After Rose and I managed invted Michael Egnor and Denyse O’Leary onto the Knight and Rose Show to discuss their new book about mind, we made lists of podcasts and articles to review in order to refresh ourselves on metaphysics and theories of mind. My favorite two podcasts (first, second) were from a three part series that Pat Flynn did with Michael Egnor.

And now there is a new episode of Pat Flynn, but this time with J. P. Moreland. When I was just still doing my undergraduate degree, I read two books by J. P. Moreland: “Scaling the Secular City” and “Christianity and the Nature of Science”. I actually taught the first one chapter-by-chapter, in my basement, to other students. I also listened to many of his Veritas Forum and Stand to Reason lectures, including the famous Wonmug lecture.  He also has a STEM undergraduate degree (chemistry).

There are 3 parts:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Here is the description from Mind Matters:

Moreland turns to an older philosophical idea: the concept of a substance. Unlike an aggregate (a pile of wood, for example), a substance is a unified whole. It exists as a single thing. A deeper unity allows it to stay the same even as it changes in minor ways.

A human being, in this view, is a substance. Your soul is the organizing principle that gives you identity and holds everything together — even when your body changes. Moreland explains that the parts of a substance are inseparable; they only exist as part of the whole. For example, a hand that’s been cut off is no longer a real hand because it has lost its role and function.

This idea goes all the way back to Aristotle (384–322 BC). He said that substances are more basic than their parts. Your identity doesn’t come from the combination of your parts — it’s your identity as a substance that gives your parts their meaning and function.

Naturally, I like the scientific evidence from Egnor and O’Leary better than philosophical arguments. But I do think it’s worth it for even sensible people to know a little squishy nonsense about metaphysics and mind. There are good arguments against naturalism from philosophy, and we should all know about them. I find that it’s always better, in a discussion, to say “I have 10 reasons for what I believe, and you haven’t got any reasons for what you believe”.

By the way, here are the different views of mind that I learned about when I was younger, by listening to all these old on-campus lectures with Christian scholars:

• substance dualism
• thomistic dualism
• idealism
• physicalism

I asked Grok to list out the useful arguments for dualism. So, if you’ve never heard of any of this before, then you can check that out. If I were going to defend dualism using philosophy, I would argue from first-person knowledge of my own thoughts, intentionality, and persistent identity over time. Grok has two more in the list that I don’t use.

Non-theists are committed to the idea that the building blocks of life emerged spontaneously from chemicals on the early Earth. Well, Dr. James Tour and a couple of colleagues have written a new article that argues that proteins and RNA both break down faster than they can be formed in a realistic early Earth environment. To get them formed, you would need an intelligent designer.

Before we get to the paper, I should say what a protein is. A protein is a chain of amino acids. If you imagine a chain of kid’s blocks that can chain together, then the amino acids are the blocks, and the chain of blocks is the protein. Once the chain of amino acids is long enough, it can fold up into a shape to do things in the body. BUT the chain only folds into a useful shape if the sequence of blocks is in the right order. It’s similar to how Scrabble letters can form words and sentences. If the amino acids make meaningful words and sentences, then they will fold up, and be useful. Otherwise, they are junk.

RNA is like a messenger that reads recipes out of a book of recipes (DNA) and carries them to the kitchen (cells) where the recipes can be followed to make dishes. The recipe tells the kitchen how to put the blocks (amino acids) together to make a protein chain (a meal). Without RNA, the body wouldn’t know how to build the right proteins to perform biological functions. Again, the RNA itself is another chain, but this time it’s a chain of nucleotides. Nucleotides are also like letters, but more complex than amino acids.

So, the paper is asking the question: could these chains of components arise in the early Earth, without an intelligent designer to arrange them?

The paper was published in the journal BioCosmos, and it’s posted on Sciendo. You can read the full text and even download the PDF.

Anyway, Evolution News reported on the article, and here is what they said:

Rice University chemist James Tour, along with co-authors M. C. Parker and C. Jeynes, recently published an article in BioCosmos titled “Thermodynamic Limitations on the Natural Emergence of Long Chain Molecules: Implications for Origin of Life.” The study demonstrates that proteins and RNA degrade at rates that render their spontaneous formation under natural, undirected conditions highly implausible. To date, no origin-of-life researcher has provided a substantive response to the thermodynamic challenges outlined in the paper.

The early Earth environment is a much more messy place than a university lab, and as a result, chains tend to break down. It would be like trying to chain together blocks while running or swimming.

The authors calculate the decay time of proteins and RNA, to see how quickly they break down. And it turns out that the longer the chain is, the faster it breaks down.

Here’s how Evolution News explains it:

More specifically, the half-life of a dipeptide — two amino acids linked by a peptide bond, as found in proteins — is approximately 7 years. Therefore, a polypeptide chain of 200 amino acids, which is typical for many functional proteins, has a half-life of only 13 days. The situation is even more severe for RNA. A chain of two nucleotides has a half-life of about 100 days, meaning that an RNA strand of 200 nucleotides would degrade in roughly 12 hours. Both classes of molecules decay far more rapidly than they could plausibly form under natural conditions, making their spontaneous emergence highly unlikely in any undirected origin-of-life scenario.

The key point again is that the longer the chain gets, the faster it breaks down. But how fast is the building up rate?

In comparison to a protein’s half-life, the rate of polypeptide chain elongation under prebiotic conditions is very long. Yang et al. (2025) identify numerous barriers to sustained polypeptide growth, including the formation of non-peptide linkages and cyclic structures, stringent environmental requirements, and unfavorable thermodynamics. Their analysis establishes that the rate of growth must be far smaller than one added amino acid per chain per day.

Even assuming one addition each day, synthesizing a protein of 200 amino acids would require over six months. However, the growing chain would almost certainly degrade in a much shorter time span. The challenge is even greater for RNA, which has a significantly shorter half-life and encounters additional chemical and structural hurdles during formation.

So the building up rate for proteins and RNA is much slower than the breaking down rate.

I’m not a biochemist, I’m a software engineer. So my job is to try to come up with a good analogy for you so that you remember this well enough to use it in a conversation, later. After all, we must help the evolutionists to come to their senses!

Imagine building a tall tower of toy blocks on a windy beach. You carefully stack each block (amino acids or nucleotides) to make a protein or RNA chain, but it’s slow work—maybe one block a day. Meanwhile, big waves (the harsh early Earth environment) keep crashing in, knocking your tower down faster than you can build it. For a 200-block tower (a functional protein), it’d take months to stack, but waves destroy it in days (protein half-life: 13 days). For RNA, it’s even worse—your tower collapses in hours (half-life: 12 hours)! Without a skilled builder (an intelligent designer) shielding and guiding the process, the tower will never get built.

Well, I think this is a very interesting piece of work these gentlemen have put together, so we shall see how good of a job the other side does at finding an answer. If you have ever seen Dr. Tour debate, he likes to draw a formula on the chalkboard, and then hand the chalk to his opponent and ask them to solve it. Will they be able to solve this problem? If not, then they should quit being so bold about their naturalistic view of life!

I wanted to share a story from the book “Right Turns“, written by Jewish conservative talk show host Michael Medved. In the story, he explains how his uncle got him to accept one of the most important lessons of life.

He tells the story of having a special dinner with his Uncle Moish in chapter 7:

He took special interest in me from the beginning because, he claimed, he saw a chance with me to redeem past mistakes and to do a better job in shaping a finished product than he had done in “raising” his kid brother, my father. I appreciated my uncle’s solicitous attention… Nevertheless, I was only eleven and found it difficult to ignore my other pressing priorities, most notably, my obsession with tacky science fiction movies. I began to pester Uncle Moish to take me to see a heavily advertised shocker called The Brain from Planet Arous.

To my surprise, Moish at least kept the door open to the idea that he would escort me to The Brain from Planet Arous. But first he insisted on taking me out to dinner at a “fancy restaurant” for a very important and very serious conversation.

I dressed up in my one suit for this solemn occasion and remember the discomfort of a too-tight tie and the too-snug shoulders during our steak dinner. Moish allowed me to order absolutely anything I wanted from the menu—in contrast to my unfailingly cost-conscious mother on those rare occasions when I went out to eat with my parents. Looking around that shiny, busy dining room, with all the well-dressed and prosperous adults, I remember feeling conscious of my status as the only kid in the place. After dinner, feeling very important and grown up, I ordered dessert before my uncle leaned his long, serious face conspiratorially across the table.

“Now is the time, Mike, for the talk we need to have. Maybe your parents think you’re too young, or they don’t want you to hear. But I think you’re ready. I think you need it. I think you are going to remember.”

[…]“First of all, let me ask you. Have you ever heard of the Scarlet Plague?”

“I know about the Black Death, Uncle Moish. That was the disease that killed all those people in the Middle Ages.”

‘That’s very good. but no, the Scarlet Plague is even worse. It’s not about the Middle Ages. It’s about right now, and fifty years ago. It kills more people, ruins more lives, than any other disease. And the worst part about it is the people who are most likely to get sick, and who are going to suffer the most, are the brightest minds, the biggest idealists, the natural leaders of this world. They are people just like you.”

I warmed to his compliment, and tried to smile away my fear and discomfort.

“The Scarlet Plague is Communism. It’s Scarlet because they call themselves Reds, and also that is the color of blood. And there’s blood everywhere with the Communists, of the people they kill, that they torture and they cripple. I know because I saw it myself—I saw it starting in Russia before we got out in 1924. But not only Russia, you know. It’s everywhere. It’s in America. It’s in Israel. Especially with intellectuals! If you’re not ready for it, you may get infected—so you have to understand.”

And he went on to lay out the most gripping, convincing, and altogether persuasive case against the Communists and their lies and their cruelty and they insatiable lust for power and destruction. More than a decade later, when I first read Solzhenitsyn’s epochal (and then brand new) Gulag Archipelago, I thought of my Uncle Moish making the same sort of case, with equal passion, in that ritzy restaurant in Philadelphia. l tried to remember all the names and dates and stories he told me, but the underlying message emerged more clearly than any details. I knew something about “The Cold War” and the threat from the Soviet Union, but Moish made the danger feel far more immediate, insidious, almost supernatural.

“And when you tell your father that we had this talk—and you should tell him—he’ll just laugh and make fun of me. He’d tell you not to worry. He thinks because the Reds never infected him that there’s nothing to worry about. He’s too relaxed about everything! Because he doesn’t know the way they’re going to go after you— I know they will!—and they’re going to go after millions and millions of other people in your generation. Your father doesn’t take it seriously but I need you to take it seriously. I need you to be prepared. You’re In the Boy Scouts, right? ‘Be prepared’ is the motto! Be ready to fight back against the Scarlet Plague!”

It all seemed impossibly heavy and melodramatic, as if Moish worried that my mostly Republican, middle-class San Diego world had already been infested with active cells of preteen Commie agents. Nevertheless, I promised to heed his lecture and to keep his pleas in mind in the years ahead.

And amazingly enough, I did. Less than six years after the diatribe, I was surrounded in college by honest-to-goodness leftist lunatics, and in trying to deal with the psychos from the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), I thought repeatedly of my uncle’s warnings about the Scarlet Plague… I’d like to believe that I would have rejected extremist temptations even without my uncle’s warnings, but as I made progress in my political journey, his unforgettable harangue seemed more and more prescient, even profound.

I read the book about 20 years ago and the story stuck with me.

Michael Medved is a very successful talk show host. He reaches a wide audience, including a lot of religious and secular Jews with his conservative message. And he promotes  scholars who work on intelligent design in science, like Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. What a huge difference his Uncle made. He knew the importance of winning a person using ALL the tools that you have available. You can’t rely on daycare, public schools, celebrities, athletes and artists to communicate important truths to young people. You must do it. And if you have something important to say, then spend your time and money and effort making sure you are heard.