Free Republic

Fresh tissues continue to be found in supposedly millions-of-years-old fossils. These un-replaced, un-mineralized, still-soft tissues come from animals or plants that were preserved by some catastrophic event.1 Each specimen looks young, and a direct inference is that its host rock must also be dated as thousands, not millions, of years old. And the fresher the meat, the more ridiculous are the evolution-inspired claims of great antiquity for the rock in which it was discovered. These tissue finds are typically accompanied, in either the technical literature or science news, by the phrase "remarkable preservation." If one is to believe in the...

A common theme in science fiction involves a highly advanced society in which people no longer understand the basis of science and technology. In such societies science is often just a series of beliefs that are to be accepted without question like in a religion. The Startrek episode "Spock's Brain" dealt with a society in which the people had little understanding of anything, even though the women lived in a climate controlled environment underground with sophisticated technology that required Mr. Spock's brain to operate. Installing Spock's brain had required one of the women to put on a machine that temporarily...

I’m delighted to see that Freddie deBoer and Led-the-commenter have delivered excellent pushback on a weak point of my previous post. Their point in brief is that the mere fact that our contingent minds have had remarkable success in explaining the universe so far is no guarantee that they will continue to experience such success. Moreover, it is possible that there are deep fundamental questions that we will never even be able to posit, much less solve. On these two points, I concede entirely. Both of them are correct! They are not, however, as disastrous for my argument that epistemic...

There has been an attempt ongoing for some time to harness the respectability of science and conflate it with an increasingly popular philosophy known as scientism. But scientism and science are different things. The latter is a powerful method of obtaining and applying material facts and information. The latter creates a subjective world view using the pretense that science has the capacity to tell us objectively right from wrong, the ethical from the unethical, best from worst, etc..

In an article titled, “Survey Asks Students When They Lost Virginity,” writer Bob Unruh reported, “A team of lawyers who advocate for parental rights is working with parents whose children attend Ventura High School in Southern California to raise a formal objection after teachers had students fill out a survey on sex with questions such as “Are you sexually active” and “If not, why not?” ( http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=126030 ) Many prophetic voices have tried to warn Americans that they and their society are quickly falling into the abyss of human and satanic decadence, madness, mayhem, and murder that engulfed Russia after...

The Foundation If we and our posterity...live always in the fear of God and shall respect His Commandments...we may have the highest hopes of the future fortunes of our country.... But if we...neglect religious instruction and authority; violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity." Daniel Webster, Address to the New York Historical Society, 1852, http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html Heedless to the warnings of wise men like Daniel Webster, since the...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe. They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds. But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed. "That temperature...

A meteorite that hit the town of Murchison, Australia, hasn't quit giving up its secrets. The Murchison meteorite is one of the most studied space rocks because many pieces were recovered after it was seen breaking up as it fell through the atmosphere in 1969. Approximately 100 kg of the carbonaceous chondrite was recovered. Carbonaceous chondrites are extremely important to scientists as they were formed from material that existed in the solar system's planet-forming disk of gas and dust. They are, quite literally, time capsules holding onto a 4 billion year old record of the birth of our solar system....

It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle. Very few religious skeptics have been made more open to...

Freeper gets a fascinating contract listed on Intrade, bets that the experiment will be replicated, and cashes in. In 2008, Dr. Yoshiaki Arata performed a fascinating experiment with Deuterium Gas loaded onto a Palladium matrix, and without any input power, showed that there was some excess heat. Generating excess heat in cold fusion cell wasn't a new development -- scientists had been replicating the Pons-Fleischman effect for 2 decades. What was a new development was how easily replicable this particular experiment was. It seemed to me that this would be the easiest way to replicate anomalous heat production, removing the...

SCIENCE is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx...

Emails from a number of high profile climate scientists (e.g. Phil Jones at University of East Anglia) were leaked to the world revealing intentional efforts to manipulate climate data and report results inaccurately for the sake of globalism. Any self-respecting individual who has been told with a straight face that science is and objective methodology for obtaining knowledge should now be questioning how it is possible that something so profoundly objective could produce "Climate Gate." The answer is quite simple: it's the Religion of Science.

For the past 150 years archaeologists have been verifying the exact truthfulness of the Bible's detailed records of various events, customs, persons, cities, nations, and geographical locations. Dr. Nelson Glueck probably the greatest modern authority on Israeli archeology, has said, “No archeological discovery has ever controverted [overturned] a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.” In every instance where the Bible can be, or has been checked out...

Introduction The famous evolutionist Julian Huxley once said, "Any view of God as a personal being is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent" (Essays of a Biologist [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923], p. 217). His sentiments were echoed by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell: "That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin,...

A new NASA study of a Martian meteorite that made headlines 13 years ago strengthens the original claim that the rock contains evidence of life on ancient Mars. Researchers at the Johnson Space Center used advanced electron microscopes that weren't available in 1996 to re-examine the magnetite crystals on the meteorite. The meteorite, called ALH84001, was blasted from the surface of Mars 16 million years ago, scientists say, and is thought to have landed on Earth 13,000 years ago. An American scientist found it in Antarctica in 1984.

November 27, 2009 Evidence of Life on Mars Lurks Beneath Surface of Meteorite, Nasa Experts Claim Nasa scientists have produced the most compelling evidence yet that bacterial life exists on Mars. It showed that microscopic worm-like structures found in a Martian meteorite that hit the Earth 13,000 years ago are almost certainly fossilised bacteria. The so-called bio-morphs are embedded beneath the surface layers of the rock, suggesting that they were already present when the meteorite arrived, rather than being the result of subsequent contamination by Earthly bacteria. “This is very strong evidence of life on Mars,” said David Mackay, a...

Darwinism and the adoption of Chinese Marxism According to James Pusey, writing in Nature, "Charles Darwin's banner was first unfurled in China during the Reform Movement of 1895-98, in response to China's defeat in the Sino-Japanese War." There were two groups seeking change: the reformers, who were loyal to the Manchu Qing Dynasty, and the revolutionaries, who wanted a clean break with the past. --snip-- The reformers and the revolutionaries debated vigorously "with both sides wildly waving Darwin's banner" The leaders of these movements imbibed the message of scientific racism coming from America and Europe and presented themselves as 'fit'...

Amateur fossil hunters Jamie and Jonathan Hiscocks were looking for dinosaur remains in East Sussex, UK, when they instead found tiny spider webs trapped inside a piece of ancient amber. Oxford University paleobiologist Martin Brasier inspected the amber, which was assigned an age of over 100 million years. He concluded that spiders back then were able to spin webs just like today’s garden spiders.The amber-encased webbing formed concentric circles like those that contemporary orb-weaver spiders manufacture. Also evident were “little sticky droplets along the web threads to trap prey,” Brasier told the Daily Mail. He added, “You can match the...

As a practising priest, there was great scope for mediation when Reiss took on such a key role in such a renowned scientific institution, but sadly science and religion really do not good bedfellows make. Yet if the CERN experiment succeeds in its quest to re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang, maybe a way can be found to understand the role of a creator in the building blocks of science. Some scientists believe in the concept of a creator at work behind the Big Bang and that among the possible revelations about ‘dark matter’, anti-matter and space-time dimensions...

In his new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” biologist Richard Dawkins brands those who doubt Charles Darwin’s ideas on evolution as “history deniers,” even stooping to compare them to “Holocaust deniers.” In today’s highly charged political climate, scientific debates over controversial subjects such as climate change and evolution increasingly substitute such overblown rhetoric for careful analysis. We commonly see one side depicting the other as not only wrong, but as unreasonable, irrational, or immoral. As a result, two terms are presently in vogue to describe those who question scientific ideas: “Skeptic” and “Denier.” In practice, the terms have virtually...