Biblical Creation vs. Evolution

[Soldier4Christ]

The knowledge concerning the laws of thermodynamics was developed about one hundred and fifty years ago, but this knowledge was inscribed in the Bible three thousand years ago. In Psalm 102:25_26 we read, "Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment . . ." The Bible tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but now, in their present state, and fully in accord with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they are wearing out like a suit of clothes. At the time the Bible was written, most people believed that the universe had been here forever and would continue to be here forever. The Bible says, not so, the universe had a beginning and is now wearing out and running down, just as modern science has determined. Furthermore, modern science establishes that the universe had to have a beginning. If the universe had been here forever it would have run down a long time ago. It hasn't run down yet, so it could not have been here forever. Therefore, it had a beginning, and the Biblical statement, "In the beginning," has been scientifically verified, as has its statements concerning the present state of the universe.

Let us now consider theories on the origin of life. Here also the so-called evolutionary origin of life chemist is forced to utilize processes contrary to natural laws. In their experiments designed to produce even very simple molecules, they run into insuperable difficulties. For example, they must postulate some form of energy that would be available to convert simple molecules into more complex molecules. The only forms of energy that would have been available on their hypothetical primitive Earth would have been energy from the Sun, electrical discharges (lightning), radioactive decay, and heat. Most of the available energy would be that from the Sun. All raw forms of energy are destructive. The raw, unshielded ultraviolet light coming from the Sun is deadly, destroying rapidly the biological molecules required for life, such as amino acids, proteins, DNA, and RNA. UV light rapidly kills bacteria by disrupting molecules. All forms of life from bacteria to man are killed by UV light, and you know that if you are hit by lightning you would not become more complex—you would be severely injured or killed.

In all experiments employing these sources of raw energy, the rates of destruction vastly exceed the rates of formation. How then was Miller in his experiment1 able to obtain a small quantity of several amino acids and a few other products? He employed a trap. As tiny quantities of these substances were constantly being created and were immediately isolated in the trap, the gases he employed were circulating continuously through his raw energy, electrical discharges (simulating lightning). Without the trap, the products would have been destroyed by the electrical discharges at rates that vastly exceed the rates of formation, and no detectable quantities of the products would have formed. There could have been no traps available on the hypothetical primitive Earth. If these products were formed in the atmosphere they would be destroyed before they could reach the ocean. Furthermore, the ocean could not have acted as a trap since even there destructive processes would eliminate any surviving products.

In any case, a trap is fatal to the theory. The purpose of the trap is to isolate the products from the energy source, but this brings the process to a complete halt. For amino acids to join together to make a protein, a large quantity of energy is required, but the very purpose of the trap is to isolate the products from the energy. No energy, no further progress. Even as long ago as 1960 the physical chemist, D. E. Hull, taking into account the rates of destruction versus the rates of formation in these origin of life schemes, concluded that, "The physical chemist, guided by the proved principles of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics, cannot offer any encouragement to the biochemist [origin of life chemist], who needs an ocean full of organic compounds to form even lifeless coacervates" (Nature 186:693). Coacervates are mere blobs of disorganized material. Please note that Hull states that these so-called origin of life schemes are contrary to proved principles of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics, which are essentially the same as natural laws.

To the evolutionist, history began with "In the beginning, hydrogen . . ." To the creationist, history began with "In the beginning, God . . ." Science and natural laws come down solidly in support for the fact of creation.

    "Thou are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created" (Revelation 4:11).

[Soldier4Christ]

Where Can We See Young-Earth Evidence?


"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).

Rocks and fossils do not come with labels informing us of their age. They must be understood in light of their geologic context, and interpreted within a worldview. Unfortunately, my evolutionary colleagues are often so dominated by uniformitarian brainwashing they can't objectively understand young-Earth evidence. Nevertheless, some of the evidence is clear and open for all to see.

One such clear piece of evidence is in Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah. Named by a former director of National Geographic magazine for its photographic beauty, it can be found near the better-known Bryce Canyon National Park. Here one can see numerous clastic "pipes" rising many feet into the air.

A clastic rock consists of eroded fragments of a previous rock. For instance, sandstone consists of sand grains, usually derived from a previously existing granitic source. When sand grains are deposited and cemented together it becomes a sandstone. These clastic pipes are sandstone, nearly identical with a deeply buried sandstone source.

Evidently a tectonic event fluidized an unconsolidated sand deposit, and squeezed it up like toothpaste into piercements in the overlying rock. Once emplaced as a liner "dike," or in this case a vertical "pipe," it hardened into resistant rock. Eventually the surrounding, more easily erodable rock was washed away, leaving only a vertical pipe.

The timing of the deposition, squeezing, and erosion provides the young-Earth argument. According to conventional dating methods, the pipes squeezed up some 150 million years ago, but the source sandstone bed is 175 million years old. Thus, the mother bed remained soft and unconsolidated for 25 million years before it squeezed up.

In the presence of a cementing agent to bind the grains together, which both the source and daughter pipes have, loose sand can harden into a sandstone in a short time, perhaps just years. The fact that the pipes exist at all is evidence that little time passed between deposition and squeezing. Thus, the millions of years postulated by old-Earth advocates never happened.

[Soldier4Christ]

Amber: A Window to the Recent Past

Beautiful, golden fossilized amber begins as resin. Exuded as a sticky liquid from bark or wood, it polymerizes into solid amber. It slowly degrades when left in the open and therefore must be rather quickly buried in dense sediments. There are about twenty amber deposits, the most prominent locations are in the Baltic and Dominican Republic.

Many thousands of amber pieces contain fossils. A variety of animals are preserved in those golden tombs, including insects, crustaceans, tadpoles, lizards, annelids, snails, and spiders. In 1997, a piece of Dominican amber was appraised at $50,000 because it contained a frog. Even hair of mammals has been found. Such preservation gives us an idea of the pre-Flood ecosystem thousands of years ago.

The beautiful and aromatic blue amber of the Dominican Republic is the most rewarding of the ambers for aesthetic and scientific reasons, and holds the record when it comes to fossil content. Not only does this amber contain ten times more insects than Baltic amber, it also is 90% more transparent. Some of the fossilized creatures are extinct, but this is hardly evidence for vertical evolution.

There have even been discoveries of preserved animal and plant DNA, "Amber has preserved ancient life to such infinitesimal detail that it even captures fragments of DNA of the organisms entrapped in it."1 The discovery of DNA segments is not surprising for the creationist. However, it stupefies the Darwinist, because evolutionists maintain that amber is many millions of years old.

The oldest known amber containing insects is — according to evolutionary dating — 146 million years old. But what is found are animal forms that remain unchanged. Secular biologists are constantly amazed that creatures displayed in such a clear sarcophagus can be identified down to genus or even species. For example, small oak tree flowers have been found dated at "90 million years old," but they are still oak. The same is true for the oldest feather (100% feather — not a transition from a scale), the oldest mushroom, mosquito, biting black fly, and fig wasp. All that is seen in these organisms is no change ("stasis") or the possibility of extinction. This in no way supports the case for macroevolution, but is certainly what creationists expect.

To conclude, just as the mineralized fossils found in sedimentary rock units worldwide fail to support macroevolution, the same holds true for animals and plants found in "ancient" amber. Creation scientists aren't particularly surprised by the plants, animals, and DNA found in amber considering the youth of this planet. Furthermore, creationists have been requesting these creatures in amber should be subjected to Carbon 14 dating. A similar requst is made to date the "70 million year old" soft dinosaur tissue recently discovered in eastern Montana. But secular scientists are reticent. Why? The search for truth should actively go where the physical evidence leads.

[Soldier4Christ]

I Love Lucy?

Lucy, to TV audiences of the 1950s and 1960s, was a spunky red-headed actress. To our more educated schoolchildren today, however, "Lucy" means something quite different. She is the celebrated fossil that appears in textbooks as a hairy, semi-naked, upright-walking ape striding boldly across a treeless African landscape. Her jaw is set and she leaves behind her a set of trailing footprints. As the unquestioned icon of human evolution, her fame is comparable to that of the former actress. Why is it that all public school children have heard of this fossil? Let us consider Lucy and her species, Australopithicus afarensis.

The human evolution story usually begins with the more primitive austral-opithocines (literally, "southern apes") that transition into the genus Homo (or human), through either Homo habilis or Homo erectus, depending on who you talk to. Homo habilis is a mixed taxon of both human and ape remains, and has fallen into disrepute. As for Homo erectus, a great many suggest this category be subsumed into Homo sapiens. Thus "Lucy" and the afarensis fossils occupy a critical place in the human evolution story, squarely between that of the truly apish austra-lopithocines and humans.

Lucy's skeleton was about 40% complete and was a remarkable discovery when unearthed by Don Johanson in 1974. The creature would have stood 3.5 feet tall, about the height of a chimpanzee. Its skull was grossly ape-like, and also about the size of a chimp's, with very little in the way of human-like features. Lucy possessed very long fingers with a decided curve to them, like modern apes possess for tree-swinging activities. From other A. afarensis finds, it is believed Lucy possessed long toes with a curvature that also suggested prehensile and arboreal behavior. Lucy's upright-turned shoulder joint enabled suspensory behavior and her hands, wrists, and arms were powerfully prehensile. And so you ask, what makes Lucy such a great missing link? Angles of bones in the (reconstructed) hip joint and knee joint suggest that Lucy spent part of her time walking upright. That is as strong as the evidence gets that she was related to humans. Virtually no anatomists will support Johanson's claim that Lucy was a habitual upright walker, yet this is what most textbooks boast.

There is one more piece of evidence that has been used to argue that Lucy was an upright walker: the Laotoli footprints. In strata comparable in age to those from which Lucy came are a set of very well defined fossil footprints. Remarkably, anatomists are unanimously agreed that the footprints are indistinguishable from those made by modern man on a beach. Rather than admit this as evidence that man and Lucy lived side-by-side in the past, it is claimed that an ape like Lucy must have made the footprints because "we all know" that man hadn't evolved yet. This, despite the fact that it is almost inconceivable that an austro-lopithocine foot could have done it! It is only by circular reasoning that this can be admitted as evidence for human evolution yet this is exactly what is being done in our public schools today.

If you want to know why Lucy is hailed the greatest of missing links it is because she is the best the evolutionist can come up with! There can be no other explanation. It is a credit to an educational establishment that banks on the ignorance of taxpayers that Lucy remains a "missing link."

[Soldier4Christ]

Astrobiology: Follow the . . .

"Astrobiology" is a curious science. Like its predecessor "exobiology" it is, as George Gaylord Simpson once quipped, "a science without a subject." We know about astrophysics and astrochemistry, but where is the biology in astronomy? So far, it's only in the imaginations of evolutionists, who think the recipe for life is as simple as "just add water."

Today, astrobiology is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field that is (as long as the NASA money flows) attracting a great deal of vibrant research into many interesting questions: What is life? What are the conditions for life? How can we detect it? But it is still a science without its prime subject. Nevertheless, there is motivational power in a suggestive name like astrobiology.

Another phrase motivates much of NASA's astrobiology quest: "follow the water." Since life as we know it depends on liquid water, it seems that watery environments are the best places to look. Doubters that water is essential for life usually do more armchair speculation than lab work. Most realists understand water's incomparable qualities.

"Follow the water" explains the excitement any time scientists find evidence for water at some planet or moon, such as last November's announcement that Saturn's moon Enceladus might have liquid under its erupting south pole. Due to its chemical properties, water can only exist under narrow conditions of temperature and pressure. For many years, scientists assumed this meant that only the surfaces of terrestrial planets within a star's habitable zone, where water could exist as a liquid, could host life. Inferences for watery environments under the ice of moons far outside the habitable zone opened up new vistas for imagination.

Another finding bolstering astrobiological hopes was the ubiquity of life in extreme environments. "Extremophiles" have been found around deep sea vents, under Antarctic ice and in boiling-hot springs. These discoveries, however, beg the question of how these hardy life forms originated.

The "follow the water" motto suffers from a logical flaw: water is necessary, but not sufficient for life. It is no more logical than assuming that if iron is found on a planet, skyscrapers can't be far behind. The key to life is the way its ingredients are organized, not just the materials used.

Though life is notoriously difficult to define, Benton Clark of the University of Colorado captured this essence in his definition of life in an article in Astrobiology Magazine: "life reproduces, and life uses energy. These functions follow a set of instructions embedded within the organism."

This suggests a different motto than "follow the water." If taken seriously, it might turn astrobiology in a completely different direction: one that takes seriously intelligence as a cause, and views design detection as the most fruitful approach. It might even lead a scientist to start with John 1:1-3 as a foundation for research. Instead of "follow the water," try "follow the instructions."

[Soldier4Christ]

'Outrageous misinformation' on Kansas standards
Campaign responds to critics of policy to 'teach the controversy'

The leading promoter of intelligent design theory announced a new effort to battle against an "outrageous misinformation campaign" against the new science standards regarding evolution adopted by Kansas schools.

The Seattle-based Discovery Institute hopes its "Stand Up For Science, Stand Up For Kansas" public education campaign, which includes an online petition, will help set the record straight.

Last year, the Kansas State Board of Education revised the state's science standards to require students to learn the full range of scientific evidence for and against biological and chemical evolution. The board heard testimony from 23 scientists and scholars about how such evidence should be presented in the classroom.

The board said "curriculum standards call for students to learn about the best evidence for modern evolutionary theory, but also to learn about areas where scientists are raising scientific criticisms of the theory."

Some opponents, such as Kansas Citizens for Science, have urged schools in the state to ignore the new standards, contending the board "changed the definition of science in order to include supernatural causes as acceptable scientific explanations, inserted numerous statements into the biology standards that have been rejected by mainstream science and are only found in intelligent design creationist literature, and cast unwarranted doubt upon the methodology and validity of science."

But the Discovery Institute insists the aim of the standards merely is to teach the evidence both for and against Darwinian evolution.

The think tank says it opposes any attempt to mandate the teaching of alternative theories such as intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education.

"There is now a concerted and organized effort to undermine those standards and ultimately to repeal them and replace them with dogmatic, Darwin-only science standards," said Rob Crowther, the Discovery Institute's communications director.

The institute points to polls showing an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that when biology teachers present the scientific evidence supporting Darwin's theory of evolution, they also should teach the scientific evidence against it.

Crowther contends Kansas' approach to teaching evolution will require students to analyze the evidence so they will gain the critical thinking skills necessary to become good scientists.

Four other states have similar standards requiring students to learn about critical analysis of evolution – Minnesota, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Meanwhile, a group called the Intelligent Design Network has published a list of frequently asked questions about the standards on a website called Teach Darwin Honestly

The group argues the basis for the changes in curriculum standards "reflect common sense and all have a solid scientific basis."

The standards, the group points out, were crafted by eight members of a writing committee that included three holders of doctoral degrees in the life sciences. The result then was scientifically and educationally validated by 23 experts during three days of hearings in May 2005. The experts included five Ph.D. biologists, four Ph.D. biochemists, three Ph.D. chemists, one Ph.D. geneticist (inventor of the Gene Gun), one Ph.D. quantum physicist, two Ph.D. philosophers of science, one Ph.D. professor of education, three biology teachers, a Muslim journalist and an attorney.

The FAQ points out the teaching of intelligent design was excluded expressly from the standards.

Evolution was not removed from the standards, the FAQ states, adding, "This is misinformation that seeks to suppress any critical analysis of evolution."

The Intelligent Design Network addresses the charge that the curriculum changes will drive businesses out of Kansas and disqualify students for college.

"This is propaganda designed to frighten rather than inform," the group says. "It amounts to crying 'FIRE! FIRE!' in a crowded theater when there is no fire. This deception was concocted by founders of Kansas Citizens for Science and was outlined in the November 2000 issue of Freethought Today, a publication of atheists and agnostics."

The reason there are conflicting reports, the FAQ says, is because organizations "that oppose the changes are unwilling to publicly debate evolution because they falsely claim it is not scientifically controversial. To avoid a discussion of the real controversy they unfairly demean those who seek it."

A message posted on the Kansas Citizens for Science website by Liz Craig, an officer and public relations contact for the group, outlines the strategy opponents used in 1999 and in the most recent debate.

    My strategy at this point is the same as it was in 1999: notify the national and local media about what's going on and portray [advocates] in the harshest light possible, as political opportunists, evangelical activists, ignoramuses, breakers of rules, unprincipled bullies, etc.

    There may no way to head off another science standards debacle, but we can sure make them look like asses as they do what they do. Our target is the moderates who are not that well educated about the issues, most of whom probably are theistic evolutionists. There is no way to convert the creationists.


________________________

The Discovery Institute petition can be found at:

http://www.standupforscience.com/

[Soldier4Christ]

Creation And The Sciences (#19950930)
by Henry Morris, Ph.D.

“So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:27).

The first chapter of Genesis is the foundational chapter of the Bible and, therefore, of all true science. It is the great creation chapter, outlining the events of that first week of time when “the heavens and the earth were finished, and. . . . God ended His work which He had made” (Genesis 2:1,2). Despite the evolutionists, God is not creating or making anything in the world today (except for special miracles as recorded in Scripture), because all His work was finished in that primeval week. He is now engaged in the work of conserving, or saving, what He first created.

There are only three acts of special creation-that is, creation out of nothing except God’s omnipotent word-recorded in this chapter. His other works were those of “making” or “forming” the created entities into complex, functioning systems.

His first creative act was to call into existence the Space/Mass/Time cosmos. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is the domain which we now study in the physical sciences. The second is the domain of the life sciences. “God created . . . every living creature that moveth” (Genesis 1:21). It is significant that the “life” principle required a second act of direct creation. It will thus never be possible to describe living systems solely in terms of physics and chemistry.

The third act of creation was that of the image of God in man and woman. The study of human beings is the realm of the human sciences. Our bodies can be analyzed chemically, and our living processes biologically, but human behavior can only really be understood in terms of our relation to God, whose image we share. HMM

[Soldier4Christ]

Taking back astronomy: the heavens declare “creation”!

by Dr. Jason Lisle, AiG–USA


When I was in college, I took a geology class that presented the secular “millions-of-years” version of the history of the earth. Although I believed in biblical creation, I wasn’t sure (initially) what to make of the scientific evidence that was presented in that class.

Fortunately, at about the same time, I bought and read the famous book by Morris and Whitcomb The Genesis Flood. This book gave me a framework for understanding geological evidence in light of Scripture. I began to really understand how the rocks and fossils could be explained by recent creation and the worldwide Flood of Noah.

Since then, I have read many other excellent resources on biblical creation that have helped me to understand the evidence in the fields of biology, anthropology, genetics, information science and others—but not one on astronomy. Although there have been a handful of creation-based astronomy books, I have not seen a basic, yet comprehensive, overview that provides a foundation for interpretation of astronomical evidence.

For many years now, it has been my aspiration to develop a resource that will do for astronomy what The Genesis Flood did for geology. It has been my burden to write a book that shows the layperson how the universe makes sense in light of what the Bible teaches about creation. This is the purpose of my new book Taking Back Astronomy: The Heavens Declare Creation!

The book covers numerous topics, including the “distant starlight problem,” aliens, the age of the universe, problems with the big bang and naturalism, the unique design of the earth and many others. But mainly, the book gives a biblical view of the universe. Here are some excerpts from a section dealing with the age of the solar system:

    Many of the planets of the solar system also have strong dipole magnetic fields. Jupiter’s magnetic field, for example, is extremely powerful. The magnetic fields of Uranus and Neptune are also quite strong. If these planets were really billions of years old (as secular astronomers believe) then their magnetic fields should be extremely weak by now. Yet, they are not.

    A reasonable explanation for this is that these planets are only a few thousand years old, as the Bible teaches …

    The moon moves about an inch and a half further away from the earth every year due to this tidal interaction. Thus, the moon would have been closer to the earth in the past. Six thousand years ago, the moon would have been about 800 feet (250 m) closer to the earth (which is not much of a change considering the moon is a quarter of a million miles, or 400,000 km, away). So this “spiraling away” of the moon is not a problem over the biblical timescale of six thousand years.

    If, however, the earth and moon were over four billion years old (as big bang supporters teach), then we would have big problems. This is because the moon would have been so close, that it would actually have been touching the earth less than 1.5 billion years ago. This suggests that the moon can’t possibly be as old as secular astronomers claim.

And from another section on laws of nature:

    In fact, Christianity provides the basis for such scientific research. The Christian expects the universe to obey laws because God created those laws—the “ordinances of heaven and earth” (Jeremiah 33:25). The creationist expects that the laws of nature that applied yesterday will apply in the future as well; this is because God is consistent (Malachi 3:6) and does not arbitrarily change His mind (Numbers 23:19). We expect the universe to be understandable, because God created it and He created us with the ability to reason (Isaiah 1:18) and understand.

    However, the naturalist cannot account for these properties of the universe. What reason does he have for expecting the universe to be consistent and predictable? Why should a naturalist be able to assume that the same laws that apply here on Earth also apply on, for example, the surface of the star Alpha Centauri? Applying such assumptions has been overwhelmingly successful, but they are not assumptions that arise out of naturalism, but from the Bible …

    If the universe had not been designed by God, then why should it obey any laws of nature? Where did the laws of nature come from, and why do they obey logical mathematical relationships?

[Soldier4Christ]

Where Can We See Young-Earth Evidence?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1).

Rocks and fossils do not come with labels informing us of their age. They must be understood in light of their geologic context, and interpreted within a worldview. Unfortunately, my evolutionary colleagues are often so dominated by uniformitarian brainwashing they can't objectively understand young-Earth evidence. Nevertheless, some of the evidence is clear and open for all to see.

One such clear piece of evidence is in Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah. Named by a former director of National Geographic magazine for its photographic beauty, it can be found near the better-known Bryce Canyon National Park. Here one can see numerous clastic "pipes" rising many feet into the air.

A clastic rock consists of eroded fragments of a previous rock. For instance, sandstone consists of sand grains, usually derived from a previously existing granitic source. When sand grains are deposited and cemented together it becomes a sandstone. These clastic pipes are sandstone, nearly identical with a deeply buried sandstone source.

Evidently a tectonic event fluidized an unconsolidated sand deposit, and squeezed it up like toothpaste into piercements in the overlying rock. Once emplaced as a liner "dike," or in this case a vertical "pipe," it hardened into resistant rock. Eventually the surrounding, more easily erodable rock was washed away, leaving only a vertical pipe.

The timing of the deposition, squeezing, and erosion provides the young-Earth argument. According to conventional dating methods, the pipes squeezed up some 150 million years ago, but the source sandstone bed is 175 million years old. Thus, the mother bed remained soft and unconsolidated for 25 million years before it squeezed up.

In the presence of a cementing agent to bind the grains together, which both the source and daughter pipes have, loose sand can harden into a sandstone in a short time, perhaps just years. The fact that the pipes exist at all is evidence that little time passed between deposition and squeezing. Thus, the millions of years postulated by old-Earth advocates never happened.

[Soldier4Christ]

Evolution Is Not Based on Natural Laws

According to evolutionary theory, starting with the chaos and disorder of the Big Bang and the simplicity of hydrogen and helium gases, the universe created itself.

One of the claims most frequently used by evolutionists for excluding the scientific evidence for creation in public schools and to be denied for publication in scientific jour-nals is that such evidence is not based on natural laws, therefore it cannot be scientific. They claim that evolutionary theory is based on natural laws and thus qualifies as a scientific theory. Hence, the theory of creation must be excluded, but the theory of evolution is admissible (of course, it must be absolutely atheistic). However, evolutionary theory is not based on natural laws but is actually contrary to natural laws.

Let us first consider evolutionary theories on the origins of the universe. The most widely accepted theory on the origin of the universe is known technically as inflation theory, but is generally referred to as the Big Bang theory. It was recognized that the standard Big Bang theory had insuperable flaws, so something else had to be postulated to rescue the theory. Alan Guth, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, invented the notion, based on quantum theory, that prior to the Big Bang there occurred a fluctuation of a false vacuum. The particle, or whatever it might be called, that was produced in a tiny fraction of a second, inflated itself into something about the size of a grapefruit. From this point on the remainder of the universe was produced essentially similar to the original Big Bang theory, starting with subatomic particles, then hydrogen (75%) and helium (25%), then stars and galaxies, eventually our solar system, and so on until we arrived. There were no natural laws in existence during this hypothetical early stage of the origin of the universe. Evolutionists must suppose that the natural laws that now govern the operation of the known universe somehow were produced by the Big Bang. Therefore, its origin could not have been based on natural laws. If creation is excluded then likewise all evolutionary theories on the origin of the universe must also be excluded.

Furthermore, there are perhaps as many as fifty physical constants in the universe that must be precisely what they are or the universe and life could not exist. They cannot be a little bit more or a little bit less. They include, for example, the universal constants (Boltzman's constant, Planck's constant, and gravitational constant); the mass of elementary particles (pion rest mass, neutron rest mass, electron rest mass, unit charge, mass-energy relation); and fine structure constants (gravitational, weak interaction, electromagnetic, and strong fine constants). The probability that even just one of these physical constants could have been produced with precisely the value required from the chaos of the Big Bang is vanishingly small, let alone fifty or so. Thus, all theories on an evolutionary origin of the universe contradict the laws of probability and must therefore be excluded on this basis as well.

According to evolutionary theory, starting with the chaos and disorder of the Big Bang and the simplicity of hydrogen and helium gases, the universe created itself. This is clearly a violation of natural law, namely the Second Law of Thermodynamics. According to this law an isolated system can never increase in order and complexity, transforming itself to higher and higher levels of organization. An isolated system will inevitably, with time, run down, becoming more and more disorderly. There are no exceptions. Contrary to this natural law, evolutionists believe the universe is an isolated system which transformed itself from the chaos and disorder of the Big Bang and simplicity of hydrogen and helium gases into the incredibly complex universe we have today. This is a direct violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If natural laws are natural laws, the universe could not have created itself. The only alternative is that it is not an isolated system. There must be a Creator that is external to and independent of the natural universe who was responsible for its origin and who created the natural laws that govern its operation.

What about the present state of the universe? There are three possibilities. It could be in a steady state, neither increasing nor decreasing in order and complexity. A second possibility would be that it is increasing in order and complexity. The third possibility would be that it is constantly decreasing in order and complexity. Some evolutionary astronomers reject the Big Bang theory and suggest what is called the Steady State Theory. They would suggest the first possibility. If the Big Bang theory is correct, and as evolutionists believe, the present natural laws are all there is and all there ever has been, then the order and complexity of the universe should constantly be increasing. Creation scientists, on the other hand, maintain that in the beginning God created the universe in a perfect state and therefore matter would have no tendency to increase in order and complexity. Thus, if something has occurred since creation to change the original created state (and we know that it has) the order and complexity of the universe could not be increasing, but it could be decreasing. Fully in accord with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the order and complexity of the universe is constantly decreasing. Every star in the universe is burning up billions of tons of fuel every second. Obviously, that supply of energy cannot last forever. Therefore, unless God intervenes (and the Bible tells us He will), the universe is certain to die. Eventually every star will have burned up all of its fuel and the lights will go out. At this point, there would be no life and no activity anywhere in the universe. It would be dead. If the natural laws which now govern the universe are causing its death and destruction, and these laws are all there is and all there ever has been, how could they have created the universe in the first place? What sort of tortured logic is necessary to suggest such an impossibility? The present state of the universe and the laws that govern it contradict all evolutionary theories concerning its origin.

The knowledge concerning the laws of thermodynamics was developed about one hundred and fifty years ago, but this knowledge was inscribed in the Bible three thousand years ago. In Psalm 102:25_26 we read, "Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment . . ." The Bible tells us that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, but now, in their present state, and fully in accord with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they are wearing out like a suit of clothes. At the time the Bible was written, most people believed that the universe had been here forever and would continue to be here forever. The Bible says, not so, the universe had a beginning and is now wearing out and running down, just as modern science has determined. Furthermore, modern science establishes that the universe had to have a beginning. If the universe had been here forever it would have run down a long time ago. It hasn't run down yet, so it could not have been here forever. Therefore, it had a beginning, and the Biblical statement, "In the beginning," has been scientifically verified, as has its statements concerning the present state of the universe.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

Let us now consider theories on the origin of life. Here also the so-called evolutionary origin of life chemist is forced to utilize processes contrary to natural laws. In their experiments designed to produce even very simple molecules, they run into insuperable difficulties. For example, they must postulate some form of energy that would be available to convert simple molecules into more complex molecules. The only forms of energy that would have been available on their hypothetical primitive Earth would have been energy from the Sun, electrical discharges (lightning), radioactive decay, and heat. Most of the available energy would be that from the Sun. All raw forms of energy are destructive. The raw, unshielded ultraviolet light coming from the Sun is deadly, destroying rapidly the biological molecules required for life, such as amino acids, proteins, DNA, and RNA. UV light rapidly kills bacteria by disrupting molecules. All forms of life from bacteria to man are killed by UV light, and you know that if you are hit by lightning you would not become more complex—you would be severely injured or killed.

In all experiments employing these sources of raw energy, the rates of destruction vastly exceed the rates of formation. How then was Miller in his experiment1 able to obtain a small quantity of several amino acids and a few other products? He employed a trap. As tiny quantities of these substances were constantly being created and were immediately isolated in the trap, the gases he employed were circulating continuously through his raw energy, electrical discharges (simulating lightning). Without the trap, the products would have been destroyed by the electrical discharges at rates that vastly exceed the rates of formation, and no detectable quantities of the products would have formed. There could have been no traps available on the hypothetical primitive Earth. If these products were formed in the atmosphere they would be destroyed before they could reach the ocean. Furthermore, the ocean could not have acted as a trap since even there destructive processes would eliminate any surviving products.

In any case, a trap is fatal to the theory. The purpose of the trap is to isolate the products from the energy source, but this brings the process to a complete halt. For amino acids to join together to make a protein, a large quantity of energy is required, but the very purpose of the trap is to isolate the products from the energy. No energy, no further progress. Even as long ago as 1960 the physical chemist, D. E. Hull, taking into account the rates of destruction versus the rates of formation in these origin of life schemes, concluded that, "The physical chemist, guided by the proved principles of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics, cannot offer any encouragement to the biochemist [origin of life chemist], who needs an ocean full of organic compounds to form even lifeless coacervates" (Nature 186:693). Coacervates are mere blobs of disorganized material. Please note that Hull states that these so-called origin of life schemes are contrary to proved principles of chemical thermodynamics and kinetics, which are essentially the same as natural laws.

To the evolutionist, history began with "In the beginning, hydrogen . . ." To the creationist, history began with "In the beginning, God . . ." Science and natural laws come down solidly in support for the fact of creation.

    "Thou are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created" (Revelation 4:11).

Endnote

1. Miller, S. L. May 15, 1953. A production of amino acids under possible primitive earth conditions. Science 117:528.

* Dr. Duane Gish is Senior Vice President Emeritus of ICR.

[Soldier4Christ]

 Evolution and Me

By: George Gilder
National Review


Editors Note: Discovery senior fellow, technology guru and conservative economist George Gilder has a major essay in the new issue of National Review, entitled “Evolution and Me: Darwinian Theory has Become an All-Purpose Obstacle to Thought Rather than an Enabler of Scientific Advance.”

The piece offers a unique and fresh perspective on the issue of materialism vs. design and is a breakthrough description of the case against Darwinism and for intelligent design based largely on information theory and our understanding of information in the age of supercomputing and instant information delivery. It turns out that Darwin’s theory is especially vulnerable to the analysis of life from the hierarchical structure that Gilder says a 21st century understanding of modern physics, mathematics and computer science provide.

Gilder’s penultimate point? “Wherever there is information there is a preceding intelligence.”

“Everywhere we encounter it,” Gilder writes, “information does not bubble up from a random flux or prebiotic soup. It comes from mind. Taking the hierarchy beyond the word, the central dogma of intelligent design ordains that word is subordinate to mind. Mind can generate and lend meaning to words but words in themselves cannot generate mind or intelligence.”

Throughout the article Gilder shows how irreducible complexity in mathematics, in logic, in computer science, in physics, all point to a similar irreducible complexity in biological systems as well. He winds through information theory and economics, moving smoothly from quantum physics to mathematics, all the while showing how “Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture. As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.”

You’ll want to read Gilder’s view on why Darwin’s theory of evolution falls down, and why intelligent design is a better explanation.


I first became conscious that something was awry in Darwinian science some 40 years ago as I was writing my early critique of sexual liberation, Sexual Suicide (revised and republished as Men and Marriage). At the time, the publishing world was awash with such titles as Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo and Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis, which touted or pruriently probed the animality of human beings. Particularly impressive to me was The Imperial Animal, a Darwinian scholarly work by two anthropologists aptly named Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox that gave my theory of sex roles a panoply of primatological support, largely based on the behavior of patriarchal hamadryas baboons.

Darwinism seemed to offer me and its other male devotees a long-sought tool — resembling the x-ray glasses lamentably found elsewhere only in cartoons — for stripping away the distracting décor of clothing and the political underwear of ideology worn by feminists and other young women of the day. Using this swashbuckling scheme of fitness and survival, nature “red in tooth and claw,” we could reveal our ideological nemeses as naked mammals on the savannah to be ruled and protected by hunting parties of macho males, rather like us.

In actually writing and researching Sexual Suicide, however, I was alarmed to discover that both sides could play the game of telling just-so stories. In The Descent of Woman, Elaine Morgan showed humans undulating from the tides as amphibious apes mostly led by females. Jane Goodall croodled about the friendliness of “our closest relatives,” the chimpanzees, and movement feminists flogged research citing the bonobo and other apes as chiefly matriarchal and frequently homosexual.

These evolutionary sex wars were mostly unresolvable because, at its root, Darwinian theory is tautological. What survives is fit; what is fit survives. While such tautologies ensure the consistency of any arguments based on them, they could contribute little to an analysis of what patterns of behavior and what ideals and aspirations were conducive to a good and productive society. Almost by definition, Darwinism is a materialist theory that banishes aspirations and ideals from the picture. As an all-purpose tool of reductionism that said that whatever survives is, in some way, normative, Darwinism could inspire almost any modern movement, from the eugenic furies of Nazism to the feminist crusades of Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.

So in the end, for better or for worse, my book dealt chiefly with sociological and anthropological arguments and left out Darwin.

Turning to economics in researching my 1981 book Wealth & Poverty, I incurred new disappointments in Darwin and materialism. Forget God — economic science largely denies intelligent design or creation even by human beings. Depicting the entrepreneur as a mere opportunity scout, arbitrageur, or assembler of available chemical elements, economic theory left no room for the invention of radically new goods and services, and little room for economic expansion except by material “capital accumulation” or population growth. Accepted widely were Darwinian visions of capitalism as a dog-eat-dog zero-sum struggle impelled by greed, where the winners consume the losers and the best that can be expected for the poor is some trickle down of crumbs from the jaws (or tax tables) of the rich.

In my view, the zero-sum caricature applied much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources. (For examples, look anywhere in the socialist Third World.) I preferred Michael Novak’s vision of capitalism as the “mind-centered system,” with the word itself derived from the Latin caput, meaning head. Expressing the infinite realm of ideas and information, it is a domain of abundance rather than of scarcity. Flouting zero-sum ideas, supply-side economics sprang from this insight. By tapping the abundance of human creativity, lower tax rates can yield more revenues than higher rates do and low-tax countries can raise their government spending faster than the high-tax countries do. Thus free nations can afford to win wars without first seizing resources from others. Ultimately capitalism can transcend war by creating rather than capturing wealth — a concept entirely alien to the Darwinian model.

After Wealth & Poverty, my work focused on the subject of human creativity as epitomized by science and technology and embodied in computers and communications. At the forefront of this field is a discipline called information theory. Largely invented in 1948 by Claude Shannon of MIT, it rigorously explained digital computation and transmission by zero-one, or off-on, codes called “bits.” Shannon defined information as unexpected bits, or “news,” and calculated its passage over a “channel” by elaborate logarithmic rules. That channel could be a wire or another other path across a distance of space, or it could be a transfer of information across a span of time, as in evolution.

Crucial in information theory was the separation of content from conduit — information from the vehicle that transports it. It takes a low-entropy (predictable) carrier to bear high-entropy (unpredictable) messages. A blank sheet of paper is a better vessel for a new message than one already covered with writing. In my book Telecosm (2000), I showed that the most predictable available information carriers were the regular waves of the electromagnetic spectrum and prophesied that all digital information would ultimately flow over it in some way. Whether across time (evolution) or across space (communication), information could not be borne by chemical processes alone, because these processes merged or blended the medium and the message, leaving the data illegible at the other end.

While studying computer science, I learned of the concept of a universal computing machine, an idealized computer envisioned by the tormented genius Alan Turing. (After contributing significantly to the Enigma project for decrypting German communications during World War II, Turing committed suicide following shock therapy — “treatment” for his homosexuality.) A so-called “Turing machine” is an idealized computer that can be created using any available material, from beach sand to Buckyballs, from microchips to matchsticks. Turing made clear that the essence of a computer is not its material substance but its architecture of ideas.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

IDEAS SUPREME

Based as it is on ideas, a computer is intrinsically an object of intelligent design. Every silicon chip holds as many as 700 layers of implanted chemicals in patterns defined with nanometer precision and then is integrated with scores of other chips by an elaborately patterned architecture of wires and switches all governed by layers of software programming written by human beings. Equally planned and programmed are all the computers running the models of evolution and “artificial life” that are central to neo-Darwinian research. Everywhere on the apparatus and in the “genetic algorithms” appear the scientist’s fingerprints: the “fitness functions” and “target sequences.” These algorithms prove what they aim to refute: the need for intelligence and teleology (targets) in any creative process.

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or “source code” used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.

The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects Shannon’s concept of entropy and his measure of “news.” Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes.

As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous “information.” In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.

Biologists commonly blur the information into the slippery synecdoche of DNA, a material molecule, and imply that life is biochemistry rather than information processing. But even here, the deoxyribonucleic acid that bears the word is not itself the word. Like a sheet of paper or a computer memory chip, DNA bears messages but its chemistry is irrelevant to its content. The alphabet’s nucleotide “bases” form “words” without help from their bonds with the helical sugar-phosphate backbone that frames them. The genetic words are no more dictated by the chemistry of their frame than the words in Scrabble are determined by the chemistry of their wooden racks or by the force of gravity that holds them.

This reality expresses a key insight of Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate co-author of the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Crick expounded and enshrined what he called the “Central Dogma” of molecular biology. The Central Dogma shows that influence can flow from the arrangement of the nucleotides on the DNA molecule to the arrangement of amino acids in proteins, but not from proteins to DNA. Like a sheet of paper or a series of magnetic points on a computer’s hard disk or the electrical domains in a random-access memory — or indeed all the undulations of the electromagnetic spectrum that bear information through air or wires in telecommunications — DNA is a neutral carrier of information, independent of its chemistry and physics. By asserting that the DNA message precedes and regulates the form of the proteins, and that proteins cannot specify a DNA program, Crick’s Central Dogma unintentionally recapitulates St. John’s assertion of the primacy of the word over the flesh.

By assuming that inheritance is a chemical process, Darwin ran afoul of the Central Dogma. He believed that the process of inherita The Origin of Species, though, Gregor Mendel showed that genes do not blend together like chemicals mixing. As the Central Dogma ordains and information theory dictates, the DNA program is discrete and digital, and its information is transferred through chemical carriers — but it is not specified by chemical forces. Each unit of biological information is passed on according to a digital program — a biological code — that is transcribed and translated into amino acids.

THE MEDIUM NOT THE MESSAGE

Throughout the 20th century and on into the 21st, many scientists and politicians have followed Darwin in missing the significance of the “Central Dogma.” They have assumed that life is dominated by local chemistry rather than by abstract informative codes. Upholding the inheritability of acquired characteristics, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Trofim Lysenko, Aleksandr Oparin, Friedrich Engels, and Josef Stalin all espoused the primacy of proteins and thus of the environment over the genetic endowment. By controlling the existing material of human beings through their environment, the Lamarckians believed that Communism could blend and breed a new Soviet man through chemistry. Dissenters were murdered or exiled. (The grim story is vividly told in Hubert Yockey’s definitive 2005 book, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life.)

For some 45 years, Barry Commoner, the American Marxist biologist, refused to relinquish the Soviet mistake. He repeated it in an article in Harper’s in 2002, declaring that proteins must have come first because DNA cannot be created without protein-based enzymes. In fact, protein-based enzymes cannot be created without a DNA (or RNA) program; proteins have no structure without the information that defines them. As Yockey explains, “It is mathematically impossible, not just unlikely, for information to be transferred from the protein alphabet to the [DNA] alphabet. That is because no codes exist to transfer information from the 20-letter protein alphabet to the 64-letter [codon] alphabet of [DNA].” Twenty letters simply cannot directly specify the content of patterns of 64 codons.

But the beat goes on. By defrocking Lawrence Summers for implying the possible primacy of the genetic word over environmental conditions in the emergence of scientific aptitudes, the esteemed professoriat at Harvard expressed its continued faith in Lamarckian and Marxian biology.

Over at NASA, U.S. government scientists make an analogous mistake in constantly searching for traces of protein as evidence of life on distant planets. Without a hierarchy of informative programming, proteins are mere matter, impotent to produce life. The Central Dogma dooms the NASA pursuit of proteins on the planets to be what we might call a “wild goo chase.” As St. John implies, life is defined by the presence and precedence of the word: informative codes.


cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

I began my 1989 book on microchips, Microcosm: The Quantum Era in Economics and Technology, by quoting physicist Max Planck, the discoverer of the quantum, on the resistance to his theory among the scientific establishment — the public scientists of any period whom I have dubbed the Panel of Peers. By any name they define the “consensus” of respectable science. At the beginning of the 20th century, said Planck, they balked at taking the “enormous step from the visible and directly controllable to the invisible sphere, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.”

But by entrance into the “microcosm” of the once-invisible world of atoms, all physical science was transformed. When it turned out early in the 20th century that the atom was not a “massy unbreakable particle,” as Isaac Newton had imagined, but a complex arena of quantum information, the classical physics of Newton began inexorably to break down. We are now at a similar point in the history of the sciences of life. The counterpoint to the atom in physics is the cell in biology. At the beginning of the 21st century it turns out that the biological cell is not a “simple lump of protoplasm” as long believed but a microcosmic processor of information and synthesizer of proteins at supercomputer speeds. As a result, breaking down as well is the established biology of Darwinian materialism.

No evolutionary theory can succeed without confronting the cell and the word. In each of the some 300 trillion cells in every human body, the words of life churn almost flawlessly through our flesh and nervous system at a speed that utterly dwarfs the data rates of all the world’s supercomputers. For example, just to assemble some 500 amino-acid units into each of the trillions of complex hemoglobin molecules that transfer oxygen from the lungs to bodily tissues takes a total of some 250 peta operations per second. (The word “peta” refers to the number ten to the 15th power — so this tiny process requires 250x1015 operations.)

Interpreting a DNA program and translating it through a code into a physical molecule, the cells collectively function at almost a thousand times the processing speed of IBM’s new Blue Gene/L state-of-the-art supercomputer. This information processing in one human body for just one function exceeds by some 25 percent the total computing power of all the world’s 200 million personal computers produced every year.

Yet, confined as they are to informational functions, computer models stop after performing the initial steps of decoding the DNA and doing a digital-to-analog conversion of the information. The models do not begin to accomplish the other feats of the cell, beginning with the synthesis of protein molecules from a code, and then the exquisitely accurate folding of the proteins into the precise shape needed to fit them together in functional systems. This process of protein synthesis and “plectics” cannot even in principle be modeled on a computer. Yet it is essential to the translation of information into life.

WORRYING THE WORD

Within the Panel of Peers, the emergence of the cell as supercomputer precipitated a mostly unreported wave of consternation. Crick himself ultimately arrived at the theory of “panspermia” — in which he speculated that life was delivered to the earth from other galaxies, thus relegating the problems of creation to a realm beyond our reach. Sensing a crisis in his then exclusively materialist philosophy, neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins of Oxford coined the word “meme” to incorporate information in biology, describing ideas as undergoing a Darwinian process of survival of the fittest. But in the end Dawkins’s memes are mere froth on the surface of a purely chemical tempest, fictive reflections of material reality rather than a governing level of information. The tongue still wags the mind.

These stratagems can be summed up as an effort to subdue the word by shrinking it into a physical function, whimsically reducing it to a contortion of the pharynx reflecting a firing of synapses following a mimetic emanation of matter from a random flux of quanta shaking physical atoms. Like the whirling tigers of the children’s fable, the recursive loops of names for the word chase their tails around the tree of life, until there is left at the bottom only a muddled pool of what C. S. Lewis called “nothing buttery.”

“Nothing buttery” was Lewis’s way of summing up the stance of public scientists who declared that “life” or the brain or the universe is “nothing but” matter in motion. As MIT’s Marvin Minsky famously asserted, “The brain is nothing but a ‘meat machine.’” In DNA (2003), Crick’s collaborator James Watson doggedly insisted that the discovery of DNA “proved” that life is nothing but or “merely chemistry and physics.” It is a flat-universe epistemology, restricted to what technologists call the “physical layer,” which is the lowest of seven layers of abstraction in information technology between silicon chips and silica fiber on the bottom and the programs and content at the top.

After 100 years or so of attempted philosophical leveling, however, it turns out that the universe is stubbornly hierarchical. It is a top-down “nested hierarchy,” in which the higher levels command more degrees of freedom than the levels below them, which they use and constrain. Thus, the higher levels can neither eclipse the lower levels nor be reduced to them. Resisted at every step across the range of reductive sciences, this realization is now inexorable. We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth. As the famed chemist Michael Polanyi pointed out in 1961, all these fields depend on chemical and physical processes, but are not defined by them. Operating farther up the hierarchy, biological macro-systems such as brains, minds, human beings, businesses, societies, and economies consist of intelligent agents that harness chemical and physical laws to higher purposes but are not reducible to lower entities or explicable by them.

Materialism generally and Darwinian reductionism, specifically, comprise thoughts that deny thought, and contradict themselves. As British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Nobel-laureate biologist Max Delbrück (who was trained as a physicist) described the contradiction in an amusing epigram when he said that the neuroscientist’s effort to explain the brain as mere meat or matter “reminds me of nothing so much as Baron Munchausen’s attempt to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.”

Analogous to such canonical self-denying sayings as The Cretan says all Cretans are liars, the paradox of the self-denying mind tends to stultify every field of knowledge and art that it touches and threatens to diminish this golden age of technology into a dark age of scientistic reductionism and, following in its trail, artistic and philosophical nihilism.

All right, have a tantrum. Hurl the magazine aside. Say that I am some insidious charlatan of “creation-lite,” or, God forfend, “intelligent design.” “In the beginning was the Word” is from a mystical passage in a verboten book, the Bible, which is not a scientific text. On your side in rebuffing such arguments is John E. Jones III of central Pennsylvania, the gullible federal judge who earlier this year made an obsequious play to the Panel of Peers with an attempted refutation of what has been termed “intelligent design.”

But intelligent design is merely a way of asserting a hierarchical cosmos. The writings of the leading exponents of the concept, such as the formidably learned Stephen Meyer and William Dembski (both of the Discovery Institute), steer clear of any assumption that the intelligence manifestly present in the universe is necessarily supernatural. The intelligence of human beings offers an “existence proof” of the possibility of intelligence and creativity fully within nature. The idea that there is no other intelligence in the universe in any other form is certainly less plausible than the idea that intelligence is part of the natural world and arises in many different ways. MIT physicist and quantum-computing pioneer Seth Lloyd has just published a scintillating book called Programming the Universe that sees intelligence everywhere emerging from quantum processes themselves — the universe as a quantum computer. Lloyd would vehemently shun any notion of intelligent design, but he posits the universe as pullulating with computed functions. It is not unfair to describe this ubiquitous intelligence as something of a Godlike force pervading the cosmos. God becomes psi, the “quantum wave function” of the universe.

All explorers on the frontiers of nature ultimately must confront the futility of banishing faith from science. From physics and neural science to psychology and sociology, from mathematics to economics, every scientific belief combines faith and facts in an inextricable weave. Climbing the epistemic hierarchy, all pursuers of truth necessarily reach a point where they cannot prove their most crucial assumptions.

cont'd

[Soldier4Christ]

IRREDUCIBLE

The hierarchical hypothesis itself, however, can be proven. Kurt Gödel, perhaps the preeminent mathematician of the 20th century and Einstein’s close colleague, accomplished the proof in 1931. He demonstrated in essence that every logical system, including mathematics, is dependent on premises that it cannot prove and that cannot be demonstrated within the system itself, or be reduced to it. Refuting the confident claims of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert that it would be possible to subdue all mathematics to a mechanical unfolding of the rules of symbolic logic, Gödel’s proof was a climactic moment in modern thought.

This saga of mathematical discovery has been beautifully expounded in a series of magisterial books and articles by David Berlinski, notably his intellectual autobiography Black Mischief (1986), The Advent of the Algorithm (2000), and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005). After contemplating the aporias of number theory in Black Mischief, he concluded, “It is the noble assumption of our own scientific culture that sooner or later everything might be explained: AIDS and the problems of astrophysics, the life cycle of the snail and the origins of the universe, the coming to be and the passing away. . . . Yet it is possible, too, that vast sections of our experience might be so very rich in information that they stay forever outside the scope of theory and remain simply what they are: unique, ineffable, insubsumable, irreducible.” And the irreducibility of mathematical axioms translates directly into a similar irreducibility of physics. As Caltech physicist and engineer Carver Mead, a guiding force in three generations of Silicon Valley technology, put it: “The simplest model of the galaxy is the galaxy.”

The irreducibility takes many forms and generates much confusion. Michael Behe, author of the classic Darwin’s Black Box (1996), shows that myriad phenomena in biology, such as the bacterial flagellum and the blood-clotting cascade, are “irreducibly complex” in the sense that they do not function unless all their components are present. It’s an all-or-nothing system incompatible with an evolutionary theory of slow, step-by-step incremental change. Behe’s claim of “irreducible complexity” is manifestly true, but it thrusts the debate into a morass of empirical biology, searching for transitional forms in the same way that paleontologists search for transitional fossils. Nothing definitive is found, but there are always enough molecules of smoke, or intriguing lumps of petrified stool or suggestive shards of bones or capsules of interesting gas, to persuade the gullible judge or professor that somewhere there was a flock of flying dragons or a whirling cellular rotaxane that fit the bill.

Mathematician Gregory Chaitin, however, has shown that biology is irreducibly complex in a more fundamental way: Physical and chemical laws contain hugely less information than biological phenomena. Chaitin’s algorithmic information theory demonstrates not that particular biological devices are irreducibly complex but that all biology as a field is irreducibly complex. It is above physics and chemistry on the epistemological ladder and cannot be subsumed under chemical and physical rules. It harnesses chemistry and physics to its own purposes. As chemist Arthur Robinson, for 15 years a Linus Pauling collaborator, puts it: “Using physics and chemistry to model biology is like using lego blocks to model the World Trade Center.” The instrument is simply too crude.

Science gained its authority from the successes of technology. When Daniel Dennett of Tufts wants to offer unanswerable proof of the supremacy of science, he writes, “I have yet to meet a postmodern science critic who is afraid to fly in an airplane because he doesn’t trust the calculations of the thousands of aeronautical engineers and physicists that have demonstrated and exploited the principles of flight.” Dennett is right: Real science is practical and demonstrable, following the inspiration of Michael Faraday, Heinrich Hertz, Thomas Edison, William Shockley, Robert Noyce, Charles Townes, and Charles Kao — the people who built the machines of the modern age. If you can build something, you can understand it.

The Panel of Peers, however, is drifting away from these technological foundations, where you have to demonstrate what you invent — and now seeks to usurp the role of philosophers and theologians. When Oxford physicist David Deutsch, or Scientific American in a cover story, asserts the reality of infinite multiple parallel universes, it is a trespass far beyond the bounds of science into the realm of wildly speculative philosophy. The effort to explain the miracles of our incumbent universe by postulating an infinite array of other universes is perhaps the silliest stratagem in the history of science.

Darwin’s critics are sometimes accused of confusing methodological materialism with philosophical materialism, but this is in fact a characteristic error of Darwin’s advocates. Multiverse theory itself is based on a methodological device invented by Richard Feynman, one that “reifies” math and sees it as a physical reality. (It’s an instance of what Whitehead called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”) Feynman proposed the mapping of electron paths by assuming the electron took all possible routes, and then calculating the interference patterns that result among their wave functions. This method was a great success. But despite some dabbling as a youth in many-worlds theory, Feynman in his prime was too shrewd to suggest that the electron actually took all the possible paths, let alone to accept the theory that these paths compounded into entire separate universes.

cont'd