The Watch on the Beach

I was having a rather interesting conversation with several friends on Facebook the other day about how some people see God in the world around them. It's a subject that's probably worth a post in itself, but there was a specific aspect of the conversation that got me thinking about the subject of the evolution/creation debate, which I haven't written on in a long time, but I wanted to revisit. I should say upfront that I've come to a point in my life where, while I still believe in God, I'm pretty firmly on the evolution side of the debate, but there are still interesting aspects to the conversation nonetheless.

The thing that came up in the conversation was an argument that I myself have used in the past, and it's a classic creationist parable. Imagine you're walking on the beach. As you walk along, you see something shiny in the sand at your feet. You reach down and pull it out of the sand to find it's a gold watch. Do you say to yourself, "Amazing! The random action of the tides and the sand has fashioned this timekeeping device!"? Of course you don't; you recognize that you're holding an object that has been designed.

So now, the argument turns to the human body and asks, do you realize that even on the cellular level the human body is a far more intricate and amazing piece of machinery than that watch? Cells processing minerals, nutrients, and strands of RNA, joined togather to make organs that serve larger, specialized purposes, all fitted together within your skin to make a large, incredibly complex machine that has the ability to do everything that a human body does. How can we look at this amazingly complex piece of machinery and say this was the result of random chance?

That's the Intelligent Design argument, but we know it's evolution; we have mountains of evidence, including fossils of so many of the intermediate species that evolved from simple single-celled organisms to something fish-like to something reptile-like to something rodent-like to something ape-like to what we are now. We know, minus a few minor details, how we got from simple life forms to homo sapiens, and a designer is actually not necessary for the process. Yet it bothers me still.

Why do we look at the watch and say it must have a designer? It really is so much simpler and easier to construct than a human body. You could take apart a watch, and if you were particularly clever, you could figure out how to put it back together, or even build one from parts you made yourself. Nobody could do that with a human body. Even the collective knowledge of all the scientists in the world today couldn't figure out how to build something like a human being from scratch.

The watch itself is also the product of evolution in a sense. Watches are probably never designed completely different from any watch that came before, but were built as improvements on prior designs. It occurred to me that if clocks had been invented in the southern hemisphere, they would run counterclockwise (although we wouldn't call it that) because the earliest clocks were based design-wise on sundials, a kind of proto-clock. However, that evolution was certainly guided by intelligence, although obviously not by a single supernatural one.

So, this is the thing: a watch is complicated enough that we say it must have had a designer, but does there come a point of complexity where we say something is beyond the scope of a designer? What is the basis--separate from knowing an object's history--for judging whether it had a designer?

The Bill Nye - Ken Ham debate

I don't know if I need to explain this as it seemed to be a pretty big media event, but Tuesday there was a creationism/evolution debate between Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") and Ken Ham (CEO of "Answers in Genesis"). As far as such debates usually go, this was a good one, and I felt that since it was a topic I like to cover on my blog from time to time, I'd give a sort of after-commentary here outlining what I think each debater did well as well as what they did poorly.

Interestingly, Bill Nye did extraordinarily well, considering that he is not a biologist, nor does he seem to know much of anything about the Bible. It seems to me that for debates like this, the evolution side would best be served by a debater who really knows their biology. I don't think that ended up being as big of a handicap for Nye as his lack of knowledge about the Bible in the end, as he made some arguments against the Bible that any reasonably-informed Christian could sweep aside as misinformation.

But I wanted to start with Ken Ham, both because he was the one who won the coin toss to speak first, and because I was far more impressed with his arguments than I think I ever have been with a creationist. As I think I've said before many times, creationists seem to often have a near-complete lack of knowledge of what evolution really means or how it works. Ham, however, seems to have a good grasp on the science, and doesn't make the mistake of outright denying evolution in any form. Rather, he points out what are really some near-obvious facts: Darwin spent a lot of time studying finch beaks in the Galapagos, and while there really is a striking amount of variation to be found there, the fact remains that with all that variation, they're all still finches. The point that Ham makes here is that while evolution definitely occurs, it's hard to show that animals evolve into entirely different kinds of animals. Yes, lions, tigers, pumas, and housecats all have a common ancestor, but they're still all cats.

Ham furthermore makes an important distinction between what he calls "observational" science and "historical" science. Observational science is science where you do experiments and make real-time observations of phenomena, while historical science is where you take what you know about natural phenomena and extrapolate that knowledge into the unobservable past. Since the past is unobservable, then historical science consists largely of guesswork, and standard evolutionary scientists have suggested that all life comes from a single, large family tree, while Ham is suggesting that we should think of all of life as being comprised of a sort of "family orchard" where different classes or "kinds" of animals all branch from a single ancestor that is completely unrelated to any other "kind". He points out that this model fits in just as well with biology as we know it today, but happens to also fit with the Biblical account of creation.

Also, a minor, but vital point that Ham makes is that there are plenty of young-earth creationist scientists that are doing just as much for innovation and technology as any atheist scientist. One of his chief examples is that of the inventor of the MRI, which revolutionized modern medicine, and yet that scientist/inventor believes that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

Bill Nye, however, had plenty of interesting things to say, many of which were seemingly pretty devastating to Ham's position. Nye had a lot to say about the fossil record, which consistently progresses from simple animals to more complex organisms, showing evidence that the modern species that we know must have had simpler biological ancestors. Also, he points out that if all the animals in the world at one time were kept on Noah's ark, which landed after the flood in the Middle East, then there should be fossil remains of Australian animals like kangaroos in the Middle East, but no such fossils have ever been found.

Actually, Noah's ark was a big point of contention for Nye. Mathematically he showed that if the ark had had only a few thousand "kinds" of animals that led to the millions of species that exist today, that would imply evolution that operated at a rate of 11 new species daily for the last 4,000 years. Evolution like that would be hard to miss!

One of Nye's last points was that the standard model of evolution has actually at times predicted archaeological finds, and one of the things that is considered the hallmark of a scientific theory is that it has predictive ability. Nye suggested that Ham's model does not have predictive ability, a challenge that Ham never addressed.

As for weaknesses (apart from the fact that neither debater seemed to me to successfully rebut any claims made by the other), Ham at one point made the claim that science is being forced into a naturalistic mindset, and it needs to be opened to other possibilities. While I agree that alternative theories like creationism need to be considered, I can't say that I'm convinced that there is a value to non-naturalistic science. Nye repeatedly attacked the validity of the Bible by using the "telephone game" metaphor, which implies that the Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., when in fact each new version of the Bible that is published makes use of better textual evidence than previous ones, and is usually a translation directly from what are considered the best ancient texts.

In the end, I think both men really knew their stuff well, and presented their own arguments excellently, but like so many debates before, I don't think either of them was at all swayed by the opposing argument, and I bet both men considered themselves the winner. I found it entertaining, but I'm not sure that anything really useful was accomplished on either side.

Thumbing my nose at Stephen Jay Gould

(Note: This blog entry has prerequisite reading, a short essay to be found here.)

My grandmother used to have a peculiar habit of collecting rocks. Collecting rocks in itself is not weird, most people have done it at one time or another, but most people do it because the rocks they collect have either a certain physical beauty or perhaps they came from a place that has sentimental value to them. My grandmother collected rocks because she wanted to be an archaeologist.

The place where I grew up was considered by many archaeologists to be a veritable treasure trove of artifacts, having been populated for centuries by numerous cultures. An interesting history there, actually; the Pomo tribe was in many ways like the financial center of the ancient California economy. They had a technology that as far as I know is still a secret to this day that enabled them to make stone drill bits they used in the manufacture of beads from seashells. These beads were used as a local currency because there was a limited supply of them made under strict secrecy and control of the Pomo. When Europeans finally made it to the West Coast, they brought with them the technology to make drill bits out of metal, and the economic system collapsed virtually overnight as everyone freely made counterfeit beads.

My grandmother's interest as an amateur archaeologist was, unfortunately, lacking in any sort of scientific rigor. Her back porch was often littered with various stones she had collected on her walks along a nearby creek, and when asked why she had chosen the stones she had, there were two stock answers.

1. "I think these are man-made because I see so many rocks just like them all over the place."
2. "I think this rock was man-made because I've never seen another rock like it anywhere."

I think anyone could see the problem with this logic. Aside from the obvious contradiction, the fact is that real artifacts will probably fall somewhere in between on the commonality spectrum, but in the end, the real issue is that relative rarity of an object is not something that's truly a factor in how likely it is to be man-made. (Those stone drill bits I mentioned are undoubtedly man-made, but are extremely rare, while old rusty nails, which are also undoubtedly man-made, are very easy to find when digging around in the dirt in that area.)

For those of you that read the essay I linked to, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with evolution, or maybe you see it as a transparent attempt to switch the topic to Intelligent Design. Well, ID is definitely going to come up in some form in this post, but I have a message for people on both sides of the evolutionary debate. In his essay, Stephen Jay Gould mentions

"I had always learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success."

I myself had never been taught this, but perhaps I was biased growing up with a cat that had opposable thumbs. I think what Gould is hinting at here is that anti-evolutionists are looking at the thumb of humans and saying essentially, "The thumb as we know it in humans is extremely rare in other animals, therefore surely we must have been designed." Uniqueness is indeed often touted as a basis for assuming intelligent design, usually, of course, as a list of things that are unique to humans in particular. Something that I have been noticing lately after reading a great deal about the platypus is that uniqueness is a surprisingly common thing. Every animal has something that sets it apart from other animals, or it would be the same animal, wouldn't it? And while the platypus is indeed very odd, odd animals exist everywhere. (I think on this continent, our "odd animal" is the hummingbird, but I'm sure there are other freaks of nature.) Anyway, the oddly unique qualities that are possessed by homo sapiens are really a non-issue to evolutionary biologists, and from a purely scientific standpoint, they shouldn't be, really.

The thing that I really find fascinating about this essay is that Gould (a man who, if Darwinism were a religion as some of my fellow fundamentalists seem to think, would have been one of its archbishops if not the Pope) seems to agree with some of the views that creationists and ID proponents espouse today. While most skeptics insist that the idea of a creator who designed life is preposterous and need not even be addressed as a possibility, Gould gives a nod to the concept:

"[I]deal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator."

Certainly Gould never admits the idea of a creator as a likely possibility, and in fact the whole point of the essay is to argue fiercely against the concept, but he does address the concept in order to make a reasoned argument against it, something few evolutionists even bother to do, it seems to me.

For those anti-evolutionists who may be reading this, I would say to you that if you actually read Gould's essay and it didn't give you pause, I think you're either being intellectually dishonest or you didn't understand his point. I think a big part of what makes his argument so strong is that he does take time to consider the possibilities presented by the hypothesized existence of an intelligent creator of the panda. In seeing both sides, at least in some limited degree, he's creating a case that is much more well-rounded than most I've heard. Creationists could and should take a tip from Gould. While I've been railing a bit in my last paragraph about evolutionists failing to address the opposition, I don't want to give the impression that I think creationists are any better on average in that respect. No ground is going to be gained for the cause of promoting creationism or ID by ignoring the other side. Evolution has a lot of evidence and many solid arguments behind it, and while, yes, it does seem highly unlikely that somehow billions of years of random chance caused inert matter to somehow coalesce and eventually morph into modern humans, simply saying that it's dubious is hardly an argument in itself.

Gould's argument is pretty straightforward, but needs an essay several pages long to explain the backdrop of the real meat of the argument; delving into the general morphology of the order carnivora, comparing pandas to bears and other relatives, explaining the mechanism of the human thumb vs. the panda thumb all lead up to a basis for putting it all together into a simple premise.

"The radial thumb is...a contraption, not a lovely contrivance."

Gould is assuming that an omnipotent creator would either give the panda the same thumb he gave other animals (especially since all the parts are there to do so), or he would build an entirely new type of thumb from entirely new body parts that simply do not exist in other species. There's logic in this, no doubt. The panda's thumb is essentially a thumb that is designed the hard way, so to speak, when at least one more elegant solution to the construction problem exists, and one might suppose other elegant solutions could be made. (If you were a mechanical engineer, you probably could think of one or two easily, I imagine.)

One of the things about this argument that I find interesting is that, aside from acknowledging the possibility of a creator, it also runs counter to what I've heard from other atheists. Often those who promote the idea of evolution over creationism will point to the similarities between creatures and say that those similarities indicate common ancestry. Gould seems to be implicitly confirming what many creationists will say in response to such an argument: that common design implies a common designer. After all, why should God re-create the thumb for humans when a perfectly good thumb already exists in other primates? It's that very argument that creationists love to use (and the average evolutionist pooh-poohs) that is the very basis for Gould's argument here. Why shouldn't God use a pre-existing design, or, if there was a good reason not to, why wouldn't God make something new rather than cobble together a thumb from second-hand parts, so to speak.

When I was a kid, I got some Legos in a McDonald's Happy Meal. The small collection of Legos was designed to make something specific, like a little racecar. Now, I could make that racecar, sure, but the real fun was in making something new and unexpected out of those parts. Could I position the wheels closer together so that they functioned like gears? Could I make a car that bore little or no resemblance to the intended car design? If I really wanted to get creative, I could have asked my parents to buy me more Legos, but tinkering was fun and stimulating. Is it a sure thing that God would not also think so? As I could think of my attempts to combine the same set of Legos in different ways a way of showing my creativity, could not God also wish to show His creative side by combining the same set of bones, muscles and tendons in varying and surprising ways? Is nature's variety God's way of showing us that there's more than one way to skin a cat?

While I do think that Gould's argument is very strong (and has resulted in my wanting to read some of Darwin's books, particularly the one on orchids, which must be a blast), what's really missing in the story here to truly address the concerns of a theist is more info on the theological side. While Gould takes time to unpack all the baggage of ursine bone structure, when it comes to dealing with the question of creationism, he simply assumes the proper action of an omnipotent creator.

"If God had designed a beautiful machine to reflect his wisdom and power, surely he would not have used a collection of parts generally fashioned for other purposes."

So many arguments against the existence of God boil down to this sentence with different phrases inserted in the underlined spaces. "If God was really good, surely he would have spared my mother Alzheimer's." "If God didn't want me to have sex with whomever I want whenever I want, surely he would not make it feel so darn good." "If God wanted me to believe in him, surely he would give me a million dollars." In short, assume you know what God would do or how he would think, and base your beliefs around that assumption.

The fact is, maybe Gould is right. I mean, it sounds reasonable. However, there are a lot of things that sound reasonable, but aren't necessarily so. "Humans are designed in a manner so high above the other animals in dexterity, intelligence and other factors that surely we are the apex of creation." That's something that sounds quite reasonable to most people, but evolutionary biology shows that this is not the case at all, or at least it doesn't follow in direct logical progression.

You know what I think? I think there are (at least) two things in the universe that are simply beyond our ability to fully comprehend. One of them is the full story of the origin of life as we currently know it, and the other is the mind of God. Maybe instead of fighting over who has come closer to arriving at unattainable knowledge, we could just enjoy the journey? Probably not likely, but that's my personal plan.

A death in the family

It's an odd sensation to pick up the newspaper or, in my case, a magazine, and find out for the first time about the death of a family member. Not that it was a close family member, nor that I was unaware of the fact that they were dead. Actually, the real news was the former: the fact that they were not as close a relation as I had been led to believe.

Of course, as I'm sure you realized the instant you began reading this that the relative I was talking about was homo erectus, who apparently died, oh, tens of thousands of years ago, I guess, I don't know the specifics. I was reading a fascinating article in Newsweek on a number of interesting developments in the study of human evolution, and I marveled, not at the information, but at the manner of presentation of the information, and the implications it might have for both those who put their trust in fundamentalist Christian dogma about the origins of man and those who put their faith in Darwin, or whatever, I think you know what I mean, although I am here and no doubt throughout this writing going to be far less than scientifically precise. Here I present another meandering musing on evolutionary theory that may be almost as random and aimless as the supposed forces of natural selection themselves.

So anyway, it turns out that the paternity test came back, and erectus is not the baby's father. The article itself is vague on exactly when the test was performed, but really, when erectus has been gone for thousands of years, it's not clear exactly how much it matters; suffice it to say that the suspected connection was never there, at least not in the way many scientists suspected. Rather than being our father, the family tree of the hominids that is now considered more accurate shows erectus as a sort of "first cousin twice removed" or grand-uncle, something of the sort. I don't know whether this came as a surprise to evolutionary scientists, but it sure does seem to have come as a surprise to the author of the article. Homo erectus was a species that, according to what is known about it, managed to thrive for around two million years and spread across various parts of three continents. They didn't make tools, or at least not more than very crude ones, but they walked upright, looked a lot like modern humans and are believed to have had a pretty good cognitive ability, based on what appears to be the structures of the brain. Still, they died out, and--along with homo neanderthalensis--seem to have not been our ancestors, nor the ancestors of any living species.

The author of the article seems to be very surprised to find that such seemingly advanced species of hominids could have lived and yet not been our ancestors. "More than once in human prehistory, evolution created a modern trait such as a face without jutting, apelike brows and jaws, only to let it go extinct, before trying again a few million years later." The author's view of evolution is interesting to me, both because many of the things they seem to find surprising seem obvious to me, and because it's the sort of surprise that I think for some people may be based on commonly-accepted ideas of evolutionary theory. If evolution is indeed an unguided force of nature (more or less, "force" may be a poor choice of words) then why not create something randomly that turns out not to be useful at the time it's created? Heck, species die out all the time, so why should it be so unusual that hominid species have also done so, even if they were similar to other ones that did survive?

For that matter, does the author really think of evolution as an unguided force? Would one say of an impersonal force, "evolution created", or "let it go", or "trying again"? It sounds more like the description of a cosmic tinkerer or scientist, trying little experiments to see what happens. Of course, that's hardly the view of any world religions I know, either, which is why this evidence, while it "upended traditional ideas" about evolutionary theory hardly gives weight to creationism. Certainly the God of the Bible isn't the sort of being that would have created numerous nearly-human species just to let them die out, right?

Both the author's view of an age-old understanding of evolution and the implications of a theory of theistic evolution favor the idea that human descent is a matter of a straightforward, linear progression of "{Sahelanthropus tchadensis} begat Australopithecus who begat Homo habilis who begat Homo erectus who begat Homo sapiens." Of course now it would seem that few if any of these ancient hominids are direct descendants of our modern species. There are two mistaken assumptions here, firstly that evolution is linear, and second that the whole point of evolution is to yield an end product of homo sapiens. Both of these concepts are worth exploring, though.

The author says about these dead-end branches that "It's like discovering that your great-great-grandfather was not an only child as you'd thought, but had a number of siblings who, for unknown reasons, left no descendants." I say, is that so momentous? My grandfather was into genealogy, and it's interesting to me to note that while scientific studies of genealogy like to focus on the Y-chromosome as a pointer to study lineage, my grandfather has left behind no descendants with his Y-chromosome. On that side of my family, I have only one male cousin, and he, like me, was born of one of our grandfather's daughters, while my grandfather's only son has only daughters himself. Now that Y-chromosome may exist in a distant relative somewhere--and probably does, actually--but if by odd chance there was a genetic mutation in my grandfather's Y-chromosome that might have been significant in some way, the world will never know. If it happens on a small scale with my own maternal family (and possibly paternal family, as I have no sons or brothers), then why not on a larger scale? That being said, while those branches seem obviously likely to exist to me, it's not completely wrong to look at evolution as a linear process in one sense, because my own Y-chromosome came from a direct line of male descendants before me, obviously, and if you wanted to track its origin, my lack of genetically significant male cousins doesn't matter at all. Homo erectus may be interesting biologically, but only tells us things about who we are indirectly.

As for the concept of evolution being directed at the creation of modern humans, oddly this is a sort of yes and no, and it's only yes due to random chance, one might suppose. It seems sometimes like humans are the pinnacle of life on this planet, but that's only out of an anthropocentrist sort of view. Evolution seems to focus on humanity because the study of evolution largely focuses on human evolution. Biological science will no doubt study all life, but put its primary focus on our own life because, despite occasional claims to the contrary, we as a society do try to use science to answer the same questions we struggle with in religion. We want to know how we got here, and what possible purpose we may have in being here. Sometimes it may make us forget that science does try to be dispassionate and unbiased as much as it can be. It makes sense to want to study ourselves, but in doing so, we inflate our own abstract sense of self-worth sometimes, and pure science doesn't give us that. To the undirected force of evolution, while today we may be the dominant species, thousands of years from now we may be another homo heidelbergensis: a stepping stone to a new, more advanced species, or tomorrow's homo erectus: just another evolutionary dead-end. That being said, while in a grander scale our place in the order of things may be temporary, at the moment we may indeed stand at the apex of the animal kingdom.

But as we stand at the summit and view those others that fell off of cliffs along the climb here, the surprise at what we see is interesting. While I strongly suspect the author is perhaps somewhat clumsily presenting information in a newsweekly that's not really "news" (I mean, aside from the fact that this is all stuff that happened hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago), there was a time not too long ago when this information was being newly processed by scientists and shaking up their own more sophisticated assumptions of hominid descent. After all, it's only been a little over 150 years since the first skull of a neanderthal was discovered, making scientists start to think more deeply about our biological place in the world, but every time a discovery is made, claims are made about what significance such and such fossil has, charts are rearranged to reflect new thinking, and human evolution is turned upside down, shaken out of its box and put back together.

Even now that we have begun to use more sophisticated methods of examining fossils, including DNA analysis (although I don't understand how one gets DNA from a fossil, but no matter) there seems to be a lot of assuming going on. In the opening of the article, we are assured that "...DNA...accumulates changes at a regular rate." Later, we are told that (my emphasis) "...DNA changes at a fairly regular rate." Technicality, right? Molecular biologists supposedly can use this rate of change like a clock, which is why we are told about it, but then about halfway through the article we are told of a specific gene:

It had changed in only two of its 118 chemical "letters" from 310 million years ago (when the lineages of chickens and chimps split) to 5 million years ago. But 18 letters changed in the (relative) blink of an eye since the human lineage split from chimps'...

How's that? We know that the change is regular, except when it's not regular? It seems that in these huge time scales of millions of years, so much is assumed. The article tells an interesting tale of how DNA of body lice tells us that they evolved about 114,000 years ago, and since they live in the habitat of human clothing, that must be when we evolved to lose most of our body hair. Oh, it's a fascinating theory, no doubt, but then, does it really make sense?

Why evolve to lose our body hair if it's just going to force us to invent clothing to keep ourselves warm? Why not invent clothing, which leads to the evolution of body lice, which between the two leads us to evolve to lose body hair, since clothing means it is no longer needed, and it's easier to delouse if you have less hair? Could we have the cause and effect backwards? Not to mention the fact that there are plenty people alive today that still have lots and lots of body hair, so it's not quite a common trait of the whole species.

And how do we really know what is a common trait of a whole species? The briefly-mentioned sahelanthropus tchadensis had a big part to play in rearranging the diagrams of hominid descent with its discovery, but then it's only a single fossil! Using the family tree metaphor again, it seems sort of like finding a single picture of a man in an old family photo album who looks sort of Italian, and dumping out all the pictures in your (non-Italian) family's album to rearrange the lot of them. Surely there must be a more rational approach, but then I'm not a photo album arranger, nor am I a biologist. Still, if a person who's never been to the U.S. saw a broadcast of a basketball game from Houston, would they be fair to assume that there exists in the U.S. a race of seven-foot-tall Chinese men?

My personal observation on all of this? There are far too many fossils of our ancient, branching family tree to deny that there is something to the theory of human evolution, but at the same time, there seem to be far too few fossils to say anything about it with definitive surety. Maybe in the end I will be proven wrong, but it seems to me that the science of evolution, in studying things that happened millions of years ago that left behind scant evidence, we operate far more on speculation than anything else.

Rising to the Challenge, part III: Dog on, "Well, it's DNA!" and still, "Ew, no God."

I'm going to take a moment to go back to the comments of both Zondo Deb and Jono, and continue to expand on a concept I touched on in part I of this series of posts.

What if there was found in nature a message that unambiguously pointed to a higher power? Call me naive, but I still think there is. It's a message found inside every living thing on the planet, and it's called DNA. Now I admit I'm no biochemist, or whatever it is one might need to be to become an expert on DNA and all related sub-cellular information-carrying and processing molecules, but there is something fascinating going on at the microscopic level in living cells. Maybe it's the sort of thing that one would write off as creationist propaganda, but while I realize some creationists like to grasp at scientific and pseudoscientific straws, a lot of the things I plan to discuss here were things that I had mused over back in the days before I was a Christian, and I've never been a strict Biblical Fundamentalist Creationist. (Some of my views on creationism can be found at my other blog, mostly back about a year ago.)

What is DNA? It's a complicated molecule that carries within it a sort of chemical code. The code is written in four different chemical letters called "bases" which essentially come together to form various three-letter words that spell out sentences called "genes". Those words correspond to amino acids, which according to the gene they are in will be strung together to make a protein. Human DNA has about 3,000,000,000 bases which code for about 30,000 genes.

Now, admittedly human genetics are more complicated than those of lower forms of life, but you have to consider that the complexity goes down to a cellular level. Each individual cell of any living creature is made up of complicated little machineries which exist to process fluids, move minerals and burn fuel. The various genes coded onto DNA are accessed to formulize the creation of all the little proteins that make the parts that run the machinery of the cell.

Imagine trying to create a functioning automobile out of tinker toys. (Such a car would be huge, but scale isn't so important in imagining it, as the tinker toys at the cellular level aren't visible to the naked eye.) Just imagine fitting together tiny little pieces to make a machine that can transport things from one place to another under its own power, and has the standard amenities like power steering, anti-lock brakes, etc. That's an approach to the complexity that exists in a cell, but a cell is actually far more complicated than that. And aside from the complexity of the structures that make a cell simply function, there's also the fact that living cells have the property of self-replication. That is to say, imagine not only building a car out of tinker toys, but in the engine of your tinker toy car, you've got a sort of tinker toy encoded blueprint of the car that, rather than sitting there statically waiting for some tinker toy virtuoso to come along and read it to build another car, the car itself will gather loose tinker toy parts it finds and build more tinker toy cars as part of its normal function. Imagine building a car like that made from any material! And that's just a cell; imagine the further complexity of building a whole body!

Irreducible complexity is a popular concept among "Intelligent Design" proponents these days, but has some serious flaws scientifically, some of which I expect to address at a future date. The thing that really fascinates me, and something I've never heard addressed by any ID people, is a sub-cellular chicken-or-egg problem. (I actually heard this from an author who I believe is an atheist.) You've got DNA, right? It's a coded message that tells you how to build a human being, an amoeba, a redwood tree, whatever sort of massive "tinker toy car" it's a part of. How is the code read? Well, there are various sub-cellular structures such as RNA that serve various purposes like reading the code off, gathering the appropriate amino acids, stringing them together, checking the code for errors, making copies of DNA, and even cellular-level immune systems to protect from virus intrusion (these are totally separate from the system-level immune systems such as your white blood cells). All of these structures and systems are like the hardware on which the software of the DNA code is run.

Where does that hardware come from? Answer: it's built from certain parts of the code integrated into DNA. So you can't have the machineries that build living things on the cellular level unless you have the machinery to build them already in existence. Put raw DNA in a beaker and wait to see what happens. Nothing. Try with water, cold or hot. Nothing. Add a bunch of carbon, nitrogen and trace amounts of other important minerals. Still nothing. How about a warm soup of amino acids in varyingly oxygenated and heated environments? It will do nothing. Nothing whatsoever. No, DNA only functions in its natural environment, surrounded by a living cellular structure. And living cells don't come from nowhere.

So as usual, getting to the point after a wild series of paragraphs of blah-blah-blah-blah... Where does life come from, if not from an intelligence that is not life, at least, not as we know it? A DVD without a DVD player is useless, and vice versa. DNA without life does nothing, and if you somehow could remove all the DNA from a living organism, it would cease to function in fairly short order, and certainly would never fulfill its primary evolutionary function, which is to reproduce itself. So it seems logical, to me at least, that there must exist (or once have existed) an intelligent being that is not an earthly life form. While that intelligent being may not be "God" in the sense we tend to think about it, I have a hard time thinking of any alternate ideas that don't approach ridiculousness. It is for this reason that I have been fairly confident that there is a divine Creator, even in the days before I was a Christian.

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

One...

While I was away on my trip, I spent a lot of time sitting in a meeting room waiting for an appropriate time to put in my two cents worth. I always feel a little embarrassed to admit such things, but often when I'm wasting time in a meeting, important or not, I pretend to take notes on the meeting, but in reality am taking notes on whatever random thought happens to be crossing my mind at the moment.

After using up several note pages analyzing the behavior of the chaotic iterations of a rather simple function I had thought up a few days before when reading an old math textbook (which caused me to discover a delightfully odd connection between Pascal's Triangle, Fibonacci numbers, and the powers of two--don't worry about it, it was interesting, but essentially trivial), I turned my thoughts to ponder a fundamental issue of theology.

There's an argument for the existence of God that's often known as the "first cause" argument. Pretty much it goes like this. Everything that has a beginning has a cause. As it makes no sense for there to be a chain of causes stretching back ad infinitum, there must be at the beginning of the causal chain a cause that has no beginning and is itself uncaused. This "first cause" is God.

Now, if you're a theist, you might like this argument, and you almost certainly accept each part of it as being true, whether or not you accept the validity of the logic contained in it. Most Christians at least tend to believe that the Bible teaches this to be so. As for me, though, I hate to see someone purporting to have definitively answered the question of the existence of God when I see no such thing.

In preparing to write this entry, I came across this page which seems to feel it has dealt with the objections sufficiently. I think it misses the boat just a tad.

The first objection listed is actually meant to be a thought-provoking question: "Who created God?" Children love to ask this question, as well as atheists both trying to be difficult and genuinely questioning. The author of the page dismisses this question by merely pointing out that the argument applies to things which have a beginning, and God is not a thing with a beginning. Okay, fair enough, but now we are faced with another problem I think, at least if we're trying to use this argument to pursuade the atheist that God (and in particular our God) must exist. That problem is, how do you know that God had no beginning?

There's a difficult bit of circular reasoning that always threatens to creep into our arguments for the existence of God. Atheists will accuse a Christian of making this argument: Everyone should believe in God. Why? Because the Bible says so. Why believe the Bible? Because God wrote it. Hmmm... Sorry, but if you're going to be convincing to a non-believer, you're going to have to get out of this loop. While in my experience, some atheists love to accuse people of making this argument when they are not in fact doing so, in the case of the "first cause" argument, and the response to this objection/question in particular, the circular reasoning is contained hidden within it in a way that most atheists and some children immediately see. I ask again, how do you know that God had no beginning? Only because the Bible tells you that is the case. If you think you're going to use the "first cause" argument to show that God has no beginning, I don't think it will really work, both because the answer to the question "Who created God?" becomes unanswerable in an unbiased way, and for other reasons that I hope to include in this post below.

The second objection, as stated on the site, is that not everything that has a beginning has a cause. It's interesting to me that this goes into some specifics that I hadn't even considered before today. Generally, I'd always considered a major objection to be "How do you know that everything that has a beginning has a cause?" Apparently, the author of the page happens to think science has shown this not to be true. (As I said, it's the first I've heard of it.)

It's very strange to me the way he responds. "Randomness, if randomness there be, is confined to the microscopic." I ask, "So?" First of all, if there are exceptions to a rule, then there are exceptions. I don't think logically you can say, "There are no exceptions, because what exceptions there are happen to be very small ones." Maybe I'm wrong, but this is the way I'm reading the response, and it comes across as nonsense. Secondly, if we concede that exceptions exist on the microscopic level, then let us not forget the fact that the Big Bang theory essentially says that the universe started out as a microscopic particle! Really, this argument is hopeless.

But in a more general sense, I do wonder how it can be said that all things with a beginning have a cause. Perhaps with those microscopic particles, their action is indeed caused, but not in a manner we can easily understand. Even if we eventually come to explain their behavior, and this exception to the rule disappears, how do we really know that there is a rule at all? I've yet to see any proof for the claim that all things with a beginning have a cause; it seems to be stated as an obvious fact, but it somehow escapes me.

Getting back to my paper with random thoughts in the background of my meeting, I started to think of alternate hypotheses. What if it is possible for causes to stretch out to infinity? Could the universe have been created by something outside of this universe, which was in turn created by something outside of itself, etc.? Or what if cause is something that, outside of the confines of the space-time continuum can loop on itself? If you're going to suppose the existence of a being outside of space and time (God), that is separate from many of the rules that govern us, then why couldn't the universe somehow have created itself in a causal loop? What if a sentient being within the universe created God, and God, being outside of time, was able to create us in turn?

What if God was created? Does that imply we would need to worship this arch-deity that was/is the cause of God? Or maybe such a being doesn't care, and we are in the hands of God only, despite the fact that He was created. Or perhaps the God of the Bible, claiming to not be created, when in fact He was, is a liar. I don't think so, but in an abstract sense, one must consider the possibility, right?

Then again, if we suppose the existence of one non-created being, then why not multiple created beings? I remember I once suggested the possibility to someone that perhaps the "angels" are not created beings, but also are self-existent from eternity, despite being less powerful than God. "But God created everything that was created!" I was told. "Yes, but I'm not claiming that angels were created." Sure, this goes against mainstream theology, but when you talk abstractly about uncaused beings, isn't this a distinct possibility? And since we are told that angels interact with the universe, this makes multiple uncaused causes. (Sounds like a pantheon, and once again, in theory, why not?)

The universe is filled with philosophical questions that have no easy answer. Plugging in God as the one and only answer to each of these questions may be satisfying for the theist (I know it is for me!), but is it really conclusive on a logical level? Sometimes I fear that theistic philosophers miss that we're only proving to ourselves the one thing we already believe.

The evolution of Darwinism

"Did God, the supreme intelligence, deign to design distinctive shell patterns for the tortoises of each island?"
-"Evolution of a Scientist," Newsweek, Nov. 28, 2005, p. 54

Evolution is always an interesting subject to me. Partly because it's such a hot-button topic for many people, and partly because despite that fact, there are many people who insist it's not a hot-button topic at all.

In a recent Newsweek article about the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, there were a number of interesting comments, including the above quote, which I'll get to. One thing in particular that jumped out at me was a quote from the sidebar. "Evolution is not controversial in the field of science." (quote by "Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education") While in a sense this is not quite true (there are scientists who feel that evolutionary theory is not sufficient to explain life as we know it), in another sense it's so true as to be a sort of "duh" statement. The strange thing about "science" in what I believe to be its truest form, is that nothing is controversial from within science. The idea of "science" is to find ways to understand the way the world works. Ethics, philosophical truth, theology, popular opinion and the like, while indeed able to influence scientists, should not in theory influence science itself. Some people who oppose evolutionary theory do so with the argument that saying we humans evolved from lower life forms cheapens the value and dignity of human life. While not everyone agrees with this, from the scientific point of view it doesn't matter if a scientific theory cheapens anything at all. If a scientist found a way to make substantial amounts of gold from common household items, then the value of gold would be cheapened, but that wouldn't change the fact that the method would exist. (Of course, atomic theory would tell us such a method does not exist, but that's beside the point.)

Another excellently thought-provoking quote was, "[Intelligent Design] says, if there's some part of science that you can't understand, that must be where God is. Historically, that hasn't gone well. And if science does figure out [how the eye evolved]—and I believe it's very likely that science will ... then where is God?" (quote by "Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian") There once was a time when I believed this, and it's a popular view, actually: that God is to be found in the gaps that science cannot fill. But Collins is right; if we claim this to be the case, then does God get smaller and smaller each time science takes a step forward? I personally believe that there is nothing about the physical world that is beyond the range of science to understand, given enough time and resources. If there is no end to time, and scientists eventually get to the point where there is virtually nothing that is not understood in a scientific perspective, will God suddenly cease to exist? I have heard some atheists express the view that we're already there, particularly in the case of evolution. To many atheists, the existence and complexity of life on the planet was one of the biggest hurdles to overcome to be confident that there is no God. As Richard Dawkins has said, evolution makes it "possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." The fact is, no matter how unlikely a person may think the idea of life evolving from non-life spontaneously is, the probability is not completely zero, and it allows atheists to get a toe in the door of plausibility. I don't like the idea that somehow the more plausible the atheists' claims on truth may be, the less plausible theists' claims become to balance things out. And what may be worse, when one views science as the enemy of faith, I believe one will tend to reject anything science has to offer. This is a great shame.

The article also points out that scientists don't call it "Darwinism". I have no idea if this is true on the whole but I don't doubt it's true in general. Calling something by a word that ends in an "-ism" makes it seem more philosophical than scientific, and even if a scientist might reject evolutionary theory, they would surely prefer to dismiss it on scientific grounds rather than cheapening it with an easy label. Still, "Darwinism" is found in many dictionaries, and is indeed a well-understood word, even to those who would rather not use it. Also, my main concern about "Darwinism" is that I often wonder why it is considered more of a science than a philosophy. I don't say it to cheapen it, I actually do believe that evolution clearly happens, I only question the scale: yes, animals change and speciate, but does that mean that all life as we know it today is here as a result of speciation from some single original life form? As I said, evolution does have a toe in the door of plausibility, but does having that toe imply that the door must be flung wide? Yes, we see speciation, we have a fossil record that shows us some rather extensive history of evolution, but until all the gaps are filled in (which they may never be, even if evolutionary theory of the more extensive sort is true) how can we really know the origin of life? Claiming that science can explain a one-time event that happened billions of years ago with no record to speak of smacks of philosophy to me rather than science.

But what of creationism? What of God's role in all of this if indeed He exists and has taken a role? Couldn't God have used evolution as a tool, but not necessarily the only tool at His disposal? Could God have created life that has the appearance of having evolved when, in fact, it did not? Why not? It seems to me that every argument and piece of evidence I have heard for evolutionary theory could be reworked into evidence for creationism. For instance, all mammals have either five digits on each of four limbs, or evidence of rudimentary structures that suggest four five-fingered limbs. To a biologist that believes in evolution, this suggests a common ancestry for all mammals. To me, it suggests a common base design for all mammals that has been tweaked by the creator in various ways. The same goes for similarities in DNA, protein structures, etc. Is it common ancestry, or common design? I think evolutionary theorists are making the same mistaken logical leaps that "intelligent design" advocates are. Like the idea that God is where science cannot explain things, ID suggests that if we find biological structures that we cannot explain the evolution thereof, they must have been designed. Why does this make any more or less sense than to say that those things we can explain must have evolved (without any supernatural intervention)? I think it's flawed inference on both counts.

But Darwin famously did an extensive study of variations in finch beaks in the Galapagos Islands. So many different kinds of finches, and each one had its own little ecological niche to fit into. He speculated (not proved) that perhaps they all might have come from a common ancestor. This speculation seems reasonable enough, but why must it then follow that God had no hand in the matter? Could not God have created different species of finches? Could not God have directed varieties of finches towards the ecological niches that they would best fit? Could not God have created the original ancestor of all finches, whose descendants then had, by very simple natural forces, come to speciate into their modern equivalents? Why is God excluded? Matthew 10:29 says "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father." If God takes personal interest in the life of a sparrow, why not the beak of a finch?

Would God "deign to design distinctive shell patterns"? Why is the answer an implied "no"? For all the glory and power and honor the Bible attributes to God, I believe it also attributes the kind of character that gives us a clear answer of "yes". Does that mean God did? I don't know how one would find the answer to that.