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Loving Science – but Not the Empire: How Real Science Reveals a Creator but the Establishment Keeps Us in the Dark
Loving Science – but Not the Empire: How Real Science Reveals a Creator but the Establishment Keeps Us in the Dark
Loving Science – but Not the Empire: How Real Science Reveals a Creator but the Establishment Keeps Us in the Dark
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Loving Science – but Not the Empire: How Real Science Reveals a Creator but the Establishment Keeps Us in the Dark

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For decades the world has been telling us that God is dead and science has proven it, but is that really true? As the evidence has continued to accumulate, the tide has turned. God is back to full health and not only that, but He is far more awesome and ingenious than we ever imagined. Now it is the scientific establishment that is on the ropes as a century of errors and deception has been unearthed.

In Loving Science – But Not the Empire, experimental scientist Jay Sonstroem helps readers discern between the findings of real science and fables, which have been pushed by an entity he calls The Empire. Jay provides short, readable chapters to reveal both the wonders of creation and the schemes and blunders of The Empire, which have resulted from its hijacked version of science. Topics include the hidden truth of DNA, the wonders of biology, the fine-tuning of the universe, and evolution and Darwinism debunked.

Is it possible to love science but not worship it? You bet. Does a person who believes in God have to give up Reason? No. Come along and piece together the puzzle of life, the universe, and everything in between. What you believe about your origins has everything to do with what you believe about your destiny. Follow the light, find the Truth, and together, let’s free science from a Godless agenda.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherWestBow Press
Release dateFeb 27, 2023
ISBN9781664289079
Loving Science – but Not the Empire: How Real Science Reveals a Creator but the Establishment Keeps Us in the Dark
Author

Jay Sonstroem

Jay Sonstroem spent his career as an experimental scientist for the United State Army’s “Night Vision Lab.” As a physicist and optical engineer, he specialized in lasers, optics, and electro-optics, especially infrared systems. Due to his practical experience in the physical sciences, he came to be an expert at telling real science from science fiction, storytelling, and hand waving. He is now semi-retired but continues to support the Army on a part-time basis.

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    Loving Science – but Not the Empire - Jay Sonstroem

    Copyright © 2023 Jay Sonstroem.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

    WestBow Press

    A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

    1663 Liberty Drive

    Bloomington, IN 47403

    www.westbowpress.com

    844-714-3454

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

    The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government, and the public release clearance of this publication by the Department of Defense does not imply Department of Defense endorsement or factual accuracy of the material.

    Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.

    Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™

    Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.

    ISBN: 978-1-6642-8908-6 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-6642-8909-3 (hc)

    ISBN: 978-1-6642-8907-9 (e)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900571

    WestBow Press rev. date: 02/27/2023

    To all the scientists whose views and work have been hidden, cancelled, or crushed

    by The Empire.

    CONTENTS

    Preface/Acknowledgements

    Introduction: Who I Am And What’s My Gripe?

    Chapter 1 Defying Common Sense

    Chapter 2 What Is Real Science

    Chapter 3 DNA Part I: The Revelation

    Chapter 4 The Cell: Mindboggling Complexity

    Chapter 5 What Is The Empire?

    Chapter 6 The Empire Gets It Wrong

    Chapter 7 Science Class In Public Schools

    Chapter 8 The Eyes Have It

    Chapter 9 Evolution Part I

    Chapter 10 Ape To Man: Science At Its Worst

    Chapter 11 Fine Tuning Of The Universe

    Chapter 12 The Dating Game – Part I

    Chapter 13 DNA Part II — The Central Dogma (The What?)

    Chapter 14 The Origin Of Life

    Chapter 15 How To Tell If Something Is Designed

    Chapter 16 Feedback Loops

    Chapter 17 Big Bang Or Big Bust?

    Chapter 18 Evolution Part II: The Limits

    Chapter 19 The Brain

    Chapter 20 The Dating Game Part II – Radiometric Dating

    Chapter 21 What About The Dinosaurs?

    Chapter 22 Birth Plus One Minute

    Chapter 23 Aren’t All Creationists Dummies?

    Chapter 24 DNA Part III: Breakdown

    Chapter 25 Real Science Vs Fairy Tales

    Chapter 26 Evolution Part III: Loose Ends

    Chapter 27 The War Of Worldviews

    Chapter 28 The Dating Game Part III – The Geologic Column

    Chapter 29 Climate Confusion

    Chapter 30 What Is Truth?

    Chapter 31 The Finished Puzzle

    Chapter 32 The Need For Reform

    Afterword

    About the Author

    Figure/Photo Credits

    Endnotes

    PREFACE/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

    I had never planned to write a book. While several people through the years have encouraged me to do so, I always shrugged it off. There are many excellent books out there that deal with the kinds of origins issues that I cover here. But as I look at my bookshelves, I see that my personal library on this topic has grown to be extensive. This is just the books that I have purchased, which must amount to about 30,000 pages in all. Yet none of them really pull together what I consider the critical pieces of information into one place in a reader-friendly way. Nor do they sufficiently expose the ugliness of the scientific establishment as it promotes its own godless religion and snuffs out traditional religions. And very few people have the time to read this much material if they want to look into this critical subject.

    So I finally gave in after recent urging by several people including Pastor Dax, my brother-in-law David and sister-in-law MaryBeth. This book is my attempt to pack the essential information into one place. It includes the best of the scientific evidence for a Creator/designer, and the worst of the blunders, fraud, and deception of what I am calling The Empire over the past century and a half. I have tried to make the book more fun and readable by playing off the evil empire of the Star Wars saga, and including quotes and analogies along the way. Thanks to my wife and daughters for helping me with my Star Wars quote picking party!

    I want to thank my family editors, who carefully reviewed my first draft of each chapter. My wife Andrea was the first screener, and gatekeeper for the initial writing. My daughter Becca and brother-in-law David provided grammatic edits and content suggestions to the first draft. An editorial review at WestBow Press provided a number of helpful suggestions which helped me to improve the final product. Thanks also to the whole staff at WestBow Press for guiding me through the assisted self-publishing process.

    Of course, my wife also had to put up with me isolating myself in my study every other week for over a year, and keeping me fed and watered. Thanks my sweet!

    At Burke Community Church, Pastor Marty has been a great influence with his fearless commitment to preaching and teaching the truth in all things, and with his creationist apologetics. Thanks also to the boys in my lifegroup at BCC, who provided weekly encouragement for the past two years, ever since I told them that I was writing this book. You guys are the best… roll tide!

    The book is also a response to some extent to a recent report produced by the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod which deals with the "Intersection of Science & Christian Theology". ¹ This report was thought-provoking for me in many ways and included a challenge of sorts for Christians who are in the sciences to reach out and uplift our world with the light and the truth. In my case, I had accumulated a wealth of knowledge and information on the issue of origins, so here I play my part by presenting it to anyone who cares to read it. I believe that the preponderance of scientific data reveals a Creator, and people will be enriched by knowing that.

    The introduction will explain who I am and more about how I came to hold the positions I hold on the origin of things, in light of my background and career in science and my life as a Christian.

    INTRODUCTION

    Who I Am And What’s My Gripe?

    Your Humble Author

    I love science. Ever since I was a kid I had an interest in figuring out everything around me. My brothers were into model rockets and I thought that was the coolest. I got an aeronautics kit for Christmas one year, and it was filled with experiments that I could do and things I could build. I think I did them all. Strange little planes and gadgets were all around the house. I found out that you could measure the height of a tree from a distance using simple trigonometry. I would say to my mom, did you know that tree is 65 feet tall? Very good, Jay. I loved doing all of the experiments.

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    Here is a picture of me in third grade, already wearing my geeky glasses. When my youngest daughter first saw this picture, she said dad, it looks like you are wearing a Star Trek uniform! Yes it does, and proud of it. For some reason those velour shirts were popular that year… amazing. But the truth is out, I was a little nerd.

    By the time I got to high school, I had an inkling that I wanted to pursue some kind of science as a career. I was really interested in astronomy. My dad was a biology professor at a small private college and he would bring home sample college textbooks that publishers would send him. I was reading the astronomy textbooks for fun when I was half way through high school.

    My high school library had a section on astronomy, and I read those books too. There were books on amateur telescope making which gave me a craving to build my own telescope from scratch. I never did this, but instead I bought my own Newtonian reflector when I was a high school senior. It was the classic form of backyard amateur telescope at the time. I still have it today, and some of the astrophotos that appear in this book were taken through that telescope.

    That was also the year that I discovered physics! Mr. Martin was my high school physics teacher. He was young and engaging and he got me hooked. We would do some group experiments in class that were fun and amazing, and the labs were fascinating to me. Plus, I was paired for the year with this gal as a lab partner who was pretty and nice and didn’t mind that I was a nerd. It was heavenly. But back to the physics, I also learned some important lessons that year about the scientific method, experimental science, and observing that have served me through my life.

    As I looked into college, I thought about going into astronomy, which is also a branch of physics. But from all of my reading, I had the distinct impression that all astronomers were atheists. As a Christian, I consciously avoided this career in fear for my faith. I didn’t want to put myself in a position of being constantly surrounded for the rest of my life by people with a different worldview. It was 1978, and as a 17-year-old, I had first bumped up against The Empire.

    So I went to my local state college and studied physics. Dr. Bulman was my most frequent and favorite professor. He was the consummate professional and always came into class wearing a long blue lab coat. He was an elderly gentleman with a hint of the absent-minded professor, and was very loveable. He was my advisor for my senior project which involved an old particle accelerator that we had in the basement of the science building.

    We spent a lot of time together that year, and I learned that during World War II he had worked as a physicist on navy ships figuring out ways to degauss them. That means to get rid of any magnetic signature, to make them invisible to certain types of mines that triggered on the magnetic field. This was eye-opening to me, to think that the military had scientists doing this kind of thing in the midst of a war. Of course, we all know about the Manhattan project and high profile stuff like that, but this was much more nitty-gritty. Perhaps a seed had been sown in my mind for what would be in store for my life work.

    I had a great Chemistry teacher also in college and actually thought a bit about switching to chemistry. But then in lab one day I got a splatter of nitric acid on my hand, and I still have an image in my mind’s eye of smoke coming up from my skin. And the smell of the chemicals in general kind of turned me off. So that was the end of my chemistry.

    Meanwhile, I had also discovered Optics. Optics is the branch of physics that deals with light: how to direct it, detect it, form it, funnel it, focus it, reflect it, etc. The optics labs were the best yet. We actually measured the speed of light using some pretty basic equipment and got it right within about 5%. I also had my first encounter with lasers. Lasers are everywhere now, but at the time it had only been 20 years since their first invention. This was a promising career path.

    With my scientific interests further refined in this way, I went on to attend graduate school at the University of Rochester. The Institute of Optics at the U of R is world renowned as one of the finest centers for study and research in this field. I had made it to the Big Time now. Those who got into the Institute were kind of cream of the crop. I wondered how I would stack up? But you might be thinking: how hard can it be to study about light? Very hard. I remember sitting for the final exam in my first laser class. The exams were passed out to us and after about ten minutes the student next to me just started crying. I felt like crying too, but I gutted it out, and eked out a B, I think.

    I recently came across my class notes from my Optical Waveguides class. Sounds very new age, doesn’t it? Page 1 starts out with Maxwell’s Equations. These are like the magic potion of electromagnetic theory. A few pages in you start to encounter what looks like long strings of hieroglyphics. I showed the notebook to one of my daughters and she turned pale. I can’t believe the math that I used to be able to do. I have forgotten most of it now.

    I was in the Masters Degree program, but most of my friends there were in the PhD program. They tried to talk me into switching over and staying on, and this was a tough decision. The decider for me was that I had seen some bad examples of what I think of as academic politics. Strange turns of events with some students and their advisors that didn’t seem right or fair. I expect these kinds of goings-on are common, but that was not for me. I got my MS degree and got out. But I have great fondness for my time at the Institute.

    I had shared an office space at the school with a couple of other students. One of them had come to the school from a job at the Army’s Night Vision Lab, as it was known at the time. He recommended I check it out, and that it would be a great first job coming out of school. I liked the thought of being able to help develop the technologies that would help our soldiers to own the night. That’s where I ended up, and not just for a few years, but for my entire career.

    As a civilian government employee, I worked mostly with low power lasers and with infrared (IR) sensors, the kind that let you form images from the thermal radiation (heat signatures) that things emit. While the lasers we worked with on-site were considered low-power compared to some others, they were still all class IV lasers, which is the highest level in the laser safety classifications. Not safe to the eyes or skin. The ones I worked with were mostly also infrared lasers, which means you can’t see the beam with your naked eyes. In the early years, when we were setting up some new labs, we had to get our hands down near the beams, and it wasn’t unusual to have a beam burn through your sleeve and get your arm or hand. Well, I may have avoided the burns from a chemistry lab, but I got my share of minor laser burns! It was old school back then, we just went on with the work. Just a flesh wound.

    The Night Vision Lab was a great fit for me. I got to design and carry out many first-of-a-kind experiments. It was real science, rubber-meets-the-road kind of things. Experimental, scientific method start to finish. The Army was my employer and our customer, and hand-waving and storytelling would not get you very far. It had to work, and it had to be better than what was already out there. It had to be buildable and fieldable. Over my career I also evaluated hundreds of technical proposals from various contractors, and I became an expert at detecting the difference between real science and storytelling.

    I was involved in many field tests, and test director for some of them. I spent weeks away from home at Army test ranges at places like Ft. A.P. Hill, VA and White Sands Missile Range, NM. Given my specific job, I often manned the equipment on the receiving end of some higher-energy lasers. I worked with lasers where you could easily hear the beam as it hit the test targets. Pop, pop, pop, whack, whack, whack… Yes, light has momentum. It was exciting sometimes!

    I worked in technical areas where there was very fertile soil. The lab encouraged inventiveness and I was able to do my share. I ended up with 7 patents, of which I was the sole inventor on 6. I authored or co-authored over 50 technical papers for the major military symposium which covers this technical field, and I ended up as a Fellow for this symposium.

    I’m no Einstein, but I’m no dummy either. Think of me as Joe average experimental scientist. The point in all of this is that I know real science from smoke and mirrors, from bogus science and fairy tales. So here we turn the corner in this introduction from who I am to why I’m writing this book.

    What’s My Gripe?

    My professional career never touched on the origins of the universe, the earth, or living things. The Army needed us to be working on other things. But inquiring minds want to know. As a human being, I had a great interest in these topics. The secular world provides a uniform and constant drumbeat: the universe evolved on its own, the earth and its geology evolved on its own, and life evolved on its own. Time and chance account for everything, and there is no need for anything else.

    My Christian worldview conflicted with these things. There is a God, and he created the universe, the Earth, and all living things. But the science seemed to be so clearly on the other side. Which view is true? Or is it a mish-mash of both? Maybe God was behind it all, but he used these evolutionary processes to do it?

    As a young person, I had kind of bought into the evolutionary side. Remember that photo of me in 3rd grade? There were already other things besides star fleet academy going on inside that cute young skull. I was in 3rd grade when I first read a simple science book that explained the evolution of man. Ironically, I had checked the book out of the school/church library at the Lutheran elementary school I attended. I was so naïve at the time…I assumed that if it was in a science book, it had to be true. Science always gave you the facts. In retrospect, maybe this was actually my first encounter with The Empire.

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    But it just so happened that we were all assigned to come up with a project for science class that we would investigate and report out to the class. Armed with this new knowledge about human evolution, I enlisted my best friend as my partner and we told our whole class about it. I can still picture the look on my teacher’s face when we finished. He was flummoxed, but he didn’t know what to say. Our report was not in keeping with Lutheran theology.

    This bothered me for many years. Had I screwed up? I knew there was a conflict here, but didn’t know how to deal with it. So I kind of compartmented things and went on. For most of my youth I leaned towards the evolution side regarding the science, but feeling that God must have directed it all. Problem solved, for the time being.

    When I was a junior in College, I saw Dr. Dwayne Gish debate my Physical Anthropology professor on the issue of life and human origins. Gish was a famous creationist, and he creamed my professor. But two things stand out most in my mind. First, at the end of the debate when they opened up for questions, the first question directed to Dr. Gish was Bible-related, and meant to trip him up. He pointed out that he had not brought up The Bible during the whole debate, and that all of his arguments had been strictly scientific. That largely ended the questions. No one could counter the facts that he had presented.

    But the most memorable thing for me was that outside the auditorium a few minutes later I saw a student pacing back and forth talking to himself, totally enraged. I think his worldview had just been demolished and he was losing it. I was startled by his anger and obvious hatred. This had been a fair exchange of viewpoints based on the scientific facts. Why was he going haywire? Another encounter with the side effects of The Empire. I shifted my leanings to the creationist side.

    These issues percolated below the surface into my adult life. Finally, when I was about 30 years old, I bit the bullet and started a deep dive into finding some answers to the question of origins. I wanted to know the real science behind these things. By real science I mean the part based on the scientific method [I will lay this out in detail in chapter 2]. I began to dig down into the evidence to see if I could determine fact from fiction.

    This actually turned into a hobby of sorts that continues to this day. I began to collect and read books and articles that explored both sides of the issue. I could find all of the major popular books on evolution at my local library, but very little of the literature from the Gish side of the spectrum, which I had to purchase. Hmmm, more evidence of the pervasiveness of The Empire? Since I had been immersed in the viewpoint favoring the evolutionary side all my life, I generally read more on the other side, spending Fall through Spring with the creationists, and Summer with the evolutionists. I know, I’m so organized…

    It was only after the first few years into the deep dive that the blinders came off. On topic after topic, from the origin of life to the evolution of man, from the fossil record to the dating game, the real science favors the creationist view. In case after case, I found that the evidence at hand takes you only so far, and then the storytelling begins. I was amazed to find what passes as science with the mainstream in all of the key disciplines. Brought up with scientific rigor, I had thought that this must be followed everywhere. I was sorely disappointed.

    What’s more, I found that the cards are stacked against the open exchange of ideas. There is a scientific establishment so to speak which controls and regulates what data and research can be accepted in mainstream academia and publications. In our schools and in our textbooks, and in our public libraries. During my deep dive, a new movement began among some scientists known as the Intelligent Design, or ID movement. Those who joined with this group began to be banned from publishing and research. People were fired from their jobs. In 2008 a film came out titled Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which covers this very topic. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you will find it described as a propaganda film. Need I say more?

    This is my gripe. Jane T Public and John Q Public get all of their information on science and scientific developments from an establishment that is completely biased towards an atheistic worldview on the origins issues. They believe many things are proven science which are not proven science, and which are sometimes completely outside the realm of science, and are true science fiction.

    For the purpose of this book, I am calling the dominant scientific establishment The Empire. This is a nod towards the Star Wars movies and stories with which you are hopefully familiar. No analogy is perfect, and this is true here of course, but you can judge as we go along where the shoe fits. It also gives me the chance to inject humor here and there with hopes to make you smile. You will need it. You will read things that may make your blood boil, but hopefully you will hold it together better than the angry young man outside Dr. Gish’s debate.

    These issues are important and far-reaching. What you believe about your origins has everything to do with how you live your life and what you believe about your destiny.

    So, come with me on our own Trek as we explore the world around us. From the miracle of life to the miracle of birth, from the wonders of the cell and the eye to the revelation of what DNA really is. We will look at the evidence vs. the storytelling. And we will sadly witness how science has suffered many black eyes in the course of promoting false concepts, especially evolutionary theory. Many of these are not yet known to the public.

    And I do love science, but I don’t worship it. And I definitely don’t love The Empire.

    CHAPTER 1

    Defying Common Sense

    You are in a hurry to get to that appointment. You finally find your keys, you bump your head getting in the car, and go to start her up: click click click… Have you heard that sound before? The battery is dead. Why today? It’s the worst possible time! Murphy rules.

    It is universal to human experience. Nothing is ever easy. Things always break. Nothing ever repairs or organizes itself. It takes great time and effort on our part to just stay even. Welcome to the real world.

    In this chapter I’m going to ask you to consider the world from the big picture perspective. Then, as we work our way through the book, we will start to whittle away at the details. We will see example after example of things that we’ve been told are proven science, and why that’s not the case. But these things that we have been told will generally have one thing in common: they defy common sense. And more specifically, they defy the most certain and universal laws of science.

    Scientific laws are statements that predict or describe certain natural phenomena, based on repeated experiment and observations. They are time-tested and universally and consistently observed to be true. In physics, the grandest laws are known as the laws of thermodynamics. The first law relates to the conservation of energy, and the second law relates to the loss of order. There is a third law which relates to what happens at a temperature of absolute zero, but that one is largely irrelevant to our discussions.

    The textbook definitions of these laws are somewhat dry, but here they are for completeness:

    "The First Law: The law that heat is a form of energy, and the total amount of energy of all kinds in an isolated system is constant; it is an application of the principle of conservation of energy." ¹

    "The Second Law: A general statement of the idea that there is a preferred direction for any process; there are many equivalent statements of the law, the best known being those of Clausius and of Kelvin." ²

    As I said, pretty dry, and not especially useful to the average reader. But what normally follows in the physics books is a level of weeds that would help us even less. So I’m going to take a different approach and have a great writer lay it out in layman’s terms.

    Like any good nerd, I love reading science fiction, and in my youth I especially enjoyed the novels by Isaac Asimov. If you haven’t read his Foundation series, it’s a classic. Asimov was actually a biochemist, but also an atheist and a big proponent of evolutionary theory. Despite his worldview, on the non-science fiction side, Asimov once wrote an article titled In the game of Energy and Thermodynamics, You Can’t even Break Even. Here he is addressing the laws at hand, and we will use his article to provide reader-friendly and unbiased definitions of these laws (obviously not biased to favor the creationist). Note that while these are the laws of thermodynamics, they are more generically, laws of science.

    The First Law: "To express all this, we can say: ‘energy can be transferred from one place to another, or transformed from one form to another, but it can be neither created nor destroyed’. Or we can put it another way: ‘The total quantity of energy in the universe is constant’.

    This law is considered the most powerful and most fundamental generalization about the universe that scientists have ever been able to make" ³

    The first law is over-arching, and figures prominently with some topics that we will visit, but in this chapter, we will concentrate on the second law.

    The Second Law: "Another way of stating the second law, then, is: ‘The universe is constantly getting more disorderly’.

    Viewed that way, we can see the second law all about us. We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself, it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily. Even if we never enter it, it becomes dusty and musty. How difficult to maintain houses, and machinery, and our own bodies in perfect working order; how easy to let them deteriorate. In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself – and that is what the second law is all about."

    Thank you Isaac, I couldn’t have said it better myself! You may also be familiar with the term entropy. Entropy is usually defined as a mathematical function that quantifies the disorder or unavailable energy in a system. Entropy is directly linked to the second law, which demands that entropy increases over time. A simple example of entropy is static on a phone line - the original information was dispersed so you can’t hear everything someone said.

    Again, these laws are not limited to the study of heat engines. They represent broad categories of phenomena throughout human existence. ⁵ To the average Joe, the second law is better known as Murphy’s Law, usually stated if something can go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. This is where the rubber meets the road for people going through their daily lives. Most people have heard of Murphy’s law, and think of it as a bit of cute folklore in a way. But it is in fact just the second law distilled down to layman’s terms. While people don’t track Murphy’s law by conducting scientific experiments, it is a real thing.

    In this book, I am not going to let you forget Murphy’s law. As with the opening of this chapter, I am going to open every chapter with an example of Murphy at work. I am going to pound you with these real-life morsels. If you are cringing now (I don’t want to be pounded!), I will try to lessen the cringe factor now and then with examples that are funny, at least for you they will be funny. Years ago I meant to start making a list of my closest encounters with Mr. Murphy, but I never did this. So most of these are things that have happened within the last year while I was writing the book, while a few are gems recalled from memory. They are things that happened to me and to close family members, who I thank for their inputs. I know that you will be able to relate.

    But again, the point is that we are constantly bombarded by our culture with things that are patently absurd, and overtly contradict the second law, but that we are supposed to accept. These most often involve promoting the theory of evolution, since this is the area where the conflict is most obvious and most constant. Supposedly brilliant minds in fields like zoology and biochemistry tell us we should ignore our common sense and believe fairy tales. Here are a couple of examples.

    Richard Dawkins is a prominent favorite voice of The Empire. He has written many books, usually on the topic of evolution. His viewpoint is that of an atheist and evolutionist. We will spend some more time with Dawkins in future chapters, but for now, we will stick with the main thrust of his writings: that living things have the overwhelming appearance of having been designed, but they were not designed because he says so.

    …the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

    Designoid objects are living bodies and their products. Designoid objects look designed, so much so that some people – probably, alas, most people – think that they are designed. These people are wrong. … They have in fact been shaped by a magnificently non-random process which creates an almost perfect illusion of design.

    Of course, Dawkins then goes on through the rest of each book saying things that defy the second law. To his credit, Dawkins is a master storyteller. But he leaves real science behind and moves smoothly into an exercise in creative writing. He’s asking you not to believe your lying eyes. Can we apply a little common sense here? Living things look designed because they are designed. Dawkins says elsewhere that all appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a special way. ⁸ This special way is smoke and mirrors. As we will see throughout this book, living things are full of information. Information builds them, runs them, and maintains them. There is no special way that can explain this.

    You may have noticed that the previous quotes from Isaac Asimov date to 1970. Not that his definitions are wrong, but there has been much progress in the last half century in some key related fields with regard to the second law, particularly information theory. These findings have only increased the power and sweep of the second law. "Modern science has shown that the older law is merely a special situation of the New Generalized second law, which, in simple language, can be summarized as follows: On average, things mix." ⁹ Or, regarding information: "Nature is a destroyer of patterns, and therefore, information." ¹⁰

    Dawkins would have us believe that natural selection has special hidden powers that built up the extremely complex information in the genome over time. But natural selection does exactly the opposite. It weeds out creatures that can’t survive in certain circumstances. It is a destroyer of information. It leaves behind the creatures that can survive, but it does nothing to explain how they got there in the first place. It touts survival of the fittest, but cannot explain the

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