It takes a lot of blind faith to believe that the universe came into being from nothing without a cause, that life came from non-life and that it evolved into everything we see today, including having highly ordered information in DNA that could not have been brought about by chemical reactions. Oh, and highly functioning gears.
With two diminutive legs locked into a leap-ready position, the tiny jumper bends its body taut like an archer drawing a bow. At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engage—their strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. At top speed the jumper breaks 8 mph—quite a feat considering its body is less than one-tenth of an inch long.
This miniature marvel is an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect and one of the fastest accelerators in the animal kingdom. As a duo of researchers in the U.K. report today in the journal Science, the issus also the first living creature ever discovered to sport a functioning gear.
How does selection arrive at such coordination? What good is one gear without the corresponding gear? The challenge of IC for Darwinism remains.
There has never been a valid reason for denying God’s existence. How much more so is this true with the vast amount of evidence we have today?
Romans 1:18–20 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
Eternity Matters 
So can God sue the so-called inventor of the zipper, gear motors, etc? Seems like they stole His design. I wonder if He has a patent on those things…
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Mechanical gear “fund” – they’re collecting funds for the gears?!?! :oD
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Yes, God can sue, He owns it all. Psalm 24:1. Don’t worry, something tells me that God will deal justly with all by the time its said and done.
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Ok, this may be a bit snarky, but that’s just my mood today: If God sued (and you’re right, He owns it all) where would we hold court? And who would be the judge?
Sorry, but I’m VERY glad it’s Friday.
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Well, that’s the interesting part. He is the Judge, and He would hold it in His own court. No human court could do His case justice. 🙂
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Was watching a documentary on the Science Channel a few days ago (not to be confused with SyFy). It was about a modern naturalist expedition to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America. They were attempting to build upon the observations that Darwin made during his famous 1859 visit to the islands. They went on and on – first the scientists, then the program narrator, contrasting the “scientific” theory of evolution with “fundamentalist religion” of the Biblical account of creation and the ensuing “uproar” among the Catholic church and other bastions of the Christian faith of the day.
At one point, the camera zoomed in on one of the biologists on the ship’s deck, who was recounting a letter he’d received from a female viewer of the show. He told how the letter wanted to know how he squared thus-and-so “with the controversial theory of natural selection.” He spat, “Lady, it’s not a theory and it’s not controversial.” He was quite snotty about it.
I said out loud to the TV, “It *is* a theory, and it’s very controversial.” Had I been holding the camera, I might have added, “And I think the gentleman doth protest too much.”
Believing in Darwin’s theories, however misguided, is at least a rational and defensible position to hold. What I’ve run out of patience with, is this continued insistence that it’s the only possible explanation for the origin of life on Earth, coupled with this arrogant dismissal of anyone who thinks differently.
I was suddenly reminded of something one of my favorite bloggers once wrote. He said, “When it comes to scientific theories, you save the drama for your mama. People getting angry and testy about the skepticism from others, are advancing what would more properly be called religion.”
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That’s a great quote!
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Guys, it’s not a question of God or science, God or evolution, God or Darwinism. It’s simply (!?) a question of discerning how God designed the universe and how he continues to sustain it. Darwin points out a lot of examples of how evolution has happened in our lifetime (breeding of racehorses for instance), and as a qualified chartered engineer I can really appreciate the brilliance of designing a process such as Darwin describes in his book in order to achieve his goal. There is too much adversarial debate on this issue, it steers us away from the truth. There is not space to explore this fully, but for more info see http://philhemsley.wordpress.com/the-big-picture/
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Breeding racehorses is a deliberate human act done by rational human minds who are selecting for certain traits. It has nothing to do with the allegedly random and unguided mutations required for Darwinian macro evolution.
Small intraspecies changes do occur in nature (changes in insect coloration, bacterial resistance to antibiotics, etc) but these changes do not transform a species into a palm tree, an iguana, or a chimpanzee.
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We have a God who created and sustains the universe, as we see in the consistent behaviour of matter, modeled by the laws of physics. Within that design, we don’t need to insist that he guides every action. If i drop a ball in a funnel, i don’t need to guide it to the end of the funnel to know that it will come out, I allow it to bounce around and follow a ‘random, unguided’ course which has a clearly defined end (coming out of the end of the funnel). I see God as having designed an extremely elegant funnel, where the end point of the evolutionary funnel is what we see around us today. See for instance the number of separate times the camera eye has evolved through completely different paths. I speak more on this in my book….
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We have a God who created and sustains the universe, as we see in the consistent behaviour of matter, modeled by the laws of physics. Within that design, we don’t need to insist that he guides every action. If i drop a ball in a funnel, i don’t need to guide it to the end of the funnel to know that it will come out, I allow it to bounce around and follow a ‘random, unguided’ course which has a clearly defined end (coming out of the end of the funnel). I see God as having designed an extremely elegant funnel, where the end point of the evolutionary funnel is what we see around us today. See for instance the number of separate times the camera eye has evolved through completely different paths. I speak more on this in my book….
We don’t need to insist that He guides every action, because He set it all in motion at the beginning. The entire point of Intelligent Design is to assert that species have always existed more-or-less as they do today. Contrary to popular belief, this is what we actually see in the fossil record – species appearing and disappearing suddenly, each “after its own kind,” with a remarkable lack of transitory forms that allegedly show one species transforming into another through a long series of mutations. (Even a Darwinist should be prepared to concede that such a transitory creature would be ill-equipped to survive in either the environment it’s entering or the one it is leaving.)
In any event, I’m not understanding why you brought up racehorses. A racehorse is what it is because human beings have made it that way – by controlling who it breeds with, its diet, and other factors. The thrust of macroevolution is that natural selection took place without intelligent guidance or intervention by rational minds.
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How can one constantly deny a scientific “theory” which gains some credibility from the evidence it has accrued, perhaps not all the credibility you people are looking for. But how can you deny evolution these grounds and then be in favor of a theory that literally has ZERO evidence. What evidence is there of a creator in this universe? What evidence is there of an actual process of design? How do species simply emerge on the Earth? Why haven’t we seen God create any new ones? I assume you don’t deny that millions of species have gone extinct throughout history. Do you guys have any explanation for this? I am sure that if so many species have died out, God would want to replace them or something. Otherwise, our Earth would be slowly dying out. And SO many species become extinct at an alarming rate these days due to the actions of us humans, so don’t tell me that there are no modern extinction events. Does your “theory” really tell us anything new? Or does it simply bash evolution on the basis that there are things it cannot explain yet, or perhaps needs to explore more, so this must be a much more valid way of interpreting the universe. That is NOT science. You people ignore the fact that there are hundreds of fossil intermediates between various species. Even species that are alive today such as the lungfish are literally living intermediates (the lungfish being an intermediate between fish and the first creatures that lived solely on land). How do you explain vestigial structures that serve no purpose in creatures, yet do in other related species, which are clear indicators we can point to that we have COME FROM SOMEWHERE. And even if you can’t accept this as fact, you do NOT have the ability to explain to anyone the physical process of intelligent design, and how it happens, why God does it in the way he does, what purpose these species serve. And you cannot point to the Bible or the stories of Genesis and say that this is EVIDENCE. Of course it’s not evidence, just like no scientist would ever claim mere writings of another scientist as evidence for a particular claim. That claim must be physically backed up and observable in order for someone to be sure that it is truth. Do you guys understand what I’m saying?
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Because it has been riddled with falsehoods and relies on bullying and oppression to prevent criticism.
The fact that it exists. Even Darwinists agree that the universe came into existence at a point in time. It is simple logic that it had a creator.
Romans 1:18–20 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
Please read Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer http://www.amazon.com/Signature-Cell-Evidence-Intelligent-Design/dp/0061472794/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307907110&sr=8-1
Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Doubt-Explosive-Intelligent-ebook/dp/B0089LOM5G/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1364310570&sr=1-2
Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels – J. Warner Wallace – http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Case-Christianity-Homicide-Detective- Investigates/dp/1434704696/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366286399&sr=8-1&
See Darwin’s Doubt above. Re. extinction — see original sin.
Now you are making theological claims about what you, the created being, think the creator must do.
Yes, and you have no observable evidence of macro-evolution.
I hope you reconsider your views.
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