Parallels in Daniel & Revelation

"The 8th chapter of Daniel brings up the wicked policy, all the way through, of the two republics. Then turn to Revelation. 

---The first half of the book is to bring us to the second half. 

Just as certain parts of the book of Daniel are to bring us up to the

place where the vision is established, so the first part of Revelation is to bring us face to face with the work of the beast and his image, enforcing their worship upon all the people; and there the Lord says: Revelation 14:9,10 If any man worship the beast and his image...  [he shall] drink of the wine of the wrath of God. 

And: 12 Here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus. 

Thus another great subject of these two books is the commandments of God as they were written, and not as they were thought to be changed by Satan, and by this power which he uses. 

We are to preach that. Thus from the books of Daniel and Revelation, we are to preach: 

• the coming of the Lord, 

• the sanctuary, and 

• the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus." 

A.T. Jones

Creation Moment 8/22/2025 - Reversed Evolution Nonsense

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools...

Romans 1:22

"Apparently, evolution (and natural selection) can do almost anything:

"If new forms appear, the credit goes to creative natural selection; if old forms fail to change, the conservative force is called stabilizing selection; and if some species survived mass extinctions while others perished, it is because the survivors were more resistant to extinction."

So for those who believe it, evolution explains everything. Even the lack of evolution is supposedly proof of evolution!
Recently, scientists at the University of California, Riverside, suggested evolution has a rewind button—that somehow evolution circles back to reacquire traits an organism once had and then supposedly lost. In other words, evolution can go backwards. And why not? After all, they think it can do anything. According to Bernstein of Phys.org,

"On the younger, black-rock islands of the Galápagos archipelago, wild-growing tomatoes are doing something peculiar. They’re shedding millions of years of evolution, reverting to a more primitive genetic state that resurrects ancient chemical defenses’"

Q: On what basis do they say that the plants are reverting to a more “primitive” genetic state or that these chemical defenses are “ancient”? 

---They work just fine in the twenty-first century.

*The chemical defenses in this case are molecules called alkaloids: a large class of organic compounds found primarily in the nightshade family that includes eggplants and tomatoes. 

The “ancient” alkaloids are a natural and bitter plant pesticide that dissuades grazing animals and insect predators. Popular examples of alkaloids are nicotine and morphine.

In this study, various samples of wild tomatoes (genus Solanum) were taken from the Galápagos Islands. It was found that plants on the eastern islands produce alkaloids—specifically steroidal glycoalkaloids (SGAs)—that are different than those on western islands.

"That difference comes down to stereochemistry, or how atoms are arranged in three-dimensional space. Two molecules can contain

exactly the same atoms but behave entirely differently depending on how those atoms are arranged.

To figure out how the tomatoes made the switch, the researchers examined the enzymes that assemble these alkaloid molecules. They discovered that changing just four amino acids in a single enzyme was enough to flip the molecule’s structure from modern to ancestral."

*Creationists would say these are not modern or ancestral (which suggests evolution) molecule structures; rather, they are simply two types of enzymes ensconced within the tomato’s genome.

Regardless, researchers writing in Nature stated, “Our findings highlight how GAME8 [GLYCOALKALOID METABOLISM 8 (GAME8) cytochrome P450 hydroxylases] evolution has shaped alkaloid diversity in the genus Solanum, demonstrating a complex interplay between enzyme function, genetic variation, and evolutionary adaptation.” 

But there was no GAME8 evolution. There has always been genetic variation and alkaloid diversity in the genus Solanum since its creation, allowing the plant to fill various ecological niches (adaptation).

Jozwiak et al. in Nature appeal to gene duplication, stating,

 “Ancestral GAME8 likely favored 25R, with gene duplications giving rise to 25S-producing enzymes in more recent Solanum species [25S and 25R are tomato and eggplant type isomers].6 But “the whole idea of gene duplication being able to explain gene origins and function is now being actively refuted by empirical data produced by evolutionists themselves.”

*Evolutionists are in a quagmire, observing changes that are “reversing evolution” and thus don’t fit the Darwinian narrative.
*That’s because evolution isn’t supposed to have a rewind button. It’s generally viewed as a one-way march toward adaptation, not a circular path back to traits once lost. While organisms sometimes re-acquire features similar to those of their ancestors, doing so through the exact same genetic pathways is rare and difficult to prove.

Of course, this evolution story must force the resulting implications for people into the narrative.

"And this kind of change might not be limited to plants. If it can happen in tomatoes, it could theoretically happen in other species, too. “I think it could happen to humans,” [Jozwiak] said. “It wouldn’t happen in a year or two, but over time, maybe, if environmental conditions change enough.”

Jozwiak et al. stated, “This study reveals how enzymatic and evolutionary mechanisms drive the production of isomeric metabolite variants, tailored to function in particular ecological niches.”

Creationists on the other hand would state there are no evolutionary mechanisms. In fact, Jozwiak et al. also stated that “the evolutionary mechanisms driving stereochemical diversity among Solanum species remain poorly understood.” Instead of pointing to an evolutionary process, this study reveals how continuous environmental tracking results in “the production of isomeric metabolite variants within the Solanaceae family genome, tailored to function in particular ecological niches.”

To conclude, the Galápagos tomato plants are simply using chemical defenses that have always been part of the plant’s genome. The “biosynthetic diversity and stereochemical specialization” has been part of this amazing and diverse plant family since its creation thousands of years ago." 

 ICR

Lesson of Luke 4:38

Luke 4:38 And He arose out of the synagogue, and entered into

Simon's house. And Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever; and they besought Him for her.
"Here is a type of another form of the disease of sin. 

This time it is a hot and burning fever, and there are many men who have the fever of pride, or the fever of ambition, and some who have the fever of impetuous lust." 

Charles Spurgeon

Christ vs. the Sadducees on the Resurrection

"What is the issue here? The issue is whether or not there is a resurrection of the dead. “The Sadducees, who say that there is no resurrection,” were arguing, by presenting Jesus with this preposterous hypothetical, that there cannot really be a resurrection of the dead.

Mark introduces the incident with the same explanatory theological note on the Sadducees: “Then the Sadducees, who say there is no

resurrection, came to Him with a question.” Mark 12:18. 

As does Luke: “Some of the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question.” Luke 20:27. Obviously, the only issue in this passage is whether or not there will be a resurrection of the dead.
By asking, “whose wife will she be in the resurrection,” the Sadducees thought that they had asked an unanswerable question and had thereby proved the doctrine of the resurrection to be unworthy of belief. Christ exploded the hypothetical by declaring, "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

Jesus then proceeded to the real issue, the resurrection of the dead: "But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." Matt. 22:31-32.

Again, the only issue in this passage is whether there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a resurrection of the dead is necessary only if the dead are sleeping in the grave. 

Jesus is defending the doctrine of the resurrection from skeptical Sadducees, who, Scripture tells us in several places, did not believe what Scripture teaches regarding the resurrection." 

F.D. Nichol

Creation Moment 8/21/2025 - Sounds an awful lot like.......

For by Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible... Colossians 1:16

"Check out Carl Zimmer’s recent article in the New York Times, “Scientists Are Learning to Rewrite the Code of Life”:
"These plans demand tremendous amounts of engineering. The genome of Escherichia coli is about four million bases long, and each type of codon appears in thousands of different places along its length. To carry out so many changes, the researchers must build entire genomes from scratch…

Some changes caused no trouble, but others caused devastating harm. Bacteria have certain genes that overlap, for instance, and changing a codon in one can accidentally wreck the sequence of the other.
The scientists had to invent a lot of repairs to undo the damage, including separating overlapping pairs of genes to create two distinct stretches of DNA.
“We definitely went through these periods where we were like, ‘Well, will this be a dead end, or can we see this through?’” Dr. Robertson recalled.
Glitch by glitch, the researchers figured out how to fix the altered DNA…
“It’s kind of crazy that they were able to pull this off,” said Yonatan Chemla, a synthetic biologist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the study. “It’s a technically demanding tour de force.”
Meanwhile, at Harvard, Dr. Nyerges and his colleagues have encountered glitches of their own. “There’s a lot more in genomes than we thought,” he said. “We are still not great at designing biology.”

“Engineering,” “building from scratch,” “inventing,” “designing”… “Rewriting the code of life,” it turns out, sounds an awful lot like intelligent design." 

EN&V

Lesson of Luke 4:40

Luke 4:40 Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto Him; and He laid His hands on every one of them, and healed them.

"Ah, it is setting with some of you!

Those gray hairs are like the streaks of light upon the horizon

as the sun goes down; but blessed be God, He who heals the spiritually sick in the early morning, by bringing children to Himself, does not cease to work until the sun goes down." 

Charles Spurgeon

The Robe of Righteousness SIMPLIFIED

"Many are the ideas that flit round’ on the internet concerning what is the robe of covering Christ gives to us. Let us in this article place our attention on these two paragraphs in sequence from Ellen White’s book, Christ’s Object Lessons, pp. 311-312:

"Only the covering which Christ Himself has provided can make us meet to appear in God’s presence. This covering, the robe of His own righteousness, Christ will put upon every repenting, believing soul.

“I counsel thee,” He says, “to buy of Me ... white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear” (Revelation 3:18).
This robe, woven in the loom of heaven, has in it not one thread of human devising. Christ in His humanity wrought out a perfect character, and this character He offers to impart to us. “All our righteousness are as filthy rags.” Isaiah 64:6. 

Everything that we of ourselves can do is defiled by sin. 

But the Son of God “was manifested to take away our sins; and in Him is no sin.” Sin is defined to be “the transgression of the law.” 1 John 3:5, 4. 

But Christ was obedient to every requirement of the law. He said to His disciples, “I have kept My Father’s commandments.” John 15:10. 

By His perfect obedience He has made it possible for every human being to obey God’s commandments. 

When we submit ourselves to Christ, 

--the heart is united with His heart, 

--the will is merged in His will, 

--the mind becomes one with His mind, 

--the thoughts are brought into captivity to Him; 

we live His life. 

This is what it means to be clothed with the garment of His righteousness. 

Then as the Lord looks upon us He sees, not the fig-leaf garment, not the nakedness and deformity of sin, but His own robe of righteousness, which is perfect obedience to the law of Jehovah."

In older English “meet” to appear means “fit” to appear." 

Larry Kirkpatrick

Contrast Between God and Man SERIES PAGE

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because our days upon earth are a shadow:

Job 8:9

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Creation Moment 8/20/2025 - Aluminum-20 & the proton-emission phenomena & mysteries of the proton drip line

When I consider.... the work of Thy fingers,....What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that Thou visitest him? Psalm 8:3,4

Peering into the Creator's DESIGN: His Interwoven Balance of the Laws of Physics and Chemistry....

"This rare and unstable isotope doesn’t just decay, it unravels through a dramatic sequence of proton emissions that challenge long-held assumptions about nuclear structure. The finding marks the first known case of a “triple-proton decay chain,” and it may even hint at a break in the fundamental symmetry of atomic particles, opening a new frontier at the edge of nuclear stability.

What makes aluminum-20 special is not just that it exists briefly before vanishing; it’s how it vanishes. The decay pathway it follows is one of the rarest ever seen. First, it emits a single proton, turning

into magnesium-19. Then, that magnesium-19—already unstable—simultaneously ejects two more protons, collapsing into neon-17. It’s like watching a tightrope walker step forward and instantly split into three tumbling acrobats mid-air.
This process is known as three-proton emission, and aluminum-20 is the first nucleus ever discovered in which its direct decay product (magnesium-19) is itself a two-proton emitter. This extraordinary sequence provides nuclear physicists with a kind of Rosetta Stone—an intricate decay puzzle that reveals hidden information about nuclear forces, quantum behavior, and the boundaries of stability.

Currently, more than 3,300 nuclides are known, yet fewer than 300 are stable and exist naturally. The remainder are unstable nuclides that undergo radioactive decay.
Common decay modes, such as α decay, β- decay, β+ decay, electron capture, γ radiation, and fission, were discovered by the mid-20th century.
In the 21st century, two-proton radioactivity was found in the decays of some extremely neutron-deficient nuclei.
In recent years, even rarer decay phenomena such as three-, four-, and five-proton emission were observed.
“Aluminum-20 is the lightest aluminum isotope that has been discovered so far,” said Dr. Xiaodong Xu, a physicist with the Institute of Modern Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
“Located beyond the proton drip line, it has seven fewer neutrons than the stable aluminum isotope.”
Using an in-flight decay technique at the Fragment Separator of the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research, the physicists

measured angular correlations of aluminum-20’s decay products.
Through detailed analysis of angular correlations, they found that the aluminum-20 ground state first decays by emitting one proton to the intermediate ground state of magnesium-19, followed by subsequent decay of magnesium-19 ground state via simultaneous two-proton emission.
Aluminum-20 is the first observed three-proton emitter where its one-proton decay daughter nucleus is a two-proton radioactive nucleus.
The researchers also found that the decay energy of the aluminum-20 ground state is significantly smaller than the predictions inferred from the isospin symmetry, indicating a possible isospin symmetry breaking in aluminum-20 and its mirror partner neon-20.
This finding is supported by state-of-the-art theoretical calculations that predict that the spin-parity of the aluminum-20 ground state differs from the spin-parity of the neon-20 ground state.
“This study advances our understanding of the proton-emission phenomena, and provides insights into the structure and decay of nuclei beyond the proton drip line,” Dr. Xu said." 

SciNews

Contrast Between God and Man SERIES: 10

There is none righteous, no, not one. 

As it is written, 

There is none righteous, no, not one: 

Romans 3:10

There is none good but one, that is God. 

And He said unto him, Why callest thou Me good? 

there is none good but one, that is, God:

 but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. 

Matthew 19:17

Edward Beckersteth

SDA History: A.T. Jones on Preaching

It is time for You, Lord, to work: 

for they have made void Your law. 

Psalm 119:126

"I cannot preach the commandments of God without preaching the

faith of Jesus; and that I can not preach the faith of Jesus without preaching the commandments of God.

I am to preach the commandments of God so that it will be the faith of Jesus only; and I am to preach the faith of Jesus so it will be nothing but the commandments of God." 

A.T. Jones

Creation Moment 8/19/2025 - Punctum

Thou, even Thou, art LORD alone; Thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and Thou preservest them all; and the host of heaven worshippeth Thee. Nehemiah 9:6

Q: What purpose could Punctum serve? Only the DESIGNER of the cosmos knows....

"It started as a side note in a high-resolution ALMA observation. Elena Shablovinskaia and her team weren’t hunting for the weird. They were mapping the bright, active heart of NGC 4945 — a nearby starburst galaxy 11 million light-years away — when they spotted a faint blip about 60 parsecs off-center.

At 50% ± 14% polarization in millimeter wavelengths, the source — now nicknamed “Punctum” from the Latin for “point” or “dot” — has one of the highest polarization degrees ever seen in an extragalactic compact object. Even stranger, it’s invisible in optical, infrared, X-ray, and lower-frequency radio data. The only window into its existence is ALMA’s millimeter eye.
Astronomers now claim Punctum could represent an entirely new astrophysical object.
Punctum isn’t just bright for its category — it may be its own category. Shablovinskaia’s team measured its millimeter luminosity at roughly 2 × 10³⁵ erg/s, making it 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, 100 times brighter than microquasars, and rivaled only by the Crab Nebula among known stellar remnants.
The leading suspect is synchrotron radiation from an object with a highly ordered magnetic field. That’s the same basic physics behind pulsars, magnetars, supernova remnants, and non-thermal filaments in the Milky Way. But Punctum’s combination of intensity and polarization doesn’t match any of these.
Polarization is basically light with a sense of direction — instead of its electric fields wobbling every which way, they’re all lined up, like cosmic hairs brushed neatly by a magnetic field. In space, that often happens when charged particles spiral around magnetic field lines at near-light speeds, producing synchrotron radiation. The stronger and more orderly the magnetic field, the more coordinated the light’s “dance” becomes — which is why Punctum’s 50% polarization is such a smoking gun for something with an unusually well-organized magnetic environment.
Punctum could be the first detected member of an entirely new class of astrophysical object, one that hides from most of the electromagnetic spectrum and only reveals itself in polarized millimeter light." 

ZME

Contrast Between God and Man SERIES: 9

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, Who can know it? 

The heart is deceitful above all things, 

and desperately wicked: who can know it? 

 Jeremiah 17:9

God is light and in Him is no dark ness at all.

 This then is the message which we have heard of Him, 

and declare unto you, that God is light, 

and in Him is no darkness at all. 

1 John 1:5

Edward Beckersteth

Lesson of Luke 4:41

Luke 4:41 And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou art Christ the Son of God. And He rebuking them suffered them not to speak: for they knew that He was Christ.

"Confessions were extorted from the demoniacs.
They said, Thou art Christ the Son of God, 

but they said it crying with rage and indignation; 

it was a confession upon the rack, 

and therefore was not admitted in evidence.

*Christ rebuked them, and did not suffer them to say that they knew Him to be the Christ, that it might appear, beyond all contradiction,

 --that He had obtained a conquest over them,

--and not made a compact with them."

Adam Clarke

Nothing to indicate a disembodied consciousness

"Of the creation of man we read, "The Spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." Job 33:4. 

And life is contemporaneous with that God-given breath: "All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils." Job 27:3. 

If God decided to withdraw His life-giving spirit from the world, everyone would die at once: “if He set His heart upon man, if He gather unto Himself His spirit and His breath; all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust." Job 34:14-15. 

The spirit returns to God because it came from God and because God gathers it to Himself. There is nothing here to indicate a disembodied consciousness." 

F.D. Nichol

Creation Moment 8/18/2025 - Electricity & YOU

I will praise Thee; 

for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: 

Psalm 139:14

"Electricity itself can be defined as the movement or current of small charged particles, usually electrons. Some substances, such as metals and various types of liquids, allow the movement of (or conduct) charged particles better than others. 

The harnessing of electricity has enabled us to develop devices which cause electrical energy to be changed into some other form of energy—e.g. heat (cooking), light (electric bulbs), motion (electric motors).

Man was not the first to harness electricity and put it to work. 

When we look at the human body, for example, especially the

nervous system, we should conclude that the designer of the human body must have had an intricate knowledge of electronics and must have known how to harness electrical energy to change it into other forms of energy. When we consider the scale of the operation (i.e. at the atomic and microscopic levels), we can only wonder at God’s profound wisdom in creation.

The nervous system is composed of two parts: the central nervous system, which is the control center comprising the brain and the spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, which consists of nerves connecting other parts of the body to the control center . Via a combination of electrical and chemical processes, the nervous system is used to control the functioning of the entire human body.

The basic building block of the nervous system is the nerve cell, called a neuron. The brain itself consists primarily of neurons. Under a microscope a neuron looks like an octopus with many tentacles. A neuron can transmit an electrical impulse to the next neuron. The network of electrical impulses enables us to receive information from the physical world and then send it to our brains, and vice versa. 

Without the neuron circuits our bodies would completely shut down, like turning off the power supply to a city.

Scientists inherently acknowledge that the nervous system is built according to an electrical design. The scientific literature describing the nervous system is replete with references to electrical theory and electrical devices that man uses today. 

Such references include technical words like batteries, transducers, motors, pumps, calculators, transmitters, electrochemical potential, circuitry, binary system, current, resistance, voltage, capacitance, charge. The difficulty of describing the nervous system without resorting to such language implies the Creator’s understanding prior to man’s electrical inventions.

It is difficult to understand how anyone can believe that the nervous system, particularly the brain, could have been produced by evolutionary randomness and selection." 

AIG

Contrast Between God and Man SERIES: 8

A man that shall die. 

I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; 

Isaiah 51:12

Who only has immortality. 

Who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen. 

 1 Timothy 6:16

Edward Beckersteth

Observation of Daniel 7&2

"Again: in Daniel we are brought, in the 7th chapter, to a power—the little horn that rises up—that will… Daniel 7 [RV] 25 ...think to change the times and the law. 

By the way, it just now occurs to me that in Daniel’s prayer to God, it is said of God that: Daniel 2:21 He changes the times and the seasons. 

*Now when here comes up a power blaspheming against God, and thinking to change the times as well as the law of the Most High, where does he put himself? In the place of God. 

---The Lord may change times and seasons, but He never changes His law." 

A.T. Jones

IN the NEWS - And More....A TASTE OF WHAT MAY COME

It has been continuing---the massive weird global natural calamities--crammed into a small window of time of the last few weeks.

--A TASTE OF WHAT MAY COME--

For nation shall rise against nation,

and kingdom against kingdom:

and there shall be famines,

and pestilences,

and earthquakes,

in divers places.

All these are the beginning of sorrows.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars:

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, ...and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

Matthew 24:7,8,6/Luke 21:11

China: Massive wind storm blows around people and property in northwest. Another typhoon adds to the flooding of the country.

Landslides in part of the country with more flooding.

Iran: RUNNING OUT OF WATER--LITERALLY--With a heatwave at 122F the country's drought has caused the government to beg for water from nearby countries including from Afghanistan. Capital of Tehran is about out of water. national estimates are, that unless major rains come, the country could be totally out by October. The lack of water has led to national rolling electricity blackouts----and massive anti-government protests.

Taiwan: Hit by another typhoon.

Indonesia: Another quake. Volcanic eruption.

Japan: Record rainfall adds to flooding in the south. Volcanic eruption.

Turkey: Wildfires continue to ravage the country....now getting serious. Record heatwave continues.

Greece: Out of control wildfires due to heatwave.

Britain: Scotland hit by wildfire during heatwave.

Spain: Wildfires getting seriously out of control. Madrid endangered.

Portugal: Firenado rips through the landscape.

Cape Verde: Flooded from record rain storm. 

France: Intense record heatwave contributes to wildfires across the south.

Iceland: Phreatic eruption near volcano.

Italy: Heatwave contributes to massive wildfires near Naples.

Montenegro: Wildfires during heatwave. Serbia has come in to assist.

Mexico: Earthquake off coast.

Albania: Record heatwave and worst wildfires on record. 

U.S.A: Massive 1700 ft. mud tsunami in Alaska. Sandstorm closes down highways in New Mexico. Chattanooga, Tennessee and Charleston, South Carolina flooded as well as southeast Wisconsin. Red Alert for west coast due to cracks discovered in Cascadia subduction zone.

Creation Moment 8/17/2025 - ‘Consciousness’—as "the Music of the Mind"

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7

"University of California (Santa Barbara) cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga has written a significant article at IAI.TV. He and synthetic biologist Bridget Queenan maintain there that “People with missing brains make clear the mystery of consciousness.”

Mystery? Gazzaniga, who trained under Nobelist Roger Sperry (1913–1994), is a close colleague of leading neuroscientist Christof Koch. Is he backing away from eliminative materialism (the mind is simply what the brain does)? He and Queenan dance around the topic in a most interesting way, beginning with people missing large parts

of their brains:
A 2013 case reported a 60-year-old missing the back of her brain. Again, normal on the outside: employed until recently, married, with one child and the ability to live alone. Inside, a cavity where the cortex should be. A 2018 case reported a 60-year-old, unmarried and unemployed, but active in a band and a choir, with his head full of fluid and only a thin sheet of cortex. A 2021 case reported a 72-year-old living independently, again largely without what we might recognize as “a brain.” Even rats got in on the action: R222 lived well into adulthood, performing well in lab-rat escapades despite a hollowed-out brain.

Collectively, these findings suggest that the human (and rat!) brain is considerably more plastic than expected. If you were born with bones or muscles half the expected size, or a quarter, or a tenth, you wouldn’t carry on unimpeded. If you were born with a tenth of your liver, we’d have a problem. Yet, somehow, the human brain can rise to the occasion—at a performance review…

Q: Is your brain really necessary for consciousness? 

Gazzaniga and Queenan argue that “It may be time for a new approach to brains and ‘consciousness’—as the music of the mind.” Music, they remind us, is more than volume and can be produced in a variety of ways.

What’s missing from Gazzaniga and Queenan’s model of consciousness becomes clear when they turn to analysis:
They write, “We can explain what makes music bad, though it’s much harder to explain what makes it good or great. That’s why we need to build a definition of consciousness from the ground up.” They then, puzzlingly, seek to downgrade language — unique to humans — compared to the “music” of consciousness:

Language is not the same as consciousness. Plenty of composers —Beethoven and Tchaikovsky among them—are in the Pantheon of “Great Composers” for music alone. We don’t require them to handle the words. We only seem to demand words when we want to exclude members from the club.
It’s time to admit that many living creatures aren’t so great at language, while being perfectly good at consciousness. They are musicians, but not singers, they are composers, but not librettists—get over it and move on. “Necessary for consciousness?”

Q: What’s obviously missing from this account is the mind of the composer?

A: Everything else flows from the immaterial ideas that inspired the composer who began the process by writing them down in musical notation:
Second, human language is similarly the outcome of abstract ideas arising in an immaterial mind. It is in no way inferior to music, as great literature attests. 

Animals have languages, to be sure. But their languages are signal systems — Even if Gazzaniga and Queenan wanted to provide an account of the origin of music in immaterial ideas, they could not do so. They would find themselves in direct conflict with the — increasingly unbelievable — mantra that the mind is simply what the brain does. So they end up confusing the issues around language and talking around the inescapable fact of human exceptionalism.often complex ones, to be sure, but not the same thing." 

MindMatters

Contrast Between God and Man SERIES: 7

Man looks on the outward appearance. 

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.

1 Samuel 16:7

But the Lord looks at the heart. 

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. 

 1 Samuel 16:7

Edward Beckersteth

Creation Moment 8/16/2025 - Zinc: “part of a Master Switch”

I will praise Thee; 

for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Psalm 13:14

"Zinc is element 30 in the periodic table, and the most abundant metal in the body after iron. Even so, we only carry about three grams of zinc by weight. That trace amount should not be

disparaged: it is vital for 10 percent of the proteins and enzymes in our cells. In his earlier book The Miracle of the Cell (2020), Denton devoted two pages to zinc, listing the varieties of some 300 enzymes that rely on its unique properties. Last year, in an article about metals in proteins, Casey Luskin mentioned several important functions that zinc enzymes perform.

One important zinc enzyme Denton focuses on is carbonic anhydrase. It converts CO2 in our cells to bicarbonate, and then reverses the reaction in the lungs….After inventing a novel vital fluorescent sensor for live-cell zinc tracking, scientists discovered close to 8,000 compartments in the egg, each containing approximately one million zinc atoms. These packages release their zinc cargo simultaneously in a concerted process, akin to neurotransmitter release in the brain or insulin release in the pancreas.

Zinc is “part of a master switch” that “controls the decision to grow and change into a completely new genetic organism.” Even though it has a serious function, it’s a beautiful show to watch — all programmed to perfection:

“On cue, at the time of fertilization, we see the egg release thousands of packages, each dumping a million zinc atoms, and then it’s quiet,” said Thomas V. O’Halloran, the other corresponding author. “Then there is another burst of zinc release. Each egg has four or five of these periodic sparks. It is beautiful to see, orchestrated much like a symphony. We knew zinc was released by the egg in huge amounts, but we had no idea how the egg did this.” 

CEH

Contrast Between God and Man SERIES: 6

All flesh is grass, and all The goodliness thereof as the flower of the field. 

All flesh is grass, 

and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: 

Isaiah 40:6

The eternal God. 

The eternal God is thy refuge, 

and underneath are the everlasting arm.

Deuteronomy 33:27

Edward Beckersteth

IN the NEWS - The Groaning: Even the Rabbits

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Romans 8:22

"Some Fort Collins rabbits have been spotted with strange growths on their heads. Colorado Parks and Wildlife says it is a virus.
Recently residents in southeast Fort Collins began noticing the

unusual-looking rabbits, including 9NEWS Northern Colorado reporter Amanda Gilbert. Susan Mansfield said she saw a rabbit with black spines or “quills” around its mouth.
According to wildlife officials, the growths are caused by a virus that results in wart-like protrusions on the rabbit’s face or head. The condition is similar to benign cancerous cells and has no known cure, CPW said.
Wildlife officials emphasized that while the virus can spread between rabbits, it is not known to be contagious to humans, dogs, or other wildlife. They said it doesn't hurt the rabbit, unless it grows on sensitive areas like their eyes or mouths.
Although the virus is not considered a threat to public health, wildlife officials recommend giving infected rabbits space and avoiding any attempts to help or handle them." 

WHASABC