Kingdom Come

Nothing, however, but nothing, could rival the sales boost provided by Donald Trump [in his first term]. This president embodies the insight that given a willingness to lie without compunction, norms of veracity can be abolished with extraordinary speed. It is one of the central demands of the Party, in Orwell’s book, that you “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”. Trump put that maxim into effect on his very first day in office of his first term, with his insistence that people ignore the evidence of their senses about his Inauguration day crowds.

One particular area of Huxley’s prescience concerned the importance of data. Facebook’s mission statement “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” sounds a lot like the new world’s motto “Community, Identity, Stability”. The public nature of relationship status, the idea that everything should be shared, and the idea that “everyone belongs to everyone else” are also common themes of the novel and the company — and above all, the idea, perfectly put by Zuckerberg and perfectly exemplifying Huxley’s main theme, that “privacy is an outdated norm”.

This theme, of an attack on privacy, is central to Orwell’s vision too. Thought crime is one of the most serious crimes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is at this point that we can start to see his and Huxley’s novels not as competing visions of the future but as complementary, overlapping warnings. Our world has sex on display everywhere, entertainment to take you out of your mind whenever you want, and drugs to make you stop feeling.

Continue reading “14) Intelligence Or Intelligentsia?”

The ancient Greek philosophers, by use of thought processes alone, laid the foundation for the way science is conceived and investigation pursued in our modern world, while believing in the existence of a Creator, a Supreme Being, and/or lesser gods.

Thales (d. ~550 BC) is known as the Father of Science because he used observation, scientific knowledge and logic, developing theories of mathematics, engineering, astronomy and medicine to find explanations for natural phenomena which had previously been attributed to the 12 Olympian gods. At the same time, he did not reject gods, and believed these energy beings were present in everything.

Pythagoras (d. ~500 BC), whose geometry theorem is still one of the most widely used, also contributed to the development of science. Pythagoras believed that souls are immortal.

Parmenides (d. ~450 BC) is considered the father of metaphysics. He believed that real existence could not be perceived through the senses, only through logic and reasoning. His main principle was that “everything is one”. This exactly matches Albert Einstein’s 20th century deduction that energy and mass are the same.

Anaxagoras (d. ~425 BC) argued that nothing can perish, the ingredients of the material world are constantly changing form and everything has a portion of everything. Again, matching Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Continue reading “16) Proven Facts Or Biased Ideas?”

“avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith.” (I Timothy 6:20-21)

There were three major revolutions in scientific thought that prepared the way for a successful theory of evolution.

The first major change in scientific thought was in the field of biology. Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist, had proposed the first successful taxonomy of all species of plants and animals. This taxonomy abandoned the theory of the chain of being that claimed that all living creatures formed an unbroken scale of complexity and nobility, terminating with the most complex and noble of all, humanity. Instead, Linnaeus showed that life could be divided into separate categories, each divergent from the others.

How does this make sense? Evolution is the theory of a chain of complexity, so Linnaeus’ “abandonment” of this idea cannot support Evolution. 

The truth is that Linnaeus was not abandoning anything but building on Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) existing classification of animal species in his History of Animals, while his pupil Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 BC) wrote a parallel work, the Historia Plantarum, on plants.

Continue reading “SECTION III: Science Falsely So-Called”

The Big Bang Theory remains the most popular explanation for the existence of the universe, despite its inherent failure to provide an explanation for matter out of nothing and organization out of chaos.

Because it eliminates an Almighty Creator / Sustainer / Authority / Judge.

About 13.8 billion years ago the universe sprang into existence in an event known as the Big Bang.

“In the beginning” there was an equal amount of mass and energy condensed to the size of a soccer ball, called a Singularity. This is clearly based on Einstein’s Relativity where E=m, without, however factoring the c2 Force that controls the stability or conversion or chaos of the effect of one on the other. 

Then, obviously requiring a Force which is not explained by the Big Bang Idea (not actually a Theory) the universe suddenly, without explanation blew up / inflated / expanded, becoming vastly larger.

There’s a tremendous amount of research and speculation about what started inflation, but nobody knows. There is no evidence we can point to; no observations we can make; no experiments we can perform.

One thing that has been absolutely mathematically determined by these studies is that temperature fluctuations are thousands of times smaller than a Big Bang predicts. 

How long inflation lasted is not only unknown, but unknowable. Nonetheless, astronomists have no problem assigning a date of “about 13.8 billion years ago.” 

Continue reading “17) The Big Bang Theory Is Just A Show”

The Problem: By the mid 19th century it was obvious that Earth was much older than 6000 years,

It was not obvious.

There is no evidence for this claim. It was asserted out of the rejection of biblical moral authority as the article itself admits. “After all, if the Earth were too young for there to have been time for evolution, the evolution debate would be over.”

Initially, three lines of evidence for long ages of earth’s existence were pursued.

Each failed

1. Hutton attempted to estimate age based on the application of observed rates of sedimentation to the known thickness of the sedimentary rock column, achieving an approximation of 36 million years. This was based on three false assumptions that 1) sedimentation occurs at a constant rate over time, 2) no compression has occurred in lower levels of sedimentary rock, and 3) no erosion or disruption of sedimentary layers has occurred in the 36 million years that have passed.
2. Ocean salinity: In 1889 John Joly, acting on suggestion of Edmund Halley, attempted estimate based on the salinity of the ocean. He calculated the amount of salt [currently] being transported into the oceans by rivers and compared this to the salinity of sea water [assuming it was initially fresh water], obtaining an age of 90 million years. Joly missed that salt is removed from the oceans by various processes.
3. Thermodynamics: Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, during the late 19th century, assumed that the Earth had originally been molten then, using average melting point of rocks and the laws of thermodynamics, determined that the Earth would completely solidify within 20 million years. At the time the process of radioactive decay inside the earth generating new heat had not been discovered.

Continue reading “18) Dating The Earth”

[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 “19) Absolute Dating”

Relative dating stems from the idea that…objects closer to the surface are more recent in time relative to items deeper in the ground.

Relative dating can be determined through comparing finds in carefully mapped strata.

One of the world’s oldest landfills was recently uncovered in Jerusalem….Through a systematic excavation of this landfill, Tel Aviv University archaeologist Yuval Gadot and his team have been able to shed light on Jerusalem during a particularly tumultuous chapter of its history—when Rome ruled, the Temple stood, and Jesus preached.

From the earliest agricultural villages through the early modern era, people have used clay vessels for almost every sort of activity…

Earthenware vessels of different periods on display at Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Turkey from archeological sites estimated to date back to about 5,000 BC.

Several problems arise with the use of stratification for dating. Rodents, for example, can create havoc in a site by moving items from one context to another. Natural disasters like floods can sweep away top layers of sites to other locations.

Nonetheless, relative dating is paleontology’s basis for dating fossils back to millions of years old.

Continue reading “20) Relative Dating”

Alfred Wegener (1880–1930), a German meteorologist and geophysicist observed that the continents of South America and Africa looked like they would fit together remarkably well. Similar fossils were found on continents separated by oceans, additional evidence that perhaps the landforms had once been joined. He hypothesized that all of the modern-day continents had previously been clumped together in a supercontinent he called Pangaea from ancient Greek, meaning “all lands” or “all the Earth”. Think Pan American Airlines.

This is consistent with the biblical account that “God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the [singular] dry land appear: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:13)

Another source of evidence of the breakup of a single land mass into many are the deep scratches and sediments deposits left behind when a melting glacier moves past a smooth rock. The Palaeozoic glaciation on Pangea left scratches on rocks, which today are several continents and far away from each other but match up like scattered puzzle pieces.

Wegener did not know what drove this movement so in keeping with the recently proposed long age speculation to support the new idea of evolution, assigned millions of years of “drift”. Only decades later, in the 1960s technologies adapted from warfare made it possible to more thoroughly study Earth with scientific equipment such as seismometers and magnetometers.

Geological research replaced continental [slow] drift with [sudden] plate tectonics.

Continue reading “21) Evidence For Rapid Change”