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CARL SAGAN interview with Charlie Rose:

“…faith is belief in the absence of evidence. To believe in the absence of evidence, in my opinion, is a mistake. The idea is to hold belief until there is compelling evidence. If the Universe does not comply with our previous propositions, then we have to change…Religion deals with history poetry, great literature, ethics, morals, compassion…where religion gets into trouble is when it pretends to know something about science,”

I would respond that there is evidence that Christianity is true.In 1838 American biblical scholar Edward Robinson shook up the archaeological world by discovering Hezekiah’s Tunnel mentioned in the Bible. There is meaning in life available to anyone who will put their faith in Christ, and peace can’t be found in a Guru. Why not take a few minutes and just read the short chapter of Psalms 22 that was written hundreds of years before the Romans even invented the practice of Crucifixion. 1000 years BC the Jews had the practice of stoning people but we read in this chapter a graphic description of Christ dying on the cross.

More Than Star Stuff

BY DAVID F. COPPEDGE  *   |

MONDAY, JUNE 01, 2009

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Carl Sagan famously said “we are all star stuff” in his 1980s TV series Cosmos. The stuff theme stuck. Lawrence Krauss wrote in New Scientist for February’s Darwin Bicentennial that we should all “celebrate evolution as only star children can.” He said, “Since the days of Galileo, astronomy has established a fundamental connection between humans and the cosmos. We have learned that ‘star stuff’ and ‘earth stuff’ have the same elemental composition. The very atoms in our bodies come from the stars.”¹

Logically, the statement is reversible. One could say that stars are made of human stuff. But evolutionists don’t want the statement to be commutative. They want to teach a one-way progression from Big Bang to stars to man to mind. Why not teach it the other way? Mind first, then a plan, then the creation of a diverse array of living and nonliving phenomena, all sharing the same basic atomic structure.

The star stuff metaphor commits the fallacy of reductionism. It is like saying the Constitution is earth stuff. Reductionism distracts attention from the most important properties of an object. We think of the Constitution for its political philosophy, not its atoms of ink on paper. The outstanding features of human nature are not the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements that make up our physical bodies, but rationality, morality, aesthetics, and spirit. God breathed the breath of life into Adam to make him a living soul. A soul is not star stuff.

Krauss could not sustain his reductionist doctrine. In the New Scientist article, he launched into a crusade:

[T]he intimate connections between humanity and the entire cosmos, as illustrated by both evolution and astronomy, suggest that the only sensible perspective of humanity is a global one. The need for a global perspective is of vital importance now, as we are the first generation in history that must seriously confront global limits to our future on Earth, from energy to climate change.¹

Star stuff suggests no such thing. Krauss just appealed to morals. Here is another logical fallacy, a non sequitur (Latin, “it does not follow”). How did “sensible perspective” and “vital importance” emerge from atoms? Krauss followed this statement by saying that “science raises the human spirit.” Now he smuggled in spirituality and science (knowledge).

If anything is “suggested” by the linkage of our bodies to star stuff, it is the fundamental ability of intelligence to organize materials, and the inadequacy of atoms alone to describe the mind. Stars have a simple structure defined by physical laws. We, however, can order and direct our material bodies by our minds.

When someone says you are star stuff, ask if a computer is star stuff, too, or a car, or a book. Yes, we have stuff, but we are not mere stuff. “For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (Psalm 103:14)–yet He took on human form and died to save us. The dry bones in Ezekiel’s vision were just stuff until God organized them into an army (Ezekiel 37:3). Even then, they were merely organized stuff until God’s Spirit breathed life into them.

Christians can choose to order their “stuff” toward a star-like goal: “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Daniel 12:3).

Reference

1. Krauss, L. Celebrate evolution as only star children can. New Scientist, February 24, 2009.

* David Coppedge works in the Cassini Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The views expressed are his own.

Cite this article: Coppedge, D. 2009. More Than Star Stuff. Acts & Facts. 38 (6): 18.

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I disagree that being star stuff is a great thing versus being created by the God of the Bi le for a purpose.

On May 15, 1994 on the 10th anniversary of the passing of Francis Schaeffer I mailed the following letter to Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan and about 250 other skeptics.

Could you take 3 minutes and attempt to refute the nihilistic message of the song (DUST IN THE WIND) which appears at the beginning of the enclosed audio tape followed by Adrian Rogers sermon FOUR BRIDGES THE EVOLUTIONIST CAN NOT CROSS. 

Back in 1980 I watched the series COSMOS and on May 5, 1994 I again sat down to watch it again. In this letter today I will tell you of 3 GENTLEMEN who contemplated the world around them. The first one is an evolutionist by the name of Carl Sagan. Mr. Sagan is what I would call a humanist full of optimism.

The second man also sought to contemplate the world around him and this man was King Solomon of Israel. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon limits himself to the question of human life lived “under the sun” between birth and death and what answers this would give (that is exactly what Mr. Sagan has done in COSMOS).It is this belief that life is only between birth and death that eventually causes Solomon to embrace nihilism. In the first few words of Ecclesiastes he observes the continual cycles of the earth and makes some very interesting conclusions”…to search for understanding about everything in the universe.”

The third man I want to mention is Francis Schaeffer who I believe was the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century. However, when he was a young agnostic many years ago he also had an experience similar to King Solomon’s when he contemplated the world and universe around him.contemplated the world and the universe around him.CARLSAGAN:”Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”KING SOLOMON: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11;3:18-19 (Living Bible): 2 In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is futile. 3-7 For what does a man get for all his hard work?Generations come and go, but it makes no difference.[b] The sun rises and sets and hurries around to rise again. The wind blows south and north, here and there, twisting back and forth, getting nowhere.* The rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full, and the water returns again to the rivers and flows again to the sea . .everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied; no matter how much we hear, we are not content. History merely repeats itself…For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!—-What Solomon said ties into this following statement by evolutionist Douglas Futuyma – “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. And what evolution does is to remove humans from the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given rise to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in one sense there is nothing special about us.”

———-FRANCIS SCHAEFFER: There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man (at the age of 18 in 1930). I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.

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Solomon died 3000 years ago and Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984  exactly 10 years ago.I firmly believe Solomon was correct when he said in Ecclesiastes 7:2 “It is better to spend your time at funerals than at festivals. For you are going to die, and it is a good thing to think about it while there is time.”Suppose that you to learn that you only had just one year to live—the number of your days would be 365. What would you do with the precious few days that remained to you? With death stalking you, you would have little interest in trivial subjects and would instead be concerned with essentials. I know that is what I did when I was bed ridden in a hospital in Memphis at age 15. I was told that I may not live. My thoughts turned to spiritual things. Thank you for your time.Sincerely,Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail lane, ALEXANDER, AR 72002, TIME MAGAZINE May 28, 1984

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