From the mind of Junaid Chundrigar comes “Disassembled,” a delightful bit of animation (two minutes) revealing to all the world what it’s like for super heroes to experience a bad day.

Still better depictions of Venom & Galactus than have appeared upon the silver screen!

Comments are open; add yours!

It’s been a long while since i have perused the statistics DreamHost provides regarding bandwidth, disk space, MySQL usage, and so on. So long, in fact, that i forgot all about “conueries,” DreamHost’s in-house assessment of system resources used by a database.

I’ll be the first to admit that my usage is very likely on the small end of the scale — i manage small sites with humble traffic numbers. However, i looked at my database usage, and i couldn’t help but think that i could do better. A quick visit to DreamHost’s WordPress performance guide reminded me of a pair of essential plugins i’ve been neglecting.

WP Widget Cache

The first is WP Widget Cache. This plugin provides a huge and often much more noticeable performance enhancement over most other caching options.

Let’s say you have a site with a “healthy” sidebar: a dozen or so widgets, showcasing everything from tags to recent comments, database-driven ads & a blogroll of all of your favorite digital destinations. Upon every page load, each of those dozen widgets must process, several of them performing numerous database queries. Traditional caching plugins, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, will cache a whole page when it is viewed, allowing subsequent views of that page to be rendered speedily. However, when users visit pages which aren’t already cached as a result of other visits, they will have to wait for your sidebar to render. Because your sidebar widgets are often the same on most (if not all) pages of your site, this behavior is sub-optimal.

Here is where WP Widget Cache is gold: It allows you to have a feature-rich sidebar which is cached when any page on your site is visited (assuming that page has widgets on it!). Subsequent visits to any other page on your site featuring those widgets will render much quicker — even though they may not be present in a traditional page cache, the widgets have already been cached!

I cannot stress this enough: WP Widget Cache should be on every WordPress site upon which you plan to use widgets! You owe it to your visitors, regardless of whatever server benefits there may be!

DB Cache Reloaded Fix

The second plugin i am now using and want to recommend is DB Cache Reloaded Fix (DBCRF). Like the first plugin, DBCRF fills in where traditional page caching plugins lack: By caching database queries, visitors who visit non-cached pages will notice an nice performance improvement because common database queries will already have been made, allowing the system to focus only on page-specific queries (such as post content or comments).

If you have an extremely popular site and are using a service, such as DreamHost’s shared hosting, which keeps tabs on your database usage (as opposed to database disk space), you will get quite a bit more life out of your hosting plan by turning on DBCRF!

Results

Yesterday, i activated WP Widget Cache & DB Cache Reloaded Fix on all of the sites which i manage, including this one. The results are already noticeable, not only in how fast the sites load for visitors, but in statistics as well:

That is a bar graph of the past couple of weeks’ visitors for this site — never mind the actual number of visitors represented! ;) The point is that today’s traffic has been roughly the same as yesterday’s. Having activated the above two plugins just prior to the new day of stats beginning, all of today’s visitors have been enjoying the benefits of the additional caching. On the technical side, is there an improvement? See for yourself!

Today’s stats are much improved over the previous days! The number of database connections have been reduced by around 2/3, and the number of queries made to the database have been decreased by even more! This has resulted in a conuery savings of ~80%, opening the door for much more growth, which is fantastic for any website, especially those on shared servers!

Comments are open; add yours!

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“And this is the condemnation, that knowledge is come into the world, and men loved ignorance rather than knowledge, because their deeds were superstitious.” — John 3:19, Rational Version

Comments are open; add yours!

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Jess & i had the good fortune of watching The Avengers earlier today during its first showing here in town. There isn’t a lot i could add to the global discussion of this movie — all the blogs are abuzz with it (and rightly so!) — so rather than write a full review, i will compare the movie to Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Last year, the world watched Chicago get tore all to hell in the third entry of the Transformers saga epic visual effects orgasm. The bar for over-the-top sci-fi movies was raised high.

Enter The Avengers. There were numerous times while watching that movie — and even during its trailers — when i felt as though we were seeing elements of Dark of the Moon (DotM) all over again. But where DotM failed, The Avengers excelled.

Warning: There be spoilers ahead.

The Avengers assembled!

Let’s consider the cast. DotM, like the two films which preceded it, featured a cast full of a variety of Transformers, both good and bad, and few of them any more exceptional than another. Yet after three movies & repeated viewings, i have to ask: How is it that Michael Bay could find no time to develop any of the myriad of Transformers into likable characters with rich personality & back story? At times i thought that character development was sacrificed in favor of having more Transformers on screen at one time.

But then, The Avengers. I’ll concede that several of these characters had the advantage of having their own solo films in order to establish their character, but even in The Avengers, the characters were able to be presented in a way that made them seem like real people, real characters with real personality — each with their own motivations, their own conflicts, their own raison d’être. Even newcomers like Hawkeye received ample screen time to establish their characters. As it turns out, you can have larger than life characters without getting bogged down in the larger-than-lifeness of it all (or without resorting to racial stereotypes).

Kneel before Loki

The DotM theme of human subjugation was also bettered by The Avengers. In DotM, the Decepticons (bad robots from the planet Cybertron) sought to enslave the human race in order to force the rebuilding of their home world. Though a few humans voluntarily joined the Decepticons’ cause — for protection, for profit — the rest were viewed by the Decepticons as mere insects, an annoying but necessary part of the system which would allow them to rebuild their home. The Decepticons, poorly written as they were, seemed to fail to realize that it was one human boy — a godawful, horribly annoying one at that — who kept screwing up their plans.

The Avengers, on the other hand, featured a much, well, human view of humanity. The antagonistic, Loki, used mind-control to acquire a few necessary minions to carry out his plans. And though there are those who are willing to, for fear of death, bow to the mad god Loki, their surrender is not simply glossed over. A motivation beyond shallow greed & self-preservation is presented, a motivation which presents some very interesting philosophical jumping off points for those so inclined. Is freedom bad for humanity? Are we happier when we are subjugated, when our decisions are made by a higher authority?

Cybertron Entering Earth’s Orbit

Finally, in DotM, the film has as its MacGuffin a bunch of Cybertronian pillars which, when activated in unison, create a space bridge back to Cybertron. The Decepticons succeed in setting these up, causing Cybertron to begin being pulled into Earth’s orbit. Here is where i must question the sanity of the already clearly insane Decepticons. Cybertron (at least in the movie continuity) is huge, much larger than Earth, and the Decepticons are pulling it into Earth orbit, very close to the Earth. If you thought the gravitational effect of the moon upon Earth was notable (and the moon is very, very far away and much, much smaller than the earth), well, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” The introduction of Cybertron would wreak havoc, possibly within the entirety of the inner solar system.

Fortunately, there is a online solar system simulator, within which i was able to set up a small-scale representation of what we saw in the movie: the sun, Earth, its moon, and Cybertron (between Earth and its moon). In my first set up, i placed Cybertron between the earth and the moon, traveling in the same direction of the moon; this resulted in the earth & the moon colliding, with Cybertron orbiting the sun in an off-center ellipse. In my second attempt, i placed Cybertron on the opposite side of Earth, traveling again in the same direction as the moon; this resulted in the moon colliding with Cybertron, Earth being thrown from the solar system, and Cybertron again orbiting the sun alone.

Long story short, the Decepticons plans would result in their own destruction (they were on Earth, not Cybertron) or at least the loss of all of the raw materials which they had planned to use to rebuild their home world.

The Avengers had a very similar MacGuffin: a cube known as the tesseract, a self-sustaining source of energy which is used by Loki to create a worm hole to the realm of the Chitauri, an alien race with whom Loki has aligned. Rather than bring a planet through the wormhole, though, a much more realistic use is employed: the deployment of an army of Chitauri soldiers & leviathans.

There are probably more similarities between The Avengers and DotM, which i’d love to hear about so feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on either of these movies below.

I really enjoyed The Avengers. Joss Whedon did an amazing job pulling it all together, and i look forward to the future of the Marvel film universe.

Quick complaint: I really would have liked to have seen the return of both Natalie Portman’s character Jane Foster as well as Don Cheadle’s War Machine, both of whom were established in the Avengers universe via Thor & Iron Man 2, respectively. In the future, if Marvel Studios ever gets the rights to the X-Men, it would be great to see the Scarlet Witch & the Vision make it into an Avengers movie.

And i live in the futile hope that someday there will be a Marvel movie so big, featuring a threat so great (Galactus? Apocalypse? Who is your favorite Marvel super-threatening super villain?) that we see the need for a movie which recognizes the existence of multiple teams — the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, perhaps some of the other “X” teams. Oh sure, casting would be a nightmare, but this sort of thing is common in the comic books. Also, Wolverine & Spider-Man have both been Avengers, so their presence in the same universe ought to be a given.

Comments are open; add yours!

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Seven years ago, i was taking a hard look at my life, preparing to move completely out of Mom’s house for the first time, into a home that for which i’d be personally responsible.

To be honest, that post would have been long forgotten — it barely resulted in a blip in this site’s traffic nor did it solicit any comments or linkbacks — but the entry did merit a remark from Dad that that was the sort of blog entry i should be writing, that by tying theology into something practical, theology actually becomes interesting.

His remark did impact me — i began to see that post as sort of a benchmark for my writing, though i rarely came anywhere close to writing such practical theology again.

Perhaps that is because i have lead a fairly ordinary life. Big events which force a theological response in my mind don’t come along too often — moving out of Mom’s was a relatively huge deal.

Flash forward to today. My girlfriend & i have been working for several days now in preparation of the yard sale we’re hoping to have this weekend. And yet again, i’m faced with the task of examining just about every item i own.

This time, however, i’ve not been evaluating my possessions via a theological lens — a lens which so distracted me seven years ago that i referred to my Nintendo DS system as a “Game Boy DS” in that old post ;) — but rather via a purely practical lens.

And what it boils down to is that over the past seven years, i have accumulated a ton of stuff. Jess too has a ton of stuff, not to mention our six-year-old.

Looking at some of the things i own, i’m left to wonder about the whys. Why do i own a pile of t-shirts that barely fit me? Why do i own a small stack of jeans, while only one pair fit me? Why did i ever buy all of those fluff theology books when i was never going to read them in the first place?

Right now, it feels as though our home is filling up — our bedroom is getting packed with priced & (somewhat) organized items to sell, our dining room is a triage area of items awaiting pricing, furniture to be stored is spread throughout the house in almost every room. And we still have lots at both of our moms’ houses through which to go.

I look forward to this weekend, to what i hope will be a very successful yard sale. I look forward with eager anticipation of a much less cluttered home, within which we feel much more able to function. We have so many things we want to do — herb gardens, decorating, yard work, numerous repairs — but every time we turn around, we’re faced with messes.

Messes because those pillows haven’t had a home in months. Because those pants don’t fit into my dresser. Because those candles don’t have a place.

Because it’s far easier to let a mess accumulate than to fight the clutter in order to find a place for everything other than the floor or the coffee table.

I’m ready for a space to breathe, for the house to be a comfortable home, not simply a glorified storage unit.

Comments are open; add yours!

This image, “Top 10 Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian,” has been circulated around quite a bit, and a friend of mine recently shared it with me on Facebook. I haven’t blogged lately, and i wanted to write something, so i’m throwing that list at you, along with a bit of commentary for each entry. Enjoy!

1. You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours. Ironically, you most often don’t even refer to your god by name, given that there is no real consensus over what his name should be. So you call him “God,” akin to naming your pets something like “Dog” or “Cat.”

2. You feel insulted and “dehumanized” when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the biblical claim that we were created from dirt. I know it’s more about the fact that evolutionary thought completely does away with the myths of “creation in God’s image” and “breath of God leads to man becoming a living soul.” I find it more insulting & dehumanizing to hear that i somehow share image or soul-essence (however you want to word it) with such a god.

3. You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a triune God. “Not three gods, but three personalities,” i hear you object. Fair enough, but that’s only really relevant in the theology text books. In practice, there are three distinct persons in Christianity, with three very different roles. (In some sects of Christianity, we could even lump Mary into that group, if not angels & saints as well.) More to the point, though, the Bible speaks of gods (plural), endows angels with godlike dominions (such as the “angel of the bottomless pit” mentioned in Revelation, an angel analogous, perhaps, to Hades or Anubis. The point is, Christianity isn’t all that dissimilar from polytheism; it’s a distinction primarily of semantics & vocabulary.

4. Your face turns purple when you hear of the “atrocities” attributed to Allah, but you don’t even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in Exodus and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in Joshua including women, children, and trees! When God is set up in the psyche of man as the rule of law, the judge of righteousness, etc., then it follows that everything God does is right & good, never mind that we find the same actions repugnant when attributed to other gods. Yet in the religions which ascribe to those deities, those deities are the rules of law, making their actions no better or worse in the context of their religions than God’s actions are within the context of Christianity. Morality should not be derived from belief in any god; morality should be derived from our humanity, our rationality… from the simple & easily arrived at conclusion that “do unto others” or “do no harm” ought to be the core of our morality. Yes, the Bible contains that lesson (amid numerous violations of it, committed or endorsed most often not by Satan but by God), but it is by no means the only (or even the first) to contain it.

5. You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life, and then ascended into the sky. It’s pretty simple: All non-Christian claims to miraculous events are simply nonsense; all Christian (or perhaps more strictly, all biblical) claims to miraculous events are to be accepted with no further evidence than “because someone/the Bible says so.” Incidentally, the amount of evidence available for the non-Christian miracles and the amount of evidence available for the Christian miracles are pretty much identical.

6. You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (~4.5 billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old. Judeo-Christianity has quite the problem here. On the one hand, it is believed that the Bible’s record, which includes genealogical records going back to the purported first humans, is absolutely accurate due to having been inspired* by God. On the other hand, Judeo-Christianity also places at least some credence on so-called natural revelation, or the ability to look at nature and somehow arrive at the Judeo-Christian God’s existence & majesty. So then what are we to do when the natural record is found to, very obviously, reveal a very old Earth, one which vastly predates the biblical record? The rational thing to do is to admit that the Bible is obviously mistaken, discard it as myth as countless other myths have been discarded throughout history, and to move on with our lives, in awe & wonder at the beauty of nature.

7. You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs — though excluding those in all rival sects — will spend eternity in an infinite Hell of suffering. And yet consider your religion the most “tolerant” and “loving.” Curiously, when one looks at the Bible carefully, there are only one or two ways to get thrown into Hell. From a Calvinist’s perspective, Jesus didn’t die for your sins unless you are one of the elect; those who are not fortunate enough to be among the elect are damned to Hell, ultimately not for their sin, but because God created them in order to showcase his wrath. From an Arminian’s perspective, Jesus did die for your sins, but you’re thrown into Hell because you did not choose to believe in him; in other words, you burn in Hell for an eternity for nothing more than unbelief. In both cases, God is described as love. It is fortunate for God that he gets to define love for his believers, and that he includes himself in that definition; no rational person would find true love in the actions of the biblical god, with perhaps rare actions (exceptions to the rule).

8. While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in “tongues” may be all the evidence you need to “prove” Christianity. Certainly this doesn’t describe mainstream Christians, but it does touch on an important point, which for a much larger percentage of Christian looks like this: feeling “God in your heart” or having an “emotional experience” or “hearing God” or any number of other such “evidences” are put forward as reasons to believe. Visiting fundamentalist churches during “camp meeting” time provides ample opportunity to see the emotional manipulation in action, if you’re interested in seeing it for yourself. But ultimately, appealing to the human heart, feeling, emotion, or attitude as “evidence” creates another nice paradox of Christianity; the Bible declares the human heart to be deceitful above all things. Scientific evidence, we are thankful, is subject to rigorous peer review and is thus open to examination as to whether it passes muster.

9. You define 0.01% as a “high success rate” when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God. Jesus spoke quite a bit on prayer; among other things, he stated that if you ask in his name, you shall receive it. Elsewhere, he referred to repeated supplication not going unanswered. He even said that all it takes is a tiny amount of faith, and you would be able to command trees. This all sounds good, theologically. But in practice? I can only conclude that the vast majority of Christians lack faith, simply by the success rate of their prayers. There is a theological defense that states that God has three answers to prayer: Yes, no, and later; these three answers, it is claimed, is enough to explain the results of every prayer ever uttered, and God is much more fond of the “no” answer simply because his will is so far beyond ours. If you were paying attention, you’ll no doubt have noted that the theological answer doesn’t match up with what Jesus said at all. Curious, isn’t it?

10. You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history — but still call yourself a Christian. The Bible, by and large, is ridiculously easy to understand. However, it seems theologians don’t want folks believing exactly what the Bible says; rather, they devise complex frameworks for interpreting the Bible. It is these frameworks which become unnecessarily complex. Additionally, it is accepted that the Bible cannot be understood except by means of the Holy Spirit’s illumination, allowing the simple straightforwardness of the Bible to be shrouded in theological complexity. It is a source of much irony that a book written by & for the uneducated of an ancient, superstitious nation is claimed by men in our enlightened era to be a source of unending knowledge, that to understand it takes a lifetime of study, and that major seminaries & universities devote countless years of study and teaching toward expounding it.

Comments are open; add yours!

Makes perfect sense

Another entry into the annals of crappy things Christians failed to think all the way through, this image declares that “Jesus loves you” and that “conditions do not apply” (emphasis mine).

As an atheist, that’s very good news. It means that Jesus loves me, and i don’t have to do a thing to enjoy that love.

Now, most Christians (at least the ones that know the Bible) would point out that God only loves believers — that unbelievers are looked upon with wrath by God… not with love.

And it’s not really enough to believe. If you believe, you’re expected to bear fruits of that belief. (If you believe and do nothing, then the party line of Christendom is that you weren’t really a believer to begin with.)

So sure, Jesus loves you… on the condition that you believe in & devote your life to him.

And in light of that, i have good news for all of you parents out there: For most, if not all, of you reading this, there isn’t a thing in the world that would separate your children from your love, no matter what they do. Your love for them is truly without condition.

Requiring your children to love, honor, and obey you in order for them to enjoy your love? Well, that would be the godly method of parenting, now wouldn’t it?

Comments are open; add yours!

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In his effort to cast a shadow over the theory of evolution, Matt Slick presents in his Apologetics Notebook a list of purported members in the evolutionary ancestry of mankind, with this brief introduction:

The following is a list of the alleged evolutionary record of man. If evolution is true, then there should be evidence. But the evidence given is weak as you will see.

I’m not going to be quoting Slick’s explanations for each of these proposed ancestors, as i have done in past responses to his material, but will instead offer, so far as i can tell, the best current explanations of each of them.

And i will say, Matt Slick and other creationists do get their explanations regarding some of these absolutely correct. There have been hoaxes, misidentifications, and so forth in the history of evolution, just as there has been human error in every other area of study, including, well, theology. But just as the cults which Matt Slick devotes his time to rebutting don’t do anything to invalidate “biblical Christianity,” so to the misidentifications & hoaxes in the history of biology, which do nothing to refute actual evidence.

All of that said, let’s look at the list presented by Slick to determine what is real evidence & which we shouldn’t even be mentioning at this point.

• Ramapithecus: No longer considered to be an ancestor of man, further evidence of Ramapithecus has revealed it is very much like Sivapithecus, possibly the female thereof. It is now placed in the ancestral line of orangutans. on Wikipedia

• Australopithecus: Slick cites a report from 1974 when he says, “Australopithecus is considered unrelated to man as an ancestor.” However, Australopithecus is most likely part of man’s evolutionary line as a predecessor to the Homo genus. on Wikipedia

• Zinjanthropus: It’s currently uncertain whether Zinjanthropus belongs in the genus Australopithecus or the genus Paranthropus. Whether this genus is an ancestor of man seems up for debate; however, even if Zinjanthropus is not an ancestor of man, it’d still be ancestor to some other primate. on Wikipedia

• Nebraska Man: The Nebraska Man, or Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, was first described in 1922 based upon a tooth found five years prior. In 1925, further work revealed that the tooth actually belonged to Prosthennops, an extinct peccary (Slick incorrectly states that the tooth belonged to an extinct pig). Science retracted the identification of the fossil as an ape in 1927. In other words, there is no reason to bring up Nebraska Man in discussing the evolution of man, unless you’re a creationist seeking to point out the blunders of scientists. However, unlike biblical creationists, science recognizes, corrects, and grows from its errors; biblical creationists are tied to the biblical account, regardless of the physical evidence which is found.

• Piltdown Man: A known hoax, popular among creationists who use it to illustrate so-called deceit or dishonesty among biologists who would do anything to find proof of evolution. However, according to Wikipedia, “In the decades prior to its exposure as a forgery in 1953, scientists increasingly regarded Piltdown as an enigmatic aberration inconsistent with the path of hominid evolution as demonstrated by fossils found elsewhere.” Using the theory of evolution, Piltdown Man was able to be fingered as an aberration, and further study confirmed that this was the case. That’s the nice thing about scientific theories: they can be used to predict things about reality, predictions that confirm the validity of the theories. In other words… on Wikipedia

• Java Man: Despite Slick’s (and other creationists’) claim that the discover of the Java Man bones (a skullcap, teeth, and femur) later admitted that the bones were simply those of an ape, the claim is simply not true. The skullcap in particular is similar to other specimens of Homo erectus, an ancestor of modern man. At this point in time, the Wikipedia article seems to be junk (and its discussion page doesn’t help much), so for this one, i refer you to the talk.origins Archive.

• Peking Man: Another example of Homo erectus, Slick says that a Chinese missionary has determined the Peking Man to be completely human. Now, perhaps it’s possible that the missionary simply wanted a human to preach to that wouldn’t object to the unscientific claims made by the Bible; as it is, further discoveries have pretty much confirmed that Peking Man was Homo erectus, an evolutionary ancestor of man. on Wikipedia

• Neanderthal Man: While no longer believed to be an ancestor of mankind, neanderthal man lived at the same time as early man and was either a sub-species of man or a separate human species altogether. Very recent genetic testing has confirmed that all non-Africans are part neanderthal. My Uncle John once suggested to me that the interbreeding of Genesis 6 had more to do with neanderthals & humans rather than anything supernatural. Well, now we know: non-African humans had a thing for neanderthals. (As a side note, the image of neanderthal man as a dumb-as-rocks caveman should be replaced: neanderthal man had a brain size equal to if not larger than Homo sapiens.) on Wikipedia

• Cro-Magnon: Slick doesn’t say what’s wrong with the evidence of Cro-Magnon man, so i’ll just leave this at saying Cro-Magnon was the first early modern man and had a larger, stronger build than we do today. on Wikipedia

Other than Nebraska Man & Piltdown Man, every evolutionary example which Matt Slick gives us is at least somehow related to the evolution of man. Still, that list is small. There are around two dozen species in the evolutionary ancestry of man, and scientists are coming to understand the genetic links between all of these species increasingly.

If there ever were a missing link, it would have been genetics: While creationists want to proclaim genetics an enemy to evolution, in reality genetics is one of many fields of study which confirms the theory of evolution.

So there you have it: Matt Slick rightly challenges evolution by stating that there should be evidence.

And there is. Lots of it. Freely available to those who are not so brainwashed to be able to appreciate it.

Comments are open; add yours!

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This is part three in an ongoing series dealing with Matt Slick’s Apologetics Notebook, a binder full of a variety of Christian apologetics, mostly pertaining to the so-called cults. If that’s all it was, i’d have no issue with the book—Christian in-fighting distracts them from evangelism, which saves the rest of us time. However, Slick includes a section called simply “Evolution,” wherein he sets out to explain to Christians why evolution is wrong. We’ve already seen that Matt Slick doesn’t understand science & that he relies upon out-dated, irrelevant name– & quote-dropping.

We now come to a subsection which Slick has titled, “There Are Many Problems with Evolution.”

First, there is the problem of life spontaneously forming out of nothing.

Right off the bat, here is a serious problem: the origin of life has nothing to do with the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution describes how life changes through time; in other words, it assumes the existence of life and is a framework for understanding how life works.

If you want to discuss how life initially came about, you want to discuss abiogenesis, and far from having no idea how life came to be, there are a number of competing hypotheses among scientists. In time, as evidence accumulates, these hypotheses will be weeded out until one which best fits the evidence remains, which will no doubt become an accepted theory of abiogenesis.

For life to form by chance (see page 197 on the mathematic impossibility of this occurring), there would have to be an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of combinations of molecules.

Do you know what else is equally unlikely? That you’re reading these words right now. There are hundreds of millions of websites — and hundreds of billions of web pages. But you’re on this one. Statistically, that would never happen. After all, if you visited one page a second for every second of your life, you’d need 3,171 years to visit 100 billion web pages. But you didn’t have to browse that many to arrive here.

And nature didn’t have to randomly try every single one of the possible combinations of chemicals & energy for life to form. All it takes is that one right combination, and given that a good mix of chemicals & energy could have existed in any of thousands (if not millions) of places on Earth, it was simply inevitable that life would form.

Though many scientists say both qualifications have been met on earth, mathematically speaking, it is impossible. this is why many evolutionists are divorcing themselves from the origins issue. I will discuss this later.

If evolutionists are “divorcing themselves” from the issue, perhaps it’s because they’d rather the appropriate experts handle an issue that’s unrelated to evolution? You’ll note that evolutionists aren’t divorcing themselves from the theory of evolution. Despite undergoing intense scrutiny, the theory of evolution has held fast.

As for abiogenesis being mathematically impossible, well, that’s not how “impossibility” works. If you’re allowing for the fact that some random combination of chemicals & energy can create life, then you’re allowing that it is possible, no matter how improbable.

“Impossible odds” events happen all the time, just ask the winners of a jackpot. Or to borrow an example from Matt Slick’s own camp, there are Christians who claim that it would be impossible for one man to fulfill all of the messianic prophecies in the Old Testament.

Yet Christians believe that one man did fulfill those prophecies. (As an aside, i’m unconvinced that several significant “messianic prophecies” were no such prophecy at all, until it was labeled as such after the fact by New Testament authors.)

So either extremely improbable events are possible… or they’re not. And given that it makes very little sense to label any event that has a possibility of occurring as “impossible,” i’ll go ahead and move on to Slick’s next point.

Second, there is the problem of the continued formation of new genetic material. The development of new genetic material within organisms is also a very serious problem. The DNA molecule is so complex that a random appearance of one basically can’t happen. See the quotes by scientists on this problem on page 198 for more information.

I could write a simple program that would output a random number a million characters in length. The probability of any one number appearing would be . This number is “impossibly large,” yet every time the script is ran, a number would be output, despite the unbelievable odds against that number being chosen.

My point is, just because something is unlikely, doesn’t make it impossible. At all.

As for the development of new genetic material (new genes), well, musing about the likelihood of such a thing is academic: science has observed the appearance of new genetic material.

Third, there is the problem of the human ancestor line which is riddle with holes. From what I have seen, the historical evidence for the human ancestor line (hominid line) falls into three categories: pure ape, pure man, and fakes. That means that the evolutionary line of man is non-existent. The human ancestor line is riddle with gaps. You’ve heard the term “missing link.” What you haven’t heard is “found link” or “discovered link.” That’s because they are all still missing.

Let’s make the evolutionary party even more interesting: let’s just start at 4 billion years ago. As it happens, we have fossil evidence for a great deal of the evolutionary tree, and while there have been fossils presented which have turned out to be fakes or otherwise wrongly presented, scientists rightly ignore those. (Indeed, in my experience, the creationists are the ones that like to bring them up.)

As for the human ancestor line being “riddled with gaps,” well, i can only guess that Slick will only accept an archaeologist unearthing an animated fossil that shows a smooth change from one species to another.

“Fill in the Gaps,” Ape, Not Monkey, by Jeffrey Weston

I also want to point out (because i’ve rarely seen this mentioned by others) that we are a transitional species (as are all species). We, as humans, exist as an intermediate species between what came before and whatever will come after. Each of us is a living, breathing example of a “missing link,” full of leftovers from our evolutionary past, leftovers which the next step in our evolution may lose completely (or start using again!).

If, however, we were created as a species complete, one-hundred percent human from day one, why then were we created with so many unnecessary features—features which are readily explained by evolutionary theory but which call into question the efficiency of any so-called creator god(s).

Fourth, there is the problem of the missing links of all other species. None of the evolutionary lines of any of the animals, birds, fish, nor plants is established. They are all up for grabs.

In the sidebar of this post, there is an image of a tree of life, one of many such diagrams available online which depict the evolutionary lines of just about any form of life you could think of. For Slick to say that none of the evolutionary lines are established is poor scholarship at best and outright dishonest at worst.

That is why a theory came out called punctuated equilibria. It stated that the reason there aren’t fossilized evolutionary links between species is because evolution took huge sudden jumps…in 100,000 to 300,000 year increments or so during different periods of earth’s history. This is revealing because it is an admission by scientists that the fossil record is so incomplete that a theory explaining huge regular gaps had to be formulated.

The theory of punctuated equilibrium was not developed because none of the evolutionary lines were known; rather, the theory was developed as an alternative to phyletic gradualism in an attempt to better explain the fossil record of speciation. Either speciation was gradual (phyletic gradualism), or it is more jerky (punctuated equilibrium).

Additionally, yes, the fossil record is incomplete. For it to be complete, at least one of every possible species would have to have been fossilized & recovered by archaeologists.

Unlike a biblical worldview — which would have the only fossils being formed in the aftermath of the Deluge — the fossil record fits what evolutionary theory predicts (and yes, that includes the gaps). If the biblical account of the Deluge were true and it were the cause of fossils, then we’d see a mix of modern species with ancient species such as dinosaurs throughout the fossil record (which we don’t). Instead, the fossil record has ancient fossils in ancient rock strata, more recent fossils in more recent rock strata, and so forth.

So then, where is all the evidence that proves evolution is true?

If you want proof, stick to mathematics. However, if it’s evidence you want, it’s not exactly hidden, and i encourage anyone reading this to spend some time reading through as many of those links as you find interesting. In so doing, you’ll come to appreciate life even more, recognizing it as the wonder of nature that it is.

So that’s Matt Slick’s list of problems with evolution, and as you can see, they are not problems at all.

The next section in the Apologetics Notebook is “Theistic Evolution,” wherein Slick points out that attempting a doctrinal compromise between biblical creation & evolutionary theory just doesn’t jive with the Bible. I’ll be skipping this section simply because i agree with Slick in it: the Bible makes even less sense once you compromise it to the point that Genesis refers to naturalistic origins of life which are somehow aided by God.

Comments are open; add yours!

You may also enjoy…

• Matt Slick Anti-Evolution Apologetic: An Introduction
• Matt Slick’s Pro and Con Quotation Collection
• The Imaginary Path of Human Evolution

“I don’t understand how someone can become a parent and not believe.” Those were the words told to me by a friend of mine in light of the recent birth of my daughter and, well, my brazen atheism.

By coincidence, a short while before i had stumbled upon the above video (~four minutes long).

Comments are open; add yours!