Creationist Theory

Posted: August 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Religion, Science | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

While considering evolution as a theory, I came up with an interesting thought on how G-d may have created the universe. Before that though, I’d like to go over evolution, and some of the problems that I have with it:

Timing

Converse with an evolutionist for any amount of time and it won’t be long before you run into the crux of how evolution works, but cannot be observed or reproduced. It all comes down to timing. We cannot prove evolution, because it takes Billions of years for the process to work. Honestly, to me this isn’t any different than a religious person telling you that you just need to have Faith. It’s not an answer, it’s deflection due to lack of an answer. It’s easy to say that something not very reasonable is able to happen if you add enough time to the equation. But if you really think about it, Billions of years is also a lot of time for things to go terribly wrong, or not go at all.

Lack Of Process

Given the scientific community supporting evolution, I’m very surprised given that it isn’t something you can apply the scientific process to. You can’t reproduce evolution in a lab, it’s almost all theoretical. I could have possibly replaced the title with Lack Of Evidence, but supposedly, there’s lots of evidence. Until you actually look at the evidence. Then all that’s really evident, is the evidence isn’t really all that evident. Or even existent in some cases. I intend to cover the evidence in a different series of posts (in fact this post was suppose to be the first, but I was derailed with a new creationist idea).

There are plenty more problems I have with evolution, but those two points are all that is really relevant to this post. So, back to lack of process. I got to thinking about why not do research investigating the creation of the original single-celled life-forms that were supposedly created from inorganic materials. Then I remembered the Miller-Urey experiment which I remember hearing mixed reviews on. Some indicated that the findings weren’t repeatable, but on further examination, that seems to not have been the case. It seems this is a very repeatable experiment. Now, I won’t bother with the obvious problems that this experiment has. I think it’s useful for what it shows, that you can in-fact create organic things, from inorganic things, even if it’s in a controlled lab environment. Or less misleadingly, you can create the amino acid building blocks that you would need, to create the organic things.

Now, before I take us to our final destination, a word on G-d and Science. I personally think Science is a very beneficial thing, if you know how to handle it. If you’re afraid that Science is going to disprove G-d’s existence, then it’s something you probably fight against. If you feel that Science really just proves G-d’s existence even more, then it is a useful and welcome tool. I personally believe that Science does a fairly good job of proving the existence of G-d, not disproving. You just have to look at the facts and evidence for what they are, and stop spending so much time trying to bend the evidence to prove what you want it to. Many scientists for some reason think that if they discover how something functions, that it moves it out of G-d’s territory and into the territory of Science. This is foolish and arrogant. Just because you discover how G-d did something, or discover a process that G-d has created, doesn’t disprove G-d’s existence. It just means that G-d is so awesome he created a world where we can actually figure out how everything works. It’s a great and wonderful thing. Things don’t have to work this way! There’s no reason why everything should follow a set of rules and on top of that, rules we can actually figure out! It’s quite amazing really!

Now, here is what I am considering. What if, instead of Billions of years, God put everything in place for evolution, the entire process, and using his amazing power, set it into motion. THEN, what if instead of it taking the Billions of years that it should have, God caused every major stage to happen in a single day. Consider how much can go wrong, it almost feels likely that SOMETHING had to have guided the process, in order to get where we are today. It also seems possible, that SOMETHING has to continue to keep everything working in balance, and moving in the right direction.

Lastly, I would simply like to state that I appreciate all of the efforts of the evolutionist and creationist scientists out there.

I personally am not afraid that science is going to disprove the existence of G-d. What I believe, is that new research and discoveries force intelligent people to reconsider what they know about their religion. It causes you to constantly be considering the nature of G-d and the universe, and I think that’s a good thing. Wouldn’t it be great, if eventually, we come so far that new findings only support what we already believe about G-d? That we discover new and exciting things, deeply consider what these new findings mean, and discover that all the findings do are provide more credence to our belief in G-d? That my friends, is the scientific process at work!

G-d vs Science

Posted: August 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Religion, Science | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment

Many scientists seem to have an innate need to explain things without consideration for the possibility of Holy Intervention. Everything has to have a logical explanation, even if Adonai IS the more logical explanation. It’s understandable how this came about, but it blinds many scientists to a more reasonable conclusion for some problems, and prevents them from thinking about the bigger picture.

Recently, I watched amazing orbits on nat-geo and it really struck me that our system is so orderly, but this isn’t the norm. The norm is a chaotic solar system where everything is destroying everything else. Also, it’s a wonder that our solar system has existed in such perfect harmony without spiraling out of control. It seems to reason that our Earth orbit, due to, at least, minor imperfections, should have resulted in an orbital decay that would have already spiraled us out of the range of sustainable life, given how the Earth is 3-4 billion years old and all….and yet here we are in the same perfect orbit.

Here is a cool picture of mercury’s orbit, which I think is the most awesome thing I saw this week. Period.

At one point, I thought that eventually science would start directing itself back toward our g-d Adonai. Since Science is all about discovering the truth of the universe and understanding why the world is the way that it is, if g-d really does exist and created everything, then eventually, it stands to reason that scientists will in some distant future be led in the right direction. I realize now that this is likely to take an exceptionally long time, if it ever happens at all. The reason? Because for scientists, the idea of admitting that G-d has a hand in anything, is an extreme last resort. More likely, these type of scientists will continue to hang onto a less logical answer out of spite (for lack of a better term). Evidence of this? I know to the uneducated and up to the moderately educated, what I’m about to say will sound ridiculous. But my best evidence is the theory of evolution. Specifically, macro-evolution.

I think we can fairly well agree about linear types of evolution, but I just haven’t found much support for inter-species evolution. Everyone seems to think there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to support a chain of evolution from goo to you. But guess what. Go look for it. All I’m going to say is, good luck. You’re going to need it. I’m not against science or theories that were once regulated to G-d’s territory. But scientists cling to the evolution theory in a strikingly similar manner to how creationists cling to creation theory. Both sides try to use scientific proof, but neither ends up doing a very good job.

I’m not personally against the theory of evolution, but I find it disconcerting how widely accepted it is given the lack of proof for it.

To my whopping 2 readers out there, if you are impassioned evolutionists, please feel free to refute what I’m saying. Clue me in to the ‘proof’ so that I can analyze it for myself. Until then, next time I’ll start to catalog some of the ‘proof’ that is out there, and why I’m just not very impressed by it.

Until next time!

Taste buds by design?

Posted: August 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

I’m constantly fascinated by the sheer number of simple things that I take for granted everyday. Things like tasting my food! We’ve eaten so much food over so many years, that we don’t really think about it any longer, but it is pretty fascinating! I couldn’t help but wonder recently, why do we enjoy the taste of food? It’s not really necessary for us to. My growling stomach and that feeling of hunger is plenty of motivation to cause me to eat, but then I get the wonderful sensation of taste to top it all off!

But then, the question is raised, is our sense of taste NECESSARY? If it isn’t necessary, then why do we have it?

Let’s start with a world that has no taste. It seems, at first, that without taste, we wouldn’t know that we’re eating something bad! You’d just dig in and munch away on some rancid tasting food. Right? Wrong! You don’t need a lab-coated scientist for this one. First, if you expect that a food might not be good, you inspect it. Is it visibly bad? Then what do you do? SMELL! Pretty much you’re at about a 90% bad food detection rate at this point. It’s pretty rare to actually do a taste-test if the food is bad. Usually, if you’re sampling the food, you’re more than reasonably convinced that it is still good.

Aha! Poisons! You taste foods to make sure they’re not poison! Wait…what?

Well that doesn’t sound right. In nature, things that are poisonous are very commonly very brightly colored. So we’re back to our step 1, vision. I’m not sure that step 2 (smell) comes into play very much with this one as I don’t really go around smelling poisonous foods all day, so cannot really comment there. I also really have no idea what poisonous foods taste like and unforunately a google search didn’t turn up much. Not a lot of people guzzling poisons on a regular basis I guess.

Lastly, I’ve read a few posts that suggest our sense of taste is meant to direct us to eat things that we’re deficient in, or in need of, like our well-known sweet tooth. This indicates that the following foods are meant to suggest the following needs:

  • Sweet – carbohydrate.
  • Salty – electrolytes.
  • Sour – acids.
  • Bitter – toxins.
  • Umami – glutamate and nucleotides.

A wiki on taste slightly supports this, but the problem I have here is the fact that it feels easy to draw a false assumption here. The truth is, we do in fact have taste buds, and the general consensus is that there are a few basic tastes, like bitter, sweet, salty, etc. Also, these tastes are typically based on how far away we are from a very specific marker, for example, in the case of salty, how far away the item tastes from sodium. The wiki explains it better, check it out. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have taste buds so that we’ll want a specific kind of food that we’re deficient in. If I were going to make an argument in favor of evolution for taste buds, it would make much more sense to say that our taste buds evolved over a period of time as a result of the types of foods that we were already eating on a regular basis that our bodies found useful. Oh look, this food gives me energy, think I’ll develop some cool new taste, sensor, thing, for that!

Honestly though, the concept of developing taste buds via evolution is just too much in the realm of fantasy for me.

The idea that our bodies evolve via random mutations just hits some kind of common-sense mental barrier that I have. I just cannot get past it. I think it’s because I’m a software engineer, that I tend to believe things need a lot more design work in order to function properly, so I may be too biased in that direction. I just cannot buy into the idea that a system can move from simple to complex without some design work. In my experience it doesn’t happen that way. If you have a complex system and introduce random variables into it, let me tell you, in my world, the stuff is gonna hit the fan. I’ll leave it at that, as this is already becoming too long of a post. Now…

Back on point, we need to make the distinction here between taste and craving. The article is really saying that we crave foods we’re deficient in, but this is only tangentially related to taste. Your taste buds are not causing the craving, or causing you to desire certain types of foods. They simply transmit yummy or yucky signals to your brain.

Now, it would be fairly easy for me to merely say that our all-powerful creator blessed us with a sense of taste and that evolution has nothing to do with it. However, I try to learn as much as I can about evolution rather than simply discount the theory. I’m not entirely on the g-d created evolution too! wagon, but I’m not against the idea either. I know, I know, Torah says g-d created the world in seven days. But the thing is, Torah isn’t an all encompassing history of the planet. It’s just not that thick of a book. It’s called Torah, not The Unabridged History of the Planet, Math, Science, Physics, and Everything In-Between! It’s a lot shorter to write, “Yeah, so I said exist and stuff existed” than a detailed description of *how exactly* stuff was brought into existence.

So, to summarize, I cannot think of many reasons why taste buds would exist given any of the prevailing theories on the topic, other than that G-d was being nice to us when he thought the idea up.