#47 Gratitude

I just recently celebrated the American holiday of Thanksgiving where we get together with loved ones and spend the day being grateful for our many blessings. Several people that I spoke to during the following week remarked how it was now their favorite holiday. They have a lot of quality time with loved ones and feel so appreciative afterwards. Christmas on the other hand has become so overly commercialized and materialistic. Thoughts are about what I don’t have, what I need, what I want, what can I get, and how much I have to spend on others. There is such a vast contrast in the two holidays and the kind of feelings that come out.

Science now can tell us why. Research that has been done on the energies of the heart and the brain have been able to demonstrate which types of thoughts are beneficial and which ones are harmful.[1]

Energies of the heart are now able to be detected up to 6 to 8 feet from the body. And those energies are also able to be picked up by other people near you. Those energies can affect others positively or negatively.

Researchers are even looking into ways of reprogramming our DNA by positive energies and thoughts.[2]

Feelings of gratitude are at the very top of the list for creating what is being called “heart coherence”. This energy is healthier for all of the organs of your body. You perform better at physical tests. You have more energy. You are more creative. And you make better decisions.

What is gratitude and where does it come from? Why would this kind of energy have all those benefits? Why does being generous and thinking good thoughts about others lead to wonderful benefits for you as well.

No matter how great your accomplishments are, you don’t feel gratitude to yourself. Gratitude can only be felt in relationship with someone or something outside of yourself. Most often it is toward a person or persons for a benefit they have provided you.

In fact, to go one step further about these energies, if you harm another person, there are negative energies created that eventually are harmful to you also.

If some benefit that comes your way is the result of what seems to be just “blind luck” or pure accident, then the gratitude you feel is minimal if at all. You can’t be grateful to nothing.

That’s why the origins of gratitude cannot be explained by evolution and materialism, which are just blind accidental forces. You do not feel gratitude from a random mutation. “I was so grateful that I accidentally was born.” It doesn’t happen.

Believers in a Creator are able to experience one of the most profound feelings in the depths of their souls, namely gratitude to God. Think of the last time you experienced a feeling of profound gratitude. This probably inspired a natural desire to share the feeling with others and generously give out from the abundance you experienced.

Non-believers cannot experience gratitude in relation to their source of life. Therefore, they are denied in their soul an energy vibration that is very healing and healthful.

There exists research that shows that believers are happier people and they are healthier people and they get along better with others. Naturally it is controversial and disputed by non-believers. So I don’t claim it’s a scientific proof, just a lot of anecdotal experience. [3]

How you view your own origins makes a huge difference in how you view the world. Did you come from a loving, caring, extremely intelligent, and parental source? Or did you come along accidentally starting from rocks and chemical soup and amoebas?

The energy of gratitude and generosity and the laws they follow are invisible, universal, and eternal. They did not accidentally arise at some point along an evolutionary timeline. They existed from the beginning. Where did they come from? How could they exist if there was no original designer that put in place laws of mutual benefit and relationship?

If “survival of the fittest” were a true law, then research on energy would show that struggle and conflict would produce good health, but they don’t. It’s just the opposite.

There must be a God.
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1. The Mysteries of the Heart. http://www.heartmath.org/templates/ihm/articles/infographic/2013/mysteries-of-the-heart/index.php

2. Scientists Prove DNA Can Be Reprogrammed by Words and Frequencies. http://wakeup-world.com/2011/07/12/scientist-prove-dna-can-be-reprogrammed-by-words-frequencies/

3. Believers are happier than atheists. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1581994/Believers-are-happier-than-atheists.html

#46 Ants

As a result of my studies, I have come to believe that every plant, animal, insect, and fish are proofs for God in and of themselves. There are hundreds of thousands of such proofs everywhere you look for “he who has eyes to see and ears to hear.”

Pick any one that you like and research it extensively. You can go on and on and on being more and more astounded. Each is so marvelous that the only possible conclusion, if you are willing to accept it, is that it was designed by a super intelligent source.

Let’s talk about ants for a while…tiny creatures with a brain no bigger than a pinhead. There are over 12,500 cataloged species of ants, with estimates of perhaps 22,000 in existence.[1] Evolutionists have their creation story for how all these different ants came into being. The story always starts with knowing the conclusion and figuring out the path of how blind and accidental processes might have arrived at that end. It’s pure fiction. When you analyze each supposed step with logical questions, you’ll have to believe in miracles to accept that it could really have happened.

There isn’t any real proof that can be observed, so in the end you have to decide what story you are going to believe in. Did all of these astounding capabilities of ants just come about accidentally? Or is there a God behind it? Either way, you are a still just a believer. There is only faith.

Here is a quote that shows what I mean. In the considered opinion of biologist Jochen Zeil of the Australian National University

“I think that every animal we look at [including the ant] is a more competent, more robust, more flexible, more miniaturized and a more energy-, material-, sensor-, and computation-efficient agent than anything we have ever built.” [2]

I would agree with him, but his conclusion is different than mine. He thinks that it all happened by accident and he chooses to believe in evolution. His faith is that there was no invisible God behind it.

Ants are everywhere in the world. Have you ever taken the time to watch them? Probably you studied them in school somewhere and you were very impressed at what they can do. A functioning colony of ants may contain millions and millions of ants and some colonies may be as big as a house. Scientists have poured cement into ant colonies and then dug them out to see what they look like (see pictures below).

How big in size is an ant brain do you think? But amazing things are going on inside there. Researchers have concluded they are doing math as complicated as the programmers who built the Internet so that billions of tiny packets of information run smoothly along channels and through nodes and switches to get to their final destinations. Here is a quote about ant math and food supplies:

“The algorithm relates at least three critical variables: the rate of outgoing foragers, the amount that the rate increases with each returning ant, and the amount that the rate decreases with each outgoing ant. Researchers discovered that this ant algorithm closely matches the one that programmers wrote to regulate Internet traffic. The algorithm uses two formulae:

[3]

Here is another type of math. Researchers Chris Reid and Associate Professor Madeleine Beekman experimented with ants and changeable mazes.[4] They discovered that ants can adapt well enough to create an optimal solution to a maze, something few computer programs can do.

This was called the “towers of Hanoi” puzzle. [5] “The game involves transferring disks of tapering size from one of three stacks to another without placing a larger disk on top of a smaller one. For the ants, though, researchers transposed the different stacking options onto a maze of hexagons, where the shortest route to food corresponded to the best solution to the puzzle. Of course, the ants solved it. They even reworked new solutions to overcome blocked tunnels. In addition, the pioneer ants that solved the puzzles somehow explained the correct route to their relatives.”[6]

Ant colonies of necessity have incredible systems to function as they do with effectiveness and efficiency. All the food coming in and being stored and used up needs to be accounted for, measured constantly, and maintained. There are systems for heating and cooling the food, systems for disposal of wastes, systems for hygiene and disposal of dead ants, systems for caring for eggs and the newborn, systems for protection and survival in case of floods or invasions.

Here is a simplified diagram to illustrate the point above:

(See diagram above) “An ant colony has several entrances (A), leading to a variety of subterranean chambers. Each chamber has a specific use. Some are for food storage (B). The queen has her own room (D). In another chamber workers tend unhatched eggs (C). A deeper room serves as a nursery for larvae and cocoons (F). In the replete gallery (G) are the worker ants whose expanded abdomens contain surplus food for the colony. In another room (E), worker ants are digging a new chamber.”[7]

Scientists believe ants have a sophisticated guidance system like GPS and also that they are able to count and remember how many steps they have taken away from the nest so that they can return. They can also communicate through a number of different chemical signals to other ants.

“Distances travelled are measured using an internal pedometer that keeps count of the steps taken and also by evaluating the movement of objects in their visual field (optical flow). Directions are measured using the position of the sun. They integrate this information to find the shortest route back to their nest. Like all ants, they can also make use of visual landmarks when available as well as olfactory and tactile cues to navigate. Some species of ant are able to use the Earth's magnetic field for navigation. The compound eyes of ants have specialized cells that detect polarized light from the Sun, which is used to determine direction. These polarization detectors are sensitive in the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum.”[8]

Just think about how complicated the ant eye mechanism must be to accomplish what it does. Please read about The Eye in my previous proof for God. But the ant uses other really complicated systems as well like smell and touch and muscles all integrated into their tiny brains.

Ants have been observed to be moving in pairs where one seems to be teaching the other one. I think one should conclude that they are passing on information which strongly indicates intelligence rather than accidental origins.

Evolution hypothesizes that the process of natural selection is at work. This normally involves a male and a female parent. Ant mating and reproduction can be very different from that. Here is a statement from Wikipedia:

“A wide range of reproductive strategies have been noted in ant species. Females of many species are known to be capable of reproducing asexually through thelytokous parthenogenesis and one species, Mycocepurus smithii, is known to be all-female.”[9]

Also another statement from Wikipedia showing more issues for evolutionists:

“The life of an ant starts from an egg. If the egg is fertilized, the progeny will be female (diploid); if not, it will be male (haploid). Ants develop by complete metamorphosis with the larva stages passing through a pupal stage before emerging as an adult. The larva is largely immobile and is fed and cared for byworkers.”[10]

If males are “haploid” it means they only have 1 set of chromosomes, not two to offer for Natural Selection to work. Secondly, metamorphosis could never be a process that could have resulted from evolution (see my blog article on that). Thirdly, asexual reproduction also does not offer a chance for Natural Selection to function.

Each colony has several different types of ants within the same species, e.g. workers/drones, soldiers, queen, and males. Evolution cannot account for how they accidentally came to exist and then could continue to be produced by the observable ways they are. Typically the food they receive or chemicals around them determine what type of ant they become. Scientists don’t really know that much about this subject.

Some ants in a colony can fly, but others cannot. How can that be explained adequately by accidents?

Various ant species build amazing things besides nests. Some make bridges and some can make rafts. Tell me no intelligence was involved in an elaborate construction, it was all by accident, and then let me smile condescendingly.

“Solenopsis invicta, a common species of fire ant, originates from the rain forests of Brazil, where heavy precipitation can cause flooding to occur up to twice daily. In order to stick together as a colony during these deluges, the fire ants hook their legs and mouths together to create a living, breathing waterproof material that floats for hours, or even weeks, if necessary, until floods subside.”[11]

In conclusion, there are thousands of different species of ants with incredibly complex systems of organization on a massive scale. It takes a lot of faith in chance and denial of intelligence to believe all this evolved by chance. Let me also remind you that there are over 20,000 known species of bees, 100,000 species of wasps, and 4,000 species of termites. All of these live in highly developed colonies as well.

There must be God.
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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant

2. Gross, M. 2012. How ants find their way. Current Biology. 22 (16): R618.

3. Prabhakar, B., K. N. Dektar, and D. M. Gordon. 2012. The Regulation of Ant Colony Foraging Activity without Spatial Information. PLoS Computational Biology. 8 (8): e1002670.

4. News story: http://sydney.edu.au/news/sobs/1699.html?newsstoryid=6164 The result was exactly as predicted: the ants quickly established pheromone trails along the shortest path. But then we blocked the shortest paths, thus forcing the ants to find an alternative solution. As explained above, conventional wisdom dictates that the ants would not be able to adapt and would continue following their original trail that now leads nowhere.

Contrary to predictions, Argentine ants rapidly found the alternative shortest path, showing that they have the ability to adapt to sudden changes in their environment. But the speed with which they adapt depends on whether or not they had prior experience with the maze: colonies that had explored the maze hours before food was introduced, found the alternative solution quicker than colonies without such pre-exposure. This is a puzzling result, as the time between exploring the maze and the need to find an alternative solution when the original path is blocked, was at least 1 hour.

5. Reid, C. R., D. J. T. Sumpter and M. Beekman. 2011. Optimisation in a natural system: Argentine ants solve the Towers of Hanoi. Journal of Experimental Biology. 214 (1): 50-58.

6. Insect Arithmetic--Pure Genius! by Frank Sherwin, M.A., & Brian Thomas, M.S. http://www.icr.org/article/7536/

7. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-144467/An-ant-colony-has-several-entrances-leading-to-a-variety

8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant

9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant

10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant

11. http://www.nbcnews.com/science/bizarre-fire-ants-lock-together-form-big-rafts-survive-floods-2D11660482

#45 The Eye

The eye is a wonderful proof for God. The more you know about it, the more impossible it could come into existence without God, a supremely intelligent being, having created it. Just follow with me some of what it does and how it does it.

This is going to be my longest article because there is so much information and research done on the eye and it is so astounding. I have read maybe 100 articles about the eye and this post is hardly going to scratch the surface of the awesomeness of all the different types and abilities of the eyes in creation. I’m not even going to cover many of the amazing parts. I hope you can read to the end of this. I tried to make every paragraph succinct and educational.

The human eye can detect 7 to 10 million colors. That’s more than any machine known to man. All the colors we see are all within only 1.5% of the entire light spectrum.[1] By such an amazing accident (for evolutionists) or incredible design (for religious people) our eyes see exactly the wavelengths of light where the color is and not the others. Those colors that we are able to see happen to be truly marvelous.

Photoreceptor cells in our eyes can catch photons of light and send a signal to the brain which interprets what color it is and distinguishes various objects. Evolutionists talk about some “original” light sensitive cell like it was simple. Just read about “Signal Transduction in the eye” [2] and how receptors are chemically turned on and off instantaneously if you want to get an idea of how tremendously complicated it is to activate a photoreceptor.

Evolutionists also never talk about all the millions of colors. Did photoreceptors recognize just one color in the beginning and then “gradually over time” accidentally become able to tell the difference in all the millions of colors. That’s a hard one to believe because the ability to see any color at all is extremely complicated. [3]

Even if some first creature developed a photo receptor cell, so what? It would be pointless for survival unless it was somehow connected to a brain that was also connected to a muscle system to provide movement.

Evolutionists talk about the eye evolving to help the creature escape predators. Excuse me. If this is supposed to be the first eye to develop, then there are no predators with eyes yet. What are they escaping from?

Also, even having a photo receptor cell is not valuable for survival unless there is some way to tell which direction the danger is coming from so you can escape in the other direction. There are way too many logical holes in these evolutionist faith statements. Their faith in evolution is blind. They don’t even ask simple questions.

The retina of the human eye is made up of an average of 120 million rods and 6 million cones, each with their own neuron that carries messages to the brain. (Birds have 10 times that number.) The rods see in black and white for night vision and the cones see all the different colors. There are 3 types of cones that perceive different wave lengths. The retina is further divided into the macula, a small central area giving central vision, and the fovea, a small depression at the center of the macula which gives the clearest vision. In the fovea the blood vessels, nerves, and ganglion cells are all displaced for better vision. The area in the macula is 100 times more sensitive than the rest of the retina.

Does Natural Selection really explain how this could have developed gradually step by step with each step over sequential generations being better able to survive and pass on its genes? It would take millions of generations. There’s not enough time. Humans all have eyes the same, so all 7 billion of us and all humans in history must have descended from an original ancestral couple had eyes like we all have now. And eyes have never evolved since. And not one of all the millions of supposedly intermediate stages of eye is still around. Not one older stage ever shows up in random individuals either. Every other kind of eye or intermediate stage has died out completely.

All eyes have a lens made out of a transparent protein substance found nowhere else in the body. This lens must necessarily be formed out of a flexible substance and it must have muscles to change its shape so it can alter the path of the incoming light and constantly re-focus it on receptor cells. If you can’t focus the light, you can’t see anything.

There are 12 muscles on the outside that move the eyeball around in the socket, including one that uses a pulley mechanism to swivel the eye (the Superior Oblique, see diagram). Eye muscles come in pairs to move your eyes up and down, left and right. If the muscles only turned your eyes to the right, they would be stuck there until many generations later when a muscle developed to pull them back left. The same is true if you only had a muscle to pull them up but not one to pull them back down.

Tilt your head and your eyes adjust so you can still see well.

Evolution hypothesizes that blind chance mutations have the amazing ability to come up with these changes so they can be selected for by natural selection. That’s total blind faith. How could the lens material and all those muscles happen accidentally, without any intelligent design at all? One small change at a time will never produce a continuously workable eye.

Recent discoveries have revealed that the muscles surrounding your eyes are amazing. They “jitter” at the rate of 30 to 70 microscopic movements per second all day every day. If the muscles did not do this, you would not be able to focus as well because your brain’s programming of the incoming signals removes any unchanging image.[4] These jitter motions come in 3 types, called drifts, tremors, and saccades. The ones named “tremors” move the cornea and retina about 0.001 millimeter (about 1/70th the width of a piece of paper). Our eyes do all this automatically.[5]

Here’s a fact you probably learned in grade school, the lens inverts all the images coming through so it hits your retina upside down. Your brain automatically turns it right side up. If your brain didn’t do that, you’d have a hard time escaping from any predators. The brain is taking upside down images from both your eyes, inverting them, and putting them together. Evolutionists don’t talk about that.

Another necessary part of the eye is the iris which opens and closes to let in varying amounts of light. Too much light and you are blinded. You are probably not aware of how much work your iris is doing all day long because it’s totally automatic. That sure is a nice ability to have or you might be blinded or in the dark most of the time.

And then there are also your eye lids, some pretty useful pieces of skin with their own sets of muscles. Each eye has over 50 glands in the eye lids for secreting oil for lubricating the eyes.

Everybody has tear ducts that come in mirror image sets for each eye. How does something like that happen by accident? Like every other detail of your eyes, you will find your tear ducts are like a miracle if you read up on the research to understand what they do and how they do it. Not only do you cry when something gets in your eye, but your tear ducts also work when you are emotionally moved. How do evolutionists explain that?

Another essential ingredient to being able to see is the optic nerve. This statement is from Wikipedia: “Each human optic nerve contains between 770,000 and 1.7 million nerve fibers, which are axons of the retinal ganglion cells of one retina. In the fovea, which has high acuity, these ganglion cells connect to as few as 5 photoreceptor cells; in other areas of retina, they connect to many thousand photoreceptors.”[6] On top of everything else that happened by accident for evolutionists, you also have to add the accidental development of an optic nerve which would have no purpose unless there were photoreceptor cells on one end and the brain on the other. Of course, there is an optic nerve coming from each eye, thus doubling the number of nerve fibers to the brain which interprets the signals.

Even if the eye developed and then for some reason started sending electrical impulses to the brain, probably the most remarkable achievement of all is how the brain translates those impulses into “seeing” colors and then translating those colors into shapes and giving them meaning?

Darwin himself recognized that the unbelievable complexity of the eye was a problem for his theory, but then he went ahead and ignored it and assumed evolution anyway. “The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder” [7] The idea of natural selection producing the eye “seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” [8] He went ahead and believed in his evolution theory anyway. Today, after all the scientific discoveries since Darwin, I think his comment about “absurd in the highest possible degree” is more applicable to his theory.

There are lots of diagrams you can find of the supposed evolution of the eye, but they are pure imagination (emphasis mine). If you read the explanations carefully, you will always discover that they are an hypothesis… in other words complete conjecture. There is absolutely no fossil evidence for these diagrams. The diagrams are always described as “likely”, “probably”, or “possibly”. In other words they are pure speculation and totally from the artist’s imagination. They ASSUME evolution before they even draw the first stage. Evolutionists always talk like it’s the “gospel”. But it’s blind faith.

Look at this diagram below. See how they make huge leaps and changes in the design because they know where they want to get to. But all you have to do is use the old “slow and gradual” argument that they themselves espouse and think about the real world. Every single minor change means a significant number of changes in DNA. How many generations need to live and die between the changes in the pictures? Remember these are animals with only partial eyes that have to find a mate somehow. They have to pass the “improvement” to the next generation and not lose it. That means both the male and female have to have it AND it has to pass to all future generations and never get weeded out. If Natural Selection really works, it works both ways. Not only does it improve things, it should also eliminate unnecessary, non-functional parts, or those that are a hindrance.

Even if one eye could evolve, which is an unbelievable stretch, how do you account for two eyes right next to each other. That’s got to be statistically hundreds of times more difficult. Most evolutionists make up an explanation for one eye and then stop. They still have to explain how did we get two so perfectly connected and coordinated eyes working in harmony and also connected into the brain in order to give us parallax vision and 3-dimensional mental images?

Evolutionists have two main techniques to try to explain eye evolution. Logically they fall apart because both techniques assume evolution before they start their explanation. This is called circular reasoning, using evolution to prove evolution. The most common is to notice other eye-like structures in nature and assume they were one of the steps in a long process that has never, ever been seen. A helicopter may look like an intermediate step from a car to an airplane, so what? Applying true logic reveals the false assumptions.

Just because simple eyes exist and complex eyes also exist in nature, that is no proof that complex eyes evolved from simple eyes. Cars did not evolve from soap box racers or skate boards just because there are design similarities.

Secondly, evolutionists look in the womb and see the eye develop in stages which they call evolutionary stages. They may say that a seed growing is evolution, but it’s not. Why is the growth process in the womb necessarily the explanation of the process that took millions of years? Also, a seed already has the full complement of DNA structure. It’s not evolving, it’s fulfilling instructions which are already there.

Evolutionists like to use what I’ll call “magic words”. They sound nice but they are totally unscientific and no respectable scientist uses them. Here are examples that you’ll find all the time: “selective pressures”, tinker, suggest, at some point, scenarios, hypothesizes, diverging, proliferated, arose, favored, modified, emerged, developed, etc. And the biggest one of all is “may have”. Those are not words used by real scientists with solid evidence. Passive, unthinking processes cannot do intelligent things. Evolutionists are really only telling a story that they already believe. They can make it up as they go along whenever there is an objection.

Another problem that evolutionist believers have is their so-called tree of life where all species developed from a single cell. Since mammals, fish, birds, insects, amphibians, etc. all have different types of eyes and are on different “branches” of the tree, therefore the evolution faith requires that all the different types of eyes “evolved” independently of each other. The Wikipedia article states that complex eyes have evolved between 50 and 100 separate times in evolution. [9] Imagine of the mathematical odds against that, can you? Evolutionists are forced to believe that eyes not only evolved one time in history but 50 to 100 separate times. To make it even more impossible, almost always the animal developed exactly two of them.

Wikipedia quietly admits that “Since the fossil record, particularly of the Early Cambrian, is so poor, it is difficult to estimate the rate of eye evolution.”

The fossil record only shows eyes already developed. “The oldest eye in the fossil record, that of a trilobite, is a very complex faceted compound eye that ‘dates’ back to the Cambrian, conventionally dated about 540 million years ago.”[10] Did you get that, the oldest fossils with eyes (trilobites) already have a fully developed complex faceted compound eye. [11]

Another way that I could put it is that there is no fossil record at all to support evolution of the eye. Or, also, you could say that any evolution of the eye is pure speculation.

Here is another statement admitting that evolutionists have no idea how it happened. “The curious thing, however, about the evolution of the vertebrate eye is the apparent suddenness of its appearance and the elaboration of its structures in its earliest known stages.”[12] They just DO NOT know where eyes came from or how.

Remember, I've only cover some of the amazing aspects of the eye. 

The eye was awesomely designed, but Evolutionists just won’t accept it.

There truly is a God.

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[1] Some great fun facts: http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM107Lab/Exp7/Spectroscope/Spectroscope.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell

[3] Wikipedia: Color Vision. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision

[4] http://creation.com/an-eye-for-detail

[5] Tom Wagner,, Darwin Vs. the Eye. Sept. 1, 1994

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_nerve.

[7] Award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer explains the “creation” of the organ so complex that it baffled even Darwin. The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine. October 9, 2009.

[8] Award-winning science writer Carl Zimmer explains the “creation” of the organ so complex that it baffled even Darwin. The New York Academy of Sciences Magazine. October 9, 2009.

[9] Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye

[10] http//creation.com/did-eyes-evolve-by-dawinian-mechanisms

[11] Did Eyes Evolve By Darwinian Mechanisms?, Jerry Brergman

[12] Duke-Elder, S.S., System of Ophthalmology, Volume 1: The Eye in Evolution. p. 237.

#44 Murphy's Law

I'm sure you have heard of Murphy's Law. It goes like this: "If anything can go wrong, it will."

Over the years it has been easily accepted and adopted by people as a popular truism. [1] Even many similar sayings have been added to it. Here are a couple of my favorite "corollaries". "If two things can go wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will go wrong." "If something can go wrong, it will go wrong and at the worst possible time."

I even own two books about Murphy's Laws.

The more complicated something is, the more likely it will break down or malfunction. Isn't this our experience in life? Isn't this our intuitive understanding of the laws of nature? That's why we can laugh and accept Murphy's Laws. If something is complicated, it's therefore more difficult to build it, install it, and maintain it, because it's more likely to break down.

Think about complicated computer programs. We are getting updates from Microsoft all the time to fix "bugs". Imagine buying something at a store that needs to be assembled when you get home. The more parts there are and the more complicated the instructions are, the more chance there will be a problem putting it together.

If you are a painter and are going to put a couple thousand brushstrokes on a canvass, how many mistakes are you going to make?

Now let's think about Evolution where believers have faith that millions upon millions of times a more complicated living being developed from a less complicated one without any intelligence being involved. All the wondrous beauty and awesomely complicated systems of life developed from nothing. I’m sorry, even with our best human intelligence it's not just hard to do that, it's impossible.

Evolution Theory says that over a lot of time, more and more complicated systems develop and better and better functioning parts happen by natural laws. I don't experience any natural laws like that. Things that are complicated are more likely to break down and it takes a lot of effort and intelligence just to maintain them.

Evolution Theory says that dumb chance does better than applied human intelligence. And dumb chance is not just a little bit smarter, it's billions or trillions of times smarter. Human beings cannot duplicate a simple blade of grass! But dumb chance has accidentally produced all of the estimated 8.7 million species on earth. [2]

Evolutionists place unshakeable faith in natural selection. They believe this force keeps everything moving forward and upward. But natural selection never even begins to operate until there is the process of reproduction functioning successfully. They never allow questioning about where the ability to reproduce came from. Nothing about the process of reproduction is simple in any way. And where did life come from before it is reproducing? Life could not have originated by natural selection. All the attributes of life had to be in place before reproduction could take place, for example, DNA, RNA, proteins, respiration, digestion, cell membranes, repair capability, waste elimination, and much more. [3]

If Murphy’s Law operates even once in a while, then evolution is impossible. If something can go wrong, it will … eventually. So therefore “given enough time” (as the evolutionists like to say) things will not develop greater and greater complexity, they in fact will go “wrong”.

There must be God holding it all together.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law 

[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110823180459.htm

[3] http://101proofsforgod.blogspot.com/2013/07/41-first-living-cell.html

#43 Sucking and Breast Milk

I think you know that all mammal babies are born with the innate instinctive sucking ability. How could that ability have evolved slowly, simply, gradually over millions of years and many generations?

If a baby doesn’t come out of the womb knowing how to suck already, then within a matter of hours it will be dead. There is no trial and error over many generations. There is no survival of the fittest because there is no survival. It’s life or death at birth.

The Theory of Evolution is very seductive because they always use words like “simple”, “easy”, “slow”, “gradual”, “many generations”, “great periods of time”, etc. But behind it all is only faith and assumptions. Evolution of higher ordered species from lower ones has never been scientifically observed nor demonstrated in a laboratory. The Theory of Evolution is a religion of faith in lifeless chemicals.

If you have had children and you breastfed them, you were certainly amazed that the baby immediately knew how to start sucking. There was no learning process. We even have pictures from in the womb of the baby sucking his/her thumb.

The process of a mother producing milk for a new born baby is a miracle in itself. The appearance of milk and the baby sucking it was definitely designed by an intelligent being.

Most of her life a female mammal does not have any milk to give no matter what she might try. Through a miraculous process of hormonal changes triggered by interactions with the growing fetus, the production of breast milk gets started at just the right time.

When the baby is born, milk is ready to start flowing when the baby starts sucking.

How could a slow, gradual process over may generations produce milk at precisely the moment when the infant starts sucking? It has no special survival benefit for the mother, only the baby. How does mutation or natural selection account for producing breast milk? The whole process makes the mother much more vulnerable to predators.

If the milk comes at the wrong time, the baby dies. If the baby does not suck, it will die. There doesn’t seem to be any room for trial and error. It’s success or death. Many generations of developing breast feeding over millions and millions of years cannot cut it. There are too many obstacles to be overcome.

The very first creature to exist of each mammal species had to have this ability. It could not have developed separately over long periods of time on each branch of the evolutionist so-called tree of life.

The whole process of milk being produced and baby sucking is very, very complicated and has to work out simultaneously and be successful at the birth of the very first baby of each species.

Scientific research is also finding out some amazing benefits of breastfeeding babies. Some of the health benefits for the baby that have been determined are: fewer illnesses and stronger immune system; less constipation and diarrhea; better stools and digestion; less allergies; lower diabetes risk; antibodies that protect against infection; all the nutritional needs of the baby during first 6 months; stronger vision;
protection against ear infections; better mental development, higher IQ and less antisocial behavior; better mouth formation for less speech problems; less eczema; improved bone quality; healthier hair; increased independence and emotional stability; eases frustrations and daily stresses.

Amazingly enough, there are also great benefits for the mother as well. Here are some that researchers have discovered: stronger bones for later in life; lower risk of osteoporosis, anemia, and arthritis; lower risk of breast cancer; lower risk of cardiovascular disease; lower risk of ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, and endometrial cancer; natural bonding and closeness with the baby; helps the uterus return to normal size in a timely manner.

All these extremely valuable benefits must have been working from the very first baby that sucked.

Every father and mother knows that the mother’s body went through all kinds of complicated and miraculous changes when she was pregnant. She had no control over that. If she was the smartest woman in the world, could she have told her body all the right things to do so that baby could be born and survive? Absolutely not. It was all controlled by a much higher intelligence.

There must be God.

#42 Bats and Echolocation

We are all somewhat familiar with bats. 

But when I took some time to research them more seriously, I was astonished by their abilities.

Some bats can reach a top speed of 60 miles per hour. They come in all different sizes and live almost everywhere. There are 1,240 species of bat identified which is about 20% of all mammals classified.

The most astounding feature of bats is that they can fly around in total darkness very quickly without ever hitting another bat, some tree branch, or a wall. In darkness, they can locate a mosquito or moth that is flying, then track it down, catch it, and eat it.

Scientists have discovered that bats have the ability to do this by using sound and what they call “Echolocation”. It means that they make a loud noise and then by listening for the echoes that come back they figure out all the landscape and other animals around them.

There are tremendous challenges that had to be overcome in order for this system to work.

1. The sounds they make have to be loud enough to echo back to their ears and be detected. Imagine how much sound is going to echo off a flying mosquito? Not much. As you may remember from science class, sound energy dissipates at the rate of the square of the distance from the source. Bouncing off a mosquito back toward the bat, it is again going to be dissipating as the square of the new distance. Some bats make noise as loud as 140 decibels. Luckily for us the sound waves are above our ability to hear them (ultrasonic). We experience pain at 125 decibels.

2. Their eardrums must be extremely sensitive to detect mosquito echoes, but how do they not blow out their own eardrums when they make a 140 dB noise. It seems they have muscles in their ears that act to muffle or disconnect the tiny little “hammer” and “stirrup.”

3. The sound cannot be continuous or else the echo also would be continuous and interfere with interpreting the “data” and causing confusion. They make a “clicking” sound at a rate of about 10 per second when they are cruising but reaching up to a maximum of 200 per second when chasing a prey. The sounds may also be varied like a whistle or changed depending on the prey they are chasing and the like.

4. The sound of each individual bat has to be unique. Bats might roost in a colony of 1000’s. How come their noises don’t interfere and cause confusion and collisions with other bats all making loud noises at the same time?

5. The bat brain has to make calculations which take into account the Doppler Effect. Sound waves change pitch if the source of the noise is moving away (lower) or coming closer (higher). You may have experienced a train whistle sounds lower after it has passed you by. Imagine the complicated computer programming that would be necessary to duplicate what a tiny bat’s brain can do when chasing a moving mosquito.

6. Sound waves used must be the shorter ones. Longer sound waves would not be useful for accurately identifying tiny little objects that are just millimeters in length.

7. Sound waves travel faster in warmer air than in colder air so they will travel out and back faster on warmer days. Bat brains have to take this into account.

8. Different surfaces reflect sound differently. Water, wood, metal, plants all must be echoing back sound waves that are slightly distorted based on their surface properties.

9. The bat brain has to be really fast. Think how fast that mosquito is moving and in all different directions. The bat brain has to get the information from the ears and calculate how fast to move and in which direction quickly enough to catch the mosquito.

10. The bat brain has to interpret all objects in its environment. The bat has to figure out the difference between a swarm of mosquitoes and a tree branch or another bat instantly.

11. Bats also have to be able to recognize the opposite sex in the dark. Otherwise they can’t find a mate and reproduce. Infants have to be able to locate their own mothers in order to get milk.

There are other things going on as well, but that should be enough to amaze anyone.

When my kids were young, they used to play a game in the swimming pool called “Marco Polo”. One person closed his eyes and tried to catch others who would shout out “Marco”. That was hard enough because they would move after they shouted out. But suppose they didn’t have to shout and the person with his eyes closed made all the noises and tried to locate the others by the echoes he heard.

Darwinian evolution requires gradual incremental steps of development over many generations. Bat echolocation is far beyond the design capabilities of human beings although we have some understanding though developing sonar. Echolocation is a capability that needs to be working almost instantly because you will never catch a mosquito gradually. If a bat is flying in the dark and his echolocation is not working, he’ll soon crash into something and seriously injure himself.

Flying is a phenomenal ability for a mammal. Flying in the dark is many times more amazing. Natural Selection would quickly kill off the bats that tried flying in the dark without echolocation. Bats with good eyes flying in the daytime would surely outlive bats with bad eyesight or trying to fly at night. Echolocation has no chance to develop over many generations. The odds of flying and echolocation developing simultaneously over many generations are astronomical.

Speaking of odds, scientists have also found echolocation used by whales and dolphins. These species and bats are totally unrelated. To have both accidentally "evolve" this phenomenal ability is beyond common sense. There must have been a cosmic designer that created both species using a common pattern.

There must be God.

#41 The First Living Cell

Let’s take a couple of minutes to think about the origin of life in the very, very first living cell. Many people think about the beginning of life as something that just happened easily and naturally. One small, tiny, simple cell just spontaneously and accidentally happened. A bunch of chemicals in some goo formed into a blob. No big deal.

If you think that first living cell was just a blob of goo, then it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch from pond scum or murky soup of chemicals to a little tiny cell. Some bolt of lightning or other source of energy zapped the chemicals and voila, suddenly life started.

Believers in Evolution do not (and cannot) begin to apply their theory until after life exists and has started reproducing. Mutation and Natural Selection, the processes of Evolution, cannot operate until there is already life reproducing itself. The Theory of Evolution does not explain where everything before life came from or how life itself got started. (It’s obviously therefore, a sort of religion requiring faith.)

But for right now, let’s think about that first living cell a little more deeply given what we now know about living cells. What are some of the qualities that first living cell had to have in order for life to exist in it? We now know from Biology there are certain basic requirements for life to exist and the whole process is extremely complicated. [1]

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Suppose you laid all the individual parts for an automobile out on your driveway, can you now imagine any possible scenario that could take place in the next billion, billion years where those parts get organized by some natural (i.e. no intelligence added) process into a fully functioning car that you could someday drive away? There could be lightning bolts, hurricanes, floods, windstorms, asteroids, whatever, but nothing is going to assemble anything.

With all the microscopic research done in cell biology, we now know that even a single tiny little cell is like a busy little city.[2] It’s much more complicated than an automobile. Even if you had all the chemicals necessary for life in one place like a swamp or deep ocean setting, getting it organized into some form of first living cell is on the order of complexity of simultaneously assembling all the different cars in America.

Here is a short list of some of the attributes that would have been necessary for the first living cell. There are others that you can find in the research if you want to go into more depth. I’ll expand on some of these later on after the list.

1. Reproduction and Inheritance.[3] The first living cell had to be able to reproduce a second living cell or there would never have been any more life. It also had to pass on its genetic characteristics by some mechanism such as DNA.

2. Cell Membrane.[4] There had to be a wall around the contents of the cell to hold in the material. Otherwise, it would drift away or be destroyed by other chemical processes. The Cell Membrane also has to be permeable to let chemicals go in and out. It must also be able to grow in size.

3. Digestion for Energy.[5] Life requires a process to get energy. There had to be a system for breaking down chemicals and converting it to get energy out of them.

4. Protein Production.[6] There had to be a system for making proteins and enzymes or it could never reproduce itself. There are 20 basic amino acids that are necessary for all the known life forms.

5. Repair capability.[7] All DNA and RNA molecules are subject to harmful mutations and damage from other chemicals. There had to be a process of repairing them when they are multiplied.

6. Elimination of Waste.[8] There would need to be a process for getting rid of used up chemicals.

7. Respiration.[9] Most life forms take in oxygen in some way. Scientists are still debating if the first living cell would have required a process of taking in oxygen.

So here is a pretty amazing list of abilities required for life. I might also have included growth as a property and another property might be sensing and responding to the environment.[10]

To go from a goo of chemicals to a fully functioning living cell that meets the above requirements without any intelligence applied seems a lot less likely than assembling an automobile. You might be able to imagine how one or two of the above processes or systems could have happened, but all of them is not reasonable or logical.

Let me quickly mention a couple of famous headlines about scientists creating life in the laboratory. First is the Miller–Urey experiment in 1953 [11]. They put the hypothesized original chemicals in a test tube and hit it with a bolt of electricity. The result was the formation of some amino acids (less than 10), the so called building blocks of life. Even though this experiment is still found in a lot of science textbooks, it has been fully discredited because the early earth’s atmosphere was not like they hypothesized.[12] And even if they got some amino acids, it takes 20 to build a protein. That’s like getting only some of the simplest car parts on your driveway, it’s not a functioning car.

Second, on May 20, 2010, Craig Venter, a pioneer in human genome research was able to synthesize a living bacteria.[13] It was hailed as “creating life”. What they did was figure out the DNA of an already living cell. They were able to synthesize a genome of over a million DNA base pairs sequence using very complicated processes and millions of dollars. One part of the process required yeast to help copy the DNA because a machine cannot do it. At one point there was a mistake of a single base pair missing and it wouldn’t work. It took them 3 months to find the error and then make the copy correctly. They then inserted this DNA back into an already living cell with its DNA removed. If you call that “creating life”, you have to ignore the fact that all they really did was COPY the DNA of “life” that already existed. Even then they had to put the DNA they copied back into a previously living cell for it to function. The cell of cytoplasm where they put the DNA already had a cell membrane and the systems required for cellular tasks like carrying sugars, copying DNA, removing wastes, converting energy, regulating production speeds, communicating with the environment, and so on.[14] This is an amazing accomplishment to be sure and I don’t want to minimize it, but look at all the intelligence that has gone into it. It has taken some really, really smart people 15 years to get this far and they’ve hardly started. So how much intelligence will it take before they can “create life”, if ever. Will they still try to claim life happened accidentally with no intelligence behind it. That would be laughable.

Okay, back to the list and Requirement Number 1, Reproduction. Think back to Biology class in school where you learned about mitosis and cell division. The first living cell had to be able to do that all by itself the very first try. Otherwise there would be no second living cell. We know that all reproducing cells contain DNA, a very complicated molecule.[15] It is the mechanism that inherits the characteristics of the cell to the next generation. The simplest life forms must have a DNA molecule of thousands of base pairs.[16] It would have to somehow decide to split in half and make an exact perfect copy of itself. Then the two strands would have to separate into two different areas of the cell and the cell membrane would surround each one and split into two new cells.

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Evolutionists have to believe that the DNA pre-exited the first living cell. It could not logically have formed accidentally at the same time as the cell membrane formed or after the cell already existed. However, DNA is too complicated to last outside a cell. This idea has basically been deemed unlikely because DNA cannot exist for long without protection from harmful mutations and serious breakdown from contact with oxygen and other chemicals and ultraviolet light.

Number 2, Cell Membrane. There has to be a cell membrane to surround the cell, otherwise you don’t have a cell. But a cell membrane is an extraordinary boundary. If you have ever seen an animation of what’s happening all the time with the membrane that surrounds a living cell, you will be amazed.[17] You probably did science experiments in school with osmosis. Well, osmosis is going on all the time with nutrients, water, oxygen and other chemicals passing in and out of the cell through the membrane. Just where did the membrane around the first living cell come from? Could something like that have been floating around in the soup too at the same time as all the perfect chemicals and scoop them up and then close the whole thing like a fishnet?

I think this is getting too long. But as you can see, each well established attribute of a living cell that is listed above would require more intelligence than we currently have in the world of science.

There must be God.
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[1 ] Why the Miller–Urey Research Argues Against Abiogenesis, by Jerry Bergman, August 1, 2004, Institute for Creation Research, http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i2/abiogenesis.asp
“The eukaryote protozoa, believed in Darwin’s day to be as simple as a bowl of gelatin, are actually enormously complex. A living eukaryotic cell contains many hundreds of thousands of different complex parts, including various motor proteins. These parts must be assembled correctly to produce a living cell, the most complex ‘machine’ in the universe—far more complex than a Cray supercomputer.”

[2] An Analogy for the Genome. http://richardhartersworld.com/cri/2002/analogy.html. "Imagine a small walled town. Within it there is a diversified population of people performing different tasks. There is a butcher and a baker and an undertaker, guards at the gate and a refuse collector. The people in the town are good at their tasks but they are quite stupid so anything novel is a real problem for them. Fortunately there is a library in the town, a library which contains instructions for dealing with unusual situations."

[3] ] How Evolution Works, Marshall Brain http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/evolution11.htm

[4] How Evolution Works, Marshall Brain http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/evolution11.htm

[5] ] How Evolution Works, Marshall Brain http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/evolution11.htm

[6] ] How Evolution Works, Marshall Brain http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/evolution11.htm

[7] Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair “DNA repair is a collection of processes by which a cell identifies and corrects damage to the DNA molecules that encode its genome.”

[8] Properties of Life: Homeostasis, http://plantphys.info/organismal/lechtml/biology.shtml

[9] The Respiration Process: “one of 7 characteristics of all living organisms.” http://www.biotopics.co.uk/humans/respro.html

[10] Wikibooks: Structural Biochemistry/Properties of Living Organisms http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Structural_Biochemistry/Properties_of_Living_Organisms

[11] Duke University, Miller/Urey Experiment http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiology/miller.html

[12] Why the Miller–Urey Research Argues Against Abiogenesis, by Jerry Bergman, August 1, 2004, Institute for Creation Research, http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v18/i2/abiogenesis.asp

[13] Scientific American, May, 2010, Man-Made Genetic Instructions Yield Living Cells for the First Time, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=synthetic-genome-cell

[14] Have Scientists Created a Living Cell?, Brian Thomas, Institute for Creation Research, http://www.icr.org/article/5485/

[15] Complicated Cells Leave No Room for Evolution, Brian Thomas, http://www.icr.org/article/5353/

[16] The Smallest Genome: What's the Minimum DNA Amount for Life?. http://news.softpedia.com/news/The-Smallest-Genome-What-039-s-The-Minimum-DNA-Amount-for-Life-73763.shtml. “Nanoarchaeum possesses the smallest genome in the world: just 490,885 pairs of nucleotid bases.”

[17] www.YouTube.com. Search for “animation of cell membrane”. Suggested examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z9pqST72is. This animation shows the working of DNA, RNA, proteins, and ribosomes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdBJt6sdDfI