Cosner “That’s a false premise. God does not routinely order killing”
Notice how Harrison (arbitrarily?) left out the word “arbitrary reasons”. God has never killed anyone for arbitrary reasons.
I have had the privilege of having my writings critiqued by Harrison. One of Harrison’s favorite weapons is to claim: “yOu didN’t QuoTe tHe wHoLe cOnTexT!!!!!!”
It’s a shame that Harrison didn’t bother to apply that critique to himself, but do atheists even have a moral standard by which to make sure they uphold consistency or honesty?
Strawman arguments and uncharitable literalism (ignoring genre/context) persist throughout the rest of the chapter.
In my online interactions with atheists, I hear all the time that the Bible or Scientists, who believe the Bible do not make any testable predictions. Notice how Harrison totally misrepresents Cosner’s arguments:
P73: “Parents will eat their children? Looks like God is endorsing familial cannibalism to me”
Not once did Harrison consider God’s foreknowledge of the future being revealed to Ezekiel even though that is what was clearly being communicated. God has knowledge of the future, and He’s telling Ezekiel that the impending punishment upon the rebellious Israelites will be so severe that they will eat their own family members. God’s knowledge not endorsement, but someone with only a surface-level reading of the Bible wouldn’t know the difference
On p75 Harrison tries to trap Christians on the horns of a trilemma but instead commits the trifurcation fallacy:
Either the Bible does not accurately represent God (fatal to the fundamentalist cause)
Christians believe genocide is morally OK (confirming you need to twist your morals to make Biblical morality acceptable)
God does not actually exist (Rendering the Bible as pure mythology)
Considering that point 2 is false (Since God is the ultimate authority, He cannot commit murder/genocide) and there is at least 1 more option, even though Harrison has taken a class on philosophy, he’s clearly not putting what he learned into practice. There are any number of possible additional options, but 1 of them is 4. God has a sufficient justification to render judgment on a people group. Knowing that the Bible teaches that humans have ALL sinned and no one deserves God’s mercy, it’s not just a people group that can get righteous judgment, but ALL people have rightly earned God’s holy judgment. That ANYONE has received grace is an amazing fact and makes God worthy of praise.
“I know two people does not a religious orthodoxy make, but if Cosner and my Methodist friend combined represent something approaching the norm of Modern Christian theology, then IT CAN ONLY BE SURMISED that not only does Christianity require you to shun more humane interpretations of morality in favour of being compelled to say nice things about God at every opportunity for the rest of your life, but Christianity also requires you to conclude that picking up sticks is treason and that babies need to be killed because they’re potentially dangerous.”
“Bottom line: If you’re not convinced that Christianity requires you to twist your morality to fit in re-read the above paragraph until you are.”
Essentially, Harrison says that if you don’t believe his atheistic caricature of Christianity, re-read his book until you’re convinced his caricature is actual Christianity.
Ch7
Harrison starts off this chapter criticizing Jesus for upholding the laws given to Moses. But again, Harrison does so without a consistent & transcendent standard…just his temporal personal preferences.
Harrison misunderstands Cosner’s assertion that the Christian worldview justifies charity. He then proceeds to say that charity & government programs existed long before the Christian worldview became widespread. This is another of his examples of uncharitable and purposeful misreading to push his agenda. Cosner never said Christianity is the source of all government welfare as Harrison implied. But the Christian worldview is the sole ideology that can justify all human value, so that any charity would be expected. Were naturalism true, why help the weak or unfit? The humanist religion must deny one of their core tenets (survival of the fittest) or redefine it to claim to love charity
P87-88 “If Jesus endorses the Old Testament and was even around when it all happened then Jesus the son is just as answerable as God the father in all human rights violations and war crimes”
Anyone else see the problem with Harrison’s logic? Human rights violations. From where do human rights come? If not from God, then there can be no such thing as human rights! As much as Harrison hates Frank Turek, Harrison is literally stealing from the Christian worldview to argue against it. He does the same thing with the concept of war crimes…as if there is a transcendent standard of morality by which criminals must be judged for crimes. How did a cosmos made only of particles produce transcendent moral standards such that Harrison can pronounce judgment on the Almighty? It’s ridiculous of him
Since God’s nature is the source of human rights (humans are created in his image), God has never violated them. Since the transcendent moral standard comes from God’s unchanging character, He cannot criminally break them. God’s judgment for rebellion is just and since Harrison has no rational standard by which to judge the Almighty, his objection is a dismal failure
P90 Back in his early chapters, Harrison shrieked (incorrectly) that Cosner employed the poisoning the well fallacy…and then promptly poisoned the well against her. In his chapter called “What About Him?” Harrison leads off with the assertion that Jesus is a racist and implies that creationists (and by association with Jesus all Christians) are racist with his line “And let us not forget that Creationist white supremacist groups are still active today in Christian America.”
You’ll notice how Harrison insinuated that white supremacists are creationists (and followers of Jesus) so being a creationist/Christian opens you up to being a racist. He’ll hem and haw with “plausible deniability” and say that’s not what he intended, but the well is poisoned.
Ch8 Here Harrison tries to project his personal temporal preference (which he calls his religion of humanism) onto God. So, Harrison feels justified in condemning God for judging the sin of mankind in the worldwide flood. Does God not have the right to do with his creation as He wills? Why not? I covered this in a separate blog post, Stay in Your Lane. Harrison does not know how to properly do an internal critique. Should he want to correctly show why the Bible is incorrect regarding God’s morality, he must take on the Christian position (for purposes of argumentation) and show how it leads to an inconsistency or an absurdity. But as it is, his objections are just screaming at the air and stomping his feet.
On pg97, Harrison opines loudly and ignorantly about Jesus cursing the fig tree. Lost to Harrison and sadly even most Christians is what Jesus was actually trying to say. For reference, see Isaiah 5. God describes planting a garden and doing everything necessary for it to bear much fruit…to be a delight to the vinedresser. But the vineyard (Israel) fails to be a light to the nations (Isaiah 49). Instead, the vineyard is impotent…worshipping false idols and prostituting itself among the nations. As Jesus enters the last week of his life, He is justly judging Israel (the fig tree) never to bear fruit again because of their wickedness and their upcoming unjust murder of the Messiah (Matt 27:25).
P101 “To sum it up, ending the life of a plant or animal for the reasonable sustainment of life isn’t a bad thing – animals eat plants and animals eat other animals all the time. But killing humans in a fit of rage is a bad thing”
Why? According to atheists, what transcendent standard proclaims this to be true? How do you know? Would it be wrong to kill Trump? Putin? Tucker Carlson? Alex Jones? Hitler?
If humans are simply animals, what’s wrong with animals killing other animals? How do you know? What is the distinction between 1 type of animal and another type of animal with regards to killing? Flush with internal contradictions, the humanist, who has a faith commitment to evolutionism, has no rational justification for calling 1 type of interaction between animals as immoral and any other type of interaction between animals as moral. Only in the Christian worldview can the murder of humans be justifiably shown as immoral.
CH9 Harrison starts ch9 with a plan to “fix” Christianity by taking out God, and simply replacing it with secular humanism. All Fixed! He proclaims that the group of people, who are responsible for building, staffing, and supporting more schools, orphanages, hospitals, charitable donations, mission organizations, and general welfare should become more like the secular religion that has done NONE of that. I did find it interesting that there is one atheist orphanage in the world. So, in all of history and throughout all civilizations, there is only 1 orphanage created in the name of atheism. I do understand that humanism and atheism are not completely synonymous, but there is near complete overlap in their Venn diagrams. The orphanage is on tenuous financial grounds. We’ll see if the humanists can rally with actual financial support rather than just keyboard virtual signaling. But it does make one wonder, if humanists are so bent on helping the suffering, why is the only measurable metric of their actual assistance almost completely missing?
Ch10 Not realizing that Christianity is the explanation for all of history, life, origins and the future, Harrison declares that Jesus or his teachings are unneeded because “It is fair to say that if numerous independent cultures came to the same principles without Jesus (in this case The Golden Rule), it indicates that that The Golden Rule didn’t need a Jesus to make it.” (duplicate “that” in original)
But as Christians, we would expect the Golden Rule to be a worldwide phenomenon since humans are all created in God’s image. All humans know what is right/wrong in general because it is written on our hearts (Rom 2:15). So, his objection stems from an ignorance of the Christian worldview or malevolence against Jesus.
CH11
Why didn’t Jesus teach people about antibiotics? That wasn’t his purpose. Throughout, the book, Harrison’s assumption has been that secular humanism’s goal, so he asks “Is your morality focused on maximising human well-being and reducing pain and suffering by having a rational understanding of the world around you or is your morality simply focused on making sure the feelings of an infinitely great and powerful God aren’t hurt because someone ate shellfish.”
But that is not the standard. The Bible is clear that God’s purposes are to be glorified by saving unworthy sinners. Jesus’ own words tell us why He came into the word. John 12:47. Paul affirms this revelation in his 1st letter to Timothy. Chapter 1 verse 15
Ch12 Harrison leads off with a howler:
“Because Cosner’s morality is based on the will of the supreme intelligence behind the creation of the universe as revealed in the Bible, there should be no possible way I could counter any of her arguments gained from that theology and methodology”
That’s like saying, “if the speeding laws in a country truly were from the state, there would be no way to argue your way out of a ticket with a police officer”
It’s just ridiculous
Next he does do a very good thing by defining terms. Unfortunately, his conclusions end up as temporal preferences rather than actual objective morality
“In my estimation, the essence of morality should be designed by what is universal to the shared human experience – health, wellbeing and personal and economic freedoms”
It’s fine to love your neighbor, and your enemies…in fact, this is the actual Christian position as opposed to what Harrison has been on about. In fact, my article about why Empathy is arbitrary, inconsistent, and irrational for the atheist exposes the utter lack of foundation from which atheists loudly prattle-on about their virtue. So, on which foundation do they stand to prattle-on? Knowing Harrison’s hatred for Frank Turek, atheists are literally stealing their worldview from God in an attempt to make sense of their assumptions.
Getting back to Harrison’s prattling: ”Jehovah’s Witness families have died because of their parent’s belief that…it is better for their child to die…This is an abject failure of theism.”
Did anybody catch what he did there? It’s called a hasty generalization. “Because 1 theistic group did something I don’t like, then ALL theism is an abject failure”
Garrison doubles down on p133 (this is a paraphrase of Harrison’s 7 paragraphs) Westboro Baptist church says mean things, so Christianity is false
On p134 Harrison mocks the Bible as not being God’s Word because “When someone reads the Bible, they are free to interpret the text in any way they see fit”. The inferred point from him then is that if the Bible can be interpreted in many ways, then NONE of them are correct. This is a sweeping generalization, which takes the form: if there are many counterfeits then all are counterfeit.
But Christians do not believe this and the Bible teaches against what Harrison says. The Bible is the revelation of God, and is justification for knowledge being possible at all (2 Tim 2:2, Act 17:11)
P134 Harrison doesn’t think his argument through when he opines about what he believes to be the total flexibility in biblical interpretation
“Case in point: In Isaiah 7:14, the word that is commonly translated as virgin in the verse “.,..the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son…” does not mean virgin – the original Hebrew word almah just meant a young woman of child-bearing age without ant reference to previous sexual activity”
Harrison displays ignorance to the word he has grown to loathe – context. In what context was this Word from the Almighty spoken to Isaiah? The king of Judah, King Ahaz was worried about the imminent invasion from the most powerful army in that area of the world. He was considering a bad alliance and the LORD gave Ahaz the prophecy that the nations he feared would becomes desolate. And the sign would be that an “almah” would give birth to a son. Harrison believes it is likely that the LORD said: “a girl of child-bearing age will bear a son” as if that’s some sort of unusual state of circumstances. As if a girl of child-bearing age had ever had a son before as a sign that the most powerful army in that part of the world would be destroyed. Neither myself nor Harrison are Hebrew scholars, but Harrison’s opinion that God would give a sign that a woman would have a son as a sign from God is a lazy and ill-conceived objection. Because the Hebrew word also means virgin, the context clearly shows the word to hold the meaning that all Bible translators, all Hebrew scholars, and all Christians have known for thousands of years.
The Criteria p135
The crux of Harrison’s argument can be distilled to this 1 thing:
He has a subjective opinion that morality is “In my estimation, the essence of morality should be designed by what is universal to the shared human experience – health, wellbeing and personal and economic freedoms”
Let’s call it morality H. We’ll call Christianity morality C
Harrison claims that H > C based on H as the standard. But this is not a valid comparison. To determine TRUTH, a comparison would need to be done against a transcendent standard (T). Since atheism cannot account for unchanging, abstract, absolutes, the best Harrison can say is “My feelings are better than yours”
The strength of Christianity is that it does make a claim to be a transcendental standard. The unchanging, transcendent, absolute Monarch, who created and upholds creation, has deemed certain behaviors as moral and others as immoral. So like it or not: God’s creation – God’s rules
C = T
Therefore C > H based on the standard of T
Jesus said the greatest commandment (Matthew 22) is this “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
IN THAT ORDER. So, we as God’s creation and image bearers are to love God supremely and follow this with loving our neighbors (and even our enemies – Luke 6)
P146 “So it turns out that the best religion for the task at hand of helping inform a human-centric morality that increases well-being…is no religion at all”
While his whole book has been building a case against Christianity and for the religion of humanism, his last line of his book rejects his own premise. It’s a fitting end to a book filled with caricatures of Christianity, baseless assertions, and sloppy logic
This isn’t a typical full review of the new content by Amazon, but I’ll include my overall thoughts about the movie
It really is stunning to me to hear God-deniers say. “The worldwide flood recorded in Genesis is impossible.” or “there’s no way the entire globe could have been flooded as recorded in Genesis” or “Noah’s flood? That’s just a fairy tale”. What does that have to do with the movie, Oppy?
At near the 9 minute mark one of the lab coats says: “The two Viking orbiters as they looked down on Mars, they saw…that’s strange. There could be signs of past water flowing. Was Mars once a green world with living things and blue oceans?“
At about 39:45 “We picked the Spirit landing site, Gusev Crater, that looked like it had a huge dried-up riverbed flowing through into it, and we went there hoping to find evidence of past water and past habitability. I mean there has to have been a lake in Gusev Crater at one time. But all Spirit found was this prison of lava rocks.”
“And it turns out that the composition of these little blueberries, was a mineral called hematite, which is a mineral that often forms in the presence of water.”
“From the minerology, from the geochemistry, everything that we needed to come to a reasonable conclusion that there was once water on Mars. It was right there in the walls of Eagle Crater. But this is a very acidic environment. Not a place where life could have developed.”
“So, yes there had been liquid water, but this wasn’t water that you or I would want to drink. It was basically like battery acid.”
“What you really want is nice, flowing, neutral-pH groundwater. And so to go and find a story of habitability, you’ve got to go on a bit of a roadtrip”
“This is a clay that has been intensely altered by relatively neutral pH water, representing the most favorable conditions for biology that Opportunity has encountered”
“Water. Drinkable neutral water once existed on the surface of Mars. And not only was there water, but it could possible sustain ancient microbial life. So that is just revolutionary.”
“It showed us that the ancient Mars was much more suitable to the origin of life.“
“This was the Holy Grail. This is the reason we had gone to Mars. Oppy discovered Mars was a wet world very much like Earth. There were oceans. Water played a huge role in its early history. It completely altered the planet.”
“And Opportunity spent years exploring Endeavor Crater, making incredible discoveries that tell that story of water. So we could go back in time to a planet that might actually have had life.“
“Mars had water. What happened to that water? And can we take the information and understand how that could happen here on Earth? And can we understand our part in that. Are we doing something that can accelerate that here on Earth. Because that’s something that you don’t recover from.”
Are you kidding me? They were able to turn this documentary about a planet with no water, no life, no humans, no fossil fuels into a global warming fear-mongering documentary…like most of the rest of them.
Their motivation was religious in nature (“This was the Holy Grail”), and it’s clear that their research was interested only in finding naturalistic origins of life.
Don’t misinterpret my critiques as a dislike for discovery or research. But what did you notice about their motivation for exploration? Extra terrestrial life. This blind search for life in lifeless places reveals their faith in naturalism. In their search for life, they recognize the need for water. So, in this video, we see over and over these lab-coats share their desire to find water. There’s not a drop of water on Mars.
But a planet (Earth) that is more than 70% covered by water could NOT have had a worldwide flood according to naturalists, and a planet (Mars) with not a single drop of liquid water is assumed to have been flooded in the distant past. The inconsistency and hypocrisy is astounding
Another level of hypocrisy among the God-deniers, is their denouncement of God’s amazing designs in biology. It was clear that the design of the robots was mimicry of the design of the human body. Same height. Same use of binocular vision. Same use of limbs and joints found in human arms. Yet I hear from God-deniers all the time, “humans are designed badly”. It’s a ridiculous claim for God-deniers to say humans are designed poorly when scientists literally mimic the incredible designs by the Almighty to achieve discoveries on other planets.
Overall, the documentary was positive and encouraged people to be involved in engineering solutions and discovery. I support finding engineering solutions and discovery, but motivations and intentions matter. There’s much better motivations for discovery and engineering solutions than the most unsuccessful career path of all time: astrobiology!
ApoloJedi 