“…God is that which formed everything on Earth so that non-life could become alive and conscious. …
I believe it is far more likely that a pile of scrap in a junkyard would by natural processes, within a lifetime, become a running car again,
than it is for life to exist without God in 13.5 billion years of evolution”
Fred Hoyle, _The Intelligent Universe: A New View of Creation and Evolution_ (1983)
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Page 19
of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray.
A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard.
What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?
So small as to be negligible, even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe.
“an Argument from Incredulity.
‘I can’t conceive how this could possibly happen therefore it couldn’t possibly happen.’”
In your view, is the DNA-RNA-protein system’s origination account below adequate & satisfactory?
Are you yourself able to “conceive how this could possibly happen”?:
Bobby Azarian, _The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity_ (2022), 306pp, on 54
Driven by persistent energy flow, the complexity of a dissipative chemical network steadily increases, new features are forged, and finally, self-organization spawns a cell.
“an Argument from Incredulity.
‘I can’t conceive how this could possibly happen therefore it couldn’t possibly happen.’”
Is this “an Argument from Incredulity”?:
[Gould]”Odd arrangements and funny solutions are… paths that a sensible God would never tread”
Stephen Jay Gould, _The Panda’s Thumb_ (1980), on 20-21
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Thus, the paradox, and the common theme of this trilogy of essays:
Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design — nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative.
But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator.
Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution — paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce.
No one understood this better than Darwin.
Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.
Which brings me to the giant panda and its “thumb.”
[Haeckel]”kindly and peaceful social life which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures”
Do you agree with Haeckel that if a Creator had made plants and animals, then there would have been a [Haeckel]”kindly and peaceful social life”?
Ernst Haeckel, _The History of Creation_ (1876), on 19-20
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If we contemplate the common life and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall find everywhere, and at all times, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures — we shall rather find everywhere a pitiless, most embittered Struggle of All against All.
Nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist;
we find everywhere a struggle and a striving to annihilate neighbours and competitors.
“an Argument from Incredulity.
‘I can’t conceive how this could possibly happen therefore it couldn’t possibly happen.’”
Is this “an Argument from Incredulity”?:
‘I can’t conceive how God could possibly allow trilobites to become extinct,
so therefore,
it couldn’t possibly have been the case that God allowed trilobites to go extinct, which they did.’
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“the fate of the Trilobites.
They thrived in Earth’s oceans for 270 million years, with 22,000 species present in every available ecological niche, only to disappear in the Permian mass extinction.
…do you suppose this was God’s judgement on their iniquity?
If so, odd how God’s judgement resembles random naturalistic forces”
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“an Argument from Incredulity.
‘I can’t conceive how this could possibly happen therefore it couldn’t possibly happen.’”
Is this “an Argument from Incredulity”?:
‘I can’t conceive how the loving _Abba_ of the New Testament could possibly allow five major mass extinctions,
so therefore,
it couldn’t possibly have been the case that the loving _Abba_ of the New Testament allowed the five major mass extinctions that occurred.’
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“Where is the loving _Abba_ of the New Testament in the world described by evolution?
Five major mass extinctions and any number of lesser ones.
98% of all the species that have ever been extinct”
Is this “an Argument from Incredulity”?:
‘I can’t conceive how God could possibly allow trilobites to become extinct,
so therefore,
it couldn’t possibly have been the case that God allowed trilobites to go extinct, which they did.’
Nope. I was critiquing the claim that a loving God who marks the fall of sparrows and counts hairs created the universe as described by evolution.
“Is this ‘an Argument from Incredulity’?:
‘I can’t conceive how God could possibly allow trilobites to become extinct,
so therefore,
it couldn’t possibly have been the case that God allowed trilobites to go extinct, which they did.’”
“Nope”
Interesting.
“was critiquing the claim that a loving God who marks the fall of sparrows and counts hairs created the universe as described by evolution”
Do you believe “that a loving God who marks the fall of sparrows” would allow:
any human to die?
a mass-extinction of animals?
the Holocaust to occur?
the mass-killings done by the atheists Stalin and Mao to take place?
a flood killing 99% of humans to happen?
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“For example, even slight changes to any of them would prevent the formation of atoms.
So the problem for naturalism is that it just seems insanely lucky that these arbitrary values that are built into the very fabric of the physical world just happen to be the very precise values that are necessary for any sort of life we can conceive of to develop.
This isn’t just a Christian apologetic point, it is a problem that bothers philosophical naturalists;
I mean, the fine tuning argument takes its foundation from the fine tuning problem, which had previously been articulated by physicists.
I (obviously) don’t think it is a conclusive argument–and as a theist, I thought it was quite weak–but it is the sort of thing that just bugs me.
How did we get so insanely lucky?”
“it is a problem that bothers philosophical naturalists…
it is the sort of thing that just bugs me.
How did we get so insanely lucky?”
Frederick Buechner, _Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith_ (2004), on 85
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Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts, you are either kidding yourself or asleep.
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith.
They keep it awake and moving.
hat tip
Randal Rauser, _The Doubters’ Creed: How to Be a Christian When You Don’t Believe It’s True_ (2023), 129pp., on 121
amazon .com/Doubters-Creed-Christian-When-Believe/dp/1738771830/
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“the issue of Fine Tuning… I’m not sure we can say that the universe is fine tuned for ‘life’.
The building blocks for life perhaps.
All we can say is that we are here and that we observe certain conditions that exist and did exist.
As I said my argument was against using Fine Tuning as a reason to believe in the Christian God.
The omni-God.
Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient, etc…
Against Divine Omnipotence, whence constraints?
If you say that God can only do something logically possible I reply that God created logic itself, right?
if you say God can’t make a square circle, I reply that God made the rules and foundations of grammar, and their relations to reality, right?
If the answer to these questions is no, then we’re not talking about the Christian God.
Why would an all powerful God create constraints He must obey?
All this leads me to question the internal coherence of the Christian God concept itself.”
Does your argument work “against using Fine Tuning as a reason to believe in” the God of deism?
“if you say God can’t make a square circle”
In English at least, “square circle” is gibberish.
What is “a square circle”?
“There are spots (at least one) from which life can originate and spread”
What are all the spots of which you’re aware “from which life can originate and spread”?
“There are spots where life cannot originate but to where it can spread”
What are 2 of those spots?
“Statistically improbable things happen all the time.
Maybe we were in fact just insanely lucky!”
Is the origination of humans via totally-mindless-at-every-level processes more,
or less,
“insanely lucky,” than [Dawkins]”hurling scrap metal around at
random and happening to assemble a Boeing 747″ capable of flying?
Richard Dawkins, _The Blind Watchmaker_ (1986)
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The combination lock on my bicycle has 4,096 different positions.
Every one of these is equally ‘improbable’ in the sense that, if you spin
the wheels at random, every one of the 4,096 positions is equally
unlikely to turn up. I can spin the wheels at random, look at whatever
number is displayed and exclaim with hindsight: ‘How amazing. The
odds against that number appearing are 4,096:1. A minor miracle!’
That is equivalent to regarding the particular arrangement of rocks in a
mountain, or of bits of metal in a scrap-heap, as ‘complex’. But one of
those 4,096 wheel positions really is interestingly unique: the
combination 1207 is the only one that opens the lock. The uniqueness of
1207 has nothing to do with hindsight: it is specified in advance by the
manufacturer. If you spun the wheels at random and happened to hit
1207 first time, you would be able to steal the bike, and it would seem
a minor miracle. If you struck lucky on one of those multi-dialled
combination locks on bank safes, it would seem a very major miracle,
for the odds against it are many millions to one, and you would be able
to steal a fortune.
Now, hitting upon the lucky number that opens the bank’s safe is
the equivalent, in our analogy, of hurling scrap metal around at
random and happening to assemble a Boeing 747. Of all the millions of
unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, positions of the
combination lock, only one opens the lock. Similarly, of all the millions
of unique and, with hindsight equally improbable, arrangements of a
heap of junk, only one (or very few) will fly. The uniqueness of the
arrangement that flies, or that opens the safe, is nothing to do with
hindsight. It is specified in advance. The lock-manufacturer fixed the
combination, and he has told the bank manager. The ability to fly is a
property of an airliner that we specify in advance. If we see a plane in
the air we can be sure that it was not assembled by randomly throwing
scrap metal together, because we know that the odds against a random
conglomeration’s being able to fly are too great.
In your opinion, if the Christian God exists, do you think that Christian God would be capable of– starting with the physics and chemistry with which we’re familiar– capable of making biological systems that _exceed_ [Bialek]”limits set by basic physical principles”?
“Colloquium- William Bialek (Princeton)- Ambitions for theory in the physics of life”
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I am interested in the interface between physics and biology, broadly interpreted.
A central theme in my research is an appreciation for how well things work in biological systems.
It is, after all, some notion of functional behavior that distinguishes life from inanimate matter, and it is a challenge to quantify this functionality in a language that parallels our characterization of other physical systems.
Strikingly, when we do this (and there are not so many cases where it has been done!), the performance of biological systems often approaches some limits set by basic physical principles.
While it is popular to view biological mechanisms as an historical record of evolutionary and developmental compromises, these observations on functional performance point toward a very different view of life as having selected a set of near optimal mechanisms for its most crucial tasks.
Even if this view is wrong, it suggests a theoretical physicist’s idealization;
the construction of this idealization and the attempt to calibrate the performance of real biological systems against this ideal provides a productive route for the interaction of theory and experiment, and in several cases this effort has led to the discovery of new phenomena.
The idea of performance near the physical limits crosses many levels of biological organization, from single molecules to cells to perception and learning in the brain, and I have tried to contribute to this whole range of problems.
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Do you believe that totally-mindless processes are capable of producing efficiencies that far exceed what ingenious humans have thus far been able to come up with?
[Bialek]”Strikingly, when we do this…, the performance of biological systems often approaches some limits set by basic physical principles”
“The bacterial flagellum… has an energy conversion rate of nearly 100%”
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The bacterial flagellum rotates at a rotation frequency of 300 Hz,
has an energy conversion rate of nearly 100%,
and is able to self assemble
(Berg, 2003; Macnab, 1999, 2003; Kojima and Blair, 2004).
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hat tip
Douglas Axe, _Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed_ (2017), 300pp., on 269
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