Darwin expresses his dismay and discouragement because, in comparison to how very scrupulous a man is about the pedigree of his livestock, when it comes to his own marriage, “…he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same motives as the lower animals, when they are left to their own free choice…”1 Of course, marriage in Jewish and Christian traditions is an exalted spiritual covenant between the two and God. With regard to how the “inferiors” should approach marriage, he says, “Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian, and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service who aids toward this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.”2
Not only is physical or mental deficiency reason to not marry, but he also said, “All ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children, for poverty is not only a great evil, but tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage. On the other hand, as Mr. Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, while the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society.”3 In absolute contradistinction, the Bible and many other religions, assign no evil to poverty. Oh well, the Darwinian Decalogue says, Thou shalt not marry if you are physically or mentally weak and/or unable to provide…enough Darwin dollars.
Darwin asseverated that, “…Species are produced and terminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by miraculous acts of creation and by catastrophes.”1 He was so confident of his own acuity that he further averred, “…we may feel that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world.”2 So much for science being open ended, at least as far as Darwin was concerned!
Darwin clearly determined that what is observable at the time is sufficient basis and guide for all hypotheses concerning past, present, and future.3 It is sufficient for understanding all about man, some about God—at least one can say that God is not involved in His world in any real or substantive sense but has left everything to “impressed laws upon matter”. Of course, Darwin and every other scientist has disproven his hypothesis; for example he thought the cell was just a blob, and of course now we know that each cell is a highly developed factory; moreover, the history of modern science is densely populated with examples of more factual and clear knowledge being dependent upon technological advances. Another example is that not only is the DNA the source of information, as once thought, but there is a highly developed hierarchy of information of which the DNA is a part.4
Darwin believed that study of the anatomy and behavior of animals could be analogized for man since he concluded that man was merely an animal. He viewed the difference between man and animal one of degree rather than kind. He said, “But everyone who admits the principles of evolution must see that the mental powers of the higher animals, which are the same in kind with those of man, though so different in degree, are capable of advancement.”5 This is the same naturalistic philosophy by which the Princeton Ethicist Peter Singer concludes that parents should be able to kill their babies up to 28 days after birth if a defect is found.
Concerning the beginning of human life, the membership of the National Academy of Sciences weighed in with a resolution declaring that the question of when human life begins was “a question to which science can provide no answer…Defining the time at which the developing embryo becomes a person must remain a matter of moral or religious value.”6 However, scientists then cried “separation of church and state” and went on to argue scientifically about when human life begins. They used the same arguments of recapitulation of phylogeny (evolution of a group) by ontogeny (developmental history of an organism), as captured by Ernst Haeckel, 19th century German biologist, that at a particular time fetus and fish are the same.
Of course he, as well as a Darwinist, is simply carrying on the fallacious philosophical idea that the seeable is the sum of reality. For example, Darwin compared the process where a frog passes through the condition of a fish to a fetus, “inasmuch as at one period of its life the tadpole has all the characters of a fish, and, if it went no further, would have to be grouped among fishes. But it is equally true that the tadpole is very different from any known fish….In like manner, the brain of a human fetus, at the fifth month, may correctly be said to be not only the brain of an ape, but that of an arctopithecine or marmoset-like ape;”7 He said of man, “viewing him in the same spirit as a naturalist would any other animal.”8
So, the subreptions from anatomy continue; if a fetus does not look like a fully developed human then it is not. Of course, doffing one’s Darwinian spectacles, one can see that the fetus is a fully developed human for a fetus. It is quite “elementary my dear Watson.”9
As one who is keenly aware of the benefits of modern science, I am extraordinarily grateful, but all of the advancements will never counter balance the rapacious depredation of man by naturalistic tyrants swathed in the diaphanous respectability of being a scientist.
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, (Originally published by John Murray, London, in 1859: reprint with introduction by Michael T. Ghiselin, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006), 305. [↩]
- Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 307. [↩]
- This is the common theme of thought, argument, and emphasis throughout Darwin’s books On the Origin of Species and Descent of Man. [↩]
- Steven Meyer explores this in his book Signature in the Cell. [↩]
- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, (originally published 1871: reprint with introduction published New York: Barnes & Noble, 2004), 548. [↩]
- John G. West, Darwin day In America: how our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 333. [↩]
- Darwin, Descent, 175. [↩]
- Darwin, Descent, 141. [↩]
- Yes I know Sherlock never actually said this, but he sure should have. [↩]
Dr. David Wells is Distinguished Senior Research Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. He can be depended upon to offer valuable insight into biblical questions as he does so succinctly here:
Where Christian faith is offered as a means of finding personal wholeness rather than holiness, the church has become worldly.
There are many other forms of worldliness that are comfortably at home in the evangelical church today. Where it substitutes intuition and feelings for biblical truth, it is being worldly. Where its appetite for the Word has been lost in favor of light discourses and entertainment, it is being worldly. Where it has restructured what it is and what it offers around the rhythms of consumption, it is being worldly, for customers are actually sinners whose place in the church is not to be explained by a quest for self-satisfaction but by a need for repentance. Where it cares more about success than about faithfulness, more about size than spiritual health, it is being worldly. Where the centrality of God to worship is lost amidst the need to be distracted and to have fun, the church is being worldly because it is simply accommodating itself to the preeminent entertainment culture in the world. Is it not odd that in so many church services each Sunday, services that are ostensibly about worshiping God, those in attendance may not be obliged to think even once about his greatness, grace, and commands? Worship in such contexts often has little or nothing to do with God.1
- David F. Wells, “Introduction: The Word in the World,” in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis, ed. John H. Armstrong (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 31. [↩]
Many Baptists who had been persecuted1 in colonial New England for preaching the gospel were deeply concerned that the proposed Constitution did not go far enough in guaranteeing liberty of conscience in religious freedom. The approval of nine states was required to ratify the Constitution, and Rhode Island and Virginia were both refusing to sign because it did not guarantee liberty of conscience in religious freedom.
The Constitutional Convention was embracing the Virginian, James Madison’s, version of the new Constitution. However, there were Baptists in various counties who did not trust Madison. They actually looked to the separatist Baptist preacher, John Leland, for leadership. He was a powerful Baptist preacher and leader who was highly esteemed and trusted by Virginians.
At the time, Baptists were siding more and more with Patrick Henry in an attempt to unseat Madison as the Virginia delegate to the convention, and Madison also became aware that Leland and the people were growing hesitant of supporting him and/or the new Constitution.
Consequently, Madison arranged a meeting with Mr. Leland during which Madison promised Leland that he would include a definite declaration for religious liberty and conscience in the new Constitution, which would guarantee religious liberty to all Americans. Subsequently Mr. Leland publically endorsed James Madison.
Madison informed Pastor George Eve that the Constitution needed to include and especially address rights of conscience. On January 27, 1789 Pastor Eve defended Madison during a public meeting at his church Blue Run Baptist Church.
Then, on December 15, 1791 under the direct leadership of James Madison and the extraordinary influence of John Leland, the Bill of Rights was ratified. Thus Americans have known religious freedom that is unparalleled in human history or the current world milieu.
Our heritage of religious freedom is the result of God working in and through His people. Will the same be said about us by our descendants?
- my sermons entitled “Those Darn Baptists” demonstrate this [↩]
We are still reeling from ‘Climategate’ and now ‘Himalayangate’. What is now being dubbed as “climate gate”, where a hacker has breached the computers at Hadley CRU, Britain’s largest climate research institute and a proponent of global warming, discovering e-mails that reveal evidence of serious and widespread fraud. The director of Britain’s leading Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, has told Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition…”It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago that someone had hacked into our system and taken and copied loads of data files and emails.”…1 which by any estimation has undermined the peer review process and evidences collusion at the highest levels.
This “disclosure of thousands of emails, computer programs, and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in the UK — revealed scandalous scientific misconduct of monumental proportions by the world’s leading paleoclimatologists, particularly the dendrochronologists — enough that it has crippled the credibility of the entire field of science and seriously tarnished the reputations of its inner cadre of researchers.”2
Now what is being dubbed ‘Himalayangate’ or ‘Glaciergate’, referring to the warning issued two years ago by “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)… [which] issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.”3
Now, this flagitious claim has to be withdrawn because, as the Times article tells us, it “was not supported by any formal research” peer reviewed data, but rather upon: a “news story”, “speculation”, a “phone call” – nefarious redactional liberties.
Once again4, prudence and skepticism seem to be the order of the day for those who dislike becoming political pawns in the Al Gore sequel; if they believed it once, they will again!
- http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked, accessed 12-22-09 [↩]
- Global warming alarmism falling apart in light of ‘Climategate’ and IPCC errors By E. Calvin Beisner, BaptistPress News Jan 22, 2010, http://www.bpnews.net/BPFirstPerson.asp?ID=32123 accessed 1/23/10 [↩]
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1 accessed 2/1/10 [↩]
- see other articles on Global Warming on my blog [↩]
Biologist Jonathan Wells elucidates the critical distinction between evolution and Darwinism. He notes, “Evolution means change over time”1 and of course no one doubts that. “But Charles Darwin claimed far more than any of these things. In The Origin of Species he set out to explain the origin of not just one or a few species, but all species after the first—in short, all the diversity of life on Earth. The correct word for this is not evolution, but Darwinism.”2
He then gives three distinguishing characteristics of Darwinism: “(1) all living things are modified descendants of a common ancestor; (2) the principal mechanism of modification has been natural selection acting on undirected variations that originate in DNA mutations; and (3) unguided processes are sufficient to explain all features of living things—so whatever may appear to be design is just an illusion.”3 Darwin’s theory specifically “applies only to living things… [even though he] speculated that life may have started in ‘some warm little pond’ but beyond that he had little to say on the subject.”4
Remember, (1) is an unprovable idea, requiring unprovable assumptions, although there is evidence that can be used to support the idea; (2) does not tell the whole story since we now know that the information flow is hierarchical; (3) is actually inadequate to explain all features, and the concept of “unguided processes” is a faith statement to which science cannot legitimately speak. Of course, the proposition that the appearance of design is an illusion is a faith statement extraordinaire. To wit, Darwinist real claim is that even though things may appear designed, they cannot be since natural selection is true, regardless of the evidence to the contrary. This is not a scientific statement but rather a faith statement. If they were not intransigently committed to Darwinism, it would make far more sense to recognize that the reason some things appear to be designed is because they actually were designed. Of course, that proposition is absolutely unacceptable since design requires a designer, which any true Darwinist rejects maugre the evidence!
It behooves Christians to be careful about accepting Darwinism under the guise of science or evolution, lest some become unwitting Darwinists and disgrace their Lord and their God-given minds.
- “change over time” “cumulative change through time” “a change in gene frequencies over generations.”…Darwin’s phrase “descent with modification” is okay in a limited sense. Jonathan Wells, Ph.D., The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006), 1-2. “Even hypotheses that some closely related species (such as finches on the Galapagos Islands) are descended with modification from a common ancestor are not particularly controversial…” Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide, 3. [↩]
- Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide, 3. [↩]
- Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide, 2. [↩]
- Wells, The Politically Incorrect Guide, 4. [↩]
Cameron Pettigrew thought of himself as an exemplary employee.1 In two and a half years at Fidelity Investments, he earned multiple company honors and was even offered a job at the corporation’s prestigious Wall Street branch. But then Fidelity got wind of his receiving an instant message at work about how poorly a National Football League player was performing. That led to an investigation, and Pettigrew was fired the next day for running a fantasy football league on company time. Fidelity called the league gambling through the use of company time and equipment and previously had warned all employees in an email, “[F]antasy sports activities [are] not permitted on company time.”2 And Pettigrew is not an isolated case. One report estimates that companies lose as much as $1.5 billion annually when their employees play fantasy football at work.3 Yet this is only part of a larger trend: using technology to waste time that should be spent working.
Increasingly, experts are confirming through research that the use of social media is often a way for workers to rob their employers—an act of insubordination that can take several forms. For instance, 53% of workers under 24 say that socializing through their mobile electronic devices or entertaining themselves online is their primary “time wasting” activity at work. Almost two-thirds of employees with Facebook accounts access them at work, translating into a 1.5% loss of total employee productivity across an organization.4
Of course, technology used properly can result in savings of both time and money. Telecommuting allows workers to remain productive when bad weather keeps them away from the office. Online meetings save companies thousands of dollars in travel expenses required for face-to-face gatherings. Email prevents the requisite delay when letters are delivered through traditional mail channels. And text messages allow quick communication with other colleagues.
In the business world, electronics retailer Best Buy used new forms of media to create IT systems allowing all 150,000 of its employees to collaborate on important projects. The new systems helped the company increase productivity and cut steps in several standard processes.5
The downside of such technologies is that too many workers use them for individual convenience instead of company benefit.6 For example, on the Monday following Thanksgiving in 2009, more than half of all online purchases were made from work computers. That is significant given that Cyber Monday, as it is called, ranks among the busiest online shopping days of the year.7 The NCAA men’s basketball tournament in March presents another temptation for employees to steal time. Broadcaster CBS airs all of the games online complete with a “boss button” that workers can click to bring up a mock spreadsheet in case a supervisor walks by while they are watching basketball unlawfully.8
Certainly, past eras presented opportunities for workplace time wasting too. Long before the Internet came to be, personal phone calls, extended water-cooler conversations, and lying about sick days robbed companies of work hours that were rightfully theirs. But the Internet and social media offer more opportunities than ever for laziness, distractions, and dishonesty at an employer’s expense. Of course there are legitimate exceptions and qualifications to the general rule, but the problem is very real. And this is a place for Christians to be counter-cultural in their integrity and thoughtfulness. So all should pause in their flurry of electronic activity long enough to make sure it does not reflect a heart that refuses to give employers what is rightly theirs.
- This article is quoted in its entirety from www.kairosjournal.org [↩]
- Steve Schwarz, “Fired for Playing Fantasy Football,” Sports Network Website, December 18, 2009, http://www.sportsnetwork.com/merge/tsnform.aspx?c=sportsnetwork&page=fantasy-nfl/news/news.aspx?id=4274390 (accessed January 22, 2010). [↩]
- “This is based on the assumption that every fantasy football player actually works at an office.” See Nando Di Fino, “A Fantasy Player’s Worst Nightmare,” Wall Street Journal Website, December 18, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703523504574604233198387734.html (accessed January 22, 2010). [↩]
- Jeffery Zaslow, “The Greatest Generation (of Networkers),” Wall Street Journal Website, November 5, 2009, http://online.wej.com/article/SB10001424052748704746304574505643153518708.html (accessed January 22,2010). [↩]
- Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009), 158. [↩]
- See also Kairos Journal article, “Technological Rudeness.” [↩]
- Kathy Shwiff, “Retailers, Electronics, Toys Sites Up in November,” Wall Street Journal Website, December 28, 2009, http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091228-704456.html (accessed January 22, 2010). [↩]
- The “boss button” was clicked 2.5 million times during the tournament in 2008 and was sponsored in 2009 by Comcast. See Eric Benderoff, “NCAA Tournament: CBS Winning in the Online-Revenue Bracket,” Chicago Tribune Website, March 19, 2009, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/2009/mar/19/business/chi-tc-biz-thu-march-madness-onlmar19 (accessed January 22, 2010). [↩]
The following is Antony Flew’s recitation of the point by point refutation of “the monkey theorem” by Gerry Schroeder,1 which led Flew to conclude that the ‘monkey theorem’2 ‘was a load of rubbish.’”3
“Schroeder first referred to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After one month of hammering away at it (as well as using it as a bathroom!), the monkeys produced fifty typed pages—but not a single word….the shortest word in the English language is one letter (a or I)….A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it….The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000. Schroeder then applied the probabilities to the sonnet analogy. ‘What’s the chance of getting a Shakespearean sonnet?’…He continued, ‘All the sonnets are the same length. They’re by definition fourteen lines long. I picked the one I knew the opening line for, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” There are 488 letters in that sonnet. What is the likelihood of hammering away and getting 488 letters in the exact sequence….What you end up with is…10 to the 690th.
[Now] the number of particles in the universe—not grains of sand, I’m talking about protons, electrons, and neutrons—is 10 to the 80th. Ten to the 80th is 1 with 80 zeros after it. One to the 690th is 1 with 690 zeros after it. There are not enough particles in the universe to write down the trials; you’d be off by a factor of 10 to 600th.
If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips—forget the monkeys—each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; If you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second [producing] random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials. It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a sonnet by chance. The Universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger.”4
Flew concludes, “if the theorem won’t work for a single sonnet, then of course it’s simply absurd to suggest that the more elaborate feat of the origin of life could have been achieved by chance.”5
- Dr. Gerry Schroeder has a B.Sc. Chemical engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) M.Sc. Earth and planetary sciences, M.I.T., PhD Earth Sciences and Physics M.I.T.; He addresses a similar question “Can random mutations produce the evolution of life? That is the question addressed herein” on his website and he demonstrates the mathematical impossibility of such a notion. In his article, Evolution: Rationality vs. Randomness, http://www.geraldschroeder.com/Evolution.aspx [↩]
- Also known as the “infinite monkey theorem.” See similar type experiments, all of which fail to produce support for the mathematical probability of Darwinism. The “Shakespeare simulator” did after 1 ½ years, which equals 2,738 trillion trillion trillion monkey-years, produce 24 letters from a line in The Second Part of King Henry IV, (a year later the total was up to 30 letters “which took trillions and trillions more monkey-years to produce.”). However, notes biologist Jonathan Wells “the universe isn’t big enough… to hold all the ‘monkeys’ it would take to type even one of Shakespeare’s sonnets—much less his collected works. And real monkeys don’t type a letter every second without stopping”, which is what the simulator was programmed to do. ((Jonathan Wells, Ph.D., The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2006), 93. [↩]
- Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 77. [↩]
- Flew, There is a God, 77. [↩]
- Flew, There is a God, 77. [↩]
The vast majority of Christians will face difficult decisions regarding impending death of a loved one. I am refining this list, as well as still thinking through other principles, but these have proven to be quite helpful in guiding me to think biblically about such eventualities.
- Strong families are essential since family members are the ones who will be making some if not all of the decisions, and some decisions will require great sacrifice on the part of the caregivers.
- Remembering that all life is sacred, valuable, and worthy of love because of being created in the image of God. To decide their worth, fate, or just desert based merely upon anatomical considerations is Darwinian to the core and should be rejected.
- One should never withhold nutrition, water, and love. The amount of nutrition and water given should be limited to what is ergogenic for the patient, which at times could necessitate limiting them to what the body can use or void.
- A willingness on the part of decision makers to do what honors God, the “grey haired”, parents, etc., which may be quite costly for the decision maker.
- Limits should be set by what is actually “impossible” rather than what is economically, physically, and emotionally difficult, or extraordinarily challenging.
- Medical opinion alone is not sufficient to end a life.
- Heroic measures are appropriate so long as life is being extended.
- There is a difference in dying a “natural” death and facilitating an “untimely” death.
- Seek wise biblical counsel concerning long-term care or life and death decisions because there are nuanced considerations that may shape one’s decisions either in the Biblical or Darwinian direction.
I have given these in order to assist, and granted, they may still leave some questions unanswered, but I believe most of those are better addressed on an individual basis. Safe general guidelines are to treat them as created in the image of God, regardless of their present or future capabilities, and honor them according to the commands of Scripture; e.g. “honor your father and mother”, “honor the grey haired”.
Euthanasic death is always promoted as an act of mercy. However, it appears at times to be an act of mercy for someone other than the patient. This was the case with Terri Schiavo, who had to be starved to death in order for her to die; a person who also had family who said they would care for her and physicians demurring to the “persistent vegetative state” (PVS) diagnosis. All she needed was nutrition, water, and love, all of which was readily available, but denied by the euthenists.
Now, we actually heard from a Belgium man, Rom Houben, who was paralyzed in a car accident in 1983 and diagnosed to be in a coma or persistent vegetative state (PVS), as was Schiavo, but Houben was in this comatose state for 23 years. I say that we heard from him, and I mean that because after 23 years he woke up, and here is some of what he said!
Houben, 46, said of his awareness and yet his inability to communicate, “I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.” “All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life,” Houben said. ”Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.”
“I shall never forget the day when they discovered what was truly wrong with me — it was my second birth,” he said, “I want to read, talk with my friends via the computer and enjoy my life now that people know I am not dead.” 1
As Christians, we clearly recognize that there is a time to die, but unlike the euthenist, we esteem every human life, and we presume life; moreover, we asseverate that nutrition, water, and love are NOT extraordinary measures, and therefore should never be denied!
- All quotes are from the Baptist Press Thom Strode November 30, 2009, accessed same day [↩]