Cell structure
Was the above living cell due to random chance?

Homepage for Lewis Loflin

Welcome to my website. This is my 25th year on the net.

Yes I'm on Facebook and Skype. My Skype name is LLOFLIN1.

I am an old school liberal. This website covers a several subjects. They relate to applied science-engineering, history, religion, and education.

I also advocate individual liberty and individual freedom. My goal is to invoke thought. I reject any form of correctness - political, theological, etc.

I'm a former US Army soldier and here is a picture of my duty station in West Berlin. My military occupational specialty was 33S intercept systems technician and I held a top-secret SI clearance.

I grew up in Norton, Virginia, and graduated high school from John I. Burton High School in 1977.

I left King College in Bristol for financial reasons. I graduated with honors from Northeast State Technical Community College. I have two AS degrees in Computer Information Technology and university parallel.

I live in Washington County, Virginia just outside Bristol. We may not have jobs but lots of great natural beauty. There is a difference between conservationist and environmentalist. See Common Sense Environmentalism in Southwest Virginia.

Science and Why I'm an Evolutionist Further down the page.

I have 45 years experience in electronics, from vacuum tubes to modern solid state and industrial controls.

See Build a 12AV6 Vacuum Tube AM Radio.

In college I had a year each of physics, chemistry, and biology along with C, C++. Pascal, and assembly. I tend to teach from a general science viewpoint.

See KIM-1 My First Computer from 1978.

Lewis Loflin Electronics Background Biography

Origins US Constitution

What is Dark Matter? How religion could be misused FT Lewis Loflin The discussion: Lewis goes into how dark matter might be altering our reality in a way that we can't see it! The first half is a bit technical but then we do a deep dive into religion where Lewis shines with some interesting takes on his work and how things in the Bible might not be what you think.

The above is a podcast I participated in. Related to the above:

Definition of dark matter. Dark in this case means not detected by normal senses, not dark as in evil.

From www.energy.gov:

Dark matter accounts for five times as much of the universe as ordinary matter. (Some claim as high as 80-85% of the matter in the universe.) However, we know little about it other than that it only interacts with ordinary matter through gravity. Despite our lack of knowledge, scientists do have overwhelming indirect evidence for dark matter...

Another quote:

Dark matter is matter that does not interact electro magnetically, and therefore cannot be seen using light. At the same time, dark matter does interact gravitationally and can therefore be "seen" through its gravitational effect on other matter. It is common throughout the universe and helps shape galaxies. In fact, recent estimates put dark matter as five times more common than regular matter in our universe. But because dark matter does not interact electro magnetically, we can't touch it, see it, or manipulate it using conventional means.

The discussion started with Plato's Demiurge that created the universe and maintains it. The Demiurge organized pre-existing matter, which is less perfect than Plato's concepts of Forms. Christians deflate the Demiurge with the Hebrew OT God, Gnostics considered matter evil thus the Hebrew God was evil.

Assuming scientists are correct that dark matter does exist, then matter existed BEFORE the Big Bang. it also acts on matter in our universe shifting entire galaxies around.

Life is not Random Chance

Am I to believe the immense complexity of the above cell is due to random physics and chemistry?

Image source www.digizyme.com

Thomas Jefferson a Unitarian or classical Deist (he called himself Unitarian) had a view of God similar to the Demiurge of Plato. To quote Jefferson circa 1823,

I think that every Christian sect gives a great handle to atheism by their general dogma, that without a revelation. there would not be sufficient proof of the being of a God...

On the contrary. I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe, it is impossible I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is in all this design, cause and effect up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regeneration (evolution?) into new and other forms. We see, too evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the universe in its course and order...

So irresistible are these evidences of an intelligent and powerful agent that of the infinite numbers of men who have existed through all time they have believed, in the proportion at least to a unit, in the hypothesis of an eternal pre-existence of a Creator rather than in that of a self-existent universe...

This is speculation, but does the "agent" reside in the dark matter universe?

The entire tract can be read at Existence of Deity-God by Thomas Jefferson

The website and URL is based on a conflict I had with the Sullivan County Tennessee Commission over the Ten Commandments being hung in the County Courthouse in 1998. This is long settled and turned out well for everyone. See Sullivan County Tennessee Religious Wars 25 Years Later.

Because of the Ten Commandments controversy and because I attended a Christian college as a non-Christian, I had to learn much more than some may have wished.

This is a Classical Deism Website

I have a lot of religious-historical material written from a classical deist perspective. I take a non-hostile view of other beliefs UNLESS they become primarily political and threaten our individual rights.

"What could be more fundamental to science than the assumption that the explorability and thereby the cognizability of reality arises due to its bearing the handwriting of its author? God speaks the language of his creation, and our spirit, which is likewise his creation, is able to perceive it, to hear it, to comprehend it."

Christoph Cardinal Schonborn

Essays on Religion

Gnosticism Versus Christianity

Religious Traditions

Christianity

The Holocaust by Rabbi Meir Kahane
Why Kahane was Right by Lewis Loflin

Science and Why I'm an Evolutionist

We are often given a choice of two extremes - either one must have blind faith in some book with dictated nonsense or in atheism. Both are false choices and I'm not buying it.

Science has been a life-long love and I'm very defensive of it. I reject the abuse of science to bolster various political claims and the invasion of money, religion, and politics into research. I define science as strictly the description of the physical operation of the universe as defined by my chemistry professor in college, a devout Christian.

Science is no more about "truth" than the computer gadgets I build on my other website. Those devices do give some indication of their builder-creator, but are hardly objects for worship in themselves.

I've had college level physics, chemistry, and biology, but claim no expertise in these fields. I've read every science text in the school library and have been an amateur geologist since I was a kid. I loved collecting fossils and rocks from the coal-mining sites near Norton, Virginia. Strip mines are great for collecting fossils.

I'm very strict on the scientific method and the proper use of it. To quote, "It is a process for making observations, recording data, and analyzing data that can be duplicated by other scientists...If a theory cannot be tested, it cannot be a scientific theory." That makes me a big skeptic of any claim that refuses to follow it. Without verifiable scientific proof I'm not going to buy into it for the same reason I reject literal Six-Day Creationism.

Al Gore Green Religion