God and the Intellectuals (Part II)
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God and the Intellectuals (Part II)
“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”—Cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle[1]
…by Jonas E. Alexis
The scientific community experienced one of its most important paradigm shifts in the twentieth century when scientists discovered evidence that the universe was not eternal, but had a beginning. As Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose state,
“almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”[2]
Many scientists were bewildered by that discovery because it clearly pointed toward a conclusion they had been trying to avoid. Not only did it compel them to reconsider their theories, but it also implied that a greater intelligent force must exist.
After all, everything that begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.
While physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies agrees that the scientific data suggest that the universe had a beginning, he rejects the conclusion of a Creator because, in his own words, “I never liked the idea of divine tinkering.”[3]
When all is said and done, the scientific evidence does not offer us many choices when it comes to the beginning of the universe. Despite the fact that theists have been saying for thousands of years that the universe had a beginning, some atheist scientists have just figured that out in the twentieth century. The only difference is that the theist posits a Creator as the cause, whereas the atheist tries to come up with something else.
Since the eternal universe hypothesis has now been rejected by the scientific community, we are left with two possible and frightening explanations: either the universe created itself, which is a contradiction in terms, or someone else did the job.
David Berlinski
The universe as we know it is a privileged one, containing all the elements required for life—alter or remove a single element and death on a massive scale will ensue.[4] This is a fact most physicists agree upon,[5] however reluctantly, and is what mathematician and philosopher David Berlinski calls a “put-up job.”[6]
If the universe created itself, that means that the universe had to be in existence before it created itself! This is not only self-contradictory but completely incompatible with all the known laws of science and human experience.
Unfortunately, many brilliant minds have fallen into the trap of what I call intellectual perversity. Daniel Dennett DE CLAREs in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (a book that is considered an apologetic for atheism) that the universe “creates itself ex nihilo,” and that, he believes, is “the ultimate bootstrapping trick.”[7]
Quite frankly, it is a bootstrapping trick, and Dennett gets stuck on that trick because he wants the origin of this “self-creation” to be “non-miraculous.” Perhaps Berlinski was quite right when he joked a few years ago:
“We lose something in the literary or intellectual culture that’s no longer accessible. You get a guy like Daniel Dennett, whose greatest intellectual achievement was growing that stupid beard of his, masquerading as a scientific expert on Darwinian theory, staring at the camera, and no one is dousing him with a bucket of water. It’s incredible to me. Richard Dawkins is accepted as the great intellect…it should be sad.”[8]
In a heated email correspondence between Michael Ruse and Dennett, Ruse wrote of Dennett and Richard Dawkins,
“I think you and Richard are absolute disasters in the fight against intelligent design…What we need is not knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issues. Neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas…It is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard claims…
Daniel Dennett
“Now, for the record. I am a hard-line Darwinian and always have been very publicly when it did cost me status and respect. in fact, I am more hard-line than you are, because I don’t buy into this meme [expletive]… ”[9]
Ruse, who is no friend of intelligent design or creationism and who is a “fanatical Darwinian,”[10] again DE CLAREs that “evolutionism…functions like a secular religion,” although he maintains that “Darwinian evolutionary theory is anything but a genuine theory…”[11]
Ruse writes that Dawkins’ “The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I mean it.”[12] Lastly, Rule actually compares Dawkins’ argument with a first-year undergraduate student and, on that note, says, “There are a lot of very bright and well informed Christian theologians. We atheists should demand no less.”[13]
Terry Eagleton, one of England’s most influential literary critics, came to similar conclusions. He wrote,
“Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology…As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it”[14]
A Self-Creating Universe?
Dawkins agrees with Dennett’s idea of the universe creating itself. In answer to the question “How do you believe life itself began?,” he responded, “The origin of life has got to be something self-replicating. We don’t know what it was, but whatever it was, it was self-replicating.”
When the interviewer asked him to define what he meant by self-replicating, Dawkins said, “It has to grow and then split, so that it reproduces daughter units like itself.”[15]
Stephen Hawking, in his recent book The Grand Design, ascribes to that hypothesis, saying, “Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.”[16]
Peter Adkins of Oxford likewise gives allegiance to this principle, calling it the “Cosmic Bootstrap.” For Adkins, “space-time generates its own dust in the process of its own self-assembly.”[17]
These ideas are spurious when taken to their logical conclusions. As Oxford mathematician and philosopher of science John C. Lennox notes in his critique of Hawking’s view,
“If we say that ‘X creates Y,’ we presuppose the existence of X in the first place in order to bring Y into existence. That is a simple matter of understanding what the words ‘X creates Y’ mean. If, therefore, we say ‘X creates X,’ we imply that we are presupposing the existence of X in order to account for the existence of X. This is obviously self-contradictory and thus logically incoherent—even if we put X equal to the universe! To presuppose the existence of the universe to account for its own existence sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland, not science.”[18]
Yet Dennett believes that even reason can be explained that way. Dennett dogmatizes,
“In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing had so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all. The explanation for this is simple: there was nothing that had interests. But after millennia there happened to emerge simple replicators.”[19]
At its core, this is nothing more than a circular argument. Adding massive amounts of time does not change the fact that nothing can begin without a cause. If there was no purpose or reason in the beginning, where did these “simple replicators” originate from?
Natural selection cannot be the answer here, for it can only function using information already present in a system. A donkey, for example, has in its gene pool the information for four legs, a tail, and so on, but it does not possess the information to produce a wing or a beak.
Charles Darwin assumed that the required information was already present in the system and had evolution continue on from there (quite frankly, he was never able to give a succinct explanation of the origin of species in his ambitious Origin of Species).
Daniel Dennett, however, attributes to Darwinism what Darwin had assumed already existed:
“self-replicating macros, preceded or accompanied perhaps by self-replicating clay crystals, gradually advancing from tournaments of luck to tournaments of skill over a billion years. And the regularities of physics on which those cranes depend could themselves be the outcome of a blind, uncaring shuffle through Chaos. Thus, out of next to nothing, the world we know and love created itself.”[20]
This argument is important because it demonstrates how far Dennett is willing to bend reason and logic in order to justify his preexisting beliefs.
Dennett’s idea that the universe created itself, without reason or cause, is not only irrational but suggests that Dennett is willing to give up whatever intellectual credibility he has to make his dreams come true.
And it was Dennett who complained that “I wonder if any believers in the End Times will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book [Breaking the Spell] through”![21]
Richard Lewontin
For Dennett, the issue of a miraculous origin of the universe is out of the question, so he is forced to postulate something that is even more miraculous: that the universe created itself. This kind of desperate leap of faith is needed when one tries to escape from the more rational conclusion that the universe indicates that some “super-intellect has monkeyed with physics,” to use Sir Fred Hoyle’s words.
Yet Dennett’s particular view is shared by many, including Thomas Nagel of New York University,[22] Richard Lewontin of Harvard, L. T. More of the University of Cincinnati, physicist Paul Davies, Nobel laureate George Wald, and scientist/author Isaac Asimov.
In recent years, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have fallen into a similar trap by promoting the multiverse theory in order to escape the ultimate conclusion that the universe was created by a supernatural being.
Hawking and Mlodinow DE CLARE that the new theory, also called M-theory, “predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god.”[23]
But where did these multiverses come from? Hawking and Mlodinow tell us that they “arise naturally from physical law. They are a prediction of science.”[24]
Both scientists, though brilliant in their own fields, cannot see that this simply replaces one circular argument with another. If adding billions of years is not enough to solve the origin of the universe, then adding an unlimited number of parallel universes also will not answer the question of how our universe was created.
These arguments are merely smokescreens to deflect attention away from the inherent deficiencies of the belief system. It is one thing for Hawking and Mlodinow to confidently posit these assertions as axiomatic, but it is quite another to provide scientific foundations for them.
If multiple universes arise naturally from the physical law, where did the physical law come from in the first place? If multiple universes are a prediction of science, then science must be able to give us at least some scientific explanation for this.
Again John Lennox addresses the underlying flaws of this theory:
“Physical laws cannot create anything. They are a description of what normally happens under certain given conditions…The sun rises in the east every day, but this law does not create the sun; nor the planet earth, with east and west. The law is descriptive and predictive, but it is not creative. Similarly Newton’s law of gravitation does not create gravity or the matter on which gravity acts.”[25]
Because there is no scientific or rational backbone supporting Hawking’s multiverse theory, fellow intellectuals such as Paul Davies and Richard Swinburne completely reject it. Swinburne states,
Roger Penrose
“It’s crazy to postulate a trillion (causally unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job.”[26]
Physicist and staunch atheist Steven Weinberg lamented that multiple universes “are very speculative…without any experimental support”[27] and physicist Lee Smolin called it “a fantasy,”[28] even though he promoted it in his book.
Roger Penrose, who is far from thrilled with Hawking’s new book, DE CLAREs in his response to The Grand Design that “M-theory enjoys no observational support whatsoever.”[29]
Atheist physicist Peter Woit of Columbia University was also disappointed at The Grand Design’s heavy reliance on M-theory, which he sees as sheer speculation. He DE CLAREs,
“I’m in favor of naturalism and leaving God out of physics as much as the next person, but if you’re the sort who wants to go to battle in the science/religion wars, why you would choose to take up such a dubious weapon as M-theory mystifies me.”[30]
Because Hawking and Mlodinow jumped on the multiverse idea without first pulling together scientific backing, John Horgan of Scientific American denounces Hawking’s “‘new’ theory” as “the same old crap.”[31]
The lack of scientific evidence for M-theory has also been dismissed by physicists such as Frank Close, Jon Butterworth, and Jim Al-Khalili.[32]
Even if we grant Hawking the premise that M-theory is correct and scientific for the sake of argument, it would still not be legitimate to conclude that there is no “super-intellect” behind it. This was pointed out by Don Page, a theoretical physicist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a former student of Hawking’s, with whom he co-wrote many papers.
Page DE CLAREs, “I certainly would agree that even if M-theory were a fully-formulated theory (which it isn’t yet) and were correct (which of course we don’t know), that would not imply that God did not create the universe.”[33]
Victor J. Stenger
Although atheist physicist Victor J. Stenger admits that Hawking and Mlodinow have not said anything new at all, he rejoices that “thanks to Hawking’s notoriety, at least more people will now have heard that science has plausible answers to how the universe came about naturally without the need for a creator.”[34]
The only people thrilled with The Grand Design rest largely in the New Atheists camp. Richard Dawkins, for example, rejoiced at what he saw as a victory for Darwinian evolution.
“Darwinism kicked God out of biology but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grace.”[35]
Similarly, although Hawking and Mlodinow DE CLARE in the first page of their book that “philosophy is dead” and that it “has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics,”[36] they later get involved in highly philosophical theories that have not been confirmed by science.
Speculation about multiple universes aside, there are basic yet profound questions—such as why human beings matter, why there is a universe after all, and why the laws of the universe seem to correspond to the rational human mind—that science cannot explain.
Nobelist Sir Peter Medawar called this the limit of science.[37] Michael Polanyi, the Jewish polymath who converted to Christianity, also implies that there is a limit to the sciences.[38] As mathematician and astronomer John D. Barrow argues, science can only make sense if it operates within certain parameters, for if it is unlimited and unbound, it may lead to contradictions.[39]
Science also cannot explain basic mathematical truths and principles—axioms that all mathematicians take for granted. Even Euclid made it clear in his Elements that postulates in mathematics are “unproved but accepted premises.”[40]
Mathematics cannot function without these unproved but accepted premises, and Elements itself has to begin with accepted premises in order to go forward. Every student of geometry knows that a line by definition must contain at least two distinct points. But this is an assumption that has to be accepted as true in order to make any progress in geometry.
Despite this principle, Peter Adkins of Oxford wrote,
“There is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence. Only the religious—among whom I include not only the prejudiced but the underinformed—hope there is a dark corner of the physical universe, or of the universe of experience, that science can never hope to illuminate.”[41]
Yet fellow atheist Bruce Sheiman DE CLAREs, “The more I understand the world as revealed by science, the more I find the materialist and reductionist explanation for our human destiny terribly devoid of depth, value, and meaning.”[42]
Adkins, like many of his fellow atheists, has not been paying attention at all, for even physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman made it clear that “every attempt to reduce ethics to scientific formulae must fail…The sciences do not directly teach good or bad…Ethical values lie outside the scientific realm.”[43]
And Feynman certainly was not among the religious.
Does the Brain Think?
Francis Crick
Willfully ignorant of the shaky footing their suppositions rest on, Hawking and Mlodinow then apply their views to the human brain.
“Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions and not some agency that exists outside those laws.”[44] Then Hawking and Mlodinow take the next illogical step, concluding that “free will is just an illusion.”[45]
There is nothing new here at all. This idea has been advanced by people from Daniel Dennett to Francis Crick. Crick DE CLAREs in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul:
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”[46]
But this position suffers badly when it is taken to its inevitable conclusion. If the brain determines our actions, it logically follows that we are prisoners of our brains. Be it for good or evil, we have no choice but to follow the commands of our brains, since we are “no more than biological machines.”[47]
Albert Einstein, being a determinist, accepted the idea that we have no responsibility when it comes to our own actions, even though he saw the logical repercussions of it and was frightened by them:
“I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime, but I prefer not to take tea with him.”[48]
However, if Stalin, Mao and others are not philosophically responsible for their actions, then how can they be held accountable? The interesting part is that this deterministic/materialistic view is also embraced by Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and nearly all the other New Atheists.
In actuality, the so-called New atheists leave themselves no other choice. For example, Stephen Hawking is a flaming determinist, so it is no accident that in The Grand Design we constantly read phrases like “given the state of the universe at one time, a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past” (using Pierre Laplace’s argument) and this “scientific determinism must hold for people as well.”[49]
Not only that, the authors state that “biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.”[50]
One needn’t be a genius to see that this is nonsense. If the unfeeling laws of nature determine how a system will evolve over time, what reason do we as conscious human beings have to trust that system? The laws of nature do not have minds or emotions. And a thing by itself cannot be “determined”—i.e., passively acted upon—without necessitating an external determiner.
John Eccles
Hawking and Mlodinow are very vague about how they arrived at the idea that because biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry, they are therefore “determined.” This is why philosopher of science Ervin Laszlo makes the point that when people like Hawking begin to talk about God and religion, we should not mistake them for scientists.[51]
In order to make their case, Hawking and Mlodinow have to give the impression that their presuppositions are scientific, when in fact they can provide no scientific foundation for their flimsy and—quite frankly, intellectually embarrassing—claims. There is no convincing evidence from neuroscience saying that our physical brains determine our actions.[52]
In fact, there is a great deal of reliable evidence to the contrary. The brain is simply a machine that the real person inside uses. This is one reason Nobel Prize winner Sir John Eccles DE CLAREd that there is a “ghost”—the real person—that tells the brain what to do.[53]
Yet the New Atheists seem determined to base whole premises on the idea that understanding the physical brain will help neuroscientists understand the real person.
“The more we understand ourselves at the level of the brain,” Sam Harris writes, “the more we will see that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human values.”[54]
Hawking and Mlodinow agree wholeheartedly. “Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws.”[55]
This makes no practical sense whatsoever. If their suppositions are true, we might as well empty our jails and close down our courts, since anyone accused of a crime was simply taking orders from his or her brain. They can’t be held responsible for the chaotic, meaningless commands issued by their brains.
Yet every day thousands of people are convicted and held responsible for their choices.
Another application is emotional love. If Hawking and Mlodinow are correct, then telling someone “I love you” has no meaning. It was merely prompted by chemical impulses in the brain, probably to further a biological imperative. (I hope Crick’s and Hawking’s wives do not know about their presuppositions.)
Unfortunately, this line of reasoning culminates in absurd real-life applications. If we are merely puppets of our brains, then personhood, free will, the purpose of life, and humanity itself become meaningless concepts.
We see a similar pattern in Sam Harris’s books, which are fraught with internal contractions.
During the course of The Moral Landscape, Harris uses brain and mind interchangeably, revealing his rejection of anything beyond the materialistic.[56] However, he also refers to human beings as “conscious creatures” and consciousness as “the basis of human values,”[57] concepts which his colleague Daniel Dennett completely denies.
Dennett himself unapologetically asserts that human beings “are made of mindless robots and nothing else, no non-physical, non-robotic ingredients at all.”[58]
Robots, by definition, do not have consciences and do not act as free agents. External entities always tell them what to do and they act on those orders. Again jumping off his premise that we are all robotic machines rather than free agents, Dennett argues that consciousness itself is an illusion.[59]
Francis Crick and others believed likewise. Steven Pinker, who along with Dennet previewed Harris’s manuscript for The Moral Landscape,[60] also does not believe in a conscious, human-controlled mind. He states that the mind is simply “the physiological activity of the brain” and that this process goes back to the genes, which previously had been shaped by “evolutionary processes.”[61]
But even he understands that this is merely a hypothesis. He admits that “virtually nothing is known about the functioning micro-circuitry of the human brain, because there is a shortage of volunteers willing to give up their brains to science before they are dead.”[62]
Lost in his assertions, Sam Harris somehow fails to provide an evidentiary explanation as to why human beings are “conscious creatures.” Harris simply assumes it and offers nothing more.
In a nutshell, the New Atheists have adopted such ideas about the brain not because there is verifiable science behind them, but because, as Richard Lewontin of Harvard said some years ago, “materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[63]
In other words, these atheists don’t care whether an idea is true or false, whether a hypothesis is scientifically accurate or incorrect, but merely whether it denies a “super-intellect” a place in the universe. Listen to Lewontin’s full quote:
“We take the side of science [Darwinian evolution] in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”[64]
This underlying absolute must be taken seriously, for it forms the foundation for many atheists’ books over the years.
Francis Collins
Daniel Dennett postulated in 1995 that the Christian God who created the universe is “like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood,” leaving room for none but the deluded to believe in Him after reaching adulthood.[65] (Richard Dawkins said something very similar in 2003 on a BBC radio broadcast.[66])
Yet if this were true—if God belongs in the class of imaginary beings like Santa or the Tooth Fairy—then why is it that no adults believe in Santa but many consistently believe in God throughout their entire lives?[67]
Formerly an atheist, Alister McGrath didn’t come to believe in God until he went to Oxford and began to rethink things he had taken for granted. He soon discovered that neither the intellectual foundation nor the existential description for atheism could stand up to reality.[68]
Antony Flew, one of the most trenchant and articulate atheists in the twentieth century, renounced his atheistic beliefs late in life.[69] Lee Strobel was a staunch atheist throughout his time at Yale, until he began to reexamine the claims of Christianity.
Francis Collins, former head of the Genome Project, did not become a Christian until he started practicing medicine.[70] Cosmologist Frank Tipler started his career as “a convinced atheist,” but changed his views when he seriously studied Christianity.[71]
And the list of individuals throughout history who believed in God is long. Let’s just name a few here:
Antiseptic Surgery, Joseph Lister (1827-1912)
Bacteriology Louis, Pasteur (1822-1895)
Calculus, Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Celestial Mechanics, Johann Kepler (1571-1630)
Chemistry, Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
Comparative Anatomy, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)
Computer Science, Charles Babbage (1792-1871)
Dimensional Analysis, Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919)
Electrodynamics, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
Electromagnetics, Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Electronics, Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945)
Entomology of Living Insects, Henri Fabre (1823-1915)
Field Theory, Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Fluid Mechanics, George Stokes (1819-1903)
Galactic Astronomy, William Herschel (1738-1822)
Gas Dynamics, Robert Boyle (1627-1691)
Genetics, Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)
Glacial Geology, Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)
Gynecology, James Simpson (1811-1870)
Hydraulics, Leonardo de Vinci (1452-1519)
Hydrography, Mattew Maury (1806-1873)
Hydrostatics, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Ichthyology, Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)
Isotopic Chemistry, William Ramsay (1851-1916)
Model Analysis, Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919)
Natural History, John Ray (1627-1705)
Non-Euclidean, Geometry Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866)
Oceanography, Matthew Maury (1806-1873)
Optical Mineralogy, David Brewster (1781-1868)
Paleontology, John Woodward (1665-1728)
Pathology, Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902)
Physical Astronomy, Johann Kepler (1571-1630)
Reversible Thermodynamics, James Joule (1818-1889)
Statistical Thermodynamics, James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
Stratigraphy, Nicholas Steno (1631-1868)
Systematic Biology, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778)
Thermodynamics, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
Thermokinetics, Humphrey Davy (1778-1829)
Vertebrate Paleontology, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)
Absolute Temperature, Scale Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
Actuarial Tables, Charles Babbage (1792-1871)
Barometer, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Biogenesis, Law Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
Calculating Machine, Charles Babbage (1792-1871)
Chloroform, James Simpson (1811-1870)
Classification System, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778)
Double Stars, William Herschel (1738-1822)
Electric Generator, Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Electric Motor, Joseph Henry (1797-1878)
Ephemeris Tables, Johann Kepler (1571-1630)
Galvanometer, Joseph Henry (1797-1878)
Global Star Catalog, John Herschel (1792-1871)
Kaleidoscope David Brewster (1781-1868)
Pasteurization, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
Reflecting Telescope, Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
Self-Induction, Joseph Henry (1797-1878)
Telegraph, Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872)
Thermionic Valve, Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945)
Mathematical Analysis, Leonhard Euler (1707-1883)
Number Theory, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
Botanist and Inventor, George Washington Carver (1864-1943)
Mathematician and Astronomer, Benjamin Banneker (1731-1806)
And who can talk about the world of literature and classical music without William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Franz Joseph Haydn, Franz Liszt, among others?
Are all these people deluded? And if so, what is so powerful about Christianity
that it can deceive so many brilliant people throughout the centuries? As Francis Collins pointed out,
“If faith was a psychological crutch, it must be a powerful one.”[72]
This psychological crutch has also kept noted figures such as John Polkinghorne into intellectual bondage for far too long.[73] Polkinghorne, who played an instrumental role in the discovery of quark and other theoretical particles, did not become an idiot by accepting Christianity.[74]
It seems then that it is too simplistic to equate the idea of God with childhood myths. But this concept continues to find favor with modern atheists, and can be traced back to the writings of Sigmund Freud—The Future of an Illusion—and Ludwig Feuerbach—The Essence of Christianity. We will look at the premises and the illogical leaps of these two books in a future article.
Though Hawking and Mlodinow do not regurgitate Freud and Feuerbach in their book, they do seem to follow Lewontin’s premise, declaring confidently that “it is possible to answer” the question of the origin of the universe “purely within the realm of science, and without invoking any divine beings.”[75]
With divine intervention thrown out, the authors state that “Mtheory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe,” and they hope this theory will eventually “be a model of a universe that creates itself. We must be part of this universe, because there is no other consistent model.”[76]
Once again, Hawking and Mlodinow are great scientists, but “when ideology is your guide, you’re bound to get lost.”[77]
[1] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science, November 1981.
[2]Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 20.
[5] See Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? (New York: Mariner Books, 2008); John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces that Shape the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards,
The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (WA: Regnery Publishing, 2004); Michael J. Denton, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (New York: The Free Press, 1998).
[6]See David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretension (New York: Basic Books, 2009), chapter 6.
[7]Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006), 244
[10] Michael Ruse, “Why Richard Dawkins’ Humanists Remind Me of a Religion,” Guardian, October 2, 2012.
[14]Terry Eagleton, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching,” London Review of Books, October 19, 2006, vol. 28, No. 20: 32-34.
[20]Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Touchtone, 1995), 185.
[22] Thomas Nagel seems to have changed many of his views recently. Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[30] Peter Woit, “Hawking Gives Up” (blog post at http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3141).
[31] John Horgan, “Cosmic Clowning: Stephen Hawking’s ‘new’ Theory of Everything is the Same Old CRAP,” Scientific American, September 13, 2010.
[34]“Another Ungodly Squabble,” Economist, September 5, 2010; Victor Victor J. Stenger and William Lane Craig have debated the question of origin on at least two occasions. One of the debates can be viewed on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjOs62PJciI.
[38]See Michael Polanyi, Science, Faith and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946).
[39]See Barrow, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter nine.
[46] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 3.
[51] Ervin Laszlo, “When Stephen Hawking Speaks About God, Don’t Mistake Him for a Scientist,” Huffington Post, September 22, 2010.
[52] See M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Nancy Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
[69]See Antony Flew, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperOne, 2007).
[70]See Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: The Free Press, 2006).
[71]See Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).
[73] See John Polkinghorne, Belief of God in the Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003);
[74] John Polkinghorne, Science and Religion in Quest for Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[77] Daniel J. Flynn, Intellectual m*o*o*ns: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Idea (New York: Crown Publishing, 2004), 1.
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Posted by Jonas E. Alexis on Jul 13 2013, With 1576 Reads, Filed under Editor, Living, Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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On the subject of infinite regress, the Wikipedia page “turtles all the way down” is informative and amusing, if not particularly enlightening.
Shakyamuni Buddha said that metaphysical speculation was a distraction from following the path. Probably a step up from watching Reality TV, though.
“May all beings be happy and at their ease”
Mr. Alexis,
With all due respect, you are talking about oranges, while I am talking about apples. It is impossible to describe an apple to one who confines their thought to the definition of an orange, and cannot imagine what an apple might be.
Rational thought alone, no matter how rigid, will not solve the problems of Humanity’s survival.
Polemics are the realm of those who have already destroyed their opposition.
Christianity won, Mr. Alexis. You are fighting the battle of your predecessors, a battle long over. Look around, this great christian victory has given all of us this world, plagued with dilemmas of survival brought about entirely because of this murderous success.
Some glory, eh?
Hasta la Vista, dudecycle.
As I suggested in my comment on Part I, this argument between theism and atheism is a sideshow. From the ‘non-theism’ (wisdom tradition) point of view, these adversarial extremes are two sides of the same false coin, minted from the same limited materialistic notions of causality that ignore the nature and centrality of Mind. Both of them are blind to spiritual truth, which can only be approached through other means than mere reason and logic. Reason and logic are very useful tools, but without real experience through meditation and contemplation, they are insufficient in themselves to comprehend the confusing world of appearances, aka the Cosmic Joke.
Freud, in spite of his reductionist reliance on infantile sexuality as the primary cause of individual human thinking and behavior, put it well when he stated that belief in a Creator God was merely “an infantile wish-fulfillment fantasy.” But debunking that illusion, which is the sole contribution of atheism, tells us nothing further about the nature of things.
The buddhists talk about the “chiliocosms,” meaning the infinite numbers of cosmoses existing in vast and limitless space and beginningless and endless time. Do they know what they’re talking about? I happen to think so.
I will deal with Freud’s wish fulfillment in part 3 of “God and the Intellectuals.” The next article will not be about this issue at all.
Looking forward to it. In the meantime, one might consider how a kaleidoscope works.
Jonas.
Stephen Hawking has really gone down in my esteem. Infact he might just have pushed me a step nearer into believing in a creator.
‘If the brain determines our actions, it logically follows that we are prisoners of our brains. Be it for good or evil, we have no choice but to follow the commands of our brains, since we are “no more than biological machines.”[47]‘
The born-gay-believers should argue like this. But I wonder if they could accept living as slaves without individuality.
Mr Alexis,
you based your interesting article on the ongoing discussion between some major fractions inside the scentific community, beginning with the cosmologists. Here you stated that hard evidence proposed a beginning of the universe.
I also know of this intellectual fight, but I would like to add that these hard evidence is based on a very crude assumption, which might bring all this down in the near future. Please don’t only rely on those sources, who are often heard of in scientific papers and books. There are a lot more, anybody should know of.
As a studied mathematician and physicist, I more and more began to question the basics of the following assumptions:
1. Gravity is a basic force, separate (also in origin) from all the other basic forces, which is also responsible for the building of the universe, all the galactics, all the solar systems and also all the stars and planets. It’s all gravitation.
2. Electricity is not the building force of the universe.
3. Tesla was wrong in his theory behind his later experiments, postulating the existence of scalar electrical waves (longitudinal waves).
4. The velocity of light in vacuum is a constant of roughly 300.000 km/s. It’s the absolute limit of transportating energy or mass.
5. The theory of electricity is well established and understood. It’s theory has no inherent contradictionsand it can explain every peculiar electrical phenomenon
Fact is: electr. force / gravit. force = 10.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000
There are more and more facts of hard evidence, which cannot be explained by that hard evidences you referred to. So, my personal interest lies much more on this development than on the omgoing cultural/intellectual fight between those two opposing fractions.
As far as these two factions are concerned, I’m completely out of that thought-loop. I can well accept the existence of god and also try to explore our nature here on earth and the universe as well.
I would never ever try to refute the existence of god through logical (or may I say rather rabbinical) arguing.
But what I would suggest to those famous intellectuals is this:
Try to think more outside the box, don’t refute experimental data anymore, which contradict your theories. Natural science has a long tradition and it changed remarkeably in it’s methods over the time. Anyone, who thinks we are at the end of this methodical and philosophical developments, will be proven wrong sooner or later.
To finsish this up, I would like to paraphrase a term, Gordon Duff used in several of his latest disclosures. He talked about the existence of “interdimensional travelling”. Now, Mr. Alexis, do you think this term should rather belong to some more or less esotheric cathegory or could this term (and it’s implications) give a hint to far more advanced, but also hard evidence scientific knowledge?
Interesting. Theists are often accused of being scientifically illiterate and being idiots. But now we are asked to ignore modern science. By the way, the fine-turning evidence is very convincing and does not seem that it will go down the tube any time soon.
Jonas: God bless you and VT a million times over for printing this amazing article! Indeed you have exposed the Emperor without clothes. Not only is he naked, he is diseased, covered with repulsive leprous sores, blind deaf and mute, and crippled to boot.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said that the Amalekite enemy of today are the atheist scientists, who make unbelief in God more seductive via theory pseudo sophisticated theories. The tragedy is that so many Jewish intellectuals support these ideas. If it is true that Hitler was influenced by Darwinism, then I propose that he would have found Darwin’s Jewish cheerleaders a real gas. Pun intended.
Growing up in a Jewish home and Jewish academic community out at Stanford, I observed that Jews are able to compartmentalize their secular work and their spiritual values. Many Jews will militantly defend Darwinist ideas, that on face value completely undermine and destroy the veracity of the biblical text, both Old and New Testaments, and then on Sabbath go off to synagogue to read from the Torah and recite Jewish prayers. To many Jews Darwinism is a tool to destroy Christianity. This is because Christianity tends to take a much more literalist and simplistic view of the bible than Judaism. Jews can use all sorts of sophisticated midrashic and kabalistic approaches to bend the Genesis creation narrative to the demands of Darwinism, but Christians generally cannot do this.
Unfortunately the Catholic Church has lent its huge influence to the wicked cause of Darwinism for precisely this reason. The Catholic Church historically has opposed individualized readings of the bible, and Darwinism seems to afford the Church the opportunity to take the bible back from the masses and to insist that it be read and interpreted only through the official view of the Magisterium. That Darwinist ideas contradict almost all the early Church fathers seems not to concern the Church at all.
Darwinism is a fatal virus in the body of Christianity. No matter how much pastors and priests exhort their people to follow Jesus, so long as Darwinism is not openly and actively refuted the people are always wondering if the bible is just a mind controlling fairy tale. If the Genesis creation account, stories of the Flood and great dispersion from Babel, destruction of Sodom and Gemorah etc, are all just stories and myths, then perhaps so are the accounts of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection. Why should anyone make the sacrifices the bible demands if it is all must a myth, parable, or metaphor?
Unfortunately most religious leaders are unwilling to upset the apple cart and risk ridicule. They ignore the fact that most Americans doubt Darwinism, but they are overly sensitive to the elites who control the press and the funding of the universities and thus will not speak out.
Studies show that while 60% of incoming freshmen to American colleges and universities profess belief in God, by the time they graduate that number has plummeted to 10%, an attrition rate of over 80%. And much of that catastrophic loss of faith is attributable to the pernicious lies fomented by the evolutionists.
If you look up on youtube this clip: “Intelligent Design/Evolution Debate (7 of 8)” at the 2′ mark you will see Eugenie Scott, one of the most ardent defendents of Darwinism, admit to David Berlinski in a public debate that the classic Darwinist claim of mutation and natural selection may not be true. Yet still she goes on to insist that evolution has to be true!
The following is from the writings of a South African Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Yoram Bogacz, who was trained as a professional geologist, who is a young earth creationist. Here he exposes the openly acknowledged ulterior motives of the Darwinists:
torahexplorer * com/2013/06/28/origin-of-life-and-philosophical-outlook/
Origin of Life and Philosophical Outlook
In Signature in the Cell, Dr. Stephen Meyer presented a comprehensive and accessible history of research into the origin of life. In this post, we take a bird’s eye view of research into this area over the past three-quarters of a century. We shall also digress in order to get a snapshot of how ideological commitments shape the views of many scientists.
***
Let’s begin with Dr. Ernst Chain. Chain won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of penicillin. I mentioned him in Genesis and Genes, in the context of the discussion about whether evolutionary theory is relevant to nuts-and-bolts research in biology. I cited an article by Philip Skell (1918-2010), who was a distinguished professor of chemistry and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and a prominent Darwin sceptic. In a 2009 article in Forbes.com entitled The Dangers of Overselling Evolution, he made the point that evolutionary theory makes no contribution to actual research:
In 1942, Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain wrote that his discovery of penicillin (with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming) and the development of bacterial resistance to that antibiotic owed nothing to Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s evolutionary theories.[1]
Chain understood the immensity of the task of trying to explain life in naturalistic terms. In The Life of Ernst Chain: Penicillin and Beyond, we read that:
I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago.[2]
In August 1954, Dr. George Wald, another Nobel Laureate, wrote in Scientific American:
There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility… a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution.
This statement may seem astonishingly frank to many members of the public. Informed consumers of science, in contrast, are aware that much of the debate around the origin of life and biological evolution has precious little to do with drawing inevitable conclusions from straightforward evidence. It is far more about worldviews and ideologies, and only extremely naive observers assume that this does not apply to scientists who participate in the debate. Wald makes it perfectly clear that his direction was dictated by his philosophical leanings, and that is true of many scientists and Western intellectuals. Consider the views of Thomas Nagel. Nagel is a courageous thinker whose latest book, Mind and Cosmos, is a fierce demolition of Darwinian evolution.[3] But Nagel will only go so far. In The Last Word, which appeared in 1997, he offered a candid account of his philosophical inclinations:
I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers… It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.[4]
The fact that faith – the faith of many scientists in the ability of unguided matter and energy to create life – drives much of the discussion about evolution, was underscored by Dr. Gerald Kerkut, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of Southampton, who wrote in 1960 that:
The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material. This is still just an assumption… There is, however, little evidence in favor of abiogenesis and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed… it is therefore a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that abiogenesis did occur and he can choose whatever method… happens to suit him personally; the evidence for what did happen is not available.
Harold Urey won a Nobel Prize for chemistry, but is probably more famous for participating, with his graduate student Stanley Miller, in what became known as the Miller-Urey experiment. Writing in The Christian Science Monitor on 4th January 1962, Urey wrote:
All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.
Hubert Yockey, the renowned information theorist, wrote in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1977 that:
One must conclude that… a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.
Richard Dickerson, a molecular biologist at UCLA, wrote in 1978 in Scientific American that:
The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models; hence one can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts. The complex genetic apparatus in present-day organisms is so universal that one has few clues as to what the apparatus may have looked like in its most primitive form.[5]
Francis Crick needs no introduction. In Life Itself, published in 1981, he wrote that:
Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.
Crick’s conclusion is that:
The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.[6]
Prominent origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel wrote in New Scientist in 1982 that:
Prebiotic soup is easy to obtain. We must next explain how a prebiotic soup of organic molecules, including amino acids and the organic constituents of nucleotides evolved into a self-replicating organism. While some suggestive evidence has been obtained, I must admit that attempts to reconstruct the evolutionary process are extremely tentative.[7]
The views of Nobel Prize winner Fred Hoyle are particularly interesting. He struggled with the conflict between his ardent atheism and his knowledge of the excruciating difficulty of positing a naturalistic start to life. Writing in 1984, Hoyle stated that:
From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brain-washed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it; it is just not possible that life could have originated from a chemical accident.[8]
The writer Andrew Scott hit the nail on the head when he wrote, in 1986, that most scientists’ adherence to naturalistic accounts of the origin of life owed little to the evidence and much to ideological commitments:
But what if the vast majority of scientists all have faith in the one unverified idea? The modern ‘standard’ scientific version of the origin of life on earth is one such idea, and we would be wise to check its real merit with great care. Has the cold blade of reason been applied with sufficient vigor in this case? Most scientists want to believe that life could have emerged spontaneously from the primeval waters, because it would confirm their belief in the explicability of Nature – the belief that all could be explained in terms of particles and energy and forces if only we had the time and the necessary intellect.[9]
This conclusion is mirrored in the words of Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and authority on origin-of-life studies. Writing in 2002, Davies affirms that it is scientists’ adherence to methodological naturalism that drives their agenda and conclusions:
First, I should like to say that the scientific attempt to explain the origin of life proceeds from the assumption that whatever it was that happened was a natural process: no miracles, no supernatural intervention. It was by ordinary atoms doing extraordinary things that life was brought into existence. Scientists have to start with that assumption.[10]
In 1988, Klaus Dose, another prominent origin-of-life theorist, summed up the situation nicely when he wrote that:
More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.[11]
Carl Woese was a pioneer in taxonomy, and one of the major figures in 20th century microbiology. His view of the origin of life:
In one sense the origin of life remains what it was in the time of Darwin – one of the great unsolved riddles of science. Yet we have made progress…many of the early naïve assumptions have fallen or have fallen aside…while we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.[12]
Paul Davies, too, writes that no substantive progress has been made in this area since Darwin’s time. In a recent short paper suggesting that life be viewed as a software package, Davies writes:
Darwin pointedly left out an account of how life first emerged, “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter,” he quipped. A century and a half later, scientists still remain largely in the dark about life’s origins. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the origin of life is one of the greatest unanswered questions in science.[13]
Readers of Genesis and Genes will recall Richard Lewontin’s admission that his mathematical models of evolutionary mechanisms are a sham – they do not correspond to reality. The biologist Lynn Margulis reminisced:
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass [University of Massachusetts] Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it – changes in the population, random mutation, sexua| selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Lewontin, who is one of the most prominent geneticists in the world and a protégé of one of the founders of neo-Darwinism, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was equally forthright about the role that faith plays in moulding scientists’ approach to important issues. In his review of a book by Carl Sagan, Lewontin wrote in 1997 that:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[14]
Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute is one of the world’s leading origin-of-life researchers and a leading expert on self-organisational systems. He writes:
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.[15]
In Genesis and Genes, I also quoted the biochemist Franklin Harold. In his book The Way of the Cell, Harold frankly acknowledged that “We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”[16] Regarding the origin of life, Harold writes that:
It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not yet at hand. The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.[17]
Massimo Pigliucci was formerly a professor of evolutionary biology and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and holds doctorates in genetics, botany, and the philosophy of science. He is currently the chairman of the department of philosophy at City University of New York. He is a prominent international proponent of evolution and the author of several books. Writing in 2003, Pigliucci writes that “[I]t has to be true that we really don’t have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means.”[18]
In 2007, we find science writer Gregg Easterbrook writing in Wired: “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”[19]
Also in 2007, Harvard chemist George M. Whitesides, in accepting the highest award of the American Chemical Society, wrote: “The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea… On the basis of all the chemistry that I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable.”[20]
As recently as 2011, Scientific American acknowledged that origin-of-life research has gotten nowhere in the last century. In an article by John Horgan, we read that:
Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for the New York Times on research into life’s origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists, astronomers, and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.[21]
Also writing in 2011, Dr. Eugene Koonin provided a neat summary of the utter failure of this endeavour:
The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science… Origin of Life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life… these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.[22]
***
The area of origin-of-life research is fascinating not only for its own sake, but also in the way that it exposes what many uninformed members of the public take for granted, namely, that scientists are driven by data, and data alone. I elaborated on this misconception in Genesis and Genes, demonstrating that the commitment of many scientists to methodological naturalism is a far more important factor than the scientific evidence in reaching conclusions about life on Earth.
***
See Also:
The post Certitude and Bluff:
http://torahexplorer.com/2013/01/15/certitude-and-bluff/
References:
Some of the quotations in this post come from an article by Rabbi Moshe Averick, published in The Algemeiner. The article can be read here:
http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/09/27/speculation-faith-and-unproven-assumptio...
Retrieved 26th June 2013.
[1] The article can be read here:
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/23/evolution-creation-debate-biology-opinions-c....
Retrieved 2nd November 2010.
[2] R.W. Clark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1985), page 148.
[3] To read more about Nagel and his latest book, see these reviews:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112481/darwinist-mob-goes-after-serious-ph...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html
[4] See http://www.jidaily.com/914e2?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider
Retrieved 27th June 2013.
[5] Richard E. Dickerson, “Chemical Evolution and the Origin of Life”, Scientific American, Vol. 239, No. 3, September 1978, page77.
[6] Life Itself, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1981, page 88.
[7] Leslie E. Orgel, “Darwinism at the very beginning of life”, New Scientist, Vol. 94, 15 April 1982, page 150.
[8] Fred Hoyle, Evolution from Space, New York, Simon and Shuster, 1984, page 53.
[9] Andrew Scott, “The Creation of Life: Past, Future, Alien”, Basil Blackwell, 1986, page 111.
[10] Paul Davies, “In Search of Eden, Conversations with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams”.
[11] Klaus Dose, “The Origin of Life: More Questions Than Answers”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Vol. 13, No. 4, 1988, page 348.
[12] Carl Woese, Gunter Wachtershauser, “Origin of Life” in Paleobiology: A Synthesis, Briggs and Crowther – Editors (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1989.
[13] See: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.4803.
Retrieved 27th June 2013.
[14] “Billions and Billions of Demons”, Richard Lewontin, 9th January 1997, New York Times Book Review.
[15] At Home in the Universe, London, Viking, 1995, page 31.
[16] Franklin Harold, The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life, Oxford University Press, 2001, page 205.
[17] Ibid. page 251.
[18] Massimo Pigliucci, “Where Do We Come From? A Humbling Look at the Biology of Life’s Origin,” in Darwin, Design and Public Education, eds. John Angus Campbell and Stephen C. Meyer (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003), page 196.
[19] Gregg Easterbrook, “Where did life come from?” Wired, page 108, February, 2007.
[20] George M. Whitesides, “Revolutions in Chemistry: Priestly Medalist George M. Whitesides’ address”, Chemical and Engineering News, 85 (March 26, 2007): p. 12-17. See http://ismagilovlab.uchicago.edu/GMW_address_priestley_medal.pdf.
Retrieved 22nd April 2012.
[21] John Horgan, Scientific American, 28th February 2011.
[22] Eugene Koonin, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and origin of Biological Evolution (Upper Saddle River, NJ, FT Press, 2011, page 391.”
Mr. Dean,
I apologize for posting this with all the links. Just delete it ok. I didn’t notice the links in the footnotes at the end. Sorry.
Thanks, Mevashir.
If you look up on youtube this clip: “Intelligent Design/Evolution Debate (7 of 8)” at the 2′ mark you will see Eugenie Scott, one of the most ardent defendents of Darwinism, admit to David Berlinski in a public debate that the classic Darwinist claim of mutation and natural selection may not be true. Yet still she goes on to insist that evolution has to be true!
The following is from the writings of South African Orthodox Jewish rabbi Yoram Bogacz, who was trained as a professional geologist and who is a young earth creationist. Here he exposes the openly acknowledged ulterior motives of the Darwinists:
torahexplorer * com/2013/06/28/origin-of-life-and-philosophical-outlook/
Origin of Life and Philosophical Outlook
In Signature in the Cell, Dr. Stephen Meyer presented a comprehensive and accessible history of research into the origin of life. In this post, we take a bird’s eye view of research into this area over the past three-quarters of a century. We shall also digress in order to get a snapshot of how ideological commitments shape the views of many scientists.
***
Let’s begin with Dr. Ernst Chain. Chain won a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of penicillin. I mentioned him in Genesis and Genes, in the context of the discussion about whether evolutionary theory is relevant to nuts-and-bolts research in biology. I cited an article by Philip Skell (1918-2010), who was a distinguished professor of chemistry and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the USA and a prominent Darwin sceptic. In a 2009 article in Forbes.com entitled The Dangers of Overselling Evolution, he made the point that evolutionary theory makes no contribution to actual research:
In 1942, Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain wrote that his discovery of penicillin (with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming) and the development of bacterial resistance to that antibiotic owed nothing to Darwin’s and Alfred Russel Wallace’s evolutionary theories.[1]
Chain understood the immensity of the task of trying to explain life in naturalistic terms. In The Life of Ernst Chain: Penicillin and Beyond, we read that:
I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago.[2]
In August 1954, Dr. George Wald, another Nobel Laureate, wrote in Scientific American:
There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility… a supernatural creative act of God. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution.
This statement may seem astonishingly frank to many members of the public. Informed consumers of science, in contrast, are aware that much of the debate around the origin of life and biological evolution has precious little to do with drawing inevitable conclusions from straightforward evidence. It is far more about worldviews and ideologies, and only extremely naive observers assume that this does not apply to scientists who participate in the debate. Wald makes it perfectly clear that his direction was dictated by his philosophical leanings, and that is true of many scientists and Western intellectuals. Consider the views of Thomas Nagel. Nagel is a courageous thinker whose latest book, Mind and Cosmos, is a fierce demolition of Darwinian evolution.[3] But Nagel will only go so far. In The Last Word, which appeared in 1997, he offered a candid account of his philosophical inclinations:
I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers… It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.[4]
The fact that faith – the faith of many scientists in the ability of unguided matter and energy to create life – drives much of the discussion about evolution, was underscored by Dr. Gerald Kerkut, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of Southampton, who wrote in 1960 that:
The first assumption was that non-living things gave rise to living material. This is still just an assumption… There is, however, little evidence in favor of abiogenesis and as yet we have no indication that it can be performed… it is therefore a matter of faith on the part of the biologist that abiogenesis did occur and he can choose whatever method… happens to suit him personally; the evidence for what did happen is not available.
Harold Urey won a Nobel Prize for chemistry, but is probably more famous for participating, with his graduate student Stanley Miller, in what became known as the Miller-Urey experiment. Writing in The Christian Science Monitor on 4th January 1962, Urey wrote:
All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.
Hubert Yockey, the renowned information theorist, wrote in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in 1977 that:
One must conclude that… a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written.
Richard Dickerson, a molecular biologist at UCLA, wrote in 1978 in Scientific American that:
The evolution of the genetic machinery is the step for which there are no laboratory models; hence one can speculate endlessly, unfettered by inconvenient facts. The complex genetic apparatus in present-day organisms is so universal that one has few clues as to what the apparatus may have looked like in its most primitive form.[5]
Francis Crick needs no introduction. In Life Itself, published in 1981, he wrote that:
Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.
Crick’s conclusion is that:
The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.[6]
Prominent origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel wrote in New Scientist in 1982 that:
Prebiotic soup is easy to obtain. We must next explain how a prebiotic soup of organic molecules, including amino acids and the organic constituents of nucleotides evolved into a self-replicating organism. While some suggestive evidence has been obtained, I must admit that attempts to reconstruct the evolutionary process are extremely tentative.[7]
The views of Nobel Prize winner Fred Hoyle are particularly interesting. He struggled with the conflict between his ardent atheism and his knowledge of the excruciating difficulty of positing a naturalistic start to life. Writing in 1984, Hoyle stated that:
From my earliest training as a scientist I was very strongly brain-washed to believe that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the situation, the state of mind I now find myself in. But there is no logical way out of it; it is just not possible that life could have originated from a chemical accident.[8]
The writer Andrew Scott hit the nail on the head when he wrote, in 1986, that most scientists’ adherence to naturalistic accounts of the origin of life owed little to the evidence and much to ideological commitments:
But what if the vast majority of scientists all have faith in the one unverified idea? The modern ‘standard’ scientific version of the origin of life on earth is one such idea, and we would be wise to check its real merit with great care. Has the cold blade of reason been applied with sufficient vigor in this case? Most scientists want to believe that life could have emerged spontaneously from the primeval waters, because it would confirm their belief in the explicability of Nature – the belief that all could be explained in terms of particles and energy and forces if only we had the time and the necessary intellect.[9]
This conclusion is mirrored in the words of Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and authority on origin-of-life studies. Writing in 2002, Davies affirms that it is scientists’ adherence to methodological naturalism that drives their agenda and conclusions:
First, I should like to say that the scientific attempt to explain the origin of life proceeds from the assumption that whatever it was that happened was a natural process: no miracles, no supernatural intervention. It was by ordinary atoms doing extraordinary things that life was brought into existence. Scientists have to start with that assumption.[10]
In 1988, Klaus Dose, another prominent origin-of-life theorist, summed up the situation nicely when he wrote that:
More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.[11]
Carl Woese was a pioneer in taxonomy, and one of the major figures in 20th century microbiology. His view of the origin of life:
In one sense the origin of life remains what it was in the time of Darwin – one of the great unsolved riddles of science. Yet we have made progress…many of the early naïve assumptions have fallen or have fallen aside…while we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.[12]
Paul Davies, too, writes that no substantive progress has been made in this area since Darwin’s time. In a recent short paper suggesting that life be viewed as a software package, Davies writes:
Darwin pointedly left out an account of how life first emerged, “One might as well speculate about the origin of matter,” he quipped. A century and a half later, scientists still remain largely in the dark about life’s origins. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the origin of life is one of the greatest unanswered questions in science.[13]
Readers of Genesis and Genes will recall Richard Lewontin’s admission that his mathematical models of evolutionary mechanisms are a sham – they do not correspond to reality. The biologist Lynn Margulis reminisced:
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass [University of Massachusetts] Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it – changes in the population, random mutation, sexua| selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Lewontin, who is one of the most prominent geneticists in the world and a protégé of one of the founders of neo-Darwinism, Theodosius Dobzhansky, was equally forthright about the role that faith plays in moulding scientists’ approach to important issues. In his review of a book by Carl Sagan, Lewontin wrote in 1997 that:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[14]
Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute is one of the world’s leading origin-of-life researchers and a leading expert on self-organisational systems. He writes:
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.[15]
In Genesis and Genes, I also quoted the biochemist Franklin Harold. In his book The Way of the Cell, Harold frankly acknowledged that “We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”[16] Regarding the origin of life, Harold writes that:
It would be agreeable to conclude this book with a cheery fanfare about science closing in, slowly but surely, on the ultimate mystery; but the time for rosy rhetoric is not yet at hand. The origin of life appears to me as incomprehensible as ever, a matter for wonder but not for explication.[17]
Massimo Pigliucci was formerly a professor of evolutionary biology and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and holds doctorates in genetics, botany, and the philosophy of science. He is currently the chairman of the department of philosophy at City University of New York. He is a prominent international proponent of evolution and the author of several books. Writing in 2003, Pigliucci writes that “[I]t has to be true that we really don’t have a clue how life originated on Earth by natural means.”[18]
In 2007, we find science writer Gregg Easterbrook writing in Wired: “What creates life out of the inanimate compounds that make up living things? No one knows. How were the first organisms assembled? Nature hasn’t given us the slightest hint. If anything, the mystery has deepened over time.”[19]
Also in 2007, Harvard chemist George M. Whitesides, in accepting the highest award of the American Chemical Society, wrote: “The Origin of Life. This problem is one of the big ones in science. It begins to place life, and us, in the universe. Most chemists believe, as do I, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea… On the basis of all the chemistry that I know, it seems to me astonishingly improbable.”[20]
As recently as 2011, Scientific American acknowledged that origin-of-life research has gotten nowhere in the last century. In an article by John Horgan, we read that:
Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for the New York Times on research into life’s origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists, astronomers, and biologists are as stumped as ever by the riddle of life.[21]
Also writing in 2011, Dr. Eugene Koonin provided a neat summary of the utter failure of this endeavour:
The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science… Origin of Life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life… these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.[22]
***
The area of origin-of-life research is fascinating not only for its own sake, but also in the way that it exposes what many uninformed members of the public take for granted, namely, that scientists are driven by data, and data alone. I elaborated on this misconception in Genesis and Genes, demonstrating that the commitment of many scientists to methodological naturalism is a far more important factor than the scientific evidence in reaching conclusions about life on Earth.
[See source article for extensive footnoting]
Western thinkers and intellectuals must MAN-UP before it is too late and accept that in modern times they have been deliberately and skillfully subverted from TRUTH and from positive cooperative progress.
The judaic master-plan for world domination is responsible for this happening – and the wise men of our nations must have the honesty and bravery to discover this, to admit it – and to take up a position AGAINST the subversion. It has spread throughout the world now – and only a handful of countries oppose it – countries which we are continually being asked to brutally attack with massive military force.
Even when that bubble is broken and our wise men begin to see through the mist it will still take decades to return the ideological perception of public reality back to one of normalcy and wholesome societal health – in turn generated by patriotic and public spirited inclusion. Independent and un-subverted nations, with their own means of defending themselves, is the only guarantee of future global freedom. This is not a pipe dream – it is the normal default condition of un-subverted peoples.
Our KGB defectors, like Yuri Bezmenov, inform us how the stages of ideological subversion work – with DEMORALIZATION; DESTABILIZATION; CRISIS and NORMALIZATION being a work in progress for our unfortunate and unhappy generations.
We need to understand that when they talk about DEMORALIZATION – they mean this in both senses of the word – the literal translation as well as the reduction in ‘feel good factor’ that it would usually mean to English speaking people. The literal translation of DE-MORAL-IZATION is about the removal of all moral standards in society – in particular Christian ones. The removal of God, of Christ and of Christian morals was a key target of judaic intervention for subversion.
That removal leaves a people floundering in immoral and self destructive behaviour, leaves them with no standards to live up to, obviously causes societal breakdown and a regression ensues back to the pre-history animal kingdom. That society is then helpless and unable to defend itself from the influences of the united objectives of the subverter.
This has been done to other civilizations before our own. It is a standard operational procedure in the mindset of the attacker – and the years of descent into desolation, hopelessness and anarchy provide rich pickings for the tribe in the meantime.
You need to understand that the promotion of atheism is a ruse – a tactic to destabilize and destroy. The people who most promote it do not abandon THEIR religion – far from it. It is mental desolation for the Gentile. This is manifesting itself in the many suicides of our young children at school. They are told that there is no God, no redemption, no moral difference between good and evil – so long as you get away with it. They are indirectly told that life promises them only pain, misery, sickness, old age and death.
Most atheists today were given Christian morals and teaching at school as a grounding. At an older age they may have decided to abandon that and go their ‘own’ way. We will now see what happens to young people who are brought up with no Christian moral guidance at all – only politically correct subversion indoctrination to promote the aims of the new judaic world order.
Hello Mr. Kay,
I simply do not know what to say anymore. I have been accused of “the dualistic mindset” that “demands that everything be reduced to its simplistic extremes.” Yet you have made extreme statements in the past, such as “exclusivity is a mental disease…” I thought we were living in a free-thought society? Why should you not allow other positions, particularly when they are based on deductive arguments? Once again exclusive statements are found throughout your writings, such as “everything cannot be reduced” to simplistic extremes. This is non-negotiable to you.
Instead of representing the position accurately and concisely, you started building straw man, such as the following, “When someone tells you that the only alternative to cold, dead atheism is one of the entrenched religions which have helped to saddle humanity with diminished potential, stupid and self destructive profiteering, and literally thousands of rules of conduct, most of which are designed to turn you into a willing victim and fodder for the vampire-remember, there is a third choice.” I would challenge you to show where I said that the only alternative to “dead atheism” is religion.
Any careful reader shouldn’t be able to misrepresent the argument: “Since the eternal universe hypothesis has now been rejected by the scientific community, we are left with two possible and frightening explanations: either the universe created itself, which is a contradiction in terms, or someone else did the job.” If you have a third alternative, I am willing to include it in the argument. Please let us know. If you cannot give us one, perhaps it is time to be a little careful in building a straw man.
“I still recall vividly, a conversation I had with a Rifleman some years ago. He relished the idea of going to war against Islam. On his back was tattooed the Cross, and he loved to brag to everyone what a great Christian he was. He would get all hot and bothered over the idea of a new crusade, and loved the idea of being a crusader.” I simply cannot understand why the issue is being diverted here. Haven’t I said that there have been horrible things committed in the names of Christianity by professing Christians? If that will help you, Calvin for example was largely responsible for the death of Michael Servetus! I do not admire him for this evil act anymore than I would admire the neoconservative hawks. But again, is that how you disprove a system? What kind of logic is this? If I can disprove Richard Dawkins’ position, does that mean that atheism is false?
Jonas – I think that you have posted this in the wrong box!
Mr. Alexis,
There is the avenue of what is said-and what is implied. Sir, by implication, if you offer the example of cold Atheism countered by Christian theology, then where is the alternative? You are correct that you did not explicitly state that only 2 alternatives exist, however what was implied, was the conclusion that the tonic for atheism was Christianity. One does not find in this piece the suggestion, for instance, that Bon Po is a tonic for atheism, or for that matter Wicca, or even Buddhism. The argument goes directly into a dualistic viewpoint where only Atheism and Christianity are given time. Considering this, I do not think it is outrageous to remind readers that other alternatives exist.
I stand by my statement that the exercise of exceptionalism, so often appearing as sanction for deviant behavior throughout the centuries to the present day, is indeed a mental disease. Sir, if one were hold that they are superior to some other aspect of humanity, then the next step follows quickly; the adoption of the belief of special sanction, unique rules, “permission” to transgress into behaviors that undermine everyone’s humanity. History is filled with evidence of this reality.
Modern Cosmology today owes an apology to thinking people by forcing through the hapless Big Bang theory at all costs.Modern science has not disproved the eternal universe hypothesis, it is simply not en vogue as a “hot” theory. Modern science does not like the eternal universe theory, in my opinion, because it sounds too much like religion, and the modern mind likes a beginning, middle, and end, yet I haven’t encountered one piece that soundly puts to rest the eternal universe theory. Similarly, just because modern society looses interest in real beef doesn’t mean its suddenly not nutritious.
A system is proven or disproven by its efficacy, its loyalty to human potential, its generation of a healthy and beneficial environment to live in. Certainly modern society suffers from a complete loss of understanding of the forces that ensure our existence. On a deeper level, it never occurs to modern society that the natural world might be more than a storehouse of resources for human use, and whim.
Further, modern society is plagued by various toxic beliefs that are currently endangering our ability to continue to exist. How is this so? It is the belief system that urges us all into the suicide pact of WW3. It is the belief that the Earth should be used thoroughly, and with a heavy hand that is directly implicated in the current 6th great extinction. Where do these beliefs come from sir? Is it really so out of sorts to affix to religion, and now increasingly science, as the originator of so many of these toxic beliefs?
It is true that a system, any system will be subject to errant behavior. However, is it not apparent that life on this living planet is in danger, from the excessive behavior of the human race? Does this not mean that we are facing dysfunction on a level that calls into question the very validity of the systems in question? In my opinion, this is so.
Dr. Roberts recently wrote that Washington is currently treasonous and traitorous. Isn’t it reasonable to explore the possibility that it was the system itself that allowed for this condition to take place?
Why is it that modern society places so much faith in systems that so obviously do not work? Could it be because of the beliefs it holds?
Regardless, if the modern mind is determined to cling to systems so deeply compromised as those today, then it is not possible to disprove them, because the modern mind will not accept this conclusion. There will always be some question, some grey area, with which to exploit and claim that the problem is not the system, but the aberrant behavior within it. However, if that system was so good and beneficial, how did it come to pass, that it became so corrupted by deviants?
We do know how this came to pass for Christianity. We know that Christianity quickly allied itself to the power elite, a position it continues to hold. Today that position is threatened by organized Jewry, yet in a schizophrenic episode of epic proportions, Christianity turns and directly supports that which subverts them, while attacking the third member of the abrahamic trinity-Islam. WW3, anyone?
Sir, if it is not a failed system that has created such a depraved state of affairs, then you must have a system unable to protect and defend itself from parasitic assault. The question then is a circular one; How good is such a system?
Mr. Kay,
So you would have liked it if I present, say, Wicca or Buddhism as an alternative? Buddhism, as you should know, is atheistic in its classical sense. And Wicca as an alternative? Really?
I do not know how you can keep referring to exclusivity as a mental disease while appealing to exclusivity to make your point. If you cannot see that, I have nothing further to say on this. The very fact that you keep arguing about this is an implicit admission in and of itself.
You simply dismiss the work of physicists and cosmologists in just two statements without a shred of evidence: “Modern science has not disproved the eternal universe hypothesis, it is simply not en vogue as a ‘hot’ theory. Modern science does not like the eternal universe theory, in my opinion, because it sounds too much like religion, and the modern mind likes a beginning, middle, and end, yet I haven’t encountered one piece that soundly puts to rest the eternal universe theory.”
One thing I did not mention in the article is the work of Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University, who is not even a Christian or Muslim. Don’t take my words for it. Read a paper he delivered at Cambridge University here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.4658v1.pdf. Or the lecture itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXCQelhKJ7A.
Here’s what Vilenkin said: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning” [Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 176)]. You are a reasonable man and should not be afraid to follow the evidence wherever it leads and no matter what the consequences.
“Does this not mean that we are facing dysfunction on a level that calls into question the very validity of the systems in question? In my opinion, this is so.” I respect your opinion and you have every right to propose it. In fact, I will defend you in saying it. However, this is not how arguments are presented in a scholarly discussion. I will say it for the last time: a system is to be dismissed by its tenets, not by its abuse or excess. For example, you know too well that Social Darwinism has been horrible at the dawn of the twentieth century (I will point this out in a future article). But should one ultimately conclude that Darwinism itself is wrong because of its horrible history? Let us be honest here.
Mr. Alexis,
Our conversation has been interesting, but it is currently at an impasse, and as such, is loosing productivity. Apparently it is impossible to bridge a fundamental gap of understanding. For whatever reason, you cannot allow that uniqueness can exist without superiority. Thus, exclusivity is in fact the exercise of a false superiority, not and exercise of uniqueness. If you cannot understand this, then I have nothing more to say.
It might be comforting for you to dismiss “Gnosticism” as a subset of Christianity, and accuse me of falling into that same trap, however, Gnosticism never did move closer to Christianity than the attempt to bridge the divide between the Material man-Christianity, and the Mystical man-”Gnosticism”. “Gnosticism” remained thoroughly pagan to its last holdout at Dendara, where it was ordered to disband by Cyril, or face the sword. Your refusal to allow this is typical for Christianity, and the Material man. You are not allowed to demand that certain rules of engagement be followed without my agreement, and if I must follow the rigid language of excessive rationality, then you must follow the language of the mystic.
No, I’m not going to quote scientists who support alternative theories to the Big Bang. If you are interested, you can find them on your own.
Finally, I am interested in the actual functioning of things, like systems. I dare say that ultimately, everyone is clearly and intimately concerned with how things run, not just by some distilled scholarly dissertation of its tenets. The proof is in the pudding, Mr. Alexis. It matters little how esoterically sound the ideological structure might be. Something works in the real world, or it sort of does, or it doesn’t work. Ideology be damned.
The real problem with Western Intellectualism is this fantastical belief that rational thought exists-or can exist, in some sort of vacuum. This absolute hubris disassociates the human mind from its very environment. It creates a false reality of walls that do not exist. What does not exist for Western Intellectualism is a true understanding of Human origin, humanity’s place in the biosphere, or any concept whatsoever of humanity’s co-evolution with life on a divine, living planet. This is reality, Mr. Alexis. Reality so strong that it hits humanity right in the forehead. Why is this so hard to see?
But lets be certain to NOT focus on anything real. The playground of those who can’t change a light bulb is the scholarly debate. They can argue useless inanities all day long, and get paid for it to boot.
What a state of affairs.
Hello Mr. Kay,
I cannot allow uniqueness to exist without superiority? I am a person who happens to be black and many of best friends happen to be of different colors. Some of my best friends and writers are Jews. The Christian movement started with a Palestinian Jew. If that is not uniqueness “without superiority,” I do not know what is.
I am glad that readers are also observing our differences here as well because you keep dismissing exclusivity and appealing to exclusivity at the same time and almost in the same respect. Aristotle said that you cannot break the law of non-contradiction—it breaks you. I am seeing the same thing here with exclusivity.
“Exclusivity” is not about “superiority” but about making rational arguments. You know too well that truth, by its very nature, is exclusive. The moment I say that two plus two is four, I implicitly say that two plus two is not five or six. That’s just the way it is. If exclusivity is a mental disease, then “X is Y” and “X is not Y” are no longer mutually exclusive. That is not logical, and I am sure you and I are in agreement here.
“No, I’m not going to quote scientists who support alternative theories to the Big Bang. If you are interested, you can find them on your own.” Brilliant. You take an affirmative position, and then you smuggle yourself out of it by saying that you are not going to provide evidence for it. Thanks again!
This modern cognition we call thought is mired in eternal duality. Good vs. Evil. Love vs. Hate. Up vs. Down. Religionists vs. Atheists
These are the choices offered to us, to dwell in one camp or in the other.
This is the result of development of the rational intellect alone, without balance, actually without any recognition of balancing principles at all.
This is the “gift” we have all inherited from a system of thought and belief that is not accountable to reality. The fact that modern intellectuals cannot come to any kind of conclusion regarding the ultimate nature of reality means that they are utterly ignorant of its existence.
We can loose ourselves in the fictions of the mind, when that mind has no ability to ground itself in reality.
There is another path than merely to the vote yes or no to patriarch God.
Modern thought has engendered an absolutist and simplistic, cold explanation for reality that is ego maniacal, deviant, and destructive to the human psyche.
I have been accused of not following formal arguments, and refusing to accept the dictates of self -appointed experts. In regards to the latter, I plead guilty. In regards to the former, it is because the dualistic mindset demands that everything be reduced to its simplistic extremes. Yet everything cannot so be reduced.
When someone tells you that the only alternative to cold, dead atheism is one of the entrenched religions which have helped to saddle humanity with diminished potential, stupid and self destructive profiteering, and literally thousands of rules of conduct, most of which are designed to turn you into a willing victim and fodder for the vampire-remember, there is a third choice.
I still recall vividly, a conversation I had with a Rifleman some years ago. He relished the idea of going to war against Islam. On his back was tattooed the Cross, and he loved to brag to everyone what a great Christian he was. He would get all hot and bothered over the idea of a new crusade, and loved the idea of being a crusader. He took me to task that one fateful day, for not joining him in his genocidal religious fanaticism. Things got very dicey, and guns were at the ready. He said things I’ve never let anyone say to me, but I let it go, let him go, diffused the situation, and never spoke to him again. I realized that he was so certain of his righteousness, that he was happy to kill for it. No meaningful alternative was allowed to to creep into his awareness. I was pissed off at his arrogant ignorance, and hoped he’d get a bigger picture someday, before he wrought too much damage. Still, on hindsight, I was wrong. I should have filled him so full of holes that he no longer cast a shadow.
Thanks Jonas.
Just came into my mind one comedy, where our former President’s wife was on boat trip on river Danube. She said, “what a beautiful river, and Strauss made that beautiful waltz The Blue Danube too. Just wondering, which was first, the song or the river?” In the light of the article, that’s a good question.
But the answer those Darwinists etc gives just makes me kind of tired. There’s no (Christian) God and life in all it’s dimensions is just physics, chemistry and biology. Is that so, how about the most simple question, how to maintain the life already born, the food chain.
Say there was a carrot, some CO2 and H2O inside a radiation penetrating box, a closed system. Suppose also that we were able to measure the radiation energy influx and outflux. After the test had finished we would notice that CO2 and H2O levels had decreased and O2 and sugar levels in that carrot had increased. Then applying the First Law of Thermodynamics with enthalpies of formation agrees with measurements.
But then applying The Second Law of Thermodynamics with entropies of formation, we’ll find that inside the box entropy had in fact decreased, that is against the second law, unless radiation has the property of entropy as well. And it does, although I’ve never found that in any book of thermodynamic or heat transfer I studied. Here’s one link I found:
http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-81482-2008-JA.pdf
But if we consider the speed of light a universal constant and entropy a function of frequency, we must also consider that frequency is a function of relative time only. That means that entropy and relative time are related and relative time is related to the speed we move away from initial Big Bang point. Fact is that because of life our Planet’s specific entropy is much lower than Mars’s and we are one step behind closer to the initial point, I don’t know.
But those Dawinists seems to well know the age of the Universe, although they rather not to use anything like absolute time. If Newton’s Law of Gravity works, did we gain the escape speed at the BB or are we coming back to the initial.
Now I got it. If Hitler would have known how the universe was created, there would have been no world war II.
Aristotle once said, the truth lies in equal distances to the two opposite evils. Gandhi once said, when one sees God, he will know the truth.
My Two Pennies :=: ;=; ” ” Never say X doesn’t Exist “” …. ….. …. …. Instead I’d recommend Rethinking along terms of ” I just maybe haven’t Discovered it just YET. ”
Be Practical & Responsibly Presume the wildest Wilderness out There…. NO Offense to any one BUT eg scat
Its kinda like Really Really Keeping An Open Mind ALWAYS ……
An interesting though somewhat risky article – you are always a good read Mr. Alexis (-:
“When all is said and done, the scientific evidence does not offer us many choices when it comes to the beginning of the universe. Despite the fact that theists have been saying for thousands of years that the universe had a beginning, some atheist scientists have just figured that out in the twentieth century. The only difference is that the theist posits a Creator as the cause, whereas the atheist tries to come up with something else.”
The above quote begs the basic Chicken or Egg question – If God created the Universe, then who or what created God? The Bible says that God exists, always existed, and always will exist, which is impossible for us to understand on a strictly rational level, since we humans mainly exist in a universe of observable causality. Christians can not answer this question, nor do they feel that they are required to, since this statement is grounded in belief (they trust and accept it as being true even though its unprovable). For a Scientist this is similar to being put in a round room and told to pee in the corner, they can’t do it since breaking the laws of causality can not be broken for no reason. Buddhists, and some Scientists, say that the Universe creates itself, and offer observations of this as an ongoing process as proof, but this also begs the question of what came first and how.
I think it is fascinating to see how research in particle physics is beginning to bend the laws of causality. Quantum computing has shown us experiments where data arrives before it is sent. New theories about time and gravity being attributes of physical matter open for the scientific possibility of something non-physical that could exist outside of time.
Follow the truth – where ever it leads you.
Ups – sorry about the cut and paste mistake, it should say…
“they can’t do it since the laws of causality can not be broken for no reason”
Hey Dodd,
Thanks for the question. Without going to a long preamble in philosophy, let us suppose for a moment that some super intellect created God, and the next question that must ask, “who created that super intellect,” and so on and so forth? Do you know where that leads? Infinite regress, which is irrational. The argument does not state that everything has a cause. It states that whatever begins to exist has a cause. And this is not new at all! This has been discussed from time immemorial by a wide range of philosophers, many of them were not Christians.
Second, let us suppose for example that God created the universe. It ought to be assumed that he can’t create the universe and still be “inside” the universe. You can’t create a computer and still be “inside” the computer. Bill Gates is smarter and wiser than Microsoft. In a nutshell, if we take the theist position seriously, God has to be “outside” of time, otherwise it makes no sense. In other words, he created time. Hence the old saying, once upon a time, there was a time when there was no time.
“The argument does not state that everything has a cause. It states that whatever begins to exist has a cause.”
- Does God exist?
” let us suppose for example that God created the universe. It ought to be assumed that he can’t create the universe and still be “inside” the universe.”
- 1. What will prevent this? 2. Was Jesus God? 3. If in the beginning there was only God, and God created everything, then logically, who or what is everything made from or of?
“if we take the theist position seriously, God has to be “outside” of time, otherwise it makes no sense. In other words, he created time. Hence the old saying, once upon a time, there was a time when there was no time.”
- Interesting paradox(es..)
, a quote from the Dali Lama:
“Why is there no creation possible in Buddhism? It has been said that one cannot find living beings at the becoming of the universe for the essential reason that causes have no beginning. If there were a beginning to the universe, there would also have to be a beginning to consciousness. If we accepted a beginning to consciousness, we would also have to accept that its cause has a beginning, a sudden cause which would have instantly produced consciousness; this would lead to a great many other questions. If consciousness had arisen without cause, or from a permanent cause, that cause would have to exist on a permanent basis, always, or not exist at all, ever. The fact that a phenomenon exists intermittently proves that it depends on causes and conditions. When all the conditions are met, the phenomenon is produced. When those conditions are absent or incomplete, the phenomenon does not appear. As causes have no beginning and stretch back to infinity, the same thing must apply for living beings. Creation is therefore not possible.
Let us now consider a particular phenomenon, a glacier for example: it does indeed have a beginning. How was it created? The outside world appears as a result of the acts of sentient beings who use this world, These acts, or karmas, in turn originate in the intentions and motivations of those beings who have not yet taken control of their minds.
The “creator of the world,” basically, is the mind. In the Sutras, the mind is described as an agent. It is said that consciousness has no beginning, but we must distinguish here between gross consciousness and subtle consciousness. Many gross consciousnesses appear as dependents of the physical aggregates, of the body. This is evident when you consider the different neurons and the functioning of the brain, but just because physical conditions are met does not mean that this is enough to produce a perception. In order for a perception which will have the faculty to reflect and know an object to arise, it must have a consubstantial cause. The fundamental consubstantial cause, of the same substance as its result, will in this case be the subtle consciousness. It is this same consciousness or subtle mind which penetrates the parental cells at the moment of conception. The subtle mind can have no beginning. If it had one, the mind would have to be born of something that is not the mind. According to the Kalacakra Tantra, one would have to return to the particles of space to find the fundamental consubstantial causes of the external physical world as well as of the bodies of sentient beings.”
- The “Delayed choice quantum eraser” experiment raises some interesting questions about causality (quote from wikipedia, upper case letters are added for emphasis):
“It is counterintuitive that a different outcome results based on whether or not the photon is constrained to follow one or another path well AFTER it goes through the slit but before it hits the detector.”
Jonas,
good points but since nothing is impossible with the prime creator but to lie, he is both, inside and outside that which he created because Christ himself is the physical manifestation (God with us) of the Creator who is “spirit”- the alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Remember, it is prophesied that this creation (universe) will indeed roll up (like it rolled out) like a worn out peice of cloth. Then, as I understand, we begin the “8th day” (1000 human years= appox 1 day to God).
Dodd
You said “The above quote begs the basic Chicken or Egg question – If God created the Universe, then who or what created God? The Bible says that God exists, always existed, and always will exist, which is impossible for us to understand on a strictly rational level, since we humans mainly exist in a universe of observable causality. Christians can not answer this question, nor do they feel that they are required to, since this statement is grounded in belief (they trust and accept it as being true even though its unprovable).
Answer
It is easily provable in the patterns of all creation (nature/Pi and patterns scream the genesis claim over and over) and through simple deductive reasoning as Jonas put forth. But as I have often said, “proof” is in the eye of the beholder but this truth only speaks to the fact that some people ignore proof, cannot see what is plainly evident or they can see it. Either way, none of these facts refute truth which the creator/savior has a monoply on, which can also be found inside many human beings.