Intelligent Origin

Like everyone else, I haven’t got the foggiest clue how life began. Volcanic vents, comets’ tails and Darwin’s own warm pools have all failed to produce the goods. The main problem is that the simplest forms of life today are still, on an objective level, fantastically complex. The earliest stages of life on earth are no longer with us and have left no trace. In recent years we have also learnt that life appeared relatively quickly after our planet cooled. Bacteria were swarming in the primordial oceans just a few hundred million years after the crust had formed.

Despite all this perplexity, I think that the origin of life is not a good occasion to invoke direct divine intervention. I have come to this conclusion for a historical and a theological reason. Let me deal with them each in turn.

Intelligent Design seeks to overturn a well-established scientific theory on the basis that it cannot explain what it purports to explain. “Intelligent Origin” theories (to coin a term) are quite different in that there is no scientific theory that even purports to explain how life first arose. Thus, Intelligent Origin is in competition with speculations and pipe dreams. There is no purely scientific reason for supposing that life has a naturalistic origin. This means that Intelligent Origin is seeking to insert God or some sort of miraculous happening where science can provide no explanation itself. This makes Intelligent Origin a classic ‘God of the Gaps’ argument and history has shown us that these make for poor apologetics.

The theological reason that I would avoid Intelligent Origin is that it seems to assume that God had to have recourse to a miracle to allow life to appear. Given that we believe that He created the universe with the intention that intelligent beings should emerge, it would appear to be a serious design fault if life could not arise spontaneously. Of course, God could do things in any way He pleased but he is not capricious. His method appears to be to rely very heavily on secondary causes that follow the laws of physics. I would be surprised if He saw fit to reject this method for the origin of life. My suspicion is that the laws of nature, as discovered by science, will turn out to be such that the emergence of life will not be unlikely at all. Life, I believe, must have been a near certainty or else, again, we would have to assume that God did not know what he was doing. Note that this is not the same as assuming that the universe is a ‘fire and forget’ weapon as once postulated by deists. I assume that God must continue to maintain the existence and laws of nature.

Overall then, I don’t feel comfortable with even the most careful attempts to show that life could not have emerged as a result of a naturalistic process.



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

The Chisel of Death

For many of today’s intelligentsia, the reading of ‘The Selfish Gene’ was a sort of a baptismal moment, awakening them to the tragic pointlessness of the cosmos and demonstrating the falsehood of religion. In the Guardian science blogs, Susan Blackmore writes:

‘Darwin's great idea is so simple….here it is in a nutshell – plants and animals produce far more (slightly varying) offspring than can possibly survive. Starvation, disease, predation, and unattractiveness mean that only a few go on to breed again. At each step the survivors pass on whatever adaptations helped them and so gradually they become better designed. You could call it "design by death". Like a human creating a sculpture by chipping away wood, nature's weeding-out is the force that creates new design. Once you get it that's that! How can you go on believing that God created humans in his own image when you can see, because you really understand the principle, that nature's cruel and wasteful selective process can create all that design without him?’

Presented with this dismal revelation, Dr Blackmore seems to have dyed her hair in a kaleidoscopic array of colors, presumably in a bid to restore some spark of hilarity to an otherwise bleak universe. It now seems to be the orthodoxy that whilst the discipline of physics reveals a fine tuned and beautiful mathematical structure which is resplendent with order, the world revealed by biology is essentially bad. The history of life on earth is a random walk of struggle and chance which has been driven by selfish genes. Such a view is only accommodating to the bleak ‘weltanschauung’ of scientific naturalism and materialism. In our infancy we treated nature with a mixture of fear, awe and respect but following our enlightenment this superstition can be banished; we have unmasked mother nature and can see her for what she is, a haggard old witch. The philosopher David Hull remarked in an essay published in nature:

‘The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain and horror. Millions of sperm and ova are produced that never unite to form a zygote….On current estimates 95 per cent of the DNA that an organism contains has no function. The queens of a particular species of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation, a serrated appendage which they use to saw off the head of the host queen … The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray'

Leaving aside the issue of how sane it is to empathise with one’s bodily fluids, or to castigate insects for lopping their queen’s head off (a practice not entirely uncommon among human beings) I can’t say I have been convinced to sign up to this manifesto of misery. Possibly I might feel differently were I to be savagely gnawed to death by a passing Hyena but these continue to be rare in the suburbs of North London. Natural evil exists certainly, but is life’s slow bloody march from amoeba to hominid inherently evil?. As with so many other things, it depends on how you look at it.

Design by death

In Susan Blackmore’s view competition is presented as the engine of evolution and death as the fuel for the fire. However, the process of natural selection does not require death. Natural selection could conceivably go on in a landscape where creatures are immortal. All natural selection requires is differential reproduction of genotypes; in other words that some genotypes leave more offspring than others. Evolution is not primarily about survival but about what breeds. Obviously there’s no breeding without survival, but survival alone is just a precondition for breeding. It’s the successful breeding itself that matters and the differential multiplication of living beings. As Al Moritz has said on our forum:

‘Natural selection is not a simple “live or die” phenomenon, but one of living somewhat longer or somewhat shorter, and thereby – or for other reasons of “fitness” – exhibiting differences in reproductive capability.'

In the light of this I could just as easily construct a narrative of nature called 'survival of the randiest', after all at this very moment, thousands of organisms are copulating, birds are singing their mating songs and new life is being consummated in the hedgerows. Indeed I would include an account of this article about the evolution of South African Squirrels which shows the power of natural breeding, in a rather crude way. Although such a narrative would be accurate and entertaining, I'm afraid it wouldn't be much use in promoting an atheistic world-view.

Yet death does surely come to every organism, the inevitable consequence of a finite world. More than 99% of all species have gone extinct; something to be mourned in the case of the Dodo and the Wooly Mammoth, although perhaps something to be celebrated in the case of the Velociraptor and the T-rex which would have regarded Homo Sapiens as an appetising entrée. But in an evolutionary view of life death is not the last word, instead it is the key to replacement with new life. If nothing had ever died, nothing much could ever have lived. Death is part of the life cycle, not life part of the death cycle. In a pre-Darwin static view of creation, the problem of death was maximized. In the light of evolution we see that without death and replacement, the species cannot track the changing environment, only by renewing itself can it evolve into something else. As Darwin himself pointed out, the death of animals often does not entail suffering and natural selection employs pleasure more than pain as an adaptation.

Survival of the fittest

Ever since Darwin, Western European and American scientists have perceived nature as fiercely competitive--"red in tooth and claw," in the lurid words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Scenes of animal life on the Serengeti make for great television but in pure percentage terms the vast majority of life on this planet consists of plant life and bacteria, this has led certain biologists to deem it ‘green in shoot and bough’ as a more accurate tag-line. Natural selection, one has to point out, is not automatically equal to competition. Competition is a situation in which the presence of two individuals either of the same species of different species negatively influence the fitness or reproductive success of the other. But you could have natural selection simply by the discovery of a new niche where competition does not come into it at all. You might get a co-operative synergy between species in which the exploitation of a new niche positively influences other individual. This would entail evolution through the relaxation, not the employment of natural selection.

Indeed scientists like Martin Nowak have suggested that co-operation should be considered one of the motors of evolution along with mutation and natural selection. Both Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan have followed the theories of Ivan E Wallin, in arguing that the vehicle of evolution is the fusion of different organisms into a symbiotic system which subsequently created new bodies, organs and species. Moreover, nearly all organisms live in some kind of symbiosis and show relics of earlier symbiosis. Organisms work together to provide shelter, protection, pest control and transportation. Mitochondria in the human cell, for instance, formally constituted independent bacteria and the basic substance of cells consists of bacterial nucleo-cytoplasma. Others such as Augros and Stanciu have argued that natural selection and competition are not omnipotent on earth. All species have their niche and nature makes use of many types of ingenuity to avoid competition. Within species there appears to be hardly any struggle or killing on a large scale. Even predator prey relationships do not fit into the picture of bloody rivalry we imagine. The predator does not hate or get angry with its prey, it kills to eat, just as we eat chickens for dinner. Few species kill wantonly. Even pain is minimised as the prey often enters shock before death. Without considerable collaboration, life on Earth as we know it would not have existed, let alone flourished. As Lewis Thomas a biologist states:

‘a century ago there was a consensus about this: nature was ‘red in tooth and claw’, evolution was a record of open warfare among competing species, the fittest were the strongest aggressors, and so forth. Now it begins to look different.....the urge to form partnerships, to link up in collaborative arrangements is perhaps the oldest, strongest and most fundamental force in nature. There are no solitary, free living creatures, every form of life is dependent on other forms.’

Evolution is therefore a much wider process which has produced sociality, generating love and altruism just as much as competition. If it had not done so, there would be no such thing as a human ethical process.

A world without tears?

Yet for all these qualifications, suffering and waste does occur in the evolutionary process and it would be undeniably panglossian to try and disguise it. There really is an aspect of nature that is red in tooth and claw as illustrated by the picture of a heron eating a bunny rabbit at the head of this post. Both cooperation with altruistic costs and competition, the latter with suffering as a side effect, are inherent and unavoidable consequences of the biological world. Here it is best to step back and look at the painting, rather than the individual brushstrokes.

Evolution shows us that there must be a mixture of order and disorder if there is to be autonomy, freedom, adventure, success, achievement, emergence and surprise. In a world without chance there can be no creatures taking risks and the skills of life would be very different. All advances in evolution come in contexts of problem solving with a central preoccupation for sentient life being the prospect of getting hurt. There does not appear to be a coherent alternate model by which a painless world could give rise anything like the dramas of nature that have happened on this planet. An environment entirely irenic would stagnate us, an environment entirely hostile would slay us. Creativity requires the context of conflict and resolution. All of our features arise as solutions to problems. There can be no heroic quality without dialectical stress, without friction there can be no muscles, teeth, eyes, ears, noses fins, legs, wings, scales, hair, hands or brains. Half the beauty in life comes out of endurance and struggle.

Organisms are what they are because of what they do, and because of what they eat. A lion is majestic because it feeds on other creatures, human intelligence emerges from our struggle to survive, to hunt other creatures and to co-operate with others. The natural environment we decry as evil is critical to human meaning and fulfilment at both the individual and societal level. Not only do we rely on plants and animals for survival, we also possess a innate attraction to other forms of life, but by anthropomorphising nature and attempting to shield it, we inevitably rob it of its purpose and dignity.

Certainly we could imagine a world in which we were all herbivores but in this instance we would be likely to be docile and would spend most of the day eating to get energy. If we were based on photosynthesis we would not need to move and therefore possess a brain. What would nature look like without if it were in a controlled state with minimised suffering, it would most probably be like a giant zoo; an emasculated, Walt Disney freak show. Edward Skidelsky captures something of this when he writes:

‘Lions and tigers are permitted to indulge their traditional way of life in subsidised, patrolled enclosures, so as to provide entertainment for tourists and wildlife photographers. These enclosures are, in effect, vast zoos. There is something sad about all this….we cannot restore to animals the fierce independence that we have taken from them, and so we console ourselves with the fantasy that we can "defend their rights" or "liberate" them. Having deprived animals of their truly animal nature, we now wish to endow them with a spurious human nature. The name for this is sentimentality; indeed, sentimentality is the general name for emotions that have their origin in guilt. Sentimentality inevitably hurts its object.’

The blundering of nature

Certainly a Devils Chaplain might write quite a book on the ‘clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature’, but more ink tends to be split on the wonders of genetic creativity. Life’s genetic vitality is actually a sophisticated problem solving process in which the production of errors produces knowledge. This process of random exploration and problem solving has a familiar logic to it. When one looks beyond the short term editing for survival we see that the evolutionary process scans and provides new arrivals, climbing ever upwards towards complexity sentience and mind. How blind is such a process in light of recent surveys of convergence and the findings of contemporary geneticists?. Modern biology is discovering a wide variety of sophisticated enzymes which can edit, cut, splice and reiterate gene sequences. Far from blind groping, we now see that cells are well equipped with special enzymes to tamper with DNA structure and that the scope for the self engineering of multigene families appears to be limited only by the ingenuity of control systems for regulating these pathways.

Design by life

Prior to evolution death was something that simply happened to organisms. In the light of evolutionary theory we now see that out of the life and death of living organisms come sensory awareness, behavioural flexibility and consciousness. If nature has a message it is out of death does come good, that contingency can deliver the astonishingly unlikely but ultimately reliable redemption of tragedy. A trivial example is my lunch which contains a slice of dead poultry, layered on top of the dead products of photosynthesis which were fed from a soil created by thousands of years of dead organisms. The human body it feeds is made up of the products of dead stars. Does this make me and my lunch evil?, should I have spent my break lamenting the futile blundering wastage which went into it?. Darwin said it best when he remarked:

‘Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely. the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’

Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

The Gifford Lectures

Many prestigious thinkers have given the Gifford Lectures over the years, and as they are intended to be about natural theology broadly conceived, they often have to do with science and religion, philosophy, theology, etc. At their website they list all of the lecture series that have been given, going back to the late 19th century, and many of the older ones are available to read online. Since the lectures have usually been picked up for publication, they are (I assume) in their original form before having been rewritten, which can be either good or bad depending on your perspective. Many of the more recent lectures cannot be read online for (again, I assume) copyright issues, but you can still read an impressive number of important works there, such as The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James; The World and the Individual (vol. 1 and vol. 2) by Josiah Royce; Space, Time and Deity (vol. 1 and vol. 2) by Samuel Alexander; The Nature of the Physical World by Arthur Eddington; and The Mystery of Being (vol. 1 and vol. 2) by Gabriel Marcel. More recent lecture series include The Evolution of the Soul by Richard Swinburne; In Search of Deity by John Macquarrie; and Warrant: The Current Debate by Alvin Plantinga. Again, these are just those that are available to read online at their website. Their list of important authors whose lectures are not online is obviously more extensive.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Islam, Christianity, and Euthyphro

Euthyphro is one of Plato's dialogues which presents us with a meta-ethical dilemma that has been addressed throughout philosophical and theological history (meta-ethics being the study of the ground or foundation of ethics). In this debate, Socrates asks Euthyphro why God assigned the particular moral laws he did, such as to not commit murder or adultery. The problem this creates is that if God assigned these laws because they are good in and of themselves, then there is a "higher" reality than God, and God commands them because he must align himself with this reality just as much as we do. God, in other words, is not absolute; neither the ground of morality nor of reality. But if we say that these laws are not good in and of themselves, then these laws are simply arbitrary, and God could have made them differently. The "good" would have been to commit murder and adultery if God said so. In this case, God is not intrinsically good because the appellation of "good" is entirely arbitrary (this is the position that Euthyphro takes in the debate).

Traditionally, Christianity has split the horns of this dilemma. Moral laws are intrinsically good, not arbitrary. But their goodness is not derived from something outside of God; rather, they are derived from God's own intrinsically good nature. The ground of morality, in other words, is identical to the ground of reality. The error of the Euthyphro dilemma is that it tries to put the two concepts -- the goodness of certain acts and God's command of them -- into a cause-and-effect relationship with each other. If the goodness of these acts is what causes God to command them, then they are higher than he. But if his command of them is what makes them good, they are arbitrary. Neither, however, is the case: these two concepts are both effects from a common cause, namely, God's own nature.

Now, as far as I can tell, this option would be available to any general theistic position. But in my (admittedly limited) knowledge of Islam, Muslim theologians have not availed themselves of this resolution. A core doctrine of Islam is that God is completely transcendent; that is, he transcends even our moral and rational categories. God may give moral commandments, but ultimately, they are not expressions of his nature -- if they were, then he would not transcend them. Since they have their origin in his command of them, but not in his nature, they could have been different, and are therefore arbitrary, as Euthyphro thought.

Thus, in the Qur'an, God is represented as capricious. For example in the battle of Badr, God had told Muhammad (indirectly -- since God is completely transcendent there is no direct communication between him and humanity in Islam) that he would outnumber his enemies. When Muhammad's army got there, they found to the contrary that the enemy outnumbered them; but there was no way to avoid the battle at that point, and the Muslims ended up winning anyway. Later, when Muhammad asked why God told him that they would outnumber the enemy at Badr when they didn't, the response in the Sura of the Spoils of War is essentially, "If God had told you the truth, you wouldn't have gone". Thus, God lied to Muhammad in order to accomplish his goals (which makes me wonder what else he lied to Muhammad about).

Or take the Qur'an's explanation of Jesus' crucifixion, which Muslims deny: God made it seem that Jesus was crucified, but he really wasn't. Islamic tradition explains this by claiming that God put the image of Jesus on someone else (sometimes thought to be Judas Iscariot), and this person was crucified instead of Jesus. In any case, God made things appear differently than they really are in order to accomplish his objectives. He tricked people so he could get what he wanted.

In contrast to this, the God of the Bible cannot lie; not that he merely does not or will not, but he cannot. Unlike Islam, in Christianity morality and rationality are two things that put us in touch with God, because of their origin in his nature. God does not transcend morality and rationality, he is their very ground. That's part of what it means to say that we are created in his image -- there is a connection between humanity and God, even after the fall. We are created in his image because we have the capacity for morality and rationality. There's more to it than that of course, but that's at least some of it.

So it seems that Islam has pitched its tent with Euthyphro, by accepting that the moral laws are good because God commands them, and that they are thus arbitrary. Now -- to get even more speculative -- when I think about this, I wonder whether it has any connection to the bloody nature of Islamic history, and with Islamic terrorism today. Of course, other religions have had their share of violence as well, but Islam seems to stand out in this regard, despite what the popular media says. Committing an evil act in the name of Christianity can only be done by essentially contradicting the central commandment of Christianity to love God and to love other people. But if morality is not directly linked to the ground of reality, it can be reasonably ignored as long as one is doing so in the name of the ground of reality. If murder is not intrinsically bad, then if you can serve God by committing murder, there's really no reason why you shouldn't.

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Replacing Religion

Interesting interview with a guy who tries to imagine what science would look like as a religion. Interesting but not necessarily convincing. Since "Scientology" is already taken, should we call this "Scientolatry"?


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Quote of the Day

"Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of "7 times 9" in a boy's mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of "65." What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought -- that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces "7 times 9 are 63" is better than the brain which produces "7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law -- laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural law may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed."

Arthur S. Eddington
Science and the Unseen World (1929)



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Homo ideologicus

The New Atheists have made waves by loudly insisting that religion and religious belief are inherently irrational, that they are unique in their capacity to make people do stupid and destructive things. Richard Dawkins is most famous for describing religion as a virus of the mind, infecting people's brains and clouding their judgment. Or take Steven Weinberg, who famously remarked that "With or without [religion], you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."

But is religion alone in this regard? I am inclined to think that behind the seemingly inherent irrationality and destructiveness of religion lies an even deeper human impulse which is not unique to religion but can arise from all aspects of human experience: the impulse to ideology.

What is ideology? It is not simply a system of belief or a worldview. It refers to the process by which the human mind, individually or collectively, becomes fixated on a specific idea or institution as a source of value, meaning and security. Take German Nationalism, for example: Hitler because as powerful and popular as he did because he promised the Germans the things that they had been missing since World War I: economic prosperity and a reason to be proud of their country. And these were not just frustrated desires coming to the fore: they represented a deep chasm within the very soul of Germany, that had to be filled somehow. It went beyond just wanting to have more money or seeing their country rise to prominence again: the German people could not find meaning in their existence were it not for the restoration of these things. And so they turned to a monster who promised to give it to them and so turned a blind eye on the atrocities of the new regime. (See the excellent discussion of ideology in Hope in Troubled Times, pp.31-60)

Satan astutely remarks in the book of Job, "Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life." (Job 2:4) In this simple statement we see the deepest roots of ideology: insecurity, physical or spiritual. When we are confronted with life and meaning-threatening circumstances, we are tempted to surrender power to something, anything that looks like it might save us from our predicament, regardless of the ultimate consequences for ourselves and others. That something becomes an ideology, which is then endlessly rationalized and defended with seemingly blind faith.

The important part of this process for our purposes is that ideologies are not confined to religions. To be sure, religion is very fertile ground for cultivating ideologies because it seems to promise eternal security to its adherents. But ideologies can also be found in politics (think conservatives vs. liberals, or people's adherence to revolutionary leaders), economics (Keynesians vs. neo-classicals), philosophy (think of the devotion which Marxists or Freudians shower on the writings of their founding fathers) and elsewhere. In each case we see adherents of ideology selectively read the evidence, refuse to back down in the face of critical challenge and write their opponents off as biased, irrational or even dangerous. There is no inherent difference between religious and other ideologies, with the possible difference that the consequences of being wrong in religion, as Sam Harris reminds us, are far more serious!

Ideology in any field is dangerous. The remedy for it is open-mindedness, critical thinking and in the monotheistic traditions the acknowledgment that you are not God, that the quest for truth, though it ends ultimately in God, is never ending from a human point of view.


Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Origins

Reasons to Believe is a Christian ministry that deals primarily with science apologetics. A common objection to using science to defend Christianity, or any religious claim, is that appealing to supernatural causality is not falsifiable, since it does not make risky predictions, and hence is not really science. (Of course, many people who so object tend to see science as refuting -- that is, falsifying -- Christianity. This is a rather striking inconsistency.) To counter this objection RTB has come out with several books in the last few years which present models that make predictions that future scientific discoveries can verify or falsify.

The first book they published is entitled Origins of Life by biochemist Fazale Rana and astrophysicist Hugh Ross, RTB's vice-president and president, respectively. Origins of Life addresses ... wait for it ... the origin of life. The book's subtitle notwithstanding, they write

This is not a book about evolution per se. That is, it is not about the theory by which life accumulates changes over time, so that simple, early organisms change over eons into more complex, advanced ones. It is not about the entire history of life on Earth either. Rather, this book has a narrower, yet crucial, focus ... This book is about the origin of life -- the first appearances of living organisms on Earth. We address such questions as: What was first life like? When did it appear on Earth? How did it get here?

Rana and Ross contend that natural processes are incapable of bringing life into existence out of non-living material, and thus life's origin requires a supernatural agent. To this end, they take the baton from The Mystery of Life's Origin written by Thaxton, Bradley, and Olson in 1984. Rana and Ross attend the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) conferences held every three years, so their knowledge of the field is extensive and up to date.

Rana and Ross specifically make eight predictions based on their interpretation of Genesis 1 which they say can be falsified. Some might suggest that basing their model on the Bible immediately excludes it from consideration as scientific. But how one comes to hold a model or hypothesis or theory is irrelevant in science; what matters (at least according to contemporary philosophy of science) is whether it can be verified or falsified. Friedrich Kekulé came up with the ring structure of benzene after daydreaming of a snake biting its own tail, but no one would use this to suggest that benzene isn't characterized by a ring structure. Of course, I don't consider the Bible to be as fanciful as daydreams; my point is that even if you think it is as fanciful, or even that it is anti-scientific in the extreme, this is no argument against Rana's and Ross's model. If it can be verified or falsified by evidence, then its origin is simply irrelevant.

At any rate, these are the predictions that Rana and Ross offer:

1. Life appeared early in Earth's history, while the planet was still in its primordial state.
2. Life originated in and persisted through the hostile conditions of early Earth.
3. Life originated abruptly.
4. Earth's first life displays complexity.
5. Life is complex in its minimal form.
6. Life's chemistry displays hallmark characteristics of design (they discuss what these hallmarks are in their conclusion).
7. Early life was qualitatively different from life that came into existence on creation days three, five, and six.
8. A purpose can be postulated for life's early appearance on Earth. ("[Our] model bears the burden of explaining why God would create life so early in Earth's history and why (as well as when) He would create the specific types of life that appeared on primordial Earth.")

They contrast this with what they claim are the predictions from a naturalistic (i.e. non-miraculous) perspective. They acknowledge that there is great diversity here, and that often the predictions made from a particular model are based on that model's specifics. Nevertheless, they are able to derive nine general predictions made by naturalistic models:

1. Chemical pathways produced life's building blocks.
2. Chemical pathways yielded complex biomolecules.
3. The chemical pathways that yielded life's building blocks and complex molecular constituents operated in early Earth's conditions.
4. Sufficiently placid chemical and physical conditions existed on early Earth for long periods of time.
5. Geochemical evidence for a prebiotic soup exists in Earth's oldest rocks.
6. Life appeared gradually on Earth over a long period of time.
7. The origin of life occurred only once on Earth.
8. Earth's first life was simple.
9. Life in its most minimal form is demonstrably simple.

Rana and Ross then test the predictions of both models against the scientific facts as we now know them, and argue that their model receives strong support, while naturalistic models are undermined. Moreover, they point out that their model can continue to be tested as future scientific discoveries will either support or undermine their predictions (as well as those of naturalistic models).

They address whether life arose early in Earth's history or late; whether it arose quickly or slowly; whether there is any evidence for a prebiotic soup; whether chemical pathways can account for the origin of proteins, DNA, and RNA; the difficulty of accounting for homochirality (that proteins and sugars must be uniformly right or left "handed"); the information content encoded in DNA and RNA; the origin of cell membranes; the lower limit of complexity that a cell must have in order to survive and propagate; the role of organisms that thrive in extreme environments (extremophiles); the possibility of life on Mars, Europa, and other extraterrestrial locations; and "directed panspermia", the theory gaining in popularity (due to the problems outlined in the preceding chapters) that an advanced alien civilization intentionally seeded Earth with life. (Indeed, it seems to me that any supernatural explanation for the origin of life amounts to divinely directed panspermia).

Origins of Life is a fascinating discussion of the subject. Several chapters are worth the cost of the book all by themselves. Their chapter on cell membranes, for example, addresses a subject that is rarely raised. "To date, no studies have been conducted on the long-term stability of octanoic and nonanoic bilayers." ... "Despite its importance to naturalistic origin-of-life scenarios, researchers in this field focus only limited attention on membrane origins."

Other examples are their chapters on alternate life-sites in our solar system, including Mars, Europa (one of Jupiter's moons), and Titan (one of Saturn's). The latter is particularly interesting, since the Huygens Probe landed on Titan a few years ago, although (unfortunately) several months after Origins of Life was published. Again, this book is very comprehensive in its approach, so to discuss their arguments at length would take pages.

Other books they have published employing this model are Who Was Adam? by Rana and Ross which deals with human origins; Creation as Science by Ross which deals with their creation model in general; The Cell's Design by Rana which deals with the complexity of individual cells; and just released is Why the Universe Is the Way It Is by Ross. I have not yet read these books and don't know anything about them beyond their general descriptions. But I'm looking forward to them.

(cross-posted on Agent Intellect)



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Two short stories

First, James' post on the Large Hadron Collider reminds me of a very clever short story: Some Particles Just Shouldn't Be Accelerated. Enjoy.

Second -- and please forgive the vanity, but writing a blog is an exercise in vanity already -- I sometimes post short stories on my other blog, and I thought my most recent entry would be of interest to readers of this one, as it is something of a send-up of the Brights and their ilk. Here it is.



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.

Hitchens, God, and Morality

The Corner is National Review Online's blog that's primarily devoted to politics from the right side of the spectrum, but occasionally they veer over to more important issues. One of their bloggers saw Christopher Hitchens debate Lorenzo Albacete, and Hitchens apparently acknowledged that he believes in the numinous and the transcendent, just not in the supernatural. Moreover, his rantings against the evils done in the name of religion belie a belief in an absolute standard being violated; so much so that the bloggers muse that he's downright Puritanical (to use an oft-misused term). It starts here, and then continues here, here, here, and here.



Discuss this post at the Quodlibeta Forum

Click here to read the first chapter of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science absolutely free.