New ”Dawkins Debate” on Video

Richard Dawkins usually avoids debates like the plague. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

For over two decades, Richard Dawkins has consistently refused to take part in debates on origins issues. This might well stem from sour memories. In 1986 he teamed with Professor John Maynard-Smith to debate professors A. E.Wilder-Smith and Edgar Andrews at Oxford University on creation-evolution.

The Darwinian duo obviously fared so badly that Dawkins had to launch an ad hominem attack against Professor A. E. Wilder-Smith and make an impassioned plea for giving zero votes to the creationists.

The audience did not agree with him, however.

Then Richard Dawkins had to face defeat on a video called ”From a Frog to a Prince”. When asked for evidence of a mutation that could increase genetic information, he searched for an answer in vain for about 17 seconds before eventually giving up and forgetting the question.

No wonder, then, that Dawkins turns down invitations to debate origins issues.

Recently, Renton Maclachlan, who runs a radio station in New Zealand focusing on creation, posted a YouTube video in which he interviewed ”Richard Dawkins”:



The video referred to this clip:



Sources:

Fraudulent report at AAAS and the 1986 Oxford University debate. http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/cosmos/origines/debate_gc.htm

Was Dawkins Stumped? Frog to a Prince critics refuted again. Creation Ministries International, 12 April 2008.

Great Britain puts an end to UFO research

Although UFOs and crop circles have made headlines in the UK press, few if any have seen little green men lately. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

The most recent casualty of the current economic recession is UFO research. The British Ministry of defence will shut down its UFO investigation unit. Set up over 50 years ago, the researchers at the unit have not seen a glimpse of an authentic flying saucer or a little green man.

While UK citizens have sent thousands of e-mails to the unit and used a special hotline to report their observations, they have not succeeded in convincing the researchers that the phenomena they have kept on seeing originate from outer space.

Perhaps the foremost reason for believe in UFOs and little green men is Darwinian evolution, although the money makers at Hollywood can hardly wash their hands. Those who believe that life developed randomly on Earth will also believe that it developed on other planets, and are expecting to find support for their view.

However, since the origin of life needs more than just water, other UFO research institutes might also run out of pounds, euros or dollars before any little green men appear on planet Earth to save us from impending climate change.


Source:

Ormsby, Avril, Tim Castle and Peter Millership. 2009. After 50 years, UK ministry shuts down UFO unit. Reuters (4 December). http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B32XH20091204

Bizarre claim: ”Israelis Playing Mini-Mengele"

A British MP associates Israelis with the notorious doctor of Auschwitz. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

Truth is often one of the earliest casualties in the propaganda war, especially when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians. Recently British MP George Galloway, who is known for his pro-Palestinian bias, associated Israel with Josef Mengele, the notorious doctor at Auschwitz who experimented with concentration camp inmates.

According to Galloway, ”the body parts of Palestinian prisoners were systematically harvested without the knowledge or consent of their families”.

Galloway based his claim on a report aired on Swedish television in which fact and fiction merged into a thick stew. However, he says that Palestinian sources support his thesis.

A decade ago, there was a public outcry in Israel after it became known that doctors had taken body parts from fallen Israeli soldiers and some dead civilians, both Jews and Arabs, without notifying their relatives of the matter. In 2001, the Israeli Ministry of Health set up a commission to investigate the issue and ”forbade organ removal from deceased persons without family permission”.

The Israeli government also tightened legislation on the issue, broke up organ trafficking rings and prosecuted ”those involved both directly and indirectly. ”

After this, two notorious cases of organ trafficking were reported. Three men were indicted, two of them Israeli Arabs and a Jewish surgeon who was arrested in Ukraine.

Israelis never conducted experiments on living Palestinians. They did not ”harvest” organs from prisoners or kill any prisoners in order to do so. The kidneys and other organs were from dead Israelis and Palestinians.

In contrast, Mengele experimented with living prisoners. Galloway’s claim of Israelis playing ”mini-Mengele” turns out to be a bizarre distortion of what really happened. The real issue might well have to do with anti-Semitism.

Sources:

Galloway, George. 2009. Dark echoes of Holocaust. Daily Record (28 December) http://blogs.dailyrecord.co.uk/georgegalloway/2009/12/dark-echoes-of-holocaust.html

Israel Reiterates Hard Line on Illegal Organ Trafficking Following Revelations of Decade-old Case. The Israel Project. (21 December 2009.) http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=3587015&content_id=%7B428A17E4-5043-4712-83D4-1037E77FF4B9%7D¬oc=1

Israelis "Playing Mini-Mengele". Honest Reporting (29 December)
http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Israelis_Playing_Mini-Mengele.asp

Super-intelligent molecules or old speculations of the origin of life?

Michelangelo: The Creation of Adam. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. In the Darwinian scenario, there is no need of the Creator since super-intelligent molecules are assumed to be capable of creating life.



Joel Kontinen

”Four billion years ago, a number of molecules organised themselves in water, the true cradle of life. Here they formed chemical groups capable of generating true copies of themselves (self-reproduction). As a result of minor errors of assembly, more effective groups appeared and became dominant species (evolution).”

This is how Andre Brack, who is a biophysicist, outlines the origin of life in Unesco’s newsletter A World of Science. The scenario is neither credible nor possible but it is nonetheless a typical example of Darwinian storytelling.

Charles Darwin assumed that life began in a warm little pond. Brack repeats an old tradition that fails to take into account the complexity of the cell.

By using the ”just add water” strategy one might be able to make chicken noodle soup, provided one has all the necessary ingredients but producing a living cell is a much more complicated achievement. Brack’s super-intelligent molecules would easily become honorary members of Mensa.

Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University, has a much more realistic view of the cell as Brack: The cell is full of molecular machines and it could not have come about by Darwinian mechanisms.





Source:

Brack, Andre. 2009. Are we alone? A World of Science 7 (1), 4.

Rejecting Christianity leads to an irrational worldview

James W. Sire, an associate professor of English, discusses worldviews in The Universe Next Door, a textbook used in over a hundred universities and collages. Over 250, 000 copies have been sold.



Joel Kontinen

Rejecting Christianity leads to an irrational worldview. This is the basic message in James W. Sire’s book The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalogue. Sire, an associate professor of English, defines worldview as ”a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or unconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world.”

According to Sire, naturalism, so popular with atheists, is anything but rational: “If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it.” (p. 84).

Atheism does not lead to rational thinking but to nihilism that leads to meaninglessness. Not all naturalists are nihilists, however, because they are inconsistent. In other words, they do not believe in their own worldview. If they were to believe it, in a meaningless universe suicide would be as acceptable a decision as watching a film produced by Walt Disney (pp. 93-94).

Sire also criticises biblical interpretation based on ”theistic” existentialism. Theologians following in the footsteps of Rudolf Bultmann do not want to hear about new discoveries that support the historical reliability of the Old Testament (pp. 124-125).

Few academic textbooks are as easy to read as The Universe Next Door. A well-documented book, its 1976 edition includes an index and almost 20 pages of endnotes.

Source:

Sire, James W. 1976. The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalogue. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press.

Old speculations re-emerge: The Black Sea Flood as the inspiration behind the description of the Noachian Flood?

Noah’s ark was considerably larger than this model built by Spanish artisans in Gran Canaria. You can see an image of what the ark probably looked like here.



Joel Kontinen

Recently, Ulrike Guérin and Katrin Köller brought up the local Black Sea flood as a potential explanation for the Noachian flood in an article on underwater treasures in UNESCO’s newsletter A World of Science.

According to Guérin and Köller, 7,500 years ago the surface of the Black Sea was a hundred metres lower than that of the Bosphorus. As the climate became warmer, glaciers melted, raising the sea level of the Mediterranean until its waters broke the natural dam at the Bosphorus and water rushed through.

They conclude this from the traces of a submerged coastline lying 17 metres below the surface of the Black Sea.

The hypothesis that Guérin and Köller propose is not new. Roughly ten years ago, National Geographic sponsored research that aimed at establishing the connection between the post-ice age Black Sea flood and the cataclysm of Noah’s day. The expedition was led by Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic.

Dr. Tas Walker assessed these speculations in 2000. He showed that no details of the local flood scenario corresponded with what we know of the global cataclysm of Noah’s time.

The flood of Noah’s day was an unique global flood that destroyed all people and land animals outside the ark.

The Black Sea flood was a local catastrophe that occurred at the close of the ice age. Scientists who have dated the marks it left behind have failed to take into account the effect of the global flood that would have changed the 14C/12C relationship of the atmosphere as great amounts of vegetation remained submerged. Consequently, the carbon-14 dates for this and other catastrophes are too old.

Sources:

Guérin, Ulrike and Katrin Köller. 2009. Of Shipwrecks, lost worlds and grave robbers. A World of Science 7 (2): 19-23,

Walker, Tas. 2000. The Black Sea flood Definitely not the Flood of Noah. Journal of Creation 14 (1): 40-44. http://creation.com/the-black-sea-flood

The Real Meaning of Christmas

God gave us first Christmas present.



Joel Kontinen


Although we might not know what month Jesus was born in Bethlehem, we celebrate Christmas because the Creator of the entire universe ” made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil. 2:7).

In addition to Creation and Redemption, the event that marked the beginning of Christ's earthly life, i.e. Christmas, is also an essential part of historical Christianity.

We cannot understand the good news of the New Testament without the tragedy of the third chapter of Genesis that introduced sin and death into the world.

God created a perfect world but man was reluctant to take his Creator at His word and wanted to follow his own path. By breaking God’s explicit commandment, Adam and Eve brought chaos to the world.

However, God did not desert man but promised to send the Saviour who would pay the penalty for mankind’s sin. Thus, some 2000 years ago, Luke wrote the following comforting words: "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”


Have a blessed Christmas!