Yesterday evolutionist Bill Nye and creationist Ken Ham had a publicly televised debate. I didn't see it, but a lot of people are talking about it, and I got into the tail end of a debate going on a friend's Facebook page. Michael, an agnostic because atheist sounds too harsh for someone who isn't anti-God, just doesn't believe in God, and Peter, a Christian biologist had a lively debate going on. They were discussing things with terminology I don't know, so part of it was way over my head, but other things were said that I do know a little about, so I added my two cents worth.
I'm not adding their conversations, but Michael criticized Scripture saying, No man has seen God at anytime, and then in another place it says someone saw the face of God. He also threw in a criticism of the Bible being unscientific. They had a discussion of amino acids being created in a test tube, which I have read about. I don't know the terminology they were using, but I know enough about the event to comment on it. So, with that introduction, here is my reply.
Wow. Wish I'd seen the debate. I've had these kinds of discussions and the intellectuals blow me away. I've heard Ham speak too and I thought he presented creation well, but it was never in a debate situation. It sounds from the comments that he didn't do so well. I don't suppose I could keep pace with Michael and Peter, but I would like to add a few thoughts.
Both men were arguing from subjective beliefs which require faith. Ham's position is based on a scriptural foundation which does indeed leave many details unanswered, but which are supported scientifically by such laws as thermodynamics. Evolution has just as many or more unanswered questions that scientific laws actually refute. Laws of probability show that the likely hood of getting enough amino acids to combine to even take the first step toward life are so astronomical that it is foolish to believe it could even happen.
There are many questions about Scripture and some of those probably have to do with translations not being exactly perfect, but it's an unfair argument to take a verse out of context and throw it into the mix without taking the time to do an exegetical study on the whole passage and finding out what its true meaning is. It's also unfair to make a blanket statement about scientific errors in the Bible without noting what and where they are so we can discuss them.
As for actual evolution, there are things that have honest scientists stymied. The eyeball, for example. No one has dared speculate on how it evolved. The same goes for sex. If life just mutates blindly into new life, what's the point of sex? And how could blind mutation invent something so pleasurable? For that matter, what is the purpose of blind mutation into life forms anyway? If there is no God, why are we here? What's the meaning of life? What answer does evolution provide?
The entire evolutionary argument falls apart when you start talking about evolving mushrooms. You alter and select mushrooms through breeding, but at the end of the day you still have a mushroom. It hasn't evolved into anything.
When you talk about fossils you start losing credibility. The fossil record all over the world proves one thing; no transitional forms, no proof of any change from one creature to another. Colin Patterson, an evolutionist, who was the curator of the British Museum of Natural History, realized this and made the comment that it should be a crime to teach the fossil record as proving evolution in public schools.
Stephen Jay Gould also realized this and came up with a theory he called Punctuated Equilibrium in which species don't slowly evolve, they leap forward all at once. In other words, a monkey didn't slowly evolve into a Neanderthal, he suddenly gave birth to a human, and all monkeys did the same thing at the same time. Patterson called these "Hopeful Monsters."
The fact is, if you can believe something like that, you can believe in creation, because that's essentially how God did it. All at once. Both ideas suggest an intelligence behind the action.
Creation shows purposeful design, and that's what we see all through the universe. Mathematical precision; everything working in an exact order dependent on everything else. Explain how an explosion out of nothingness did that? You can't do it.
A final thought. You bring up DNA, which is actually the death of evolution. DNA is the blueprint of life and it determines exactly what life is going to be. You alter it, or mutate it as evolution says, and you either deform or kill the life form. Down syndrome for example. Genetic mutations are almost 100% harmful, that's why evolution requires billions of years to develop. The problem is, the life form would become extinct long before it ever began to develop positively and ultimately you would have to have billions of sparks in the primordial ooze starting life over and over just trying to get the first amoeba to survive.
Not only is it easier, it is more logical to believe the biblical record of creation.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Minimum Wage
When Walmart workers went on strike in nine cities last November 29, demanding raises to double their minimum wage, the company did a cost analysis study and showed that if they raised the minimum wage of all their hundreds of thousands of employees to $15 an hour, it would cost more than the profit they took in 2012. The result would have led to either half of the workers being laid off, or a steep increase in the cost of their products in order to keep the stores open, followed by the average shopper being forced to go elsewhere and the beginning of the end of Walmart.
The argument is that corporate owners and CEOs take an unfair amount of their profits while single mothers with two kids have to take two or three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. Obama continually invokes class warfare with his demands for income equality and closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Minimum wage sounds good to people at entry level jobs who don't understand business, or what it took their employers to build the companies they are working for, but it never works in the long run. There are obviously examples of CEOs milking their companies for ungodly personal benefits; GM for example. Capitalist systems are always wide open for corruption because money talks, but free enterprise/"trickle down economics" has made America the wealthiest, most accomplished nation on earth. The answer is not to destroy the system.
The problem is twofold; government interference through taxes and greedy unions. Unions had a purpose when they were started, but they have drifted far from fair wages and safe working conditions. Unions demanding unrealistically high wages of 70 to 80 dollars an hour plus lifelong benefits commensurate with salary at retirement is one of the things that broke GM. The union was so greedy that they preferred to let the company go under and their members lose everything before they would offer a single compromise to save their jobs. But why should they compromise? They had Obama and the government backing them up. You and I, the taxpayers, have lost 10 billion dollars propping up the company. How many GM cars do you have for your investment?
The bigger problem is government taxes and regulations. There are hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations handed down every year. Corporations are forced to hire hundreds of accountants and lawyers just to keep pace. There is part of the cost of your product. The cost of keeping up with OSHA is so great that companies have been forced to outsource to other countries just to stay in business. That's why everything in Walmart is made in China. It's cheaper to build a factory and a warehouse, hire cheap Chinese labor and ship the goods over here than it is to buy American made goods. Thousands of jobs are lost in America because of union greed and overbearing government mandates.
Then there is the ambulance-chasing legal profession that forces everybody with any money to get insurance for their own protection; the pharmaceutical companies that spend millions in advertising for experimental products that are so dangerous they take 30 seconds out of every commercial telling you the side affects to protect themselves; the health insurance debacle, which as bad as it is always made out to be, was still the best in the world, and is now falling apart with Obamacare; and on and on it goes.
The answer is for the Federal government to stop deficit spending, balance the budget, cut corporate taxes, abolish the personal income tax, close down the EPA, the DOE, OSHA, and the IRS, and let the capitalist free enterprise system, common sense, and the American entrepreneur work. The fewer taxes corporations are burdened with the more jobs they can provide. We are 17 trillion dollars in debt. If the government had put that in the bank and saved it, instead of wasting it on the socialist welfare state, they could give every American citizen, all 300 million of us, over 50,000 dollars each. For a family of three that would pay for a nice house. How is that for income equality? That would level the playing field quite well.
In his SOTU Obama pointed at the stock markets and admitted that corporate America is doing better than ever and that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is greater than ever. He used the argument to push inflicting more of his pain on the economy, but if anyone was paying attention, that was an indictment in his own words of the failures of his own policies. The gap has gotten wider under his economic program than ever before, and includes his own 12 million dollar increase in personal wealth. And no, it's not Bush's fault or Reagan's. The 1980s was not the decade of greed. That started with Clinton, grew through Bush, and exploded in 2009 when Obama took office. There will always be greedy people, but with a few exceptions, the problem is not in corporations. It is in the government.
Minimum wage increases sound good to people who don't understand economics, and to leftist, socialist politicians who see easy votes from non-thinking people. The reality, however, is that government required minimum wage increases have always caused the cost of living to go up at a faster rate than those on minimum wage can keep up with. It doesn't work. The answer is to end this goofball politically correct socialist nanny state and let the American people go back to work.
The argument is that corporate owners and CEOs take an unfair amount of their profits while single mothers with two kids have to take two or three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. Obama continually invokes class warfare with his demands for income equality and closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Minimum wage sounds good to people at entry level jobs who don't understand business, or what it took their employers to build the companies they are working for, but it never works in the long run. There are obviously examples of CEOs milking their companies for ungodly personal benefits; GM for example. Capitalist systems are always wide open for corruption because money talks, but free enterprise/"trickle down economics" has made America the wealthiest, most accomplished nation on earth. The answer is not to destroy the system.
The problem is twofold; government interference through taxes and greedy unions. Unions had a purpose when they were started, but they have drifted far from fair wages and safe working conditions. Unions demanding unrealistically high wages of 70 to 80 dollars an hour plus lifelong benefits commensurate with salary at retirement is one of the things that broke GM. The union was so greedy that they preferred to let the company go under and their members lose everything before they would offer a single compromise to save their jobs. But why should they compromise? They had Obama and the government backing them up. You and I, the taxpayers, have lost 10 billion dollars propping up the company. How many GM cars do you have for your investment?
The bigger problem is government taxes and regulations. There are hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations handed down every year. Corporations are forced to hire hundreds of accountants and lawyers just to keep pace. There is part of the cost of your product. The cost of keeping up with OSHA is so great that companies have been forced to outsource to other countries just to stay in business. That's why everything in Walmart is made in China. It's cheaper to build a factory and a warehouse, hire cheap Chinese labor and ship the goods over here than it is to buy American made goods. Thousands of jobs are lost in America because of union greed and overbearing government mandates.
Then there is the ambulance-chasing legal profession that forces everybody with any money to get insurance for their own protection; the pharmaceutical companies that spend millions in advertising for experimental products that are so dangerous they take 30 seconds out of every commercial telling you the side affects to protect themselves; the health insurance debacle, which as bad as it is always made out to be, was still the best in the world, and is now falling apart with Obamacare; and on and on it goes.
The answer is for the Federal government to stop deficit spending, balance the budget, cut corporate taxes, abolish the personal income tax, close down the EPA, the DOE, OSHA, and the IRS, and let the capitalist free enterprise system, common sense, and the American entrepreneur work. The fewer taxes corporations are burdened with the more jobs they can provide. We are 17 trillion dollars in debt. If the government had put that in the bank and saved it, instead of wasting it on the socialist welfare state, they could give every American citizen, all 300 million of us, over 50,000 dollars each. For a family of three that would pay for a nice house. How is that for income equality? That would level the playing field quite well.
In his SOTU Obama pointed at the stock markets and admitted that corporate America is doing better than ever and that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is greater than ever. He used the argument to push inflicting more of his pain on the economy, but if anyone was paying attention, that was an indictment in his own words of the failures of his own policies. The gap has gotten wider under his economic program than ever before, and includes his own 12 million dollar increase in personal wealth. And no, it's not Bush's fault or Reagan's. The 1980s was not the decade of greed. That started with Clinton, grew through Bush, and exploded in 2009 when Obama took office. There will always be greedy people, but with a few exceptions, the problem is not in corporations. It is in the government.
Minimum wage increases sound good to people who don't understand economics, and to leftist, socialist politicians who see easy votes from non-thinking people. The reality, however, is that government required minimum wage increases have always caused the cost of living to go up at a faster rate than those on minimum wage can keep up with. It doesn't work. The answer is to end this goofball politically correct socialist nanny state and let the American people go back to work.
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