How to be an intellectually satisfied Young Earth Creationist
It is easy! Simply believe the Biblical account of human history and look at the actual findings of modern science without listening to the idiotic Darwinist spin. Life is obviously designed, the rock layers are a testament to the Flood and a fallen world would naturally be filled with sin and disease and pain and woe. Everything you see in Earth and in the heavens fits precisely what the Bible says. All a Young Earth Creationist needs to do is know his Bible and keep up with science and think critically. After all, a Darwinist has to start with a belief in random and inexplicable *poofs* that began and/or designed whatever there is that can be observed in the material world. We believe God created the heavens and the Earth. Darwinists have had to build a mythology over time.
credit
Reminding on and all about the concept that Darwinism is a religion:
"There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilites not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:
For those of you who have perused this blog before, you are aware that there is something of an ongoing dialogue between me and a group of Darwinist commenters, with a few of my fellow believers in an Intelligent Designer joining the conversation on a regular basis since the beginning of 2006. My last post on Wednesday would be instructive to catch up to where the blog has gone. For those of you who are new, and to remind regular readers, this blog is primarily concerned with the subject of worldviews. Whether you can even conceive of it or not, you have a worldview. This definition will come from dictionary.com along with their cited sources...
"worldview."
n. In both senses also called Weltanschauung .
[Translation of German Weltanschauung .]
worldview
~~~~~~~
EVERYBODY has a worldview. Everyone has a set of assumptions they take with them through their journey in life. If someone tells you that have no subjective assumptions about the world, check your wallet and back away, because if her or she does not even acknowledge that he or she has a worldview, then you are not dealing with a reasonable person. A reasonable person has good reasons for his worldview, understands that he has one and is willing to make changes to that worldview if new information arises to challenge it. For instance, I was a Darwinist at one time and had considered becoming a paleontologist but I am now a YEC who belongs to a few scientific organizations and receives peer-reviewed publications as well as magazines and other information from such groups. My worldview has completely changed in the last 30 years. If your worldview is unassailable then you are far too confident in your own intellect and need to add the humility that allows for changes.
Atheists and agnostics (an agnostic is an atheist who doesn't want to talk about it) will almost without exception be Darwinists because macroevolution is a vital part of the atheistic humanistic creed. Because Darwinism is more religion than science, Darwinists hate to have anyone look under the hood of operational science lest us average people discover that it is not only not proven fact, it is failed every possible test. The high priests of Darwinism are every bit as harmful to science today as the high priests of the Middle Ages were hostile to it in their day. You could liken the NCSE to the forces of the Inquisition back a few hundred years ago in Europe (not England).
A creationist has the following (in no particular order) going for him:
credit for madden cartoons
What, you say, Darwinism is a religion? Absolutely! You must have faith, profound faith, in a long series of unbelievably impossible accidents, so many they defy quantification, to trust Darwinism. Or, you may simply have accepted the propaganda offered to you without thinking on it critically. In that case, I would urge you to bring that subject to the front burner. You see, if the Universe didn't just *poof* into existence, if life didn't just *poof*, if information and DNA and, well, we could be pointing out *poofs* all day long. A belief in Darwinism requires a suspension of common sense in favor of a myth. In fact, I believe there is far more evidence in favor of creationism than there is for Darwinism.
The fine tuning principle all by itself supports creation rather than yahoo we won the Universal Lottery. Go look carefully at the Five Questions post and the comments thread as well. Recently I presented four huge problems that Darwinists could not handle. The rock layers do not support Darwinism. Darwinists still teach a form of uniformitarianism or gradualism despite the catastrophic nature of sedimentary rocks. Genetic redundancy teaches us that functions in the cell falsify many tenets of Darwinism. The cell teaches us that Darwinism is impossible. Facilitated Variation theory is another nail in that Darwinist coffin. Let's not forget the complete lack of comprehension that Darwinists have in dealing with information!
Okay, I could be linking back to posts all day. Let's look at back-to-back posts I made a few years ago:
There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilites not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." - Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist."}
"We [scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31.
"The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails." - H. L. Mencken
“[I suppose the reason] we all jumped at the Origin [of Species] was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” - Julian Huxley, British biologist.
View from the flipside
Last year Anthony Flew, a noted anti-creationist, atheistis philosopher who had lectured and debated on the side of Darwinism for decades, made a stir in the scientific community with this statement: "It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together...It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."
"When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics." - Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics) Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface.
Many scientists see the supernatural in their work
Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics): "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say 'supernatural') plan."
"The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero." - Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry.
Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist): "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."
Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy): "I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing."
Believers are numerous in the scientific community
"I was reminded of this a few months ago when I saw a survey in the journal Nature. It revealed that 40% of American physicists, biologists and mathematicians believe in God--and not just some metaphysical abstraction, but a deity who takes an active interest in our affairs and hears our prayers: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." - Jim Holt. 1997. Science Resurrects God. The Wall Street Journal (December 24, 1997), Dow Jones & Co., Inc.
Alexander Polyakov (Soviet mathematician): "We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it."
Arthur L. Schawlow (Professor of Physics at Stanford University, 1981 Nobel Prize in physics): "It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life."
Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist): "The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine."
Believers dominate the ranks of great scientists of the past
"The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension." - Isaac Newton
Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer) "I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science."
"Overwhelming evidences of an intelligence and benevolent intention surround us, show us the whole of nature through the work of a free will and teach us that all alive beings depend on an eternal creator-ruler." - Lord Kelvin
"I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like all great astronomers and mathematicians of the past." - Augustin Louis Cauchy
Conclusion
There is room for both believers and non-believers in the scientific community. Some, like Einstein, will come to science with a readiness to believe in God but will remain unconvinced. Others, like Tipler, find their predisposition to ignore God tossed aside in the face of the evidence they have found in their research. My personal belief is that the more we learn about life and the cosmos, the more compelling the evidence will be that God does exist and did, indeed create all things. I leave the last word to Sir Francis:
"A little science estranges a man from God; a lot of science brings him back." Sir Francis Bacon
Hat tip to Judaism Online, to Rich Deem and Quodlibet.
Should science be limited to the study of the known natural world and its systems? Or is the job and goal of science to seek knowledge no matter where that may take the searcher? In other words, do we limit scientific study to the natural only?
I can hear the cries of researchers studying the paranormal as they scramble to justify their grant monies! Creation scientists and those who fall into the Intelligent Design category will immediately disagree.
Let's look at this logically. What is the definition of science?
From Dictionary.com:
n.
1. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
2. Such activities restricted to explaining a limited class of natural phenomena.
3. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.
4. Knowledge, especially that gained through experience.
So only item 2 mentions the necessity of confining one's studies strictly to the supernatural. And what is the supernatural?
The same source yields:
adj.
1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.
3. Of or relating to a deity.
4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous.
5. Of or relating to the miraculous.
The first two definitions of "supernatural" do not mention a deity at all, simply some power or existence beyond what is known to be natural.
Doesn't it follow that the best scientist would not turn away from evidence that pointed in a supernatural direction? To do so makes for bad science, for in so doing the scientist is failing to make every effort to pursue all possibilities. Ignoring evidence that points to supernatural activities or powers from prejudice or religious preference is undoubtably an everyday occurence in the scientific community but that does not make it best practice. You can be sure that Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein never thought in that way. Great thinkers allow for all possibilities so as not to miss the truth.
My conclusion is as follows: One looks to natural processes to explain all phenonmenae first, but one must be willing to follow evidence into the realm of the supernatural if that is where the evidence leads. Those who are unwilling to do so are allowing their prejudices to diminish their effectiveness as researchers.
~~~~~~~
As a side note, I have taken much time to logically prove that information has no mass and is not material in form or substance. So when a commenter challenges me to quantify information I shake my head in a combination of wonder and dismay. Information itself cannot be quantified. The material form that transmits information CAN be quantified. For instance, if I use the English language in written form, you can count the number of letters that I write. However, that will not tell you the actual quality and nature of the information that was transmitted. It may well be that a three-page long interview of Lindsay Lohan would contain less useful information than one paragraph written by a brilliant thinker such as David Berlinski.
Just for fun, ask an atheist what his standard of morality might be? Christians have and acknowledge absolutes determined by God. Any concept of morality that an atheist says has been evolved along with the evolution of people is balderdash, because the concept of the survival of the fittest, the law of tooth and claw, tells us that the strong take from the weak and there is no basis for an atheist to label a behavior as "wrong."
I promise you that if you know your history, you can identify the concept of Darwinism is at the root of every Hitler and Mao and Stalin and that it is the driving force behind the legalization of baby murdering and the idea that your own government should attempt to teach your children all about homosexual sex. That is right, homosexuality is actually being forced upon people because atheists don't actually believe in right and wrong, babies are legally aborted every day because atheists don't actually believe in right and wrong.
Hitler gassed his Jews in the middle of the 20th Century and if the USA keeps going toward Obamanation we will have euthanasia of the poor, the old and the weak by the middle of the 21st Century. Look up the subject of Eugnenics and/or Margaret Sanger, for instance. Ideas have consequences. Atheistic Humanism has been an epic fail for humanity and a means by which millions and millions of innocent people have been brutally murdered. Most mass murders of the 20th century were born from the ideas of Darwin, his cousin Francis Dalton and Hutton and Marx and George Bernard Shaw and Woodrow Wilson, to name just a few.
The world is crying out for a new generation of scientists and philosophers and statesmen and teachers and writers that reject Darwin and humanism and celebrate the Biblical absolutes that led to the founding of the USA and the enrichment of the lives of the common man in the 19th and 20th Century. Freedoms hand in hand with Biblical morality built the USA. Darwinism, no absolutes and atheistic humanism expressed in the form of radical socialism will tear it back down. A world ruled by a small class of elites presiding over a vast population of serfs is the result of atheistic socialism. But intellectual freedom and the hard work of ID and creation scientists along with a revived Church can still win the day. But each and every one of us needs to review his or her worldview and think critically about what you know about the world and what you take by faith.
Is your faith grounded on defensible facts and evidence and absolutes? Can your faith withstand the buffeting of opposing viewpoints? The very fact that the NCSE exists tells you that Darwinists cannot defend their worldview in a fair fight and depend on censorship and brainwashing and intellectual blackmail for survival. We can only hope and pray that their efforts will be seen clearly by the world and, once understood, categorically rejected. As Gertrude Stein once said, "There is no 'there' there." There is no fact there, there is no observation there, there is no proof at all there when you go back to Darwin. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, if you look at Darwinism closely you will find only smoke and mirrrors and myth.
credit
Reminding on and all about the concept that Darwinism is a religion:
"There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilites not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." - Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist."}
"We [scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31." (more to come)
For those of you who have perused this blog before, you are aware that there is something of an ongoing dialogue between me and a group of Darwinist commenters, with a few of my fellow believers in an Intelligent Designer joining the conversation on a regular basis since the beginning of 2006. My last post on Wednesday would be instructive to catch up to where the blog has gone. For those of you who are new, and to remind regular readers, this blog is primarily concerned with the subject of worldviews. Whether you can even conceive of it or not, you have a worldview. This definition will come from dictionary.com along with their cited sources...
"worldview."
n. In both senses also called Weltanschauung .
- The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world.
- A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.
[Translation of German Weltanschauung .]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Word Origin & History
worldview
EVERYBODY has a worldview. Everyone has a set of assumptions they take with them through their journey in life. If someone tells you that have no subjective assumptions about the world, check your wallet and back away, because if her or she does not even acknowledge that he or she has a worldview, then you are not dealing with a reasonable person. A reasonable person has good reasons for his worldview, understands that he has one and is willing to make changes to that worldview if new information arises to challenge it. For instance, I was a Darwinist at one time and had considered becoming a paleontologist but I am now a YEC who belongs to a few scientific organizations and receives peer-reviewed publications as well as magazines and other information from such groups. My worldview has completely changed in the last 30 years. If your worldview is unassailable then you are far too confident in your own intellect and need to add the humility that allows for changes.
Atheists and agnostics (an agnostic is an atheist who doesn't want to talk about it) will almost without exception be Darwinists because macroevolution is a vital part of the atheistic humanistic creed. Because Darwinism is more religion than science, Darwinists hate to have anyone look under the hood of operational science lest us average people discover that it is not only not proven fact, it is failed every possible test. The high priests of Darwinism are every bit as harmful to science today as the high priests of the Middle Ages were hostile to it in their day. You could liken the NCSE to the forces of the Inquisition back a few hundred years ago in Europe (not England).
A creationist has the following (in no particular order) going for him:
- The Bible gives an historical account of the early human race, the creation of all things, the Flood that was the cause of the majority of the sedimentary layers and the assurance that all men ARE created equal.
- The Anthropic Principle that applies to the entire Universe, not just the Solar System and Earth.
- DNA and the presence of inexplicable, complex information within God's signature, DNA.
- The fact that science has proven that life only comes from life.
- Recent findings about DNA and reproduction that further falsify mutation and natural selection as a creator of new life or new kinds of organisms.
- Proof that speciation can happen rapidly but never does speciation demonstrate added information.
- The sedimentary rocks, which are full of polystrates and paraconformities and megebraccias and just a long list of huge problems for a gradualist but rather fit the Flood expectations nicely.
- A long list of mistakes and lies propagated by Darwinists that indicate that they tend to twist and bend and spin evidence in order to fool people. From recent lies such as Pakicetus and Ida the Lemur, to complete idiocies such as Nebraska Man, to the wildly spun explanations for actual flesh and blood remains found in some dinosaur fossils that confound the logical mind.
- Footprints of dinosaur and man together along with numerous artifacts and official accounts of man and dinosaur living together up unto relatively recent centuries. There is no good Darwinist explanation for apparently anatomically correct representations of dinosaurs in artworks found on virtually every continent long before modern paleontologists began putting the bones and other fossil evidence together to get a picture people in Cambodia and Mexico and England, for instance, knew hundreds and even over a thousand years ago.
- New knowledge about our Solar System. We have moons spewing ammonia, planets giving off more heat than they receive from the Sun, orbits that could not have been sustained for more than a few hundred thousand years, comets that lose mass every time they pass close to the Sun and NO real source for new ones (Oort cloud my foot). Our Moon's orbit is not stable and you cannot take it back a few million years. The Sun is a changing dynamic force that would surely have been hostile to life just a couple of million years ago.
- The magnetic field of the Earth and the signs it leaves in rocks point to a young Earth and one big catastrophic event in the recent past. Hmmm, I wonder if a worldwide flood would be the answer?
- Massive problems with Darwinist dating methods and I will yet have more to say on that score.
credit for madden cartoons
What, you say, Darwinism is a religion? Absolutely! You must have faith, profound faith, in a long series of unbelievably impossible accidents, so many they defy quantification, to trust Darwinism. Or, you may simply have accepted the propaganda offered to you without thinking on it critically. In that case, I would urge you to bring that subject to the front burner. You see, if the Universe didn't just *poof* into existence, if life didn't just *poof*, if information and DNA and, well, we could be pointing out *poofs* all day long. A belief in Darwinism requires a suspension of common sense in favor of a myth. In fact, I believe there is far more evidence in favor of creationism than there is for Darwinism.
The fine tuning principle all by itself supports creation rather than yahoo we won the Universal Lottery. Go look carefully at the Five Questions post and the comments thread as well. Recently I presented four huge problems that Darwinists could not handle. The rock layers do not support Darwinism. Darwinists still teach a form of uniformitarianism or gradualism despite the catastrophic nature of sedimentary rocks. Genetic redundancy teaches us that functions in the cell falsify many tenets of Darwinism. The cell teaches us that Darwinism is impossible. Facilitated Variation theory is another nail in that Darwinist coffin. Let's not forget the complete lack of comprehension that Darwinists have in dealing with information!
Okay, I could be linking back to posts all day. Let's look at back-to-back posts I made a few years ago:
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Science and Supernatural: Scientists speak
There are three basic views scientists take of mixing the natural and the supernatural. Some make a decision to exclude the possibility of the supernatural, some make a decision to look for the supernatural and some just search for truth and will accept what they find either way. The standard Darwinist propaganda is that good scientists look for the answers in science only in the natural world and exclude all supernatural possibilities.There is a faction of scientists who exclude the supernatural from their possibilites not on the basis of science, but philosophy. Let's hear from some of them:
"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually- fulfilled atheist." - Richard Dawkins, Darwinian apologist.
"I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom." - Aldous Huxley, philosopher, author, lecturer -(REPORT, June 1966. "Confession of Professed Atheist."}
"We [scientists] have … a prior commitment to materialism [and] we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations… Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” -Richard Lewontin, “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, 1997, p. 31.
"The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails." - H. L. Mencken
“[I suppose the reason] we all jumped at the Origin [of Species] was because the idea of God interfered with our sexual mores.” - Julian Huxley, British biologist.
View from the flipside
Last year Anthony Flew, a noted anti-creationist, atheistis philosopher who had lectured and debated on the side of Darwinism for decades, made a stir in the scientific community with this statement: "It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together...It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."
"When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics." - Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics) Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface.
Many scientists see the supernatural in their work
Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics): "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say 'supernatural') plan."
"The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero." - Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry.
Fred Hoyle (British astrophysicist): "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."
Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy): "I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing."
Believers are numerous in the scientific community
"I was reminded of this a few months ago when I saw a survey in the journal Nature. It revealed that 40% of American physicists, biologists and mathematicians believe in God--and not just some metaphysical abstraction, but a deity who takes an active interest in our affairs and hears our prayers: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." - Jim Holt. 1997. Science Resurrects God. The Wall Street Journal (December 24, 1997), Dow Jones & Co., Inc.
Alexander Polyakov (Soviet mathematician): "We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it."
Arthur L. Schawlow (Professor of Physics at Stanford University, 1981 Nobel Prize in physics): "It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life."
Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist): "The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine."
Believers dominate the ranks of great scientists of the past
"The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension." - Isaac Newton
Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer) "I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science."
"Overwhelming evidences of an intelligence and benevolent intention surround us, show us the whole of nature through the work of a free will and teach us that all alive beings depend on an eternal creator-ruler." - Lord Kelvin
"I am a Christian which means that I believe in the deity of Christ, like Tycho de Brahe, Copernicus, Descartes, Newton, Leibnitz, Pascal… like all great astronomers and mathematicians of the past." - Augustin Louis Cauchy
Conclusion
There is room for both believers and non-believers in the scientific community. Some, like Einstein, will come to science with a readiness to believe in God but will remain unconvinced. Others, like Tipler, find their predisposition to ignore God tossed aside in the face of the evidence they have found in their research. My personal belief is that the more we learn about life and the cosmos, the more compelling the evidence will be that God does exist and did, indeed create all things. I leave the last word to Sir Francis:
"A little science estranges a man from God; a lot of science brings him back." Sir Francis Bacon
Hat tip to Judaism Online, to Rich Deem and Quodlibet.
Can Science and the Supernatural coexist?
I can hear the cries of researchers studying the paranormal as they scramble to justify their grant monies! Creation scientists and those who fall into the Intelligent Design category will immediately disagree.
Let's look at this logically. What is the definition of science?
From Dictionary.com:
n.
1. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.
2. Such activities restricted to explaining a limited class of natural phenomena.
3. Such activities applied to an object of inquiry or study.
4. Knowledge, especially that gained through experience.
So only item 2 mentions the necessity of confining one's studies strictly to the supernatural. And what is the supernatural?
The same source yields:
adj.
1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.
3. Of or relating to a deity.
4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous.
5. Of or relating to the miraculous.
The first two definitions of "supernatural" do not mention a deity at all, simply some power or existence beyond what is known to be natural.
Doesn't it follow that the best scientist would not turn away from evidence that pointed in a supernatural direction? To do so makes for bad science, for in so doing the scientist is failing to make every effort to pursue all possibilities. Ignoring evidence that points to supernatural activities or powers from prejudice or religious preference is undoubtably an everyday occurence in the scientific community but that does not make it best practice. You can be sure that Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein never thought in that way. Great thinkers allow for all possibilities so as not to miss the truth.
My conclusion is as follows: One looks to natural processes to explain all phenonmenae first, but one must be willing to follow evidence into the realm of the supernatural if that is where the evidence leads. Those who are unwilling to do so are allowing their prejudices to diminish their effectiveness as researchers.
~~~~~~~
As a side note, I have taken much time to logically prove that information has no mass and is not material in form or substance. So when a commenter challenges me to quantify information I shake my head in a combination of wonder and dismay. Information itself cannot be quantified. The material form that transmits information CAN be quantified. For instance, if I use the English language in written form, you can count the number of letters that I write. However, that will not tell you the actual quality and nature of the information that was transmitted. It may well be that a three-page long interview of Lindsay Lohan would contain less useful information than one paragraph written by a brilliant thinker such as David Berlinski.
Just for fun, ask an atheist what his standard of morality might be? Christians have and acknowledge absolutes determined by God. Any concept of morality that an atheist says has been evolved along with the evolution of people is balderdash, because the concept of the survival of the fittest, the law of tooth and claw, tells us that the strong take from the weak and there is no basis for an atheist to label a behavior as "wrong."
I promise you that if you know your history, you can identify the concept of Darwinism is at the root of every Hitler and Mao and Stalin and that it is the driving force behind the legalization of baby murdering and the idea that your own government should attempt to teach your children all about homosexual sex. That is right, homosexuality is actually being forced upon people because atheists don't actually believe in right and wrong, babies are legally aborted every day because atheists don't actually believe in right and wrong.
Hitler gassed his Jews in the middle of the 20th Century and if the USA keeps going toward Obamanation we will have euthanasia of the poor, the old and the weak by the middle of the 21st Century. Look up the subject of Eugnenics and/or Margaret Sanger, for instance. Ideas have consequences. Atheistic Humanism has been an epic fail for humanity and a means by which millions and millions of innocent people have been brutally murdered. Most mass murders of the 20th century were born from the ideas of Darwin, his cousin Francis Dalton and Hutton and Marx and George Bernard Shaw and Woodrow Wilson, to name just a few.
The world is crying out for a new generation of scientists and philosophers and statesmen and teachers and writers that reject Darwin and humanism and celebrate the Biblical absolutes that led to the founding of the USA and the enrichment of the lives of the common man in the 19th and 20th Century. Freedoms hand in hand with Biblical morality built the USA. Darwinism, no absolutes and atheistic humanism expressed in the form of radical socialism will tear it back down. A world ruled by a small class of elites presiding over a vast population of serfs is the result of atheistic socialism. But intellectual freedom and the hard work of ID and creation scientists along with a revived Church can still win the day. But each and every one of us needs to review his or her worldview and think critically about what you know about the world and what you take by faith.
Is your faith grounded on defensible facts and evidence and absolutes? Can your faith withstand the buffeting of opposing viewpoints? The very fact that the NCSE exists tells you that Darwinists cannot defend their worldview in a fair fight and depend on censorship and brainwashing and intellectual blackmail for survival. We can only hope and pray that their efforts will be seen clearly by the world and, once understood, categorically rejected. As Gertrude Stein once said, "There is no 'there' there." There is no fact there, there is no observation there, there is no proof at all there when you go back to Darwin. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, if you look at Darwinism closely you will find only smoke and mirrrors and myth.