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Such “ostrich” rules require everyone to bury their heads in the sand and to adopt the timeworn idiots’ slogan, “Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is made up.” Atheism can pronounce itself the proud “winner”—again—but the victory is hollow because the victor has made up his own rules.

No “spontaneous” origin of life? Make up your own rules and you can win every time. Make it the rule that God cannot even be considered as a possibility, then atheism wins—but the dice are loaded, so the “winner” is disqualified. If the rule is adopted that by considering the mountains of scientific evidence for God’s existence, one is engaging in religion, and religion is outlawed as having no scientific basis, then no matter how overwhelming the scientific evidence for God, it will not be allowed—by the very definition atheists have imposed.

Have you ever had a “Joseph moment”? I had one the other day.

By Joseph, I’m referencing the biblical character—Abraham’s great-grandson—who was the second youngest of 12 brothers. Although favored by his father, he was hated by his brothers, who soon sold him as a slave to Egypt. (What a great family, huh?)

While in Egypt, he rose to the top as the employee of a prominent man, only to be falsely accused of raping the man’s wife. This offense landed him in prison for years. But these prison years were not wasted, for events that happened there soon catapulted Joseph to second-in-command in ancient Egypt, where he orchestrated a plan to save that country—and many others—from death by famine.

Joseph’s story finally wraps up when his brothers come to town to buy food, and learn that the brother they treated terribly now has power to make their lives miserable. But he doesn’t. Instead, Joseph chooses to see the providence of God in his life circumstances—both good and bad—and forgive, telling his brothers, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

We all have difficult things in life. A friend betrays us, a family member explodes in fury and refuses to interact for months, we’re falsely accused at work—even the government and society in general seem to go after us with unjust taunts of racism or fascism. And when those things happen, it’s easy to let our hurt and betrayal get the best of us, consuming our thoughts and actions for months.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Joseph wrestled with those same feelings. At some point, however, he was able to rise above those wrestlings, forgiving those who wronged him and seeing God’s fingerprints in their actions, despite how terrible they were. And as I began to realize the other day, getting glimpses of God’s fingerprints in the difficulties of life puts a whole new perspective on things.

So often it’s easy to view God as the meanie up in Heaven who doesn’t hear our prayers or give us what we want. But the reality is that those things we view as mean or difficult or uncomfortable or mistakes are really just His way of looking out for us and seeking our good, even if it might not seem like it right away.

Twentieth-century minister A. M. Overton said it best in his poem “He Maketh No Mistake”:

My Father’s way may twist and turn,
My heart may throb and ache,
But in my soul I’m glad I know,
He maketh no mistake.

My cherished plans may go astray,
My hopes may fade away,
But still I’ll trust my Lord to lead
For He doth know the way.

Though night be dark and it may seem
That day will never break;
I’ll pin my faith, my all in Him,
He maketh no mistake.

There’s so much now I cannot see,
My eyesight’s far too dim;
But come what may, I’ll simply trust
And leave it all to Him.

For by and by the mist will lift
And plain it all He’ll make,
Through all the way, though dark to me,
He made not one mistake.

Are you going through a difficult time? Or is there something in your past you just have difficulty forgiving and forgetting? Or maybe you’re overwhelmed with the direction of the world, wondering how anything good can come out of the increasing evil we see swelling around us.

Look for the ways God is using those evil things to accomplish His good. It will change your perspective to realize that the things we think are mistakes, are really just the plot twists to make the good seem all the more delightful and surprising when it comes.

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2023/05/evil-and-good-annie-holmquist/

Should we be worried about the power psychology professions have in our everyday lives and the direction of the field?

In researching “Trusting the ‘Experts’ is Risky Business,” I came upon the news of an Indiana family who lost custody of their transgender teen even when there was no finding of abuse. The U.S. Supreme Court let the judgment of the lower court stand, a judgment that calls into question advising trends in psychotherapy.

In this case, by order of the courts, the parents were both forced into therapy and prohibited from discussing gender identity with their child outside of the therapy setting. Meanwhile, the child complained of feeling unsafe with his parents. Again, the court stipulates that there was no finding of neglect or abuse.

In sum, the parents lost their First Amendment Rights—in their own home— and, ultimately, their child based on recommendations and information from psychology and the psychotherapy community.

Their case caught my attention because the parents objected to their child’s transgender identity, a poorly defined condition where current recommendations call for treatment with aggressive drugs that can cause sterility and surgeries, including castrations and breast removal.

Children, including teens, don’t understand the ramifications of these interventions and cannot provide informed consent. Caring parents and psychology professionals should be questioning this.

Yet the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Psychiatric Association, The American Academy of Childhood and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), and the American Counseling Association have all taken a stance of extreme support of medical gender-affirming care, even as the WPATH files and the Cass Review revealed these practices are based on poorly researched pseudoscience amounting to experiments on children and vulnerable adults.

The willful oversight of these findings is an alarming indicator of the current direction of the psychology-based professions.

It’s also the tip of the iceberg.

Not only do you have the denial of reality in matters of biological sex, but in the science sector, there have been research and publication abuses, and for two decades now, a replication crisis has undermined much of the field’s scientific integrity.

While p-hacking and other poor research techniques account for some of the replication crisis, different aspects of the research issues come from a willful denial of all reality.

In a sneak peek of the 2024 revision of Research and Evaluation in Counseling, Bradley Erford spends 20 pages questioning the nature of truth, the rejection of objective reality, multiple realities, and critical theories.

Under critical theories, it reads:

research is viewed as a political endeavor that should facilitate social action to benefit the powerless in society. Further, it accuses the research process from other paradigms of silencing less powerful groups in society.

You don’t see any rebuke for this blatant perversion of science. Quite the contrary. He remarks,

One can also easily see that diverse theoretical variations are likely to emerge from postpositivist, constructivist, and critical theory approaches, leading to rich discussions and attempts to converge and differentiate emerging theoretical propositions.

That’s not all. In a clear ideological overreach and ethical breach, some disciplines, like counseling, have insisted that practitioners take on, uphold, and promote multiculturalism values for decades. The APA has a new strategic plan to use psychology to solve societal issues.

It is hard to overstate the precariousness of this house of cards in terms of credibility.

Yet, the machinations of modern life proceed like the Titanic at full throttle. The law looks to these practitioners and this science when making judgments and drafting policy, like allowing kids to hide major life changes from parents or get gender-affirming care without parental consent.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/bulletin-board/psychology-associations-have-lost-their-credibility/

Only an intelligence can author meaningful information and put it in writing; and the detailed instructions for constructing and operating only one cell, let alone all of them in the human body, would take a supreme intelligence, bringing us back to the Creator once again. Natural selection can only effect many changes within a species by the mingling of DNA through mating and reproduction. There can be an almost infinite variety of dogs all descended from the wolf, but natural selection cannot create a new species because that would require an infusion of new information into DNA, and information neither comes from matter nor can it be created by any evolutionary process. From the very beginning (and ever since), information had to have been introduced into DNA by an outside intelligence. There is no other explanation for the appearance of information (and through it, life) organizing lifeless chemicals.

Darwin called On the Origin of Species “one long argument.”1 It was an argument opposing the doctrine that species had been individually created, and an argument proposing the hypothesis that all living things are the modified descendants of one or a few common ancestors. But the hypothesis was unsupported in 1859, and the evidence for it is still insufficient. Homology has become circular reasoning. The fossil record remains at best inconclusive (and likely opposed to Darwinian gradualism), and molecular phylogeny is shot through with inconsistencies. Natural selection and mutation produce nothing more than changes within existing species. And the origin of species — Darwin’s central problem — remains unsolved.

On the Origin of Species may have been one long argument, but from the standpoint of empirical science, continued claims that the evidence for evolution is “incontrovertible”2 (as Richard Dawkins put it) might be better termed one long bluff.

Notes

1.Darwin, Origin of Species, 1st ed., 459. 

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York: Free Press, 2009), vii. 

https://evolutionnews.org/2022/02/darwins-one-wrong-argument/

Adnan Abyat is an imam in Canada who recently preached a rousing sermon designed to get his congregation all fired up for jihad. As Muslim leaders all over the world speak of Hamas’ conflict with Israel as a jihad, it’s understandable that this kind of sermon would be common in the Islamic world these days. Abyat, like many others, attributed the jihad impulse to Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Yet there is abundant reason to believe that Muhammad was not exactly what Adnan Abyat and so many others think he was.

In his sermon, which should have, but almost certainly didn’t, raise eyebrows among Canadian law enforcement and intelligence officials, Abyat said: “I attest that Muhammad is Allah’s servant and His prophet who awakened the desire for Jihad and incited the believers, who made Jihad for the sake of Allah the pinnacle of Islam, and the one who said that Paradise is underneath the shades of the swords.”…

All this raises the question once again: what if Muhammad really said none of this? What if the stories Islamic tradition tells us about what he said and did are more myth and legend than sober historical fact? Then Hamas and other jihadis all over the world are killing and dying for a fiction. It would be the cruelest of cruel jokes on the jihadis, but if this idea became widely known in the Islamic world, the result could be transformational.

I explored this question several years ago in a book entitled Did Muhammad Exist?”, which, you might be surprised to learn, was controversial. In it, I demonstrated that the earliest available biographical data about Muhammad dates from two centuries after the traditional date of his death. There are a few mentions of “Muhammad” here and there before then, but none of them match what we know, or think we know, about the prophet of Islam….

The first six decades of the seventh-century Arab conquest contain no mention anywhere of the existence of the religion of Islam, or of the Qur’an, or of Muhammad as the prophet of Islam. The Arab conquerors had extensive contact with the people they conquered, many of whom wrote about these conquests. Yet Islam, the Qur’an, and Muhammad just don’t seem to come up….Most Islamic traditions say that Muhammad was always the name of the prophet; others, however, assert that he was originally named Qutham and that his name was changed to Muhammad later. Most Islamic traditions state that the angel Gabriel appeared to Qutham/Muhammad and delivered the Qur’anic revelations to him; some, however, maintain that initially an angel named Saraphel visited the new prophet, and was only later replaced by Gabriel.

Those who defend the historical value of the early Islamic material may dismiss these as erroneous traditions and point to the preponderance of support for the mainstream versions, but this doesn’t answer the question of why such traditions began circulating in the first place. If Muhammad had always been known as Muhammad and the angel who appeared to him always as Gabriel, why would anyone make up stories renaming the central characters Qutham and Saraphel?

These variant traditions, however, also could indicate that Muhammad as we know him is a composite figure whose story is made up of many earlier traditions. It could be that stories of Qutham and Saraphel were incorporated into the Muhammad myth, as were traditions that were originally about others as the figure of the prophet of Islam was being constructed.

That’s just two of the many strange and anomalous aspects of Islamic tradition regarding Muhammad.

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/08/19/as-a-canadian-imam-calls-for-jihad-in-muhammads-name-a-tough-question-must-be-asked-n4931771

Furthermore, for there to be natural selection, there must be DNA—but now we’ve moved up another level. DNA constitutes the instruction manual for construction manual for constructing and operating all of the nano-chemical machinery in each of the 100 trillion cells in the human body. But DNA is in writing—and it is encoded so that only certain protein molecules can decode it!

There are numerous problems with natural selection, the first one being the obvious fact that natural selection can only select from what is available. No “selection” can occur until there is a living replicator; and the probability of even the smallest living unit (i.e., the tiniest cell) forming by chance is mathematically impossible.  Dawkins states, “Natural selection is not by chance . . . it is the opposite of chance!” Fair enough, but molecules come together in proper order only by obedience to the laws of chemistry, in a process that is not related at all to “natural selection.” If Dawkins wants to call it that (these chemicals haven’t yet “spontaneously” come to life), let him do so. The coming together of molecules, which must be according to the laws of chemistry, happens continuously and has never once produced life.