Spotting design in nature is a risky business, since we are told by experts that to recognise design in nature is to see what is not there. Richard Dawkins has said that “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” He goes on to state that there is no design or purpose involved in the production of these complicated things. From that relatively mild beginning he goes on to argue that people who do believe such nonsense: about a Creator and intelligent design are little more than ignorant, credulous, cretinous buffoons. His targets include PhD scientists, theologians and philosophers in what is a general critique of those who oppose evolution via natural selection over millions of years. So a layman like myself stands no chance in the face of such derision. But fool though I may be I stand alongside others of faith, people it is difficult to accuse of being fools. Dawkins if he were to appear before Newton, Lord Kelvin, Mendel, Clerk Maxwell, Pascal and Faraday, to name just a few, may shrink to his proper condition: a microbe in comparison to those who believed in a Creator God who made it all. The perfect model of an intelligent designer. However we do not live in the age of those greats of science. We live in an age of scepticism, and believers in a Creator God in such an age are in a hard pressed minority. Just your average village idiot holding fast to ideas long since abandoned.
I believe God created everything in six twenty-four hour days. Saying that sets me up for a storm of ridicule, and if I am to set out my stall in the public arena I might as well get ready for the over ripe tomatoes, rotten eggs and all of the above satire, insults and irony. But before you do you might like to pause for a moment. Below you can listen to the comments of someone you might take more seriously. The video is less than three minutes long. The main speaker is Stuart Burgess. He came from an unpromising deprived background, got a job at an engineering firm, and completed his engineering apprenticeship with Stothert and Pitt Cranes in Bath. After attaining his PhD in the area of machine design he worked for the European Space Agency for 5 years, mainly working on the ENVISAT earth observation satellite which is the largest civilian satellite in the world. He designed the solar array deployment mechanism including inventing a new type of gearbox – the double action worm gear set. He spent three years at Cambridge University as an Assistant Director of Research and Fellow of Selywn College. He has been at Bristol University since 1997 mainly working in the area of design optimisation of mechanical systems and biomechanical systems.
He has also studied peacock feathers and this is what he had to say about them. Amazingly the colour is not produced by pigment.
“My favourite evidence is the peacock tail feather. It has beautiful iridescent colours produced by thin film interference. The feather has layers of keratin with precision thicknesses comparable to the wavelengths of the individual colours of white light. The feather barbs are also incredibly well aligned to produce mathematical patterns like ellipsoids and cardioids. The design of peacock feathers is so precise that engineers cannot replicate it. Yet the feathers seem to exist purely for decoration!”
Burgess was instrumental in the Gold medal performances of Team GB cycling at the Brazil Olympics. Britain’s athletes in the Velodrome accrued a total of 12 medals, 6 being Gold with every member of the 10-strong track cycling team winning at least one, which was a record performance. No other nation got more than two Gold medals.
His team’s chain drive engineering was used on all the Team GB 2016 track bikes. Every part of the bike, which travels at up to 50 miles an hour, had to work as efficiently as possible. The best combination of chain and sprockets was required, but current test rigs using a turbo trainer were found not to be accurate enough. A pendulum system and a laser to measure its movement was devised to measure efficiency by monitoring how slowly the pendulum came to rest. By turning existing design rules on their head, their research found that larger sprockets made for a more efficient chain drive. Two years were spent testing and designing, with great results. Between them, the Para and Olympic Team won 33 medals and set two world records. He has also designed a flapping micro air vehicle (FMAV). It weighs less than 1 ounce (20 g), with nuts smaller than a pinhead. The wings have a span of approximately 6 inches (15 cm) and can flap up to 10 beats per second. Powered by a mobile phone battery, the wings can flap for around 5 minutes.
That brief bio of a brilliant engineer and scientist should persuade you to listen to what he has to say about nature’s systems, because most of his inventions are inspired by nature’s systems.
I have no expertise or knowledge on this subject, so I will leave it to another person who also has little idea what to do in response to climate change concerns to illustrate the problems. If nothing else this short video clip will make you think.
Please turn the lights out before going to bed and pulling the duvet over your head.
Just think on this, the timescale over which we have been measuring changes to the climate are so tiny in comparison with the supposed age of the earth that any data we have is the piffling equivalent of a water molecule to an ocean. But even from human history we know that if the River Thames was so heavily frozen over that Londoners could have a fair on its surface, then we have already lived through a period which today would have thrown climatologists into a frenzy, and the religious into sackcloth and ashes: the end is nigh!
But between 1309 and 1814, the Thames froze at least 23 times and on five of these occasions -1683-4, 1716, 1739-40, 1789 and 1814, the ice was thick enough to hold a fair. Two hundred years ago Londoners stood on the Thames eating gingerbread and sipping gin. The party on the frozen river had begun on 1 February and would carry on for another four days. The ice was so thick it was able to support printing presses churning out leaflet souvenirs, oxen were roasted on roaring fires, dances were enjoyed and an elephant was marched across the river alongside Blackfriars Bridge.
All the following info regarding temperatures is from the website WUWT: Watts Up With That? Quotes are between italics. The graphic below shows the peaks and troughs in temperature charts over the last 2000 years. The peaks in temperatures were not only higher a thousand years ago but the entire millennia was warmer than ours.
‘A 2012 paper, looking back at the climate of the past two thousand years was published in the journal “Climate of the Past,” The title of the paper is, “The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature in the last two millennia: reconstructions of low-frequency variability,” by B Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute and F C Ljungqvist of Stockholm University.
Now another paper, by Esper et al published in the Journal of Global and Planetary Change, shows that not only were the summers of the MWP equal or greater than our current warmth, but that the summers of the Roman Warm Period of 2000 years ago were significantly warmer than today.’
As our predictions regarding climate change are probably inaccurate; and nothing serious will be done anyway, and because radical action would cause political uproar and rioting then it may be best to just hunker down and wait for whatever is coming. As a Christian I believe we are close to the anticipated end of one era and the beginning of another. Having said that there is good reason to think this will have little or nothing to do with climate change issues. Below is a more reasoned and serious rebuttal of climate change with all its shrill, panicky knee jerk responses.
From the two sources below you will hear that there is good reason to believe the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, is responsible not for global disasters but for greening the planet. Something of enormous benefit to the poor worldwide. Just listen, and if you are not a climate change ideologue you find yourself changing position.
Here is the gentle genius Freeman Dyson being interviewed on the subject. He’s on the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, where as a young physicist he hobnobbed with Albert Einstein. When Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for quantum electrodynamics, Dyson was widely acknowledged to be almost equally deserving — but the Nobel Committee only gives out three prizes for a given discovery.
Before reading on it is best to check out this video.
Are the best and cleverest of our youth going mad, or are they being indoctrinated through the imposition of an ideology which cannot be challenged? Not so long ago answers like those given on this university campus would have been thought a work of fiction, a set up. But it was not. This is reality for those who have abandoned all connection to the real world. But in some ways it is unfair to expose the students to ridicule. They are young, impressionable and have gone to university to learn from lecturers set in place to mark papers submitted by students. They are then presented by an ideology, which however counter intuitive it might seem, is being constantly affirmed by their own convictions, the majority of their fellow students and all of their professors. All students want to pass their chosen course with good grades, so it takes one of real character to challenge those teaching the class and risk the hostile attention of their peer group. It is almost painful to watch decent students desperately trying to square a circle; scrabbling around for the right words to affirm a belief a part of them knows to be untrue and arguably absurd.
This should not be necessary, but here are a few reasons to believe male and female are different but complimentary; almost as if they were deliberately made for one another.
These are many Genetic Differences Between Male and Female
Examine the chromosome pair 23, XX for female and XY for male, and the many differences between the sexes become apparent. The Y chromosome is considerably shorter than it’s X chromosome counterpart. Despite its size the “Y chromosome carries two of the most important genes for a male. One of these genes is called SRY that determine the maleness of the human species. It is responsible for the initiation of male sex determination in humans which initiates the process of turning the sexless gonads into testis in the male, otherwise they stay up in the abdomen to become ovaries for the female. It is therefore the chromosome pair 23 from the male that determines what sex the developing embryo will ultimately become after conception. The other gene controls the production of sperm.
Another major genetic difference between the sexes is the inheritance of the mitochondrial DNA in the female. Mitochondria are present in all the cells of both sexes but are passed from one generation to the next only through the mother. The genes they carry are replicated and do not go through any recombination as the rest of genes do during fertilisation. Maternity testing is based on this knowledge of the mitochondrial DNA properties. Paternity testing is generally performed using the nuclear DNA present in all non-reproductive or somatic cells. All of this information clearly shows that the physiological differences in the sexes are biological as well as chemical driven. It is the quantity of the testosterone and oestrogen in the blood of both sexes and the ratio of the two hormones present that affect the physiological activities in both sexes as well as the physical attributes of the male and female human body.
That very brief overview should be sufficient to kill off the absurdities about gender identity being promoted to and through the students being interviewed in the video above. They are the generation about to take up positions in every sphere of educational, academic and political life. If you think this is merely an American phenomena then think again, it has infiltrated through much of Western Society and is spreading through university faculties based on those subject areas covered by the Humanities.
The following words were written around 1600 years ago by a Christian saint: Anthony the Great.
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
The question is, has this time arrived? Below three very sensible, articulate, well balanced and qualified women give their views on what is happening to us all.
That could be answered by asking this question: why are there No Exit, No Admittance, No Smoking, No Trespassing, No Through Road signs throughout the land. There are some areas of life which are off limits, and in most cases for good reasons: they are dangerous. I grew up with a tradition and order based worldview which is now not just rejected but despised. One in which homosexuality, the main subject of this post, was not approved by society. It was one of those no! do not go there prohibitions. Of course many did, a No Exit sign to some people is an invitation to take a short cut, but there are consequences. Over the last half century there have been many breaks from tradition and with cultural norms, some of which involved breaking the law; others were just disapproved of such as promiscuity, rebellion, bad language, lack of consideration for others and so on. All of these, even if not necessarily approved of by everyone are now either tolerated or actively encouraged. Tolerance is the new virtue; let it all go by and ignore the resulting chaos because everyone has the right to be themselves and express their individuality more or less as they see fit.
What could possibly go wrong?
The law as it once operated, say sixty years ago did many things badly; but nevertheless, in theory it at least upheld centuries old concepts of right and wrong. Society once disapproved of many things we now accept as enlightened. This includes homosexuality which was once limited to acts done in private, acts considered sinful in an age that believed sin was real and serious and detrimental to society. It was not just a religious question it impacted on society. However we have moved on from thinking such things sinful, we have moved on from thinking about sin at all. But just for a moment lets put sin to one side. Even if I were not a Christian I would still regard this issue as being of concern, primarily for health reasons. Homosexuality is associated with increased suicide rates, mental and physical disorders, sexually transmitted diseases, relational instability and the lowering of life expectancy. All of these tragic side effects are well documented which is why it so strange that this lifestyle is being encouraged from primary school age upwards, making it one of the oddest causes celebre ever to have entered Western culture.
It is easy for a Christian to be seen as judgemental and unforgiving on this matter. However this I do know, a Christian who excuses sin cannot speak for God; but a Christian who forgets he or she is a sinner, quite likely worse than the person he or she accuses, is in no position to judge anything. So it’s a tricky and humbling position to find myself in. Here is the writing of St Paul in Romans ch 1. Homosexuality is mentioned earlier in the chapter but does not figure in this following list of named sins.
‘God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips,slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents;they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.’
From that quote you can see that sin is not one dimensional or hierarchical, but is a multi-faceted reality.
All I know for sure is that Jesus desires above all to bring us sinners into a state of grace, and he does this by forgiving and restoring on the basis of repentance. We have to acknowledge our sin. We have to turn to Jesus and say sorry. A Christian cannot say a sin is anything less than something which separates us from our Maker. We are asked to love, we are told to weep with those that weep and we should be there to carry one another’s pain and sorrow. We should offer prayer, comfort, hospitality, kindness and understanding. What we cannot say is it is OK to make an idol of ourselves and our opinions or to change a commandment of God in order to make us feel comfortable in our already genetically and biologically ordained body plan. I realise there are rare exceptions to this general rule. Allowing for exceptions does not change the unremitting norms imposed not by theologians or right wing fanatics, but by nature.
Over matters such as homosexuality I can think of no one better qualified to speak on the subject of sexual ethics as they relate to the Christian Faith, than Rosaria Butterfield. She earned her PhD. from Ohio State University in English Literature, served in the English Department and Women Studies Programme at Syracuse University from 1992 to 2002. During her academic career, she published the book The Politics of Survivorship: Incest, Women’s Literature, and Feminist Theory as well as many scholarly articles. Her academic interest was focused on feminist theory, queer theory and 19th century British literature. She achieved tenure in 1999, the same year that she converted to Christianity. She is far more qualified than I to discuss the question as to whether or not homosexuality is a sin, and answer the question why we should say no, this is not a lifestyle choice that should be recommended.
She says:
‘Christians can, and sadly do, fall into all kinds of sin. But if Christians call what God calls sin a grace, we are calling God a liar, and, as 1 John warns, God’s Word and His truth are not in us (1 John 1:5-10). Some say you should love the sinner and hate the sin. I think we should love the sinner and hate our own sin. If we spent more time hating our own sin, we would be more responsible in our dealings with others. But we want to be clear about what God calls sin. God calls any heart that is not submitted to Jesus sinful. You are a Christian if you have been redeemed from sin by the blood of Christ. Do we all struggle with sin? Yes, and some struggle more than others. Do some people have to give up more than others? Yes. The Christian life is not democratic; some have one cross to bear and others ten. Can someone be a Christian who struggles with homoerotic desire? Yes. There is no sin of temptation. The question is what you do with the temptation. Repentance is the ground zero of the Christian life. We who are Christians are citizens of a new country, and there is no dual citizenship for the believer. Christians exchange all unholy affections for Christ, and this requires daily repentance.’
This is a short video clip but well worth watching. There are many full length videos by her to watch on You Tube should you choose to do so.
How do you go about giving an age old society a complete makeover? If you were wise and cared about majority opinion you would make your decisions in the same way a planner sets about the layout of public pathways in a country park. The old advice was to do nothing for a while. Just observe the routes people naturally took as they meandered over the landscape. The main preferred tracks soon become apparent, and permanent paths and amenities would be laid down over and around those well trodden areas. A natural and simple process which made the great majority very happy. This kind of procedure has been happening to us as a society, but not in the natural way mentioned above. In modern times the reverse method has been applied. Since the nineteen nineties governments of whatever party seem to have been of one mind in seeking to impose a new sense of what society should be. The method has been to lay down paths in heavy duty concrete all over areas which have never before been considered; and never in areas any sizeable majorities would have chosen.
A multicultural and multi-faith society became the new idea, and questions as how to best assimilate these changes into a once stable society has never been satisfactorily solved. Consequently change has been underway for sometime, but the paths being laid have not been decided by the general public. They have been laid down by the government and those the government are listening to; and those they are listening to are in my view dangerous; being influenced by highly motivated pressure groups. Stonewall, the LGBT pressure group advises the government on many issues, including the education of our youth. Ofsted has become the muscle enforcing some of Stonewall’s agenda on schools. Many Christian denominations have given way seemingly in anticipation of public censure and state reprimands. Feminists have also gained a huge amount of political traction. Religions other than Christianity have impacted as well, and in ways perhaps not anticipated. These very varied groups with very different agendas are troubling due to the power they seem to exercise over government agencies. You only need to examine the legislation passed by parliament over recent decades. Ethics and moral standards are now in the hands of those, in my view, least qualified to make judgements. Some of them are ideologues. A definition is: an often blindly partisan advocate or adherent of a particular ideology. An ideology is a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. This includes beliefs, ideas, ideals, principles, creeds, theories. I admit this accusation could, in the past, when it had influence on government, be laid at the door of the Christian Church. Nevertheless sixty years ago this country still welcomed eccentrics, people who bucked the system and challenged convention. That happy state has been closed down. Take care about what you say or do, or else, learn to conform to the new reality. If not, be prepared for a quick lesson in State compliance.
Society has been transformed and it is I think helpful to look at what has happened, is happening and to consider what may come in the near future. The pressure to conform to the new prospectus is increasing year on year. Protest is encouraged on one side and repressed on the other. This process feels like it is planned. It is vicious towards opponents, even unconscious opponents in the sense they may be unaware it is happening until it happens. Coercion is in the air, and the coercive means being used are not difficult to discern once you begin to look for them. A society which has at its root a plan to change the past and usher in a new form of society is something which can never be done other than through covert control of mind and body. This is how dictatorships are formed. Think in unison with the leader’s thoughts or else! We are a society seeking to encourage diversity, equality and acceptance of all, when every instinct in humanity is known to want to gather around those with whom we feel most comfortable. Which is in part why the immigration issue was so influential in the Brexit vote. Political correctness seeks to end hate when hate is often nothing more in reality than a heated expression of judgement against something we find odious or intolerable. What those of a politically correct nature find odious and intolerable and unnatural many other people think of as reasonable, acceptable, good and even holy. The PC agenda is impossible to achieve without creating an extremely sophisticated system to police it, something which is developing apace. Since coercion and indoctrination are becoming part of daily life, isn’t it time to take a look back at what has been lost and into the future to understand what may be coming.
It is well established that behind the facade of every government office and agency down to county, district and local councils and all their employees, there is a vast bureaucracy. This ensures that the minutiae of legislation is fully enacted and that non compliance is ruled out as an option. It is not just the fact of these departments existence, but their empowering of all members of staff to an intimidating and seemingly unchallengeable level of authority. They have been taken through processes of training steeped in politically correct ideals. The doctrines associated with this training are held to be absolute values: challenging them will achieve nothing unless you follow the procedures they have established. Try complaining with any degree of annoyance and you are likely to be quickly closed down, your attitude considered unacceptable and probably documented and remembered. This, regardless of what is often the hard face of officialdom. The lack of flexibility in the systems is one of the reasons people get upset.
I remember very well my only experience of such training: a two hour session, one of a series given to staff at one of Her Majesty’s Prisons. I was involved in an art teaching course and was offered the opportunity to attend these instructive seminars. Staff, even temporary, were paid to attend, so needing money I decided to give it a try. I sat near the back of the room and listened with growing unease. Afterwards I swore, never again. Those attending were to be trained to accept principles dictated by PC procedures and attitudes which ideally should be followed to the letter. A failure in any small regard was not recommended. The whole session emphasised the seriousness of it all. Humour was altogether absent and I came to the conclusion it would be rare for human errors to be considered an excuse for any perceived failure. And that is the truth, there is little sympathy for those who make mistakes. All it needs is a word or two out of place. Here is an example; it hit the headlines and made a point. Do not offend against political correctness.
“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry,” he told delegates.”
The story was told by Sir Tim Hunt. This is a man who had been a government adviser. He won the 2001 Nobel prize in physiology for his work on cell division. And yet over a mild joke he was brought down; within 24 hours he had lost his position at University College London. Hunt knew the consequences: he is quoted as saying “I am finished.” His hopes of promoting science in this country and beyond ended. He had become toxic and his connections to academic institutes were closed down without a chance given to defend himself. The story of his remark went viral through the “hang em high” mobs who use Twitter like kangaroo courts.
A small joke aimed at getting a laugh rather than making a strike at feminism caused a representative section of academia to fold like pastry. Why? Because it could no longer stand on principle. Political Correctness is no laughing matter, it has power and bite and is enforced by a corrupt application of the Law. These incidents can occur to anyone in any kind of work place anywhere at anytime. This is just one demonstration of PC dogmas in action, and how fast they can operate when linked to a very loud, remorseless section of the public. Twitter approval or disapproval carries terrifying weight. In a situation like that of Tim Hunt it acted like a mercenary force, undisciplined and uncaring of the damage it causes. In fact it glories in the damage it can cause. As you will hear, this phenomena is sometimes the decisive factor in decision making, particularly it seems among universities. Students are so alert to any offence, and the heads of universities so concerned by the consequences that they surrender sometimes even before a complaint is made; a perceived threat is sufficient. Twitter encourages mob action and while mobs are useful if cleverly deployed, managing them has always been difficult, almost an art form. Serving them a constant and varied diet of victims works well and political correctness provides plenty of targets to gnaw at and spew out. This is one area where the real world of good old common sense gradually fades from view to be replaced by the theatre of the absurd.
Can you imagine the process of endless twaddle that went on before this particular set of guidelines was sent out to the appropriate departments.
It concerns the equality and diversity team at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust. A set of guidelines had been distributed to staff,. The intention was to avoid any legal action by employees claiming discrimination due to the choice of timing, the venue, and even the catering of their Christmas events. The briefing suggested choosing a time for the office Christmas party that was suitable for mothers so as to avoid the accusation of sex discrimination. Care should be taken about providing food that would be suitable for guests of all religions. That is just one example among the many that could be chosen. At face value this looks pathetic and small fry, an annoyance like a wasp at a picnic. But something more substantial is being built. If we have as a society become so sensitive that the slightest disturbance to our equilibrium causes uproar, then how are we to cope if something serious happens? Not so long ago we were robust: give and take was the rule, someone has a dig at you, you gave a dig back and we laugh it off. I worked in the Post Office for fourteen years and grew some backbone while there, in the sense that I learned how to take a joke and give it back. It was very rare if anyone took it hard, let alone complained. And the women gave it out just as good as the men. It was to me, at the time of a rather nervous disposition, the most enjoyable working experience I ever encountered and by far the least politically correct. I left the P.O. in 2000.
So how did this humourless, litigious, vengeful spirit arise in a people once so easy going? How were we changed so greatly and in such a short time? I think this remains a mystery. There seemed nothing obvious, it just crept in like a damp draught chilling the entire atmosphere. Laws from the EU, seemingly petty and ridiculous, came to us from across the Channel. These had to be implemented by parliament and obeyed, so we grumbled as the British do and did very little beyond laughing it off and grumbling some more. But we got used to it, and learned to endure while the received absurdities became the new reality. In the famous book Animal Farm the animals, with the exception of the pigs, watched with doe eyed docility as their freedoms disappeared one by one. The old idea of an Englishman’s home being his castle disappeared as it became plain that officialdom had multiple rights of intrusion trumping any individual rights to keep them out. We were introduced to a new mission, to save the planet. Green Taxes were imposed and we became more and more used to doing what we were told for idealistic reasons. Climate change made us think in global terms: fear of global catastrophes were constantly shoved in our face along with the insistent message that we must do something. The imperative to change was in the air. Every breath we take, every move we make should be done with this realisation in mind. Our survival was at stake. Tiny details mattered, household rubbish had to be sorted exactly as prescribed by the local council. We became used to using the blue bag for papers, black bin, green bin, whatever bloody bin and get it all correct or else expect some kind of reprimand from the council. Suddenly our lives, once easygoing and largely free of officialdom, became rule bound. In my view we are being trained like you might a potentially dangerous animal. The danger to the State are those prepared to says things or do things that are disapproved of, free speech needs managing, coercion is becoming the rule.
Watch out, speak out, and refuse to be influenced by the enforcement of decrees from above or by packs of Twitter fed mobs as to what the Truth is; because of one thing you can be certain, the Truth is far removed from the doctrines of Political Correctness. So, are we losing our bearings? The speaker in the video below speaks of some of the issues raised in the article. He is American and is speaking about American issues, particularly in universities, however exactly the same things are happening in the UK and all across the Western World, from Scandinavia to Australia.
Which lifeforms hold the record when calculating speed by body lengths per second? The world’s fastest land animal, relative to size is a mite the size of a sesame seed. Paratarsotomus macropalpis clocks speeds up to 322 body lengths per second. If that were converted up to a speed in human terms it approaches 1,300 miles per hour. While this is much slower than a pistol bullet, no-one in their right mind would want to be hit by anything small and hard travelling at that speed. This finding is considered by the research team which discovered it as opening new possibilities in the design of robots and in biomimetics. If so it will be just another example of science learning from nature. Exquisite engineering produced by evolution, and therefore without design, totally out-competing all mankind’s best efforts at design. Two comments could be made in response to that fact: isn’t evolution astonishing, or isn’t evolutionary theory fatally flawed.
But back to speed. What about optimum speeds in liquid? A top Olympic swimmer can move through water at a speed of about one body length per second. The simplest of all living organisms are prokaryotic cells: so what can bacterial life achieve by way of speed? The current record holder is Ovobacter propellens. It is a very large bacteria that looks like a ciliate, ( protozoan / a single celled microscopic animal ). It has around 600 flagella protruding from a tuft which provide the rotary motorisation and its speed: 200 body lengths per second. There are others that seem faster, two clocked at 400 to 500 blps, but they are significantly smaller so their actual speed is less.
Biomimicry is now a well established branch of science. Studying nature has enabled scientists to learn how to innovate with novel environmentally clean solutions to design problems. The core idea is that nature has already solved many of the problems facing mankind. It has been proved that animals, plants, and microbes are either consummate engineers or were engineered by a consummate being. As the last part of the previous sentence cannot be true according to atheism, the official story goes like this: over billions of years of unconscious research and development nature evolved a treasure trove of design solutions, many of them solving 21st century design problems. The surprising aspect of this is that an undirected process, which has no concept of engineering, has the innate capacity to teach the most highly evolved creatures on earth lessons in design. If you believed in God as designer of all things you would not be surprised, in fact you might expect, even predict this development. If not you are stuck with happenstance.
The question is simple? For mankind miniaturisation is difficult at best, at nano technology size, extremely difficult. You can reference You Tube videos by James Tour on evolution that relate to his ground breaking work on nano-cars. The difficulties are enormous and his opinion is that evolution is incapable of solving the design problems involved. For an evolutionary process these efficiently geared and motorised systems should be beyond any serious hope of realisation. That these are considered possible is an example of how the mind of mankind, even at its most intuitive and finely tuned, can still be blinded by faith. Faith in a process that can create out of nothing biological machines capable of performances that dwarf anything man can make. And this is not at the peak of evolutionary attainment, on the contrary it is at the lowest levels, right at the very beginning of what can be described as life on earth. Rule a Creator God out as an explanatory source and there are consequences. Science is made to look like an ape with a piece of wood, pondering how to make a violin for his mate, and a wheelbarrow for himself. We all know this cannot be done however many billions of years are available. I suggest this is even more obvious in relation to evolution and these molecular machines.
The video below is about the rotary motors, called flagella which power these bacteria at such speeds through their liquid environments.
Why does God create people who are seemingly destined for eternal damnation?
This article is an extended version of one written in answer to that question posed by someone very close to me.
The question strikes at God’s character, how can such a God be good? Is God just like us, a mixture of good and bad? Study the books of the Bible and you find many examples which seem to give evidence, both for and against. God is criticised for creating people who are unfairly judged. Why? Because having knowingly created them he knew that their mindset and actions would cause them to be forever lost. However, try reversing that question. Do you think it would be be fair if everyone God created was saved and entered paradise, regardless of their mindset and acts? How could that be fair? It is like the famous Jesus parable of the workers in the vineyard, only much worse. In that story there were some people who worked all day, while others worked for only an hour. But at the end of their working day they were all given exactly the same wage. Many people think such a set up was thoroughly unjust. But in comparison with everybody being saved regardless of what they do, the workers in the vineyard story seems a very minor injustice. Could it ever be fair if those who chose to hate both God and their neighbour entered paradise alongside people who chose to love both God and their neighbours?
This goes against everything we instinctively feel about justice. We want justice whenever we are cheated: we want it when a person offends us, we want it desperately when a drunk driver runs over and kills a child and does not stop or report the incident. We cry out for justice. It is so unfair! We are appalled when a filthy rich oligarch lives a life that uses and disposes of people at will; makes sexual slaves of immigrants and uses the poor and child labour in his factories. A man who enriches himself at the expense of others, robs and steals, rapes, murders, tortures and executes and then goes on to live a long life in comfort and die in peace without ever paying the penalty for all the evil he has done. We will cry out,”Make this person pay the penalty due!” Suddenly hell is well deserved or not enough. Then we want, demand justice. But an afterlife and a judge is the price you have to pay for this kind of justice. An atheist can never hope for it, since he or she believes that death ends everything. There is no justice in atheism.
A strange thing is that while we play the mercy card and want to use it all the time, we are at the same time prepared to endorse killing zones on peoples who have in our opinion gone beyond what is tolerable. The Second World War was fought and most of our population accepted that it was just, moral and necessary to carpet bomb, day and night, cities in Germany filled with civilians: men, women, and children. We went beyond that, and with no noticeable protest from either us or the Americans when we took the decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once again the targets being primarily civilian. We can therefore, when it comes to crimes against humanity carry out what we think is a proportionate response, and this is not considered a crime against humanity. Are we all hypocrites? In these cases I do not think so, these decisions were probably absolutely necessary. My point is simple, judging from a position of the judged against, those being wiped out or maimed or traumatised for life will see things one way; judging from a position of taking a malignant, otherwise unstoppable evil out of world we may see things very differently. Not one of us has either the insight or overview to judge accurately. That is why God is needed to judge, because he has insight, seeing into the heart of humankind, and he has total overview, seeing and knowing all things. The only question is whether or not the judge is good and wise and of exemplary character. The judge is Jesus. Read the scriptures and decide for yourselves if you can find anyone better. Not that we have a choice in the matter.
The question of Free Will.
If a new born child’s parents knew in advance that it would grow up to become another Adolph Hitler, then would it be right to give birth to that child? That is not such an easy question if you believe in free will, because if the parents bring up their child with good principles they will always hope that it may make different choices to the ones that seem to be written in future history. And those choices were available to Adolph Hitler throughout his life. You could say the same to me and I could say the same to you. I could decide to throw away my belief in God and ruthlessly chase money, fame, women etc and be prepared to kill and wreck marriages and ruin people in the process. I could if given sufficient power nuke civilians and oppress entire populations. I could do all of that but at the last hour of my life truly repent and be saved. Is that fair? No, but it does prove that God will show astonishing acts of mercy which are seemingly totally undeserved. This shows that God’s nature is very different to ours, and arguably vastly superior.
You seem to accuse God of being unjust, but judgement is necessary. Without judgement and punishment there can be no justice. So how exactly does God judge us, is it by a tick box legalism or is it done some other way? I believe it is some other way.
If I am to be judged then I want to be judged by the God of the Bible rather than any human judge for the following reasons. Because He knows me through and through, because He has stated that He desires the death of no-one. He personally took our physical form and lived and died in order to save us, and at our judgement He brings witnesses we never knew to plead on our behalf. The saved who did not even know who Jesus was, speak out in amazement:
“When did we see you in prison, or in need…” And the reply, “…when you did it to least of these my little ones you did it to me!”
These saved people did not realise that caring for others contributed in some major part to God’s judgement of them. But Jesus, because he is God, knew everything about these people, and it was Jesus who provided the witnesses. That is not a sign of someone wanting to consign us to Hell. This is the character of the Christian God. It is also demonstrated by His original creation. It was VERY GOOD, according to His own testimony. Not a single one of his human creations were ever intended to be put in this position. Creation was originally perfect, no death, no sin, no damnation. We, or our original parents, knowingly took the decision to disobey God’s only commandment. And if you ask,’ what was a tempter doing in that original paradise?’ then you should know that angels also had the free will to love or reject the God who created them. And all that first fallen angel could do was ask a question and make a suggestion. He did not cast a spell over them. All that was required of our parents was to refuse to do what was suggested. Doing what we wanted in disobedience to our Maker’s commandment led to the first expression of free will. God let us have the gift we so desperately wanted: self determination, our choice, freedom! And we misused it. If you do not like this judgement by association then I wonder what you thought about the entire German people suffering for the sins of its leaders.
According to the scriptures Adam and Eve were greatly superior to us, without sin, with good intellects and clear sound minds. But all it took was an insinuating question and they failed the simplest of simple tests. If they failed we most certainly would have done. Was it inevitable, no, I do not believe it was. Foreknown yes, and that is a difficult question to answer. But while we all pay the penalty the one on whom it fell with the greatest weight was our Saviour. Jesus took it all and by so doing reclaimed the ground lost in the Garden. Rebellion against God by both Angels and humans brought sin and death into the world. Sin leads to the loss of every good promise of God relating to the afterlife. An indifferent or disappointed God might well have decided that as we have chosen to rebel against our Maker we deserve the consequences. Rebel and reject the commands of any ruler anywhere in the world at any time in history and you were dead meat. The chances of this judgement being commuted were not good.
If an electrical manual informs us that sticking a metal object in a socket could cause death then most of us avoid doing it. It is not Rocket science. If the maker of anything says a particular act could cause a fatality then we are plain stupid to go against the instruction. This Jesus, this King and God whom you find such fault with comes to the help of both the stupid and the rebellious, He chose to do what no human king has ever contemplated, took upon himself both the form of those who had rebelled, and, the judgement of death upon their and our sin. Why? So we could get to the very place He always intended us to live, which is with Him. And the reason? Because He loves us, and calls us to be His sons and daughters. If we, who know this history decide to throw that back in His face, then are we in any position to complain? Those who know nothing of Jesus or the Gospel are a separate issue. Paul indicates that in these cases decisions will be taken according to whether or not they have listened to and obeyed their conscience. But that is not your question. You do know enough of the Gospel to make a decision, one that every human on earth has to face during their lifetime. For most of us it is the only life or death decision we will ever have to make. That is why it is a good idea to check the matter over, and seriously.
If we are honest we realise that we scarcely know how to judge ourselves. We want our own way, we are self-centred by nature, we think our opinions are superior to any other, we know we are right, and that if we ruled the world it would be a better place. And at the same time we suspect that this cannot be true. You want God to be like you, we all want God to be like us. You and others who agree with you are in effect continually stating that if God had planned and acted out things according to principles you endorse then things would be much fairer and better. The truth is the Dali Lama, Mohammed, Hitler, all philosophers and political thinkers and a host of others all thought the same. Being wise in our own estimation is a sin, and I along with everyone else am guilty of this sin. If you were taking a daily dose of a drug that someone you trusted said was lethal, would you take notice? If they also said there was a way out, an antidote to counter the effects of this lethal poison, would you say, ‘I can’t be bothered to read the instructions and neither do I see the need to do anything.’ To do that would be to condemn yourself to death. God is not deceiving you, it is all clearly laid out and many people have tried their best to make it understandable.
God cannot give us free will without the inevitable consequence that some will freely choose a life they know to be set against the will and command of their Maker. Our maker, like any maker has the right to make the rules. And we have been given free will so we can make a free choice. If we had no free will then you would have cause to complain. I accept your statement that you really want to know the answers to these questions. The answer is that sin is the lethal drug and God in Jesus has provided a way out. A way out that cost more than a king’s ransom. You and I have cost our God. The measure of it was a good man, a perfect man, who took our place, endured arguably the worst method of execution ever devised by man, to get you and me into this paradise where according to His Word “every tear will be wiped away.”
The question you posed is a great one for a critic, it gives what looks on the surface like a good excuse to do nothing other than complain about the ways of God. But when you analyse it, does the objection look as good an argument as it first appeared? There is another point to be made and it relates to free will. Without free will there can be no such thing as love. If love is not a free choice it is immediately devalued. We value freedom almost above all things. Enslaved individuals long to be free, occupied nations fight for their freedom, you along with most adult people hate to be told what to think or say or do unless you respect the person asking, or can see the sense in it and approve the objectives. We demand the right to question and challenge any prevailing view that goes against what we hold to be good or true. The God you find fault with has given you every freedom. The decisions you will make either for or against God are entirely within your power. You know this and yet still find fault.
God could say ‘depart from me’, and there would be no turning back. Hell awaits. He could have washed his hands of the problem, just as Pontius Pilate did with Jesus. God could cast us all away, because none of us deserve anything less than judgement. We are spoiled, ruined by sin, a batch that went wrong. What creator faced with this reality would do anything other than throw away the dross. I throw away every failed painting once I think it’s recovery is impossible. God faced this kind of failure and chose to go to the furthest limits of love and sacrifice to recover what was lost, including you and I. The only way God could save a free born people who had rejected him was to take their deserved punishment upon Himself and then proclaim them not guilty. In Christ we are not guilty, outside of Christ we are lost. We have a choice, God has done everything possible to prove to us His love and care and we have refused to look at it, creation speaks enough of Him, but Jesus says everything there is to know of Him, all that is necessary for your salvation and mine.
There is one way God could have done it that does not involve the faith route. And the amazing thing is that you would hate it, because you value your freedom to choose: your free will. God could have reasoned, if I take away the gift of choice then no one would have to be lost. This would mean that God would oversee every thought and every potential word or action. Every neuron in your brain, you have approximately 100 billion (100,000,000,000) of them, would have to be supervised by God every moment of your life in order to prevent some aberrant thought or action. You would be God’s robot, doing nothing other than his will. The cost of this: damn near everything you value. Love cannot exist in this relationship because there is no relationship. You would be programmed to conform. It takes a Creator of almost unimaginable love to willingly create a being who can turn round to his creator and say I hate, I have no need of you, I spit upon you and think you cruel and heartless to give me a choice as to whether to live or die. Why not force me to love you, why cause me to have to seek you out and acknowledge your existence, to have to say sorry for what I have become, to repent, to use your word, and then to have to worship you because of who you are? Why did you have to love me like this?
The answer is simple, it is God’s nature to love you like this. Give him a chance and God will touch your life.
The painting at the heading of this article is a part of one I did of the story of the Prodigal Son. At the lowest point of his life, when all had been lost his thoughts returned to the father and the home he had left behind.
“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you.I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’So he got up and went to his father.”
That is an act of repentance, and it is all that is required. We have a choice, return to our Father through the sacrifice of his Son or die in our sins. God is good enough to face us with the reality rather than leave us in any doubt. As to the nature of hell, there are many speculations, no-one knows for sure, but no-one in their right mind would choose it if there were any other option, and there is. Jesus made a way for you and for me. It cost him everything, and he did it for you.
Almost everyone knows how to date a dinosaur. You need to time travel backwards to 65 million years BC. Unless of course they were seen and documented in those days before the word dinosaur was invented by Richard Owen. The famous Victorian palaeontologist, who founded London’s Natural History Museum in 1881. Until that time such creatures whose fossils were being discovered were called dragons. If there is solid evidence that such creatures were seen by humans then the entire evolutionary framework, which is based on millions of years, goes up in smoke. As this cannot be contemplated, prepare yourself to deny the credibility of all the following.
Witness of Apollonius a famous Greek traveller and philosopher.
The following is quoted from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana: by Philostratus {220 AD}
On the Existence of Dragons.
‘Now as they descended the mountain, they say they came in for a dragon hunt, which I must needs describe. For it is utterly absurd for those who are amateurs of hare-hunting to spin yarns about the hare as to how it is caught or ought to be caught, and yet that we should omit to describe a chase as bold as it is wonderful, and in which the sage (Apollonius) was careful to assist; so I have written the following account of it: The whole of India is girt with dragons of enormous size; for not only the marshes are full of them, but the mountains as well, and there is not a single ridge without one. Now the marsh kind are sluggish in their habits and are thirty cubits long, (45 feet) and they have no crest standing up on their heads, but in this respect resemble the she-dragons. Their backs however are very black, with fewer scales on them than the other kinds; and Homer has described them with deeper insight than have most poets, for he says that the dragon that lived hard by the spring in Aulis had a tawny back; but other poets declare that the congener of this one in the grove of Nemea also had a crest, a feature which we could not verify in regard to the marsh dragons.
And the dragons along the foothills and the mountain crests make their way into the plains after their quarry, and prey upon all the creatures in the marshes; for indeed they reach an extreme length, and move faster than the swiftest rivers, so that nothing escapes them. These actually have a crest, of moderate extent and height when they are young; but as they reach their full size, it grows with them and extends to a considerable height, at which time also they turn red and get serrated backs. This kind also have beards, and lift their necks on high, while their scales glitter like silver; and the pupils of their eyes consist of a fiery stone, and they say that this has an uncanny power for many secret purposes. The plain specimen falls the prize of the hunters whenever it draws upon itself an elephant; for the destruction of both creatures is the result, and those who capture the dragons are rewarded by getting the eyes and skin and teeth. In most respects they resemble the largest swine, but they are slighter in build and flexible, and they have teeth as sharp and indestructible as those of the largest fishes.’
Experts disagree as to whether or not all these writings belong to the named author. This type of criticism is applied in one form or another to most ancient texts. Appollonius is believed to have lived around 2000 years ago. What is certain is that this text was written long before anything was known about dinosaurs. So, these descriptions are either made up out of the writer’s imagination or arose as the result of a drug induced reverie. Beyond that the only logical alternative is that this incredible sage, who had encyclopedic about all things animal and was exceptionally well travelled, actually saw what he described. There is part of one sentence in the above account which rules out the possibility of this account being a myth.
…but other poets declare that the congener of this one in the grove of Nemea also had a crest, a feature which we could not verify in regard to the marsh dragons.
No writer of myths is concerned with verifying anything. Verification of this kind of evidence is the business of academics: historians and scientists. The Loch Ness monster is considered an unverified modern myth, but what about these eye witness accounts of a creature which if seen in Loch Ness would be considered as verification.
Witness from a Royal Navy Captain
To falsify a ship’s log would cause a captain to face court-martial, the loss of his career, reputation and pension, and cause great trouble to the crew members judged complicit in the deceit.
Declassified files recently released from the National Archives indicate that huge sea serpents were a fact of life for mariners. This account is taken from a captain of the Royal Navy. It.is in no sense legendary and comes from the 19th century. This sea-serpent was seen close to the island of St Helena on May 9, 1830 by the crew of the Rob Roy. Its captain, James Stockdale recorded the encounter in his official log.
“About five p.m. all at once while I was walking on the poop my attention was drawn to the water on the port bow by a scuffling noise. Likewise all the watch on deck were drawn to it. Judge my amazement when what should stare us all in the face as if not knowing whether to come over the deck or to go around the stern, but the great big sea snake! Now I have heard of the fellow before, and I have killed snakes twenty-four feet long in the straits of Malacca, but they would go in his mouth. I think he must have been asleep for we were going along very softly two knots an hour, and he seemed as much alarmed as we were and all taken aback for about fifteen seconds. But he soon was underway and, when fairly off, his head was square with our topsail and his tail was square with the foremast….My ship is 171 feet long overall and the foremast is 42 feet from the stern which would make the monster about 129 feet long. If I had not seen it I could not have believed it but there was no mistake or doubt of its length, for the brute was so close I could even smell his nasty fishy smell….When underway he carried his head about six feet out of water – with a fin between the shoulders about two feet long. I think he was swimming about five miles an hour – for I watched him from the topsail yard till I lost sight of him in about fifty minutes. I hope never to see him more. It is enough to frighten the strong at heart.”
And another! This second report of a sea-monster sighting has been declassified at an official level by the British Government. It describes an 1857 encounter that also occurred in the vicinity of the island of St. Helena. The following is from Commander George Henry Harrington.
Commander Harrington’s ship Castilian
“While myself and officers were standing on the lee side of the poop looking toward the island, we were startled by the sight of a huge marine animal which reared its head out of the water within twenty yards of the ship when it suddenly disappeared for about half a minute and then made a reappearance in the same manner again, showing us its neck and head about ten or twenty feet out of the water….Its head was shaped like a long buoy and I should suppose the diameter to have been seven or eight feet in the largest part with a kind of scroll or ruff encircling it about two feet from the top. The water was discoloured for several hundred feet from the head, so much so that on its first appearance my impression was that the ship was in broken waters, produced, as I supposed, by some volcanic agency, since I passed the island before….But the second appearance completely dispelled those fears and assured us that it was a monster of extraordinary length and appeared to be moving slowly towards the land. The ship was going too fast to enable us to reach the masthead in time to form a correct estimate of this extreme length, but from what we saw from the deck we conclude that he must have been over two hundred feet long. The Boatswain and several of the crew, who observed it from the forecastle, state that it was more than double the length of the ship, in which case it must have been five hundred feet”
Once again it is reasonable to ask whether or not a witness like Commander Harrington is anything less than about the most convincing of any that could be imagined.
Witness of the Roman historian Pliny the Elder.
The Natural History is an encyclopaedia published circa AD 77-79 by Pliny the Elder. It is one of the largest single works to have survived from the Roman Empire to the modern day and purports to cover the entire field of ancient knowledge, based on the best authorities available to Pliny. The work became a model for all later encyclopaedias in terms of the breadth of subject matter examined, the need to reference original authors, and a comprehensive index list of the contents. The work is dedicated to the emperor Titus, son of Pliny’s close friend, the emperor Vespasian, in the first year of Titus’s reign. It is the only work by Pliny to have survived and the last that he published, lacking a final revision at his sudden and unexpected death in the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius.
Here is Pliny on dragons and serpents.
‘In Ethyopia there be as great dragons bred, as in India, namely, twentie cubites long (35ft). But I marvel much at this one thing, why king Iuba should thinke that they were crested. They are bred most in a country of Ethyopia, where the Asachæi inhabited. It is reported, that upon their coasts they are enwrapped four or five of them together, one within another, like to a hurdle or lattice work, and thus passe the seas, for to find better pasturage in Arabia, cutting the waves, and bearing up their heads aloft, which serve them in steed of sailes.’
Chapter XIIII.
Of monstrous great serpents, and namely of those called Boae.
‘Megasthenes writeth that there are Serpents in India which grow to such a Size that they are able to swallow Stags or Bulls whole. Metrodorus saith that about the River Rhyndacus, in Pontus, there are Serpents which catch and devour the Fowls of the Air as they fly over them, however high or rapid their Flight may be. It is well known that Regulus, Imperator during the Wars against the Carthaginians, near the River Bograda assailed Serpent with his Military Engines, the Balistae and Tormentum, as he would have done to a Town…
Another story from a different source speaks of presumably this same creature and incident.
The Witness of John of Damascus
John of Damascus, an eastern monk who wrote in the 8th century, gives a sober account of dragons, insisting that they are mere reptiles and did not have magical powers. He quotes of the Roman historian Dio who chronicled the Roman Empire in the second century. It seems Regulus, a Roman consul, fought against Carthage, when a dragon suddenly crept up and settled behind the wall of the Roman army. The Romans killed it, skinned it and sent the hide to the Roman Senate. Dio claimed the hide was measured by order of the senate and found to be one hundred and twenty feet long. It seems unlikely that either Dio or the pious St. John would support an outright fabrication involving a Roman consul and the Senator.
In contrast, below is an account of a very small creature unknown to anyone until this sighting.
Witness of Ulysses Aldrovandus
Ulysses Aldrovandus is considered by many to be the father of modern natural history. He travelled extensively, collected thousands of animals and plants, and created the first ever natural history museum. His impressive collections are still on display at the Bologna University (the world’s oldest university) where they attest to his scholarship. His credentials give credence to an incident that Aldrovandus personally reported concerning a dragon. The dragon was first seen on May 13, 1572, hissing like a snake. It had been hiding on the small estate of Master Petronius. At 5:00 PM, the dragon was caught on a public roadway by a herdsman named Baptista, near the hedge of a private farm, a mile from the remote city outskirts of Bologna. Baptista was following his ox cart home when he noticed the oxen suddenly come to a stop. He kicked them and shouted at them, but they refused to move and went down on their knees rather than move forward. At this point, the herdsman noticed a hissing sound and was startled to see this strange little dragon ahead of him. Trembling he struck it on the head with his rod and killed it. (Aldrovandus, Ulysses, The Natural History of Serpents and Dragons, 1640, p.402.) Aldrovandus surmised that dragon was a juvenile, judging by the incompletely developed claws and teeth. The corpse had only two feet and moved both by slithering like a snake and by using its feet, he believed. (There are small two-legged lizards that do this today.) Aldrovandus mounted the specimen and displayed it for some time. He also had a watercolour painting of the creature made.
Both Marco Polo and Aldrovandus speak of dragons having just two feet and dragging themselves along, their locomotion being a combination of squirming like a snake aided by added propulsion from their feet. No-one in their right senses would make up such a creature if they cared about being taken seriously.
You can see and read more on this topic by visiting my website: www.dinosaursfordummies.org.uk
It used to be believed that Dna, proteins and red blood cells like any organic matter could only last a few thousand years at most. The discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur bones described below by Mary Schweitzer shook that idea to its foundations. Which is why we are now taught that soft tissue, blood cells etc, can last and remain intact almost indefinitely, for at least 65 million years. Is that testable by the scientific method? No, it cannot, which makes it ideal if you want to shove another supporting brick beneath a tottering edifice.
Below a Creationist scientist: Mark Armitage puts forward his case having studied the same kind of evidence found by Schweitzer. He served as the Manager for the Electron and Confocal Microscopy Suite in the Biology Department at California State University Northridge. After nearly four years his job was suddenly terminated by the Biology Department when his discovery of soft tissues in Triceratops horn was published in Acta Histochemica. He was told to keep his religion out of the lab. His actual fault was to point out that the soft tissue he had found, which included intact bone cells ( Osteocytes ) in an 80.000,000 year old triceratops, were inconsistent with the long age evolutionary paradigm. He was sacked. Armitage subsequently took a legal action for wrongful termination and religious discrimination by the University. He won that lawsuit and was awarded a sum of $399,500. Armitage is a full on character. You may not agree with many of his comments but his talk on both his own work and that of Mary Schweitzer is fascinating. How could proteins and cells remain intact and in such good order in conditions hostile to preservation for 80 million years? If you think this is impossible then maybe you should reconsider the biblical explanation for the origins of life.
