This video presentation has received positive reviews because so much is clearly explained by Dr. Meyer about his book “Darwin’s Doubt.”
“Darwin’s Doubt” with Stephen Meyer from Socrates in the City on Vimeo.
Watch and hear from the author himself.
Director, WindowView.org
WindowView is in a sense another way of saying “world view” except that a line of reasoning and an appeal to ‘data’ or information that is before us is indeed part of the real objective to presenting the Window. It’s YOUR window, you look, you see, you assess and in the end only you can conclude what is real. But lets visit the vital questions in life for a moment. If Darwin’s theory on evolution is all there is to being, then we are the result of chance and randomness in the universe. But Darwin had his doubts about evolution and the data today support good reason to doubt his theory. So, then, what is reality? What are the consequences to getting the correct data to determine who you are?
Dr. Samples offers the following list of critical factors and questions in his book “World of Difference.”
“An accurate road map supplies valid directions that profoundly guide a person’s life decisions. Therefore, a well-thought-out course, or worldview, needs to answer twelve ultimate concerns that philosophers identify as “the big questions of life”:
1. Ultimate Reality: What kind of God, if any, actually exists?
2. External Reality: Is there anything beyond the cosmos?
3. Knowledge: What can be known and how can anyone know it?
4. Origin: Where did I come from?
5. Identity: Who am I?
6. Location: Where am I?
7. Morals: How should I live?
8. Values: What should I consider of great worth?
9. Predicament: What is humanity’s fundamental problem?
10. Resolution: How can humanity’s problem be solved?
11. Past/Present: What is the meaning and direction of history?
12. Destiny: Will I survive the death of my body and, if so, in what state?
When a worldview elucidates reasonable answers to these ultimate questions, life (and death) issues become much more comprehensible and easier to get through.”
The concept of WindowView hinges on the fact that evidence from science, Scripture, changes around the globe, and a timeline sequences that follows a known chronology going forward, all this presents a convergence of driving forces. All this provides an affirmative answer to the first questions and all the data from there on becomes easier to see. But what about these ultimate questions. You have asked them, we all have. But have you taken time to look through the Window?
Director, WindowView.org
WE ARE ALL AT RISK
A recent MarketWatch article starts this way:
“A poll of participants ahead of this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos found 10 areas of highest risk to the world. Such risks are “defined as an occurrence that causes significant negative impact for several countries and industries over a time frame of up to 10 years,” according to a report issued before the conference slated for this month in Switzerland.
1. Fiscal crises in key economies: The biggest concern, according to the report, remains whether wealthy countries can keep it together. “The report lists fiscal crises as the top risk advanced economies remain in danger of fiscal crises. …
Aside: This article relates how global economic instability could (ironically) stem from (complex political scenarios and ) falling oil prices as described elsewhere.
The MarketWatch article outlines these additional factors for global risks:
2. Structurally high unemployment/underemployment: The flip side of income disparity is the persistent unemployment and underemployment of millions of people.
3. Water crises: Huge population growth is placing big demands on freshwater supplies, notably in China and sub-saharan Africa. …
4. Severe income disparity: With employment in developed countries still suppressed in the wake of the financial crisis, and huge unemployed populations in developing economies, income disparity is a huge issue for Davos participants.
“Income disparity is also among the most worrying of issues. It raises concerns about the Great Recession and the squeezing effect it had on the middle classes in developed economies, while globalization has brought about a polarization of incomes in emerging and developing economies. This is true despite the obvious progress in countries such as Brazil and lower levels of poverty in several developing countries in Asia and Africa.“
5. Failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation: Similar to the fear of global governance failure is the fear that concerns over climate change won’t be addressed. “Climate change, ranked fifth on the list, is the key driver of such uncertain and changing weather patterns, causing an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts,” according to the report.
6. Greater incidence of extreme weather events: … Of note, is the finding that huge populations in coming years will be born in developing countries with potential exposure to hurricanes and typhoons, posing greater risks of damage such as was caused in the Philippines last year by a huge storm.
7. Global governance failure: This one amounts to the fear that … in the end international institutions aren’t actually able to get their act together.
“Given that global risks can be addressed effectively only through international collaboration, it is hardly a surprise that global governance failure is also included in the list as the risk of seventh highest concern,” the report finds.
8. Food crises: Nothing gets people riled up like not being able to eat. …
9. Failure of a major financial mechanism/institution: Perhaps not surprisingly … concern over failures financial institutions remains very high.
“Five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, with its system-wide impacts, the failure of a major financial mechanism or institution also features among the risks that the respondents are most concerned about, as uncertainty about the quality of many banks’ assets remains.”
10. Profound political and social instability: No. 10 on this year’s list is profound political and social instability potentially caused by military actions or aggressive foreign or trade policies on the part of global or regional powers.
———————– From the Window —————————-
The above ten cited concerns are not necessarily directly linked to biblical themes, but some are. For the serious Bible student, the idea of global governance is something that might link all ten issues. One day, soon, according to the Bible the world will turn to a single over arching global governance … a one world government. While climate change, as a whole, is not described in the Bible, numerous other events and the making of the one world government easily connect to the risks we see today. How will humans in a material context respond to changes in a way that leads to a single governance? We suggest material and spiritual forces bring us to such a point. And to understand that viewpoint takes time looking through the Window!
Director, WindowView.org
“A team of Rutgers University researchers has attempted to answer that question and localize it by studying past sea-level rise along the East Coast, as well as other factors that could influence what happens along the New Jersey Shore.
In recently published studies, they conclude that sea level at the Shore – already rising faster than at any time in the last 4,300 years – could go up by 11 to 15 inches more than the global average by 2100.
While levels worldwide will generally increase less than a foot by 2050, those at the Shore will likely rise 1.5 feet, according to a mid-range scenario. By 2100, local levels could climb 3.5 feet, bringing unprecedented flooding.”
Quotation above from Full article
Why is sea level rise important? Our answer: because the topic of change affects every living being on the planet. And if that is linked to what life is and will be in the future, then change heightens our senses concerning a deeper look at the value and meaning of life itself.
The underlying position one can adopt from time spent looking through the ‘window’ is that driving forces in material and mind open one’s spirit to seeing life in the context of purpose and a future. Too many people either don’t take time to look at their life in the context of our origins, information from both science and Scripture, and further make too many conclusions by assumptions. Global change is one aspect of the multiple perspectives one gains by a good long look. You are alive … here … now, so why not look if indeed the WindowView reveals something special about life and that you are not here by chance.
Director. WindowView.org
“From The Herald and Presbyter, November 22, 1911, Cincinnati, Ohio. We reprint this excellent paper as the remarkable utterance of a Christian layman on a most important subject. — Editor
BY AN OCCUPANT OF THE PEW
Perhaps the most remarkable movement in philosophic thought that has occurred in any age was the rise and general acceptance by scientific circles of the evolutionary theory as propounded by Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. It was remarkable that men of science, whose peculiar boast it is that they deal only with established facts, should have so readily departed from this rule and accepted a system based upon hypothesis only, and which was, and is still after the lapse of forty years, without a single known fact to support it. Even when allowance is made for the well-known eagerness of many scientists to do away with all dualism, which was Mr. Darwin’s aim, it was still remarkable that men of trained intellect should have so promptly accepted at face value his two principal works, in which the expression, “we may well suppose,” occurs over eight hundred times, as a basis for the argument. Pure supposition may answer as a foundation for fanciful sketches like those of Jules Verne’s; but as ground upon which to base a sober scientific argument it appears to the average man as little less than farcical. Why it did not so appear to the scientific mind, the scientific mind may perhaps be able to explain. We frankly confess our inability to do so.”
From THE FUNDAMENTALS – A TESTIMONY TO THE TRUTH Volume 4 Edited by R.A. Torrey, A.C. Dixon and Others.
The following words from Dr. Wright may not at first resonate with the way moderns think, but from this window is a view to interesting reflections. Written over a century ago, these words are worth a look:
Theories of evolution have chased each other off the field in rapid succession for thousands of years. Evolution is not a new thing in philosophy, and such is the frailty of human nature that it is not likely to disappear suddenly from among men. The craze of the last half century is little more than the recrudesence of a philosophy which has divided the opinion of men from the earliest ages. In both the Egyptian and the East Indian mythology, the world and all things in it were evolved from an egg; and so in the Polynesian myths. But the Polynesians had to have a bird to lay the egg, and the Egyptians and the Brahmans had to have some sort of a deity to create theirs. The Greek philosophers struggled with the problem without coming to any more satisfactory conclusion. Aniximander, like Professor Huxley, traced everything back to an “infinity” which gradually worked itself into a sort of pristine “mud” (something like Huxley’s exploded “bathybius”), out of which everything else evolved; while Thales of Miletus tried to think of water as the mother of everything, and Aneximenes practically deified the air. Diogenes imagined a “mind stuff” (something like Weissmann’s “biophores,” Darwin’s “gemmules possessed with affinity for each other,” and Spencer’s “vitalized molecules”) which acted as if it had intelligence; while Heraclitus thought that fire was the only element pure enough to produce the soul of man. These speculations culminated in the great poem of Lucretius entitled, De Rerum Natura, written shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. His atomic theory was something like that which prevails at the present time among physicists. Amid the unceasing motion of these atoms there somehow appeared, according to him, the orderly forms and the living processes of nature.
Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress over those of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their milder forms they are “deistic” — admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, however, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin’s theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but little our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process.
From: CHAPTER 6 THE PASSING OF EVOLUTION BY PROFESSOR GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, D. D., L.L. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. In THE FUNDAMENTALS – A TESTIMONY TO THE TRUTH Volume 4 Edited by R.A. Torrey, A.C. Dixon and Others. ca. 1909
On the news wire for November 5:
“Milky Way may host billions of Earth-size planets – LA Times
There’s no place like home, but scientists now say that Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars in a so-called habitable zone are so common that there could be as many as 11 billion in the Milky Way alone.”
We have NASA colleagues who strive hard to find evidence for water on Mars or to reach into space for habitable planets. And we may find many houses with rooms and spaces fit for life in the universe … but the real question is: Why do we make the leap to say if it’s fit for life, we will find life? Let us think one step further.
Starting on planet Earth and examining every aspect of life from sophisticated research efforts we now find the ultimate dilemma. Science indicates laws and conditions ( the application of physics, chemistry, and material sciences ) is likely equal across the universe. If life starts here it could by the same means start elsewhere. That is logic used by many persons.
Okay, now the wrench to throw into the works. Human explorations of planetary science (i.e. of Earth ) and every conceivable approach to how chemicals could or can come together to create first life … all come to dead ends. Human ingenuity suggests there must be an answer because … well … because here we are alive today.
Bottom line: Scientists cannot tell you how life arouse from chemicals. So why would any other planet elsewhere be any better than this known fit for life earth? You can think about that because we want to go to the bigger problem now known to the sciences.
Life is not simply metabolism, form, reproduction, or historical records of species. Life is an innovation. A first innovation for first appearance and we will not toss out the word evolution here, because some change in life forms appears over time (from existing life).
The problem is simply life is based on information. Information in DNA and also epigenetic information that is elsewhere in living beings and not in the DNA. The point raised here is simple. No one in science has explained how the initial information arouse. Most biological, genetic and evolutionary research shows change over time, but based on existing information in life forms. Explaining new innovation that gives us new forms based on new information is lacking.
There is more to this presentation than written here. The main point is that the universe can have trillions of habitable planets, but unless chemicals can make life and information is somehow introduced to direct life’s forms and being … you can count all the planets you want to no gain.
Is this a case of skepticism? Actually, not at all. This post is simply drawing attention to the status of what science also knows as fact. And that gives cause to not being so moved by planetary discoveries, because the real question for which we desire answers concerns the source and origin of life in the first place.
Director, WindowView.org
Related Window Links:
Chemical Origins — Yes or No — What Does the Evidence Show
Time Required for Macroevolution to Occur
Living On A Privileged Planet
To Our WindowViewers:
A while back we came across an article about the potential release of methane that currently is held in the permafrost of the northern latitudes. If the permafrost region experiences temperature increases … then methane will be released into the atmosphere. AND once that happens, warming will accelerate. The international panel of scientists has just released new documentation and in January a report will be posted with their latest assessment.
BOTTOM LINE: If the IPCC is correct and the further warming also influences methane releases … then the Change we speak of at WindowView will come quicker than anyone, you, us, all plain folks, could ever imagine.
————— IPCC PRESS RELEASE ————-
27 September 2013
Human influence on climate clear, IPCC report says
STOCKHOLM, 27 September – Human influence on the climate system is clear. This is evident
in most regions of the globe, a new assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes.
It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. The evidence for this has grown, thanks to more and better observations, an improved understanding of the climate system response and improved climate models.
Warming in the climate system is unequivocal and since 1950 many changes have been observed throughout the climate system that are unprecedented over decades to millennia. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850, reports the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group I assessment report, Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis, approved on Friday by member governments of the IPCC in Stockholm, Sweden.
“Observations of changes in the climate system are based on multiple lines of independent evidence. Our assessment of the science finds that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice has diminished, the global mean sea level has risen and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased,” said Qin Dahe, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group I.
Thomas Stocker, the other Co-Chair of Working Group I said: “Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and changes in all components of the climate system. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.”
——————- end quotation from press release ————
We’ll provide more on the methane story in a future post. One thing is certain, the news on climate change is heating up. Sea level is rising, migration patterns have changed, and life on earth is shifting!
Visit our change pages at WindowView
Director, WindowVieworg
Window Related Links:
Thesis on Change
Climate Change
Historic Scientists’ Warning
We are certain that this blog will not be the only place where a claim of design in nature will be linked to the handy work of an Intelligent Designer. No matter where you are in terms of thinking about design being a cause for our lives … the picture of gears presented below is remarkable. Take a look, but then read the quote to follow!
Planthopper Gears on Rear legs
The photo above is of a page from the September 13, 2013 Washington Post. The article states: “Its remarkable that these gears look so similar to the gears man has designed, even the individual teeth are so similar,” said Burrows, author of a study that was published online Thursday in the journal Science.’
Well, we have examples of macro-molecules at the cell level acting and functioning like machines. Too often structures like feathers seem to be accepted as the result of evolution, yet historical commentaries even back to Darwin’s contemporaries likened feathers and even metamorphosis (of a caterpillar to a butterfly) as examples of [intelligent] design. All this with good reason due to specificity, complexity, and design features that chance just does not adequately explain.
Today the argument from design holds water in many ways … only the unwillingness to venture into exploring the relevance of design and the designing intelligence behind the scenes holds us back from a full exploration of who we are and how we got here!
Could we … should we … add this to Darwin’s list of doubts? (see our article on Darwin’s Doubts)
Think about it! Enjoy! This is a wonderful example.
A Washington Post video of the gears in motion may still be viewed at this link.
Director, WindowView.org
The following post presents the words from a friend who is working with Operation Blessing International. We are providing Jennifer’s personal account. For additional information we refer you to Operation Blessing Intl.‘s website.
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I have been working with the Syrian refugees in Jordan for about the past year now. We just recently went to Jordan on Sept 9th. These are some pictures I took. The situation in Jordan is severe and that does not count Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and other countries where they are fleeing. To hear their stories up close and personal is heartbreaking. The people have fled with NOTHING and I repeat NOTHING. We are trying to raise money to help them. My boss was here and he is a filmmaker so he took video. You will be able to see that in a few days on www.ob.org.
From listening to these stories, even if the US did something to deter the situation of the systematic killing of the Syrians, it would be worth it. Sometimes you have to put your comfort/thoughts/resources aside to help those in need and to defend those who cannot defend themselves. Social justice is a major theme in the bible throughout the prophets. I am in a position to change the situations of the refugees and I am going to do my best to make that happen.
Of note, what you might not expect … The Israeli’s and I are working together on this. Yes, the Israelis want to help the Syrians and I am here to tell you that it is happening more than you know and more than you will hear.
At this point we have delivered food, clothing, blankets to the refugees about 7,500 so far. We are working to meet the ongoing needs of Refugees as the come across the border with absolutely nothing. The take their family which could be as many as 12-20 people in one family and cross the border overnight. They come into the towns and villages looking for shelter and food. The UN camp is to capacity at 120,000 people. The UN is trying to build two more camps but in the mean time, the refugees overflow into the towns to stay in abandoned buildings, with families or anywhere they can find. You can see UN tents scattered around northern Jordan, one here, two there, a few clustered together. We were taken to one makeshift camp of 25 families, about 160 people. They were telling us that we were the only people who had come to help them. No one else has come. We supplied them with food and the returned with 100 blankets the next day.
As you stand face to face with these people who are soldiers, teachers, bakers, people of every kind you can’t help but think, “if I were in your shoes what would I want you to do for me?” The only answer I can come up with is to change their situation in any way possible. That means food, water, medication, shelter, work, any type of provision is something. Each one of these areas is being considered as we address those who want to help in this situation. The winter is coming and in northern Jordan it is already cool at night. The terrain is dry and open so the wind cuts across the area and it does get very cold.
The winter is coming and in northern Jordan it is already cool at night. The terrain is dry and open so the wind can come across the area and it does get cold. I met a few women who have newborns that they gave birth to in their tents. There is no food, no milk, no supplies for the children. They have only a little when it comes to clothing. They are stranded in a situation that needs to be changed.
There is no food, no milk, no supplies for the children. I am working with Arabs, Christians and Jews to assist the Syrians. We have cut across the political, social and religious aspects of this situation to get to the heart of the matter – meet the needs of the refugee.
Isaiah 58:6-10 speaks of a true fast and if you see the hungry to feed him, the naked to clothe them, to provide shelter for the poor wanderer with shelter. We cannot sit idly by while these people suffer. It is our duty as human beings to respond and show that we do care and that we can change the situation.
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We at WindowView.org believe that the larger picture on what is happening and will happen in the Middle East requires the compassion, understanding, and love that the Heavenly Father provides to all. If inspired, please visit Operation Blessing Intl.‘s website and consider how you might help. At the very least, be aware that the popular media hardly reports the complete story of events in the Middle East. Here are pictures from the full view.
Director, WindowView.org
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Photo Credit and Permission granted by Jennifer Allen © 2013 all rights reserved
