The Existence of God: Nature’s Evidence
[Ps. 19:1-2]
PART 3
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 by saying “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.
Philosopher of Science, Stephen Meyer caused quite a stir within the scientific community with the publication of his 2009 hefty tome Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design a Times Literary Supplement Book of the year. Meyer’s book boldly advances and cogently defends the thesis that intelligent design is the only known cause of the specified information that we find in the DNA molecule and that after exhaustively examining the explanatory weaknesses of all scientific origin-of-life theories that attempt to deal with the information challenge of 1st life coming into being.
Meyer says “Every major origin-of-life scenario—whether based on chance, necessity, or the combination—failed to explain the origin of specified information…[which pointed] to a source of information beyond the realm of physics and chemistry.” (332-333)
Then Meyers boasts or beams “…my long investigation had turned up nothing in way of materialistic processes with the demonstrated capacity—the proven causal efficacy—to produce the large amounts of specified information necessary to generate a self-replicating organism. Nor was I alone in this conclusion. Leading scientists —Francis Crick, Fred Hoyle, Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson, Eugene Wigner, Klaus Dose, Robert Shapiro, Dean Kenyon, Leslie Orgel, Gerald Joyce, Hubert Yockey, even Stanley Miller—had all expressed scepticism either about the merits of leading theories, the relevance of prebiotic experiments, or both. Even Richard Dawkins, not known for rhetorical restraint in support of evolutionary orthodoxy, candidly admitted in 2008 that ‘no one knows’ how life arose in the first place…At the same time, conscious intelligence has repeatedly shown itself capable of producing such information. It follows that mind—conscious, rational intelligent agency—what philosophers call ‘agent causation’, now stands as the only cause known to be capable of generating large amounts of specified information starting from a non-living state” (333, 341)
Natural scientists in the house would know and all others need to know that the Dean Kenyon mentioned by Meyer in this quotation was co-author (with Gary Steinman) of the landmark 1969 book Biochemical Predestination which advanced the view that ordinary non-living chemicals did become living.
The best explanation of the origin of 1st life, given the information rich complexity of all life forms is an intelligent designer God, a personal causal agent not impersonality plus time plus chance.
Now a concluding postscript on
Nature’s inexplicable God-pointing Phenomena
The fitness of so many things in nature for Life which demand a design inference and defies undirected chance explanations as highlighted in Michael Denton’s book, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe.
Brief quotations on Light, Water and Oxygen…
“That the radiation from the sun (and from many main sequence stars) should be concentrated into a minuscule band of the electromagnetic spectrum which provides precisely the radiation required to maintain life on earth is a very remarkable coincidence described as ‘staggering’ by Ian Campbell in Energy and the Atmosphere…the fact that water absorbs damaging UV radiation while allowing visual light to penetrate to considerable depths has a very important consequence; it means that photosynthesis can occur in water even in the absence of the protective ozone layer.” (53,58)
“…water gives every appearance of being uniquely fit for the type of carbon-based life that exists on earth. Every one of its chemical and physical properties [thermal properties, surface tension, capacity to dissolve a vast number of different substances and low viscosity] seems maximally fit not only for microscopic life but for large warm-blooded organisms such as mammals, as well as for the generation and maintenance of a stable chemical and physical environment on the surface of the earth.” (19)
“The chemical fitness of oxygen to living systems can only be exploited if additional conditions are satisfied. The solubility and rate at which oxygen diffuses in water is obviously critical, Since water is the matrix of life, if oxygen was either insoluble in water or chemically unstable in an aqueous solution, it would be incapable of playing any biological role…oxygen is basically a very dangerous reactive substance and is highly toxic to life at levels above those normally encountered in nature. Oxygen toxicity is caused because a small proportion of oxygen atoms are continually interacting with water, producing highly reactive damaging radicals…In fact, all organisms which utilize oxygen possess a number of enzymes specifically designed to eliminate reactive oxygen radicals.” (123, 125)
What’s the inference to the best explanation of these life-permitting features of light, water and oxygen, intelligent design or undirected chance processes?
The meticulous details of the biochemical machinery of life [including the absolute cruciality of the transitional metals in the periodic table for the biochemistry of cell function] defy a non-design explanation. Consider this statement by biochemist Michael Denton, “One key role [played] by metals in the cell is the formation of electronic circuits, and one area where these play a vital role is in energy metabolism. Moreover, it is only the transitional metal atoms, particularly iron and copper, which possess precisely the properties required to form an electronic circuit. No other atoms will do.” (199)
What then is the conclusion of the matter? If we desire/demand no higher level of proof than that which we employ in law and in life re the argument for the existence of God and factor in the evidence I have adduced for the origin of the universe and the origin of life with its information-rich complexity then the existence of God is established beyond reasonable doubt and so I rest my case and now open for your questions and comments.
©Rev. Clinton Chisholm, March 12, 2015