The great faith that is Darwinism...a tribute to *poof*

Surely it is time to step back and express true admiration for the great faith of Darwinism.   It is quite possibly the religion that has the largest number of true believers with, conversely, perhaps the least amount of evidence or logic to bulwark that faith.  Some of Darwin's devoted acolytes come here to submit their paeans to Darwin and I must say that their faith is truly impressive and their fervor as well.  Allow me to submit some evidence and a few comments that illustrate the point.

What is the First Law of Thermodynamics?

"In its simplest form, the First Law of Thermodynamics states that neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed. The amount of energy in the universe is constant – energy can be changed, moved, controlled, stored, or dissipated. However, this energy cannot be created from nothing or reduced to nothing. Every natural process transforms energy and moves energy, but cannot create or eliminate it.This principle forms a foundation for many of the physical sciences.

The First Law of Thermodynamics is one of the absolute physical laws of the universe. Everything in the entire universe is affected by this law, as much as time or gravity. There are three Laws of Thermodynamics. The Second Law (Increased Entropy) and the Third Law (Zero Entropy at Zero Kelvin) are dependent on the First Law and each other. Together, these laws form part of the baseline for all modern science. No exceptions or contradictions to these laws have ever been observed... "

So we have a law.   The first law of thermodynamics = 1LOT.  Since Darwinists adhere to a principle that everything must have a natural/material cause and that no one should consider any supernatural forces at any time...no matter what...then a devoted naturalist has a big problem.   He believes in natural laws and forces.  Natural forces cannot create or destroy anything.   So therefore how did the Universe come to be?

Stephen Hawking gives the Darwinist answer:  "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing,"

"Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to ... set the Universe going."

Spontaneous creation?   This is the answer of supposedly the greatest mind of our day?  Stephen Hawking has bet his life and his soul and his spirit and everything on *poof*!   Truly this is remarkable faith.  Because to believe in a miraculous spontaneous creation of everything from nothing by no cause is 100% faith and 0% fact.   It is totally miraculous and completely opposite to the findings of operational science.   So for a naturalist to defy the basis for his entire worldview by appealing to an incomprehensible and inexplicable miracle is nothing but faith alone.  


I think it is notable that, for such a smart guy, he completely flubs the proposition.   If there is no material world and no existence there is therefore no gravity to somehow exert its mighty power to create.   Gravity has been around for a long time and we have never seen gravity break the 1LOT.  In other words we have been able to observe and measure gravity for many generations now and no one has yet seen it make anything.   It may be a force, but it is not creative, does not contain information and while it exerts force upon objects it is not a tangible material thing you can hold in your hand.   Would you care for a jar of gravity?   Yes ma'am, would you like that burger with or without gravity?

So we see that Hawking is a man of great faith, willing to abandon his stated scientific principles and common sense in order to hang his beliefs on the smoke and shadow of pure unsubstantiated faith.   We should stand in awe of such faith!

So let us hear from one of the acolytes after seeing me quote Hawking:

"Jon Woolf said... Personally, if I had Stephen Hawking's mind in Stephen Hawking's crippled body, I wouldn't have much patience with anybody who tried to tell me it was "all part of the plan" of "a just and loving God." Hawking's condition is as powerful a moral argument against the Christian God as I can think of."

Sorry, Jon.  As the old joke goes, "get your own dirt!"  You cannot borrow my Theistic morality and thump me with it, as you have rejected a Creator God and his morality.   Your Darwinist selfish-gene-survival-of-the-fittest philosophy must come with the Darwinism.   You have no standard from which to determine what is "right" and what is "wrong."  Furthermore, you are running as fast as you can from the scientific question and trying to sneak behind a metaphysical barrier. 

"As for this post, it's naught but a gigantic fallacy: an argument from authority. And not even on any factual topic; it's a subjective opinion on theology and morality. On that, the Armpit Rule applies".  

And you forgot na-na-na-na-na-na!  Come on out from all that verbiage and borrowed morality that you cannot support by your belief system and talk science.   Observational science says that nothing is being created or destroyed.   The existence of the Universe is an impossibility from a naturalistic point of view.  That it does exist calls for a supernatural solution.   Hawking is crying out for a miracle that does not involve a supernatural being or force capable of providing it.  In view of the 1LOT the idea of the Universe creating itself is an absurdity.   Therefore I have to give both you and Hawking credit for pure blind faith.   Blind, deaf and dumb faith! 

By the faithful following of the Scientific Method, the spontaneous generation of the Universe or even a grain of sand would have been relegated to the "hypothesis abandoned" pile long ago.  

Now some of you may have read my A comic club does Darwinism...take my primordial soup, PLEASE! 
Yes, I did have a little fun with it.  After all, there are not that many scientific laws that have been tested and challenged and retested and tested again like the Law of Biogenesis.  It states simply that life only comes from life and this article does a very nice overview, I think.   Let us borrow just a little from said article:

"THE LAW OF BIOGENESIS
In the field of biology, one of the most commonly accepted and widely used laws of science is the law of biogenesis. This law was set forth many years ago to dictate what both theory and experimental evidence showed to be true among living organisms—that life comes only from preceding life, and perpetuates itself by reproducing only its own kind or type. As David Kirk correctly stated: “By the end of the nineteenth century there was general agreement that life cannot arise from the nonliving under conditions that now exist upon our planet. The dictum ‘All life from preexisting life’ became the dogma of modern biology, from which no reasonable man could be expected to dissent” (1975, p. 7). The experiments that formed the ultimate basis of this law were first carried out by such men as Francesco Redi (1688) and Lazarro Spallanzani (1799) in Italy, Louis Pasteur (1860) in France, and Rudolph Virchow (1858) in Germany. It was Virchow who documented that cells do not arise from amorphous matter, but instead come only from preexisting cells. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states concerning Virchow that “His aphorism ‘omnis cellula e cellula’ (every cell arises from a preexisting cell) ranks with Pasteur’s ‘omne vivum e vivo’ (every living thing arises from a preexisting living thing) among the most revolutionary generalizations of biology” (1973, p. 35).

Down through the years, countless thousands of scientists in various disciplines have established the law of biogenesis as just that—a scientific law stating that life comes only from preexisting life and that of its kind. Interestingly, the law of biogenesis was firmly established in science long before the contrivance of modern evolutionary theories. Also of considerable interest is the fact that students are consistently taught in high school and college biology classes the tremendous impact of, for example, Pasteur’s work on the false concept of spontaneous generation (the idea that life arises on its own from nonliving antecedents). Students are given, in great detail, the historical scenario of how Pasteur triumphed over “mythology” and provided science “its finest hour” as he discredited the then-popular concept of spontaneous generation. Then, with almost the next breath, students are informed by the professor of how evolution started via spontaneous generations. Nobel laureate George Wald has commented on this discrepancy as follows:

As for spontaneous generation, it continued to find acceptance until finally disposed of by the work of Louis Pasteur—it is a curious thing that until quite recently professors of biology habitually told this story as part of their introductions of students to biology. They would finish this account glowing with the conviction that they had given a telling demonstration of the overthrow of mystical notion by clean, scientific experimentation. Their students were usually so bemused as to forget to ask the professor how he accounted for the origin of life. This would have been an embarrassing question, because there are only two possibilities: either life arose by spontaneous generation, which the professor had just refuted; or it arose by supernatural creation, which he probably regarded as anti-scientific (1972, p. 187).
Indeed, Dr. Wald is correct. Students do forget to ask the professor how, if spontaneous generation has been discredited, evolution could ever have gotten started in the first place. This point may have escaped some students, but it has not been lost on evolutionary scholars, who confess to having some difficulty with the problem posed by the law of biogenesis. Simpson and Beck, in their biology textbook, Life: An Introduction to Biology, state that “there is no serious doubt that biogenesis is the rule, that life comes only from other life, that a cell, the unit of life, is always and exclusively the product or offspring of another cell” (1965, p. 144, emp. added). Martin A. Moe, writing in the December 1981 issue of Science Digest, put it in these difficult-to-misunderstand words:

A century of sensational discoveries in the biological sciences has taught us that life arises only from life, that the nucleus governs the cell through the molecular mechanisms of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and that the amount of DNA and its structure determine not only the nature of the species but also the characteristics of individuals (p. 36, emp. added).
In recent years, however, some evolutionists have suggested that what is commonly referred to as the “law” of biogenesis is not a “law” at all, but only a “principle” or “theory” or “dictum.” This new nomenclature is being suggested by evolutionists because they have come to the stark realization of the implications of the law of biogenesis—not because contradictions or exceptions to the law have been discovered. It is of interest to note that in nineteenth-century science texts, biogenesis was spoken of as a law. But, of late, that term has been replaced by new terms that are intended to “soften” the force of biogenesis upon evolutionary concepts. A rose, however, by any other name is still a rose, as the adage goes. And there can be no doubt that biogenesis most certainly reflects (to use Dr. Hull’s own words) “an actual regularity in nature,” since there never has been even a single documented case of spontaneous generation! Still, some modern-day evolutionists prefer to use a different term when speaking of biogenesis. One well-known biology dictionary says under the heading of “Biogenesis, Principle of ”—“The biological rule that a living thing can originate only from a parent or parents on the whole similar to itself. It denies spontaneous generation...” (Abercrombie, et al., 1961, p. 33). Others have followed suit. Simpson and Beck, in their text quoted above, stated: “We take biogenesis as a fundamental principle of reproduction from the experimental evidence and also from theoretical considerations” (1965, p. 144, emp. added). 

R.L. Wysong, in his classic work, The Creation-Evolution Controversy, commented:

The creationist is quick to remind evolutionists that biopoiesis and evolution describe events that stand in stark naked contradiction to an established law. The law of biogenesis says life arises only from preexisting life, biopoiesis says life sprang from dead chemicals; evolution states that life forms give rise to new, improved and different life forms, the law of biogenesis says that kinds only reproduce their own kinds. Evolutionists are not oblivious to this law. They simply question it. They say that spontaneous generation was disproved under the conditions of the experimental models of Pasteur, Redi, and Spallanzani. This, they contend, does not preclude the spontaneous formation of life under different conditions. To this, the creationist replies that even given the artificial conditions and intelligent maneuverings of biopoiesis experiments, life has still not “spontaneously generated.” ...Until such a time as life is observed to spontaneously generate, the creationist insists the law of biogenesis stands!... How can biogenesis be termed any less than a law? (1976, pp. 182-185)."
How can biogenesis be termed any less than a law?  Only by faith!  How then can Darwinism possibly be called science?  It is nothing more or less than a religious belief unsupported by science. Let's post that representation of the scientific method for you again.

So when it is shown that life only comes from life and life never comes from non-life, the scientist who is following the rules of scientific investigation would have discarded the idea of the spontaneous generation of life long ago.   Especially now, when we understand that life is not just protoplasm but that even a very simple cell is fantastically complex and designed with multiple processes requiring timing and instruction.   Each human cell is more complex than a simple machine and in fact would be better described as a huge yet efficient factory that supervises itself from the information contained in the DNA.  Surely no naturalist would decide to ignore and throw away a law...unless it was on account of blind faith that is so strong that it overwhelms all evidence and reason!

Chaos Engineer gives us the perfect example of such faith:  "Don't bug me, I'm primordial soup, I take millions of years to cook."

That's not working for me...it's just based on the laziest sort of puns and doesn't have any connection to the current state of abiogenesis research."

The current state of abiogenesis research?!  Nope, I haven't had time to drop by Dr. Frankenstein's lab recently, is he still at it?


As I recall, things never seemed to work out for that idea?

photo credit

But what the heck, tell us about it.  Is the Abiogenesis Research Society sharing space with the Long-lost Leprechaun Loyalists?  The Unicorn Union?  "Surely you jest - don't call me Shirley!"

Chaos continued..."I do think we could put together a good stand-up routine, but it would need to be more like this XKCD strip. ("Evo-psych" is "Evolutionary Psychology", the study of the genetic causes of aspects of human behavior.)

Basically we'd need to get a solid grounding in the fundamentals of biology and then we could do an effective satire on some of the latest controversies."

Okay, that sounds fair.  You go back to school and learn about all those things, things that I have been teaching and explaining on this blog for years?   Go back and stay there until you understand what a "law" is, how it is established and then come back and explain to me how you propose to turn science on it's ear and overturn the Law of Biogenesis. 

Chaos Engineer misses the point by so far I do not know where to start.  Let's just give him credit for being another religous zealot for Darwinism but once again, one who believes in stark contrast and in complete opposition to the findings of operational science!   Is that clear?  Biogenesis is a LAW, there is no abiogenesis!  There is more factual support for the existence of Santa Claus.

We should all stand in admiration of the faith of Louis Pasteur, for you see, he believed that God created but was not afraid to test for it and to either prove or disprove the Law of Biogenesis.  He was not afraid to ask, to seek, to test and observe and discover.   Great scientific minds did not find the idea that God created the Universe and God created life a hindrance to science.  Newton considered the idea to be foundational to scientific research, for he believed that a Logical Mind would create logical laws and processes and systems and forces that could be understood and used by man.  Newton and Pasteur would scoff at foolish scientists of today who spend millions of hours and dollars in a vain attempt to disprove scientific law because of their religious beliefs rather than a desire to know and understand the Universe around them.  

"Anonymous said...
"I promise you not one comment on this piece will include any actual evidence for a spontaneous generation of life from non-life." Evidence that a spontaneous generation of life from non-life is possible, or evidence that that's what happened to start the ball rolling here on Earth?


Anonymous said...
I'm asking because the former has been presented here once or twice, IIRC."

IIRC is short for "if I recall correctly."  He doesn't, of course,  because any evidence that counteracted the Law of Biogenesis would not be wasted on my little blog, it would be trumpeted from the rooftops of the great Darwinist Temples like NCSE and The Smithsonian and UCal and so on and so forth. There is no known instance of any violations of the 1LOT or the Law of Biogenesis.  Darwinism is therefore as unscientific as any hypothesis could be.   It begins by thumbing it's nose at God and then ignores the rules of science while calling for miracles from nothing to support them.   

*Poof* is Hawking's answer and it is Dawkin's answer and it is the only answer they have. 



credit for POOF

That, my friends, is the best the acolytes could come up with for an answer to challenges to the basis to their faith.  1LOT and Biogenesis are established laws that have NEVER been observed to be broken and yet for Darwinism to be true they must be not only ignored but, in fact, reversed!  Oh, but I almost forgot this one:

Jon Woolf said... How do scientists KNOW there was anything like primordial soup that allowed for the first life to form?

How do you know there wasn't? WERE YOU THERE?

[snicker.wav] I just love being able to use creationist lines against creationist arguments... 

Aside from the fact that operational science has stated unequivocably that it didn't happen....remember that whole idea of whether we were going to be scientific or not?   Aside from the fact that operational science tells me that it didn't happen, the Creator Himself told me the same thing.  He was there.   Furthermore, when Job deigned to question God about His plans and ways, God answered him.   I do not believe God answered Job only for Job's sake, but for all who would read the Bible from that point forward.  From Job chapter 38.

1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: 

 2 "Who is this that darkens my counsel
       with words without knowledge?

 3 Brace yourself like a man;
       I will question you,
       and you shall answer me.

 4 "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
       Tell me, if you understand.

 5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
       Who stretched a measuring line across it?

 6 On what were its footings set,
       or who laid its cornerstone-

 7 while the morning stars sang together
       and all the angels shouted for joy?

 8 "Who shut up the sea behind doors
       when it burst forth from the womb,

 9 when I made the clouds its garment
       and wrapped it in thick darkness,

 10 when I fixed limits for it
       and set its doors and bars in place,

 11 when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther;
       here is where your proud waves halt'?

So the question becomes, Jon Woolf, not where was I, for I have already acknowledged God as Creator. Genesis 1 is far more scientific than anything Stephen Hawking has ever come up with in his illustrious life. God told us what He did, in what order He did it and why He did it.  The how is beyond our understanding but God has urged us to do our best to understand and utilize to the best of our ability.   

God urged man to "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."  Studying the way things work and learning to use that knowledge is part of the job God gave to man.  I do not have to repeat to you the part where man decided to sin, separate himself from God and bring death and illness and sickness and disease and aging and worries and woes upon us all.   That is another topic.  Squaring the Circle about Religion would be an attempt to cover that one. 

The question to you, Jon Woolf and to you, anonymous and to you, Chaos Engineer, is not from me but rather from God.  Were YOU there?   Dare you call both operational science and God a liar?   To be so bold must take faith beyond my comprehension.   Faith beyond understanding.   Faith beyond reason.



IF ~ Poof!  Illustration from DP Sullivan
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