Paul K. Hubbard
I ended Part 1 with this statement: “Thus there is an extraordinary disconnect between these two sciences – one desperately looking for signs of life and knowing instantly that it is living if it should appear – and another doggedly arguing that consciousness is simply a logical but rare illusion of an unconscious machine. How do we explain this disconnect? …to be continued…”
To find out more on the nature of this disconnect, I read through Stephen Meyer’s other two books – The Return of the God Hypothesis (c2021) and Signature in the Cell (c2009) – in that order. And that order helped me very much because the strength of his argument in The Return of the God Hypothesis was in its last element, there being three: 1) the evidence from cosmology shows that the material universe had a beginning, the “Big Bang”, 2) the “Anthropic Principle” and 3) evidence in biology, especially since the discovery of DNA, shows that large amounts of inexplicable genetic information had arisen to make life possible. And Signature in the Cell addresses this phenomenon very thoroughly.
The “Big Bang” theory got many theists enthusiastic when it first came out, presumably because of this very reason. Christian apologists were talking about this 50 years ago. Recent data from the James Webb telescope have seemingly contradicted parts of the theory, but nothing has really changed. The theory of an expanding universe is practically unassailable. Yet the theistic argument that the universe had a definite beginning, demonstrated by the Big Bang argument, and that this implies an intentionally creative act by a creator, has gotten no traction at all over the last 50-70 years. Therefore, Meyer’s rehash of this “discovery” is passé.
One could argue that the stage is set for the return of the “God Hypothesis” by the long-standing, unassailable belief that the universe had a discreet beginning and that the long-standing realization that conditions that make life possible in our universe could only have arisen as part of a benign, though astronomically unlikely Anthropic Principle. But the God Hypothesis has not returned. And it shows very little sign of returning.
But if it should have returned, it should have been because of Meyer’s first book: Signature in the Cell. In this book, he takes the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson, which is the complex structure of DNA, and has shown that this structure has turned out to be a densely packed program of information about how to build the proteins of complex life. Meyer shows something that should have been obvious. As obvious as it was to Dr. Ellie Arroway in the 1997 American film, “Contact,” when, (as we said) lounging on the hood of her car, she first hears the “Contact” signal, and there is absolutely no question in her mind that this is a WOW! signal. This was a conscious signal that has originated with conscious life outside our solar system! Even more – this is a signal that shows the world how to build a machine that can traverse a worm hole.
The question that should arise in our minds is this: if the SETI community, in an unguarded moment of candor, will admit the implications of intelligent information suddenly appearing in a radio telescope, then how can a community of scientific materialists be so intransigent in denying those implications when it appears written in our own DNA?
Meyer does not focus on this disconnect. He focuses on the sheer improbability that intelligent information can arise by chance. Evolutionists handily dismiss Fred Hoyle’s “Junkyard Tornado” argument by asserting that given enough time, a tornado could build a Boeing 747 out of randomly distributed parts. Evolutionist confidently assert that given enough time, a roomful of monkeys could eventually type out War And Peace. No, they can’t. There is not enough time. Even for those unfamiliar with scientific notation, Meyer methodically proves this. There aren’t enough seconds after the Big Bang to randomly form a single protein.
The universe is only 13.6 billion years old. The solar system is only 4.6 billion years old. The statistical probability of randomly forming a protein utterly dwarfs this number. War and Peace has a little less than 600,000 words. If that book were a combination lock with as many permutations, how long would it take a roomful of monkeys to figure it out? In the 1980s, it was argued that the program necessary to control the “Strategic Defense Initiative” would be prohibitively large, running to millions of lines of code. Windows 11 uses ~60,000,000 lines of code. Imagine a program that could assemble a typewriter – and also a monkey.
Now imagine writing a program for human intelligence, and your boss (natural selection) keeps changing his mind about what kind of creature he wants to build. The program goes into long periods of stasis, in which no progress is made. Then one day a catastrophe hits your building, your office, your desk, your project. And 70% of your program is destroyed. But you just tape the remnants back together and just press on? How long would it then take to produce a coherent program? Meyer predicts that such a probability dwarfs the number of particles in the known universe.
This kind of cognitive dissonance can only be explained as a psychological phenomenon that falls far outside any field of physical science. We live in a sea of consciousness and intelligent information. To even imagine an unconscious, unintelligent environment of absolute chaos is impossible. It would be like a fish trying to prove or even to disprove the existence of water to another fish. Such an argument cannot even begin to proceed along rational lines. So what lines does such an argument proceed? Irrational. Ironically, only the rational repetition of mere facts can expunge the irrational ideas that lie at the bottom floor of our rational constructions, like demons in a haunted house. We all have them. If you want to exorcise them, you must read books like Meyer’s. They’re not entirely scientific. They’re therapeutic.
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