I was interested to read reports this week about an advertising campaign that is planned by a certain anti-religion movement for next year. What they are planning is to get large posters on London buses that read: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."
What I find interesting about this is: why are they planning to include the word "probably"? If they are so sure that God doesn't exist why don't they just say: "There is no God. Now..."?
Is this a tacit admission that even those who oppose religion most vehemently can't actually prove that God doesn't exist? So even they have to concede that while, in their opinion, God "probably" doesn't exist, actually, there is a possibility that maybe He does exist.
Of course, if you have looked into the evidence yourself and concluded that you don't believe that God exists, then fine. Personally, I have concluded that He probably does exist.
But are you living with the belief that God doesn't exist without having really ever looked into it in any detail? -- If so, wouldn't it be a good idea to look into it in a bit more detail just so you can make up your mind for yourself? After all, even these campaigners seem to accept that there is at least a chance that He does exist, so it's surely worth at least considering that possibility?
If you are interested, I have put together a few posts on at least some of the reasons why I reached my conclusion - the post "You Believe That Stuff???" is the best place to start if you are interested.
The other interesting (or, possibly, sad) thing is the second part of their message - the reason that they don't want you to think about God: so you can "stop worrying and enjoy your life". What's sad about that is that not only do they disagree with me on whether God exists, but they also disagree on what life is like if you do choose to follow Him. They seem to be working from the assumption that following God means you are therefore going to have a miserable life. Well - maybe they should listen a bit more closely to what He says - their assumption doesn't exactly tally with His message - nor my experience...
Showing posts with label Why I Believe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Why I Believe. Show all posts
Friday, October 24, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
My Choice
In my last post in this series on why I believe in God, I summarised the points that I have been talking about in the previous posts and concluded that, as I see it, there are two options regarding the origin of the universe and life:
So how do I decide which of these two options I will choose* to believe in?
Now, of course, if you have been following along, there is no secret about the fact I choose to believe in the "God exists" option. But let me explain the "why" behind that choice.
The first reason is simply that this is the option that seems more likely to me to be correct. As I said before, both options, when you really think about them, are rather mind-blowing. However, the alternative option (multiple, eternal universes) just seems more unlikely to me - particularly since it would require the laws of physics to be fundamentally different in different universes. You may disagree, of course, but to me the existence of God is, in the end, the more plausible of the two options.
The second reason is the personal implications of getting the answer wrong. The fact is that one day I will die. If I am right about what I believe, then it may be that this is true:
On the other hand, if I am wrong (and God doesn't, in fact, exist) then I will still die with the anticipation of all those wonderful things. And that will be that. I will never know that I was wrong.
The alternative would be for me to believe that God doesn't exist. If I did choose that option, and I was right, then I would die with the expectation of death being the end. And it would be - although I'd never actually find out that I was right.
On the other hand, if I choose to believe that God doesn't exist then when I die I may just find that I was wrong and it is, after all, true that (like it or not) "every knee will bow". I may just find out that I too will "fall at His feet" in fear.
And maybe I'll find that He won't place His hand on me and say "Don't be afraid".
Call me a coward if you like, but that's not a mistake that I am particularly keen to make. In fact, I would want to be absolutely convinced - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that God doesn't exist for me to risk not believing in Him.
Particularly since believing in Him, though it costs me my life in one way, gives me so much more than it takes - even this side of death.
So there you have it - that concludes this (very brief) summary of some of the reasons why I believe what I believe.
As I said in the introductory post, what you choose to believe is up to you. Of course, since I do, in fact, believe what I believe, I believe that what I believe is true (otherwise I wouldn't believe it). Which means that I believe that heaven is real. And that means that, if I had any say, my preference would be for you to make that same choice - because I'd really like to meet up with you in heaven and have a good old chat with you over a nice cup of coffee (or, more likely, something far more enjoyable than coffee).
After all - we'll have all of eternity to get to know each other!
* This assumes that I have a choice. If God doesn't exist then we don't really have any choice about what we do or believe because all that is really happening is that our brains are responding to electrical and chemical impulses in the way they are forced to do by the laws of physics. If God does exist, then we have choice if, and only if, (and only to the extent that) He gives it to us.
- God exists and the universe is the way it is because He created it that way, or
- God doesn't exist and the universe we see today is just one of a vast number of multiple universes and is the way it is simply as a result of random chance and natural processes.
So how do I decide which of these two options I will choose* to believe in?
Now, of course, if you have been following along, there is no secret about the fact I choose to believe in the "God exists" option. But let me explain the "why" behind that choice.
The first reason is simply that this is the option that seems more likely to me to be correct. As I said before, both options, when you really think about them, are rather mind-blowing. However, the alternative option (multiple, eternal universes) just seems more unlikely to me - particularly since it would require the laws of physics to be fundamentally different in different universes. You may disagree, of course, but to me the existence of God is, in the end, the more plausible of the two options.
The second reason is the personal implications of getting the answer wrong. The fact is that one day I will die. If I am right about what I believe, then it may be that this is true:
... at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord ...In other words, it may be true that when I do die I too will see "The Creator" who made this universe and will, no doubt, respond is the same way as John (one of Jesus' closest disciples) did when he saw just a vision of Him as He appears in heaven:
[Phil 2:10-11, NASB]
Then I turned to see the voice that was speaking with me... When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man.But then, if I am right about what I believe, the good news is that the Creator's response to me will be similar to what His response was to John in that last passage:
[Rev 1:12,17 NASB]
And He placed His right hand on me, saying, "Do not be afraid ..."And I'll go on to live forever in a place that is more fantastic than anything I could even dream of alongside a God who loves me more than I can understand.
[Rev 1:17 NASB]
On the other hand, if I am wrong (and God doesn't, in fact, exist) then I will still die with the anticipation of all those wonderful things. And that will be that. I will never know that I was wrong.
The alternative would be for me to believe that God doesn't exist. If I did choose that option, and I was right, then I would die with the expectation of death being the end. And it would be - although I'd never actually find out that I was right.
On the other hand, if I choose to believe that God doesn't exist then when I die I may just find that I was wrong and it is, after all, true that (like it or not) "every knee will bow". I may just find out that I too will "fall at His feet" in fear.
And maybe I'll find that He won't place His hand on me and say "Don't be afraid".
Call me a coward if you like, but that's not a mistake that I am particularly keen to make. In fact, I would want to be absolutely convinced - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that God doesn't exist for me to risk not believing in Him.
Particularly since believing in Him, though it costs me my life in one way, gives me so much more than it takes - even this side of death.
So there you have it - that concludes this (very brief) summary of some of the reasons why I believe what I believe.
As I said in the introductory post, what you choose to believe is up to you. Of course, since I do, in fact, believe what I believe, I believe that what I believe is true (otherwise I wouldn't believe it). Which means that I believe that heaven is real. And that means that, if I had any say, my preference would be for you to make that same choice - because I'd really like to meet up with you in heaven and have a good old chat with you over a nice cup of coffee (or, more likely, something far more enjoyable than coffee).
After all - we'll have all of eternity to get to know each other!
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.
Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.
[Eph 3:14-21 NASB]
* This assumes that I have a choice. If God doesn't exist then we don't really have any choice about what we do or believe because all that is really happening is that our brains are responding to electrical and chemical impulses in the way they are forced to do by the laws of physics. If God does exist, then we have choice if, and only if, (and only to the extent that) He gives it to us.
Note: This is the last in a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Two Options
Ok - let's summarise what I have talked about in the posts up to now on this topic of "Why I believe in God":
Now to me, this all amounts to, if not "proof" of the existence of God, at least enough evidence for me to consider it as a very strong possibility.
You may disagree - and that's fine - as I stated right at the beginning, what you believe is entirely up to you. In fact there are, clearly, millions of people (including some very clever and educated people) who do disagree.
But then there are also millions of people (including some very clever and educated people) who agree with me and also conclude that there is a God. (If you're interested, here's lists of are some of them, both present and past).
The problem, of course, is that the relevant evidence and the arguments about how that evidence should be interpreted are very complex and it wouldn't be possible for any one person to have a full understanding of all of them.
In some ways that's a bad thing - because it means that there is really no-one who is fully qualified to draw any kind of conclusion on this topic.
In other ways, though, it's a good thing - it means that we don't need to wait until we know everything there is to know about all these topics before we can reach some kind of conclusion of our own. We just need to make sure that we have looked at enough evidence and arguments from both sides to enable us to make a reasonable, rational decision about which of the two basic options we are going to choose.
Well - I say "need" - there's nothing forcing us to actually look at any of this - we could just select whichever is most convenient, go with that and hope for the best. However, that's not really an approach that I would recommend if the stakes are as high they may possibly be.
So - what are the two options?
They are these:
These are the two options as I see them*.
To be honest both of them are rather mind-blowing. Both of them do funny things to my mind if I start to ponder them in any depth. And neither of them can actually be proven by actual external observation.
Mind-blowing as they are, however, I feel that I need to make a decision about which I believe. Of course you already know which I have selected if you have read this far, but bear with me for just one more post so I can talk you through my own reason for making that choice...
* Actually, there are other slight variations on the "God does not exist" side of the argument. For example, I once heard someone who argued that there is a feedback loop in time, so that the life and complexity that exists today in effect designed itself by feeding back through time and influencing the changes to happen in the correct way (although even this relies on the infinite existence of "something"). However, the two that I have presented generally appear to be considered as the two core options (except, of course, by those who don't believe that we should even allow for God as one of the options, in which case they are left with just the one option).
- A permissible hypothesis - It seems to me that there is no logical reason for discounting "God" as at least a potential answer to the question of why things are the way they are.
- Hello World - Life requires information. Generating the information for even the most basic of living things by random processes would be likely to take incomprehensibly vast amounts of time (far more than are allowed for by even the most extreme estimates for the age of the universe).
- Special Conditions - Formation of life also requires very specialised conditions - specialised chemical and environmental conditions, specialised planetary conditions and finely balanced laws of physics and chemistry. Again, the chances of all these conditions being available simply by chance are incredibly small.
- Random Writing - Having formed the first living "thing" we would then need to allow for that thing to improve over time by a process of random changes followed by natural selection. Once again the odds are stacked phenomenally heavily against this being successful.
- Starting from Scratch - Even if we put aside the issue of random probability, changing things gradually over time (even when coordinated by an intelligent human) does not normally result in a highly efficient system. Rather it requires us to learn lessons from past attempts but then to build something new from scratch.
- Changing in Parallel - Similarly, even when making incremental changes to existing systems to improve them, the norm is that we would need to change multiple parts of that system in parallel. Changes to one part without synchronised changes to another will, more often than not, make things worse rather than better.
- A Lot of Positives - Even if positive (information adding) mutations happened every generation it is questionable if there would be enough time for all the necessary changes to take place in the time available.
- And more... - And those are just some of points to consider - there are many more to add to these (a task that has been undertaken by others more qualified than I am to do so).
- Yes But... - Of course there are also arguments that people make against the existence of God - however, none that I have encountered constitute genuine proof that God doesn't exist, and some are (in my view) not really actually relevant to the topic.
Now to me, this all amounts to, if not "proof" of the existence of God, at least enough evidence for me to consider it as a very strong possibility.
You may disagree - and that's fine - as I stated right at the beginning, what you believe is entirely up to you. In fact there are, clearly, millions of people (including some very clever and educated people) who do disagree.
But then there are also millions of people (including some very clever and educated people) who agree with me and also conclude that there is a God. (If you're interested, here's lists of are some of them, both present and past).
The problem, of course, is that the relevant evidence and the arguments about how that evidence should be interpreted are very complex and it wouldn't be possible for any one person to have a full understanding of all of them.
In some ways that's a bad thing - because it means that there is really no-one who is fully qualified to draw any kind of conclusion on this topic.
In other ways, though, it's a good thing - it means that we don't need to wait until we know everything there is to know about all these topics before we can reach some kind of conclusion of our own. We just need to make sure that we have looked at enough evidence and arguments from both sides to enable us to make a reasonable, rational decision about which of the two basic options we are going to choose.
Well - I say "need" - there's nothing forcing us to actually look at any of this - we could just select whichever is most convenient, go with that and hope for the best. However, that's not really an approach that I would recommend if the stakes are as high they may possibly be.
So - what are the two options?
They are these:
- "God" exists. The universe is the way it is because God designed it like that, so probability and reliance on random changes are not necessary. God Himself (who would need to be far more complex than the most complex thing that He has designed) has always existed and so no random processes were necessary to initially being Him into existence. He exists outside of the universe (probably including outside of time itself) and so is not governed in any way by the laws we observe operating in this universe.
- "God" does not exist. The universe is the way it is because of the effect of random changes and luck. The probabilities are such that it is unreasonable to believe that we just "struck lucky" the first time, so there must be multiple universes (so many of them that it makes the number of atoms in our current, observable universe look minute). These universes must exist in a way that means that the laws of physics, physical constants, etc. are different in each one of those universes. It is possible that large numbers of universes all exist at the same time, or that there is just one "universe" which is repeatedly being "reborn" in a new form (or some combination of those two). The fundamental matter and/or energy from which all these universes are made has existed for an infinite length of time (i.e. always - there never was a time when it didn't exist) but does not appear to have settled into any kind of steady state - rather it is continually changing into different states to enable different types of universes to form. Alternatively, at some time in the past there was nothing until a certain point when, without any external cause, something happened to that nothing to cause it to turn into "something".
These are the two options as I see them*.
To be honest both of them are rather mind-blowing. Both of them do funny things to my mind if I start to ponder them in any depth. And neither of them can actually be proven by actual external observation.
Mind-blowing as they are, however, I feel that I need to make a decision about which I believe. Of course you already know which I have selected if you have read this far, but bear with me for just one more post so I can talk you through my own reason for making that choice...
* Actually, there are other slight variations on the "God does not exist" side of the argument. For example, I once heard someone who argued that there is a feedback loop in time, so that the life and complexity that exists today in effect designed itself by feeding back through time and influencing the changes to happen in the correct way (although even this relies on the infinite existence of "something"). However, the two that I have presented generally appear to be considered as the two core options (except, of course, by those who don't believe that we should even allow for God as one of the options, in which case they are left with just the one option).
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Yes, But...
So far in this series of posts on why I believe in God, I have really only looked at some arguments that seem to me to indicate that God does exist. In this post I want to (very briefly) talk about some potential arguments against that conclusion (beyond those that I haven't already dealt with directly or indirectly in some of the other posts in this series).
That aside, however, the question of how old the earth (or universe) is depends on how you interpret the evidence that is available now. And how people interpret the evidence depends to a large extent on that their belief system is. So, people who believe in evolution tend to interpret the evidence in a way that indicates long time scales (billions of years) whereas creationists interpret the same evidence in ways that indicate far shorter time scales (around 6000 years). And sometimes accepting a short time scale makes it far easier to explain some of the things we see. Here are 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe from CMi
Of course you can always find examples of people who have done "bad" things in the name of religion. But then you can easily find vast numbers of examples of particularly "good" things that have been done in the name of religion - as well as countless "bad" things that have been done for all manner of other reasons. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, if you take evolution to its logical conclusion then you can easily justify behaviour that everyone recognises as "bad" - if evolution is correct then why was Hitler considered evil rather than being celebrated as a hero of mankind?
The fact that "bad" things have been done in the name of religion doesn't prove anything about the existence of God - it only goes to show that there are people who do bad things.
However, if you look at the genetics behind it, what is actually happening is primarily that existing information (within the DNA) is being lost - no new information is being gained. So, for example, if you could get a pair of the original "dogs" you may be able to again breed them into (say) poodles by repeated selection. However, you could never take a pair of poodles and breed them into that original dog - or into great danes, for that matter - because the necessary information has been lost. You would have to re-introduce that information by breeding them with some other kind of dog or by adjusting their DNA in some other way.
Maybe rather than telling us about evolution, the breeding of dogs actually tells us more about how the original dog was "programmed" with information that would allow it to adapt to an amazing variety of different environments and situations?
Actually this is a slight simplification because some of the characteristics of some types of dogs do come from mutations - but ones that would have been disadvantageous to a dog in the wild. Again, CMI can provide more information about these points than I can here - here are some examples:
If He exists, why doesn't He always overtly answer the prayers of His followers?
If God exists, why doesn't He make Himself more obvious or visible to people?
And so on.
Now don't get me wrong here - I don't mean to trivialise these kinds of questions. I think that a lot of them are very important and worthy of serious investigation. However, I think that they are off the topic when thinking about whether or not such a thing as "God" exists. Rather, these are questions about what God is like if He does, in fact, exist. An important study, I agree, but one that is distinct from the issue of whether or not He actually exists in the first place.
If God doesn't exist, then there is little value in studying what He is like. More to the point, though, just because we may happen to disagree with, or dislike, the way He is or the things He does, doesn't mean that we can conclude that He doesn't exist. If God exists, then He is the way He is whether we like it or not. If He does exist, and He does things that don't fit in with what we would expect, it simply means that our understanding of Him is incorrect in some way - it doesn't constitute any kind of proof that He doesn't exist. If I happened to believe that all roses should be red, it wouldn't mean that yellow roses suddenly ceased to exist. It would just mean that my understanding of roses was wrong (or at least, incomplete).
To be honest, I would be a lot more surprised if we could fully understand God and how He behaves. I wouldn't expect someone who could create the universe to be fully comprehensible to me with my far more limited capabilities and intelligence. It would be a little like expecting an ant to be able to fully understand the behaviour of a human.
Of course, just because something "feels silly" (or odd or uncomfortable or scary) is not a scientific reason for rejecting it. People once thought that the concept of large chunks of ice floating around the oceans was crazy and unbelievable. However, that didn't change the fact of the existence of icebergs. Similarly, it feels a bit odd to think that the air around us is packed with all sorts of sounds and pictures that are invisible to us as humans - however, that feeling doesn't stop TVs, radios, etc. from working.
This goes back to the point that I make in the post about whether one should even allow for the existence of God as a possible conclusion to the "evidence" we see around us. Many people don't, and I suspect that the reason is this feeling that it is somehow silly, unscientific or just plain too scary to even consider such a possibility.
Yes, But... Don't things like radiation dating, etc. prove that the earth is millions old?
Firstly, this isn't actually relevant to the question of whether God exists or not - rather it is relevant to the question of whether the Biblical account of creation is relevant.That aside, however, the question of how old the earth (or universe) is depends on how you interpret the evidence that is available now. And how people interpret the evidence depends to a large extent on that their belief system is. So, people who believe in evolution tend to interpret the evidence in a way that indicates long time scales (billions of years) whereas creationists interpret the same evidence in ways that indicate far shorter time scales (around 6000 years). And sometimes accepting a short time scale makes it far easier to explain some of the things we see. Here are 101 evidences for a young age of the earth and the universe from CMi
Yes, But... Religion is bad
Again, this isn't really, in my opinion, really relevant to the question of whether or not God exists. However, again, it is worth looking at briefly. The short answer to this is that it isn't - "religion is a bad thing" is not something you can easily conclude from the evidence. For example, the report "Helping Out - A national survey of volunteering and charitable giving" (which was prepared for the UK Government Cabinet office) reports the following:As Table 3.4 also shows, there is a clear link between those who actively practised their religion compared with those who were not active, or did not profess to have any religion. Sixty-seven per cent of those actively practising their religion gave some level of formal help (compared with 55% in other groups), and over half were regular formal volunteers (compared with a third or less in other groups).Statistics aside - it is very likely that your experience is the same - think about the people you know who are active Christians - there's a good chance that (even if you find them a bit odd sometimes) you find that they are generally of comparatively high moral standing - not perfect - they make mistakes - but they are likely to be generally "good" people.
Of course you can always find examples of people who have done "bad" things in the name of religion. But then you can easily find vast numbers of examples of particularly "good" things that have been done in the name of religion - as well as countless "bad" things that have been done for all manner of other reasons. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, if you take evolution to its logical conclusion then you can easily justify behaviour that everyone recognises as "bad" - if evolution is correct then why was Hitler considered evil rather than being celebrated as a hero of mankind?
The fact that "bad" things have been done in the name of religion doesn't prove anything about the existence of God - it only goes to show that there are people who do bad things.
Yes, But... We Can See Evolution Happening - For Example in Dogs
Breeding of dogs is actually not a good example of evolution. Rather it is primarily an example of adaptation within a "kind" (as the creationists call it). The difference (briefly) is that selective breeding draws out particular, pre-existing characteristics. It does this by favouring certain characteristics over others. In dog breeding this is done by human selection; in nature it happens by natural selection (yes - even creationists believe in adaptation and natural selection).However, if you look at the genetics behind it, what is actually happening is primarily that existing information (within the DNA) is being lost - no new information is being gained. So, for example, if you could get a pair of the original "dogs" you may be able to again breed them into (say) poodles by repeated selection. However, you could never take a pair of poodles and breed them into that original dog - or into great danes, for that matter - because the necessary information has been lost. You would have to re-introduce that information by breeding them with some other kind of dog or by adjusting their DNA in some other way.
Maybe rather than telling us about evolution, the breeding of dogs actually tells us more about how the original dog was "programmed" with information that would allow it to adapt to an amazing variety of different environments and situations?
Actually this is a slight simplification because some of the characteristics of some types of dogs do come from mutations - but ones that would have been disadvantageous to a dog in the wild. Again, CMI can provide more information about these points than I can here - here are some examples:
- Dogs breeding dogs?
- A pair of dogs/wolves on Noah’s Ark couldn’t have produced all dog varieties today?
- Pedigree Dogs and Artificial Selection
Yes, But... If God exists, why does (or doesn't) He ... [fill in the blank]
If God exists, why does He allow bad things to happen?If He exists, why doesn't He always overtly answer the prayers of His followers?
If God exists, why doesn't He make Himself more obvious or visible to people?
And so on.
Now don't get me wrong here - I don't mean to trivialise these kinds of questions. I think that a lot of them are very important and worthy of serious investigation. However, I think that they are off the topic when thinking about whether or not such a thing as "God" exists. Rather, these are questions about what God is like if He does, in fact, exist. An important study, I agree, but one that is distinct from the issue of whether or not He actually exists in the first place.
If God doesn't exist, then there is little value in studying what He is like. More to the point, though, just because we may happen to disagree with, or dislike, the way He is or the things He does, doesn't mean that we can conclude that He doesn't exist. If God exists, then He is the way He is whether we like it or not. If He does exist, and He does things that don't fit in with what we would expect, it simply means that our understanding of Him is incorrect in some way - it doesn't constitute any kind of proof that He doesn't exist. If I happened to believe that all roses should be red, it wouldn't mean that yellow roses suddenly ceased to exist. It would just mean that my understanding of roses was wrong (or at least, incomplete).
To be honest, I would be a lot more surprised if we could fully understand God and how He behaves. I wouldn't expect someone who could create the universe to be fully comprehensible to me with my far more limited capabilities and intelligence. It would be a little like expecting an ant to be able to fully understand the behaviour of a human.
Yes, But... It feels silly to believe in God
Actually, this isn't really a position that is often stated "out loud" (as it were) as a reason for not believing in God. However, I thought I'd mention it because I think that it is actually (consciously or not) one of the core reasons that many people don't believe in God - along, possibly, with not wanting to believe in God because of concerns about the implications of that conclusion.Of course, just because something "feels silly" (or odd or uncomfortable or scary) is not a scientific reason for rejecting it. People once thought that the concept of large chunks of ice floating around the oceans was crazy and unbelievable. However, that didn't change the fact of the existence of icebergs. Similarly, it feels a bit odd to think that the air around us is packed with all sorts of sounds and pictures that are invisible to us as humans - however, that feeling doesn't stop TVs, radios, etc. from working.
This goes back to the point that I make in the post about whether one should even allow for the existence of God as a possible conclusion to the "evidence" we see around us. Many people don't, and I suspect that the reason is this feeling that it is somehow silly, unscientific or just plain too scary to even consider such a possibility.
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
And more...
I said that I wasn't planning to turn this blog into a Christian evidences site, so I'm not intending to go on much further on this line. Instead, if this is something that you are interested in pursuing further, may I recommend the Creation Ministries International (CMI) or Answers in Genesis (AiG). These sites have more material than I could hope to provide for you - either just browse around to see some what you come across or use their search functionality to find information on a specific topic that you are interested in.
Here's a couple of suggestions of places to start:
For my part, however, I'm not quite finished yet - stay with me for just a couple more posts and then I'll be done. [For now. On this topic. Probably ;-) ]
Here's a couple of suggestions of places to start:
- Missing links - or "transitional forms" to use the more official term. One of the problems with evolution is that we would expect to see a continual range of fossils gradually changing from simple forms to more complex forms with fossilised examples of a scattering of all the "forms" in between. However, that is not what we actually do find. Rather we find lots of examples of discrete "forms" - i.e. we see lots of thing A and lots of thing B but little to nothing in between (rather than a whole range of things gradually changing from A to B). Examples of fossils that could possibly represent those "transitional forms" (missing links between each new species) are (at best) very rare. Here is an article from CMI about the fact that one has to seriously question whether the fossil record really supports the theory of evolution.
- Lack of information-increasing mutations - I've touched on this slightly in some of my previous posts: actual examples of genuine, beneficial, information adding mutations (as required by evolutionary theory) are rare (some would say non-existent). Again, here's an article on the topic from CMI.
- Morality and ethics - Why is it seen as a good thing if someone sacrifices themselves for someone else? Why is cheating to get ahead a bad thing? Why is killing someone else bad? If evolution is true then the opposite should be true in each of those cases since evolution relies on "survival of the fittest". The apparently in-built, and remarkably consistent, understanding that exists within mankind of right and wrong seems to me to point to the existence of a "higher authority" who sets the standards for "good" and "bad". Again, here is a relevant article from CMI. There is also a good book called "Mere Christianity" written by a guy named CS Lewis which talks about this at some length - this book is available from Amazon in the UK or in the US (and, no doubt, elsewhere)
For my part, however, I'm not quite finished yet - stay with me for just a couple more posts and then I'll be done. [For now. On this topic. Probably ;-) ]
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
A Lot of Positives
In the last few posts I have been a few of the things that seem to me to be problems with the concept of moving from some initial simple living thing to the highly complex livings we see around ourselves today by a process of random mutation and natural selection. In this post I want to talk about just one more - the length of time required (even if the process wasn't random).
Research into human and chimp DNA indicates that our DNA is about 95% to 98.5% the same as chimp DNA. That doesn't sound like much of a difference, until you realise that our DNA consists of about 3 billion bases (i.e. individual "letters" in the DNA coding). This means that even a small percentage amounts to a lot of differences. In fact, by the more conservative estimates I have come across, there are still around 40 million differences between our DNA and chimp DNA. For example here's a quote from an article from the Seattle PI:
So how long would that take? Well, let's assume that we start off with a chimp and that the chimp has a baby that has one of those positive changes (mutations) and that baby chimp grows up and has a baby which has another positive mutation and so on until, eventually, the line has progressed to the stage where we have a human.
The length of time taken (based on the assumption that there is one positive change each generation without skipping any generations) is simply the average age of sexual maturity multiplied by the number of changes. Now chimps become mature at about age 9, and humans become mature (well, at least able to reproduce!) somewhere in their early to mid teens, so let's take age 10 as the average. That would mean that we need 40 million x 10 = 400 million years. Even if we started off with something half way between a chimp and a human (which evolved into a chimp on one hand and a human on the other), we wound need 200 million years (half of 400).
This is a bit of a problem because chimps and humans are, according to evolutionary theory, supposed to have separated only around 4 to 8 million years ago. And this assumes that there is a positive mutation each generation without negative changes getting in the way and spoiling things. Realistically, we would expect there to be a number of generations between each positive mutation to allow that mutation to spread through the population enough for it to exist in the same animal as the next positive mutation and for it to be identified as positive by natural selection. If we were to allow, say 5 generations for this in each case, the time taken would shoot up to 1 billion years (5 x 200 million). According to standard evolutionary timelines there were only very basic, single celled organisms around that long ago never mind anything as advanced as a chimp.
This means that, if the evolutionary explanation is correct, there are two possibilities:
Research into human and chimp DNA indicates that our DNA is about 95% to 98.5% the same as chimp DNA. That doesn't sound like much of a difference, until you realise that our DNA consists of about 3 billion bases (i.e. individual "letters" in the DNA coding). This means that even a small percentage amounts to a lot of differences. In fact, by the more conservative estimates I have come across, there are still around 40 million differences between our DNA and chimp DNA. For example here's a quote from an article from the Seattle PI:
Out of the 3 billion units of DNA, the human-chimp comparison revealed some 35 million simple changes, or mutations, in the single units of the overall sequence. They also found about 5 million additions to or subtractions from the genome involving chunks of DNA sequence.In other words, if a chimp were to change into a human, its DNA would need to be changed 40 million times.
So how long would that take? Well, let's assume that we start off with a chimp and that the chimp has a baby that has one of those positive changes (mutations) and that baby chimp grows up and has a baby which has another positive mutation and so on until, eventually, the line has progressed to the stage where we have a human.
The length of time taken (based on the assumption that there is one positive change each generation without skipping any generations) is simply the average age of sexual maturity multiplied by the number of changes. Now chimps become mature at about age 9, and humans become mature (well, at least able to reproduce!) somewhere in their early to mid teens, so let's take age 10 as the average. That would mean that we need 40 million x 10 = 400 million years. Even if we started off with something half way between a chimp and a human (which evolved into a chimp on one hand and a human on the other), we wound need 200 million years (half of 400).
This is a bit of a problem because chimps and humans are, according to evolutionary theory, supposed to have separated only around 4 to 8 million years ago. And this assumes that there is a positive mutation each generation without negative changes getting in the way and spoiling things. Realistically, we would expect there to be a number of generations between each positive mutation to allow that mutation to spread through the population enough for it to exist in the same animal as the next positive mutation and for it to be identified as positive by natural selection. If we were to allow, say 5 generations for this in each case, the time taken would shoot up to 1 billion years (5 x 200 million). According to standard evolutionary timelines there were only very basic, single celled organisms around that long ago never mind anything as advanced as a chimp.
This means that, if the evolutionary explanation is correct, there are two possibilities:
- There have to have been multiple positive mutations happening simultaneously (somewhere between 25 and 125 or more of them per generation depending on how many generations we need to distribute the mutations around). And of course these have to be in a line that is not being subject to an equal or larger number of negative mutations. Now getting just one positive mutation is rare enough. Getting those kinds of numbers of them happening regularly is just, in my opinion, totally implausible.
- Alternatively there would need to be multiple parallel lines of evolution happening simultaneously that somehow or other suddenly combined at some point (or a various points) to form a human. This is slightly less implausible (to me), but still isn't very convincing because the outcome of this would be far more likely to be a whole range of species ranging from chimp to human rather than just the two ends of the spectrum. [As an aside this is what leads to the kind of thinking that gives people an excuse to believe that their race is more highly evolved that some other race - the kind of thinking that has caused huge racial problems in the past.]
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Changing in Parallel
Carrying on from the last post, another problem with getting our simple, single celled living thing to gradually change into some complex animal is the inter-relationship between individual changes.
Let me give you a non-biological example of what I mean - the humble zip (or zipper or zip fastener or whatever it happens to be called in your part of the world!). For a zip to work, you have to have:
What's more, if you want to make improvements to an existing zip, you need to change all three of those factors in parallel. If you changed the shape of the teeth, but didn't change their spacing and the shape of the slider to match then it would just get stuck.
This means that making and improving something like a zip is really difficult to do by random processes because the changes have to coordinate with each other very closely. If a piece of molten metal happened to randomly cool into a rudimentary slider, for example, it would be (at best) totally useless unless you happened to already have some adequately shaped teeth that had randomly managed to become arranged in a nice regular pattern along the edges of the two sides of the cloth. However, those teeth would have been long since rejected because, without the slider, they would be very unlikely to be a more efficient solution than just using buttons (have you ever tried to do up a zip without the slider bit?).
This type of thing occurs all the time when you are designing or building things. You are forever designing two or more things to work together in various ways. Even if you are changing something that exists already (as we were discussing last time), you regularly have to change multiple parts of the system in a coordinated way rather than just making one isolated change.
The same applies in nature. Take your blood circulation system, for example. For this to be of any use to you, you need to have blood, a heart, and a series of tubes for the blood to flow through (among other things). Without any one of those, the other two are not likely to be that useful.
Or take sexual reproduction. There would be no point in developing some kind of "male" living thing unless a "female" developed at the same time. And if you did get them both to come into existence at the same time they would be at a reproductive disadvantage - they would have to find each other before they could reproduce, while all the other non-mutants around them could go on reproducing individually without any such hurdle. The advantages of sexual reproduction only become apparent after a number of generations by which time the whole idea would have been selected out. What's more, the reason sexual reproduction is advantageous is that it helps to minimise the spread of mutations. Exactly the opposite of what you want for evolution.
Now, maybe we could come up with theories of how these things kinds of things could come about by gradual, independent changes - for example a set of gradual, independent changes that would allow a button or lace system to slowly change into a zip (with each step being better and more efficient that the preceding one). And similarly for the circulatory and reproduction systems. Not to mention the myriad of other mutually dependent systems that exist in nature.
So I won't say that it is impossible for these things to happen (impossible is way too contentious a word!). But it sure makes it a lot more difficult and less likely. There is a very narrow path that all these changes have to follow. Just think of all those wasted mutations that would have been just the ticket, but were selected out because some other dependent change hadn't come along yet!
Let me give you a non-biological example of what I mean - the humble zip (or zipper or zip fastener or whatever it happens to be called in your part of the world!). For a zip to work, you have to have:
- A series of teeth that are shaped in a way that allows them to interlock with each other,
- A way of attaching the teeth to each piece of cloth that ensures that they are all nicely and evenly spaced with just the right gaps between them, and
- A device that you slide up and down that is shaped in the correct way to lock or unlock the teeth.
What's more, if you want to make improvements to an existing zip, you need to change all three of those factors in parallel. If you changed the shape of the teeth, but didn't change their spacing and the shape of the slider to match then it would just get stuck.
This means that making and improving something like a zip is really difficult to do by random processes because the changes have to coordinate with each other very closely. If a piece of molten metal happened to randomly cool into a rudimentary slider, for example, it would be (at best) totally useless unless you happened to already have some adequately shaped teeth that had randomly managed to become arranged in a nice regular pattern along the edges of the two sides of the cloth. However, those teeth would have been long since rejected because, without the slider, they would be very unlikely to be a more efficient solution than just using buttons (have you ever tried to do up a zip without the slider bit?).
This type of thing occurs all the time when you are designing or building things. You are forever designing two or more things to work together in various ways. Even if you are changing something that exists already (as we were discussing last time), you regularly have to change multiple parts of the system in a coordinated way rather than just making one isolated change.
The same applies in nature. Take your blood circulation system, for example. For this to be of any use to you, you need to have blood, a heart, and a series of tubes for the blood to flow through (among other things). Without any one of those, the other two are not likely to be that useful.
Or take sexual reproduction. There would be no point in developing some kind of "male" living thing unless a "female" developed at the same time. And if you did get them both to come into existence at the same time they would be at a reproductive disadvantage - they would have to find each other before they could reproduce, while all the other non-mutants around them could go on reproducing individually without any such hurdle. The advantages of sexual reproduction only become apparent after a number of generations by which time the whole idea would have been selected out. What's more, the reason sexual reproduction is advantageous is that it helps to minimise the spread of mutations. Exactly the opposite of what you want for evolution.
Now, maybe we could come up with theories of how these things kinds of things could come about by gradual, independent changes - for example a set of gradual, independent changes that would allow a button or lace system to slowly change into a zip (with each step being better and more efficient that the preceding one). And similarly for the circulatory and reproduction systems. Not to mention the myriad of other mutually dependent systems that exist in nature.
So I won't say that it is impossible for these things to happen (impossible is way too contentious a word!). But it sure makes it a lot more difficult and less likely. There is a very narrow path that all these changes have to follow. Just think of all those wasted mutations that would have been just the ticket, but were selected out because some other dependent change hadn't come along yet!
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Starting from Scratch
In my last post I made a start at looking at the problem of taking a simple living thing (that had somehow come into existence) and changing it into something significantly more sophisticated using random processes. Most of the time you just get the biological equivalent of gobbledygook.
But there's another problem with this process - it's this: trying to make something really good by making small, incremental changes to something that already exists is not a particularly good way of achieving your goal (even if those small changes are carefully considered by people who know what they are doing).
And I speak from personal experience here. Let me give you a (very) brief resume of my career to date: I stated out by studying at university for four years for a degree in civil engineering and then went on to work for a major international engineering consultancy. This role involved carrying out analysis and design of a wide range of major structures for clients based around the world. I also became a fully chartered civil engineer during that time. Subsequently, I had a bit of a career change and moved into the IT field where I have held a number of positions related to the design and implementation of IT systems (mainly for the international airline that I currently work for).
Now my intention here is not to try to get you to offer me a job, but to show you that I have had a lot of involvement in designing and building things over the years.
On some occasions the situation has been such that it was possible to design the "thing" from scratch. I.e. the thing didn't exist, someone wanted it, so we designed and built it.
On other occasions we were a little less fortunate. On those occasions the "thing" already existed but the needs of the owner of that thing had moved on, so the thing had to be changed to meet those new requirements. Some examples included having to increase the height of a large dam in Sudan, having to adapt part of a high-profile train terminal in London to reduce the likelihood of death or injury in the event of a train crash, and, in IT, I was involved in one way or another in having to make ongoing improvements to several business critical IT systems.
In all these cases (where we have had to "improve" something) there is no doubt that the end result would have been better if we had been able to start from scratch. When you are improving something that already exists, with the best will in the world, you always have to make compromises.
I suspect that you have also see this at least with IT systems. One day a shiny new system is installed and everyone is amazed at how great it is (well hopefully!). However, over time, needs change, and so changes are made to the system. Someone wants the system to do something a little differently, so they write their requirements and IT writes and installs a patch. And then it happens again. And again. And again and again and again. And before long that system isn't quite so shiny and new any more. In fact, it's the department's pet hate. It's ropey and keeps crashing. It does weird stuff with their data when they least expect it. The longer the process goes on the worse things get. So finally the decision is taken that enough is enough. A new system is brought in... and the process starts all over again.
That's just what my experience tells me: making lots of small changes to a system over an extended period of time just isn't the way you get really good systems. Even when the people making those changes are highly skilled and know what they are doing. You are far better off learning the lessons from the old system, taking advantage of new technologies that have become available, and starting again from scratch.
Now, if this principle is true in civil engineering and in software engineering, I see no reason to suspect that it is not true when it comes to designing animals. And when I look at the design of animals I don't see systems that look like they have been continually "patched" (with random patches) and so are very flaky, don't really hang together very well and should really be scrapped so we can start over. Rather I see systems that are amazingly well designed and make my own attempts at designing and building things look rather pathetic. More like the kind of thing I would expect to see if they had been designed from scratch by a highly skilled engineer.
But there's another problem with this process - it's this: trying to make something really good by making small, incremental changes to something that already exists is not a particularly good way of achieving your goal (even if those small changes are carefully considered by people who know what they are doing).
And I speak from personal experience here. Let me give you a (very) brief resume of my career to date: I stated out by studying at university for four years for a degree in civil engineering and then went on to work for a major international engineering consultancy. This role involved carrying out analysis and design of a wide range of major structures for clients based around the world. I also became a fully chartered civil engineer during that time. Subsequently, I had a bit of a career change and moved into the IT field where I have held a number of positions related to the design and implementation of IT systems (mainly for the international airline that I currently work for).
Now my intention here is not to try to get you to offer me a job, but to show you that I have had a lot of involvement in designing and building things over the years.
On some occasions the situation has been such that it was possible to design the "thing" from scratch. I.e. the thing didn't exist, someone wanted it, so we designed and built it.
On other occasions we were a little less fortunate. On those occasions the "thing" already existed but the needs of the owner of that thing had moved on, so the thing had to be changed to meet those new requirements. Some examples included having to increase the height of a large dam in Sudan, having to adapt part of a high-profile train terminal in London to reduce the likelihood of death or injury in the event of a train crash, and, in IT, I was involved in one way or another in having to make ongoing improvements to several business critical IT systems.
In all these cases (where we have had to "improve" something) there is no doubt that the end result would have been better if we had been able to start from scratch. When you are improving something that already exists, with the best will in the world, you always have to make compromises.
I suspect that you have also see this at least with IT systems. One day a shiny new system is installed and everyone is amazed at how great it is (well hopefully!). However, over time, needs change, and so changes are made to the system. Someone wants the system to do something a little differently, so they write their requirements and IT writes and installs a patch. And then it happens again. And again. And again and again and again. And before long that system isn't quite so shiny and new any more. In fact, it's the department's pet hate. It's ropey and keeps crashing. It does weird stuff with their data when they least expect it. The longer the process goes on the worse things get. So finally the decision is taken that enough is enough. A new system is brought in... and the process starts all over again.
That's just what my experience tells me: making lots of small changes to a system over an extended period of time just isn't the way you get really good systems. Even when the people making those changes are highly skilled and know what they are doing. You are far better off learning the lessons from the old system, taking advantage of new technologies that have become available, and starting again from scratch.
Now, if this principle is true in civil engineering and in software engineering, I see no reason to suspect that it is not true when it comes to designing animals. And when I look at the design of animals I don't see systems that look like they have been continually "patched" (with random patches) and so are very flaky, don't really hang together very well and should really be scrapped so we can start over. Rather I see systems that are amazingly well designed and make my own attempts at designing and building things look rather pathetic. More like the kind of thing I would expect to see if they had been designed from scratch by a highly skilled engineer.
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Random Writing
In the last two posts (on this topic) I have talked about the information and the conditions that would be needed for the first living thing to come into existence.
For this post, let's assume that we (somehow or other) already have the first living thing - so now what we are interested in is getting that thing to change over time into something more sophisticated.
What I'm not planning to do this time is go into the whole mathematical calculation of the probabilities again. For two reasons:
And so on until we have achieved our goal of producing that wonderfully crafted piece of literature.
Unfortunately, by then, no-one will have the faintest idea what English is (or was), so no-one will be able to appreciate the fruit of all this effort, so we will have to start all over again. (Bother!)
My conclusion is that this is not a particularly viable approach to writing. I suppose that it is not impossible that we may eventually hit upon some word that we wouldn't otherwise have through of that adds something to our text, but writing something in its entirety or making significant and far-reaching improvements? I'm not convinced.
For the same reason I have to admit to being less than convinced when I watch nature films that talk about the incredible and intricate design that is evident in the animals and plants around us but then want me to believe that it all came about by a similar random process.
For this post, let's assume that we (somehow or other) already have the first living thing - so now what we are interested in is getting that thing to change over time into something more sophisticated.
What I'm not planning to do this time is go into the whole mathematical calculation of the probabilities again. For two reasons:
- I did that already in the Hello World post - all I would be able to show is that as the quantity of information grows so the improbability grows exponentially to figures that no-one can actually conceive of.
- Because of the fact that the thing is now "live" and so has some kind of interest in survival, the maths becomes a lot more complex and involves factors that are not really very easily quantifiable, so the overall point would be rather obscured by questions about how exactly the calculations should be done.
- Find some text that is Ok but could do with being improved. I chose one of my poems, but feel free to pick any text - not too long (or the experiment gets a bit cumbersome), but also not too short. The one I chose was about 1000 characters long (including spaces).
- Count the number of characters (or let your word processor count them for you!) and get some way of generating a random number in that range (you could use a spreadsheet or you could cut out lots of bits of paper with all the numbers on them). We will use this random number to work out the start location for our random change.
- Get a dice to use to work out the length of the random change (we'll assume that our random changes can be anything up to 6 characters long)
- Cut out bits of paper with the letters of the alphabet on them (we'll stick to just capitals for now) and one to represent a space.
- Generate your first random change: get a random number to show you where to make the change within the text, use the dice (or whatever) to work out how long the change should be, and pick random characters out of a hat to see what you should change the letters to (don't forget to put the letters back in after each draw so that you allow for words with the same letter in more than once). Then go ahead and change the original text and decide whether the result is better or worse than the original.
- Repeat until either you are satisfied that you have generated a masterfully crafted piece of prose (or poetry) - or until you die, whichever comes first. (I gave up after 200 attempts because there are other things that I would like to do with my life!)
And so on until we have achieved our goal of producing that wonderfully crafted piece of literature.
Unfortunately, by then, no-one will have the faintest idea what English is (or was), so no-one will be able to appreciate the fruit of all this effort, so we will have to start all over again. (Bother!)
My conclusion is that this is not a particularly viable approach to writing. I suppose that it is not impossible that we may eventually hit upon some word that we wouldn't otherwise have through of that adds something to our text, but writing something in its entirety or making significant and far-reaching improvements? I'm not convinced.
For the same reason I have to admit to being less than convinced when I watch nature films that talk about the incredible and intricate design that is evident in the animals and plants around us but then want me to believe that it all came about by a similar random process.
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Monday, March 17, 2008
Special Conditions
I was talking in the last post on this topic about the improbability of the "information" required for life coming about by chance. However, there is something that needs to come first - that is the conditions need to be in place under which the appropriate chemical processes can take place in order to for that information to be encoded in some way and for some kind of living "thing" to be formed.
In other words we need the following:
Let's look at these in a bit more detail...
Firstly, there's that mix of chemicals. A number of experiments have been done over the years to determine what the mix of chemicals and environmental conditions would need to be in order for the basic ingredients of life to be spontaneously synthesised. The most famous of these is known as the "Miller-Urey experiment" which was seen by some as "scientists creating life in the lab".
In reality, what they actually achieved was to generate monomers (amino acids). However, what was less well known and reported was the fact that they also generated a number of chemicals that would have prevented those monomers from combining to form polymers (which is what would really be needed to build some kind of cell or something like that). They also generated some other chemicals that would be likely to react with the very amino acids that had just been formed (thereby destroying them).
That was not the only such experiment, of course. There have also been other similar experiments using different mixes of chemicals and conditions. However, they have not been (as far as I can gather) particularly convincing either in terms of the molecules actually formed (in comparison to the actual molecules we find in living things) or in terms of the likelihood of that kind of environment actually being able to exist for any length of time on a planet like Earth.
That's not to say that there isn't some combination of chemicals and conditions that would work - maybe one of those is correct and we just haven't got the details thrashed out, or maybe we just haven't thought up the right mix yet. However, what is certainly true is that we would need very specialised and specific chemicals and conditions.
Which brings me to my next point: in order to have the right conditions, we would need a very specific planet on which to synthesize our living thing. For example, if the Earth were closer to the sun it would be too hot to have liquid water (a pre-condition for life as we know it). Similarly, if it were further away it would be too cold (water would freeze). Both of which would be a bit of a show-stopper for carbon-based life.
So, not only to we need to have the right mix of chemicals, but we need them to be on the right planet. Right chemicals but wrong planet? No life (bad luck). Right planet but wrong chemicals? No life. You need to have the right mix of chemicals with the right conditions on the right planet.
Finally there are the laws of physics. This one is, perhaps, a little less obvious at first, but the fact is that the laws and constants that govern how the universe works need to be "fine tuned" in relation to one another in order for it to be possible for chemicals to exist and combine in a way that makes life possible. For example, if gravity were a little stronger (and everything else stayed the same), anything that was complex enough to be life would be too heavy to move. We, for example would not be able to stand up, and (depending on how different) would be crushed by our own weight.
And gravity is only one of those things. There are all sorts of laws and constants that need to be in balance with each other or it becomes impossible for any kind of life to exist. Things like the size of atoms, the speed of light, the value of Pi, the charge held by electrons, the fact that when you apply a force to something it accelerates at a certain rate, etc. etc. If these things weren't all nicely in balance with each other then it would just not be possible for any conceivable kind of life to come into existence. In fact, a New Scientist article (24 May 1997, pg 39) suggested that the probability of all the laws and constants being balanced, by random chance, in a way that supports the existence of any kind of life is about 1 in 10229 (another one of those not-so-likely events like we had in the "Hello World" post).
So, in summary, quite apart from the probabilities involved in forming the information needed for life, there is the problem of the fact that we would need to have these very specialised and specific conditions. It's not something that could happen any old day on just any old planet in just any old universe. There are an awful lot of things that have to all be just right.
In other words we need the following:
- A mix of chemicals that supports the formation of molecules that could potentially combine to form a living thing (including encoding that "information").
- The right conditions for the chemicals to form themselves into those molecules and for those molecules to combine together into the living thing.
- Laws of physics and chemistry that support the very possibility of the formation of those molecules in the first place as well as their combination into that living something.
Let's look at these in a bit more detail...
Firstly, there's that mix of chemicals. A number of experiments have been done over the years to determine what the mix of chemicals and environmental conditions would need to be in order for the basic ingredients of life to be spontaneously synthesised. The most famous of these is known as the "Miller-Urey experiment" which was seen by some as "scientists creating life in the lab".
In reality, what they actually achieved was to generate monomers (amino acids). However, what was less well known and reported was the fact that they also generated a number of chemicals that would have prevented those monomers from combining to form polymers (which is what would really be needed to build some kind of cell or something like that). They also generated some other chemicals that would be likely to react with the very amino acids that had just been formed (thereby destroying them).
That was not the only such experiment, of course. There have also been other similar experiments using different mixes of chemicals and conditions. However, they have not been (as far as I can gather) particularly convincing either in terms of the molecules actually formed (in comparison to the actual molecules we find in living things) or in terms of the likelihood of that kind of environment actually being able to exist for any length of time on a planet like Earth.
That's not to say that there isn't some combination of chemicals and conditions that would work - maybe one of those is correct and we just haven't got the details thrashed out, or maybe we just haven't thought up the right mix yet. However, what is certainly true is that we would need very specialised and specific chemicals and conditions.
Which brings me to my next point: in order to have the right conditions, we would need a very specific planet on which to synthesize our living thing. For example, if the Earth were closer to the sun it would be too hot to have liquid water (a pre-condition for life as we know it). Similarly, if it were further away it would be too cold (water would freeze). Both of which would be a bit of a show-stopper for carbon-based life.
So, not only to we need to have the right mix of chemicals, but we need them to be on the right planet. Right chemicals but wrong planet? No life (bad luck). Right planet but wrong chemicals? No life. You need to have the right mix of chemicals with the right conditions on the right planet.
Finally there are the laws of physics. This one is, perhaps, a little less obvious at first, but the fact is that the laws and constants that govern how the universe works need to be "fine tuned" in relation to one another in order for it to be possible for chemicals to exist and combine in a way that makes life possible. For example, if gravity were a little stronger (and everything else stayed the same), anything that was complex enough to be life would be too heavy to move. We, for example would not be able to stand up, and (depending on how different) would be crushed by our own weight.
And gravity is only one of those things. There are all sorts of laws and constants that need to be in balance with each other or it becomes impossible for any kind of life to exist. Things like the size of atoms, the speed of light, the value of Pi, the charge held by electrons, the fact that when you apply a force to something it accelerates at a certain rate, etc. etc. If these things weren't all nicely in balance with each other then it would just not be possible for any conceivable kind of life to come into existence. In fact, a New Scientist article (24 May 1997, pg 39) suggested that the probability of all the laws and constants being balanced, by random chance, in a way that supports the existence of any kind of life is about 1 in 10229 (another one of those not-so-likely events like we had in the "Hello World" post).
So, in summary, quite apart from the probabilities involved in forming the information needed for life, there is the problem of the fact that we would need to have these very specialised and specific conditions. It's not something that could happen any old day on just any old planet in just any old universe. There are an awful lot of things that have to all be just right.
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Hello World
"How did life begin?"
At some point in the dim and distant past there was no life. Then something happened, and after that something, there was life.
The question is: What was that "something"? And what could have caused it? And, most critically, how likely (or unlikely) was it to have happened?
I'll sort of touch on the first two of those questions in a later post. For this one I want to constrain myself to talking about the last one.
There are various definitions of "life" (typically they talk about the ability to respire, reproduce, etc.). However, to me, when thinking about how life may have originated, a key consideration is information. For life to exist for an extended period (i.e. in order to be able to reproduce, eat, etc.) there needs to be information that is passed from one generation of that life to another (so that the life continues to the next generation).
In all life that we know of, that information is passed by genes (DNA and / or RNA). Genes are, in effect, a way of writing down information using an "alphabet" of 4 "letters". The "letters" are specific types of molecules - these are arranged in specific arrangements in the gene in order to code the information - just like letters are arranged in a certain order to encode information in writing (like this text you are reading right now).
Another place where information is often encoded is in computers. In this area, there are just two "letters" (0 and 1) which are arranged in specific orders to encode information.
Now, a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law and I were talking about how possible it would be to randomly generate a copy of Microsoft Word (I think we were using version 2000 at the time - licensed copies, I hasten to add!). The theory was that if you could randomly generate the relevant files, presumably you would be able to use it for free.
This hypothetical idea caught my interest, and I decided to have a go at working out the probabilities. However, rather than starting off trying to generate the whole of Word, I thought that (in the tradition of people learning to write programs) I would start with trying to generate the following simple Java program:
To do that I made that assumption that I had another program that was capable of generating random 0s and 1s into a file of the correct length at a rate of 1000 attempts (i.e. complete files) per second. How long would it then take to generate that program?
I was surprised at the result.
I'm not sure what your estimate would be, but before I started, I had assumed that the answer would be in the order of 10s of years - i.e. if I set it off now, then I would get a result sometime in the next, say 20 to 50 years.
How wrong I was.
According to my calculations, I found that - get this - even if every atom in the known universe was itself a universe, and each atom in each of those universes was a computer generating 1000 files per second, it would still take about 5 billion billion years before I would be likely to generate a program similar to my simple "hello" program (never mind exactly the same as it).
That's quite a while. In fact, it's about a billion times as long as the earth is supposed to have been in existence (claimed to be around 4.6 billion years).
It also requires quite a few more computers than I have at my disposal at the moment.
So the long and short of it is we can forget about generating that program. And we can certainly forget about generating Microsoft Word which is vastly more complex than that.
This all lead me to think about the amount of information that would be required for the very simplest living thing. The answer was, at best, several times more than the amount of information in that program code (again resulting in vastly lower probabilities).
Something that improbable would, of course, normally not even be considered as an option. And I mean not even considered. Like - you would send me to the loony bin if I suggested it.
So, I ask myself, is it reasonable to consider it as a possibility for the origin of life?
Or, to put it another way: is it unreasonable to at least consider the possibility of an alternative explanation?
At some point in the dim and distant past there was no life. Then something happened, and after that something, there was life.
The question is: What was that "something"? And what could have caused it? And, most critically, how likely (or unlikely) was it to have happened?
I'll sort of touch on the first two of those questions in a later post. For this one I want to constrain myself to talking about the last one.
There are various definitions of "life" (typically they talk about the ability to respire, reproduce, etc.). However, to me, when thinking about how life may have originated, a key consideration is information. For life to exist for an extended period (i.e. in order to be able to reproduce, eat, etc.) there needs to be information that is passed from one generation of that life to another (so that the life continues to the next generation).
In all life that we know of, that information is passed by genes (DNA and / or RNA). Genes are, in effect, a way of writing down information using an "alphabet" of 4 "letters". The "letters" are specific types of molecules - these are arranged in specific arrangements in the gene in order to code the information - just like letters are arranged in a certain order to encode information in writing (like this text you are reading right now).
Another place where information is often encoded is in computers. In this area, there are just two "letters" (0 and 1) which are arranged in specific orders to encode information.
Now, a couple of years ago, my brother-in-law and I were talking about how possible it would be to randomly generate a copy of Microsoft Word (I think we were using version 2000 at the time - licensed copies, I hasten to add!). The theory was that if you could randomly generate the relevant files, presumably you would be able to use it for free.
This hypothetical idea caught my interest, and I decided to have a go at working out the probabilities. However, rather than starting off trying to generate the whole of Word, I thought that (in the tradition of people learning to write programs) I would start with trying to generate the following simple Java program:
public class h
{
public static void main(String[] a)
{
System.out.println("hello");
}
}
To do that I made that assumption that I had another program that was capable of generating random 0s and 1s into a file of the correct length at a rate of 1000 attempts (i.e. complete files) per second. How long would it then take to generate that program?
I was surprised at the result.
I'm not sure what your estimate would be, but before I started, I had assumed that the answer would be in the order of 10s of years - i.e. if I set it off now, then I would get a result sometime in the next, say 20 to 50 years.
How wrong I was.
According to my calculations, I found that - get this - even if every atom in the known universe was itself a universe, and each atom in each of those universes was a computer generating 1000 files per second, it would still take about 5 billion billion years before I would be likely to generate a program similar to my simple "hello" program (never mind exactly the same as it).
That's quite a while. In fact, it's about a billion times as long as the earth is supposed to have been in existence (claimed to be around 4.6 billion years).
It also requires quite a few more computers than I have at my disposal at the moment.
So the long and short of it is we can forget about generating that program. And we can certainly forget about generating Microsoft Word which is vastly more complex than that.
This all lead me to think about the amount of information that would be required for the very simplest living thing. The answer was, at best, several times more than the amount of information in that program code (again resulting in vastly lower probabilities).
Something that improbable would, of course, normally not even be considered as an option. And I mean not even considered. Like - you would send me to the loony bin if I suggested it.
So, I ask myself, is it reasonable to consider it as a possibility for the origin of life?
Or, to put it another way: is it unreasonable to at least consider the possibility of an alternative explanation?
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Is "God Exists" a Permissible Hypothesis?
The way science normally works is this:
- Something is observed that we would like to explain or understand
- We collect as many facts that appear to be relevant as we can, carry out various investigations and come up with one or more "hypotheses" (i.e. statements of possible conclusions on the matter)
- We carry out experiments to check if one of our hypotheses is correct (maybe with some adjustments)
- We can only look at the facts that remain now (rather than actually looking at the facts as they were then),
- We are rather limited in what experiments we can carry out (starting up a new universe is a little beyond the capabilities of most labs!), and
- This tends to be an emotionally charged question, so it is difficult to be completely objective about it.
Now, the question that I have asked myself is this:
Is the existence of God a permissible hypothesis?
In other words, in my aim to understand the origin of the world, is there anything unscientific in at least allowing for the possibility of there being something (that we could call "God") that is beyond what we call "the universe" (if the facts seem to point to that conclusion)?
This is an important question because there are people who would say that I should not even allow for such a conclusion and that to even consider that as one of the options is "unscientific" in some way.
For myself, however, I can't see any reason for excluding this as a possible explanation. I would rather look at the facts and decide for myself whether or not they seem to support this or another conclusion.
In fact, in my opinion, the exact opposite is true: it is a direct violation of the principles of science to exclude a particular conclusion before we even start looking at the evidence. That's not called "science", that's called "prejudice" (making a judgement before considering the facts). Or, to put it another way:
To reject a conclusion before you begin,
is to throw the word "science" into the bin.
So - if we want to be genuine about being "scientific", then we need to allow for any conclusion that is supported by the evidence. Including at least being open to the possibility that God may exist (as well, of course, as being open to the possibility that the universe came into existance by itself as a result of random processes).
If that's you, then you may be interested in the rest of these posts where I talk about some of those evidences. Of course, if you prefer to be prejudiced (which is, I guess, your right), then you probably won't be swayed by the evidence... but you may find the posts interesting anyway :)
Note: This is part of a series of posts about why I believe in God. See my post "You Believe that Stuff???" for more info and links to the other related posts.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
You Believe That Stuff???
One of the things that I promised the other day was that I would give you a bit of an explanation of why I believe in God, so I thought that now was as good a time as any to get started on that.
And, it seems to me that a good place to start is to point out a few things that I am not going to be trying to do:
And, it seems to me that a good place to start is to point out a few things that I am not going to be trying to do:
- I am not trying to set up a Christian evidences site. There are many of those already available run by people who are far more capable at it than I am (I'll try to post a couple of links to some at a later date). All I am trying to do is explain to you (in summary) just some of the kinds of things that I have thought about that have lead me to believe that there really is a God out there.
- I'm not trying to force you to believe in God. Whether or not you believe in God is your business. Of course, if God does exist and if it is true that "He is a rewarder of those who seek Him" (as the Bible claims), then the question of whether or not He exists is more than just an academically interesting question. So if my telling you why I believe in God leads you to think about that question and ultimately believe in Him too, and if that turns out to mean that you also receive that reward, then that would be great - I believe that that reward is real and that it is offered to you just as much as it is to me so why wouldn't I want to tell you about it? However, even if you decide that you don't believe in God, I hope that what I have to say in these posts will help you to understand me a little better and at least see that there is some kind of foundation for my belief (even if you don't agree with it).
- I'll label them all with "Why I Believe", and
- I'll try to remember to list them all here in the most logical reading order:
- A permissible hypothesis - should I even allow for the possibility of the existence of God as an explanation for the origin of the universe?
- Hello World - What are the chances of first life coming into existence?
- Special Conditions - The chances are zero unless the conditions are suitable for life to form.
- Random Writing - If we do get the first life we need to then progress towards more complex life.
- Starting from Scratch - Repeatedly changing something over time doesn't usually result in a great system.
- Changing in Parallel - Different parts of systems very often have to change in a coordinated way for the change to be successful
- A Lot of Positives - Even if positive mutations happened every generation would there be enough time for evolution?
- And more... - A few other points to consider and links to further information.
- Yes But... - What about the arguments that people make against the existence of God?
- Two Options. - It seems to me that there are two fundamental options that we need to choose between.
- My Choice. - My reasons for choosing the option that I do.
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