The Science of it All, Intelligent Design

One last bit of reflection

One last bit of reflection





















There is nothing more.






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Intelligent Design

Evolution= Upside Down Science

Evolution= Upside Down Science













While neither the creation model nor the evolutionary model can be proven or disproven, these two views can be compared to see which one fits the data better.  When compared, the young earth model (creation and a worldwide flood) fits the data perfectly while the old earth model (evolution with ‘slow and gradual’ geologic events) has continual flaws— it is essentially upside down science.

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Intelligent Design, The Science of it All

Disrupting Long Held Beliefs

Disrupting Long Held Beliefs

























First up: Rock Types and Processes for Their Formation and Weathering

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Intelligent Design, The Science of it All

Something New to Contemplate

Something New to Contemplate

It is only recently that some defenders of evolution have tried to divorce the origin of life from consideration.  It is probably because the hope of finding an answer is rapidly fading, as one scientific discovery after another of sophisticated machinery in even the simplest living cells makes the problem of a naturalistic origin ever more difficult.  Popular articles on origin-of-life research have often portrayed the field as constantly advancing and quickly converging on a purely Materialistic Naturalism explanation for the origin of the first autonomous cell.  This creates an important proposition that atheists must believe.  That is life came from non-living chemicals, a process called chemical evolution or abiogenesis (Abiogenesis, biopoiesis, or informally, the origin of life, is the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds.)  Every so often, the lame stream media headlines trumpet the latest and greatest solution, even though specialists in the area know that they are not even close to solving this problem.  Moreover, they never ask, why is this theory replacing the other theory that we highlighted and headlined a year or so ago.

Common arguments about the origin of life have traditionally focused on the unlikelihood of life forming by chance.  I myself have promoted this concept and of course have had others say, “It just had to happen once” as naive as that statement is.  Perhaps most famously, physicist Fred Hoyle calculated the probability of a cell coalescing to be roughly 1 part in 10 to the power of 40,000.  He compared this probability to the chances of a tornado plowing through a junkyard and assembling a jet airplane.  Now, I am not happy with that analogy because it takes us away from the concept of a cell that we should be dealing with.  So let us go with the smallest human protein which is made up of 44 amino acids (Human protein Q6YH21, a collagen-like molecule associated with acetylcholinesterase in skeletal muscle, has a variant gene NM_080542, which encodes for the shortest protein in the human body).  If we have 20 of each of these 44 amino acids floating in a solution it would be similar to these 880 amino acids suspended in Lake Erie (to want to make it turbulent).  Well, not quite, we need to shorten it by about 2 square miles.  Lake Erie is 116 cubic miles in volume, so that comes out to 1.277 x 10^24 gallons or 1,277,295,890,000,000,000,000,000 gallons.  So cut out 6 cubic miles and redo the math.  In addition, we would want these amino acids to randomly form together so the lake has a lot of waves and currents and tides.  The interesting thing is we are assuming that the necessary molecules have already formed into the amino acids and that the protein molecule will form randomly and properly and be folded correctly into this protein.  This event happens hundreds of thousands of times every minute within each cell of your body.

It is possible, we might get a protein to form, but it is highly improbable.  Plain and simple. So you understand the difference between possibility and probability now?


Closely linked to  the concept of probability is that of entropy, since probability is proportional to the number of configurations (N) in which some state could occur, and entropy is proportional to the log of N.  As an example, the number of ways water molecules can arrange themselves in the solid state is much smaller than the number ways in the liquid or gas states, so ice is the state with the lowest entropy.  Due to this connection, the probability argument is restated that nature tends to move from states of lower entropy to higher entropy, which simply means that nature moves towards states that are highly probable.  This tendency is known as the second law of thermodynamics.


Jeremy England, a physicist from MIT had a brainstorm of an idea that life is very good at increasing the entropy of its surroundings: life absorbs energy and dissipates it as heat, and this by definition increases the surroundings’ entropy. In addition, of course, if something can self-replicate, then it will generate more energy dissipaters.


Natural systems never both decrease in entropy and increase in energy at the same time.  Therefore, the origin of life through purely natural processes would seem as implausible as water on a hot summer day spontaneously freezing or a river flowing unaided uphill for thousands of miles.  Physicists and chemists (in order to try to explain what they cannot calculate) often combine entropy and energy (or enthalpy) together into what is called the free energy of a system. The change of free energy is always negative for spontaneous changes (e.g., wood burning or ice melting in summer), and it directly relates to the total increase in entropy of the universe.  The challenge for the origin of life is then explaining how billions of atoms could spontaneously come together into a state of significantly higher free energy.

Various calculations have been done, all using different variables and the probability has always been essentially zero.  At face value, this thermodynamic analysis for the origin of life would seem to negate any possible materialistic solution to the problem.  Theorists have long recognized one remaining loophole (but remember, these are theorists- a person concerned with the theoretical aspects of a subject).

Most calculations have assumed that the system was in a state near equilibrium.  However, many argue that the origin of life took place in a system strongly driven away from equilibrium.  This would be a pond subjected to intense sunlight or the bottom of the ocean near a hydrothermal vent flooding with its surroundings superheated water and high-energy chemicals.  These settings are commonly referred to as non-equilibrium dissipative systems.  Their common characteristic is that classical thermodynamics breaks down, so the previous analyses do not completely hold.  Instead, principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics must be applied, which are far more complex and less well understood.  Moreover, the energy from these outside sources is hoped to enable the free-energy barrier to be overcome.  Therefore, scientists are relying on less than scientific methods to prove their points.

However, such appeals to non-equilibrium systems do little to solve the basic thermodynamic problems.  First, no system could be maintained far from equilibrium for more than a limited amount of time. Any progress made toward forming a cell would be lost as the system reverted toward equilibrium (lower free energy) and thus away from any state approaching life.

This has been extensively promoted as a ‘groundbreaking idea’ about why we have life.  Despite the hype, nothing is being offered to explain how life could have evolved from lifeless chemicals; still a massive unsolved hurdle.

The input of raw solar, thermal or other forms of energy actually increase the entropy of the system, thus moving it in the wrong direction.  For instance, the ultraviolet light from the sun or heat from hydrothermal vents would be more likely to break apart  complex chemical structures than form them.


Intelligent Design, Philosophy

The enigma of purpose

The enigma of purpose

If you subscribe to news feeds, read the newspaper, or watch TV, you certainly believe that we humans have been behaving badly. In recent years, we humans have variously blamed other (it is always others) humans for causing: global cooling, global warming, famines, floods, mass extinctions, plagues, deforestation, landslides, earthquakes, and so much more. All of the problems (real or imagined) on planet Earth are apparently our fault, and it’s only supposed to get worse. Naturalist and evolutionist Sir David Attenborough summed up this thinking well: “Humans are a plague on earth,”  he wrote in an article  in the, 22 January 2013 But this raises a very interesting question: if naturalistic evolution is true, why does it matter that we’re a “plague on earth”?

The idiocy of these media reports (and there are plenty of articles on different websites that criticize them).  Instead, I want to point out the obvious disconnect between the headlines and the evolutionary beliefs subscribed to by many of these same media outlets, their correspondents, and the environmentalists they quote.

If (and it is a big IF) evolution is true and man is nothing more than a highly-evolved primate, the result of random mutations and natural selection over millions of years, then we humans are just another part of nature.  Anything we do is simply nature in action.  If a species becomes extinct because of human intervention, it is just natural selection.  If the burning of fossil fuels causes a runaway greenhouse effect that cooks the planet, it will be a natural occurrence.  If the world is one day obliterated by a nuclear holocaust, it certainly won’t be an unnatural event.  And why not?  In the atheistic, evolutionary worldview, everything is natural.  If atheistic evolution is true, the word ‘unnatural’ can have no meaning!

However, this is not the reality we seem to experience.  We mourn the loss of biodiversity, agonize over the size of our carbon footprint, protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and we are rightly horrified by acts of cruelty to animals.  I’m not saying that all humans behave like this, but since many of us do, all of us can.  For some reason, we humans are held to a higher moral standard than the rest of nature.

Evolutionists have to believe humankind has evolved to a point where we can understand the natural process that has made us what we are but, at the same time, the logical ramifications of that same natural process do not bind us.

Ask an environmentalist why they do what they do and they will likely tell you they want to ‘leave the planet in better shape than they found it,’ or something similarly noble.  In his closing remarks for the 2000 BBC Natural History Unit documentary State of the Planet, Attenborough says;  “Surely we have a responsibility to leave for future generations a planet that is healthy, inhabitable by all species.” (State of the Planet, BBC Natural History Unit, Part 3, 2000)

Apparently, our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to purposefully plan for the future of planet Earth.  These are admirable intentions!  However, they are not what we would expect given evolution.  As Richard Dawkins makes clear in his book The Blind Watchmaker:

“Natural selection, the blind unconscious automatic process, which Darwin discovered and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life has no purpose in mind.  It has no mind, no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all [emphasis added].”  (Dawkins, R., The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA, 1986)

But somehow this blind, purposeless, natural process has managed to produce human beings that have foresight and can purposely plan for the future. Sir David exhorts us to use this foresight to manipulate the natural order so that we can achieve his purposes. In doing so we are often purposefully engaging in behaviour that, whether we realise it or not (and most do not), is exactly the opposite of what we would expect if evolution were true.

Environmentalists work tirelessly to save animals from extinction, even animals such as lions and tigers that potentially compete for food with us.  Animals, which given half a chance, would not hesitate to drive us to extinction.  This is opposite the basic evolutionary narrative where survival of the fittest is supposedly a main driver of behavior.  Apparently, Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” does not apply if the tooth is brushed twice daily and the claw occasionally painted.

Nevertheless, it is in our behavior toward ourselves and our fellow humans that the evolutionary disconnect is both most obvious and, at the same time, most studiously ignored.  We care for our sick, allowing potentially genetically inferior individuals to survive (using up valuable resources) and reproduce (reducing population fitness).  We medically intervene to enable infertile couples to reproduce and pass on their (likely inferior) genes.  At the same time, seemingly, healthy individuals will use contraception to limit their offspring and many will even undergo medical procedures to abort the offspring they have already conceived.

We actively choose lifestyles that limit our likelihood of procreation (celibacy, same-sex relationships, or just choosing never to have children). We encourage our young to delay sexual activity.  We even legislate with the intention of limiting sexual partners (anti-polygamy laws and marriage itself).  What is interesting is those who would advocate for multiple partners will often point to examples in nature to support their belief that monogamy is unnatural.  On the surface, this might seem reasonable, until you realize that in nature the result of multiple partners is more offspring, whereas in humans, more offspring is usually the last thing the practitioners want.

We engage in warfare with the intent of annihilating those who disagree with us while at the same time enacting rules to ensure that this happens humanely.  When we capture an enemy, our focus must immediately change from trying to kill them to treating them with dignity, knowing full well that they would probably not hesitate to kill us given the opportunity to escape.  We often adhere to these rules despite knowing that our enemy likely will not.

So many of our intentions, good and bad, seem anti-evolutionary in their execution.

Evolutionists have devised explanations for this behavior.  But the necessarily contradictory nature of these explanations only serves to reinforce the absurdity of evolution as a scientifically plausible reason for our purposive behavior. As respected chemist and member of the US National Academy of Sciences, Philip Skell pointed out:


Our best intentions are a natural outworking of the fact that man was created in the image of God and given dominion over His creation (Genesis 1:26–30). Our worst intentions are a direct result of Adams rebellion (Genesis 3:14–19). The evolutionary worldview fails to make sense of so many of our intentions because, as the Bible clearly teaches, we are not the result of evolution.

Next time you read or hear of something mankind has supposedly done to jeopardize the future health of our planet, remember that these reports are (in most cases) unwittingly reinforcing the biblical account of Creation and the Fall.

Education vs Common Core, Intelligent Design, Philosophy

I think therefore I believe I might just be what it is I think

“Cogito ergo sum”  is a Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”.  The phrase originally appeared in French as “je pense, donc je suis” in his Discourse on the Method, so as to reach a wider audience than Latin would have allowed.  Many of my generation and younger (I don’t know or want to know the current “hip” description for them- “hippie” was mine I have no idea who “millennial’s,” “X-Generation,” “baby boomers”-Hippies may overlap them) have used that phrase as a reason to deny the existence of a “God”.

They use this phrase, and many more taken out of context of the original writers overall thesis, and use it as the basis of what they wish to believe.  All the science fiction movies and novels have added greatly to the depth of their beliefs so that it is virtually unshakeable.  I like the ones who have used the “Star Wars” “May the force be with you” to generate a level of consciousness that we must all strive to obtain.  So let us explain how incredible wrong they are about René Descartes and his belief about God and why they say it is not so- those few who are capable of debating in intelligent fashion.


Most individuals ignore the rest of his entire work and concentrate on just that phrase in order to justify their beliefs. However, that is unfair, as that one statement is directly in opposition to his final thoughts and conclusions.  So it behooves me to go through his Meditations and set everyone straight.





In his First meditation he lays out his thesis to the esteemed Dean and Faculty of the Theological Center in Paris: “I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical rather than theological argument. For although it is quite enough for us faithful ones to accept by means of faith the fact that the human soul does not perish with the body, and that God exists, it certainly does not seem possible ever to persuade infidels of any religion, indeed, we may almost say, of any moral virtue, unless, to begin with, we prove these two facts by means of the natural reason.  And inasmuch as often in this life greater rewards are offered for vice than for virtue, few people would prefer the right to the useful, were they restrained neither by the fear of God nor the expectation of another life; and although it is absolutely true that we must believe that there is a God, because we are so taught in the Holy Scriptures, and, on the other hand, that we must believe the Holy Scriptures because they come from God (the reason of this is, that, faith being a gift of God, He who gives the grace to cause us to believe other things can likewise give it to cause us to believe that He exists), we nevertheless could not place this argument before infidels, who might accuse us of reasoning in a circle.“

Descartes states that he has put off examining the foundations upon which he has built all his false beliefs. But he must now do so, in order to establish firm and lasting truths in the sciences. Examining each of his opinions for falsehood would be tedious; rather, Descartes says that if he can simply show that there is cause for doubt for an opinion, then he can throw that opinion out.  So he states”

“In the first Meditation I set forth the reasons for which we may, generally speaking, doubt about all things and especially about material things, at least so long as we have no other foundations for the sciences than those which we have hitherto possessed. But although the utility of a Doubt which is so general does not at first appear, it is at the same time very great, inasmuch as it delivers us from every kind of prejudice, and sets out for us a very simple way by which the mind may detach itself from the senses; and finally it makes it impossible for us ever to doubt those things which we have once discovered to be true.”

The senses seem like a good place to start, since they often mislead us. But would it not be insane to reject also such deliverances as that we have hands, eyes, etc.? Probably. We have no clear criterion for distinguishing between our waking and sleeping lives. But whatever we dream, Descartes suggests that the constituting elements of them, i.e., ‘simples’, must surely have a basis in reality. The idea is that ‘simples’ are that out of which we form complex ideas (e.g., of a unicorn). So if we find the simplest elements in nature, we will have found the most universal, which then must be true.  The mathematical and physical sciences, then, which don’t depend on composites, might be considered to be indubitable. Can 1 + 2 not be 3? People often make mistakes in the above disciplines. So we can both doubt that God is benevolent and the capacity of our reason to deliver true judgments. Thus, Descartes resolves to throw out all his previous beliefs, and assume that God is maliciously bent on deceiving him. His famous saying is in this Meditation, but I will deal with it later.

He writes on to the Professors:

“In the second Meditation, mind, which making use of the liberty which pertains to it, takes for granted that all those things of whose existence it has the least doubt, are non-existent, recognizes that it is however absolutely impossible that it does not itself exist. This point is likewise of the greatest moment, inasmuch as by this means a distinction is easily drawn between the things which pertain to mind—that is to say to the intellectual nature—and those which pertain to body.”

He asks what is there concerning which he can have not the slightest occasion for doubt? It is that he exists.  This follows, he argues, from the fact that even if he denies that he has a body, or that the world exists, or that he is not being deceived by a malicious God, there is still an object of those denials: himself.  While he can suppose his body to not belong to him, he can’t suppose thinking to not belong to him.  Thus, he knows only that he is a Thinking thing –one who “doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.”

Continuing to write:

“In the third Meditation it seems to me that I have explained at sufficient length the principal argument of which I make use in order to prove the existence of God. But no ne the less, because I did not wish in that place to make use of any comparisons derived from corporeal things, so as to withdraw as much as I could the minds of readers from the senses, there may perhaps have remained many obscurities which, however, will, I hope, be entirely removed by the Replies which I have made to the Objections which have been set before me. “

Descartes notes that his being certain of his being a thinking thing, which is a “first instance of knowledge,” reveals what is needed for him to be certain of anything: a clear and distinct perception of what is affirmed. But if it could be that something so clear and distinct could be false, he would not be certain of the thing’s truth. Thus, everything he perceives clearly and distinctly is true.

“In the fourth Meditation it is shown that all these things which we very clearly and distinctly perceive are true, and at the same time it is explained in what the nature of error or falsity consists. This must of necessity be known both for the confirmation of the preceding truths and for the better comprehension of those that follow.” 

Descartes now moves to deduce other truths from those that he has established: that God exists, and that Descartes depends on him for his existence at all moments.  From the previous Meditation, God can never deceive Descartes.  He says that while deception may seem like “an indication of cleverness or power, the will to deceive undoubtedly attests to maliciousness or weakness.  Accordingly, deception is incompatible with God.  Descartes wonders then, if God won’t deceive, why he has endowed us with judgments that seem given to frequent error.

Why, then, does error come about?  Descartes offers that it is because though our intellect is finite, our will is infinite. Errors in judgment are caused by indifference of the will, which occurs when the will affirms or denies despite there being no (good) reason to do either.  A will that is properly inclined by a clear and distinct perception on the part of reason prevents error in judgment.  In concluding, Descartes argues that God does not owe us, who have not merited anything, an infinite intellect, which, besides, is not proper to us.  In addition, though God concurs in our actions, he has responsibility only for the good in our actions; the bad are a result of negation.  We are responsible for our sins, because we can choose to abstain from willing/judging things that we do not understand, and only will/judge things that we perceive clearly and distinctly.

“In the fifth Meditation corporeal nature generally is explained, and in addition to this the existence of God is demonstrated by a new proof in which there may possibly be certain difficulties also, but the solution of these will be seen in the Replies to the Objections. And further I show in what sense it is true to say that the certainty of geometrical demonstrations is itself dependent on the knowledge of God.”

Now Descartes seeks to return to the subject of whether material things exist, which was pushed aside in the first Meditation. A natural starting point is the ideas that we have of objects. He says that he has 4 distinct ideas of extension, which he is able to enumerate parts in and to which he is able to ascribe such properties as size, shape, motion, etc. there are no external objects, he is able to think of triangles at will, and upon their essences, which are not fabricated. He can demonstrate their properties in his mind. He can use the truths of geometry, arithmetic on these objects and find the sine and cosine and they would be correct.  If it follows from the fact that whatever he perceives clearly and distinctly to belong to an idea of something he brings forth, that it belongs to that thing, then it follows that God exists.

As long as Descartes remembers that he clearly and distinctly perceived once that there is a God, who doesn’t deceive, no counterargument can be given that puts doubt on any of his clear and distinct beliefs. But this still leaves out the existence of material objects. Do we perceive them clearly and distinctly, apart from their ideas?



Descartes begins his project of determining whether we can know that external objects exist by distinguishing between the imagination and intellect. Imagination is a faculty that we use for picturing what we’re thinking about..  We can think of the earth by imagining in our mind.  But the conceive of the earth as an eight sided octagon takes a bit more understanding of a complex combination of ideas. Thus, Descartes argues, imagination is not essential to our mind. Understanding is. He conjectures that perhaps the imaginative faculty belongs to something distinct from his mind, a body maybe.

Various themes about innate truths are introduced in the Fifth Meditation. Among them concerns the effects of repeated meditation: truths initially noticed only by means of inference might eventually come to be apprehended self-evidently. In the build-up to the passage claiming that the Evil Genius Doubt is finally and fully overcome, Descartes has his mediator say:


Although it needed close attention for me to perceive this, I am now just as certain of it as I am of everything else which appears most certain. And what is more, I see that the certainty of all other things depends on this, so that without it nothing can ever be perfectly known”. (Med. 5, AT 7:69)

First, he sensed that he had hands, feet, etc.  Further, he judged what was beneficial and what was harmful, what opportune, what inopportune, by means of his sensation of pleasure and pain.  He also sensed colors, odors, etc., on whose basis he distinguished, say, sky from seas.  Ideas bombarded him constantly, in other words.  Why then did he think there were external bodies?  Because, the ideas they presented were more vivid, more explicit than he could muster through meditation, nor could he not sense them when they were present, or imagine them when they were not.  With regard to his having a body, he sensed, by nature’s teaching, which his body was his, since his will to eat, e.g., was always connected to hunger in his stomach.  In addition, his moods shifted in accordance with the particularity of his sensations.

Because God is not a deceiver, what nature teaches us is probably true.  So, our bodies are tightly joined with our minds, so much so that they constitute one thing. Nature also teaches us that there are other bodies around us.  Descartes clarifies that by “nature” he means only what pertains to our composite minds and bodies, and so what we are allowed to infer on the basis of sense appearance

The full statement that the progressives steal part of is: “What of thinking?  I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist, that is certain.  But how often?  Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist. I do not now admit anything which is not necessarily true: to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.”

When I try to doubt my own existence, I immediately apprehend that I must exist in order to be attempting the doubt.  Similarly (on this interpretation), when I try to doubt God’s existence, or omnipotence, or benevolence — or any other attribute contained in the very conception of an all-perfect being — I immediately apprehend, as Descartes writes, that any such skeptical conception of God “implies a conceptual contradiction — that is, it cannot be conceived” (1643 letter to Voetius, AT 8b:60).

If our schools had only taught critical thinking in high school classes, we might have an entirely different world out thinking of thinking rational beings.  Instead we have a group that when told that Rhett Butler said “Frankly, Ma’am. I don’t give a damn” they now know all about Gone With The Wind and the Civil War.

Didja Know, Intelligent Design

Grand Canyon Research

Grand Canyon: legal battleground?

The Blue Angel Trail along the Grand Canyon


The complaint

Snelling’s lawyers, Michael Kitchen of Margrave Celmins PC and Gary McCaleb of Alliance Defending Freedom, filed the complaint. ADF released this statement the same day (9 May 2017). Sarah Kramer of ADF also left this blog entry describing the case. One day later, Bob Unruh of WorldNetDaily left this account. In it he asked whether the “grand illusion” concerning the Grand Canyon would soon lose its credence.

Only by reading the complaint can one grasp the legal and moral issues at stake. In it, Dr. Snelling’s lawyers give the details.

In November of 2013, Dr. Snelling applied for permission to study folding sedimentary structures, from the Paleozoic group of strata. He sought to collect up to sixty half-pound samples from four places in the Grand Canyon. Dr. Snelling had already reserved several Colorado River rafting trips between April and July 2014 to collect the samples.

Everything went fine, until Ronda Newton, the Research Permitting Coordinator, asked for two peer reviews of his research proposal. Dr. Snelling had applied for and gotten permits for earlier research in the Grand Canyon. She asked for these in February of 2014. No one had ever asked for peer reviews of his proposals before. Still, he found three scientists willing to review his proposal.

So then Ms. Newton sent the application materials to two evolutionists. That act started all the trouble.

Two ringers and an empty suit

Karl Karlstrom, PhD, is a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. In January of 2014 he had published, in the journal Nature, his own article on the Grand Canyon. In it he said the Grand Canyon formed five to six million years ago, when several older structures linked up. Thus he himself broke with convention, which says the Grand Canyon formed 70 million years ago.

One would suppose Dr. Karlstrom would gladly take an interest in a proposal that the Grand Canyon was younger still. Not so. The science did not seem to pose a problem. But Dr. Snelling’s religious views did. So also did the views of the three earlier peer reviewers. Then Dr. Karlstrom suggested to let Dr. Snelling take his samples somewhere else—without saying where else.

Dr. Huntoon gives the game away

Ms. Newman could and should have asked Dr. Karlstrom to clarify the “somewhere else.” She did not. Instead she sent the application to another professor, Peter Huntoon, PhD, of the University of Wyoming. Dr. Huntoon at least had studied those same Paleozoic folds that Dr. Snelling wanted to sample.

Whereas Dr. Karlstrom had made an effort to sound reasonable, Dr. Huntoon did not. He couldn’t get past the creation advocacy angle. He wrote:


In other words, the National Park Service should never approve any research that questions the secular model of Earth origins. That statement alone shows that science, and especially origins science, are not value-free. Anyone who still thinks so, should ask Dr. Huntoon. Then he specifically suggested the Park Service should deny permits to people representing interests he deemed inappropriate. If his earlier statement did not make his bias abundantly clear, this did.

Any truly objective official should have thrown out Dr. Huntoon’s report on its face. No scientist ever speaks of another as “representing inappropriate interests.” Unless said scientist is an origins scientist, or a dedicated global-warming alarmist. Then he or she does it all the time. Dr. Huntoon set the prize example. And Ms. Newton? She accepted that report, because it told her what she wanted to hear. For good measure, Dr. Huntoon told Ms. Newton more of the same in an e-mail. “Reviewing is fine,” said he, “just not processing the dead-end creationist material.”

The empty suit

Ms. Newton then sought an opinion from Dr. Ron Blakely of North Arizona University. And he said only that “it is difficult to review such an outlandish proposal.” What was so outlandish? What did he find outlandish? Dr. Blakely never said.

The Park Service denies the permit

On 4 March 2014, the Park Service denied the permit. Martha Hahn, Chief of the Science and Resource Management Research Office, wrote the denial. She said only,

it has been determined that equivalent examples of soft-sediment folds can be found outside of Grand Canyon National Park.

Where outside the Grand Canyon? Dr. Snelling asked Mss. Newman and Hahn again and again where to find those “equivalent examples.” And they did not even bother to return his telephone calls. Nor could they, in all honesty, have told him anything different from what he had already found out. To wit: he couldn’t find any “equivalent examples” anywhere except in the Grand Canyon.

Ms. Hahn wanted to make sure Dr. Snelling would not take his samples anyway. So she warned him the Park Service would never let him do research in any National Park if he did. Not only that, but Ms. Newton suggested that Ms. Hahn alert two other persons to watch out for Dr. Snelling or other “folks like this” on the Colorado River.

Dr. Snelling re-files

So Dr. Snelling missed his opportunity. But, trying to be reasonable, he re-filed on 8 February 2016. This time he proposed to collect only forty samples. He also answered every concern Dr. Karlstrom and others had raised. (Remember: at least Dr. Karlstrom did address the science to some extent.)

Again the Park Service delayed the application. This time they demanded more details on the site locations. Dr. Snelling did specify his sampling locations with margins of 100 feet. Other researchers should specify sampling sites with such precision.

Dr. Snelling waited to hear back from the Park Service. And waited. And waited.

Curiously, he did get a permit, but not to take the samples. Instead he must make a dry run to take pictures and get on-site GPS coordinates for every sample site. The Park Service sent the permit on 25 April 2016, but dated it 15 July 2016. The Park Service has never before demanded that any researcher do that kind of dry-run recon. Even the research guidelines for the Grand Canyon do not demand anything remotely like this. Naturally, Dr. Snelling refused. And on 5 July 2016, Ms. Newman (see above) sent an e-mail refusing any sampling permit.

Refusal to answer

Finally, on 22 December 2016, Dr. Snelling called his lawyers. They wrote straight to Christine Lehnertz, the Superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park. In their letter they set forth the legal issues the delay raised. Alliance Defending Freedom have done this before, in three other cases that involve the Grand Canyon.

Believe it or not, Ms. Lehnertz did not answer the letter or even say whether she got it. Dr. Snelling’s lawyers sent another letter on 31 January 2017, with the same lack of result. On 31 March 2017, Representative Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) wrote to Ms. Lehnertz, asking her to grant the permit. She ignored the congressman also.

The issues go beyond the Grand Canyon

Most of these acts took place during the Obama administration. All that has happened during the Trump administration, is refusal to answer letters. Still, the complaint cites Donald Trump’s specific Executive Order on religious freedom.

Dr. Snelling alleges five causes of action:

  1. Abridgment of his freedom of speech, by denying a permit for scientific investigation on obviously specious grounds. The actual grounds amount to viewpoint discrimination. To prove this, Dr. Snelling has the correspondence of Drs. Karlstrom, Blakely, and especially Huntoon.
  2. Interference with the free exercise of his religion, by the same act and on the same grounds.
  3. Denying him due process of law.
  4. Denying him the equal protection of the law.
  5. Breaking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Scientific process issues

The scientific issues should concern any intellectually honest scientist. Evolutionists always call what they are doing “science,” and what creation advocates do, “pseudoscience.” They point to “statements of faith” like that from Answers in Genesis, while denying they subscribe to any similar statements. Yet three scientists have criticized Dr. Snelling on the grounds of his religious faith. Of the three, only Dr. Karlstrom raised any scientific concerns anyone might call legitimate. (Dr. Snelling answers those concerns.) The other two have disgraced themselves, their discipline, and the entire community of scientists.

Dr. Huntoon has given the worst offense. How dare he deem any avenue of scientific inquiry “inappropriate”? What does he fear? Could he fear that Dr. Snelling might develop evidence challenging the moral foundations of “our…secular society”?

But Dr. Huntoon actually gives a typical offense against religious and academic freedom. He illustrates the intellectual corruption of origins science today. His type of “investigator” doesn’t want to investigate, but to shut down any investigation of the fundamental question of origins. That question is: did the universe, this earth, and life come to exist over billions of years, or mere thousands? Maybe this explains why no one ever accepted the Walter T. Brown Written Debate Challenge.

Worse even than Dr. Huntoon’s attitude, is that of Mss. Newman, Hahn, and Lehnertz. In no other context, and under no other circumstances, would anyone in their positions accept the kind of petty, puerile, and spiteful objections Dr. Huntoon raised. They would mention him, if at all, only to condemn him. Instead Ms. Newman sought him out for the exact kind of opinion he gave. Her colleagues went along with this. That such persons remain in government employ, should concern anyone who cares about freedom of religion or scientific inquiry.

Evillution, Intelligent Design

Richard Dawkins Greatest Hoax in Science

This will be the first article detailing many of the “popular” so-called Atheists currently writing and confusing individuals today.  I promise not to be fair- it is only right to point out stupidity when one steps into and cannot get it off your shoes easily.

Clinton Richard Dawkins is probably the most famous evolutionist, anti-creationist and atheist today, and a staunch admirer of Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) the beginner of the muddling mess of science today.  His father  was an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). His father was called up into the King’s African Rifles during World War II and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight.  This background may have had an influence on his further development.  Living in a dusty, sparse area with less than perfect sanitation and then being transported into the luxury of a 100 acre farm in England.

He gained his degree in Zoology at the Balliol College, Oxford, in 1962.   he was tutored by Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988), who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries about instinct, learning and choice in animals.  Dawkins continued to study under Tinbergen, at the University of Oxford, receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1966.

Dawkins then took a position of assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, which in late 60’s was a hotbed of radicalism, I know, I spent some time rioting there.  He returned to Oxford as a lecturer in 1970 and he researched animal decision-making.  Since the 1970s, he has concentrated on improving his writing skills for popular audiences, for which he is far more famous than for his scientific research on animal behavior.

Dawkins’ first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), advocated a gene-centered view of evolution.  In other words, life first began from a ‘replicator’ that could make approximate copies of itself, which would therefore predominate in some kind of primordial soup that no one has been able to duplicate.  Those copies that could make internal biological machines to help them copy better and then would reproduce more.  Dawkins claims that these replicators are our genes, and our bodies are just ‘gigantic lumbering robots’ which are their ‘survival machines’.  This book also independently introduced the idea of the ‘meme’, a set of ideas that is replicated in other minds. (This has had an explosion with the advent of Facebook).

Dawkins regards his second book, The Extended Phenotype (1982), as his most important contribution to evolutionary biology.  This was kind of sequel and defense of The Selfish Gene; whereas in his first book, Dawkins argues that the organism is the gene’s survival machine, in his second he extends the genes’ influence to the environment modified by the organism’s behavior.  If this behavior helps the organism’s survival, then the genes ‘for’ that behavior will reproduce best.  His examples include beaver dams and termite mounds, as well as animal behavior that benefits a parasite afflicting it, hence the genes of that parasite. He also forgot one of his beloved Darwinian concepts, that the environment could have an effect on the organism to change the gene.  How he could forget that is anybody’s guess.  Mine is the advance on the book.

In 1986, Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker, an attack on the argument that design in the living world demonstrates an intelligent Designer.  Instead, apparent design is the result of evolution by natural selection.  He regards that as a vital argument for his own Atheistic faith:


Dawkins participated in the Huxley Memorial Debate at the Oxford Union one of very few.  He was opposing the proposition, “That the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution.”  With him was the leading English evolutionist John Maynard Smith (1920–2004), and they were opposed by two biblical creationist scientists: triple doctorate organic chemist and pharmacologist A. E. Wilder-Smith (1915–1995) and Edgar Andrews (1932– ), then Professor of Materials at the University of London.

The audience of Oxford students voted and it  was a modest win for the evolution side, 198–115. Yet Dawkins was not happy—in his closing comments, he had “implored” the audience (his word) not to give a single vote to the creationist side, since every such vote “would be a blot on the escutcheon of the ancient University of Oxford[i].”  Ironically, it would be a return to Oxford’s roots, since it was founded by creationists.  After that, he is on record refusing to debate any biblical creationist. Somewhat like a baby throwing a hissy fit.

In 1995, he was appointed the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. This was an endowment by leading Microsoft software designer and billionaire Charles Simonyi (b. Simonyi Károly, 1948) explicitly done just for Dawkins. The endowment stated, “The aim of the Professorship is “to communicate science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding.”  It was established with the express intention that the holder “be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field.”  Whether Dawkins lived up to that lofty goal is debatable.

One report said: “Evolution’s first great advocate, 1860s biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, earned the nickname ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ from his fellow Victorians. I n our own less decorous day, Dawkins deserves an even stronger epithet: ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler, perhaps,’ Simonyi suggests[ii].”  Dawkins retired from this post in September 2008.  You will be unable to find any example from this period were Dawkins aided the public understanding of any real science such as physics or chemistry, or even of the history or philosophy of science. However, during this professorship, Dawkins wrote seven books on evolution/atheism.  It is not surprising that British author Paul Johnson called it “Oxford’s first Chair of Atheism.[iii]

One of them, Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Dawkins’ admits is one of his own favorites and is aimed to defend slow and gradual evolution. The title is a parable: many structures in living organisms are so complex that there is a vanishingly small probability of producing them in a single step—this corresponds to leaping the high Mt Improbable in a single step.  However, Dawkins says, this mountain has a gently upward-sloping terrain on the other side, where a climber can ascend gradually, constantly progressing to the top.  This corresponds to the neo-Darwinian mechanism of evolution—mutations + natural selection.  Mutations produce gradual improvements, and natural selection means that organisms which have them are slightly more likely to leave offspring provided they are in the right spot at the right time and are compatible to intertwine their chromosomes through what every process is available.  So a later generation of organisms is slightly more complex, or higher up the slope of Mt Improbable.

In his largest book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (2004, 688 pages hardcover), Dawkins aimed to illustrate the history of life on Earth.  This was a series of 40 tales, from the point of view of man’s alleged evolutionary precursors[iv], and the name is a play on the Middle English classic The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400). This has made him probably the best known exponent of evolution in the world.

Richard Dawkins not only regards Darwinism as compatible with atheism, but that atheism is a logical outcome of evolutionary belief- which I tend to agree with.  He has long promoted atheism both individually and as part of Atheistic organizations.  Dawkins is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a vice-president of the British Humanist Association (since 1996), a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society of Scotland, a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 2003, he signed Humanism and Its Aspirations, published by the American Humanist Association.

In his 1991 essay “Viruses of the Mind”, Dawkins singled out theistic religion as one of the most pernicious of these viruses, that is, he regards theism as a kind of disease or pathology, and parents who teach it to their children are, in Dawkins’ view, supposedly practicing mental child abuse  But the sorts of criteria Dawkins applies have led critics to wonder whether Dawkins’ own strident atheism itself could be a mental pathology—or ‘atheopathy’- A neologism, coined by Jonathan Sarfati, which combines the word “atheist” and the suffix “-path” (“one afflicted by a specified disorder”) to create a word meaning something like “one afflicted by atheism.

Dawkins criticized those who resorted to prayers after 9/11.  Somehow he overlooked the record-breaking tens of millions killed by Atheistic regimes last century.  This was thoroughly documented by Rudolph Rummel (1932– ), Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, who coined the term democide for murder by government (I have written about it at: )

This antitheism continued in the presentation of a Channel 4 program in the UK, called The Root of All Evil?  (2006). The title was Channel 4’s choice, not Dawkins’, but he argued that humanity would be better off without belief in God.  In this program, Dawkins interviewed a number of Christian leaders, and visited several holy sites and communities of major religions.  However, some critics attacked the program for not having informed Christian responses.  For example, Dawkins’ fellow Oxford PhD, Alister McGrath (1953– ), Professor of Historical Theology (with a PhD in molecular biophysics), claimed that after his responses Dawkins seemed uncomfortable, so he was not surprised that his own contribution to the show remained on the cutting room floor[v].

Dawkins’ defense of atheism produced his best-seller to date, The God Delusion (2006), with 1.5 million copies sold.  Many high-profile Atheists praised it, and naturally Christians criticized it.  For example, Philip Bell, M.Sc. and former cancer researcher, published a detailed review[vi], and there are other books responding to it[vii]. However, leading logician and Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (1932– ), currently “John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame”, was not impressed with Dawkins’ excursions outside biology into philosophy, claiming that they could be called sophomoric were it not a grave insult to most sophomores[viii].  Now, I am not sure about you, but since it is my money, before I buy a book I read as many reviews, both positive and negative that I can before buying it. Stupidly, I bought this one and was not disappointed.

Prof. McGrath himself responded to the book (co-authored with his wife)[ix]. This also revealed that Dawkins’ support among Atheists was not universal—famous evolutionary philosopher Michael Ruse writes in the blurb, “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an Atheist, and the McGraths show why.”  Ruse also said that the “new Atheists” led by Dawkins are “a b****y disaster”[x], and said the following about the book:

“Question: What do you think of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins? Your approach is a lot milder? (The book lays open on his bed in the hotel room in Amsterdam where Ruse is interviewed.)

“Answer: I am just as critical of this book as of the work of Intelligent Design authors like Michael Behe, despite the fact that I, as an agnostic, am closer to Dawkins, and am 99% in agreement with his conclusions. But this book is stupid, politically disastrous and bad academics.  If someone spoke about biology and evolution as he does on theology, Dawkins would react without mercy.


“Dawkins’ book confirms my analysis of evolution as pseudo-religion.  His secular humanism has quasi-religious characteristics.[xi]

Another Atheist , Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway, began his review of The God Delusion with these words:


Eagleton continues:


Dawkins publicly debated his book with John Carson Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at Oxford.  Lennox is also a Christian apologist and Intelligent Design supporter, and teacher of Science and Religion at Oxford, and the author of several books on the relations of science with religion and ethics.  This debate did not cover evolution, but the wider Christianity vs atheism topics covered in The God Delusio[xiii]n. Dawkins seemed quite red-faced and uncomfortable during the debate.

However, Dawkins refuses to debate best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Great about Christianity[xiv] among others, even though D’Souza is a theistic evolutionist not a creationist[xv]. Yet many of Dawkins’ fellow ‘new Atheists’ such as Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett have been willing. In an open letter, D’Souza contrasted Dawkins’ eagerness to entrap non-scientist Christians on his TV shows with a refusal to debate a strong opponent on level terms:




Now for a little rehash of what has been covered so far.  We will go into his next book on another post.  It is the information age- little information at a time. Dawkins started off as a “real scientist” and then moved on the showbiz aspect of popularity.  If even his own “kind” (Atheists) have harsh words for him you can image what others believe.


[i] Cooper, G. and Humber, P., Fraudulent report at AAAS and the 1986 Oxford University debate,

[ii] Downey, R., in Eastsideweek, 11 December 1996.

[iii] Johnson, P., If there is no God, what is the Oxford atheist scared of? Spectator, p. 19, 16 March 1996.

[iv] See review by Weinberger, Lael, Long tails, tall tales, J. Creation 22(1):37–40, 2008;

[v] McGrath, A., “Do stop behaving as if you are God, Professor Dawkins”, Mail Online, 9 February 2007.

[vi] See Bell, P., Atheist with a Mission: Critique of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, J. Creation 21(2):28–34, 2007;

[vii] Slane, R., The God Reality: A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Day One, UK.

[viii] Plantinga, A., The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum, Christianity Today (Books and Culture), March/April 2007;

[ix] McGrath, Alister and McGrath, Joanna Collicutt, The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine, SPCK, UK, 2007.

[x] Kumar, J.,, 19 August 2009

[xi] Ruse, Michael, interview with De Volkskrant (Netherlands), p. 7, 7 April 2007, (translated by Frans Gunnink).

[xii] Eagleton,T., Lunging, flailing, mispunching, London Review of Books 28(20), 19 October, 2006, last accessed 25 January, 2007;

[xiii] See The God Delusion Debate (DVD), available from CMI.

[xiv] Regnery, Washington DC, 2007.

[xv] See review by Cosner, L., Mostly masterful defence of Christianity; pity it’s slack on creation, J. Creation 22(2):32–35, 2008;

[xvi] D’Souza, cited in: The rout of the New Atheists,, 21 July 2008..

Intelligent Design

Is anything possible?

It is obvious from my discussions with those on Facebook and in other environments, that there is an incredible lack of understanding about the difference between what is possible and what is probable.  Along with it goes the concept of impossible and highly improbable.  As much as I would like to place the blame on the school system (which has a lot to do with) one has to look elsewhere for the complete story.

Our society has gotten on the supercilious concept that anything is possible.  We encourage the concept that nothing is impossible.  We can achieve anything we set our mind to (not withstand environmentally, political, monetary, geographical or educational pitfalls), Girls can grow up to become astronauts like Sally Ride and possibly die alongside men in an ignoble death.  Women can break the ‘glass ceiling’ and become President- if they do not burnout on lies first. Men can join a boy-band with virtually no skills and become rich and famous- and then act like a fool behind his bodyguards.  In other words, we sincerely believe that for anybody ANYTHING is possible.

However, there is such a thing as reality (reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined.)

If Stephen Hawking were to believe that it possible for him to drive a stock car at Daytona on race day we would have a problem.  However, even with an incredible amount of reengineering of the controls and safety equipment, it is HIGHLY IMPROBABLE that Mr. Hawking will be able to no matter how much he feels it should be possible.

Bruce Jenner (AKA Caitlyn Jenner) believes it is possible to be a women.  Sorry sir, not going to happen.  Every cell in his/hers/its body contains an XY chromosome.  In addition, that means you are a male, no matter how much hormone treatment and surgery you have had performed on you.

It might help if we define some of the terms we will be using:


Probable and possible are two commonly used words in the English language. Even though these words do not share the same roots, they convey an idea very slightly different from each other.  Therefore, as always with such things, there is confusion regarding the meaning and the usage of the words.

Oxford Advanced Learner’s dictionary defines ‘probable’ as “likely to happen, to exist or to be true”, while ‘possible’ is defined as “that might exist or happen but is not certain to”

Probable implies that there is a very high chance or likelihood that a certain event might occur.  On the other hand, possible means that the subject [whatever the word possible is describing about] might happen or might not happen, but there is no certainty of the outcome.

The most common use of possibility and probability is in flipping coins and rolling die.  It is simple when you do it once.  If you do it many times you can get into all sorts of trouble when you try to “play the odds.”

We have taken a circuitous route to get to the point of this post.  A recent Facebook post I had mention that extreme improbability of chemicals in the ‘pre-biotic soup’ to chemical combine with the other chemicals and then to form together to create a building block of what would become life. Because of this discussion one of the poster provided this answer:

“Realistically, this is the problem of an infinite number of monkeys typing away randomly at an infinite number of keyboards and given an infinite amount of time, one of them will produce Shakespeare. The problem with all that is when the first monkey writes the first sonnet, then you no longer have an infinite number, it has then become finite. And the predicted result has occurred. Just because you calculate the odds against a random set of complex proteins forming as being too great to ever happen only means that when it did, the experiment was over. Life formed. The monkey wrote ‘To be or not to be. — ‘The measure of time is impossible for humans on this scale.”

One overriding mistake by this learned individual: Modern cosmogony (the branch of science that deals with the origin of the universe, especially the solar system)  accepts finitism, in the form of the Big Bang, rather than Steady State theory which allows for an infinite universe, but on physical rather than philosophical grounds.

I figure a lot of it may be that we do not normally imagine things so huge, that often it is beyond our ability to even fantasize even if we think we have and can.  I even did a visual image of the amount of debt that Obama added to our total debt.   Those graphics are at:

However, let us go further and respond to the obvious misunderstandings inherent in the response and produce some actual visually understandable images.  I mean when one says a billion, billion, billion, billion to 1 possibility what does that really mean.

Within any given alphabet of x possible characters (where each character has an equal chance of occurring), the probability of any one of the characters occurring is 1 chance in x. For instance, if a monkey could bang randomly on a simplified typewriter possessing only keys for the 26 English letters, and assuming he was a perfectly random little monkey, there would be 1 chance in 26 that he would hit any particular letter at any particular moment.

The ‘famous’ atheist Richard Dawkins wrote “I don’t know who first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare[1].”  The idea originated with French mathematician Émile Borel, who pointed out in 1913 how unlikely it would be that a million monkeys typing ten hours a day would produce exactly all the books in the world’s libraries. Borel used this to illustrate the extreme unlikelihood of certain events, but Darwinists such as Dawkins now use the image of typing monkeys to illustrate the opposite: the likelihood that random processes can produce information.  According to the “infinite monkey theorem,” an infinite number of typing monkeys (or a finite number of monkeys typing for an infinite time) will eventually produce the works of William Shakespeare[2].

In theory, an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time would write the works of Shakespeare—mixed in with an infinite amount of utter nonsense.  But the real world isn’t infinite. On July 1, 2003, a Monkey Shakespeare Simulator was posted on the Internet.  The simulator does not use real monkeys, of course; it is a computerized random letter generator in which each “monkey” type’s one letter per second and the number of monkeys is continually increasing.  The simulator compares its output with the works of Shakespeare and reports matches—though it waits for such matches to appear on their own instead of selecting for a target sequence, as Dawkins’s did in a simplified program he wrote. After a year and a half, the longest match produced by the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator was twenty-four letters from a line in The Second Part of King Henry IV, which took the equivalent of 2,738 trillion trillion trillion monkey-years to produce. (A year later, the record had been extended to over thirty letters, which took trillions and trillions more monkey-years to produce[3].)

The poster believes that along about say 1,502 trillion, trillion 768 billion, 532 million, 456 thousand two hundred and one time a monkey actually typed something worthy of Shakespeare and the rest since then has been useless typing.

If you want to believe that, then please get in touch with me, I have some sea front property in Yuma, AZ I would like to sell.

I believe I have shown that not only is it IMPOSSIBLE for the monkeys to type anything remotely similar to a Shakespeare sonnet, it is also completely IMPROBABLE.  However, one can always hope that anything is possible..

Or let us take another approach: This has a somewhat comical appeal to me, is that of a blind monkey typing. Suppose that, instead of 26 letters plus spaces and punctuation in our English alphabet, there are only 20 possible choices for the monkey for each keystroke. We’ll use 20 because that’s the number of different kinds of amino acids our cells link together to make proteins (for now, we’ll ignore substitutions of amino acids; the math is so overpowering it works either way, and some proteins allow little or no substitution). We can compare the odds of a monkey accidentally typing a specified sequence of letters with the odds of the accidental formation of a specified sequence of amino acids.

Here’s a line from Shakespeare: “What fools these mortals be.[4]”  It has a total of 27 letters/ spaces. How likely is it that a monkey will accidentally type this exact sequence?  Again, we assume the monkey has a choice of exactly 20 letters/ spaces for each keystroke and is equally likely to type, completely at random, any particular letter/ space in any position. Of course, our blind monkey could get lucky and type this exact sequence the very first time.  But what are the odds?

Because there are 27 letters/ spaces, the number of possible sequences of this length is 2027, or about 1035. The number of seconds in the history of the universe, since the big bang, is about 4 × 1017.  So, even if we have a billion (109) quick-typing monkeys, who type the entire 27 characters every single second since the beginning of the universe (obviously this is fanciful, the monkeys couldn’t have existed at the beginning of the universe, but we are just trying to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem), we “only” get a total of 4 × 1026 sequences, and the chance that any of these monkeys ever typed “what fools these mortals be” is about 1 in 250 million (because 1035 is about 250 million times bigger than 4 × 1026).

So the odds of accidentally forming a precise sequence of 27 amino acids are laughingly small. Let’s now expand our imaginations to assume that every star in the universe has a planet with 1 billion monkeys typing. If we use a large estimate for the number of stars in the universe, we can expect that one of these monkeys will type “what fools these mortals be” within about 10 seconds[5].

But that’s just the beginning of complexity. Now let’s estimate the odds of accidentally creating a specified string of 75 amino acids. There are 75 letter/ spaces in “What a piece of work is a man how noble in reason how infinite in faculties.” There are a total of 2075 or about 4 × 1097 amino acid sequences of this length. Suppose, instead of a mere billion monkeys, each star in the universe has a planet with a billion billion billion billion monkeys, or 1036 monkeys, and each monkey can type even this 75 letters/ spaces sequence in just 1 second, to keep it simple[6]. OK, maybe too much math, definitely too many monkeys, but the likelihood of any of these blind monkeys ever typing our specified sequence in a time equal to the history of the universe is less than 1 in 1019, or less than one part in ten billion billion. So the odds of forming a single, relatively short specified protein with 75 amino acids by accident are vanishingly small, regardless of how many stars with Earthlike planets may exist. We are beyond laughingly small to pretty darn ridiculous.

Don’t tell me amino acids can be created by accident. Don’t tell me about “billions and billions” of years for life to arise. Don’t tell me about “countless” stars and planets in the universe. It all doesn’t matter. Using simple concepts of number— exponents— one can expose as false claims that life arose by accident.

Case made.  And then you have to worry about the possibility of amino acids gathering together into polypeptides and then proteins.  A simple quick view of that is at

I promised to give you counterarguments, and here is one from Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, among others. They say it is “false” that Darwin’s theory rests on chance alone; they say it works by “cumulative selection.” Say you start with a piece of gibberish and you want to transform it into meaningful text— you want to transform gibberish into “what fools these mortals be.” You give the gibberish a spin— you randomly change letters, or mutate the DNA code in the world of life— and some of the resulting English letters/ DNA letters may be correct. Not many, but perhaps one or maybe more. You hold on to any that are correct. You give the remaining English letters/ DNA letters a second spin/ mutation, and perhaps you get another one or more that are correct, and now you hold on to those also. You keep doing this. This process will converge in a reasonable period of time to yield the English phrase, or the DNA code, you are looking for. Dawkins and many others, with umpteen degrees and peer-reviewed articles to their credit, claim this “cumulative selection” drives Darwinian evolution. To which I meekly respond, in the words of the great John McEnroe: “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!” How does the gene know what it is looking for? How does it “cumulatively select” good letters and keep mutating only the bad letters? You get a designed product, and we’re not supposed to notice the wizard behind the curtain running the show? You sneak intelligence in the back door but still claim the process is “natural”? So to Dawkins and many others, “cumulative selection” works like this. You have an ordinary gene (let’s call him “Joe”) just sitting there, hiding out in the DNA, minding his own business.  Not a lot happens in the genome. Sure there’s replication, but the error rate on that is only one letter in a billion.  But one day there is a mistake, and a DNA letter is changed by accident.  Joe says, “Hey, that feels good, I might be able to use that someday” and decides to hang onto that change for future generations.  It’s a slow process, but Joe is patient. Sure enough, just 125,314 generations later, somehow, inexplicably, a string of DNA letters from Joe’s buddy Hal gets inserted by accident when Joe is being replicated, and Joe says, “You know, that feels good too. I’ve got a hunch I might be able to use those extra letters someday, particular if another 27 changes are made in just the right spots in my DNA code.”  Well what do you know, but it all works out perfect for Joe in just 72,437,197 more generations.

Reality is a far cry from possibility.


[1] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 47–49.

[2] “Infinite Monkey Theorem,” Available online (April 2006) at:

[3] The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator

[4] The quote is attributed to Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger.

[5] Some current estimates are about 1023 stars in the universe, but let’s say 1025 to be generous. So this calculation assumes 1034 imaginary monkeys typing!

[6] Now, over the life of the universe, all of these monkeys can be expected to type about 4 × 1078 sequences. For this calculation we multiply 4 × 1017 (the number of seconds since the big bang) times 1025 (number of stars) times 1036 (number of monkeys on each star), to get 4 × 1078 sequences.

Intelligent Design

Why ID part 4

Why ID part 4


The difference between LIVING and non-living is DNA and all of its many components.  We will try to give a brief, but detailed study of this particular chemical and try to understand what the DNA enigma is.  How DNA was discovered has been the subject of many fascinating books- I suggest the first 5 chapters of “Signature in the Cell” by Stephen Meyers for a good history.

DNA is made up of 4 distinct chemicals (adenine [A], thymine [T], cytosine [C] and guanine [G] that provide the information of life (not really, as in all things there are exceptions to the rule sometimes, thymine [T]is replaced with uracil [U]).

  1. Notice they form two groups: 1) pyrimidines: a nitrogenous base with a six-sided ring structure; a biologically significant derivative of pyrimidine, especially the bases cytosine, thymine, and uracil found in RNA and DNA  and 2) purines: a nitrogen-containing substance derived from uric acid that is the precursor of several biologically important compounds; a derivative of purine, especially either of the bases adenine and guanine, which are found in RNA and DNA.  Bio-chemists knew that the same amount of  Thymine and Adenine as well as the same amount of Cytosine and Guanine  existed in each chromosome.


We knew that there is a structural asymmetry in the construction of the backbone of the DNA molecule. The phosphate groups attach to a different carbon molecule on one side of the ribose sugar than they do on the other.  On one side of the ring structure of the sugar, the phosphate attaches to what is called its 5′ carbon (five prime carbon); on the other, the phosphate attaches to what is called its 3′ carbon.  It was known by chemists for a long time but nobody had the insight to understand the nature of the double helix.  Everyone was trying to make the two backbone run parallel to each other.

This did not work- all kinds of odd ball models were being developed and published and then rejected by bio-chemists.  Then along came the contrarians Watson and Crick.  Crick realized that the pattern she was describing— called a “monoclinic C2 symmetry” pattern— was indicative of an anti-parallel double helix structure. Instead of the two strands running from 5′ to 3′ in the same direction, Crick realized that Franklin’s data indicated that one helix was running up in the 5′ to 3′ direction and the other strand was running down in the 5′ to 3′ direction the other way.  Watson as he was building the model realized that they were two separate strands entwined around each other.

The following:  is a great description of how DNA and RNA work.  It goes into developing hemoglobin and then sickle cell anemia, but up until that, it is great.  It is from , Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research.

The Watson-Crick model clearly indicated that DNA had an impressive chemical and structural complexity.  It was a very long molecule composed on the outside by a regular arrangement of sugar and phosphate molecules.  On the inside, it could contain an almost infinite variety of different arrangements of the four bases.  This produced an impressive potential for variability and complexity of sequence as required by any potential carrier of hereditary information.  Most biologists thought life consisted solely of matter and energy.  However, after Watson and Crick, biologists came to recognize the importance of a third fundamental entity in living things: information.  At some point in the history of the universe, biological information came into existence.  Nevertheless, how?

Theories that claim to explain the origin of the first life must answer this question.  How could disparate chemicals bond together in such a manner as to pass on information to a receptor that could read it?  How did the receptor develop?  What we are talking about here is ‘biological/chemical information’ and the beginning of LIFE itself.



Details about this image will become available as we continue on the path of the mystery of the mystery.  In Darwin’s time few, if any, biologists talked about biological or genetic information (that information just was not known at the time), but today they routinely refer to DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA and proteins as carriers or repositories of information.  Biologists will tell us that DNA stores and transmits “genetic information (without really knowing what ‘that’ is), that it expresses a “genetic message (they can see what that is),” that it stores “assembly instructions (they can see what is created) ,” a “genetic blueprint,” or “digital code.”  Biology has entered its own information age, and scientists seeking to explain the origin of life have taken note.  Life does not consist of just matter and energy, but also information.  According to evolutionists, matter and energy were around long before life, so this third aspect of living systems has now taken center stage.  At some point in the history of the universe, biological information came into existence.  But how?  Theories that claim to explain the origin of the first life must answer this question.  However, what exactly is information?  What is biological information?  Beginning in the late 1940s, mathematicians and computer scientists began to define, study, measure, and quantify information.  However, they made distinctions between several distinct types or conceptions of information.  What kind of information does DNA have?  What kind of information must origin-of-life researchers “explain the origin of”?  It is important to answer these questions because DNA contains a particular kind of information, one that only deepens the mystery surrounding its origin.

How do you define information?  Is it just a piece of knowledge?  Is it something that communicates something?  See Shannon’s Information theory (

If you did not read the above link, good luck on understanding the following. We left that document with the question: So what kind of information does DNA possess, Shannon information or some other?

We need to look at what molecular biologists have discovered since 1953 about the role of DNA within the miniature world of the cell.  In the wake of Watson and Crick’s seminal 1953 paper, scientists soon realized that DNA could store an immense amount of information.  The chemistry of the molecule allows any one of the four (or five if discussing RNA) bases to attach to any of the sugar molecules in the backbone.  This allows the kind of almost incalculable variable sequencing that any carrier of genetic information would need to have.  In addition, the weak hydrogen bonds that hold the two anti-parallel strands together suggest a way the molecule might allow itself to be unzipped.  This allows the exposed sequence of bases to be duplicated in a unique and fascinating manner.  It would seem that DNA was ideal for storing information-rich sequences of chemical (alphabetic) characters.

However, how DNA expressed this information and how it could possibly be using that information remained uncertain.  These answers would come due to new developments in the field of protein chemistry.  Scientists today know that protein molecules perform virtually all of the critical functions in the cell.  Proteins build cellular machines and structures, they carry and deliver cellular materials, and they catalyze chemical reactions that the cell needs to stay alive.  Proteins also process the genetic information.

To accomplish this critical work, a typical cell uses thousands of different kinds of proteins; each with a distinctive shape related to its function.  It is kind of like Microsoft Office.®  Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Word- all completely different programs, different sizes, different functions, however, they can interact with each other, pass data to and from each other and many other functions that assist you in maintaining top functionality while working on your computer.

By the 1890s, various biochemists had begun to recognize how proteins were central to the maintenance of life in the cells.  The biochemists knew proteins were heavy (“ high molecular weight”) molecules that were involved in many of the chemical reactions going on inside cells.  Chemists were also able to determine that proteins were made of smaller molecules called amino acids during the first half of the twentieth century.  Many scientists, for awhile,  thought that proteins were so important that they (the proteins), rather than DNA molecules, were the repositories of genetic information.

Until the 1950s, scientists repeatedly underestimated the complexity of proteins. William Astbury[1] was an outstanding scientist who had studied physics at Cambridge during and after World War I.  He then worked with William Bragg[2], the pioneering X-ray crystallographer whose son Lawrence later supervised Watson and Crick.  Astbury was convinced that proteins held the key to understanding life.  He thought they should exhibit a simple, regular structure that could be described by a mathematical equation or some general law.

He was used to studying highly regular and orderly structures as a crystallographer. Salt crystals, the first structures determined using X-ray techniques, have a highly repetitive or regular structure of sodium and chlorine atoms arranged in a three-dimensional grid, a pattern in which one type of atom always has six of the other types surrounding it.


Astbury was convinced that proteins— the secret of life—life— should exhibit a similar regularity.  During the 1930s he made a discovery that seemed to confirm his expectation.  Astbury used X rays to determine the molecular structure of a fibrous protein called keratin, the key structural protein in hair and skin.[3]  Astbury discovered that keratin exhibits a simple, repetitive molecular structure, with the same pattern of amino acids repeating over and over again— just like the repeating chemical elements in a crystal (or the repeating pattern of bases that P. A. Levene[4] had mistakenly proposed as a structure for DNA).  Astbury concluded (unfortunately) that all proteins, including the mysterious globular proteins so important to life, would exhibit the same basic pattern he discovered in keratin.  Many of Astbury’s contemporaries shared the same view.  In 1937, for example, two leading American biochemists, Max Bergmann[5] and Carl Niemann[6], of the Rockefeller Institute, argued that the amino acids in all proteins occurred in regular, mathematically expressible proportions.[7]  It took 25 years before this mistaken thought process was understood and corrected.

About the same time that Watson and Crick were trying to solve the structure of DNA (the late 1950’s), another Cambridge scientist made a discovery that would challenge Astbury’s view of proteins.  While working just a couple miles from Watson and Crick at famous Laboratory for Molecular Biology (or LMB), biochemist Fred Sanger[8] determined the structure of the protein molecule insulin.  Sanger’s discovery would later earn him the first of two Nobel prizes in chemistry. Sanger showed that insulin consisted of irregular sequences of various amino acids, rather like a string of differently colored beads arranged with no discernible or repeating pattern[9].


The above was the part of chemistry class (both high school and college) that I hated the most-drawing stupid diagrams.  To me as long as you knew the formula (C257H383N65O77S6), what the heck difference did it make if you knew the diagram?  But some of those old fuddy-duddy’s insisted on you drawing it out exactly like what they had in the book, but it really did not matter when they found out the actual protein looked like below.  All that time, energy, arguments and grade points wasted.


Subsequent work on other proteins would show the same thing: the sequencing of amino acids is usually highly irregular and defies description by any general rule.[10]

Many biologists at the time still expected proteins, considered by many the fundamental unit of life, to exhibit regularity, if not in the arrangement of their amino acids, then at least in their overall three-dimensional shapes or structures  would end up exhibiting some sort of geometric regularity. Some imagined that insulin and hemoglobin proteins, for example, would look like “bundles of parallel rods[11].”  As Johns Hopkins biophysicist George Rose recounts, “Protein structure was a scientific terra incognita[12].  With scant evidence to go on, biologists pictured proteins vaguely as featureless ellipsoids: spheres, cigars, Kaiser rolls[13].”


Then came the publication of a paper by John Kendrew who studied chemistry at Cambridge and graduated in 1939.  After doing research on radar technology during the war, he took up the study of molecular biology at the Medical Research Council Laboratory in Cambridge in 1946.  There Kendrew began to work closely with Max Perutz, the Austrian crystallographer who, along with Lawrence Bragg, had officially supervised Watson and Crick.  In 1958, Kendrew made his own contribution to the molecular biological revolution when he published a paper on the three-dimensional structure of the protein myoglobin[14].


Kendrew’s work revealed an extraordinarily complex and irregular three-dimensional shape, a twisting, turning, tangled chain of amino acids. Whereas protein scientists had anticipated that proteins would manifest the kind of regular order present in crystals, they found instead a complex three-dimensional structure.

In the Nature paper, he wrote, “Perhaps the most remarkable features of the molecule are its complexity and its lack of symmetry.  The arrangement seems to be almost totally lacking in the kind of regularities which one instinctively anticipates, and it is more complicated than has been predicted by any theory of protein structure[15].”

Biochemists recognized that proteins exhibited another rather remarkable property.  In addition to their complex shapes and irregular arrangements of amino acids, proteins also exhibit ‘specificity’.  By specificity, biologists mean that a molecule has some features that have to be what they are, within very fine tolerances, for the molecule to perform an important function in that cell. Any deviation will cause that protein to fail to perform is function.

Proteins show specificity in two ways.  First, proteins display a specificity of shape.  The strangely irregular shapes of proteins that Kendrew and others discovered are essential to the function of the proteins.  In particular, the three-dimensional shape of a protein gives it a close association with other equally specified and complex molecules or with simpler substrates.  This enables it to catalyze specific chemical reactions or to build specific structures within the cell.  In other words, the proteins all fit together in a certain way, which allows the chemical relationship to proceed.


Because of its three-dimensional specificity, one protein usually cannot substitute for another.  A topoisomerase[16] can no more perform the job of a polymerase[17] than Excel can format a letter better than Word.

Enzymes are proteins that catalyze specific chemical reactions.  The simplified figure below shows an enzyme called a beta-galactosidase and a two-part sugar molecule (a disaccharide) called lactose.  The enzyme’s shape and dimensions must exactly conform to the shape and dimensions of the disaccharide molecule, so that the lactose molecule can nestle into the pockets of the enzyme.  Once it does, a chemically active part of the enzyme, called an active site, starts a chemical reaction.   The reaction breaks the chemical bonds holding the two parts of the sugar together and liberates two individual molecules of glucose, both of which the cell can use easily.

These two molecules can then be used in further reactions necessary in maintaining the life and health of the cell.


Consider how another example of the specific shape of proteins allows them to perform specific functions.  The eukaryotic cell has an uncanny way of storing the information in DNA in a highly compact way (Eukaryotes are cells that contain a nucleus and other membrane-bound organelles; prokaryotic cells lack these features.)


Strands of DNA are wrapped around spool-like structures called nucleosomes.  The nucleosomes are made of proteins called histones.  It is the specific shape of the histone proteins that enables them to do their job.

Histones 3 and 4, for example, fold into well-defined three-dimensional shapes with a precise distribution of positive electrical charges around their exteriors.  This precise shape and charge distribution enables DNA strands to coil efficiently around the nucleosome spools and store an immense amount of information in a very small space[18].  Due to the nucleosome spooling, the information storage density of DNA is many times that of our most advanced silicon chips[19] [20].


In the case of nucleosomes,  there is an uncanny distribution of positively charged regions on the surface of the histone proteins that exactly matches the negatively charged regions of the double-stranded DNA that coils around it[21].


Proteins have a second type of specificity— one that will explain the first. Proteins do not just display a specificity of shape; they also display a specificity of arrangement.  Whereas proteins are built from rather simple amino-acid “building blocks,” their various functions crucially depend on the specific arrangement of those building blocks.  The specific sequence of amino acids in a chain and the resulting chemical interactions between amino acids largely determine the specific three-dimensional structure that the chain will adopt when completed. Those structures or shapes determine what function, if any, the amino acid chain can perform in the cell— whether as an enzyme, structural component, or a machine for processing information[22]. Below is a simplified picture of how that might work.


Next up the I will try to tie this all together with the importance  of the Sequence Hypothesis, the ‘genetic code’ and the “Shannon Information Plus”.  After that the “Origin Of”.

[1] An English physicist and molecular biologist who made pioneering X-ray diffraction studies of biological molecules.

[2] A British physicist and X-ray crystallographer, discoverer (1912) of Bragg’s law of X-ray diffraction, which is basic for the determination of crystal structure

[3] Astbury and Street, “X-Ray Studies of the Structure of Hair, Wool and Related Fibres”; Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, 61– 62; Olby, The Path to the Double Helix, 63.

[4] An American biochemist who studied the structure and function of nucleic acids. He characterized the different forms of nucleic acid, DNA from RNA, and found that DNA contained adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, deoxyribose, and a phosphate group. He specialized in decoding protein and peptide structures.

[5] He developed the Bergmann-Zervas carbobenzoxy method for the synthesis of polypeptides.

[6] an American biochemist who worked extensively on the chemistry and structure of proteins,

[7] Bergmann and Niemann, “Newer Aspects of Protein Chemistry.”

[8] In 1958, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry “for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin”.

[9] According to Judson: “The man who released the present-day understanding of molecular specificity in living processes was Frederick Sanger. His determination, beginning in the mid-forties, of the amino-acid sequences of bovine insulin proved that they have no general periodicities. His methods and this surprising result had many consequences, of course: the most general and profound was that proteins are entirely and uniquely specified” (The Eighth Day of Creation, 88– 89, 585). See Sanger and Thompson, “The Amino Acid Sequence in the Glycyl Chain of Insulin.”

[10]Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, 581– 85.

[11] Olby, The Path to the Double Helix, 265.

[12] a term used in cartography for regions that have not been mapped or documented.

[13] Rose, “No Assembly Required,” 36, 28.

[14] is an iron- and oxygen-binding protein found in the muscle tissue in almost all mammals. It is related to hemoglobin, which is the iron- and oxygen-binding protein in blood, specifically in the red blood cells.

[15] Kendrew, et al., “A Three-Dimensional Model of the Myoglobin Molecule,” 662– 66.

[16] enzymes that regulate the overwinding or underwinding of DNA. The winding problem of DNA arises due to the intertwined nature of its double-helical structure.

[17] an enzyme that synthesizes long chains or polymers of nucleic acids. DNA polymerase and RNA polymerase are used to assemble DNA and RNA molecules

[18] Lodish, et al., Molecular Cell Biology, 321– 23.

[19] Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information, 192– 93.


[21] Lodish, et al., Molecular Cell Biology, 322.

[22] Alberts, et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, 111– 12, 127– 31.