Tag Archives: Origin of Life

Commentary

Can evolutionary biologists be objective about evolution?

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From Evolution News, and article by Casey Luskin.

Excerpt:

What I am suggesting is that the public packaging of Darwinian theory has become intensely political, and that would-be critics face certain pressures.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to what evolutionists themselves are saying.

Consider the words of philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini in their book What Darwin Got Wrong:

We’ve been told by more than one of our colleagues that, even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, nonetheless we shouldn’t say so. Not, anyhow, in public. To do that is, however inadvertently, to align oneself with the Forces of Darkness, whose goal is to bring Science into disrepute.

(Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, What Darwin God Wrong, p. xx (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Likewise, theoretical biologist Günter Thieβen wrote in Theory in Biosciences:

It is dangerous to raise attention to the fact that there is no satisfying explanation for macroevolution. One easily becomes a target of orthodox evolutionary biology and a false friend of proponents of non-scientific concepts.

(Günter Theißen, “The Proper Place of Hopeful Monsters in Evolutionary Biology,” Theory in Biosciences, Vol. 124: 349-369 (2006).)

Again, philosopher and biologist John Dupré writes in American Scientist:

The enduring debates with creationists have also undoubtedly tended to discourage admission that major conceptual issues about evolution remain unresolved.

(John Dupré, “The Conditions for Existence,” American Scientist)

Such words are not harbingers of some kind of a mass conspiracy to hide problems with evolution from the public. No such conspiracy exists. But they do show evidence of the hyper-political nature of this debate, where scientists feel political pressure to avoid lending credence to those they call “creationists.”

It’s important to point that what materialists mean by “science” is presuming materialism and then carrying on a charade of investigating the world and discovering that materialism did it. They can’t be open to agent causation, because their religion doesn’t allow it.

Give me that old-time religion
Give me that old-time religion

Imagine a materialist CIO who thought that code was written by large numbers of monkeys pounding at keyboards instead of by engineers. He would be firing all the software engineers and replacing them with monkeys in order to generate better code. And he would call this method of generating new code “science”. It’s the scientific way of generating new information, he would say, and using software engineers to generate new code isn’t “science”. It’s what he learned at UC Berkeley and UW Madison! His professors of biology swear that it is true!

It seems to me that there are incentives in place that make it impossible for Darwinists to discuss their materialistic religion honestly. They feel pressured to distort the evidence in the public square, and there are political pressures on them to distort the evidence in order to avoid being censured by their employers and colleagues. When questions about the evidence for Darwinism come up, they have to rally around their religion and chant the creeds that comfort them. There can be no questioning of their faith in the presupposition of materialism.

Videos

Stephen C. Meyer in FOUR John Ankerberg online videos

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From Evolution News. (H/T Stephen C. Meyer)

Excerpt:

In four television episodes of the John Ankerberg Show broadcast across the US and over 200 nations worldwide, Dr. John Ankerberg interviewed Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, author of the groundbreaking book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The series will begin broadcasting on April 3 at 5:30pm EDT on the Daystar Network and on April 10 at 9:30pm EDT on the INSP Network.

In the interviews Dr. Meyer explains how even Charles Darwin, in his book The Origin of Species, admitted he did not know how the first cell came into being, or how life came to be.

Scientists in Darwin’s day thought the cell was a simple glob of plasm, but today we have discovered that the cell is an almost unimaginably complex system of molecular machines and rich in digital code.

Where did this high-tech in low life come from? Ankerberg and Meyer explore the mystery surrounding this question, which Meyer calls the DNA enigma. Click on the links below to watch full episodes of the show online!

  • Week 1: Every person’s body consists of over a trillion cells. Almost every one of these cells includes a DNA molecule. What is DNA? Why is it so special? What does it do? Where did the digital code embedded in DNA originate? Why does the specified information in DNA point to a designing intelligence?
  • Week 2: As scientific technology has progressed, scientists have realized the cell is more and more complex. According to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, the DNA within each cell is far more complex than any computer software ever created. Where did the coded information within DNA come from? What naturalistic theories have been proposed? What is the possibility of the precise genetic information in DNA evolving by chance?
  • Week 3: In addition to chance, scientists have offered other answers to the origin of the precise genetic information found in DNA. Why is it that natural selection, self-organizing natural laws, or some combination of these with chance cannot explain where the information originated? We’ll also see why DNA exhibits signs of a designing intelligence.
  • Week 4: What is the scientific theory of Intelligent Design (ID)? Is ID true science or just religion masquerading as science? We’ll also answer the objections to ID such as, “Is ID just an argument from ignorance?” (“We don’t know what the naturalistic causes are right now for the origin of life.”) We’ll also see why ID is based on scientific reasoning but may have larger religious implications.

And Meyer is not making this up. This is the state of science today.

From Scientific American.

Excerpt:

As recently as the middle of the 20th century, many scientists thought that the first organisms were made of self-replicating proteins. After Francis Crick and James Watson showed that DNA is the basis for genetic transmission in the 1950s, many researchers began to favor nucleic acids over proteins as the ur-molecules. But there was a major hitch in this scenario. DNA can make neither proteins nor copies of itself without the help of catalytic proteins called enzymes. This fact turned the origin of life into a classic chicken-or-egg puzzle: Which came first, proteins or DNA?

RNA, DNA’s helpmate, remains the most popular answer to this conundrum, just as it was when I wrote “In the Beginning…” Certain forms of RNA can act as their own enzymes, snipping themselves in two and splicing themselves back together again. If RNA could act as an enzyme, then it might be able to replicate itself without help from proteins. RNA could serve as gene and catalyst, egg and chicken.

But the “RNA-world” hypothesis remains problematic. RNA and its components are difficult to synthesize under the best of circumstances, in a laboratory, let alone under plausible prebiotic conditions. Once RNA is synthesized, it can make new copies of itself only with a great deal of chemical coaxing from the scientist. Overbye notes that “even if RNA did appear naturally, the odds that it would happen in the right sequence to drive Darwinian evolution seem small.”

The RNA world is so dissatisfying that some frustrated scientists are resorting to much more far out—literally—speculation. The most startling revelation in Overbye’s article is that scientists have resuscitated a proposal once floated by Crick. Dissatisfied with conventional theories of life’s beginning, Crick conjectured that aliens came to Earth in a spaceship and planted the seeds of life here billions of years ago. This notion is called directed panspermia. In less dramatic versions of panspermia, microbes arrived on our planet via asteroids, comets or meteorites, or drifted down like confetti.

John Horgan is not a Christian, nor even a theist. The origin of life is not explainable on the basis on unintelligent causes. But it is perfectly explainable as the result of intelligent causes. Just like the sequence of letters arranged in this blog post to have meaning are best explained as the result of an intelligence.

News

How Stephen Hawking’s materialism drives him into irrationality

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From Evolution News.

Excerpt:

In a documentary from the Discovery Channel on the search for extraterrestrial life, Stephen Hawking provides an extraordinarily candid example of the fallacious materialist logic for why extraterrestrial life “must” be possible.

Around 1:15 of the clip below, Hawking states:

The life we have on earth must have spontaneously generated itself. It must therefore be possible for life to be generated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe.

The gaping hole in Hawking’s logic should be immediately apparent to anyone willing to think critically and skeptically: If we haven’t yet explained how life could have spontaneously generated on earth, how do we know that it can be generated spontaneously elsewhere in the universe?

What makes Hawking’s position even worse is that in this clip he admits that “we don’t understand how life formed.”

So according to Hawking, “we don’t understand how life formed,” but he knows that “the life we have on earth must have spontaneously generated itself.” Hawking might be, as the documentary puts it, “one of the greatest minds of our generation,” but as anti-ID biochemist Russell Doolittle once said to me in grad school (when attacking Michael Behe), smart guys are great rationalizers.

Here’s the clip:

I would not want to be a materialist. I would have to believe in magic and defend a lot of nonsensical things. Then I would lose a lot of arguments. I wouldn’t like it. I guess I haven’t believed in the Flying Spaghetti Monster of materialism since I learned about the Big Bang. Abandoning materialism is just part of growing up. You put the science fiction down, and start reading science.

Anyway, there is a conference on science and materialism.

Excerpt:

Conference sessions will examine the conflicting worldviews of theism and materialism; the widespread impact of materialism on science, ethics, society, Biblical studies and theology; the latest scientific evidence against materialism and for intelligent design in biology and cosmology; and the positive implications of modern science for theism.

Speakers will include Westminster faculty Vern Poythress, author of Redeeming Science; K. Scott Oliphint, author of Reasons for Faith; Jeffrey Jue, author of Heaven Upon Earth; Brandon Crowe, Lecturer in the New Testament; and Westminster President Peter Lillback, author of George Washington’s Sacred Fire. Speakers will also include Discovery Institute Fellows such as astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, co-author of The Privileged Planet; molecular and cell biologist Jonathan Wells, co-author of The Design of Life and author of The Myth of Junk DNA (forthcoming, 2011); philosopher of biology Paul Nelson; philosopher and theologian Jay Richards, editor of God and Evolution: Protestants, Catholics, and Jews Explore Darwin’s Challenge to Faith; and social scientist John West, author of Darwin Day in America: How Our Politics and Culture Have Been Dehumanized in the Name of Science.

If any of my readers are interested in seeing how science is at war with the religion of materialism, please get the book “Who Made God?” by Edgar Andrews, which is suitable for readers of virtually any experience level. I also loved “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel, which is also good for beginners.