Where the Conflict Really Lies, Part 2

In part 1 of my review of Dr. Alvin Plantinga’s book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, I spent all my time discussing how he deals with the superficial conflict between theism and science. That’s because Plantinga spends most of his book discussing the issue. When it is time to move on to the deep concord that exists between science and theism, you have reached page 191 of 350. I suppose he spends so much time on the issue because there is so much discussion of it in today’s society.

When Plantinga moves on to discussing what he sees as the deep concord between science and theism, he brings up many familiar arguments. He starts with the “fine tuning” argument, which says that science has found many, many aspects of the universe that would forbid life if they were much different from how we actually observe them:

For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life even remotely similar to the sort we have, could probably not have developed (p. 195)

Thus, it really does look like the universe was “rigged” to produce life, as the theist believes.

Plantinga also discusses the argument that turned me from atheist to creationist – the argument from design. When we observe nature, we see instances of the most exquisite design, which generally implies the existence of a designer. He says that the design argument isn’t an irrefutable argument for theism. After all, there are ways around it. However, they “add to the pile” of evidence for theism. Here is how he puts it:

…design discourses do support theism, although it isn’t easy to see how much support they offer. I realize that this is a wet noodle conclusion: can’t I say something more definite and exciting? Well, I’d love to; but my job here is to tell the sober truth, whether or not it is exciting. That obligation can sometimes interfere with telling a good story, but what can I say? (p. 264)

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Where the Conflict Really Lies, Part 1

I have written about Dr. Alvin Plantinga before (here, here, and here). He is arguably the most important Christian philosopher alive today and is largely responsible for the revitalization of Christian philosophy that took place in the mid-to-late 1900s. As my previous posts indicate, I don’t always agree with Dr. Plantinga. However, each time I have read one of his books or listened to one of his lectures, I have learned a great deal. As a result, I was thrilled to receive a copy of his newest book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism for Christmas.

Like any serious book on science or philosophy, this is not an easy book to read. It’s not that Plantiga is hard to understand – quite the opposite. It’s just that he thinks very, very deeply. As a result, when you read his books, you also have to think deeply. Of course, the hard work is rewarded if you stick with it, but make no mistake about it – reading this book in its entirety is hard work. Now Dr. Plantinga has made it a bit easier for you if you don’t want to work quite so hard. The book is written in two fonts: a large one and a small one. If you read just the large font, you can understand the message of the book, but you won’t get bogged down by certain details. If you read the small font as well, you get the message of the book in all its philosophical depth. While that is challenging, it is well worth it.

Dr. Plantinga encapsulates the message of his book in an elegant phrase. He says that his overall claim can be summed up as follows:

There is a superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism. (p. ix)

Needless to say, I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. Interestingly enough, however, I agree with it for slightly different reasons from those that are given in the book.

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Silver Foxes Change Rapidly… and in Surprising Ways

In the experiment, farm-bred silver foxes went from being agressive towards people (left) to being friendly (right) in as little as six generations. (Photos from reference 1)

I recently read about a fascinating experiment that has been going on in Russia for the past 50 years. Dmitry K. Belyaev acquired some silver foxes from a farm that breeds them for their fur. The farm started about 50 years prior to the experiment, so several generations of foxes had experienced human contact to some degree. However, the foxes still did not care for human contact and were quite aggressive if they were forced into such contact.

Belyaev took this group of foxes and began trying to develop a new trait: tameness. Each fox was exposed to a human for a specific amount of time at specific ages. The fox was then evaluated based on how well it reacted to the human, and only the foxes with the best overall reactions to humans were bred. In a mere six generations, some foxes were born that not only enjoyed human contact, they actually craved it! This behavior became characteristic of the entire population, so that the foxes now behave like dogs – wagging their tails, whimpering, licking people, and generally doing all they can to interact with people.1

Now these results are cool on at least two levels. First, I was shocked at how quickly the foxes adapted to human socialization. For human-friendly foxes to appear in a mere six generations just astounds me. I know that dogs were domesticated from wolves, but I always imagined that it took a long, long time. After all, a lot has to change in order to take an animal that avoids people and is aggressive towards them and turn it into an animal that not only jumps up on your lap to cuddle with you but begs to be able to do so! According to this experiment, however, the change can happen quickly. Second, I just think it would be incredibly cool to have a pet fox. From time to time, I see a wild red fox in the neighborhood where I live. I would love to have such a beautiful animal as a pet!

Those are the cool aspects of the experiment. However, there are a lot more interesting aspects to the experiment, and they indicate that we still have a lot to learn when it comes to genetics.

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The Debate is Settled on Another “Vestigial Organ”

The Guiana dolphin's vibrissal crypts, which some thought were vestigial remains of whiskers (photo from reference 3)
Most dolphins are born with hairs on their rostrum. However, those hairs quickly fall out, leaving empty pits behind. The photograph on the left gives a rather striking example of these pits, which are often called vibrissal crypts. For a long time, there has been controversy in the scientific literature regarding what these pits are. Some have contended that they are leftover vestiges from when the ancestors of dolphins had whiskers1, while others have suggested that they serve some sort of sensory purpose.2

Wolf Hanke and his colleagues set out to settle this controversy for at least one species – the Guiana dolphin (Sotalia guianensis). As they say in the introduction to their study3

These vibrissal crypts are often described as vestigial structures lacking innervation and the characteristic blood sinuses [15,16], which are probably reduced in favour of the sonar system.

However, they indicate that there are some data that contradict this this idea, so they decided to do a detailed study of the Guiana dolphin’s vibrissal crypts. First, they examined the microscopic structure of the tissue. They noticed that each crypt had about 300 nerves plugged into it, which is more than the number of nerves plugged into a rat’s whisker. It seems obvious that there wouldn’t be such a large amount of nerve tissue wasted on a useless structure.

In addition, the tissue looked a lot like the electroreceptors found in the bill of a platypus which allow the platypus to detect electrical fields in the murky water where it lives. Why would the platypus want to sense electrical fields? Because whenever a muscle contracts, it sends out a weak electrical signal. As a result, a platypus can find prey without seeing or smelling it. All the platypus has to do is find the electrical signals being emitted by the prey’s contracting muscles.

So the microscopic structure of the tissue in the vibrissal crypts makes it look like the Guiana dolphin uses them to detect electrical signals, just as the platypus does. The scientists decided to put this idea to the test, and the results were astounding.

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The Rage Against God

Peter Hitchens is probably best known for the fact that he is the brother of Christopher Hitchens, the famous New Atheist who recently died. This is unfortunate, because he is actually a very accomplished writer. He was a resident foreign correspondent for British newspapers in both Moscow and Washington, and over the years, he has written five books. In 2010, he was awarded Britain’s most prestigious prize for political journalism, The Orwell Prize. Honestly, I had never heard of him until I read about his latest book, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. Given that he is the brother of a New Atheist, and given that New Atheists are known for their anger against God, I decided this would be an interesting book to read. While it did turn out to be interesting, it wasn’t anything like I expected it to be.

I think my expectations for the book were wrong because I didn’t appreciate the fact that Peter Hitchens is a political writer. As a result, he seems to see things through the prism of power and control. For example, here is how he explains the New Atheists’ rage against God:

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Why is it more advanced in Britain than in the USA? I have had good reason to seek the answer to this question, and I have found it where I might have expected to have done if only I had grasped from the start how large are the issues at stake. Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power. (pp. 112-113)

In other words, as far as Peter Hitchens is concerned, it’s all about power. There is a rage against God (and Christianity in particular), because belief in traditional religious principles gets in the way of the New Atheists’ desire to force people to live the way the New Atheists want them to live.

How does Peter Hitchens come to this conclusion? Mainly, it is because of his life experiences. A large part of the book is concerned with his experiences as a foreign correspondent in Moscow. As he discusses them, he paints a picture of Russia in the waning days of the Soviet Union, and it is not pretty. The people are mostly depressed, alcoholism is rampant, and there is no freedom. Everyone is watching everyone else, and if you aren’t connected to one of the elites, the slightest mistake can produce drastic consequences. In the end, all this was possible because of the supreme power the Soviet Union wielded over its people.

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You Never Know What They Will Discover…If You Let Them!

Tetrakis(nitratoxycarbon)methane, a theoretically-possible molecule discovered by ten-year-old
Clara L. Lazen.
Back when I was on the faculty at Ball State University, I was cleaning some platinum foils that I was using in my research. I brushed them with ethanol and then put them in a flame until they glowed red hot. By accident (which is often the way scientific truths are discovered), I found that if I passed a platinum foil back over (but not into) the ethanol while it was hot but no longer glowing, it would start to glow red hot again. When I pulled it away from the ethanol, it would stop glowing, but if I put it near the ethanol soon enough, it would once again begin to glow. I was fascinated by this effect and played with it for quite a while. The next day, I was teaching chemistry to a class of gifted-and-talented high school juniors, and I showed them what I had found. Then I gave them the “explanation” for it.

Platinum is a known catalyst, which means it tends to speed up a reaction without being consumed. In addition, alcohols are known to decompose into another class of organic molecules called “aldehydes,” and that happens quickly in the presence of the right catalyst. Thus, it was “obvious” what was going on: the platinum was catalyzing the decomposition of ethanol vapors into aldehyde vapors (specifically, acetaldehyde vapors), and the energy released by that reaction heated the already-hot platinum sufficiently to start it glowing red again. The students oohed and ahhed over the effect, and they dutifully wrote down my explanation in their notes. At the end of class, however, one of the students patiently explained to me that my analysis couldn’t be correct.

You see, she had done something I hadn’t bothered to do. She used the appendixes in the back of her book to calculate the energetics of the decomposition of ethanol into acetaldehyde, and she found that the reaction actually absorbed energy. It did not release energy. Thus, it could not be heating the platinum! Needless to say, I was rather impressed with this young lady’s analysis. The next class period, I told all the students that I was wrong and that I would look into the real explanation. However, I couldn’t find anything in the chemical literature that was relevant. As a result, I asked the young lady if she would work under my NSF research grant that summer and figure out what was really going on. She was surprised that I thought she could figure something like that out, but she said she would be happy to try.

It took her only a few weeks to learn what was really going on. Yes, the platinum was catalyzing the decomposition of ethanol into acetaldehyde, but that wasn’t what was causing the effect. Instead, the other product of that decomposition, hydrogen, was reacting with the oxygen in the air to make water. That reaction released the energy which caused the platinum to heat up enough to glow red hot again. This young lady’s work was so solid and elegant that we published a paper on her explanation of the effect.1

Why am I telling you this story? Because a friend of mine alerted me to an article that brought it all back to me in vivid detail.

Continue reading “You Never Know What They Will Discover…If You Let Them!”

From Atheist to Creationist: Several Have Made That Journey

I receive a regular newsletter from Creation Ministries International (CMI), a young-earth creationist group made up of scientists from around the world. While I was reading the October, 2011 edition of that newsletter, I ran across an article entitled “Eternal fruit – from atheist to creationist.” According to the article:

Sai-Chung was an atheist activist attending church to study Christianity – so as to be effective at undermining it!

Well, it turns out that this man attended a talk on creation science given by Warwick Armstrong, who used to be a speaker at CMI but is now retired. Recently, Sai-Chung contacted CMI and told them that Armstrong’s talk (which was given in 2003) was instrumental in him coming to faith in Christ. He is now a youth group leader in the Chinese extension of one of Australia’s largest churches. He was actually contacting CMI because he wanted some assistance in polishing off his first talk on creation.

So here is someone who attended church specifically to learn how to undermine it. Obviously, then, he was not predisposed to believe what the Church (or the creationist speaker) was telling him. Nevertheless, what he heard was so convincing that he not only decided to put away his atheism and become a Christian, he also decided to become a young-earth creationist! That story, in and of itself, is quite interesting. It also got me to thinking: Sai-Chung isn’t the only one who made the journey from atheist to young-earth creationist. I made that same journey, albeit by taking a slightly different path.

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Cooler Heads Are Starting to Prevail

Someone I respect and admire sent me a Wall Street Journal article that was published on January 27, 2012. It is an opinion piece written by 16 scientists and is entitled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”1 While most of the scientists who authored the opinion piece are not climatologists, there are three notable exceptions: William Robert Kininmonth was in charge of Australia’s National Climate Centre at the Bureau of Meteorology from 1986 to 1998. Dr. Richard Lindzen is professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT and has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications in the field of climatology. Henk Tennekes is the former director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute.

These and the other 13 authors offered some advice to any candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy. He or she should understand:

…that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

The article makes many good points. It brings up the fact that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever left the American Physical Society because of its anti-science stance on global warming. It informs the reader that there has not been any detectable warming of the earth over the past ten years and that climate alarmists can’t explain why. It also tells us:

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse.

More importantly, it brings up the fact that all models which have been used to promote the idea that global warming is human-made and catastrophic in nature have consistently overpredicted the rise in earth’s surface temperatures for the past 22 years. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. Those who want to convince us that drastic action must be taken to curb global warming typically use computer models to tell us how horrible the results of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be in future decades. However, those computer models have consistently been wrong, and most climate scientists know this.

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Having Troubles Posting Comments?

I got an E-MAIL indicating that someone was having trouble posting comments to my latest blog entry. I tried posting the comment as a reader and also had trouble, so I am having someone who knows more about WordPress than me look into what might be the problem. Since I have gotten comments in the past few days, this might not be a problem that affects everyone. Hopefully, it will be cleared up soon.

UPDATE: It seems the problem with posting had to do with a specific link that was in the comment. Removing the link seems to make the comment post fine. If you are having trouble posting, please contact me here to let me know.

The New Creationism

Paul Garner is a British environmental scientist and Fellow of the Geological Society of London. He is a very active young-earth creationist researcher, currently doing original geological research in collaboration with Dr. John Whitmore and Dr. Steve Austin. He also recently authored a book called The New Creationism.

The word “new” in the title does not mean that he is offering some fundamentally new concept in creationism. Instead, the purpose of the book is to give the reader an understanding of the latest creationist models in the areas of astronomy, geology, and biology. In this purpose, Garner succeeds admirably. He is not only a very understandable writer, he is also very knowledgeable in a wide range of fields. As a result, this book is easy-to-read and (mostly) accurate.

There are many things l really like about this book, and one of them is that Garner makes sure the reader is not fooled by terminology. For example, in his second chapter (“The Sun, Moon, and Stars”) he discusses how astrophysicists think main sequence stars (such as our sun) eventually turn into different kinds of stars (like red giants, white dwarfs, and supergiants) and perhaps even supernovae. He then says:

Some creationists have instinctively reacted against this idea because the process of change is usually referred to as ‘stellar evolution.’ However, it is perhaps better to think of it as ‘stellar ageing’ because the changes are nothing more than an outworking of the law of entropy, the tendency of all natural systems to move towards a disordered state. (p. 37)

This is a very important point. What is generally referred to as “stellar evolution” has nothing to do with evolution as the term is generally used. It certainly has to do with change, and “evolution” can mean “change.” However, the general use of the term “evolution” implies an increase in complexity, and that is certainly not what goes on in stellar evolution.

Another thing I really liked about the book is that it concentrates on the evidence that supports creation and only discusses the evidence against evolution when necessary. Many creationist books are nothing more than attacks on evolution. While it is important to show a competing theory’s weaknesses, science should never be focused on shooting down opposing ideas. It should be focused on building up your own ideas. As a result, Garner gives the reader a lot of evidence that supports various creationist models.

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