#28 The Lottery

Most of us are familiar with the Lottery, right? Many states have them now and they are advertised all the time. You know that the odds of winning a lottery are more than a million to one, even hundreds of millions to one in the bigger lotteries. But millions of people buy a ticket anyway and start dreaming of what they will do when they win.

The thing about the lottery that gets people to buy a ticket is that someone is guaranteed to win. Somebody is going to win the jackpot. 

Let’s apply the concept of the lottery to the existence of life in this universe. Believers in evolution will assert that we “won the lottery” because life exists and evolved into us and the world we live in. It seems to make sense, right? We are here after all.

Ah, but the theory of evolution does not guarantee there will be a winner because it is based on randomness and accident. Would you buy a ticket for the lottery if the likelihood of NO winner was a million to one or even greater.

The mathematical odds of life spontaneously and randomly arising from a “soup” of chemicals has been put at one out of a number with a one followed by 40,000 zeros. There are no known chemical reactions or laws of physics that can produce a living cell. The greatest scientists in the world cannot do it.

“The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 noughts after it … It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution …if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." Sir Fred Hoyle (astronomer, cosmologist and mathematician, Cambridge University) [1]

Winning the lottery just once is unbelievable but winning it TWICE IN A ROW is beyond rational comprehension. Can you even conceive of winning the lottery three, four, or five days IN A ROW? The odds of any life happening accidentally are about the odds of you winning the lottery EVERY DAY IN A ROW for 10 to 20 years.

Therefore, the existence of life itself happening accidentally is like winning the lottery every day for 10 to 20 years in a row. Those who believe it might have happened accidentally without a God and that we won this cosmic lottery out of blind luck are lacking some common sense. They are trying really hard to believe something against all the odds and the patently obvious and simple conclusion that there must be an intelligent designer.

It is so much easier and more elegant to hypothesize that there is an original source of life outside of the physical universe. 

Note also that the lottery idea above is based on the odds that a single living cell would form by accident. I didn’t even touch on the odds of a single cell developing accidentally into anything more complicated like DNA which is necessary before you can have plants and animals.

There must be God.

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

Hoyle was knighted in England in 1972. He is also the originator of the term “Big Bang”. Many of his ideas were and still are controversial. Further quote from Wikipedia:

"Published in his 1982/1984 books Evolution from Space (co-authored with Chandra Wickramasinghe), Hoyle calculated that the chance of obtaining the required set of enzymes for even the simplest living cell without panspermia was one in 10^40,000. Since the number of atoms in the known universe is infinitesimally tiny by comparison (10⁸⁰), he argued that Earth as life's place of origin could be ruled out. He claimed: 'The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.'"

#27 The Truth About Mutation

Those who think there is no intelligent creator of all living beings very often rely on the process of random mutation as the way living species came to exist. They deal with living beings that reproduce and where mutations happen, mostly skipping over how the atoms and other materials got here in the first place.

They believe faithfully that this process could actually produce all the thousands of magnificently functioning attributes of the millions of species that exist.

But does this really make rational sense when you study the truth about mutation, not just assume what is possible “in theory”.

When you go to the dentist and have to get X-rays on your teeth, they put a lead vest on you to shield your heart. Why is that? The reason is to prevent mutations of your cells. Another term for it is cancer.

There is a big scare in the media about a hole in the ozone layer around the earth. Why? What's the big deal? It's because if there is less ozone to protect us, there will be more mutations going on, more sickness, more disease.

Most states have a law against getting married to your first cousin. Why? That's because inbreeding of close relatives increases the likelihood of genetic mutations. One famous one is hemophilia.

Every year the "Flu Season" strikes with a new mutated version of last year's flu. Is this a good thing?

If you think about it, you already know that almost all mutation is a bad thing. The odds of bad things happening as a result of a mutation are thousands of times greater than good things happening.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, a prominent evolutionary biologist [1], spent years irradiating fruit flies for thousands of generations to artificially induce mutations. What were the results? When asked, he couldn't think of a single mutant that was more viable out in nature. He could only think of several which might be more viable at unusual conditions like very elevated temperatures.

Nils H. Nilsson [2], famous Swedish botanist and evolutionist, was active in plant breeding. He has said, “My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed.”

How about the study of bacteria? Mutation has been studied most extensively in bacteriology because you can experiment with millions of bacteria and thousands of generations in a fairly short period of time. Alan H. Linton, British bacteriologist, wrote in 2001, "Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another." [3]

We currently have millions of perfectly functioning species on earth all intricately woven together in phenomenal ecosystems connected to the earth. If there was a lot of mutating going on, then where are all the bad results from the mutations. The track record of mutations is mostly diseased and dysfunctional results. Where are they out in nature?

The fossil record does not show any "missing links". This is a well known fact. But, a missing link is an intermediary step along the "right" path to get to a certain developed species. But think about it. Missing links are a tiny, tiny fraction of what would have to be thousands of mutated beings that were the "wrong" path for every "missing link" along the "right" path. No mutants exist in the fossil record either.

All the species on the earth seem to exist in their "final" form, their "perfected" form, and fully functioning. How come scientists don't find any species in nature that are mutating toward something else? There are no records of ever having actually seen instances of evolution for as long as they have been looking. There have of course been changes within a species, but that’s not evolution.

Here is an even more fundamental problem for those who have faith in mutation. Mutation requires changes BUT ONLY after there is already a successfully functioning species. Where did that first species come from? You have to have a male and female correctly functioning respectively before they can have a mating relationship which could result in a mutation.

This picture from Wikipedia shows what types of mutations can occur. But note that it assumes the original DNA exists before mutation occurs. It cannot explain the original existence of the DNA.

In the old days people used to think that life could spontaneously "combust" out of nothing. No one believes that anymore. Life only comes from life.

Because there is life, the original source must have the attribute of life.

There must be God.

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[1] Theodosius Dobzhansky, (January 24, 1900 - December 18, 1975) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosius_Dobzhansky
was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Heribert-Nilsson

[3] Alan H. Linton, emeritus professor of bacteriology, University of Bristol (U.K.), in The Times Higher Education Supplement (April 20, 2001), p. 29.

#26 The Things In Your Room

Look around you in the room that you are sitting in. You could probably identify 1000 different objects in most rooms.

These pictures are from a Google Images search for “my room”.

Pick just one object and imagine backwards in time as far back as you can regarding that object and the process it went through from the very beginning until it came to exist in your room.

Let’s say you bought it at a store. Somehow it got to that store from the manufacturer which could be as far away as the other side of the earth, like China.

There may be hundreds of ingredients that were brought together from various sources by the manufacturer. Is it wood, plastic, metal, or something else? Where did that raw material originate? 

How did it get its color? Was it artificially colored? By what? What was that process? 

What about the shape of the object? Was it random?

I’m sure you cannot imagine it got that form randomly. Almost absolutely you will know that some intelligent person designed the look and feel and components of that object. He or she designed it over time after much thought and many developmental stages. Blueprints of some kind were made for the construction engineers and the manufacturing process.

Some intelligent person probably laid out an assembly line process and the exact sequence to build the object. Intelligent workers were brought in for each stage of the process. Maybe there were a large number of intricate parts to be assembled, some by machines, some manually. Imagine the sophistication of those machines.

I once watched a documentary on TV about how a simple pencil is mass produced. Once I saw one about potato chips.

Looking again around your room at all of the objects, you know for sure that the most complicated ones were the most difficult to produce. The most complicated objects required the most highly intelligent people to create them.

Ask yourself if there is even one single object in your room that is totally the result of accident and randomness? Is there one single item in your room that exists there which has no purpose? Is there any object that exists which was not caused by intelligent beings?

Nobody in their right mind would argue that any object in your room occurred randomly or by accident with just one exception.

The exception is YOU. Atheists and evolutionists believe that YOU came to exist by accident.

YOU, the most extraordinarily complicated entity in your room (in fact, in the entire universe), somehow got there by accident and a random assembly process.

Preposterous.

Absurd.

There must be God.

#25 New Zealand Long Finned Eel

The Longfinned Eels of New Zealand grow very slowly but eventually they reach about 6.5 feet long and 40 pounds for females. Males are smaller, only about 2.5 feet. They only mate once in their lives at the very end right before they die and in a place thousands of miles from their home. To make it even more complicated the males die much younger than the females. Males die at an average age of 23 years old, but females live to an average of 34 (usually ranging from 27 years old to 61), with one recorded as old as 106 years.

Something like this could not happen accidentally, randomly, or by natural selection. There must be a God who created this, probably for the pure fascination of His children. In all the years scientists have studied these eels, they have never located their mating grounds.

Scientists speculate various locations from the deep ocean trenches east of Tonga to the deep trenches near New Caledonia. (Some say the Coral Sea.) They do know the female eels can have millions of eggs in the ovaries, but they don’t know what the males do to fertilize them.

Each eel only mates once, after having traveled thousands of miles from their home, and then it dies. The females are usually an average of 12 years older, so there is a huge problem for this species to evolve. How could it possibly have gotten started and continued for so long? Some scientists believe they existed 65 million years ago. Others say 23 million years ago. What if the males and females don’t swim to the exact same place over thousands of miles or die en route? What if some males don’t show up for a few years and the females die off or vice versa? What if the ocean currents take the eggs out to sea and not back to New Zealand?

When the eels reach the end of their lives, their heads become much more slender and tapered, their skin turns darker, and their eyes double in size. They swim from their fresh water home to the ocean and at that time they stop eating and begin their long journey. They never eat again. They swim over 1,200 miles according to some scientists and over 3,100 miles according to others. Reaching their spawning grounds, the females lay their eggs and die.

In some unknown way the eggs are fertilized. The larvae are called leptocephalus and look nothing like an eel – they are transparent, flat, and leaf-shaped. The larvae reach New Zealand by drifting on ocean currents taking a year to as much as 18 months of floating.

Off the New Zealand coast they change into tiny little eels before going up the fresh water rivers. They are now called “glass” eels because you can see through them. They begin swimming upstream and start to change color to brown as they go along their way. Young eels (called elvers) swim upstream and spend a number of years maturing in freshwater.

They are legendary climbers and have made their way well inland in most river systems, even those with natural barriers. Remarkably they have the ability to get out of the water and travel sort distances on land when they encounter obstacles like waterfalls or dams. Elvers (young eels) swimming up river will climb waterfalls and even dams by leaving the water and wriggling over damp areas. It is not unheard of for an eel to climb a waterfall of up to 20 meters (60 feet).[1]

The theory of natural selection says there is no God and things developed randomly because of some benefit to the organisms or better adaption to the environment. The whole life cycle of the Longfinned Eel at every stage is taking the hard and complicated way, not the easy way. This is a creature that's very existence leaves you feeling a sense of awe.

There are 4 distinct phases in their life cycle. Can a reasonable mind really believe that all these stages could have developed by accident. Only a mind of faith can explain it, so people can choose either faith in a creator God as the source or have faith in some miracle of accidents and coincidences in an extraordinarily long improbable sequence.

It only makes sense that there must be God.

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[1] http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/fish/facts/eel/

Long-finned Eels of Marlborough, New Zealand (YouTube video)

http://youtu.be/95nUTKnDIU4 

#24 Pacific Golden Plover

Take a look at the globe sometime and notice the distance from Alaska to Hawaii. Also note that Hawaii is out in the middle of nowhere and it would be pretty hard to find in the Pacific unless you knew exactly where you were going.

How easy would it be for a bird to hatch from its egg, have its parents leave after just a few days, fend for itself for a couple months, plump up in weight, and then take off flying to Hawaii non-stop for longer than 70 hours [1] with no guides, and not miss?

The birds that do exactly this are called Pacific Golden Plovers (Pluvialis fulva), known by natives of Hawaii as Kolea. They are small and weigh only about 8 ounces. Every year they migrate between Alaska and Hawaii or other similar routes making nearly a 2,000 mile journey without stopping or resting because they can't swim. It takes them about 70 hours each way and they lose 50% of their body weight. They are known to return to Hawaii to the exact same patch of grass year after year for up to 20 years [2]. Some return to the same backyard and are welcomed by the natives. They like front lawns, parks, ball fields, sometimes even in parking lots.

The parent Plovers live in Alaska from May to August, forage for food, mate, nest, and wait for the young to hatch. In August while the chicks are days old, the parents leave their young behind in Alaska and fly to Hawaii without them. The young have to grow and bulk up on food and water much longer. About October they leave for Hawaii. During the trip they will use up half of their body weight in energy to make the trip.

By the end of April or early May, all the Plovers will have left Hawaii and journeyed the 2,000 miles back to Alaska. For Hawaiians  the coming and going of the Plovers mark the changing of the seasons.

The Theory of Evolution is based on a process described as slow and incremental changes over long periods of time. There are no partial incremental trips from Alaska to Hawaii for a bird that can't swim. The Plover has to have eaten enough to make the trip and fly exactly to a very small target in the Pacific Ocean the very first time or else die. If it dies along the way, there is no reproduction and hence no evolution.

Darwin himself recognized the limitation of his theory and what scientific facts would invalidate it. He is quoted as saying:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case." [3]

It would take a very, very intelligent designer to build a machine capable of flying from Alaska to Hawaii non-stop the very first time. To believe the Pacific Golden Plover happened accidentally is fantasy.

There must be a God.


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[1] https://phys.org/news/2011-06-plovers-tracked-pacific.html

[2] https://phys.org/news/2011-06-plovers-tracked-pacific.html

[3] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition, Harvard University Press, 1964, p. 189.

#23 Children and Parents

We are all children of our parents. Inside us are very powerful instincts to have a relationship with our parents. Automatic bonding takes place without a conscious decision.

Even many children who are adopted would go to great lengths to try to learn who their real biological parents are.

We are innately constituted in our very being to having a loving relationship with our parents. This is a win-win relationship for everyone. If our parents are mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy and we are in a loving relationship with them, then the odds are huge that we will be healthy also. Even the community around us will benefit.

But this is also a lose-lose proposition. If the parents are immature, then they become an upper limit on their children’s maturity. If the parents are abusive, then the odds are that the children will also become abusive.

The parent-child relationship is so much of an underlying foundation for our existence that if we are abandoned emotionally and spiritually as children, we will have serious psychological consequences and may even never recover.

The highest revealed understanding of the nature of God is that of a loving Father and Mother, i.e. parents. 

If one does not have God in their life, they are abandoned like a child. He or she is consciously or unconsciously on a search to fill the empty space in that deep inner part of their being.

Many substitutes appear such as money, knowledge, power, sex, or fame which seem for a while to fill the emptiness. But none of them will ever truly satisfy the place reserved for God in our lives. They eventually will be recognized for what they are, false gods.

Sadness, emptiness, bitterness, and resentment, and usually pain are all the results of chasing after these false gods.

It’s either a win-win or a lose-lose for each person having a relationship with God. We are designed to exist in a loving relationship with God, our eternal parents. Nothing else will ultimately satisfy our hearts.

There must be a God.

PS:  Allow me to share the final two paragraphs from a recent book I read, Life In Eternity.

“…as I looked at the sleepy faces of those sitting and standing all around me, I gasped in instantaneous tears. For as I discerned each person’s face -- whether that of a child, a young adult, an older man, or a beautiful woman, as well as the faces of many other people from all walks of life -- I became instantly conscious of two extraordinary realities. In the first nanosecond, I saw each human face expressing the sense of being lost and all the myriad pain of disorientation, and the ongoing suffering involved in the lifetime struggle to overcome an unknown amnesia and to live a conscientious life. In the next nanosecond, I saw how much, how desperately, how passionately God loves each person, how tremendously much God longed to be able to assuage each man’s and each woman’s pain, how much God desired to restore to each person the sense, the living reality of his or her own true identity as an authentic son or daughter of God -- and to reassure each person that they were not only immeasurably loved by God but, as God’s child, he or she had a truly cosmic identity as a Being of LOVE, potentially capable of exercising unlimited power to create. I felt so much of God’s heart to rescue us, to embrace each of us, so much of God’s yearning to reassure us, to heal us -- so that we could finally be immersed in the cosmic joy that in our original birthright.

Slowly, as I stepped back from this realization, I stopped crying. And I simply knew then that, however many dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions of years it might take, God would walk with us every step of the way, that God would recover all of us as His children, who could finally and triumphantly declare: WE HAVE AWAKENED! WE DO KNOW WHO WE ARE! WE ARE THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF GOD!” [1]

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[1] Life In Eternity: Human Beings in the Spirit World, by Kerry Pobanz. 2012, ISBN 978-1-105-65604-0

#22 Life Spans

Living entities that reproduce over longer life cycles, if they had evolved, would have necessarily taken a longer time.

A rather simple conclusion that must be drawn from the Theory of Evolution is that beings that take years to reproduce must take longer than beings that reproduce in days or weeks. A human being takes about 20 years between generations. A fruit fly takes about 8.5 days between fertilization and adulthood.

But this has not been demonstrated to be true at all.

Take for example experiments on fruit flies. This is a "species that is easy to care for, breeds quickly, and lays many eggs." [1] Eggs can develop into mature adults in roughly 8.5 days. Females will lay about 400 eggs. Research on heredity using fruit flies has been some of the most important research in the history of biology. [2]

Fruit Fly

If you assume half the eggs are female and each individual of each generation every 8.5 days produces 200 female eggs. They could produce 25 to 40 generations in a year. The number of individuals produced that could possibility have evolved is gigantic. 200 x 200 x 200 ... (25 times) in one year. That's of the order of 3.3 x 10 to the 57th power.

That's a lot of opportunity to be able to observe some evolution. Compare that to humans which take 20 years to grow to where they can produce a second generation. There have probably been more generations of fruit flies studied by scientists than there have ever been of human beings.

Yet in all the years of doing scientific research on fruit flies, there has never been any observable evolution. Even when the scientists are interfering, they can't get any evolution.

In July, 2012, there was news that scientists had "evolved" fruit flies that could count.[3] Actually, they detected some perceived response to light flashes after 40 generations. This is not evolution. (1) These are still fruit flies. At most they learned some trick. They did not evolve into some other species, which is what evolution is supposed to be all about. (2) The fruit flies did not change on their own. There was obviously a lot of human intelligence applied. (3) After years of experiments and countless generations, fruit flies are still fruit flies. There is no evidence of evolution. Change yes, but evolution no.

Human beings are millions of times more complicated than fruit flies. Fruit flies mature in 8.5 days compared to humans at about 20 years. That means fruit flies mature 859 times faster.

In the scheme proposed by the Theory of Evolution, the more complicated and highly evolved entities emerged later in time. But this is not feasible because those with longer life spans have to take hundreds of times longer to produce each successive generation.

We can apply this same logic all over creation. Using other insects, fish, or mammals with short life spans that have been studied by scientists, evolution has never been demonstrated. Mice live only for 1 to 3 years. Rabbits live up to 5 years. House flies and bees live about 4 weeks. Pigmy goby fish live only 2 months. Where is there any evolution ever shown in these species? The mayfly that lives less than a day has been around for 300 million years, but it's still a mayfly.

Mouse

Rabbit

House Fly

Pigmy Goby

What about all the beings with much longer life cycles? How could they evolve when it takes so long for one generation to reproduce? Elephants take 2 years in the womb. Giraffes and rhinos take more than a year. The lowly velvet worm takes 15 months. Whales and dolphins take over a year and a half. How about the Black Alpine Salamander that takes 2 to 3 years to produce just 2 offspring? Then there is the champion 17 year cicada which takes 17 years between generations.

Black Alpine Salamander

Velvet Worm

17 Year Cicada

After you apply years and years of research trying to validate a theory and you still have never been able to find any evidence that it is true, isn't it about time to junk that theory?

There must be God.


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[1] Wikipedia. Fruit Fly article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster

[2] Wikipedia. Fruit Fly article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster

[3] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/flies-learn-math/