Transgendered? No U-Turn for LaVern

For many years while I lived in Nashville, Tennessee, I would hear the familiar voice of “U-Turn LaVern.” She was the radio traffic reporter, notifying her listeners of auto accidents and offering alternative routes. I never saw her face or met her in person, but I always liked her style and her fitting nickname, “U-Turn LaVern.”

Little did I know then of the major gender crisis that had gone on in her life. Through junior high and into high school, LaVern wished she had been born a boy. She did boy stuff and had no interest in more typically feminine activities. And she grew into a very large woman.

In her own words:

I Wished I Had Been Born a Boy

“Probably until I was well into junior high and maybe even high school I was fairly convinced God had simply mixed me up with John Mark, the name my parents had selected if I had been born male.

 “You see, I am over six feet tall and very large framed. I wear a size thirteen shoe. My hands are as large as any man my height. I was always told I had a pretty face but because of my height I was able to carry a lot of extra weight without looking fat and the fullness on my frame tended to make me look less pretty and just attractive. Still I never felt pretty or much less feminine.

“So for many years I wondered. Did God make a mistake?

“Life was very difficult at times and the scars of adolescent taunts, a very low self-esteem and deep, deep loneliness took its toll for many years but that was the journey God had for me.

“I am so thankful I was not approached by anyone that might have worked to convince me I was not what God made me to be and I wonder often, what if?

“I suppose it was probably easier to be a ‘tomboy’ rather than a ‘girlie’ or ‘sissy’ guy but maybe not. Just like the guys opposite me, I was having trouble finding comfort in what God made me to be.

“It’s a journey I am thankful was accompanied by parents, peers and mentors that taught me God does not make mistakes.”

Lavern is now in her 50s. Married over 26 years, she is a mother of four.

----

Think about it. If LaVern were growing up today, secularists would likely urge her to explore her gender identity and to consider a change. With her doubts about being female, her desire to be male, and her low self-image, she might have been drawn to become trans-gendered.

Instead she believed what Moses wrote in Gen 1:26-27 and Jesus affirmed in Matt 19:1-9. It is God the Creator who makes a person male or female. He does not make mistakes.

So LaVern chose to make the most out of being what God made her to be: a woman! As a result, now in her 50s, she has been married well over twenty-five years and is the mother of four.

Did LaVern make the U-turn? She did not!

As a result, she has found joy in God’s creation and design.

She goes on to write:

“I am so thankful my path was exactly as it was.

“I am so thankful that eventually it was a path that led me to a man, my husband, that filled the deep loneliness with a love so complete I can’t imagine life without him.

“I am still a tomboy. I struggle to identify with many of the women in my life.

“I had a conversation with a co-worker just last year. I was concerned about my inability to connect with a couple of the women I was working with. I told him I could not understand why they seemed to not like me, why they almost seemed uncomfortable around me. His response still makes me laugh. He said, ‘Well LaVern, you’re basically a dude! You’re intimidating.’

“So still, as basically a dude, I am completely and fully a girl, a woman.

“Fully and completely comfortable with who and what God made me to be.

“I still detest dressing like a woman. I hate dresses and frills.

“I spend as much time as possible in my favorite muck boots and weathered tattered clothes working outside, getting as dirty as possible.

“I love working with my hands till they are rough and worn.

“I’m proud my hands look like hands that work, not like a man but like a woman.

“A woman that may be a bit rough around the edges but make no mistake, still one-hundred percent woman.

“The woman God made me to be.

“Perfect but flawed.

“And praying without ceasing for those still on the journey to find peace and understanding of their own flawed perfection and the perfect plan God has for them.”

Thank you, “U-Turn LaVern,” for showing us that some U-turns are the wrong turns, and for reminding us that God’s path is always right.

https://uturnlavern.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/155/

Of Apes and Men: Are You Pulling My Tail?

While checking the forecast on accuweather.com, I was surprised to find, on a weather site no less, an article entitled, “Why don’t humans have tails? Scientists find answers in an unlikely place.” (The article, posted 3/25/2024, was written by Mindy Weisberger of CNN. I have posted the link below.)

Frankly, I had never asked this question! I thought I knew the answer! Was I missing something? Maybe a tail? I was curious.

One’s verdict regarding the Genesis account brings inevitable consequences. Other questions and answers inevitably follow. Based on the Genesis record, which I (and many scientists) hold to be true, it’s super easy to explain and understand why human beings do not have tails.

We never had tails! God made man as a separate creation, from the dust of the earth. Man is not a glorified, improved, evolved ape. Period.

However, those who deny the Genesis account desperately seek to find another mechanism by which life as we know it came to be. As a result, there are countless unanswerable questions which emerge.

Where are our tails, friends?

Great apes have tails. Human beings do not. This is a problem for the evolutionist, who had presupposed that apes’ tails evolved because tails were beneficial mutations. (The article cited below will acknowledge this.) Therefore, apes with tails would have survived due to this added resource, while those that did not would have perished. Survival of the fittest, you know.

So how did evolution become de-evolution? Why don’t human beings have tails?

This is a huge challenge. Unbelieving scientists have spent countless hours, time, and money to discover the answers to this crisis. According to the article’s title, they found “answers” – real answers, not ideas, theories, or possibilities. How? By going to “an unlikely place.” Hmmm … That has you wondering where they went, how they got there, and how they could be sure that these were the actual answers.

At the top of the web page there is a photo of monkeys. The caption reads, “Tails are useful in many ways, but — unlike these vervet monkeys pictured in Lake Mburo National Park in Uganda — humans’ closest primate relatives lost the appendages about 25 million years ago.” There is no footnote or source cited to prove this statement.

The reason for the loss of our tails is said to be a case of “gene jumping.” “Jumping genes” are genetic sequences capable of switching their location in the genome and triggering or undoing mutations.

The article states in part:

Tails are useful for balance, propulsion, communication and defense against biting insects. However, humans and our closest primate relatives — the great apes — said farewell to tails about 25 million years ago, when the group split from Old World monkeys (Again, no evidence of this claim is provided. It’s a “given” to the writer of this CNN article.). The loss has long been associated with our transition to bipedalism, but little was known about the genetic factors that triggered primate taillessness.

Now, scientists have traced our tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code that is abundant in our genome but had been dismissed for decades as junk DNA, a sequence that seemingly serves no biological purpose. They identified the snippet, known as an Alu element, in the regulatory code of a gene associated with tail length called TBXT. Alu is also part of a class known as jumping genes, which are genetic sequences capable of switching their location in the genome and triggering or undoing mutations.

Study coauthor Itai Yanai is a professor with the Institute for Systems Genetics and Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. This “expert” admitted that this “jumping-gene answer” was “astounding.” He said, “I think it’s astounding that one Alu element — one small, little thing — can lead to the loss of a whole appendage like the tail.”

Astounding indeed! And how did a “jumping gene” – just one – in one of our “primate ancestors” – just one – lead to the loss of tails in all – yes, all – great apes and human beings from that point forward?

Another admission – a very honest one – came from the lead study author Bo Xia, a research fellow in the Gene Regulation Observatory and principal investigator at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University. Xia said, “The more I study the genome, the more I realize how little we know about it,” Xia said.

In our current social and cultural climate, unproved humanistic assumptions about origins are stated and affirmed in biology, chemistry, genetics, paleontology, and a host of other sciences. We who believe the Bible to be the inspired, inerrant, authoritative Word of God must continue to ask …

“Are you pulling my tail?”

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/why-dont-humans-have-tails-scientists-find-answers-in-an-unlikely-place/1634668 

 

 

Stephen Hawking - "The universe began with 'almost infinitely small quantum foam of the singularity before the Big Bang.'" Say that again?

If you wish to be notified of future posts, please follow these steps. On the bottom of the left side of this page, you will see the words, "FOLLOW BY EMAIL." Enter your email in the box, click "Submit," and check the "I am not a robot" box.

You will receive an email from "Feedburner" that says, 

Activate your Email Subscription to: CoryHCollins 

You must open that email and click the link in order to confirm your subscription. Then, whenever there is a new post on the blog, you will receive an email notification.

Please forward this message to anyone that you think would benefit from the blog. They will not be added unless they personally follow the steps above.

---------------------------------------------------------

1 Cor 1:20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. 

1 Cor 2:9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

I write today with love for the lost, sorrow for the influence that unbelievers have on others, and a renewed desire to share the good news of Christ with all. May we who believe teach and offer hope to our dying world. May we speak the truth in love.

Stephen Hawking, the brilliant world-famous physicist who died March 15, 2018, never accepted the simple truth, “In the beginning God.” Note what he preached instead, with great certainty and confidence. What follows are excerpts from a BreakPoint post, then two posts taken directly from Fox News.

Stephen Hawking and the Limits of our Knowledge (BreakPoint)

Hawking’s book, A Brief History of Time, became a global hit, selling more than 10 million copies. He made regular appearances on television, including hit shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and (in animated form) “The Simpsons.” The film about his life, “The Theory of Everything,” did more than $100-million at the box office and produced five Academy Award nominations and one win.

Stephen Hawking didn’t stay in his lane. He was a scientist, but in each of his books and nearly all of his media appearances, he ventured into philosophy, masking metaphysical observations and proclamations in language of scientific certainty.

Hawking regularly opined on what are known as the “ultimate questions,” such as “Where did everything come from?” “Why are we here?” “What’s the meaning of life?” “Who are we as human beings?” and “What is our ultimate destiny?”

He said:

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”

“There is no heaven or afterlife… that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

“The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.”

Stephen Hawking says he knows what happened before the dawn of time (Fox News)

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/03/05/stephen-hawking-says-knows-what-happened-before-dawn-time.html

It’s the biggest question in the universe. What happened before the Big Bang? Now world-famous physicist Stephen Hawking says he has an answer.

“The boundary condition of the universe ... is that it has no boundary,” Hawking tells the National Geographic’s Star Talk show this weekend.

In other words, there is no time before time began as time was always there.

It was just different.

He tells physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that amid the almost infinitely small quantum foam of the singularity before the Big Bang, time existed in a ‘bent’” state.

It was distorted along another dimension — always getting fractionally closer to, but never becoming, nothing.

So there never was a Big Bang that created something from nothing.

It’s just looks that way from our point of perspective.

“All the evidence seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning, about 15 billion years ago,” Hawking says in one of his lectures.

“There must have been a beginning. Otherwise, the universe would be in a state of complete disorder by now, and everything would be at the same temperature. In an infinite and everlasting universe, every line of sight would end on the surface of a star. This would mean that the night sky would have been as bright as the surface of the Sun. The only way of avoiding this problem would be if, for some reason, the stars did not shine before a certain time.”

But things were different at the Big Bang.

“The density would have been infinite,” Hawking says.

“It would have been what is called, a singularity. At a singularity, all the laws of physics would have broken down. This means that the state of the universe, after the Big Bang, will not depend on anything that may have happened before, because the deterministic laws that govern the universe will break down in the Big Bang.”

This has long posed a serious problem for physics, he says.

“Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang. Events before the Big Bang, are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them.”

But there are ways to figure out what came before, he says.

“Quantum theory introduces a new idea, that of imaginary time. Imaginary time may sound like science fiction, and it has been brought into Doctor Who. But nevertheless, it is a genuine scientific concept. One can picture it in the following way. One can think of ordinary, real, time as a horizontal line. On the left, one has the past, and on the right, the future. But there’s another kind of time in the vertical direction. This is called imaginary time, because it is not the kind of time we normally experience. But in a sense, it is just as real as what we call real time.”

This has enormous implications when it comes to the Big Bang.

“James Hartle of the University of California Santa Barbara, and I have proposed that space and imaginary time together, are indeed finite in extent, but without boundary. They would be like the surface of the Earth, but with two more dimensions. The surface of the Earth is finite in extent, but it doesn’t have any boundaries or edges. I have been around the world, and I didn’t fall off. “

There’s no raw physics that supports his idea. Yet.

But Hawking’s insight has proven right before.

What we do know is that when it comes to the Big Bang — and black holes — our understanding of physics breaks down.

The only certainty about the infinitesimally small quantum building blocks of our universe is that they are uncertain. Simply observing them can cause them to change. They can be in two places — or two states — at once.

They seem to be a physical embodiment of probability and potential: elements of reality that haven’t quite yet decided what they’re going to do.

While it dictates our lives, we still don’t know what time is. Or exactly where it comes from.

We know how it works. We know its effects.

It’s like gravity.

It doesn’t entirely seem to fit in the ‘big’ world of the physics we experience, nor the ‘weird’ world of the subatomic.

But, like the strange behavior of quantum physics, perhaps time has a lot more left to tell.

This story originally appeared in news.com.au.

Quotations from Stephen Hawking (Fox News)

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/03/14/quotations-from-stephen-hawking.html

LONDON –  Physicist and author Stephen Hawking possessed an uncanny ability to come up with memorable phrases and sayings that summed up his world view. Here is a short selection of his many famous observations:

— “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”

— “Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.”

— “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”

— “For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”

— “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

— “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”

— “Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.”

— “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

— “We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.”

— “My disabilities have not been a significant handicap in my field, which is theoretical physics. Indeed, they have helped me in a way by shielding me from lecturing and administrative work that I would otherwise have been involved in. I have managed, however, only because of the large amount of help I have received from my wife, children, colleagues and students. I find that people in general are very ready to help, but you should encourage them to feel that their efforts to aid you are worthwhile by doing as well as you possibly can.”

In the Beginning … Nothing?

The Law of Cause and Effect is among the most fundamental rules of science. At least it used to be. If you had told most people in the past, including brilliant atheists, that there was an effect without a cause, they would not have taken you seriously. In fact, unbelievers denied the existence of God using this very idea. “Who created God?” they would ask, assuming that even God had to have a cause behind Him.

However, if God is not the ultimate cause, who or what is? The problem has been that no one could come up with a plausible alternative to God. In the beginning … what? Matter? Energy? The Second Law of Thermodynamics affirms that the universe, including for example the Sun, is running down. Energy is being expended, not sustained. Nothing in the material universe could have existed from all eternity. It just couldn’t.

Some then tried to claim that a very tiny bit of something somehow multiplied and produced the vast, complex array that we call the cosmos. Once again, however, no one could explain how that “bit” could have existed eternally, or how something so little could cause something so much greater.

So we are back to God, or should be! In fact, scientists who believe in God – and there are myriads of them – have no problem with the fact that God made all things from nothing. Heb 11:3 declares, “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”

However, those who presuppose that there is no God are in crisis. They have come to a cliff, facing a chasm that they cannot cross. If matter was not here from the beginning, if energy did not work on that matter to “create” a “bang” and bring life from non-life, and if there is no God, they are out of answers!

What about evolution? In addition to all its other problems, assumptions, and missing links, this unproven theory lacks a starting point. If man evolved from A … that evolved from B … that evolved from C … what is the first thing, or being, or source that gave rise to all the others? We are back to cause and effect! Evolution demands multiple effects with no ultimate cause or clear intermediate causes! It has no beginning point to offer, especially now that theories of eternal matter or everlasting energy have proven false!

So what’s the latest? How do we get a universe without an origin, a creation without a Creator?

Hold on. The answer is coming. Yes, we are told, atheists have a solution. Are you ready? Some of them are saying …

In the beginning … nothing!

I am serious. The latest idea, presented with a straight face and accepted as quite reasonable by the truly intelligent, is that there is no cause after all. The law of “every effect has a cause,” that “this came from that,” has now become the law of “the first effect had no cause” and “everything came from nothing.”

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and Director of the Origins Institute at Arizona State University, published A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. This book, as its title suggests, purports to explain how something---and not just any something, but the entire universe---could have emerged from nothing, the kind of nothing implicated by quantum field theory.

Wait … did you say quantum field theory? Is that the best we have?

Krauss says, “And while we don’t yet know the ultimate origin of life, for most people it’s plausible that at some point chemistry became biology. What’s amazing to me is that we’re now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing.”

Huh? What’s that? Say it again? “… we’re now at a point where we can plausibly argue that a universe full of stuff came from a very simple beginning, the simplest of all beginnings: nothing.”

According to Ross Anderson, writing in The Atlantic, “It’s a story that Krauss is well positioned to tell; in recent years he has emerged as an unusually gifted explainer of astrophysics. One of his lectures has been viewed over a million times on YouTube and his cultural reach extends to some unlikely places---last year Miley Cyrus came under fire when she tweeted a quote from Krauss that some Christians found offensive. Krauss’ book quickly became a bestseller, drawing raves from popular atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, the latter of which even compared it to The Origin of Species for the way its final chapters were supposed to finally upend the ‘last trump card of the theologian’”.”

Did you catch that? The well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins, sees this “big nothing” as sufficient to overthrow the theologian’s arguments for God’s existence? Krauss says, “We don’t know … plausible …” That unseats faith in God?

Think back with me about this.

When scientists declared that life cannot spontaneously generate from non-life, the theologian already knew that.

When scientists admitted that they could not find the links to prove evolution, the theologian already knew that.

When scientists proclaimed that the universe had a beginning, the theologian already knew that.

When scientists realized that matter and energy could not have existed eternally, the theologian already knew that.

And now, when scientists say, it all started from nothing, the theologian already knew that, too. “In the beginning God.” That’s it. In the beginning, there was no universe, no matter, no creation. Not until He brought it all into being, ex nihilo, from nothing.

Dawkins’ bold statement makes me think of Robert Jastrow’s famous comment. Jastrow (1925 – 2008) was an American astronomer, physicist and cosmologist. He was a leading NASA scientist, populist author and futurist. He wrote, "… scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized."

"Consider the enormity of the problem. Science has proved that the universe exploded into being at a certain moment. It asks: What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter or energy into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions, because, according to the astronomers, in the first moments of its existence the Universe was compressed to an extraordinary degree, and consumed by the heat of a fire beyond human imagination. The shock of that instant must have destroyed every particle of evidence that could have yielded a clue to the cause of the great explosion."

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

—Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe, (1981), p. 19.

Now consider the title of Anderson’s article in The Atlantic: “Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?”

Are you kidding? Physics – at least all that physics has actually proven – has shown faith in God to be the only thing that is not obsolete! Theories come and go. God remains.

Note what Krauss further admits in response to this question from Anderson:

Anderson: “Your book argues that physics has definitively demonstrated how something can come from nothing. Do you mean that physics has explained how particles can emerge from so-called empty space, or are you making a deeper claim?” 

Krauss: I’m making a deeper claim, but at the same time I think you’re overstating what I argued. I don’t think I argued that physics has definitively shown how something could come from nothing; physics has shown how plausible physical mechanisms might cause this to happen. I try to be intellectually honest in everything that I write, especially about what we know and what we don’t know. If you’re writing for the public, the one thing you can’t do is overstate your claim, because people are going to believe you. They see I’m a physicist and so if I say that protons are little pink elephants, people might believe me. And so I try to be very careful and responsible. We don’t know how something can come from nothing, but we do know some plausible ways that it might. 

But I am certainly claiming a lot more than just that. That it’s possible to create particles from no particles is remarkable---that you can do that with impunity, without violating the conservation of energy and all that, is a remarkable thing. The fact that “nothing,” namely empty space, is unstable is amazing. But I’ll be the first to say that empty space as I’m describing it isn’t necessarily nothing, although I will add that it was plenty good enough for Augustine and the people who wrote the Bible. For them an eternal empty void was the definition of nothing, and certainly I show that that kind of nothing ain’t nothing anymore.

There is more in Anderson’s article. Read all of it here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/?UTM_SOURCE=yahoo.

It’s not just theologians. Even fellow scientists take issue with Krauss’ conjecture. Look at this review of Krauss’ book, written by David Albert, a professor of philosophy at Columbia and the author of “Quantum Mechanics and Experience.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=1

The more I read and think, the more I believe Genesis! God took nothing and created all.