The Nothing Myth

Chapter I: Waves

Transparently, historically, my faith has always been a shaky faith. “Faith,” as I’ve traditionally understood it, involves the relenting of your senses, of your discernment, of your reasoning and suspending reality to accept something for which there is no evidence. A blind faith. Oscillating somewhere between both admiration and pity I’ve always looked at those so strong in their conviction in the existence of a God and wondered how they do it. 

I am highly sceptical by nature, telling me something is true “Because it is” is the surest way for me to doubt. As it relates to faith, reading words from a book hundreds of years old, being preached to or hearing people’s subjective spiritual testimonies mean nothing if you doubt the underlying foundation on which the belief system rests. While belief through subjective experience may work for some, for me, faith without evidence is superstition. 

Like so many, I’ve had periods of belief and periods of unbelief. Preceding periods of belief I’ve had subjective experiences and feelings that could only be described as spiritual in nature. Feelings, however, tend to fade. Like that of the initial “Honeymoon” phase with a new significant other where you experience visceral feelings of infatuation, your feet eventually return to the ground where the imperfect nature of human relationships exists. Heightened feelings more generally tend to be fleeting and then you question the validity of that emotion with the passing of time. How many times have we been angry or sad in a moment and then once further removed from the situation we think, “Why am I even mad?” “Why am I even sad?” Subjective feelings, as it relates to faith, are insufficient. For me, to surrender, to authentically “Buy in” requires something tangible, something that does not fade with time but is instead durable. A mammoth boulder anchored on a shore line that can withstand the waves as they come and go.

Chapter II: Philosophy

Much of this blogging site is dedicated to the search for the best explanations to life’s existential questions. Questions surrounding meaning, purpose, identity, free will, the nature of humanity, the nature of nature. Moreover, what philosophical framework provides the best explanations and produces the best outcomes. A way to examine competing ideas is to put them under stress tests. A method to effectively do this is to take them to their furthest logical extremes and see how it holds up. Oversimplified examples: Introspection (Looking inward) helps you understand who you are, why you are the way you are. Excessive introspection can lead to naval-gazing, a self absorption that breeds habitual negative thought processes and with it, depression and anxiety bringing you right back to where you started. Existentialism, the philosophy associated with thinkers such as Nietzsche, at the extreme can lead to a complete loss of meaning, loneliness, and a sense of isolation in the universe, “Nothing matters” nihilism. The current dominant philosophy in academia known as Post-modernism that views everything through the lens of power and everything being constructed through language therefore an objection to objective truth because everything is socially constructed. Through postmodernism’s radical deconstruction you can be left foundationless with an attitude that says, “Nothing is real so what’s the point?” This trend of having good observations that are half right and half wrong but deliver either poor outcomes or fall apart at the extremes is true of mostly all of the philosophical perspectives I’ve delved into. Except one.

From a purely secular perspective (secular being the operative word) the most durable and practically useful teachings that I’ve found are the words and lessons of Jesus Christ. Notice I did not say “Christianity.” I am speaking exclusively about Jesus in isolation, the embodiment of “Man-Perfected.” The Nietzschean “uber-mensch.” Those teachings spoke of radical love, forgiveness, self-sacrifice, humility, the golden rule among other principles. Secular philosophers, atheists and even those of other faiths recognize Jesus as the perfect being while denying his divinity. Like that of an old Russian fable, something can be true without being real. And while historical evidence and the opinion of scholars point to a man named “Christus” being executed by Pilate in Judea having existed, this speaks nothing of proof that he was the divine “Son of God.” More broadly, if we accept A) Jesus’ philosophy was wise and sound and B) He was a man that historically existed, this means nothing in terms of pointing to the existence of a God. And so we reach an impasse. It is precisely at this point where I arrive at a brick wall and am met with doubt. It is with Jesus’ claim of “I am,” invoking divinity as the son of God that I’m asked to suspend reality and blindly believe in the metaphysical, the omniscient, the omnipotent, an invisible creator above. As mocking critics say, “Sky Daddy.”

For me to believe in any of it, all of it needs to be shown plausible or even probable. I am willing to skip over a crevasse, I am not going to jump over a canyon. In order for me to believe in anything, let alone something as fantastical as a metaphysical deity I need evidence. Not text from an ancient book, not words from a preacher, not environmental conditioning or cultural pressure, an actual evidentiary argument that is scientific in nature. 

In my search, I found what came to be the most scientifically compelling argument for the existence of a creator or God through the work of Dr. Stephen C. Meyer. 

A few years back I watched Meyer on the Joe Rogan Experience where I found his perspective very interesting, at times a little too technical and over my head, but interesting. Upon remembering the conversation I recently pulled up debates Dr. Meyer was involved in on YouTube. It’s one thing to talk to Rogan for three hours and it’s a completely different thing to debate with some of the world’s leading physicists, evolutionary biologists, intellectuals and atheists. What I found was that his arguments and his theory of Intelligent Design held up remarkably well. Often, his intellectual counterparts did not take him seriously, believing they were there to debate the caricature of the stereotypical “Bible-thumping southern hick” rather than the brilliant, well-researched intellectual and scientists that he is. This was enough for me to buy and study the book he was on JRE to promote, “Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.”

Chapter III: Intelligent Design

I know I know, relax, relax. “You think evolution is fake??” “You think the earth is 5,000 years old??” “We have fossils, you know?” Bear with me here. I know seeing “Intelligent Design” or references to faith above makes it seem like it’s going to be a few thousand words of, “God did it and the proof is that he said so.” I promise it is a much more nuanced and compelling argument than you may initially be inclined to think. I know this because I was extremely sceptical of it myself. I would not waste your time reading this nor my nights and weekends studying and writing this if it was dogmatic propaganda. You’ve made it this far, allow me the grace to tease this apart. If I do it any justice the believers will find it affirming, the agnostics will find it compelling and the objective atheist will find it interesting. 

Dr. Stephen C. Meyer earned his doctorate in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and went on to work as a geophysicist and then a professor. He currently runs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, the main organization centered around the theory of intelligent design. 

The theory of intelligent design does not purport to prove the existence of God, rather, the theory looks at the universe and the life within it as possessing hallmark signs that point to being designed through intentional and intelligent cause rather than indirect processes such as purely natural selection and random mutation or even blind luck. What does this mean? It means there are zero scientific explanations currently existing that can account for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the arrival of information necessary to produce new life forms, nor the origin of the physical constants in the universe we describe as the laws of nature (gravity, speed of light, electromagnetism, particle physics, etc.) There is, however, indications of hallmark signs of the work of engineering which then point to an engineer. Not “God,” an engineer, an architect, a designer. 

Chapter IV: Evolution & DNA

CHAPTER PREFACE: You will likely find this to be the most boring and difficult to understand portion of the essay. Because I have very little understanding of the nuts and bolts of molecular biology, much of this portion will consist of an article written that discusses the DNA problem within neo-darwinist theory that Meyer identifies. The arguments on the other side of this chapter are much more interesting however it is necessary to include this portion. Thank you.

Contrary to what most critics would believe, Intelligent Design agrees with many if not most of the tenants of evolution and natural selection. Microevolution or adaptation is an observable phenomenon. Example: Darwin’s finch beak adaptation. Charles Darwin observed that finches had different breaks associated with the food they ate. Thick-strong beaked finches cracked hard seeds, thin pointed beaks for insects and then long-narrow beaks for cactus nectar or fruit. The finches all came from the same ancestor and adapted to their environment. This is adaptation and the evidence that this exists is overwhelming. What intelligent design pushes back on or is sceptical of is macroevolution or speciation which is the large-scale changes that led to the appearance of new species of plant and animal. “I.D.” postulates that there is real scientific doubt that humans (and all living organisms for that matter) came from the same single-celled organism. The “Pre-biotic soup.” It is however less focused on how new species suddenly emerged as it is how the information necessary to produce new species came-to-be. Here we’ll explore the holes in both aspects. 

Cambrian Explosion

Darwinism posits that evolution (Changes in species over time) happens through natural selection but limited by the science of the time, it did not seek to explain the genetic component. Neo-darwinism is the derivative theory of darwinism that seeks to explain how this happens by adding the genetic component claiming that random gene mutation combines with natural selection to drive evolution and it is through this mechanism that new species of plant and animal emerged. This is an important distinction because when people invoke “Evolution” they do not make clear whether they are referring to Charles Darwin’s work in The Origin of Species or whether they’re referring to Neo-Darwinist theory that seeks to explain speciation or macroevolution. Intelligent Design agrees with most of the assertions made by Charles Darwin (adaptation) but pushes back heavily on some of the assertions made in neo-darwinist theory.

In Western society, evolution has become a modern secular religion in that it seeks to explain how life came to be and to question it is to be a heretic, to speak blasphemy. The truth is there is a missing mechanism, one that Charles Darwin could not explain but assumed that with time, this missing mechanism would be identified as we found more fossil records and had greater scientific advances. Well, we have found more fossils and we have had greater scientific advances, specifically within molecular biology. Unfortunately for him, this has only created greater uncertainty in macroevolution (speciation) and raised more questions. 

In his book “Return of the God Hypothesis” (ROTGH), Meyer states, “In the Origin of Species, Darwin depicted the history of life as a gradually unfolding, branching tree, with the trunk representing the first one-celled organisms and the branches representing all the species that evolved from these first forms. In this view, novel (new) animals and plant species arose from a series of simpler precursors and intermediate forms over vast stretches of geologic time. Darwin argued vigorously for this view. At the same time, he acknowledged that the sudden appearance of many major groups of organisms in the fossil record did not fit easily into his picture of gradual evolutionary change.”

To paraphrase, Darwin theorized that completely new species of plant and animal can emerge from tiny changes to existing species over a timeline of millions of years. The issue that Darwin could not account for (nor can science account for even today) lies in what is referred to as the “Cambrian Explosion.” This event took place beginning 530 million years ago and it was what evolutionary theorist Eugene Koonin refers to as “A biological big bang.” At this time, major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record in a timeline that would be considered “Sudden” within the evolutionary framework. To quote Meyer, “The first winged insects, birds, flowering plants, mammals and many other groups also appear abruptly in the fossil record, with no apparent connection to putative ancestors in the lower, older layers of fossil-bearing sedimentary rock.”

167 years have now passed since Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, one of the great scientifically insightful works to have ever been produced. Darwin, as well as the scientific community more broadly, would have assumed that this inexplicable gap in the evolutionary timeline would have been filled in and solved by now. The opposite has come true. Not only have the fossils of the species that would have preceded those of the Cambrian explosion not been found but with the advent of molecular biology and our understanding of DNA, this gap has only widened.

More fundamental to the intelligent design argument than the sudden arrival of new species without a connecting ancestor is the sudden arrival of the information necessary to produce the new species. Many modern espousers of evolutionary theory postulate that this sudden emergence of species of the Cambrian era can be attributed to a combination of random gene mutation and natural selection over a long period of time. Although random mutation exists, can it explain the generation of completely new life forms? To examine this we must look within the cell. 

The Protein Problem

A combination of random mutation (Changes in DNA) and natural selection leads to adaptation or microevolution, this is not where the discrepancies lie. Where the issue lies is in the generation of new species and that in order to generate new life forms, a completely new shape of protein must be generated. Inventing a new protein would require a new gene. How difficult is this? 

In his article “Giving Up Darwin,” Yale professor David Gelernter breaks down this process in what is the longform quotation below. I normally would not pull such a long quote however the explanation given is far better than I could hope to paraphrase. It is not necessary to comprehend everything that is broken down below, only to understand the chances of the sudden emergence of completely new life forms being produced through random mutation and natural selection. Gelernter, in breaking down the probability of new species arising through evolutionary means, states,

“How to make proteins is our first question. Proteins are chains: linear sequences of atom-groups, each bonded to the next. A protein molecule is based on a chain of amino acids; 150 elements is a “modest-sized” chain; the average is 250. Each link is chosen, ordinarily, from one of 20 amino acids. A chain of amino acids is a polypeptide—“peptide” being the type of chemical bond that joins one amino acid to the next. But this chain is only the starting point: chemical forces among the links make parts of the chain twist themselves into helices; others straighten out, and then, sometimes, jackknife repeatedly, like a carpenter’s rule, into flat sheets. Then the whole assemblage folds itself up like a complex sheet of origami paper. And the actual 3-D shape of the resulting molecule is (as I have said) important.

Imagine a 150-element protein as a chain of 150 beads, each bead chosen from 20 varieties. But: only certain chains will work. Only certain bead combinations will form themselves into stable, useful, well-shaped proteins.

So how hard is it to build a useful, well-shaped protein? Can you throw a bunch of amino acids together and assume that you will get something good? Or must you choose each element of the chain with painstaking care? It happens to be very hard to choose the right beads.

Inventing a new protein means inventing a new gene. (Enter, finally, genes, DNA etc., with suitable fanfare.) Genes spell out the links of a protein chain, amino acid by amino acid. Each gene is a segment of DNA, the world’s most admired macromolecule. DNA, of course, is the famous double helix or spiral staircase, where each step is a pair of nucleotides. As you read the nucleotides along one edge of the staircase (sitting on one step and bumping your way downwards to the next and the next), each group of three nucleotides along the way specifies an amino acid. Each three-nucleotide group is a codon, and the correspondence between codons and amino acids is the genetic code. (The four nucleotides in DNA are abbreviated T, A, C and G, and you can look up the code in a high school textbook: TTA and TTC stand for phenylalanine, TCT for serine, and so on.)

Your task is to invent a new gene by mutation—by the accidental change of one codon to a different codon. You have two possible starting points for this attempt. You could mutate an existing gene, or mutate gibberish. You have a choice because DNA actually consists of valid genes separated by long sequences of nonsense. Most biologists think that the nonsense sequences are the main source of new genes. If you tinker with a valid gene, you will almost certainly make it worse—to the point where its protein misfires and endangers (or kills) its organism—long before you start making it better. The gibberish sequences, on the other hand, sit on the sidelines without making proteins, and you can mutate them, so far as we know, without endangering anything. The mutated sequence can then be passed on to the next generation, where it can be mutated again. Thus mutations can accumulate on the sidelines without affecting the organism. But if you mutate your way to an actual, valid new gene, your new gene can create a new protein and thereby, potentially, play a role in evolution.

Mutations themselves enter the picture when DNA splits in half down the center of the staircase, thereby allowing the enclosing cell to split in half, and the encompassing organism to grow. Each half-staircase summons a matching set of nucleotides from the surrounding chemical soup; two complete new DNA molecules emerge. A mistake in this elegant replication process—the wrong nucleotide answering the call, a nucleotide typo—yields a mutation, either to a valid blueprint or a stretch of gibberish.

Building a Better Protein

Now at last we are ready to take Darwin out for a test drive. Starting with 150 links of gibberish, what are the chances that we can mutate our way to a useful new shape of protein? We can ask basically the same question in a more manageable way: what are the chances that a random 150-link sequence will create such a protein? Nonsense sequences are essentially random. Mutations are random. Make random changes to a random sequence and you get another random sequence. So, close your eyes, make 150 random choices from your 20 bead boxes and string up your beads in the order in which you chose them. What are the odds that you will come up with a useful new protein?

It’s easy to see that the total number of possible sequences is immense. It’s easy to believe (although non-chemists must take their colleagues’ word for it) that the subset of useful sequences—sequences that create real, usable proteins—is, in comparison, tiny. But we must know how immense and how tiny.

The total count of possible 150-link chains, where each link is chosen separately from 20 amino acids, is 20^150. In other words, many. 20^150 roughly equals 10^195, and there are only 10^80 atoms in the universe.

What proportion of these many polypeptides are useful proteins? Douglas Axe did a series of experiments to estimate how many 150-long chains are capable of stable folds—of reaching the final step in the protein-creation process (the folding) and of holding their shapes long enough to be useful. (Axe is a distinguished biologist with five-star breeding: he was a graduate student at Caltech, then joined the Centre for Protein Engineering at Cambridge. The biologists whose work Meyer discusses are mainly first-rate Establishment scientists.) He estimated that, of all 150-link amino acid sequences, 1 in 10^74 will be capable of folding into a stable protein. To say that your chances are 1 in 10^74 is no different, in practice, from saying that they are zero. It’s not surprising that your chances of hitting a stable protein that performs some useful function, and might therefore play a part in evolution, are even smaller. Axe puts them at 1 in 10^77.

In other words: immense is so big, and tiny is so small, that neo-Darwinian evolution is—so far—a dead loss. Try to mutate your way from 150 links of gibberish to a working, useful protein and you are guaranteed to fail. Try it with ten mutations, a thousand, a million—you fail. The odds bury you. It can’t be done.

A Bad Bet

But neo-Darwinianism understands that mutations are rare, and successful ones even scarcer. To balance that out, there are many organisms and a staggering immensity of time. Your chances of winning might be infinitesimal. But if you play the game often enough, you win in the end, right? After all, it works for Powerball!

Do the numbers balance out? Is Neo-Darwinian evolution plausible after all? Axe reasoned as follows. Consider the whole history of living things—the entire group of every living organism ever. It is dominated numerically by bacteria. All other organisms, from tangerine trees to coral polyps, are only a footnote. Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 10^40 bacteria—yielding around 10^40 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 10^77 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 10^40x(1/10^77)—10^40 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 10^77—which equals 1 in 10^37. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. Darwin loses.”

To summarize, in order to make the claim that the emergence of completely new life forms could’ve arisen naturally as a product of random mutation and natural selection is to make the claim that this protein problem has been solved. The issue with claiming that the protein problem has been solved is that it is so inconceivably unlikely that for all intents and purposes it is statistically impossible. A cursory search on this topic of speciation or the generation of completely new information necessary for new life forms to be generated and it will be presented as if it has been solved. “Random mutation combined with natural selection over the course of millions of years will generate new life forms.” False. A deeper examination involving asking the correct and very specific questions and or reluctant admissions from honest biologists that represent science and not, “The Science” will reveal that this issue at the protein level is one that has not been solved and is a major glaring gap in the macroevolution, neo-darwinist theory. More objective evolutionary biologists such as Bret Weinstein believe that this missing mechanism will eventually be found while acknowledging that it does indeed remain an unaccounted for mystery.

Chapter V: The Cosmos

“So long as the universe had a beginning, we would suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” -Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking’s 1966 PhD thesis sought to expand on the black hole physics worked on by his working partner, mathematician Sir Roger Penrose. To pull a quote from page 112 in ROTGH that breaks down Hawking’s discovery, “Hawking realized that Penrose’s work on black holes had implications for understanding the origin of the universe. He began to think about how the density and volume of the expanding universe would have changed over time. He realized that at every point in the past the mass of the universe would have been more densely concentrated. That meant that space would have been more tightly curved at every successive point farther and farther back in time. In his mind’s eye, as he extrapolated backwards in time, he saw that at some point the curvature of the universe would reach a limit–that is, it would attain an infinitely tight spatial curvature corresponding to zero spatial volume. This is called a “Singularity,” where the known laws of physics would break down and from which the universe would have begun its expansion.” “In this PhD thesis he [Hawking] provided preliminary mathematical proof for the occurrence of a spatial singularity at the beginning of the universe.”

So what does this prove and what does this imply? Quite simply it points to an origin of the universe with best estimates having this singularity event, a “Big Bang,” taking place 13.8 billion years ago. This means the universe is not infinite, having always been here thus requiring no explanation. Rather, it emerged from non-existence. Moreover, it’s not just that this event led to the eventual formation of stars and planets but the creation of all matter, energy, space and time. Yes, quite literally time itself did not exist prior to an estimated 13.8 billion years ago.

I mention the initial Hawking quote once more, “So long as the universe had a beginning we would suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? “

Well, Stephen, your greatest scientific contribution points to a universal beginning, so what of the creator?

Chapter VI: Ex Nihilo

Ask an atheist the origin of life and most would say, “Evolution.” Ask an atheist the origin of the universe and they’d say, “The Big Bang.” While both of these responses can help explain the organization of life and the universe, neither go far enough to explain the origin, the genesis. The Law of Conservation of Mass states what we’ve all heard, “Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.” That is, nothing within the universe can be created from nothing. Nature, strictly speaking, cannot create itself therefore how exactly could the big bang explain the origin of all the mass and energy necessary for the expansion of the universe in the first place? Moreover, does evolution explain the origin of life when life cannot, within the laws of the universe, simply emerge? Even if you believe humans evolved from a single cell organism nothing within evolution or physics for that matter, explains the emergence of material necessary to form that single cell. Allow me to put this another way using an example of a cake.

Picture a cake sitting on a kitchen counter. You wonder how this cake came to be. You recognize that it’s impossible by means of nature for a finished and frosted cake to simply appear from nowhere so you postulate that it must have come from the nearby oven. You then think deeper by realizing that if you put an empty pan in the oven a cake wouldn’t simply emerge so you think of the ingredients necessary for a cake, the eggs, flour, butter, sugar, etc and then how they must be mixed together and baked at the right temperature and for the right amount of time. To believe then that the big bang that took place 13.8 billion years ago is the absolute genesis, the creation of everything from nothing it would be like saying the oven created the cake. Similarly, to believe that evolution created life it would too be like saying the oven created the cake. The oven is the medium, not the genesis, not the raw material beginning. Moreover, what of the baker?

Watchmaker

Invoking any idea of a creator, a super-intelligent entity that created the universe and the life within it tends to be dismissed and scoffed at by the scientific community or the non-religious more broadly. Dismissal often stems from the conflation of the design argument and “Young earth creationism” (YEC), a belief  amongst a minority of Christians that holds earth and the universe more broadly were created by God between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. For some reason this minority-held belief gets attributed to all Darwinian sceptics or those that believe the universe is a product of an intelligent entity. I’d venture to say this is done intentionally to prop up the atheistic worldview and paint theists as delusional sycophants. As morons. The theory of intelligent design does not follow the logic of young earth creationism, rather, it follows what we know from scientific discovery and recognizes missing mechanisms at the cellular and cosmological level and attributes what could only be described as “Improbable miracles” to specifically chosen acts of a designer. Not because an old book says so or due to superstition but instead because, in part, every single created object that exists and functions in the universe was created by a designer. 

Robert Boyle, the 17th century scientist who is credited as being the “Father of Modern Chemistry,” and who created “Boyle’s Law’ came up with a useful analogy that he believed explained the origin of the universe. The Watchmaker analogy (similarly put forth by philosopher and theologian William Paley) goes something like this. A man who belongs to a primitive civilization, untouched by technological innovations is walking the beach when he passes a stone. He thinks nothing of it, it’s perfectly reasonable that he sees a stone and assumes it’s always been there. As he kept walking he notices a pocket watch wash ashore. He notices the moving hands and the foreign symbols on the watch’s face. The man then opens up the watch to view the inside where he notices the rotating gears that are functioning in cohesion to cause the motion on the face of the watch. The man recognizes that this foreign machine is complex. The parts are arranged purposefully and it is functioning independent of an operator. The man knows nothing of the watch’s purpose or what it indicates, the only thing he KNOWS is that this is not something produced organically from nature but instead it was created and designed by an intelligent being. 

To put it another way, if you were dropped off on Mars and you noticed a space suit on the ground, you would not think, “Oh wow, instead of flowers this planet produces space suits.” You’d immediately recognize that intelligent life from another planet had been on Mars because you’d recognize that the suit was created by an intelligent foreign life. 

Similarly, absolutely every single thing (looking around my living room, the television, lights, computer, phone, books, etc.) did not simply appear, they were designed and created by a being inhabited with intelligence. The point that Boyle and later Paley were making is that the watch is the universe. The complex systems in place to first organize and sustain the planets and stars and then later on create and sustain life does not appear to be pure happenstance like the rock on the beach but rather the universe and the life within it are the direct results of a designer who created systems that, like the gears in a watch, are too complex, too specifically arranged to be a simple product of nature. Nature cannot create and then organize itself. Mass, energy, space and time cannot simply create themselves from nothing, emerge from nothing. There has to have been a miraculous intervention that exists independent of the universe in order to create the universe. 

The watchmaker analogy has had many critics since its inception including from prominent atheists such as the likes of Richard Dawkins with his book, “The Blind Watchmaker.” However, the first argument from which all arguments against have come is from philosopher and leading figure of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume. Hume argued against the comparison of the universe and a complex machine because our only knowledge of machines being designed comes from seeing humans making them. Because we’ve never seen the universe being made, we cannot say the universe operates like a machine because that would then imply a designer. In regards to the invocation of a miracle that led to the formation of the universe, Hume states, “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”

The argument put forward by Hume served (and continues to serve) as a profound critique of what is referred to as the teleological argument or the argument supporting an ordered, purposeful universe being a product of design.

While I understand (and somewhat agree with) the logic behind Humes’, “We’ve seen watches made, we’ve never seen the universe being made so how can we attribute that to God,” I see two glaring holes in Humes’ broader argument against miracles. First, Hume argues that miracles cannot exist because everything in and of the universe is limited by the laws of nature. Yes, I agree. However, if we define “Miracles” as something that cannot occur naturally due to the limitation of universal laws, why or how would this preclude a mass designer or architect? Does that not strengthen the claim of the teleological argument? 

Let me put it in better context. Nature cannot perform miracles. The inexplicable emergence of the universe and the life within it is miraculous. “Something from nothing.” Therefore, the universe and life itself cannot definitionally be created or explained by nature since the laws of the universe dictate it an impossibility so by extension, something that presupposes, exists, and operates outside of the universe must be the explanation for the universe. 

An argument developed by medieval Muslim scholars known as the Kalam Argument follows a similar logic that the universe must have come from an uncaused first cause that exists independent of this universe. 

To summarize the first critique of Hume’s argument, 1) Everything that is exists (phones, books, TVs, phones, watches, etc) was created by a being that has intelligence and 2) Nature is governed by the laws of the universe therefore miracles (the universe and life emerging from non-existence) could not have been a product of nature which then points to something that must exist and operate independent of the universe such as an acting agent that presupposes the universe. 

My second point of contention with Hume’s argument relates to the discrediting of the universe being compared to a machine because machines are not a product of nature but are created by man. Hume invokes the laws of nature in his argument but doesn’t consider that the laws of nature may themselves be created mechanisms in the operation of the universe. The operative word, “Created” does not necessarily point to God, however, the laws that govern space, time, mass and energy only emerged following the singularity event 13.8 billion years ago having not existed prior, therefore, they were created which then points to a creator.

I’ll give you an example that better illustrates my point using one of the governing mechanisms of the universe, gravity. 

Gravity is what keeps the planets of the milky way orbiting the sun. It is what keeps moons orbiting planets. It is what maintains the distance between planets so we don’t collide. On earth, it keeps us from flying off into space. You’re telling me that gravity is not a mechanism that provides the universe with a function necessary to operate? To put it another way, gravity isn’t one of the many necessary gears inside of the watch that allows the watch to work? Moreover, gravity is one of these ordering mechanisms that did not exist prior to 13.8 billion years ago and was therefore created. These phenomenon forces that govern the universe have not always existed where we’d be able to infer they organized themselves creating planets, stars, life. No, they emerged inexplicably nearly 14 billion years ago and when they did, they were set up in such a precise and orderly manner that it organized the universe in a way that allows it to survive. 

These “Gears of the universe” these fundamental constants and conditions we observe and refer to as “The Laws of Nature” were so finely tuned that if they were different in any way at all the universe would have never formed. How improbable is it that the initial conditions of the universe would become what they are and with it, form and sustain the universe? The math has been worked out. 

The Penrose Number

Dr. Meyer on page 131 of ROTGH, “Fine tuning in physics refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life, or even complex chemistry, and thus any conceivable forms of life to exist.”“Indeed since the 1950s, physicists have discovered that life in the universe depends upon a highly improbable set of forces and features as well as an extremely improbable balance among them. The precise strengths of the fundamental forces of physics, the arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe, and many other specific features of the cosmos appear delicately balanced to allow for the possibility of life. If anyone of these properties were altered ever so slightly, complex chemistry and life simply would not exist. The fine tuning of these properties has puzzled physicists not only because of their extreme improbability, but also because there doesn’t seem to be any necessary physical or logical reason why they have to be as they are.”

The above “Universe creating machine” illustrates how the fundamental forces of the universe need to be dialed exactly correct for a universe to exist. This brings us to Roger Penrose.

Sir Roger Penrose is an Oxford physicist and mathematician who worked with Stephen Hawking on the singularity theorems and became interested in mathematically analyzing how statistically unlikely it is that “our universe would have the low-entropy, highly ordered arrangement of matter that it has today.” 

In other words, ‘What is the probability that the universe would have had the precise conditions necessary at the very beginning that would have allowed it to self organize into a sustainable universe. The answer? A 1 in 10^10^123 or a one in ten to the power of ten to the power of one hundred twenty-three chance. To put this number into context, omitting the power of 123, 10^10 equals 10 billion, 10^80 is the estimated total number of elementary particles within the entirety of the universe. The age of the universe when measuring in seconds is 10^17, if you began writing the number of zeroes within the Penrose number (10^10^123) at the beginning of the universe, the beginning of time itself at a rate of one zero per second up to right now it would still take 10^106 times longer than the universe has existed to complete it. 

None of this, mind you, touches on “How” these fundamental forces came to be, only the chances of the universe becoming what it has AFTER the creation of these forces. So technically yes, it is possible this universe would come to be (after the creation of space, time, mass and energy) but with that possibility being 1 in 10^10^123, i’d say it is “improbable.” Charitably. 

To quote Nobel-Prize winning physicist Charles Townes on the topic of a designed universe, “as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe, it’s remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren’t just the way they are, we couldn’t be here at all. The sun couldn’t be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here.”

Chapter VII: Science and God

In my years of toil, wrestling with acceptance of the metaphysical and or the existence (or non-existence) of God, it has been, in part, the belief that science disproves God that has given me much doubt. “We no longer need to invoke ancient ideas like that of Greek mythology to explain the universe and the creation of man, we have Darwin.” 

If I learned anything from the Covid era it is that science and “The Science” are not only different but are incompatible, antithetical with one another. Science is a process, a system of understanding through experimentation, observation, and reasoning. “The Science” is institutional capture, biases and acts of self-preservation that aim to accrue power and money and operate authoritatively. A collection of brilliant, but fallible humans treating their profession and scientific community as a quasi-atheistic religion. “Scientism.” We have no problem recognizing this to be the case with Christianity and the Catholic Church. Christianity is a system of beliefs while the Catholic Church is a human-operated system that tends to act in ways that serve itself and not the mission. Why would science as an institution (or any other institution for that matter) be immune to such dereliction? 

It is within the scientific community’s best interest to offer you all the answers of the universe and to have you worship at the altar of secular humanism because it, in part, makes them God-like. I view this no different than the story of Adam and Eve and the original sin. Adam and Eve did not eat from the tree of good and evil, they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil meaning they wanted to be God-like in their understanding. Pride. Scientific narratives that dismiss the possibility of a grand designer and come claiming to offer you answers regarding the origin of the universe and life are not presenting you with objective and verified information, they are presenting you with a human-made narrative that only they themselves are capable of interpreting from the divine “Saint Darwin.”

Albert Einstein once stated, “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.” This is truly baffling. The fact that through science and mathematics we are able to translate the language of the universe is remarkable. While people often believe that science and religion, specifically Christianity run counter to one another, at a deeper level of examination you’ll come to find that at the very foundation of scientific inquiry you’ll find theism, the belief in God. The great thinkers on which we formed the foundation of modern science were believers in God who set out not to disprove the existence of a creator but rather to understand His creation. When Isaac Newton discovered and wrote the laws of gravity he did not say, “Now we don’t need God,” he proceeded to write Principia Mathematica, one of the foundational scientific texts of modern science that attributed a “Most beautiful system” (planets, comets and the sun) to an act of design by a creator. The statement and belief “We are made in the image of God” is the single and solitary reason humanity believed we are capable of understanding the universe and the life within it because “The image of God” does not necessarily mean in appearance but in mental faculties, meaning, that because both the universe and our minds from from the same source, we share a rationality with this foundational source. In other words, “We can trust our eyes.” If for example the universe was completely random, having no underlying order that keeps the world spinning and life living, it’s just blind indifferent luck then there would be no rational way to understand anything at all. However this is not the case, there is a complex language in DNA, in space-time, matter and energy that can be understood through mathematics because there IS a rhyme to the reason. 

Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox often cites the “Needham Question” to emphasize this point. Joseph Needham was a British scientist and historian who was interested in finding out why, despite China’s early sophistication, they were unable to develop modern science the way Western civilization did. Working closely with Chinese scholars the answer was discovered. Because Chinese culture did not have the concept of a rational law-giving creator, they did not believe the universe adhered to discoverable laws and simply thought, “It is what it is” rather than what Western civilization surmised, with its roots in the Christian framework, “We are of God, therefore, we have the faculties to understand his language.” The most militant atheist can paint the belief that we’re made in the image of God as complete rubbish but they are forced to admit that without the belief in God, modern science would not exist nor would the understanding of the universe with all its laws have been achieved. To quote Nikola Tesla, “The gift of mental power comes from God, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with his great power.”

Moreover, of the Nobel Prize winners between 1900 and 2000, 65% of them held a theistic worldview. It is only in recent times that we believe science and theism run in conflict and this is in no small part by the spread of the New Atheism movement of the 2000s that hitched their wagons to the Neo-Darwinist assertion that because we have Darwinian Evolution, we no longer need God. But as we discussed, the genius work that is Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species does not (nor even attempt to) explain the origin of the life that Darwin brilliantly observes, a point that Darwin himself acknowledges. To assert that Darwinian evolution explains the emergence of life is like saying a book produces letters and words independent of an author. 

The scientific atheist would believe that as science and technology advances we would make discoveries that further remove us from the false belief in a grand designer. The opposite has come true. When we looked out into the vast cosmos we didn’t find that the universe was self-evident and eternal, we found that the universe had a definite beginning from which not only planets and stars emerged but the laws and parameters that govern them. When we looked into the cell we found structures and mechanisms that resemble machinery that humans eventually invented that you’d find in an industrial plant or on a circuit board. We found a language in DNA that resembles digital code, as Bill Gates put it, “DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve ever developed.” Molecular biology did not find blind and indifferent chemicals, it found a hidden language, so complex and so perfectly organized that even with our technology and understanding we cannot begin to understand how it came to be nor how it would have self-organized. Even if you remove the question of how the information  necessary to produce life within the cell arrived in the first place, believing the that the information would self-organize is like believing all of the letters in this essay would organize themselves in the exact pattern of the words, sentences, paragraphs and format that you’ve read it in only infinitely more implausible. Furthermore, to believe the information necessary to produce life would simply emerge from nature would be to believe the words on this legal pad (or your device) simply appeared out of the blue rather than the much more plausible theory that I’ve written them. 

Dare I say it requires more faith to hold an atheistic view of the universe and life than it does to believe the cosmos is the product of a designer. To hold Ex Nihilo, Nihil Fit, “Something from nothing” even though we know through scientific discovery that nothing can emerge from nothing. To hold the atheistic worldview you must simultaneously believe that the laws of nature are fixed yet they randomly decided to break themselves without a cause to produce the cosmos and life. Now that requires a tremendous amount of faith compared to the alternative viewpoint that can be explained by everything around you. The phone you’re holding or the laptop you’re reading required software which required a software engineer. A garden presupposes a gardener. A house presupposes a builder. A cabinet presupposes a carpenter. A child presupposes parents. A beer presupposes a brewer. A watch presupposes a watchmaker. This list could go on to describe absolutely everything because nothing in the universe can happen or come to be without cause. The universe and life itself could not generate itself from nothing and without a cause because nature is limited by the laws within it. Therefore, whatever caused the origin of everything must exist outside of the universe and nature because it cannot be limited by the laws within it. The laws of the universe did not exist prior to 13.8 billion years ago so how is it possible for them to create themselves? Not only to create itself but to do so in such a statistically improbable way that allows it to sustain itself. I repeat, it requires more faith to believe in something that is impossible within the framework of nature than it is to believe a produced requires a producer, a designed a designer, or more generally, an action requires a cause and a cause requires an agent. 

The Big Bang and natural selection cannot explain the origin of the universe nor the life that inhabits it, they can only help us understand how they operate. Science cannot explain the origin of the universe, only help us understand the language it speaks.

Chapter VIII: Final Thoughts

The apostle Paul stated, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.” Separately, from the book of Peter, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope you have.” 

These words may mean nothing to you. Fair enough. They do to me, however. Not solely because I have faith therefore a duty to defend the Christian worldview through argumentation and persuasion but more viscerally because I am angered by the worldview that’s been jammed down our throats since entering this world that has for far too long been artificially insulated from the critiques and criticisms that the culture has subjected the theistic worldview to. No longer.

Young people have only known a culture and civilization that has sought to kill God and replace it with fallible human endeavors. We wonder why rates of depression, anxiety and suicide are skyrocketing and we don’t once consider that the culture and civilization has been waging non-stop war against a belief that provided a sense of hope and meaning, leaving a void that has since been filled by hopelessness and nihilism. We’ve sought to kill a belief in something greater than ourselves and that which is eternal for the belief that we are all there is and nothing really matters. A belief structure that is the foundation of morality for an amoral attitude, as Dostoevsky put it, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” The idea that there is an underlying order in the universe that is purposeful in exchange for a belief that the universe is blind and indifferent. The eradication of belief in this order has led to the proliferation of peoples’ personal chaos. 

A critique of theism often posited by atheist intellectuals is that people cling to religion because it provides them with a sense of comfort. Yes, this is true, but this fact does not render belief as untrue. Belief that food will satiate my hunger does not prove food that I cannot yet see does not exist. 

We’ve simply asserted that science disproves the existence of a divine creator without any actual evidence that closes that door. Science and discovery has proven Greek mythology and the belief that Zeus hurls lightening when angry, Hinduism and the belief that Gods are a part of nature (nature cannot create nature therefore Hindu Gods could not have created themselves), and other false religions to be untrue, would a divine creator not support provable ways to discredit belief systems that take credit for his creation and lead his flock astray?

Critics often point to the stories and claims of the old testament as proof that the bible is false and God does not exist. They’ll point to examples such as Noah’s Arc as evidence of the ridiculousness of belief without thinking critically about it. While Christians and Christian theologians are defined by the New Testament and hold that it is historically true (and there is great evidence for that), interpretations of the old testament are widely debated with some believing everything happened exactly as it is said or there is the belief that I share that it does not set out to be 100% factual and scientific but rather, it sets out to say what we need to hear, meaning some fact, some metaphor and allegory, some history, some prophecy, incredible wisdom, and truth. Not necessarily fact, but truth. The story of Noah’s Arc that discusses a great flood, two of every animal on a boat. Did Noah’s story happen as it’s described? Maybe? Maybe not? It doesn’t really matter because faith does not depend on your interpretation of it. In so few words it imparts wisdom, describes human behavior and describes a historical event (a great deluge that nearly wiped out all of humanity) that scientists and historians have only very recently discovered evidence of despite painting it as verifiably false previously. 

I bring up the old testament and the story of Noah for two reasons. First, it is but one of many examples where science and history has only recently caught up to what is a very old book. And two, to highlight the critique often pushed by atheists who cherry pick stories and lines of the old testament, void of context and understanding to use as a weapon against people of faith. The inability of atheists to differentiate facts from truth and understand symbolic narrative does not render God non-existent nor Christians stupid. So few if any atheists are smart enough to be atheists. 

While I speak of God, the goal of my writing this essay is not to proselytize and convert. The purpose is instead to present an argument that I myself needed to hear and read. I started spending nights and weekends researching this topic for myself and found the argument compelling enough to document here because I figure if I found this interesting, perhaps someone else might too. As I’ve mentioned previously my faith has historically been a shaky faith, oscillating at times between theism, agnosticism and atheism. It is incredibly difficult if not impossible for me to believe anything without reason and evidence let alone something I cannot see. Faith without evidence is blind faith, blind faith I cannot do. What I can do is be open to evaluating information and seeing where it leads. In evaluating the information I have found that faith does not have to be blind, there is evidence everywhere if only you take the time to look. Intelligent Design does not prove the existence of God just as science does not disprove God’s existence. What intelligent design does prove is exactly that, science does not disprove the existence of God, a message that I feel has been suffocated and prevented from seeing the light of day. 

Scientific exploration and discovery is truly a semi-unfathomable endeavor that humanity has been able to undertake. However, what is restricted from science is the ability to answer the greatest and most important questions. The questions raised by 7 year old children are the same questions that have been pondered by the greatest minds since humanity gained consciousness. “Where do we come from?” “Where did the universe come from?” While Intelligent Design is often argued for by Christians it is not limited to Christians. There are theistic, agnostic and even atheistic scientists and philosophers that may or not not believe that the acting agent is “God” but who definitely believe there is sufficient evidence that points to the universe showing evidence of design. One of the great astrophysicists Fred Hoyle is quoted as saying, “A common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics.” Hoyle, an atheist, affirms the central tenant of the intelligent design hypothesis. That is, there are undeniable signs that point to the origin of everything being the result of a guiding intellect that preceded the existence of the universe which means we are not the product of a blind and indifferent universe, rather, we are the product of intentional and deliberate design and with that, we have purpose.

The laws of science…seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” -Atheist Physicist Stephen Hawking

It seems that the laws of physics…have been fine-tuned…to make possible the existence of life.” -Atheist Physicist Steven Weinberg

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. -Atheist Biologist Richard Dawkings

The universe looks designed, therefore God exists.” -Christian Author C.S. Lewis