ORGAN DONATION

Many people thoughtlessly sign the organ donor card thinking they would like to help other people when they are no longer alive, by donating their organs.

Can organs be harvested from a truly "dead" body?
The answer (see below) apparently is NO.

This gives way to some thought:

What takes precedence: fighting to restore you to health or harvesting your organs which may be needed for another patient?
Who makes this decision if you have signed over your body?
What criteria are used to make this decision? Christian criteria, that life is given, and taken by God at His time?

If you are alive when your organs are harvested, when do you die? On the operating table?
Do the physicians cause your death?
Do you feel pain?
Can you hear what is happening?
What is the definition of cardiac death?
What is the definition of brain death?

Life Site News has the following on the subject:

However, although Tibballs' opponents stress that his opinions are in the minority, there has been growing concern about aggressive organ harvesting policies that fail to ensure that the patient is actually dead.

Lifesite News has reported several recent cases in which patients deemed "brain dead" resuscitated only moments before their organs were to be removed. Such cases have brought more evidence to the table showing that the highly contested definition of "brain death," and the later idea of "cardiac death," do not eliminate the possibility that donors may yet recover from seeming lifelessness.

Lifesite News published the story in June of a French man who, after suffering cardiac arrest for at least ninety minutes, was being prepared for organ removal when doctors noticed the patient breathing, his pupils dilating, and the patient reacted to pain. Within weeks, the patient that had been considered "brain dead" was walking and talking. (http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jun/08061308.html)

In another example, earlier this year 21-year-old Zack Dunlap was spared from dissection when a relative saw him react to touch minutes before he was scheduled to have his organs removed. Zack was originally deemed eligible to donate his organs when doctors could detect no blood flow to his brain. He later said, however, that he could hear the doctors pronouncing him dead as he lay seemingly unconscious. (http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/mar/08032709.html)

In his article "Organ Donation: The Inconvenient Truth," LSN medical advisor Dr. John Shea reveals the disturbing similarity between these "miraculous" cases and other organ donors whose surgeries were successful:

"Some form of anesthesia is needed to prevent the donor from moving during removal of the organs. The donor's blood pressure may rise during surgical removal. Similar changes take place during ordinary surgical procedures only if the depth of anesthesia is inadequate. Body movement and a rise in blood pressure are due to the skin incision and surgical procedure if the donor is not anesthetized.

"Is it not reasonable to consider that the donor may feel pain? In some cases, drugs to paralyze muscle contraction are given to prevent the donor from moving during removal of the organs. Yet, sometimes no anesthesia is administered to the donor. Movement by the donor is distressing to doctors and nurses. Perhaps this is another reason why anesthesia and drugs to paralyze the muscles are usually given."

Dr. Paul Byrne, an expert in organ donation and neonatologist, has continuously fought against policies and practices that put donors at extreme risk for being pronounced dead prematurely in order to lay hold of their organs.

Read the attached medical report on brain death

http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008_docs/BrainDeath.pdf

Brain Death - An Opposing Viewpoint Paul A. Byrne, MD; Sean O1ReilIy MD, FRCP; Paul M. Quay, SJ, PhD
• Recent and proposed legislation to establish “brain-related” criteria of death has uniformly confounded irreversible cessation of total brain function with the death of the human person. Much of the confusion comes from widespread misunderstanding of how the word “death” is used and what it means. Cessation of total brain function, whether irreversible or not, is not necessarily linked to total destruction of the brain or to the death of the person. Further, to take vital organs or to otherwise treat people as though they were dead already on the basis of these recent criteria is morally unacceptable to most Orthodox Jews and Christians.
(JAMA 242:1985-1990, 1979)

extract from page 7:
"If someone's head has been completely crushed by a truck or vaporized by a nuclear blast, or if his brain has been dissolved by a massive injection of sulfuric acid, then a cessation of function has occurred that we rightly see as absolutely irreversible. But it is the manifest destruction of his brain that convinces us of this total irreversibility, not vice versa.

But if there is no proof of complete destruction, then any declaration that a cessation of function is absolutely irreversible is a presumption, even if well grounded, which is contingent on the current state of medical knowledge and on the availability of adequate life-support systems in the concrete circumstances. Even if the presumption is correct, it establishes, as seen above, no necessary link with destruction of the brain.

If it is incorrect, the patient may possibly be cured. Thus, whether right or wrong, a presumption as to the irreversibility of a lack of brain function is insufficient ground for removing a patient's vital organs or for immediate autopsy, cremation, or burial."

and from page 10:
"Many today argue that midbrain activity or brainstem activity is peripheral once the cortex has ceased to function.1, 19 There is no limit to what real functions may be declared peripheral when the only non-peripheral function is imaginary.
Further, if complete destruction of the brain were what really is intended, then why is so much written concerning indefinite ventilation of corpses and the like? If a patient whose whole brain has been destroyed is on a respirator, then, even by the older criteria, with only the rarest of exceptions would he survive more than a week.5, 20 If, however, his brain is not dead but merely nonfunctioning because of some CNS depressant, say, then ventilatory support should be continued, at least as long as there is any chance of effecting a recovery or even of seeking an as yet unknown way to reverse his presently irreversible lack of function."

The harvesting of organs is a huge business. The medical profession has generally lost its ethics.
Organs cannot be harvested from a truly "dead" body. Decay will have set in.
Signing the card places your death in the hands of a physician.

Food for thought.

EVOLUTION: a Religion

If you are being taught that evolution is true,below you will find material to help you refute that claim. What are the seven most RIDICULOUS claims of evolution?	Print Page

1. Acquired characteristics can become inherited characteristics. One of the things that has always fascinated me about the theory of evolution is the insistence of its proponents that animal and plant species "learned" to adapt in order to survive. Of course, this assumes that a particular species was dying off due to lack of adaptation and continued to die off over a period of thousands, or perhaps millions, of years until the animal finally mutated a gene that changed its behavior allowing it to survive. But wait a minute! If it took the animal thousands or millions of years to develop the "survival gene," then it was obviously able to survive during that time without the genetic mutation that evolution says it needed for survival. So, in reality, it did not need to evolve because it was already surviving for that length of time without the need for genetic change. The logic of evolutionists on this point is truly baffling. Most would fail a college course in basic classical logic. Add to the above the assumption that plants and animals somehow "learn" through the process of evolution. In the evolutionary explanation there is an almost mystical implication that there is a conscious process going on that has allowed species to become other species or to evolve new processes or appendages for the sake of survival. The assumptions involved in this kind of thinking are staggering. One of the things that scientists should have learned from their study of the peppered moth in England (touted as "proof" of evolution) is that even though adaptations can take place within species, a peppered moth is still a peppered moth. (1) This remains true whether the dark or light variety predominates due to its ability to camouflage itself from predators. To date, none has ever been observed evolving into an Emperor Gum Moth or a Gypsy Moth (see the Sept-Oct 2005 edition of The Sabbath Sentinel for a thorough discussion of the peppered moth).

2. Matter came into existence from nothing.

Taken at face value, this is exactly what the book of Genesis says that God did. In our case however, we have evolutionists making the same statement with no causal agent. I have done quite a bit of research on this point, and it is evident that most evolutionists agree that matter is not eternal, that it came into existence at some point in the past. On the other hand, if matter were eternal, then it would be completely inert and disorganized because all energy tends to render itself less usable over time as it changes form; that is, it follows the second law of thermodynamics. Nothing in the universe would be radioactive because all radioactive matter would have exhausted its half lives in aeons past. Of course, the whole idea of radioactivity and half lives is not even workable in a universe in which matter is eternal. Half lives assume a beginning, and if matter is eternal, radioactivity can have no beginning. Again, it’s a matter that most evolutionists do not understand the logic of their own premises or are not willing to take those premises all the way out to their logical conclusions.

Most evolutionary scientists believe that the universe came into being 12.7 billion years ago, and that it started from a "Big Bang," which is evolutionary lingo for an enormous explosion somewhere in the nothingness of space. The "Big Bang" theory assumes that there was once a super-concentrated glob (not to be confused with the physics term "mass") of subatomic particles (all the mass and energy in the universe) that exploded, hurling mass and energy outward from that explosion point. The story (sometimes called Cosmology (2) ) goes that as the matter raced outward, it began to cool and coagulate into the celestial balls we see at night called stars and planets. This is, of course, a very simplistic explanation of the Big Bang theory, but I think you get the gist of it.

If I were in a classroom, I would have to ask a few questions at this point. Where did the subatomic particles come from? What physical laws in a nonexistent universe caused the Big Bang to occur? Why 12.7 billion years ago? Why not 107.7 billion years ago? What was the causal agent of the Big Bang? Where did the physical laws originate that govern the cooling and coagulating of the matter into stars and planets that was hurled outward by the Big Bang.

One of the problems with the Big Bang theory is the concept of time. Time is important to us on earth, but in the rest of the universe there is only mass, motion, and energy. So, when we say 12.7 billion years, can we say for certainty that time has always been a constant factor in determining the age of the universe?

Probably the biggest problem with the Big Bang theory is that it starts with a preexistent "something" instead of "nothing." No matter how far back you push the beginning of the universe, you still have to answer the question of how the first matter and energy came into being.

3. Evolution is statistically possible.

To avoid allowing this discussion to become too complicated, let me quote a number of well-known scientists.

"The occurrence of any event where the chances are beyond one in ten followed by 50 zeros is an event which we can state with certainty will never happen, no matter how much time is allotted and no matter how many conceivable opportunities could exist for the event to take place" (Dr. Emile Borel, who discovered the laws of probability).

"The probability for the chance of formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organism known is 1 in 10 ^340,000,000. This number is 10 to the 340 millionth power! The size of this figure is truly staggering since there is only supposed to be approximately 10⁸⁰ (10 to the 80th power) electrons in the whole universe!" (Professor Harold Morowitz, Biophysicist of George Mason University)

"I could prove God statistically; take the human body alone; the chance that all the functions of the individual would just happen, is a statistical monstrosity" (George Gallup, famous statistician).

"The idea of spontaneous generation of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable even to the scale of the billions of years during which pre-biotic evolution occurred" (Dr. Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner).

"The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop" (Dr. Edwin Conklin, evolutionist and professor of biology at Princeton University).

"All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that life’s complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did" (Dr. Harold Urey, Nobel Prize winner).

"One may well find oneself beginning to doubt whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random... nevertheless although the miracle of life stands ‘explained,’ it does not strike us as any less miraculous...." (French biochemist and Nobel Prize winner, Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity).

"A further aspect I should like to discuss is what I call the practice of infinite escape clauses. I believe we developed this practice to avoid facing the conclusion that the probability of self-reproducing state is zero. This is what we must conclude from classical quantum mechanical principles as Wigner demonstrated" (Sidney W. Fox, The Origins of Prebiological Systems).

"Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation" (Professor Phillip E. Johnson).

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going" (Dr. Francis Crick, biochemist, Nobel Prize winner, Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature , pg. 88).

I have about two more pages of quotes from famous scientists, some Nobel laureates, putting into doubt the notion that evolution is at all possible. However, even from the sample of quotes given above, the reader should be able to see that even evolutionists often embrace their theory as a matter of faith (like a religion), and not because there is any evidence to support it.

4. Evolution produces improvements in species and a more highly organized universe.

Evolution assumes the increase in order in the universe and the increase in the usability of energy, in addition higher complexity in supposed "evolved" organic species of plants and animals.

However, the second law of thermodynamics (called "entropy"—the universal law of decay) states that matter tends toward chaos and that energy becomes less usable over time. This universally known and recognized law directly contradicts the brazen postulation of the theory of evolution that matter has become more organized over time and that the evolution of living organisms has somehow produced greater order and provided us with more usable energy.

What evolutionists seem not to recognize is that candles burn out, flowers wilt, and people get old and die. Fight as we might against the forces of nature, given enough time, our sun will one day burn up all its fuel, and this planet will grow cold and incapable of sustaining life. What happens then with this thing called evolution? We only continue to exist by taking in energy from outside this planet. Once that outside energy source is gone, so is biology. Life ceases.

5. The geological strata prove organic evolution.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. If the strata prove anything, it is that evolution has never taken place. What we observe in the strata are fully-formed animal and plant species. We do not see half-lizard-half-bird species, but we do see lizards and birds embedded in the rock layers as fully-formed lizards and birds.

I use the example of lizards and birds because evolutionary biologists contend that birds evolved from reptiles. However, nowhere in the geological strata do we find any evidence of this. Science required evidence, and there is none.

When fossils are found in rock layers, it is most often the result of alluvial sedimentation. What occurs in every flood event that causes these deposits is a natural sifting of sediment. Small particles settle to the bottom and larger particles are on top. The same is true of the animal and plant species that are caught in the watery catastrophe. Because of this natural phenomenon, we cannot assume that "older and less complicated" species are found in the lower layers of rock. It is very possible that small and large animals were deposited together in the same flood, and that the smaller plants and animals sifted to the bottom of the layers. Where a fossil is found in the strata proves nothing about the age of the fossil—only that the layering of sediment is exactly the same as can be observed on any river shore or beach in the world.

6. We can date the age of fossils by looking at the surrounding strata.

One of the assumptions of evolutionists is that geological strata in places like the Grand Canyon or Williston Basin in North Dakota can be used as a measuring stick for the evolution of plant and animal species. What is generally not revealed in geology or biology text books is that any animal or plant species is likely to be found resting conformably (i.e., without upheaval or disruption) in any set of rock layers anywhere in the world. In other words, trilobites might be found at the bottom of a geological column in the Grand Canyon. In another part of the world, or even in the state of Arizona for that matter, trilobites might be found resting conformably in what are considered to be the "newer" layers in the column. (3) There is no such thing as a geological column that can be used as a standard by which to measure the likelihood of "old" or "recently evolved" species of plants or animals. The truth is, the geological column has been pieced together from exposed layers and core drilling from around the world. It is a patchwork.

In actual fact, the strata are "dated" by the fossils contained in them. You read that correctly; the strata are dated by the fossils, and the fossils are dated by the strata. This kind of circular reasoning is very tricky, but biologists and geologists have been using it for years to "prove" their case for evolution. It has been a winning strategy for a long time, but many biologists and geologists are beginning to question its validity (of course, the average Joe on the street could spot such faulty reasoning in less than the 100 plus years that it has taken scientists). As some paleontologists state:

"It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology" (Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record, 1973, p. 62).

"The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales" (O’Rourke, J.E., "Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53).

"Paleontologists cannot operate this way. There is no way simply to look at a fossil and say how old it is unless you know the age of the rocks it comes from....And this poses something of a problem: If we date the rocks by the fossils, how can we then turn around and talk about the pattern of evolutionary change through time in the fossil record?" (Eldridge, Niles, Time Frames, 1985, p. 52).

In addition to the problem of circular reasoning, there is the dilemma of rapid fossilization. Specifically, what do paleontologists do with fossilized trees that protrude through layers of rock that are supposedly millions of years apart in age? It has always been assumed that fossilization required long periods of time, but that myth was shattered with the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May of 1980. Since that catastrophe, scientists have discovered that many fossils formed within months or a few years as a direct result of the eruption. In addition to trees poking through "millions of years" of strata, other interesting modern fossils have been found, such as a cowboy boot and a modern human finger.

7. Evolution is "scientific."

Evolution is not observable, it is not measurable, and it is not repeatable—three absolutely necessary ingredients for any theory to be deemed scientific. To be scientific, evolution must be based on theories that are falsifiable, which means that such theories can be repeated and disproved (if false) by others. The assumptions for any experiment cannot be rigged to lead only to the conclusion that the theory is true (which evolutionists have done). It has to allow the scientist the option of concluding that the theory is false. The scientific method has four steps:

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

If the experiments bear out the hypothesis, it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature. It is often said in science that theories can never be proved, only disproved.

What makes evolution unscientific is that it cannot be tested. Some may object to this statement by saying that we can observe evolution by looking at the rocks and fossils in the Grand Canyon and many other places. The problem with that objection is that evolution, as it is defined, is not rocks and fossils, it is a process of the mutation of one species into another that supposedly continues to this day.

Since any hypothesis has to be based on observation, where can we observe the process of evolutionary mutations taking place? We can’t, because they are not taking place. In actual fact, if evolution were true, we should see many more transitional (intermediate) species of plants and animals than we see fully-formed species, yet we see none. We do not see them in the fossil layers; we do not see them around us in living "half-species." They do not exist.

However, evolutionists are not even looking at the process of evolution. They are looking at what they assume are the results of some hitherto unobserved process that they call organic evolution. They assume the results of that process are recorded in the fossil record. Their theory is based on two mutually supportive (and faulty) assumptions: that the fossils date the rocks, and the rocks, in turn, date the fossils. It cannot be both. You have to pick one or the other and test it.

Conclusion

It was not possible to cover all the baseless claims that evolutionists adduce to try to convince the public that God is not the Creator of all things, and that man really is the final answer to all moral and spiritual questions. One of the problems with evolution that I did not even address in this article is how our world, once full of nothing but dead matter (at least according to evolutionary thought) came to produce all the rich variety of life that we see all around us. Nowhere do we see this taking place, yet evolutionists tell us that it happened not just once, but an almost infinite number of times. Nonetheless, like macro evolution, we cannot go to any spot on earth to observe it for ourselves.

I realize that many Christians are intimidated by scientists and the mass of data they display in favor of evolution. What is seldom publicized is that in all fields of science, there is very little agreement on how evolution supposedly took place. We are constantly told that we are more than foolish if we do not believe their story of our origins. Who are the real fools? Those who see that there is no evidence for evolution or those who have wasted their lives pursuing the fool’s gold of a world full of dreams, myths, and vapors that has no originator and no source of life?

There is only one principle that evolutionists live by—that evolution is true. It is to them an article of faith that colors all of their conclusions. It is indeed a religion, not science.

End Notes

1. The use of the peppered moth as an example of natural selection that supports the theory of evolution has come under fire in recent years. Sunday Telegraph journalist Robert Matthews wrote:

"Evolution experts are quietly admitting that one of their most cherished examples of Darwin’s theory, the rise and fall of the peppered moth, is based on a series of scientific blunders. Experiments using the moth in the Fifties and long believed to prove the truth of natural selection are now thought to be worthless, having been designed to come up with the ‘right’ answer." (http:/ / e n .wi k i p e d i a . o r g /wi k i / C r e a t i o n i sm_ and_the_peppered_moth)

2. Cosmology: The Study of the Universe

"Cosmology is the scientific study of the large scale properties of the Universe as a whole. It endeavors to use the scientific method to understand the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the entire Universe. Like any field of science, cosmology involves the formation of theories or hypotheses about the Universe which make specific predictions for phenomena that can be tested with observations. Depending on the outcome of the observations, the theories will need to be abandoned, revised or extended to accommodate the data. The prevailing theory about the origin and evolution of our Universe is the so called Big Bang theory..." (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html)

3. "conformable" Successive beds or strata are conformable when they lie one upon another in unbroken and parallel order and no disturbance or denudation took place at the locality while they were being deposited. If one set of beds rests upon the eroded or the upturned edges of another, showing a change of conditions or a break between the formations of the two sets of rocks, they are unconformable. (Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms, http:// www.maden.hacettepe .edu.tr/dmmrt/index.html)

Written By: Kenneth Ryland

this article may be seen at:

http://www.biblestudy.org/basicart/what-are-the-seven-most-ridiculous-claims-of-evolution.html