Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places, if you look at it right. -- Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter The above lyric can be found in the song "Scarlet Begonias" from the album/CD Live From the Mars Hotel. Yes. I confess that I was once a Deadhead. There was a time in my past that I sought wisdom from the music of the Grateful Dead and their leader, Jerry Garcia, the primary singer and lead guitarist. However, when Bob Weir, rhythm guitar player and alternate voice of the Grateful Dead suggested that, "Too much of everything is just enough", I recognized that line wasn't clever or wise -- it was stupid. That line was from the song "I Need a Miracle Every Day" and it reminded me of the band's participation in the infamous "acid tests" conducted by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, documented by Tom Wolfe in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Too much of anything is too much of that thing. Too much of everything will more than likely cause your premature death. Case in fact: Jerry Garcia is no longer a member of the Grateful Dead because he is dead. So I soon decided to stop seeking to gain philosophical wisdom from people who gained fame through their abuse of LSD, in favor of slightly more conventional sources. The line from "Scarlet Begonias" will always remain true, though. If I hadn't first read Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion advocating atheism, I never would have ultimately written my books Divine Evolution and Counterargument for God. That is indeed a most strange place for me to have begun to truly see … [Read more...]
Transcendental design
The advocates of Darwinism have declared that the debate about origins is over -- firmly settled in favor of descent over design. Quite frankly, I wish the debate were over. I've gotten tired of circular arguments with Darwinists about their exaggerated claims that misinterpret some scientific evidence while completely ignoring equally important evidence that threatens their ultimately atheistic worldview. These tedious arguments get old pretty quick. It's a terrible waste of time. Frequently, my opponents become angry and impolite. And I also have constructive work to do, meaning novels to write. But I remain unconvinced that descent actually explains why and how humans came to exist, and I simply can't abide an inferior argument winning by default. At a casual glance, I would expect the creature shown above to be most likely found in the jungle, a zoo, or National Geographic video...not living as my neighbor in the house next door. In fact, I'm fairly certain that "people" have never looked like the creature depicted above. Yet according to advocates of Darwinian theory, that the female ape-like creature shown in the picture had sexual intercourse with a male ape-like creature that looked pretty much exactly like her. Over generations the baby apes shape-shifted to lose their fur and get smarter in the process of becoming human, all attributable to the vagaries of a powerful, mystical factor known as Deep Time. Isolation of the gene pool and genetic drift allegedly caused this clearly ape-like creature to eventually "evolve" into a sentient human, … [Read more...]
Climate change, evolution, and irrational scientism
Climate is what we expect. Weather is what we get. -- Mark Twain I believe in climate change -- at minimum, the climate in Georgia where I live changes four times per year. I call the phenomena "seasons." However, I don't consider "climate change" as something humans understand anywhere near well enough to control. Neither do I believe the sky is imminently about to fall because of human consumption of fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas seem to exist for a reason. Why shouldn't we efficiently put our natural resources to good use? As someone with a couple of decades worth of experience and formerly considered as something of an expert in the field of software development, I can say with complete confidence that only sheer hubris allows climate science experts to insist with any degree of certainty that their computer models can predict the future. The problem is simply too complex. There are far too many unknowns. For example, the forecast in Atlanta today is calling for between 3 and 7 inches of snow...quite a margin of error, wouldn't you agree? Now if the weather experts can't even accurately forecast how much snow is going to fall later today, how can they possibly say with total confidence they know what the weather will be like several years into the future? The butterfly effect is part of the chaos theory of mathematics. The term was coined by Edward Lorenz to describe his discovery that very slight changes to the input data for his weather models could produce a significant variations in the outcome, as if the flapping of a butterfly's wings in a … [Read more...]