Running Against A Strong Headwind...

A second lockdown is back with us here in good old England. And four weeks of it too. And so the media, especially the Daily Mail national newspaper, seem to report contradictory evidence. Do we need a lockdown or not? According to our Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his three-men-in-a-tub: Chris Whitty, Matt Hancock and Pat Vallance, another lockdown is necessary to contain the virus and to slow down its spreading. Others insist that a second lockdown will do more harm than good and it's nothing more than kicking the empty tin can further down the road. Furthermore, accusations of false information and figures deliberately inflated to give us all the creeps, instead, making all us further confused.

Poor Boris Johnson! Receiving advice from both directions, there he stands in the middle, and had I been him, I would fall on my knees in prayer and asked other Christians to pray for me to lead the country in the right way, maybe even put out a nationwide prayer request.

The snag with this is such a request for prayer guidance would be met with delirious mockery from some, apathetic silence from others, from others still, to be regarded as a write-off, unfit to lead a country without some "help" from some fictitious old bearded man in the sky. And then there will be still others who would pray. Not all are atheists. 

And the lockdown gives plenty of opportunities to meditate, especially while I'm out and about.

With an area of high pressure at this moment sitting over the UK, the Autumn sky is clear of clouds, the sun, quite low over the horizon, nevertheless bring cheer to the deciduous trees as their leaves turn a golden brown over a calm surface of the lake over which the trees border, creating a mirror-image reflection. All this just a short walk from my home. As the leaves of the trees turn golden yellow, orange and red, the contents of the lake which I'm standing by flows through an underground stream which will eventually meet with the River Thames, pass through London and eventually empty into the North Sea. Over many months, that is.

South Lake, close to my home.

The cycle of nature continues to circulate. The sun evaporates the sea, the vapour condenses into clouds while drifting towards the hills and mountains and fall as rain, nourishing all vegetation which will, in turn, provide food and shelter for all life, wildlife, domesticated, and man alike. The rainwater collects as rivers, in some, cascading over high ledges as spectacular waterfalls, and then meandering over flat plains, whether forested or agricultural, even through cities, to empty back into the ocean. As the Hydraulic Cycle never ceases, neither will the world ever stop turning, night always follows day, as the sphere whizzes through space to complete a slightly elliptical and eccentric orbit around the sun, adding each year to our age.

And yet we batten down our hatches as the infection rate keeps on rising, and even now, actually ordered from the powers above not to let anyone, whether friend or distant relative, into my own home. Thus I sit in quietness, with my mind filled with curiosity on why our nation remains apathetic to God, who holds all things together and keeps the mechanics of nature well-oiled, as well as sustain our lives.

Like in one of our Zoom virtual prayer meetings held every weekday mornings, run by Ascot Life Church. Longing, oh, longing for a hug, nevertheless, I gaze at the pigeonhole set-up on our computer screen and listen to one of our elders read out Psalm 139. After he had finished with the verses describing God's omnipresence, I shine a spotlight onto the verses highlighting on how we are secretly and wonderfully made "in the depths of the earth" (v. 15.) I then went on to remind the group about our superb immune system, how we breathe in germs at all times and how the body can fight them without falling ill ourselves, how we eat food and then allow the digestive tract do its work without our conscious efforts, how electric cells near our heart regulates the muscular contractions as the "red river of life" flows through the bloodstream.

And yet we seem to be alone, living in a world which is hostile to God and in full reliance on Science to solve the problem of this virus and to bring the pandemic to an end. And YouTube and television keep on insisting in Darwinian evolution as factual, with Wikipedia referring to Divine Creation as a pseudoscience, with all its followers portrayed as somewhat delirious. Therefore, I have respect for scientists who holds a large question mark over this evolutionary theory which seems to have robbed our minds of genuine scientific knowledge and common sense. Therefore, in preparation for this blog, I had to brush up on what I had already learnt in the past, together with some new information.

For example, the huge Deoxyribonucleic Acid molecule (DNA), or the chromosome, is about 88 millimetres in length if straightened out, yet just over half a trillionth of a centimetre in width. Although it resembles a twisted ladder, it's so small, it fits well inside the nucleus of a cell, normally in the form of an X. There are 44 chromosomes in each cell, 22 from each parent, along with a pair of X or Y chromosomes, depending on the gender of the individual, thus making 46 chromosomes in a cell altogether.

Each chromosome consist of nucleotides, the rungs which make up the ladder, while the two parallel "rails" are the polynucleotides. The rungs are set in pairs, one rung consisting of Thymene, paired with Adenine, while Guanine is paired with Cytosine. Thus these rungs are referred to as Base Pairs.

In Chromosome 1, for example, 247,199,719 base pairs are making up the ladder. Each pair must be arranged in exactly the right sequence to produce the right code required for the production of the protein appropriate to the cell, or else it could malfunction and even die.

Scientists and academics such as Michael Bere, William A. Dembski, Fred Hoyle, N. Chandra Wickramasinghe and Emile Borel have made mathematical calculations on the probabilities on the cell having evolved without an intelligent designer. Take the DNA molecule. If the mathematical formula was calculated based on factors, say, for example, 6x5x4x3x2, the answer would be 720. This form of calculation is referred to as 6! - thus 6!=720. The probability of a DNA molecule having evolved by chance or without a Designer would equal to one chance out of 1x10^40,000. That is one, followed by 40,000 zeroes.

It was Fred Hoyle who was astonished by such a calculation. He reckoned that the chance of picking by random just one electron out of the entire universe, the chance would be 1x10^80. If each electron becomes a universe in itself, then to pick one electron out of all those universes would be 1x10^160.

Yet, despite the evidence, Fred Hoyle preferred to remain an atheist and an evolutionist. To bring any reality to his preferred theory, he rejected the Big Bang theory of how the Universe had begun and favoured an eternal existence, thus accommodating the idea that life on Earth originated by amino acid molecules hitching a ride on a meteorite which plunged into the primaeval ocean. He coined up the theory of Panspermia. This idea was given a boost when in 1969 a meteor fell near the Australian town of Murchison in New Victoria. The fact that it was packed with amino acid molecules gave credit to the evolutionary idea of Panspermia as the source of all life's origins.

But Michael Bere had other ideas. Seeing the same calculations, he wrote in Evolution's Black Box that it was time for Darwinism to be thrown out to the garbage and teaching it in schools should cease. Then William A. Dembski's Criterion had made a calculation for the probability of the whole living cell to evolve without any intelligent intervention.  

If it's considered that between all 46 chromosomes in the cell containing up to 6,159,687,494 basic pairs of nucleotides, then with all the other molecular machinery making up the perfect functioning of the life of the cell, the probability of it evolving by chance is 1x10^4,478,146. That is, one chance in one, followed by 4,478,146 zeroes!

Such impossibility was demonstrated by Emile Borel in the context of time. To accommodate such a probability, on a basis of one billion trials a day, itself a tremendously big number, the wait would be 1x10^91 days or 2.74x10^88 years. If secular science dates the age of the Solar System as only five billion years, then it's still a tiny fraction of the wait required for the cell to fully evolve.

Secular scientists have branded all this as a pseudoscience, as they reckon the maths is wrong. But with even Wikipedia classifying Creationists as living in a dreamland, as a Creationist myself, I can't help feeling somewhat lonely. Indeed, it may be a lot easier to give in to peer pressure and accept theistic evolution, but I, for one would prefer to stick with the truthfulness of the Bible. As I have mentioned in my previous blogs, many atheists at YouTube fancy the idea of a flat earth as one of the beliefs of Christian Creationists.

As as I have said before, rather than to believe that the earth is a flat disc covered by a glass-like dome known as the firmament, I rather believe what the Bible itself hints, which is that the Hebrew word translated as "Firmament" actually indicate an expanse, a sphere of water vapour within the earth's antediluvian atmosphere, yet it's not there now.

Could the trapped heat generated by this ancient expanse of water vapour had been responsible for the giantism found among various species of Dinosaur, especially that of the Sauropods? If such beasts were alive before the Flood and that the water vapour in the antediluvian atmosphere was also responsible for the longevity of man - after all, Adam lived to 930 years, Seth 912 years, Enosh 905 years, Kenan 910 years, Mahalalel 895 years, Jared 962 years, Methuselah 969 years, Lamech 777 years, Noah 950 years.

After the Flood, Shem lived to 600 years, Arphaxad 438 years, Shelah 433 years, Eber 464 years, Peleg 239 years, Reu 239 years, Serug 230 years, Nahor 148 years, Terah 205 years, Abraham 175 years, Isaac 180 years, Jacob 147years, and Joseph 110 years. The writer of Genesis wanted us to know the chronology of our ancestors, as well as the ancestry of the Hebrews, with the emphasis that the collapse of the canopy or expanse during the Flood had a devastating impact on all land animal species and human longevity.

Although I tend to favour the canopy theory, that the thick expanse of water vapour had resulted in both antediluvian giantism of various animal species and the extreme longevity of mankind, my doctor friend Andrew Milnthorpe, also a devout Creationist, prefer the Genome bottleneck theory. But whichever the case may be (and both could apply) one piece of evidence here becomes obvious, the law of entropy causing the genome of all postdiluvian life to deteriorate. Present-day land animals are much smaller in size and human longevity is less than a tenth of antediluvian longevity. Indeed, entropy seems to work against evolution, not for it. 

Fragment of Murchison Meteorite

And the atheist reaction to the veracity of the Bible is a throwback to an incident which took place in the garden of Eden. Soon after Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the forbidden tree and fell into sin, guilt bade them hide behind a bush when the presence of God was felt. Fear of judgement. At present, atheists are doing exactly the same thing - hiding behind the theory of evolution to blank out from their reality the fear of judgement. Adam and Eve ran behind the bush, the atheist runs behind Charles Darwin. Not much of a difference there.

As this lockdown takes its course, nothing is better than to reflect on the truthfulness of the Bible and give our Saviour God all the glory he deserves.