Radaractive Part Two - Science and Supernatural
It's ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ack!!!!!!!! After a long hiatus and vacation, the Radar is in the house...much to be done.
It's been a great century so far. My wonderful wife and I have been as far west as Hawaii, as far north as the middle of Alaska, as far south as Phoenix and as far east as the Eastern Shore (Atlantic Ocean) of Virginia. We've been up and down all sorts of hills and valleys and perused rock formations everywhere we've gone. Both of us are amateur geologists/scientists/historians and we tend to avoid the tourist shops and casinos and head out to the hills and streams when we travel.
This Christmas-New Years vacation schedule included a stay at a mountain lodge in West Virginia. There is a remarkable mountainside there that impressed me, easily over one thousand feet of exposed sedimentary rock layers, all relatively uniform! We identified lots of shale and coal along with standard limestone, mudstone and etc. It wasn't a terribly rich source of fossils, not for us anyway, sadly. Still, it was memorable to awaken early and watch the sun rise in the mountains.
We were about 3,000 feet above sea level at the lodge. I got up before the sun and perched at a balcony a few dozen feet above the ground to commune with God and watch dark turn to light.
A small herd of deer gathered below me, foraging watchfully, as the sun first touched the highest peaks. Like dogs, they would investigate when one of them would empty a bladder, making sure all was well I suppose. Once in a while one would wag a tail or nudge another animal. I counted eight of them in this group. They moved on into the woods as the light came on.
Two Ravens flew past on an unknowable mission. I spotted a Cardinal high in an fir tree. The light moved down the face of the mountains. The lodge stirred behind me as the first lodgers awoke to seek breakfast. Later the smaller birds appeared, like Bluebirds and Blue Jays and a Titmouse or two. More Cardinals showed up, too. There were Junkoes and Gold Finches. But many of them scattered when a few juvenile Homo Sapiens came out to tromp the woods in the immediate vicinity of the lodge. It took quite a while before the rays of light began to filter all the way down to the river valley far below, and by that time there had been a couple of Hawk sightings as well. I would later see a Bald Eagle but none appeared that particular morning.
I looked at the formation of the mountains, knowing that they went on for hundreds of miles. I considered the vast array of plants and animals that populate the region, the hundreds of layers of rock, the beauty and grandeur and functionality of it all. To my eyes, I was feasting upon wonders of God's Creation. A naturalistic materialist would be looking at a bunch of mistakes that had survived by chance and by being a bit more useful than the untold billions of other mistakes that had gone on before. I was looking at a world of beauty and purpose. The naturalistic materialist may see beauty, but no purpose there at all. What a shame!
For the last year, the debate has raged on in this blog primarily between creationists and evolutionists. This year I want to restart the conversation from a slightly different beginning point. I want to make a portion of my position very clear.
SCIENCE AND SUPERNATURAL TOGETHER
I will have so much more to say about this, but I wish to state emphatically that I believe that the supernatural has a place in science and to exclude it is to willfully turn a blind eye to very real possibilities concerning the origins of things and also the very operation of those things.
Our last discussion involved rapid speciation. As it happens, some of the arguments against the notion of a world-wide Noahic flood used by the evolutionist crowd deal with the wide variety of organisms found in the world today, not to mention the races of man and the languages thereof. However, no one has been able to refute the scientific studies done that show that rapid speciation occurs within populations, so rapid that one could well believe that all species of life found today could have been the descendants of the menagerie found on the Ark or of those organisms capable of surviving the ordeal outside the Ark.
This then causes commenters to object to the idea of the Ark itself, in that even though I can demonstrate that the size of the Ark and the design could not only hold enough animals and cargo but also survive a world-wide flood, the people on board could not care for such a cargo. They grumble that it would require some kind of supernatural intervention!
Supernatural Intervention
Of course! Absolutely. The Book of Genesis doesn't say if the animals were all juveniles, or whether they hibernated during the voyage, or whether Noah and his family were granted supernatural strength and energy to care for the animals and etc. This we really don't know because it is not specified. But the idea that God intervened in the process supernaturally is not a problem for creationists!!!
Make no mistake, I have presented evidence, and will continue to do so, that shows how very possible and plausible are the historical accounts found in Genesis. But I have never shied away from the proposal that supernatural forces are involved. Hey, did Jesus walk on water and heal the sick and raise the dead by supernatural means? Yes. Did God supernaturally part the Red Sea to let Moses and the Nation of Israel pass and then close it upon the chariots of Pharoah? No doubt. Did God create the Universe by supernatural means? Duh! Of course I believe that God has used supernatural powers to accomplish things during the history of all existence.
So I will admit to the world that the supernatural has and will be a part of life around us and therefore to exclude the supernatural from science is the act of a small child covering his eyes and thinking he has hidden himself. It is a foolish endeavor!
In truth, the world I see is far more logical than the world of the atheistic evolutionist. That there are literally millions of varieties of organisms is far more likely in a world created by God than a world in which all life evolved by chance from one exceedingly simple patriarchial organism. That all creatures would use the same design program (DNA) and that within that genetic code would be myriad options for sizes and shapes and colors and so on is far more likely to be by design. The billions upon billions of tons of sedimentary rock layers are far more likely to have been the result of a world-wide flood and the attendant runoff and glaciation periods than by a tormented series of local incidents somehow accomplishing worldwide results as postulated by evolutionists. Heck, did you know that the common design for an eyeball would have had to have evolved along several different bloodlines rather than one common ancestor? How ridiculous is that?
In any event, rapid speciation has been established. However, during the time of modern scientific study macroevolution has NOT been observed. So far, the variation in kind as designed by God is observable and evolution remains an unproven hypothesis. More to come!
It's been a great century so far. My wonderful wife and I have been as far west as Hawaii, as far north as the middle of Alaska, as far south as Phoenix and as far east as the Eastern Shore (Atlantic Ocean) of Virginia. We've been up and down all sorts of hills and valleys and perused rock formations everywhere we've gone. Both of us are amateur geologists/scientists/historians and we tend to avoid the tourist shops and casinos and head out to the hills and streams when we travel.
This Christmas-New Years vacation schedule included a stay at a mountain lodge in West Virginia. There is a remarkable mountainside there that impressed me, easily over one thousand feet of exposed sedimentary rock layers, all relatively uniform! We identified lots of shale and coal along with standard limestone, mudstone and etc. It wasn't a terribly rich source of fossils, not for us anyway, sadly. Still, it was memorable to awaken early and watch the sun rise in the mountains.
We were about 3,000 feet above sea level at the lodge. I got up before the sun and perched at a balcony a few dozen feet above the ground to commune with God and watch dark turn to light.
A small herd of deer gathered below me, foraging watchfully, as the sun first touched the highest peaks. Like dogs, they would investigate when one of them would empty a bladder, making sure all was well I suppose. Once in a while one would wag a tail or nudge another animal. I counted eight of them in this group. They moved on into the woods as the light came on.
Two Ravens flew past on an unknowable mission. I spotted a Cardinal high in an fir tree. The light moved down the face of the mountains. The lodge stirred behind me as the first lodgers awoke to seek breakfast. Later the smaller birds appeared, like Bluebirds and Blue Jays and a Titmouse or two. More Cardinals showed up, too. There were Junkoes and Gold Finches. But many of them scattered when a few juvenile Homo Sapiens came out to tromp the woods in the immediate vicinity of the lodge. It took quite a while before the rays of light began to filter all the way down to the river valley far below, and by that time there had been a couple of Hawk sightings as well. I would later see a Bald Eagle but none appeared that particular morning.
I looked at the formation of the mountains, knowing that they went on for hundreds of miles. I considered the vast array of plants and animals that populate the region, the hundreds of layers of rock, the beauty and grandeur and functionality of it all. To my eyes, I was feasting upon wonders of God's Creation. A naturalistic materialist would be looking at a bunch of mistakes that had survived by chance and by being a bit more useful than the untold billions of other mistakes that had gone on before. I was looking at a world of beauty and purpose. The naturalistic materialist may see beauty, but no purpose there at all. What a shame!
For the last year, the debate has raged on in this blog primarily between creationists and evolutionists. This year I want to restart the conversation from a slightly different beginning point. I want to make a portion of my position very clear.
SCIENCE AND SUPERNATURAL TOGETHER
I will have so much more to say about this, but I wish to state emphatically that I believe that the supernatural has a place in science and to exclude it is to willfully turn a blind eye to very real possibilities concerning the origins of things and also the very operation of those things.
Our last discussion involved rapid speciation. As it happens, some of the arguments against the notion of a world-wide Noahic flood used by the evolutionist crowd deal with the wide variety of organisms found in the world today, not to mention the races of man and the languages thereof. However, no one has been able to refute the scientific studies done that show that rapid speciation occurs within populations, so rapid that one could well believe that all species of life found today could have been the descendants of the menagerie found on the Ark or of those organisms capable of surviving the ordeal outside the Ark.
This then causes commenters to object to the idea of the Ark itself, in that even though I can demonstrate that the size of the Ark and the design could not only hold enough animals and cargo but also survive a world-wide flood, the people on board could not care for such a cargo. They grumble that it would require some kind of supernatural intervention!
Supernatural Intervention
Of course! Absolutely. The Book of Genesis doesn't say if the animals were all juveniles, or whether they hibernated during the voyage, or whether Noah and his family were granted supernatural strength and energy to care for the animals and etc. This we really don't know because it is not specified. But the idea that God intervened in the process supernaturally is not a problem for creationists!!!
Make no mistake, I have presented evidence, and will continue to do so, that shows how very possible and plausible are the historical accounts found in Genesis. But I have never shied away from the proposal that supernatural forces are involved. Hey, did Jesus walk on water and heal the sick and raise the dead by supernatural means? Yes. Did God supernaturally part the Red Sea to let Moses and the Nation of Israel pass and then close it upon the chariots of Pharoah? No doubt. Did God create the Universe by supernatural means? Duh! Of course I believe that God has used supernatural powers to accomplish things during the history of all existence.
So I will admit to the world that the supernatural has and will be a part of life around us and therefore to exclude the supernatural from science is the act of a small child covering his eyes and thinking he has hidden himself. It is a foolish endeavor!
In truth, the world I see is far more logical than the world of the atheistic evolutionist. That there are literally millions of varieties of organisms is far more likely in a world created by God than a world in which all life evolved by chance from one exceedingly simple patriarchial organism. That all creatures would use the same design program (DNA) and that within that genetic code would be myriad options for sizes and shapes and colors and so on is far more likely to be by design. The billions upon billions of tons of sedimentary rock layers are far more likely to have been the result of a world-wide flood and the attendant runoff and glaciation periods than by a tormented series of local incidents somehow accomplishing worldwide results as postulated by evolutionists. Heck, did you know that the common design for an eyeball would have had to have evolved along several different bloodlines rather than one common ancestor? How ridiculous is that?
In any event, rapid speciation has been established. However, during the time of modern scientific study macroevolution has NOT been observed. So far, the variation in kind as designed by God is observable and evolution remains an unproven hypothesis. More to come!