Archive: CEH Reports the Week of 9/11
Reporting continued from California after Washington was hit, but the terror attack caused much food for thought.
Note: Some links may no longer work.
Sagan’s House of SETI Transformed Into House of Prayer 09/14/2001
Exclusive Over the intercoms of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came an unprecedented announcement Friday morning. The President had declared a National Day of Prayer to remember the victims of Tuesday’s terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The announcement said that the lab’s von Kármán Auditorium would be open from noon to 1:00 p.m. for silent prayer and meditation. The famous auditorium is decorated with full-scale models of spacecraft including Voyager, on which is prominently displayed the golden record designed by Carl Sagan to encapsulate messages, pictures and sounds from earth for the entertainment of any potential aliens who might intercept the craft in the distant future.
On this day, however, a steady stream of employees entered quietly to sit, bow, kneel and pray or meditate on the recent national tragedy. Outside, two dozen people gathered to pray corporately and sing God Bless America, My Country ‘Tis of Thee, America the Beautiful and the national anthem as the prayerful entered and left the auditorium. Some passersby stopped and listened, or joined, the outpouring of patriotism and invocation seldom seen at a place known for its Origins program that seeks to explain the universe and all life by naturalistic processes without reference to a Creator. Earnest invocations from the assorted group of scientists, engineers, secretaries and maintenance personnel called on God to revive the nation, lead its people to repentance, and give wisdom to its leaders.
Interestingly, while prayer was encouraged at JPL, the new Wellness Center had a sign indicating that all Yoga classes have been canceled till further notice. How do you spell relief?
Numerous evolutionists, including Carl Sagan, have spoken in the von Kármán Auditorium and preached evolution or expressed their belief in life in outer space. Where are they now? Can they pray to chance and atoms for comfort when disaster strikes? Will the highly-evolved aliens from another galaxy give our President wisdom on how to deal with evil and suffering? (It would be a long wait for an answer; Voyager won’t even get to the nearest star for 40,000 years.)
This was truly a remarkable, though subdued, day for JPL. It’s a shame it took a disaster to bring people across this land to their knees.
President Reminds Nation of Creator of Moral Design 09/14/2001
President George W. Bush, in remarks at the National Cathedral, pointed to the Creator of moral order for comfort in the tragic aftermath of the terrorist attack on America:
God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own. Yet the prayers of private suffering, whether in our homes or in this great cathedral, are known and heard, and understood . . . .
This world He created is of moral design. Grief and tragedy and hatred are only for a time. Goodness, remembrance, and love have no end. And the Lord of life holds all who die, and all who mourn.”
Insect Family Tree All Mixed Up 09/13/2001
“Controversy and antagonism” characterize the latest ideas about the evolutionary phylogeny of arthropods, including insects, lobsters and spiders. The DNA-sequencing data do not agree with the morphological data (evidence of relationship based on outward appearance), according to Nature Science Update.
This is becoming a common lament among the Darwinists. Follow the Darwin links for other examples.
Scientists Try To Relate Morals to Brain Activity 09/13/2001
Princeton neuroscientists have asked patients moral questions while watching their MRI scans, according to EurekAlert. They claim they see a higher activity in the emotional portions of the brain when asking moral questions, and conclude that moral judgments are more emotional than logical.
Evolutionists are blind to their own reductionist fallacies. They are so convinced we are the sum total of the molecules that make up our bodies, they cannot entertain any thoughts of a real soul or spirit or self except as an epiphenomenon of matter.
Most of us have seen a “color organ” an electronic device that makes lights flash in response to music. Does the color organ give you any clues to the lyrics? Similarly, do brain waves reveal the inner thoughts of a person? Solomon said as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. You can measure the dancing lights, but you cannot measure the content of thought with an MRI scanner. If brain waves is all thought is, then science, too, is nothing more dancing lights responding to chemical reactions. How then can it know anything, including the claims of these neuroscientists?
James Clerk Maxwell, our featured Creation Scientist of the Month, wrote about this tendency toward evolutionary reductionism of humanness in an 1878 essay entitled Psychophysik, which you can read online. On a lighter note, read his thoughtful poem Recollections of Dreamland, in which he asks if our thoughts are “wandering fancies, by some lawless force entwined / Empty bubbles, floating upwards through the current of the mind?”
What is “Fundamentalism”? 09/13/2001
In the wake of the terrorist attack on September 11, the word fundamentalist is again appearing often in the media to describe Islamic extremists who may have been involved. To provide background on the term, Creation-Evolution Headlines is providing links to University of Virginia site with additional links to other sites. It explains how Christian fundamentalism was prompted partly by “encroachment of Darwinian theories about the origin of the universe.” Here is another historical analysis of Christian fundamentalism by the Believe Religious Information Service, and a description by ChristianAnswers.Net of how Christian fundamentalists should regard Islamic fundamentalists.
The contrast could not be more stark. Islamic fundamentalism conquers by terror, brainwashing, and death to the infidels; Christian fundamentalism by reason, persuasion and prayer. Islamic fundamentalists are exemplified by Osama ben Ladin and machine-gun toting, flag-burning zealots; Christian fundamentalists by pastors, authors and university presidents.
The original Christian fundamentalists were scholarly men like J. Gresham Machen (a man who disliked the term fundamentalism because he was not starting a new movement but defending historic Christianity). He only attempted to identify what were the fundamental doctrines of Christianity that could not be compromised without destroying Christianity itself, such as the doctrine of creation, which was under attack by the Darwinists. How the word fundamentalist became a pejorative term and was misapplied to other religions makes for an interesting study in propaganda tactics.
Soft Tissues of T. Rex Preserved in Bone 09/12/2001
Mark Armitage, electron microscope specialist and biologist, has photographed delicate soft tissues in a dinosaur bone:
A specimen of hip bone from a Tyrannosaurus rex, excavated from a ranch in Wyoming over 100 years ago, and thought to be 65 million years old is shown, by scanning electron microscopy, to have intact, mummified microscopic collagen fibers and other ultrastructural features within compact bone. Bone Haversian canals as well as lacunae and canaliculi are well preserved. Networks of collagen fibers remain intact within lacunae and what may be mummified osteocytes are shown to be present.
Writing for the September 2001 Creation Research Society Quarterly, he compares these with human bones of known age and concludes these dinosaur bones cannot be as old as claimed. The paper contains detailed electron micrographs.
Armitage says, “These data call into question the long ages ascribed to these dinosaur fossils and support their rapid preservation in the absence of decomposers. The high level of ultrastructural preservation also implies that these dinosaur bones are simply not very old.”
Other finds in reported in creationist literature (see References at end of paper) also show dinosaur bones that are not fully fossilized. Could these delicate structures have survived intact for 65 million years? Is evolutionary dating a myth?
Go To the Ant, Thou Network Programmer 09/12/2001
Ants may look stupid individually, but en masse they are a supercomputer. According to the BBC News, they’ve solved some intricate programming problems working as a company. Programmers at the University of Brussels created artificial ants in a computer that mimic antsy behavior, and found them superior at solving complex routing problems.
See also our Nov 15, 2000 story on this subject. As far back as the fossil record shows, ants already had all their hardware and software pre-programmed.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
God of our fathers, whose almighty hand
Leads forth in beauty all the starry band
Of shining worlds in splendor through the skies,
Our grateful songs before Thy throne arise.
Thy love divine hath led us in the past,
In this free land by Thee our lot is cast;
Be Thou our ruler, guardian, guide and stay,
Thy word our law, Thy paths our chosen way.
From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,
Be Thy strong arm our ever-sure defense;
Thy true religion in our hearts increase,
Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.
– Daniel C. Roberts, 1841-1907
Our fathers’s God, to Thee
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King.
– Samuel Francis Smith, 1808-1895
O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness, and every gain divine.
– Katharine Lee Bates, 1859-1929
Neandertals Had TLC 09/11/2001
Neandertals were a caring, loving lot, according to a University of Washington paleoanthropologist as reported in Scientific American News Briefs. He deduced this by finding a mature individual with bad teeth. He figures his family members must have prepared soft food for him, since he would be unable to bite the meat off a mammoth rib and chew it.
Is this a case of storytelling based on miniscule evidence, or a major reversal in thinking? Both. If you grew up being taught Neandertals were beetle-browed, hunched-over brutes grunting to each other, you need to get up to date on the new image. Now Mr. & Mrs. Neandertal and family are clean cut, upright, artistic, adventurous, skilled nerds, and now they belong to the Red Cross, too. Scientific thinking can undergo a paradigm shift. What evolutionary story is next to turn inside out?
Protozoans Excel at Programming 09/10/2001
Microscopic one-celled organisms like Paramecium use programming tricks during reproduction that rival human software engineering, according to the BBC News:
One of the oldest forms of life on Earth has been revealed as a natural born computer programmer. Scientists studying a species of single-celled protozoans called Ciliates have found that the organisms are experts at sorting, shuffling and splicing DNA when they reproduce. Some of the repertoire of tricks Ciliates use to untangle their DNA resemble the techniques that computer programmers use to make software more elegant and robust.
The article describes how they use a linked list technique to guarantee accuracy while searching and preserving connections between lists of data, in this case DNA. Scientists at the University of Leiden are examining the little organisms for clues on how to build DNA computers.
A program requires a programmer, and a programmer requires a Programmer-Maker. Rocks and seawater do not evolve into machines that can perform wonders like this.
The article refers to cilia, the hairlike paddles on the exterior membranes of these organisms that helps them swim. See Michael Behe’s explanation of how these little oars work. He demonstrates that they are irreducibly complex; that is, they are composed of parts that must all be present at the same time. They could never self-assemble, therefore, in a series of gradual evolutionary steps like Darwin supposed.
Human Culture, Like Cosmos, Has Inflationary Evolution 09/09/2001
Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack, University of California at Santa Cruz professors of culture and physics, use the inflationary epoch of the cosmos as an analogy for human culture. Writing for Science Magazine’s Essays on Science and Society, they describe the evolution of the relationship of cosmology, culture and religion, and conclude that we need to leave the exponential growth period and get to a sustainable growth period.
This essay is a montage of inaccurate history, myths, assumptions, non-sequiturs and UN-style political correctness. Even if inflationary cosmology were true (which is filled with major problems and doubts), it has nothing whatever to do with human culture. The authors mischaracterize the Galileo affair and Blaise Pascal’s beliefs, and assume human culture is on a mythical upward evolutionary path of enlightenment. Get real.
Sierra Club Blocks Creation Museum 09/09/2001
Even though their plans meet and exceed all code requirements, Answers in Genesis has suffered a setback in their effort to build a Creation Museum in the Cincinnati area. The Sierra Club has raised charges about its effects on a nearby creek, an action that could tie up the process in the courts for two years.
AiG has suffered repeated underhanded tactics by evolutionists to thwart efforts to use their own private property to showcase creation. Does the Sierra Club, a thoroughly Darwinist organization, really care about the environment here, or are the opponents using them as a front since previous objections have failed? Read our Baloney Detector description of subversion.
Fear of Spiders Proves Evolution 09/09/2001
According to the American Psychological Association, your fear of spiders and snakes is proof that human perception has evolved. ear of poisonous things helps you survive and reproduce: “In short, potential threats grab our attention, which has surely helped us to survive. The authors say their findings not only support the evolutionary hypothesis, but also more specifically suggest a default attentional setting in humans that automatically makes them focus their attention on evolutionarily fear-relevant stimuli.”
We’re going to have to start a new Chain Link topic, dumb and dumber. The APA is always good for the latter category. (They’re the ones who saw value in pedophilia recently, remember?) To see why this current evolutionary just-so story to explain the obvious doesn’t work, consider that everybody without a fear of snakes and spiders would have to die off. That’s called the cost of selection. In fact, the more afraid you are of spiders, the more you win the Darwin Fitness Lottery! So say good-bye to the Crocodile Hunter and all the entomologists and herpetologists in the world; they’re losers.
Psychology is a pseudo-science, an empire of fakes masquerading as scientists who use Darwinian assumptions to explain away the soul and spirit of man. Anyone who goes to a psychologist for answers should get his head examined.