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Some people claim that 2 + 2 = 4 in base 10 math. But think about this for a moment. Someone could claim that 2 + 2 = 5. Or that 2 + 2 = 7,380,934. Now here’s the thing about that. Those people who would say the answer to 2 + 2 is some particular answer or another are typically those people who fit into a certain demographic (i.e., those who come up with counterarguments to poor reasoning may be culturally biased toward stating 2 + 2 = 5). So we can use the OTF to examine whether it is right in treating any answer to 2 + 2 as valid.

Now there are essentially an infinite number of answers you could claim satisfy 2 + 2. Yet certain mathematicians will insist that 2 + 2 = 4 in all cases in base 10 math. Even facing the OTF, they insist their answer could be the only correct one.

Fine. I understand this and I grant it. Even though their particular brand of mathematical solution has a low probability to it they could still have the correct answer after all. At this point though, they are talking about possibilities. Their answer could still be true even though the odds are their answer is wrong. This is sort of like winning the lottery when there are an infinite number of mathematical tickets to draw out of a barrel. The odds are 1 in infinity but that doesn’t give any one of them pause. Even if we pare the possible solutions down to positive whole numbers, acknowledging the rest are negatives or fractions or even irrational numbers, this still doesn’t change much of anything, nor would it give them any pause. Why? Because they have done a dance that I now call The Delusional Sidestep (TDS). Since the consequences of the demographic data are quickly recognized by them to require the OTF they make a quick sidestep to avoid it by claiming they could still be right despite the odds. Wait just a minute!? What about the odds? Ahhh, just ignore them we’re told. There is nothing to see here. Move along. We prefer our delusion to the actual probabilities.

Remember, it doesn’t matter that someone can provide actual reasons why one answer is valid and another isn’t. WE MUST NOT IGNORE THE ODDS! Why, any statistician would agree with me here. What are the odds the Roman Empire was located in present-day Italy? Well, there are 195 countries in the world now, so the answer is 1 in 195. Obviously, therefore, it is not at all likely that the Roman Empire was located in present-day Italy. What are the odds that Obama is president of the United States? Well, the population of the United States is 307,006,550, so the answer is 1 in 307,006,550. Obviously, therefore, it is not at all likely that Obama is president of the United States.

It’s obvious to any intelligent person that there are far more ways for a factual question to be answered incorrectly than correctly, and therefore the odds that any particular answer is actually true is quite low. Therefore, if you make a factual claim, the OTF says you’re talking bunk so I don’t have to listen to a single thing you say. Only a non-scholar could possibly disagree with my brilliance.

I have been dialoging a bit with Skarlet on the subject of whether the claim that God permitting of evil to occur exculpates Him, whereas God’s foreordaining or determining of evil does not. Since I am criticizing the Arminian view, as expressed by most people I’ve talked with and by Skarlet in particular, I must point out that throughout this particular post I will be assuming the moral position of Arminianism is true, especially concerning the definition of love. This will save me from having to notate each statement. Thus, if I say, “God loves such-and-so person” I don’t have to add “under Arminianism.” Furthermore, this is an internal critique of Arminianism. I would not frame the subject in this manner if I were presenting Calvinism. All this should be obvious even before, but now I’ve made it explicit too.

Anyway, I believe the tension of the issue can most fully be expressed by the question: “Is it loving to permit an injustice to occur when you have the ability to stop it?” For the moment, I’m restricting this question to humans only, so I’m not concerned yet with whether it is loving for God to do so.

When Skarlet critiqued the Calvinist position, she offered up the illustration of an eight-year-old being raped. I will therefore continue with that illustration, re-presenting some of what I already asked Skarlet before, but also adding some commentary and teasing out some of the logical implications as we go along. Let’s see if we can understand the entirety of the question first.

Suppose that there is an eight-year-old girl being raped. Are you obligated to rescue her?

Obviously, there is not enough information immediately available to answer this question. The location of the parties involved, for one thing, is highly relevant. If the rape is occurring in Boston and you live in Bermuda, it is difficult to argue with a straight face that someone is obligated to go that far out of his way to stop such an attack.

More important to our discussion, the relative strength of the parties involved is also relevant. If you are in position where you could logically render aid, yet the eight-year-old girl is being raped by several strong, athletic body-builders, or by someone wielding a weapon, while you in contrast are a mere 110 lbs and confined to a wheelchair, again it would be ludicrous to believe you are obligated to rescue the girl.

What about the other extreme then? Suppose it’s the 110 lb weakling who is raping the eight-year-old girl, whereas you are an athlete in the prime of your life and you happened to have brought your AK47 to show off to your defensive linemen friends when the attack occurs five feet in front of you. At this point, is there an obligation to rescue the girl? It doesn’t seem that it is at all possible for the rapist to harm you, and instead it seems almost trivial that you would be able to subdue him instead, saving the girl from a horrible event. It appears that at most all that could happen to you is that you are inconvenienced for a moment.

If you stand five feet away and permit this sexual assault to happen, are you not rightly condemned for your inaction? Does Scripture not say that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves? And if that is the case, is it loving for you to allow the eight-year-old girl to be raped when you could have so easily stopped it? Perhaps the rapist might believe it is loving! But certainly not the victim.

So it appears that the moral imperative to act is dependent upon some sliding factors, and most of those factors seem to concentrate on the risk involved. It seems to boil down to the fact that we do not require someone to self-sacrifice in order to save another person, but we also do not let them off the hook when it is no self-sacrifice and they refuse to act. That is, if the risk of injury to life or limb is high enough, there is no moral impetus to act to save someone in need; but if there is little or no risk then one must act.

But we can clearly extrapolate this back to God. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. His omnipresence means that when the eight-year-old girl is being attacked by the rapist, He is in a location where He could intervene. His omniscience means that He knows even before it happens that the attack is going to happen, and furthermore He knows what He could do to prevent it or to neutralize it once it begins. And finally, his omnipotence means He has the power to ensure that the girl is saved with absolutely no risk to Himself. If all these things are true, then how does God not have a moral requirement to save the girl?

Even that example doesn’t truly show the scope to which God is involved though. For one thing, neither the girl nor the rapist would exist had God not created them. For that matter, the ability for the rapist to get to the girl would not have existed without God having created the world either. Furthermore, as Christians we believe that God’s power is what continues to keep everything that exists existing. Which means that nothing exists unless God is actively using His own power, willing it to exist. So as the rapist is raping the eight-year-old girl, God is at that very moment continuing to sustain the existence of the rapist.

Furthermore, we know that the wages of sin is death, so life is not owed to anyone. As a result, God would not be unjust in killing the rapist, even before the rapist attacked the eight-year-old girl. So even if God did not want to use His power to remove the rapist in a different manner (such as physically forcing him away), He could still simply strike the rapist dead at any moment and the attack would cease. God would have violated no sense of justice in doing so. The rapist is not owed life, nor even existence.

More importantly: how can anyone argue that God in the Arminian sense loves the eight-year-old girl here? It seems to me that at best all you’ve got is a completely dispassionate God who couldn’t care less about her, if not a God who actively hates her. It seems to me that all an Arminian can do is say, “God says He loves her.” But at this point, shouldn’t actions speak louder than words?

So let me make this blunt for Skarlet. Skarlet, suppose that you are the eight-year-old girl. Suppose that you are in the process of being raped, and I am standing just a few feet away. I fully know what is happening to you. I could stop it from happening without any risk at all to myself, yet I sit by and let the attack go on. Then, after all of that, suppose I had the gall to go up to you and say, “I love you.” What would you do?

Or let’s make it even more analogous. Suppose that the rapist is a creature that I designed in a lab. I used quantum mechanics to ensure the creature makes non-determined choices. In the process of designing the creature, it became apparent that I need to constantly feed it electrical current from a generator that I have to carry with me. Now suppose that that creature is roaming the country with me in tow (continuing to feed it electrical current from my generator) and it attacks and rapes you. At this point, all I need to do to stop the attack is simply turn off the generator I’m carrying. Yet I do not do so, nor do I try in any other way to stop the attack. You cannot argue that I caused the attack to happen, since it occurred as the result of a chain of non-determined quantum states; and yet would I not rightly be arrested and jailed for all of this? And would you not spit in my face if I told you that I did all this out of love for you and everyone else in the world?

Clearly “permission” does not exculpate humans when they are in as analogous a position to God as we can think of. What actually is different about God that enables “permission” to exculpate Him? Furthermore, what is it about that actual detail—whatever it is—that would exculpate God via permission and yet would not simultaneously exculpate God for determining what happened instead of permitting it?

Now Skarlet has offered one possible defense here, which is to quote C.S. Lewis from The Problem of Pain. Lewis’s argument is predicated on the assumption that the possibility of pain arises naturally as a risk whenever free will occurs. He concludes:

So it is with the life of souls in a world: ?xed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is con?ned and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you ?nd that you have excluded life itself.

Yet Lewis seemingly forgets that in Heaven there will be no pain or suffering at all. How is this possible if “the possibility of suffering” is a direct result of “the order of nature and the existence of free wills”? The only answer can be that in Heaven we will have no free will. And yet if we will have no free will in Heaven, why do Arminians contend we must have free will on Earth? But an even greater problem, if not having those means you’ve “excluded life itself” then Lewis must mean that there will be no life after death in the first place! Surely not an orthodox view to hold.

Additionally, even most Libertarians grant that freedom does not require us to have the ability to make every possible choice. After all, God cannot make an evil choice yet is considered free. So that means that pain is not a necessary risk in granting creatures free will, for the free will need only be between options that are good or better, and not even allow evil to be an option. Indeed, that is how some Libertarians argue to say we keep free will in Heaven. Yet if it works in Heaven, why can’t God implement it on Earth? If it is moral in Heaven, where we will spend our eternity, how could it not be moral on Earth?

“…this book will destroy Christianity.”

Those words by atheist Michael Martin are located in the blurb he wrote that appears on the back cover of The Christian Delusion, edited by John Loftus (speaking of back cover blurbs, Dale C. Allison, Jr. starts his blurb by instructing us to “Forget Dawkins” and that’s sage advice no matter who gives it). Furthermore, Keith Parsons states of The Christian Delusion that “there can have been few works as effective” at debunking Christianity. Ken Pulliam states: “It demonstrates that those who believe in the tenets of evangelical Christianity truly are deluded.”

The book contains chapters written by a wide range of modern atheists, including Hector Avalos, Richard Carrier, and Edward T. Babinski[*]. (If those names sound familiar it’s because we’ve engaged with each of them many times on Triablogue.) Of his contribution to the book, Carrier slapped both of his chapters with a “tour de force” label and confidently assured us, “I doubt I’ll ever have to write another [refutation of the resurrection].” He says: “My debunking of [Christian claims on science] is so decisive in this chapter, you won’t need to refer anyone anywhere else.”

But such hubris vastly overreaches reality, and Triablogue is here to demonstrate it with The Infidel Delusion.

The Infidel Delusion was written (in alphabetical order) by Patrick Chan, Jason Engwer, Steve Hays, and Paul Manata. This is a true tour de force. By the time I got to Manata’s debunking of Valerie Tarico’s naturalistic reductionism in chapter two, the perfect metaphor had formed in my head: Collectively, these Triabloggian authors were firing intellectual howitzer shells point-blank into a cardboard shanty town.

Each chapter of The Christian Delusion is thoroughly debunked by Hay’s philosophical and theological acumen, Engwer’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, Chan’s medical training, and/or Manata’s philosophical prowess. Contrary to the tactic The Christian Delusion used—to attack the weakest arguments put forth in the name of Christianity—the authors of The Infidel Delusion dismantled the strongest arguments atheists had to offer. Indeed, if there truly are “few works as effective” as The Christian Delusion, as Parsons claimed, then Triablogue shows atheism to be in a sad state indeed.

A Quick Overview of What’s in The Infidel Delusion
After introductions from Hays, Engwer, and Manata, the debunking of The Christian Delusion begins. In chapter one, Eller’s entire premise is shown to be at odds with the rest of The Christian Delusion, making that book internally incoherent. Eller’s belief that there is no real Christianity, but instead thousands of Christianities, actually destroys the basis for The Christian Delusion by rendering the idea that there is such a thing as Christianity (singular) to refute moot. If atheists are to be consistent, either Eller’s contribution must go or it must stand alone.

Chapter two shows Tarico’s cognitive research to be nowhere near adequate to explain what she thinks it explains. In addition to being self-refuting, Manata makes an excellent case that Tarico doesn’t even understand the issues involved in naturalism and scientific reductionism. Additionally, Chan includes a great deal on the medical issues involved, including debunking the idea that Paul’s vision of Christ on the Road to Damascus could be explained by a frontal lobe seizure.

Chapter three deals with Long’s attempt to show cultural background determines how one will believe. This sort of cultural relativism is a double-edged sword, however. If it works against Christianity, it is only at the expense of destroying atheism in the process.

Chapter four gets us to the heart of The Christian Delusion, the Outsider Test for Faith that forms the key of Loftus’s atheistic apologetic. Hays demonstrates how Loftus doesn’t consistently apply this test since it equally destroys his own view. Engwer shows that the attitude Loftus has about how beliefs are formed doesn’t cohere to Christian experience. And finally, Manata demonstrates that the outsider test is “vague, ambiguous, invalid, unsound, superfluous, informally fallacious, and subject to a defeater-deflector.”

Chapter five reviews Babinski’s flawed view of Jewish cosmology based on uncharitable assumptions about the stupidity of ancient people and their lack of ability to understand figurative language; chapter six shows Tobin’s repeating of common objections to Scripture (creating “dilemma” by ignoring all conservative scholarship, and even most liberal scholarship); and chapter seven refutes Loftus’s claim that Scripture is unclear, ironically in part by showing that if Loftus’s chapter is true, Babinski’s and Tobin’s must be false! But internal consistency is not something The Christian Delusion was concerned with.

Chapter eight deals with Avalos’s claims that Yahweh is a “moral monster.” Yet this once again requires us to reject Loftus’s chapter seven, and furthermore Avalos’s moral relativism defeats his own argument.

Chapter nine deals with concepts of animal suffering as evidence for the non-existence of God. Amongst other arguments, Hays deftly shows how Loftus’s claims are unsupported anthropomorphisms, while Engwer focuses on the ludicrous demands Loftus requires of believers to “answer” this “problem” and Manata shows Loftus’s argument is really nothing short of wishful thinking completely divorced from the Christian theology it was supposed to debunk.

Chapter ten reviews Price’s misuse of methodological naturalism, including the fact that Price actually ignores the vast majority of modern scholarship in rejecting the very existence of Jesus as a historical figure. Chapter eleven examines similar weaknesses of methodology in the claims Carrier makes regarding the resurrection.

Chapter twelve examines Loftus’s poor exegetical skills and his inability to understand even simple Biblical passages in context. In critiquing Christian prophecy, Loftus manages to all but ignore the preterist movement and makes some rather basic label errors on the positions he does look at.

Chapter thirteen deals with Eller’s moral claims, especially in light of his rejection of objective morality. The Infidel Delusion shows how his evolutionary claims are insufficient to create any type of morality.

Chapter fourteen shows that Avalos’s argument that atheism didn’t cause the Holocaust is irrelevant to the issue of whether Christianity is true. Finally, chapter fifteen shows that Carrier’s historical claims that Christians are not responsible for modern science is both irrelevant to the issue of the truth of Christianity as well as focused on the wrong issues, even within the context of his argument.

The last section of The Infidel Delusion consists of ten appendices that give us more detail into some of the arguments presented within the various chapters, as well as a look at some of the specific claims made by contributors to The Christian Delusion outside of the scope of that actual book.

Conclusion
The Infidel Delusion debunks the entirety of The Christian Delusion. This is not to say it addresses every single flaw in The Christian Delusion—such would take multiple volumes. But there is no major claim made in The Christian Delusion that withstands the criticism leveled at it in The Infidel Delusion. As Steve Hays wrote in his introduction, “…if The Christian Delusion turns out to be just another white elephant in the overcrowded zoo of militant atheism, then that‘s a vindication of the Christian faith.”

The Infidel Delusion certainly demonstrates this.

Full disclosure: While I did not contribute any writing to The Infidel Delusion, I did edit, collate, and format the ebook.

UPDATE:
[*] To be fair, Babinski classifies himself as an agnostic.

Arminians often attempt to insulate God from moral complaints against His sovereignty by falling back to the “permissive” argument. For example, in dealing with the problem of evil, they assert that God does not deterministically cause any evil to occur, but instead He merely allows it to happen, and because he permits it instead of ordaining it, He is somehow no longer culpable. On Triablogue, we’ve often discussed this issue and why it isn’t defensible on philosophical grounds for an Arminian to claim that permission could exempt God from culpability. In the process, we’ve also made many exegetical arguments for our position as well. I do not wish to rehash old ground anew, but instead to add yet one more Scriptural proof that permission alone is insufficient to exempt someone from culpability. And that Scriptural proof is found in the Law of Moses.

Exodus 21:28 states:

When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall not be liable.

Now an ox is an animal, and as such it as a rudimentary will. It is not an inanimate object, in other words, and it will often do things that the owner does not wish for it to do. Anyone who has ever owned livestock—or even pets, for that matter—knows of the frustration of wanting an animal to do something and the animal not doing it.

What is clear from this verse is that the owner of the ox is not held responsible for the actions of the ox. Presumably, this would be due to the fact that the ox’s will is not the owner’s will, and that is why the owner is not liable. The owner did not wish for the ox to kill anyone, the owner did not plan for this, therefore the owner is not culpable.

Thus far, it looks like this would be evidence for the position that if God permits something evil to occur He is not culpable for that. However, the very next verse reads:

But if the ox has been accustomed to gore in the past, and its owner has been warned but has not kept it in, and it kills a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.

And here we see that the escape to “permission” cannot remove culpability from God. For we see that it is still the case that the owner of the ox does not will that the ox gore anyone, and we still see that the owner does not plan this event to happen, yet nevertheless the owner is held responsible with the same penalty imposed as if he had murdered the man himself. Why is the owner culpable? Because he did not take measures needed to reign in an ox “accustomed to gore.” He is negligent for not stopping that which he knew was dangerous, and therefore he receives the same penalty as if he had personally acted instead of the ox.

It seems to me that this verse neutralizes not only all Arminian arguments designed to exculpate God, but it even neutralizes Open Theist arguments. For the Arminian is now in the unenviable position of acknowledging that God has exhaustive foreknowledge and knows not only which ox will gore which person, but also which person will murder another. And if the owner of an ox is culpable when he knows full well that he has a dangerous ox, then God surely must likewise be culpable if He knows full well that a created being He put on Earth is a danger to others. Likewise, the Open Theist is not let off the hook because even if God did not know at first the human beings were going to commit evil, once they did and He did not take measures to restrain that evil, then this verse would show God is just as guilty as if He Himself did the evil. So clearly, the argument that “permission” exculpates is invalidated by the Law itself.

Now for the record, and because I know that some will misread what I write here, I am not saying that it really is the case that God is culpable for evil and that Arminians will just need to learn to deal with it like we icky determinists do. Rather, I am only saying that one cannot escape to “permission” to get God “off the hook” given the typical starting point of morality that most Arminians (and not only Arminians, mind you) have. Since I am a Divine Command Theorist, then my own position doesn’t start where there’s does. Indeed, I don’t have to use “permission” to get God “off the hook” because God is never on the hook to begin with under DCT.

William Birch has been doing a series on eschatology over on his blog and I typically disagree with almost everything Birch writes… :-D

This time, however, I’ve found his posts to be quite useful for sparking thought and they also provide a good bit of relevant background data, and I don’t feel the need to try to try to refute the few areas we disagree on.

Eschatology is a very divisive thing in modern Christiandom, and sadly so. I say “sadly so” because in my opinion it’s about the least important systematized Christian doctrine. The broad outline is not trivial, of course—but then every view holds the broad picture to be the same: in the end, Jesus wins. I’m talking about the particulars: whether someone is premillennial, postmillennial, or Biblically sound amillennial. Add on the fact that we have people who are pre-, mid-, or post-tribulation too. Then there’s the Preterist movement, which consists of full preterism, partial-preterism, and historic preterism, and probably a few other adjectives too.

One thing about eschatology is clear, and that’s that eschatology isn’t very clear at all. The proof of that is found not only in the wide variety of doctrinal positions, but also in the fact that there don’t seem to be much “connective tissue” between the various sub-levels of positions. True, there are general trends. For instance, preterism doesn’t seem to be all that popular amongst dispensational circles (mostly due to the fact that dispensationals tend to be premillennial, whereas preterists tend to be a- or postmillennial). However, it’s still not unheard of to have a dispensational preterist.

In fact, if we randomly assigned various labels from eschatology, I doubt most people would say, “Wait a minute, those views don’t go together.” In other words, someone could say they’re a post-trib amillinial dispensationalist and another could say he’s a pre-trib covenantal historical premillinialist and none of us will cry out that it’s a contradiction. On the other hand, have someone say, “As a Calvinist, I hold to Libertarian Free Will” and you’re going to see sparks fly.

As I said, this shows me that Biblical teaching on eschatology is not very clear at all. Now since I believe in the perspicuity of Scripture, someone might ask me why that wouldn’t cause tension in my view. Well, I believe that the Bible is clear on the subjects that it needs to be clear on—the important issues. And in the issues where the Bible is less clear, then it is not as vital that we know what’s put forth.

Now that is not to say that it’s pointless, or that somehow eschatological texts are somehow “less Scripture.” But God Himself prioritizes within Scripture, holding some things to be more important for us to know than others. Indeed, in the end, He withholds certain things from us, saying that the secret things belong to Him alone.

So when it comes to eschatology, I have no qualms whatsoever at saying, “I have no confidence at all in my understanding of this particular passage.” That said, it doesn’t hurt to hash things out, to think about Scripture amongst fellow believers, and try to gain some further understanding. So long as we don’t become sola eschatologists then we’re fine.

With that in mind, I want to share the comments (typos and all) that I left on William’s post about the 70 weeks of Daniel:

Part of the problem with the numbers involved is the fact that Hebrew numerology was just plain weird (as far as modern Americans are concerned). For example, look at how Matthew displayed the geneology of Jesus so that there would be 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 from David to Babylon, and 14 from Babylon to Christ.

BTW, if we take 490 (as 70 x 7) and divide by 14, we get a generation of 35 years. That seems almost twice as long as a “typical” generation, especially when you consider that under the Roman empire the average life expectency was only around 30 (for instance, one site claims: “On average, the life expectancy at birth of women was between 20 and 30 years and that of men a bit higher”).

So, with that in mind, it’s quite plausible that the 70 weeks (or “weeks of years”) in Daniel may have little to nothing to actually do with length of time, and a whole lot more to do with some Hebrew numerological concepts.

Further, our modern concept of time is very foreign to the ANE mindset. For one thing, today we measure things to fractions of a second, and we’ve structured our lives on strictly following a rigid clock; but back then, there were no clocks. Best you got was a sundial, or maybe a water-drip or hourglass type of a thing. But our fascination with time and getting things exact wasn’t something shared by shepherds. This means that there can be an aweful lot of “rounding” going on, and it wouldn’t have concerned anyone.

Combining numerological ideas with this rounding “error rate” (for lack of a better term) has some interesting applications. For us today, we usually round to the nearest 100, 500, or 1000 when speaking of years. So we say Christ came 2000 years ago, even though it’s probably about 2014-2016 by now. Or we say that the Reformation started 500 years ago. Etc. These numbers are the kind we gravitate toward.

But consider the case of 500. If you were predisposed to considering multiples of 7 to be “holy”, it might very well be that you’d round 500 to 490, so it would by 70 x 7. So something happening 500 years from now, perhaps, you’d say was happening in 70 times 7 years. This isn’t a violation or an error anymore than us saying Christ came 2000 years ago is an error. It’s a rounding principal.

For reasons such as these, I don’t take the numbers in Daniel as requiring literalistic interpretations. That said, I do find it interesting that you can get a count that gets fairly close to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD; but I just don’t have any confidence in any of those interpretations in the end.

(Again, this is all my opinion and I don’t begrudge anyone’s disagreement.)

…

By the way, William, one other thing that may be of interest to you in your studies here is the use of Hebrew codes. By this I don’t mean the nonsense that was profligated by “The Bible Code” a decade ago. Instead, I mean such things as the “atbash” (i.e., “Sheshach” standing for “Babylon”). This shows that the Hebrews did have a rudimentary (for our times) system of encryption. And it’s also important to remember that Daniel was in the Babylonian courts (albeit as a POW, but he was still trained as a wise man) and so could have been familiar with Babylonian encryption techniques too. I haven’t had time myself to delve into any of that in detail, but depending on how much work you want to do it’s a possible path to search too. :-)

One potential objection that I want to address would be the charge that if we say that we cannot come to a full understanding of the 70 weeks in Daniel, then it was pointless for God to inspire that passage. Let us suppose that it is impossible for us to ever learn what was meant there, not just in practice but in theory too. Does that make the passage pointless to us now?

I argue that it does not render the passage pointless for at least two reasons. First, we know that the passage meant something to Daniel. When the passage was penned, it had immediate significance to that audience. Even if we are unable to discern what that meaning is, it tells us that God worked through Daniel for His purposes. And secondly, it shows us that God is proactive and responds to His people’s prayers. He doesn’t abandon them in captivity in a foreign country. He is there, with them. Both of these concepts are demonstrated, even if full interpretation is impossible. And I don’t believe it is impossible in theory, even if perhaps in practice we will never figure it out this side of heaven.

It is quite obvious that my parents know me well. For my birthday, they got me DVDs from a course on number theory. This meant I was awake far too long last night watching the first set. In the process, I learned a wicked kewl way of converting kilometers to miles using the Fibonacci series.

The Fibonacci sequence starts with 1,1 as the “seeds.” Then it follows the rule, “The next number in the Fibonacci sequence is the sum of the previous two numbers.” So the sequence begins:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55

The 2 comes from adding the previous two numbers (1 + 1). The 3 comes from adding the previous two numbers, which now are (1 + 2). The 5 follows the same rule, only now the numbers are (2 + 3). Etc.

Now it happens that the ratio between numbers in this sequence approaches the golden ratio, and at infinity it is equal to the golden ratio. The golden ratio is defined as the Greek letter phi (which doesn’t show up here, so I’ll use x instead) and can be expressed as x = 1 + 1/x. This gives us a recursive equation, one that includes itself within the definition. However, this equation can still be solved by multiplying both sides by x² = x + 1. This gives us a quadratic equation, which means we want all the terms on one side. That gives us x² – x – 1 = 0. Using the binomial theorem, we can solve this to show that x = (1 +/- sqrt(5))/2.

[In the previous equation, “sqrt(5)” stands for the square root of 5.]

Now even without a calculator, we know that the square root of 5 is just a little more than 2, since the square root of 4 is exactly two. So if we subtract the square root of 5 from 1, we will end up with a negative number as our end result. But we only want the positive version, which is x = (1 + sqrt(5))/2 so we can safely ignore the negative version.

In any case, we know that 1 + a number that is a little bigger than 2 gives us a number that is a little bigger than 3. And if we divide that number by 2, we will end up with a number a little bigger than 1.5. And the golden ratio begins 1.608…

Now it just happens that 1.6 is pretty close to the ratio between a kilometer and a mile. In other words, we have about 1.6 km per mile. So if the ratio between the numbers in the Fibonacci series in about 1.6, then we can use the Fibonacci series to convert km to miles. Let’s start easy by reprinting the Fibonacci series we had above:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55

If we want to know how many miles are in 13 km, we find 13 on the series and then look for the previous Fibonacci number, which is 8. So there are about 8 miles in 13 km. And if we measure it, we see that 13 km is roughly 8.08 miles.

But what if we want to know how to convert a number that is not part of the Fibonacci series? Well, it turns out that you can add up Fibonacci numbers to make other numbers. So suppose we want to know how many miles are in 20 km. What you do is start with the closest Fibonacci number that is smaller than the number you’re looking for. We see in this case that that would be the number 13.

So keep 13 in mind. Now if you subtract 13 from 20, you’re left with 7. Let’s find the closest Fibonacci number smaller than 7, and that’s 5. So keep 5 in mind too. Finally, if we subtract 5 from 7, we’re left with 2, which is itself a Fibonacci number. So we end with 2.

So we’ve pulled out 13, 5, and 2. And if you’ll notice, 13 + 5 + 2 = 20, our original number. So 20 is composed of those three Fibonacci numbers. What we do to convert it to miles, then, is to find the next lowest Fibonacci number for each of those composite numbers, and add them together. So the next smallest from 13 is 8, the next smallest from 5 is 3, and the next smallest from 2 is 1. 8 + 3 + 1 = 12.

So there are about 12 miles in 20 km. And by measurement, we see that 20 km is actually about 12.4 miles, so we’re pretty close.

Now you may be wondering how the above works. Well, we know that the ratio between Fibonacci numbers is the golden ratio, and the ratio between miles and km is also close to the golden ratio. This means that so long as we can express the ratio of any number as a sum of Fibonacci numbers, we can use the previous “trick” to convert them.

To demonstrate how this works, let’s use a simpler ratio: 1/2. Suppose we wanted to know what half of 20 is. Obviously, we know that 20/2 = 10. But we can express 20 as 8 + 12 too. If we then take half of each of those numbers, we get 4 +6. 4 + 6 = 10, which is identical to 20/2. Or suppose we expressed 20 as 18 + 2. Half of 18 = 9, and half of 2 = 1. 9 + 1 = 10.

Because the ratio is the same, then no matter how you compose 20, dividing each of those numbers by the same ratio before you add them together is equivalent to finding the value of the original number divided by that ratio. So the same thing happens with Fibonacci numbers, except the ratio is the golden ratio instead of a half. Therefore, if we can compose a number as the sums of Fibonacci numbers (and if I am not mistaken, I believe all natural numbers can be expressed as the sums of Fibonacci numbers), then we can use the same technique as shown above to find a conversion between km and miles.

Now I should point out that while there are many things in nature that seem to use the golden ratio, the fact that the relationship between km and miles is close to the golden ratio is actually a matter of serendipity rather than due to some natural law of the golden ratio. Apparently, the mile was defined by the English Parliament in 1592 as being 1760 yards. The survey mile was derived as being 8 furlongs (each furlong being 10 chains, each chain being 4 rods, and each rod being 25 links—yeah, you figure it out). There is no intrinsic pattern or order to any of these gradations, hence the continual demand in science to use the metric system.

A meter, on the other hand, was originally defined as the length of a pendulum with a half-period of 1 second. It was later changed to being 1/1000000 of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. In 1983, the definition was changed so that a meter is now officially the distance light travels through a vacuum in 1/299792458 seconds. This number was formed by using an updated version of the previous definition of a meter and measuring the speed of light as 299792458 meters per second; but it has now become the benchmark itself.

So these two methods, one complete arbitrary and seemingly random, and the other apparently strict measurements of distance covered through time, somehow happened to form a ratio fairly close to the golden ratio.

One of the biggest problems I have with Darwinists is their tendency to take evidence that proves a trivial portion of their theory correct and assume that proves the entire theory correct. As a result, the plethora of evidence for, say, adaptation (e.g., wolves with thicker coats in cold climates, the peppered moths of England, etc.) is used to cover the paucity of evidence for large-scale evolution (i.e., species-to-species evolution, assuming “species” is ever defined by Darwinists, of course). To give an analogy, it is as if Darwinists are attempting to convict a man of first degree murder by proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is a jaywalker. But a bunch of adaptation doesn’t lead to evolution of species anymore than a bunch of jaywalking leads to murder.

One of the strongest arguments Darwinists use is based on the fact that many different creatures look similar to each other in some fairly foundational ways, including sometimes in the genome itself. Even Michael Behe (of Darwin’s Black Box fame) believes in common decent in part because of a broken gene that is found in both chimps and humans. The assumption is that if some feature is the same in two different population groups, they must have a common ancestor with that same feature.

It is certainly plausible to assume that common features indicate a common cause, and common decent is one possible way that that could occur (whether likely or not is a different issue). But it is by no means the only way. Indeed, a common environment could just as easily explain certain common traits. That is, suppose that a gene is mutated due to radiation in the environment, and two species have that same gene and share the same environment. There is a good possibility that the gene will be mutated identically in both populations simply because of the environment, and it has nothing to do with lineage.

Naturally, I’m not saying that’s what happened with the broken gene found in both chimps and humans. I haven’t studied that particular issue enough to know either way; but I do know enough to not assume ipso facto that commonality must require common decent. Indeed, there is a specific example of which I am familiar that demonstrates just how dangerous it is for scientists to dogmatically claim decent in such a manner.

It’s called the marsupials of Australia (they also exist here and there in South America and Asia, but they reign in Australia).

Marsupials differ from placental mammals in that marsupials will give birth to their young prematurely, and then the offspring will move into a pouch (called the “marsupium”) in females, and they be raised in that pouch until they are fully developed. In contrast, placental mammals carry their offspring to full term before birth. These differences result in some anatomical differences, mostly in soft tissue, between placental mammals and marsupial mammals.

That said, there are many marsupials that look virtually identical to placental versions of the same animal, as pointed out in this article:

In some cases, placental and marsupial mammals physically resemble each other: the pouched marsupial mouse and the harvest mouse, the marsupial mole and the common mole, the marsupial wombat and the marmot, the tasmanian wolf and the wolf.

The comparison between animals is such that, for instance, in the case of the wolf it is virtually impossible for the untrained eye to tell the difference between an Australian marsupial wolf skeleton and a European placental wolf skeleton.

Let us assume Darwinism is true for this argument. If we see a marsupial wolf that looks almost exactly like a placental wolf, we would immediately argue that this proves that marsupial and placental wolves had a common wolf ancestor that diverged into two lineages: one placental and one marsupial. And indeed, for a time, this is what Darwinists believed. Likewise with the marsupial mouse and the placental mouse: they too would have had a common mouse ancestor that diverged into two lineages.

But Darwinists must also consider the case of the wolf and the mouse together. The assumption is that since both are mammals (regardless of whether marsupial or placental animals are in view) then at some point each had a common ancestor that diverged into different lineages, one of which lead to the mouse line and one of which lead to the wolf line. Thus far, the Darwinist is not in any trouble.

The problem comes when he tries to handle both of these. The Darwinist needs to account for how both the wolf and the mouse diverged into marsupial and placental lines. It seems fairly logical to say that the differences between a marsupial wolf and a placental wolf are not as extreme as the differences between a wolf and a mouse (after all, even the untrained eye can distinguish between the skeleton of a mouse and the skeleton of a wolf despite not being able to distinguish between the marsupial and placental skeletons of a wolf). This would mean that, in order of precedence, the mammal lineage should have split into the mouse lineage and the wolf lineage before each branch then split into placental and marsupial lineages.

Yet that would mean that the marsupial split needed to happen multiple times. Not just twice, but there are about twenty such species that have marsupial members with corresponding placental members, and there are also several marsupial species that only exist as marsupials.

To make matters worse, even if we could stipulate that for some unknown reason, marsupials just happen to arise a lot in the fossil record, we also have to deal with the timeline. Australia and Antarctica broke off from Gondwanaland roughly 45-80 million years ago, according to which modern geological timeline you pick. As most of us have heard repeatedly, dinosaurs ruled the world until about 65 million years ago, and the only mammals alive at the time were small shrew-like creatures. This means if we assume Australia broke off only 45 million years ago, mammals only had 20 million years to co-evolve before those mammals on Australia were isolated from the rest of the world. If Australia broke off closer to 80 million years ago, we’d only have those shrew-like creatures to develop all the species of marsupials in Australia.

Which is it? Well, today most Darwinists on this issue believe all the marsupials in Australia have come from just one species: microbiotheria. In other words, Darwinists today believe that the marsupial/placental split only happened once. After that, placental mammals developed into the wide variety of animals that exist in Europe and North America, and the marsupial mammals developed into the wide variety of animals that exist in Australia and parts of South America. In the meantime, certain lineages just happened to evolve such that the Tasmanian wolf looks exactly like a European wolf to all but the trained observer. And the marsupial mouse looks like the placental mouse. And the placental flying squirrel looks like the marsupial flying squirrel. Etc, etc, etc.

Never fear though. Darwinists already know about this and have proposed an explanation! It’s called convergent evolution. Convergence is the idea that two organisms from separate species follow similar evolutionary paths due to identical environmental pressure. Thus, according to Darwinists, there was one species on Australia that also lived on the rest of the continents with mammal life. Because the environment was similar, the decedents of organisms on either side of the divide both evolved along similar pathways, to the point that the marsupial wolf, mouse, mole, and squirrel look almost identical to the placental wolf, mouse, mole, and squirrel.

Unfortunately, Darwinists don’t see how this undercuts their best evidence for common descent: the similarity of features. For you see, one broken gene that is the same in chimps and humans is proof of common decent, but having an entire skeleton that looks indistinguishable to another organism isn’t proof of common decent—it is proof of convergence. I would think that if the environment is sufficient to explain widespread morphologic similarities between marsupial and placental mammals, it must be sufficient to explain one broken gene.

Yet when you consider the vast difference between a mouse and a wolf, there is really no reason to think that an environment that would so alter the reproductive system of certain types of mammals—such that one becomes marsupial and one becomes placental—that that same environment would somehow “magically” zero in on the exact phenotype of the wolf or mouse. Indeed, on Darwinian principles alone, would this not actually suggest that given a shrew-like mammal on Earth, it was inevitable that wolf-like creatures would come about? Doesn’t all this suggest some kind of teleology? It certainly doesn’t seem to make sense from a process of random mutation followed by natural selection. That may get you the difference between placental and marsupial mammals, but it certainly cannot explain the existence of similar placental and marsupial wolves, given how far along the Darwinian lineage they each are from their shrew-like predecessor.

In my opinion (which therefore makes it infallible truth, seeing as how Jesus said “Thou art Peter and upon this rock” etc.), the most consistently funny television show of all time was Whose Line Is It Anyway? By which I mean the American version, because the British version wasn’t as funny, although it still had its moments of greatness too. Whose Line was all about improv. There was no script, just a bunch of comedians who acted out sketches on the barest of suggestions.

One of the better sketches was called “Newsflash” and consisted of two members pretending to be newscasters while a third (usually Colin Mochrie) was put in front of a green screen. He didn’t know what was being displayed on the green screen behind him, but had to pretend that he did. By the end of the sketch, based on clues given him, he had to guess what it had actually been showing.

Here’s one of my favorite examples:

Now that you’re back from following the linked videos and getting your fill of Whose Line clips, I’ll appear to randomly change the subject…

When most of us try to visualize time, we tend to think of it from the perspective in which we perceive it. That’s to be expected, of course, but if we think about it in detail, we find flaws with our typical concepts. For example, we tend to believe that what we are experiencing as “now” is now for everyone, everywhere. That it’s some kind of “universal now.”

But this treats time as an objective reality. However, modern physics (and many philosophies) reject the objective nature of time. Time is relative to the observer in physics—there is no constant “speed” of time, and there is no objective “now” for any two observers. Indeed, one observer may view two events as simultaneous while another observer views those same two events as one preceding the other. Both views are equally valid, if you take their relative motion into account.

In the end, time is intricately linked to space. Einstein’s method of treating time as a fourth dimension worked well in math, and typically physics still keeps time as an extra dimension. Even in M-theory, where there are eleven physical dimensions, time is seen as an extra dimension too (so it’s common for someone holding to M-theory to say “There are eleven dimensions plus time”). String theory typically states there are ten dimensions plus time, and so on. Additionally, in theistic views, time is usually seen as having been created by God along with the rest of the universe. Therefore, time is intimately linked with space under theistic views too.

It’s easy for us to visualize space (or at least objects in space) as an abstract quantity. We can imagine any object, say, a desk. It exists in space, and the dimensions of the desk define the dimensions of the space the desk exists within. It is far more difficult to picture time in here as well, but we can imagine a desk as it progresses through time. The desk starts new, then gets scratches, coffee spills on it, kids draw on it, until such point as the wood begins to rot and eventually the desk crumbles away.

While it is easy for us to visualize the special aspect of the desk, we can’t visualize the entire time-line of the desk as a whole in spacetime, as that would require us to view something in at least four dimensions. But while it is difficult for us to view it, it is not at all difficult to write mathematical equations about it and understand how the variables interact with each other.

Since we view only the special aspects, we usually think of various objects as special snapshots within time. We mentally compare a start point with an end point, but we cannot see the time dimension itself. I would like to suggest that in order to view the entirety of the object, one must also take into account the timeline of the object, viewing the whole in spacetime rather than just in space. I would suggest that that is how God views the universe. Obviously we cannot do it, but we can come up with analogies to help us better understand certain concepts.

One of the better analogies has come to us from the movie industry. This is the epitome of a series of snapshots in time, usually at the rate of 24 frames per second (for movies) or 30 per second (for TV). What’s interesting is if you film at, say 48 frames per second, and play back at 24 frames per second, time will appear to take twice as long for the actors involved. Or, if you film at 12 frames per second and play it at 24 frames per second, time will appear to take half as long. Varying the speed at which action is filmed varies the appearance of time, and gives us such things as the “slow-motion” shot. Alternatively, you can alter the speed at which the film is played back (such as when you press fast-forward while playing a movie) instead of when the film is shot.

So suppose you watch a scene of a movie and you set your DVD player to play it in slow motion. The events unfold and seem to take much longer than they normally would; but, from the perspective of the characters in the video, time does not take any longer than normal. That’s because, from the character’s perspective, everything has slowed in relation to each other. Put it this way: if it takes 24 frames for the character to reach a certain point, it will always take 24 frames regardless if you play it at 12 frames per second or 48 frames per second. Changing the frame rate in playback doesn’t affect the number of frames used for the action.

Let us extend the analogy. Suppose that there are four scenes in a movie: A, B, C, and D. Suppose that for the characters, the events unfold chronologically. A happens before B, B before C, and C before D. What would happen if you took D and spliced it between A and B? You would have A, D, B, C (this would be similar to old theaters when the rolls of film got mixed up). The characters at point D know things that occurred in B and C, but D is played before B or C are played. From the point of view of the characters involved, B and C both preceded D even if D is played back before B and C. That is, as far as the characters in the movie are concerned, they have a specific history that is related to the story itself that has nothing to do with how the film is played back. You could actually randomize the entire movie so that there are no two consecutive frames. Pick any frame at random, and the characters in it will have knowledge of the history of whatever went before them, and will know nothing of the future that is ahead of them, within the context of that frame.

This means that, again as far as the characters are concerned, you could completely randomize time and they would not know it. Someone who watches the movie would know, but not the characters in it. Techniques like this (although not as extreme) have been used by many non-linear movies. Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is an example of such a non-linear story, where the things that occur chronologically at the end of the story are shown in the middle of the movie, etc. As far as the characters are concerned, there is no “jumping” in time—but the audience can see it.

Let’s take that analogy and apply it to reality itself: as long as we have a concept of history, time itself could actually be completely randomized and we would not know it. That is, the “now” that we have could have been preceded by a “now” in the middle of next week, but we wouldn’t know it because we have only the experience of our history in mind at our “now.” While it is certainly unlikely that this is the case, what it shows is once again that our experiences in time do not have any bearing on the way that time actually unfolds from the perspective of an outside observer, such as God. God could have arranged time like a movie director, in that as He “views” the movie of the universe, He might see the Flood occur after the Resurrection. For that matter, time could be flowing backwards.

Of course, such assumes a closed future. That is, it views all objects in their entirety in both space and time. If God views the Flood after He views the Resurrection (on His heavenly DVD player), then the characters at the Flood could not do other than they did do. For God has already seen the Resurrection, which occurred after the Flood in chronological time, and required the actions of the Flood to have already been in the history of the universe at that point, even if it hadn’t yet been viewed.

It is important to note that this truth has absolutely nothing to do with what the people existing in time observe. Again, time could be completely randomized and they would not sense it. This is a function of an outside observer having seen that portion of the spacetime existence of an object, not a function of the character who is in time itself.

In the end, this means that if someone can view a complete object in spacetime, then the future is closed for that object. Whatever will happen is what will happen and it is unavoidable because it has been seen. More importantly, it means that if we exist as objects seen fully in spacetime by someone outside of spacetime, that means that the future is fully, 100% determined for us too! This means that an outside observer could “play” history over and over, just like we do a video, and the same exact results will obtain because the object that exists at any particular point in time (from its perspective) exists in the future and the past as that same object. If it were to change, then it would mean that randomizing time would be observable to people within time.

And this brings me back to Whose Line (bet you thought I forgot). Because of the movie analogy, it is tempting for someone to argue that this determinism is due to a feature of characters following a script. Whose Line has no script, yet the same principals apply. Take a frame from the above video, say one that occurs 30 second into the clip. Colin at that point doesn’t know what is on the green screen. You could splice in a frame from 3:40 in. Colin now knows what was on the green screen. It doesn’t matter what order you play those frames in, nor if you play it forwards or backwards. As far as Colin is concerned within the context of the film clip, how you view it does not alter time for him. You can alter the outside perception of time—play it in slow motion or speed it up—but it will not affect his perception of what went on. When you view the clip, the events are fully determined. The ending will be what it will be as you watch it; it cannot be other than what it is.

Additionally, this does NOT require infallible knowledge on the part of the observer. For instance, if you watch the above clip, it requires a certain history to be true for the characters who have been filmed. This means that if you watch them “now,” it necessitates their history so that they get to that point, yet you are not infallible. And this means that if the last “frame of time” has been viewed by any outside observer, the entire scope of spacetime has been determined, because it must be what it is to get to that last frame.

Ultimately, this means that even if God knows our “future” imperfectly—if He simply knows any of it—determinism obtains up to that point. Whatever God knows from our future requires a certain history for the world to get to that future. If God has seen scene D in the movie, then scenes A, B, and C are determined even if we are only in scene A “now.”

The only way to avoid this is to assert that there is no actual future; there is only the present and an eternally unfolding “now.” But this would require an “objective now” that even God must follow. God cannot have seen the ending, because if He has then all the preceding events are determined even if He didn’t want them to be.

As I looked through the local used bookstore yesterday, I found a copy of Jerry A. Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True ((2009). New York: Viking). The jacket flap contained praise from Edward O. Wilson, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, and Richard Dawkins, all assuring me that this book is extremely brilliant and devastating to those who would deny evolution. If you are familiar with the boasts of Darwinists, you’ll know how empty those promises are. But I figured it was only $9.98, so I might as well look at it.

While I have only just started it, the book has thus far been underwhelming. The introduction simply asserts repeatedly that evolution is true and only fundamentalists don’t believe it. For example (all italics mine):

What [Dover trial Judge] Jones had done was imply prevent an established truth from being muddled by biased and dogmatic opponents (xiii).

But evolution is far more than a “theory,” let alone a theory in crisis. Evolution is a fact (xiii).

…this volume gives a succinct summary of why modern science recognizes evolution as true (xiv).

Evolution gives us the true account of our origins, replacing the myths that satisfied us for thousands of years (xv).

But it is more than just a good theory, or even a beautiful one. It also happens to be true (xvi).

Indeed, if ever there was a time when Darwinism was “just a theory,” or was “in crisis,” it was the latter half of the nineteenth century, when evidence for the mechanism of evolution was not clear, and the means by which it worked—genetics—was still obscure. This was all sorted out in the first few decades of the twentieth century… (xvii).

True, evolution is as solidly established as any scientific fact (it is, as we will learn, more than “just a theory”), and scientists need no more convincing (xvii).

In 2006, for example, adults in thirty-two countries were asked to respond to the assertion “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” by answering whether they considered it true, false, or were unsure. Now, this statement is flatly true… (xviii).

Why teach a discredited, religiously based theory, even one widely believed, alongside a theory so obviously true? (xix).

My first through reading all that was: “The gentleman doth protest too much.” But the above isn’t why I wrote this post. Instead, I want to move on to one of Coyne’s analogies. Coyne writes:

Starting with the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in 1635, biologists began classifying animals and plants, discovering that they consistently fell into what was called a “natural” classification. Strikingly, different biologists came up with nearly identical groupings. This means that these groupings are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify, but tell us something real and fundamental about nature. But nobody knew what that something was until Darwin came along and showed that the nested arrangement of life is precisely what evolution predicts. Creatures with recent common ancestors share many traits, while those whose common ancestors lay in the distant past are more dissimilar. The “natural” classification is itself strong evidence for evolution.

Why? Because we don’t see such a nested arrangement if we’re trying to arrange objects that haven’t arisen by an evolutionary process of splitting and descent. Take cardboard books of matches, which I used to collect. They don’t fall into a natural classification in the same way as living species. You could, for example, sort matchbooks hierarchically beginning with size, and then by country within size, color within country, and so on. Or you could start with the type of product advertised, sorting thereafter by color and then by date. There are many ways to order them, and everyone will do it differently. There is no sorting system that all collectors agree on. This is because rather than evolving, so that each matchbook gives rise to another that is only slightly different, each design was created from scratch by human whim.

Matchbooks resemble the kinds of creatures expected under a creationist explanation of life. In such a case, organisms would not have common ancestry, but would simply result from an instantaneous creation of forms designed de novo to fit their environments. Under this scenario, we wouldn’t expect to see species falling into a nested hierarchy of forms that is recognized by all biologists (pp. 9-10).

Of course, Coyne’s entire premise is false. First off, it is not at all surprising that biologists tend to classify animals similarly when you realize that they are classifying animals for similar reasons. After all, Coyne makes a big deal about how you can sort matchbooks by “size” or “color” seeming to forget that there’s nothing stopping biologists from arranging animals by size or color too. But biologists don’t do that. Why? Because when they begin their classification, they start with the assumption that the animals are related, and then sort based on those assumptions. They are not looking to classify by size; they are looking to classify by how organisms are related.

I daresay that if you hand several matchbooks to various random collectors and tell them, “These are all related to each other and we want to see if you can find out how” they will come up with many arrangements that are similar to each other. Similarity in organization does not, as Coyne claims, prove these classifications “are not subjective artifacts of a human need to classify.” That would only be true if each person came to classification without any prior concept of how they should be classified and still classified everything the same way. Furthermore, there are lots of dissimilarities in various classification schemes that are simply glossed over here by Coyne.

Coyne is also in error when he says “we don’t see such a nested arrangement if we’re trying to arrange objects that haven’t arisen by an evolutionary process of splitting and descent.” Has Coyne never seen a fractal, used a computer, or examined the management of a corporation? We see hierarchical sorting and nested arrangement all the time in intelligently created processes and objects.

Consider computer programs in more detail. With the advent of object oriented programming, the structure of all but the simplest of programs must be hierarchical. It is the most efficient means of writing complex programs across multiple platforms by hundreds of different programmers.

Furthermore, computer programs will often use the exact same libraries. Not because one program evolved from another, but because someone designed a bit of code that performed a specific function useful in many different applications, so the code snippet gets put in a library for other programmers to use. Entire modules can be created in the same way, and various different programs assembled from these modules. If someone was not aware that the programs were designed that way, it would be quite facile for someone to imagine the programs came about by descent with modification instead of being tailor made from bits of previously designed code. The evidence would seem compelling, but only because one starts off with the assumption that intelligence is not involved.

Coyne also has the following endnote that damages his matchbook analogy:

Unlike matchbooks, human languages do fall into a nested hierarchy, with some (like English and German) resembling each other far more than they do others (e.g., Chinese). You can, in fact, construct an evolutionary tree of languages based on the similarity of words and grammar. The reason languages can be so arranged is because they underwent their own form of evolution, changing gradually through time and diverging as people moved to new regions and lost contact with one another. Like species, languages have speciation and common ancestry. It was Darwin who first noticed this analogy (endnote 2, p. 235).

That’s right, after telling us that the nested arrangement proves that species were not created, Coyne shows a nested hierarchy of language. Yes, language. One of the indicators of intelligence. Talk about evolved irony!

Even if we agree with Coyne that language shows a “form of evolution” that form of evolution is most certainly NOT Darwinist. There are no random mutations followed by survival of the fittest; there is instead intelligent agents tinkering with their language. To the extent that language is an analogy of evolution, it is an analogy of theistic evolution, not Darwinism.

Thus far, Coyne’s arguments are far from persuasive. Indeed, Coyne seems to operate from a very simplistic viewpoint. He seems to believe that anything that indicates evolution must be proof of Darwinism, when in fact Darwinism is not the only theory of evolution (indeed, no one believes in Darwin’s Darwinism these days). Furthermore, Coyne seems to think that anything that looks like evolution cannot be equally explained by intelligent design either. Both of these flaws render his arguments considerably less than sound.

Perhaps he will improve as I get further in the book. But given past experience reading all the other “definitive” books on Darwinism, I won’t be holding my breath.