Reading between the lines

from here

 

by Don Batten

Photo stock.xchng

I visited China in 1983, at the time when the cult of Mao was just beginning to loosen its grip on that country. However, Communist party cadres still very much controlled everything, and the minders for my visit made out that this was ‘paradise on earth’. “There is no unemployment in China”, they said.
Beijing’s English language newspaper was full of positive thinking—everything was wonderful in utopia. The newspaper praised all the enterprising citizens who were contributing to the ‘revolution’. And then my eyes fell on a story about a madam comrade, a model citizen, who had started a program for ‘idle youths’, giving them training in various work skills so they no longer got into mischief. In other words, they had been unemployed!

I suspected my minders had been stretching the truth just a little in claiming that there was no unemployment in China. How could there be ‘idle youth’ in need of skill training if everyone had a job? It was likewise with crime. Crime and corruption did not exist but were reported when the culprits were punished. Propagandists catch themselves out because it is difficult for them to be consistent.
It’s like that when you read the science journals of today, especially the popular ones. Many writers try to give the impression that evolution (everything-made-itself) explains everything—just like the communists tried to persuade people that their doctrine solved everything. However, if you think carefully about what you are being told, you will see that they often give the game away. You have to learn to ‘read between the lines’.

Example 1. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

On the Lateline program on ABC (Australia) television in 1996, the presenter interviewed one of the astronomers behind the SETI program. Why would anyone bother to send signals into space, hoping to get an answer, when the closest planet (if any exist) is likely to be a hundred thousand light years away? It would take 200,000 years to get an answer! What would motivate anyone to do this? What motivated this astronomer? He said, “It would be the death of religion.” “You mean Christianity?” asked the presenter. “Yes”, was the reply.
This astronomer obviously did not want to believe in the Creator as revealed in the Bible, and therefore would believe that blind chance produced life, which is full of complex information, from simple chemicals. The amount of information in a bacterium is about the same as in two large books. And then this original life form changed into all the life forms on earth, including him, all by itself, without a Creator’s involvement. The astronomer has about 1,000 books of complex information in each of his cells. All this information just happened; no intelligent source was necessary, in his way of thinking. No Creator was necessary. All that meaningful coded information just made itself.
But then how could this astronomer be sure that anything he heard with his radiotelescope from outer space was not also the result of chance? How would he know that it came from an intelligent source? He is ready to recognize the evidence for intelligence on a radio signal from ‘out there’, but not in the incredible living things beneath his very nose—indeed in his nose—here on earth. Such inconsistency is present throughout evolutionary thinking. For more, see God and the extraterrestrials.

Example 2. Antibiotic resistance

In a very interesting article in New Scientist, Jason Chin discussed antibiotic resistance, attributing such resistance to ‘evolution’.¹ The whole tone of the paper was ‘evolution does it’. This indoctrinates the uninformed reader in the belief that antibiotic resistance is evolution in action. But is it?

Evolution would need a mechanism for creating new genetic information. Chin implies throughout the paper that the antibiotic resistance mechanisms have arisen as a result of exposure to antibiotics—that is, evolution has created new complex functions. However, he unwittingly gives the game away in several places.
Amoxycillin resistance in bacteria has been overcome by adding a compound which blocks the bacterial enzyme which degrades the amoxycillin. The combination, known as Augmentin, the author says, “is a better antibiotic than amoxycillin ever was [that is, even when bacteria had never been previously exposed to amoxycillin]: it is active against a wider range of bacteria …” (my emphasis and addition).
So, reading between the lines … when amoxycillin first came into use it could not kill some types of bacteria because these already had the enzyme that degrades amoxycillin. Addition of the enzyme blocker in Augmentin now allows amoxycillin to kill these bacteria as well.
But that means that there were certain bacteria that already had the resistance mechanism before amoxycillin was in use. It is well known that the genes for such resistance can be transferred between different types of bacteria. The bacteria which were not resistant, but now are, most probably got their resistance from the ones which had the resistance mechanism all along. There is no new genetic information involved, just its transfer from one bacterium to another! In other words, all this has nothing to do with microbes-to-man evolution. There is no new complex information.
This is confirmed in the last paragraph of the article. Julian Davies of the University of British Columbia suggests that scientists should be able to predict the ways in which bacteria will foil new antibiotics. He is reported as saying, “I would go and get a handful of soil, I would expose the microbes in the soil to the antibiotic and pick out the ones that grow. And in a fortnight I could tell you the mechanism of resistance that would eventually be found in the clinic.”
Again, the resistance mechanisms are already present in some bacteria. Resistance arises in disease-causing bacteria by transfer of the genetic information from resistant types of bacteria which may not even cause disease. These may be ecologically beneficial bacteria that are involved in normal healthy soil, for example. Or they may be bacteria that normally live in the large intestines of healthy people, or on our skin. A gene for resistance usually has some other role normally and it just happens also to confer resistance to an antibiotic.
So, we can read between the lines in these overtly evolutionary statements and see that the very subject matter contradicts the evolutionist’s beliefs. Complex genetic information does not arise from accidents, it can only be the result of our immensely intelligent Creator’s plan and purpose.