More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 10 - July 31, 2019
While it may seem intuitively possible for life to emerge by chance, especially given the size of the universe, the task is much more difficult than it may seem. Consider some of the many probabilistic hurdles that must be overcome for a single functional protein to arise by chance alone.13
For these reasons (and many more), most origin-of-life researchers have abandoned chance theories as an explanation for how life began.
WHAT ABOUT SELF-ORGANIZATION?
Yet six years after the publication of Biochemical Predestination, Kenyon began to doubt his own theory.
After much deliberation, Kenyon became convinced that the information content in DNA could not have arisen through natural lawlike processes alone.
Moreover, there is no known law of nature that could cause amino acids to link up in the right sequence to produce a functional protein. This is why Kenyon abandoned his theory and became a proponent of intelligent design.
In other words, DNA requires proteins, yet proteins require DNA. How could two mutually dependent systems emerge separately? This chicken-and-egg problem has confounded scientists for decades.
Recall that the key feature of life is information. Any valid theory for how life began must be able to explain information’s origin.
SIMULATING THE ORIGIN OF LIFE
The problem, of course, is that Dawkins selected his target in advance. Rather than the computer program generating biological information through a random and unguided search, Dawkins intelligently guided the program to reach a predetermined end. Yet this is the very thing natural processes alone cannot accomplish.
Evolutionary algorithms only work if they are guided with informational input from a computer scientist.
IGNORANCE OR DESIGN?
Former atheist Antony Flew put it best, “The only satisfactory explanation for the origin of such ‘end-directed, self-replicating’ life as we see on earth is an infinitely intelligent Mind.”
According to the New Atheism, “In the beginning were the particles. Through the combined forces of chance and law, the particles became complex. Eventually the particles formed solar systems, planets, and rocks. Then the particles became alive and formed trees, animals, and people.”
DNA is a coded instruction manual for living organisms
See William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells, How to Be an Intellectually Fulfilled Atheist (Or Not)
From my perspective, the most fascinating discovery made by these scientific pioneers had little to do with the cell’s structures or activities. Rather, the captivation lay in the sheer beauty and artistry of the biochemical realm.
How did the chemical systems that carry out life’s most fundamental processes come into existence?
The scenario origin-of-life researchers offered to explain life’s initial chemical evolution—the transformation of a complex chemical mixture into living entities strictly through the outworking of chemical and physical events—seemed inadequate to produce the cell’s vastly complex, highly sophisticated, tightly orchestrated chemical systems. Based on my experience as a chemist, I knew that chemical systems could self-organize, but the organization displayed by biochemical systems differs qualitatively from the order possessed by crystals and other types of molecular aggregates that form
...more
“There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties,” says Tim Folger in Discover magazine, “so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.”1
A FINE-TUNED UNIVERSE
First, the expansion rate of the universe after the big bang had to be just right to support life.
Second, each of the four fundamental forces of nature had to be carefully fine-tuned for life: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force.
Third, recent scientific discoveries confirm that Earth has extremely rare conditions that allow it to support life, even though the vast majority of the universe is uninhabitable.
What happens when we try to assign a probability to the fine-tuning of all the known constants of nature? Oxford physicist Roger Penrose concluded that such a task would be impossible, since the necessary digits would be greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe.
This objection is known as the weak anthropic principle.
According to Dawkins, accepting the design hypothesis raises a further question: Who designed the Designer? Thus, the fine-tuning argument fails because it doesn’t explain the origin of the Designer. However, is this how science works? Can scientists only accept explanations that have further explanations? The problem with this objection is that it is always possible to ask for a further explanation. There comes a point, however, when scientists must deny the request for further explanation and accept the progress they have made. If the universe looks designed, why not accept design as the
...more
Dawkins believes the multiverse theory holds the greatest promise for answering the fine-tuning argument.
Yet fellow atheist Bradley Monton points out a flaw in the multiverse theory: “Dawkins is not certain that these other universes exist. If appealing to the existence of other universes is the only way Dawkins has of replying to the fine-tuning argument, then under the supposition that the other universes don’t exist, the fine-tuning argument is successful.”
In order for the universe to permit life … whatever form organisms might take, the constants and quantities have to be incomprehensibly fine-tuned. In the absence of fine-tuning, not even atomic matter or chemistry would exist, not to speak of planets where life might evolve!
No other element in the periodic table has the information-storage capacity of carbon or its ability to remain stable through chemical and heat pressures. Carbon is the only element capable of supporting complex life.
In addition to carbon, life also requires a solvent to allow for chemical reactions. As the most abundant chemical compound in the universe, water is uniquely suited for this task. Water has some unusual physical characteristics that make it the perfect solvent for life:
If it wasn’t for carbon and water, no complex life could exist in the universe.
Evolution cannot account for these properties, for evolution is dependent upon their preexistence.
Even if Darwinian evolution were true, it could not explain why we have a fine-tuned universe as well as the chemical properties in nature that can support life.
There is an implicit assumption that life would adapt to whatever hand of physical and chemical cards were dealt to it. Yet this is untested and intrinsically questionable…. The capacity of evolution to fine-tune itself is thus ultimately dependent on fundamental chemical properties which in themselves can thus be argued to represent a case of robust and fruitful fine-tuning.
In their discussions of evolution, they treat chemistry and physics as irrelevant background information.
This point [that the existence of biologically essential elements requires cosmic fine-tuning] is not negated by suggesting that evolution can fine-tune itself. Chemical reality constrains evolution; these processes can only occur because the chemistry of certain metals, predetermined by quantum mechanical parameters, permits them to do so…. Evolution can only fine-tune itself because of the predetermined properties of chemical elements.
Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.
This is not a god-of-the-gaps argument, in which God is posited for the lack of a naturalistic explanation. Rather, we appeal to God because of our positive experience that intelligent agents have the capacity for fine-tuning. The enigma of fine-tuning seems best understood as the work of a Fine-Tuner. Mathematician David Berlinski said it best: “One answer is obvious: It is the one that theologians have always offered: The universe looks like a put-up job because it is a put-up job.” The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 112 (emphasis in
...more
Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design
law of noncontradiction,
On June 22, 2009, USA Today featured a story titled “The God Choice” that was surprisingly favorable to the reality of the soul.
happened.7
What is the best explanation for NDEs? From a naturalist perspective, such cases should not simply be rare—they should be impossible. We cannot be separated from our bodies because we are our bodies. And when our bodies die, we die.
NDEs cannot be explained away as the result of drug use or a hallucination, because many cases of NDEs have been reported when no drugs were administered to the patients.
“Since consciousness and thought are entirely physical products of your brain and nervous system—and since your brain arrived fully imprinted at birth—what makes you think you have free will? Where is it going to come from?”12 We agree with the conclusion of Wolfe’s argument. If there is no soul, then free will does not exist.
If materialism is true, then a human being is simply a body. If you are solely a material system, then you have no inner self that has the capacity to freely choose between options. You have no center of consciousness to make reasoned decisions.
Dawkins admits that the origin of consciousness may be another gap as improbable as the origin of life.
Nineteenth-century preacher and novelist George MacDonald wrote in Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood that we are souls and have bodies.
