Month: October 2014

Lesson 3: It Was Good

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So unfortunately, part of the course is missing (For $20.00, I was expecting nothing but the best!) and I cannot get page 12 of the leader’s guide which contains discussion question one for this chapter.

To be fair, I get half of the discussion answer from question one, but even with that it makes little enough sense that I am afraid I can’t figure out what the question was supposed to be. In any case, I will put the answer as far as I am able to see it, and you can make up a question in your own head.

Question one: ???

Their Answer: Evolutionists and atheists do not like the idea of a Creator who can give them rules for their lives, has judged His creation in the past, and will do it again for their disobedience. Their problem is their sin, not their science.

My Answer: … … Kay.

Question two: How would a hydrospheric layer, a canopy, on top of Earth’s atmosphere affect living conditions on Earth?

Their Answer: Oxygen and pressure would be increased, allowing for global, tropical conditions, resulting in larger, healthier, more energetic life. This would make larger plants, men, reptiles (Dinosaurs), etc., explaining the evidence found in the fossil record.

My Answer: One thing that I found interesting in this lesson was how they explain from where the water for Noah’s flood came (though I am still unclear on where it went; I believe, if my cursory understanding YEC science holds, God just created more land. Or something.). There was, prior to the flood (they tell us) a Hydrosphere above all current layers of the atmosphere. The Hydrosphere increased atmospheric pressure, as it was actively exerting downward force on the current layers of the atmosphere. Now, this was not gaseous water, it is important to let you know this; it was liquid water. How was it floating there? I have no idea. If it was floating, how was the atmospheric pressure was supposed to be increased? If it was not floating, as by magic (God did it, of course), then it would have just crashed to the Earth in a crushing sheet.

In any case, we know what would happen with a higher Oxygen content atmosphere, you get larger animals. I am not familiar enough with prehistoric atmospheric conditions to tell you what the pressure would have been like. I could go look it up, but that is for later.

Question three: Who is responsible for suffering in the world?

Their Answer: Man. Man’s sin ruined God’s good creation.

My Answer: I agree that the suffering in the world is largely man’s fault, but I am not willing to say that the world was perfect before some arbitrary date in the past (the flood occurred during the year 2400 BC, give or take a dollar).

That’s it for the questions.

During the application section, they posit that evolution was created, specifically and wholesale, by Satan. Evolution, they say, was created for the WHOLE PURPOSE of leading men away from God, and has NOTHING to do with explaining nature. Of course.

Challenge for Lesson 3: Memorize Romans 5:12 (“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”) Then find someone, and quote this at them. Surely, this will prove to them where death came from and thus make them Christian! (Again, maybe a little paraphrasing).

It says that this is a masterfully insightful passage, and will show them that it is not God’s fault that life is a bitch. (Paraphrasing)

Lesson 2: How Old is it?

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Oh man, I actually had to step back and take a 15 minute breather after I watched lesson 2. They are willing to ignore so much science if it means that they can prove that the Earth fits their cosmological model. The best part, for them, is that they can use two different numbers (4400 years since the flood, 6000 years of human history), and anything that even partially correlates to these two numbers can be used to prove they are right. Doesn’t matter how much they have to ignore, so long as they have some correlation.

Anyway, I said I would be posting the discussion questions, not the course material. I apologize.

Question 1: How do limiting factors demonstrate a young Earth?

Their answer: Natural phenomena date back fairly recently, indicating that the earth’s age cannot be much older than 6000 years. (There seems to be a missing bit of text here, because I cannot make sense of it this next part) Otherwise, these phenomena would be much older, too. Other indicators, such as current population sizes, etc, as well as the complete absence of older phenomena, clearly confirm the Bible, which gave us a 4000 year history prior to Christ.

My answer: This isn’t a discussion question at all. This doesn’t ask me to affirm my faith, or talk about anything. They just present limited historical studies, ignore most historical studies, and tell me to move on. I suppose all that’s left is for me to talk about the “Facts” in their discussion answer (which are but a small snippet of what they present in the class). First, let’s look at human history. Ancient Egyptian history dates back to about 3100 BC, which doesn’t show the Earth as older than 6000 years, but it gets more interesting for them when you realize that their history continues unbroken through the flood.

Just throwin’ it out there. Unless Noah decided to preserve some Egyptian writings, I can’t see how that goes away. Or how about there.

How about Sumeria? Same thing, their written records go back to 3500BC, though they talk about having settled the area of Sumer prior to the appearance of writing. Even ignoring that, there is unbroken history that passes trough the period of Noah’s flood.

Cave paintings may not have been writing, but they go back into the tens of thousands of years. You may argue that our dating methods are flawed in this case, but whatever you happen to believe, a worldwide flood would have washed away these paintings, which exist almost exclusively in caves that are situated where the elements would not otherwise wash them away.

Their evidence for natural phenomena is incredibly limited, and basically ignores tree ring dating and ice layer dating, as far as this course is concerned, so I guess that is all I can say about that.

As far as population evidence, they assume a constant rate of growth, which is an odd thing. Looking at uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, for example, we see that their populations are completely static. If the growth of populations was completely uniform, as they (indefensibly) believe, would seem to indicate a world where there are equal numbers of every race of human (as you may recall, as of the year 2400BC, there were only 8 middle eastern tribesmen/women left alive on the Earth). They all had the exact same number of children, for the purposes of this math.

I think that covers their answer in the discussion section, though a book could be written to stand against what they presented in the course itself.

Question 2: Why does the establishment propagate lies such as the necessity of long ages for the formation of stalactites and stalagmites?

Their Answer: Much time is needed to afford the theory of evolution. Evoltuionism requires much more time than is evidenced. Examples such as “million-year-old” stactites are necessary to overcome the embarrassing limiting factors that disprove their faulty worldview.

My Answer: Again, they took a small sample of stalactites from areas local to the United States, and then applied them to all stalactites and stalagmites in the entire world. They did the same to petrification, of course (Look, this petrified pickle obviously proves that ALL petrification can happen in the shelflife of a pickle!). It isn’t even that evolution is some wide ranging science that every scientist clamors to prove, it is just that geology, chemistry, biology, they all seem to point to similar indications. I won’t say there are no flaws, no areas that could be “shored up” so to speak, with better information, but science is constantly growing, constantly learning. If I don’t have the answer today, I don’t believe that to mean I will never happen. In the 1980s, if you said you were looking for extrasolar planets, and perhaps even extrasolar life, they would have laughed you out of the conference. Now we have found over 1500 extrasolar planets, and are searching for factors that could indicate life. This is only 30 years later. That blows my mind, and I hope it blows yours, too!

Question 3: According to the dates given in the Bible, the earth is about 6000 years old. Evolutionists claim that it is billions of years old. How does this conflict affect the lost and the faith of believers?

Their answer: It casts doubt and unbelief in the minds of the lost and unbelievers. If they cannot trust Genesis, a book to which almost every other book in the Bible refers, and a book to which Jesus himself referred, stating, “In the beginning…” then how can they trust other parts of the Word of God?

My Answer: I believe that far too much stock is placed, by YECs, in the literal veracity of certain parts of the Bible, and to the odd exclusion of others. In various other posts in this blog, I have pointed out explicit, point for point contradictions in this “perfect” book.

I am not aiming to take faith away from the faithful, I am aiming to make people think about what they believe. If you believe in the literal, perfect Bible, I can prove your beliefs false. If you believe in a loving saviour, in Jesus the Christ, I do not want to prove your beliefs false. It is only when your beliefs work to the detriment of society that I have a problem, and many, if not most, believers in the Western world are far more moderate, and I respect their God, gods, and/or theologies (as much to the extent as one such as myself can).

That’s it for the questions, but one more thing:

In their “Application” section of the lesson, where they tell you why you MUST believe the things they have taught you, they state that “As the worldview of Evolutionism continues to permeate our educational system and society, crime, sin, disease, and evil continue to skyrocket”

I’ll just leave this here.

The Challenge for lesson two is to start an argument with someone who believes the world is over 6000 years old, and challenge them with cherry picked evidence for a young Earth, and hope they have a very loose grasp of history.

I.. Uhhh… May be paraphrasing a little.

Lesson 1: They are both religions

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As part of my ongoing quest to learn everything I can, I am now posting the discussion questions, and my answers, to the final paper in lesson 1 of my Young Earth Creationist course. Lesson 1 is titled “They are Both Religions”, and compares the faith required to accept religion to the faith required to accept evolution. That is a little bit of a misrepresentation; they accept micro evolution (which they term, staunchly, adaptation, for fear of the “e” word), so what this course really considers a religion is the idea of abiogenesis (life from non-life, ie: how the first life form came into being).

To that end, below are the discussion questions at the end of lesson one, the answers provided by the course leaders, and my answers to the questions.

Question 1: What are the four basic questions of man? Are they still relevant in our society today? If so, why?

Answer provided by the textbook: The four questions are Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going when I die?
The way we answer these questions is related to our worldviews, which have ramifications in any culture or society.

My answers to the questions:

Who am I? I am a homo sapiens, a primate that is the result of thousands of millions of years of evolution. I am a member of the caucasian race, though I do not believe that the color of my skin in any way reflects my feelings towards other members of homo sapiens. I am the son of farmers, who themselves were the son and daughter of farmers, but I have chosen to break the chain and go into an alternate profession.

Where did I come from? I do not know the origin of life, but I also do not know if the origin of life has any bearing on my personal ethics or morals.

Why am I here? This is a personal statement, and does not reflect the general view of homo sapiens, but my own life goal, the whole reason I feel that I am here, is to bring more happiness into the world than I take out of it. I think it is important to discuss why I feel that way, because the point of this course is to cover why, without God, we have no morals or ethics.

I believe that other people are important. Perhaps they would feel, without God to tell them otherwise, that they are the most important person in the universe, but I do not feel that in any way. I want to help others achieve their goals, I want to help others because that is how we create a legacy and be remembered. I won’t be remembered by history, that is a loftier goal than mine, but I will hopefully be remembered by friends and family as someone who was always welcome.

Where do we go when we die? I believe I will enter an oblivion of blackness. To quote Mark Twain, “I did not exist for millions of years before I was born, and I was not inconvenienced by it in the slightest.” I will follow some 60 billion homo sapiens who went before me, and for the hundreds of billions who will come after. History may not recall my name, but why should it? Why would I be so arrogant as to believe that, because I don’t want to die, I will clearly live forever after I die? That seems like it shows the ego that is too common in the human race.

Are these questions still relevant in our society today?

Certainly, I believe that these questions are still important, aside from the “Where we go when we die,” question. I believe using the excuse of “I am a good person because I don’t want to go to hell”, is both dangerous and terrifying. But understanding your place in the universe helps you understand true humility, and the human race requires more humility.

Question 2: Do you believe that your view of the age of the earth affects your everyday life?

Their answer: If someone holds the evolutionistic worldview, he must live his life according to his own will. If someone holds the worldview of Creationism, God is the final authority, and he must conform to God’s will.

My Answer: I do not believe that the age of the Earth is anything worth fighting over. While I do believe that it is painfully ignorant of science to believe the world is 6,000 years old, I do not believe that those that hold this view are in any way inferior to those that agree with science. Even science does not know the exact age of the Earth, of course, and the number even within the last 60 days was modified. Perhaps this is, again, my feeling of humility at work; I do not know the age of the world or the age of the universe, but I have an idea. I am open to the idea that I could be wrong, and I think this tells you more about me than could possibly be revealed in most other sentences. “I know all of the answers, I have at my hands the true words of the Creator, and the world is 6,000 years old,” speaks to an arrogance of belief that I could never hold.

Question 3: Do you believe evolution is scientific or religious?

Their answer: Evolutionism contradicts fundamental science and is supported only by faith – not by evidence.

My answer: The constant response from the religious opponents of evolution that it is a science of faith is disturbing to me. It both ignores what science is (Science is not defined by “Only things we can see exist”) and ignores the mountains of evidence that show the idea of evolution. YEC science often takes a single case and applies it to all instances; multi-strata petrified trees prove that all of geology is wrong, they will tell you. There is an alternate way that the grand canyon *could* have formed that jives with the Bible, and since we already know geologists are wrong about everything, it is safe to write off their guesses. Carbon 14 has easy error conditions (anything that has been underwater tends to get erroneously dated, and C14 dating has limited date ranges for which it is effective). Because of this, we can also throw out radiometric dating, according to YEC science (They will throw out ALL forms of radiometric dating because of flaws with a single element). Tree ring counting? Ice core dating? We can throw those out because we weren’t there to see the rings/ice layers form, so who knows if they’ve always formed at a rate of one per year?

The reason that YECs believe that evolution is a religion is that they are so quick to throw out an excuse for why it might not work that there is no way that scientists can come up with evidence faster than YECs can ignore it (that sentence felt odd to write). In any case, I certainly believe that evolution is sufficiently supported by evidence.

Challenge Question:

I wasn’t going to include the challenge questions, but I found this question so royally offensive I had to mention it in this post or else I would have felt like I was letting something truly dark walk by me without warning those around me.

The Challenge: Ask an elementary school-age child if he knows where everything in the world came from. If his answer involved the Big Bang, ask him where the original matter came from. If he doesn’t know where this original matter came from, consider sharing the Biblical account with him to explain how everything came into being.

What the actual what.

Ask someone who is 5-10 a question that scientists are still currently working on, that people who have spent some 25 years in school, and some 25 years studying this exact question, and expect this child to have the answer?

This speaks to an intellectual dishonesty that really makes me sad. I honestly just … To tell a 5-10 year old child that, if they don’t have ALL of the answers, that they must accept religion… That…

I am sorry, I think I have to step back, rethink, and start over. I am just so sad that this is considered a valid tactic. I support science taught in the classroom, and I support teaching evolution, but I would never, ever, ever be so morally barren as to walk up to a 6 year old and say “Your God is a lie, now listen to me talk about my atheism at you.”

No. That is horrible. That is evil. That is so… AUGH! I can’t even talk about it. Suffice it to say, I find this tactic deplorable. That is all I can say.

ON TO LESSON TWO, TITLED “HOW OLD IS IT?”

THERE’S NOTHING MORE BADASS THAN RESPECTING A LADY!

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The upcoming generation is one of entitlement. I realize that saying this is both as useful and as surprising as a fart at an all you can eat bean buffet, but it is important to start with it.

Each generation has entitlement issues, I had them, my parents had them, but the thing is that the world is designed to teach you that you have to work for a living. In previous generations, you learned this through physical labor, in my generation we learned this through the fact that the world is complicated, and without a lot of education, you will have troubles with the massive number of high skilled jobs that are becoming more the norm than at any point in history in the past.

But this generation, while feeling the same entitlement at a young age as every generation before them, have not had their entitlement checked by the world. In schools, you don’t get zeroes. In youth competitions, you don’t get awards. Even getting proper marks in school is considered unhealthy competition by someone in power, apparently (I have never met a person who agreed with the idea that you shouldn’t get proper marks, and shouldn’t be allowed to fail, and yet somehow it has become a policy).

With that, we come to the idea of bullying. Bullying is exerting some power over others, and while it is a very negative thing, certainly, it helps to prepare children for a world in which not everyone or everything will be nice to them. This is an important point, because bullying has become something of an art form, or theater, in these modern times.

And now we come to the internet and video games. On the Internet, the saying goes, nobody knows you are a dog. Perhaps you think that saying is a bit silly, but it illustrates both the allure and the danger of the internet. Are you a 40 year old man posing as a 12 year old girl? That’s creepy. But more commonly, you have 12-17 year old males posing as 20 year old males, and it is this that causes one of the most common complaints, both of the internal gaming community and of those from the outside looking in.

Let’s take the MOBA (Dota 2, League of Legends, etc) communities as our example. They are, very often, malicious. There is no other word for it. Every player thinks they are the perfect player, better than any other player, and they will instantly let you know as soon as you have made a mistake. Why is that? Well, first, they are 12-17 year old males. This is not, in and of itself, telling, but each will tell you that they are 24. Second, they have never been told they AREN’T the best player in the world, except by others whom they have never met. Everyone playing a game of Dota has been called a noob at some point (even if you have only ever played one game in your whole life; it is that bad), and most of us have been told to uninstall, stick to bot games (games with computers, so you don’t “ruin” the fun of your superiors, I suppose), or told to kill yourself. And this is before they know anything about you; imagine if you are a depressed person on the edge, seeking an escape from the pain of the real world, and then are told to kill yourself?

What happens, though, and why does it happen, when they find out there is a female in their midst? That’s where you see the entitlement turned up to 12, and there are too many reasons for this. The first is that a 17 year old feels like they are owed sex (have you talked to a 17 year old anonymously these days? … … … Ignore the ramifications of that sentence, please.). So when a girl comes up, they are reminded of the fact that they are playing a video game instead of going out; in ages past, they may have been an antisocial person who would have become your usual dungeon nerd (I feel confident in my use of the term; it applies to me more than anyone else I know), but games have become too social, people have become too entitled, to let this INJUSTICE pass.

That is the core of the misogyny in the gaming community, and make no mistake; misogyny is the word. There is so much hate and vitriol, and it comes out at the drop of a hat. There is a saying that some use ironically, but that too many use sincerely, on the internet; please forgive my language, but this is a post about the idea of misogyny. On the internet, if you are discovered to be a female, the first thing you will hear, and you will hear it a lot, is “Tits or GTFO (Get the F*** out)”.

Perhaps the ramifications of this, outside of the fact that it is completely unreasonable, are missed too easily. The person saying this feels entitled. That woman, thinks the person flinging this around, owes me sight of her breasts.

So how do we cure this? Well, some games have mentioned it, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly (the title of this post comes from a line said by a character in the Borderlands series), but we have started to see society recognize that we created this problem. We’ve been told we are special, then shown that we aren’t (At least to some extent). The next generation has been told they are special and…. Here we are.

I don’t know how to make it go away, but I definitely know that the answer is NOT “Reduce competition, remove failure, and remind everyone that the world is their burrito.” Make them earn their way in the world, like everyone else, and then maybe they will understand that everyone has problems, and the world does not OWE you anything.

Also, don’t be a dick online. Please?

Learning (FOR SCIENCE!)

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So recently an opportunity came up that I could not resist; Udemy (an online learning academy) is offering a 3 hour online course on Creation Science, entitled “Beginnings”. It is hosted by one of my favorite creation speakers, Eric Hovind. The course is actually paid ($20 for the whole course!), which means I am assuming they are actually intending their audience be only people who share their view on things (or maybe they just want money).

In my quest to understand the minds of every human on the planet (I am already at 1 out of 7.x billion! That’s practically halfway there!), I decided to take the course. What is $20.00, compared to the massive trove of knowledge I can take in?!

I won’t share the materials point for point (I respect their desire to make money from this, as they did invest time in making it), but at the end of each lesson (after the exam), they present discussion questions. Well, I am able to look at attendance numbers (that seems odd, but I’ll take it), and I am the second student to sign up.

As there are only two students to sign up, posting my discussion answers to the students only forum (THERE IS A STUDENTS ONLY FORUM!) would feel a little less like a discussion and more like talking to myself. Well, even more than talking to myself than writing to this blog (I am talking to AT LEAST two other people, rather than just one).

To that effect, over the next few days, I’ll be taking these lectures and then making blog posts about the discussion questions posted at the end of each. I am sure sometimes they will be funny, from what I’ve seen many will be philosophical, and I doubt any will be scientific.

I hope you’ll enjoy taking this journey with me. I am learning about non-science, FOR SCIENCE!

They Were Good Guys All the Time! (Spoilers)

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Well, it’s official. The world is now so progressive, I am not allowed to hate anything any more, ever, because that is rude. Apparently.

I think it is out of control, but I think that requires some explanation.

Let’s start with the popular musical, Wicked. It turns out the Wicked Witch of the West was good the whole time.

Maleficent? A villain whose NAME is based on a word used to describe evil? She was good the whole time! Misunderstood, betrayed, good!

Dracula? The new Dracula paints Vlad the Impaler not as history would have him, as a man who loves torture so much that popular history remembers nothing but his torture. In the movie, Vlad sells his soul to save his family and the people he rules over. He did it for you! For you the whole time!

I realize ideas are difficult to come up with (as someone who spends a considerable amount of time writing, and triple that time with writer’s block), but I feel like Hollywood is throwing in the towel. That is not to say that all movies are creatively barren, but the amount of fresh ideas is getting so sparse. Even in those few short stories that I have posted on this very blog are very derivative/cliched (I am open to admitting this).

Just… Leave me something to be angry at, please? Maybe the whole reason I love Harry Potter is, even after a detailed look at Voldemort’s back story, it is clear that he was a jerk right from the start; bullying kids at a young age, being evil in school, murdering shortly after leaving school.

What I am about to say may sound shallow, or wrong, or any one of a thousand possible negative words, but I think it speaks to psychology.

I have preached (eheheheh) on this blog the idea of tolerance (in various forms). We can condemn people who are clearly off the rails (militant terrorists, who should NOT be confused with your average Muslim), but we should understand where everyone is coming from, and condemn only what requires condemnation, and only after we understand them.

I do not really hate anyone, not anyone alive. I dislike some people, but I would never call it hate. I dislike some groups, but I wouldn’t call it hate (Westboro Baptist Church… You have tempted my patience, I won’t lie). My friends over at Creation Today, I like them, even if I disagree with their ideas (they are sincere, which is more than I can say about many people I know).

So where am I going with all of this?

I don’t WANT to hate any living person, and that is why I need Hollywood to stop messing with me. I NEED to hate someone (I think it is part of human nature to hate, something we all work to overcome to various degrees). To that end, let me hate evil; let me hate people to whom “evil” truly applies. Let me hate people that don’t exist. It makes me feel good (needs my dopamine hit, please) to see good triumph over evil, it makes me feel good (I will admit it publicly) when someone who is *evil* dies.

So stop telling me that evil is just misunderstood. Dracula was not a misunderstood historical figure; he would put people on giant spikes and slooooooowwwwwlllllyyyyy split them open with it. Maleficent tried to corrupt something purely innocent. The Wicked Witch of the West was… Well, okay, I actually have always thought she got the short end. I mean, Dorothy killed her sister and looted her corpse. Wanting revenge for that is understandable.

But stop it, Hollywood. Just. Freaking. Stop.

Let me continue to hate evil. Please? It makes me feel good to hate evil, and if you leave me not evil to hate, I feel like I will be a worse person for it (is that ironic?).

The Origins of Life

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I made this a separate post because I think it is a separate topic altogether. I had my own little personal revelation (for all of my intelligence, I am often times very slow to make what seem to be simple conclusions) this morning while writing my other post on evolution; the idea that some people deny evolution wholesale is that it does not currently understand EXACTLY how the first living organism came to be alive. The rest of evolution they accept to a degree, and give it the title Adaptation or Survival of the Fittest, as though those are completely separate topics.

To that end, I am willing to break out evolution into two separate topics; Adaptation being the first, and being the topic I posted about earlier today, and The Origins of Life being the second, which I will discuss in this post. I hope this is to your liking, if you are an opponent of, or undecided about, evolution as an overarching theory.

I will, in openness and fairness, admit that science does not currently know the exact mechanism by which life originated on this planet we have named Earth, and still science has not created life in a lab, meaning we have not synthetically replicated the process as yet.

Alright, now that this is out of the way, let’s talk about the origins of life.

I will be speaking exclusively about the ideas of origins of life proposed by biologists, in this case; alternate origins of life theories, such as I.D., or outright creationism, are at the very least as unlikely as what I will present here, and I will let proponents of these theories tell me why they are correct in their own time (or, as is more likely, I will offer direct rebuttals in later posts).

Let’s first discuss the chances life would have formed. They are infinitesimal, the chances that they would happen being almost so small as to make the occurrence almost laughably unlikely. I will accept this, and it has been used as opposition to the very IDEA that life could spontaneously originate. That being said, what if the chance of life beginning on a planet is 1 in 1 billion. The number of planets estimated varies (I have not looked recently, but with constantly improving techniques for locating planets outside of our solar system, estimates become more refined), but I will choose a number on the EXTREME low end, at 1 trillion. If this estimate is correct, then there would be 1000 planets in the universe with life in them, and that is with life having only a 1 in 1 billion chance of EVER getting started on a planet. That is ignoring the fact that moons could certainly have the conditions required for life. That is ignoring the fact that there could be far more planets than 1 trillion. That is ignoring the fact that, who knows, life may be more common than we think (our own view of the universe is still only comparable to knowing your neighbors in a city of millions of people. You know they’re out there, you just have no idea who they are).

Also worth noting, aside from the fact that even something highly unlikely could definitely happen when observing huge numbers, is that life only had to start once. If each year, there is a 1 in 4 billion chance that life would spontaneously start somewhere (even so much as a single bacteria forming from something that would not be considered alive), there it would still be likely that life would have started on our home planet. The Anthropomorphic Principle states that life had to start on Earth at some point, because we are here observing it. That seems obvious, of course, but it does bear stating; it is the scientific principle that relates “I think, therefore I am.”

Let’s say that Earth is the only planet to ever spawn life (something I think is unlikely, but that is a topic for another day). That means we are one unique planet among 1 trillion (or several trillion. Or a quadrillion.). That something with a very low chance happened among the entirety of the universe doesn’t feel nearly so unlikely.

Now that I’ve gotten the truly boring stuff out of the way, the stuff that doesn’t answer the question as to *how* specifically, we can move on to more speculative science. In this case, we can’t prove it, and all we have is our best guesses. Who knows, perhaps life being created is so unlikely, we will never see it in action! But that doesn’t mean we can’t guess.

Imagine a world with no life, just a bunch of rocks, a giant ocean, things floating and being pressed together. This goes on for a billion years, no life having formed… But in this time, unrelated things are being mashed together, energy from the sun is being absorbed, the atmosphere is changing… Things that, for lack of a better term, stick together better are getting more and more numerous over time; that should make sense. Things that stick together best, over a billion years, keep getting more and more numerous. Then of those things that stuck together, the sub-products stick together. We still don’t have life, but we have more complicated bunches of molecules, floating around in the giant ocean. They keep getting more and more complicated, as parts are knocked off, parts are added, things change and move, and still after more than one billion years we don’t have life.

Then something happens, something mysterious, something we don’t understand yet. A molecule changes to more effectively bind to other molecules. It still isn’t alive, but by some process in nature, it binds to other molecules better. Because of this binding feature, certain molecules in nature become rarer, as they are bound to these complicated molecules, still floating in this giant ocean, still not alive. There is now, for lack of a better word, competition; molecules that bind less well are eventually all ripped apart by the ceaseless march of the waves of the ocean, and the more suited molecules now have to compete for limited resources to bind. They can’t find them easily, but as they can’t truly “die”, as they aren’t alive, the ocean drags them around, changes them more. They change to bind to alternate things.

This process of unlife changing and binding to other unlife continues to untold years, hundreds of millions more, before a molecule, now as complicated as life itself, but still not alive, *moves*. Unsure of how it happened, this one complicated molecule shudders, and moves, and *seeks* to bind to other molecules. It is the very first thing that could be considered close to life, but even moving of its own accord, it still does not eat or breathe or excrete like we would assume life would. But it is close; like a virus may not be considered alive, it still shows signs that might be associated with life.

Well, this molecule that is semi-alive begins to replicate innumerably; as it binds better, it is natural that there are *more* of them. And since they actively move to bind, there are other molecules that form to *escape* this binding. We have now, before even the first true life form, seen the beginnings of the arms race that is survival of the fittest.

Well, now the moving molecule has to adjust its tactics; its “food” is running, so it has to get faster, or learn how to find other food. Maybe it finds a complex molecule that has the elements that make up its food, but configured in an unfriendly way. Eventually, our first semi-life form has created the first digestive tract; it takes a bunch of elements, some it wants and some it doesn’t, separates them out, excretes what it doesn’t need, and keeps what it does.

This replicates, because now it can get what it *wants*, so it makes copies. We now have our very first life form. With the first splitting of the first cell, when our still not-alive molecule was complicated enough to build another like itself based on ingesting molecules that were not like itself, we have the first thing that we would call alive.

I won’t say this guess is scientifically binding, but it is plausible.

Perhaps someday we will create life in a lab, prove that it can be done, prove how it can happen. Until then, biologists are confident that they are closing in on the answer, and because they spend entire lifetimes, because the theory of evolution is hundreds of years old, and because my study is at best casual, I am happy to defer judgment to them. Because people whose life work is proving what I have said above still think it is plausible, what could I say to prove it wrong?

If I buckled down and studied biology very seriously, perhaps I could find a major flaw in my theory, or perhaps I could enhance it, make it fit the evidence better. At this point, though, others are doing that for me, and I await their findings with the avid curiosity one expects of a four year old. Each tantalizing new piece of evidence that points us closer to the origins of life, I pick it up with wide eyes and giddy feelings.

And each piece of evidence that stands against a finding, that makes us rethink everything? That is ok, too, because we are still learning.

Even though I may not like the man, I have to admit this is a great quote applicable to almost all parts of life:

“I have not failed 100 times, I have found 100 ways to not make a light bulb.”

The Mechanism of Wonder (The Greatest Show on Earth)

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It has always confused me, and I am talking back into my high school days when I was really introduced to Biology (it came up earlier, but I don’t know that I really understood it well enough to form an informed opinion), and its cornerstone, evolution, why people find it so hard to believe. I mean, I’ve talked about evolution at some length, even on this blog, but I was just rehashing common talking points with my own personal flair, but I doubt I was converting anyone. I’d like to expand on at least one point here, and see where it takes me.

It doesn’t necessarily require religious dogma to find evolution hard to swallow (though they do like to layer on very heavily the reasons why evolution is a faulty theory, in their eyes), and I do understand that. It is difficult to grasp the idea of small changes over hundreds of millions of years, especially if you grow up around people telling you that the world is much younger, and also that evolution is bogus. I feel bad for children who grow up in areas of even the most affluent first world countries that are told, in the science classroom, that evolution is a “controversial” theory; it is anything but.

One particularly odd argument against evolution is that there is no such thing, there is merely adaptation (which is undeniable; Darwin’s finches adapted before the venerable scientist’s very eyes. Hell, even scientists at Liberty University have seen adaptation at work in bacteria. Also, Liberty University is a leading Liberty University science of bacteria Liberty University.). It is odd to deny the overarching theory when accepting that things adapt to change over time; almost mind boggling, actually.

I think I have to approach adaptation at this point, as I think there is some confusion. First, there is no practical difference between adaptation and evolution, and to deny this is to misunderstand the point. What we see, in our limited scope of study, is the sum total of a process running longer than our minds can possibly conceive of, possibly imagine. “We have never seen a duck become a dog,” and other similarly vacuous arguments, wildly misinterpret the scope of adaptation and evolution. There is no scientist in their right mind that would ever argue that from a duck’s egg would hatch anything but a duck, so let’s forget that line of reasoning altogether.

It was Richard Dawkins who mentioned, far too casually, a point that really revolutionized my own understanding of evolution, and I would like to make that the cornerstone of this small essay. In “The Greatest Show on Earth”, he mentions in passing that evolution is so slow that, looking from generation to generation, each child will look so much like its parents that you won’t even see the difference. It is only when you step back and look over 100,000 generations, or 1,000,000 generations, or more, that you are even to tell the difference between two species to the point that they would even be marked in different columns in a paper by a biologist.

Evolution is so slow that if you were to speed up time and watch it in action, there would only ever be one species, because each animal looks so much like its parents. If you were to look at a picture of the adult form of each child, it would seem like a time lapse photo of a single organism slowly transforming into myriad shapes, sizes, colors, forms, it would grow and lose hair, it would form antlers and drop them, but each iteration so closely resembles its parents that it would, in all of these forms, still seem to be that of a single species.

How is this possible? If that’s the case, how do we have species at all? The answer to that lies both in the advanced stage of evolution (and time) in which we currently find ourselves, and the convenience of the fossil record. I say convenience, and that word will be held against me in a court of debate, but the fossil record has truly made the study of biology not only possible, but wonderful, awe-inspiring. Fossils form only rarely, so we get snapshots. This is not the time lapse photo from above, this is one photo between thousands, and if you look at these snapshots in time, you can clearly see the differences in this species; you can see that one had certain features in its skeleton, certain bone structures, certain horns, tell-tale eye sockets, or any one of a thousand signals that it was different from its cousins, because you only see it as a single piece of a large puzzle rather than a single frame of a long movie.

Let’s give some small examples, then, as I don’t think my above analogy was very clear (though I am struggling to come up with anything better). We go back 15,000 years, when there are only very few species of canine. In this case, our subject will be a pack of wolves that, through careful coaxing and bribery, are more or less domesticated (or at the least captured and bred). These wolf pups are raised, and only the most docile are further bred (for the purposes of this example, I will be using highly accelerated selective breeding). Each shares so much in common with its parents that it is difficult to tell that there are changes at all, but the selective breeding continues. As these wolf cubs are selectively bred for docility, they also gain floppier ears. Other small changes occur over the years, and there are cubs bred (now that they have been domesticated) for different tasks; larger cubs are taken by hunters and bred for aggression and discipline, smarter cubs are taken and bred to think on their feet and assist with rounding up cattle or sheep, smaller cubs, or the most docile cubs, are bred for loyalty and friendliness. Each cub, bred in captivity, down an unbroken line of succession, appeared (for all intents and purposes) to share the traits of its parents so closely that they don’t appear to be a different species.

It is at this point that I would like to present a visual aid to our study of evolution.

Click Here, and you will see a small assortment of dog breeds.

Click Here, and you will see the parent from which ALL (that is, 100%, 1/1, each of, all of, and any of) these breeds came.

This is in less than 15,000 years, mind you. Given the amazing amount of differences we can see cropping up, is it really so hard to see that maybe this and the above link to wolves may have shared an ancestor some time in the past? Given that the primary living diversity we see is about a half a billion years old, we can take 15000 to be about 0.003% of the current age of complex life (it is even less than that, but I am using the simplest math I can because math is hard). I mean, each of the presented species (canine and feline) share a staggering amount of similar traits; the tail to body length ratio is similar, they are both quadrupeds, they share similar coloration, many species of canine and feline share the same triangle shaped ears, they both share similar dental characteristics, their skeletons (when viewed completely free of tissue) are almost identical aside from differences in the skull.

So why is it so hard to believe that canines and felines shared an ancestor in the distant past?

And, if you accept that, what happens when you go further back even than that? Rats are similar but smaller, horses are similar but larger. Well, if you take horses to be similar, now we look at cattle, buffalo, bison, as they share characteristics with horses, such as hooves, body shape, bone structure. Well, now that we have accepted that, let’s go back further. You’ve seen a hairless gerbil, yeah? Imagine that with scales, change the dental work, and we’ve got ourselves a reptile. This isn’t all as easy as I have made it sound, I understand that, but the further you break it down, the easier it is to see the patterns and the relationships inherent in the animal kingdom. You can make a simple chain of “w is similar to x, x is similar to y, and y is similar to z, but w is NOT similar to z… However, I have proven, through a series of events, that w and z are related.”

Cats are similar to dogs, dogs are similar to horses, horses are similar to certain breeds of cattle, and by this short chain, I have shown a relationship between cats and cattle. They may not appear related, but that is the glory of the masterwork that is evolution. And each child of the above could appear so similar to its parent that we would never notice it changing… But what will cats look like in 100,000 years?

Couldn’t sleep last night (Creative Writing on caffeine and drowsiness)

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After years of saving, months of searching, weeks of packing, and days of jittery anticipation, I was finally ready to live in my personal paradise.

I’d wanted to live on my own acreage for as long as I could remember, away from the hustle and bustle of the city life, and this fit the bill in so many ways. It wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere, though most of my friends would argue that point, it had tons of privacy provided by being fully surrounded by thick trees, a beautiful lawn and large (well, I’d call it large, but I am from the city) plot of dirt that I could already visualize growing my garden in.

The previous owner was awesome for the whole duration of the sale process. He had lived on this acreage, he told me, since it was just a little farm a short ride from what was, at the time, a very small town–a time that spanned some 80 years of his life. The man was still full of vim and vigor, but he told me he was not a proud man, it was time to pack up and move to somewhere in the city that required less upkeep. To that end (thankfully) he left me the equipment he used to care for the yard; a small tractor with various attachments for mowing the lawn, working the garden, various garden tools, an ATV (that appeared to have more kilometers on it than most vehicles on the road), and a variety of odds and ends that would likely sit in the small tool shed next to the house until they were long forgotten.

The lawn behind the house actually had a backstop on it, the old man telling me that he and his family used to play softball on it, and metal plates that they used as bases were in the tool shed. Having an odd moment of empathic nostalgia, I could almost hear the murmur of conversation, the cheering of family, see the players running the bases, swinging the bat, throwing the ball. I may never use it, but the field being there gave me a sense of … You know, I don’t know the word that would best describe it. Contentedness, I suppose?

The house wasn’t large, but as a single occupant I could not ask for more. It was certainly a house built in an older style, the floors hard and the hallways narrow, but you could tell that there were stories and memories in these walls going back generations. I won’t lie, and neither am I proud, I have never been overly comfortable with basements, and even though this was now my own, I wasn’t very comfortable looking down that narrow staircase into the darkness below. I don’t know when the house was built, exactly, but the basement definitely didn’t have a warm feeling about it. The windows were small and didn’t let in a lot of light, the hallway at the bottom of the stairs was claustrophobic, and the room that the man said he had used as food storage before refrigerators were common was cold and harsh, with an unfinished cement floor and bare wooden shelves lining the walls. I closed the door on that room, and couldn’t think of a reason I’d ever need to open it in the future.

Most of my life is still in boxes in the living room, but that is a problem for another day. I have enough clothes for this week, my bed is set up in the master bedroom–I mean, it wouldn’t really count as a master bedroom in a modern house, but it was my own and this thought made it easy for me to hold on to my happiness.

With a contented sigh, I laid down and drifted off to sleep.

***

I looked out the living room window and saw a car driving up to the house. I walked to the front door and opened it as a beautiful women exited the driver side. She made eye contact and walked up to me.

“Hello…”

My eyes snapped open, the grogginess that only an interrupted dream could bring lingering as I rolled over and searched blindly on the floor for my alarm clock. It’s six in the morning, 30 minutes until my alarm goes off. Well, no use trying to get back to sleep at this point, I already feel like something kicked my head and threw sand in my eyes, no use compounding that.

I walk through the motions of my ingrained morning ritual, the new house barely even affecting my morning thought processes. Shower, shave, go back to the room to get dressed, find some breakfast, brush my teeth, do my hair, all in that order, the same order I’ve been doing it in for the last ten years. I check my watch, and it is 6:45–I’d be at work early, but I’d be on the early end of rush hour. Might as well go for it.

My job is pretty mundane, I do I.T. for a small business, keeping their email flowing, their payroll running, that kind of thing. If someone’s printer had a paper jam, I’m the guy they’d call. I wouldn’t say it is action packed, but there is some satisfaction in doing a job well enough that the 80 or so people that rely on your work have hardly a complaint–in fact, in I.T., having hardly a complaint in any situation is definitely something to either pat your back about, or (among the more pessimistic of us) to knock on wood about.

After a day as unremarkable as the description of my job, I head home. My plan for the evening is to do my first bit of yard work; mow the lawn, take a better look at my property, nothing special, but I’m almost giddy to get out there. Rush hour on the way home is a little worse than I thought it would be, and I am not looking forward to winter driving conditions on poorly maintained roads.

It’s 6:30pm by the time I park the car and head inside. Given the time it took to get home, I decide to make myself a quick dinner before I get to work. While sitting down to eat, a red car pulls into the driveway. Leaving my plate on the cupboard, I walk to the front door and open it while a pretty young woman gets out of the car. She’s wearing a black dress that makes me feel suddenly under-dressed, and as she looks up to make eye contact her stunningly green irises almost entrance me. She walks up and extends her hand for me to shake.

“Hello, my name is …”

My eyes snap open as I feel a sudden falling sensation and slide off my chair. My food is sitting cold on the counter, still, and I glance at the clock showing 7:30pm. I’d been out for 45 minutes, and a lot of good sunlight had been lost in that time. Well, looks like I won’t be mowing the lawn tonight. I guess moving takes more out of you than I remember, and I guess I will have to reluctantly accept that getting older isn’t all fun and games.

I spend the next couple of hours unboxing more of my life before heading off to bed for (obviously) much needed rest.

***

An older red car drives up the driveway, and again I find myself walking towards the front door as it comes to a stop at the end of my driveway. The car itself is fairly beat up, a Pontiac Sunfire with rust around the wheel wells. A beautiful woman exits the driver side wearing a small black dress that looked like it had to be worth more than the car itself, and her hair, a deep auburn, flung around her head before settling at its full length below her shoulders.

She was wearing sleek black gloves that went to just below her elbows. As she started to walk over to me, she pulled off the glove on her right hand and extended it towards me, and I extended my hand to shake it. Her hand was very cold, but her grip was very strong. I stared into her green eyes as she spoke, “Hello, my name is Marylin.”

My eyes opened slowly, feeling as though sandpaper lined the underside of my eyelids. It is amazing how quickly you can wear out, with only two days of bad sleep leaving me feel like my limbs were made of lead. I don’t drink coffee, but after only my second rough morning I am already considering taking it up. 6:15am. Ugh, might as well start the day.

Shower, shave, go back to the room to get dressed, find some breakfast, brush my teeth, do my hair, and off to work.

I arrive just in time, the drive itself seeming to disappear in a fog of lost memory and barely considered thoughts. I sit down in my office and there is a knock at the door.

The door opens and Marylin looks at me and smiles, wearing that same dress, and those same gloves from my dreams. She pulls off both gloves seductively, slowly, smiling at me the whole time. I don’t even know what to do or say, or who this woman is when I blink, and my office is empty, the phone ringing. I look around as I answer the call, the confusion beginning to fade as I focus my mind on work.

At the end of the day, I resolve to at least mow the lawn before I sit down to eat and lose another beautiful evening of productivity. The drive home seems to pass by in a blur again, but it is 6:30pm by the time I pull up. Just because it felt like a two minute drive doesn’t mean time is willing to show even the slightest hint of favoritism, I think as I mount the mower and turn the key.

I feel an amazing sense of ease again as I mow the lawn, riding the small tractor and maneuvering it around the backstop and other varied obstacles. I feel better, satisfied, as I return the mower to its home in the detached garage and dismount. As I turn around, there is a knock at the door. Feeling another growing sense of confusion, I walk over and open it. There is no one there, but it is dark outside, the sun completely set. I check my watch, squinting in the dim light of the light on my porch that I couldn’t remember turning on, to see that it’s now 10:30pm. It couldn’t have taken me more than an hour to mow the lawn. I rub my eyes, a wave of exhaustion coming over me out of nowhere, and walk towards the house.

I pour myself a bowl of cereal, not having the energy to make anything more complicated, scarf it down and shuffle to my bed where I collapse in a heap.

***

An old, red Pontiac Sunfire drives down the driveway. I walk towards the front door, and feel a strange sense of deja-vu as I reach for the handle to open it. The driver of the car is already standing as the front door opens. She seems vaguely familiar, but I can’t place from where.

She has these beautiful green eyes, and is wearing an elaborate black dress and long, sleek gloves that come up to near her elbows. I’ve definitely seen her somewhere before. As she walks towards me, she pulls off the glove covering her right hand. I see, as she steps, that her shoes are black and shine with reflected light. When I look up, she is already face to face with me, her curly auburn hair draped down her back, looking at me with a smile on her face, holding out her hand expectantly.

I shake my head a little, and reach out to shake it.

“Hello, my name is Marylin. It will be nice to meet you.” Her eyes have an odd gleam to them.

I roll over, my eyes not even wanting to open, as I register that my alarm is ringing. GAH! It’s 6:45 already! Gonna be late!

Quick shower, shave, go back to the room to get dressed, find some breakfast, leave for work. As I pull out of the driveway, I feel a distant sense of unease and frustration. I can’t believe I forgot to brush my teeth and do my hair. It’s lucky I wear my hair short, but it will still bother me all day.

Work passes in a blur of exhaustion, the kind where your brain just seems to fight you on every decision. I don’t remember the day passing, but soon it is 5:00pm, though I felt like I had just arrived.

As I pull up to speed on the highway, all I could think about was that as soon as I got home I needed to get to sleep.

I couldn’t wait to get home, get to sleep.

I see a woman standing on the side of the highway, and she seems very familiar. I barely have time to register the beautiful black dress before I zip by, and in the rear view mirror I can see her turn her head to follow me.

Had I seen her somewhere before? I shake my head. Probably just sleepy.

Couldn’t wait to get home.

Couldn’t wait to get to sleep.

Couldn’t wait.

“Welcome home,” a voice said from the passenger seat. I turn my head towards a woman with auburn hair and a beautiful black dress.

Why so much religion, though?

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Some have commented that a blog about “Life, the universe, and everything” should have more diverse postings than religion all day every day. That is actually pretty fair, and I am sorry for how things have worked out.

Generally speaking, with this blog, I post stream of consciousness. That means, of course, whatever comes to mind hits the blog. It may not seem like it, but the blog has only been live for just over 2 weeks; a topic like religion can easily occupy a mind for a couple of weeks, I think. As time goes on, and as more things catch my mind’s eye, I am sure I will write about more interesting things, things other than purely religion. I definitely hope, for example, to do more creative writing exercises–that was definitely fun (and something I need to expand on).

The other reason religion is easy to write about is that people tend to have strong opinions, and thus tend to comment on the posts. I am looking for comment, I am looking for discussion, I am looking for answers. I do not profess to ‘know’ the things about which I have an opinion, and if someone has an opinion that runs counter to mine, perhaps my mind will be changed, or at least we will open a dialog. Who knows.

That being said, anything that is worth discussing in my life I hope to put down here on my blog. It just so happens that right now, religion occupies a lot of my mental cycles.

My blog is only two weeks old, hopefully I haven’t scared everyone off already. That being said, if I managed to work up 100 regular readers, and then get rid of them in less than a month, I’ve got to say… That is impressive, no?