It goes without saying that understanding how the universe came into being is a fundamental question, one that drives a lot of scientific endeavour, as well as a lot of theological and philosophical questions. Sometimes (well, a lot of the time) the scientific study clashes with the theological study.
A lot of religious believers operate with the belief that there is a deity, quietly directing the universe, unseen, yet there. They believe this as an article of faith, and from the perspective of faith, this idea cannot be proven or disproven. Such believers rarely try to use science to prove the supernatural, and indeed, some believers argue that it is pointless to use science to prove something that sits outside of science.
Others take a different view. Recall some heated discussions with one Silence of Mind? Well, over at Citizen Tom’s website, he has argued that science proves God’s existence. Of course, he argues this validates his particular version of Christianity, but the discovery of a guiding hand, a designer if you will, does not automatically point to omnipotent beings, and even if it did, it doesn’t automatically validate Christianity.
That’s going a little off-tangent. Does SoM’s argument – in this case one specifically relating to biology – hold water? To quote:
1. We know from modern discoveries in molecular biology that proteins comprise a vast family of specialized bio-tools.
2. Since tool-making is proof of intelligence, bio-tools prove the existence of God.
Al this demonstrates is assumptive reasoning. I suspect SoM’s starting point is ‘God must exist, therefore I will look for evidence that God exists’. He is not asking ‘what does the evidence show?’
Advanced, highly-evolved systems can arise from humble beginnings, but not without various evolutionary dead-ends. The fossil record is littered with mutations that were at best, not useful, or at worst, harmful to the survival of a species. The ‘specialised bio-tools’ that keep some species alive spectacularly failed to provide other species with a platform to do anything other than stagnate. They are not evidence of a creator.
Recently, the covid pandemic provided real-time examples of random mutations in action, and sometimes, the mutations of the virus were to its benefit, and other times, carried no benefit whatsoever. The ‘bio-engineering’ that went into this disease did not prevent it from going down the route of genetic failure in some instances. The same is true of various lifeforms, of various degrees of sophistication.
The ‘argument’ against random mutation and evolution is built upon the idea that a random process cannot possibly produce advanced systems, yet as the gregarious Michael Wong demonstrated via Creation Theory, events can build upon other events, over periods of time. It may take a long time – billions of years – but that does not make it impossible, and it does not require the influence of a creator.
The other point is, a creator does not automatically equate to the Christian version of God! There is no more scientific verification of the Christian/Jewish/Islamic God than there is for the Hindu, Sikh or Native American deities. There is inherent scientific validity to claims of the Christian God’s existence, and nor is a creator a vital, logical deduction.
2
0
20
I haven’t followed that part of the discussion with Citizen Tom or SOM, but I do know that if you examine biology on a cellular level, you wind up with a peek into some fascinating “bio-tools,” that look much like gears in an engine, the whole thing working together in a cohesive manner. At one point in time science just perceived a cell as a little blob, a building block of life so to speak. We have since come to realize that each cell is more like a machine with many moving parts. Much like a car did not begin as a set of tires, grow a battery and evolve a radiator, we realize a cell also could not have slowly evolved over time.
There’s no denying that the deeper we ‘see’ into organisms, the more complex they appear (much like atoms etc). However, it’s just as possible that they could have evolved to that complexity.
Well, there’s a definite conflict going on between Darwinism and science at the moment. Darwin suggested that simple things evolve into complex things, kind of like building blocks. But that theory was before we could even look into a cell. Today we know that a cell, rather than a simple building block is actually a complex piece of machinery all by it’s own self. A complex, interdependent machine full of moving parts, really cannot build it’s own self. It has no way of anticipating the future and what it might need. Kind of like how an ancient car could have been nothing but four wheels sitting on the ground, but it has no way of imagining the need for an engine to make it go forward, or how to build such an engine or why it might want to move in the first place.
Darwin had his theories, but he and the scientists of his era didn’t have the tools to carry out the analysis and research we can do now, so I don’t see an outright conflict with his speculation, rather, there was stuff he couldn’t hope to know in his lifetime.
I can see why people might conclude that the sophistication of cellular structure (and indeed, the universe) would lend people to believe it’s been created. However, the numerous dead-ends, failures, and extinctions suggest two things to me. Either the designer has struggled to get things right, or there is no designer. It remains possible for even the most complicated cell to have arisen naturally, without a creator, it would merely take a long time. It would be subject to a lot of dead-ends, a lot of false dawns (as the fossil records show), but not impossible, given time.
There’s an online experiment, one worth trying, about random probability: http://creationtheory.org/Probability/Page03.xhtml