The s8intcom Blogger

By Chris Parker & s8int.com, Copyright 2009

We thought that it might be fun and or interesting to compile a list of the science stories of 2009 that were most compatible with Special Creation; or which moved the scientific ball in that direction. Another basis for selecting these top 12 science stories for Creationists might be the illumination a story might shed on the myth of macro-evolution.

But first, a digression. I grew up reading science fiction stories. In my teen years I read science fiction almost exclusively. As a genre however, I’d say the themes of science fiction literature are at odds with the Bible more than any other. Its typically very humanist in its adoption of science and man as its heroes. Man can achieve through science, technology, grit, determination and that “special quality” that we alone possess says science fiction.

For non believers, there is something comforting in believing that though we are special, we are but one of thousands if not millions of alien species out there. These are “people” we can fight or form alliances with–but that we don’t have to bow down to. Even famous Atheist Dawkins, admitted that he could accept aliens as our creator–just not God.

Since the Bible places man at the “center of the universe”, the existence of aliens also refute the Bible and possibly the story of special creation in Genesis. The themes of science fiction typically conflict with those of the Bible.

I went to see Avatar last week and I enjoyed–the special effects. Mature Christians on a daily basis screen out news, information and media that conflict with their core beliefs. That’s why many of them don’t think its a big deal to see any movie regardless of theme. (For instance, they may take their kids to see a warlock hero movie knowing that according to Revelation; “those who practice magic arts” will be excluded from God’s Holy City” Rev 22.) How many Atheist parents do you suppose took their kids to see “The Ten Commandments” or “The Passion”?

I”ve had a few mature Christians tell me that they don’t need apologetics because their faith is strong. My question is; what about your young son or daughter or your grandson? Don’t they realize that many of them aren’t able to screen out the constant evolution/Atheist dogma that news and media put out there? Many of them find that when they reach college that they haven’t been prepared to deal with the scientific and philosophical challenges coming their way. There; because I said so or years of shrugs may not carry the day.

What I know about James Cameron, who directed Avatar is that he also was the Executive Producer behind the documentary:”The Lost Tomb of Jesus” which purported to have found the bones of Jesus Christ in a family tomb. They also suggested that He had a son with Mary Magdeline. In Avatar, he puts forth a “Mother Earth” Goddess and promotes the standard SciFi notion that consciousness can be stored on a computer.

Thankfully, secular scientists kicked dirt on his Jesus tomb and his “evidence” and like the first story on our List it has been given a wide berth.

Of course, such a list as this is totally and completely subjective. Here are our top 12 Science Stories of 2009 for Creationists/Believers.

1)The Fossil; Ida and the Explosive Pace of Evolution-ary Debunking

It was only about 7 months ago when “Science” came out with a multi-pronged, hard-hitting and extremely hyped story about a “missing link” about which it was said “This Changes Everything!”. They were referring of course to a tiny fossil that they had cleverly named “Ida” (for marketing purposes).

Ida was the subject of a simultaneous release of a book, a TV special and a scientific paper announcing its discovery. It would be impossible to overstate the hype associated with the fossil.

“This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years,” said Dr Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil.”

Curiously, it was other evolutionists rather than Creationists who were most critical of both the hype machine and the science surrounding Ida. An independent scientific review failed to uphold the initial claims about Ida and by October 2009, the headlines were like this one in Discover Magazine; “Much-Hyped Primate Fossil “Ida” Probably Isn’t Our Ancestor …”

Time Magazine, Scientific American, NewScientist and a host of other Science media failed to list “This changes Everything, Ida” in their Top 10 Science Stories of 2009—not even as a debacle.

Ida was replaced at the top of Time’s list by Ardi, actually discovered in 1992 and claimed to be our oldest ancestor. Scientific American placed Ardi at #3 without even a mention of that game changer; Ida.

Signs are not so good for Ardi either however. The same skepticism that confronted the scientific claims made about Ida are now being directed towards Ardi. In an article in the November 2009 edition of Scientific American entitled “How Humanlike Was “Ardi”?, -Ardi proponents continued to claim that Ardi was a human ancestor who walked upright, however, other experts begged to differ: from the article; “But many others in the field propose that some of these statements may be overblown. In fact, Jungers (a professor at Stony Brook) says, “I think some of the things they said might have been for effect.”

The fossil Ida debacle was an important story for believers in 2009 because it was the most forceful and coordinated attempt ever by the evolutionary cabal to push their “science” down our throats and within seven months it was overthrown so effectively that even the evolutionists are busy trying to forget it.

2) There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Simple’ Organism

Mycoplasma pneumoniae, has only 1/5 the number of genes as E Coli the single celled bacterium which is the most frequently studied.

“What may be the most thorough study ever of a single organism has produced a beta code for life’s essential subroutines, and shown that even the simplest creatures are more complex than scientists suspected.

The analysis combined information about gene regulation, protein production and cell structure in Mycoplasma pneumoniae, one of the simplest self-sustaining microbes.” Wired Magazine.

In evolutionary theory, single cells were supposed to have arisen by chance and this simple life would lead to more complex life through a process of evolution. The problem for evolutionists/materialists is; even the simplest single cells are incredibly complex. How could such complex cells assemble themselves spontaneously? Obviously, they could not have.

3) Octopus Fossils, Allegedly 95 Million Years Old? Who Gets the Surprise-Evolutionists or Bible Believers?

Whenever one hears about ants or bees or spiders or wasps etc. being found in amber, which are supposedly millions of years old, take note; they are clearly recognizable as; ants, bees, spiders or wasps, no matter how old science claims that they are.

Each of these discoveries are brought to the public in isolation; but the consistent pattern in the discovery of “millions of years old” fossils or of preserved creatures is that they have not changed. Even minute changes that science might point to as showing “evolution” over time can be accounted for by the genetic variation inherent in species.

So the question is; when is this supposed “evolution” occurring?

Recently, scientists discovered octopus fossils which were supposedly 95 million years old from the Cretaceous. If you’re an evolutionist, you were surprised by what was found; they were “virtually identical” to “modern” octopi. If you are a Bible believer, this is exactly what you expected.

Ironically, the San Francisco Examiner placed this story at Number 3 on their own list of 2009 science stories because of the rareness of the discovery itself;

“What is truly astonishing to the scientists is how similar these ancient creatures are to their modern-day counterparts. Dirk Fuchs, lead author on the study stated, “These things are 95 million years old, yet one of the fossils is almost indistinguishable from living species.” [EurekAlert]

Far and away, the best head in the sand, evolution quote of all however comes from Science Daily;

“This [lack of evolution] provides important evolutionary information.”

He who has an ear let him hear! Matt 11:15

4) Authenticated Human Footprint Overlaid by Dinosaur Print Found on Limestone Block

A Cretaceous Limestone block contains a human footprint overlaid with a dinosaur print.

“In early July, 2000 Alvis Delk, assisted by James Bishop (both of Stephenville, Texas), was working in the Cretaceous limestone on the McFall property at the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas and discovered a pristine human footprint intruded by a dinosaur footprint.

This discovery was made in the vicinity of McFall I and II Sites where the Creation Evidence Museum team has excavated since the Spring of 1982. The eleven-inch human footprint matches seven other such footprints of the same dimensions in the “Sir George Series”, named in honor of His Excellency Governor General Ratu Sir George Cacobau of Fiji.

Scientific Verification of Footprint Authenticity: The fossil was transported to a professional laboratory where 800 X-rays were performed in a CT Scan procedure. Laboratory technicians verified compression and distribution features clearly seen in both prints, human and dinosaur. This removes any possibility that the prints were carved or altered.” … CREATION EVIDENCE MUSEUM…..
s8intcom source:

5) Everything You Know About Natural Selection Is Wrong
From: CreationEvolutionHeadlines.com

“Oct 16, 2009 — It’s called “a fresh theoretical framework” but it undermines the popular conception of natural selection. It’s called a “dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology” but it criticizes as simplistic and false the ideas of Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken proponents of natural selection as “the greatest show on earth.”

It produces a new scheme for how natural selection works, but raises more questions than it answers. What is it? It’s a new book by Harvard philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), reviewed mostly positively by Jay Odenbaugh in Science.

Odenbaugh is in the philosophy department of Lewis and Clark College, Oregon. Get ready to jettison your “classical” concepts of fitness, selection and reproductive success. Unload your simplistic ideas of gene selection, individual selection and group selection. Prepare to see Richard Dawkins demoted from his status as a leading spokesman for modern Darwinism. In his first paragraph, Odenbaugh clears the deck to get ready for the “fresh” ideas of Godfrey-Smith:

“Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection is a dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biologists tell us that evolution by natural selection occurs when a few ingredients are present—specifically, when there is variation with respect to a trait, those variants differ in the numbers of offspring produced, and this variation is heritable to some degree.

Unfortunately, as Godfrey-Smith argues, this recipe is far too simple, and even more complicated versions such as the replicator approach offered by Richard Dawkins suffer serious flaws.

This “classical recipe,” for example, ignores the fact that for some organisms numbers of offspring don’t necessarily determine reproductive success (“fitness”) whereas rates of population growth, age structure, or variation in expected numbers of offspring do.

Likewise, natural selection and patterns of heredity can “cancel” each other out, leaving no evolutionary change. The concept of Dawkins’s replicators—those entities that interact with like entities and of which copies are made—presupposes that there can be no reproduction without replication, which is false when we have continuously varying traits evolving by natural selection.

Thus, our standard models for understanding what evolution by natural selection is are just too simple. “” Jay Odenbaugh in Science

Source: David Coppedge’s Creation-Evolution Headlines

6) A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed?

“That’s because young dinosaurs didn’t look like Mini-Me versions of their parents, according to new analyses by paleontologists Mark Goodwin, University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner, of Montana State University.

Instead, like birds and some other living animals, the juveniles went through dramatic physical changes during adulthood.

This means many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives, have been misidentified as unique species, the researchers argue. “ National Geographic News, Oct. 9, 2009

This combined with the news that scientists had overestimated the size of dinosaurs by as much as 50% (Dinosaurs Shed a Few Tons in Science Makeover)shows that certain scientists need to show a little more humility whilst pontificating about the “paleontological past” and—fewer dinosaurs needed for Noah’s Ark!

7) Dinosaur Proteins, Cells and Blood Vessels Recovered from Bracyhlophosaurus

Two years ago, when paleontologist Mary Schweitzer claimed to have obtained blood cells and collagen protein from the thigh bones of a fossilized Tyrannosaurus Rex, she got nothing but grief.
Paleontologists didn’t want to hear that living tissue had been found on a creature they claimed had lived and died more than 65 million years ago. They have in large measure refused to believe or accept that she had found living tissue.

Creationists on the other hand, were happy to accept that she had found living tissue, but rightly pointed out that it was a strong indication that this dinosaur had lived much more recently than science claimed. In fact, Christians rather expected that living tissue might be found on dinosaur remains.

This of course upset the evolutionists even more and did little for her credibility with her fellow paleontologists.

“Last year, one group reinterpreted the so-called soft tissues as nothing more than bacterial biofilms, “cities” of bacteria not unlike the plaque on your teeth or slime on moist rocks. ”

If Schweitzer keeps this up she might end up like Virginia Steen-McIntyre, who also gave them what they didn’t want. That’s because Schweitzer has done it again. This time she claims to have found living tissue in the bones of a dinosaur more than 80,000,000 years old.

We say, as long as we’re dealing with evolutionary “monopoly years”, why not living tissue a billion years old? And we say along with her fellow paleontologists; there’s no way that living tissue could survive that long in fossilized remains”…
Source:

#8) “So We Make Up Stories” About Human Evolution

“Dr. Richard Lewontin is the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Harvard University Press describes him as one of their “most brilliant evolutionary biologists.” A Harvard professor since 1973, he has impeccable academic credentials, and has gained worldwide notoriety for authoring several books, including The Triple Helix, The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, and Biology as Ideology.

During the week of February 14-18, Dr. Lewontin was invited to speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting held in Boston, Massachusetts. Michale Balter, writing for Science magazine, reported briefly on Lewontin’s comments that caused quite a stir in the evolutionary community.

Balter titled his article “How Human Intelligence Evolved—Is It Science or ‘Paleofantasy’?” (2008). In the first paragraph, Balter quipped that Lewontin really “knows how to grab an audience’s attention.”

What did Lewontin say that was so noteworthy and attention-grabbing? Lewontin “led off a session titled ‘The Mind of a Toolmaker’ by announcing that scientists know next to nothing about how humans got so smart.

‘We are missing the fossil record of human cognition,’ Lewontin said at the meeting. ‘So we make up stories’” (Balter, 2008, emp. added). While Balter spent the rest of his article scrambling to show that Lewontin’s conclusions are not recognized by all in the scientific community, Lewontin’s devastating blow to evolution’s long-cherished scenario of human development could not be papered over so easily”… by Kyle Butt, M.A. Apologetic’s Press

9) The Copernican Gambit

In this cosmic game of chess, which has been going on at least from the time of the scientific revolution, there have been moves and countermoves on the part of Theists and Materialists with respect to the origin of the universe.

We live in a universe fine tuned for life. This knowledge grudgingly comes from science, not from believers, even though it is what we would expect. Science is stuck on its side of the chessboard throwing out weird defenses like dark matter and dark energy which are needed to make big bang work.

This dark matter and energy which supposedly accounts for 95% of matter and energy can’t be seen, tested or measured. This kind of thing, along with superstring theory, which also can’t be falsified or tested, is making it difficult for the well read Materialist to be intellectually fulfilled.

“But now, scientists “Blake Temple and Joel Smoller, mathematicians at the University of California and the University of Michigan, believe they have come up with a whole new set of calculations that allow for all the sums to add up without the need for this controversial substance.” ..Telegraph.co.uk

At the last moment, a new strategy; the Copernican Gambit; (our name) a possible way to fix the big bang theory and to free materialists from the pressure of defending a theory that only accounts for 4% to 5% of observations. Can materialistic creation be saved?

‘The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is likely to be equally controversial as the work it purports to challenge especially as it relies on our galaxy being at the centre of the Universe”…. Telegraph.co.uk

The Copernican principle is the presumption that there is nothing special about our place in space and time; neither us humans nor our planet. That principle moved earth and man out of the center of the universe (as Genesis seems to place us) and makes the earth just another lonely planet circling a star. This theory would relieve science of the need to invent and sustain its mystical darks but would place earth and man squarely back into the center of the universe.

“Just when we thought we were out, (of the center) they pulled us back in”!

It probably should be called the “Reverse Copernican Gambit”.
Check—mate?
Orginal s8int.com treatment here

10)Climategate: Global Warming Might Not be Man Made-But the Data May Be

The great climate change science scandal. Thousands of leaked e-mails have
revealed the unwillingness of climate change scientists to engage in a proper debate with the sceptics who doubt global warming. Thus, a little of the “Inconvenient Truth” leaked out.

The emails indicate that they have hidden, obscured and even deleted data contrary to the global warming case. They have worked to deny skeptics the right to publish dissent in scientific journals and have created statistical ‘tricks” to make charts appear to show what they want them to show.

Believers should along with everyone else do everything they can to take care of our planet. Believers do believe that the world will end with “fervent heat” but that the cause will be God—not man.

More Here

11) Mammoth, Giant Sloth and the Whale Fossils found ‘Together” at Thomas Jefferson Law School Construction Site

How does science account for the discovery of the fossils of giant land and ocean creatures together in such close proximity? Fossils are rare because the conditions necessary for their formation are thought to be rare.

What calamity could account for the simultaneous death, instant burial and preservation of these giant sea and land creatures?

Believers should have little trouble conceiving of just such a scenario. Consult the book of Genesis.

Orginal s8int.com post: “This Weak in Fossils”

12) Poll Reveals Public Doubts over Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

Belief in creationism is widespread in Britain, according to a new survey.
By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent
Telegraph UK 31 Jan 2009

“This year marks the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species.

More than half of the public believe that the theory of evolution cannot explain the full complexity of life on Earth, and a “designer” must have lent a hand, the findings suggest. And one in three believe that God created the world within the past 10,000 years. ” … Jonathan Wynne-Jones

Orginal Post

This was our own subjective list of the Top Science Stories of 2009 for Christians. I’m sure that our list missed some important news. What do you think?

To comment, send an email to s8intcom@comcast.net and we’ll post here for you.

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