The amazing complexity of life

Back to my blog on I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. The last blog on this covered the design argument in which the authors claim the basic laws of the universe are set up to allow human life to exist. This time I'll focus on a second type of design in the universe -- the complexity of life. The authors point out that advancing technology has enabled scientists to discover a tiny world of awesome design and astonishing complexity.

The biggest problem for Darwinian believers is to explain the origin of the first life, which is not as simple as once thought. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA, the chemical that encodes instructions for building and replicating all living things. It's a blueprint, and Bill Gates called it the most complex computer code ever seen. DNA even in a one-celled amoeba is unbelievably complex in its message. Richard Dawkins, an atheist professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all 30 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Darwinists have a difficult task. They have to say life came spontaneously from nonliving chemicals without intelligent intervention. The trouble is, all experiments designed to spontaneously generate life have failed. Another difficulty they have, besides the complexity of DNA, is the origin of DNA. It relies on proteins for its production, but proteins rely on DNA for their production. So which came first, proteins or DNA? One has to be in existence for the other to be made.

So why are Darwinists so committed to their viewpoint? Because they have a philosophy which rules out intelligent causes before they even look at the evidence. Since they have ruled out any possibility of God because of their philosophical foundations, Darwinism has be true since it's the only God-free theory.

A couple of key quotations make this very clear. Phil Johnson, a Christian law professor, states, "Darwinism is based on an a priori [prior] commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence." Richard Lewontin, a Harvard University atheistic professor, says, "It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenonal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door." That's an amazing statement, considering he is saying Darwinists start with a philosophical position of atheism and build their science on that. So much for the neutrality of science.



But Darwinists say that they have billions of years to work with, so that may allow spontaneous generation of life to happen. The problem is that nature disorders; it doesn't organize things. Atheists and theists alike have calculated the probability that life could arise by chance from nonliving chemicals. The results are staggering. One biochemist said that the probability of getting one protein molecule by chance would be the same as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand in the Sahara desert three times in a row. And one protein molecule is not even life. You need about 200 of these molecules to get life going.


This is fascinating material, but there is a lot of it. So I'll save some for the next blog.

A just-right universe for us

I have been blogging on a book that our class at church will be reading together--I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Geisler and Turek. For this entry I want to cover what is probably my favorite section of the whole book. It involves the argument from design, also called the teleological argument. It looks like this: every design had a designer; the universe has highly complex design; therefore, the universe had a designer. In the last few years science has uncovered so much evidence of complexity in the universe that argues powerfully for the existence of God.

For one thing, the universe is specifically organized to enable life to exist on earth. Think about just the solar system--no other place is able to sustain life. We live, like Goldilocks, in a just-right position, neither too hot (Venus) or too cold (Mars).We have around us scores of improbable and interdependent life-supporting conditions that make earth a perfect home in a hostile universe. These highly precise environmental conditions go by the term "anthropic principle." The universe looks fine-tuned to support human life here on earth.

What are some of these conditions that are exactly right? I'll just list some, skipping the details, but the book explains each more fully: the percent of oxygen in the atmosphere, the transparency of our atmosphere, the moon-Earth gravitational interaction, the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, the gravitational force in the universe, the expansion rate of the universe, the velocity of light, the level of water vapor in the atmosphere, the precise location of Jupiter in the solar system, the thickness of the Earth's crust, the rotation of the earth, the tilt of the Earth's axis, the rate of lightning in the atmosphere, seismic activity on the earth. There are something like 122 of these conditions both on earth and throughout the universe that have to be precisely right for us to exist.

The authors quote a Nobel Laureate, Arno Penzias, who has this to say after examining the conditions like the ones in the previous paragraph: "Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan."

The skeptic's response comes in several flavors. One popular one today is called the Multiple Universe Theory. This theory says there actually is an infinite number of universes in existence, so it's no wonder that at least one looks like the one that we are in. There are significant problems with this explanation. First, there is no evidence for it. Secondly, an infinite number of finite things like universes is an actual impossibility. Third, even if there were other universes, they would need fine-tuning to get started just as ours did.

This chapter in Geisler and Turek's book discusses design of the universe, but there is much more to this design argument. The other area of design that is so powerful today has to do with the microscopic level. Design that went unnoticed in Darwin's day is being revealed in exiting ways. I'll cover those in the next blog.

Can we know the truth?

Here's a second blog covering I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, a book that we will be discussing in a class at our church. The previous blog covered the first chapter which explained that denying absolute truth and its knowability is self-defeating. In this second blog I want to cover the next chapter in the book with the provocative title "Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?"

The authors discuss four reasons why people believe what they believe. They include sociological reasons (parents, friends, society, culture), psychological reasons (comfort, peace of mind, meaning, purpose, hope), religious reasons (scripture, pastor/priest, guru, rabbi, imam, church), and philosophical reasons (consistency, coherence, completeness -- best explanation of all the evidence). Of course, the key question is whether each of these reasons are good ones to believe something. Notice how many of the reasons are actually poor, reflecting only subjective preferences rather than logic and evidence.

Then comes the question about logic. In our society today there is skepticism about logic. Some suggest we should consider using Eastern logic rather than Western logic. What difference do people suggest there is in these two types of logic? Some say in the East people use both-and logic while in the West it is either-or logic. But notice the word choices here -- skeptics tell us there are two types of logic, but they present them as either-or choices. That means they are actually using Western logic alone in attempting to suggest there are two types of logic. That's self-refuting. The authors point out, as result, there really is no such thing as different kinds of logic to discover the truth. There's only one type: we have to use it; it's built into the universe.

Many Americans today are involved in such self-defeating arguments because of one man -- David Hume. He believed that all meaningful ideas were either true by definition or must be based on sense experience. So, according to him, propositions were only meaningful if the claim involved abstract reasoning like a math equation, or the truth claim could be verified through one of the five senses. If he is correct, then any book talking about God is meaningless. His two conditions became the basis nearly two hundred years later for a brand of philosophy called Logical Positivism, which became popular in university philosophy departments by the mid--1960s.

But the authors point out that Hume's statements are self-refuting. Why? The claim that something can only be meaningful if it's verified by the five senses or true by definition cannot be proven through one of those two methods. Now it's true that claims that are empirically verifiable or true by definition are meaningful, but these claims don't comprise all meaningful statements as Hume contended.

One other person has brought a lot of skepticism about truth to the world -- Immanuel Kant. He said there was no way to know anything about the real world because the structure of our senses and our mind forms all sense data, so we never really know the thing in itself. We only know the thing as it appears to us after our mind and senses have form it. That sounds powerful, but once again there is a simple response. Kant claims we can't know the real world, but he claims to know something about it. So, once again, his argument is self-refuting.

The authors then go on to ask how one can know truth. They say it begins with the self-evident laws of logic called first principles. One is the law of non-contradiction, which says contradictory claims cannot both be true at the same time in the same sense. Another is the law of the excluded middle, which tells us that something either is or is not; there are no third alternatives. For example, either Jesus rose from the dead or he did not. We also learn truth through induction, observing the world around us and then drawing general conclusions from those observations.

Can observation and induction help us know something about God? Yes, according to Geisler and Turek. God may be invisible, but we can observe the effects of God just as we cannot observe gravity but can observe its effects. Much of the rest of their book discusses some of these effects of God that we can observe in the universe, but since that covers a lot of territory, I'll save that for a future blog.

Does truth exist?

This fall a class at our church is going to go through a terrific book called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. The book follows a four-step progression: truth exists, God exists, miracles are possible, the New Testament is reliable. Each of these steps leads to the next. I'd like to cover some of the material in the next few blogs, starting with the idea that truth about reality is knowable.

The authors begin by defining truth. They say it is simply telling it like it is, or that which corresponds to its object, or that which describes an actual state of affairs. Contrary to what is being taught in many public schools, the authors claim truth is not relative but absolute, meaning it is true for all people at all times and all places. By definition all truth claims are absolute, narrow, and exclusive. There are those who say Christians, for example, are narrow-minded people because they believe they have the truth. But atheists believe their point is true, which makes them just as narrow-minded. Any truth claim is exclusive, so it does no good to complain that one group thinks it is correct; all people think they have truth when it comes to a worldview.

Several other things can be said about truth as well. Truth is discovered, not invented. It is true for all people, no matter what culture. Even though our beliefs about truth may change, truth itself is unchanging. Beliefs cannot change the fact even if they are sincerely held.

But today we have the assertion that there is no truth. However, when we look at that statement, we see that it is self-defeating because it claims to be true in all cases and therefore defeats itself. It's much like hearing someone say, "I can't speak a word of English"--that's self-defeating too.Those who believe in relativism make many self-defeating statements like that -- "all truth is relative," "there are no absolutes," "it's true for you but not for me." So complete agnosticism or skepticism is self-defeating because it claims truth cannot be known but then claims that its view is true.

The authors have tried to establish that truth can be known. But what about other religious beliefs? Can they all be true? No, since they are mutually exclusive -- they teach opposites. So much for the new definition of tolerance, which now means we have to accept every belief as true. Some people will bring up the parable of the blind men and the elephant in which six blind men feel a different part of the elephant and reach a different conclusion about the object in front of them. We are told that no single religion has the truth since we are all like the blind men. This sounds okay until we think about the story a little further. Somebody in the story seems to have an objective perspective since they can see that the blind people are mistaken. So apparently people can see the truth, and this parable does not support religious pluralism.

Well, that's the first section of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. There's more that examines the possibility of truth, but I'll save that for a future blog.