#15 Computers

Most of us use computers on a daily basis. If you have been around computers since the 1980’s and 1990’s like I have, then you have probably marveled continuously at the amazing explosion in computer technology.

What computers can do is astounding! They have developed greater and greater capabilities while the physical sizes have continued to shrink.

Computers are unbelievably fast at doing any one particular thing that they have been programmed by a man to do. The Internet is awesome. You can have a free video conference with someone on the other side of the earth as a simple example.

But always remember that with every stage in advancement, there was always an input of creative genius. Men and women, following electrical and chemical laws and principles, used their intelligence and applied it to make computers faster, smaller, etc.

No computer expert has ever yet invented a computer that is creative and could develop itself. They only follow the instructions given them. It may happen one day by way of man’s applied creativity, but it won’t happen without human input (i.e. intelligent designs). No one thinks that given even millions or billions of years that a computer would get more complex by itself. It would never happen. Given all the correct pieces lying side by side, it would still never happen.

Why do people insist on believing that living beings with brains superior to computers somehow magically developed without any intelligent input?

I found estimates from back in 2009 that the human brain is 40,000 times more powerful than the fastest, most powerful computer in the world at that time, a super-computer. That computer is a really unbelievable machine. Check out this quote from an article in Scientific American Magazine:

“Computers are lauded for their speed and accuracy, but they don't hold a candle to the human brain when it comes to tackling complex mathematical problems, Dharmendra Modha, director of cognitive computing at the IBM Almaden Research Center, said at today's event. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research arm, last year gave Modha and his colleagues $4.9 million for a project called "SyNAPSE," through which they are trying to reverse-engineer the brain's computational abilities to better understand its ability to sense, perceive, act, interact, and understand different stimuli.”

"We have no computers today that can begin to approach the awesome power of the human mind," Modha said. A computer comparable to the human brain, he added, would need to be able to perform more than 38 thousand trillion operations per second and hold about 3,584 terabytes of memory. (IBM's BlueGene supercomputer, one of the worlds' most powerful, has a computational capability of 92 trillion operations per second and 8 terabytes of storage.)[1]”

What did it take to develop such an incredible computer? You’d have to be an amazing computer builder and programmer to even begin to understand it. Could it have possibly been developed without directed intelligence? It boggles the mind in its absurdity.

Scientists are now concluding that the brain is not even a computer. It’s something else way beyond what a computer is, just a super fast calculator with lots of storage. It takes in trillions of information bits each second and constantly monitors everything, your heart and circulatory system, lungs and respiratory system, digestive system, excretory system, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, etc. And all of that is not even done consciously.

If computers are nowhere close to being a human brain and they were absolutely designed by intelligent beings, then it totally boggles the mind that anyone could even think that the human brain did not have a creator of far superior intelligence. The brain had to have been designed and created by a higher intelligence than us.

What would you think of a person who decides that no intelligence at all was behind the appearance of computers and then he/she ridicules you for believing that intelligent beings created computers? Is there a real discussion possible with that person?

There must be a God.
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Notes:
[1] Computers have a lot to learn from the human brain, engineers say
By Larry Greenemeier | Mar 10, 2009, Scientific American

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=computers-have-a-lot-to-learn-from-2009-03-10

#14 Empty Space

Scientists tell us that we are made up of mostly empty space. In an atom, there is the nucleus surrounded by the electron(s) which has a form with properties similar to both a wave and a particle.

How much space is there? The current estimate is that the atom is 99.9999999999999% empty space. There are 13 decimal places to the right of the decimal point.

All of the matter of all the humans on the earth could fit inside a sugar cube with room to spare.[1]

To get some perspective, take a grain of rice representing an atomic nucleus and place it at the center of a football or baseball field in a large stadium. Then the seats on the outer limits of the stadium would be similar to the area of the electron field of the grain of rice nucleus. However, you need to think about the stadium as being a sphere and not just a horizontal structure, which makes the empty space a whole lot greater.

If you took all of the space out of your body, you’d instantly disappear and it would take a high powered microscope to find you.

Some scientists aren’t even sure if there are really protons and electrons any more. Maybe it’s all just energy.

Everything that we experience as hard, cold “reality” is not. It’s empty space mostly. A tiny, tiny fraction of it may be energy.

Actually we could say that everything is really mostly nothing…empty space.

Everything that we are experiencing as something is because of the amount of energy it has which is oriented in a certain way that we can interact with it and experience it.

Without the form that is given to the energy and the invisible laws and principles that operate on the energy, everything would simply collapse into nothing.

Where did the invisible form, laws, and principles come from? And for that matter, where did the energy come from?

If there is an original source before any of this, even time and space, that must be God.

Energy, time, space, laws and principles, all came from that original source at the same instant.

Can any rational mind really believe that all of this minutely and exquisitely ordered, vastly consistent, awesomely beautiful, extraordinarily complex, and ultimately understandable universe is totally the result of “it just happened.” 

Where did it all come from?

Simple, there must be a God.

____________

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-chown/11-of-the-craziest-things_b_628481.html#s107477&title=The_entire_human   cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown

[1] also. http://cclblog.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/marcuschown/  Interview with Marcus Chown.

“That’s because the atoms out of which you are made are 99.9999999999999 per cent empty space. I don’t feel like a ghost. But I am. And so are you!

Of course, the person who discovered this was… Ernest Rutherford, assisted by Ernest Marsden. A fitting point to end this Q&A on since, of course, they were both New Zealanders!

#13 The Infinite Monkey Theorem

Since my last post talked about man descending from apes, I'd like to now take a diversion to put to rest The Infinite Monkey Theorem once and for all. You may have heard about this one. It sort of plays tricks on your mind using the concept of infinity. Infinity doesn't really exist in any practical, scientific sense, but if you accept infinity in an argument, then you can end up also accepting that "given infinity, anything can happen".

If you take the leap from "given infinity, anything can happen" over to "it did happen", you may just be making a leap of faith so great that you are downright foolish. 

Here is the description of The Infinite Monkey Theorem from Wikipedia.[1]

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters and symbols ad infinitum. The relevance of the theory is questionable -- the probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time even a hundred thousand orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but not zero).

Note it says "(but not zero)". That is of course a mathematical concept unrelated to any reality we could ever experience. Their emphasis should be placed more on EXTREMELY low probability EVEN given 100's of thousands of times the AGE of the UNIVERSE.

Here is another statement from Wikipedia.

If there are as many monkeys as there are particles in the observable universe, and each types 1,000 keystrokes per second for 100 times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a short book is nearly zero.

So let's get real. Here we have an example where they plug in some specific numbers that are incredibly gigantic: the number or particles in the whole universe, 1,000 key strokes per second, 100 times the age of the universe. Even with all of that, the odds are "nearly zero".

Do you still think "anything can happen"?

Also, remember, we are definitely not talking about a short book. The DNA of a human contains 3 BILLION characters, and they are not random but exactly in the right order. All the other millions of species that exist also have DNA that would have to be correctly ordered for this world to exist.

There has to be a God.

Somebody tested real monkeys.

Just for your curiosity, there were some professors and students who tried an experiment with real monkeys. They never got even one single recognizable word after a whole month.

Continuing from Wikipedia

In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.[11]

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages[12] consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. Phillips said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They're more complex than that. ... They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention there."[11][13]

Even computer programmers can't get close.

Lots of people never give up. Some computer programmers devised random programs to try to get a meaningful sequence. Note again the time span is billions of times the age of the universe just to get a very short sequence located somewhere inside a whole book. To produce the exact book would be "infinitely" harder. (Ha Ha.) Also note that the computer programmers are intelligent beings trying on purpose to do it and they can't do it. And they want us to believe "it could happen"?

Here is the information, also from Wikepedia.

One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on August 4, 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey-years, one of the "monkeys" typed, "VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t" The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".[25]

A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters:

RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d...


Again I repeat, there must be a God.
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Notes

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

[11]^ a b "No words to describe monkeys' play". BBC News. 2003-05-09. Retrieved 2009-07-25.

[12]^ "Notes Towards the Complete Works of Shakespeare" (PDF). vivaria.net. 2002. Retrieved 2006-06-13.

[13]^ "Monkeys Don't Write Shakespeare". Associated Press. Wired News. 2003-05-09. Retrieved 2007-03-02.

[25]^ Newyorker.com Acocella, Joan "The Typing Life: How writers used to write" The New Yorker April 9, 2007, a review of The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Cornell) 2007, by Darren Wershler-Henry

#12 Chimpanzees

Biologists have told us that Chimpanzees are our closest "relatives" and evolutionists believe that we all descended from ape-like creatures.

It has been repeated for years that the DNA between chimpanzees and humans is 98% to 99% the same. (Actually, human and chimp genome sequencing more recently has put that figure at 95% to 96%.)

That seems like a really small difference and so it's plausible to think that the gap is easily overcome by a few simple mutations. Actually not.

Let's take a closer look at the reality.

Human DNA has 3 billion "letters" (base pairs). So what is a 2% difference out of 3 billion. It's 60 million differences.

What this means is that an ape-like creature would have to go through 60 million changes to their DNA to get to where it's a human being.

60 million characters is something like the equivalent of 20 books of information that are each 500 pages long. (The Encyclopædia Britannica has about 40 million words on half a million topics.)

The DNA of our ancestral ape would have to "evolve" 60 million times to produce a human.

AND we're not just talking about 60 million "mutations". That's because mutations are not necessarily improvements. We're talking about 60 million improvements and advances in the ape's DNA to a human's.

And if you want to know the truth, scientists have never witnessed any mutation which adds NEW information. Mutations are known to lose or confuse information. The idea that mutation is a method of advanced development is not based on observation, but faith.

The only mutations that scientists can find to study are the ones that cause diseases.

So the number of mutations would have to be many times 60,000,000, even if some tiny fraction of mutations did actually result in advancements.

But even if we disregard the fact that mutations don't bring advancements, and go with the mutation theory, does it work? No it doesn't.

Remember, for mutation to work its magic, the apes had to reproduce. Reproduction is the only way that mutations can be passed down to descendents. How long does that take? Ape-like creatures will have to grow to be 10 to 20 years old before they mate and produce offspring.

We need to have 60 million mutations to get a human. At that rate, it's going to take a long time. Take a guess.

Imagine the absolute shortest possible route. If there were one successful mutation from an ape toward a human being every single generation (totally against science), it would still take more than 10 years (lifespan) x 60,000,000 changes. Absolutely could not take less than 600,000,000 years.

The typical "evolution clock" indicates that 700,000,000 years ago was when the first multi-celled organisms appeared. It was about 4,000,000 years ago that ape-like mammals appeared. This can't cut it.

As they say, "It doesn't compute."

There must be a God.

#11 Purpose

Every movement you make has some kind of purpose. Every sound that comes out of your mouth is for a reason. Every item in the room you are sitting in was created for a purpose.

"What is my purpose in life?" is a nagging question from childhood for many of us. A person with no purpose is a sad sight.

Why does everything have purpose? It makes absolutely no sense that a totally random and accidental process resulted in a everything that exists having a purpose.

Our minds even go so far as to demand that things have a purpose. What happens to something that you determine has no purpose? That's right, you throw it away.

If something has no purpose, then it has no value. In other words, it is worthless. A person who surrounded himself with worthless objects would be considered crazy.

If you use a certain tool in your profession and a better tool is invented for the same purpose, you switch to using the new tool. We are constantly evaluating everything according to how well it fulfills some desired purpose.

If it exists, it must have a purpose. Our brains cannot think any other way.

How could this be? Something totally invisible, i.e. purpose, is applied to all materials in the world. Could this have originated exclusively from the materials themselves?

Where does an object's purpose come from? Purpose comes from the creator of an object. If you come across some machine and you don't know what it's for, who do you ask?

When you find God, you find your purpose. That's because He is the creator.

There must be a God.

#10 Life After Death

Most of us go through our day to day lives without thinking about or experiencing life after death. But there are some people who openly communicate with spirits and see them constantly. Whole books are written about such experiences with “the dead”. There are many such books available with all types of themes and one of the main points they always try to make is to provide documented evidence that these experiences could not be faked.

Unless you have read these types of books and the evidence they present, you might tend to think that this is all hallucinating or some type of scam.

Throughout human history, millions of people have claimed to have had experiences with those who have passed away. How does a materialist explain these phenomena throughout all cultures, all civilizations, and all history?

Are we to totally discount the reams of reports of “near death experiences” coming from people who “died” but somehow were revived? Were they all hallucinating? Do you discard all of the evidence without really taking the time to read what has been reported?  

Set aside for the moment whatever your beliefs are about life after death just for the sake of argument. If there really is life after death, that would almost certainly cinch the case for there being a God. Would you accept that?

Evolution is all about the physical world only. Everything has to follow so-called physical laws of nature, i.e. materialist only nature. If there exists a vast realm of life which is invisible to our eyes which is populated by personalities that used to live on the earth, then where did it come? How did it get there?

If all your ancestors and everyone who has ever lived in history is still alive in an invisible world, is that even conceivable by any process detailed anywhere in the theory of evolution? 

Any proofs for the theory of evolution would immediately become infinitely more challenged if they have to somehow account for life after death.

You may not be all that familiar with what are called life after death experiences. Most people are not. But there is a huge storehouse of information available to anyone interested. Many famous mediums communicated messages from the spirit world that have been verified by the scientific community of their times. Many of the mediums were Americans in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s and very high level leaders of science were present, observing and verifying the results.

Is it possible that they were all fooled somehow? 

Check out any library, bookstore, or the Internet. Read up on the documentations and proofs that these experiences with personalities “on the other side” were very real. Scientists who have studied the paranormal may not say they have conclusive proof, but the preponderance of evidence can easily lead to the assumption that there exists life after death, a much easier conclusion that anything else.

(Recommendation: do some research on your own on some of the original sources listed below. Even read their critics if you want. Their disbelief is obvious but their arguments are thin.)

If the human personality lives in the spirit world forever and continues to grow toward higher levels as a loving being, this would make sense as the creation of a loving God who has created humans in His image and likeness. Love should last forever. Loved ones should be together in love after this life.

Do the research and this is what it points to.

There must be a God. 
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Sample of References:

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into The Afterlife, by Dr. Eben Alexander, #1 New York Times Bestseller for 39 weeks through 8/4/2013. Famous brain surgeon spends 7 days in a comma experiencing God and the spiritual world.
http://www.lifebeyonddeath.net/

Life After Death: The Evidence by Dinesh D'Souza
Drawing on some of the most powerful theories and trends in physics, biology, philosophy, and psychology, D'Souza concludes that belief in life after death offers depth and significance to this life.

Life After Death: The Burden of Proof by Deepak Chopra
In Life After Death, Chopra draws on cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the great wisdom traditions to provide a map of the afterlife. It’s a fascinating journey into many levels of consciousness. But far more important is his urgent message: Who you meet in the afterlife and what you experience there reflect your present beliefs, expectations, and level of awareness. In the here and now you can shape what happens after you die.

Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die by Anthony Peake
This book proposes a simply amazing theory - a theory that states that personal death is a scientific impossibility. Using the latest findings of neurology, quantum physics, and consciousness studies, Anthony Peake suggests that we never die. After reading this book you will understand the reason for your life and how you can make it better next time.

The Science of Life After Death: New Research Shows Human Consciousness Lives On by Stephen Hawley Martin
A lengthy and exhaustive study by the University of Virginia Medical School clearly indicates consciousness continues after death in at least some cases, if not all. This particular study, begun in 1961 and continuing today, was initiated by Ian Stevenson, M.D., a psychiatrist who graduated first in his class at McGill Medical School. Stevenson went to great lengths and much effort to follow scientific protocol in his investigations. Over the years, more than 2,600 of the cases he and others investigated have checked out in terms of the details.

On Life after Death, revised by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Caroline Myss
In this collection of inspirational essays, internationally known author Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross draws on her in-depth research of more than 20,000 people who had near-death experiences, revealing the afterlife as a return to wholeness of spirit.

The Afterlife Experiments: Breakthrough Scientific Evidence of Life After Death by Dr. Gary E. Schwartz
Risking his academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz asked well-known mediums to become part of a series of experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. This riveting narrative, with electrifying transcripts, documents stringently monitored experiments in which mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues.

Life After Death: Some of the Best Evidence by Jan W Vandersande PhD
Renowned physicist Dr. Jan W. Vandersande surveys evidence for an afterlife and finds a lot of the observed physical phenomena both credible and compelling. Intended for skeptics and believers alike, Life After Death condenses more than 100 years of literature and testimony-including the author's own psychic experiences... . As the book makes clear, the occurrences during such episodes, though fantastical, can't be dismissed as mere fantasy or fraud. Through historical accounts, photographs and personal experience, this engagingly written work adds to a growing body of evidence for the existence of an afterlife that's increasingly difficult to ignore.

Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon--Survival of Bodily Death by Raymond Moody
In Life After Life Raymond Moody investigates more than one hundred case studies of people who experienced "clinical death" and were subsequently revived.  First published in 1975, this classic exploration of life after death started a revolution in popular attitudes about the afterlife and established Dr. Moody as the world's leading authority in the field of near-death experiences. 

Life After Death by Mary T. Browne
A renowned psychic and spiritual healer with clients all over the world, Mary T. Browne had her first clairvoyant experience at the age of seven. For more than thirty years since then, her visions of the other side and her communication with her teachers, both in spirit and on the earth plane, have helped to form not just her understanding of death, but her philosophy of life.

Thirty Years Among the Dead by Dr. Carl A. Wickland 
It's about the author's experience treating cases of spirit possession. It gave great insight into the realms of the spirits and their rather very serious impact on those living. The departed spirits communicated through an intermediary, medium, his wife. The stories told touched my heart and enhanced my understanding of the nature and character of the spirits. 

The History of Spiritualism, Volumes 1 and 2 (Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge) by Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is best known for his creation of the character Sherlock Holmes. Trained as a medical doctor, Doyle - like many Victorian intellectuals - became fascinated by spiritualism and its promise of communication with the afterlife. Doyle was a firm believer in the movement, claiming as evidence 'sign[s] of a purposeful and organized invasion' from the spirit world. In 1926, he published this influential two-volume history. Volume 1 covers the background and origins of spiritualism, beginning with Swedenborg before turning to the 'supernatural' events in upstate New York in 1848 that are generally regarded as the beginning of modern spiritualism. It then focuses on key individuals including D. D. Home, and on scientific investigations of spiritualist phenomena. The History provides valuable insights into Victorian and early twentieth-century culture and the controversies generated by spiritualism at that time.

Best Evidence: An Investigative Reporter's Three-Year Quest to Uncover the Best Scientific Evidence for ESP, Psychokinesis, Mental Healing, Ghosts and Poltergeists, Dowsing, Mediums, Near Death Experiences, Reincarnation, and Other Impossible Phenomena That Refuse to Disappear (2nd Edition) by Michael Schmicker
 "Best Evidence is indeed one, if not the best itself, of the major books explaining and offering proof that psi phenomena are here to stay whether we like it or not," Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D, physicist and National Book Award winning author of Mind Into Matter, Taking the Quantum Leap. "My highest recommendation, not just one but a half-dozen astounding stories, any one of which can change the way we think about the nature of reality," Dean Radin, Ph.D, author of The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. "For skeptics and cautious believers alike, a splendid introduction to 'impossible phenomena that refuse to disappear,'" Stanley Krippner, Ph.D, Co-Editor, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence. "Hard line skeptics won't be pleased, but Schmicker has done his homework an excellent survey of the strongest evidence," Marcello Truzzi, Ph.D, Center for Scientific Anomalies Research.

To Heaven and Back: A Doctor's Extraordinary Account of Her Death, Heaven, Angels, and Life Again: A True Story... by Mary C. Neal M.D. 
A kayak accident during a South American adventure takes one woman doctor to heaven — where she experienced God’s peace, joy, and angels — and back to life again.

My Descent Into Death: A Second Chance at Life by Howard Storm. 
Storm, an avowed atheist, was awaiting emergency surgery when he realized that he was at death’s door. Storm found himself out of his own body, looking down on the hospital room scene below. Next, rather than going “toward the light,” he found himself being torturously dragged to excruciating realms of darkness and death, where he was physically assaulted by monstrous beings of evil. His description of his pure terror and torture is unnerving in its utter originality and convincing detail.

23 Minutes In Hell: One Man's Story About What He Saw, Heard, and Felt in that Place of Torment by Bill Wiese. 
Wiese saw the searing flames of hell, felt total isolation, and experienced the putrid and rotting stench, deafening screams of agony, terrorizing demons, and finally, the strong hand of God lifting him out of the pit--"Tell them I am coming very, very soon!"

Heaven is Real But So is Hell: An Eyewitness Account of What is to Come by Vassula Ryden. 
This book features her amazing encounters with both good and evil forces and reveals profoundly important messages for all humanity, largely hidden until now. Sometimes harrowing, but filled with hope, it answers many of the questions that people have been asking for thousands of years and at the same time offers a glimpse into God's love and justice, and of what is soon to come.