challenge to atheists, skeptics, and agnostics:
Read all of the following.
by
Joe Nall
© 2014
What you or I believe has no effect on unchangeable truth. That kind of truth will ultimately prevail despite all objections.
Shunning a Million Dollars
Suppose you are told by reputable sources that there are a million tax free cash dollars available for you to claim as your own. All you have to do is go pick this cash up. It is all legitimate and lawful. You are persuaded it is true because of who told you about it.
However, there is only one way to get to the money. It is at the end of a path 20 paces long. All you have to do is walk down this path and get it. It is an extremely dangerous path though. Every step you take will probably be your last. Each time you move your foot to take a step you understand there is only one chance in a million you will live to take another step. If you do not place your foot in precisely the right spot, in precisely, the right manner you will trigger an explosion that will blow your body into bits. You are not told where to put your feet or in what manner to do it. You are not told whether to go barefooted or wearing shoes.
If you are a sane human, you will not take the first step. Your intelligence will tell you there is no way that you will ever see the money. You will not even attempt the first step. Your intelligence will swiftly convince you that you would die. Your desire to live will persuade you not to proceed down the path. You might be extremely disappointed or even angry. But you will not venture down that path.
If you perceive the numbers correctly, this same exercise of intelligence will immediately cause you to reject a theory of “natural” chance driven evolution which includes Darwinian evolution despite claims to the contrary. (Your intelligence might allow you to embrace some combination of “supernatural” and chance. But you have arbitrarily dismissed the supernatural.) I am speaking of the numbers that describe the probability of life as we know it happening by chance...minus intelligence. Any serious student of the subject knows that reputable scientists and mathematicians have studied that probability in depth. Life happening by chance is virtually infinitely less likely than your chance of walking successfully down the path to get the million dollars. Said differently, compared to your chance of successfully getting the million dollars, the probability of life happening by chance is zero, realistically speaking. Said differently, compared to the probability of life happening by chance, your chance of one in a million of successfully getting the million dollars is very good...comparatively speaking. But you still will not go after the money, not with just one chance in a million that you will survive.
There is not an evolutionist alive that would take the first step down the path toward the million dollars. But they cling to the theory of “natural” evolution despite the overwhelming mathematical evidence that it cannot be so. Why do they do that? It cannot be mere intelligence that causes it. Simple intelligence would cause them to reject natural evolution much more quickly than they decide not to step down the path toward the million dollars. There is something other than intelligence at work here. What is it? It is the same thing that causes one to reject Jesus Christ. If it is not ignorance, it must be desire, desire that truth be what one wants it to be, or that truth is definitely not what one doesn't want it to be...even in the face of strong evidence to the contrary. Intelligence designs intelligent designs (h-m-m-m).
Capacity of Raw Random Chance
Imagine this scientific experiment. Floating sensors are placed on a 10’ grid covering all oceans and waterways on planet Earth. Each sensor detects the varying height and velocity of waves, and the varying speed and direction of wind. All of this data is fed to a supercomputer capable of processing the data. All data is random chance, depending on the waves and wind. The computer processes the data in a random chance fashion. (Don’t object that the computer is not programmed. Remember, evolution has no program, no plan.) A plotter is connected to the computer to plot the random results. You sit and wait for anything useful to show up on the paper. How long will you wait? You will not wait at all because you are confident nothing useful or intelligible will appear. Do you really assume mindless chance driven evolution does a better job? Why?
About Psychology
You say religious people are merely indulging in psychiatric fantasy. You speak a clue to the truth. God gave us psyches that are central in our being. And having done so, where do you think He would deal with us? You are correct; our psyches are precisely where He deals with us. It is not your intelligence that makes you atheistic or skeptic or agnostic. It is in your psyche. Your cognitive dis
Age of the Earth
You say "our" universe is about fifteen billion years old and mock those who believe the earth is young. If you assume time has never changed, perhaps it is. But what if time has changed? After all, time is simply the rate of chronology of physical events. And you say time can be warped. The graph below is a computer solution by Xcel of the equation Factor = 1+1/time. The time increments could represent any value greater than zero. Each increment could be a nanosecond or a billion years, or perhaps even a day. The factor value could change accordingly. There could be any number of such factors in the natural equations, time factors that now equal one. They all approach infinity at time equals zero, at the beginning. No one was there to observe, to make measurements that could be compared. So how do we tell time? The age of the earth depends on how one tells time and whether time has been warped.
Closed Loop Negative Feedback Control Systems
Now, another reason I am a dyed-in-the-wool intelligent designist. Because of the “Watch my finger” instruction given by physicians. Actually, because we can watch the finger. The sense we call vision is a closed loop negative feedback control system. When the doctor moves his finger your brain notices the finger leave your focal point and which direction it moves. Your brain tells your eye muscles to move the focal point in the direction the finger moves. Negative feedback within your brain tells the eye muscles to stop eye movement when the focal point is where it needs to be. Positive feedback would cause your eye to move wildly to extremes and it would never stop where it needs to stop. The closed loop feature causes the focal point to actually stop where the brain tells it to, not somewhere else. The essence is simple. The details of how your body accomplishes vision are very elaborate and complicated indeed. Your body contains many complex control systems of this type, digestion, sleep, balance to name a few. Having designed closed loop closed loop negative feedback control systems and knowing the thought, intellectual effort required in the design process, I find it amazing that anyone could think these systems can come into existence without thought...intellectual effort.
Engineers design closed loop negative feedback control systems, but none that compare to the complexity of systems in the human body. So I ask how dumb dead matter and dumb dead light arrived at the control system we call vision without the input of intelligence? My answer (the answer of most people): they didn’t. Darwinian evolutionists do not like that answer. But they cannot disprove it. Nor can I prove it, objectively that is. Therein is the crux of the matter. Darwinian evolutionists can come no closer to “objectively” proving their theory than I (or the rest of us designists) can come to “objectively” proving intelligent design. Although it seems quite objective to me. Actually Darwinists cannot come as close. Without just cause, they toss out any consideration of the supernatural.
We know that intelligence designs systems. We marvel at the many sophisticated gadgets designed, manufactured and used by humanity. None of these gadgets are the product of chance. Objectively speaking, they are all the results of intelligence actively at work designing. Many people want chance (or chance plus natural selection) to be able to put systems together and conveniently assume it can. They claim it can. But they cannot demonstrate it. Microevolution is a tiny modification to an existing life form.
The intelligent, informed choice is that intelligence thought of and designed the system we call vision. To assume otherwise is to grab at imaginary intellectual straws. It ignores the overwhelming volume of evidence that intelligence designs systems and the total absence of even a shred of evidence, that chance can design anything, much less a complicated system. Imagination is not evidence. There is no informed intelligent basis in known reality for the assumption that chance has designed any useful system.
(to be continued)
For now, continue the challenge by reading the Final Message.