A response to Bill Nye

Posted: September 2, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Religion, Science, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

I often think there aren’t enough things for me to blog about, but it turns out that there is no shortage of stupidity on this planet. Here is the popular quote:

“And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can – we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.

“It’s just really a hard thing, it’s really a hard thing. You know, in another couple of centuries that world view, I’m sure, will be, it just won’t exist. There’s no evidence for it.”

On the surface, it’s easy to think that Mr. Nye is asking us not to teach our children our religious view, and if you stopped at just reading quotes in the media, that’s what you probably do believe. I’m glad to have watched the video , titled “Creationism is not appropriate for children”, as that isn’t exactly the message, but really it’s pretty close. The very title of the video is just about enough on it’s own, but I would urge everyone to watch it before forming an opinion, because then all you’re really forming an opinion on, is other peoples’ opinions of the video, not the video itself.

So what’s it all about? Really, his core message is to not use taxpayer dollars to teach Creationism as a legitimate theory in schools. I’m actually okay with this. Why? Because separation of Religion and State is a good thing. I don’t want my children learning about other religions in school, unless they’re taking a religious studies class that goes over other world religions, and then, it would have to be with my approval. So we cannot have it both ways, having only our religious viewpoints expressed in schools. It’s a bad thing.

Now, watching the video, you cannot help but notice the subtle overtone that Mr. Nye clearly things that Creationism is quite ridiculous and he actually says that the theory of evolution is core to everything in Life Science (Biology). As if Biology cannot stand on its own without evolution as a base. This is in no way true. The evolution theory is actually fairly unnecessary in almost every way to anything, other than perhaps genetics and DNA research. It’s really not that useful of a theory honestly, although perhaps someday in the future, scientists will make more breakthroughs and finally make it actually worthwhile. Right now, it’s not worthwhile. It has added zero benefit to the scientific community other than to confuse everyone into thinking that it’s a proven, valuable thing, when it is not. Now, if actual evidence and data someday supports evolution, I’ll be fine changing my viewpoints on it, but right now, no such supporting data exists.

However, Mr. Nye did mention the age of the universe and paralleled that evolution fits in better with the billions of years model of space than creationism. That’s because evolution requires billions of years to work, and really the main support for the statement. So if we think the earth is billions of years old, then this has some credence. Here we really start touching more on religious viewpoints that scientific viewpoints though. It’s kinda funny that it all hangs on the seven days of creation. If it weren’t for that, things would really be different. So either you think everything happened in seven physical days, and thus have a problem, or you believe that it’s just an overview of what G-d did, and you have no real problem. I’ve offered another Creationism theory, so I had to consider how this affects that theory.

I thought the pic was a cool timeline based on the flood. I haven’t evaluated it in anyway, just enjoy that someone put some effort into it!

To me, there are only a few key things to comment on, without any real definite resolution (because I haven’t lived for billions of years). First, on the one hand, you would think if man was created early in the life of the planet (sixth day) and given a planet that is several billions of years old, we would expect that the population of the earth would be much higher than it is now. The population of the planet doesn’t well support that humans have been around for billions of years. This however, supports neither side as it really doesn’t help evolutionists much either. Another point to consider, is that we haven’t uncovered any civilizations that far in the past. It doesn’t seem from our archaeological finds, that humans have existed for billions of years. Once again, doesn’t help either side really.

So what evidence actually supports an Earth age of several billion years? Really the only thing that does is fossils. Fossil ages for me are a mystery. I can’t make myself believe that there are reliable methods for dating them. The most used is, and just going from memory so the element is probably wrong, but Uranium based dating. So it determines the age by the decay rate of an element. To me, this idea is faulty because it expects the decay rate to remain constant for billions of years and never change. I find this hard to believe, since a billion years is just a long time and it feels possible that the decay rate could change at some point (speed up, slow down, be affected by environmental factors). I know ‘feels like’ isn’t very scientific, but I think some common-sense is sometimes useful (this isn’t always true though!). Also, I believe that fossils many times are taken from earth layers that aren’t likely to have been billions of years old, but the fossil is dated as billions of years old because it falls inline with the evolutionary scientist digging it up, so they discard the age of the earth layer in favor of the age of the fossil. This post goes over it in more detail, and while not presented in the most professional and scientific format, it sums up things better than I have time for here. It states that in most cases, scientists discard rock ages that they don’t like and keep the ones that fit what they want to believe, and I in-fact believe this is often true.

This ran a bit long, so for now, happy thinking!

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!