Science

A Waste of Brainpower and Money

Americans spend more than $50 billion a year on space exploration. This includes not only money spent on rocket ships, space stations, and satellites, but also on scientists and researchers at universities and elsewhere.

But a funny thing is happening. The more money we spend, the more most of the scientists find out they are wrong. Here are a few examples from recent headlines:

Of course, it is okay to be wrong; the scientific method is based on making guesses about something then testing to see if you are right and wrong. The problem here is that most of these billions are being spent on proving ideas we already know are wrong.

All of the headlines and much of the research and exploration are related to our search for origins, of the universe, our planet, life, etc. No doubt there are things be discovered in this search. But we won’t find much that is meaningful and we will waste billions of dollars if the search begins with a lie, the denial of Genesis 1: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

Denying this is a lie for all humans, just not Christians, as Romans 1:19–20 makes clear:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

In the Bible, we have eyewitness accounts of God creating all things (Christ and the Holy Spirit). Yet scientist continue the search for dark matter, which they have never found any proof for (see above), because it is needed to substantiate the increasingly falsified Big Bang thesis. Even many secular scientists have given up on the Big Bang and are looking elsewhere for answers.

Of course, they’ll keep coming up snake eyes until they look to God. No need looking for secret lives of universes, the multiverse, or galaxies swallowing galaxies to figure out where we came from.

One wonders what we might be able to learn about God and His creation if all that brainpower and money (not that the government ought to be funding it) were focused on research that begin with the premise, “God created the heavens and the earth.” If you’d like to get a taste of what could be accomplished with this, I recommend visiting the Biblical Science Institute founded by Dr. Jason Lisle, a Christian astrophysicist. Another good site is Creation Ministries International. And Answers in Genesis.

by Swiss Policy Research

According to the latest immunological and serological studies, the overall lethality of Covid-19 (IFR) is about 0.1% and thus in the range of a strong seasonal influenza (flu).
In countries like the US, the UK, and also Sweden (without a lockdown), overall mortality since the beginning of the year is in the range of a strong influenza season; in countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland, overall mortality is in the range of a mild influenza season.
Even in global “hotspots”, the risk of death for the general population of school and working age is typically in the range of a daily car ride to work. The risk was initially overestimated because many people with only mild or no symptoms were not taken into account.
Up to 80% of all test-positive persons remain symptom-free. Even among 70-79 year olds, about 60% remain symptom-free. Over 95% of all persons develop at most moderate symptoms.
Up to 60% of all persons may already have a certain cellular background immunity to Covid-19 due to contact with previous coronaviruses (i.e. common cold viruses). The initial assumption that there was no immunity against Covid-19 was not correct.
The median age of the deceased in most countries (including Italy) is over 80 years (e.g. 86 years in Sweden) and only about 4% of the deceased had no serious preconditions. The age and risk profile of deaths thus essentially corresponds to normal mortality.
In many countries, up to two thirds of all extra deaths occurred in nursing homes, which do not benefit from a general lockdown. Moreover, in many cases it is not clear whether these people really died from Covid19 or from weeks of extreme stress and isolation.
Up to 30% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by Covid19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital.
Even in so-called “Covid19 deaths” it is often not clear whether they died from or with coronavirus (i.e. from underlying diseases) or if they were counted as “presumed cases” and not tested at all. However, official figures usually do not reflect this distinction.
Many media reports of young and healthy people dying from Covid19 turned out to be false: many of these young people either did not die from Covid19, they had already been seriously ill (e.g. from undiagnosed leukaemia), or they were in fact 109 instead of 9 years old. The claimed increase in Kawasaki disease in children also turned out to be false.
Strong increases in regional mortality can occur if there is a collapse in the care of the elderly and sick as a result of infection or panic, or if there are additional risk factors such as severe air pollution. Questionable regulations for dealing with the deceased sometimes led to additional bottlenecks in funeral or cremation services.
In countries such as Italy and Spain, and to some extent the UK and the US, hospital overloads due to strong flu waves are not unusual. Moreover, this year up to 15% of health care workers were put into quarantine, even if they developed no symptoms.
The often shown exponential curves of “corona cases” are misleading, as the number of tests also increased exponentially. In most countries, the ratio of positive tests to tests overall (i.e. the positive rate) remained constant at 5% to 25% or increased only slightly. In many countries, the peak of the spread was already reached well before the lockdown.

Read the entire article.

I've spent a lot of time over the years studying economics, governance, science, culture, etc. from a biblical perspective. Although a number of the books I've read are not written by Christians, by God's common grace non-Christians can contribute to our understanding of the world and often do a better job than Christians--within limits. Here is a list of some of the books and lectures that I have found beneficial in helping understand how God designed the world to work.

The Fundamentals

The Reagan I Knew by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The Tragedy of American Compassion by Olasky Marvin

Black Rednecks and While Liberals by Thomas Sowell

How Should We Then Live by Francis Schaeffer

A Serrated Edge by Douglas Wilson

Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Witness by Whittaker Chambers

Flags Out Front by Douglas Wilson

Slaying Leviathan: Limited Government and Resistance in the Christian Tradition by Glenn S. Sunshine

The Maker Versus the Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics by Jerry Bowyer

Plowing in Hope: Towards a Biblical Theology of Culture by David Hegeman

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

Black and Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America by Douglas Wilson

Exposing the Truth about Climate Change

If you want to really understand the truth about climate change, I would highly recommend reading the books and articles on the list below. First, a few books:

Then, here are some articles and websites:

Six-day creationists, i.e., those of us who believe that God created the world in six 24-hour days, are often ridiculed as being unscientific. Even inside the church many have bent and twisted scripture to accommodate the very modern view that the universe has been in existence for billions of years.

However, it is actually the foundations of modern thought about the age of the earth, Darwinism and evolution, that are unscientific. As part of an article pointing this out, David Coppedge provides us with a brief overview of evolution that highlights it's magical, rather than scientific, nature:

The Story of Evolution

Evolution explains more complexity, and more simplicity. It explains why flight arose in some birds, but was lost in others. With evolution, organs and genomes can become more complicated, or more streamlined. Eyes emerge through evolution, but eyes are also lost by evolution. Evolution makes the cheetah fast but the sloth slow. By evolution, dinosaurs grow to skyscraper size, and hummingbirds grow tiny. With evolution, peacocks grow more flashy and crows more black, giraffes tall and snakes long. Evolution makes roundworms round, and flatworms flat. Evolution explains predator and prey, loner and herder, light and dark, high and low, fast and slow, profligacy and stinginess, terrorism and altruism, religion and atheism, virtue and selfishness, psychosis and reason, extinction and fecundity, war and peace. Evolution explains everything.

Big Science is Not Objective

Life is not easy, but it is a lot simpler than many would have us believe. Here are a few simple (but not simplistic) thoughts for us to chew on:

God is our Creator and He created the world in six days.
Jesus is our Savior if we repent of our sins and call on Him as our Lord.
Liberty is better than oppression, and oppression largely comes from the hands of people using government as a means to increase their power, prestige, and/or wealth.
The earth's atmosphere generally gets warmer and cooler based on how hot the sun is (go figure!), and it has been following this cycle long before man learned to harness fossil fuels.

But leave it to experts to make these a lot more complex than need be. That is the case whether they are experts on theology or science.

Liberty Is an Anti-Darwinian Concept

The traditional view of creation that has been held almost unanimously throughout church history is that creation took place over six 24 hour days. Augustine seems to have believed instead in instantaneous creation, but no prominent members of the church believed in a creation scenario that allowed for the earth to be millions or billions of years old.

That is until Charles Darwin and friends came on the scene in the 1800s, anxious to undermine the authority of Scripture.

Six Reasons Reformed Christians Should Embrace Six-Day Creation

The great debate of our time is the exact same debate that took place at the beginning of the world: under whose authority do we live?

Adam and Eve decided it was under their own authority, although soon they discovered they had been deceived and had in fact placed themselves under Satan's authority. The world today still labors under oppression with the same illusion of autonomy.

The church, at least in word, submitted to the authority of God by declaring His Word to be infallible. But, as I have written, around the turn of the 19th century, many in the church began using "science" to deny the authority of Scripture. They did this using the proclamations of Charles Darwin and other scientists to claim that the world couldn't have been created in six literal days since evolution, geological formations, and other scientific "facts" showed that the earth was millions of years old.

With that, Genesis had been turned into at best poetry, at worst a myth. From there we went to a mythical Adam, to denying Scripture's teaching about sex and marriage, and finally to a mythical Jesus.

The Source of All Knowledge and Wisdom

Everything we know, everything we understand, comes from God

God is: Eternal, Spirit, Infinite, Immutable, Omnipresent, Omniscient, Holy, Perfect, Love, Beauty, Good, Mercy, Truth, Righteous, Just
God is the source of all: Holiness, Perfection, Love, Beauty, Goodness, Mercy, Truth, Righteousness, Justice
Two means of revelation: Creation (general) and Scripture (special)

Everything that unbelieving scientists know and understand is from God. He gave them eyes and ears and noses and hands with which to observe, brains with which to comprehend, and a world that they can observe and understand.

Young Earth or Old? The Battle Over the Authority of Scripture

The Washington Post recently published a book review of Reading the Rocks by Brenda Maddox. The review’s title, “When the earth’s story defies religious belief,” expresses the reviewer’s assumption that the earth’s story is not always in accordance with Scripture.

As we are fallen people in a fallen world, such an assumption is not a surprise. Human thought is naturally anthropocentric rather than theocentric. This creates a lot of problems for Christians; we struggle with turning our thoughts away from ourselves and toward God.

Unbelievers, though, do not share this struggle. They have no desire to have theocentric thoughts. Every thought they have, every proposition they put forth, seeks to deny God. Their denial of God taints the truthfulness of their every pronouncement. In fact, unbelievers hate truth because they hate the Source of all truth.

Get Your Swimsuits Out

According to the New York Times, it won’t be long before we will all be swimming to work:

The truth is, how shall we put it, a bit more nuanced.

Galileo by Mitch Stokes

Galileo by Mitch Stokes is a highly entertaining and informative book that helps rewrite the conventional wisdom the it was the church that stood in the way of Galileo and others as they pushed forward the idea that the earth was not the center of the universe. The geocentric view was in fact widely adhered to by secular scientists, and the threat to their reputations and ability to earn a living were at the "center" of the opposition to Galileo. This is the same problem we face today with global warning, evolution, and many other areas where scientists refuse to look the facts straight in the eye. Galileo is part of Thomas Nelson's Christian Encounters Series. I haven't found one yet that doesn't present a sound biblical worldview.