Great Britain’s YWCA Drops Christian From Its Name

As Europe is debating the right to display crucifixes in public, Great Britain drops the word Christian from the name of a well-known Christian association. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Christianity is obviously not very trendy in Great Britain. Recently, a well-known Christian association changed its name. Known as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) since 1855, the association assumed the name Platform 51. (51 per cent of the population are women.)

The initiative for the name change came from YWCA. A spokeswoman for the association said that the name no longer reflected what its members represented since not all of them are Christians.

None of YWCA’s other 124 national organisations is planning to follow Great Britain’s example.

For some time, Britain has treated Christians harshly and trodden on their rights.

Recently, Owen and Eunice Johns, who are evangelical Christians, forfeited their right to be foster parents because they refused to give up their Bible-based views on sexual morality and said that homosexuality is a sin.

Source:

YWCA loses Christianity from title. The Telegraph 7 January 2011.

Researchers Doubt Alien Microbe Claim

Meteorites can be very brittle and Earth-based life can infiltrate them. Image courtesy of NASA.





Joel Kontinen

The Media have not made a big issue of the recent disclosure of alien life found on Earth.

Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA, said he had found signs of alien life in meteorites.

Hoover published his findings in the Journal of Cosmology, which is not an ordinary science journal but is dedicated to promoting the panspermia hypothesis or the view that life came to Earth from outer space.

The journal is going through turbulent times. In mid February Lana Tao, the senior executive managing director, announced that it will cease to appear in May.

This is not the first time that Hoover announces the discovery of life that originates from outer space. The previous “discoveries” have turned out to be misinterpretations.

Many scientists doubt Hoover’s interpretation of what has been found. They believe that Earth-based microbes could have infiltrated the brittle meteorites.

Moreover, NASA announced that it did not have anything to do with Hoover’s paper.

NASA’s reluctance is understandable. Last December it promoted the discovery of a bacterium that allegedly uses arsenic. The study was severely criticised for not being rigorous enough.

Source:

Ball, Philip. 2011. The aliens haven't landed. Nature News. (8 March)

Sir Isaac Newton Believed in the Bible’s History

Sir Isaac Newton's portrait by Godfrey Kneller (1702). Image courtesy of Wikipedia. Newton was one of the most famous creation scientists of all time.



Joel Kontinen


Michael Shermer, a well-known American skeptic, has promoted Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday (25th December) as a replacement for Christmas. The idea is somewhat odd since Newton was probably the best-known creation scientist of all times.

Newton wrote surprisingly much about the Bible. He believed that its revelation of the past history of humans and its predictions of the future were entirely reliable. He also studied the history of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern nations and concluded that both Greek and Egyptian historians had artificially stretched their history to make it appear longer than it actually was.

Ancient nations seemed to have had a competition for the longest national history. Historians could for instance invent fictive rulers in order to make the past of their own country appear longer than the history of neighbouring countries.

According to Newton, the history written in the Bible differed from the stories of other nations since it described the past reliably.

Source:

The Newton Project.

”Don't Tell the Creationists, But Scientists Don't Have a Clue How Life Began”

Tintoretto: Creation of the Animals (ca. 1550). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Recently, science writer John Horgan wrote a blog post at Scientific American.com on the difficulties of the origin of life theories. Horgan refers to Dennis Overbye’s report on a conference on origins of life research recently held at Arizona State University.

“Geologists, chemists, astronomers and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life”, Horgan says.

There are many difficulties lurking along the way towards birthing life spontaneously. DNA cannot make copies of itself without enzymes that act as catalysts for chemical reactions, so the classical dilemma of the origin of life remains unsolved:

Which was first, the hen or the chicken?

Researchers had hoped that RNA would provide the solution but “the RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation”, Horgan admits.

Horgan mentions Francis Crick’s panspermia hypothesis. Crick speculated that space aliens brought the seeds of life to Earth in their spaceships. Others assume that life came to Earth in the form of microbes from comets, asteroids or meteorites.

All this just moves the problem further back into space. Horgan admits this and says: “Creationists are no doubt thrilled that origin-of-life research has reached such an impasse.”

He is probably right. Life cannot originate spontaneously on Earth or even elsewhere. It needs more than just a catalyst.

It needs an Omnipotent (all powerful) Creator who can give birth to that what is impossible for natural processes even in a trillion years.

Source:

Horgan, John. 2011. Pssst! Don't tell the creationists, but scientists don't have a clue how life began. Scientific American.com. (28 February).

The Fossils of Thorns and Thistles: A Nightmare for Christians Believing in Millions of Years

According to Genesis, thorns and thistles appear after the Fall.



Joel Kontinen

Progressive creationism is a view that interprets the Genesis creation days as long eras lasting for millions of years. It assumes that God created new species to replace those that had become extinct.

According to progressive creationism, Adam and Eve were real historical people who lived approximately 100,000 years ago.

Many progressive creationists believe that the Fall was a real historical event that had cosmic consequences. However, some of them think that animals were killing each other before the Fall.

Thorns and thistles are nevertheless a big problem for them. A textbook on the evolution of plants shows that there were thorny plants already in the Devonian Era roughly 345–395 million years ago. It has a picture of Psilophyton crenulatum, a plant that is not very different from the thorny plants we see in our time.

Progressive creationists have a huge problem: the consequences of sin are seen in the fossil record over 300 million years before the Fall of Adam and Eve.

It would be easy to solve this problem by returning to a genuine biblical timescale that knows nothing of millions of years of past history.


Source:

Stewart, Wilson N. and Gar W. Rothwell. 1993. Paleobotany and the Evolution of Plants. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Charles Darwin: "Let theory guide your observations”

Charles Darwin seems to have admitted that his approach was not entirely objective. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

Many would believe that Charles Darwin observed nature and this led him to discover evolution and publish his famous theory. The truth is a lot more complicated, however.

In June 1863 Darwin wrote a letter to John Scott, a young geologist, giving interesting advice:

“Let theory guide your observations, but till your reputation is well established be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations.”

Theory guided Charles Darwin in his observations. According to his theory, there was no need of God in the creation work. He assumed that natural selection would make the Creator unnecessary.

Now we know that natural selection cannot create. It only selects from existing genetic information. While it might explain the preservation of species, it does not explain the origin of species.

Darwin’s views are outdated and need to be replaced by ideas that actually work.

Source:

Darwin Correspondence Project Letter 4206 — Darwin, C. R. to Scott, John, 6 June [1863],

Anthropologists Doubt Ardi

Ardi’s skull obviously looked like this: Image: Science 326 (5949), (2 October 2009) from the article Gen Suwa, Berhane Asfaw, Reiko T. Kono, Daisuke Kubo, C. Owen Lovejoy and Tim D. White: The Ardipithecus ramidus Skull and Its Implications for Hominid Origins.

Joel Kontinen


In October 2009 the journal Science published several articles on a fossil discovered in Ethiopia. It was dubbed Ardi. According to its discoverers, Ardipithecus ramidus was a human ancestor that walked on two feet almost like us.

The find was severely criticized by other anthropologists. Alan Walker, a paleoanthropologist at Penn State, complained that “some portions of Ardi's skeleton were found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction.”

This naturally diminished Ardi’s credibility as a member of our human family.

Recently, Nature published a study that was very critical of Ardi’s status. Bernard Wood and Terry Harrison, who both are professors of anthropology, compared Ardi to other assumed hominids. They challenge the conclusions of the 2009 Science papers.

They conclude that Ardipithecus is an extinct hominid.

Wood and Harrison warn their colleagues of making too hasty interpretations of fossils. They remind us that scientists assumed that Ramapithecus, discovered in southern Asia in the 1960s and 1970s, was a human ancestor. However, they later found out that it was an ancestor of modern orangutans.

Oreopithecus bambolii, an ape found in Italy, also resembles human fossils to some extent, but studies have shown that it cannot be our ancestor.

According to Wood and Harrison, paleoanthropologists should carefully consider all possible options before they announce that a particular fossil is a human ancestor.

Although they do not rule out the possibility that Ardi might after all belong to the human family tree, they believe that the evidence shows that it is not a close relative of ours.

Creationists have always regarded Ardi as an extinct ape. While Nature’s criticism is a bit late, it is obviously better to set things straight now than to let readers think that scientists have at last found an apeman that walks to two feet.

Sources:

Fossils May Look Like Human Bones: Biological Anthropologists Question Claims for Human Ancestry. ScienceDaily (16 February).

Wood, Bernard and Terry Harrison. 2011. The evolutionary context of the first hominins. Nature 470 (7334): 347-352.