Are Darwin’s followers protesting too much?

a few assorted notes on atheists and atheism: video - Former hard core atheist Howard Storm continues to share his gripping story of his own near death experience. Today, he picks up just as Jesus was rescuing him from the horrors of Hell and carrying him into the glories of Heaven. http://www.daystar.com/ondemand/joni-heaven-howard-storm-j924/#.UKvFrYYsE31 "I knew for certain there was no such thing as life after death. Only simple minded people believed in that sort of thing. I didn't believe in God, Heaven, or Hell, or any other fairy tales. I drifted into darkness. Drifting asleep into anihilation.,,(Chapter 2 - The Descent),, I was standing up. I opened my eyes to see why I was standing up. I was between two hospital beds in the hospital room.,,, Everything that was me, my consciousness and my physical being, was standing next to the bed. No, it wasn't me lying in the bed. It was just a thing that didn't have any importance to me. It might as well have been a slab of meat in the supermarket" Howard Storm - former hard-core atheist - Excerpt from his book, 'My Descent Into Death' (Page 12-14) The Atheist’s Guide to Intellectual Suicide – video https://vimeo.com/60437420 Paul Vitz - The Psychology Of Atheism (1/5) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgWajMM2HzU From Atheism to Theism In Reverse - video http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=9C2E1MNU Anthony Flew – The Honest Ex-Atheist – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbyTwmaJArU Letters From the Dead: Antony Flew Posthumously Defends "There is a God" Through Letters Recently Made Public - Oct. 2012 http://news.yahoo.com/letters-dead-antony-flew-posthumously-defends-god-letters-010139898.html The following study shows one practical reason why militant atheists have to be so persistent, and dogmatic, in 'evangelizing' their false nihilistic religion. It seems it would die a 'natural' death without such an effort: Why do atheists have such a low retention rate? - July 2012 Excerpt: Only about 30 percent of those who grow up in an atheist household remain atheists as adults. This “retention rate” was the lowest among the 20 separate categories in the study. https://uncommondesc.wpengine.com/intelligent-design/why-do-atheists-have-such-a-low-retention-rate/ Belief in God rises with age, even in atheist nations - April, 2012 Excerpt: Yet the surveys found one constant—belief in God is higher among older people, regardless of where they live. http://phys.org/news/2012-04-belief-god-age-atheist-nations.html bornagain77

I have read that atheism is linked to having "daddy issues". Paul Vitz's book Faith of the Fatherless explores what Vitz terms the "defective/absent father hypothesis" which, while admittedly anecdotal, provides an alternative explanation for atheism. Sigmund Freud dismissed religion as a psychological projection based on wish fulfillment. It's notable that Vitz comments on this, stating that this really isn't a part of any scientific theory or hypothesis or psychoanalytic theory, but rather the views of Freud, who was an atheist himself. The most common reason I have come across for atheism is one that a friend defined for me years ago, "I don't want anyone telling me what to do." Simple as that. Atheists wish to make their own moral decisions without having an objective moral standard to live up to. It has little to nothing to do with evidence for the Bible's accuracy or philosophical arguments for the existence of God. Barb

A Response to Martin Poenie on Protein Evolution - Jonathan M. July 25, 2013 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/07/a_response_to_m074821.html bornagain77

"Because it’s reality."

Non-reality can be a lot more fun. Why do you think so many kids are possessed by gaming these days? CentralScrutinizer

Because it’s reality.

If Darwinism is true, what difference does that make? What's the point of "knowing reality", under nihilism? William J Murray

"And really, what would it matter if the whole world ended up believing in creationism? Evolution has no direction, no purpose, no goal, no nothing. It is a cold dark heartless process that doesn’t care about anything. It could care less what people believe or even if all people and all life goes extinct. Whether life exists in this universe or doesn’t makes no difference if atheism is true." Because it's reality "Plus, I’m sure it is not true, but just for the sake of argument, even if atheism were true, I think I would prefer to be deceived and happy than enlightened and empty. I would rather believe in God, purpose, & meaning, and have hope as opposed to having to live with the reality that my existence is meaningless, morality is a fantasy, love is nothing more than a meaningless chemical reaction, death and non-existence is the fate that awaits us all, and the knowledge that ultimately nothing I do really matters in the grand scheme of things." This is why theists twist the science to fit their beliefs. The alternative is too unbearable for them. "Most atheists just try to ignore this elephant in the room by trying to find a way around it philosophically, denying it, or belittling the seriousness of it, but real thinkers realize the implications of this problem. They see how dangerous this worldview can be and the emptiness and despair it naturally leads to. Most atheists never fall that far into despair, but that is where their worldview naturally leads them." This is why I'm a nihilist. Atheism is just as deluded as theism. Rather than face what is they both want to view it as the way they think it ought to be. Is it crappy worldview? Sure it is. Am I happy and fulfilled? Not really. Why be one? Because it's reality. JLAfan2001

And really, what would it matter if the whole world ended up believing in creationism? Evolution has no direction, no purpose, no goal, no nothing. It is a cold dark heartless process that doesn't care about anything. It could care less what people believe or even if all people and all life goes extinct. Whether life exists in this universe or doesn't makes no difference if atheism is true. Plus, I'm sure it is not true, but just for the sake of argument, even if atheism were true, I think I would prefer to be deceived and happy than enlightened and empty. I would rather believe in God, purpose, & meaning, and have hope as opposed to having to live with the reality that my existence is meaningless, morality is a fantasy, love is nothing more than a meaningless chemical reaction, death and non-existence is the fate that awaits us all, and the knowledge that ultimately nothing I do really matters in the grand scheme of things. Most atheists just try to ignore this elephant in the room by trying to find a way around it philosophically, denying it, or belittling the seriousness of it, but real thinkers realize the implications of this problem. They see how dangerous this worldview can be and the emptiness and despair it naturally leads to. Most atheists never fall that far into despair, but that is where their worldview naturally leads them. tjguy

Absolutely, WJM. Atheism is all about "psychological baggage". James Spiegel's "The Making of an Atheist" finally made me realise that fact once and for all. Chris Doyle

I think that a lot of Western atheists are carrying around a lot of psychological baggage that fuels their anti-religion, anti-God animus. I think part of it is a sense of hurt and betrayal that they were once "fooled" into believing, which in turn has led to a habit of using everything they can to support a sense of intellectual superiority to distance themselves from their "shame". Which also fuels their absurd hyperskepticism - doubt all things so that one can never be so painfully wrong again. Sort of like a person who was in love but was betrayed and vows to never be made a fool again, then takes on airs to make themselves feel superior to the one that did the damage, telling others in love that they are all fools and that what they experience is not real. William J Murray

And as Poenie mentioned, ORFans are not limited to bacteria

Orphan Genes (And the peer reviewed 'non-answer' from Darwinists) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zz6vio_LhY Genes from nowhere: Orphans with a surprising story - 16 January 2013 - Helen Pilcher Excerpt: When biologists began sequencing genomes they discovered up to a third of genes in each species seemed to have no parents or family of any kind. Nevertheless, some of these "orphan genes" are high achievers (are just as essential as 'old' genes),,, But where do they come from? With no obvious ancestry, it was as if these genes appeared out of nowhere, but that couldn't be true. Everyone assumed that as we learned more, we would discover what had happened to their families. But we haven't-quite the opposite, in fact.,,, The upshot is that the chances of random mutations turning a bit of junk DNA into a new gene seem infinitesmally small. As the French biologist Francois Jacob wrote 35 years ago, "the probability that a functional protein would appear de novo by random association of amino acids is practically zero".,,, Orphan genes have since been found in every genome sequenced to date, from mosquito to man, roundworm to rat, and their numbers are still growing. http://ccsb.dfci.harvard.edu/web/export/sites/default/ccsb/publications/papers/2013/All_alone_-_Helen_Pilcher_New_Scientist_Jan_2013.pdf

The following paper uses the most optimistic probability numbers from Darwinists themselves, as to the probability of Darwinian processes producing new proteins, and finds that ORFans present a 'brick wall' to Darwinian explanations even using the Darwinists own numbers for probability:

Proteins and Genes, Singletons and Species - Branko Kozuli? PhD. Biochemistry Excerpt: That hypothesis - that evolution strives to preserve a protein domain once it stumbles upon it contradicts the power law distribution of domains. The distribution graphs clearly show that unique domains are the most abundant of all domain groups [21, 66, 67, 70, 72, 79, 82, 86, 94, 95], contrary to their expected rarity.,,, Evolutionary biologists of earlier generations have not anticipated [164, 165] the challenge that (ORFan) singletons pose to contemporary biologists. By discovering millions of unique genes biologists have run into brick walls similar to those hit by physicists with the discovery of quantum phenomena. The predominant viewpoint in biology has become untenable: we are witnessing a scientific revolution of unprecedented proportions. http://vixra.org/pdf/1105.0025v1.pdf

Despite Martin Poenie unrestrained optimism in Darwinism to explain widespread ORFans by 'mundane genetic mechanisms', the fact of the matter is that Martin Poenie, nor any other Darwinists, can demonstrate the origination of just one novel gene by Darwinian processes, much less whole suites of novel genes! And without such a demonstration, we are basically left with just the blind faith (and bullying tactics) of Darwinists! bornagain77

Martin Poenie, in one of the few critiques of 'Darwin's Doubt' that did not rely mostly on emotion and ad hominem to try to make its case, states:

Recombination can do all the things that Axe thinks are impossible. For example, recombination can generate multiple substitutions in one step and still generate one or two functional proteins as the outcome. Quoting Watson et al. (2011, Evolution, 65: 523): Whereas asexuals must move against selection to escape local optima, sexuals reach higher fitness peaks reliably because they create specific genetic variants that "skip over" fitness valleys, moving from peak to peak in the fitness landscape. This occurs because recombination can supply combinations of mutations in functional composites or 'modules', that may include individually deleterious mutations. Thus when a beneficial module is substituted for another less-fit module by sexual recombination it provides a genetic variant that would require either several specific simultaneous mutations in an asexual population or a sequence of individual mutations some of which would be selected against. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/07/douglas_axe_pro074781.html

Yet Martin Poenie is simply wrong, recombination of sexuals does not lead to greater genetic variability as he thinks it does:

Sex Is Not About Promoting Genetic Variation, Researchers Argue - (July 7, 2011) Excerpt: Biology textbooks maintain that the main function of sex is to promote genetic diversity. But Henry Heng, Ph.D., associate professor in WSU's Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics, says that's not the case.,,, ,,,the primary function of sex is not about promoting diversity. Rather, it's about keeping the genome context -- an organism's complete collection of genes arranged by chromosome composition and topology -- as unchanged as possible, thereby maintaining a species' identity. This surprising analysis has been published as a cover article in a recent issue of the journal Evolution.,,, For nearly 130 years, traditional perceptions hold that asexual reproduction generates clone-like offspring and sexual reproduction leads to more diverse offspring. "In reality, however, the relationship is quite the opposite," said Heng.,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110707161037.htm

In fact, its been known for quite a while, even before this 2011 paper, as Walter Remine relates in this following interview, that sexual reproduction severely limits genetic variability rather than enhances it as Darwinists had originally thought, and as Martin Poenie and other Darwinists apparently continue to hold.

Walter ReMine on the Origin of Sexual Reproduction - interview http://kgov.com/ReMine-3 http://kgov.s3.amazonaws.com/bel/2012/20120727-BEL150.mp3

Moreover, instead of placing the cart before the horse as Poenie seems willing to do to try to explain genetic diversity, I would like to know how sexual reproduction came about in the first place. One of the most counter-intuitive novelties of the Cambrian explosion was the appearance of unique sexual reproduction for a wide variety of different phyla:

How did the sexes originate? Why is it that the vast majority of living things require a "male and female" to reproduce? If evolution were true - doesn't it make much more sense that EVERY living organism was self-replicating and required no useless energy expenditure? When did the first male get here? When did the first female get here? How? Why? Wouldn't they have had to appear fully functional and at the same time in order for the next generation of organisms to arrive? Of course, they would. So, how is it that the first male and female for almost 2 million living organisms arrived together and fully functional so that reproduction could take place? "Sex is the QUEEN of evolutionary biology problems." Dr. Graham Bell - In his book, 'The Masterpiece of Nature' Ian Juby's sex video - (Can sexual reproduction plausibly evolve?) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab1VWQEnnwM

This 'sex problem' that is never addressed by Darwinists is nicely summed up here:

Richard Dawkins interview with a 'Darwinian' physician goes off track - video Excerpt: "I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [for amazement] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly -- a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves -- that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we're stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?" http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/video_to_dawkin062031.html

i.e. Since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful reproduction be realistically 'selected' for? Any other function besides successful reproduction, such as sight, hearing, thinking, etc.., would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successfully reproducing, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded as so much excess baggage since it would slow down successful reproduction. Indeed, instead of eating us, time after time these different types of microbial life are found to be 'selflessly' helping us in essential ways that have nothing to do with their ability to successfully reproduce,,, Amazingly, even though no one has ever seen a new ORFan gene arise by evolutionary processes, Martin Poenie goes on to claim that ORFans, since they are now found in every new species sequenced (10-30%), prove that Cambrian explosion was no big deal

Finally, in regard to ORFans, in my view, Axe's argument simply backfires. ORFans are found in all genomes; prokaryotes, eukaryotes, bacteriophages and animal viruses. Remarkably, the recently discovered megavirus "Pandoravirus" has 2500 genes, almost all of which are ORFans. The fact that the number of ORFans tends to be constant from one type of organism to the next in prokaryotes and eukaryotes indicates that they not uniquely associated with the Cambrian explosion and that they are likely formed by mundane genetic mechanisms that operate in all organisms.

Perhaps Martin Poenie has no problem asserting that large percentages of ORFans can arise by 'mundane genetic mechanisms' without ever any actual empirical demonstration that such large scale inovation really can happen by 'mundane genetic mechanisms', but I, and quite a few other people who are not so enamored with such grand and unsubstantiated Darwinian claims, find room plenty of room to doubt that 'mundane genetic mechanisms' can account for 10% to 30% of genes in a genome being unique:

Widespread ORFan Genes Challenge Common Descent – Paul Nelson – video with references http://www.vimeo.com/17135166

At the 12:40 minute mark of the following 'The Dictionary of Life' video, Dr. Nelson describes the breaking point for Darwinian scenarios from the genetic evidence of ORFans:

The Dictionary of Life | Origins with Dr. Paul A. Nelson - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=zJaetK9gvCo#t=760s

bornagain77

Thanks News, that was an insightful and well written article that you linked to: 'Why all the animus against those who doubt Darwin? If one is secure in the belief that evolution is true, why get so worked up over those who disagree?,, if one firmly believes that reality is a meaningless accident, what does it matter what anyone else might believe about it? Who cares anyway?' Indeed, why? When Atheists Are Angry at God - 2011 Excerpt: I’ve never been angry at unicorns. It’s unlikely you’ve ever been angry at unicorns either.,, The one social group that takes exception to this rule is atheists. They claim to believe that God does not exist and yet, according to empirical studies, tend to be the people most angry at him. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/01/when-atheists-are-angry-at-god bornagain77