THE PRODIGAL SON OF GOD: May 2015

7. Chance, creation and design

Miraculous accidents
Darwinists believe that one type of creature can eventually evolve into a completely different type of creature through genetic changes that are totally random and purposeless. Consider the transition from land reptiles to fish:

[A]s ordinary land reptiles ventured into the water, ... they now needed fish-like tails. Obligingly, with no possible knowledge that such was needed, random, accidental mutations altered the incredibly complex genetic apparatus that had produced reptiles in such a way that beautifully designed, marvellously functional fish-like tails were produced on a reptile previously floundering awkwardly around in the water. Likewise, feet and legs were no longer useful for propulsion in water, and so the vast complex of genes that coded for all the structures in feet and legs was somehow, a mutation here, a mutation there, transformed miraculously into the incredible complex of genes required to code for the tendons, blood vessels, nervous system, muscles, bones, and other structures, all arranged in a precise way, to constitute the paddles now highly efficient for propulsion in water. It is evident that, in spite of fervent denials, evolutionists do believe, even in miracles.¹
To transform a reptile into a mammal, all sorts of radical changes would be required. Darwinists believe that this transition is very well documented by the fossil record, which shows certain therapsids (mammal-like reptiles) becoming increasingly mammal-like in the course of the Triassic. Reptiles have multiple jaw bones and a single bone in the ear, while mammals have a single jaw bone and three in the ear. The gradual reconfiguration of these structures, via the intermediate stage of a double jaw joint, is attributed to a long series of random mutations; most were harmful, but some produced just the right changes, so that the surviving creatures could continue to chew and hear. The essential organ of hearing in the mammal is the extremely complicated organ of Corti, which no reptile possesses. At the same time, many other marvellous new physiological and anatomical organs and processes had to be invented, such as a new mode of reproduction, mammary glands, temperature regulation, hair, and a new way of breathing (including a diaphragm). Hair develops from complex follicles deep in the dermal layer of skin, quite unlike reptilian scales, their presumed precursors. Mammary glands (the source of the name ‘mammals’) allegedly evolved from sweat glands (missing in reptiles) and milk from sweat. It’s unclear what happened to mammal babies during the supposed slow transition from a thin, watery, salty solution of urea and various toxins to a thick, nutritious liquid rich in protein, sugar, fat and antibodies.²

Fig. 7.1. The organ of Corti contains rows of sensory hair cells, which generate nerve impulses in response to sound vibrations.³

For the mammalian reproductive system to function properly, the following features, among others, must all be present: ovary and testes to manufacture ova and sperm, each of which must have only half the normal number of chromosomes; the male body must have a mechanism for implanting the sperm in the female’s body; sperm cells must have the ability and instinct to seek out the waiting ovum; the ovum must accept a single sperm, and then block the entry of any further sperm; the sperm cell must unite with the ovum in a way that ensures ordered blending of the nuclear chromosomes and genes; the fertilized ovum must initiate cell division and proliferation; the growing embryo must acquire a placenta and umbilicus to conduct blood and waste products between mother and embryo; the fetus must be expelled from the womb at full term; mammary glands are needed to supply liquid nourishment to the newborn babe. All these features could hardly be the outcome of a slow accumulation of genetic copying mishaps. To paraphrase Gould: What good is half a penis? Or a sperm without a tail? The entire reproductive system would have to appear all at once in perfect working order.
As indicated earlier, many Darwinists have now resorted to invoking regulatory genes as a magical solution to every problem. For instance, Michael Schwartz writes:

If fins become limbs with feet at their ends merely through the turning on of homeobox genes in novel locations and the insertion of a short molecular sequence into one particular homeobox gene, then the evolution of primate hands and feet would be an even simpler evolutionary feat.⁴
In other words, a regulatory gene is switched on here and adjusted there and hey presto – hands and feet appear! The origin of the regulatory gene system itself, and any mutations that regulatory and structural genes undergo, are of course attributed to blind chance.
The living world presents endless fascinating examples of ingenious designs that expose the sheer idiocy of standard Darwinian explanations. The butterfly, for instance, starts life as a tiny hard-shelled egg within which an embryo grows and eats its way out to become a caterpillar, which proceeds to gorge itself on vegetation. When fully grown, the caterpillar sheds its skin for the last time, and changes into a pupa or chrysalis containing an amorphous mass of tissues, which somehow rebuilds itself into a totally different structure with a totally different lifestyle. It is surely an insult to our intelligence to insist that the mysterious metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly could have originated by fortuitous genetic mutations. But as Michael Behe says, ‘In some ways, grown-up scientists are just as prone to wishful thinking as little boys ...’⁵
The electric eel, typically growing to about 2 metres long, has three abdominal pairs of organs that produce electricity, extending four-fifths of the length of its body. They are composed of 5000 to 6000 stacked electroplates and can produce a shock of up to 500 volts. All the various components have to be present for the system to work; without the insulating fatty layer, for example, the eel would electrocute itself. Darwin himself admitted: ‘The electric organs of fishes offer another case of special difficulty; it is impossible to conceive by what steps these wondrous organs have been produced.’⁶
Or consider the bombardier beetle, half an inch in length, which is equipped for its defence with a miniature liquid-fuel rocket engine. The beetle stores hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide in an internal reservoir, from which the mixtures can be pumped into a reaction chamber containing enzymes. The valve is closed, and the explosive reaction at 100°C forces the spray out through a turretlike orifice in the beetle’s rear end, which sends it in any desired direction. This complex defence mechanism along with the instincts needed to operate it could hardly be the result of gradual, random evolution.
The flatworm called Microstomum also has a remarkable defence system. When it is attacked, defensive cells called nematocysts, just beneath the surface of the worm’s back, are discharged and sting the attacker. The worms obtain their nematocysts from hydras; normally they avoid hydras, but when they need more nematocysts, they eat them and digest all their tissues except these particular cells. After the nematocysts have been enclosed within certain of the flatworm’s cells, those designed to fire coiled or sticky threads are digested, while those that fire poisonous barbs are transported to sites just beneath the outer layer of the worm’s back, where they are oriented so that their stings will fire upward. The cells forming the worm’s outer layer become very thin just above the nematocysts, providing portholes for the firing of the stings. Finally, the cells encapsulating the nematocysts undergo extensive changes that enable these cells to act as trigger mechanisms.⁷
There are countless puzzling examples of mimicry in the plant and animal worlds. For instance, the aardwolf resembles the striped hyena – an aggressive animal that most predators avoid. The aardwolf possesses an erectile mane along its back that makes it appear much larger than it really is and enhances its resemblance to the hyena. The similarities even extend to the aardwolf’s internal anatomy. How did random mutations and natural selection manage to accomplish this?

Fig. 7.2. The aardwolf (top) mimics the striped hyena (bottom).⁸

Fig. 7.3. A Philippine anglerfish, looking just like a rock or shell, waves a piece of bait resembling a small fish which is found in that region. The bait, which is part of its body, has fins, a tail, and black spots for eyes. The bait attracts predatory fish close enough for the anglerfish to snap them up.⁹

Irreducible complexity
In Darwin’s time the cell was believed to be a ‘homogeneous globule of protoplasm’, but it is now known to contain systems of mind-boggling complexity. Some cells swim using a cilium, a structure that looks like a hair and beats like a whip. Cilia are very complicated molecular machines, containing about 200 different kinds of protein parts. It is an example of what Michael Behe calls an ‘irreducibly complex system’ – i.e. a system which ceases to function if any one of its interrelated parts is removed. Such systems, he says, cannot be produced in the gradual, step-by-step manner that Darwin envisaged, and would have to arise all at once.
Another irreducibly complex system is the rotatory flagellum – a sort of outboard motor that some bacteria use to swim. Some flagella turn at more than 1000 revolutions per second. The device includes a long tail that acts as a propeller; the hook region, which attaches the propeller to the drive shaft; the motor, which uses a flow of acid from outside the bacterium to the inside to power the turning; a stator, which keeps the structure stationary in the plane of the membrane while the propeller turns; and bushing material to allow the drive shaft to poke up through the bacterial membrane. In the absence of the hook, the motor, the propeller, the drive shaft, or most of the 40 types of proteins necessary for the construction and operation of the flagellum, either no flagellum is produced or one that does not work at all.¹

Fig. 7.4. Drawing of a bacterial flagellum showing the filament, hook, and the motor imbedded in the inner and outer cell membranes and the cell wall.²

Other examples of irreducible complexity include vision, blood clotting and the intracellular protein transport system. Behe points out that the technical literature is essentially silent when it comes to explaining in any detail how such intricate systems might have evolved in a Darwinian fashion; most of the papers in molecular biology journals are concerned with DNA sequence analysis. On the subject of the flagellum, Simon Conway Morris writes:

While we should not underestimate the difficulty in explaining how such a flagellar motor might have evolved, everything else we know about evolution indicates that the pathway to construction will involve the twin processes of cobbling together and co-option, with at least some of the proteins being recruited in quite surprising ways from some other function elsewhere in the cell.³
In other word, Morris has nothing to offer but a pious hope.
Darwin admitted that the belief that an organ as perfect as the eye could have been formed by natural selection is ‘enough to stagger anyone’, but appealed to the enormous period of time available. Even more staggering is the current belief that camera-type eyes (like our own) evolved randomly and independently at least seven times. Like Darwin, Richard Dawkins thinks that the eye evolved step by step through a series of intermediate stages. But note that improvements in the structure of the eye are useless unless they go hand in hand with improved neural processing. And even the ‘light-sensitive spot’ that Dawkins takes as his starting point is a multicell organ, each of whose cells makes the complexity of a motorcycle or television look paltry in comparison. Dawkins merely adds complex systems to complex systems and calls that an explanation. Behe comments:

This can be compared to answering the question ‘How is a stereo system made?’ with the words ‘By plugging a set of speakers into an amplifier, and adding a CD player, radio receiver, and tape deck.’⁴

Fig. 7.5. Cross-section of the human eye. The retina has 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones, which cause photochemical reactions that transform light into electrical impulses. About a billion impulses are transmitted to the brain every second, by means that are poorly understood.

Behe illustrates the complexity of vision with the following rather technical but still highly simplified description: When a photon hits the retina, it interacts with a small organic molecule called cis-retinal, causing its rather bent shape to straighten out. This changes the shape of the protein rhodopsin, which is bound to it, and exposes a binding site that allows the protein transducin to stick to it. Part of the transducin complex now dissociates and interacts with a protein called phosphodiesterase, which then acquires the ability to cut a molecule called cyclic-GMP and turn it into 5'-GMP. Some of this sticks to another protein called an ion channel. Normally the ion channel allows sodium ions into the cell, but when the concentration of cyclic-GMP decreases because of the action of the phosphodiesterase, the cyclic-GMP bound to the ion channel eventually falls off, causing a change in shape that shuts the channel. As a result, sodium ions can no longer enter the cell, the concentration of sodium in the cell decreases, and the voltage across the cell membrane changes. That in turn causes a wave of electrical polarization to be sent down the optic nerve to the brain. The system then has to regenerate and return to the starting point ready for the next incoming photon.⁵ When the electrical signals are processed, integrated and interpreted by the brain (and mind), vision results.
Michael Schwartz believes that by invoking regulatory genes, the need for an elaborate account of the eye’s origin and complexity disappears:

[T]he reasons lie in knowing that there are homeobox genes for eye formation and that when one of them, the Rxgene in particular, is activated in the right place and at the right time, an individual has an eye.⁶
A more vacuous Darwinian ‘explanation’ is difficult to imagine!

God and imperfection
In the early 19th century, Anglican priest William Paley argued that if we found a watch on the ground we would assume its various parts had been designed and put together for a purpose. He went on to argue that highly complex living systems, too, must have been designed. Supporters of the modern intelligent design (ID) movement argue that intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell, because only intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of functionally specified information. Michael Behe argues that random mutations and natural selection play a role in evolution, but that ‘design is evident when a number of separate, interacting components are ordered in such a way as to accomplish a function beyond the individual components’.¹ Intelligent design is also invoked to explain the vast chain of coincidences that make life on earth possible – e.g. the relative strengths of the four physical forces, the ratio between strong and weak chemical bonds, the thermal properties of water, and the properties of the earth’s atmosphere. If the ‘laws of physics’ had been only slightly different, carbon-based life would be impossible.² Darwinists reject the intelligent-design hypothesis as untestable and unfalsifiable, and therefore pseudoscience. However, the same charge can be levelled against the neo-Darwinian hypothesis that the entire living world originated through random mutations and natural selection.
The ID movement leaves open the question of the identity of the designer or designers, whether they are natural or ‘supernatural’, and how their designs are imprinted on matter. ID advocates disagree about the reality of common ancestry. Many are Christian theists (some of whom are creationists), and believe that there is only one designer/creator: the hypothetical omnipotent and omniscient God of orthodox Christian theology. Biblical creationists accept that genetic variation (microevolution) is constantly taking place, but reject macroevolution and the theory of common descent. They do not believe that God intervenes by planning and directing mutations to accomplish large-scale evolutionary changes. At various times in the past, God supposedly created each new kind of creature out of nothing by supernatural means, so that these newly created beings appeared on earth abruptly and fully developed. A 2012 survey found that 46% of Americans believe that ‘God created human beings in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years’.³
Darwinists argue that since there are flaws in the designs of creatures we see on earth, they cannot be the product of an intelligent agent – this is known as the ‘argument from imperfection’. As S.J. Gould put it, ‘Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.’ His favourite example was the panda’s thumb. The giant panda has a thumb that it uses to grasp the bamboo shoots that form its main diet. However, its thumb is not one of the five fingers of the normal mammalian paw. Instead, it is an extra digit constructed from a modified wrist bone, with appropriate rearrangement of the musculature. Gould assumes that a designer would have given the panda a real opposable thumb, and concludes that the panda’s thumb must have evolved by Darwinian means.⁴
However, it is impossible to disprove design on the basis of unprovable assumptions about how a hypothetical designer would or would not act. As Behe says, the designer might have multiple motives, with engineering excellence often relegated to a secondary role. Furthermore, the fact that living systems are not perfect does not prove that there is no design at all and that random Darwinian evolution is a fact. Note that Gould fails to provide an adequate Darwinian explanation of how the Panda’s thumb evolved:

He simply states that a single change in a regulatory gene, which controls the action of many structural genes, was responsible for the whole complex development of bone and muscle. But he does not specify which regulatory gene changed, nor does he explain how a change in the regulatory gene would orchestrate this remarkable transformation. He offers nothing more than the traditional vague magic-wand explanation.⁵
ID proponents, including creationists, respond to the argument from imperfection by trying to show that alleged ‘imperfect’ designs are actually sophisticated engineering feats or they regard them as the product of degeneration of a rational and beneficial original design. Take the human eye, for example. Darwinists argue that the vertebrate eye is a botched design as it is wired backward: the photoreceptors face away from the light, resulting in a ‘blind spot’. ID proponents point out that positioning the nerves in front of the light-sensitive retinal cells ensures maximum blood supply to the retina and therefore maximum sensitivity. Whether the eye is perfect or not, the fact remains that ‘The scientific literature contains no evidence that natural selection working on mutation can produce either an eye with a blind spot, an eye without a blind spot, an eyelid, a lens, a retina, rhodopsin, or retinal.’⁶
Robert Wesson draws attention to many odd and seemingly illogical features in the living world. The human body, for example, is ill adapted in many ways:

The body is a bundle of imperfections, with sagging bellies, drooping breasts, useless protuberances above the nostrils, rotting teeth with trouble-prone third molars, aching feet, bulging buttocks, easily strained backs, and naked tender skin, subject to cuts, bites, and, for many, sunburn. We are poor runners and are only about a third as strong as chimpanzees smaller than ourselves.⁷
However, these relatively minor defects do not prove that the body arose from chance mutations and random selection. From a theosophical point of view, the entities embodying in physical forms get the body they need to gain the experiences and learn the lessons necessary for their evolutionary progress. Evolving, imperfect souls are unlikely to have absolutely perfect bodies, and the misuse by humans of their free will is the root cause of a multitude of ailments.
Evolutionists have argued that the forelimbs of turtles, horses, humans, birds and bats are less than perfectly adapted because they are modified from an inherited structure rather than designed from completely ‘raw’ materials for a specific purpose. But the mere fact that vertebrate forelimbs are modifications of the same basic design is no proof of anything. It is certainly compatible with intelligent design, for why shouldn’t designers – who need not be omnipotent – produce new features in organisms by modifying existing ones?
Behe, who describes himself as ‘a pretty conventional Roman Catholic’, believes there is a single intelligent designer, ‘beyond nature’, but that it is also responsible for creating ‘a torrent of pain’ and ‘untold human misery’. He asks: ‘Are viruses and parasites part of some brilliant, as-yet-unappreciated economy of nature, or do they reflect the bungling of an incompetent, fallible designer?’⁸ Other believers in a benevolent intelligent designer predict that genetic studies will reveal that virulent bacteria are degenerative systems resulting from loss of original genetic information.⁹
Features that have no apparent use at all are also cited as evidence against design. For instance, less than 5% of the DNA in most plants and animals codes for proteins; the remainder was originally labelled ‘junk DNA’ or ‘pseudogenes’. Darwinists argued that this non-functional DNA confirmed that genes mutated randomly, resulting in a genome riddled with useless information, mistakes and broken genes. However, it has been known for decades that many non-protein-coding sequences do have important functions, such as encoding RNA molecules involved in the regulation of gene expression. It has also been suggested that some of this DNA may consist of ‘redundant’ ancestral genes that are no longer expressed, or that it may contain information for future evolutionary events. The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project infers that at least 80% of human DNA serves some biochemical purpose, though some scientists disagree.¹⁰

Monotheism vs. creative powers
Many people are unable to reconcile the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, perfect creator with the suffering, imperfections and waste in nature. The gnostics, for example, argued that God must have been

an inferior deity, a builder, receiving his ‘orders,’ so to say, from the divine architects ... [T]he manifold imperfections and incompletenesses so plainly apparent even to us humans, in the kosmical system, proclaim that it could not be the work of an all-perfect and kosmically omnipotent Deity; from utter perfection could spring forth only a perfect and complete work.¹
Monotheists might argue that God chose to create a potentially perfect universe, but endowed each soul with a measure of free will, which can be used for good or ill. However, this explanation is insufficient, for if God determines the character and circumstances of birth of each new soul he supposedly creates, he would be responsible for many of the numerous apparent injustices in the human and animal worlds – which would surely reflect rather badly on him.

There are further objections to the traditional theological concept of God. If God is infinite and has always existed ‘he’ is an abstraction and cannot be a thinking, creating being; a being is by definition finite and limited, a learning entity, and certainly not all-powerful and all-wise. An infinite God could not be entirely separate from the physical universe, but would be synonymous with infinite nature. To conceive of God as existing outside the cosmos is therefore illogical, and the idea of God creating the universe and everything within it out of literally nothing is simply absurd: nothing can come from nothing, and therefore infinite nature must always have existed – whatever creationists and big-bang cosmologists may claim.²
Instead of a single supreme creator-god, more sophisticated forms of creationism hold that a wide range of spiritual and other nonphysical beings are involved in the process of ‘creation’.³ In contrast to strict creationism, other researchers and mystical traditions propose that there is a physical evolutionary process, but they go beyond strict Darwinism by proposing that this process is guided and directed by hierarchies of paraphysical entities.
19th-century naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, for example, parted company with his contemporary, Charles Darwin, after coming to the conclusion that unaided natural selection was unable to account for the physical form of humans and that the guiding action of ‘higher intelligences’ was a ‘necessary part of the great laws which govern the material Universe’.⁴ 20th-century anthropologist Robert Broom believed that various spiritual and psychic agencies were at work in guiding and controlling evolution, some benevolent and some malignant.⁵
Alexander Mebane proposes that a variety of subdivine designers guide the process of saltational evolution. He suggests that the abundance of weirdly fantastic life forms and lifestyles indicates that the designers have always competed with one another.⁶ Robert Gilson proposes that the ultimate ‘all-wise and all-powerful’ divine source delegates most of the work of creation to a vast hierarchy of subordinate but largely autonomous powers. These nonphysical agencies bring about genetic mutations, but the lower ranks may make errors.⁷ Both Mebane and Gilson seem to imply that the designers work predominantly selfconsciously.
Philosopher Thomas Nagel recognizes that the materialistic, reductionist Darwinian paradigm has failed to explain the origin and evolution of life, and the existence of consciousness, cognition and our moral sense, purely in terms of purposeless physicochemical laws and a long series of accidents. Rejecting the idea of an intelligent agency outside the natural order, he hopes that new ‘principles’ that are ‘teleological rather than mechanistic’ will eventually be discovered.⁸ There certainly appear to be purposeful processes at work in nature, but invoking abstract teleological principles does not help to explain them – it’s real, natural, but predominantly nonphysical forces, energies, entities and intelligences that are required.
The ageless wisdom tradition postulates an interlinked series of nonphysical worlds and entities behind the workings of the physical world, as echoed in many religious and philosophical systems. Christianity, for instance, speaks of angels, archangels, dominions, principalities, etc. And in the first verse of Genesis – ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ – the word normally translated as ‘God’ is actually a plural word, elohim, meaning ‘gods’ (el means ‘god’, eloh means ‘goddess’, and -im is the masculine plural ending). The word translated as ‘created’ is a reflexive verb signifying that the androgynous creative powers made or formed themselves into, i.e. became, the spiritual realms and the material realm.⁹ The elohim are clearly not equivalent to boundless infinitude, which is referred to in the second verse as ‘the deep’ (tehom), corresponding to the ayn soph of the kabbalists, the shunyata of the Buddhists, and the parabrahman of the Hindus.
The most detailed and accessible presentation of the ancient wisdom is to be found in modern theosophy. The theosophical teachings on evolution given out since the formation of the Theosophical Society in 1875 are merely a general outline of the information in the possession of the Brotherhood of Adepts.¹⁰ This information is said to have been compiled and repeatedly verified by countless generations of sages and seers, whose occult powers grant them access to the inner realms of nature and enable them to read the records of the earth’s history clairvoyantly.

References
Miraculous accidents

Duane T. Gish, Evolution: The fossils still say no!, El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1995, pp. 104-5.

Ibid., pp. 167-73; John D. Morris and Frank J. Sherwin, The Fossil Record: Unearthing nature’s history of life, Dallas, TX: Institute for Creation Research, 2010, p. 154.

‘Ear, human’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, CD-ROM 2004.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Sudden Origins: Fossils, genes, and the emergence of species, New York: John Wiley, 1999, p. 38.

Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The biochemical challenge to evolution, New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 23.

Balázs Hornyánszky and István Tasi, Nature’s I.Q., Badger, CA: Torchlight Publishing, 2009, p. 66;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_eel.

Richard L. Thompson, Mechanistic and Nonmechanistic Science: An investigation into the nature of consciousness and form, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1981, pp. 193-5.

William R. Corliss (comp.), Biological Anomalies: Mammals I, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1995, p. 17.

William R. Corliss (comp.), Science Frontiers: Some anomalies and curiosities of nature, Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1994, p. 154.

Irreducible complexity

Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000, pp. 123-4, 134-5; Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The search for the limits of Darwinism, New York: Free Press, 2008, pp. 261-8.

Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 71.

Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a lonely universe, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 111.

Darwin’s Black Box, p. 39.

Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe, pp. 117-9; Darwin’s Black Box, pp. 18-22.

Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p. 362.

God and imperfection

Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, p. 194.

See Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the laws of biology reveal purpose in the universe, New York: Free Press, 1998.

gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx.

Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 20.

Sri Ramesvara Swami (ed.), Origins: Higher dimensions in science, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1984, p. 47.

James P. Gills and Tom Woodward, Darwinism under the Microscope: How recent scientific evidence points to divine design, Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2002, pp. 151-9; Darwin’s Black Box, p. 224.

Robert Wesson, Beyond Natural Selection, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 95.

Behe, The Edge of Evolution, pp. 228, 232, 237-8.

Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2009, pp. 490-1.

Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt: The explosive origin of animal life and the case for intelligent design, New York: HarperOne, 2013, pp. 400-2; Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The hypothesis of formative causation, London: Icon Books, 3rd ed., 2009, p. 180; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_DNA.

Monotheism vs. creative powers

G. de Purucker, Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press (TUP), 2nd ed., 1979, p. 509.

See Trends in cosmology, http://davidpratt.info.

See Michael A. Cremo, Human Devolution: A Vedic alternative to Darwin’s theory, Los Angeles, CA: Bhaktivedanta Book Publishing, 2003.

Quoted in H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, TUP, 1977 (1888), 1:339.

R. Broom, The Coming of Man, London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1933, pp. 11-2, 196-8, 220-5.

Alexander Mebane, Darwin’s Creation-Myth, Venice, FL: P&D Printing, 1994, pp. 69-70.

Robert J. Gilson, Evolution in a New Light: The outworking of cosmic imaginism, Norwich: Pelegrin Trust, 1992, pp. 99-109, 122.

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

G. de Purucker, Studies in Occult Philosophy, TUP, 1973, pp. 129-33; Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy, pp. 95-104.

See The mahatmas, http://davidpratt.info.

THE PRODIGAL SON OF GOD

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Stranger Than Science.... Not Really.... Science Matters.... But Nothing Will Matter On The Day Strange Matters Are Set Loose

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Miraculous accidents

7. Chance, creation and design

Miraculous accidents

Irreducible complexity

God and imperfection

Monotheism vs. creative powers

References

An article published by David Pratt. @ http://davidpratt.info/evod1.htm

Friday, May 1, 2015

Jesus Said There Are Two Gods: You Will Either Love One Or Hate The Other