The s8intcom Blogger

by Chris Parker, Copyright 2010

2010 came in like a lion with a major earthquake in Chile and went out with snow like lamb’s wool covering many parts of the United States. So much for global warming?

More on that later.

There really is no way to quantitatively select the top 10 or 12 science stories that were the most important to the cause of belief in God, special creation and Biblical truths in 2010. This is quite obviously a subjective exercise. No real attempt has been made to here to prioritize among these choices either. If last years list is any indication, we’ll get some argument and some suggestions-some of which will be printable.

At s8int.com, we believe and fully accept the Biblical account for creation. That faith and belief helps us form our world view and our view of science. We’ve always assumed that true, honest and objective science would support the Biblical account and God’s place in the universe—and it has.

The world’s preeminent Atheist, Richard Dawkins, made the following observation in his book; The Blind Watchmaker’

“An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: “I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.” I can’t help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

It’s been a tough decade for Darwinism, though and 2010 was no different. It continues to be the case that the more science learns about the universe and our place in it the less tenable is the Darwinist faith. Despite the hard work and dedication of Darwinists, a new Gallup poll (reported in December of 2010) shows that only 16% of Americans subscribe to the view that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in the process.”

Photo:Stein interviews Dawkins in “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed!”

Things have gotten so bad for Darwinists that Richard Dawkins now says that he could accept the notion that “super-intelligent aliens” are responsible for creating life on earth and that this would explain why life seems designed. (Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed , 2008

Dawkins doesn’t even seem to realize that this illogical and contradictory position puts him squarely back in the pre-Darwin; anything or anyone but God camp! The very position he described as being “logically sound” but “intellectually unsatisfying”!

The Joy of Ignorance? What group has tried to turn their own ignorance into a virtue as aggressively as the Darwinists? Remember “vestigial organs”? Basically science was ignorant about the function of certain “organs” and so they declared them functionless, leftovers from the evolutionary process.

They asserted that God wouldn’t have created useless organs and that ergo; there was no God!

Unfortunately for this theory, science could not maintain its ignorance for long; the list of supposedly vestigial organs in humans has gone from approximately 180 in 1890 to arguably, none in 1999. (Bergman, Jerry, “Do any vestigial organs exist in humans?”, Journal of Creation 14(2):95–98, August 2000)

Dawkins and other atheists also trumpeted “Junk DNA” as proof that there was no God. God they reasoned, would not have created useless, functionless, “junk” DNA (non-coding DNA ) that took up so much of the space in the genome. They fairly chortled about it. Dawkins said;

“Once again, creationists might spend some earnest time speculating on why the Creator should bother to litter genomes with untranslated pseudogenes and junk tandem repeat DNA.” (Dawkins: The Information Challenge)

Time and additional scientific knowledge and understanding vindicated God as the creator and showed that Dawkins and other evolution believing critics were simply speaking from a very deep well of ignorance. It turns out, once again that science’s (and Dawkin’s) own lack of knowledge was the problem here, not God’s creative abilities:

” “The findings, from a project involving hundreds of scientists in 11 countries and detailed in 29 papers being published today, confirm growing suspicions that the stretches of “junk DNA” flanking hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the study goes further, indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion “letters” of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks.” (Washington Post, July 14, 2007 Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle
)

Finally, Darwin admitted that it was difficult to conceive of how an organ as complicated as they eye could have evolved (although he believed it did). Michael Behe, an architect of “intelligent design” deemed the eye irreducibly complex; in other words it had to be the result of a deliberate design rather than evolution because it would have been useless without all of its parts being fully functional.

Evolutionists have deemed the eye to be one of evolutions biggest mistakes because it appears to them to be wired backwards. In 2010 it became clear once again that ignorance on the part of atheists and Darwinists was the problem. A study showed that the design of the eye leads to better vision and that in fact its design should be copied in order to make better optical machines.

This is a principle Christians can depend on; if evolutionists think that something God created is imperfect;- simply wait until their ignorance dissipates. “Let God be true and every man a liar!” Romans 3:4

We combed through; Discovery News, CreationEvolutionHeadlines, NewScientist, s8int.com/WordPress and other sources to compile news stories of interest. Here’s our list of the top science stories of 2010 for Christians/creationists.

1)Universal Health Scare: Study Locates Conscious Minds Locked in Appearance of “Vegetative State And; Atheist Doctors More Likely to Kill You!

“Distressing” is not an adequate word to describe a study by Cambridge University neuroscientist Adrian M. Owen that proves that many people in supposedly vegetative states actually are quite aware of what is happening around them and have opinions and views about it all. There may be thousands of such people in the U.S. alone.

The implications are hard to bear and yet demand action. Can you imagine anything much worse than being completely unable to communicate with others and yet affected by them? Anyone who has suffered an injury that impairs even a small function knows how frustrating that can be. But this is almost like being buried alive. With this difference: the patient is aware of people’s conversations and can, at least in his mind, respond. But no one in the presence of such a person–until now–has found a way to “listen” and therefore to converse.

This study adds force to the anti-euthanasia arguments made in cases like that of Terri Schiavo. It also calls in the name of human compassion for greater efforts to engage such conscious minds encased in unresponsive bodies and to give their lives some scope for vigorous interaction. It also calls for greater scientific and technological efforts to break the physical chains binding such people.

A colleague of Dr. Owens sees a number of immediate practical uses of the new way of communicating with conscious, but immobilized persons. “This technique could be used to address important clinical questions. For example, patients who are aware, but cannot move or speak, could be asked if they are feeling any pain, allowing doctors to decide when painkillers should be administered.”

But another urgent need is to find ways to communicate more directly than is possible now. In their study, the Cambridge team used MRI technology, which is expensive and obviously hard to arrange on any regular basis. Posted by Bruce Chapman on February 3, 2010 4:03 PM Discovery News

Atheist Doctors More Likely to End Your Life–ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2010) —

Atheist or agnostic doctors are almost twice as willing to take decisions that they think will hasten the end of a very sick patient’s life as doctors who are deeply religious, suggests research published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

And doctors with a strong faith are less likely to discuss this type of treatment with the patient concerned, the research shows. The findings are based on a postal survey of more than 8500 UK doctors, spanning a wide range of specialties, which was designed to see what influence religious belief — or lack of it — had on end of life care…. ScienceDaily

2)Darwinian Reversals

“There is a wide consensus among paleontologists that birds are the descendants of theropod dinosaurs”, according to Wikipedia and other Darwinist sources. This idea is a new tenet of the Darwinist faith and the truth is the acceptance of the idea has never really been as much of a consensus as advertized. As we’ve noted many times, “Storrs Olson, Curator of Birds at the Smithsonian and evolutionist himself proclaimed that “a cadre of “zealots” were trying to “actively promulgate the theropod dinosaur origin of birds theory in concert with Nature and National Geo”… Quote Story

An article published in 2009 in Medical Hypotheses noted: Some “Non-Avian Feathered Dinosaurs May Have Been Birds.” Spend a few minutes working out that headline’s meaning. In an article published in PhysOrg, a different group of evolutionists at OSU made a complete reversal of the Darwinist tenet by claiming that the evidence showed that dinosaurs evolved from birds!” Commentary by: CreationEvolutionHeadlines

“Feb 9, 2010 — Birds evolved from dinosaurs, we are often told. That’s backwards, reply some scientists at Oregon State University. According to PhysOrg, the recently-published bi-plane model study of Microraptor gui (01/29/2010) demonstrates that theropod dinosaurs did not sprout wings and fly; instead, they became flightless after their bird ancestors came down from the trees.

Their response demonstrates how the same evidence can be spun different ways. They are adamant about it: “The weight of the evidence is now suggesting that not only did birds not descend from dinosaurs,” John Ruben of OSU said, “but that some species now believed to be dinosaurs may have descended from birds.” He’s glad to see a breakthrough from the conventional wisdom. “This issue isn’t resolved at all. There are just too many inconsistencies with the idea that birds had dinosaur ancestors, and this newest study adds to that.” CreationEvolutionHeadlines

From Soup to Nuts! One of the oldest tenets of Darwinism is that life began in a “primordial soup”. However, “the ‘soup’ theory has been overturned in a pioneering paper in BioEssays which claims it was the Earth’s chemical energy, from hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, which kick-started early life.” ScienceDaily

The truth is that absent an acceptance of the Genesis account science has no idea how dead chemicals became living. There are literally hundreds of competing ”scientific” theories regarding life’s origin, as we covered in our story:. “When It Comes to Explanations for the Origin of Life, Genesis Has the Quality; So, Science Comes At You With Quantity

Neanderthal Now One of Us. Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon have long been enlisted by the Darwinists as a caveman/primitive man proof of the truth of the evolution of man from lower forms. They were successful enough that even some Christians invented “pre-Adamic” man to try to help the Bible out.

As late as last year some scientists were still claiming that man and Neanderthal never interbred; that they couldn’t speak, that they had no language, argued over whether they buried their dead, claimed that they only ate meat because they weren’t smart enough to cook vegetables, etc. etc. (Cro-Magnon was rehabilitated some years ago).

Now, it’s all changed. It’s been reversed…

An analysis of “Neanderthal” DNA indicated that their DNA matched “modern” man’s DNA to 99.97%. Since the analysis was only of 60% of the genome the actual match might be closer. That awaits further study. It’s worth noting that each of our own DNA is a match to our neighbor’s to 99.999%.

Scientists Lied and Real Neanderthals Died! Neanderthal DNA 99.97% Identical to that of Evolutionary Scientist’s!

Neanderthals Admired Beauty 01/10/2010
Jan 10, 2010 — This may be the last evidence needed to debunk the image of Neanderthals as dim-witted brutes: they wore make-up. CreationEvolutionHeadlines

Humans and Neanderthals Are One 05/08/2010

“May 08, 2010 — If Neanderthals bred with modern humans, they are one and the same species. That must be the case according to the most widely-accepted definition of a species: those who can breed and produce fertile offspring. The news media are abuzz with Science magazine’s cover story this week, “The Neanderthal Genome.” Most anthropologists are now accepting the genetic evidence for human-Neanderthal mixing of DNA, and that there are remnants of the Neanderthal genome walking the earth in living human beings. CreationEvolutionHeadlines

Science Daily announced, “Neandertals ‘Hardly Differed at All’ from Modern Humans.”

Fossil Ida:

The last bit of dirt was kicked over Ida, the fossil that evolutionists claimed was going to change everything. ‘Missing Link’ Fossil Was Not Human Ancestor as Claimed, Anthropologists Say ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2010)

3)Macro Evolution’s Evolving, Non-Evolving Problem The trade secret of paleontology might very well be the lack of transitional fossils..(Gould); but the Darwin family secret is the long list of supposedly millions of years old fossils which are indistigushable from their living counterparts. Two of those articles are linked here:

Pelican Fossil Poses Evolutionary Riddle; Why, They Haven’t Evolved, Not Even a Little

“Oh What A Tangled Web We Weave, When At First We Practice to Deceive”–Alleged 165 Million Year Old Spider Looks Just Like 165 Day Old Spider

4)
Evolutionists Blind, Ignorant, Criticism of the Design of the Eye Proves to be Short Sighted and Wrong. (Will Science Teachers Continue to Constrict Their Pupils with This Kind of Teaching?)

Dawkins is not great. First, as head atheist he jumped on the; vestigial organs prove there is no God train, only to see it derailed; then onto “junk DNA” and finally to the “backwards designed” eye.

A 2007 Article entitled” Evolution’s Greatest Mistakes” claimed that the eye was an example of “flawed evolution”.

“The most famous flaw is found in vertebrate eyes. Their light-sensing structure, the retina, is wired up back-to-front.) NewScientist

In May, commenting in an editorial about a 2007 German study that found that the eye is wired backwards, purposely –or at least to the benefit of the eye said:

“IT LOOKS wrong, but the strange, “backwards” structure of the vertebrate retina actually improves vision.”
NewScientist went on to note that creationists have defended the eye design by claiming that the backwards design actually enhances vision:

“…creationists have argued that the backwards retina clearly has no problems providing vertebrates with excellent vision – and even that its structure enhances vision.

“This week, a study by (non-creationist) neurophysicists in Israel has found just that (see “Optical fibre cells transform our weird, ‘backward’ retinas”). Their simulations showed that Müller cells, which support and nourish the neurons overlying the retina’s light-sensitive layer, also collect, filter and refocus light, before delivering it to the light sensors to make images clearer.”

You have to love this defensive quote from NewScientist;

“The findings do not mean the creationists have a point – although they may well quote the study”.

According to the authors of the research paper, the findings of the study could lead to better designed optical equipment and cameras. So much for bad design.

5)Not A Grain of Truth to Science’s Claim That “Primitive Man” Domesticated Food Crops: Animals Refuse to eat Genetically Modified Foods..

It’s the belief of evolutionary scientists that all the domesticated grains that we eat; grains like rice, corn, oats, wheat and barley, were created by deliberate cultivation over hundreds or even thousands of years by our primitive ancestors. They would have needed the ability to work tirelessly and purposefully for a period of generations on crops that would have no food value for them until the projects were created; all eons before Gregor Mendel developed prinicples of genetic transmision of inherited traits.

This story is hard enough to believe but here’s another problem. If man genetically modified all the food crops we mentioned; why were cows and pigs eating them? And why do they have a problem with the New genetically modified foods? Isn’t the same agent, man responsible for the old GM crops as well as the new?

Clearly not, the crops we’ve known for thousands of years were created by God—not man. When Adam was punished he was told that he would have to earn a living by the sweat of his brow, he was meant to plant and harvest crops–the same crops that Cain brought as a failed offering to God.

Animals didn’t have a problem with the former, but the do have a problem with the latter. Article

6) Why Paleontology is Not “Science”; When It Comes to Giant Pterosaur Flight, Science Believes Very Strongly Both Ways!

In the course of a year’s time paleontologists made the bold statement that pterosaurs couldn’t fly; only to have another study claim that they were the greatest flyers ever!

Any discipline that claims two mutually exclusive things are both true in that short a period of time can’t be called a science. This is the stuff they want to teach your kids. Article

7)
Research Indicates Ancient Civilization Thrived Until Ocean Submerged It Beneath the Persian Gulf “About” 8 Thousand Years Ago: Do You Noah What That Reminds Us Of?

An ancient civilization the size of Great Britain was located under the Persian Gulf. The civilization was “drowned” thousands of years ago.

Science Daily Article: Liberals and Atheists Smarter? Intelligent People Have Values Novel in Human Evolutionary History, Study Finds.”

Unfortunately, we’re not smart enough to comment on this article. We didn’t understand it. It didn’t make any sense to us…. Article

9) Human Genome “Infinitely More Complex” Than Expected 04/05/2010 “April 05,

2010 — Ten years after the Human Genome Project was completed, now we know: biology is “orders of magnitude” more complicated than scientists expected. So wrote Erika Check Hayden in Nature News March 31 and in the April 1 issue of Nature.

An air of daunting complexity haunts the article. The Human Genome Project was one of the great scientific investigations of the end of the 20th century. Some compared it to the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program. It used to be tedious, painstaking work to read the sequence of DNA letters.

Now, deciphering genomes is a matter of course. But with the rush of data coming from genomes of everything from yeast to Neanderthals, one thing has become clear: “as sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data, the complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude,” Hayden wrote.

…..Hayden acknowledged that the “junk DNA” paradigm has been blown to smithereens. “Just one decade of post-genome biology has exploded that view,” she said, speaking of the notion that gene regulation was a straightforward, linear process – genes coding for regulator proteins that control transcription. “Biology’s new glimpse at a universe of non-coding DNA – what used to be called ‘junk’ DNA – has been fascinating and befuddling.”

If it’s junk, why would the human body decode 74% to 93% of it? The plethora of small RNAs produced by these non-coding regions, and how they interact with each other and with DNA, was completely unexpected when the project began.

These realizations are dissipating some of the early naïveté of the Human Genome Project. Planners predicted we would “unravel the mysteries behind everything from evolution to disease origins.” Cures for cancer were envisioned. We would trace the path of evolution through the genetic code. That was so 1990s.

Joshua Plotkin, a mathematical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said, “Just the sheer existence of these exotic regulators suggests that our understanding about the most basic things – such as how a cell turns on and off – is incredibly naïve.” “ CreationEvolutionHeadlines

10) Evolution as “Scientific Literacy” Dropped by NSB; Sets Off Firestorm 04/11/2010
April 11, 2010 — Can you be called scientifically literate if you deny that humans evolved from lower animals? What if you deny the universe began with an explosion? American students have typically scored low on those questions, leading to charges that they are scientifically illiterate compared to other countries in Europe and Asia.

But now, the National Science Board (NSB) decided to drop those hot-button questions in the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, a biennial compilation of the state of global science, on the grounds that they don’t accurately reflect students’ knowledge of science, but rather their beliefs. The decision set off angry protests in certain quarters.

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee reported on this issue in the April 9 issue of Science. He quoted Joshua Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) calling it “intellectual malpractice” to discuss scientific literacy without mentioning evolution. “It downplays the controversy,” he said. Jon Miller, a science literacy researcher at Michigan State, conducted the survey until 2001. As the one who added the survey question in the first place, he thinks the current board is making a big mistake.

“If a person says that the earth really is at the center of the universe, … how in the world would you call that person scientifically literate?” he asked. Bhattacharjee said, “those struggling to keep evolution in the classroom say the omission could hurt their efforts.”

But the NSB defended its decision to drop the “value-charged” question on evolution as a misleading indicator:…… CreationEvolutionHeadlines

11) The Great Global Warming Collapse

“In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.” Globe and Mail

12)Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests
Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience Staff Writer
Jan 15 2010“Scientists have discovered the earliest known Hebrew writing – an inscription dating from the 10th century B.C., during the period of King David’s reign.
The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought. (The Bible’s Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew.)
Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B.C., because Hebrew writing was thought to stretch back no further. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.

“It indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research,” said Gershon Galil, a professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, who deciphered the ancient text.” Article

Top 12 Science Stories for Creationists/Believers of 2009

Tags: atheism, atheist doctors, Bible, creation, creation evolution headlines, evolution, eye, Genesis, global warming, Ida, macro evolution, materialism, origin of life, richard dawkins, top 12 science stories, top 12 science stories for creationists, transitional fossils
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