Category Archives: Evolution and Creation

Desire, Delusion and Projection

I got a comment on yesterday’s post that took me down a new line of thought relative to whether these global warming folks are outright lying, or just indulging in massive wishful thinking. At least as regards to whether the planet really is warming up and man is actually the cause. Though Rush Limbaugh maintains they are indeed lying, and I wouldn’t rule it out, I can’t help but wonder if desire, delusion and projection might be another way to evaluate their viewpoint/actions.

I’ve mentioned before being at the World Science Fiction convention years ago and listening to a panel of scientists express agreement that sometimes one’s hypothesis can overshadow the data. “You know in your gut your hypothesis correct,” one woman said. “You just know. And thus your job is to figure out how to make the data show it.”

Confirmation bias, anyone?

As I’ve also mentioned before, I’ve encountered that same viewpoint repeatedly ever since. I’ve even quoted from some prominent atheists/scientists to the effect that science by definition excludes God. They begin from the standpoint that God should not even be able to get his foot in the door because that would destroy the “science ” of the scientific method. I can see justification for the viewpoint in a way: if whenever you don’t understand how something works you just say God’s making it happen that way and leave it, you’re not going to learn very much about the world around you on any kind of deeper level. Such an approach operates from the premise that there is no logic, no sequence, no underlying order in what’s happening, nothing to be learned about God from the created world.

When the truth is the exact opposite. Romans 1:20 says that “His invisible attributes, eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made…” Science, then, is really just another way of finding God. Looking carefully at the natural world, you see the logic, the sequence, the building of one element upon another to produce a whole, the incredible precision and specificity of it all. None of which you’d see if you could never get past the, “God did it so we can’t figure it out” mentality. The real question behind all scientific inquiry and experimentation is how did God set this thing up to work? How will it interact with other things? What exactly is this thing and how much of it can we know? Kind of the same approach we use in studying the word of God.

But as with so many things, including the word of God, people can take a truth and misapply it. They are ignorant, arrogant, they possess a nature virulently opposed to God, their natural thoughts can’t understand God, and they live in a world system devised and administrated by a creature who is far smarter than any of them, but just as arrogant about himself and as ignorant and deluded about who God is. Many of the people who have seized upon science and the theory of evolution as truth, do so admittedly because it gives them a way to explain everything without having to acknowledge (and thus be accountable to) God.

Which brings me to the third element of my triad, projection. Projection is when you take your own sins, failings, and faulty viewpoint and project them onto others, all the while denying you have any such failings yourself. Then you criticize those on whom you’ve projected for the sins you deny in yourself. So it is here. Atheists and atheist/scientists love to mock Christians as being blind, as having “to check their brains at the door in order to believe in the things of God. “Faith is believing to be true what you know to be a lie,” one said.

I know that’s not me, because I know the Word of God is not a lie. But given the revelations of Climategate, the desperation with which the media and global warmists seek to defend their position in the face of God’s laughter (that would be the massive snowstorms burying the east coast just now) it seems to me that they are the ones who are caught in “blind belief”, the ones who truly are seeking to believe that which they know to be untrue.

And I can see why they might be so incredibly desperate because look what they have to lose… position, esteem, reputation, money, maybe their life’s work. I suspect not too many of them are eager to admit they are wretched sinners, weak and foolish and in need of a savior, either. It’s not rational, it’s emotional.And emotions simply cannot think.

ADDENDUM:  Speaking of desperation in defending global warming, a British engineering prof, Dr. John Brignell, runs a website called numberwatch where he’s collected links to media stories ascribing the cause of everything under the sun to global warming, many of them contradictory. Things like…

Lack of snowfall, too much snowfall
shrinkage of coral reefs, growth of coral reefs
destruction of bananas, growth of same
winds increasing, winds decreasing
hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late.
wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less…

All supposedly the result of global warming. He has over 600 of them at this writing. You can see them all HERE.

Climategate

Many of you may have heard about the leaked emails out of the  Climate Research Unit at the University East Anglia in Britain. the CRU is supposedly the premiere research organization in the world when it comes to climate change, and the group that supplied two of the four sets of data that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used for its report. Its data and perspective are described as “key to setting environmental agenda” for the world and turns out these climate scientists were doing exactly the same things  the evolutionists tend to do: making the data fit how they want it to fit, and in some cases even making the data up.

One of the things legitimate scientific researchers are supposed to do is give other researchers free access to the data they have collected to so they may come to the same conclusions, generally by repeating the experiment or process. In this case the CRU not only refused for years to allow others to examine their original data it now turns out that they managed to “lose” the original data… these would be temperatures they took over the years from various locations, information gleaned from tree ring studies and other elements they combined to “reconstruct” past temperature profiles. (that last immediately begins to sound fishy to me. Once people start trying to reconstruct something as ephemeral as specific temperatures of the past, my skeptic lights go on)

In any case, they took the temperatures they had gathered, put them through a sequence of computer programs (also top-secret  so others could not confirm) to “adjust” the temperatures to make up for various unspecified factors in the collection process and, oh my! they came up with a tidy rise in global temperatures over the last 150 years. Then they managed to ditch original readings from which they derived their adjusted temps.

They’d like people to believe it was all an accident, it was way back in the 80s when global warming wasn’t an issue, and maybe some would believe that  if it weren’t for the emails wherein heretofore respected AGW (that’s Anthropocentric Global Warming) scientists told each other to get rid of the data, moaned about how hard it was to get their vaunted programs to spit out the right conclusions, and discussed how they might keep their opposition from ever publishing in legitimate journals, thus providing themselves with the ability to marginalize their findings by pointing out they’d never been published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal.

These people are the main scientists involved in the UN study (IPCC mentioned above) that resulted in the alarmist warning that governments had better do something about this approaching disaster or mankind will destroy the earth. The same study that’s generated the upcoming conference in Copenhagen which our President is set to attend in just a few days.

Even Global Warming advocates are horrified and shocked that their heros, the scientists they respected and believed have pretty much violated every research protocol in the book. They want the head of the CRU to step down and last I heard he was going to. But even so, there are others who tsk and sweep it all under the rug. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, (whose degrees are in Industrial Engineering and Economics, not a climate science) told the UK’s Guardian, “The processes in the IPCC are so robust, so inclusive, that even if an author or two has a particular bias it is completely unlikely that bias will find its way into the IPCC report.” So he’s just pretending none of it happened. (article)

That just blows me away. I don’t know what universe these people live in, but it’s not the same as mine. Or maybe it is, and the truth is that they don’t care if they lie, don’t care, really, if anyone believes them, they just want to continue on with their plans until they have the power they are seeking. (Pachauri also thinks “Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed.”)  (article)

I’ve said it before, and this new development makes it clearer than ever that the whole thing is a hoax. It’s all wishful thinking, self-delusion, corruption, deceit, arrogance, and clearly, I think, part of the push toward one world government.

The interesting thing, as I mentioned earlier, is how closely the methods and comments and goals of the scientists are so similar to those I quoted as coming from evolutionists not too long ago. The same approach of deciding what the truth is, then setting out to “prove” it.

I find it also interesting that in both cases, God is shoved aside, deliberately, consciously and in some cases openly, excluded from the picture. Evolutionists are searching for a rational explanation for everything that does not include God or any sort of supernatural creative event. At the other end of the spectrum, Global warming alarmists say God cannot protect His creation and they are committed to proving that global disaster which only man can avert, is on the way.

And amazingly a lot of people believe both camps.

A quote from The Black Swan comes to mind (actually a lot of concepts do, but I’ll confine myself to one.)

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but someone fall for the securities analyst — those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians.[And here I would add, global warming scientists] Using confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War…”

How weird to live in a world where people would rather trust fallible men spouting theories that the least bit of common sense would recognize as ridiculous, than God. How weird that these same people should take their own views a step further and describe them in religious terms. As happened last Monday as reported on Fox News by George Russell: “Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion ‘as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,’ according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world’s would-be environmental watchdog.”

For more on this:  Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation

The Strange Case of the Tuatara

Does this make any sense:

Scientists have “recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara, which are up to 8000 years old. They found that, although tuatara have remained largely physically unchanged over very long periods of evolution, they are evolving – at a DNA level – faster than any other animal yet examined.”

So reports the Science Daily in an article called New Zealand’s Living Dinosaur — the  Tuatara — is Surprisingly the Fastest Evolving Animal. The creature, a type of lizard that lives only in New Zealand, hasn’t changed physically in 8000 years, but its DNA is evolving rapidly. “Of course,” says the discoverer, Professor Lambert, “we would have expected that the tuatara, which does everything slowly — they grow slowly, reproduce slowly and have a very slow metabolism — would have evolved slowly. In fact, at the DNA level, they evolve extremely quickly, which supports a hypothesis proposed by the evolutionary biologist Allan Wilson, who suggested that the rate of molecular evolution was uncoupled from the rate of morphological evolution.”

Say what? Molecular evolution has “uncoupled from morphological evolution?” Then wouldn’t that mean the first has no connection with the second? And wouldn’t that sorta make molecular evolution a bit… irrelevant? Is the data here being pushed into a mold to fit the conclusion the researcher desires? The whole thing raises numerous questions for me, being neither a paleontologist nor a geneticist. How exactly does DNA evolve? What are the signs? And if DNA is “evolving” with no discernible change in phenotype… what’s the point? How does that prove anything?

The conclusions in this article presented as from the “experts” requires not only the use of faith, but the dispensing of logic to be accepted: We know this creature is evolving rapidly, even though it hasn’t changed in 8000 years. Talk about non-intuitive! Tell me again — why is it we’re supposed to put our faith in stuff like this instead of the Bible?

Photo: Tuatara in New Zealand. (Credit: iStockphoto/Robyn Grant)