Honorable mentions
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails To Fix the Planet
Bjorn Lomborg cares about the poor and about our environment: He writes, “Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem.” Children now live in fear and some adults decide not to have children, but Lomborg shows that hurricanes and droughts are not more frequent and that 17 times more people now die from cold than heat. An obsession with global warming will waste trillions of dollars and crowd out investments in immunization, education, and other needs that would save and prosper many more lives: “Every dollar spent on fighting early child malnutrition results in $45 of social good.” Investment in better crop varieties, more fertilizer, and other innovations will help the poor more than cutting carbon dioxide.
Carved in Stone: Geologic Evidence of the Worldwide Flood
Timothy Clarey has a Ph.D. in geology and was a full professor of geology in Michigan, so he’s not proceeding from ignorance when he challenges faith in current theories. He rightfully criticizes mainstream unwillingness even to examine evidence for a worldwide flood and geological upheavals that could move mountains: “Contrary to uniformitarian thought, sedimentary rocks—and other geologic features—don’t require millions of years to form.” Clarey, who also spent eight years as a Chevron exploration geologist, states that “bacteria consume organic material even after it is buried,” so, “Oil and gas cannot be millions of years old, otherwise the remains would have been devoured long ago.” Young- and old-earthers can learn much from each other.
2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity
Oxford math professor emeritus John Lennox provides a clear introduction to a future in which the political issue might be not which humans will rule, but whether humans will have any say at all. The Asilomar AI Principles in 2017 stated, “Superintelligence should only be developed in the service of widely shared ethical ideals, and for the benefit of all humanity rather than one state or organization.” Given the omnipresence of sin, that seems unlikely, and what concerned C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength—the plan to “make man a really efficient animal”—75 years ago may be right around the corner 75 years from now, or even in 2084. Lennox distinguishes between narrow and broad artificial intelligence, so he’s no doomsayer, but he shows what the stakes are.
The Miracle of the Cell
For centuries “fearfully and wonderfully made” were just words about our bodies from Psalm 139. Now we have proof: Biochemist Michael Denton shows how vast is the chasm between some chemical soup and a cell filled with genetic information encoded in the double helix, and much besides. Despite decades of experimentation and hypotheses, Denton reports that “no one has produced any convincing explanation of how nature could have overcome this chasm. … Science, it seems, has reached an impasse.” Logically, those with yard signs saying, “I believe in science,” should also have signs saying, “I believe in intelligent design.” Denton says this realization and road-mapping regarding cells “will be of far greater intellectual consequence than any other discovery in science” during the past 500 years.
This page is part of WORLD’s 2020 Books of the Year section. Next: Understanding America.
Comments
Steve Shive
Posted: Sat, 11/28/2020 06:20 amThese are great Marvin! Thanks. Working at a world class research institution in Baltimore I see these issues all of the time. These plus the unwillingness to debate or consider the weaknesses of their arguments. And as one brilliant MD, PhD, told me once, "Naure is smarter than that!" This was referring to impersonal evolutionary events that seemed to be doing something he didn't like.