I delivered a public lecture in Barbados on July 16, the topic was ‘The Existence of God: Nature’s Evidence’. While reading over the section dealing with the origin of life and the neo-Darwinian explanations, a mischievous thought occurred to me which I added to my lecture notes. It’s below.
“By the way natural selection as a mechanism or feature of biological evolution seems to me to be either a misnomer at best or an oxymoron at worst.
Misnomer in that what scientists call natural selection is not by itself an entity, causal or otherwise, separate from and acting on a living replicable organism but simply our belated description of how a living replicable organism adjusts to environmental changes/factors (critically involving gene pool encoded potentialities/potencies and limited by those potentialities/potencies).
An oxymoron in that if it is purely natural i.e. undirected/unguided by intelligence it cannot at all select (‘selection’ is suggestive of ‘telos’ an ‘end’ in view which is denied by evolutionists in the process called descent with modification).
The polar opposites are not natural causation vs. supernatural causation but natural causation vs. intelligent causation.”
My lecture notes continue with the following.
“Yet ponder the strange albeit old words of the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist George Wald of Harvard University concerning the origin of life ‘Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of 2 billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the ‘impossible’ becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles…we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance.…’ (George Wald, “The Origin of Life” in Editors of Scientific American, The Physics and Chemistry of Life, 1955, p. 12).
This is nice-sounding nonsense because time like chance has no causative powers and so is not a mechanism that can accomplish anything therefore Wald’s alleged hero is pure fiction and his scientific eminence does not mitigate the nonsense of his argument!
In stark contrast to Wald we find a most revealing statement from the famous British mathematician and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle who originated the steady-state theory of the formation of the universe.
In the 1981 book Evolution from Space which he co-authored with fellow mathematician and astrobiologist Chandra Wickramasinghe, they admitted that though they were life-long atheists they were agreed that the high degree of order and specificity in the universe demanded pre-existing intelligence even to the limit of God.
Both men had calculated that the odds of life appearing by random processes was 1 chance in 1040000 so they chide scientists who try to evade the God-pointing nature of 1st life.
They said ‘The tactic is to argue that although the chance of arriving at the biochemical system of life is…utterly minuscule, there is in nature such an enormous number of other chemical systems which could also support life that any old planet like Earth would inevitably arrive sooner or later at one or another of them. This argument is the veriest nonsense, and if it is to be imbibed at all it must be swallowed with a jorum of strong ale.’(p. 28)
Hoyle said something more insightful and humourous in a report in Nature magazine of November 12, 1981. He said ‘The chance that higher life forms might have emerged [by random mutations and natural selection] is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.’
Kindly understand the intellectual cheating involved in all computer simulations of origin-of-life type experiments and evolutionary changes.
Two problems. The scientists take 1st life as a given to prove how life originated plus they use intelligence to design and direct target sequences in a computer simulation to show how life could have originated or developed in an undirected non-teleological process!
By the way if Stanley Miller had not carefully designed a way to safely bleed off oxygen from his pre-biotic soup experiment he might have suffered damage or death.
Any computer simulation in which natural selection and mutations are depicted as working together at once from the start is scientifically fraudulent because natural selection can only be invoked after a replicable organism has been around for some time.”
It seems some modern scientists need ophthalmic surgery of a kind to correct their blind spots.