Emily Dickinson and I agree...

Opinion is a flitting thing,
But Truth, outlasts the Sun --
If then we cannot own them both --
Possess the oldest one --

Emily Dickinson

~~~~~~~

The older I get and the more I find out
The more I find to discover
So therefore I think I shall learn no more
Before I get any dumber

Radar

~~~~~~~

No one has Emily Dickinson quite figured out. She wrote with childlike wisdom and

veracity.  She was reclusive and mysterious, perhaps from a medical condition, perhaps

as a result of a broken heart.  Sometimes she wrote something stunningly significant

with admirable brevity.  I admire that particular sentiment at the top and completely

agree with it.

My poem was written tongue-in-cheek in my twenty-first year, during a time I was not

only attending college but also experiencing a truly significant love relationship for

the first time.  My exposure to higher education, new independence and the wealth of

sensations and feelings of true love had completely enthralled me.  You see, I was a

reader at an early age, reading college level books in grade school for my own pleasure

and learning.  I thought I really understood the world at age 12.  I was surprised and

pleased to learn how many new vistas of knowledge were opening up to me at the age of

21.  I made the poem up on the spot and recited it to my Dad while we were having one

of our man-to-man discussions and he encouraged me to write it down and save it.

What follows is a personal rant.  I think Emily was onto something, but I sometimes think

that the scientific community in large part has decided to quit learning in some areas and

has closed minds to new ideas in certain disciplines.  This is the only explanation that makes

sense to me for the continued belief in the increasingly ridiculous concept of evolution.

The "why" is a matter of beliefs rather than science.  Right now I am primarily concerned with

pointing out the "what." 

PERSONAL INTERLUDE (Just skip this part if you don't care)

One thing my Dad and I enjoyed, from the time I began reading "adult" books as a child,

was to sit down and just talk about things...philosophy, religion, news events, science

history or whatever.  In those moments we were more like two guys than father and son.

He had traveled the planet during his military days and then later as a business executive.

He had begun life on my great-grandfather's farm as his family struggled to eek out a

living for three generations of people.  They had pots rather than a bathroom, a mule

instead of a tractor and ate so many turnips that Dad refused to eat one as an adult.  Most

of their meat came from game they had hunted down. 

My Dad's family's first car was a Model T Ford that had been converted into a pickup truck.

The gas tank used a gravity feed system to power the engine, so they had to drive backwards

up hills.  Sometime in the late 1930's my grandfather was able to purchase a partnership

in a grocery store where the farm habitually sold its produce.  Grandpa bought a 1922 Chevy

touring car and drove back and forth from the store with a Colt .45 holstered to his belt.

The reason?  His job was to take the money home from the store at night and then deposit

the earnings in the bank the following morning.  Everyone in the area knew my "Pap" had that

gun and knew how to use it.  No one ever tried to rob him or the store.

When my Pap was born, there were no planes.  Automobiles were for the rich or were home-made

by inventors.  Even when I was a small boy, my grandparents had a party line phone shared with

several neighbors.  Blackberry and laptops and moon landings and satellite television would have

been foreign to him.  But Pap was a farmboy who worked hard and became a small businessman.

I am very proud of him for working hard to make a career and a living for his

family.  I am proud of my Dad for obtaining a scholarship to college and for his eventual

success in the business world as well as his willingness to go to war for his country.

He once found and restored a 1922 Chevrolet touring car that was just like the one his father

had owned. 

My Dad died at age 53.  Now I am older than my Dad ever was.  It surprises me that he seemed

so old to me back then and I feel so young right now at age 56.  But I think he gave me a great

gift in that he would take the time to just talk with me and listen to me as an individual from

the time I was just a kid.  He helped me believe in my ability to reason and learn.

I benefitted from having a stay-at-home Mom who taught me to read and write before I went to

Kindergarten.  Both of my parents had large libraries and encouraged me to read.  I had carte

blanche beginning in the third grade to hop on a bus and ride to the downtown public library to

check out books.  She made sure I had money for bus tokens and I often went to the downtown

library since the Bookmobile had very limited selections available. 

Thanks to my Mom (still kickin' it at age 79) and Dad for encouraging me to read and think

and learn!

END PERSONAL INTERLUDE

Naturalistic Materialistic people are a challenge to me, in that I have a great deal of hope

that I can open their eyes to see more than their limited point of view while dealing with

their tendency to believe they know it all and have no need to learn more.  It is almost

as if they are living out the theme of my little poem, but not in a sarcastic way but as if

it is the best way to live.  Some of the most famous of these, such as Richard Dawkins,

seem so hopelessly programmed that one could not imagine a new thought ever managing to

penetrate their thick skulls. 

Thick skulls?  Is that not a derisive comment?  Yes, but I don't think that Richard Dawkins

is stupid.  I think his skull is thickened by propaganda, whether readily accepted or not, and

that he is almost incapable of thinking outside of his own personal box.  This was illustrated

by the movie "Expelled" in which, during an interview with Ben Stein, Dawkins admitted he would

have no problem with the concept that all life on Earth had been designed as long as that life

had been seeded here by aliens from another part of the Universe!!!!!

If Dawkins has admitted that his problem with a designed Universe is the idea of a Designer, he

is at least honest.  People like Julian Huxley and Dawkins have that going for them.  Too bad

most naturalistic materialistic scientists who believe in evolution won't own up to it.

E-MC2 is an equation that summarizes the relationship between energy and matter.  It would seem

that the naturalistic materialistic scientist would say that it also sums up everything about

the Universe and all that can be known must fit somewhere in that equation.   All scientific

inquiries must be limited thereby.  Anything else is a matter for the religious.

I say to you all that naturalistic materialism is a religion.  Humanism is a religion.  Atheism

is, in fact, a religion.  All of these things are bounded by belief.  Naturalistic materialists

are making a religious statement when they say that all scientific studies must be limited to

natural rather than supernatural questions and answers.  Says who? 

You see, the Universe is made up of more than energy and entropy.  I challenged my commenters to

come up with an explanation for the presence of information and they could not do it.  The

reason is clear, they have no explanation.  They simply asked more questions in response.

Information can be quantified by the amount of space it takes up in some material form to a degree.

for instance, eggroll and gorglel take up precisely the same amount of space on this blog but

one of them transmits intelligence and one does not, at least not in English.  I work in the IT

industry (The binary man says there are only 10 kinds of people...) and we do quantify information

as being multiples of bits.  But what we are REALLY saying is that information is being given

to us and others through a kind of code that can be represented materially and that the code

takes up a certain amount of material space.  Filling up space with stuff is not the same as

transmitting information.  I could start a Word document and then place something to hold down

the "a" key on my keyboard and come back a few minutes later to find I now had a 298 KB
document that consisted of line after line of aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

Would there be a message there?  No.  But when I come to the keypad and being typing words,
then I am not just filling up space with letters, I am transmitting information. 

So we have three major

aspects to existence to deal with:

Energy

Entropy

Information

Hmmm.  But that is not enough.  I may have something to say, but I must decide to transmit it in

some form and act upon that decision before the information is actually transmitted.  If I must

decide to do it before it gets done, then in fact there is yet another aspect of existence to

consider:

Energy

Entropy

Information

Will

Yes, I must exert my will to transmit information which, with energy, I then type onto the page

which then causes some energy to be converted to entroy in the process.  Whew! 

Guys, naturalistic materialistic scientists suggest that a big bang formed the Universe.  The

concept basically boils down to this:  From nothing came something.  Now this is really kind

of silly when you look at it critically.  But that is basically what naturalistic materialistic

scientists want to believe.

They then believe that life just kind of came from non-life somehow.  Now I think that we need to

consider this...

DARWIN

Charles Darwin grew up in a culture of changing realities.  Although Pasteur had recently shown
that life could not come from non-life, James Hutton had proposed his theory of uniformitarianism
that Lyell had furthered, bring revolutionary ideas to the forefront in the world of geology.  In

the matter of social order, Karl Marx and the concept of communism combined with so-called
higher textual criticism of the Bible was bringing upheaval to the political and religious world.

Charles Darwin's grandfather had written an evolutionary-style book, Zoonomia, and had sought
for a non-religious solution to the problem of the origins of living things.  Charle's father was

nominally a church member but in fact simply wanted to appear to be respectable in order to
advance his successful career in business.  Darwin did marry his first cousin, who was a believer
in God. He adored his wife and his little daughter, but the daughter suffered from severe stomach
illnesses and died at age ten.  Darwin, himself a descendant of cousin marriage, blamed his
marriage to a cousin for making his daughter genetically deficient and also became a fervent
atheist as a result of her death.  Darwin was motivated to find a way to explain away God.

Scientists of the time knew little about the nature of life and knew nothing about the DNA system

of coding that is present in all living things.   Had they known, the likely would have simply

dismissed evolution by means of natural selection out of hand.  But they did not know, it became
the accepted dogma and soon everyone was being taught that science had basically proven
the concept to be true.

Trouble is, once it was generally accepted that all things were made of earth, wind, fire and water.

It was generally accepted that the Sun revolved around the Earth.  Newton's laws of physics were

the accepted fact, until Relativity came along, until Quantum Mechanics came along...

The Smart Scientist

The smart scientist realizes that Truth is always to be strived for but may not ever be found.  It

is the goal and love of the scientist to advance knowledge farther along on the road to Truth but

to not be satisfied with the current thinking just because it is popular.

The Average Scientist

The average scientist accepts the mainstream point of view in order to get along, to get funding,

to receive tenure and get his papers published.  He focuses his research, usually, in one small

area and seeks to advance knowledge in that one small area and hopefully make discoveries
and simultaneously a name for himeself.

The Wise Scientist

The wise scientist recognizes that God created all things and that He is the holder of all Truth.

He knows this is why the laws of science are organized rather than random and this is why a man

can study and understand natural processes, because they were designed with purpose and will
by a superior intellect.  This understanding underlies his thinking processes as he studies and
tests and questions and seeks for answers.  Men like Lord Kelvin and Newton and Linnaeus and
Copernicus were all believers in God as the Creator of all things and that knowledge gave them
confidence that processes could be understood and that knowledge could benefit mankind.

The Foolish Scientist

The foolish scientist doesn't actually care about finding truth, he is most concerned with proving

his point of view.  He will only consider evidence that supports his personal belief system and

may actually try to hide evidence that hurts his cause.  He will make fun of those who disagree

with him, which is not admirable.  Worse, he will work to exclude those with differing beliefs from

the schools and institutions he inhabits.  He seeks to stifly any dissenters and all dissenting

information.  He does not want other points of view to even be presented, let alone seriously

considered!  Sadly, at least a very large minority of scientists fall into the average or the

foolish category.

~~~~~~~

Commenters, have you noticed how naturalistic materialistic scientists fight so hard to keep any

Intelligent Design information from being presented in schools?  Fear and ignorance!  It is as if

the scientific community, in the majority, is this massive cult that bows to a dogmatic line of

propaganda and shuns all who dare to question that dogma.

You expect us to believe that life came from non-life and yet can find no comprehensible means by

which this may have ever been accomplished.  You study life carefully for multiple generations and
find that speciation can happen rapidly but new life is never formed.  You expect people to believe
that an explosion created a Universe of orderly systems and laws, that an accident produced
living creatures with remarkably complex parts.  You expect people to believe that information
magically appeared from no one and from nowhere and is now found throughout the planet.

I asked you before and again I fling down the gauntlet.  Give me an explanation for the presence of

information.  How did intelligence in the form of DNA get implanted in living cells?  How is it born

in the minds of men?  In fact, how can you explain a logical and orderly Universe that obeys laws
that are comprehensible and predictable?  Do you expect us to believe that intelligence just
burped into existence?

A child understands that if you drop a drinking glass onto the kitchen floor it will spill its contents

and probably shatter into several pieces.  The devout naturalistic materialistic scientist seems to
believe the process would work in reverse once in awhile, that sometimes a bunch of junk on the
ground organizes itself into a nice glass of milk and leaps up into your hand. 

If we had a scientific community composed of Wise and Smart scientists, we would be benefitted
greatly, as research would tend to focus on where the evidence leads rather than continual
attempts to find ways to disprove the possibility of God.

Maybe, in your opinion, the Universe was an accident and life was a lucky break and living beings
are the result of a long string of mistakes and bungles that just happened to coincide with other
mistakes and bungles that just happened to coincide with changing ecological conditions...over
and over and over again millions and millions upon millions of times for each kind of plant and
animal that ever existed.

Maybe, in your opinion, thousands of miles of sedimentary rock were laid by local floods, wild
chance caused every mountain on the planet to have once been a seabed, solid rocks can be
folded like putty and some animals evolve into completely new kinds of beings while some remain
the same for millions and millions of years.  Oh, and also millions of years worth of rock records
are found some places and not others, while sometimes rock layers are found out of order
because rocks sometimes flip like click beetles and shuffle like cards.

Are you sure you want to base your life on such a groundless and empty belief system?  How do
you find any meaning in a random life that happened by chance and will disappear like the tail end
of a breeze? How do you find peace when such questions hang over your head?