The Speculist

A scenario: a couple billion years from now, long after the last remnants of humanity have been subsumed into some unimaginable post-Singularity future, intelligent beings descended from these lab-created microbes will begin to ponder their own existence. They will come up with two competing theories about the mystery of life:

1. That life developed spontaneously in primordial conditions.

2. That life is the result of intelligent design.

Hmmm...which camp will be right? Discuss.

Whoa. Both camps would be right I guess.

What if they detected an easter egg in their DNA? Something left by some sequencer - maybe a signature or some other identifier. What effect would such a discovery have on their science? Would it retard their development or advance it?

Would it retard their development or advance it?

Yes.

Stephen, help me understand how "spontaneously in primordial conditions" is compatible with "intelligent design." Not that spontaneity and intelligence are incompatible :) ... I'm just trying to understand your premise. I'm always looking for "both and" solutions rather than "either or," if they're not contradictory. But I have to look deeper than my preconceptios somtimes to find them.

Kathy:

Entire books have been written attempting to answer the question you pose. It is perhaps one of the most important questions of our time. I may not be able to field it adequately.

Is "Intelligent Design" compatible with evolution? Most scientists would say "no." I just finished Carl Zimmer's book "Evolution" that has a chapter devoted to Creationism and Intelligent Design and how and why these movements got started.

Zimmer's book, as you might guess, doesn't dispute evolution as the path by which all living creatures alive today got here. On the other hand, Zimmer is remarkably sympathetic to the reasons that the Creationism movement got started in the first place.

Darwin's "Origin of Species" hit the world like a ton of bricks in the 19th century. Some intellectuals twisted this science into justification for any evil a nation or people might seek to do. Why not kill off the crippled, the retarded, and other ethnic groups? This is about survival of the fittest after all. Morality became irrelevant to those intellectuals that bought into this philosophy. Thus arose Nihilism, some of the worst aspects of Nazism, and Eugenics.

It should come as no surprise then that there would be a significant backlash to evolution. Principled people saw evolution as the fountainhead of all of these spiritually deadening ideas.

At first the anti-evolution forces sought to outlaw the teaching of evolution in public schools. After a period marked by some successes for their cause, they were forced into a defensive position: "If you are going to teach evolution you must also teach this other "science," Creationism."

The problem with Creationism is that it is not a science. Science requires that a theory be verified by evidence and experiment. Creationism's claims could never be subjected to experiment. It was always based on religious faith. Therefore, the U.S. Supreme Court held that laws requiring equal time for Creationism were an unconstitutional breech of the wall between church and state.

The Creationism forces retreated again but returned with "Intelligent Design." Intelligent Design is variation of the "watch found on the seashore" idea: If I'm walking on a seashore and find a gadget that I can't identify, but I find that it has certain working parts that would obviously function together for some common purpose, my first thought would not be, "well I wonder what forces of nature conspired to create this piece of machinery?" Instead, I would wonder who dropped it, what it does, who made it, and why.

This, in essence, is the argument of "intelligent design." Life is a machine, it has parts that work together to accomplish its purposes. Why would believing that it was designed purposefully be less acceptable than believing it came about spontaneously?

Intelligent Design advocates are careful not to comment on Who the Designer might be. That would trigger another unconstitutional breech. Intelligent Design is politically clever and is logically acceptable for many people.

The problem for Intelligent Design is that it presented as an alternative to evolution. This became a problem for me personally when in 1990 I visited a rock outcropping outside of Waco, Texas. There, in front of my eyes I could see fossils being recovered from different layers of sedentary rock. Not only did the life forms move from simple to complex as you moved up the strata, but transitional forms could be recognized. Some links aren't missing. Would a benevolent God have me deny the eyes He gave me?

But Intelligent Design has larger problems than the observation of one college kid. Biology has come a long way since Darwin, but his ideas have served as background for all subsequent advances. Darwin's ideas have even influenced other areas of science like physics. These ideas explain too much to abandon because they raise troubling religious and philosophical questions.

But the troubling questions remain. Why should we not behave as animals if that is what science teaches us that we are? If God cares about our lives, exactly where does He fit in historically?

Jesus was once asked whether a good Jew should pay taxes to Rome. Jesus answered by showing Caesar's face on a coin and saying, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." Matthew 22:21.

Science can tell us much about the world around us. It can even tell us about our bodies and how they can to be in the natural world. Science cannot tell us who we are or what kind of people we should strive to be. These are divine matters.

This is the way I try to resolve the conflict. But it seems this conflict comes up again and again in different ways. Issues like embryonic stem cell research seem to straddle the fence between science and the divine.

Other people I respect would answer this question differently. Joseph at "Echo Chamber" is a minister and would likely have a much different answer. Reason from "fightaging.org" would be at the opposite end of the spectrum from Joseph. I suspect that Phil is in the middle struggling along with me.

I hope this begins to answer at least where I'm coming from on this.

I suppose one could consider the entirety of intelligent evolution one big circular game of life creating more life, laying the seeds for future societies and civilizations. My personal philosophy is that the Universe is in a constant cycle - that the big bang and the big crunch continually happen over and over again. The key here is that the societies in the Universe at any given time have the ability to affect those future universes by adding to the complexity of the pattern at the time of the big crunch / big bang. I figure the things we do can set the 'initial variables' - the mathematical constants and atomic weights - and in doing so create (or destroy) opportunity for different forms of life in each new Universe. Of course that's just a theory, there's no real way that it could be proven.

Stephen - "The problem with Creationism is that it is not a science. Science requires that a theory be verified by evidence and experiment. Creationism's claims could never be subjected to experiment."

Evolutionary theory has the same problem. We have NEVER witnessed an organism going from simple to more complex, i.e., the generation of new DNA information, we have only witnessed speciation (Darwin's finches). We witness destructive evolution, not creative evolution. In thermodynamics would be called entropy...

It takes as much faith (I would argue that it takes more) to believe in evolution as it takes to believe in creationism.

Matt:

My reply grew into a full post:

http://www.speculist.com/archives/000778.html#more

Right-o. We'll continue this there.

The methane on Mars is more indictative of Thomas Gold's theory that natural gas is of non-biological origin than the possibility of current life on Mars.

I read parts of Gold's book, "The Deep, Hot Biosphere" in the 90's when it came out. I decided that if they found methane in the Martian atmosphere, that this is vindication for Gold's theory, at least for natural gas. I think he's wrong about oil, but he's absolutely right on about natural gas.

The problem with creationism is that it is an example of a circular argument that really does not solve the origin problem. The creation argument is that life is too complex to have emerged through spontaneous self-order, that it is irreducibly complex. They then go on to say that only an intelligent entity could have designed something so complex. Such an intelligent entity, ifself, is presummably of irreducible complexity, at least more than that of the human mind, that it would have had to been created by a previous intelligent entity, and so on.

This is a circular argument that complete fails to address the issue of how thing really began. As such, I do not consider it to be a useful "theory" for understanding the basis or origin of life.

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