Paleontologist and museum curator explains why the fossil record supports intelligent design not natural selection.

Gunter Bechly was a curator at a museum in Germany. For the 200 year anniversary of Darwin's birth, he put together an exhibit that included a display to disprove intelligent design.  He said:

I made one big mistake I read the books ... [on intelligent design] and what I recognized to my surprise is that the arguments I found in those books were totally different from what I heard either from colleagues or when you watch youtube videos where the discussion is around intelligent design versus neo-Darwinian evolution. And I had the impression on one side that those people are mistreated their position is misrepresented and on the other hand that these arguments are not really receiving an appropriate response and they they have merit.  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ToSEAj2V0s)

In this video, Gunter Bechly explains how the fossil record differs from what evolution by natural selection would produce, and he explains how we know that enough fossils have been found to rule out incompleteness as an explanation for that deviation. He also explains why more scientists don't speak about the overwhelming evidence in favor of intelligent design - he lost his job because he spoke the truth.

From the video:

Differences between the fossil record and what evolution by natural selection would produce:

"Darwinism predicts slow changes but the fossil record shows rapid changes"

"The theory predicts gradual changes with small steps but the fossil record shows sudden changes with big steps"

"There is no evidence for gradations of one form of one species into another."

"The fossils are distributed mostly on the terminal branches of the phylogenetic trees but they lack mostly for the internal branches and for the nodes where they should be found according to the theory."

"Even though there are some transitional fossils what we lack is this plethora of transitional fossils that would be predicted by the theory where you would have thousands of small steps that show the transition from one form to another form."

"There is conflicting evidence between the fossil record and between the predictions from the theory. For example between molecular data molecular clock datings between the pattern of appearance that is predicted by the philogenetic reconstruction and the pattern of appearance in the stratigraphical column.

"There are often fossils that are out of place that are found at the wrong place and at the wrong time and conflicting evidence that does not support Darwin's theory can no longer be explained away as an artifact of undersampling or as caused by the incompleteness of the fossil record."

How we know the fossils that have been found represent an accurate portrayal of the history of life:

"Charles Darwin was quite aware that his theory does not agree with the fossil record and so he hoped that this can be explained away with the incompleteness of the fossil record with our insufficient knowledge of geology. And he hoped that over time the gaps would be filled and ultimately the theory would be confirmed by the fossil record but this didn't happen. Now we know a lot more than Darwin did and over time with growing knowledge about the fossil record the problem didn't disappear it even became more acute."

"Darwin's attempt to explain the evidence from the fossil record away as lack of knowledge about the fossil record and the incompleteness of the fossil record is no longer tenable. And here's why, let me first give a metaphor and this example was coined by my colleague Paul Nelson. Imagine you have a new hobby and you walk along the beach and you collect what the flood washes in. You collect starfish and shells and snails every day you find something new. But over time repetition sets in and ultimately you reach a day where you only find over and over again what you already found. And then you know that you have sampled enough to know what is out there."

"Exactly this method is applied in paleontology to statistically test the completeness of the fossil record and in paleontology it's called the collector's curve. In most groups of organisms we know that the fossil record is sufficiently complete to be sure that the gaps that we see and the discontinuities we see are not artifacts of undersampling or of an incomplete fossil record but actually data to be explained."

"But there is another reason why this phenomenon cannot be an artifact and that is if it would be an artifact we should expect that over time the gaps get smaller and the apparent non-gradual transitions become more gradual but what we actually find is that with growing knowledge of the fossil record the problems don't disappear but they get even bigger and bigger and this shows us that nature wants to tell us something."

"The phenomenon of sudden appearances in the fossil record is not just an exceptional case say as in the Cambrian explosion but actually is a pattern that is found everywhere. It is beginning with the very origin of life. It goes up to the origin of human culture. It is found in all periods of earth history. It is found in all geographical regions. And it's found over all taxonomical categories from plants and protists to invertebrate and vertebrate animals. So it's a clear pattern that cries out for an explanation."

"We have no transitional fossils for all the animal body plans and the Cambrian explosion. We have no or nearly no transitional fossils for the origin of the different insect orders, for the different mammal orders. And this for example includes bats. And imagine that the oldest fossil bats that we know are already totally modern hardly distinguishable from a modern bat with completely developed wings already with evidence in the ears for echolocation. They are just there and there's no fossil record showing the many steps that were necessary to build up these body plans by incremental changes."

"Douglas Ervin who is one of the world's foremost specialists on the Cambrian explosion and Douglas Ervin said that it looks like the great taxonomic categories, the classes, came first and that the lower taxonomic categories came later and that it doesn't look like that the large differences were built up by the smaller differences."

Rapid evolution cannot be explained by alteration of regulatory networks. Bechly says, "Recent studies have shown that this is not true every major transition in the history of life required new genes and new proteins."

And various environmental changes that might require rapid evolution do not explain the mechanism for producing new genes.

Microevolution (small changes in existing species) cannot be used to explain macroevolution (large changes resulting in new types of species) because,  Bechly explains, it is known, based on the time it would take for a single mutation to become established in a population, that there is insufficient time for new types of species to have evolved by natural processes. Bechly says, 

"The geologically established windows of time that are available for different transitions in the history of life are orders of magnitude too short to allow for the necessary genetic changes to arise and to spread in an ancestral population and this basically shows that Darwin's theory the neo-Darwinian mechanism is not mathematically feasible."

Bechly explains how it is known that there is insufficient time for new types of species to evolve by natural processes. He says the the time it takes for new species to appear in the fossil record is often similar to the average life span of a single species when there should be many intermediate species needed to produce, for example, a new organ or a new body plan.

The problem for the Darwinian mechanism that is posed by the fact that for many transitions we only have time available that equals the lifespan of just one or two species that come successive after each other is the following: To make a major re-engineering you usually think you would require many successive species which are slightly different from each other and then ultimately after a long time and many different species you get a major new body plan or a new organ. But here you see that you would have to make a jump either with one or two species or even within a species to a totally new reconstruction and so even if common ancestry should be correct this shows that this cannot be explained with an unguided process there you need some kind of intelligence be infused from outside the system to make such a big jump within a single species

There should be many intermediate species between a quadrupedal swimming mammal and a whale, yet the transition happened in a third of the lifespan of a single vertebrate species.

"What we found is that to make the transition between the so-called protocetus which were still quadrupedal swimming animals which were propelling in the water with their hind legs to make this transition to fully marine fish-like whales which swim with reduced legs and driven by the tail fluke for this transition there's only one and a half million years of time available that is according to mainstream evolutionaries knowledge.

Just a third of the lifespan of a single vertebrate species to make this re-engineering from a land animal to a fish-like whale that's unbelievable and shows that there is a major theoretical problem for the unguided process postulated by Darwin.

Blechly goes on to explain that naturalistic alternatives to neo-Darwinism do not solve the problem of the origin of genetic information needed for those mechanism to evolve.

And he says intelligent design is the best explanation for the scientific evidence based on logical inference:

In my view the fossil evidence clearly points towards intelligent design because the observed changes happened much too quickly to be explained by an unguided naturalistic process. They have to be explained with an intelligent agent. And for me personally, really a light bulb went on when I discovered that this is not based on an argument from ignorance, not based on a kind of god of the gaps argument, but it's just based on a rational inference to the best explanation. We know that only intelligent causes can cause this effect we look at the evidence and we see that this evidence clearly points to this cause. So ignoring the evidence from the fossil record that points to intelligent design actually is some kind of science denial

At the end of the video Bechly explains that scientists are not free to express belief in intelligent design because doing so would end their careers and that there are probably many more scientists who believe in intelligent design than those who publicly acknowledge it.

At the natural history museum in Stuttgart as soon as I came out as an intelligent design proponent collaborations were stopped, I didn't get funding anymore, my website was deleted, I was removed as head of an exhibition that I had designed, and ultimately I was told that I was no longer welcome and that I was considered to be a risk for the credibility of the institution. So it's not a big surprise that many scientists even if they are secretly doubting Darwinism are not outspoken about it and stay undercover and after my coming out as an ID proponent I was contacted by two famous colleagues who are famous scientists and world-renowned experts in their fields and they told me very confidentially that they have come to doubt the neo-Darwinian process themselves so probably there are more out there than we think.

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Video: Biology of the Baroque: Nonadaptive order cannot be explained by Darwinism.

"Biology of the Baroque" is a documentary that explores the amazing patterns, order, and beauty in biology that go beyond what can be explained by Darwinian evolution. It features geneticist Michael Denton and is inspired by Denton's new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis (2016).
...

15:14

Human language is so complex and nuanced that it has become impossible to simulate perfectly in even the most advanced intelligent machines as any simple conversation with Siri will show. Human language is varied and textured, adapted to both concrete and abstract conversation across every people group and culture. What makes human language so intriguing is not just a great variety of different languages but their underling similarities. Despite superficial differences, human languages share deep structural similarities. This is why an Australian aborigine can learn German despite the many differences between German and the languages of the Australian Aborigines. The fact that humans, no matter what part of the world they're from, share both language and equivalent higher intellectual faculties means that these abilities must have arisen in the earliest human ancestor and that poses a problem. The capability to compose a symphony understand advanced mathematics or discuss abstract ideas would not have been of any survival value for early man. His needs were shelter and food. The idea primitive man needed our current linguistic or other higher intellectual abilities to survive is untenable. Nevertheless early man must have had this capability because it was passed down to every human in every part of the world. Even today things like art literature or music are understood to be valuable not for survival or reproduction but for their own sake. Such capacities reach far beyond the algorithm of natural selection. They're excessive, superfluous, even a gift. Their very existence is completely incomprehensible if humans are solely the result of Darwinian forces. The case that human language developed step by step through natural selection is further weakened by the fact that no single language gene has ever been discovered. That is the needed complexities seem to have arisen spontaneously in a self organizing emergent fashion.

An interesting example in the video is the mammalian red blood cell. In mammals the red blood cells eject their nuclei when they differentiate from the parent cell type. It is hard to understand how this could evolve because it requires a complicated cellular process and there is no way to explain how a process so complex could evolve gradually because there would be no selective advantage until all the parts of the system existed. In addition, birds keep the nuclei in their red blood cells and birds are much more efficient at using oxygen than mammals, so it is hard to understand why the ejection of nuclei would ever evolve by natural selection.

The video concludes (17:30):

Narrator: Nonadaptive and beyond adaptive order poses an existential challenge to Darwinism because it means there are huge parts of the history of life that not only can't be explained by Darwinian evolution but they are completely outside the domain of natural selection. Natural selection only selects for adaptation. If non adaptive order exists, Darwinism cannot be the whole story of life. If nature is an artist, not just an engineer, Darwinism is in a dire position.

Denton: For a designer, lots of patterns might exist in nature which have, as it were, are deeply adaptive but not adaptive in a specific organism. On the other hand a designer might decide he likes this pattern. He likes the pattern of a maple leaf. Or it's beautiful or its symmetrical or something like this. In other words, on a design hypothesis, you don't need to show that all the order of biology in the world is specifically adaptive in a specific organism.

Narrator: Intelligent design leaves room for nature's peculiarities and novelties because it acknowledges there are some things that are not irreducible to mere adaptation and survival. There are other forces at work in nature besides that of natural selection and death.

Denton: If you imagine that there's a designer behind the world, the designer would be free to choose whichever patterns he wants. But I think non adaptive order poses a far less of a challenge to intelligent design theory than it does to Darwinism. 'Cause Darwinism necessitates that all the order of nature is adaptive or once was adaptive. But if you can't show that, Darwinism can't be shown to be the engine of evolution.

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Copyright © 2016 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Video: Guillermo Gonzalez on the Fine-tuning of the Universe to Support Life

Guillermo Gonzalez, Grove City College, PA
On Guard, July 27-28, 2012

Other posts on this subject can found in the Cosmology section of my Articles and Links Arranged by Subject page. In particular, a list of fine-tuned parameters can be found at The Fine-Tuning of the Universe to one part in 10^10^123 is best explained by an intelligent designer and creator, aka. God.

Below are some of the slides from the lecture by Dr. Gonzalez. I have (with permission) included some of the commentary from the lecture with the slides and edited the text for clarity and readability. Any transcription errors or typographical errors are my own. Please see the video for the original content.

Contents

• What is fine tuning?
  
• Objections
  
• Calculating Fine-tuning
  
• Examples of Fine-tuning
  
  • Forces of Nature
    
  • Nucleosynthesis
    
  • Other Examples
    
• More about Fine-tuning
  
• Historical Science - Inferring Design
  
• The Anthropic Principle
  
• The Multiverse Cannot Explain the Fine-tuning
  
  • The Universe is Improbably Large
    
  • Boltzmann's Brain
    
  • Rejection of Rationality
    
• Design
  

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1:18

What is fine-tuning?

• Over the past century, scientists have discovered that if certain properties of the universe were changed very slightly from what they are, life could not exist in the universe. These properties have to be within a very narrow range for our universe to be life-permitting (habitable). This sensitivity of the habitability of the universe to small changes in its properties is called fine-tuning.
  

• This was recognized about 60 years ago by Fred Hoyle, who was not a religious person. Paul Davies, Martin Rees, Max Tegmark, Bernard Carr, Frank Tipler, John Barrow, and Stephen Hawking also believe in fine-tuning.
  

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2:37

A fine-tuned universe

"The possibility of life as we know it depends on the values of a few basic physical constants and is, in some respects remarkably sensitive to their numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences."
- Martin Rees

"The present arrangement of matter indicates a very special choice of initial conditions."
- Paul Davies

"The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [i.e. the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life."
- Stephen Hawking

---

3:35

Three types of fine tuning

1. Fine-tuning of the laws of nature.
   
   Existence and forms of physical laws (forces, types of particles, quantum principles, dimensionality of space-time).
   

   Examples:
   

   • F_G= Gm₁m₂/r²
     

     The force of gravity is proportional to the product of two masses and inversely proportional to the square of their separation.
     

   • The Pauli Exclusion principle dictates how electrons are arranged in atoms and pretty much determines the whole structure of the periodic table and therefore all of chemistry.
     

   • The Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
     

2. Fine-tuning of the constants of physics.
   
   Masses of fundamental particles, force strengths, cosmological constant value.
   

   Constants: In Gm₁m₂ (above), G is a constant. Other constants are:masses of fundamental particles, electron, proton, quarks, constants for electromagnetic force, strong force, weak force, cosmological constant.
   

3. Fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe.
   
   Initial entropy, initial expansion rate, initial density fluctuations, inflation, matter/antimatter ratio.
   

Contents

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10:10

Possible objection 1

Q: How can you assign a probability when the sample size is precisely one (universe)? You can't say, for example, that 1 in 100 universes are habitable.

A: Run a hypothetical universe creating machine with different settings for the fine-tuning parameters and place a black dot on a chart of the results if it makes a non-habitable universe. Place a white dot when it is habitable. You will get a white dot is in a sea of black dots.

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12:12

Possible objection 2

Q: What about universes governed by different laws of nature that allow radically different forms of life than those in our universe? Maybe constants and initial conditions in those universes aren't fine-tuned.

A: The answer to the question is not relevant to explaining the fine-tuning of our universe.

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13:59

Possible objection 3

Q: If the constants and initial conditions had been different, we wouldn't exist, but maybe other forms of life would have been possible given the same laws.

A: Several of the examples of fine-tuning would prevent even the precursors to life. No planets, no galaxies, no chemistry! Slight changes in some parameters would result in a universe that is all black holes, all hydrogen, or it would collapse back on itself immediately.

Contents

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How do you define fine-tuning?

A 10 cm ruler with an accuracy of 1 mm would have a relative error of 1%. In analogy to fine-tuning, 1% corresponds to the amount of fine-tuning (one part in 10²), and 10 cm is called the comparison range.

Similarly, for fine-tuning, you need to define a suitable comparison range. It could be theoretical or empirical. A physical property of the universe is usually considered fine-tuned if the life-permitting range is < 10% of the comparison range.

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18:25

A sense of big numbers

• There are about 10¹³ cells in the human body.
  

• The number of seconds in the entire history of the universe = 10¹⁷
  

• Number of subatomic particles in the known universe = 10⁸⁰
  

• 
  Having a precision of one part in 10³⁰ is like firing a bullet and hitting an amoeba at the edge of the observable universe.
  

• Some examples of fine-tuning require greater precision than this!
  

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20:05

One- and two-sided fine-tuning

• Some cases of fine-tuning are one-sided, meaning that a parameter falls near the edge of the life-permitting region.
  

• Some cases of fine-tuning are two-sided:
  

In one sided fine-tuning, there is either a minimum or a maximum value of the parameter beyond which the universe would be uninhabitable. In two sided fine-tuning there is both a minimum and a maximum value and if the parameter was outside this range, the universe would be uninhabitable.

---

Example: How a comparison range is calculated to determine the fine-tuning of the forces of nature:

21:24

G₀=Strength of gravity

Strength of weak force: 10³¹G₀

Strength of electromagnetism: 10³⁷G₀

Strength of strong nuclear force: 10⁴⁰G₀

The natural range of forces in the universe spans 40 orders of magnitude. Therefore 10⁴⁰ is an empirical comparison range. It is a lower limit because theoretically it could be greater.

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23:12

Examples of fine-tuning

• Fr. Robert Spitzer notes that there are at least 20 independent constants and factors that are fine-tuned to a high degree of precision for life to be possible in the universe.
  

• The number continues to increase at a rate near one per year.
  

Contents

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24:16

One-sided example 1

The maximum value of the electromagnetic force that allows a periodic table of sufficient length is 14 x 10³⁷G₀. Its degree of fine-tuning is:

(14-1)x10³⁷G₀/10⁴⁰G₀ ~ 1%.

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26:04

One-sided example 2

The maximum value of the gravitational force that allows stars to last at least 10⁹ years = 3000G₀. Its degree of fine-tuning is 3000G₀/10⁴⁰ ~ 1/10³⁶.

But that is just one effect of gravity. When you consider other effects, the possible values are fewer. If gravity is stronger, a planet must be smaller so that complex life is not crushed, but then the planet will cool too fast if it is small. These multiple constraints put tighter limits on the strength of gravity.

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27:37

Fine-tuning analogy

Radio dial stretched across the universe

WKLF ("K-Life"): You better tune your dial to the first Angstrom if you want to tune gravity for life!

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28:35

One-sided example 3

If the weak force is decreased by a factor of 30, the initial neutron/proton ratio would be ~0.90, leading to nearly pure helium universe.

The degree of fine-tuning is ~ 1/10⁹.

The weak force is also involved in supernova explosions which distribute heavy elements throughout the galaxy. Heavy elements are needed for rocky planets and biological organisms. The weak force also determined the relative numbers of protons and neutrons in the early universe which determined the amount of helium in the universe. The weak force also controls radioactive decay which is responsible for most of the heat in the earth's interior. All three effects of weak the force, geophysical heat, amount of helium in early universe, and supernovae limit the values of the weak force that would permit the universe to be habitable.
Contents

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31:20 Carbon production

• 
  Life-essential ¹²C is formed inside stars via the nuclear reaction:
  

  3α ---> ¹²C
  

  (The symbol α represents an alpha particle, a helium nucleus containing two protons and two neutrons.)
  

• In the early 1950s, physicists did not think this reaction could operate in stars. Fred Hoyle made a prediction. We're here, as carbon based intelligent life, so somehow ¹²C must get produced. What would enhance the rate was a then unknown excited state of ¹²C at 7.7 MeV above the ground state.
  

• The state was discovered by subsequent experiment.
  

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32:32

Carbon production is fine-tuned

• The production of carbon via the 3α process is an example of fine-tuning.
  

• Oberhummer et al. (2000, Science) studied the relative production of C and O in stars. They showed that a 0.5% change in the strong nuclear force or a 4% change in the electromagnetic force would lead to large changes in the C/O ratio in the universe (due to changes in the energy of the ¹²C resonance level).
  

• But wait, there's more...
  

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34:19

Carbon production is fine-tuned

• 
  A collision of two α particles
  produces
  ⁸Be
  which has a short lifetime of
  10^-16sec. This short lifetime prevents runaway fusion that would result in early stellar explosions (before life-essential heavy elements are formed). The instability of ⁸Be leads to stellar stability. But, its lifetime could not be much shorter, or the reaction to produce carbon could not proceed.
  

• There is another fine-tuning with ¹⁶O, which lacks a resonance level near the typical α particle energy in a star. If such a resonance level existed, most of the carbon would be converted to oxygen.
  

• Fourthly, a conservation law prevents most of the ¹⁶O from being converted to ²⁰Ne (via α-capture), which has a resonance at the right energy.
  

Because of the fine-tuning, there are comparable amounts of carbon and oxygen in the universe instead of mostly carbon or mostly oxygen. Both are needed to support life. Oxygen is needed for water and energy metabolism for complex intelligent life.
Contents

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36:50

The cosmological constant (dark energy)

"Our current understanding of gravity and quantum mechanics says that empty space should have about 120 orders of magnitude more energy than the amount we measure it to have. That is 1 with 120 zeroes after it! How to reduce the amount it has by such a huge magnitude, without making it precisely zero, is a complete mystery. Among physicists, this is considered the worst fine-tuning problem in physics."
- Lawrence Krauss, (Scientific American, Aug. 2004, pp. 83-84)

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38:38

The initial entropy of the universe

• The initial state of the space-time (and thus gravity fields) of the early universe were very smooth and homogeneous (very low entropy).
  

• Present entropy of the universe is much greater than the initial entropy.
  

• Initially low entropy is required for a habitable universe in which high-entropy structures like stars form out of the surrounding low entropy space-time.
  

• Roger Penrose estimated that the amount of fine-tuning required of the initial entropy to allow for a habitable universe is 1 part in 10¹⁰¹²³!
  

Contents

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43:10

Multidimensional fine-tuning

• To be precise, you cannot just change one parameter while holding all others constant. Changing another parameter might compensate for the life-inhibiting effects of a particular parameter change.
  

• Example: reducing the weak force can be compensated by reducing the mass difference between the proton and neutron in the early universe.
  

• However, it is usually the case that changing a parameter has multiple different effects. Reducing the weak force also affects the explosion of massive star supernovae and radioactive decay.
  

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46:31

Local fine-tuning

• Each instance of global fine-tuning must be evaluated by its effects on habitability at the "local" level. By local, we mean structures within the universe that are relevant to life. These include galaxies, stars, and planets.
  

• Knowing the number and ranges of properties of galaxies, stars, and planets will allow us to determine if a change to a particular global parameter will have life-inhibiting effects.
  

• This involves details of star and planet formation, climate stability, orbital dynamics, stellar nucleosynthesis, etc.
  

Contents

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51:33

Some history

"[Evidence for God comes] from the order of the motion of the stars, and of all things under the dominion of the Mind which ordered the universe."
- Plato (Laws 12.966e)

"...when the night had darkened the lands and they should behold the whole sky spangled and adorned with stars; and when they should see ... the rising and settings of all these celestial bodies, ... when they should behold all these things, most certainly they would have judged ... that all these marvelous works are the handiworks of the gods."
- Aristotle (On Philosophy)

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52:59

Reconstructing historical events

The universe is an artifact. How do you reconstruct a historical event?

Not all science is laboratory based. Some science is historical. Geology, archeology, cosmology, astronomy are all historical sciences. There is a type of reasoning that is appropriate to historical sciences called abductive reasoning or inference to the best explanation. It's the way causal explanations are reached in the historical sciences. Abductive reasoning infers unseen causes in the past from facts in the present. If you discover an artifact or a pattern, and you want to determine a causal explanation for it, you apply the principle of uniformitarianism: apply the same kinds of causal explanations we use in everyday life to infer the best explanation for past unobserved events. If an artifact or pattern could be the result of several causes, you set up competing hypotheses based on mutually exhaustive possible explanations and choose the best one. The list of mutually exhaustive possible explanations is: necessity, chance, or design.

---

If you can rule out chance and necessity you can conclude the cause is design.

A meaningful pattern is improbable and rules out chance.

If you can infer a purpose it gives stronger evidence of design.

---

59:55

Chance

The conditions that allow for a life-permitting universe are highly improbable.

---

1:00:24

Necessity

The properties of the universe we observe are not logically necessary. They could have been otherwise.

M-theory explains how you could have other universes with different properties.

(There is a distinction between physical necessity and logical necessity.)

---

1:01:28

A meaningful pattern

The correlation of the conditions that allow for life and the fine-tuned parameter values of the universe we observe forms a meaningful pattern.

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1:01:50

Summary of design argument

We can make a design argument:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to logical necessity, chance or design.
   

2. It is not due to logical necessity or chance.
   

3. Therefore, it is due to design.
   

Contents

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1:02:47

What is the Anthropic Principle?

• The Anthropic Principle is the recognition that our very existence constrains the properties of the universe we observe to be those that allow our existence. We can only observe a habitable universe!
  

• It is merely a reminder that we have to take into account observer self-selection bias in interpreting our observations. Our sample of universes is necessarily biased.
  

• The Anthropic Principle does not explain why there exists a universe fine-tuned for life in the first place.
  

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1:03:30

Why can't the Anthropic Principle explain us?

Illustration:

• Quasars were discovered to be very distant in 1963 from their large redshifts.
  

• Why are they so luminous?
  

• Wong answer: because if they weren't, we wouldn't be able to see them. If we see an object in the distant universe, then it must be very luminous.
  

• Right answer: Quasars are powered by the gravitational energy released by matter falling into a supermassive black hole.
  

The anthropic principle is stating a necessary condition to make the observation. It is not explaining the cause of the observed phenomenon.
Contents

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1:05:04

What about the multiverse objection?

• If there exists a vast multiverse, the probabilistic resources available to account for our finely tuned universe by chance are increased. Then, we could appeal to the Anthropic Principle.
  

• Some cosmologists try to make the case that a multiverse actually exists.
  

• Chaotic eternal inflation - popular universe generator. Assume for the sake of argument.
  

Contents

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1:10:12

Problem 1: Why such a large universe?

"... do we really need the whole observable universe, in order that sentient life can come about? This seems unlikely ... Let us be generous and ask that a region of radius one tenth of the ... observable universe must resemble the universe that we know, but we do not care about what happens outside that radius ... we can estimate how much more frequently the Creator comes across the smaller than the larger regions. The figure is no better than 10¹⁰¹²³. You see what an incredible extravagance it was (in terms of probability) for the Creator to bother to produce this extra distant part of the universe, that we don't actually need .. for our existence."
- Roger Penrose

If we live in a multiverse generated by a process like chaotic inflation, then for every observer who observes a universe of our size there are 10¹⁰¹²³ who observe a universe that is just 10 times smaller. That means if the universe really did arise from chaotic inflation, from just a quantum fluctuation of a vacuum, then the universe that we see beyond our region of space, say the nearest few hundred million light years, is not really there its an illusion, if you take this to the extreme ...

Contents

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[Shortly after 1:05:04]

Boltzmann Brains

"One argument that the universe had a beginning is that it hasn't reached thermal equilibrium or "heat death" yet. If the universe was infinite in age, it would have reached thermal equilibrium an infinity of time ago - so that is evidence of a beginning of time. Ludwig Boltzmann in the 19th century said the whole vast universe could be at thermal equilibrium except we only observe this tiny little patch. This patch is not in thermal equilibrium just by chance ... we have reached heat death but not in this tiny little patch. The bigger the patch is, the more improbable it is so the universe is much vaster than it needs to be to account for our existence. If you just have a solar system pop out of a statistical fluctuation its much more probable than to have this big vast universe pop out of a statistical fluctuation. Then if we see this big vast universe and just our solar system popped out of a statistical fluctuation, then it must be an illusion, The stars that we see are really not there, everything beyond the solar system is an illusion, you have to believe in illusionism so it was rejected."

1:11:31

"The Boltzmann argument is relevant to the multiverse argument today."

"Taken to the extreme we can have a universe pop out of a quantum fluctuation that contains one brain. Boltzmann's brains are by far the most common observers in the multiverse given their small size. The smaller the universe the more probable it is. Its far more probable for a Boltzmann's brain to occur in a multiverse than our vast fine-tuned universe with its long history. And so you're more likely to be a free floating brain than a person with a real history living in a 13.7 billion year old universe. The world we observe then is an illusion. You're the only person who actually exists. All your memories are false. The probability of forming our universe out of a quantum fluctuation at its present state with the appearance of age is more likely than forming it with its finely tuned initial conditions and its long history and so this is called the attack of the Boltzmann brains and its a real conundrum for the multiverse advocates. They basically have to give up realism and the whole world around them is an illusion if they want to believe in multiverse because the most common observer in the multiverse is a Boltzmann's brain."

[Q&A 1:27:00]

If the multiverse theory is true then the most probable reality is that there is no fine-tuning, the universe arose as a quantum fluctuation consisting only of your brain, and everything else is an illusion. To believe in the multiverse is to believe in illusionism.

Contents

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1:12:50

Problem 2: The rejection of rationality

• Anything that can happen, no matter how improbable, does happen countless many times in the multiverse.
  

• Anything can be attributed just as readily to human design or to chance fluctuations of the quantum vacuum of the inflaton field.
  

• Renders all scientific reasoning and explanations unreliable. Must believe in random miracles!
  

Multiverse cosmology can explain the origin of all events no matter how improbable, as long as they're not impossible, by reference to chance because of the infinite probabilistic resources it provides. Events we explain in terms of known causes based on ordinary experience are just as readily explained in multiverse cosmology as chance occurrences without any causal antecedent.

There is no way to attribute events to causal physical laws. All causes as seen to be related to effects really aren't. They're just chance fluctuations. Chance events. So you do away with the possibility of all scientific reasoning because scientific explanation and reasoning are unreliable. You must believe in random miracles. The scientific method is dead if you believe in the multiverse.

Contents

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1:14:24

The best explanation

• Design is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe.
  

• From our uniform and repeated experience, objects we know are designed are always associated with minds and never otherwise.
  

• Multiverse cosmologies invoke causes we have no experience with and Anthropic explanations fail on our universe. But, we do have direct experience with minds.
  

• The cause of the universe is a transcendent, immaterial, timeless Mind.
  

"You can think of the universe as a kind of artifact and that artifact points to a designer. If you add to this the evidence for a beginning to the universe from another session, the cosmological argument, then you have a cause of the design already available to you. So if you already accept the cosmological argument there's a cause waiting in the wings to employ in explaining the design of our universe ... the fine tuning. The cause of the universe must be a designer who is transcendent, immaterial and a mind that exists in a timeless eternity and I think that is quite consonant with the Christian idea of God."

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Copyright © 2015 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Naturalism is an extraordinary claim.

Most people don't understand that naturalism is an extraordinary claim. The following should help to explain why it is:

The laws of nature seem to be relatively simple mathematical relationships. There are only four fundamental forces known by science. How is it that just by chance simple natural laws and a big bang would include or produce all the factors necessary for the universe to support life: 20 or 30 cosmological fine tuning parameters, at least 15 factors needed to produce habitable planets, at least 20 chemical factors needed for complex life? How is it possible that simple undesigned natural laws working alone could produce the complex machinery of cells and the information needed for simple life and macroevolution? How could such finely-tuned complexity arise at every scale from the atomic to the cosmic from simple undesigned unguided natural laws controlling chance interactions within the universe? The immensity of the problem is a compelling argument for design. If you wanted to design such a complicated thing from simple mathematical relationships, it would require a huge amount of intellectual effort. How could it happen just by chance? (The multiverse, for which there is no evidence, doesn't explain it.)

According to naturalism, undesigned natural laws caused stars and galaxies to form after the Big Bang. Inside stars, undesigned natural laws allowed the nuclei of hydrogen atoms and helium atoms to be fused into stable heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, iron, and all the rest. Then undesigned natural laws caused these stars to form supernovae and explode distributing chemical elements throughout the galaxy. These undesigned natural laws ensured that there are not too many supernovae which would be dangerous to life or too few which would not provide enough elements to form planets or life. But the right amount of elements are distributed and planets form that can support life. The chemical elements, due to undesigned natural laws have just the right properties to form bonds that can be broken and reformed according to the chemical needs of biological life.

The cosmological fine-tuning parameters include: the expansion rate of the universe, the gravitational force constant, electromagnetic force constant, the initial entropy of the universe, the mass density of the universe, the strong nuclear force and many others. All these parameters have to have exactly the right values or life could not exist in the universe.

The factors needed for a planet to be habitable include: a location in the habitable zone around its star, its star's location in the galactic habitable zone, a main sequence G2 dwarf star, gas giant planets to protect inner habitable planets from comet impacts, a nearly circular orbit, an oxygen rich atmosphere, the right amount of water, a correct mass, a large moon, plate tectonics, a hot liquid iron interior, a moderate rate of rotation, and other factors.

The point here is not that the earth or the biological life on it is unique, there might be many planets in the universe like earth. The point is how lucky it is that all these factors needed for life, according to naturalism, arise from undesigned unguided natural laws. Given the complexity of the factors needed to support life and the improbability of life originating and evolving naturally, the more life we find in the universe the stronger the argument for design is. And there is plenty of evidence for life elsewhere in the universe. (Some skeptics may ask, if the universe was designed for life, why doesn't life form spontaneously? Consider a computer, a computer is designed but programs don't arise spontaneously, they have to be designed. Similarly, in a universe designed for life, life also has to be designed.)

The chemical factors needed for complex life include: Carbon's unique ability to form many different biological compounds. Water's properties as a solvent, its viscosity is just right, it has a high heat capacity which keeps temperatures on the planet and in organisms stable, it is extremely effective for evaporative cooling, it expands when it freezes so it floats providing insulation which keeps large bodies of water, oceans and lakes, from freezing solid which would make life impossible. Oxygen is used in energy metabolism in living organisms, it's produced by photosynthesis in plants, O2 is not a greenhouse gas.

The complex machinery in cells includes: DNA, RNA, enzymes to replicate DNA, enzymes to create mRNA from a DNA template, ribosomes to produce proteins from mRNA, a tRNA for each codon in the genetic code and as many enzymes to connect each tRNA with its amino acid, nuclear membranes, cell membranes, proteins in the membranes that control what goes in and out through the membrane, enzymes used in cellular metabolism, proteins that help other proteins fold, microtubules, etc, etc

The law of conservation of information and the no free lunch theorem indicate that biological information, the information in DNA, could not arise spontaneously from chance, mutation, and natural selection. The only known source of information is an intelligent mind.

Yet, according to naturalism, all the conditions needed for life and life itself are supposed to self-organize through the action of undesigned natural laws working by themselves? To paraphrase Fred Hoyle it seems more likely that a superintellect has monkeyed with the laws of chemistry and physics.

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Copyright © 2015 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Video: Privileged Species: How the Cosmos is Designed for Human Life

Privileged Species with Geneticist Michael Denton Gets Its Online Premiere (Evolutionnews.org)

The documentary with geneticist Michael Denton, Privileged Species, is available to see now, free on-line.

Dr. Denton extends the argument for intelligent design to the ultra-, ultra-fine-tuning of the cosmos for carbon-based life forms like ourselves. You cannot watch these 33 minutes without coming away with the very powerful conclusion that the universe was designed with us very specifically in mind.

The documentary investigates the special properties of carbon, water, and oxygen that make human life and the life of other organisms possible, and it explores some of the unique features of humans that make us a truly privileged species.

(The article The Place of Life and Man in Nature: Defending the Anthropocentric Thesis by Michael J. Denton published on bio-complexity.org is on the same subject as the video.)

This video is about Dr. Michael Denton's views on the ways the universe is designed to support complex organisms like humans and why humans are unique among the species on earth. Dr. Denton is a highly respected scientist who's research focuses on locating genes responsible for inherited retinal disease in humans. His research has led to the identification of the gene used in the first successful gene therapy for inherited blindness.

The video opens with a clip of a materialist saying that man is an insignificant speck on an insignificant planet orbiting an insignificant star in an insignificant galaxy. The remainder of the video contradicts this view. The video explains how special humankind is and that we live on a special planet in a universe that was designed for life. At the close of the video Michael Denton explains that the fitness for the universe to support human life is one of the major discoveries in science and religion. The video demonstrates the difference in the worldviews of materialists and non-materialist. Materialism is nihilistic, negative, and depressing, while non-materialism is inspiring and uplifting. It is entirely consistent with the evidence John Lennox has discussed, that atheism is harmful and belief in God is enormously beneficial. (My post Skepticism, The Big Lie. Activist Skeptics and Atheists are a Danger to the Health and Well Being of Believers also discusses the evidence showing that spirituality and belief in religion are beneficial.)

When you consider the number of "coincidences" that allow life to exist, it is absolutely astonishing. This video focuses on carbon, water, and oxygen, and that alone is amazing. But when you add the equally amazing cosmological fine tuning, and the factors that make earth an ideal place for intelligent life to exist, it is mind boggling. Coincidence or the anthropic principle lose any force they might have had as explanations, and the multiverse theory (for which even mainstream scientists admit there is no evidence) doesn't explain it either.

In this video:

What is man's place in nature and what is his relationship to the rest of the universe?

• T. H. Huxley:
  

  The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.
  

The materialist world view.

• Bill Nye "The Science Guy", "I am just another speck of sand."
  
• For most of human history man regarded himself as unique.
  
• By the 19th century a growing number of people were questioning man's special status.
  
• According to Darwin and his followers there was no fundamental difference between humans and other animals. After Darwin, many scientists believed humans arose naturally.
  
• George Gaylord Simpson:
  

  Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
  
  George Gaylord Simpson
  

• Part of this quote by Carl Sagan is in the video. I have included the fuller quote for context:
  

  “There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.”
  
  Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
  

Science indicates the universe is designed to support complex life such as human beings.

• The discoveries of science over the past century have indicated that many features of our universe seem to be specially prepared to allow life to flourish. If these features were even the slightest bit different, life as we know it could not exist.
  

The forces of nature are fine-tuned to allow the universe to support complex life.

• There are four forces of nature: the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. If any of these were slightly different from what they are, life would be impossible.
  
• Gravitational force: If the gravitational force was weaker, stars and galaxies would not form. If it was stronger the universe would collapse.
  
• Strong nuclear force: If the strong nuclear force was smaller the only stable element would be hydrogen. If stronger, there would be no hydrogen and therefore no water and no life.
  
• Supernovae: The chemical elements are produced in stars and distributed by supernovae. Too many supernovae and they would destroy life, too few and there would not be enough elements for life to exist.
  
• Fred Hoyle:
  

  A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology
  

  More information on the fine-tuning of the universe to support life can be found in my post
  The Fine-Tuning of the Universe to one part in 10¹⁰¹²³is best explained by an intelligent designer and creator, aka. God.
  

Carbon

• Carbon is the basic building block of living things. It is only the element that could be used to build complex self-replicating systems.
  
• Carbon is capable of forming an almost limitless number of compounds.
  
• Carbon compounds are only stable within a narrow range of temperatures.
  
• Carbon makes technological civilization possible: natural gas, petroleum, clothing, sugar, plastics, anesthetics are carbon compounds.
  

Water

• Water is one of the best solvents. A large number of substances are soluble in water.
  
• Water is less chemically reactive than other solvents so water does not limit the chemical reactions that substances in water can undergo.
  
• It has just the right viscosity for life. If water's viscosity was lower, structures in cells would not survive when subjected to outside forces. If it was higher, circulation of blood in our bodies would be impossible.
  
• Water has a high heat capacity which maintains stable temperatures on the planet and in living things.
  
• Evaporative cooling of water is greater than most other fluids. When the temperature outside an organism is higher than its body temperature, evaporative cooling is the only way to dissipate heat. This benefits humans more than other animals because we are hairless and it allows us to be active longer during the heat of the day in warm climates.
  
• Unlike most liquids water expands when it freezes allowing ice to form on the top of bodies of water. This provides insulation and prevents them from freezing solid which would make life impossible.
  
• Water works with the tectonic cycle to recycle the elements and minerals needed for life. Tectonic action brings new materials to the surface and water dissolves and erodes rocks making elements and minerals available for life. Eventually materials are washed to the sea floor where they are recycled by tectonic activity.
  

Oxygen

• Animals get energy by using oxygen in slow combustion of hydrocarbons.
  
• Oxygen is necessary to for complex organisms to exist.
  
• Earth is just the right size to have an oxygen atmosphere. A planet larger than earth would retain primeval gasses like hydrogen and helium, a smaller planet would lose all its atmosphere.
  
• Plants use sunlight in photosynthesis to obtain energy. Oxygen is a waste product of photosynthesis.
  
• Photosynthesis needs visible light to work but visible light is just a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
  
• However most of the sun's output is visible light.
  
• The earth's atmosphere is just the right composition to allow visible light to reach the surface where plants can utilize it and produce oxygen.
  
• Human life requires at least 20% oxygen in the atmosphere.
  
• If there was too much oxygen, there would be spontaneous combustion.
  
• O₂ which is prevalent in the lower atmosphere is much less reactive below 50ºC. but if the concentration of O₂ was over 30% spontaneous combustion would occur.
  
• O₂ does not absorb heat. The huge increase in O₂ in the atmosphere in the last billion years had no effect on the heat balance of the earth.
  

A Privileged Species

• The elements and compounds needed to make a self replicating system are also fit to maintain a complex creature like ourselves.
  
• The human brain has powers including mathematical reasoning that far surpass the abilities of other animals.
  
• The physical design of the human larynx enables us to utilize a much broader range of sounds than any other mammal, facilitating sophisticated verbal communication of complex ideas.
  
• The human hand is better adapted than any other known appendage for the intelligent manipulation of the physical environment.
  
• The human body and mind seem to be optimized in a variety of ways to make us the only animal who can harness the use of fire, which opened the doors to technology.
  
• Earth seems optimized for scientific discovery. A clear atmosphere and its location in the galaxy enabled observations that have fueled science. Humans have the potential to do science and are on a planet that allows science to be done. (More at my post on The Privileged Planet)
  
• Michael Denton: "In my opinion discovering the unique fitness of the universe for carbon based life and beings like ourselves is one of the major discoveries of 20th century science and one of the major discoveries of all time in the area of design, religion, [and] science ..."
  

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Copyright © 2015 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Promissory materialism isn't even plausible, it is contradicted by the history of science.

Summary: Promissory materialism is the belief that anything that cannot be explained by materialist science, such as consciousness and the origin of life, will be explained by materialist science someday in the future. It is based on the belief that in the past, scientific discoveries have always added greater and greater support to the materialist point of view. But this belief is not supported by the history of science. In the cases of the origin of life, cosmology, the evolution of the human brain, junk DNA, catastrophic floods, photoreceptors in the vertebrate retina, the human appendix, and hips bones in whales, scientific progress has contradicted the materialist point of view. And in the case of cosmology and the evolution of the brain, scientific understanding has come to undermine scientific materialism. Developments in cosmology have led to the multiverse theory that overthrows the basic foundations of materialist science: that nature follows intelligible natural laws. The belief that the natural evolution of the brain produced a human brain flawed by susceptibility to superstitions undermines belief in anything including science and materialism.

Promissory materialism isn't even plausible, it is contradicted by the history of science.

The Icon of Materialism: Why Scientism's Cherished Progress Narrative Fails by Jonathan Witt at Touchstone magazine debunks the myth of promissory materialism. When confronted with scientific evidence that seems to contradict atheist materialist beliefs, a materialist often says that that although science might not have a good explanation now, science will eventually find a materialist explanation in the future. For example, current scientific knowledge cannot explain consciousness or the origin of life and these are two areas where materialists frequently reject non-materialist explanations by promising to provide materialist explanations in the future. This is sometimes called "promissory materialism" This faith is science (scientism) is said to be reasonable by materialists because it is supported by the history of science. Phenomenon that were once thought to contradict materialism were eventually explained by materialist science. But if you look at the actual data you see that this faith in scientism is misplaced. The history of science contains numerous examples when the atheist materialist position was wrong.

Jonathan Witt's article makes the following points:

At one time scientists thought life was very simple and could easily arise spontaneously and therefore the origin of life on earth was not mysterious. However later developments have shown that life is very complex and life does not normally arise spontaneously. The progress of science did not solve the mystery of the origin of life, it resulted in the origin of life becoming much harder for science to explain.

In cosmology, it was initially thought that the universe always existed and therefore the origin of the universe needed no explanation. However later developments showed that the universe did have a beginning, the big bang, and it appears to be fine-tuned to support life. The progress of science did not solve the mystery of the origin of the universe, it made the origin of the universe more of a mystery and more compatible with religious accounts of creation.

At the birth of modern science, most scientists believed natural laws were orderly because they were designed. But eventually most scientists came to adopt methodological naturalism and reject supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon. The result of this is that modern scientists, in order to explain the fine tuning of the universe to support life, have had to propose an unfalsifiable multiverse containing an infinite number of universes where anything is possible and natural laws lose all explanatory power. In this case, the progress of science has not provided more reasons to have faith in science, it has led to the undermining of the foundations of science. Promissory materialism promises a scientific explanation for all phenomenon but the multiverse theory makes all phenomenon explainable by mere chance.

In addition to the above points made in Jonathan Witt's article there are other examples from the history of science were the progress of science failed to support the atheist materialist point of view. (See references below.)

Natural Evolution Undermines Materialism (See reference Nancy Pearcey below.)

Scientists who believe in natural evolution believe that the human brain evolved to help the individual survive and it did not necessarily evolve to help him determine what is true and what is false. They say this caused the brain to evolve to be susceptible to superstitions and they offer that as a materialist explanation of religious beliefs. Materialists also say consciousness is an illusion and free will is an illusion. According to their beliefs, any sense you have of what is true and what is false is an illusion. But materialists seem to have a blind spot when it comes to applying these beliefs uniformly. If you accept the materialist scientific point of view, that the human brain is not reliable, then belief in anything is not rational. Applied uniformly, this would include belief in materialism ... materialist science undermines itself. The progress of science didn't support belief that the human brain is rational as materialist atheists believed themselves to be. The progress of science led to the belief that the human brain evolved for survival not truth and is not reliable.

Junk DNA did not stay junk for long.

When biologists first started to examine the genetic material (DNA) in organisms, they could not explain the function of most of it. They called this unexplained genetic material "junk DNA". In this case materialists didn't promise to have an explanation in the future. Materialists were too enthusiastic about using junk DNA as a proof that God does not exist. Materialists made the theological argument that life could not have been created by God because they believe God is perfect (21% of atheists believe in God) and would not produce junk DNA. But if scientists had promised that in the future they would have an explanation for junk DNA, they would have been right. The materialist theory of junk DNA was not supported by later findings. It has been shown that junk DNA is not junk it has functions. The progress of science doesn't show that DNA is full of junk left over by blind, undirected, evolution as materialists promised, the progress of science showed that DNA has many functions beyond simply coding for proteins. Materialist predictions failed again.

Catastrophic Floods of Biblical Proportions

When geological evidence of ancient catastrophic floods reminiscent of the biblical flood story was first described, it faced fierce resistance. Geologists tried to explain its cause as gradual erosion from glaciers. But eventually these catastrophic floods were confirmed by science. This evidence of ancient catastrophic floods which seemed to support the flood myths found in many religious traditions was never proved by science to be anything other than evidence of ancient catastrophic floods. Despite fierce resistance and unfair tactics, the progress of science did not support the materialist view, it supported the view that was more consistent with religious beliefs.

Photoreceptors in the Vertebrate Retina

(Reference: Phys.org: Specialized Retinal Cells Are a "Design Feature," Showing that the Argument for Suboptimal Design of the Eye "Is Folly" by Casey Luskin)

It used to be thought that "the vertebrate eye is 'poorly designed' because the optic nerve extends over the retina instead of going out the back of the eye." Materialists argued, as they did with junk DNA, that this 'poor design' is evidence against intelligent design. However, later research has found that the structure of the retina improves visual acuity:

"Having the photoreceptors at the back of the retina is not a design constraint, it is a design feature. The idea that the vertebrate eye, like a traditional front-illuminated camera, might have been improved somehow if it had only been able to orient its wiring behind the photoreceptor layer, like a cephalopod, is folly."

Fiber optic light pipes in the retina do much more than simple image transfer by John Hewitt

The progress of science didn't add support to the materialist's view that the structure of the retina is a poor design better explained by natural evolution than intelligent design. The progress of science showed that the structure of the retina is actually an excellent design.

The Appendix

(Reference: The Useless Appendix and Other Darwinian Myths by Casey Luskin)

Materialists argued that because the appendix in humans had no known function and was subject to infection causing appendicitis, the appendix was better explained as a product of natural evolution than of intelligent design. However, later research showed that the appendix has important functions as part of the human immune system. The progress of science didn't add support to the materialist's view that the human appendix is better explained by natural evolution than intelligent design. The progress of science contradicted the materialist's belief.

Hips Bones in Whales

(Reference: Now It's Whale Hips: Another Icon of Darwinian Evolution, Vestigial Structures, Takes a Hit by David Klinghoffer)

Hip bones in whales were also thought by materialists to be vestigial organs for which natural evolution was a better explanation than intelligent design. However later research has shown that hip bones in whales have a function in reproduction. Once again the progress of science contradicted the materialist point of view.

More Examples:

Nature's best evidence for natural selection does not show that natural selection can cause macroevolution.

• A fossilized whale bone is found that is older than fossils of animals that are supposed to be the evolutionary ancestors of whales.
  

• Fossil tracks from a land animal are found that are older than the fossil of the supposed intermediate between fish and land animals.
  

• Feathered dinosaurs supposedly intermediate between dinosaurs and birds are found not to be dinosaurs but birds that have lost the ability to fly.
  

Promissory materialism is not plausible: the materialist view is often contradicted by the progress of science.

Promissory materialism is based on the belief that anything that cannot currently be explained by materialist science will be explained by it someday in the future. But this belief is not supported by the facts of history. In the cases of origin of life, cosmology, human brain, junk DNA, catastrophic floods, photoreceptors in the vertebrate retina, the human appendix, and hip bones in whales, the progress of science has shown the atheist materialist point of view was wrong. And in the case of cosmology and evolution of the brain, scientific understanding undermines materialism. In order to maintain belief in materialism, cosmologists have had to construct a multiverse theory that overthrows the basic foundations of science: that nature follows intelligible natural laws. The belief in the natural evolution of the human brain undermines belief in anything including science and materialism.

References

The Icon of Materialism Why Scientism's Cherished Progress Narrative Fails by Jonathan Witt

For instance, through much of the nineteenth century, the scientific consensus was that microscopic life was relatively simple, little more than microscopic sacks of Jell-O. The scientific community also accepted the idea of spontaneous generation—that creatures sprang to life spontaneously out of things like dew and rotting meat. Taken together, these pieces of conventional scientific wisdom suggested that the origin of the first living cell deep in the past was hardly worthy of the term mystery—a material explanation seemed obvious.

But in 1861 Louis Pasteur conducted a series of experiments that discredited the notion of spontaneous generation. And in the next century, scientists began amassing evidence of just how complex even the simplest cell is. Today we know that cells are microminiaturized factories of astonishing sophistication and that, even more to the point, such sophistication is essential for them to be able to survive and reproduce. Matheson himself conceded in his debate with Meyer that no adequate material explanation has been found for the origin of the cell.

In sum: We have come to learn that spontaneous generation was a fantasy. We have discovered that even the simplest cells are highly sophisticated and information-rich organisms. And the only cause we have ever witnessed actually producing novel information is intelligent design.

...

Cosmology and physics provide another counter-example to the grand narrative. In Darwin's time, conventional scientific wisdom held that the universe was eternal.

...

Near the same time that scientists were realizing this, there was a growing awareness of what is now widely known in cosmology as the fine-tuning problem. This is the curious fact that the various laws and constants of nature appear finely calibrated to allow for life in the universe—calibrated to such a precise degree that even committed materialists have abandoned blunt appeals to chance.

... Satanism's grand progress narrative holds that as we learn more and more about the world, purely natural or material explanations will inevitably arise and grow stronger, while design arguments will inevitably collapse under the weight of new discoveries. But the opposite has happened in cosmology and origin-of-life studies.

...

the insight that we live in a world with various underlying laws and constants that we can profitably investigate has long been non-controversial. Moreover, the idea was encouraged by the belief that nature is the rational and orderly work of a divine mind

...

The theological, and specifically theistic, commitments of the early men of science were crucial to the birth of modern science.

...

Many later scientists abandoned science's fertile theological heritage, opting to restrict themselves to purely material explanations and insisting that science should trade only in hypotheses consistent with materialism.

... The cosmic-sized case in point is their invoking untold billions of unseen, undetectable universes to argue that ours is just a rare lucky one among all these untold universes, one with a life-sustaining combination of physical laws and constants. Never mind that the idea is un-falsifiable, and never mind that such a multiverse would itself require exquisite fine-tuning in order to generate even one life-sustaining universe.

...

The same dogmatic thinking may help explain how some nakedly misleading arguments against intelligent design continue to circulate among the proponents of scientism. So, for instance, intelligent design is dismissed as an argument from ignorance when it's actually based on people's uniform experience of designed systems and the cause-and-effect structure of the universe.

...

At other times, opponents of intelligent design attack almost the opposite straw man, warning that design proponents view the cosmic designer as wholly removed from nature except when he comes down to tinker with an imperfect creation.

...

None of these straw-man attacks hold together under close inspection, and none of them alter the reality that scientism's grand narrative of a manifest destiny is a manifest charade. Its failure presents a golden opportunity to beckon both science and the broader culture out of the flatland of materialism and back toward a richer, and more reasonable, understanding of reality.

Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself by Nancy Pearcey

An example of self-referential absurdity is a theory called evolutionary epistemology, a naturalistic approach that applies evolution to the process of knowing. The theory proposes that the human mind is a product of natural selection. The implication is that the ideas in our minds were selected for their survival value, not for their truth-value.

But what if we apply that theory to itself? Then it, too, was selected for survival, not truth -- which discredits its own claim to truth. Evolutionary epistemology commits suicide.

...

To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value.

So how can we know whether the theory of evolution itself is one of those false ideas? The theory undercuts itself.

...

Applied consistently, Darwinism undercuts not only itself but also the entire scientific enterprise. Kenan Malik, a writer trained in neurobiology, writes, "If our cognitive capacities were simply evolved dispositions, there would be no way of knowing which of these capacities lead to true beliefs and which to false ones." Thus "to view humans as little more than sophisticated animals ...undermines confidence in the scientific method."

...

The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God. They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments.

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J Harlen Bretz

Endured decades of scorn as the laughingstock of the geology world. His crime was to insist that enormous amounts of evidence showed that, in Eastern Washington state, the "scabland" desert landscape had endured an ancient catastrophy: a flood of staggering proportions. This was outright heresy, since the geology community of the time had dogmatic belief in a "uniformitarian" position, where all changes must take place slowly and incrementally over vast time scales. Bretz' ideas were entirely vindicated by the 1950s. Quote: "All my enemies are dead, so I have no one to gloat over."

“crackpots” who were right 17: J Harlen Bretz at blog.vixra.org

Bretz was originally trained as a biologist and worked as a highschool teacher. Later he moved to geology in which he earned his PhD. When he first published his theory in 1923 he was pitting himself against the established works of geologists supported by the authority of respected Ivy-League professors. The idea was quickly labelled as outrageously wrong and his opponents set to work to discredit it.

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Pardee was dissuaded from supporting Bretz. Under threats to his own livelihood from his employers he had no choice but to be quiet.

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The most thought-provoking aspect of the case of J Harlen Bretz is the extent to which geologists ganged up against him and tried to publically humiliate him. They used heavy tactics to ensure that anyone who might have supported him was silenced. When we look back today we see this as shameful behaviour.

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Copyright © 2015 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Information Theory: Chance and natural law cannot explain the origin of life.

Information theory indicates that chance (random noise) and or natural law (crystal-like order) cannot produce information, codes, or cybernetic systems (systems with feedback controls). Evolution of the first cell from a simple self-replicating system and chance variation is implausible. Therefore, for life to exist, somehow genetic information had to be created, the genetic code designed, and metabolic systems designed before natural selection could ever operate on them. Intelligence is the only phenomenon proven to produce information, design codes, and design cybernetic systems and do it with intent and purpose. Therefore intelligent design is the best explanation for the origin of life.

Consider the problems you would face and choices you would have to make if you were going to create life from simpler molecules.

First you identify all the structures and processes a cell would need to grow and divide: metabolism, a cytoskeleton, a cell membrane that regulates what goes in and out of the cell, how the cell uses chemical energy, feedback control mechanisms etc.

Then you decide how to implement all that. You decide you will use amino acids to create proteins. Some proteins will work as enzymes to carry out metabolism and other proteins will be used to build cellular structures. This adds many new processes the cell must be capable of including the metabolic pathways needed to produce the amino acids. Then you have to figure out the amino acid sequences of all the proteins the cell will build.

Next you have to devise an information processing system to store and retrieve the sequences of amino acids. So you invent the genetic code to store the information about amino acid sequences in DNA, and you design the machinery to implement it: DNA replication, DNA transcription, DNA error correcting, RNA transcription, ribosomes, tRNA and the enzymes that produce them and all the proteins and enzymes needed to do these things. All of this needs to be regulated to operate efficiently. This adds many more new processes the cell must be capable of.

Then you have to construct the first cell. You have to encode the amino acid sequences into DNA, make lipids, membranes, and proteins and other molecules needed for the first cell. You have to put each component in the right place with respect to the other components.

Could an unguided natural process accomplish that?

No:

• A living system is unfavorable thermodynamically. Life has a very low state of entropy. The fact that the earth is an open system doesn't eliminate the necessity of a mechanism to overcome the improbability of forming a highly ordered system spontaneously. The fact that the earth is an open system doesn't allow tornadoes to turn rubble into buildings.²
  

• Natural laws cannot produce functional information such as the amino acid sequence of an enzyme. Natural laws are compression algorithms. Functional information is not compressible because it is not highly ordered. Natural laws can produce highly ordered crystals, not computer programs.¹⁴
  

Could a cell be produced through natural selection and random variation from a much simpler self-replicating system?

No:

• There is no plausible hypothesis for a natural origin for life. There is no location where life could plausibly have originated naturally, not in deep sea thermal vents, tide pools, the ocean, volcanic ridges, clay surfaces or extraterrestrial locations. There is no good candidate for the first self-replicating molecule, not RNA, DNA, or protein. Hypotheses such as "RNA and protein", metabolism first, etc. do not work either.^1,3,5,6,7,13
  

• Natural processes that produce biomolecules don't produce proteins and RNA or DNA, they produce tar. The cellular structures that separate and combine biomolecules are needed to produce biopolymers. Only a cell can produce a cell.⁶
  

• Self-organizing systems are limited in the complexity they can achieve.⁴
  

• Simple self-replicating systems mutate toward simplicity not complexity because competition for resources favors reduced resource requirements.³ A self-replicating molecule would not lead to the development of metabolism, it "would self-optimize its self-replicative function to the exclusion of other potentially metabolic functions and consume all resources."¹³
  

• Natural selection cannot improve or modify anything until it exists and has utility in a self-replicating system, i.e. natural selection cannot operate on utility that does not yet exist. Natural selection also cannot accomplish anything without a source of variation.¹³ Natural selection and random variation are not capable of producing functional proteins de novo or significant changes to existing proteins. The distance between functional proteins in the "fitness landscape" is too great to be bridged by Darwinian mechanisms^{8,9,10,11,15,16}. (This argument applies equally to macroevolution by natural selection and to the origin of genetic information in the first cell.) Therefore the genetic information in cells cannot have been produced by natural selection and random variation. The genetic information in cells must have been produced before it could have any utility and therefore it must have been produced for an intended purpose.¹³
  

• Duplication with modification cannot produce new genetic information. Duplication does not increase information. Information theory shows that random variation in DNA cannot produce information. Randomness in information is noise, it reduces information content.¹³ Listen to a radio tuned between channels. Does the static produce useful information?
  

• The genetic code is finely tuned, not random, and it could not evolve from something simpler.^12,3
  

Chance and natural law cannot explain how life arose. Only intelligence could have made a living cell.

References:

1) Problems with the Natural Chemical "Origin of Life" (updated)
by Casey Luskin
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/838

2) http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/intelligent-design.1228/#post-33668

3) Chance and necessity do not explain the origin of life
J.T. Trevors, D.L. Abel
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_L_Abel/publication/8164763_Chance_and_necessity_do_not_explain_the_origin_of_life/links/09e4150d4791d394ab000000

4) Self-Organisation in Dynamical Systems: A limiting result
Richard Johns
http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/rjohns/spontaneous_4.pdf

5) Can the Origin of the Genetic Code Be Explained by Direct RNA Templating?
Stephen C. Meyer* and Paul A. Nelson
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/download/BIO-C.2011.2/69

6) Video: Life could not have formed by natural means. Biomolecules naturally react to form tar.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/09/video-life-could-not-have-formed-by.html

7) Top Five Problems with Current Origin-of-Life Theories
Casey Luskin
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/12/top_five_probl067431.html

(8) Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors
Douglas D. Axe
http://www.toriah.org/articles/axe-2000.pdf

(9) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds
Douglas D. Axe
http://www.toriah.org/articles/axe-2004-1.pdf

(10) The Case Against a Darwinian Origin of Protein Folds
Douglas D. Axe*
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/download/BIO-C.2010.1/56

(11) Lee Spetner explains why natural selection can't produce macroevolution.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/09/lee-spetner-explains-why-natural.html

(12) Life did not Arise Through the Unguided Action of Natural Laws
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2013/03/life-did-not-arise-through-unguided.html

(13) 7. The Genetic Selection (GS) Principle
David L. Abel
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_L_Abel/publication/216660503_Review_of_The_Genetic_Selection_(GS)_Principle/links/02bfe50d478c6eddd2000000

(14) Complexity, Self-organization, and Emergence at the Edge of Chaos in Life-Origin Models
http://www.academia.edu/1203553/Abel_D._L._2007_Complexity_self-organization_and_emergence_at_the_edge_of_chaos_in_life-origin_models_Journal_of_the_Washington_Academy_of_Sciences_2007_93_4_1-20

(15) Exon Shuffling, and the Origins of Protein Folds
Jonathan M.
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/07/exon_shuffling074401.html

(16) Exon Shuffling: Evaluating the Evidence
Jonathan M
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/07/an_evaluation_o074441.html

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Copyright © 2014 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.