Part 5: A QUESTION of MEANING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 5: A Question of Meaning

 

 

THE MAMMOTH IN THE ROOM

 

When I read Doctor Dahesh’s introduction to Volume 1 of Strange Tales and Wondrous Legends, in which he stated that this had been his first time creating works of literature filled with so much wondrous and strange imagery as a vehicle to exposing the dark side of humanity, which, as a writer, he felt was his solemn duty, I inferred that he had written in-your-face parables to communicate his position as regards ethics and morality with unapologetic honesty. He even issued a rallying cry to all writers, urging them not to sugar-coat the truth.

 

And what marked me the most was his heart-wrenching expression of sorrow and outrage at the January 30, 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he mourned, honored, and canonized under the heading of, “Gandhi The Prophet of The Twentieth Century.”

 

Nevertheless, all things considered, and absent any evidence to the contrary, I was under the impression Doctor Dahesh had conceived fictional moral stories.

 

Then I read the introduction to Volume 2, where right out the gate Doctor Dahesh writes,“The stories in which I have mentioned incidences of reincarnation are not imaginary.”

 

Wait! What?

 

So, God really did smite a ruthless tribe of giants, turning them in the honey bee, which had never been in existence before on planet Earth up to this point, and forced them to forever serve and defend with theirs lives the young newlywed bride whom they publicly executed her along with her husband, and who would reincarnate as their queen?

 

And mermaid do exist?

 

Incidentally, and not for nothing, but why does everyone assume mermaids to be part human and part fish? Why couldn’t they be part humanoid and part porpoise? You know… mammals! Let that sink in.

 

Anyway, that story about the quiet conversation that took place between the wicker basket and the porcelain vase perched atop the old armoire, which was listening in on them, actually happened?

 

So… in other words, inanimate things do breathe the breath of life as it were, and the Spirit can inhabit them at it would flesh and bone?

 

In “The Secret of the Wicker Basket,” which was penned on December 30, 1944, in Beirut (following the initial version that written on December 10, 1944), we learn that (and if you will indulge my adding a technical spin on it, thus potentially ruining the lyricism inherent in the story) not only did the Spiritual Fluid linked to one of God’s Angels — by divine mandate — accompany another Spiritual Fluid, one emanating from an exalted Spirit that would inhabit Prophet Moses the moment he was born on Earth in order to help him achieve the goals of the Heavens, it would also inhabit clumps of bulrushes that grow on the banks of the River Nile, which Moses’s mother would be divinely inspired to cut and frantically fashion into the caulked wicker basket that would safely cradle him across the water.

 

Furthermore, not only would the Angelic Spirit keep a watchful eye on three-month-old baby Moses, by summoning favorable and gentle winds that would ultimately steer the wicker basket-turned-canoe-of-hope into the arms of a doting Pharaoh’s daughter, that Angelic Spirit would ignite the feelings of compassion and tenderness in her heart.

 

And so, according to the wicker basket, the Angelic Spirit—or more precisely, the Spiritual Fluid belonging to the Angelic Spirit—would remain in the Nile Grass until it passed. And with each passing of the Nile Grass, the Angelic Spirit would depart for the Heavens only to return to inhabit the reeds over, and over again, because its Mission was not yet complete. At one point (and in the December 10, 1944 version of the story), the Angel speaking through the wicker basked says, “And though my Spirit may be invisible to people, it shines upon the reeds. I wonder, do they know, whence, sometimes, they get a lofty idea?” And with that, the basket would reveal that Danish Author Hans Christian Andersen would, by dint of searching, become eventually able to detect the souls in all things.

 

By now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Really? The fact that Doctor Dahesh claimed these stories were not imaginary is the only thing that jumped out at you?”

 

I know… listen, I get it: although — from its premises to its revelations —Daheshism bookends a coherent body of thought, the idea that inanimate objects are not merely sentient, but they can think and communicate, yearn, love and forgive, and even hold a grudge, is absurd when viewed through the rational-thinking lens and at best a purely academic, “what-if” exercise, eliciting at worst a “Sure, why not?” pity reaction.

 

On the other hand, if you consider that matter is energy, and if you accept that they are manifestations of the Spiritual Fluids, which are sentient according to Daheshism, then, and as counterintuitive — insane, even — as it might appear to be, it really does makes sense.

 

Besides, and from what I’ve read, the magisterium of science is abounding with absurdity.

 

To prove to you I’m not just making it up as I go along, I will read you what Richard C. Lewontin, Harvard professor of biology and leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, wrote in his article “Billions and Billions of Demons,” which appeared in the January 9, 1997 issue of The New York Review of Books:

 

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.”

 

 

 

So, right off the bat, Lewontin clearly states the scientists must make an a priori commitment to scientific materialism, or more precisely: Methodological Naturalism, which happens to be the  philosophy of science Charles Darwin adhered to, and which posits a materialistic explanation for everything.

 

In other words, regardless of whatever obvious conclusions the evidence bears out, no intelligence, creative agency, or mind, could ever be invoked. It is a non-starter, period.

 

Therefore, everything must be explained by reference to purely undirected material processes. And that is why, today, a materialist worldview still pervades due to the different iterations of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, which is strongly lobbied by The New Atheists who act as spokespeople for “Science” and declare their belief in… non belief.

 

As a result, and according Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, “Many Scientists equate their worldview of scientific materialism with the practice of science itself.”

 

Well then, there must be an impartial, scientific-based rationale centered on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for this bias.

 

Right?

 

Wrong!

 

According to Lewontin:

 

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

 

Therefore, if a theory that argues strictly from empirical evidence so much as suggests a whiff of an inference to a flawed designer—for after all we ourselves are not perfect—that theory is to be labeled as pseudoscience.

 

Incidentally, you might remember from Part 2, The Mechanics of Existence, that Doctor Dahesh told me not even the Prophets, the messengers of God, have seen God.

 

That being the case, no one should ever presume to know what constitutes empirical evidence—let alone proof that meets the standard of moral certainty—of a Divine Foot, let alone God’s existence.

 

As I suggested in Part 3, The Dynamics of Life, a sliver of a reasonable doubt is enough to falsify the Materialist worldview.

 

But I was just warming up when I said that.

 

When all is said and done, not only will I have demonstrated that the alleged creative power of the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutation is a sham given the infinitesimally limited amount of time and resources it had at its disposal to supposedly blindly self-organize chemical raw materials, and eventually build them into biological forms—living biological forms, no less—I will also have demonstrated that although we humans could never see, let alone comprehend God, we can still detect evidence of mind inside the biological cell. And along the way, I’ll be discussing, among others, sundry relevant topics such as the curious case of the Vatican endorsing Darwinism—the bedrock of atheism—while rejecting the Theory of Intelligent Design, which, come to find out, offers compelling science-based evidence that some sort of mind or intelligence lies at the heart of life.

 

To be sure, this is not about making an argument from ignorance, in which we declare victory on account of science’s current inability to corroborate the claims that Charles Darwin made by using abductive reasoning (please hold that thought) to draw an inference to the best conclusion, to paraphrase Dr. Stephen Meyer, author of Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt.

 

In Darwin’s Doubt, Meyer writes, “Darwin himself adopted this methodological principle. His term for a presently acting cause was a vera causa, that is, a true, known, or actual cause. Darwin thought that when explaining past events, scientists should seek to identify established causes—causes known to produce the effect in question.”

 

And so according to Meyer, Darwin invoked the vera causa principle to argue that presently observed microevolutionary processes of change could be extrapolated to explain the origin of new forms of life in the past. Meyer writes, “Since the observed process of natural selection can produce a small amount of change in a short time, Darwin argued that it was capable of producing a large amount of change over a long period of time. In that sense, natural selection was ‘causally adequate.’ ”

 

And… just in case you weren’t paying attention in class, I should add that in Darwin’s mind, no creator is needed. You see, that plot twist is key to the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, which is why anyone who feels intimidated or bullied by those who like to lord it over us mere mortals by projecting a supposed scientifically-based pretense of knowledge pertaining to the purported proof of God’s non-existence, should really pay close attention to the knowledge I will be sharing you, and which I have gathered after traveling through the Darwinian Theory of Evolution’s rabbit hole.

 

First however, and just in case this is new to you, allow me to give you a condensed primer on abductive reasoning, which is often illustrated using this thought experiment: if you see a live turtle stuck atop a fence post, your most logical, rational conclusion is that, “Well somebody must’ve put it there!”

 

Now, let’s set this aside for a bit while I briefly discuss deductive and inductive reasoning:

 

Deductive, or bottom-up, reasoning starts out with a hypothesis or a premise, examines the possibilities in order to reach a specific, logical conclusion; that is, one that is logically valid and true.

 

For example, assume all architects can draw.

 

Being that Mario is an architect, the logical conclusion has to be that Mario can draw.

 

Therefore, going from the general to the specific, or bottom-up.

 

And for deductive reasoning to work, the hypothesis must be correct. Also, in the realm of deductive reasoning, if something about a group of elements is true, then it’s necessarily true for the each one of the members of that group.

 

Of course, the problem with deductive reasoning is that even if the generalization is not true—therefore a total lie—it’s possible to draw a logical conclusion that is also a lie.

 

For example, consider the following proposition that says, “All those who are anti-science systematically reject the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Since Mario rejects the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, the logical conclusion is that Mario is anti-science.”

 

Here, although the conclusion is the result of a logical argument, it is untrue, because the original statement is false. Why is it false?

 

Well, and here I’m jumping way ahead, my assertion echoes the theme of a meeting of world-class Darwinian Biologists in November 2016, at the Royal Society of London who, although they publicly defend Darwinism, they expressed doubts about its central tenet, namely the alleged creative power of the canonical Darwinian mechanism of Natural Selection acting on Random Mutation.

 

And we will be certainly reviewing all that.

 

But as I said, I’m jumping ahead here and delivering the punchline, which is quite simply that despite what we’re told, surprise, Darwinism lacks creative power.

 

Listen!

 

We’re not talking small, changes, or microevolution, whose existence no sane person would deny. For example, as a dog breed, the modern boxer has a shorter face and an upturned muzzle; it has certainly evolved. However, it’s still a dog. Darwinians, on the other hand, will argue that, no, it’s on its way to becoming something else.

 

Hence, they will argue that the Darwinian mechanism has creative power—or generative power, the power to create new body plans and blueprints that weren’t available before.

 

Ergo, macroevolution.

 

That is, a land, cloven-hoofed, grass-eating animal becoming an ocean-dwelling, krill-eating, whale.

 

Now, let me just say that, theoretically-speaking, if we had unlimited time and resources, anything is possible. However, the next few episodes will show that the Darwinian Theory of Evolution is a great science-fiction story; one that is highly improbable. Unless, of course, those brilliant biologists can show us a testable manner through which Darwin’s mechanism can create new forms of life; unaided. Remember, for the evolutionary mechanism to be deemed truly Darwinian, it cannot be aided or guided by things such as computer simulations that set goals and endow it with memory, all of which would be provided by a software engineer. In other words, an intelligent agency!

 

Oh, and by “testable” I also mean predictable.

 

So, just because the reasoning is textbook deductive, and logically valid, that does not necessarily make it true.

 

One could end up on death row due to sound deductive reasoning applied to incomplete or tainted evidence, and even an unjust law!

 

Next, we have Inductive, or top-down, reasoning—often known as syllogism. For example, “Mario is architect. Mario can draw. Therefore, all architects can draw.”

 

Or, “Cobras are venomous. Cobras are snakes, therefore all snakes are venomous.”

 

So, starting with an assumed-to-be-true premise, inductive reasoning allows for a conclusion to be false. For example… Imagine Captain Haddock, for all of you fans of Tintin, (or Tintin, for you purists out there!), saying “Water and whisky makes you drunk, water and gin makes you drunk, water and vodka makes you drunk. Conclusion? Water makes you drunk!” By the way, and in case you didn’t know, Captain Haddock is allergic to water…

 

Anyway and before you throw shade at inductive reasoning, please consider that while, at the outset, it may not always produce a true conclusion, and until they gather more data, then information, then knowledge, then hopefully wisdom, scientists have to apply inductive reasoning to certain hypotheses in order to eventually answer specific questions about science. We, mere mortals, use it every day. When we buy a carton of eggs, and one of then drops and cracks, therefore confirming that it was indeed an egg, and short of candling your other eggs, or cracking open each one you have to assume that the other, still uncracked eggs, are in fact eggs!

 

Basically, inductive reasoning makes broad generalizations from specific observations. For example, imagine you have a box filled with hundreds of equally-sized square tiles with letters on them. Think of them as your Data, whence you will draw your conclusion.

 

So, imagine you draw three tiles, in a row, and each one of the tiles has the letter A stamped on it. Now, given the odds involved in pulling 3 letter As in a row, you would be justified, even if mistaken, in concluding that either all or a significant number of the tiles are As.

 

Or, say for example, you come in contact with a never-before seen form of life that definitely looks as though it’s bent on eradicating humanity. You can tell because it just ate your neighbor alive—literally. You’re conflicted: you don’t know whether to shoot it or to thank it. Or maybe both. So, until you gather more information, your knee-jerk reaction is to draw the general, perhaps utterly erroneous conclusion that whatever that species is, it is a danger to humanity. Although in time, and like the polar bear, this species might well become protected a well!

 

Now, we come to abductive reasoning, which is the kind of scientific reasoning Charles Darwin employed to arrive at his conclusions—or, arguably, to confirm his bias; after all, he had to remove God from the equation.

 

Now, using abductive reasoning, scientists, and crime solvers even, start with an incomplete set of observations, and end up creating the likeliest possible explanation. It’s essentially a matter of using whatever information is on hand for building, and if possible testing a hypothesis in order to extrapolate the theory that is the most feasible. In Chapter 6 of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, in response Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes delivers one of his famous aphorisms and says, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”

 

So, imagine you catch your 4 or 5-year-old red-handed as they are walking out of the pantry while chomping on a cookie they somehow were able to nab from the cookie jar resting on the top-most point of the tall kitchen pantry cabinet with pull-out shelves.

 

Bewildered, dazed and confused, you wonder how your child was able to reach the cookie jar, especially that you don’t even have a ladder in the pantry, or a chair for that matter.

 

All you have in there are heavy-duty pull out shelves designed to support heavy l… wait a second!

 

That’s when it suddenly hits you, after you’ve ruled out all possible scenarios, including levitation: your little diabolical genius had to have figured out a way to make a makeshift staircase out of the pull-out shelves!

 

You’re torn between calling Mensa International and grounding your child for life.

 

In any case, you will have come to this only plausible conclusion by using that process I mentioned earlier described as “Inference to the best conclusion,” by ruling out all possible explanations, until you’re left with the most plausible one, given the evidence.

 

 Mind you, in this fictional scenario, which incidentally you should never try at home, because in every instance the pantry cabinet shelves and doors were closed, therefore your child made sure to cover their tracks, you really didn’t have any premise or premises to either deductively or inductively prove your conclusion. But, that notwithstanding, it is justifiable, being that, at least in your mind, you were able to concoct a plausible explanation of the events.

 

In any case, by using abductive reasoning, Dr. Stephen Meyer would arrive at a conclusion that is the polar opposite of that of Charles Darwin’s, who, incidentally and among others, knew nothing about the information-bearing capacity of DNA, which would have been a major plot twist and hurdle for his flawed assumptions, which he used as a springboard for his gratuitous extrapolations that now have become canonized into an institutionalized worldview, ultimately becoming an orthodoxy that is aggressively promoted by several high-profile intellectuals in the secular West who reject teleology, namely, the doctrine that promotes the existence of design and purpose in nature.

 

But, first, let’s be clear on the fact we’ll be employing abductive reasoning to arrive to the conclusion that not only is Darwinism flawed, but that the popular stigma associated with attempting to argue against Darwinism is artificial and unwarranted, born of the fearmongering that Darwinists and Scientific Atheists have been engaging in as part of their agenda to scare us into believing the implied conspiracy theory that anyone who dare challenge Darwin is out to insidiously establish a Theocracy.

 

Second, let me just say what follows is not hard understand.

But it does require a degree of concentration, as I will be touching upon different areas of knowledge, which although although together form an incongruent, disparate mess at face value—hence as frustrating to decipher as a 3D image hidden inside a random dot autostereogram—they do form an ensemble. So, there’s a lot of subtlety involved.

 

The good news is that it’s not as onerous as trying to prove that 1+1=2 and not eleven! On that front, and if reading hundreds of pages stuffed with dense mathematical notation does not faze you, and you’d really like to see what it takes to prove 1+1=2, do check out Principia Mathematica by Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell—you’re in for a real treat!

So, thank you in advance for your patience and willingness to follow me, as I guide us down the many rabbit holes crated for us by Charles Darwin, whose argument is that no living creature has ever been created by any creator, rather that it evolved… from a single, original first biological life, whose genesis is still cloaked in mystery.

 

In fact, and to help you visualize what we’re up against, here’s a fictional dramatization of Charles Darwin’s elevator pitch:

 

“Based on the similarities between species, and to a degree the poor fossil record, which clearly has gaping holes in it, so it’s imperfect and should not be taken literally—albeit it’s good enough for me to cherry-pick it and weave it into a sequence of events that back my claims—I, Charles Darwin, believe all life evolved from one single organism: gradually, progressively, and adaptively. Oh so wake up, people, this notion of design is an illusion. And it’s still ongoing mind you; oh yeah, blindly… as in, randomly!

 

What’s that? No, I don’t have any idea where the original form from. Hey, anything is possible, right? It could’ve formed in a warm pond… yeah, that’s a good idea, “warm pond,” pass it on!

 

I’m sorry, what? Oh, you want me to supply you with evidence that everything that lived or lives got here through blind, undirected random gradual, progressive, and adaptive mutation?

 

Ah… you’re one of those.

 

I’ll tell you what…

 

Hm…

 

I’ll do you one better: how about you prove it didn’t happened that way! So there!”

 

And so, ladies and gentlemen, the preceding dramatization, which I hope you liked, summarizes Charles Darwin’s argument.

 

Basically, he challenged us to prove a negative.

 

So, don’t be intimidated by the books, the conferences, the pretense of knowledge, and the complicated mathematical equations. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

 

That is not to say all those who are actively trying to prove Darwin right to a moral certainty are charlatans.

 

Rather, that they are fooling themselves, having invested so many years and so much talent into what ultimately amounts to a mythology that is being peddled as true science.

 

And, I assure you, nothing I just said affects anything that goes on in the laboratories, where real science is conducted, and which would be none the worse for wear if Darwinism is called out for the sham that it truly is.

 

But Darwinism and Origin of Life research is big business, which is why Darwinists are working quietly behind the scenes to plug the holes in their precious theory, which they know cannot account for—not just the creation of life—but the creation of new life forms, and new body plans.

In due course, I aim to demonstrate that certain foundational claims made by the Darwinian orthodoxy are—quite simply— so improbable, they are impossible.

 

Again, I am not saying everything in the theory is wrong; on the other hand, though a broken clock is correct twice a day, I’m not about to trust it. And so, just because parts of Darwin’s theory point to the obvious, that doesn’t make its overreaching extrapolations valid.

 

And rest assured, we will not be invoking theology to build a persuasive argument for a science-based inference to intelligence in nature And hopefully, we will have put an end to the false narrative that anyone who dare challenge Darwin is insidiously attempting to shoehorn creationism into science education.

 

Speaking of which, and at this juncture, it’s probably helpful to go over some terminology.

 

 

 

CREATION VS. CREATIONISM

 

Apparently, there is a difference between Creation and Creationism, which is the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible.

 

Unlike some other Christians, namely the conservative Protestants in the United States who read Genesis literally and object to the teaching of evolution in the public schools, the Catholic Church considers the story of Genesis to be an allegory for the way God created the world. And it is also worthwhile to note that there are those in the U.S. that support teaching both creationism and evolution in schools.

 

Therefore, when someone says, “I am a Creationist” that means he or she believes in the literal account of creation as told in the book of Genesis, and thus uses biblical scripture as the frame of reference.

 

As far as Daheshism is concerned, it believes in Creation, but not necessarily in Creationism.

 

Let me unpack this seemingly equivocal statement for you:

 

In Daheshism—and here I am giving you the condensed version—the belief is that we are in the midst of Genesis number 761, which began after the Great Flood, in around 5500 B.C.

 

 Therefore, Noah, by stepping out of his ark, marked the end of CYCLE 760 OF CREATION and thus inaugurated CYCLE 761.

 

And from Daheshist revelations we know that life on Earth has been completely wiped out and reborn, over and over again.

 

In other words, Earth is a whole lot older than Young-Earth Creationists believe it to be.

 

And while I can’t provide you figures based on Daheshist Revelation, I have no compelling reason to reject what scientists are confirming, which is that the age of the observable universe is around 13.8 billion years, and Earth is around four-and-a-half billion years old.

 

What I can tell you is this however: Human life on Earth has been punctuated by many episodes of violent, and sudden extinctions.

 

Now, while we have no idea of what transpired during those events of great dying, Doctor Dahesh provided us with a tantalizing hint in his short story he published in Strange Tales and Wondrous Legends Part II.

 

 

JOURNEY OF A MUSK ROSE

 

In this excerpt, we read the travel diary, as it were, of a musk rose who had fallen from the hand of a young woman who had been breathing its fragrant scent while standing close to her young betrothed aboard a ship sailing for America.

And so the musk rose recounts the amazing events it witnessed during a four-day journey across the open sea.

 

At one point in its journey, the musk rose recounts, “And darkness began to cast its mantle upon the surroundings little by little, as I was gliding aimlessly, subject to the whims of the moving waters, then nightfall marched in with its titanic armies, and the tenebrous gloom immersed the immense ocean. And suddenly, a dazzling light glowed in the sky, illuminating the sea as if the sun had risen! And this light, which dispels darkness, approached. Then, a moving body descended from space, falling with miraculous lightness and speed, and it turned out to be a just like a saucer with its perfect roundness. Its diameter was forty meters, and one could hear the light, musical rumble of its engines. Through the glass windows that filled its circumference, I could see pencil-sized blue men moving to and fro.”

 

 

And as the musk rose approached this saucer and bumped up against its edge, it saw blue pencil-sized women, whose blueness was permeated with red stripes, discussing among themselves. And so it listened in more closely, and this is what one of them was saying:

 

“And now we shall go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order for us to present a report on the effects of the nuclear bomb that annihilated more than one hundred thousand persons in the year 1945. And the day will come when we will reveal ourselves to the sons of the Earth, and at which time our emperor will order us to either colonize their Earth or to destroy it over their heads, for they are evil and dissolute and nothing can hold a candle to their immorality. And I still remember that my grandfather had informed me about the event involving the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah after the news of their wickedness had reached our emperor’s grandfather. An emperor in his own right, he warned them to renounce their wickedness, or else he would do away with them, but they paid no heed. Then he sent two envoys in a luminous ship and he annihilated them. And Lot the righteous had thought they were two angels, whereas they were none other than the emperor’s messengers, and they were from the line of giants. For giants on our planet rival Earthlings in terms of body height.”

 

Based on what I had heard from reliable sources, there were cases in which human civilization had reached a far greater degree of advancement in scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements than we have currently attained. Therefore, in each Genesis cycle, humanity is marked by a pattern of change similar to what we see in the fossil record, that is, evolution, stability, then utter destruction—a reboot, as it were.

 

In any case, Adam—who unlike any other Earth dwellers, human or otherwise—was not born from human parents, but was spontaneously created in the Garden of Eden, which was hidden from the rest of humanity. Adam was the embodiment of all the Spiritual Fluids belonging to some the Loftiest of all Spirits, which dwelled in Level 150 of the World of the Spirits, also known as the Divine Worlds. And you might remember from part 2, “The Mechanics of Existence,” that the highest, or purest of these Divine Worlds are called The Heavens: the realm of God Almighty.

 

The long and the short of it is that a very large group of Spirits carried out a premeditated attempt to breach Level 150 and to cross over into the Heavens in order to see the greatness of God, and to unveil the Divine Mysteries that far surpass even their spiritual capacity for imagination.

 

They failed miserably and suffered even more wretched consequences.

 

For having dared to disobey a Divine directive and attempt to enter a forbidden realm, which, sadly, they would have eventually been allowed to enter had they been patient, they — or, rather, their respective spiritual fluids — were made to fall precipitously, all the way down to Earth, which if you remembers sits on the threshold of the first level of Hell.

 

And remember when I explained that Spiritual Fluids emanate from the Mother Spirits? Well, that’s exactly what happened here. And for all you know, at least one of your Spiritual Fluids might have been involved in that tragic saga.

 

And once again, I am skipping over many details, including the number of Spirits involved, and their hierarchical chain of command. What is important to know is that those Spiritual Fluids were made to coalesce into Adam, inside an Earthly paradisiacal realm, hidden from view, called The Garden of Eden.

 

There was another Spirit, the chief instigator of this tragic debacle; he was made to coalesce into a hideous, creature. Known as The Serpent, he had a human face and eyes that overflowed with deception.

 

Therefore, chronologically-speaking, and following their grave infraction, a fantastic number of exalted Spirits —minus one— became, as it were, Adam, in the Garden of Eden, in around 9000 B.C., so, about 11,000 years ago.

 

Eve would later enter the scene, and would be created from one of Adam’s Spiritual Fluids, 1000 years after that, therefore around 10,000 years ago.

 

And so, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, all hailed from the highest level of the realm of the Spirits, and their interactions, as we shall learn in a future episode, ushered a cascade of incredible events that would ultimately lead to the arrival of Dahesh, the Beloved Guiding Prophet.

 

For now, however, and as far as Darwinian evolution is concerned, please know that Doctor Dahesh taught that man and chimpanzee did no evolve from a common ape-like ancestor.

 

Not that there would have been anything wrong with that, especially that Daheshism teaches that every human being has a spiritual-fluid connection to one or more animals.

 

 

RITE OF PASSAGE

Have you ever looked at someone and thought they somehow reminded you of an animal, either by the way they look, or act, or walk? If so, more than likely you were instinctively detecting an actual connection to that particular animal. Oh, and newsflash: unlike their human full-time staff, cats remember their reincarnations. In any case, and at this juncture, I might as well tell you that everyone on this planet has a spiritual fluid that connects them to one or more animals.

 

So, does that mean you, literally were, in your totality, an animal before reincarnating as a human being?

 

First, the short answer is not necessarily.

 

And second, I need to clarify a point for the sake of disambiguation:

 

 The Daheshist Theory of Reincarnation conflates, so to speak, both the traditional notion of reincarnation and metempsychosis, or transmigration, which, while similar in terms of mechanism, they differ in terms of purview.

 

Generally speaking, reincarnation involves the “human soul” being reborn in a new human body.

 

So, the operative word here is “human.”

Whereas during the process of metempsychosis (also known as transmigration), any soul, human or otherwise, can migrate—as it were—from one body to another, may it be human, animal, vegetable, or even inanimate. Therefore, and unless otherwise noted, and in the interest of economy, “The Daheshist Theory of Reincarnation” also connotes transmigration.

 

With that at of way, and as regards “were we, in the literal sense, animals before being reborn as humans?”

 

Remember that Spiritual Fluids constitute a complex, inter-dimensional network. Therefore, more than likely, one or more of your Spiritual Fluids merited to be born, on Earth, as an animal. Or as part of an animal. But however many Spiritual Fluids are involved, rest assured that every human being, at one point or another was, in a manner of speaking, one or more animals.

 

But just because you might have had a spiritual fluid from a penguin, and your gait shows a slight waddle, that doesn’t necessarily mean you relish cold weather, or eating fish for that matter. And for all you know, you could end up being best friends with someone who has as spiritual fluid belonging to the leopard seal that had you for lunch!

 

In any case, and as I said, Daheshism teaches that early or anatomically modern humans and chimpanzees did not evolve from a common ape-like ancestor. And if it did, and though there would be nothing inherently objectionable about such a notion, Daheshism would then be supporting a scientific idea that is, statistically-speaking, highly improbable as I will discuss later.

 

And, yes, I am fully aware that scientists who had sequenced the genome of the chimpanzee found that humans are 96 percent similar to the great ape species.

 

Now, in terms of nomenclature, the Genome is the total amount of DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid present in the nucleus of every cell, and sometimes outside of it, known as plasmids. In any case, DNA is the actual structure that stores the genetic information—or code—necessary for life, and the Genome is the total amount of that code.

 

Now, if you’ve ever written computer code you’ll most certainly relate to this: a measly couple of percent difference in the genetic code, when converted into actual letters (or nucleotide bases as they are called), comes out to millions of characters that would need to be randomly altered, without any deleterious effect!

Practically-speaking, and if we base our calculations on the widely accepted benchmark setting the human genome to a little over three billion letters, the number of randomly-generated mutations that need to occur will be in the millions. But hold on: if, according to an article that Veritas, the Genome company published on July 18, 2017, the real human genome comprises 6.4 billion letters (or, once again, nucleotide bases), and not the mere 3.2 billion as was originally determined by the Human Genome Project, then even a one percent difference would yield 64 million letters that would have to be mutated, and in the right sequence—again, at random!

 

And forget computer simulations. They are not Darwinian because they involve things like: goals (or targets) and memory (or pushdown storage)… oh, and the programmer that’s behind it all.

 

Now I ask you, in your experience, using “common sense and rational thinking,” can you honestly imagine a scenario in which a computer code where one random alteration wouldn’t mess it all up—let alone 64 million?

 

And just in case you’re wondering: we have suddenly veered into a discussion about software programing because evolution boils down to editing DNA, as though one were updating or altering software code.

 

And, please hold that thought, as I’ll get back to that very shortly.

 

In the meantime, and just in case you’re not familiar with its history: the Human Genome Project, was a 13-year effort that begun in 1990 and was completed in 2003, and which led to the discovery of the 20,000-25,000 human genes and making them accessible for further biological study. And in case you’ve forgotten, a gene is a section of DNA.

 

As to the Human Genome itself, it consists of all the DNA of our species—the hereditary code of life as Francis S. Collins, the leader of the project, describes it in his book “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief,” which, incidentally is pro-Darwin, and as such espouses something called Theistic Evolution, which I will be address later.

 

But, just know that Dr. Collins is a rigorous scientist who happens to be a believer in a transcendent God, and his book argues that belief in God, as he put it, can be an entirely rational choice and that the principles of faith are, in fact, complementary with the principles of science. And though I admire his courage to go on record with such a assertion regarding faith and science, I do have science-based reservations about his support of the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation—while, of course, rejecting its atheistic implications; and I will be addressing that as well.

 

In any case, in his 2006 book, The Language of God, Collins describes the Human Genome as a newly-revealed text that is 3 billion letters long and written in a strange and cryptographic four-letter code. “Such is the amazing complexity of the information carried within each cell of the human body,” he writes. And apparently, a live reading of that code at a rate of three letters per second would take 31 years, even if read non-stop, day-and-night. And printing these letters out in standard font size, on letter size bond paper would result in a tower the height of Washington Monument, or 555 feet, or a little over 169 meters tall. Of course, we would need to double these values if the Human Genome is indeed 6.4 billion letters and not a measly 3.2 billion.

 

And as to the matter of editing DNA, in order to—as it were— introduce new genetic information, well and oddly enough, it has been shown that some species have evolved by losing information.

So if an organism, in order to evolve, and survive, must shed weight in terms of its DNA code, then... aside from that contradicting the Darwinian tenet that things evolve from simple to more complex, where did the original, more complex DNA come from?

 

And even if we were to argue that, “Well, it started simple, then it gained complexity, then adjusted to meet outside pressures,” the sad reality is that time is not our friend when it comes to non-deleterious, massive random alterations to DNA. That is why some of biggest names in science have entertained the theory that life on the earth had to have originated from microorganisms or chemical precursors of life present in outer space.

 

 

DIRECTED PANSPERMIA

 

As Carl Sagan explained, life must have—somehow—been transported to newly arising worlds. However, the theory that stellar radiation pressure propelled little spores of life from world to world, as proposed by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, around the turn of the 19th century, did not square with Sagan’s calculations, which showed that “the radiation dose accumulated during the ejection of an unprotected microbe from an alien solar system would kill the little beast long before it could arrive on some virgin world.” And if you imagined a bigger microbe, even one surrounded with radiation shielding, it would be too heavy to be ejected, according to Sagan.

How about life on Earth and other planets having been intentionally deposited by intelligent beings, rather than accidentally wafted by radiation pressure through interstellar space?

 

 In 1973, Francis Crick, who along with James Watson elucidated the structure of DNA, published a paper titled Directed Panspermia, which he co-authored with Leslie Orgel in 1972. The following is the abstract of that paper:

 

“It now seems unlikely that extraterrestrial living organisms could have reached the earth either as spores driven by the radiation pressure from another star or as living organisms imbedded in a meteorite. As an alternative to these nineteenth-century mechanisms, we have considered Directed Panspermia, the theory that organisms were deliberately transmitted to the earth by intelligent beings on another planet. We conclude that it is possible that life reached the earth in this way, but that the scientific evidence is inadequate at the present time to say anything about the probability. We draw attention to the kinds of evidence that might throw additional light on the topic.”

 

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that when asked what he thought about Directed Panspermia at the February 2011 event called, “The Great Debate-What is Life,” renowned evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins said the following, “I think Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel’s Directed Panspermia was largely tongue-in-cheek.”

 

Fair enough, Directed Panspermia was “tongue-in-cheek.”

 

Or was it?

 

Well, let’s see…

 

In 1973, Directed Panspermia, a six-page paper was officially published in Icarus, which is a serious scientific journal devoted to the publication of original contributions in the field of Solar System studies. And at the time of that publication, Carl Sagan was the editor. And the reason we know that is from a November 29, 1981 New York Times article by Carl Sagan himself, titled “Is there life Elsewhere and Did it Come Here?” in which we learn that prior to having Directed Panspermia refereed and published in Icarus, Crick and Orgel proposed their Directed Panspermia theory at a conference on Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, organized by Carl Sagan and held at the Byurakan Observatory in, at the time, Soviet Armenia in 1971.

According to Carl Sagan’s New York Times article, “Crick and Orgel imagined the Earth to have been seeded not accidentally but intentionally, in an effort by intelligent beings much more advanced than we to spread their form of life through the cosmos.”

 

And so, if this was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, consider that Carl Sagan, the man who coined the aphorism "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” not only was the editor of Icarus, in 1973 when Directed Panspermia was published, but he would also celebrate it in his New York Times article in 1981.

 

In other words, Carl Sagan had at least eight years to change his mind about it.

 

Therefore, and assuming they didn’t lose a bet, that must have been some elaborate running gag for which Sagan, Crick, and Orgel would put both their reputations combined on the line!

 

So, no, there is no conceivable universe in which this should be dismissed as tongue-in-cheek.

 

Plus, consider the intellectual pedigree of Francis Crick. Historically speaking, in 1953, Watson and Crick would elucidate the structure of the DNA molecule with its 4 chemical subunits that run along the interior of the helix, and which are called bases, or nucleotide bases.  Then, between 1957 and 1958, Crick, formerly a code-breaker in WWII, proposes the idea of the “Sequence Hypothesis.” As Dr. Stephen Meyer with a conversation with Ben Shapiro explains, “Crick posits what is known as the ‘Sequence Hypothesis’ where he realizes that the nucleotide bases of the inside of the double-helix are functioning like alphabetical characters in a written language.”

 

In fact, and this is where the rubber meets the road insofar as thinking about this business of whether or not DNA could have evolved randomly, Dr. Meyer explains that “it is not the physical or chemical properties of those bases that are important to their function, but rather, it is their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent code, which was later elucidated and we now call the Genetic Code.”

 

And therefore, the information in DNA is not merely improbable.

 

It is improbable and specifically arranged so as to perform a function.

 

And so Meyer explains that where DNA is concerned, “it’s not actually information theory, but it’s information theory plus a qualitative judgment about what the sequence is doing that allows us to recognize the kind of information we’re familiar with in our parlance—the one the dictionary talks about: The variable sequences of characters for conveying a meaning or a function.”

 

And given the very specific and complex nature of the information within DNA that seems to be operating in accordance with a symbol convention, add to that some real, practical issues with this notion that such an abundance of highly specified and functional information might have “evolved” incrementally, using random, undirected processes, we have a real problem on our hands.

 

I mean, just consider all the other complex and highly specified systems that come into play, not the least of which is the 20-letter alphabet consisting of amino acids to build the complex protein machines. And so if you only factor in these elements, that is, without even worrying about how DNA came about in the first place (let me finish!) considering the limitations I will be discussing in due time—which will seriously challenge this “Natural Selection acting on Random Mutation of course!” argument, so please hold that thought—this only leaves one other, dare I say logical explanation, based on our everyday experience: this all must have come about as the result of some sort of intelligence or mind.

 

Which is why, even Francis Crick, a staunch Darwinist, who believed that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,” posited that our DNA had to have had alien origins.

 

In other words, anything but a Divine Creator, because, of course, that would be absurd! For the record, and as I will be discussing in the future, ironically, Francis Crick got it right. Where his proposal comes up short in my view, is that he skirts the issue of infinite regress: In other words, who created the aliens?

 

With that out of the way, I should perhaps explain why I am about to tell you more than you probably care to know, and then some, about biochemistry and molecular biology!

 

 

SO THAT HAPPENED

 

In the Spring of 2018, I won a three-week vacation, including room and board, at a hospital.

 

Confined to my bed, I was often told that my hemoglobin count was critically low. Hearing so much about it, made me want to reacquaint myself with why that bloody hemoglobin was so important to my survival.

 

I mean, talk about being rusty!

 

And so I would become fascinated with one particular area of knowledge I had always taken for granted or quite frankly purposely disregarded perhaps owing to my natural inclination toward Mathematics and physics.

 

And though I loved and excelled in chemistry—I even had two chemistry sets—I couldn’t tell you anything about organic chemistry to save my life, probably because I slept through most of it during my high school senior year. In my defense, back then, learning organic chemistry merely consisted of memorizing an endless parade of complete structural formulae of organic compounds. It was a snooze fest.

 

Which is why up until recently the mere mention of protein would make my mouth water with anticipation of a juicy steak.

 

But, when I finally took the time, at the start of my year-long convalescence, to delve into what hemoglobin was, I found out it was essentially a beautifully-designed—hello!—protein molecule formed from a sequence of amino acids which first have to be lined up in the right sequence, lest the sequence collapse, and then folded into a three-dimensional nano-machine  that…

 

Oh, but wait! Did I just say “beautifully designed protein molecule,” aloud?

 

Silly me, how could I’ve forgotten Richard Dawkins’s 1986 book, “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design,” in which he writes from the outset that “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.”

 

Boy, that was close!

 

Of course, molecules can’t be designed into proteins, because that would imply that some sort of intelligence is at work; duh! Seriously, though?

 

And to add insult to injury, In 1986, I was still a graduate student at MIT, working on a thesis that I would later call “Tensile City,” which ended up being a diary of a fictional trip into a city of the future where all habitable environments had to be far off the ground. In any case, I was immersed in the world of design and knew first-hand what the process of designing entailed—and I am not merely referring to the maxim “form follows function,” which though valid, is only part of the story. Design, at any level, certainly involves knowledge and skill. But real design happens when the line between form and function is blurred. It involves both linear and non-linear thinking. It requires this thing we intuitively refer to as creativity.

 

Some, even call it magic.

 

And while at the Pratt Institute, I was mentored by visionary architect Vittorio Giorgini who had a sort of reverence for the natural world. In fact, our mandatory sketchbook had to feature studies of the natural world, where complex forms and equally complex functions combine with utility, structural integrity, and overall design economy.

 

And so, as an architectural student — a designer-in-the-making— I was directed to draw knowledge from the natural world, which is a noble endeavor.

 

Except, this was a case of mindless and blind nature teaching an arguably intelligent being lessons about integrating form and function seamlessly, effectively, and efficiently no less!

 

The whole thing just sounded absurd to me because of my Daheshist experience, which compelled me to reject the Materialist Worldview that there is no mind in nature—as I was constantly being reminded! I mean, Doctor Dahesh even told my elder brother Chucri, “Earth is a planet that thinks.” In other words, it has a mind.

 

But for all my silent indignation, I couldn’t begin to tell you why none of it made sense in scientific terms because I was out of my depth.

 

Plus, and like I said in Part 3, I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand why Doctor Dahesh would always promote science education if it meant reading bestsellers and textbooks that promoted the materialist worldview. I mean, for crying out loud, Richard Dawkins’s book even featured computer simulations! And although today I can easily pinpoint the flaws in these computer simulations—at the time?—it was pretty disheartening, if not overwhelming!

Also, in my experience, witnessing the Miracles of Doctor Dahesh did not automatically dispose one to belief in God. I know of at least of one individual—my 8th grade French Lit teacher for whom I was instrumental in arranging a meeting with Doctor Dahesh—who remained agnostic, after-the-fact.

 

In any case, I didn’t even know what questions to ask, let alone finding their answers.

 

But by 2018, I would catch up on some of the monumental advances in the field of molecular biology, in particular how it related to complex information-processing systems, and how information within the cell is stored, transferred, edited, and used to assemble the raw materials and construct sophisticated machines and circuits made of—wait for it—proteins. And, I had no idea how complex the biological cell, which at the time of Darwin was considered to be a simple organism, was. I would, this time, really wrap my mind around—as in, “not take for granted”—the revelation that a cell is a nanofactory, where on an unimaginable scale, digital instructions are being used to —literally—construct components of said factory:

 

The helical strands of DNA supply the information necessary for sequencing the amino acids to make proteins. Therefore, we have information in one-dimensional form that ultimately results in the production of three-dimensional machines.

 

And so I was flabbergasted by how hemoglobin is produced: first as a protein chain, which is then folded and transformed into an intricate three-dimensional nano-machine whose job is to bind and transport oxygen from capillaries in the lungs to all the tissues in the body. Conversely, this miniature wonder also transports carbon dioxide from the tissues of the body back to the lungs. And we have so many of them inside our body, all working together in concert, that it’s not even worth attempting to imagine what that entails.

 

Then I watched the dramatic, cutting-edge accurate visualizations of cellular and molecular action taking place inside our bodies by cell biologist and biomedical animator, Drew Berry, of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia. Drew Berry’s work showed how astonishing molecular machines that create the living fabric of our bodies are. And the reenactments of how complex, sophisticated, precise, efficient, quiet, and renewable the billions upon billions of molecular biological factories that keep up alive are, is only matched by the fact all these molecules are smaller than the wavelength of light, which makes them impossible to view directly.

 

But wait, so… I’m supposed to believe Richard Dawkins who, armed with his own adaptation of William Walsham How’s esteemed hymn,  “It is a Thing Most Wonderful,” at The Reason Rally on March 24, 2012, in Washington, D.C., would recite:

 

“It is a thing most wonderful that on this once barren rock, orbiting around a rather mediocre star, on the edge of a rather ordinary galaxy, on this rock, a remarkable process called evolution by natural selection has given rise to the magnificent diversity of complexity of life; the elegance, the beauty, and the illusion of design, which we see all around us.”

Please note the operative phrase here is the illusion of design.

 

Dawkins continued by reiterating that through billions of years, the laws of physics, which had never been violated, were filtered through this incredible process called Evolution by natural selection to give rise to a brain that is capable of understanding the process, of measuring the age of the universe, which is between 13 and 14 billion years, of measuring the age of the Earth, which is between 4 and 5 billion years, a brain that is capable of knowing what matter is made of, a brain that knows we are made of atoms brought together by this, and I quote, “mechanical, automatic, unplanned, unconscious process: Evolution by natural selection.”

 

And to really drive the message home, Richard Dawkins declared,

 

 “How is it conceivable that the laws of physics should conspire together without guidance, without direction, without any intelligence, to bring us into the world? Now we do have intelligence.”

 

He went on to profess that intelligence came into the world late, and that only through our brains, that now, finally, after 4 billion years, we have the opportunity to bring some intelligent design into the world.

 

Incidentally, and as I mentioned in part 3, The Dynamics of Life, scientific atheists consider that the mind is nothing more than the byproduct of brain activity. Therefore, a physical phenomenon.

 

Dawkins ended his speech by declaring, “Science makes us see what we couldn’t see before, while religion does its best to snuff out even that light which we can see”  and the real pièce de résistance came when Dawkins, ever the Militant Atheist, called upon the cheering and jeering crowd to publicly mock and ridicule Catholics for believing that wine turns into blood, citing that:

 

“Religion was not off the table, not off limits, it makes specific claims about the universe that need to be substantiated and need to be challenged and if necessary need to be ridiculed with contempt.”

 

Apparently, he was absent from class the day Richard C. Lewontin made his declaration pertaining to taking the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…

 

 

 

But seriously, and in terms of grasping the complexity of what goes on inside each one of our cells, how can modern biology account for the information present in our DNA—that is, assuming that the information in DNA always evolves and never devolves to impart an advantage, as I’ve indicated earlier? Can we really chalk it all up to Natural Selection, even though, believe it or not, all the genetic manipulation studies have shown that Natural Selection reduces genetic information?  And before anyone screams, “What about junk DNA? Doesn’t that prove that Darwin was right?” Let me say, that, yes, I am well aware that —supposedly—over 90 percent of the genome is composed of functionless, nonsensical sequences, and that since time immemorial, untold random mutations must have degraded formerly useful parts of the DNA, and left them behind as vestiges.

 

Well, if this were the 1970s, and owing to the relatively limited information that we had at the time, I would be hard pressed to debate your Junk DNA hypothesis. However, the latest genomics research now provides a ready answer to this question: Junk DNA isn’t Junk. It actually exhibits a function!

 

The ENCODE project and other recent research in genomics have confirmed this

 prediction. As reported in a Nature article, ENCODE, which stands for, The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, has “enabled us to assign biochemical functions for 80 percent of the genome in particular outside of the well-studied protein-coding regions.”

 

And apparently, and here, you’ll forgive me for jumping ahead, other research in genomics has shown that those previously-deemed, useless, noncoding regions of the genome function much like the operating system in a computer: they direct the timing and regulate the expression of coding regions of the genome, among other functions.  But, let’s just jump back to that point in time when I was — let’s face it — uneducated with regard to what DNA really was and did, let alone being able to appreciate the importance of the Junk DNA controversy; or for that matter, be able to say Deoxyribonucleic Acid!

 

Anyway, at that point, I wondered, “Is there anybody out there taking Darwin’s Theory apart and challenging it on sound scientific grounds?”

 

And that’s how a search on YouTube led me to an interview with Dr. David Berlinski. I so was impressed his responses and oratory, that I immediately looked him up online. I learned that Dr. Berlinski received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. I learned he has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics, as well as three novels.

 

Frankly, though? He had me at postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology. Oh, but wait... It says here that he’s is a senior fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. I wonder what that is... (we hear keyboard clicks for searching, then a pause, then one click implying Hit Return.) , let’s see...oh, no…

 

 

“INTELLIGENT DESIGN. WHY’D IT HAVE TO BE INTELLIGENT DESIGN?”

 

How could Berlinski associate himself, or keep company with, anyone connected with a theory widely described as “Creationism in a cheap tuxedo”?

 

But then, in a rare moment of clarity, I remembered how crazy I must sound when discussing Daheshism, a dangerous idea for which the whole nation of Lebanon condemned Doctor Dahesh without even allowing him an opportunity to defend himself, either in the newspapers, or in a courtroom, because his fear-mongering enemies had waged a vicious, unrelenting smear campaign against him. And among those the chief architects of this ruthless campaign to eradicate Doctor Dahesh? Michel Chiha, the brother of the Daheshist Marie Hadad. Would you believe me if I told you he played a major role in the elaboration of the Lebanese Constitution, which guarantees freedom of opinion and belief? Well, he did!

 

So I thought with so many voices attacking Intelligent Design, and given the growing number of books available on the subject, written by serious people, with serious credentials, there’s got to be something there.

 

Plus, in the preface of his 2008 book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, which was in response to Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Dr. David Berlinski expressed something that resonated deeply with me. He wrote, “I am a secular Jew. My religious education did not take. I can barely remember a word of Hebrew. I cannot pray. I have spent more years than I care to remember in studying mathematics and writing about the sciences. Yet the book that follows is in some sense a defense of religious thought and sentiment. A defense is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. Their books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing widely in their style, they are identical in their message: Because scientific theories are true, religious beliefs must be false.”

 

Right out of the gate, Berlinski asserts that, “If science stands opposed to religion, it is not because of anything contained in either the premises or the conclusions of the great scientific theories. They do not mention a word about God.”

 

And while he admits that he does not know if any of what the religious traditions of mankind have said about “the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning” are true—and that includes the promise of recompense for suffering and the assurance that a principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos, Berlinski writes, “I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.”

 

That a self-professed agnostic mathematician and scientist, and acclaimed polymath, such as David Berlinski, should write a book in defense of anyone feeling oppressed and held in contempt by members of a scientific community led by people falsely convinced that nature has equipped them to face realities the rest of us cannot bear to contemplate, was as illuminating as it was liberating:

The Devil’s Delusion prompted me to read his 2009 book called The Deniable Darwin, which, to me, would become the gateway—and roadmap—to a scientifically-based critique of the Darwinian theory of evolution. And I will referring to other books as well throughout this presentation, which are beginning to upset the balance of Darwinism.

 

Lastly, I would like to point out that if we go with the popular claim that Intelligent Design is a theological put-up job, then that makes me an accessory to an alleged elaborate conspiracy to sneak creationism into the science classroom. And being that I would never knowingly endorse a theory which, at its core, condemns Reincarnation, and, by extension, Daheshism,  I can assure you that I have done my due diligence insofar as scrutinizing the information before deeming it worthy of serious consideration. Lastly, I wouldn’t reject Intelligent Design, which is born from empirical inference, merely on the basis of its theistic implications—in other words, let’s be clear, it merely presents evidence that challenges Darwinism, which while I’m at it, I wouldn’t want removed from the curriculum merely on the basis of its being a theoretical deduction with atheistic aspirations.

 

It’s time for a level playing field.

 

 

MARIO HENRI CHAKKOUR, AIA

October 10, 2021

 

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