Adam Rutherford and the creation of life

Tomorrow evening I'll be at the annual Darwin Day Lecture held by the British Humanist Association. This year it will be delivered by Adam Rutherford:

I attended last year's lecture by Armand Leroi, which was excellent, so I'm looking forward to hearing what, if anything, Adam Rutherford has to say about "Creation". He's known to be provocative when it comes to matters of religious faith, so depending on the audience make-up the Q&A (if there is one) could be lively.

Eating the abiogenesis cake

It seems Joe W. Francis can't make up his mind. In "Oxygen, Water, and Light, Oh My! — The Toxicity of Life's Basic Necessities", which forms chapter 10 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, he appears to be claiming that the world is fine-tuned for life. And that it's a wonder life got started at all, given the world is so hostile to it. Well, which is it Joe?

This chapter appears to be an example of what might be called the argument from abiogenesis — the complexity of present-day biology is expounded in some detail (detail that I'm not competent to assess, not being a biologist), but it appears to miss one significant factor that's typically (or deliberately) missed in all such arguments. Sure, modern multicellular life is extremely complex, but abiogenesis isn't the wholesale springing-into-existence of complex multicellular life. It's not even the emergence of complex unicellular life. Abiogenesis is the first event — the appearance of the first self-replicating molecule. This molecule and its descendants might not even merit the description organic, even though they would lead to organic life. Whatever they were — and we can only speculate here as we don't really know — they would likely be relatively simple. Certainly relative to the intricate biological machinery evident within cells we examine today, they would probably appear absurdly simple. We have no archeological evidence — such early organisms, being soft-bodied, would not have fossilized.

To give Joe Francis his due, he doesn't explicitly present anything in this chapter as evidence for God (though I wonder, therefore, why the editors included it). But the implication is clear: cellular organisms contain highly complex mechanisms to protect them from the hostile toxicity of their environment — an environment that is fine-tuned for the existence of such cellular organisms. (No, I don't get it either.)

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952959

Naturalism vs nihilism, brimstone and fire

In the fourth chapter of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, titled "Naturalism — A Worldview", L. Russ Bush III begins by defining naturalism, and contrasting it with the pre-enlightenment view of origins, but couched in distinctly transcendent phrasing, such as:

"'Naturalism' is the belief that in the final analysis, nature is all that there is, and that 'nature' is essentially unmodified by anything other than itself. In other words, nature itself is thought to be the ultimate reality."

And:

"Naturalism affirms no God except the god of impersonal, nonliving, undesigned physical chemistry."

See what Bush does there? He characterises the naturalistic worldview as belief in a god of some kind. I've seen this tendency before* — it's as if the theistic mindset cannot conceive of a worldview that doesn't contain some ultimate thing, which even if it's not a god, is certainly god-like.

There's an unsophisticated creationist slant to this chapter. Bush asks how personalities can arise from something essentially impersonal, how life can arise from non-life. "Energy dissipates," he says. "Complexity changes by simplifying." He argues for the improbability of abiogenesis, and the improbability of the evolution of simple cellular life into complex multicellular life — using the word random rather more often than the phrase natural selection. He also diverts unnecessarily into an irrelevant concern about how — in the naturalistic view — reason was not present in the beginning, and yet it is present now. Next, of course, he gets tied up in an argument about intrinsic truth, illustrating once again the theistic obsession with absolutes.

Truth, however, is not something that exists in some transcendent realm, in and of itself. Truth is merely a description applied to facts and knowledge. Like reason and logic (and indeed morality), truth has no existence of its own.

Bush's argument against naturalism is basically that it's self-refuting, because in the naturalistic worldview, he says, nothing can be known as objectively true, and therefore that must include naturalism itself. Bush ends his piece in typical fire-and-brimstone fashion, quoting Genesis and decrying naturalistic nihilism.

But he's missed the boat. Naturalism doesn't have to be objectively true (in fact nothing does). It only needs to be true in practice. Notions of absolute truth, once discarded, leave open the possibility of determining what hypotheses about the natural world fit with what we already know, and testing them. This is how science progresses. So far, it seems to be working.

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A version of this chapter is available online:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbgod.aspx?pageid=8589952728

*The Alpha Male Monkey — Matt Arnold:
http://matt-arnold.livejournal.com/184102.html

An alternative argument from complexity

When considering whether natural organisms have been designed, or alternatively have come to be the way they are through natural processes, it's a good idea to consider some examples.

Take the mousetrap. This is a purposeful arrangement of parts, obviously designed to do a particular job. One can examine all the individual parts and see how each uniquely contributes to the purpose for which the mousetrap was designed.

Look at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. One can recognise faces carved into the mountainside, three-dimensional images of not just generic people, but specific men who actually lived — and these are their likenesses. We know, however, that these examples are not naturally occurring phenomena; they came into existence by the action of designing minds.

When we look at the forms taken by living organisms we see similar arrangements of parts, but to a much greater degree. Life is extremely complex — so complex, in fact, that to imagine that a designing mind could accurately specify such complexity is stretching credulity beyond reasonable limits. We simply cannot imagine any mind being sufficiently intelligent to be capable of such vast complexity. Even if such a complex designing mind was responsible for the complexity of life, one would be remiss in omitting to enquire where the complexity of the designer originated.

In the absence of any other explanation, therefore, we must by default assume that such complexity has arisen by gradual stepwise refinement of regressively simpler organisms. Such small steps seem intuitively more likely than the sudden fait accompli of a grand design.

Extrapolating these small steps backwards in time it seems obvious, therefore, that life originally began very simply, probably by random emergence of self-replicating molecules. It seems likely that in the not too distant future this mechanism will be demonstrated in the laboratory.