Lethal7
After having been on ED for some time now and seeing all of the threads that support denying the existence of God I think it is time that someone made a thread in support of His existence. Again this is Vega and I am now going to be stating specific arguments for the existence of the God of Christianity, the great "I AM", "Lord of Lords", "King of Kings", and "Prince of Peace." This is going to be a very long post and I am going to provide cited information so if you do manage to read it in it's entirity post what you think. Let's go.
Where Did The Universe Come From.
This is the ulitmate question of creation:Where did the universe come from? Why does it exists? The bible begins with the words,"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The bible thus teaches that the universe had a beginning. It does not teach that this beginning was recent. That is a mistaken inference based on adding up the life spans of various old testament figures. But the Old Testament genealogies do not purport to record every generation, and in any case, such a rekoning would take us back only as far as the creation of life on earth (Genesis1:2), not to the very origin of the universe (Genesis1:1). From ancient times until the twnetith century the biblical doctrine that the universe had a beginnig has been repudiated by both Greek Philosophy and modern atheism. In Spit of this, the church has stood firm in the affirmation of the temporal creation of the universe from nothing.
Then in 1929 an alarming thing happened. A Scientist named Edwin Hubblediscovered that light from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be. The startling conclusion to which Hubble was led is that the light is redder because the universee is growing apart-it is expanding! Therefore, the light from the galaxies is affected, since they are moving away from us.
This is the interesting part:Hubble not only showed that the universe was expanding but that it is expanding the same in all directions. To get a picture of this, imagine a balloon with buttons glued to it. As you blow up the balloon the buttons get farther and farther apart, even though though are stuck in place. These buttons are just like the galaxies in space. As space itself expands, all the galaxies in the universe grow farther and frather apart.
The staggering implication is that, as we go back in time, everything was closer and closer together. Ultimately, at some point in the finite past, the entire universe was contracted down to a mathematical point, ahich scientist call the "singularity," from whichit has been expanding ever since. The farther back one goes in the past, the denser the universe becomes, so that one finally reaches a ponit of infinite destiny form which the universe began to expand. This initial event has come to be known as the "Big Bang."
This event that marked the beginning of the universe becomes all the more amazing when on reflects on the fact that nothing existed before it. Nothing existed prior to the singularity, for it is the edge of physical space and time. It therefore represents the origin, not only of all matter and energy, but also of physical space and time themselves. Physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler observe, "At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity,so,if the universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have creation out of nothing."1
Such a conclusion is profoundly disturbing for anyone who ponders it. For the question cannopt be surpressed: Why does the Universe exist rather than nothing? There can be no natural or physical cause of the Big Bang event, since, in philosopher Quentin Smith's words. "It belong analytically to the concept of the cosmological singularity that is not the effect of proir physical events. The definition of a singularity. . . entails that it is impossible to extend the spacetime manifold beyond the singularity. . . . This rules out the idea that the singularity is an effect to some prior natrual process."2 Sir Arthur Eddington, comtemplating the beginning of the univers, opined that the expansion of the universe was so preposterous and incredible that "I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it except myself."3 He finally felt force to conclude,"The beginning seems to present insurperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural."4
Some people were understandably disturbed by the idea that the universe appeared to have been created from nothing. So they tried to find ways to avert the initial singularity and regain a eternal universe, but all in vain. The History of the Twentieth century cosmology has been the history of the repeated falsification of such nonstandard theroies and the corroboration of the Big Bang theroy.5 It has been the overwhelming verdict of the scientific community that none of these alternative theroies are superior to the Big Bang theroy. Again and again models aimed at averting the prediction of the standard model of an absolute beginnig of the universe have been shown to be either untenable or not to avert the beginning after all. For example in such theroies, like the oscillating universe (which expands and contracts forever)of the chaotic inflationary universe (Which continually spawns new universes), while the universes posited do have a potientially infinite universe, they turn out to have only a finite past. Vacumm fluctuation theroies (Which postulate an eternal vacuum out of which our universe is born) cannot explain why, if the vacuum was eternal we do not observe an infinitely old universe. Though still bandied about in the popular press, such models have been abandoned by almost all theroist today.
Given the obvious theological implications of the origin of the universe from nothing, we can expect that alternative theroies to the Big Bang model, which will attempt to restore an eternal universe, will continue to be propsed. Paul Steinhardt of Princeton Universtiy has recently recieved a great deal of coverage in the popular press for his new cyclic/ekpyrotic model of the universe. 6 Such propsed alternatives are to be welcomed and elvauted by the evidence, for if the pattern of faliure of such alternatives continues, the prediction of an absolute beginning by the standard Big Bang modle will further be corroborated, thereby gaining in credibility. Despite many people's predisposition to the contrary, the accumulating evicence has consistently supported the view that the universe was created out of nothing. J.M. Wersiger professor of Physics at Auburn University, makes these observations: "At first the scientific community was very reluctant to accept the idea of the birth of the universe. Not only did the Big Bang model seem to give in to the Judeo-Christian idesa of a beginning of the world, but it also seemed to call for an act of supernatural creation......It took time, observational evidence, and careful verification of predictions made by the Big Bang model to convince the scientific community to accept the ides of a cosmic genesis.....The Big Bang is a very succesful model that imposed itdelf on a very reluctant scientific community"7
Aganist all expectation, science thus verified the Bible's prediction of the beginning of the Universe.
What Does The Fine-Tuning Of The Universe Mean?
The fact that the universe exist is no guarantee that it will be life permitting. Scientists once thought that whatever the intinal conditions of the universe were, eventually the universe would evolvethe complex life-forms we see today. One of the newest findings concerning the origin and evolution of life, however, has been the discovery of how incredibly fine-tuned our universe had to be right from the moment of the Big Bang in order for life to originate anywhere at all in the cosmos. Durning the last thirty years or so, scientists have been stunned by the discovery of how complex and sensitive a balance of initial conditions must be given in the Big Bang in order forthe Universe to permit the origin and evolution of life. In various fields of physics and astrophysics, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and biochemistry, discoveries have repeatedly disclosed that the existence of life depends on a delicate balance of physical constants and quanities. If these were to be slightly altered, the balance would be destroyed and life would not exist. Indeed, in many cases, not even stars and planets, not even chemistry, not even atomic matter itself, would exist, much less biological life. In fact, the universe appears to have been incomprehensibly fine-tuned from the moment of it's inception to permit the existence of intelligent life.
For example, changes in the gravitational force or the elctromagnetic field by only one part in 10^40 would have preculded the existence of stars like our sun, making life impossible. A decrease or increase in the speed of the expansion by only one part in a million million when the temperature of the universe was 10^10 degrees would have either resulted in the universe's recollapse along time ago into a hot fireball or precluded galaxies from ever condensing, in both cases making life impossible. The so-called cosmological constant, crucial to the development of our universe, must be inexplicably fine-tuned to an accuracy of one part in 10^53 in order for a life permitting universe to exist These are just some of the many constants and quanities that must be fine-tined if the universe is to be life permitting.
And it's not just each quantity that must be fine-tuned, but theri rarios to one another must also be finely tuned. Thus, the situation is not merely like all the roulette wheels at the Monte Carlo turning up with a certain set of numbers, and those numbers also having to stand in a certain ratios to each other. For Example, the number on one wheel must be seven times the number on another and one-third the number on another wheel. It is overwhelmingly improbable that a life permitting universe should exist.
Sometimes people will say, "Yes, our universe is improbable. But any universe is equally improbable. It's like winning the lottery. Any particular person's winning it is highly improbable, but somebody has to win it." What this objection helps bring out is that it is not just the probability that is at stake here, but the specified probability. It is not the probability of one universe or another existing, but the probability of a life-permiting universe existing. Thus the correct anology would be a lottery ball in which a billion, billion, billion black balls were mixed together with one white ball, and you were invited to reach in blindfolded and pick out a ball. While ever ball has a equal improbability of being picked, nevertheless, it is overwhelming more probable that whichever ball you pick it will be black rather than white. To complete the anology, imagine now that you life depended on the ball's being white; pick out a white ball or you'll be killed! If you reached, blindfolded, into those jillions of black balls and discovered that you had pulled out the one and only white ball you might suspect that the whole thing was rigged. It you are still skeptical, imagine that in order to stave off execution you had to succeed in doing this three times in a row. The probabilities involoved would not be significantly different, but you would be nuts if you though you had accomplished this by chance.
What Explains The Actual Origin Of Life?
The fine-tuning of the universe supplies certain prerequisties for the existence of life anywhere in the cosmos, but it does not guarantee that life will actually arise in the universe. In other words, while these finely-tuned conditions are necessary conditions for life, they are not sufficient conditions for life. So we may wonder, what else is needed? What explains the actual origins of life?
Most of us were probably taught in school that life originated in the so-called "primoridal soup" by chance chemical reactions. Back in the 1950's Stanley Miller was able to synthesize amino acids by passing electric sparks through methane gas. While amino acids are not alive, protiens are made out of amino acids and protiens are found in living things and so the hope was that somehow the origin of life could be explained.
On the face of it, such a scenario for life's origin seemed hopelesslw improbable. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe estimated that theodds against the required ten to ywnety amino acids coming together by chance (remember at this stage in the game there is no natural selection and so no chemical evolution) to form an enzyme is on the order of one chance out or 10^20. Given the size of the earth's ocean and billions of years avaliable, they thought such an improability could be faced. But they point out that there are two thousand different enzymes made out of amino acids, all of which would have to be formed by chance, and the odds of that happening are around 10^40,000, odds so "outrageously small" that they could not be faced "even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."8 And that is only the beginning . it still remains for DNA to arise from protiens and for the complex machienry of the cell to arise. These issues are just to complex to set numbers to.
Now the bible does not say how life originated. It just says,"God said, 'Let the land produce vegetation:seed bearing plants and trees.....let the waters teem with living creatures.'"(Genesis 1:11,20). The bible is not a science book and doesn't tell us what means, if any, God used to create life. But the scientific evidence is certainly in accord with the origin of life's being, in Francis Crick's words, a miracle, that is, an event that was supernaturally wrought by God. The Bible and science are certainly not in conflict at this point, in fact, if anything the scientific evicence is clearer than the Bible that life's origin was due to a miraclos act of a creator God.
Is The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution True?
The question of whether the noe-darwinian theroy of biological evolution is true is much subtler then most people realize. Part of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the word evolution, which is sometimes taken to mean nothing more than "change over time," which nobody disagrees with. We therefore need to move beyond the terminology and llok at what the theory actually holds. There are at least two main tenets of the Neo-Darwinian theroy of biological evoultion: first, what we may callthe doctirne of common ancestry, and second the mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection.
According to the doctrine of common ancestry, all life-forms evolved from a single primoridal ancestor. In favor of this doctrine is the fact that almost all living organisms share the same genetic make code, or DNA. One could say that God simply used tha same basic design plan to make the different kinds of seperate organisms he made. But it migth seem more plausible that the genetic similarity of all living things is due to their being related to each other, all sharing a common ancestor.
On the other hand, the fossil evidence stands starkly in oppostion to the doctirne of common ancestry. When Darwin purposed his theroy, one of it's major weaknesses was that no organisms stood midway bewteen other organisms as transitional forms. Darwin answered this, however, by saying that these transitional animals existed in the past and would eventually be uncovered. But as palentologistshave unearthed fossil remains, they have not found these transitional forms; they have just found more distinct animals and plants that have died off. Sure there are a few suspected transitional forms, like the Archaeopteryx, a bird with some reptilian features. But if Neo-Darwinism theroy were true, there would would not be only a few, rare, missing links;rather as Michael Denton emphasizes, there would be literally millions of transitional forms in the fossil record.9 Think, for example, of all the intermediateforms that would have to exist for a bat and a whale to have evolved from a common ancestor! The problem can no longer be dismissed by saying that we have not dug deep enough. The transitional forms haven't been found because they aren't there. Thus, the evicence concerning the doctrine of common ancestry is mixed. The DNA evidence lends some support to it but the fossil evidence goes against it.
What about the mechanics of genetic mutation and natural selection, which are supposed to drive evolution? According to the theory, evolutionary development occurs because random mutations produce new features in living things, and those that are advantagous for survival are preserved and reproduced.
I know of no evidence at all that these mechanisms are capable of producing the sort biological complexity we see in the world tday from an original single-celled organism. In fact, the evidence is positively against it. For one thing the processes are just to slow. In their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Barrow and Tipler list ten steps in the course of human evolution, the development of aerobic respiration, the development of an inner skeleton, the development of the eye, for example, each of which is so improbable that before it would occur, the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and incinerated the earth!10 They conclude,"There has developed a general consensus among evolutionists that the evolution of intelligent life is so improbable that is have unlikely to have occurred on any other planet in the entire visible universe."11 If this is true, why think that intelligent life evolved by chance on this planet.
A second problem with genetic mutationand natural selection is that they cannot explain the origin of the irreducibly complex systems. This is the main point of Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box12 Behe who is a microbiologist at Lehigh University, points out that certain systems in the cell, like the blood-clotting mechanisms or the hairlike structures called cilia, are like incrediblt complicated, microscopic machines that cannot function at all unless all the parts are present and functioning . Thus they cannot evolove piecemeal. Surveying thousands of sciuentific articles on these systems, Behe discovered that virtually nothing has ever been written on how such irreducibly complex systems could not have evolved by random mutation and natural selection.13 There is no scientific understanding whatsoever about how such systems originated;with respect to them Darwin has absolutely no explanatory power.
In sum, in the absence of a methodological commitment to naturalism, there really does not appear to be compelling evidence for the Neo-Darwinian theory. On the Contrary, there seems to be pretty peruasive evidence that the neo-Dariwnian account cannot be the full story. Again the bible does not tell us how God created biologically complex organisms any more than it tells us how he created life.(The account of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 2 is obviously highly symbolic,since God, not having lungs or a mouth didn't literally blow into Adam's nose.) He could have created ex nihilo(out of nothing), of he could have have used lower stages of living organisms as raw material for the creation of higher forms through systemic changes that would have wholy improbable on any naturalistic account. The Christian is open to follow the evidence where it leads. But what the evidence does seem to indicate is that the existence of biological complexity demands intelligence such as the Bible describes.
Conclusion
After all the evidence that I have just supplied I wish that you may search both your mind and your heart and look for the answer that is already within you. More questions please PM me or come to my other thread. Open fourm on Christianity.
In His Path
Vega.
Works Cited
1. John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon,1986),442
2. Quentin Smith,"The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe," in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology(Oxford:Clarendon,1993), 120
3. Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe(New York:Macmillian,19930, 124
4. Eddington, The Expanding Universe., 178
5. For disscussion see "Naturalism and Cosmology," in Naturalism:A Critical Appraisal, ed. Wm. L. Craig and J.P. Moreland, Routledge studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy(London: Routledge, 2000), 215-52
6. Andrei Linde, who thinks that Steinhardts' model "is plagued by numerous unsolved problems," complains that the cyclic/akypotic scenario is "very popular among journalists," but "rather unpopular among scientists"("Cyclic Universe runs into Criticism," Physics World [June 2002],8 )
7. J.M. Wersinger, "Genesis:The origin of the Universe," National Forum(winter 1996),9,12. Wersinger himself apparently tries to avoid the absolute origin of the universe from nothing by appeal to a vaccum fluctuation, an idea that has been shown untenable, as I explain in the article referred to in note 6
8. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution From Space(New York:Simon & Schuster, 1981), 24.
9. Michael Denton, Evolution:A Theory in Crisis(Bethesda, Md.:Adler & Adler, 1985), Chapters8-9
10. Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 561-65
11. Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,133.
12. Michale Behe, Darwin's Black Box(New York:Free Press, 1996).
13. For Behe's response to critics, see Michael Behe, "The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis: Breaking Rules," Philosophia Christi 3, no1(2001) 165-79
14.Entire script taken from "Who made God" by Ravi Zacharias.
Where Did The Universe Come From.
This is the ulitmate question of creation:Where did the universe come from? Why does it exists? The bible begins with the words,"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The bible thus teaches that the universe had a beginning. It does not teach that this beginning was recent. That is a mistaken inference based on adding up the life spans of various old testament figures. But the Old Testament genealogies do not purport to record every generation, and in any case, such a rekoning would take us back only as far as the creation of life on earth (Genesis1:2), not to the very origin of the universe (Genesis1:1). From ancient times until the twnetith century the biblical doctrine that the universe had a beginnig has been repudiated by both Greek Philosophy and modern atheism. In Spit of this, the church has stood firm in the affirmation of the temporal creation of the universe from nothing.
Then in 1929 an alarming thing happened. A Scientist named Edwin Hubblediscovered that light from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be. The startling conclusion to which Hubble was led is that the light is redder because the universee is growing apart-it is expanding! Therefore, the light from the galaxies is affected, since they are moving away from us.
This is the interesting part:Hubble not only showed that the universe was expanding but that it is expanding the same in all directions. To get a picture of this, imagine a balloon with buttons glued to it. As you blow up the balloon the buttons get farther and farther apart, even though though are stuck in place. These buttons are just like the galaxies in space. As space itself expands, all the galaxies in the universe grow farther and frather apart.
The staggering implication is that, as we go back in time, everything was closer and closer together. Ultimately, at some point in the finite past, the entire universe was contracted down to a mathematical point, ahich scientist call the "singularity," from whichit has been expanding ever since. The farther back one goes in the past, the denser the universe becomes, so that one finally reaches a ponit of infinite destiny form which the universe began to expand. This initial event has come to be known as the "Big Bang."
This event that marked the beginning of the universe becomes all the more amazing when on reflects on the fact that nothing existed before it. Nothing existed prior to the singularity, for it is the edge of physical space and time. It therefore represents the origin, not only of all matter and energy, but also of physical space and time themselves. Physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler observe, "At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity,so,if the universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have creation out of nothing."1
Such a conclusion is profoundly disturbing for anyone who ponders it. For the question cannopt be surpressed: Why does the Universe exist rather than nothing? There can be no natural or physical cause of the Big Bang event, since, in philosopher Quentin Smith's words. "It belong analytically to the concept of the cosmological singularity that is not the effect of proir physical events. The definition of a singularity. . . entails that it is impossible to extend the spacetime manifold beyond the singularity. . . . This rules out the idea that the singularity is an effect to some prior natrual process."2 Sir Arthur Eddington, comtemplating the beginning of the univers, opined that the expansion of the universe was so preposterous and incredible that "I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it except myself."3 He finally felt force to conclude,"The beginning seems to present insurperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural."4
Some people were understandably disturbed by the idea that the universe appeared to have been created from nothing. So they tried to find ways to avert the initial singularity and regain a eternal universe, but all in vain. The History of the Twentieth century cosmology has been the history of the repeated falsification of such nonstandard theroies and the corroboration of the Big Bang theroy.5 It has been the overwhelming verdict of the scientific community that none of these alternative theroies are superior to the Big Bang theroy. Again and again models aimed at averting the prediction of the standard model of an absolute beginnig of the universe have been shown to be either untenable or not to avert the beginning after all. For example in such theroies, like the oscillating universe (which expands and contracts forever)of the chaotic inflationary universe (Which continually spawns new universes), while the universes posited do have a potientially infinite universe, they turn out to have only a finite past. Vacumm fluctuation theroies (Which postulate an eternal vacuum out of which our universe is born) cannot explain why, if the vacuum was eternal we do not observe an infinitely old universe. Though still bandied about in the popular press, such models have been abandoned by almost all theroist today.
Given the obvious theological implications of the origin of the universe from nothing, we can expect that alternative theroies to the Big Bang model, which will attempt to restore an eternal universe, will continue to be propsed. Paul Steinhardt of Princeton Universtiy has recently recieved a great deal of coverage in the popular press for his new cyclic/ekpyrotic model of the universe. 6 Such propsed alternatives are to be welcomed and elvauted by the evidence, for if the pattern of faliure of such alternatives continues, the prediction of an absolute beginning by the standard Big Bang modle will further be corroborated, thereby gaining in credibility. Despite many people's predisposition to the contrary, the accumulating evicence has consistently supported the view that the universe was created out of nothing. J.M. Wersiger professor of Physics at Auburn University, makes these observations: "At first the scientific community was very reluctant to accept the idea of the birth of the universe. Not only did the Big Bang model seem to give in to the Judeo-Christian idesa of a beginning of the world, but it also seemed to call for an act of supernatural creation......It took time, observational evidence, and careful verification of predictions made by the Big Bang model to convince the scientific community to accept the ides of a cosmic genesis.....The Big Bang is a very succesful model that imposed itdelf on a very reluctant scientific community"7
Aganist all expectation, science thus verified the Bible's prediction of the beginning of the Universe.
What Does The Fine-Tuning Of The Universe Mean?
The fact that the universe exist is no guarantee that it will be life permitting. Scientists once thought that whatever the intinal conditions of the universe were, eventually the universe would evolvethe complex life-forms we see today. One of the newest findings concerning the origin and evolution of life, however, has been the discovery of how incredibly fine-tuned our universe had to be right from the moment of the Big Bang in order for life to originate anywhere at all in the cosmos. Durning the last thirty years or so, scientists have been stunned by the discovery of how complex and sensitive a balance of initial conditions must be given in the Big Bang in order forthe Universe to permit the origin and evolution of life. In various fields of physics and astrophysics, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and biochemistry, discoveries have repeatedly disclosed that the existence of life depends on a delicate balance of physical constants and quanities. If these were to be slightly altered, the balance would be destroyed and life would not exist. Indeed, in many cases, not even stars and planets, not even chemistry, not even atomic matter itself, would exist, much less biological life. In fact, the universe appears to have been incomprehensibly fine-tuned from the moment of it's inception to permit the existence of intelligent life.
For example, changes in the gravitational force or the elctromagnetic field by only one part in 10^40 would have preculded the existence of stars like our sun, making life impossible. A decrease or increase in the speed of the expansion by only one part in a million million when the temperature of the universe was 10^10 degrees would have either resulted in the universe's recollapse along time ago into a hot fireball or precluded galaxies from ever condensing, in both cases making life impossible. The so-called cosmological constant, crucial to the development of our universe, must be inexplicably fine-tuned to an accuracy of one part in 10^53 in order for a life permitting universe to exist These are just some of the many constants and quanities that must be fine-tined if the universe is to be life permitting.
And it's not just each quantity that must be fine-tuned, but theri rarios to one another must also be finely tuned. Thus, the situation is not merely like all the roulette wheels at the Monte Carlo turning up with a certain set of numbers, and those numbers also having to stand in a certain ratios to each other. For Example, the number on one wheel must be seven times the number on another and one-third the number on another wheel. It is overwhelmingly improbable that a life permitting universe should exist.
Sometimes people will say, "Yes, our universe is improbable. But any universe is equally improbable. It's like winning the lottery. Any particular person's winning it is highly improbable, but somebody has to win it." What this objection helps bring out is that it is not just the probability that is at stake here, but the specified probability. It is not the probability of one universe or another existing, but the probability of a life-permiting universe existing. Thus the correct anology would be a lottery ball in which a billion, billion, billion black balls were mixed together with one white ball, and you were invited to reach in blindfolded and pick out a ball. While ever ball has a equal improbability of being picked, nevertheless, it is overwhelming more probable that whichever ball you pick it will be black rather than white. To complete the anology, imagine now that you life depended on the ball's being white; pick out a white ball or you'll be killed! If you reached, blindfolded, into those jillions of black balls and discovered that you had pulled out the one and only white ball you might suspect that the whole thing was rigged. It you are still skeptical, imagine that in order to stave off execution you had to succeed in doing this three times in a row. The probabilities involoved would not be significantly different, but you would be nuts if you though you had accomplished this by chance.
What Explains The Actual Origin Of Life?
The fine-tuning of the universe supplies certain prerequisties for the existence of life anywhere in the cosmos, but it does not guarantee that life will actually arise in the universe. In other words, while these finely-tuned conditions are necessary conditions for life, they are not sufficient conditions for life. So we may wonder, what else is needed? What explains the actual origins of life?
Most of us were probably taught in school that life originated in the so-called "primoridal soup" by chance chemical reactions. Back in the 1950's Stanley Miller was able to synthesize amino acids by passing electric sparks through methane gas. While amino acids are not alive, protiens are made out of amino acids and protiens are found in living things and so the hope was that somehow the origin of life could be explained.
On the face of it, such a scenario for life's origin seemed hopelesslw improbable. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe estimated that theodds against the required ten to ywnety amino acids coming together by chance (remember at this stage in the game there is no natural selection and so no chemical evolution) to form an enzyme is on the order of one chance out or 10^20. Given the size of the earth's ocean and billions of years avaliable, they thought such an improability could be faced. But they point out that there are two thousand different enzymes made out of amino acids, all of which would have to be formed by chance, and the odds of that happening are around 10^40,000, odds so "outrageously small" that they could not be faced "even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."8 And that is only the beginning . it still remains for DNA to arise from protiens and for the complex machienry of the cell to arise. These issues are just to complex to set numbers to.
Now the bible does not say how life originated. It just says,"God said, 'Let the land produce vegetation:seed bearing plants and trees.....let the waters teem with living creatures.'"(Genesis 1:11,20). The bible is not a science book and doesn't tell us what means, if any, God used to create life. But the scientific evidence is certainly in accord with the origin of life's being, in Francis Crick's words, a miracle, that is, an event that was supernaturally wrought by God. The Bible and science are certainly not in conflict at this point, in fact, if anything the scientific evicence is clearer than the Bible that life's origin was due to a miraclos act of a creator God.
Is The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution True?
The question of whether the noe-darwinian theroy of biological evolution is true is much subtler then most people realize. Part of the problem lies in the ambiguity of the word evolution, which is sometimes taken to mean nothing more than "change over time," which nobody disagrees with. We therefore need to move beyond the terminology and llok at what the theory actually holds. There are at least two main tenets of the Neo-Darwinian theroy of biological evoultion: first, what we may callthe doctirne of common ancestry, and second the mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection.
According to the doctrine of common ancestry, all life-forms evolved from a single primoridal ancestor. In favor of this doctrine is the fact that almost all living organisms share the same genetic make code, or DNA. One could say that God simply used tha same basic design plan to make the different kinds of seperate organisms he made. But it migth seem more plausible that the genetic similarity of all living things is due to their being related to each other, all sharing a common ancestor.
On the other hand, the fossil evidence stands starkly in oppostion to the doctirne of common ancestry. When Darwin purposed his theroy, one of it's major weaknesses was that no organisms stood midway bewteen other organisms as transitional forms. Darwin answered this, however, by saying that these transitional animals existed in the past and would eventually be uncovered. But as palentologistshave unearthed fossil remains, they have not found these transitional forms; they have just found more distinct animals and plants that have died off. Sure there are a few suspected transitional forms, like the Archaeopteryx, a bird with some reptilian features. But if Neo-Darwinism theroy were true, there would would not be only a few, rare, missing links;rather as Michael Denton emphasizes, there would be literally millions of transitional forms in the fossil record.9 Think, for example, of all the intermediateforms that would have to exist for a bat and a whale to have evolved from a common ancestor! The problem can no longer be dismissed by saying that we have not dug deep enough. The transitional forms haven't been found because they aren't there. Thus, the evicence concerning the doctrine of common ancestry is mixed. The DNA evidence lends some support to it but the fossil evidence goes against it.
What about the mechanics of genetic mutation and natural selection, which are supposed to drive evolution? According to the theory, evolutionary development occurs because random mutations produce new features in living things, and those that are advantagous for survival are preserved and reproduced.
I know of no evidence at all that these mechanisms are capable of producing the sort biological complexity we see in the world tday from an original single-celled organism. In fact, the evidence is positively against it. For one thing the processes are just to slow. In their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Barrow and Tipler list ten steps in the course of human evolution, the development of aerobic respiration, the development of an inner skeleton, the development of the eye, for example, each of which is so improbable that before it would occur, the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and incinerated the earth!10 They conclude,"There has developed a general consensus among evolutionists that the evolution of intelligent life is so improbable that is have unlikely to have occurred on any other planet in the entire visible universe."11 If this is true, why think that intelligent life evolved by chance on this planet.
A second problem with genetic mutationand natural selection is that they cannot explain the origin of the irreducibly complex systems. This is the main point of Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box12 Behe who is a microbiologist at Lehigh University, points out that certain systems in the cell, like the blood-clotting mechanisms or the hairlike structures called cilia, are like incrediblt complicated, microscopic machines that cannot function at all unless all the parts are present and functioning . Thus they cannot evolove piecemeal. Surveying thousands of sciuentific articles on these systems, Behe discovered that virtually nothing has ever been written on how such irreducibly complex systems could not have evolved by random mutation and natural selection.13 There is no scientific understanding whatsoever about how such systems originated;with respect to them Darwin has absolutely no explanatory power.
In sum, in the absence of a methodological commitment to naturalism, there really does not appear to be compelling evidence for the Neo-Darwinian theory. On the Contrary, there seems to be pretty peruasive evidence that the neo-Dariwnian account cannot be the full story. Again the bible does not tell us how God created biologically complex organisms any more than it tells us how he created life.(The account of the creation of man and woman in Genesis 2 is obviously highly symbolic,since God, not having lungs or a mouth didn't literally blow into Adam's nose.) He could have created ex nihilo(out of nothing), of he could have have used lower stages of living organisms as raw material for the creation of higher forms through systemic changes that would have wholy improbable on any naturalistic account. The Christian is open to follow the evidence where it leads. But what the evidence does seem to indicate is that the existence of biological complexity demands intelligence such as the Bible describes.
Conclusion
After all the evidence that I have just supplied I wish that you may search both your mind and your heart and look for the answer that is already within you. More questions please PM me or come to my other thread. Open fourm on Christianity.
In His Path
Vega.
Works Cited
1. John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon,1986),442
2. Quentin Smith,"The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe," in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology(Oxford:Clarendon,1993), 120
3. Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe(New York:Macmillian,19930, 124
4. Eddington, The Expanding Universe., 178
5. For disscussion see "Naturalism and Cosmology," in Naturalism:A Critical Appraisal, ed. Wm. L. Craig and J.P. Moreland, Routledge studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy(London: Routledge, 2000), 215-52
6. Andrei Linde, who thinks that Steinhardts' model "is plagued by numerous unsolved problems," complains that the cyclic/akypotic scenario is "very popular among journalists," but "rather unpopular among scientists"("Cyclic Universe runs into Criticism," Physics World [June 2002],8 )
7. J.M. Wersinger, "Genesis:The origin of the Universe," National Forum(winter 1996),9,12. Wersinger himself apparently tries to avoid the absolute origin of the universe from nothing by appeal to a vaccum fluctuation, an idea that has been shown untenable, as I explain in the article referred to in note 6
8. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution From Space(New York:Simon & Schuster, 1981), 24.
9. Michael Denton, Evolution:A Theory in Crisis(Bethesda, Md.:Adler & Adler, 1985), Chapters8-9
10. Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 561-65
11. Barrow and Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle,133.
12. Michale Behe, Darwin's Black Box(New York:Free Press, 1996).
13. For Behe's response to critics, see Michael Behe, "The Modern Intelligent Design Hypothesis: Breaking Rules," Philosophia Christi 3, no1(2001) 165-79
14.Entire script taken from "Who made God" by Ravi Zacharias.
I felt that this definitely deserved a spot up here. It was so wonderfully done. I can remember very well being amazed by Kalan's intellect and research.
