To us and our good fortune! Be happy, be healthy, long life!
And if our good fortune never comes, here’s to whatever comes.
Drink l’chai-im, to life! To life, l’chai-im! L’chai-im, l’chai-im, to life!
Here’s to our prosperity, our good health and happiness, and most important …
To life, to life, l’chai-im! L’chai-im, l’chai-im, to life!
Here’s to the father I tried to be!
Here’s to my bride-to-be! Drink l’chai-im, to life!
To life, to life, l’chai-im. To Tzeitel, my daughter… My wife!
It gives you something to think about… Something to drink about!
Drink l’chai-im, to life! To life, l’chai-im, l’chai-im, l’chai-im, to life.
Drink l’chai-im, to life! To Tzeitel, my daughter… My wife!
It takes a wedding to make us say, “Let’s live another day.”
Drink l’chai-im, to life!
– Sheldon Harnick (1924-2023), from “To Life” (1964)
We learned last week that materialist scientists are flummoxed by the question of how Something might have arisen from nothing. It seems almost unfair to beat materialist scientists up about their inability to deal with that core problem, except for the fact that their determination not even to try to understand reality except in materialist terms does kind of invite our ridicule, doesn’t it? When the fundamental problem with something-from-nothing is one that even a fifth-grader can spot, why can’t fully grown and educated scientists at least attempt to deal with it? And in any event, every bit as profound an enigma for traditional scientists turns out to be the question of how life first arose on earth. We might actually say that the origin-of-life question is an even more vexing problem for materialist scientists to deal with than is the origin-of-matter issue, for the simple fact that they know that they really ought to be able to solve this origin-of-life conundrum. It should be a relatively straightforward problem for trained chemists and biologists to tackle. Or so you would think. But the plain fact is that for the better part of a century, materialist mainstream scientists have been chasing the question of how life might have arisen on earth. And so far, they have made no progress toward solving any part of that puzzle at all.
Until the nineteen-fifties, the few articles that were published in popular-science magazines about the origin of life were taking an amazingly lazy approach. They assumed that life must have originated in some primordial pool, where just the right mix of chemicals was hit by lightning one day at just the right temperature, and – zap! – life began. It would have been just simple cells at first, they thought, which somehow magically assembled themselves; and then those cells would have begun to combine, and so on. Those old magazine articles looked a lot like eighth-grade science project reports. Then in 1953 there were what were considered to be three big scientific advances, which now, seventy years further on, some materialist scientists believe just might have put them right on the edge of an impending breakthrough. The first of those seminal advances came in April of 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper on DNA which advanced a new understanding of how the double helix form of DNA could help to explain how life replicates itself. The second breakthrough came three weeks later, when news broke of the Miller-Urey experiment, which showed how a cocktail of chemicals could spontaneously generate the amino acids that are vital to building the molecules of life. Then in September of 1953, there was given the first reasonably accurate estimate for the age of the earth. Origin-of-life researchers felt that at last they had a great place to really begin to do their work.
But in the seventy years since that pivotal year of discoveries, almost no further progress has been made. The popular-science-magazine versions of scientists’ latest ideas of how life on earth might have arisen randomly still look like precisely the same sorts of dramatic diagrams they used to draw in those seventy-year-old popular-science magazines, where lightning would hit pond-scum, and Presto! And as is true of the Big Bang as a proposed origin-of-matter solution, these diagrams are singularly unsatisfying. The true building blocks of life would be chemicals with some of the same names as those that are given on the linked Scientific American diagram; but all the useful chemicals would need to be in a nearly pure form, and quickly able to combine properly and in the correct order and almost under laboratory conditions if anything like these events were to have any hope of taking place in a way that might actually get life started. And then, of course, once the spark of life is struck, you would need ways to feed that tiny flame and keep it alive. Both chemicals and conditions would have to be just right. So for life on earth to have begun this way, such sparks would need to have been struck repeatedly! So often, perhaps, that once in a thousand or even once in a million times, a spark might have persisted long enough and in such ideal conditions that it somehow survived, was fed, and began to be stable. But, then what? How did that spark become a cell, and out of perhaps a million such cells, how then did one cell learn to replicate itself?
Seeing how plain foolish the materialists are being, once again the brilliant Christian origin-of-life chemist Dr. James Tour has called the materialist researchers’ bluff. Dr. Tour had become increasingly vexed by baseless claims that materialist origin-of-life researchers were beginning to make real progress, so he proceeded to make them a simple bet that, if any of their recent claims were true, they ought to have been able to win easily. He offered ten of the most prominent materialist scientists in the field of origin-of-life research a contest in which, in order to win his contest, they would need only to demonstrate how just one of a selected basic five of the essential building blocks of life could have arisen naturally. And he even suggested that three of the ten chosen materialist scientists could be the judges of whether or not his contest had been won! If they could show how even one of those building blocks could have arisen naturally, he promised that he would take down all his YouTubes in which he had repeatedly claimed that their whole field was out to lunch (metaphorically speaking). But alas, there was no winner. There was no contest in the end, since none of the ten scientists even tried to respond to his challenge. In fact, there has been no meaningful progress made by any materialist scientist toward understanding how life on earth could have arisen on its own in the seventy years since those three 1953 breakthroughs first were hailed.
So now let’s help James Tour spike the ball in his own end zone. He and others have created some wonderfully playful YouTube videos that he had offered to have taken down if the materialist scientists had accepted his challenge and then had won it; although, of course, there is no way that they could have won it. Here is one sample video that I think you will enjoy. Creationist scientists are much better funded nowadays, and they even have their own terrific online journal, called Evolution News & Science Today. Given how bollixed up mainstream science still is with its “fundamental scientific dogma” of atheistic materialism, the independent scientists who are published in Evolution News are doing beautiful and enlightened work that is fully on a par with the work of classic mainstream scientists of the free scientific age that is now more than a century into the past. It is such a joy to read their publication!
Now that we have seen how useless have been all the traditional scientific efforts to understand these two fundamental aspects of our reality, both the origin of the universe (last week) and the origin of life, I would like to point out one more thing. When you put together last week’s and this week’s blog posts and read them again, including their linked articles (and Rupert Sheldrake’s banned Tedx talk from last week), my dear friends, you now have incontrovertible scientific proof of the existence of a Creator God. Materialist scientists have accepted the existence of a great many things with far less proof than what we have delivered last week and today of God’s existence.
Please consider these two core facts:
- The reality around you exists and is stable. This universe has been here for an estimated 13.7 billion earth-years, and during all that time its cosmological constants and everything else required to maintain it in stable existence have all been held within vanishingly tiny tolerances, or else the universe would either have collapsed inward upon itself or blow apart long since. And yet you will sleep well tonight, as you do every night, with a mind entirely free from worry as all those cosmological constants and many other controlling factors keep steadily doing their minute adjusting.
- You exist and are alive and stable. The brightest scientific minds over the past hundred years have not been able even to begin to figure out how life began on earth, and they certainly have not been able to work out how life has developed from its first spark into its first cell, and then into all its complex modern variations. These questions seem to be simple ones until you actually do the research, and you begin to learn what is involved in bringing life into existence, and then creating it as it exists today in all its manifold complexity! Google some of James Tour’s YouTubes and consider the almost unfathomable difficulties that were involved in getting the earliest life to start to flourish on earth, and never mind developing it from that into the wondrously complex body and brain that you see now in your mirror.
So now you have incontrovertible proof of the ongoing existence of the loving Creator God. Not the Christian God, of course. Indeed, nothing to do with any religion because all the religions are human-made, and they are fading in this twenty-first century as we outgrow our need for them, and as we also grow beyond our leaders’ ugly and bullying lie of atheism. Now we once again can seek and find in our own hearts the God Who always has been quietly there. Before all religions there is the One Creator God, the One God that Jesus refers to as Father, and as Spirit. The One who is the highest aspect of Consciousness, and is only perfect Love. Please look around you now at each beautiful face, and know that those faces, those hillsides, those cities, literally nothing whatsoever that you see and not a single star could exist if there were no Creator God. Now that we can have God without the barrier of religions between us, we truly are entering a new age!
And add to all of this the fact that in this twenty-first century we also know for certain that we are eternal beings. We always have been eternal beings, but now in this new century, more and more of us while we are on earth know for certain this glorious truth! We know that we have nothing to fear, and we are able at last to hear the voice of God calling to us from where God dwells, deep within each of our own hearts… “Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted on the earth” (Psalm 46:10). That psalm was first sung three thousand years ago, but God has been inspiring people to sing variations of those words from even long before that, down all the generations. There always was going to come a time when we while on earth would grow past any need for religions, when we would realize that the true God always has been within us, all along, and when we would yearn for a closer and deeper Walk that we would at last be able to share with the One Eternal God. And more and more, my dear ones, it looks as if that time may soon be upon us now….
May you both be favored with the future of your choice!
May you live to see a thousand reasons to rejoice!
We’ll raise a glass and sip a drop of schnapps in honor of the great good luck that favors you!
We know that when good fortune favors two such men, it stands to reason, we deserve it too!
To us and our good fortune! Be happy, be healthy, long life!
And if our good fortune never comes, here’s to whatever comes.
Drink l’chai-im, to life!
– Sheldon Harnick (1924-2023), from “To Life” (1964)