Who are the scientists of the rank of Isaac Newton today, professing God as Newton did at his time? The universe, our galaxy, our solar system, and the Earth–Moon double planet system demonstrate clearly some remarkable evidence of highly intelligent design. If we consider them separately, each characteristic appears to be highly improbable due to random chance. When taken all of them together, the probability of random chance becomes as small as to be impossible. An alternative thought, designed by an intelligent creator is a more realistic explanation to many civilized people. Either way, we must admit that we are nothing but a product of a miracle—either a miracle of chance or a miracle of design. Isaac Newton https://reasonandscience.catsboard.com/t1939-isaac-newton Fine Read More ›

Christopher Packham writes: Though humans, along with other vertebrate and invertebrate organisms, don’t photosynthesize, we’re definitely the downstream beneficiaries of the life forms that do. Phototrophic organisms at the bottom of the food chain convert abundant sunlight into the energy that ultimately powers all other life. The two metabolic systems for harvesting light energy are fundamentally different. The most familiar is the chlorophyll-based photosynthesis by which plant life uses light to power the conversion of carbon dioxide and water into sugars and starches; the other system consists of proton-pumping rhodopsins. Microbial rhodopsins, retinal-binding proteins, provide ion transport driven by light (and incidentally, sensory functions). It’s a family that includes light-driven proton pumps, ion pumps, ion channels and light sensors. Microbial rhodopsins are Read More ›

Bringing famous scientists back to life and  listening to them talking about God and science For Louis Pasteur, I used free invented text ( see below). The others are 1:1 quotes I am Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist renowned for my discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization, the latter of which was named after me.  The American Chemical Society polled experts some time ago to identify the most beautiful experiment in the history of chemistry, they responded by giving the highest ranking to my separation of mirror-image molecular forms of tartaric acid, conducted just a year after I gained my doctorate at the Ecole Normale in Paris, in 1845. My experiments paved the way to Read More ›

Over at the Reasons.org post (see here), UB and JVL are having an exchange that illustrates perfectly how materialism blinds its proponents. UB summarizes: In 1948 did John Von Neumann take a page from Alan Turing’s 1933 Machine and give a series of lectures predicting that a quiescent symbol system and a set of independent constraints would be required for autonomous open-ended self replication? Yes. In 1953 did Francis Crick, along with Watson, discover the sequence structure of that symbol system, calling it a code? Yes. And in 1955 did he further predict that an unknown set of protein constraints would be found working in the system, establishing the necessary code relationships? Yes. In 1956-1958 did Mahlon Hoagland and Paul Read More ›

What very old trees can teach us about life, death, and time. Jared Farmer writes: What’s the oldest known living thing, and how do we know? Why should we even want to know? The explanation is a history of curiosity and care. It’s about our long-term relationships—spiritual and scientific—with long-lived plants, as long as long can be. It’s all about trees. A tree is a plant that people call a tree—a term of dignity, not botany. Although people construct the meaning of “trees” and assign age value to the vascular plants they call “ancient trees,” people cannot themselves create life that grows in place for centuries. Exclusively, solar-powered organisms enact that miracle. Among plants, there are ephemerals, annuals, biennials, perennials—and, Read More ›

UB writes: UB, only way thread, 164: >>My apologies to Origenes, he had asked for my comment, but I was away . . . . I am no expert of course, but thank you for asking me to comment. Frankly you didn’t need my opinion anyway. When you ask “What is the error in supposing something?” you likely already know there is no there there. And someone seriously asking you (like some odd prosecution of your logic) to enumerate what exactly is the biological error or the chemical error in the proposition of something that has never before been seen or recorded in either biology or chemistry — well whatever. Deacon begins by asking the question, what is necessary and Read More ›

Here: Let’s add a clip: And: Notice the balance of substance vs personalities. END

Nicoletta Lanese writes: Ancient microbes whose existence predates the rise of nucleus-carrying cells on Earth may hold the secrets to how such complex cells first came to be. Now, for the first time, scientists have grown a large enough quantity of these microbes in the lab to study their internal structure in detail, Science reported. Researchers grew an organism called Lokiarchaeum ossiferum, which belongs to a group of microbes known as Asgard archaea, according to a new report, published Wednesday (Dec. 21) in the journal Nature. Named after the abode of the gods in Norse mythology, Asgard archaea are thought by some scientists to be the closest evolutionary relatives of eukaryotes, cells that package their DNA in a protective bubble called a nucleus.  On the evolutionary Read More ›