This comes as a surprise

Saturday, December 20, 2008

While reading Inquirer.net tonight, I saw this screaming headline: 7 in 10 Filipinos won't give up on RP.

How about that? This contradicts completely what I think is the popular belief: That many Filipinos would jump at the chance to migrate. I mean, why do you think many are back in school to take up nursing or caregiving? Just the other night, one of my boardmates who took the nursing board last month told me there were 80,000 of them!

According to this Pulse Asia survey, 54% of Filipinos are actually staying put. Of the 1,200 respondents, only 20% said they would do so when asked what they will do if it were possible to migrate to another country. I don't know about you, but to me this is absolutely surprising to say the least.

All this time, I have held the belief that many Filipinos have lost hope in this country and that, if they could, would leave in a heart beat. I for one considered this option two or three years ago when I almost gave up on my dream to finish law school.

But I don't blame those who are leaving and I've got the highest respect for our OFWs. The truth is, we will be relatively fine while the rest of the world reels from the current economic crunch. We have $30 billion in foreign reserves, virtually all of it from remittances.

Still, for this country to truly reform and begin the slow march to recovery, we need our middle class, the same professionals who are now leaving in alarming number. They constitute our educated, hard-working social segment, who are numerous enough to influence the direction this country should be heading.

This survey is a good start. Accordingly, 72% of our ABC classes (no less) do not agree that the country is hopeless. And that's the best news I have heard in a long time. As they say, hope springs eternal.

Modern Science Disproving Darwin?

Monday, December 01, 2008

For 150 years, we've been taught that life as we know it today is a series of gradual evolutions, that men started out as apes, that a singular cell or something more basic sparked it all. In the last century, logic and the scientific method have set out to prove this, succeeding in many instances to cast doubt on the Biblical claim that God created life and the universe.

But what they have done, it must be emphasized, is simply raise doubt. Like defense lawyers in a criminal prosecution, all that they have accomplished is plant in the minds of the jury the seeds of doubt -- that their client might be innocent. Ironically, modern scientific advances in the past decades are proving to be enemies rather than allies of Darwinian scientists.

In this article at Y-Origins.com, there appears to be a trend towards admitting intelligent design by and, of all people, atheists, agnostics, and even hard-core Darwin acolytes. Almost all branches of fundamental science -- astronomy, molecular biology and paleontology -- as this article would show points to evidences that life, humans, and the universe are not products of happenstance.

Scientists from all over, who set out to prove Darwin, have yet to find the so-called "transitional fossils" to prove his theory that life is the result of gradual evolution. The truth is, no such missing link will ever be found. In fact, Darwin himself, unable to reconcile his Evolution Theory and how eyes have developed, admitted to a friend later in life, "to this day the eye causes me a cold shudder."

As chilling as that shudder he felt, emerging facts uncovered so far by scientific studies are cold repudiations of his suppositions. Before long, more and more will be quoted as the following scientists have:

"There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the Universe. The impression of design is overwhelming." -- Paul Davies (British astrophysicist)

"I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing." -- Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy)

"The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine." -- Vera Kistiakowsky (MIT physicist)

Today, many in the scientific community have adopted this motto: "Following the evidence, wherever it leads." Finally, science is facing up to the reality of God. It's a victory for those who have always believed there is room for God in all scientific discoveries and in the end science will only serve to validate His existence.

Dr. Robert Jastrow, a NASA scientist who set up the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, couldn't have said it better:

"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 mountains 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."