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BULLETIN ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
THE CREATION EXHIBITS CALLED MANKIND
ARE BECOMING VERY CREATIVE
but that is their original nature
and expected biblical outcome
Some people undoubtedly like their steak well-done, almost frazzled.
Some people similarly like their philosophic pies well crisped.
It is however another thing to wait until they are burned.
The Darwinian pie is ashes, and some still seem to continue with it, though it has no food value.
On this site, this has been pointed out with logical rejoinder since 1996, and before that in a published format in 1992. It may be found in many parts of The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, especially in volume I. For example one might mention pp. 102-174, with correlatives in Chapter 3, all this in one whole methodical alignment over some 1350 pages. The theme has been pursued in That Magnificent Rock, Chs. 1 and Appendix 1, and in the flush of volume in the seven volume set, The gods of naturalism have no go! as in
Bulletins 1, 2, 13, 15, 27, 34, 53, 57, 59, 64, 66, 71, 82, 83, 84, 93, 99, 105, 106, 107 and 108.
Bulletin 105, and Secession from Secession from Supposition Ch. 9 together with Apologetic Orchestra set out the special method invented for the task in general. Bulletin 105 also is a substantial survey updating many aspects since the original trilogy.
In our updating in Bulletin 105, the devastation of evolutionism from the hand of Emeritus Professor J.C. Sanford (Cornell University) is one of the elements considered. One section of this treatment is as follows.
As Dr J.C. Sanford in his Genetic Entropy stresses, myriads of copies over the generations, of the DNA from one to the next, necessarily implies errors, and many of these are associated with good features, so that when the actualities of selection occur, much is always lost. The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not cease to apply, and he cannot find even one unequivocal case of information advance in kind, on the advance side. Moreover in an intriguing coverage of a large number of new usages of non-protein coding DNA, involving something like a spread of factories all making components and special features of the most advanced kind in connection and capacity, he is able to say this (within the coverage, pp. 40-44, op.cit.):
"It is becoming increasingly clear that most, or all, of the genome is functional. Therefore most mutations in the genome must be deleterious."
Indeed, he notes on p. 45, that in a large gathering of geneticists in 2007, it was concluded that "most of the genome is transcribed, mostly in both directions, and that "most nucleotides are not only functional but poly-functional, having multiple roles."
The modes of non-protein making genes are startling in their complexity, their compoundings of functions including oversight and correction and means for the same, and many of these are involved in what appear genome-wide functionality, so that one view is that this type of DNA is more productive than the segment of 'mere' protein making operatives amid the myriad functions of the code, found ever-more complex with ever more functions, so that "the genome's functionality exceeds 100%." These genome wide patterns, Dr Sanford continues, "appear crucial to cell function, and suggest functionality throughout the entire genome." The poly-synthetic aspects of the operation of parts of the genome, in other words, are not merely regional but have integral implications.
That of course is precisely what is often found in high-level literary composition of great subtlety some with considerable ramifications. The human mind at the height of its creativity (cf. Bulletin one hundred & six) can be like that. What constructed it is scarcely deficient in comprehension of these creative mental objects.
So many things are confused with the operations of the genome, as Sanford points out in considerable detail, but the actuality is something else.
This body of data is in fact seen neither in practice, writing itself, nor in theory, involving as it does the art of thought and the presence of cognitive manipulation of symbols by having their signification fixed and reliable. What fixes these representations and their meaning, functionality and force ? They may be unfixed in time, as is normal and the whole trend of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
What is actually happening, he points out, is a relatively rapid degeneration towards entropy on the part of our genes, which are not selected one by one, but in significant groups, information being lost in non-productive transfer and not miraculously returning, and losses reflected in downgrading for the human race, a process, he notes, proceeding from the beginning of the genome.
It does not, as it cannot, continue for ever in this format, not only because energy is continually degrading in availability, but because lost information, however great the initial reservoir as in the case of the genetic provisions for the composition of the body of man, cannot be reduced indefinitely without what is called a 'melt-down' or "error catastrophe."
Man is subject individually and racially to limits, even if his imagination is not.
In Bulletin 105, it is noted further as below.
Further, the whole concept over time of removing failures whether by non-survival or violence or any other method, is a ludicrous idea as a production unit. When empirically DNA myriads of defective failures in system do not populate the earth, NONE at all, the concept of nature as worse than a mindless buffoon achieving constructive wizardries is disjoined from reality, a child's cartoon not valid human thought. Cartoons ARE cartoons not least because they laughingly ignore the necessities of procedure. Failure does not cause success: this is not a pep talk arena but a reality realisation.
To replace what does not survive and its information quota, which reduces the gene pool, AFTER that, when replacement things are magicked into existence, it is no better. Removing foozles does not invent features. The ambiguous phrase survival of the fittest, does not mean achievement of creation. The vast explosion of DNA that is so often noted, in the early phases of deposition of living forms upon the earth, is not now operative. It is not a scientifically traceable feature of our current universe, but having been instituted, it stopped.
THAT is one of the hall-marks of creativity. The thought-world-implementation by thought and purpose execution into the realm of the visible, is nothing automatic. It is controlled by
a) desire b) competence c) power
d) decision e) interest f) conceptual capacity
g) appropriate conscientiousness.These are features of what we have, creativity that started and stopped and did not continue in the arena of vast designs; and in fact, as noted, in his Wonderful Life Stephen Jay Gould points out that most of the major designs deemed early or initial in the history of life on earth, are now lost, compared with the first case. Time has lost, not gained.
The rout of the ridiculous is what has occurred, and it is a continuing process as Dr Sanford and research associates continue to test and analyse.
The sudden incidence of Dr Nathaniel T. Jeanson's work, Replacing Darwin, is a measured and temperate attestation involving vast testing, multiple graphs, vast funds of relevant information, and IT comes to a similar conclusion. He has specialised in closely related subjects in his long years at Harvard, where he gained his Ph.D..
Sanford shows that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is by no means dead, and that deterioration of the gene constituency in the human genome, in particular, is persistently and constantly operative overall, reducing the precision and potency of the genome, in a way unsurprisingly eminent, so that its deadly results for our human race, if not imminent, then relatively soon proceed to come as trends continue. Deterioration is constant, inevitable and operative. Now Jeanson, though making some excuses in some things for Darwin's gross error, yet does not stray from the underlying point, as on p. 38:
When Darwin wrote his most famous work, he took a scientific risk of massive proportions.
As Jeanson likes to stress repeatedly, an inductive process is involved in scientific method; and it is necessary to cut off each available option as to the solution of the puzzle or presentation we have in life, for example, before affirming something blindly just because it seems to be possible to the viewer. There is no prize for presumption or the blind use of catch phrases such as survival of the fittest and natural selection, however disproportionate their contribution and defective the claim in terms of measurement. You need to consider what is required to meet the data, not to find propaganda phrases for impact.
Assertion is not the counterpart of untestability, and Jeanson on p. 216 notes the turning on its head of the mockery of creation in terms of an easy seeming "God did it", which of course is distortion of method, says now he has precise testability for the matter in genetic terms, which still lacks in evolutionism. That he says, by contrast at this very level with creationism, uses mere tangentially assertions, such as "natural selection did it," or "time dependency did it" vacuous assertions.
In fact, time however does not invent what lacks the means of invention, the forces and facilities of manufacture or its equivalent, or the mind for manipulation of consigning definitions and fixities; nor does removal of the least manufacture the best. Nobel prizes will never be delivered for nothing, nor absence of facilities be recognised for prizes in functionality. You need what it takes. Causality is alive and well, and all efforts to 'account' for it, do not fail to use it to try to show how and why it came to be, and so such efforts merely constitute an eternal fallacy (cf. SMR Ch. 5). The principles of construction are not removed by pouting (or for that matter, by spouting).
Jeanson himself stresses that it is a matter of less viewer's hunch and more viewer's testing. Surely a lively imagination is a greatly to be desired feature in the due use of scientific method, but it is the results in their possible relation to an answer that determine the matter, not flair and slogans. In terms of his extreme and long-sustained interest in the genetic component of the whole matter of development, he brings to light with no small devotion to his test principle, a number of conclusions. Just as Sanford showed the deterioration aspect in the genome most forcibly and its extent, so Jeanson has concentrated most pointedly on the PERFORMANCE aspect, and cites his criterion in his field.
It is, in particular, in the relatively small and more readily observable mitochondrion in terms of relevant rate of genetic change within this body, that ready test is to be found, he observes. Having found there by checking many levels of published data and observation, a relevant rate of change in the genetic formulation in this section of the cell, one which exceeds any change from mere ungoverned mutation, and makes survival of the fittest by comparison nothing like any masterful additive, he applies this rate. How many such changes have occurred in this section of mitochondrial life ? he asks. For this, he also has measurement. How often is this type of change found ? He produces from this a period of time for that to happen, the rate and the spate, the frequency in time and the time for the number.
This is interesting. As with many things, both biological and conceptual, in the more masterful cases of creation, a model can provide for variation on an original theme, kinds if you like, adaptability to pressures and conditions being in built rather than mere abandon under minimal pressures, to death. A combination of resilience to meet conditions, variability to provide a broader set of products, within a given type, is a vast norm to which he makes a very large detailed reference in his field.
He gives an illustration. From cars, Jeanson points out, where types may be creatively specifically and creatively modified to meet specific conditions, on a closely similar basis, to many other creations, and at various levels, there is flexibility for design, while yet adhering in due conformity for base plan. This of course meets Dr Michael Denton's point of specialised protestation that continuity in nature has never existed anywhere but in man's mind (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, pp. 73ff., 353), in his scathing summary of the evidence-disregarding follies of imaginative leaps leaving the very ground on which they should be based.
On the one hand, cars may be specifically designed to fill a niche, and a new model produced for the is purpose, crafted as a variant. Of course, cars may also be developed with multi-minor-functionalities added, for convenience. Creativity is a perfect match for the data: vast arrivals of living creatures using symbolic concatenations and INFORMATION, the cessation of this input (not now a mystery but a norm for creation then or now), adaptability within chosen limits and re-issuance when deemed most fitting.
As to the time test, it is this. The time result that FITS the data for the mitochondrion (energy supply) segment of the cell is of the order of 6000 years*YE since institution. Jeanson spends much space, or ink as he calls it, demonstrating not only the ability of such change, so indicated, to meet other areas of constraint, but to show that this result is applicable not only to the human case - one most strongly investigated, but in a variety of major categories in the classification of living things. It is a major tested fact for vastly different kinds of creatures, including tested worms and water fleas, he notes, to use a largely common model for this developmental feature.
As he studies the conception of 'kinds' or min leading to the term baramin, or created kinds, he finds a remarkable feature. On the basis of creation and variations since then, the start and the finish of listed and counted changes of this type, he finds a harmony of marked degree with the data.
There are many more aspects, but this one is vital and relatively easy to test. The long ages concept which as he points out, has been flawed by assumption, fails not only in this respect maximally or vastly, an evolutionary error of staggering mathematically indicated proportions, but by contrast, it fails also in other DNA tests at present in process, outside the mitochondrial area.
While noting these future areas of ongoing test in which he engages, he yet finds this:
In other words, the answer to the origin of species can be uncovered for the first time right now.
Of course, logically and theologically as my approaching a million word work, The Shadow of a Mighty Rock showed from 1992 on, and since 1996 on the Web, it was long demonstrable; and what I call the apologetic orchestra had long acted in this field with various presentations from a number of fascinatingly different contributors. However, in the specialised field of genetics, Jeanson now presents a removal van for other options concerning creation in his own field, in a somewhat decisive manner of his own. He rules out with special emphasis on measurement and decisive testing, the competing and wretchedly famous error of Darwin and any such long age method.
Far is he from submitting to the evocative and often derisory claim that creation is an easy way out. You must remove other options in this method, he declares, and this he proceeds to do. The testable criteria admit of no other TIME interpretation. The relation of life and genes, in biological terms is inseparable, he emphasises, and this is the read-out, like it or not. Untestable OR radically (almost riotously) diverse data from theoretical expectations in substantial areas of procedure, do not adorn anything which bears the name of science, he insists.
Creation, then, an easy way out ? It is, on the contrary, a necessary way in, and it is the failure to react to vast negative testings of the evolutionism fad that is not the least of its follies, unscientific in very essence in contrast to the model presented by Jeanson in a crucial respect.
Darwin's leap was into a gap, and never landed on solid ground, and his own concern about the lack of relevant testimony in the rocks, as Professor W.R. Thompson in his privileged position noted, was justified*1. That evidential lack is still there, said Thompson, and there is no significant alleviation to this fault (cf. The gods of naturalism ... Chapter 6). Gradualism over the scale of life is a great gaffe: it is not what is found.
Similarly, we find as noted especially in Wake Up World! Ch.6, the call of the former eminent professor at Harvard*2, Stephen Jay Gould as he examines the nature of design types found in major categories, includes his invocation of the heavens. Why in heaven's name, he stresses, do they have all these EVACUATIONS rather than increasing examples, of such types in comparison with what was present in the earlier age! Why account for gain when the read-out is loss!
It is certainly an astonishing thing for anything remotely related to scientific method to be accounting for MORE major types aarriving, when the FINDING IS FAR LESS LEFT! Time in this appears as a grave-yard, not a maternity ward. One cannot help sympathising with Gould who managed to get nearer to the point in this field than many.
Three things emerge in general terms: if you don't let the facts charge you, they can char you. That is the first. The second is this: make sure they are facts, and not popular nostrums that facilitate desire, and not truth. Thirdly, God told us what He did in the beginning, and the desire to avoid Him is neither scientific nor logical. It is, and has been testable on many fronts, and nothing else has stood. He has told us what He did, and it is continually confirmed, and demonstrably true as shown for example in SMR, TMR and The gods of naturalism have go! God even traces the reason for man being so slow in the uptake in this field (Romans 1:17ff.) and exposes His profound grief (cf. Isaiah 48, Jeremiah 48, Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 21:42ff.) and marvellous provisions of grace (Ephesians 2, John 3:15ff.) to meet the case of rebellious, alienated man.
But having made man in His image, He does not treat this image-bearer like dirt: that was a mere format for function, and how intricate the DNA shows it to have been in its moulding into the self-reproducing body of man! He offers to man a safe passage to His kingdom and pardon with peace for eternity. It is like many cures in general, a matter of just one being available; and in this case, it is vastly precious, being incalculable in cost, even Christ crucified, yes risen from the dead (Romans 8:31-39, II Corinthians 5:20-21). Man includes in his intellectual armoury, the emphasis on the empirical. It is from God that he derives it. Truth is bold, as Christ was and is; it does not shrink. It is more however, than confrontational, not less. It is reasonable in gentleness, if ineradicable in force, even to the arising from the dead, which Christ both gained in treating others, and for Himself, as sin-bearing Saviour, authenticated and displayed. To disciples ? a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see Me to have. Handle me and see!
ENDNOTES
Dr Don Batten has presented a 2017 revised version of the 2009 work, "101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe." New data such as from Drs Sanford and Jeanson find these in direction very much in concert.
See:
https://creation.com/age-of-the-earth
Professor Thompson was Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Research.
*2 A more recent professor at that site has this to say. His Chair is also at Harvard and there are elements of similarity with the noted presentation of Gould.
For that in situ, see *2 in Chapter Two of The Lord of Longsuffering, we find this.
Professor Lewontin of Harvard University in biological science, makes the matter clear, and this is not the first such admission from scientists, what is the philosophic point.
Lewontin, notable figure in the aggressive evolutionary program wrote this: ("Billions and Billionsof Demons," The New York Review, p. 31, January 9, 1997 - emphasis in original):
Our willingness to accept scientific claims against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
I for my part am not willing to chain science to philosophical preferences that happen to appeal to the mind, emotions or zest. Let everything be justified, not including just so stories, amusing but incompetent, if you want truth.
Materialism wants everything to be explained in terms of matter; but you cannot explain the preference for this approach in terms of matter. It is a statement, not an argument, a preference, not a proof. If matter were all, nothing could be at all since matter logically requires adequate cause, and nothing does not qualify for t his service. If you make logic irrelevant in some irrational desire, then you cannot consistently even argue - by your own statement, that would then be irrelevant by your own model.
Models of cars or realities have one thing in common: they need to go, not stall.