Response to a recent letter to the editor

In response to this letter to the editor, published on June 20 in The Anderson Independent-Mail, I submitted the below letter for possible publication.

Among the myriad “apologist” letters that were subsequently published in relation to the debate, I only found one from a skeptic. Here is the main link to the letters if you want to skim through the various responses on matters of faith.

Following is the text from the letter to which I responded. I took issue with the writer’s point about evolution (He is apparently responding to a previous submission that I didn’t read). Notice in the last paragraph the writer’s absolute certainly that the Bible is the “only reasonable explanation” for how we got here:

The first affirmation of the Humanist Manifesto states: “Religious humanists regard…”

The second affirmation states: “Humanism believes….”

These are affirmations of religious faith.

The authors of the Humanist Manifesto acknowledge that humanism is a religion. It is sad that modern-day humanists are not that intellectually honest.

To claim that humankind, if created by a creator, was created as a caveman or worse, is an a priori assumption based on the religious belief that evolution is true. The laws of thermodynamics prove that evolution is impossible, and that there must be a supernatural intelligence behind the origin of all matter and energy.

Furthermore, a previous writer misconstrued the general tenor of the Old Testament (his BJU training notwithstanding) when describing the warfare in Old Testament times. And further, he did not differentiate between the beliefs and practices of true Christianity versus apostate Christianity.

To reply to another writer, true Christianity is about freedom of choice, not control.

To another writer I would agree that reason shines light on many things. But if your reason is biased by the false assumptions of pseudo-science, it leads only to more darkness.

For years, I have asked for one piece of irrefutable, scientifically verifiable proof that evolution is true. I have also asked for one similar piece of evidence that the supernatural does not exist.

We must use science to explain the operation of the universe, but science cannot explain the origin of the universe. The Bible has the most reasonable explanation.

I could have well written 1,000 words or more in response to each of his points but as letters go, I was a bit limited. Here was the reply:

Evolution’s basis as firm as gravity’s

A June 20 letter titled, “Still waiting for evidence,” tries to prove too much on proclaiming:

“The laws of thermodynamics prove that evolution is impossible,” as if the world’s greatest scientific minds somehow missed that glaring point.

The second law of thermodynamics does state that in a closed system, entropy, or disorder, increases with the passage of time. But the environment in which evolution and natural selection occur is an open system. That environment is our universe.

On the letter’s other points, evolution is, itself as “irrefutable” as gravity, and to say otherwise is to misunderstand the scientific meaning of the word “theory,” so much so that if we throw out evolution, we have to toss out gravity with it.

Science has made enormous inroads into explaining how complexity can, over time, come from simpler forms. To interpose God and the Bible into the equation, as the writer seeks to do, exponentially magnifies the problem because we would then have the insurmountable task of explaining how simpler beings come from an incredibly complex one. That he just creates them is not an acceptable answer on this planet or any other.

Finally, as the writer seems to demand, I offer three transitional fossils that point to evolution. An early, four-legged cetacean fossil known as Ambulocetus, or walking whale, was discovered by Johannes Thewissin in 1996. The Archaeopteryx, found in 1861, is a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds, and the Eupodophis fossil, the specimen of which was found in Lebanon and identified in 2000, shows an intermediary form between lizards and snakes.

And speaking of snakes, the Bible, with its differing accounts of man’s creation in the Garden, the variant steps by which the universe was made and contradictory details about Noah’s Ark, the Ten Commandments, Christ and, indeed, the very nature of God, the good book does a fine job of disproving itself and provides not even the hint of a “reasonable explanation.”

Gravity of the situation

This map traces gravity’s force on Earth and tells us which way is “up” or “down,” literally. The red portions of the map represent areas where gravity’s pull is the highest and the deep blue represents areas of lower gravitational force. The date holds quite large implications for oceanographers, geophysicists and even construction contractors, as the above-linked article notes. Here is the map:

Our not-so-unique planet

I was just watching an episode of “The Universe,” a History Channel series in which the narrator asked:

How common might Earth-like planets be in the universe? Even if only 1 percent of all stars were circled by a planet like our own, that would still mean there are billions of other earths waiting to be discovered.

And according to this article and Alan Boss, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution and author of the book “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” he indicated:

There may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy.

And to quote the article:

Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said.

“But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

So, notwithstanding basic organisms, what about intelligent life?

Other scientists are taking another approach: an analysis that suggests there could be hundreds, even thousands, of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland constructed a computer model to create a synthetic galaxy with billions of stars and planets. They then studied how life evolved under various conditions in this virtual world, using a supercomputer to crunch the results.

In a paper published recently in the International Journal of Astrobiology, the researchers concluded that based on what they saw, at least 361 intelligent civilizations have emerged in the Milky Way since its creation, and as many as 38,000 may have formed.

That’s just in our own galaxy. The picture to the right shows 10,000 more.

As I’ve said before, the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would seemingly create huge problems for young Earth (Actually, astronomy and astrophysics has already disproved young Earth theories) creationist theories about how life began here and, indeed, about existence in general, since the book of Genesis seems to indicate that there is only one planet on which life exists and its at the center of, well, everything that’s relevant.

The following blogger and other apologists suggest that the discovery of life on other planets would not shoot holes in the creation theory.

The discovery of alien life would not disprove Christianity anymore than it would prove evolution. In his book Darwin’s Black Box, Bio-Chemist Michael Behe astutely pointed out that understanding how something works or exists now does not prove we know how that came to be the way it is. Applying that to this discussion, it is reasonable to say that even if evolutionary scientists announce the presence of alien life in a far corner of the cosmos, this does not prove that evolution was the means by which it got there. God could just as well have supernaturally created that life apart from earth according to his divine will. So Christians need not fear any negative implications regarding how their Creationist position might be affected by the discovery of alien life. They must simply be ready to say that God can choose to create life where he chooses. — astuteness.wordpress.com

I should note that this writer cites Michael Behe, whose own theories on irreducible complexity have long since been debunked by Richard Dawkins and others and even by his own university.

This apologist site attempts to clarify matters for us, suggesting that any extraterrestrial life that exists cannot be intelligent because the only intelligent beings God created were animals, man and angels (Of course, since the word “animals” includes both multi-and single-celled organisms, they may or may not be “intelligent.”) But looking outside of pages written in Bronze-age Palestine, what are the chances that no intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe? Given the number of possible galaxies (not to mention the number of possible Earths inside those galaxies), the chances would be infinitesimally small. And this question only assumes that intelligent life needs Earth-like conditions to exist. In fact, no rule says that intelligent life absolutely needs human conditions (oxygen, ideal climates) to exist. Who’s to say that a civilization can’t exist given a totally different set of parameters? So, take “infinitesimal” and multiply it by two, and that’s more like the actual chance that intelligent life doesn’t exist somewhere else.

As per its biblical charter, the same site says that the future of the universe is “forever linked to God’s timetable for mankind and the Earth.” And what bearing does this plan have on any potential life elsewhere?

If God had created intelligent life on other worlds, it is hard to imagine that their lives would be calibrated by the failures of Earth’s inhabitants. It seems unlikely and unfair that their distant planets would be destroyed by God because of His plan for Earth [If so, I guess that would make them doomed to eternal fire by proxy]. The implication of Scripture is that there are no other intelligent beings besides man, animals, and the angels.

It’s also hard to imagine that adults in Africa, who may have never heard about Jesus, will go to hell simply because of their ignorance of scripture, so we don’t have to look beyond our atmosphere for instances of unfairness. But these types of arguments are really the only way apologists can right the ship: to subvert what we know about the universe and to claim that any theory (evolution, the big bang, gravity!, etc.) doesn’t square with scripture and should, thus, be discarded. And when things don’t make any sense at all (For instance, the problem of extreme suffering and/or the fall of man under the auspices of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent god who knew about the whole tragic scenario before he set it in motion)? Just tout our lowly ignorance versus God’s omniscience.

Doomsday Clock to strike midnight in 2012?

Like its doomsday-foretelling predecessors (The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact and others — here’s an apparent exhaustive list), the new movie 2012 gives us a taste of the end of days, this time via a prophecy that the Sun and Earth align with the center of the galaxy, which, consequently, is an annual occurrence, as NASA reminds us, which happens each December. It’s called the winter solstice.

But we shouldn’t let annoying little scientific facts get in the way of giving us a good scare. Since its initial setting in 1947 at 11:53 p.m., the actual Doomsday Clock, maintained by the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has teetered on the brink for half a century, varying between 11:43 p.m.in 1991, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and 11:58 p.m. in 1953, when the same two countries tested thermonuclear devices within nine months of each other. Suffice it to say, relations between the U.S. and Russia will probably determine our fate, at least our fate based on international relations. Here’s a graphical look at our past potential dates with destiny:

Graph showing the changes in the time of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From wikipedia.org.

Graph showing the changes in the time of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From wikipedia.org.

The movie 2012, however, provides, not an international breakdown, but a cosmic episode on the scale of a gamma ray burst, a black hole eating up the Earth or a comet colliding with Earth that is based on Mayan soothsayers’ opinions on when the world will come to a combustible end. According to an essay in The New York Times, folks are being scared out of their boots by supposed end of days foretellings.

NASA astronomer David Morrison said he’s gotten numerous letters and e-mails from folks wondering how they should prepare for the end.

“I get angry at the way people are being manipulated and frightened to make money,” Dr. Morrison said. “There is no ethical right to frighten children to make a buck [or for any other reason, religion included].”

Dr. Morrison said he had been getting about 20 letters and e-mail messages a day from people as far away as India scared out of their wits. In an e-mail message, he enclosed a sample that included one from a woman wondering if she should kill herself, her daughter and her unborn baby. Another came from a person pondering whether to put her dog to sleep to avoid suffering in 2012.

It’s unclear to me why people are giving so much credibility to prophecies written by ancient people with no more insight into future events — in truth, far less — than you or I. This is a culture which regularly performed human sacrifices and worshiped the Sun, and did both simultaneously, in fact. Four people would hold the human being down on a stone by all fours, while another stabbed the person and pulled out its still-beating heart, so that the sacrificial human got to see its own thumping life in someone else’s hand before the cheering masses. True, the Mayans were highly developed — civilized would be a misnomer — people in their ability to build great structures, but to give any credence whatsoever to a prophecy told under such an archaic belief system is just as arcane. One can only wonder: were these supposed phophecies handed down from the ball of hydrogen gas being worshiped 93 million miles away?

The above essay notes, though there’s not much to be concerned about regarding the year 2012, we still have plenty potential realities to confront, not the least of which are real natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamies and climate change and manmade ones like nuclear proliferation. Although, if we insist on worrying ourselves with some sort of crisis hurling toward us from the cosmos, one might consider learning more about the asteroid Apophis, set to cruise under our satellite orbits, about 22,000 miles from Earth, on Friday the 13th in April 2029. Or, just go see the movie.

CNN’s piece on NASA’s moon mission

Admittedly, I should be shunned and ridiculed for turning on Wolf Blitzer’s faux-news program on CNN today, but one segment about NASA’s new mission features this embarrassing, mocking and condescending piece:

What the reporter (taking liberty with that word) fails to mention is that NASA already has found water on the moon. I previously wrote about this here. The mission to blow a crater into the moon is an attempt to discover more water molecules than what can be obtained from the surface. Scientists suspect there may be more lurking underneath the surface. As I noted earlier, ice has already been found on Mars.

The presence of water, not just ice, but water molecules, in other areas of our solar system, (this is not to say what might be present in other areas of the cosmos) is a groundbreaking discovery, and with it, I feel hinges many, so far unanswered questions about our own existence, about life elsewhere, quite possibly, about religion (since so many religious texts seem to put forward the assumption that Earth is the central planet on which all else revolves). As we know, water is the central ingredient on which life can build in its most simplest form. So, the implications with this issue are, as I said before, monumental.

Silly notions about how the mission might affect ocean tides or women’s “cycles,” as the video crudely jests, can go the way of the do-do as far as I’m concerned. This is big stuff we’re dealing with and for “The Most Trusted Name in News” to air nonsense such as this says a great deal, more about the entertainment industry than about journalism. The “reporter” ends the unfortunate piece with the idiotically confident and bombastic, “CNN, New York!” which was a disingenuous way to end an already inaccurate report. As I said: embarrassing.

To add: there will be no bottled water direct from the Moon, unless, of course, those are awfully small, molecular-sized containers.

Water found on the moon

In a monumental discovery, scientists have found water molecules on the surface of the moon. We aren’t talking lakes or even puddles (that would be ridiculous and would have been discovered long before now if they existed on the moon), but these are mere molecules of H2O, but the amount of water that exists there was also a surprise. This is, indeed, a big deal because the moon was before now thought to be barren and bone dry. Here are a couple pictures, showing how the water is concentrated on the moon’s higher elevations at the poles:

Time will tell if any other planets, say Mars, contains liquid water (a necessary component for life), but rovers have found ice on the red planet and suspect water may reside below the surface (as it seeps up, it freezes).

This raises an interesting question. Since the discovery of water is so important to finding primordial, or simple, life on other planets (and we clearly have found water on Mars, and now the Moon), if we discovered, say, a single-celled organism or a very simple multi-celled organism on another planet (many scientists now believe that we are quite likely not alone in the cosmos), I ask: what would that do to the accepted Judeo-Christian doctrine that we are the central planet in the known universe and are uniquely created? Would it blow holes in creationism? Would it diminish the accepted axioms of creationism or not? I’m curious to know.