Kingdom Come

The history of “In God We Trust” becoming the official motto of the United States…

as the country became ravaged by the Civil War, religious sentiment grew… Reverend M. R. Watkinson appealed to Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, to add the phrase to all U.S. coins…He wrote, “This would place us openly under the Divine protection…

Really? The belief that proclaiming a condition brings it into existence is magical thinking. Common in young children but considered psychotic or New Age religion in grownups.

Trust is not created by fiat. Trust is formed by neurological connections in the brain through interactions with others. Trust is established as early as the neonate’s social interactions, if not prenatally, despite the still-developing brain lacking the neurological ability for cognitive or emotional processing of experiences.

Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist, researched the importance of trust in infancy. He noted that when caregivers are a consistent source of comfort, food, and affection, an infant learns trust. The baby develops a belief that others are dependable and reliable. If caregivers are neglectful the infant learns mistrust. The baby then develops a belief that the world is an unpredictable, undependable, and possibly a dangerous place.

Continue reading “Section I: In What Do You Trust?”

Stephen Hawking is a genius physicist and “one of the most important scientists and public intellectuals of our time, if not all time.” 

But despite being a top ranked scientist among scientists, Stephen Hawking does not base his choice of belief system on evidence.

Note carefully that Stephen Hawking’s choice of belief is made to resolve his emotional response to the concept of an afterlife. As he states, he is grateful, i.e. relieved to conclude that there is no afterlife. This is understandable, since he spent his entire adult life struggling with a severely debilitating physical disease, experiencing, in essence, the misery of a disembodied soul as postulated to be the condition of the afterlife.

But is someone’s emotionally disturbed coping mechanism a viable basis on which to base belief directing your own life’s choices and plans for your soul’s fate after death? 

Continue reading “1) Existence: Pointless or Endless?”

in 1859, Charles Darwin, a deacon in the Church of England, published Origin of Species  which…challenged conventional Christian belief in the literal truth of the biblical creation story.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the findings of Darwin and the Higher Critics had been embraced by…influential figures in the media, universities and seminaries. The largely upper-class and urban people who accepted the new learning became known as modernists or liberals…

a movement began that opposed modernism vehemently and affirmed the literal truth of the Bible. Building on a long tradition of anti-intellectualism on the American frontier, these Christians would come to be known as fundamentalists.

Many people have become agnostics because of the supposed conflict between the Bible and science.  In truth, there is no conflict at all between a correct translation of the Bible and really proven science…

science knows human beings have lived on the earth far longer than the few thousand years covered by the Bible…

the truth is that the Bible nowhere says that Adam was the first man…— it merely says that Adam was the first man of a new [creation] or the White race. [Note the failure to provide the biblical reference for this statement.]

The many mis-translations in the King James Bible obscure much of the truth… see Rotherham’s Emphasized Bible…

Continue reading “2) Time vs Infinity”

[In 2015] the world said hello to Homo naledi, a new species of ancient human discovered in South Africa’s Rising Star cave… at least 15 individual skeletons—one of the richest hauls of hominid fossils ever uncovered.

But one significant problem clouded the excitement over the discovery: The team doesn’t know how old the fossils are…Everyone from professional paleontologists to interested members of the public raised the same question: Why hadn’t the team dated the fossils yet?

The simple answer is: Because dating fossils is really difficult.

Continue reading “3) Dating Fossils – The Stones Cry Out”

The second major change in scientific thought was in the field of geology. Traditional…geologists held that the catastrophes described in the Bible, such as Noah’s flood, had actually taken place and caused many of the signs of geological change that could be seen. This view was known as catastrophism.

An alternative to catastrophism was the view called uniformitarianism. Proponents of uniformitarianism argued that the world’s current geological state was the result of uniform forces working slowly over long periods of time. Uniformitarianism was one of the foundations of evolutionary thought, in part because it provided a geological analogy for biological change: both were the result of gradual forces working over extremely long time periods.

Continue reading “4) Catastrophism Or Uniformitarianism?”

Evolution has been aggressively advertised as scientific truth in opposition to religious dogma since its inception in the 19th century. Its claim that there is no Creator of life has made significant inroads against religious belief in developed nations.

A new poll conducted by Ipsos for Reuters News in twenty-four countries found that 41% of respondents identified themselves as “evolutionists” and 28% as “creationists,” with 31% indicating that they “simply don’t know what to believe,” according to a press release issued by Ipsos on April 25, 2011.

What has Evolution discovered since its philosophical inception in the 19th Century that establishes its scientific credentials?

Continue reading “6) True Science Does Not Bully Or Lie”