The View From 1776

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This post continues the debate covered to date in Evolutionists For Stalin and “Jesus vs. Darwin.” Points 1 and 2.

Adam Leigland’s critique appeared on his website The Hammer of Judgement.

MR. LEIGLAND:

3. You say “If Darwinians are correct, the universe just “is” and always has been in existence by virtue of some unknowable accident.” In reality, most scientist think that the universe was born about 15 billion years ago, not that it “has always been.” I won’t spend a lot of time on the origins of the universe, other than to say that the evidence supporting the current theories is far from circumstantial (cosmic background radiation, the Hubble blue shift, and results of stellar chromospectroscopy are three examples of hard, direct evidence).

MY RESPONSE:

There may theological, doctrinal considerations that militate against the Big Bang theory.  But I am prepared to accept it, though not necessarily the time of creation you mention.  Physicists, using Einstein’s theory of relativity, have demonstrated that the the unimaginably concentrated mass of the universe at the instant of the Big Bang would have slowed time so drastically that the present general contours of the universe could have emerged in only seven days.

In any case, if the universe came into existence in the twinkling of an eye, complete with all laws of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, that is simply an awesome display of God’s power.  And the Big Bang theory requires a pre-existing God to supply the laws of science which controlled the expansion and conformation of the universe from the first nano-second of its existence.

The student anarchists of the 1960s who are today’s evolutionists and radical socialist educators, assume that, with the tremendous strides in the physical sciences, all religious and moral concepts were long ago outmoded.  Knowing nothing about the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, and the medieval scholastic philosophers, Boomers write them off as hopelessly ignorant, simply because our society takes for granted that the newest is always the best and most desirable. 

In fact, however, today’s scientists in astronomy and sub-atomic particle physics can get no farther than an understanding that there are certain fundamental forces to which all the observable universe conforms, all originating presumably in the Big Bang.  They are thus at exactly the point, and no further, at which Plato and Aristotle arrived 2,500 years before them. 

Aristotle noted that, whatever explanations may be advanced for the structure and motions of the earth and the cosmos, ultimately at the end of the chain of causes and explanations there must be what he termed the Unmoved Mover, i.e., God, or metaphysical Being itself.  Let the physicists explain with mathematical precision how the known universe expanded, millisecond by millisecond, from the Big Bang, but they will have no inkling about Who lit the fuse for that cataclysmic beginning, nor how the rules governing the behavior of energy and matter came into being.

In the Bible one finds a profound, symbolic conception of knowledge and wisdom.  In the Old Testament, in Exodus 3, Moses encounters a bush in the desert that is burning, but is not consumed by the flames.  The voice of God says to Moses from the burning bush, “I AM that I AM,” i.e., God is Being itself, neither becoming nor passing away.  Similarly in the New Testament, the Book of John opens with the very Greek philosophical formulation that, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In the original Greek text, Word is Logos, which means Reason, Truth, or Wisdom, the cosmic source of order, the summum bonum of Plato and Aristotle, and the objective of philosophy.

Present-day scientists have more accurate descriptions of the mechanical processes of nature than did the ancients, but that is of no help at all in understanding the ultimate nature of the universe, nor of the nature and role of human existence in political societies. 

One may describe a great symphony or work of art in minute detail, even reducing a specific composition to exact mathematical measurements and formulae for the relationship of elements within the work of art, but that puts the observer not one whit closer to an actual understanding of the mind and spirit who produced them.  The scientific approach to matters of spiritual nature amounts to no more than painting-by-the-numbers.  Truly to comprehend an artistic work in the most profound sense, one would have to become the artist.  Truly to understand the universe, one would have to become God. 

Presumption to that power and status is the sin that the Greeks called hubris, the sin that is symbolically depicted in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.  It is this ultimate knowledge and power to which the philosophers of the 1789 French Revolution and today’s atheistic evolutionists lay claim.  To conjure up a sense of the unfathomable depths of their ignorance and the towering height of their presumptuousness, envision a tiny pebble at the bottom of a valley approaching the Himalayas, looking upward to the majestic heights of Mt. Everest and proclaiming, “I understand the process of erosion which is slowly breaking you down.  Therefore I am your Master, and you will obey ME!”

MR. LEIGLAND:

4. You conflate “chance” with “accident.” Something happening “by chance” is not the same thing as something happening “by accident.” Chance means that there is a probability, however small, that something might happen. If you win the lottery, you don’t win it by accident, you win it by chance. Let’s reexamine the football game analogy. In the old days, extra points were drop-kicked. Then one day, as you explain, “By accident someone kicked a ball while it was held by another player. As this proved to be more consistently effective, natural selection decreed that the latter practice survive.” Now, imagine this scenario: The kicker is randomly kicking. The football is randomly bouncing. A second player is randomly grasping for the ball. One day, all three random factors successfully but improbably converge, and the current practice of holding the football is born. Sounds silly, but that’s what you would have us believe. In reality, the inherent properties of football and football players introduce the possibility, maybe even likelihood, that such a change to kicking may occur, and after a sufficiently large number of football games, the change does occur. Similarly, the inherent properties of carbon, such as its electron valence structure, make the eventual appearance of molecules that catalyze their own production (which is what DNA is, after all) possible, not by accident, but by chance.

MY RESPONSE:

With regard to your distinction between ‘chance’ and ‘accident,’ I’m not sure what that buys you.  Perhaps there is a meaningful difference in recondite scientific terminology. However, few people would doubt that there is always a chance, a measurable probability, of an accident occurring. 

In ordinary English usage the two words are used interchangeably. Roget’s Thesaurus of the English Language lists the following synonyms:

Accident (first three synonyms are fortune, haphazard, luck or chance)

Chance (the first synonym is accident).

Since you have introduced the characteristic of chance, let’s note that the chances, or probabilities, are effectively zero that the original life form assumed by Darwin and expressly postulated by biologists including Julian Huxley and Richard Dawkins, came into being without Divine intervention in the guise of Intelligent Design. 

British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, in his 1979 “In the Centre of Immensities” wrote:

“The operation of pure chance would mean that within half a billion years the organic molecules in the primeval seas might have to undergo 10 to the 50th power (one followed by 50 zeroes) trial assemblies in order to hit upon the correct sequence.  The possibility of such a chance occurrence leading to the formation of one of the smallest protein molecules is unimaginably small.  Within the boundary conditions of time and space we are considering it is effectively zero.”

Sir Fred Hoyle, English astronomer and cosmologist, did groundbreaking theoretical work on the structure of stars and the origin of chemical elements in stars.  He wrote:

“Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cube at random.  Now imagine 10 to the 50th power blind persons (standing shoulder to shoulder, these would more than fill our entire planetary system) each with a scrambled Rubik cube and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form.  You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling (random variation) of just one of the many bipolymers on which life depends.  The notion that not only the bipolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.  Life must plainly be a cosmic phenomenon.”

You state that,"Similarly, the inherent properties of carbon, such as its electron valence structure, make the eventual appearance of molecules that catalyze their own production (which is what DNA is, after all) possible, not by accident, but by chance.”

The assessment of John DeMassa, a professional research chemist who holds a PhD in chemistry, was:

“Your friend assumes that because carbon can couple with itself (catenation) this property by some alchemy with which I’m unfamiliar, makes deoxyribonucleic acid possible.   It is true that carbon catenation is necessary to form high polymers and complex organic compounds-we agree here with your friend.  Indeed carbon can couple with itself great-sized molecules, but DNA is a highly complex macromolecule with phosphorus-oxygen, carbon-oxygen, oxygen-hydrogen, carbon-carbon, carbon-nitrogen, nitrogen-hydrogen bonds-and others.  It is not held together by C-C bonds alone.  No chemist would say that the “electron valence structure make(s) the eventual appearance of (replicators such as) DNA possible...by chance."  It may be, according to the naturalists, that part of the “recipe" of replicator formation involves carbon self-bonding but it certainly is not the whole recipe.  It is a necessary condition but not sufficient.  Oxygen, phosphorous, hydrogen and nitrogen need to do their parts in the molecule, in just the right places and proportions for the whole thing to hold together.  Your friend overlooks the contributions and delicate chemistry of these elements. 
 
The position often advanced is that a proper stew of compounds in the earth’s atmospheric-ocean system available through solar-nebulae accretion or micrometeorites or volcanoes or meteorites or comets mixed and turned for 10’s to 100’s of millions of years and produced the first cell-but the chemistry is unknown and certainly is not based on the lone property of catenation (C-C self bonding).  Your friend significantly errs because DNA does not contain an olefinic backbone like polyethylene but a phosphate-sugar backbone.  In short the polymer for DNA has a MIXED atomic backbone-it is in some sense heteroatomic (many different atoms) not homoatomic (same-kind or one-kind of atom). 
    
I’ll leave it to you to argue with Dr. DeMassa.

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