Heretic: One Scientist's Journey from Darwin to Design

by Matti Leisola

There is no human lottery that remotely approaches the long odds involved in the chance origin of the first life. Based on our current knowledge of what the origin of life would require, it appears that a trillion years times a trillion years wouldn’t have been long enough. The simplest self-reproducing organism is so insanely complex that the amount of time needed for luck to have a fighting chance vastly exceeds the age of the whole universe, and now we have a window both much shorter than that and much shorter than previously believed.

If the functional proteins were too rare, then it would mean biological information is like books or software code: You can’t evolve fundamentally new and functional information through a blind process because there is just too much non-functional gibberish to wade through. Axe looked at proteins of modest length (150 residues) and published his results in the Journal of Molecular Biology.29 He found that the ratio of functional proteins to non-functional gibberish was 1 in 1074. He found that the odds of getting a protein with a particular function was 1 in 1077. That’s one protein capable of carrying out that function for every 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000 dead-on-arrival wannabe proteins. Calling that a needle in a haystack is to flatter haystacks. The number of atoms in all of planet Earth is estimated to be around 1050—a huge number but one dwarfed by 1077. The latter number is a billion times a billion times a billion times bigger.

Practically all of the hundreds of scientists I know admit in private, confidential discussions that science does not have a clue where genetic language, proteins, cell membranes, metabolic pathways, cell control systems, and the basic body plans of organisms came from,

The average protein is about 300 amino acids in length—more precisely, 267 for bacterial and 361 for eukaryotic proteins.19 These chains of amino acids can be ordered in 20300 different ways, a figure we can also represent as 10390. That’s a 1 followed by 390 zeroes. Pause for a moment to grasp how big that number is. A single water droplet of average size contains some five sextillion atoms (5.01 x 1021). There are an estimated 1082 atoms in the visible universe, a universe containing more than 100 billion galaxies; and galaxies have, on average, about 100 billion stars. And yet the even number of atoms in the entire visible universe is utterly dwarfed by the possible letter combinations in an amino acid chain 300 units long.

The story of phlogiston shows how an established paradigm may persist in the face of contrary evidence because its supporters patch it up ad nauseam instead of following the evidence. The Darwinian theory of evolution is the phlogiston of our day, festooned with a myriad and growing number of patches. Evolution is slow and gradual, except when it’s fast. It is dynamic and creates huge changes over time, except when it keeps everything the same for millions of years. It explains both extreme complexity and elegant simplicity. It tells us how birds learned to fly and how some lost that ability. Evolution made cheetahs fast and turtles slow. Some creatures it made big and others small; some gloriously beautiful, and some boringly grey. It forced fish to walk and walking animals to return to the sea. It diverges except when it converges; it produces exquisitely fine-tuned designs except when it produces junk. Evolution is random and without direction except when it moves towards a target. Life under evolution is a cruel battlefield except when it demonstrates altruism. Evolution explains virtues and vice, love and hate, religion and atheism. And it does all this with a growing number of ancillary hypotheses. Modern evolutionary theory is the Rube Goldberg of theoretical constructs. And what is the result of all this speculative ingenuity? Like the defunct theory of phlogiston, it explains everything without explaining anything well.

In the nineteenth century, the smart money in science was on the view that we don’t need to explain how the universe came to be because, well, it has always been. But discoveries in physics and astronomy put an end to this static-eternal model of the universe, and cosmologists now generally agree that our universe did have a beginning. So, what many thought never happened and didn’t need explaining—the origin of the universe—suddenly cried out for an explanation. Then scientists began to uncover what today is widely known as fine-tuning: The laws and constants of physics and chemistry appear fine-tuned to allow for life. If the strength of gravity, or electromagnetism, or of the strong or weak nuclear force, or the speed of light—on and on the list goes—if any of these were even a tiny bit different, you couldn’t get atoms beyond hydrogen and helium. You couldn’t get life-essential carbon and water. You couldn’t get stars and moons and planets. And without these, no life.

The fine-tuning is so striking that even committed atheists have abandoned ordinary appeals to chance. Instead they say there must be countless universes—a multiverse—and ours is just one of the lucky ones right for life. These other universes are, by definition, undetectable, so believing in the multiverse requires a faith commitment. Plus, the multiverse would itself need to be fine-tuned in order to spit out even the occasional universe capable of supporting life,10 so the hypothesis merely moves the fine-tuning problem off-stage. It doesn’t solve it.

TO BE sure, scientific investigators keep discovering new ways that material forces cause and shape various things in nature. But atheists don’t own the insight that we live in a world with underlying physical laws. Far from it. The idea was encouraged by the Christian belief that nature is the rational and orderly work of a divine mind, a cosmic lawgiver. That faith spurred Christians such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to go looking for the underlying laws. They looked for them, found them, and in the process launched the scientific revolution. It’s no coincidence, after all, that the scientific revolution took place in Christian Europe, a revolution moreover with roots deep in the Middle Ages.13

The renowned NASA astronomer and agnostic Robert Jastrow understood as much. He wrote that for the unbelieving scientist, confronted by the evidence of fine-tuning and a cosmic beginning, “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.”19