Recently in Evolution and the Big Bang Category

James Kushiner: "I've often thought that the information side of the evolution/intelligent design debate might prove to be the most fruitful. The publication of this article, noted here and available as a PDF, by William Dembski and Robert Marks might cost someone his job. You cannot utter intelligence and science in the same breath, for, apparently, intelligence and science don't mix."

By the way - and I'm no fan of ID - if intelligent design is a crackpot idea, why do evolutionists spend so much energy to quash it?

Michelle Malkin:

My syndicated column below contrasts the Left’s “unease” over the evangelical Christian faith of NIH director-designate Francis Collins with its radio silence on the eco-zealotry of Obama science czar John Holdren. But first, some late-breaking developments: As Zombie notes, the White House has responded to rising blogosphere unease with Holdren’s cultish ideas by pooh-poohing Holdren’s co-authorship of the nutball manifesto, Ecoscience. Team Obama told the Washington Times that Holdren “never has been an advocate for policies of forced sterilization.” Never? Whom do you believe: the White House or your own eyes?

Lots more links there for your eyes to enjoy.

Collins was not just NIH director, but he was picked as the head of the NIH's Human Genome Project. Before Wordpress ate it I'd transcribed Collin's speech-slash-testimony on Christian faith, NIH and the HGP.

When his book came out I thought it was important to dig into Collins a bit and see where his faith and science intersected. It should give him creds to alot of you that I was a little disappointed in what I heard. I wanted him to define how his understanding of evolution and genetics substantiated his faith. Only got a few squishy platitudes. Still, he holds science comfortably in one hand and God comfortably in the other.

Holdren shouldn't be a surprise either. His perspective on "natural selection" among homo sapiens is the same Sanger-esque, anti-minority, anti-life Malthusian misanthropy we've come to expect from the Planned Parenthood bloodline. Give him credit for being honest enough to publish it.

Will the glorious, broad-minded humanitarian universalist that is Obama back up both men? Or is that a bus I hear chugging up the street...

MORE: Christians Need Not Apply (to NIH)?

Welcome to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement's home page, featuring such FAQs as:

Does VHEMT favor abortion? (Answer: Only when someone is pregnant)

Does VHEMT support China's one-child policy? (Answer: The policy is less than voluntary, and even one child is too many.)

Are religions to blame for human over population? (Answer: Extinction is in accordance with God's plan for us. Jesus Christ lived His life as a lesson to us all, and begat naught.* Let us follow His example and concentrate on the spiritual journey to God, rather than on human endeavors such as producing more humans. We have been fruitful and multiplied, now it is time to mature and nurture.)

At least they took a stab (sorry) at an answer to the why-do-these-people-never-volunteer-to-go-first question. And bits like this that quote Luke 23:29, while completely out of context, are pretty thought-provoking.

*(um, not quite)

Belfast Telegraph:

“If you believe God made this Earth, you will believe you should look after something he has given us. I will seek to look after God’s creation and I do not believe in any way, shape or form that being a Christian affects your ability to protect the Earth that God has given you.”

Well, it is a Bible-based approach to creation care.

By the way, if Christian evolution is your thing you'd better ask God whether or not He wanted that critter in the gene pool before you go saving it.

John Schroeder:

The point is this - science does not know everything, despite claims to the contrary. Quantum mechanics is indeed mysterious, but it gives a lot better answers to a lot of questions than a lot of other branches of science. You see, the essential point is not what we don't know, but that we will never know if for no other reason than there is always more to know. In fact, we can't know. And therein lies the issue. When science has a problem with religion its becasue they think they can know. It's not about science, it's about ego. It's a personal issue.

Princeton University:

Scientists have called it "junk DNA." They have long been perplexed by these extensive strands of genetic material that dominate the genome but seem to lack specific functions. Why would nature force the genome to carry so much excess baggage?

The favored answer, even by Christian geneticists, is this is flotsam and jetsem left over from evolution. In fact it's proof of evolution. Or not? 

Now researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University who have been studying the genome of a pond organism have found that junk DNA may not be so junky after all. They have discovered that DNA sequences from regions of what had been viewed as the "dispensable genome" are actually performing functions that are central for the organism. They have concluded that the genes spur an almost acrobatic rearrangement of the entire genome that is necessary for the organism to grow. 

Wow - you mean we knew everything there was to know about how God made genetics, and then found out we didn't? Hmmmmmmm...

Dave Pollard:

[B]ecause of our imaginative poverty, and our inability to really understand and follow nature's model of self-management, we are unable to conceive of, let alone develop "anticipatory awareness" of, discontinuous future events. We can recognize patterns, we can do environmental scanning and constantly watch for 'weak signals' that forebode changes ahead, we can extrapolate and project, and we can even (though too rarely) recognize the recurrence of patterns from our past history. But we, and our man-made systems, don't have the resilience, the sheer numbers of data-providers and of data to draw on, or the billions of years of experience at mitigation and adaptation that nature does, and we can't hope to. Just look at most science fiction, which presumes that all sentient creatures everywhere in the universe, throughout all time, have and always will look, feel, communicate and act astonishingly like humans today, and will deal with problems depressingly like we do today.

I wouldn't lean in the direction of nature's "self-management" - I'd give more credit to God of course.  But the authors have stumbled backward into describing the effects of man's ham-handed way of doing things (sin, etc).

By the way, if people are so awfully prone to mismanaging systems, why would we self-appoint ourselves as the right folks to fix them?

MORE from Rasmussen:  Beware easy formulas.

Peter Augustine Lawler in The New Atlantis:

The scientific truth of evolution does not explain who we are as personal beings. The truth about who we are—true liberalism—may well be unsustainable if the contradiction between our personal freedom and the impersonal truth about God and nature is too extreme. But perhaps the modern dualism between nature and personal freedom is, in truth, too extreme. There may well be a ground for who we are in nature itself. After all, as far as we can tell, only a human person, a being with logos and eros and will, could possibly be open to the truth about nature—or about being, including human being. Being a political being—part of a polis or nation—is part of the truth, though not the whole or the highest truth, about being who we are.

And then there is agape, something only Christ can fully explain.

Volunteers help salamanders avoid roadway massacre:

From rural Vermont to urban centers like Philadelphia, human escorts, called bucket brigades in some places, help amphibians make it to their mating areas without getting squashed by cars. It's part education, part conservation, and part science.

"It's an extraordinary thing and people deserve to know about it," said Warren King, a member of the Otter Creek Audubon Society, who organizes a crossing in Salisbury. "And it needs to be protected. There are sites where many of the critters that are crossing never make it."

Wait a sec - aren't they violating the law of natural selection? How do they know for certain that the slowest salamanders shouldn't be getting flattened so those genes don't stay in the gene pool? The strong will survive to reproduce and make the population better able to survive in their habitat which, obviously, includes roads.

Clearly it's the cars that are doing the conservation here, and these people are messing things up.

At least according to the science of evolution.

“It’s past comprehension,” said Mary Louise Starosciak, who happened to be bicycling by with her husband while on vacation when they saw the ark looming over the local landscape. “I knew the story of Noah, but I had no idea the boat would have been so big.” In fact, Noah’s Ark as described in the Bible was five times larger than Johan’s Ark.

(Thanks to Scott for the link)

What good are greenhouse gases? Hugh Ross explains that they are part of God’s design in More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation :

The end products of greenhouse gas removal [through water cycle, plate tectonics and biological processes] - coal, oil, natural gas, limestone, marble, gypsum, phosphates and sand - are all valuable resources for launching and sustaining human civilization...

Fine-tuning this removal to compensate for the increase in solar luminosity demands fine-tuning of all seven factors governing silicate erosion plus all the factors governing the abundance, diversity, growth, decay, extinction and burial of organisms. Furthermore, all this fine-tuning had to be exquisitely timed and regulated throughout the past 3.5 to billion years.

This continual planning and fine-tuning over an extended time period challenges any reasonable naturalistic explanation.

Ross' excellent new book spells out a testable scientific design model. Something that the intelligent design movement at large as been weak on. -D

Theism vs the Many Worlds Hypothesis: (h/t)

Suppose that we accept the many-worlds hypothesis and use observer-selection to explain the existence of anthropic values in our universe. There is still one remarkable fact for which we have no explanation: why there exist a sufficient number of universes to make the existence of life unsurprising. If a few million or billion worlds were enough, this would perhaps not be too surprising. However, the anthropic coincidences would require that a mind-bending number of universes exist, something on the order of 10 to the 200th power. If we consider all possible forms that reality might take, it can seem quite surprising that we find ourselves in a version of reality with such a plenitude of universes.

Theism can offer some plausible explanations of this fact. First, as Leslie argues, we could easily imagine that God has a strong preference for variety for variety's sake. This would give God a good reason for creating an infinity of universes, in which physical and cosmological constants take every possible value. Second, God might have had in mind creating such a large ensemble of universes that interesting things, like life, would be bound to happen in at least a few of them by chance alone.

As Leslie points out, theism and the many-worlds hypothesis are not logically inconsistent. If there is only one universe, then the anthropic coincidences point to the existence of God. Alternatively, if there are many universes, this fact too supports theism.

Fun to chew on, though having personally met the Creator, I'm partial to this explanation.