Sermons From Science -- Oct 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 10 月

Sermons From Science -- Oct 2013科学布道-- 2013年10月 Sermons from Science is now published in both YouTube under the name “Pastor Chui” and also in PowerPoint slides in the website http://ChristCenterGospel.org. The contents of this presentation were taken from Dave Coppedge’s website http://crev.info. May God have all the glory. Let us pray for Dave Coppedge’s fast recovery from cancer surgery. Pastor Chui http://ChristCenterGospel.org ckchui1@yahoo.com 1/1/2020 1

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • Talk about power plants: did you know plants use electricity? Some fish, also, can navigate or stun their prey using electrical organs. • Power plants: Nature discussed how electrical signals are propagated in plants. The Venus flytrap and “sensitive plant” come to mind as spectacular examples of non-muscular leaf movement triggered by electricity, but there’s more: 1/1/2020 2

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • The mammalian nervous system can relay electrical signals at speeds approaching 100 metres per second. Plants live at a slower pace. Although they lack a nervous system, some plants, such as the mimosa (Mimosa pudica) and the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), use electrical signals to trigger rapid leaf movements. Signal propagation in these plants occurs at a rate of3 centimetres per second — comparable to that observed in the nervous system of mussels. On page 422 of this issue, Mousavi et al. address the fascinating yet elusive issue of how plants generate and propagate electrical signals. The authors identify two glutamate-receptor-like proteins as crucial components in the induction of an electrical wave that is initiated by leaf wounding and that spreads to neighbouring organs, prompting them to mount defence responses to a potential herbivore attack. 1/1/2020 3

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • Who would have thought that cutting a leaf would send an electrical alarm? Experiments on common thale cress showed no response when a larva walked on a leaf, but an electrical signal spreading at 9 cm per minute when eaten. “The relay of the electrical signal was most efficient for leaves directly above or below the wounded leaf,” the article said. “These leaves are well connected by the plant vasculature, which conducts water and organic compounds, and is a good candidate for the transmission of signals over long distances.” Receipt of the signal turned on gene expression for defense compounds. “These fascinating observations clearly demonstrate that electrical signal generation and propagation have a crucial role in the initiation of defence responses at remote sites upon herbivore attack.” 1/1/2020 4

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • The authors of the original paper did not discuss evolution, other than to speculate that “a deeply conserved function for these genes might be to link damage perception to distal protective responses.” If so, this function must have “existed before the divergence of animals and plants.” 1/1/2020 5

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • Wired fish: Two more electric fish species have been found in the Amazon basin, but they appear to be wired differently. One is biphasic or “AC” like most others, but another is monophasic like “DC”. The article on Science Daily looked for evolutionary reasons why this might be so, but the interesting thing is that “these weakly fishes produce pulses of only a few hundred millivolts from an organ under the body that extends out onto a filamentous tail.” Too weak to stun prey like the jolts from the famous electric eel, the pulses are read by other members of the species, and by the opposite sex, for communication. The fish also use them “to ‘electrolocate’ through their complex aquatic environment at night.” As for evolution, the two fish are so similar as to be classified as the same species except for the differences in electrical phase of their signals. 1/1/2020 6

Shocking Facts About Electric Life令人震惊的事实关于有电的生命 • So many ways of receiving input from the world: touch, sight, sound, smell, taste, and now electricity. The living world is a marvel of interactions between organism and environment. Each sense is exquisitely designed and useful to the organism. Elegant systems are not the result of blind, unguided processes. We believe that viewing them as designed systems would energize research, both to seek understanding of superior design, and to desire to imitate it for improved engineering. The real science stopper is to assume, “Oh, it just evolved. It evolved because it evolved”– a soporific response possessing a dormitive virtue (cartoon and 5/25/05 commentary) 1/1/2020 7

Gloria Deo 愿荣耀归上帝 1/1/2020 8

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • 154 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolutionists say they still do not understand the origin of species. In addition, they’ve lost most of whatever data they had. • An article on Science Daily says evolutionists still haven’t left: • Darwin referred to the origin of species as “that mystery of mysteries,” and even today, more than 150 years later, evolutionary biologists cannot fully explain how new animals and plants arise. • Maybe they can take refuge in that phrase, “cannot fully explain” the answer. Maybe they can partly or mostly explain it. The article does not allow that reprieve. It’s even worse than not knowing: things they thought they knew are not true: 1/1/2020 10

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • For decades, nearly all research in the field has been based on the assumption that the main cause of the emergence of new species, a process called speciation, is the formation of barriers to reproduction between populations…. • But now a University of Michigan biologist and a colleague are questioning the long-held assumption that genetic reproductive barriers, also known as reproductive isolation, are a driving force behind speciation. • Rabosky and Matute were “surprised” by the results of their study. Looking at two-thirds of bird species and 9 fruit fly species, they expected to see a correlation between speciation rates and genetic markers of reproductive isolation. 1/1/2020 11

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • “We found no evidence that these things are related. The rate at which genetic reproductive barriers arise does not predict the rate at which new species form in nature,” Rabosky said. “If these results are true more generally — which we would not yet claim but do suspect — it would imply that our understanding of species formation is extremely incomplete because we’ve spent so long studying the wrong things, due to this erroneous assumption that the main cause of species formation is the formation of barriers to reproduction.” 1/1/2020 12

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • They said evolutionists’ “understanding” is not just incomplete, but “extremely incomplete.” Another example cited on Evolution News & Views shows that foraminifera do not fit the reproductive-isolation–speciation pattern. Since speciation and reproductive isolation appear uncorrelated, a “broader definition” of speciation is needed, they said. In addition, so-called “speciation genes probably play a minimal role in the formation of species,” they said. • All they could do was speculate that maybe most species, after splitting, go extinct, leaving no evidence in the fossil record. The press release from University of Michigan is entitled, “Long-held assumption about emergence of new species questioned.” 1/1/2020 13

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Whoops, We Lost Our Evidence • Meanwhile, Darwin’s tree has other problems, Science Daily said: holes. Large portions of work on the “tree of life” have been lost, a paper in PLoS Biology reported, because of lack of data accessibility. “Given that reproducibility is a pillar of scientific research, the preservation of scientific knowledge (underlying data) is of paramount importance,” the authors began, warning that lack of reproducibility and evidential support for the Tree of Life project threatens to label it as “soft science,” putting trust in the word of scientists instead of the actual data: 1/1/2020 14

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Perhaps more importantly, we call for a shift in thinking among all evolutionary biologists who rely on the power of phylogenetics to test hypotheses and make inferences. It is crucial for this broad discipline to consider the alignments and phylogenies themselves as key data that require appropriate storage for study reproducibility and data integration.… The biological community has lost most of the alignments and trees underlying the numerous phylogenetic analyses conducted over the past several decades—we should strive to do much better in the years ahead. 1/1/2020 15

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Science Daily says that most of the data has been “lost forever” from publications that referred to the data but did not store it so that it could be cross-checked. “There are ambiguities with the alignments, you have to make certain judgment calls, and so an alignment that I do is not going to be the same as an alignment that somebody else does,” lead author Bryan Drew said, based on a study of over 7,000 papers that found “about 70 percent of published genetic sequence comparisons are not publicly accessible, leaving researchers worldwide unable to get to critical data they may need” for their own comparisons. 1/1/2020 16

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Can you think of a more pitiful example in the history of science of a majority of eminent scientists believing things that prove not to be true, teaching falsehoods for over a century, and then carelessly losing most of the data that supposedly supports its core beliefs? What a sham that shaman Charlie started. He wrote a book on “the origin of species” but 154 years later, his disciples are still behind Square One! It would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that textbook makers, documentary producers, and educators worship at Charlie’s shrine. 1/1/2020 17

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • The law require that this monstrous “mystery” religion (with its long-standing “mystery of mysteries,” the “origin of species by means of natural selection”), with its racist implications (“the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life”) be taught as fact, fact, FACT in public schools—no alternatives allowed. 1/1/2020 18

Darwin Fumbles达尔文摸索着 • Not only do they keep going bankrupt and landing in jail on their own Monopoly board, they won’t let anyone else play; whoever tries is persecuted and expelled. If you aren’t yet angry at the damage done by the Charlietans for 154 years, you need to take a refresher course in righteous indignation. One thing you can do about it is spread the outreach of Creation-Evolution Headlines, where we expose these frauds with their own words. They don’t have a data storage problem; they have an integrity problem. Time for regime change. 1/1/2020 19

Scientists’ Letter Challenges PZ Myers’ Revisionism科学家们的信挑战PZ Myers的修正主义 • In a letter to Nature, three scientists set the record straight about theology and science, after atheist P.Z. Myers got off with only a mild rebuke in a previous book review. • Glenn Branch gave a fairly genteel review of The Happy Atheist by PZ Myers last month in Nature (Aug. 8). In response, Robert White (U of Cambridge), George Ellis (U of Cape Town; see mention in ENV) and Denis Alexander (Faraday Institute; see mention in ENV, an evolution defender, ENV) – no friends of creationism or intelligent design – decided to write Nature and list a few of the “religious believers” who founded modern science. 1/1/2020 22

Scientists’ Letter Challenges PZ Myers’ Revisionism科学家们的信挑战PZ Myers的修正主义 • Young Earth creationists are easy to lampoon (see G. Branch Nature 500, 149; 2013). However, using reasoned arguments might hold more sway with the US creationist movement. • PZ Myers, author of The Happy Atheist (which Branch reviewed), should remember that the majority of those who helped to establish the disciplines that we now practise as modern science were religious believers, including Nicolaus Copernicus, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Carl Linnaeus, Edward Jenner, Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, Joseph Lister, William Thomson and Arthur Stanley Eddington — to name but a few, and excluding a long list of contemporary names. Half of the 10 most influential scientists of the past 350 years chosen for the Royal Society’s commemorative stamps in 2010 were religious believers. 1/1/2020 23

Scientists’ Letter Challenges PZ Myers’ Revisionism科学家们的信挑战PZ Myers的修正主义 • Branch had, indeed, lampooned creationists in spirit with Myers. These three scientists, though, wanted to make sure he was not dissing “religious belief” in general. • We take this opportunity for you to read some of our biographies of these great scientists by clicking their names. Some of them were not just “religious believers” but strong Christians who studied the Bible and trusted its authority. White, Ellis and Alexander would not wish to associate with “creationists” or even advocates of intelligent design, but they don’t want to support atheism, either – especially the brand advocated by foul-mouthed PZ Myers, who made a fool of himself on Ray Comfort’s Evolution vs God video by saying human beings are fish. 1/1/2020 24

Scientists’ Letter Challenges PZ Myers’ Revisionism科学家们的信挑战PZ Myers的修正主义 • It may be “easy” to lampoon creationists, but looking at all the Stupid Evolution Quotes of the Week on this site, and the many foolish things the Darwin disciples say every day (see most recent example of hundreds), who would not be embarrassed to hang with that crowd? If Charlie worshipers wish to parade their naked emperor in public, day after day, they lampoon themselves without our help. But to believe an intelligent, all-wise Creator made the order and complexity we see in nature, and told us what He did, why should that be a subject of scorn? Well, look what they did to Jesus; don’t be surprised. 1/1/2020 25

Scientists’ Letter Challenges PZ Myers’ Revisionism科学家们的信挑战PZ Myers的修正主义 • One thing we can agree with these theistic evolutionists on: “using reasoned arguments might hold more sway with the US creationist movement.” Great idea! When do they start? We dare anyone to lampoon this month’s featured scientist, Raymond Damadian, inventor of the MRI scanner – a Bible-believing creationist. Millions owe their lives to his intelligent design. 1/1/2020 26

Solomon Corroborated: It’s His Copper Mine所罗门证实了：这是他的铜矿场 • Copper mines in the Aravah of Israel were most likely Solomon’s property, not the Egyptians’, new date estimates show, supporting the Biblical chronology. • “Proof of Solomon’s Mines in Israel” reads a headline on PhysOrg. The famous copper mines of Timna, a national park in Israel near Eilat on the Red Sea, have been re-dated to the time of Solomon by radiocarbon testing of date and olive pits. More detail is on the Haaretz website for subscribers. 1/1/2020 29

Solomon Corroborated: It’s His Copper Mine所罗门证实了：这是他的铜矿场 • The new date swings the pendulum from the “Egyptian paradigm” that claims they were bronze-age mines when Egypt controlled Canaan, back to the “Solomonic paradigm” that the mines were indeed “King Solomon’s mines,” or at least were in operation during his reign. Powerful king that he was, it seems reasonable that he was in control of the extensive mining operation. 1/1/2020 30

Solomon Corroborated: It’s His Copper Mine所罗门证实了：这是他的铜矿场 • The re-evaluation also sheds light on the copper works in Edom. Todd Bolen on Bible Places Blog reserves judgment on who owned the mines, but notes that the Edomites were subjects of Solomon and could have worked the mines to pay tribute. Noting the reversal of fortune of advocates for the Egyptian paradigm, he said, 1/1/2020 31

Solomon Corroborated: It’s His Copper Mine所罗门证实了：这是他的铜矿场 • “If I had time, it would be interesting to go back through the literature and review the statements of those who used the absence of evidence at Timna from Solomon’s time as evidence against the biblical account. Once again we see why we should hold to the assured results of archaeological research lightly.” • An open-access copy of the archaeologists’ report on BASOR is available here. • Another example that if you wait long enough, claims doubting the historicity of the Biblical account get falsified. 1/1/2020 32

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • A second article proposes life began on Mars, prompting some observers to point out the failures of naturalistic origin-of-life theories. • After Steven Benner proposed Mars for the origin of ribose last month (“You Are Not a Martian,” 8/28/13), Christopher Adcock (U of Nevada) pointed out another problem with Earth-based life: phosphate doesn’t dissolve readily in water here (see New Scientist and Space.com). Since Martian phosphates dissolve more readily, maybe life originated on Mars. New Scientist was quick to point out a contradiction: 1/1/2020 35

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • “Both studies have brought renewed attention to the idea that life on Earth was seeded from space, a theory known as panspermia. “However, they can’t both be right. One idea requires Mars to be covered in liquid water, while the other needs it to be as dry as a desert.” 1/1/2020 36

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • The two articles revealed a little-known difficulty with origin-of-life research: the “phosphate problem.” Adcock had nothing but the possibility that phosphate, an essential ingredient in life as we know it, dissolves much more readily on Mars than on Earth because of its chemical form. Space.com quotes him, • “I don’t think our results have any direct bearing on the theory that terrestrial life may have begun first on Mars, other than that our results suggest phosphate for potential biologic reactions may have been more available on Mars — that the ‘phosphate problem’ may not have been as significant there,” Adcock said.… 1/1/2020 37

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • “We haven’t discovered life on Mars, nor have we presented evidence that it existed there,” Adcock cautioned. “However, we have shown that one potential roadblock for life to arise on Mars may not be such a roadblock after all.” • New Scientist pointed out the contradiction in Martian environments favored by Benner and Adcock, then caught Benner admitting that the phosphate problem and the ribose problem both rule out the origin of life on Earth, despite his warm feelings: 1/1/2020 38

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • Benner is more sanguine about the situation. He says that Adcock’s team is looking at Martian chemistry for the same reason he is: to solve a chemical problem that geologists tell us could not have been solved on early Earth. • “Just like RNA requires ribose, it also requires phosphate. Just as geologists tell us that we cannot get conditions on early Earth where ribose could have accumulated, they tell us that we cannot get conditions on early Earth where phosphate is soluble. So our two papers go in the same direction,” he says. 1/1/2020 39

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • National Geographic weighed in on this dilemma on Sept. 5. Writer Mark Kaufman noted Benner’s contention that ribose (essential for the proposed “RNA world”) falls apart in water, and can only be found in dry environments with boron—yet boron was too scarce on Earth. Then he notes the “phosphate problem” raised by Adcock. He put two and two together to raise “the big cosmic question” – where did life come from? 1/1/2020 40

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • The reemergence of the theory of panspermia is intertwined with progress (or lack of progress) in a long-term scientific quest to find out how life began on Earth, a question that synthetic biology experts such as Benner have been working on for decades. Despite some advances, the field has come up against chemical walls that are proving impossible to climb. • For instance, Benner said, the organic—meaning carbon-based—compounds understood to have come together to form life in a “prebiotic soup” do not behave in the lab in a way that would indicate they led to the formation of life on early Earth. 1/1/2020 41

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • When these compounds are energized by heat or light, instead of producing early RNA they create tar—hardly the stuff from which we would all evolve. • Origin-of-life research, stuck on the tar baby, is at a crossroads. Kaufman was not quite ready to swallow Benner’s optimism: • Benner says that “it’s yet another piece of evidence which makes it more likely life came to Earth on a Martian meteorite.” But it’s more of a changing of probabilities than it is scientific proof. • “A panspermia solution, after all, produces another panspermia problem,” he said. “If a Martian microbe did make it from Mars to Earth, maybe it would be as if it landed in Eden. But just as likely, it would quickly die.” 1/1/2020 42

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • He left off with that quote, leaving the reader pondering insurmountable problems, bereft of answers. • The gig is up. Secular origin of life research (OOL) is dead. To seriously consider displacing the problem of life’s origin (by natural processes) to another planet is tantamount to saying that it is impossible. If they cannot get it to form here, where “Eden” existed (in terms of perfect conditions for its “emergence”), then displacing it to an exterior hell is not going to help. 1/1/2020 43

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • Consider the number of problems revealed just in these articles (a subset of all the problems). Ribose needs boron in a dry desert, but even if it formed, it need water. But the moment you put it in water, where the phosphate is for making RNA, it dissolves or turns into tar. Even if you get a stable RNA (which is going to be extremely rare), it is not alive; dozens more high hurdles must be jumped in the right order by chance: getting one-handed molecules, getting them to be enzymatically active for useful purposes; getting them isolated into protocells surrounded by membranes (we could go on and on). Then, the Martian life has to get incorporated into a meteorite. Even if that happens, it has to survive in space for eons, and arrive at Earth. After all these miraculous improbabilities occur, if it doesn’t land in “Eden” it will quickly die, Benner said. 1/1/2020 44

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • Yet many articles about these origin of life theories make everything sound so simple. The “RNA world” (now shown to be so improbable it is impossible), has been for decades the cornerstone of most secularists’ optimism that life originated without design. It’s sickening to watch that empty-headed “Newsy” reporter in the Space.com video barfing out Benner & Adcock’s absurdity with uninformed confidence: “Life on Mars? You better believe it. NASA announced that it discovered elements that support ancient life on the red planet.” Such gullible toadies. Blah. 1/1/2020 45

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • We seem to be catching the first hints, though, of a few reporters becoming exasperated with the storytelling of the OOL crowd, like Marc Kaufman and Lisa Grossman. They have a long way to go, but when the day comes when they feel enough courage to start really peppering the Benners and Adcocks with hard questions like reporters do with politicians, it will get interesting. “If we cannot believe what they’ve been telling us about life forming on Earth all these years, why should we believe you when you say it happened on Mars?” “Hasn’t the origin of life been falsified by these discoveries?” “Are you really asking the public to believe this incredibly improbable sequence of events?” “Are you implying that your brain, telling us these arguments, is the product of a series of cosmic accidents? Then how can we trust anything you say?” That will be a new day for “scientists” accustomed to the lapdog media regurgitating everything they say uncritically. 1/1/2020 46

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • We call on Steven Benner to renounce his naturalism. Steve, you’re a smart guy, but you know you have been telling fables out of desperation. You know enough philosophy of science to know that science does not require naturalism; it requires following the evidence where it leads. For decades now, the evidence has been trending against naturalism. You yourself said that the problems are hard enough to almost make you want to become a creationist. Well, why not? Don’t codes and systems bear the hallmarks of intelligent design? Leave the dark side of the farce and come over to the light. 1/1/2020 47

Mars Panspermia a Sign of Desperation 火星生源说是绝望的标志 • If you leave the farce, you will make a lot of enemies. You will suffer the persecution of the Expelled. But you will make a lot of new and better friends, and you will enjoy the good feeling of a character trait sadly lacking in your old crowd: integrity. 1/1/2020 48

Sermons From Science -- Oct 2013 科学布道 -- 2013 年 10 月