UPDATE below also see new video description and original video

The caption is in Thai and describes the creature as a Nemertea, or a ribbon worm, which shoots a proboscis (elongated nose) out of a hole above its mouth to capture prey.

Presumably, that is what is going on here.

When not stretched out like an alien life form, the proboscis normally sits in “a fluid-filled chamber above the gut,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica.

And here’s a description of how it works from NCSU:

"When the animal senses a prey organism nearby, a circular muscle layer around the proboscis sheath rapidly and vigorously contracts. This contraction forces the fluid from the proboscis sheath into the proboscis and, in the process, literally turns it inside out, blowing it out of the proboscis sheath. The proboscis will rapidly (within a second or so) wrap itself around the prey, which is then drawn to the mouth and eaten."

from http://thedailywh.at/2015/05/nope-day-internet-disgusted-mystified-ribbon-worm/

So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source. I've got hundreds of these..it's not exactly a secret among palentologists that the evolutionary theory has more holes than swiss cheese. Another issue is just the dating itself..take these quotes out of context:

Curt Teichert of the Geological Society of America, "No coherent picture of the history of the earth could be built on the basis of radioactive datings".

Improved laboratory techniques and improved constants have not reduced the scatter in recent years. Instead, the uncertainty grows as more and more data is accumulated ... " (Waterhouse).

richard mauger phd associate professor of geology east carolina university In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained

... it is usual to obtain a spectrum of discordant dates and to select the concentration of highest values as the correct age." (Armstrong and Besancon)

professor brew: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method.

In the light of what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as 'proof' for their beliefs. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. "This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” Written by Robert E. Lee in his article "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error" in Anthropological Journal Of Canada, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1981 p:9

Radiometric dating of fossil skull 1470 show that the various methods do not give accurate measurements of ages. The first tests gave an age of 221 million years. The second, 2.4 million years. Subsequent tests gave ages which ranged from 290,000 to 19.5 million years. Palaeomagnetic determinations gave an age of 3 million years. All these readings give a 762 fold error in the age calculations. Given that only errors less than 10% (0.1 fold) are acceptable in scientific calculations, these readings show that radiometric assessment should never ever be used. John Reader, "Missing Links", BCA/Collins: London, 1981 p:206-209

A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), "K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia",-Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979,-"In conventional interpretation of K-Ar (potassium/argon dating method) age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily-attributed to excess or loss of argon." In other words the potassium/argon (K/Ar) method doesn't support the uranium/lead (U/Pb) method.

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years old, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such `confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." (“Secular Catastrophism”, Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, p. 21)

“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) (emphasis mine)

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.

Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: "How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

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 intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

"Material bodies are finite, and no rock unit is global in extent, yet stratigraphy aims at a global classification. The particulars have to be stretched into universals somehow. Here ordinary materialism leaves off building up a system of units recognized by physical properties, to follow dialectical materialism, which starts with time units and regards the material bodies as their incomplete representatives. This is where the suspicion of circular reasoning crept in, because it seemed to the layman that the time units were abstracted from the geological column, which has been put together from rock units."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1979, p. 49.

"The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity."—*B. Schaeffer, *M.K. Hecht and *N. Eldredge, "Phylogeny and Paleontology," in *Dobzhansky, *Hecht and *Steere (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (1972), p. 39

"The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964). [The order of fossils is determined by the rock strata they are in, and the strata they are in are decided by their tops and bottoms—which are deduced by the fossils in them.]"The geologic ages are identified and dated by the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. The fossil record also provides the chief evidence for the theory of evolution, which in turn is the basic philosophy upon which the sequence of geologic ages has been erected. The evolution-fossil-geologic age system is thus a closed circle which comprises one interlocking package. Each goes with the other."—Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), pp. 76-77

"It cannot be denied that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.

"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."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

>> ^MaxWilder:
Let us begin with this definition of "quote mining" from Wikipedia: The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
Thank you, shinyblurry, for your cut&paste, thought-free, research-absent, quote mining wall of nonsense. The only part you got right is that you should google each and every one of these quotes to find out the context, something you actually didn't do.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University and the leading spokesman for evolutionary theory prior to his recent death, confessed "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology..."

This Steven J. Gould quote is discussed in talk.origin's Quote Mine Project. Gould was a proponent of Punctuated Equilibria, which proposes a "jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change" in evolution. The quotes that are taken out of context are arguing that the fossil record does not indicate a gradual change over time as Darwin suggested. The specifc quote above is discussed in section #3.2 of Part 3. Far from an argument against evolution, Gould was arguing for a specific refinement of the theory.
More to the point, your own quote says "extreme rarity", contradicting your primary claim that transitional fossils do not exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal... ...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book... ...there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.

Dr. Patterson is discussed on a page dedicated to this quote in the Quote Mine Project. This page touches on the nature of scientific skepticism. As Dr. Patterson goes on to say, "... Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." This is the nature of pure science. We can say that a piece of evidence "indicates" or "suggests" something, but there is nothing that may be held up as "proof" unless it is testable. As a man of principle, Dr. Patterson would not indicate one species evolving into another simply because there is no way to be absolutely sure that one fossil is the direct descendant of another. We can describe the similarities and differences, showing how one might have traits of an earlier fossil and different traits similar to a later fossil, but that is not absolute proof.
Incidentally, this is probably where the main thrust of the creationist argument eventually lands. At this level of specificity, there is no known way of proving one fossil's relation to another. DNA does not survive the fossilization process, so we can only make generalizations about how fossils are related through physical appearance. This will be where the creationist claims "faith" is required. Of course, you might also say that if I had a picture of a potted plant on a shelf, and another picture of the potted plant broken on the floor, it would require "faith" to claim that the plant fell off the shelf, because I did not have video proof. The creationist argument would be that the plant broken on the ground was created that way by God.
>> ^shinyblurry:
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) ... Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them...

This quote is from 1974. Think maybe some of those gaps might have gotten smaller since then? Doesn't really matter, because the scientist in question goes on to explicitly state that this does not disprove evolution. He then discusses hypotheses which might explain his perceived gaps, such as Punctuated Equilibrium. A brief mention of this quote is found in the Quote Mine Project at Quote #54.
>> ^shinyblurry:
N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.

First of all, Nilsson is only famous to creationists. To scientists, he's a bit of a wack-job. But that neither proves nor disproves his findings, it only goes to show that creationsists will frequently embellish a scientist's reputation if it will increase the size of the straw man argument. His writings would naturally include his opinions on the weaknesses of what was evolutionary theory at the time (1953!) in order to make his own hypothesis more appealing. He came up with Emication, which is panned as fantasy by the scientific critics. Perfect fodder for the creationists.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine:
The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.
The popular press. Newsweek Magazine. 1980!!! What year are you living in, shiny???
>> ^shinyblurry:
Wake up people..your belief in evolution is purely metaphysical and requires faith. I suppose if you don't think about it too hard it makes sense. It's the same thing with abiogenesis..pure metaphysics.
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species.
The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. 2

Well, now you're just quoting some anonymous creationist. Any evidence whatsoever that the gaps between major groups are growing wider? No? Can't find anything to cut and paste in reply to that question?
>> ^shinyblurry:
You've been had..be intellectually honest enough to admit it and seek out the truth. Science does not support evolution.

I wonder, shiny, if in your "intellectually honest search for the truth" if you ever left the creationist circle jerk? Your quotes are nothing but out of context and out of date.

>> ^smooman:
is it me, or is it laughably obnoxious when wikipedia is referenced in a serious discussion?


You should read the studies that have been done on Wikipedia. For example, there was a study done around 2005 by the science journal Nature that found it to be of the same order of accuracy (or inaccuracy) as Encyclopedia Britannica, which I believe is considered the most prestigious encyclopedia.

Articles in mainstream news sources, like Newsweek, on academic areas in which I have specialized knowledge commonly have groan-worthy inaccuracies or POV-pushing, or they make statements that aren't up-to-date, so I think we have an essentialist's tendency to overestimate the difference in accuracy between conventional sources and Wikipedia.

Also, at 3 million articles, Wikipedia has 30x the number of articles (e.g. 1) as Britannica, so unless you only care about a fraction of humankind's knowledge, or you have endless time to read textbooks in hundreds of academic fields, Wikipedia is the only game in town.

^ I think this conversation has gone past the point of, well, being a conversation.

You claim "the best evidence you can offer is a link to the democrats website that makes claim to the party", despite the fact that I have actually given links to Encylopedia Britannica, US History Encylcopedia, the Law Encyclopedia, a transcript from the Democratic National Convention in 1872 where Jefferson's grandson says he's been in the Democratic-Republican party for 80 years, and Martin van Buren's Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States, but apparently you are only able to notice that I also pointed out the Democratic Party itself makes the same claim.

You say that I "keep harping on the logo and platform change" but then say "that's not my argument," yet you've offered nothing else.

I'd never heard someone claim Jackson founded the Democratic party before, so when you first claimed it, I went and checked, because I thought I might be misremembering (they're both J-named Presidents, after all).

Everything I've said came from what I read, and only in my last response did I really try to draw my own inference.

You have yet to provide a source that frames the situation in the terms of "Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party" or even "The Democratic party begain in 1828".

For your convenience, I will provide the sole reference I've found that repeats your revisionist claims: Conservapedia. I'd think twice about trying to cite their credibility as being higher than Encyclopedia Britannica, though.

I'm not sure what, if anything, you're reading that backs you up beyond conservapedia, a single dictionary entry that used the word "dissolve" instead of "split", and your strongly held belief that Jefferson and the Democratic party are like oil and water. Sorry, I forgot, you don't like my analogies. I mean that you think Jefferson and the Democratic party can't possibly be combined.

My argument is pretty hard to refute; the people you claim "founded" the Democratic party themselves say they never left the Democratic-Republican party, they just changed the name.

If they say that, who's the supposed higher authority that gets to say "nice try guys, you really founded your own party"? Perhaps Adams or Clay could dispute it, but I've not found any source that says they made any attempt to dispute it. If they didn't, why are you?

Okay. First, I'll point out that you still don't have any sources that repeat your own claim that the Democratic-Republican party simply disappeared into thin air, and that there was a clear and clean break between that party and the Democratic Party.

Second, you either didn't understand my explanation of why the Republican party would be different, or well, I guess there is no other real explanation, because you laid out a straw man instead of responding to what I actually said.

Third, your fixation with the logo is unhealthy. Seriously, if we change the logo now to a Fox to mock Fox News, does that mean Bill O'Reilly founded the Democratic party? I'm not being entirely facetious -- if the Democratic-Republican party didn't have a logo before, but during the Jackson presidency they adopted it to spite the people calling him Jackass, does that make him the founder of the Democratic-Republican party? I think it makes him a Jackass, but that's not what we're talking about.

But really, this all comes down to #1. You said the answers.com page was accurate. Here's some of what you deemed accurate:

Encyclopedia Britannica:

In the 1790s a group of Thomas Jefferson's supporters called themselves "Democratic Republicans" or "Jeffersonian Republicans" to demonstrate their belief in the principle of popular government and their opposition to monarchism. The party adopted its present name in the 1830s, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

So, one party, that changed its name.

US History Encylcopedia:

By the end of Madison's presidency and throughout Monroe's two terms, known as the "Era of Good Feeling," the Democratic Republican Party largely abandoned its minimalism and supported tariff, banking, and improvements policies originally supported by its Federalist opponents.

After the retirement of James Monroe, the newly renamed "Democratic" Party came to rally around the candidacy of Andrew Jackson. Jackson steered the party back toward its minimalist origins.

The Law Encyclopedia entry starts with:

The modern Democratic party is the descendant of the Democratic-Republican party, an early-nineteenth-century political organization led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Also known as the Jeffersonians, the Democratic-Republican party began as an antifederalist group, opposed to strong, centralized government. The party was officially established at a national nominating convention in 1832. It dropped the Republican portion of its name in 1840.

They don't all agree about the exact timing of the change, but they say it was a change in name, not a newly founded party.

In the course of searching again today, I found a couple original-source documents:

Thomas Jefferson Randolph (Thomas Jefferson's grandson) said at the 1872 Democratic convention that he'd spent 80 years of his life in the Democratic-Republican party (source), and Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States By Martin Van Buren, where he discusses the topic at excruciating length, but frequently talks about the roots of the Democratic party beginning with Jefferson.

Look, you're just wrong. You can disagree with the history as it's written, but that makes you, not me, the revisionist.

It's okay. I don't blame you for being mad. You don't like the thought that Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton were both from the same party. Here's a thought, maybe we should change the logo to a brunette sucking cock, to commemorate the founding of Limbaugh's Clinton's Democrat (as opposed to Democratic) party. The logo change, that's really all it takes to found a new party.

Someone call Hillary and let her know she won the nomination at the Democrat National Convention, where only Michigan and Florida count. Best not show her the new logo though.

Really? You must not have read any history books on the period then. Or clicked on the link I gave, and scanned the page.

I'm well aware of where the logo comes from...so what? If Democrats decide to start using Obama's logo from now on, does that mean Obama founded the Democratic party?

As for this:

>> ^blankfist:
I don't think anyone said if the platform is different, then the party is different. Not sure where you got that.

It came from this:

>> ^blankfist:
And there is a huge "break in the identity of the party between Jefferson's party" and the other big government, interventionist presidents you mentioned above (FDR, LBJ, Clinton, Obama). Jefferson believed the government that governs best is the government that governs least. Thomas Jefferson extended Washington's ideas in his March 4, 1801 inaugural address: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." (cited) None of the recent presidents in either party have been very Jeffersonian.

That's either a non-sequitor, or it's your only substantiated assertion. Otherwise you're just answering my references with a denial of the existence of the references I already provided, and calling sources like Encyclopedia Britannica revisionist.

I meant "identity" in a more superficial sense. The Colony of Virginia was very different from the State we now call Virginia -- but it's still Virgina. Today's Virginia still carries a thread of identity from its colony days that hasn't been broken, that didn't change when West Virginia split off, and that wouldn't change if they decide tomorrow to change the name of the state to Virg. Its history would still start with being founded as an English colony.

Now, if West Virginia, instead of remaining a distinct entity decided to just merge with Ohio, it wouldn't make Ohio's origins become the same as Virginia's, but the acquisition of that territory would certainly be an important chapter in Ohio's history. That's analogous to the situation we have with the Whigs and the Lincoln-founded Republicans.

Now, you revisionist fucker of pigs, do you have a single source that starts the history of the Democratic party with Andrew Jackson, that never mentions the Democratic-Republican party?

I know you love Jefferson, and hate Democrats, but the former begat the latter, even if you don't like it.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Encyclopedia, Britannica' to 'Encyclopedia, Britannica, umm yes' - edited by calvados

"By the way wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica."

Then Encyclopedia Britannica must have a LOT of errors in it. Wikipedia is great for what it is and I use it all the time. The thing is: you cannot be assured of it's accuracy. You really need to already be an expert in the area you're researching to safely use it. Contrast this with a real encyclopedia where you don't have to worry about getting information that is just flat out wrong.

The Internet is what you want to make of it. I upvote for the discussion of this flippant retard. By the way wikipedia is as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Not only that his entire premise is based on his assumption that all Internet users are retarded and cant handle multiple sources of information. As well as being guilty of believing everything they read like this guys book.

I am not sure what this video hoped to prove. It is easy to find intelligent people on both sides of the debate. However, I would submit, that the following list of THEISTS is far more impressive than the people mentioned in this video.

• Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)
Copernicus was the Polish astronomer who put forward the first mathematically based system of planets going around the sun. He attended various European universities, and became a Canon in the Catholic church in 1497.

• Sir Fancis Bacon (1561-1627)
Bacon was a philosopher who is known for establishing the scientific method of inquiry based on experimentation and inductive reasoning. In De Interpretatione Naturae Prooemium, Bacon established his goals as being the discovery of truth, service to his country, and service to the church. Although his work was based upon experimentation and reasoning, he rejected atheism as being the result of insufficient depth of philosophy, stating, "It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion….

• Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Kepler was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer. He did early work on light, and established the laws of planetary motion about the sun. He also came close to reaching the Newtonian concept of universal gravity - well before Newton was born!

• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Galileo did his most useful theoretical work, which was on dynamics. Galileo expressly said that the Bible cannot err, and saw his system as an alternate interpretation of the biblical texts.

• Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Descartes was a French mathematician, scientist and philosopher who has been called the father of modern philosophy. His school studies made him dissatisfied with previous philosophy: He had a deep religious faith as a Roman Catholic, which he retained to his dying day, along with a resolute, passionate desire to discover the truth. Descartes was to establish the near certainty of the existence of God - for only if God both exists and would not want us to be deceived by our experiences - can we trust our senses and logical thought processes. God is, therefore, central to his whole philosophy.

• Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
In optics, mechanics, and mathematics, Newton was a figure of undisputed genius and innovation. In all his science (including chemistry) he saw mathematics and numbers as central. He was devoutly religious and saw numbers as involved in understanding God's plan for history from the Bible. He did a considerable work on biblical numerology, and, though aspects of his beliefs were not orthodox, he thought theology was very important. In his system of physics, God is essential to the nature and absoluteness of space. In Principia he stated, "The most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion on an intelligent and powerful Being."

• Robert Boyle (1791-1867)
Boyle gave his name to "Boyle's Law" for gases, and also wrote an important work on chemistry. Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: "By his will he endowed a series of Boyle lectures, or sermons, which still continue, 'for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels...

• Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Michael Faraday was the son of a blacksmith who became one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. His work on electricity and magnetism not only revolutionized physics, but led to much of our lifestyles today, which depends on them (including computers and telephone lines and, so, web sites). Faraday was a devoutly Christian member of the Sandemanians, which significantly influenced him and strongly affected the way in which he approached and interpreted nature.

• Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)
Mendel was the first to lay the mathematical foundations of genetics, in what came to be called "Mendelianism

• William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907)
Kelvin was foremost among the small group of British scientists who helped to lay the foundations of modern physics. His work covered many areas of physics, and he was said to have more letters after his name than anyone else in the Commonwealth. Interestingly, his fellow physicists George Gabriel Stokes (1819-1903) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) were also men of deep Christian commitment, in an era when many were nominal, apathetic, or anti-Christian. The Encyclopedia Britannica says "Maxwell is regarded by most modern physicists as the scientist of the 19th century who had the greatest influence on 20th century physics; he is ranked with Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein for the fundamental nature of his contributions.

• Max Planck (1858-1947)
Planck made many contributions to physics, but is best known for quantum theory, which revolutionized our understanding of the atomic and sub-atomic worlds. In his 1937 lecture "Religion and Naturwissenschaft," Planck expressed the view that God is everywhere present, and held that "the holiness of the unintelligible Godhead is conveyed by the holiness of symbols." Both science and religion wage a "tireless battle against skepticism and dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition" with the goal "toward God!"

• Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Einstein is probably the best known and most highly revered scientist of the twentieth century, and is associated with major revolutions in our thinking about time, gravity, and the conversion of matter to energy (E=mc2). Although never coming to belief in a personal God, he recognized the impossibility of a non-created universe. The Encyclopedia Britannica says of him: "Firmly denying atheism, Einstein expressed a belief in "Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the harmony of what exists." This actually motivated his interest in science, as he once remarked to a young physicist: "I want to know how God created this world, I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details." Einstein's famous epithet on the "uncertainty principle" was "God does not play dice" - and to him this was a real statement about a God in whom he believed. A famous saying of his was "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."