Animal Rights vs. Human Wrongs: Alfie Evans vs. Cecil the Lion

The hospital where Alfie Evans died. Image courtesy of Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

When an American dentist killed a lion in Zimbabwe in 2015, thousands of people saw it as the ultimate crime.

Now, three years later when a court ruling allowed a children’s hospital to withdraw life support for Alfie Evans, a 23-month old toddler from Merseyside, UK, the outcry was far less pronounced.

Alfie was admitted to hospital in December 2016. He had a degenerative brain condition and was the focus of a fierce court battle.

His parents asked the Pope to help transfer the boy to a children’s hospital in Rome for treatment, but the British High Court rejected the move, as doctors argued that continuing treatment was "not in Alfie's best interests."

Who knows? Doctors are humans and as such they make mistakes.

But what stands out in this unfortunate case is the attitude of the man in the street who is more willing to fight for the rights of animals like Cecil the Lion than resist the wrongs done to a British toddler.

Might Darwinian evolution throw a dark shadow on our priorities?

Source:

BBC news. 2018. Alfie Evans: Legal battle toddler dies. (28 April).

Disbelief in God Leads to Bizarre Beliefs

G. K. Chesterton, by Ernest Herbert Mills, 1909. Public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Why are bizarre beliefs, such as the multiverse and a universe teeming with alien civilisations, rampant in our day?

British author G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) might have the answer:

“When men stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

This quote is widely attributed to Chesterton, although it obviously does not appear verbatim in his works; it was first recorded as 'The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything' in Emile Cammaerts’ book The Laughing Prophet: The Seven Virtues and G.K. Chesterton (London: Methuen & Co., 1937].

Chesterton was especially critical of atheism and Darwinian evolution.

Bizarre beliefs tend to either ignore or try to explain away cosmic fine tuning that is evident everywhere, from the micro to the macro.

Source:

Knowles, Elizabeth. (ed). 2004. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Darwinian Solution to Complex Life: Just Add Oxygen?

Some very old organisms are very complex – and they’re still with us. Image courtesy of Kelvin Song, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).



Joel Kontinen

Chinese researchers think that “a surge in oxygen” might have paved the way for the evolution of complex life a “billion years” earlier than previously thought.

Reporting on this view, New Scientist also suggests that Ediacaran creatures were “blob-like.”

However, some Precambrian creatures were very complex, full of tiny nanomachines.

Oxygen is not a sufficient cause for producing complex life. What is needed is genetic information, which happens to be a thing Darwinian evolution cannot produce.


Source:

Klein, Alice. 2018. Oxygen may have helped complex life arise a billion years early. New Scientist (23 April).

More Designed Features in Trees: Pulse, Sort of

Trees have been in the news recently.




Joel Kontinen

Trees have made headlines in recent years. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, as they are full of self-assembling solar panels.

Some time ago we heard that trees sleep at night.

Then we got to know that trees communicate with other trees.

Soon afterwards a study found that at least one eucalyptus species “sweats” to keep cool during heatwaves.

The latest surprise has to do with something akin to a pulse: “We’ve discovered that most trees have regular periodic changes in shape, synchronised across the whole plant and shorter than a day-night cycle, which imply periodic changes in water pressure,” New Scientist quotes Dr. András Zlinszky as saying.


Source:

Coghlan, Andy. 2018. Trees may have a ‘heartbeat’ that is so slow we never noticed it. New Scientist (20 April).

Mother Earth Day 2018: Celebrating a Mother who is Not Our Mother

Many people would like to believe that Earth is their mother.




Joel Kontinen

While many people would deny that God is their Father, they are inclined to believe that Earth is their mother.

They have designated a day in her honour. Thus today many celebrate Earth Day, or, as the UN prefers to call it, the International Mother Earth Day.

Now, taking care of the environment is a laudable enterprise, but making a religion of it is certainly not.

There is a name for it: idolatry.

Man was created to worship someone bigger than himself. If he refuses to worship God, he will worship something or someone else.

It seems that the number of secular holy days has been increasing lately. In addition to Mother Earth Day, there’s Darwin Day and Carl Sagan Day, for instance.

Some would go so far as to call the mushroom their brother and demand human rights for things like glaciers and rivers.

Source:

Gibbens, Sarah. 2018. How the Environment Has Changed Since the First Earth Day. National Geographic (21 April).

Darwinist Tries in Vain to Resurrect the Bad Design Argument

No bad design. Desiree Linden won the 2018 Boston Marathon. Image courtesy of Gr5555, CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

Atheistic evolutionists are fond of using theological arguments. While they don’t believe in God, they think they know how He would not have created.

They also think that they know what is bad design and what isn’t.

Richard Dawkins, for instance, has been very vocal with his view of the backward wired retina, which actually happens to be an illustration of very good design.

It seems that smart is the adjective the best describes our eyes.

Another failed Darwinian argument is that our genome is full of junk, of both DNA and RNA.

And the vestigial organ argument has fared even worse.

However, recently biologist Nathan Lents tried to resurrect some failed evolutionary arguments that he calls design glitches.

In addition to the above, he also mentioned our supposedly weak knees, which happens to be a bizarre claim, given that humans can run a marathon, provided they train sufficiently for it.

Sources:

Laufmann, Steve. 2018. Your “Botched Body”: Bad Design or Bad Logic? Evolution News & Science Today (18 April).

Lents, Nathan H. 2018. The Botch of the Human Body. Wall Street Journal (13 April).

Cooling Lava Probably Formed Giant’s Causeway during Noah’s Flood

Image courtesy of Chmee2, CC BY 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

Giant’s Causeway is a rock structure in Northern Ireland that is composed of 40,000 basalt columns touching each other.

It has been the subject of both legends and naturalistic speculations.

New research published in the journal Nature Communications suggests the columns formed when magma rock cooled quickly some “50–60 million years ago.”

The explanation might well be correct, but the timing is off by a factor of 10,000.

The global flood that devastated the Earth during Noah’s day roughly 4,500 years ago is a more plausible time. The deluge was most probably accompanied by volcanic eruptions.

The Book of Genesis describes the true history of ancient times.

Source:

Dovey, Dana. 2018. 'Giant's causeway' mysterious Irish rock structure was formed by ancient volcanoes. Newsweek (16 April).