Fear and Trembling

R. C. Sproul interviews Steven Myer starting here . This is a great discussion by two great Christian voices.

Please see a nicely done animated summary of protein synthesis here . It’s narrated by Stephen Meyer , who authored Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design .

This is the second in a short series of posts that give arguments for God’s existence. These arguments complement each other. That is, one proves one aspect of God’s nature; another proves another aspect, and so on. My area of professional expertise is industrial engineering, also called “process engineering.” I have spent most of my life in the pursuit of process improvement. I have professionally applied myself to manufacturing processes in several industries. I have looked at ways to improve equipment, organization of jobs, the way human beings interact with machines, and the way humans interact with each other. The purpose of a manufacturing process is to produce quality products, when needed by customers, at minimal cost, in a safe manner. There is one thing I know: a process left to itself does not produce products like that. If we take our hands off the controls, neglect the equipment, or ignore the people doing the work, we get bad products, late shipments, high costs, and incr...

Thanks to Answers in Genesis for a good short article and for this picture.

Reformation 21 has published a review by R. C. Sproul on Anthony Flew’s new book: There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. (HarperOne: New York, 2007). Here’s an excerpt from Sproul’s review: …There are those who argue that the laws of nature are merely convenient forms that human investigators impose on nature, that nature's facts are brute facts and mute facts, and have no inherent design. Design is something that is merely projected upon nature from the thinking of the scientist. In this case, Flew argues that the atheists accept the laws of nature simply by faith, and pursues the point that these laws are not something that are the result of cultural creation, but rather the discovery of something that exists within nature itself. Newton did not invent the law of gravity or impose a principle of gravity on the natural world; rather, he discovered it as an external reality. Now, the very presence of laws in nature indicates that nature ...

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement makes much of the argument from irreducible complexity. Dr. Michael Behe has become famous for a simple example, the mousetrap. He points out that the mousetrap will not perform its function without all of its parts. The wooden base, the metal hammer, a spring, a catch and a metal bar to hold back the hammer are all necessary parts. One component by itself will not catch a mouse. Mainstream evolutionary science has a counter-argument. To paraphrase Dr. Kenneth Miller, if you disassemble the mousetrap, each component can serve as something useful on its own. If we take away the catch and metal bar, we have something left that can serve as a paper clip. The spring could make a simple two-section key chain. The wooden base makes a paperweight. Evolutionary processes like random mutation and natural selection can combine and retain the useful parts as the complicated evolves to perform the complex function. The useful parts are combined into the mousetr...

Colson’s Breakpoint Commentary is interesting today. Here’s a sample: …Popular author and atheist, Richard Dawkins tells Ben Stein in [the movie Expelled] that there could have been a designer of life on earth, but it would have had to have been “a higher intelligence” that had itself evolved “to a very high level . . . and seeded some form of life on this planet.” …. He really did say it -- striking admission, though it is.

Ben Stein has produced a movie called “Expelled.” It will be running in limited theaters soon. The movie is about the experiences some science professors have as a result of commitments to the intelligent design movement. More details can be found here . I hope to see it soon, or at least rent it when it hits stores.

God is eternal. He has no beginning and no end. This is foundational for a popular argument for God’s existence. Reason demonstrates that something in the past must have always existed. It is not possible to count to the end of the series of real numbers. You can always count one more. It is, in one sense, an infinite series of discrete things. You can’t move to the end of a string like that. It has no end. It is similarly impossible to through an infinite series of moments of time, if time is in fact a discrete series of real moments. For example, if time extends forward out to infinity then it is obvious it will never end. Reversing the process, if time extends infinitely into the past, time would never have arrived at this moment. (See note below on time.) Similarly, we cannot expect that an infinite regress of finite causes exists either. That is, if we move backward from ourselves to the things that caused the things we perceive in our world now, then backward to the things that c...

How do we know what we know? How do we know what is true? How do we evaluate one idea against another? How do we interpret the information our senses provide us? What do we see? Hear? Touch? Smell? Taste? These questions fascinate me. I first began to ask questions like this as I studied Human Factors Engineering (HFE) in graduate school. HFE is a branch of engineering that studies how a human being interacts with their environment, usually with respect to how we obtain information and how we perform work. We looked at basic types of mistakes that people make, the way we obtain information from our senses, the way we process that information, the way we decide to act, and the way we activate machine controls to act on that processed information. The field includes ergonomics , but it included much more than that. One of the things we learned right off the bat was that the way we interact with our environment is a process. Think of a black box with arrows going into the lef...

I have been reading Christopher Hitchens’ new book: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007). Hitchens skillfully builds a wall of rhetoric around his firmly entrenched atheism. He walls himself off from Christianity with subtile and effective insult. Unlike Richard Dawkin’s recent book, it is more difficult to pin down an actual argument against the Christian faith in God is not Great , but I would like to answer a few points. ... there would be no ... churches in the first place if humanity had not been afraid of the weather, that dark, the plague, the eclipse, and all manner of other things now easily explicable. And also if humanity had not been compelled, on pain of extremely agonizing consequences, to pay the exorbitant tithes and taxes that raised the imposing edifices of religion. (p. 65) In this short passage, he refers to two ad hominem arguments. Men like Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Feuerbach developed the first in the past. It has been calle...

Next in Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion , we find a discussion of the teleological argument, or argument from design. Stated the way Dawkins does, the argument goes from evidence of design in the universe and in living things to the existence of an ultimate designer. On page 139-140, he says: It is clear that here on Earth we are dealing with a generalized process for optimizing biological species, a process that works all over the planet, on all continents and islands, and at all times … This is a recurrent, predictable, multiple phenomenon, not a piece of statistical luck recognized with hindsight. And, thanks to Darwin, we know it is brought about: by natural selection. In Dawkins’ world, life appears and evolves into increasingly more complex organisms by a “process.” I am not a biologist. I am not a chemist, or a physicist. I am, however, an industrial engineer. Another name for industrial engineering is “process engineering.” I have spent a considerable portion of my life in the ...