Origins Of Life?

While no doubt the matter will continue to be debated, British scientists seem to have made some progress regarding the origins of life. Via Fox, the Agence France-Presse reports on "a paper published in the British journal Nature by University of Manchester chemists:"

The team, led by Professor John Sutherland, venture that an RNA-like synthesis took place through a series of chemical reactions and an important intermediate substance.

Their lab model uses starting materials and environmental conditions that are believed to have been around in early Earth and are also used in the standard "RNA first" scenario.

Their theory starts with a simple sugar called glycolaldehyde, which reacts with cyanmide (a compound of cyanide and ammonia) and phosphate to produce an intermediate compound called 2-aminooxazole.

Gentle warming from the Sun and cooling at night help purify the 2-aminooxazole, turning it into a plentiful precursor which contributes the sugar and base portions of the new ribonucleotide molecule.

The presence of phosphate and ultraviolet light from the Sun complete the synthesis.

God's Gap may have just shrunk a bit more. Of course, even if scientists succeed in creating new life in a laboratory setting, even that will not prevent (the relatively sophisticated) creationists from imagining the hand of God at work in the origins and evolution of life.

The Limits of Darwin

Father Jonathan Morris argues quite correctly that evolutionary theory does not, by itself, prove or disprove the existence of God. Likewise, the natural sciences of electricity (which provided a naturalistic explanation of lightning) and geology (which provided a naturalistic explanation of large-scale formations) do not, by themselves, prove or disprove the existence of God.

The matter of theology rests on philosophy, not on any natural science, though of course the findings of natural science can buttress the case. (Even or especially theologians grant that evolution makes it easier to believe that natural forces, rather than divine intervention, created life.)

Unfortunately, Morris also errs in outlining the implications of Darwin when he writes that "scientists of evolutionary theory must avoid Darwin's pitfall of making definitive philosophical or theological statements about the absolute randomness of the natural world."

Evolution does not imply metaphysical randomness; it instead properly rests on a basis of natural law, meaning that things act according to their natures.

Morris is here sneaking in a metaphysical dualism -- stuff versus order -- that presumes supernaturalism and "intelligent design." He is thus just as guilty of making up implications of evolutionary theory as are those he criticizes.

D'Souza on Darwin

I agree with Dinesh D'Souza's central thesis today: the biological theory of evolution does not, by itself, imply atheism or disprove supernaturalism. I hope that D'Souza's more evangelical brethren note at least the first part of D'Souza's claim: "[W]e can embrace Darwin's account of evolution without embracing his metaphysical naturalism and unbelief." If you're going to be a Christian, at least be a sophisticated one, not a snake charmer.

Beyond that, true to form, D'Souza impugns the motives of his opponents. D'Souza suggests that various atheists latch on to evolution as a way to display their hostility to religion and to God. He writes of Darwin:

When his young daughter Annie died at the age of 10, Darwin came to hate the God whom he blamed for this. This was in 1851, eight years before Darwin released his Origin of Species.

Around the time of Annie's death, Darwin also wrote that if Christianity were true then it would follow that his grandfather Erasmus Darwin and many of his closest family friends would be in hell. Darwin found this utterly unacceptable, given that these men were wise and kind and generous. Darwin's rejection of God was less an act of unbelief as it was a rebellion against the kind of God posited by Christianity. A God who would allow a young girl to die and good people to go to hell was not anyone that Darwin wanted to worship.

Whether or not Darwin's initial motivation was hatred of God, it's neither fair nor accurate to turn concerns over tragedies and hell into basically psychological issues. There is a big difference between rebelling against God -- which presumes the existence of God -- and concluding that God does not exist (and therefore there is no God to blame or rebel against).

D'Souza himself has acknowledged the theoretical difficulties of a God who permits " all the suffering" in the world. And the stricter notions of hell do tend toward a reductio ad absurdum of the faith. Now, many Christians have decent answers to the problem of suffering, and some Christians reject hell altogether. So neither of these issues definitively disproves Christianity.

Issues like evolution, suffering, and hell can prompt one to reconsider the more fundamental foundations of one's religion. While none of those issues, by itself, disproves religion, enough such concerns can -- and should -- promote a deeper examination of one's religious faith. Whether one ultimately retains or rejects that faith depends on one's deeper philosophical conclusions.

Happy Birthday, Darwin

Charles Darwin was born February 12, 1809. He became one of the world's greatest scientists, and certainly its greatest biologist. His birth date deserves our recognition.

However, I'm a bit leery about an advertising campaign by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It's funding a Colorado sign stating, "Praise Darwin; Evolve Beyond Belief." Darwin certainly does merit our praise. However, his central significance is not the stir he's caused among the religious; it is his contributions to science. And the advice, "evolve beyond belief," doesn't mean anything. A belief can be true or false. The only way to evolve beyond belief is to quit thinking. The proper goal is to reach true beliefs and shed false ones.

Thankfully, there are much better ways to celebrate Darwin's birth date, such as by checking out his complete works or listening to Keith Lockitch's talk, "Darwin and the Discovery of Evolution."

Life Is Improbable

Towhhall.com, the "conservative" forum, seems to spend about equal time promoting religion and beating up Democrats. Which says a lot about why the conservative movement today is in disarray, and why Democrats rule the nation and Colorado. But Townhall does provide grist for the blog. Today Bill Murchison argues:

It's hard, with it all, to see why the scientific types cling so feverishly to the creed -- alien to the whole of civilization, prior to the 19th century -- that God couldn't have dealt the cards originally. Well -- they respond -- it's because there's no evidence to show it. Possibly not. There is something else, though: a thing called common sense. Everything here and all around us just happened, without the intervention of a Designer? Isn't that just a little improbable?

I trust I need say little in response to the "everybody's doing it" argument. Nor do I need to spend much time addressing Murchison's suggestion that a strongly held belief is like an illness. What about the idea that life is improbable? Well, of all the galaxies we know that swirl around our universe, of all the solar system comprising these galaxies, so far as we know exactly one contains a planet that supports life. Yes, life is improbable. Of all the mass in the universe, life claims a miniscule, vanishingly small fraction of it. Yet something that is improbable is also possible, and in a large universe highly improbable things are bound to arise somewhere. Indeed, the very concept of probability implies that we know of something that happens in some cases but not all.

Just think of how improbable it is that you have your distinct set of DNA. Unless you have an identical twin, no other living thing on earth shares your precise DNA. You won the universal lottery.

The idea that life is improbable poses no real challenge to the claim that life arose in a causal universe. It makes sense, whether common or not.

More Problems with Expelled

Scientific American reveals more problems with the Creationist documentary Expelled, which I've criticized previously. I'll review only one of the six main points from the article.

The article points out that Expelled offers a rather selective review of the case of Richard Sternberg. "According to the film, after Sternberg approved the publication of a pro-ID paper by Stephen C. Meyer of the Discovery Institute, he lost his editorship, was demoted at the Smithsonian, was moved to a more remote office, and suffered other professional setbacks."

However:

Sternberg was never an employee of the Smithsonian: his term as a research associate always had a limited duration, and when it ended he was offered a new position as a research collaborator. As editor, Sternberg's decision to "peer-review" and approve Meyer's paper by himself was highly questionable on several grounds, which was why the scientific society that published the journal later repudiated it.

The further implication is that Sternberg abused his editorial position to advance his pseudo-scientific ideological position, which implies that his treatment was altogether too forgiving.

Shermer, Lockitch Flunk 'Expelled'

Recently I made a few comments about the pro-creationist film Expelled, based on the preview. But I didn't realize that the film is horrid, rather than merely stupid.

Gus Van Horn points to an article by Michael Shermer, who begins:

n 1974 I matriculated at Pepperdine University... It was with some irony for me, then, that I saw Ben Stein’s anti-evolution documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens with [Stein] addressing a packed audience of adoring students at Pepperdine University, apparently falling for the same trap I did.

Actually they didn’t. The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein’s screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, Associate Provost for Research and Chair of Natural Science at Pepperdine, “the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus” but that “the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and the staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein’s lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university.” And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

This is of particular interest to me, because I went to Pepperdine, too.

Shermer also points out the propagandistic nature of the film:

Even more disturbing than these distortions is the film’s other thesis that Darwinism inexorably leads to atheism, Communism, Fascism and the Holocaust. Despite the fact that hundreds of millions of religious believers fully accept the theory of evolution, Stein claims that we are in an ideological war between a scientific natural worldview that leads to the gulag archipelago and Nazi gas chambers, and a religious supernatural worldview that leads to freedom, justice and the American way. The film’s visual motifs leave no doubt in the viewer’s emotional brain that Darwinism is leading America into an immoral quagmire. ... Cleverly edited interview excerpts from scientists are interspersed with various black-and-white clips for guilt by association with: bullies beating up on a 98-pound weakling... East Germans captured trying to scale the Berlin Wall, and Nazi crematoria remains and Holocaust victims being bulldozed into mass graves.

The film, then, is intellectually dishonest, because there is no logical connection between the biological theory of evolution and the various forms of socialism. There is, however, a logical link between religion and and the Inquisition, the Taliban, the Dark Ages, etc.

In addition, today's most enthusiastic champions of economic liberty and individual rights are those inspired by the philosophy of Ayn Rand, which also shows that legitimate moral absolutes can only be established through reason, not religious faith. (Shermer has slammed Rand, but his prejudice against her seems to flow from the Brandens' lies about Rand -- reviewed in James Valiant's Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics -- and a basic misunderstanding of the content of Rand's philosophy.)

Speaking of Rand, Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Institute makes some additional comments about the film:

"The premise of Expelled is that proponents of 'intelligent design' have been shunned, denied tenure, and even fired because of a conspiracy to quash the scientific evidence supporting their theory," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. "But the truth is: there is no evidence supporting their theory. Intelligent design is completely devoid of any positive scientific content, and consists of nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on evolution. To the extent intelligent design advocates are facing obstacles in academia it is because they are not doing real science: they haven't been 'expelled' they have flunked out of the scientific community, just as a faith healer would flunk out of medical school.

"Observe that intelligent design advocates have pumped millions into publicity-seeking, rather than appealing to scientists with facts and logical arguments. They have spent more time at Christian 'apologetics seminars' than scientific conferences, and have attempted to use the courts to force schools to teach their ideas. Now they are hoping to dupe the movie-going public with a film that misrepresents Darwin's theory and the array of facts that support it -- just as the makers of Expelled misrepresented the nature of the film in order to bamboozle respected evolutionary scientists into participating in it."

I had been thinking of seeing Expelled for the same reason that I saw two of Michael Moore's films. But I've decided to avoid Expelled for the same reason that I refused to watch Moore's latest: at a certain point, unless a complete viewing is required for a review, I don't want to spend my resources to support intellectual dishonesty.

Darwin Online

Paul Hsieh has pointed me to an outstanding resource: "The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online."

Wow. It's just stunning that such a rich collection of material is available to the public, at no charge. And to think that, when I was a child, the internet did not even exist.

This seems like a good time point out that, on its registered users' page, the Ayn Rand Institute hosts Keith Lockitch's lecture, "Darwin and the Discovery of Evolution;" see the Complete Video Collection.

Though Darwin is subject to increasingly shrill attacks from the evangelical movement, the rest of us owe him a debt of gratitude for ushering in the modern science of biology.

Milloy on Mercury and Evolution

There is all the difference in the world between reasonable skepticism regarding some particular religious or scientific claim and universal skepticism that brings all knowledge into doubt. Steven Milloy seems to have stumbled across that line.

I was impressed with Milloy's recent article about the environmentalist flip-flop on mercury. While environmentalists have typically screamed bloody murder about any trace amount of mercury anywhere, when it came to laws mandating the use of light bulbs that happen to contain mercury, environmentalists were strangely mute. Milloy concludes, "First mercury was dangerous. Then, temporarily, it became no big deal. Now that the Greens have caught us in the CFL [compact fluorescent lightbulb] trap, they’re reverting to form on mercury -- all to cause the sort of chaos resulting in increased government control of our lives."

However, after I promoted this article via e-mail, Doug Peltz pointed me to a Cato interview in which Milloy expresses doubts about biological evolution as applied to humans. While Cato's web page no longer seems to host the interview, it is available through Archive.org:

[Question:] What's the real deal on evolution? Twenty years ago on "Cosmos," Carl Sagan said it wasn't a "theory" but a "law." My Christian friends tell me it's a theory shot full of errors. And my scientist friends tell me it's provable in the everyday world.

[Reply:] Explanations of human evolution are not likely to move beyond the stage of hypothesis or conjecture. There is no scientific way - i.e., no experiment or other means of reliable study - for explaining how humans developed. Without a valid scientific method for proving a hypothesis, no indisputable explanation can exist.

The process of evolution can be scientifically demonstrated in some lower life forms, but this is a far cry from explaining how humans developed.

That said, some sort of evolutionary process seems most likely in my opinion. But there will probably always be enough uncertainty in any explanation of human evolution to give critics plenty of room for doubt.

Here Milloy implicitly casts doubt on inductive knowledge as such.

Obviously billions of years of biological evolution cannot be reproduced in a laboratory environment. However, extensive research into fossil records and genetics proves conclusively that all life on earth arose from evolutionary processes.

Moreover, the only alternative to evolution (broadly meaning the development of life through natural processes not guided by some higher intelligence) is some variant of creationism, either natural or supernatural. Natural creationism would involve something like the the process found in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is no evidence for such creation, making any claim about it completely arbitrary. But those of a religious bent would dismiss natural creationism as quickly as they dismiss evolution, for their entire motive is to create room for supernatural creationism. So, in effect, Milloy sacrifices the very possibility of objective knowledge to religion.

Does Entropy Disprove Evolution?

I can't remember how I ran across the following argument against evolution, but I thought it was darn funny:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

I've heard this "entropy" argument against evolution before, and the quote strikes me as a particularly eloquent refutation of the basic argument (for those, who, apparently unlike the original poster, "certainly know about" just such "a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy.")

I haven't tried to track down the original posting of this comment, so perhaps it was intended as humor. Yet it tracks other statements obviously intended to be taken seriously. For example, Kevin Haag (who found religion more appealing than life as a drug-abusing partier) includes on his "New Testament Christian" web page the document, "Ten Major Flaws of Evolution," by Randy Alcorn ("with additional editing by Jim Darnall"). Alcorn, the author of books such as Heaven, 50 Days of Heaven, and Heaven for Kids, offers a slightly more sophisticated argument against evolution based on entropy:

This law of physics states that all systems, whether open or closed, have a tendency to disorder (or "the least energetic state"). There are some special cases where local order can increase, but this is at the expense of greater disorder elsewhere. Raw energy cannot generate the complex systems in living things, or the information required to build them. Undirected energy just speeds up destruction. Yet, evolution is a building-up process, suggesting that things tend to become more complex and advanced over time. This is directly opposed to the law of entropy.

Alcorn does not overlook the existence of the Sun; he just flatly denies that the Sun or any other energy source (including chemical and geothermal) could have provided any of the energy that contributed to the evolution of life on earth. Good enough for apologetics, I guess.

Of course, Christianity cannot be judged by the sillier comments of some Christians. No movement can be so judged. (And, anyway, plenty of Christians believe that evolution is true.) To take another example, people who claim to see the image of Jesus in some random mark shouldn't be taken as representative. (Thanks to Paul Hsieh for the link.)

That said, some comments are both silly and self-refuting, such as the following:

"We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of The Astrological Magazine will cease with the December 2007 issue."