For materialists, human consciousness is simply a matter of physics and chemistry. In their worldview, God is not needed to produce self-aware beings. They claim that if enough hydrogen atoms bang into each other for a long enough time, they eventually will produce an atheist. The above statement may seem facetious, but it is literally a correct conclusion from materialist reasoning.

In August, Discover Magazine ran a most intriguing article entitled, “10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain.” If you stop to ponder any of these mysteries deeply, it should give you goose bumps. The authors of the article observe that “Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex.” They go on to enumerate the ten deep mysteries listed below that have confounded researchers about the three pounds of mostly fat that sit inside our skulls.

1. How is information coded in neural activity? We know that brain cells produce brief electrical discharges. These discharges appear to carry information, but as of yet no one has been able to determine if this information is digital or analog or how it is coded; nor is it certain that these voltage spikes carry information.

2. How are memories stored and retrieved? Memory storage is bizarre enough, but how it is retrieved is even more mysterious. Everyone has had the experience of being unable to remember something, and after giving up searching our memory, the information will later just pop up as if an unidentified file clerk had been sent out to the archives to look up the information and has finally come back with it. How does that work? What is doing that search?

3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent? At rest, the brain, which only constitutes about 2% of the body’s mass, uses 20% of all the oxygen. This causes it to put out huge amounts of heat, but what is it doing with all of this energy when it is at rest? No one knows.

4. How do brains simulate the future? How is it that the human brain can play chess as well as the world’s best super computers? These computers can consider the outcomes of millions of moves per second, yet the human brain is just as capable of projecting the possible outcomes?

5. What are emotions? Feelings are a total mystery. They are so powerful that occasionally they can even kill the body, yet we have no clue as to what they are or how they are formed.

6. What is intelligence? This has proven a particularly intractable mystery, especially when the phenomenon of “idiot savants” is considered. The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to a complete halt. The optimistic prediction of the 1960s that robots would soon be doing all the work for us has given way to the reality we all face of having to spend lots of time on the keyboard doing even the simplest of tasks because computers are exactly as smart as door stops.

7. How is time represented in the brain? This is a multifaceted mystery. The brain seems to have many different clocks that enable it to do many different things. For example, the brain synchronizes the perception of external events such as vision and hearing so that we experience them simultaneously even though they are not perceived simultaneously. It is a nice little trick the brain plays on us to make reality seem more coherent.

8. Why do brains sleep and dream? While it is known that sleep deprivation can cause insanity and even death, we still have no clue what the brain is really doing during those hours when the body is mostly off line.

9. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another? Signal transmission in the brain’s axons is painfully slow at 1 foot per second. This is only one hundred millionth the speed at which your computer transmits signals, yet the brain coordinates the vast array of sensory inputs and outputs such as sight, memory, and body movement almost instantaneously. How in the world is this being done? Just think about that the next time you try to get your computer to multitask.

10. What is consciousness? This is truly the biggest question of all. How can three pounds of fatty meat be self-aware?

Why This Is Important
Despite the author’s optimistic expectations about the future of brain research, the ten unsolved mysteries listed above are just as mysterious today as they were 2000 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago, and 10 years ago. Materialism makes a profound philosophical error in concluding that consciousness comes from the physics of the brain. As Sir John Eccles, a Nobel Lauriat in Medicine and Physiology, once put it, “Looking for consciousness inside the brain is like looking for the actors inside of your TV set.”

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph. D.

Biblical Minimalists are critics who historically have taken the position that almost everything in the Bible is either myth or fantasy. Until recently, Minimalists claimed that the entire Old Testament was written in Babylon during the period of the captivity of the Jews in the late Sixth Century. The Old Testament allegedly was a propaganda tool concocted to buck up the spirits of the exiled Judeans with a wonderful fictional history, something like an ancient Michael Moore “documentary”.

Minimalists refuse to acknowledge the accuracy of anything recorded in the Bible until forced by extra-Biblical verification. Unfortunately for the Minimalists, archaeologists keep uncovering evidence for the accuracy of the Biblical narrative. These discoveries have forced the Minimalists to recant and have left them with fewer Biblical accounts to disparage. For example, the once doubted historicity and veracity of the accounts of King David and King Solomon have been authenticated. When the first archaeological evidence emerged showing that King David existed, it was attacked as wrongly interpreted; however, as more inscriptions were uncovered bearing David’s name, Minimalists were forced to admit the truth.

Sadly for the Minimalists, independent extra-Biblical evidence has been found for the existence of another Biblical character. On October 29, 2007, Dr. Marjo Korpel, an Old Testament scholar at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, announced that an ancient engraved seal from the collection of the Israel Antiquity Authority in Jerusalem bears the name of Queen Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of King Ahab. Jezebel, discussed in 1 Kings 21, famously ran afoul of the Prophet Elijah.

Why This is Important

The extra-Biblical proof of not only Queen Jezebel’s existence but also of the accuracy of the specifics of the Biblical account (i.e. when she lived, where she lived, her queenly role) leave the Minimalists with nothing but unsubstantiated and unsupported claims of Biblical inaccuracies. The more the archaeologists dig, the worse the Minimalists’ case is against the Bible.

Source: Utrecht University ( 2007, October 29). “Ancient Seal Belonged to Queen Jezebel”. Science Daily. Retrieved from www.sciencedaily.com.

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph. D.

“In the Beginning Was Information” is the title of a powerful new book by Dr. Werner Gitt, the former Director of the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology and the Head of the Department of Information Technology. This book is a bombshell against Darwinism and Materialism. Dr. Gitt powerfully argues that God created the Universe and everything in it. This book is not a light read, as is the case with most German physics texts; do not expect to see it topping the best seller list any time soon, but for those willing to digest it one page at a time, it is well worth the effort. Below is an attempt to summarize his enormously complex argument.

The title is a play on John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word…” As Dr. Gitt points out: a word is information. The two terms are interchangeable in that a “word” strictly defined is a unit of information. He further points out that modern physics recognizes three constituents, which make up the Universe. These are Matter, Energy, and Information. Information is the organization of the matter and energy in the Universe. Without organization, the Universe would be totally chaotic, and in a totally chaotic environment, life would not be possible.

The organization in the universe is produced by the Natural Laws, which govern it. It is agreed by all physicists that natural laws cannot be proven. They are unlike mathematical theorems and must be discovered and tested empirically. The origin of natural laws is unknown. Natural laws are the carriers of the information, which organizes the Universe. Gitt points out that the origin of the Universe cannot be explained in terms of these natural laws because they do not preexist the creation of the Universe. In the original creation event, “The Big Bang,” all the information that governs the physics of the Universe today had to be in place already. The Big Bang was like a giant firework; it had to be packed just right before the “Bang” in order to produce all the stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies seen today.

This initial information can only have come from one of two sources. Either it is an inherent property of matter, or its origin had to come from an outside intelligent source. For the past forty years, some theorists have tried to find a way to ascribe this information’s origin to matter. Their efforts resulted in such conjectures as a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, Chaos Theory, emergent intelligence from computational processes, and other proposals. These ideas have all proved utter failures in this arena because information is not a property of matter; it is a basic independent constituent of the Universe.

Dr. Gitt demonstrates that information is also the central characteristic of all living systems. All biological processes are completely information dependent. Whether it is making a tool, collecting pollen, or digesting a sugar molecule, tremendous amounts of information and information processing power are required. The human body processes 3×10 to the 24th bits of information every day. All the libraries on the planet only hold 10 to the 18th bits or 1 three millionth as much information as the human body processes everyday. In terms of information processing, the cells of the human body legitimately can be thought of as supreme super computers.

This super computational capacity enables the body to manufacture at least 50,000 different proteins plus tens of thousands of RNAs, micro RNAs, DNAs, enzymes, antibodies, antigens, and other products needed to run the body. The DNA molecule is the primary storage medium for the information needed to manage all of this activity. A DNA molecule is a strand of amino acids that is only about two millionths of an inch thick and has achieved the theoretical limit of miniaturization for information storage capacity. Dr. Gitt finds it no accident that the DNA molecule, with the genetic code it carries, is an optimized information carrier.

This is another fact that defies Darwinian expectations. If the information stored in the genetic code arose as the result of random processes, why would the system have achieved optimization? This optimization of information storage is so efficient that it allows the DNA molecule, during cell division, to transfer all of the information it carries to another DNA molecule in as little as 20 minutes. Imagine trying to down load a large library onto your home computer in 20 minutes? The cells of your body do this all day long.

These, however, are all minor issues compared to the largest informational conundrum- the origin of biological information. DNA produces RNA; RNA in turn makes proteins and enzymes; these proteins and enzymes in turn control the synthesis of DNA. How could such an information dependent cycle possibly originate naturally? According to Dr. Gitt it cannot. A cycle where A makes B and B makes C and C makes A, cannot boot strap itself into existence because of the mutually dependent and the self-referential nature of the process. The type of information needed to initiate such an internally dependent cycle can only come from an intelligent source.

Why This Is Important

Darwinists do not like to discuss information theory because they have no adequate answers for the profound mysteries uncovered in this area. This is another dirty little secret that the media diligently ignores. Ever since the 1960s when Darwinists ran smack into the immovable obstacle of Information Theory and Technology, they have been avoiding the subject assiduously in the hope that some new piece of evidence will emerge that allows them to disprove the math. This has not happened. As a defensive measure, books like “In The Beginning Was Information” can only be ignored. It is no accident that Dr. Gitt waited until he had retired before he published this work.

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph. D.

Steven Hawking, arguably the world’s greatest living astrophysicist, called it “the discovery of the millennium, if not all time.” Hawking was referring to the anisotropies of the Universe. Anisotropies are variations or inhomogeneities in a structure. The anisotropies referred to here are the temperature variations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation distributed across the Universe. These temperature variations were left behind by the original creation event: they are the after glow of The Big Bang from which the Universe emerged. These variations are tiny, amounting to only about 1/40,000 of a degree Celsius, but they are enormously consequential. It is from these minute variations that the current Universe developed its large scale structure of Galaxy Clusters and Super Clusters. This structure is also essential for the Universe to be able to support life.

This of course is all quite interesting, but a shocking new set of findings has emerged from the study of the CMB. It has been discovered that the CMB, which pervades the entire Universe, is aligned to The Solar System. This means that, the original creation event, which produced all of space, time, matter, and energy, was precisely fine tuned so that it is aligned with the location and direction of motion of Solar System in which we live.

This discovery has been so disturbing to some scientists that it has been most inappropriately labeled “The Axis of Evil.” Since this discovery was first made in 2003, many scientists have been trying to disprove it. Researchers have been studying the CMB since 1965 when it was first found to exist. Through the years, more sensitive instruments have been developed which have allowed ever more accurate maps of the CMB to be drawn. The best known of these were the 1992 COBE and the 2003 WMAP satellite-based probes. The initial shock came when one alignment was discovered, but as work has progressed, instead of going away, at least three more of these “Cosmic Alignments” between the CMB and the Solar System have been uncovered.

The first discovery was that the original Creation Event was divided into two hemispheres, called a Dipole, with one warm lobe and one cool lobe. What researchers were shocked to find was that the plane of the Solar System sits at the exact division point, right in the middle of these two lobes. This means that the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun exactly divides these two hemispheres. It was further discovered that the direction of the Sun’s motion around the center of our Galaxy is also closely aligned with this plane.

Within each of the lobes of the dipole there are other cool and warm areas that have been located. There are a quadrupole (four lobes) and an octopole (eight lobes). To the researchers amazement, it has also been discovered that these mulitpoles are also planar and additionally are perpendicular to the Earth’s path around the sun. The likelihood of any of these alignments arising by chance is less than 1 in 1000.

Why This Is Important

One of the Primary Axioms of Materialist Philosophy is the Copernican Principle, sometimes known as the Mediocrity Principle. Simply stated, it is the opinion that humans are not privileged as observers or in anyway. Therefore, there should be nothing special about where we live in the Universe, about our Galaxy, Solar System, or Planet. The Copernican Principle was offered as a counter to the widely asserted medieval beliefs that the Earth was at the center of the Universe, that man was in an exalted place, and that God’s existence was proved by these facts. Medieval scholars did not actually believe anything like this, but that is another story.

The discovery that the CMB is cosmically aligned to the Earth should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It points to the fact that the Earth is at a special place in the Universe and that God wants it to be known. In the source listed below, it is interesting to observe how the writers try to dance around this implication (the elephant in the room) without actually coming out and directly admitting the clear implication of these discoveries. We read for example, “The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a sign post to deeper insight?” “Careful analysis have confirmed these alignments exist. But we don’t know weather they are bizarre coincidences or if something more fundamental is at work.”

As similar “coincidences” from every field of science are piling to the sky for all to see, the only ones who will not see are those who refuse to see.

Source: “Why is the Solar System Cosmically Aligned?”, by Dragan Huterer, Astronomy, Dec. 2007, pp. 38-43.

By: Lawrence Vescera, Ph. D.