Views of logic: theism vs atheism part 3

In a previous post, I noted that while atheists claim that theists simply choose to "ignore" the laws of logic and physics when they choose, it's actually the other way around.  Unless you decide to suspend the laws of physics and logic when you wish, you must actually come to the conclusion that the universe had a Personal First Cause outside of space and time.

This was all in response to a comment by an atheist that I saw reposted on the pleaseconvinceme blog.  But there was something else about that post that got me riled up.  The original post said:

Theists imagine anything is possible simply because they have an imagination that can dream up anything they want. Atheists realize that isn't the case.

What I find especially interesting about that statement is that I am actually frustrated by this tactic coming from the atheist camp, not the theist camp.  This is especially obvious when you study the naturalistic theory of evolution as an explanation for everything.  For example, one of the issues I noted last time was with the charge from atheists that the belief in God that runs rampant within our species is simply a product of evolutionary history.  The thought is that, at a previous point in our species, the belief in a god or gods gave those believers some selective advantage.  So now, even though that's not necessarily giving anyone a selective reproductive advantage anymore, it's something that has been imprinted in our species from our evolutionary history.  That's actually become a working theory nowadays.  The problem is there is zero evidence of this.  It's an example of "as long as you can imagine it and it's consistent with naturalistic evolution, it's accepted as true".

Another example of this particular problem is where did our morals come from?  Well, clearly (since there is no god), our morals do not come from a transcendent source.  They must have been at one time given us an evolutionary advantage over the other humans who did not have those morals.  Nowadays, since we are a "social species", morals are in place in our genes so that we contribute to the greater good of our whole species.  The evidence for this is as abundant as for the above example.  That is to say, it is completely absent. But it's an explanation that is consistent with the naturalistic evolutionary paradigm, so it's taken as a given now that someone thought of it.

Of course, the most classic example of, "as long as I can imagine it, it must be true" is Darwin's "warm little pond".  In regards to theories of the origin of life, Darwin said in a famous letter to one of his colleagues that he could imagine a warm little pond where life got started.  This idea alone gave rise to the entire hypothesis of a prebiotic soup that was supposedly present on the early earth, from which life arose. It wasn't long before this idea, for which there was zero evidentiary support, became scientific dogma.  The idea of a prebiotic soup became so prevalent that nowadays everyone "knows" that's where life came from.  Very, very interesting how these things happen.

Following up on Pascal's wager: the probability of God

Last time I sort of just asserted that "the probability the bible is true is actually very, very close to one."  What if this were true.  What if, when you consider all of the evidence, then the probability of the bible being true is really, really high?  In that case, as we go back to the question of Pascal's wager, not only do you have an infinite reward in this wager, but you have extremely good odds of that infinite reward existing.  Not exactly how the Vegas bookies would set things up, is it?


However, I never gave any sort of evidence for that assertion.  Unfortunately, that is the subject of this entire blog, and it would be very difficult to encompass in a single post, but I will try to list several reasons for this to be true.

1. The universe had a beginning.
2. The universe (the laws of physics and the overall make-up of the universe) is exquisitely designed.
3. The special set circumstances that must have occurred in order to produce a life-friendly planet was exquisitely finely-tuned (location and composition of the solar system, size of our moon, etc.).
4. The origin of life occurred in a geological instant.
5. The earliest life was incredibly complex.
6. The simplest life is incredibly complex.
7. The events that have taken place on this planet, in order for the planet to continue to be life-friendly for the past 4 billion years, have been exquisitely finely-tuned, (and must have taken planning).
8. The sequence of events that have taken place before the appearance of man seem designed for the benefit of man.
9. The timing of the formation of the solar system is finely-tuned.
10. The timing of the appearance of man is finely-tuned.
11. Our position in the history of the universe and our location within our universe provides us with the optimal conditions to study our universe.
12. The order and rationality of the universe demands an explanation beyond randomness.  How can these things emerge out of chaos?
13. The existence of immaterial, abstract, transcendent entities (including mathematics, logic, yes, even morality) demands an explanation beyond the material world.
14. The existence of the mind and free will demands an explanation beyond the Naturalistic Theory of Evolution.
15. The events recorded in Genesis 1 are almost perfectly consistent with the sequence of cosmological, geological, and biological events discerned from science. (Yes, I'm serious.)
16. The biblical record has never been adequately challenged from either a historical or archaeological standpoint.
17. The preponderance of fulfilled prophecy in the bible is remarkable.
18. The emergence of the apostolic church is only consistent with the bible accurately depicting the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I'm sure there are more, but I believe this is enough.  In fact, if I ever get readers on my blog, you probably would fall asleep before getting through that list.  But, perhaps in the coming weeks I'll expand on some or all of these.  For now, suffice it to say that the case for Christianity is more than just based on faith.  It is a case built on the cumulative evidence from almost every academic discipline you can think of.  Sure, each argument can by itself be avoided, but in most cases, in order to deny any single argument, you must appeal to a small, ad hoc probabilities.  When taken together, I assert that you have to twist and turn so many times, the mountain of evidence in favor of the Christian view is so great, to deny it is a matter of volition, not rationality.  (Of course, I am certain many would disagree with me.  Hence, this blog.)

Article on Titan's Atmosphere

The other day, I received an email from someone asking questions about a scientific discovery about Titan's atmosphere (a news release about this can be found here). In the discovery, scientists from U Ariz simulated conditions on Titan's atmosphere and found molecules that could be the precursors to life found in the reaction vessel!

What do I think about this discovery, from a Christian perspective? Did God create life, or did life arise naturalistically from non-living material on the early earth?

First of all, I think this discovery (which apparently has not been published yet in a peer-reviewed journal) should draw quite a bit of interest from both the origin of life community and, of course, organizations like RTB. To offer a brief critique of it, let me first start out by saying that the news article, as usual, appears to have grossly over-interpreted the conclusions that can be drawn from this study (as far as I can tell from only reading the scientific abstract, which is all that is currently available). That being said, I want to make the disclaimer that this study appears to be very good science, and I think it's really interesting and hope they do more on it. It's exciting research, and uncovering more about the universe and the conditions that may be necessary for life to form will help uncover the truth, which is always a good thing if you're a Christian.

So, a brief critique. First, note that the scientific results they are looking to publish are the result of a simulation of Titan's atmosphere. They took the small molecule gases that were found in Titan's atmosphere (CO, methane, and nitrogen), loaded them into a specialized chamber, and bombarded them with microwave radiation. What they found aggregated at the bottom of the chamber was a mix of lots of really complex molecules, including the five nucleobases used in DNA and RNA (those are, adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil and thymine) and the two simplest amino acids. That alone is amazing! But is that enough (or even close to enough) to lend support to the naturalistic origin of life?

I would say no, for two big, big reasons (and several small reasons).

First, there is either too much oxygen or not enough oxygen. What I mean is this. The article makes a point that there is enough oxygen in the atmosphere (in the from of CO) to promote the formation of the prebiotics, but not too much. You see, if there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere, the prebiotics will become over-oxidized and useless. However, because of the presence of UV radiation, the prebiotics are also destroyed: in the same way UV radiation damages your skin, UV radiation destroys the bonds of prebiotics. The only way to block the UV radiation is by an ozone layer. However, an ozone layer will not form in an oxygen deficient environment. In other words, too much oxygen, you get destruction of prebiotics, and too little oxygen and you get too much UV light, which destroys the prebiotics. The big problem is, there is no middle ground! The amount of oxygen necessary to form an adequate ozone layer far exceeds the level of oxygen where you get too much oxidation! (This is called the UV-oxygen paradox.) And notice that the researchers admit there is UV light in Titan's atmosphere, but in their simulations, they use microwave radiation (instead of UV radiation). I wonder what would have happened if they had used UV radiation in the same way that it is present on Titan's atmosphere?

Second, the article focuses on a few of the exciting molecules they formed, but it says nothing about the "toxic" molecules they also formed. What I mean by toxic is "detrimental to prebiotic chemistry". The goo they scraped off the bottom of the chamber undoubtedly also contained a series of other complex molecules, the presence of which would completely halt the formation of more complex biomolecules, such as proteins or RNA chains. Furthermore, they are still faced with the problem of homochirality (I may discuss this problem more at a future date).

You also have a multitude of other problems, such as a prohibitively small concentration of prebiotics falling into the ocean (if it's not concentrated enough, the prebiotics just won't ever "find" each other to make bonds), an alarmingly fast degradation rate of the prebiotics (most likely far outstripping the production rate from the atmosphere), the unknown mechanism to form bonds between prebiotics in the presence of water (because water inhibits these reactions), and the list goes on. For more about these problems, see where I quoted Dr Robert Shapiro here.

Summary of meeting on 10/24 (part 6)

I'm going to try to finish up the summary of our last meeting here in this post, because the excessive number of sub-parts is getting kind of ridiculous.

I still have one more point to cover here: are there chemical pathways, relevant to the conditions on the early earth, by which life's precursor molecules could have been made? If so, we should be able to deduce these pathways through conducting laboratory experiments.

So, what is the current state of biochemical pathways pertaining to the origin of life? Let's start with a history lesson. Most biology textbooks these days discuss seminal work by Stanley Miller in the 1950's (called the Miller-Urey experiment) in which he bubbled water vapor into a chamber filled with ammonia and methane (hydrogen-rich gases thought to comprise the primordial atmosphere). After simulating lightning with electric discharges for a long period of time, he found that some simple amino acids had formed in the reaction chamber! Subsequently, the origin of life research community had great optimism that the solution to the origin of life problem was just around the corner.

Fast forward 50+ years to today. Now we know the primordial atmosphere did not have the composition that Miller thought it to have. (Instead of reducing gases, such as ammonia and methane -- which have lots of hydrogen atoms -- it contained oxidizing gases, such as carbon dioxide and oxygen.) Most origin of life researchers today consider the Miller-Urey experiment to be irrelevant to the origin of life.

Most scientists today consider something called the "RNA world hypothesis" to be central to the origin of life question. Today, we live in a DNA-protein world, where DNA stores genetic information, and proteins catalyze the biochemical reactions. It would be difficult to envision that life could originate that way, since you would have to get two extremely rare events happening simultaneously: the chemical origins of DNA and of proteins. On the other hand, RNA can fulfill both roles, albeit slightly less efficiently. RNA can store information in the same way DNA can (but is less stable), and some RNA molecules can catalyze reactions similar to what proteins do (but not as well). So if the first life-form was RNA-based, instead of DNA/protein-based, then this would eliminate a major barrier to the likelihood that life arose naturalistically. Later, DNA and proteins could have slowly replaced RNA in its roles as information carrier and reaction catalyst. (This replacement would have been more or less permanent because DNA and proteins are better at their respective jobs than the RNA was.)

Now the question comes down to identifying a reasonable way in which RNA could have formed on the early earth. However, efforts to do this have been met with uninspiring results. In 2002, at an origin of life conference, here is how one leading origin of life researcher (Leslie Orgel) put it: "It would be a miracle if a strand of RNA ever appeared on the early Earth."

However, perhaps he was too quick to pronounce the miraculous-seeming nature of life's origin. Research published this year on the synthesis of nucleotides (the building blocks of RNA) demonstrated that perhaps it would be less-than-miraculous if a strand of RNA appeared on early Earth. On the other hand, some in the scientific community are skeptical. Leading origin of life researcher Robert Shapiro (and by the way, if I had to identify the three leading origin of life researchers of the 20th century, I would have said Miller, Orgel, and Shapiro) had this to say of the recent work: "The flaw with this kind of research is not in the chemistry. The flaw is in the logic -- that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth."

In other words, even our best efforts to determine the chemical pathways to life's precursors suffer from one thing: the hallmarks of intelligent design.

Ugh. My entire summary suffered from the hallmark of intelligent design. Like I've said in previous posts, we don't want to construct an argument from a negative point of view, saying, "Look how crazy-complex this is...it must have been an intelligent designer." However, I do find these arguments regarding the origin of life to be intellectually compelling, just not scientifically defensible.

Until next time...

Summary of meeting on 10/24 (part 5!!)

I'm really sorry to have dragged this summary out like this. There's just so much to talk about!

Back to our discussion of the origin of life: one of the main predictions (or, more like expectations) of our naturalistic scenario is that the first life was initially simple, and only later evolved to become complex. This was expectation was seemingly borne out in the early days of microbiology: the simplest known life forms at that time, bacteria, when viewed under the microscope seemed to simply be "bags" of jelly, with very little structure or organization. If these life forms are really that simple, there is a possibility that the earth's first life was also that simple, or perhaps even simpler. This would fit well into a naturalistic paradigm.

On the other hand, as we have grown to understand microbiology more, we now realize that the internal and surface structure and organization of prokaryotes such as bacteria are incredibly complex; it's just that this organization couldn't be seen under a simple light microscope. By itself, this doesn't rule out the possibility that the first life was simple. However, further research into the minimum complexity of life has shown that even the simplest life form possible, which could not exist/thrive without constant TLC from intelligent agents (ie, laboratory scientists), requires at minimum roughly 200 genes. That's 200 different sets of instructions to build 200 different complex molecules. If that is indeed life's minimum complexity, then the first life form must have had at least 200 genes. That indeed is an uncomfortable fit into a naturalistic scenario.

Further geobiochemical evidence has supported the notion that earth's first life was complex. As far back as 3.5 billion years ago, an evolutionary instant after the end of the late heavy bombardment (see my previous post), we have evidence of entire ecosystems of microbes in symbiotic relationships.

In addition to that, very early on -- and I must confess, I am not sure about the published date for this -- we have photosynthetic life on earth. Why is that important? The biochemical machinery required to have photosynthesis is quite complex; not something you would expect from the earliest, most simple life forms posited by naturalistic models.

I just realized something. This blog post is supposed to be a summary of the meeting we had two Saturdays ago, but I just rambled on about something we didn't actually talk about. I guess it's bonus material.

And please, if you guys have any comments or questions, criticisms, I welcome them.

Summary of meeting on 10/24 (part 4)

Last time I left you with the cliffhanger that the oldest rocks known to man show the chemical signatures of life, rather than non-life. In other words, as far back as we can study geological formations, life has been here. Let me put this in perspective.

After the earth was formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, it was unfit for life (or formless and empty). There were many impactor events that would have melted the earth's crust and vaporized all of its water in this early, "hadaean" period, which lasted from the time of earth's formation until roughly 3.9-3.8 billion years ago. The end of this era was particularly harsh, and was called the "late heavy bombardment", when the intensity and frequency of these impactor events were quite high.

These events are planet-sterilizing, so any life that could have existed was snuffed out. (Interestingly enough, there is recent research that argues that some life, if it existed, may have survived. However, this conclusion is controversial at this point. We'll have to see how that theory shakes out over then next year or so.) In addition to destroying all life, these impactors also melted all of the rocks, such that the oldest known rocks on the planet today (which are in Greenland I believe) date to the end of the late heavy bombardment, roughly 3.85 billion years ago.

In these rocks, the carbonaceous materials that we can find all bear the signature of life! In other words, the oldest known rocks date from a period that is also the earliest possible moment that the earth was habitable, and yet they show signs that life existed then! Not only was there no prebiotic soup (see my previous post), but life arose essentially instantaneously.

Wow. OK, next time we'll get to the third point I brought up in my last post: the initial complexity of life.

Summary of meeting last Saturday (part 3)

As I left it last time, the origin of life is hard! (It kind of reminds me of this "the onion" article.) But what exactly is the current state of origin of life research?

Oh, and here's a disclaimer for you all: this post is going to look a lot like a negative argument against the naturalistic paradigm, and also a lot like the God of the Gaps fallacy. If you have a problem with that, well, so do I. But as I said earlier, I still find the argument somewhat compelling, just not scientifically publishable. (See part 1 of this series of posts.)

There are four crucial parts of a naturalistic scenario for the origin of life that we currently lack evidence for. First, life must arise from a "primordial soup", or a concentrated solution of biological precursor molecules. Second, life must arise gradually over many, many years. Third, life must initially be very simple (whatever that means), only later evolving to be complex. And fourth, life must arise from identifiable biochemical reaction pathways that can be deduced from laboratory experiments.

The primordial soup, or prebiotic soup as some would call it, was a hypothesized aqueous mixture of all the biochemical molecules necessary to form life. I am not sure who first proposed this idea, but I am certain that it was a hypothetical construct for which we never had an evidence, yet somehow was made to be as fact in popular literature (see for example the series finale of "Star Trek TNG") and in textbooks. Darwin talks about it in a letter he wrote to a colleague in 1871:

...[W]e could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, heat, light, electricity, etc. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes...

And so the primordial soup was just some "warm little pond", or ocean, with a bunch of the necessary life chemicals in it, such as sugars, amino acids, and nucleobases (the molecules that give DNA sequences their identity; the A's, G's, C's, and T's).

Well, it turns out that not only do we still have no evidence for a prebiotic soup, but we actually have evidence against there ever existing such a hypothetical mixture. I must confess that I don't know a ton about the science behind these observations, but the chemical signatures from the oldest known rocks show evidence of life, rather than non-life processes (such as prebiotic chemistry). This leads us directly into the second point: how long did it take for life to arise?

Oh boy, I didn't realize how long this post was going to get. We'll have to save discussion of the other this and the other two topics for later.

Until then.

Summary of meeting last Saturday (part 2)

One of the things I like to do, in order to impress upon people the legitimacy of some of the claims I make, is to quote non-theistic scientists. This time, Paul Davies, an agnostic theoretical physicist (who incidentally is quite interested in asking life's big questions) provides two powerful quotes regarding the origin of life. Both are from his book, "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life":

When I set out to write this book, I was convinced that science was close to wrapping up the mystery of life's origin...Having spend a year or two researching the field, I am now of the opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding...This gulf's not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna.

He goes on to say:

Many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled. There are two reasons for their unease. First they feel it opens the door to religious fundamentalists...Second, they worry that a frank admission of ignorance will undermine funding...

So, the moral of the story (for now) is that the origin of life is hard.

Summary of meeting last Saturday (part 1)

Last Saturday, we had another discussion meeting, this time about the origin of life.

Ugh. This topic is really tricky, because, when discussing it, you get really close to the God of the Gaps fallacy. We spent some time discussing this fallacy, mostly in regards to the Intelligent Design Movement (which I will be posting about in the near future). In summary, the God of the Gaps fallacy is when you say fill in the gaps in our knowledge with god.

An example commonly-used by opponents of theism is that, thousands of years ago, people supposedly thought that bolts of lightning were thrown by the gods. Now we know that it is the electric discharge that occurs after a large potential difference builds between two clouds (or a cloud and the ground).

In relation to the origin of life, the God of the Gaps fallacy works like this: Scientists have no idea how life could have originated by strictly naturalistic means. In fact, by our current knowledge, it basically looks impossible. Therefore, since science can't explain it, it must have been a miracle performed by God.

In a way, I actually find that argument somewhat convincing. My reasoning is that the scientific evidence actually shows that the probability of life originating naturalistically is so remote that it would never happen even in a mole of universes (that is, 10^23 universes). But again, this is negative evidence, and I don't think the field is quantitative enough at this point to rule things out by negative evidence. So, based solely on this argument, I would say that denying a naturalistic origin of life is intellectually satisfying to me, but not scientifically defensible. In other words, I find that argument compelling, but I don't think it is ready to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, much less stand the rigor of getting into high school textbooks (as many are trying to do).

More to come later...

The five greatest reasons

At the last meeting, I discussed my idea of going through what I call the five greatest scientific apologetic arguments, one at a time. The first one was the beginning of the universe, and so we talked about the big bang theory, and what theological/philosophical implications it has.

I would say, then, the five greatest reasons are (in no particular order):

1. The origin of the universe
2. The fine-tuning of the universe (including the anthropic principle and our privileged position)
3. The origin of life (biochemistry)
4. The origin of man (including the moral argument/imago dei)
5. The design of life for the benefit of humanity (yes, I did say design of life)

Of course, these designations are somewhat arbitrary. Ask any ten people and they'll probably give you ten different answers as to what the five greatest reasons are. And most of these overlap. In fact, you could probably include numbers 2,3, and 5 all together into one big umbrella argument, and perhaps number 1 as well. The "origin of man" argument also has several different parts to it, such as archeology, philosophy, and genomics.

All in all, we'll see if we can cover roughly one topic per meeting for the next four meetings (given that we covered number one last time).