Whosoever will may come

I receive emails from the The Institute for Creation Research each day and one made me think again about free will and the most important decision one will ever make.

Christians are theologically divided when it comes to free will and the role it plays in our salvation.

A good friend of mine, several years ago, enlightened me to the fact that there are two views on the subject of salvation and free creaturely choice. JP Moreland and William Lane Craig briefly summarize the two views as follows:

Armenians, named after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), side with the libertarians and hold that (1) God's sovereignty is limited by and consistent with the libertarian choices of his creatures, (2) election and predestination are based on God's knowledge of those who would freely choose to repent and believe in Christ (or they are based on God's love but are consistent with such foreknowledge) and (3) the nature of saving faith is such that, while the unregenerate sinner may not be able to exercise saving faith without God's grace, nevertheless, once that grace is given, it is possible for the sinner to exercise or refrain from exercising saving faith.

Calvinists, named after the Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564), have generally sided with the compatibilists and hold that (1) God's sovereignty determines whatsoever will come to pass in a way consistent with compatibilist freedom, (2) God's election and predestination are not based on foreknowledge, but rather his own sovereign will and (3) saving faith is such that once God's grace is given to a sinner, it is not possible for that person not to believe.¹

God created free creatures from which evil (including turning our backs on our own creator) can originate. This does not make God the originator of evil, on the contrary. Free creatures must be worth having even if the cost is that some may be lost. Some have referred it as playing a football game. We willingly enter the game knowing that we may loose, but we play nonetheless.

We must have moral and rational freedom for responsible agency, including deciding whether the gospel is compelling enough to believe. Henry Morris in his daily devotional email describes (I replaced KJV verses with ESV ones for ease of reading):

"And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls." (Joel 2:32)

"So Peter opened his mouth and said: "Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him." (Acts 10:34-35).

Yet in the above "everyone" passage of the Old Testament, it is clear that those who "call on the name of the LORD" were the same as "the survivors whom the Lord calls." Those who call on the Lord have first been called by the Lord. He accepts all those who call on Him from every nation, but no doubt their geographical location to a large extent determines whether they will even hear of Him, and "But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" (Romans 10:14).

Theologians of great intellect have wrestled with these questions for centuries, without resolving them, at least to the satisfaction of those of different mental persuasion. On the practical level, however, the Holy Spirit led Peter to quote this passage in his great sermon on the Day of Pentecost: "And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." (Acts 2:21).

Peter was still speaking only to Jews, of course, but they had assembled at Jerusalem "from every nation under heaven." (Acts 2:5). But then Paul made it forever plain that "everyone" applied to everyone when he also quoted Joel. "For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For 'everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'" (Romans 10:12-13).

The Lord Jesus Christ Himself, on the very last page of Scripture, says: "The Spirit and the Bride say, 'Come.' And let the one who hears say, 'Come.' And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price." (Revelation 22:17). So, whosoever will, may come! One can contemplate later, with deep thanksgiving, the mysteries of the divine call, but first he must come, and if he so wills, he may! HMM²

Believe and be saved!

¹James Porter Moreland, William Lane Craig, Philosophical foundations for a Christian worldview. InterVarsity Press, 2003., p.281.
²Henry Morris, Whosoever will may come, Days of Praise, Institute for Creation Research, April 27, 2009. Answers in Genesis Days of Praise articles , Answers magazine (a biblical worldview publication with over 70,000 worldwide subscribers) and the Creation Museum.
The Photo is a quickly put together combination of drowning, the word Salvation and a lifesaver.

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Of Hurdles and Bolts

Seven hurdles neo-Darwinists must overcome.



Neo-Darwinian macroevolutionists eliminate forethought and purpose from the discussion of how we came to be. The evolutionist believes that purpose arose from natural processes with no intelligent forethought involved. No goals, no direction, and no purpose before the fact.

Science has never been clearly defined but it is about finding out how things work, and limiting ourselves to natural selection mechanisms to explain how a thing like a bacterial flagellum works doesn't seem like good science to me. Scientists don't always appeal to natural causes, otherwise SETI scientists, while searching for intelligent beings with thoughts and desires to communicate with others, aren't scientists at all. Claiming that an intelligence is responsible for creating complex information bearing signals is more credible than saying it just happened by some unguided natural process. How long can they hang on to this outdated theory remains to be seen. For now they have a lot of hurdles to overcome.

Without prior knowledge of function, Darwinian selection mechanisms cannot build anything coherently. Astronomer Fred Hoyle used the 747 in the junkyard example and Mathematician William Dembski used a contractor building a house to demonstrate how overwhelmingly difficult (read greater than one in 10^50 chance) it would be for evolution to give rise to purpose bearing biological systems. I'll talk about a bolt, a simple bolt to demonstrate the same hurdles outlined by Dembski. This is not a strawman argument as evolutionists tend to claim. No foresight and planning is exactly what they teach. They also will claim that there is no particular end target in nature like a 747 or a house, so basically whatever emerges just appears to be designed.

In this example, you are just looking for a bolt needed for a particular functioning system, but there are those seven hurdles you must overcome so let's get going.

1. Availability - Getting the right materials

Ever went to a hardware store to locate a bolt that fits something you already have? Today, you may have the luxury to pull up Google maps and find just the right bolt place in seconds, but picture yourself without any technology available to you. Do they even make or carry the kind of bolts you need. Natural selection is a bit like that, except you don't know what type of bolt you're looking for, if it even exists, what coordinates the store is at or even the city it is located in. After rummaging through endless cities, you find a hardware store and it just happens to carry bolts.

2. Synchronization - The store closes in five minutes

You forgot about time zones, you're on the other side of the planet now and it's dark and rainy over here, making it very difficult to see and find the front door. This is really messing up your timing and you don't even know if that bolt exists now, ever existed or will exist in the future.

3. Localization - Don't tell me these guys need the same bolt

You finally step into the store and start looking for a loose bolt, just waiting for you to pick up, hoping it is not attached to something else necessary for the store to stay up. Hopefully they will be willing to sell the bolt and the cost won't be too exhorbitant. But we'll grant that cost is no object.

4. Interfering Cross-Reactions - Avoiding chaos, melange and clutter

Now that you are in the hardware store you have to avoid the mousetraps, the rat poison, the lightbulbs, the wood beams, and the thousands of other categories of items for sale in the hardware store to make your way to bolts. Nothing is on shelves and nothing is placed neatly in bins. So after going through an exorbitant amount of nuts, washers, screws, nails and other store items you finally sort out the bolts. Bolts in reality have an infinite combination of thread patterns, lengths and strength ratings by the way making your task very difficult.

5. Interface compatibility - Fit and match perfectly

You have thousands of bolts to choose from, but yours must fit and match perfectly with other materials in order to perform the function. After some trial and error, you realize that none of them fit. As an intelligent agent you can ask what is this bolt supposed to fit, but as a Darwinian mechanism of random variation and natural selection you can't even begin to ask that question. This is when you realize that the bolt you need is no ordinary bolt. What you need is known as a separation bolt, is about 25 inches long, approximately 3 inches in diameter and weighs about 70 pounds. Separation bolts are used on space shuttles and are made of a special nickel-chromium alloy. The bolt must be made of Inconel 718 alloy and must meet a precise composition and have a melting point of exactly 2,437 °F. To be usable and function on the shuttle, it has to have a groove, or separation plane, about 11.5 inches from the top that allows it to break when the pyrotechnic devices fire. You really didn't plan how you were going to carry a 70 lbs bolt around and that poses another difficulty, but we'll say that you can overcome it.

6. Order of Assembly. Show up at the right time without perturbing other systems

Now, separation bolts belong to space shuttles whose undivulged assembly line location you have yet to find. Of course you have no idea what an assembly line or a shuttle looks like. But you happen to find it and you are right on time to provide the bolt necessary for assembly. We'll give natural selection all the advantages here, and pretend that after some trial and error, you find the exact location of the bolt on the shuttle. You must place your bolt precisely in the right place at the right time because the bolt catcher must fit on top. Scratching any surface while doing this may endanger the flight, cause a catastrophic accident and void any progress done so far. So even your trial and error process must be careful not to destroy anything else.

7. Configuration. All systems go?

We know that the space shuttle will surely be destroyed if the bolt does not meet the tight tolerances of the project as a whole. Each part, the external tank, the solid rocket booster, the bolt catcher and each piece of the shuttle including your bolt must be assembled in the proper sequence and in the correct fashion to form a coherent functional space shuttle that will not only take off, but accomplish its mission and come back to earth safely.

Well, now that this lengthy process is over, you can take your blindfold off.

Design theorists give neo-Darwinists every significant advantage by giving them the right bolt eventually, but without prior knowledge of what the bolt is for, the probability of every part coming together just right is implausibly small. You also never damaged the bolt during transport, loose the bolt, fall off a cliff into the ocean during your search or even question the manufacturing process involved in making such a bolt in the first place. More importantly, there is not enough time for this and the other innumerable precise processes necessary to take place.

Now, unless neo-Darwinists take a Noah's Ark approach that all comes together perfectly for those who wait, I'd suggest pondering a little about the implications. You have to have great faith to believe in evolution. I've taken a shuttle bolt as an example, but it may as well be a lawn mower bolt or a screw on a manual pencil sharpener.

What are the odds for the whole system coming together to perform its function? With no direction (no forethought or know-how) and without goals... it is so infinitely small as to defy reality.

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Irreducible Core

After studying the concept of irreducible complexity advanced by Michael Behe, and reading William Dembski's mathematical evidence for the improbability of specified complexity one can only be left amazed at our Creator.  Keiichi Namba, studies the irreducibly complex bacterial flagellum and observes that "the mechanism of this highly efficient flagellar motor is far beyond the capabilities of artificial motors."

The probability that parts just came together with any amount of randomness  to create this marvel of engineering is zero.  Thinking that 50 different separate protein parts can find each other randomly to fulfill a single operational purpose is beyond absurd.  Remember that this is a moving target with what Behe and Dembski describe as having well-matched  interacting parts indispensable for basic function.

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In this picture I wanted to focus on mission and purpose.  Like the flagellum propelling the bacterial cell with intention and purpose, the evinrude motor pushes the boat that carries this military Special Forces crew to accomplish their mission.  If the motor does not work, the mission at it was designed ends. Period.  There is no chance involved in the process.  Either the engine functions as intended and carries the crew where it needs to or it doesn't. Purpose for the Evinrude engine does not emerge from a bottom-up unguided and random process, the die-hard evolutionist like to believe in so blindly.  Purpose comes from top-down design.  Engineers conceptualize the outboard motor taking into account multiple complex factors including the laws of physics, force, inertia, and velocity. Orders come down from top command.

An impressive feature of this rotary motor is its ability to rotate at 20,000 rpm, even as high as 100,000 rpm, and change direction in a split second.  For comparison, the Yamaha Evinrude 300HP outboard engines rotate as high as 5000-6000 rpm. Here are some others for reference:

Ferrari: 8,500 rpm
Hayabusa bike: 9,900 rpm
Dragster: 10,000 rpm
Ferrari Formula1: 20,000 rpm
Micro-engines: 40,000 to 100,000 rpm 

Keiichi Namba continues, "After the motor has been formed, the flagellar filament, which functions as a helical propeller, is assembled.  Precise recognition of the template structure by component proteins allows this highly ordered self-assembly process to proceed without error. The flagellar filament is made of 20,000 to 30,000 copies of flagellin polymerized into a helical tube structure."

About the assembly of the filament lattice which extends from the motor and acts as the propeller, Science magazine (December 15, 2000) says "'action at a distance' --the assembly of a structure at a location far away from the bacterial cell--is a much more sophisticated process than any of us could ever have envisaged."

Purposeless evolution?  It is utterly incapable of overcoming the inherent purpose we observe here.

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Creating Matter

1. E=MC² (Energy = Matter x Speed of Light²) or inversely M=E/C²
2. Matter cannot be the originator of matter; this avoids an infinite regress or circular reasoning.
3. Therefore a mind (God, a designer) creating matter (the universe) is a better explanation.
4. Designer is a free agent, that is, he is free to act or refrain from acting.
5. Free acting agents are conscious beings.
6. Designing activity occurs in consciousness of free agent.
7. Exertions of will, like wanting to raise an eyebrow or an arm, even if one physically can’t, produce energy.
8. Designer exerts his will when he freely acts to create his design (i.e. the universe)
9. Designer transforms energy into matter by exertion of will.

First posted as 30 absolutist 02/20/2009 5:28 pm. Inspired from JP Moreland, The Argument from Consciousness.

If the universe has consciousness at its core, we can expect design in the universe and be able to better explain conscious beings with the ability to think, conceptualize and create. A sentence made of words for example starts as an immaterial thought which is willed into being when it is written down on paper. Another example might be an idea about a recipe. The designer, you in this case, thinks about the final product, perhaps a Nutella cake, the necessary ingredients, the steps required, the cooking time, and wills the cake into being. Language. singing or creating music are other examples of this amazing ability. Contrary to God, our power is limited as we cannot will the ingredients into being. In our case, God provides the raw elements and it seems we are made to work perfectly under these conditions. We are able to use what's available to us to make just about anything we put our mind to.

We have been given the ability to interact with the world in the most perfect way. Just look at the way our arms and hands are designed.

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Sequence and information

I came to work this morning to find that Dallas, a co-worker, reordered my keyboard keys in alphabetical order instead of the US QWERTY sequence.  A little prank that frankly irritated me a little at first (messing with my computer will do that), but as I started putting the keyboard together I started to think about protein assembly and the improbability that amino acids could come together by any natural process involving any amount of randomness whatsoever.




It is not sufficient to have all 26 letters to make words and sentences, or in the case of biology, amino acids to build up proteins, a cell, a buffalo or a human being from the bottom up.  Letters on a keyboard must be properly oriented and ordered in the right sequence to maintain the keyboard's proper functioning, namely to remain intelligible to the user so that correct sentences can be written. Likewise, amino acids must be assembled in the proper sequence to create functioning proteins.



In reconstructing the keyboard I had to be careful to put each key back in its proper slot to keep it functioning properly. If one does not know the order of the keys, pressing on the switch underneath the key and observe the output on the screen will reveal the correct place for each key. Under materialistic conditions there would be no intelligence guiding the process of building a functioning cell.



The odds of me reassembling the keyboard in the proper sequence without prior knowledge of the order and without using this trick is so slim that it is practically inexistent.  Actually, the probability of the reordering of the keys following the US QWERTY sequence by chance is the same as ordering the letters in their alphabetical order, and these guys at have already done the math.

"The probability of getting each letter in its correct position is 1 out of 26 tries, and so it will take (on average) 26 to the 26th power (26²⁶) trials to get the entire alphabet correct (and then natural selection would have something to work on, let's say, like the first life, or a brand new protein). At 100,000 trials per second it should take about:  26²⁶ (trials) / 3,155,760,000,000 (trials/year) = 1,950,756,580,000,000,000,000,000 years!"

In fact you can download their program and let it run to see what you get.  Who knows you could win some cash.  They're offering $1,500 to the first person who gets 15 out of 26 in the correct sequence.



This exercise made reassembling the keyboard actually fun! The price I paid for hiding my co-worker's backpack in the showroom Beetle trunk.

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1st Grade Common Sense

I saw Gabe's 1st grade class assignment laying on the kitchen counter.



When asked where this sheet of paper came from and who created it Gabe says: "The teacher did!"  I couldn't help but think that the public school system is hypocritical.  While I commend Gabe's grade school on the one hand for teaching basic logic skills using patterns on a sheet of paper, when one is exposed to patterns in biological life in higher education, these information bearing patterns are taught to be the result of natural selection and randomness. This is very confusing or worse, deceitful.  Consider this other pattern:


If DNA nucleotide bases come in pairs (called base pairs), and Adenine (A) only binds to Thymine (T), and Cytosine (C) only forms bonds with Guanine (G), would you be able to complete this pattern:

AT, AT, CG, TA, CG, GC, T(?), G(?)...

You would know an A comes after the T and a C after the G.  Any first grader would.  Whenever there is a pattern that contains information, first grade common sense recognizes an intelligence behind the pattern.

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