April 2019 – Anthony G. Flood

“Life from non-life”? Without a prayer.

Abiogenesis, a Greek mouthful for “the origin of life,” is according to Wikipedia, “the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter.”

The lack of critical qualification at the outset is startling: non-living matter’s alleged once-upon-a-time issuance in life is asserted as a fact, not a hypothesis. That is, the bald assertion comes first, followed by the admission of the hypothetical nature of the whole business:

While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but a gradual process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among scientists, there is no single, generally accepted model for the origin of life, and this article presents several principles and hypotheses for how abiogenesis could have occurred.

So the devilish details are unknown and there’s no single, generally accepted model for abiogenesis, yet some version of it must be true. That’s the “prevailing hypothesis.” Belief in its having occurred is “uncontroversial among scientists.”

That is to say, abiogenesis is a dogma, not an empirically verified fact. It is a sad commentary on the state of science that a theory with nothing going for it except the culturally regnant naturalistic prejudice is “uncontroversial.”

And by nothing, I mean . . . nothing. For an entertaining retailing of the dues the dogmatists pay for their dogmatism, I cannot recommend too enthusiastically Rice University Professor of Chemistry James Tour‘s lively video presentation (sponsored by The Discovery Institute) available on EvolutionNews.

Professor Tour’s massive case against “life from non-life” gives one an idea of the “integrated chemical complexity” that led the late philosopher (and long-time atheist) Antony Flew (not to be confused with Anthony Flood) to drop his profession of atheism for deism.

“Show me the chemistry!,” Tour demands. So did Flew, but he went away empty-handed.

It doesn’t exist.

The evidence for the existence of God—the God of the Bible, not Flew’s deistic deus—lies in (among many other aspects of creation) scientific inquiry itself, the fit of intelligibility and intelligence. It’s inexplicable apart from the worldview expressed in the Bible. The demonstrated folly of research programs for testing the abiogenesis “hypothesis”—or the dogma masquerading as one—is, at best, a suasive consideration for Christian theism.

So, again, set aside a couple of minutes for the beginning of James Tour’s pedagogical tour de force (sorry!). I defy you not to stay for the whole hour.

Book Launch: “Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness”

My first book went live on Amazon today. Its introduction and first chapter were originally blog posts, but the rest the book consists of essays published over the past five years. If you can help spread the word, please do. I’ll prepare a paperback version. I now append the book description.—Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), a pioneering researcher in African-American slave revolts, was also an American Communist theoretician. Anthony Flood, who attended Aptheker’s lectures a half-century ago, became his research assistant, friend and comrade. Decades after Flood repudiated the comradeship, it dawned on him that Aptheker’s politics had blocked his research in his area of specialization: he failed to recognize The Black Jacobins, the work of C. L. R. James (1901-1989) that chronicled the only successful slave revolt in modern times. The failure was ideological.

In the course of investigating this silence, Flood discovered scholars who admired both writers, but never at the same time. Doing so would have forced them to address the uncomfortable truth that one of their heroes ignored the other. That is, the white radical scholar ignored the black radical scholar who was 14 years his senior. The only explanation, Flood contends, is that Aptheker, the Stalinist, could not bring himself to acknowledge the work of James, the Trotskyist.

There are other problems with Aptheker’s legacy, of course, such as his uncovering the truth about slavery in the Americas while covering it up in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The “dissing” of James, however, undermines his “anti-racism” reputation as well as his argument that “partisanship with the oppressed” makes objectivity in history writing possible. He was a partisan of too many oppressors. He eventually admitted his own “willful blindness” (his words), yet that didn’t stop him from defending, as late as 2000, The Truth about Hungary, his book-length apologia for the Soviet Union’s crushing of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness includes not only Flood’s essay on Aptheker and James, but also vignettes of his coming into Aptheker’s life as a high school student and that of Sidney Hook (Aptheker’s nemesis and Flood’s philosophy professor). Also included are a review of the first biography of Aptheker and an inquiry into Aptheker’s status as an historian. Appendices include Aptheker’s first essay (in The American Hebrew) and Flood’s first letter on Aptheker (in The Journal of American History).

Herbert Aptheker expressed the ethos of the American Communist Party in its heyday, an atmosphere that pervades “progressive” American politics today. If you want to look at his role in that “progression,” this monograph is a good place to start.

Once more on Romans 13: James Redford’s “Jesus Is an Anarchist”

As I have an interest in dislodging the sediment of encrusted theological opinion, today I post an excerpt from James Redford’s 2001 essay “Jesus Is an Anarchist,” the text of which is here: anti-state.com and revised and expanded in 2011. It complements Otis Q. Sellers’s situating of Romans 13:1-7 in the Acts dispensation, posted recently.—Anthony Flood

It is often claimed that Christians are required to submit to government, as this is supposedly what Paul commanded that we are supposed to do in Romans 13. Thus:

Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor. Romans 13:1-7

But in actual fact Paul never does tell us in above excerpt from Romans 13 to submit to government!—at least certainly not as they have existed on Earth and are operated by men.

In fact, Paul would be an outright, boldfaced hypocrite were he to command anyone to do such a thing: for Paul himself did not submit to government, and if he had then he would not even have been alive to be able to write Romans 13.

Continue reading “Once more on Romans 13: James Redford’s “Jesus Is an Anarchist””

Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes.

When Jesus was brought before Pilate, “it was the day of the Preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14; emphasis added). Passover lay in the near future. And yet Jesus told his disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this the Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15; emphasis added). What is commonly called “The Last Supper” was the Passover.

If, however, the arguments of Colin J. Humphreys’s The Mystery of the The Last Supper hold up, there is no discrepancy. We may believe Jesus did celebrate the Passover on Nisan 14, not according to the calendar devised during the Babylonian Exile, however, but according to the pre-exilic calendar of ancient Israel. Those calendars were as different from each other as, say, the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar differs from the equally serviceable calendar of the Eastern Orthodox.

The pre-exilic calendar, being 364 days in length, is evenly divisible by 7. In such a calendar, therefore, any given date falls on the same day every year. Therefore, that calendar’s Nisan 14 has always fallen on a Wednesday since the first Passover. Humphreys’s hypothesis, to which I cannot do justice here, dissolves apparent discrepancies that have challenged faithful readers of the Gospels. Image result for The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus

For example, even though Jesus was arrested after eating His Passover, John’s Gospel has servants of the high priest Caiaphas conducting Jesus to Pilate’s hall of judgment before the “official” Passover: “and they themselves went not in the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28b).

Continue reading “Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes.”