#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]

Click for enlargement

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.

Click for enlargement

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

#40 - Chirality: Chemical Handedness

Here’s a great proof for God from Chemistry that I recently learned about.

“When two molecules appear identical and their structures differ only by being mirror images of each other, those molecules are said to have chirality. Your left and right hands illustrate chirality. Your hands may appear to be identical, but in reality, they are only mirror images of each other, hence the term handedness.” [1]

You probably know that DNA is made up of four simple nucleotides and that DNA is in the shape of a spiral staircase. Well, actually, getting even more specific, DNA is always in the shape of a right-handed spiral staircase.

When amino acids are formed in the laboratory, they can result either way, “left-handed” or “right-handed” in a 50% to 50% ratio.

“In our body, every single amino acid of every protein is found with the same left-handed chirality. ... It is a universally accepted fact of chemistry that chirality cannot be created in chemical molecules by a random process. When a random chemical reaction is used to prepare molecules having chirality, there is an equal opportunity to prepare the left-handed isomer as well as the right-handed isomer. It is a scientifically verifiable fact that a random chance process, which forms a chiral product, can only be a 50/50 mixture of the two optical isomers. There are no exceptions.” [2]

“The DNA molecule is made up of billions of complicated chemical molecules called nucleotides, and these nucleotide molecules exist as the “R” or right-handed optical isomer. The “L” isomer of nucleotides can be prepared in the lab, but they do not exist in natural DNA. There is no way that a random chance process could have formed these proteins and DNA with their unique chirality.” [3]

“How can a random chance natural process create proteins with thousands of “L” molecules, and then also create DNA with billions of “R” molecules?” [4] A random process always results in a 50-50 mix.

To make a strand of DNA step by step as evolutionists claim and still make the correct spiral, all the steps in the strand must bend the same way, i.e. right. In another post I talked about how human DNA has over 3 billion “steps on the ladder” or characters in the chain. All those characters have to be in the correct order or you don’t get a human being.

Chirality adds an even more impossible level of difficulty for DNA to have formed by accidental mutation as the evolutionist faith believes. In building up the DNA staircase step by step, every step that is added must turn out to be ones that bend to the right. If you were going to build a spiral staircase with your eyes closed and you start out with an equal number of left and right handed steps, you could never build the spiral randomly. Impossible.

Here is one very famous case of chirality in life. Do you remember the drug Thalidomide. It ”is a sedative drug that was prescribed to pregnant women, from 1957 into the early 60's. It was present in at least 46 countries under different brand names. ‘When taken during the first trimester of pregnancy, Thalidomide prevented the proper growth of the fetus, resulting in horrific birth defects in thousands of children around the world’. Why? The Thalidomide molecule is chiral. There are left and right-handed Thalidomides, just as there are left and right hands. The drug that was marketed was a 50/50 mixture. One of the molecules, say the left one, was a sedative, whereas the right one was found later to cause fetal abnormalities. ‘The tragedy is claimed to have been entirely avoidable had the physiological properties of the individual thalidomide [molecules] been tested prior to commercialization." [5]

Another example is the artificial sweetener, Aspartame, which is more than a hundred times sweeter than sucrose. However, the mirror image molecule is bitter.

Not only is all DNA right-handed, but proteins are all left-handed. There are 20 different amino acids needed in your body to sustain your life. They are the building blocks for an estimated 2 million proteins in your body. Your DNA acts like the “designer” for the proteins. It links molecules together along its length by a type of hand-clasping or matching. This is why when the proteins are formed, they are all left-handed when they separate to go about their important functions in the body.

In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did an experiment with a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor by passing it through an electric discharge. A few amino acids resulted and the newspaper headline was “Life in a Test-tube.” Don’t be fooled. Sure amino acids make up proteins and proteins are important for life, but a few amino acids are not life any more than a few auto parts laid out on your driveway make a car, especially if the parts are all left-handed. By the way, it turns out their experiment was discredited anyway because their mixture of ingredients is no longer believed to be the original formula for the primitive atmosphere of the earth. [6]

Your body is a walking miracle every instant in time. The chirality of all the amino acids and nucleotides proves it.

There must be God.

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[1] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page ii, paragraph 2. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf

[2] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page ii, paragraph 3. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf

[3] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page iii, paragraph 1. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf

[4] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page iii, paragraph 2. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf

[5] http://chirality.ouvaton.org/homepage.htm

[6] Icons of Evolution, Science of Myth? Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong, Chapter 2, Jonathan Wells. Regnery Press, Washington, DC, 2000

#39 Trees

I’m going to assume that almost every person loves trees. They are everywhere around us with about 100,000 different species, but we often take them for granted.

Without trees we wouldn’t exist. They take the carbon dioxide that we exhale out of the air and return to us oxygen that we need for survival. What a phenomenal coincidence if you don’t recognize a master designer. The whole amazingly complicated and delicately balanced ecosystem exists to perfectly support our existence.

Trees have a vascular system that passes water and nutrients throughout all the cells in the tree, somewhat similar to our own circulatory system of blood.

Trees produce for us an amazing variety of fruits that we love. They are almost all tasty in our mouths and at the same time very healthy for our bodies. Yet, there is a tremendous variety: apples, oranges, citrus, peaches, pears, cherries, coconuts, and so many others.

Trees produce in great abundance, far more than is needed for their survival…almost like they do it for us. Trees are the great “givers” in nature. I will always remember this big old cherry tree that my aunt and uncle had in their backyard. That thing produced so many cherries that they could never give enough away to the whole neighborhood. As hard as they tried, the ground would always be covered with a layer of rotting cherries.

Forests of trees support the life and existence of many other plants as well as myriads of insects and animals.

Trees give us shade from the hot sun and they shelter us from the rain like a big protective friend.

Trees give us their wood for building our houses and thousands of other creations. For thousands of years we burned the wood of trees to keep warm and to cook meals.

Many a romantic moment has happened in front of a burning fire. One of the greatest joys of going camping is sitting around the fire in the evening.

Trees give us paper. The vast majority of human knowledge that was ever shared in history was made possible by paper from trees.

Trees directly or indirectly provide jobs for a large segment of the population.

Another incredible aspect of trees is that they start from a small seed. A seed is truly a miracle in itself, containing nourishment to begin its life and all the DNA information needed to build the tree for its whole lifetime. The first thing to emerge from the seed is the "taproot" which goes straight down into the ground.

Some of the largest seeds come from trees, but the largest tree, Sequoiadendron giganteum, produces one of the smallest tree seeds. (see picture)

Ancient trees that are now under the earth have turned to coal which has also been another huge contributor to human development; heating buildings, driving steam engines for manufacturing and locomotives to move people and business; and making steam power to generate the majority of electricity in the world.

Every little boy who ever walked in the woods has picked up a stick and done wondrous things with it.

Trees can touch the sky like the Redwood in California named Hyperion that is 379.5 feet high. 

Trees remind us of the past like the Great Basin bristlecone pine called Methuselah (above). It has been dated by drilling a core sample and counting the annual rings at 4,844 years old in 2012. 

The largest living thing on earth is the Sequoia named General Sherman (below) at 52,508 cu ft. 

Trees can also be miniaturized like the Japanese Bonzai to display elegant beauty.

I'm really moved by the awesomeness of the Kapok tree.

Every autumn I try to make a trip to upstate New York when the leaves are changing color. It is spectacular and I never get tired of it. The trees do it for us every year like a living painting.

Trees are not an accident or some plant that happened to have the best materialistic, heartless survival abilities. Trees were designed with us in mind and are a precious life-giving gift to us from someone who loved us before we were born.

We could not exist without them.

There must be God.

#38 Practice Makes Perfect

From the time that we were little children, we have heard the axiom that “Practice makes perfect.”

We all know the meaning of it, namely that just about anything in life that is worth doing or learning takes practice. You don’t get it right the first time. From potty training, to learning to walk, to brushing your teeth, to kindergarten, to playing a sport, playing an instrument, getting a job, to cooking your dinner, to about everything else, it takes practice to get it right. 

Do you find anyone out there advocating “It takes an accident to make it perfect?” When you get right down to the bottom line, that’s what atheists believe. Life itself was an accident. For each higher level of species, there were more accidents (mutations). 

The Big Bang was an accident of some kind. The appearance of life from non-living chemicals was an accident. 

Most atheists will admit that random mutation cannot generate successful changes for producing evolution so they will add in “natural selection” as the cure all because it magically adds a “positive” directedness. But as I detailed in a previous Proof for God (#35), natural selection is never the source of new information. It only acts on what exists already which can be inherited. No new information comes from it.

If mutation does not work and natural selection does not work, then adding them together will not work. “Practice makes perfect” obviously means good practice, not bad practice. Bad practice added to bad practice makes a worse result.

You and I might be able to conceive of one or two accidents that happen to go “right” (i.e. toward the direction of evolution), but millions upon billions upon trillions of accidents that go right is NOT conceivable.

Michael Jordan made 49.69% of his shots in his career by practicing a lot, not by accident. 

The number one hitter of all time in baseball, Ty Cobb hit successfully 36.6% of the time in his career by practicing a lot, not by accident.

Nobody is any good at anything complicated by accident.

People who decide to be atheists have concluded that all the incredible complexity from the biochemical level up to the intergalactic level including all the flowers, fish, birds, and animals exist by accident followed by reproductive selectivity, followed by another accident, followed by more selectivity on and on to the millionth degree.

Huh!

I believe that atheists start out with a decision that there is no God and then proceed to conjure up a way that this observable world “might” have come about. Then they believe in that. They don’t start with the observable data known to science today and propose a theory. They start with the assumption that there is no God and a theory from 154 years ago. Conclusions and theories should come after analysis of data, not the other way around.

Many examples of people falsifying the data (on both sides) exist in the scientific fields. Also many advances in science have proven previous theories were false. But the “old truths” were slow to die because those who believed in them could not give them up. We have to be careful who we bow down to as our authorities. Darwin thought a cell was mostly an uncomplicated mass of protoplasm. That’s far, far distant from what biochemists know today since the electron microscope was invented.

Even Albert Einstein admitted he fudged the data when it led him to the conclusion that the universe was expanding. That would have meant the universe must have had a beginning at a certain point in time which would clearly imply a creator. Later when the research of others like Hubble also concluded the universe was expanding, Einstein admitted his falsification. [1] [2] He called it his “biggest blunder.”

Science is clearly closing in on atheists and making it harder and harder to sustain their beliefs.

Dr. Paul Zulehner, dean of Vienna University’s divinity school and one of the world’s most distinguished sociologists of religion, has said that atheists in Europe have become “an infinitesimally small group. There are not enough of them to be used for sociological research.” [3] Also, “John Updike’s observation, “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position,” appears to have become common currency throughout much of the West.” [4]

"And if you think it is challenging to be a Catholic parent, try being an Atheist parent! Some 70% of Americans raised to believe God does not exist end up being a member of a religion as an adult." [5] That is the worst retention rate of any "faith".

Real scientists go where the evidence leads. They don’t cling to unverifiable dogma. The truth about God and evolution will not be suppressed for much longer in science.

There must be a God.

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[1] http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-biggest-blunder-turns.html
"In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted a term called the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to force the equations to predict a stationary universe in keeping with physicists' thinking at the time. When it became clear that the universe wasn't actually static, but was expanding instead, Einstein abandoned the constant, calling it the '"biggest blunder" of his life."

[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071127142128.htm
Then, 12 years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is not static -- it is actually expanding. So Einstein scrapped his idea of a cosmological constant and dismissed it as his biggest blunder.

[3] Analysis: Atheism worldwide in decline. By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religious Affairs Editor, Published: March. 1, 2005
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2005/03/01/Analysis-Atheism-worldwide-in-decline/UPI-20691109700930/

[4] Atheism worldwide in decline. By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religious Affairs Editor, Published: March. 1, 2005
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2005/03/01/Analysis-Atheism-worldwide-in-decline/UPI-20691109700930/

[5] Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). See chart of retention rates among all faiths at this website: http://nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com/2012/06/reverts-catholics-who-left-and-came.html