The following is from a New York Times article on the importance of stardust in our supposed evolution:
It is the stuff of people, as well as cats, plants, buttons, shoes, seas, planets, comets, moons, cars, books and cell phones, not to mention the paper (or computer screen) on which these words appear: star dust.
While it’s true that we and everything else have a chemical makeup, what’s impossible to deduce from the existence of these chemicals is their meticulous organization into what makes us what we are. The elements of the Periodic Table don’t have properties that self-organize into higher forms of life. Chemical evolution is a myth. There’s no organized information, no software, to make the hardware run. Richard Dawkins writes that
there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over. I don’t know the comparable figure for a willow seed or an ant, but it will be of the same order of staggeringness [sic] There is enough storage capacity in the DNA of a single lily seed or a single salamander sperm to store the Encyclopedia Britannica 60 times over. Some species of the unjustly called ‘primitive amoebas’ have as much information in their DNA as 1,000 Encyclopedia Britannicas. ((The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 115.))
This is true, but what is the origin of the information and its capacity to self-organize? Dawkins does not say. It’s not enough to speculate how information arose to create life spontaneously. What’s required is to show how it could happen by observation and experimentation, neither of which has been done.
In their textbook, The New Biology, evolutionists Robert Augros and George Stanciu write:
What cause is responsible for the origin of the genetic code and directs it to produce animal and plant species? It cannot be matter because of itself matter has no inclination to these forms…. There must be a cause apart from matter that is able to shape and direct matter. Is there anything in our experience like this? Yes, there is: our own minds. The statue’s form originates in the mind of the artist, who then subsequently shapes matter, in the appropriate way…. For the same reasons there must be a mind that directs and shapes matter in organic forms ((The New Biology: Discovering the Wisdom of Nature (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications, 1987), 191.))
The materialists of our day claim that everything must be settled in terms of principles planted firmly in the soil of this world alone. Only then can enlightened minds lead the world into the dream-land reality of John Lennon’s Imagine, the National Anthem of secularists and atheists around the globe. Ray Comfort writes that “‘Imagine’ was played at the 1996 and the 2004 Olympics, and the 2006 Winter Olympics’ opening ceremony.” Emeli Sandé recorded a cover for the BBC to use during the end credits montage at the close of the 2012 London Summer Olympics.
Rolling Stone magazine lists “Imagine” as No. 3 on the list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” describing it as Lennon’s “greatest musical gift to the world.” Materialists need atheism to be true so they can go about being their own gods, the lack of empirical evidence be damned, all the while they capitalize on a God-created world. Cornelius Van Til explains the atheists’ epistemological sleight of hand:
[U]nless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything. I cannot even argue for belief in Him, without already having taken Him for granted. And similarly I contend that you cannot argue against belief in Him unless you also first take Him for granted. Arguing about God’s existence, I hold, is like arguing about air. You may affirm that air exists, and I that it does not. But as we debate the point, we are both breathing air all the time. Or to use another illustration, God is like the emplacement on which must stand the very guns that are supposed to shoot Him out of existence. ((Cornelius Van Til, The Works of Cornelius Van Til (New York: Labels Army Co., 1997.))
It seems, however, that Lennon abandoned his earlier radical beliefs since atheism did not give him the foundational properties to account for what he was trying to achieve in the world. How does evolution account for giving peace a chance? See my article “John Lennon: Republican? Theist? Anti-Evolutionist?”
Lennon’s proper premise was to get rid of religion and thereby all conflict and greed, and selfishness would disappear. Of course, evolution is conflict, greed, and selfishness. ((Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).)) Evolution is blind. “It” doesn’t “care” about anything except to perpetuate the species; and “it” doesn’t care how “it’ does it. ((Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).))
I was surprised by what I was seeing on an episode of The Blacklist titled “The Ethicist.”
While speaking to a billionaire named Digby Tamerlane who tried to cover up a hit-and-run incident that left a 12-year-old girl dead, a self-styled “ethicist” named Gerald Klepper, “a doctor who murdered 17 patients under the guise of euthanasia,” ((Jodi Walker, “The Blacklist recap: Liz finds a Blacklister of her own,” Explore Entertainment (February 10, 2019).)) explains his moral worldview and how it contrasts with the “Judeo-Christian tradition of justice.” His system is “more algebraic.”
“There’s a constant and a variable,” Klepper says to Tamerlane. “The constant is the work you do. It is value and it will compromise you if you’re behind bars. The variable is what economists call the VSL — the values of a statistical life. In this case, the value of your life versus the value of the life of the witness whose testimony will put you behind bars.”
[Klepper] tells Tamerlane that there’s a witness to his crime that’s made a preliminary statement, and he’s already crunched the numbers on her. Tamerlane is a titan of industry and employs thousands of people, yes, but the witness is a bus driver and local boys club volunteer, so on the VSL scale, she comes out ahead.
“You give people paychecks [12,000 of them], she gives them hope,” he tells Tamerlane. But, of course, there’s a way to tip the scales. [Klepper] values “America first” highly in his Very Special Equations, so if Tamerlane decides to move the plant he’s about to build in Malaysia to Detroit instead, that might just increase his VSL, which might just inspire [Klepper] to murder the nice lady witness, meaning she can’t testify as the only witness to his crime
Later in the show, Klepper engages an FBI Agent and explains that statistical analysis, as he computes the values, is the determining factor on who should live and who should die:
Klepper: I like to make calculations.
FBI Agent: Like deciding who should live and who should die?
Klepper: That’s one calculation, yes.
FBI Agent: Have you made it often?
Klepper: Often enough, and it’s a surprisingly easy one…. I don’t randomly decide who will live or die. I do it based on whose life is more valuable.
This is atheistic evolution consistently applied.