Does Evolution Kill the Idea of Self?

Image courtesy of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).




Joel Kontinen

Science, scientism and reason are popular words that many people understand precisely the way they want to.

Sceptics have re-defined science. It used to be a search for the best explanation, but somewhere along the way Darwinists hijacked the word, making it the search for the best naturalistic explanation.

This has had far-reaching consequences. Some have embraced thinking that hails from the teaching of Eastern philosophers and they question the very reality of our existence.

Elon Musk, for instance, believes we might be living in a computer simulation.

Many other sceptics think we are insignificant. This is what Bill Nye, the 2010 Humanist of the Year, believes about humans:

“I'm insignificant. ... I am just another speck of sand. And the earth really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck. And the sun an unremarkable star. ... And the galaxy is a speck. I'm a speck on a speck orbiting a speck among other specks among still other specks in the middle of specklessness. I suck.”

Consciousness and free will are hard dilemmas for Darwinists and so is the existence of the self.

Recently, Robert Lawrence Kuhn wrote an article on Live Science in which the difficulties brought by Alzheimer's to his 100-year old mother prompted him to take a critical look at selfhood.

He seems to think that while the self might be real, it is material, located in the brain.

While sceptics might invoke reason for this choice, ignoring all but the material dimension is not very reasonable.

As British writer G. K. Chesterton put it, atheists have a doctrine against the supernatural. This eventually leads to the destruction of reason.

The Bible takes an entirely different approach. We are made in God’s image and as such we are accountable to Him for all our deeds, choices and misdeeds.

And He freely offers us pardon, friendship and eternal life through faith in Jesus.


Source:

Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2016. Is Your 'Self' Just an Illusion? Live Science (7 September).

Stephen Hawking Warns of Bad Aliens - Again

Prof. Hawking is in a warning mood.




Joel Kontinen

Professor Stephen Hawking keeps on seeing threats here and there. Recently he again warned us of the danger of trying to contact aliens.

He thinks there might be life on Gliese 832c, an exoplanet that orbits a red dwarf star some 16 light years from us. It is five times as big as Earth and has a year (i.e., the length of one orbit) that lasts a mere 36 days.

Image courtesy of PHL @ UPR Arecibo, NASA Hubble, Stellarium.

Last year, Professor Hawking launched the $100 million Breakthrough Listen initiative with Russian tycoon Yuri Milner with the aim of finding extraterrestrial life:

“The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back,” The Independent quotes him as saying.

He is afraid that the little green men might kill us off.

This is not the first time he warns us of bad aliens.

In his naturalistic /materialistic world, the universe should be teeming with life, some of which might be far more intelligent than we are.

And since the only model he knows of is our fallen world, he obviously thinks aliens must also be bad.

He believes that the universe made itself through natural laws. He has everything popping out of nothing.

But quantum fluctuations cannot salvage lazy thinking.

By ignoring the supernatural dimension, Prof. Hawkins is in effect endorsing the flatland view of reality.

He has previously warned humanity of the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI), so seeing threats all over the place seems to be second nature to him.

Source:

Griffin, Andrew. 2016. Stephen Hawking warns that humanity should not respond to aliens in case they kill us all. The Independent (23 September).

Ig Nobels 2016: Rock Personalities and Human Animals

Might these rocks have personality?



Joel Kontinen


Each year, Harvard University awards research that differs quite a bit from the run-of-the-mill papers flooding science journals. While the Ig Nobels are meant to be funny, they are based on real research.

Often, the research has a Darwinian connection. Or what would we say about this year’s economics prize, awarded to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective?

According to the evolutionary worldview, rocks are our distance ancestors. Life and consciousness are afterthoughts. ‘Personality’ should actually be a big dilemma for Darwinists.

This year’s biology prize is no less Darwinian. It was awarded jointly to “Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.”

In attempting to be as authentic as possible, Mr. Foster ate worms, while Mr. Thwaites munched grass like his hirsute mates.

In a Darwinian world, man is just another animal, related to things like mushrooms. So why not eat grass and worms and live like our four-footed cousins?

Each winner also received a $10 trillion monetary compensation for their ordeal. Robert Mugabe might not like this, but it is a Zimbabwean banknote, hardly worth the paper it is printed on.

Source:

Bohannon, John. 2016. Sex life of rats, personalities of rocks awarded Ig Nobel Prizes. Science (22 September).

Smart Ants Build Quick Impromptu Bridges

An ant bridge. Image courtesy of Geoff Gallice, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).




Joel Kontinen

Ants are ingenious creatures. While they have a miniature brain, they can do some basic arithmetic, and build living rafts and huge anthills.

Some of these structures are over 9 metres (30 feet) high. Taking their size into account, humans would have to erect buildings that are over 2 kilometres (1.25 miles) high to be able to compete with these clever builders.

Some ants have come up with an elaborate farming system. Evolutionists believe this happened some “25 million years” ago.

Recently, New Scientist (NS) described another amazing ability, viz. bridge building, that ants are good at:

“BARRO Colorado Island is tiny and sits in the middle of the Panama Canal. Here, below the forest dome, a diminutive predator scuttles over dead leaves and along narrow branches. Nearly blind, this Eciton army ant follows a trail of chemical signals laid down by her sisters. She pushes forward, relentlessly, in search of prey. Whatever she finds, she’ll bring back to the nest to share with her colony.

But then she stops. The ground has dropped away in front of her. There is no scent trail, just empty space. Other members of the colony that were following begin to climb over her. Now, instead of walking in a line, they grip hold of one another using hooks on their feet, adding body after body to build an impromptu bridge. More and more join in, until they traverse the gap. And there they remain until the entire foraging party, numbering hundreds, has crossed. Then, as suddenly as it came into being, the bridge disperses, and the ants continue on their way.”

NS says that this is “an impressive feat of coordination.” Given their “very limited brainpower” and despite having no “overview of the situation” they manage to do the impossible.

This would be difficult if not impossible to explain by invoking Darwinian processes that tend to be more or less myopic.

But in a created world we would expect animals to be intelligent.


Source:

Hess, Peter. 2016. Get inside the collective mind of a genius superorganism. New Scientist (7 September).

Interstellar Cloud Destroys Belief in Alien Megastructure Near Tabby’s Star

Some thought it was comets. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.




Joel Kontinen

No megastructure. No aliens.

Not so long ago SETI enthusiasts thought they saw evidence of a “massive extraterrestrial construction project”, as New Scientist puts it, near Tabby’s star.

A star can become 1 per cent dimmer when an exoplanet crosses in front of it. This occurs at regular intervals. However, astronomers were unable to explain why Tabby’s star or KIC 8462852, as it is officially known, became 20 per cent dimmer – sporadically.

Recent research suggests that asteroids or alien megastructures can’t explain what is happening. The proposed solution is a swarm of interstellar comets.

The problem is that no one knows whether they exist.

Jason Wright at Pennsylvania State University, who initially came up with the idea of alien megastructures, now thinks the dimming may be caused by an interstellar cloud between us and the star.

This might well be a plausible explanation as Tabby’s star has been dimming for a hundred years or so.

This has not been a good year for the SETI folks. It has cast doubt on the famous wow signal and the strong radio signal coming from the star HD 164595.

It seems that those who reject the Christian worldview tend to believe in more or less bizarre phenomena.

There seems to be a strong correlation between belief in Darwinian evolution and in UFOs, for instance.

Source:

Hall, Shannon. 2016. ‘Alien megastructure’ star may be explained by interstellar junk. New Scientist (19 September).

Protein from ”3.8 Million-Year-Old” Ostrich Shells Refutes Darwinian Dogma

Here’s a bit younger ostrich egg.




Joel Kontinen

Science calls them the “oldest-ever proteins.” Their assumed age is “3.8 million years”, and researchers extracted them from ostrich egg shells found in Laetoli, Tanzania.

This might be a bit misleading, as collagen has been discovered in dinosaur bone, and collagen is certainly a protein.

Scientists have estimated that collagen could last perhaps 1– 2 million years if kept frozen, otherwise it would not last even half a million years.

Laetoli lies just south of the Equator on a plain where temperatures would hardly ever fall below the freezing point, so it seems that dogma (millions-of-years) means more to these researchers than letting the evidence speak for itself.

The preservation of DNA in “1.4 million year” old plankton, as well as blood vessels and radiocarbon (C-14) in dinosaur bone make it practically impossible to believe in millions of years.

But what beats all other discoveries of ancient protein is that of protein compounds in “1.88 billion year old” cyanobacteria.


Source:

Gibbons, Ann. 2016. Oldest-ever proteins extracted from 3.8-million-year-old ostrich shells. Science (16 September).

Potassium Kills Moon Origin Hypothesis

Potassium isotopes in lunar rocks like this killed the leading Moon origin hypothesis. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Secular Moon origin hypotheses have not fared well recently.

And the ones that do make it into headlines rely too much on fiction and speculation.

The latest casualty is the view that relies on the collision between a Mars-sized body and a proto-Earth. A paper in Nature compared the potassium-41 and potassium-39 levels in lunar rocks and terrestrial rocks.

Science Daily summarises the results:

“The leading theory for the moon's formation got in trouble recently when it was revealed that the moon and Earth are isotopic twins. Now highly precise measurements of the isotopes of an element that was still condensed at the ‘cut off’ temperature when material started to fall back to Earth suggest a dramatic solution to the problem.”

The expression ‘got in trouble’ is an understatement. The hypothesis or story is practically dead.



Source:

Washington University in St. Louis. 2016. Moon is proto-earth's mantle, relocated, chemistry suggests. Science Daily. (12 September).