http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html One Man Mormon Blues Band: Blog Jannis' PHPRss class - http://www.jannis.to/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:07:36 -0700 http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/is_matter_all_that_matters
If we are nothing but matter then we live in a material world operating according to physical laws. If this is true then the universe is a deterministic universe and there is no such thing as “free will”. We may not yet understand the laws that control our behavior, but it is controlled according to physical law and we cannot choose. And in fact, some scientists have said as much. Both E. O. Wilson and Francis Crick have made statements that free will only seems to exist. They provide various explanations, but that is their conclusion. Or is it?

The fact that both feel it necessary to declare us not free, to then explain their position, and even more to proselyte their position suggests that there are those who do not agree and they must convince them that n they are not free. It must be a very complex physical set of laws indeed that creates so many different philosophies and beliefs without coercion. Are they free to understand that they are not free while I am not free to believe that I am free?

But it gets even worse for them. Richard Dawkins says that the living material world is under the control of “selfish genes” which drive us, unbeknownst to ourselves, in many of our behaviors. But then he explains that humans, alone on the earth, can rebel and against our selfish self-replicators and alter our behavior for the good of . . . someone?

Now first, if we can deny our selfish genes, then we occupy a pretty special place in the animal Kingdom as it is. Apparently we are the only ones whose minds can control their biological destiny. But if we can control our destiny, then we are destined. And if we aren’t destined, then we are free. Brilliant scientist that he thinks he is, that doesn’t make sense.

Another writer, Steven Pinker, who thinks our minds are just a machine, states that just because our genes are programmed to act in a certain way doesn’t mean that we have to act that way. He cites as an example how he has voluntarily remained childless. But wait, if he has voluntarily remained childless, then he has chosen. He could have had children, but he didn’t. Where did that choice come from? From his machine? Or was it granted from God at the same time God created our soul. Is the mind a machine that cannot choose, or not?

While not directly involved with free will, it is also instructive to ask why would a human deny his physical nature (genes) and refuse to have children, if that is the material system that is supposed to happen. I suppose it might because they saw some benefit in their action for someone, although it isn’t clear whom? Are they benefiting the material world by not propagating. A material world doesn’t care. Are they benefiting other humans? Why? The other humans are apparently not doing anything for them by propagating? And why would they care about other pieces of material. Maybe it is purely selfish and they are benefitting themselves. That at least makes some sense. They will forgo propagation in favor of comfort or ease. Although I am not sure what significance their comfort and ease have in a material world where they will be extinguished at the end anyway.

There are other serious problems with a material world. Can you think of what they are?]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/is_matter_all_that_matters Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:07:36 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_creator_is_outside_the_creation
Of course not! I am the creator and stand outside the story. I am not a part of the story. If I showed up in the story you would ask, “Who is this author fellow? What is he doing in here?” I do not exist in the same time frame as the story. This seems so obvious. Yet let’s look at another story and how some people view that story. This is the story of the creation of the universe and time.

Before today, we knew there was a yesterday. And there was a day before that day. Does this chain of day-before-yesterday go back infinitely? I suppose so, since I can’t imagine what a day without a day before would look like. But if there were such a day, then we would call that day the beginning.

If there were a beginning, there had to be cause. But “causes” are the same as days. If there is an event, it has to have had a cause. But a cause must have had a cause of that event and so on. If there is a cause that had no previous cause, I would call it God, the beginning.

Now some atheists have argued that if there is a cause, God, there must have been something which caused God. What they don’t understand is the story of the universe is just like my novel. The creator stands outside the series of events. That is the meaning of eternal. Not that God will live forever, but that God stands outside of time itself.

Interestingly, this line of reasoning was put forward many centuries ago by St. Thomas Aquinas. More recently, physicist have determined that time is a part of the universe and was created when the material world was created. This is exactly what Aquinas reasoned centuries ago, and which modern atheists have never refuted because they do not understand his argument.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_creator_is_outside_the_creation Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:32:16 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/is_evil_natural
We might all agree that malaria is a curse. However, if you have it you probably live in very poor circumstances and you are almost for sure going to be protected from some forms of hepatitis. And you can live productively with only occasional outbreaks. So is Malaria evil in those circumstances?

The things that we commonly call evil are disease, suffering and death. yet these are not only natural, they are necessary part of nature. The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the amount of energy in the Universe is finite, and new energy is not created or destroyed. The second law states that energy can change forms, for example from electrical to mechanical, or from heat to electrical, and so forth. However, it also states that whenever energy is changed the process is never completely efficient and some energy is lost in some other form (usually heat).

This leads to the concept of entropy, or disorder, in the Universe. Everything in the Universe is becoming less organized and energy disseminated. Whenever we find organization, such as in living systems, we know that there must be an energy source for that system to become and remain organized.

On our planet that necessary energy comes from the sun. Without the constant input of energy from the sun, all life would cease to exist. Anything that interrupts the flow of energy will weaken the living thing. These weaknesses are routinely called death and disease! So death and disease are a necessary part of the natural cycle, but seen by mankind as the ultimate evil.

Further the earth has a finite space. There is only so much surface area to be occupied. Space for life is already at a premium and has been for perhaps millions of years. That is why many living things live on other living things. In fact, every life form we have investigated has at least one unique life form that lives exclusively on it, as well as sharing several other life forms that live on it, and some other plants or animals. We call these things that live on other things parasites and disease agents, and they are the most prominent form of life on earth. So living things must die in order to make space for new living things and recycle some of the components and energy flow. That is not evil. That is a neutral, scientific fact of nature and material.

So what atheists want to blame God for not stopping is an essential part of living and proves nothing about God. It is especially odd when scientists use this argument since they are the first to claim that there is no room in science for value judgments, only materialism and natural law. If death and disease are natural, they cannot be evil. If they are evil, then science is not divorced of value judgments.

Science deals with materials and nature and these cannot have values. Science claims that it is the only way of knowing about our world and the existence of God, yet does not allow the study of, or acceptance of judgment and values except in the sense of material and nature. In other words, it defines nature without God, and then claims there is no God.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/is_evil_natural Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:51:47 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_problem_of_evil
None of this seems to have an explanation, and so many atheists have decided that these events are proof that there is no God. Their argument goes like this. If there is a God, He is by definition all powerful. If He is all-powerful He is in a position to stop pain and suffering. But it is obvious that pain and suffering continues in the world, hence there must not be a God.

In fact, all pain and suffering prove is that we presently have no generally accepted explanation for pain and suffering that they understand. There may well be reasons for evil and suffering in the world, but our understanding is too limited to understand it yet. Perhaps God understands, and humans do not. All that can be said is that, as humans we have limits to what we understand. But rather decide that they might not understand something, they assume that God (who they have already defined as all powerful and all knowing) doesn't understand or exist. Atheists are not generally known for their humility.

In the next couple of weeks I want to address this argument of the problem of evil from some other perspectives. Hope you'll come back and visit.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_problem_of_evil Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:11:46 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_roots_of_our_modern_scientific_world
The medieval monastery was a place to retrieve, collect, and preserve classical knowledge. Much of this knowledge had been destroyed by the barbarian destruction of the Roman Empire and Europe. But from these Monasteries came schools of various kinds until by the twelfth century Universities began to be established. All early Universities were associated with the Church. However, they soon became independently governed. The curriculum of early Universities were religious but also became quickly secular to accommodate economic and technical demands of the day.

It was at Oxford University that inductive and experimental methods be used to advance knowledge. Francis bacon, the “founder of the scientific method” and a devout man who wrote theological papers as well as scientific, argued that man had a divine responsibility to use his reason to establish dominion over creation. The first medical research institutions and the first astronomical observatories were all built by the Church.

It is commonly taught that science was invented in the 1700’s. But as you can see from above it was off to a flourishing start several centuries before that. Two schools of theological thought were operating between the twelfth and seventeenth century. One maintained that experimentation was the way to learn Gods design and mind. The other held that scholastic debate using the rules of deductive reasoning was the way to discover God’s will. But note that both schools of thought were seeking to understand God, not deny Him. And both have contributed to our modern concepts of science.

The following is a list of scientists who were not only Christians, but who publicly announced that their scientific enterprise was to reveal the true nature of God and his plan for the Universe. Many were clergymen.
Copernicus
Kepler
Galileo
Brahe
Descartes
Boyle
Newton
Leibniz
Gassendi
Pascal
Mersenne
Cuvier
Harvey
Dalton
Faraday
Herschel
Joule
Lyell
Lavoisier
Priestley
Kelvin
Ohm
Ampere
Steno
Pasteur
Maxwell
Planck
Mendel
Lemaitre

Several scientists in the last twenty years have become militant atheists and attacked all religion in vicious terms. According to them religion is the cause of all wars, death, famine, and ugliness in the world. They have had much success in popularizing these ideas. These men display both their ignorance of their own field and lack of rationality in their attacks, mostly made in the name of selling books and making money. That is so much easier than doing true scientific experiments and applying careful and rigid rationality.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_roots_of_our_modern_scientific_world Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:29:24 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/everything_makes_sense
Would it not seem just as likely that such a chaotic event would lead to purely random subsequent events, that disorder, entropy would overwhelm the Universe and that any pockets of order would soon be dissolved in entropic doom?

Evolution is a series of random events, each selected by the environment to succeed or fail. But they in turn change the environment that selects the next random changes. Even the biologists that believe in the process admit that it is a chaotic affair that has required huge spans of time and random chance. They also admit that the trend is sloppy and that many living things do not survive and the trend can just as easily be towards failure as towards higher and more successful forms.

I will tell you why. Because we decided that the world should make sense. We accepted that hypothesis purely on faith. And then we conducted the experiments that would demonstrate that the world makes sense. And when we found what we thought was evidence that the world was a reasonable place, we congratulated ourselves for discovering it. It is the basic assumption of every scientists and reasonable person that the world ought to make sense.

It is quite impossible to prove the assumption that the world is rational. It is a tenet of faith, every much as belief in Mohammed or the Immaculate Conception. Scientists take for granted that the laws and rules we discover on this earth are Universal and in effect on every part of the Universe, and have always been since the beginning of time.

Many scientists have themselves expressed their amazement that the Universe is an orderly place and seems to be described in terms of mathematics. Richard Feynman has observed “Why nature is mathematical is a mystery. . . . . The fact that there are rules at all is a kind of miracle.” It cannot be proven the scientific laws have always been the same, or that they are the same everywhere. In fact, occasional discoveries are made, such as recent events in quantum physics, that perhaps the laws do change, or that we do not understand them.

So science itself, and reason based upon it, is built upon a faith based assumption that the Universe is orderly. And scientists never seem to ask where the order came from.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/everything_makes_sense Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:56:00 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/whos_asleep
Well, could the same be said today? For the last twenty-five years the enemies of religion, and Christianity in particular, have been wide awake and on the attack. And they have had the field pretty much to themselves. Hiding behind the mask of science, reason and logic these charlatans have convinced many people, not just that religion is useless, but that it is evil. In the mean time, religious people have retreated into their own congregations, preaching to the choir, and have left unchallenged the illogical, unreasonable, inaccurate, preposterous lies of these antireligious crusaders.

There are others who have attacked religion as well on political and cultural grounds. But these men of science have convinced much of the public through facile pens and poor logic. Yet their logic does not meet even the minimum of scientific standards, and often provide the fodder for the cultural and political attacks. Almost every book written attacking religion follows the same pattern. First they discredit the traditional reasons for believing in a God. Then they produce and argument or two supporting the contrary hypothesis (very often the same arguments over and over). Third, they cast doubt that religion is actually from God, but that it has a purely natural explanation (which is usually some theory more farfetched that the concept of God itself). Finally they attempt to portray religion as having caused evil and that one can live a perfectly moral law without the prop of religion.

At every step they rewrite history, overstate their arguments, misinterpret facts, use emotional language and completely abandon any pretext of logic and reason that they claim to worship. Their motives are self announced. They wish to be free from any restraint on their own behavior. While claiming to proclaim a better way towards morality, they do so with the aim of removing all barriers to immoral behavior. While claiming to live morally they knowingly misrepresent and cause harm to millions of people, and provide justification for the godless evils that have been forced onto the world such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and many others.

Wake up! You are under attack. The enemy knows what they are doing and is willing to go without sleep.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/whos_asleep Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:52:15 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/stories_and_evolution “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away. . . .”
“Call me Ishmael.”
It was a pleasure to burn.”

These are all first lines from famous novels. Great stories! I have read them all. Sometimes these fictional stories seem real. I guess they could be real, for all I know. In fact, having dabbled in stories myself, and having read what a number of authors say about their stories, I suspect some of them ARE real. That is authors take events that were real, and change them, embellish them, dress them and make them unreal; but so that they sound real.

Some stories are real. True stories are often more compelling than fiction, because we believe in our hearts that they really happened and we are filled with empathy for the people involved. But even true stories are often not entirely true. Authors often change them, embellish them, and dress them up a little. Some parts of true stories are probably untrue. When my Father used to tell fishing stories, you could usually be sure that he really did go fishing about the time he said he did, and at the place he said. Everything else in between might be accurate to some degree, or not at all.

Sometimes people use stories to prove a point. Stories make great analogies, metaphors, examples and parables. Politicians like to tell about some poor, suffering citizen who will benefitted by the bill they are sponsoring. People respond to stories; much more so than logic. It is probably our natural mode of thinking.

But just what is a story? A story is the recounting of a series of imaginary events. These events are speculative and cannot be proven. In fact, most of the time we wouldn’t even think of trying to verify those events. We know they aren’t true. Even if we suspected they might have an element of truth, we would recognize that it would be impossible to prove what was true and what wasn’t because it all simply arose out of man’s mind.

The single biggest argument against God, marshaled by atheists today, is evolution. But while the facts that give rise to the theory of evolution are indisputable, the theory itself is a “story”: a series of speculative, imaginary events used to explain how something might have happened. This is much like the story of Oliver Twist, imagining how things might have been in early19th century London. It might be true, or not. It might contain true elements that are embellished or downplayed. But in no way does it represent science which is based upon evidence, proof and ability to prove something false. Because the events cannot be replicated, observed, or verified in any way, the theory must be accepted with no greater weight than any other theory; including the existence of God, or magic.

Because the Theory of Evolution is merely a story, it takes upon it the same characteristics as any set of Articles of Faith: the story is simply adopted on faith. Those who choose to believe may belittle and ridicule those who do not, but they have no special standing to do so. Those who choose not to accept the story are not on unequal footing, although they may need to come up with a viable alternative story to account for the facts of biology that led to the theory.

But it should be perfectly clear that Dawkins, Bennet, Hitchens, Stenger, Brooks and others atheists are practicing a religion of sorts. Their articles of faith reject the concept of God, which then places them squarely into the universal and comprehensive, binary category of evil.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/stories_and_evolution Fri, 07 May 2010 12:19:19 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/unreasonable_atheists
Perhaps we should start with the titles of their publications. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins captures, at once, a statement which is not only loaded with personal, emotional content, but which is also un-provable and therefore unreasonable. This does not even take into account that his central thesis is unsupported by evidence, and the arrogance that he thinks he knows the truth while the rest of humanity are ignorant dunces.

Maybe you like Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. Of course, he doesn’t advocate the end of faith at all, just what he has faith in. He advocates faith in science, intellectual reason and intellectual man. His arguments are likewise filled with statements of personal belief, un-provable theses, and unsupported evidence. God: The Failed Hypothesis by Victor Stenger ignores the fact that, based upon his own rules of reason, one cannot prove a negative and he thus has no position upon which to declare a failed hypothesis.

Let’s consider some of their very “reasonable” statements. Steven Weinberg (a Nobel Laureate) wrote, “Anything we can scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.” Let’s see, it MAY IN THE END be their greatest contribution? That is a statement of faith in science and intellectual superiority, not of reason and intellect. Sam Harris has written to condemn “the lunatic influence of religious belief”. With one stroke he dismisses all of human progress under religious influence and some of the greatest minds of all time.

Christopher Hitchens writes, “All religions and all Churches are equally demented in their belief . . . .” ignoring the hyperbole, I have been taught that statements that portend to lump ALL into an argument are highly questionable since one needs find only one exception to disprove the claim. This is not a statement based on reason, but a statement of personal belief and dogma, the likes of which he would cite as evidence that all religions are delusional.

But there is more to this than their lack of reason. They themselves have their own faith and ecstasy as is evidenced by other statements. Richard Dawkins has written of “the feeling of awed wonder that science gives us . . . as one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable”. Substitute the word “religion” for the word “science” in that statement and you have a religion, pure and undefiled. Carl Sagan has said, “Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.” That is not a statement of reason, but of personal belief. This is a statement of ethics, not scientific reason based upon evidence, experiment, verification and peer review.

These are only a small sample of the fallibility of atheist's arguments. They claim their own intellectual superiority and ability to reason, and then continue to attack religion, not with reason and evidence, but with opinion, unsupported allegations, false hypotheses, and arrogance. Their motives for doing so are the subject of other blogs, but their lack of clear reasoning is manifest in their own words.

So it seems clear from their own language that they do not wish to do away with faith, they only want to control what we have faith in. They have faith in man and intellectual reason. Yet they themselves do not practice reason. They fill their writings with ethics, unsupported allegations, un-provable hypotheses, personal feelings and philosophies, and vitriol. Whether one is better off trusting in mankind’s reason and intellect, or in God, might best be decided using better “reason” than these men have demonstrated.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/unreasonable_atheists Mon, 05 Apr 2010 09:54:09 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_evolution_of_atheism
So let’s talk about atheists and evolutionary biologists on their own terms: why do atheists continue to persist in the gene pool?

Their own story, of their own existence, is that they are the descendents of a tiny bit of chemical protoplasm that coalesced in a briny pool about three and a half billion years ago. They are the product of blind natural forces, chance, and time. They are an arbitrary bag of molecules, inhabiting a tiny planet, in an insignificant solar system, of a meaningless universe. They do not differ, except in degree, from an amoeba. They have no essence beyond the purely chemical reactions of their body, and at death they will cease to exist entirely, for eternity. They have no purpose in living, and there is no great need to protect children as they have no purpose either. In fact, they are the result of their own parents’ confusion because their parents obviously not only protected these useless blobs of protoplasm, but actually educated and cared for them for many years.

Contrast this belief with the Christian belief that we are all specially created by God, in His own image, and are, in fact, His special children. We have unique capacities to think, reason, act, create, and feel emotions; all evidence of our divine origins. Not only are humans unique, but each person is unique among humans. God loves each one of us so intensely that He wants us to come home and live close to Him for eternity. He created this earth especially for us to receive a body and learn and increase in knowledge. He has provided an opportunity for all of us to learn to know Him, and return to Him through his own special Son. He has given us a responsibility to care for one another in the context of families and faith communities that all can be nurtured and cared for. This provides us with tremendous purpose while alive to work and accomplish all that we can to help others, but especially our own families and offspring.

Which group of people is most likely to survive a wild and dangerous existence? Obviously it is those who have a purpose and a community that are destined to survive. That atheists exist seems to fly in the face of evolutionary thought. Their tribe should not be successful at raising a second generation. In fact, I wonder how many atheists had faith centered parents. Atheists seem to be something akin to homosexuals. Where do they fit into the scheme of natural selection? Why does nature select for people who mate with their own sex and guarantee that they have no offspring. Why would nature select for people who have no higher purpose then their own survival. If selfish survival is an evolutionary advantage, why aren’t atheists the predominant human belief? Yet, even at their greatest influence, they are a minority in the human population.

In fact, their survival is entirely made possible by the community and accomplishments of religion. They were born to and raised by communities of people who believed that they had purpose and were special and so they were given every advantage for many, many years. They are a bit like parasites, nurtured by a religious society, but rejecting, and even attacking the very body that makes their existence possible.

They may argue that even they, as other animals, care for their young and religion is not necessary to ensure the survival of the young. Yet no other species cares for their young for literally years on end. What is the evolutionary advantage of the long nurturing of purposeless and worthless individuals?

Ideas have consequences.]]> http://onemanmormonbluesband.com/blog.html/the_evolution_of_atheism Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:54:51 -0700 Mormon Blues - One Man Mormon Blues Band - Blog