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| Geocentric orbits of Mercury, Venus and the Sun. |
Science today operates from the premise that everything in the universe--including life--is the product of natural forces. (Never mind the incoherence of natural forces being the product of natural forces!)
It didn't use to be this way. In the past, many scientists believed they were unraveling the mysteries of God, and often characterized their findings as such. Now, we are told that Science is materialistic by definition and therefore a supernatural entity such as God cannot be considered.
"Evolution" is the new scientific buzzword: evolution of lifeforms, of stars, of planets... pretty much everything came into being by some form of "evolution". It is professional suicide for an academic not to accept evolution. Because of this, it has now become generally accepted that chaos will naturally organize itself into functional systems - no questions asked. But this 'evolution premise' is just a story tacked on over the top of everything. It has no real explanatory power because it doesn't fit the evidence. Instead, the evidence is forced to fit the premise.
This is why the tree of life has become such a convoluted mess. Genetics and enhanced microscopy have revealed striking similarities all over the tree, forcing the appeal to endosymbiosis and horizontal gene transfer as the most prevalent mechanisms. These relationships can no longer be explained by genetic mutation.
It's beginning to look a lot like the geocentric orbits charted above. If you work from the premise that everything revolves around Earth, then you'll come up with some crazy orbit patterns!
Wrong Premise = Wrong Results.
Yet, it is for precisely this reason that science is so often confused by new information as it comes in. If the universe and life are designed, then it's going to be really hard to explain how they came to be without reference to a designer. Trying to explain Nature purely by natural causes is a lot like trying to explain machines purely by mechanical causes.
Imagine explaining the evolution of the automobile purely by mechanical causes!
"That's called an engine, Billy. You see, pistons and cylinders evolved from tin cans and buckets, which were eventually coupled with a fuel source that evolved from a lantern. This then, through the magic of evolution, became the internal combustion engine we have today."
As silly as that sounds, it's not far off from the explanations of how living things evolve via natural causes. Things that are similar came from a 'common ancestor' and were then honed by magical forces into whatever they are today. There is rarely any discussion of intermediates and their functionality, it is just assumed that evolution is an all-powerful force that works all of that out on its own. How do we get from there to here? Well natural selection, obviously. Tin cans, buckets and lanterns become engines because engines are much more advantageous to the machine than tin cans, buckets and lanterns. Case closed. Move on.
And, planets, moons and stars don't even need natural selection! You just smash enough rocks or elements together over enough time and you get planets, moons and stars. We've never seen it happen but it obviously did because, well, the alternative is unthinkable.
Wrong Premise = Wrong Results.
So what's the right premise?
The right premise is that:
1) The material universe was created.
2) Creation took place in stages and involved the sudden appearance of fully formed entities.
3) After the initial creation, all created objects became subject to decay and tend toward disorder.
With that said, I'd like to offer some predictions:
Prediction #1. All origin/evolutionary timelines will be pushed back to earlier dates. Scientists will constantly be forced to "rethink" these timelines as new discoveries will show that things were "more advanced" or "developed sooner" than previously thought.
Prediction #2. All evidence will fit with the sudden emergence of fully formed entities (planets, stars, galaxies, lifeforms, etc.)
Prediction #3. Evidence will become increasingly difficult to fit into evolutionary frameworks.
Prediction #4. Genetics and other microbiological features will eventually cause the tree of life to become so confused that it will no longer be useful.
Prediction #5. There will never be a workable, step-by-step, model for the origin of the first self-replicating lifeform. All such models will break down upon close examination.
Prediction #6. There will never be a workable, step-by-step, model for the evolution of significant new biological features. All such models will break down upon close examination.
Prediction #7. There will be attempts using AI to generate models for #s 5 and 6, but they will all fail unless there are excessive allowances for 'happy accidents' - so much so that man-made designs could be successfully modeled as occurring naturally using the same parameters.
Here are a couple of real world examples.
Complex life forms existed 1.5 billion years earlier than previously believed, study finds
What do they do when something doesn't fit? They make it fit, then create a story about how it all makes sense. In this study, they found that complex life forms "evolved" 1.5 billion years too early, but then died out. The explanation? A "two-step" evolution of complex life on Earth. In other words, in order to fit the wrong premise, complex life must have evolved twice! Notice that they don't even blink at the possibility, either. Evolution from molecular chaos to complex living systems is so accepted now that they don't question if it could realistically happen once, much less twice!
Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle scientists
Before super telescopes, like Hubble and James Webb, it was easy to believe that galaxies, stars, solar systems, planets, moons, and etc., were gradually formed over billions of years. It fit. It made sense. But now that these new telescopes are seeing way back, almost to the beginning of time, we are finding that many of these things were fully formed way before they should have been. From the linked article:
"Not only did the team confirm that the objects were indeed galaxies near the beginning of time, but they also found evidence of surprisingly large supermassive black holes and a surprisingly old population of stars.
"'It’s very confusing,' said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and co-author on both papers. 'You can make this uncomfortably fit in our current model of the universe, but only if we evoke some exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time. This is, without a doubt, the most peculiar and interesting set of objects I've seen in my career.'"
The sad thing is that an "exotic, insanely rapid formation at the beginning of time" is exactly what happened! We're staring directly into the mind of God, and ascribing his works to some mysterious magical force that mindlessly creates such things!
Wrong Premise = Wrong Results.
