Month: April 2014

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God’s Not Dead – part 2


I was doing some research and quickly found the following statements. As I read the article I became even more aware of the efforts to explain what happened that proves what or who we are – while not really explaining much of anything. The efforts to cloud an issue while working hard to clarify and substantiate current theories is somewhat mind-boggling. If you read what is written closely you will see that the efforts put forth in the end completely support the requirement, the staging and the changes that had to take place that allowed man of old to live such a long life (up to and over 900 years). These changes in sea level and how the atmosphere changed hold such a key to who we are. Changes like these disrupt the current scientific dating methods more specifically carbon dating. As you read the report keep in mind that if the Cambrian explosion happened and it was responsible for starting life forms to evolve, and that it took place 530 million years ago, then we should not find things of human origin or things of later era’s located in this formation of the earth. However, we do find these things. Is it even possible that life of anything could have existed and then survived this explosion. Is it possible for this type explosion to happen and still keep our earth in its place in the atmosphere allowing life that existed to continue and expand into what we see today? If it took an explosion to really kick-start life as we know it, then how could it possibly take 20 million years. It would not be an explosion! It would have been a process and this is what science wants us to believe happened. So was it a process or an explosion?

LiveScience
By By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer
September 19, 2013 2:47 PM

Evolutionary ‘Big Bang’ Was Triggered by Multiple Events

The Cambrian explosion, the evolutionary “big bang” that led to the emergence of a trove of complex life forms, was caused by multiple events, researchers argue.

Genetic changes allowing for complex body plans combined with rising sea levels and an influx of chemicals into the ocean probably created the unique conditions needed to set off the Cambrian explosion, researchers argue in a perspectives paper published today (Sept. 19) in the journal Science.

“There was this cascade of events,” said study co-author Paul Smith, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. “You can see how one process might feed into one another and possibly amplify it as it feeds back.”

Evolutionary big bang

About 530 million years ago during the Cambrian Period, the diversity of life on Earth exploded. The first sea-faring predators and prey emerged, animals developed strange and diverse body plans and evolved hard exoskeletons. A recent study revealed that life evolved during the Cambrian Period at a rate about five times faster than today. [Cambrian Creatures: Images of Primitive Sea Life]

Scientists have proposed everything from genetic changes to a starburst in the Milky Way to explain the explosion in diversity.

“There are well over 30 hypotheses out there for the Cambrian explosion,” Smith told LiveScience.

Smith and his colleagues looked through all the existing research to see what could explain the evolution of complexity from relatively simple life forms that existed prior to the Cambrian explosion.

“Prior to this, a typical ecosystem would have been a microbial mat with a few things sitting on top,” Smith said. (Microbial are single cell living organisms. Where did they come from?)

At that time, animals couldn’t eat large particles of food, and there were no food webs with predators chasing prey. (if life forms started based on the theory that the big bang mixed just the right amount of chemicals and etc. together to start life, then life didn’t exist prior to the big bang. If it did exist then the big bang did not start life. At the time of the big bang no animals existed big or small. So how did it start?)

Multiple factors

The researchers found genetic changes were needed to get the ball rolling toward an explosion of life. By estimating mutation rates, biologists have concluded the genes that code for complex, easily adaptable, bilateral body plans — a necessary precursor for diverse life forms — likely evolved 150 million years prior to the Cambrian Period. (Some evidence suggests this evolution may have occurred closer in time to the Cambrian explosion.)

But genetic changes alone couldn’t explain the explosion in diversity.

The rise of sea levels and the flooding of flat, shallow areas of the continents may have served as triggering events. The flooded areas would have provided vastly more habitat for organisms, and the contact between the eroded rock surface and the seawater would have infused minerals, such as calcium and strontium, into the oceans.

Those minerals are toxic to cells, so animals would’ve needed a way to excrete them.

The animals then would have evolved the ability to incorporate those minerals into their exoskeletons, enabling much more complicated body plans, predation and more modern food webs.

The idea that many factors led to the Cambrian explosion is pretty widespread, said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in California, who was not involved in the study.

“I think there are very few people who wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree with that,” Gaines told LiveScience.

Though the Cambrian explosion is described as a big bang, it was a rather drawn-out affair occurring over 20 million years, Michael Lee, a researcher at the South Australian Museum at the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

“One would expect that a range of complex ecological and abiotic drivers might have acted at different times throughout the period,” Lee said.

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God’s not Dead


The movie “Gods Not Dead” has hit the screens and if you choose to go and see it (I highly recommend it), you may see the world from a little different angle even if it is for just a moment. For those of you that have followed any of my writings or even read a copy of my book “Deceptive Influences” you would know this is a passion of mine. I believe that this world was created and that it has not just evolved. I believe that if everyone would take the time or maybe better yet be given the total story via our education system, the world would be such a good place to live. People would love people, people would respect people, all people would have a real truthful purpose in life. It’s not that each of us don’t have goals, and it is not that goals are not important because they are, it’s that so many times we get the important ones mixed up and they end up on the back burner and many times we loose them due to our pushing them so far back we don’t even remember them. In todays world, actually this started back in history in the early 1800’s and we could even track this back hundreds of years before our time, the world decided that God was not so important and that maybe He just does not exist and set out to prove that they were correct. Going way back in time people added new god’s to the equation in search for something that they must have felt made sense to them at the time. Then came the evolutionary theory. No God at all. While this was a very small minority in the beginning, the momentum started to grow in the mid-1800’s. Many people credit Darwin with this evolutionary thinking. He stepped out and published what he felt was important and he did this for a reason. He did this after the death of his young daughter and also his younger son. I can only guess at what his attitude on life would have been. I have never experienced this personally outside of loosing my parents and grandparents, but loosing a child let alone two would be a bit devastating. It was after this that I believe Darwin lost his faith in God. Darwin had went to college and trained to be a minister. His faith was challenged and his desire to find a different path was set.

I believe that this is true for any of us when faced with things in our lives that make us feel uncomfortable, uneasy with what we see, upset with events in our lives, and just plain upset with God. So many people blame any bad thing’s that happen on God. How often do you hear or maybe you have even stated it, “If God was a good God He would not let these thing happen”. People struggle with these issues. I truly believe that if we could allow our minds to just contemplate the total story, we would be able to understanding that it is not God doing these things. I had an example of this explain to me and it goes like this.

“If a father and a son were walking along a path together, and the son fell down and hurt himself, was it the fathers fault? Did the father cause him to fall? Or was it the father that reach down and picked up his son and help him back on his feet or carried him back home?”

Digging into this topic I have discovered that it really does come down to a single question. It should have nothing to do with what makes us comfortable, how we want to live our lives or what makes us happy. It has to do with the truth behind who we are. Were we created or did we just evolve? You may not want to tackle this question or even explore it due to our human inclination to keep our lives comfortable with where we are. However, if we were created then it is a very real possibility that God is real and that what He created is each of us. If we evolved from something, then He is not real. It takes faith to believe in either. It is now a matter of where you place your faith. When placing it one way or the other you need to do this with an understanding of all the information out there and not just what someone wants you to believe. We live in a world that either tells us what to do or provides advertising in an attempt to control our desires. What we need to do is make that decision ourselves based on our discovery journey. Believing in God is not restrictive outside of what we should not be doing anyway and allows each of us to live a great life. If you decide to believe in evolution you should still desire to live by the same rules of life. In either case our life on earth would be so much better if we all followed these simple rules. They are called the 10 commandments.

I welcome any comments and thoughts from either side of this discussion. It is an exciting journey we are on and to share and explore is what makes this life so interesting. Thanks in advance for your support and too each and every explorer that decides to jump aboard this discovery journey with me.