A Creationist Interviews Lawrence Krauss

* Real Science Radio has a Far Ranging Conversation with Krauss: Co-hosts Bob Enyart and Fred Williams present Bob's interview of theoretical physicist (emphasis on the theoretical), atheist Lawrence Krauss. Fred says, "It's David vs. Goliath, but without the slingshot." As the discussion ranges from astronomy and anatomy to cosmology and physics, most folks would presume that Dr. Krauss would take apart Enyart's arguments, especially when the Bible believer got the wrong value for the electron-to-proton mass ratio. But the conversation reveals fascinating dynamics from the creation/evolution debate. (The planned 25-minute interview ran 40 minutes, so there's also a Krauss Part II and once in each half we say, "Stop the tape, stop the tape," to comment.)

* "All Evidence Overwhelmingly Supports the Big Bang": Contradicting Dr. Krauss' over-the-top sales pitch, see RSR's List of Things that Bust the Big Bang, cataloging major observations made by NASA and leading institutions which, as the discoverers typically admit, contradict what was predicted based on the most fundamental expectations of the Big Bang.

* Atheists Admit Fully Half of the Argument: When admitting that biological life appears designed, and that the universe appears finely tuned, the atheist admits fully half of the intelligent design argument. Krauss friend Richard Dawkins often says and has written that, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed..." (Dawkins, Watchmaker, p. 1). And the leading cosmologists acknowledge the appearance of the fine tunning of many of the parameters of the universe. Stephen Hawking titled his 2010 book, The Grand Design, and since the 1980s has been admitting, "The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adusted to make possible the development of life" (Hawking, Brief History of Time, p. 129). The first half of the argument for the existence of a Designer is the identification of that which appears to be designed. Bob tried to get Krauss to acknowledge this much.

* Krauss Denies, then Remembers: RSR continues to document the quirk of evolutionists who pretend during debates with creationists that they've never heard certain common terms. Below, Krauss adds to our list...
- AronRa in the last round of our RSR debate, Ra asked, What's an evolutionist? and What's Neo-Darwinism?
- Eugenie Scott couldn't figure out what I could possibly be referring to when I asked her to provide 'evidence' for evolution, and when I quoted a leading evolutionist on 'problems' for evolution, she even asked, What's a problem?
- Richard Dawkins describes as "the kind of question only a creationist would ask", this one, which he still can't answer, “Give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome.”
Krauss however set a record for not recognizing the most common terms in the least amount of time. RSR is considering keeping our Webster's Desktop Reference handy for any possible future interviews with Lawrence. Krauss asked, often incredulously, as though he had never heard of such things:
- "What's a person?"
- "What's an atheist?"
- "What's an evolutionist?"
- "What's Darwinism?"
- He never heard of the "multiverse" proposed as an answer the fine-tuning problem [he had never heard of it, until he later remembered it]
- Krauss acts as though he's never heard of the idea of directed panspermia, nor the idea of the complexity of life being explained in part by claiming that it originated in outer space. Moments later Krauss says panspermia is an "interesting" idea, and then later, a "fascinating" idea. Panspermia, though of the non-directed type, is an idea that he himself presented on CNN just weeks earlier. And some of the world's leading scientists, including the co-discoverer of DNA Francis Crick, and even Krauss friend Richard Dawkins, have suggested directed panspermia, that is, that aliens intentionally seeded life on earth. Atheists take note however: Aliens didn't create man, man created aliens.

* Krauss Says All Scientists are Darwinists: When you hear consensus, consensus, consensus, doubt the consensus. These lists of educated and highly educated Darwin Doubters, including many thousands of PhDs, scientists, and professors, admittedly will have some overlap, but the orders of magnitude difference on the numbers indicate that the vast majority are not duplicates. In Part II, when Lawrence Krauss says that all scientists are Darwinists, he was, however, omitting the:
- 100 PhDs listed along with world renowned neurologist Dr. Ben Carson at Australia's creation.com
- 200 scientists with master's degrees or PhDs listed over at Answers in Genesis
- 300 medical doctors signing PSSI's Physicials and Surgeons who Dissent from Darwinism
- 600 advanced degreed scientists who are members of the Creation Research Society
- 800 scientists who signified their opposition at DissentFromDarwin.org
- 3,000 scientists and professors, nearly, (most of whom hold a Ph.D. in some field of science) who reject secular Darwinism to varying degrees as named online by Dr. Jerry Bergman
- 30,000 U.S. public high school biology teachers do not endorse Darwinism in class
- 100,000 college professors in the U.S. alone who, according to Harvard researchers, agree that "intelligent design IS a serious scientific alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution."
- 570,000 medical doctors in the U.S., specialists in applied science, say God brought about or directly created humans. Whereas Darwinsim is dominated by storytelling, the field of medicine is an actual applied science (see definition and applied science section below) within biology that is practiced by highly educated professionals. Thus it is significant that 60% of all U.S. medical doctors reject the strictly secular Darwinist explanation for our existence, with three of five docs agreeing that either God initiated and guided the process that led to human life or that God specially created human beings as we are.

* Journal Admits Doubt of Primary Evidence: Many evolutionists including Dawkins (as in his extrapolation from canine diversity) oversell the claim to the public that small changes within species prove that over long periods, the species themselves arose naturally. However, out of the hearing of the general public, evolutionary biologists themselves are more honest. As in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology itself, "A persistent debate in evolutionary biology is one over the continuity of microevolution and macroevolution – whether macroevolutionary trends are governed by the principles of microevolution." In house, this is a debate. Outside, Darwin marketing reps like Dawkins, Coyne, and Krauss pretend this is settled science. Whereas one of the world's preeminent self-described atheists, Thomas Nagel, concluded his 2012 book, "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False", predicting that today's evolution “consensus... will come to seem laughable in a generation or two."

* Krauss Says All Scientists are Atheists: Another example of his constant unscientific hype was when Dr. Krauss said on today's program that, "All scientists are atheists." A moment later he admitted that many of them believe in God. (See also realscienceradio.com/krauss2#big-bang-doubters.)

For today's show RSR recommends
the best astronomy science DVD ever made!
What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomy:
Our Created Solar System!

* Applied Science and Krauss' False Appeal to Authority: Krauss tells the audience that they should believe in the Big Bang because the telephone, by which Bob Enyart is interviewing him, works. However, since 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell first transmitted intelligible speech by electricity over a wire, atheistic origins theories have changed wildly, yet telephones continued to operate. "Applied science... survives enormous changes in secular theories about the beginning of the universe and of life. Thus, such scientific accomplishment does not depend upon changing theories of origins" (Bob Enyart, 2013, CRSQ, in press). So, among the logical fallacies common to atheist arguments is Krauss' false appeal to authority, that because applied science, which has broad agreement on all sides, works, therefore atheist beliefs on origins should be accepted.

* No one Krauss knows has ever said life is too complicated to have evolved here: One of the authors of the theory of chemical evolution (that elements heavier than helium form in stars and supernovas), Sir Fred Hoyle, famously held that:

"The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 [zeros] naughts after it... It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." -Hoyle

And:

"Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make the random concept absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favourable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate... It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence - even to the extreme idealized limit of God." -Hoyle

Yet Krauss says at 25 minutes into today's program that, "There's no one I know who says that life is too complicated to have evolved here." Perhaps in trying to win this one point in the disagreement, he was being coy in saying, "no one I know." However, even his friend Richard Dawkins has suggested recently:

"Well, [the origin of life on earth] could have come about in this way: The evidence may show, as we look at the complexity, as we look at the genetic mechanisms, that might be evidence that a long time ago, far far away in another galaxy, that there was a civilization that evolved by Darwinian means. And that civilization designed life and seeded it on our earth." -Richard Dawkins to Ben Stein in Expelled (not taken out of context)

After quoting this to Krauss, I added that "If biological life is so complex that it couldn't evolve here on such a hospitable planet, then, why would it evolve somewhere else? You've got the same problems there as here. Don't you agree that they're just punting."

"Well, first of all," Krauss said, "there's no one I know who says that life is too complicated to have evolved here." In debating creationists, Lawrence seems to have selective memory.

* Krauss Claims that Scientists Don't "Believe" Anything: Krauss contradicts his claim that he doesn't "believe" anything in that he believes:
- that life arose naturally from inanimate matter
- the philosophical cosmological principle
- the philosophical anthropic principle
- in a dozen things he claimed just during our brief RSR interview, including in the first one minute.
Likewise, while claiming that science doesn't have beliefs, but rather, it only disproves claims, Krauss doesn't realize that claiming that a theory has been falsified is itself a positive statement of belief. (Krauss' fellow atheist AronRa also makes this kind of error. Regarding the philosophical claim that the universe has no center, AronRa could not get himself to realize that such a claim is a positive assertion.) Atheist self contradiction includes their eager belief in falsehood (readily admitting to disproving theories) and their opposition to truth (even denying the existence of truth, which was inevitable seeing that Jesus Christ said, "I am the truth). Thus atheists are increasingly uncomfortable even with information per se, with mind, with the validity of the laws of logic, and so with truth itself. So atheists find a confused kind of comfort in claiming that they don't believe things, they just falsify ideas. Come to think of it though, they're even uncomfortable with the very existence of "ideas", since ideas themselves are not made of matter. (See realscienceradio.com/math#Einstein.)

* Krauss "Surprised" by Friend Eugenie Scott's Junk DNA Claim: Even though Eugenie made the same argument that thousands of evolutionists have made for decades, Lawrence Krauss agrees that she was wrong to tell Bob Enyart in 1998 that the we knew for sure that pseudogenes (aka Junk DNA) had no function (and were therefore evidence against intelligent design). Virtually all leading evolutionists validate the ID concept, except that they use the argument in reverse, and poorly, claiming that what they assess as poor design is evidence against a Creator. (Next week RSR will air four minutes of the Enyart/Eugenie disagreement over junk DNA as the guys discuss the landmark Nature study reporting on 440 genetic researchers who so far have identified function in 80% of the human genome!)

* Two Examples Showing that Krauss is a Poor Thinker: One wonders what prevents Lawrence Krauss from thinking clearly. In his 2012 book, A Universe from Nothing, Krauss attempts to refute that scientists often use their minds rather than scientific equipment, to make astounding discoveries of the physical universe. He is trying to support the absurd statement that he said to Bob Enyart, that scientists don't "believe anything;" that instead, they merely acknowledge empirical observations. Of course that claim is a virtual hallucination. But it would be interesting to see him argue his case. So in chapter one of Nothing, in support of this denial, he presents a story about Albert Einstein which EXACTLY contradicts Krauss' claim and contradicts even the purpose for him referencing the anecdote, for in his own telling of the account, Einstein used telescopes, yes, to make an astronomical observation, but NOT to form his theory, for his theory was formulated in his mind and had already been written on paper, even as Krauss presents it. As Discover magazine's Richard Panek explains:

In the late 17th century, Isaac Newton helped inaugurate a scientific revolution by taking Galileo's observations of the heavens' motions and expressing them mathematically. Then in the early 20th century, Albert Einstein helped inaugurate a second scientific revolution by reversing that process, taking his own calculations and looking for their physical expression in the heavens.

A second example is about nothing. Literally. Apparently no one but Krauss (and perhaps Stephen Hawking, from whom Krauss borrows the title of his book) knows that the word nothing really means something that has physical properties. So Krauss begins his book with a very brief criticism against anyone who would dare use the word "nothing," to mean... well, nothing. Of course what he's trying to do is to justify the deceitful, anti-science, false-marketing of the title of his book. His claim that the word nothing has not been improperly defined (by linguists and philosophers) flows from his bias to justify increased book sales by use of his now admittedly misleading title. So as a second example of his hype-based bias clouding his ability to think clearly, his argument regarding the word "nothing" is itself completely devoid of substance. That is, he provides absolutely no justification for his bizarre claim.

Today’s Resources: Get the Spike Psarris DVD What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomy and Vol. II, Our Created Stars and Galaxies! Have you browsed through our Science Department in the KGOV Store? Check out especially Walt Brown’s In the Beginning and Bob’s interviews with this great scientist in Walt Brown Week! You’ll also love Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez’ Privileged Planet (clip), and Illustra Media’s Unlocking the Mystery of Life (clip)! You can consider our BEL Science Pack; Bob Enyart’s Age of the Earth Debate; Bob's debate about Junk DNA with famous evolutionist Dr. Eugenie Scott; and the superb kids' radio programming, Jonathan Park: The Adventure Begins! And Bob strongly recommends that you subscribe to CMI’s tremendous Creation magazine!