See this blog post I just wrote, that you’re reading right now? This blog article is proof of the existence of God.
| Before you read/watch/listen to “If You Can Read This I Can Prove God Exists,” read THIS first. (700 words – 2 minutes) – then come back and continue reading. Thanks. |
Yeah, I know, that sounds crazy. But I’m not asking you to believe anything just yet, until you see the evidence for yourself. All I ask is that you refrain from disbelieving while I show you my proof. It only takes a minute to convey, but it speaks to one of the most important questions of all time.
So how is this message proof of the existence of God?
This web page you’re reading contains letters, words and sentences. It contains a message that means something. As long as you can read English, you can understand what I’m saying.
You can do all kinds of things with this message. You can read it on your computer screen. You can print it out on your printer. You can read it out loud to a friend who’s in the same room as you are. You can call your friend and read it to her over the telephone. You can save it as a Microsoft WORD document. You can forward it to someone via email, or you can post it on some other website.
Regardless of how you copy it or where you send it, the information remains the same. My email contains a message. It contains information in the form of language. The message is independent of the medium it is sent in.
Messages are not matter, even though they can be carried by matter (like printing this email on a piece of paper).
Messages are not energy even though they can be carried by energy (like the sound of my voice.)
Messages are immaterial. Information is itself a unique kind of entity. It can be stored and transmitted and copied in many forms, but the meaning still stays the same.
Messages can be in English, French or Chinese. Or Morse Code. Or mating calls of birds. Or the Internet. Or radio or television. Or computer programs or architect blueprints or stone carvings. Every cell in your body contains a message encoded in DNA, representing a complete plan for you.
OK, so what does this have to do with God?
It’s very simple. Messages, languages, and coded information ONLY come from a mind. A mind that agrees on an alphabet and a meaning of words and sentences. A mind that expresses both desire and intent.
Whether I use the simplest possible explanation, such as the one I’m giving you here, or if we analyze language with advanced mathematics and engineering communication theory, we can say this with total confidence:
“Messages, languages and coded information never, ever come from anything else besides a mind. No one has ever produced a single example of a message that did not come from a mind.”
Nature can create fascinating patterns – snowflakes, sand dunes, crystals, stalagmites and stalactites. Tornadoes and turbulence and cloud formations.
But non-living things cannot create language. They *cannot* create codes. Rocks cannot think and they cannot talk. And they cannot create information.
It is believed by some that life on planet earth arose accidentally from the “primordial soup,” the early ocean which produced enzymes and eventually RNA, DNA, and primitive cells.
But there is still a problem with this theory: It fails to answer the question, ‘Where did the information come from?’
DNA is not merely a molecule. Nor is it simply a “pattern.” Yes, it contains chemicals and proteins, but those chemicals are arranged to form an intricate language, in the exact same way that English and Chinese and HTML are languages.
DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and structures very similar to words, sentences and paragraphs. With very precise instructions and systems that check for errors and correct them. It is formally and scientifically a code. All codes we know the origin of are designed.
To the person who says that life arose naturally, you need only ask: “Where did the information come from? Show me just ONE example of a language that didn’t come from a mind.”
As simple as this question is, I’ve personally presented it in public presentations and Internet discussion forums for more than four years. I’ve addressed more than 100,000 people, including hostile, skeptical audiences who insist that life arose without the assistance of God.
But to a person, none of them have ever been able to explain where the information came from. This riddle is “So simple any child can understand; so complex, no atheist can solve.”
You can hear or read my full presentation on this topic at
http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
Watch it on video:
http://evo2.org/perry-speaks/perryspeaks.html
Matter and energy have to come from somewhere. Everyone can agree on that. But information has to come from somewhere, too!
Information is separate entity, fully on par with matter and energy. And information can only come from a mind. If books and poems and TV shows come from human intelligence, then all living things inevitably came from a superintelligence.
Every word you hear, every sentence you speak, every dog that barks, every song you sing, every email you read, every packet of information that zings across the Internet, is proof of the existence of God. Because information and language always originate in a mind.
In the beginning were words and language.
In the Beginning was Information.
When we consider the mystery of life – where it came from and how this miracle is possible – do we not at the same time ask the question where it is going, and what its purpose is?
Respectfully Submitted,
Perry Marshall
Full Presentation and Technical Details (please review before posting questions or debates on the blog, almost every question and objection is addressed by these articles):
–“If you can read this, I can prove God exists” – listen to
my full presentation or read the Executive Summary here:
http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
–“OK, so then who made God?” and other questions about information and origins:
–Why DNA is formally and scientifically a code, and things like sunlight and starlight are not (Please read this before you attempt to debate this on the blog!!!):
http://evo2.org/blog/information-theory-made-simple and http://evo2.org/faq/#code
-The Atheist’s Riddle: Members of Infidels, the world’s largest atheist discussion board attempt to solve it
(for over 4 years now!), without success:
Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
The first living things on Earth, single-celled micro-organisms or microbes lacking a cell nucleus or cell membrane known as prokaryotes, first appeared on Earth almost four billion years ago.
After a hundred thousand years or more of evolution and natural selection, these early forms became more and more complex, eventually developing a rudimentary nucleus, which contained the ‘pattern’ for the creature to pass on. Examples of simple creatures like this would be a protozoa, paramecium, or amoeba.
Life didn’t need a “code” to get started; it simply needed the right conditions. You want more specifics? Read any scientific textbook available on abiogenesis, evolution and natural selection. They’re full of proven, verifiable facts – i.e., that life as we know it has evolved over the past four billion years.
“Life didn’t need a “code” to get started; it simply needed the right conditions. You want more specifics? Read any scientific textbook available on abiogenesis, evolution and natural selection. They’re full of proven, verifiable facts – i.e., that life as we know it has evolved over the past four billion years.”
I beg to differ.
There is NO part of abiogenesis that is proven, verifiable fact.
Absolutely none.
And I have a $5 million prize if you can prove ONLY the origin of information problem – never mind the rest. http://www.naturalcode.org.
Science is pretty careful about declaring things total truths, and minds can be changed by testable evidence.
Evolution by natural selection is a pretty cast iron bet. We see it happening today and in fossil records.
We can see early life forms in the fossil record too. We can also see shared features between complex and simple life, shared DNA between us and other life – we even share DNA with bananas. We have some good theories as to how life got started and how good a probability there was of that happening. We won’t be all correct, but I’d bet we are close, and evidence and experiments suggests we are.
Then we have a collection of loosely related texts from two different religions, which clearly both borrow from earlier ones – texts whose very foundation ‘theory’ you actually disagree with!
God is a very recent and highly improbable and problematic explanation. Also an unnecessary one.
I suggest the book “Matter to Life” by Paul Davies, Sarah Walker and George Ellis for an up to date treatment of the subject.
David,
I am ALL IN FAVOR of successful abiogenesis experiments.
And in fact if we can ever succeed in that, such a discovery does not in my opinion take anything away from God or from a spiritual view of the world.
I have a $5 million prize (which was announced at Arizona State University at Paul Davies’ invitation) with judges from Harvard, Oxford and MIT. Top scientists endorse my work because they recognize that I am pro-science. And I am pro-abiogenesis if we can ever get it to work. See my contest at http://www.herox.com/evolution2.0.
But one thing I am vehemently against is people MAKING UP STORIES about where life came from.
Most of what you said is fiction. Most abiogenesis books are thin, legitimate but unsubstantial real-life experiments stitched together with a whole bunch of mythology, hope and speculation.
The truth is: we have no idea where life came from. We have some valuable clues, and people like Steve Benner are doing great work.
But it is a hideously difficult problem. Outrageously so.
Furthermore, “evolution and natural selection” don’t just “happen.” Evolution in the experimental sense is always an exquisitely ordered process (as McClintock, Margulis et al showed). You can’t take evolution for granted. We only understand about 5% of how evolution actually works and nobody knows how to write software that self-evolves the way organisms do. Which means mostly it’s still a mystery.
And every time someone comes here and starts making up stories, I’m going to kick them in the ass. Because it shows HUGE disrespect for the magnitude and difficulty of the scientific questions.
And most people who come here and make up these stories are atheists pushing their anti-intellectual, anti-scientific agenda.
If you really believe what you just wrote, then you have been conned by people who have no right to be lying to you. This is your invitation to peel back the curtain and see what the science actually says.
Your assertion that we basically have this figured out is, truth be told, anti-scientific.
And I will not allow it. Not on my website.
Perry, your opinions remind me of the classical old earth/new earth debate. The new earth community are hanging on for life because of their ignorance of accepting that the scientific disciplines present overwhelming evidence of the big bang, so it must mean evolution. Perry, you or anybody on this planet, can ever explain the Avalon or Cambrian explosions. They have nothing to do with any theory of evolution. You’re insistence on any evolutionary process for the origin of life is, in my opinion, a lack of faith in Jesus Christ as the One responsible for this universe we live in, including life. It doesn’t take a college, or theological degree to comprehend that. Move on, Perry.
The whole abiogenesis, evolution and natural selection ‘stories’ vs. The various religions ‘stories’ is certainly interesting and an argument that will rage on for some time yet. In my mind (and I in no way claim it a truth) abiogenesis, evolution and natural selection edges it simply because an awful lot more of the theories can be tested, we can catch glimpses of the processes in action by looking at fossil records and see them in action today etc – but it’s a story with pages missing and not fully written. I know we can see snatches of life’s history, it’s current state and project much of its trajectory – it’s beginning, or the beginning of the universe that spawned it, need not be mystical.
Genesis, and other creation stories, are too far off on so many details, orders of events etc for me – and the body of scientific evidence (and we can’t deny science works) is slim at best. The creationist view, ahead for thousands of years, is currently losing the race – will it ever win? Will the two come together? Who knows?!
Have you read Dan Browns new book? Interesting read, and he presents your information / DNA question at the end – for me the book ended where the debate here starts.
For me it’s not information that’s a wonder, after all it is everywhere, for example in the ‘instructions’ to make water which we interpret as H2O… what amazes me is that our brains and tools have evolved enough (or were created for arguments sake) to identify, understand and use that information the way we do. That’s a wonder.
Stuart, I think the most important thing to pull from this debate is the misconception of a Creationist. There seems to be a misconception that a Creationist is a Christian that holds a literal interpretation of God’s Word. For example, Creationists believe the sun, moon and stars were created on the fourth day in which all days are twenty-four days because of an imaginary rule of an attached number, and, finally, there was no death before Adam’s sin. This interpretation is disturbing. My position is that this is an English language issue. And, anybody with any common sense, which the book of Proverbs speaks of, would know the astronomical record tells us our universe had a beginning, and it happened way beyond 6,000 years ago. For the sake of the original response, my position also is that evolution has nothing to do with God’s Creation.
Jose,
A noah’s ark event, if it happened the way creationists traditionally conceive of, requires MASSIVE amounts of evolution. Otherwise how do you get millions of species from a few hundred or a few thousand?
You really should read my book Evolution 2.0. There is much new to discover about this topic, Jose.
Perry, I agree. I’m assuming by traditional Creationist you mean a literal interpretation. I attempted to make the point that the “traditional” Creationist interpretation does not represent all Creationists. The days of Creation were long periods of time. Not 24- hour days. As far as the flood, my position is it was a flood that destroyed the human inhabited world at that time. No reason to destroy emperor penguins. As you may have noticed God gave Noah the same command He gave to Adam and Eve, which was to fill the earth. That obviously did not happen.
David Altman: Yes, it did need a code. And that code was supplied by the first self-replicating organism, probably an RNA molecule, from which all life forms are descended. Evolution BEGINS with the first self-replicating organism, but it cannot explain how that organism was formed in the first place (see: abiogenesis). Currently scientists have no viable theory of abiogenesis, although they are working on it. “The right conditions” is an intuitive answer arrived at by assumption after rejecting intelligent design as “unscientific”.
It needed some form of RNA molecule, yes; what I’m rejecting is the notion that DNA is a “code” in the same way that English is a code, or C++ is a code – and therefore needed a Programmer to create that code.
Unfortunately, we’re still no closer to unwrapping the mysteries of abiogenesis.
Jose. You are taking the bible, really the only thing supporting ANY sort of Christian creationist view of the world and which in itself is not evidence anyway and relies on faith, and saying it’s ‘wrong’ in so many areas. You are then stating your view as to what the bible really should have said, and asking the world to have faith in this vs. the weight of either thousands of years of religious thinking (itself entirely faith based) or scientific thinking (theory backed up by some evidence)?
Whether the answers to life’s great questions are God, physics/chemistry/biology OR a bit of all of them, they can only be properly answered by taking a logical and evidenced based approach?
By all means we can consider the theory of ‘God’. Alongside this we should also consider all the Egyptian, Greek, Roman etc gods and creation stories – after all, some lasted far longer and there are countless claims of these gods appearing to people etc, exactly as there are with the Jewish/Christian god, Jesus etc. We should consider what science has to offer too.
To truly arrive at answers, you’d have to put your faith to one side (I am not saying lose it, just don’t let it cloud your thinking) and start over again. Be open to any theory. Apply logic to it, look for evidence, consider it.
You’ll probably still not get a final answer, but you’ll discard many theories along the way?
Stuart, my position is the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. So, I’m speaking of the Biblical God. Not any other religious God. So, to avoid confusion, Jesus is God, and He gave us His Scriptures and the scientific disciplines. For the purposes of this discussion, I was referring mainly to the astronomical record, which is sometimes referred to as the record of nature. My position is God created the universe, which includes time, space and matter, and His laws that govern the universe are otherwise known as the laws of physics. They do not change. He’s eternal. He did not create within time and space. He created time and space. His days of Creation were long periods of time. Not 24-hour days. So, yes, I’m creationist.
Use your full name please.
No problem
So, Stuart, where do you suppose I’m wrong?
Jose. What you are stating are beliefs, not facts. You could be entirely, partly or not at all wrong. I’d personally say you are swimming against the current in terms of science theory and are also stretching/twisting, and in places ignoring, what the bible says. There are a lot of people who believe in the Old Testament god who’d disagree when you say jesus was God, or was even in any way ‘related’ or ‘supernatural’. I’m pretty convinced he was ‘real’, but that he was a normal flesh and blood human.
Whether there was a creator or not, I’d suggest there is no sign of him now. And no need (other than our own) for him, everything we know of in the universe seems to work without divine intervention – the laws of physics, as you say, manage it all. I’d think no one would argue that, for example, God needs to intervene to make photosynthesis or conception occur – we can observe these events?
How it all got going, before the ‘laws of physics’ kicked in as the Big Bang happened and time and space were seemingly created/came into being, who knows?
Stuart, I’m assuming you’re not a Christian or, as some say, a believer. The most basic principle for the Christian faith is the belief in the God of the Bible, which contains sixty-six books, says Jesus is God, He was already here, and He created everything, which means our universe, everything in it and us. It also says He died by crucifixion for the sins of humanity, which is referred to as the blood atonement. Anything other than that would destroy the Christian faith. So, my point of view begins with the first two verses, in the first Old Testament book of Genesis. There are two common, Scriptural interpretations in the Christian faith, which you may be aware of: a new earth view and an old earth view. I hold to an old earth view, and it seems that the issue among the scientific disciplines is not whether an entity, god or being created our universe. The questions seem to be what of this anthropic principle, and did a personal being create the universe. So, my debate is how did the Biblical God create our universe, everything in it, life, and us. It seems that the entire point of this original thread is did God throw some evolutionary principles and processes in the mix to give us life, call it 2.0 or something else. The question still remains evolution, or not, no matter what you call it. My position is the Biblical God did not create by evolutionary processes.
Hi, I have to tell you how fascinated it is to watch you speak on this subject . I’m a Christian . After wandering away from church (but never losing my love/faith for Jesus Christ )!God called me back after the death of my Grandmother 5 years ago. Things happened to me that I can’t explain or would want to explain because people (back then) thought I was cracking up. Things I can’t explain but it was GodS way of calling me back to him. God works in mysterious ways. Bottom line …God exists, Jesus exists , but sometimes trying to explain to those who do not believe get rolled eyes, or attacks. Or made fun of. It was always hard to preach or subtly bring up up Christ or share stories of my experiences of back in 2012. Since finding you online yesterday , I can’t help but wonder one thing. Your work and research and overall gift you have from God to share what your learned , and spent years researching, do you bring people to Christ? I haven’t looked at all of your blogs yet, wasn’t sure . But knowing this and the work your present can get through to people , that’s a gift . But it’s like the old saying …bringing a horse to water. Which you are doing, but there is a whole other part to knowing God exists and knowing you have to accep Christ as your savior. People need to know there is our Heavenly Father and salvation in Jesus Christ (John 3:16) please let me know if you teach this to those who you can win over with your work. This is one of my favorite sayings and maybe how you get people who find you online because one day they feel God reaching out the them subtly…
Revelation 3:20 King James Version (KJV)
20 Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me
Sorry for typos…hard to write in that small box on the iPhone.
Sam, your Oxford definition said nothing about mathematics. Tell me your thoughts on how our universe came into existence.
Jose, I’m not sure what you mean (and I think you replied to the wrong post, but I’ll look again when I’m at my computer). Why should the definition say anything about math specifically?
I have a pair of vital questions: Have you seen RationalWiki’s entry on information theory, and have you responded to it?
I address most and perhaps all of these issues either directly or indirectly in evolution 2.0, including some of the criticisms of Gitt. This article is written by amateurs and is wrong on many points. No I have not addressed it directly. What I have done is organized a $5 million prize with the help of people such as George Church at Harvard and MIT.
I am not going to bother responding to RationalWiki as I think it is trivial. Instead I welcome the people who wrote it to debate me in public. My site already has plentiful articles articulating my precise views on information theory, as I began debating this on Infidels in 2005 and took on the whole bandwagon on what used to be the largest atheist website and forum on the Internet. Summaries at //evo2.org/dna-atheists/
I welcome anyone anywhere to challenge me on the strength of my assertions in Evolution 2.0 and / or http://www.herox.com/evolution2.0. Caution them to read my specifications and book very, very carefully, because as an author of an Ethernet book published by the world’s largest professional society of process engineers, which is now in its 3rd edition, I have most certainly done my homework.
They have not done theirs. The person who wrote this article has only a superficial understanding of information theory. They do not appear to have ever built communication equipment like I have and they do not understand the real issues at stake.
I also suggest that anyone who wants to opine on this topic read Yockey’s 2005 book, as well as “Matter to Life” by Davies, Walker and Ellis.
“No one has ever produced a single example of a message that did not come from a mind.”
This is likely true, but no more true than this:
“No one has ever produced a single example of a mind that did not come from a living being.”
Clearly if we accept BOTH of these empirical inductions as facts, we cannot explain the origin of biological information. Either something about the universe enables complex form and function – including the sort of code we see in cells – to arise without a conscious mind designing it, or a some sort of conscious mind somehow exists or existed without the benefit of a complex biological nervous system. Believe what you will, but don’t pretend that simple arguments like the one above somehow settles the matter.
Good comment.
But not more hiding behind screen names or all other posts will be deleted.
Forgive my ignorance on this subject,it may be such that my observation is irrelevant but i thought information such as code which is that tangible physical stuff which appears to evoke wonder due to its apparent pattern and order which enables it to cause spontaneous generation of ordered growth because of inherent properties peculiar to such natural phenomena though why it follows that such objects must require a pre existent mind which itself lacks any explanation for it’s existence aside from the postulation that it must be the product of a yet unexplained miracle,namely the existence of an uncaused cause whose fundamental nature is of a supernatural mental kind seems to then require another level of explanation,namely a logical,rational description of how such a metaphysical entity could itself either exist eternally without a cause or bring itself into existence presumably from nothing and i mean literal nothing not the updated versions of nothing espoused by those who know perfectly well it requires a special and rather disingenuous reinterpretation of the concept of nothing to get a universe out of it.All i see proven here is that the human mind can and does impute agency where there is nothing but perception of pattern whatever that may be and call it God when you could equally call it perception of pattern with the hunch that such a phenomenon requires an agent.Maybe the agent is the human brain and this may be the closest to a God we can ever get to.
Of course, claiming ‘God did it’ with regards the creation of life simply introduces an even bigger (and unnecessary) question – what caused him and why does he have powers that defy the ‘laws’ of physics, chemistry, biology? God just complicates matters hugely. There are far simpler and more probable answers – science has a perfectly good and well evidenced theory in evolution for how life progressed and became complex since the first transition from physics to chemistry to biology, or however you’d like to put it. It also has some far more probable theories for how that transition got started.
This post is evolution vs creationism. That is plain wrong as a title for a start!
Creationism attempts to explain how life got here, in reality it tries to explain how COMPLEX life emerged fully formed. The only thing it can draw on is texts like Genesis, which are not in any way ‘evidence’. These texts are ancient mankind’s un-evidenced ‘theories’. If anyone attempts to use creationism to explain how the universe, basic biology, information or anything other than fully formed complex life got started, they are ignoring (and in fact going against, denying the word of God etc) the only religious texts they have to quote at us. The Bible does not talk about microbes, cells etc as it’s writers did not know they existed, they could not see them. They also did not know how old the universe, earth etc was, or that it had ever been much different than it was in their time, a hot ball of rock later populated by microbes and then dinosaurs etc. So they tried to explain only the time, creatures and scale they saw.
Evolution really explains how life evolved ONCE it got started. Natural selection makes total sense and can be seen in action today. Evolution is not really ‘random’. It is not guided or designed either. The genetic mutations may be random, but they are ‘selected’ based on the ones in the gene pool that favour survival. After many many generations you get a creature that APPEARS to have been designed for its environment, easy to see why ancient man felt the need to credit a God.
How biology got started and became simple ‘organisms’ capable of evolving, eventually into what we see living today or in fossil records, is not really evolution.
Either ‘God did it’ and you need to explain how he did it and how he came to exist – you need to explain how the laws of physics etc were bypassed and you need to explain the creation of a vastly complex supernatural being vs. amino acids and biological molecules, not complex life or DNA.
There are trillions of stars, planets etc in the universe. Likely billions of worlds with the right conditions for some sort of life, likely billions a bit like earth. We know all the elements needed to make life come from stars, we know comets carry the basic ingredients for life + water throughout the universe. We know comets crash into worlds, earth got bombarded and most other planets probably did too – delivering the ingredients everywhere. There are other ways to get the ingredients and conditions too, e.g. underwater volcanic vents.
So you might have huge odds, say a billion to one (some scientists think it more likely than that), of basic biology getting started.
That means it probably happened in many places. In reality it only needed to happen in one – here. We are here because it happened here.
On earth it probably happened in many locations suitable for it to happen, it probably ‘failed’ in most. But clearly somewhere ‘life’ got a foothold and then evolution took over.
Or “god’ did it. You also have to answer ‘which god?’ Mother Nature?
Zeus? Yahweh? Chinese ones? Indian ones?
So it is not evolution vs. creationism. It is well thought out and tested theory vs conflicting and confused ancient superstitions. Science vs. Faith.
Just because we dont know of a code not created by intelligence, does not mean by default there is not one and that DNA was made by God. There are perfectly good theories on how life and DNA got going, science questions and tests these all the time and will move ever closer to answers.
Stuart,
There is one thing here that you have very very backwards.
You are saying “Before someone can invoke God, they have to explain where God came from.”
Yet at the same time, you excuse your own self from explaining where the universe came from, where information came from, where consciousness came from, etc.
You have this backwards.
There are two reasons why this is backwards.
God by Judeo-Christian theological definition has no beginning, no creator and no source of origin. (And it’s not like you don’t know this.) So you are excluding God by your own capricious choice of exclusion. Which puts you yourself in an infinite regress, but you’re not acknowledging that.
For that reason alone I have no reason to further engage with you. Because if this question has any answer at all, the ultimate answer by definition has to be an uncaused cause.
Thus your criteria themselves are irrational and illogical. (Even while you yourself have excused yourself from explaining the origin of matter / space / energy / time etc!)
I do not accept your hypocrisy.
In any such discussion, you are going to have to begin with an axiom or a set of axioms, which are defined as things that you have to assume to be true but cannot prove, in order to make your model work.
Monotheism reduces the ultimate question to the smallest possible number of axioms which is one: God.
And this does not in any way impede scientific progress because the God proposition still presumes that the universe and the laws of physics and logic are discoverable and discernible. This is why Christian theology gave birth to science 500 to 1000 years ago. God as ultimate answer gives us grounding for assuming that the rest can be, with time and patience, discovered and sorted out.
You seem to have the idea that God and science are somehow at odds with each other. Well, OK, to creationists and atheists they are. But to me they are not. I think of the two as being orthogonal to each other. God is an ultimate (and necessary) explanation. Science is a proximal explanation and will by definition never explain itself.
And I don’t think you can argue Christianity started science. The Greeks were making it observations far before that, others probably before. The ‘Arab’ world probably has a better and earlier claim too.
Christianity has, until very recently, persecuted any sort of scientific thinking – figure out what stats are, or that we orbit the sun? Heretic!
Sensible people like you have had the concede ground to science, 100 years ag you would be firmly arguing for the genesis creation. Many Americans still do. Now, because we make code but didn’t make DNA, you assume intelligence is required in EVERY case rather than chemistry, biology and natural selection. We’ve only been as far as the moon in person, and not left our solar statutes yet. Who knows what marvels are in the universe, what other examples of natural ‘information’?
You are, and will continue, retreating to the point that f the Big Bang – you are an intelligent chap and that’s where I’d bet science will finally and unarguably push you in your lifetime.
Beyond that? Big bearded man? Uncaused cause? Linear universes? Multiverses? A Space dragon farting the known universe?
Science got started in ancient China; in ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome; and in Islam. But it never went anywhere. In those cultures, it sputtered and coughed and died.
Why?
Because those cultures did not have a theology to support it.
Science rests on faith that the universe is governed by fixed, discoverable laws. That it operates without the need for constant intervention by the creator and that the creation has a degree of freedom to follow its own course.
Islam does not teach this; Greek and Roman mythology did not teach this, and neither did the Egyptian or Eastern religions.
Wisdom of Solomon 11:21, which was written 2,200 years ago, says, “Thou hast ordered all things in weight and number and measure.” This is found in the apocrypha, i.e. the books of the Catholic Bible.
It is the first known statement in history of a scientific worldview.
In Islam, the will of Allah is absolute and the world functions according to His inscrutable purposes. In Roman and Greek theology, thunder and lightning occurred because one deity was at war with another. Aristotle’s claim that heavier objects would fall faster was often repeated but almost never tested – even though anyone could easily stand on a chair and put his theory to the test.
Chinese mysticism similarly provided no grounds for an orderly, mechanistic universe.
Atheism offers no outside framework for assuming the universe is orderly either; many atheists, both ancient and modern, assume it’s all a big giant accident. Which is an explicitly anti-scientific proposition.
Only in Christian Europe was there a basis for believing that a search for discoverable laws would be richly rewarded.
Is it merely a coincidence that a large number of the founding scientists, perhaps even the majority – Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Maxwell, Boyle – were deeply religious and considered the practice of science to be an act of worship?
Perry, the Greeks worked out the Earth was a sphere. Stonehenge appears to track and record the movement of the stars, as do many other 5000+ year old monuments. Gobekli Tepe is potentially over 10,000 years old and they appear to have been recording the stars. Humans domesticated grain about 9,000 years ago, selectively bred dogs and livestock. The summerians invented writing and maths 6000 or so years ago, millions of clay tablets record weights and measures etc. That is all recorded observation, trying to understand how the world worked, improve on nature, control it. That’s all science.
Stuart:
The origin of the universe requires an uncaused cause.
TRUE or FALSE?
Perry. One cannot possibly make a true or false declaration on that, it’s not possible. There are theories, some far stronger than others.
It (likely the Big Bang) could have been caused by e.g. the collapse and then explosive expansion of some prior universe, but we cannot see beyond what evidence is in our universe? Of course, what caused that one? Or did it somehow just appear? Did there have to be a cause, there was potentially no time or space prior to the Big Bang, so no time or space for it to be caused in – and therefore nothing to cause it?
Of all the seriously presented theories and people presenting them, all of the religions attempts (from genesis to something vomiting up the universe) are the least credible theories presented by the least credible and most biased people.
Science sees something and asks who, what, why, where, when etc. Religion sees something and asks ‘how does god fit this as an explanation’ so your preconceptions (beliefs) rule out all other explanations. Most scientists, when proved wrong, will slap themselves in the forehead and change. Most true believers in a god simply won’t see anything else.
It is a simple question and it is easily answerable. You’re ducking and dodging. It is simple logic because it is cause and effect. It’s binary: There’s either an uncaused cause or there’s not. Take the fork and deal with what comes next.
Stop dodging and answer the question.
How is it easily answerable?! There isn’t enough evidence, and theories either way. Stephen Hawking appears to think maybe an uncaused cause, others differ. No one on the planet is (yet) equipped to answer you.
You state ‘if you can read this sentence I can PROVE god exists’. You can’t, you have zero evidence, just a theory. The bible is not evidence. The fact we’ve found no other similar natural carriers of ‘information’ yet on THIS planet (although you could easily argue things like Oxygen carry information on how to make more oxygen – o2) does not mean we won’t here or elsewhere and that by default ‘god did it’.
You don’t know the answer to your question in truth, clearly you have an opinion, just as you cannot possibly answer ‘god exists, true or false?’
Stuart,
Is the regression of past causes (1) infinite, or (2) finite?
Perry’s comment: “Is the regression of past causes (1) infinite, or (2) finite?”
The answer is: “Yes.” If the universe has ALWAYS existed (one prevailing hypothesis), or if the current universe sprang from a previous one, etc. (another prevailing hypothesis), then it COULD be infinite.
Or… you can simply postulate a finite universe, which is in line with what we’ve observed. Thus far, there has been no empirical evidence or repeatable test to demonstrate anything other than natural causes for everything we’ve seen.
Stuart, I agree with some of the things you pointed out. Creationism, in my opinion, is simply stating a transcendent being created our universe. My position is that the God of the Bible was that being. Why? It’s because of what the Biblical God inspired Job and Moses to record in the Books of Job and Genesis. They speak of God’s general revelation. The scientific community call it the Anthropic Principle. And, it began when our universe came into existence out of nothing, otherwise known as the Big Bang. Call it what you want, but; the Biblical God created time, space and matter, and His laws of physics have not changed. Yes, the Bible is silent about many scientific terms, such as cells, proteins, and quasars. So, the question that many skeptics should be asking is how did the Biblical God create our universe? What did that look like? This is at the heart of the debate about the Biblical God amongst the scientific community. Some see the design while others continue to hang on to evolution or aliens. My position is that evolution and the alien debate are a waste of time. Some in the scientific community need to let it go.
Jose. The bible is VERY clear in what it said creation was, and it was NOT the Big Bang! The whole thing is very earth centric and very man, fish, bird and mammal etc focused. It might place creation in the last 10,000 years or so, not much before that and certainly not 14 billion years (or whatever it is). You are basically saying ‘ignore the bible, it’s just a confused story’ and that’s exactly what I am saying too. Except you are taking religions traditional enemies findings and attempting to shoe horn them in. I’m saying God certainly isn’t needed (or likely) for anything to happen or have happened, in fact claiming ‘God did it’ introduces no evidenced answer and actually raises so many more questions.
Let evolution go? It’s a proven theory, we can SEE natural selection in action today.
Stuart, why do you think the Bible places our universe as ten thousand years old?
Perry. I cannot definitely answer finite or infinite, how could I – it could be either! We have no evidence. We can speculate, based on what we already know about our universe and good scientific method, and then test that. It’s difficult (maybe impossible) in this case, as we’d be trying to test something outside of space, time and our universe?!
If you take the infinite route, then you have an infinite regression of universes.
You might want to research the history of infinite regressions in philosophy and then let me know if you’d prefer to rule that out.
Christian theological definition? That’s one religion, and it’s a very unlikely uncaused cause – such a complex being. Science would potentially have it that the Big Bang was an uncaused cause, far more likely.
That there was a Big Bang is pretty well established. The theory is tested and we see what the theory (still evolving) suggests we will. Maybe the Big Bang came from nothing, maybe it was part of an infinite precession of Big bangs creating universes that later contract again, maybe there are ‘multiverses’. All more plausible than a big Jewish magic man in the sky – Judaism is just one of the religions Christianity borrowed from, there are elememts from Summeria (e.g. great flood) and Egypt (seem to be a lot of birth of Jesus – Horus parallels).
There is no evidence for god. The bible is a theory, and genesis does NOT stand up, it’s all over the place. Faith doesn’t equal ‘right’ and in fact it brings one to evidence.
Stuart,
An uncaused cause at some point is necessary to explain the existence of the universe.
True or false?
Perry, it seems probable that space and time came into existence at the Big Bang. So there potentially was no time for there to be a cause, and no space for one to act in? I’m not sure the human mind can grasp that concept very well though! everything we know operates in space and time, although there does seem to be an expansion of the universe – into something or maybe there is nothing in existence outside It? Or maybe we have eternal expansion and contraction.
God doesn’t have to be the uncaused cause.
You didn’t answer my question.
Stuart, the first verse in Genesis says God created the universe . More specifically, He spoke it into existence out of nothing, and Jesus Christ went to work. We can see it. So, there’s a problem with your suggestion that maybe it was out of many big bangs. You need to gain some knowledge if your going to try and defend your position.
Genesis does not say universe. It says ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth‘. Even that is an English translation, seem as somewhat incorrect and misinterpreted. It’s actually closer to ‘sky and land’. Be careful about where the bible says universe, it’s not necessarily an accurate translation and probably wasn’t meant by the translator to be what we know as the universe – that was an unknown concept until very recently.
Stuart, you’re correct in a misinterpretation. The Scriptures were not written in English.
The interpretation issue is an English language issue. Biblical Hebrew consisted of, at least, three thousand words, not including names. Hebraic words used in the Scriptures had multiple, literal meanings. For example, the word Yom is translated day in English. However, it has four literal meanings, which are used in the Biblical Scriptures. In reference to universe, the words used are shemayim eretz, meaning the heavens and the earth. I believe this is in reference to our universe. Context is critical in a correct, consistent interpretation of God’s Word. It’s also critical that when you begin Genesis 1, the point of view changes from verse 1 to verse 2, which now finds our point of reference from the surface of planet earth. Scripture does not tell us how much time has passed from verse 1 to verse 2. And, the seventh day does not have an evening or a morning. We’re still in the seventh day. So, the days of Creation are long periods of time. Not twenty-four hour days.
You state ‘heavens and the earth. I believe this is in reference to our universe’ and that ‘context is critical’.
They believed god was up in a the heavens or a heaven, he regularly descended or cane in visions to tell them to do things like commit genocide, sack cities etc. His Angels came down too. He got jealous really easily, hated anyone outside a specific tribe etc. So their god was pretty much a localised human like being, or could become such, and very Hebrew. His Angels were very human.
These people wrote the genesis story based on what god supposedly told them. They believed it wholeheartedly. They didn’t know the universe as we do, their context was very different.
With all due respect, what you believe is not relevant. And it’s certainly not evidence. Genesis is very clear, and we now know very wrong.
You mention Jesus elsewhere, he’s not an Old Testament figure. Christianity is not even the same religion as we see in the Old Testament, and certainly not the religion of Jesus. Some people linked him to Old Testament ‘predictions’ and potentially even twisted things like birthplace and lineage to fit them – wasn’t the blood of David on Joseph’s side, who supposedly wasn’t his father, so how could he fit that part of thepredictions. There are two separate versions of his birth story. Early Christian sects and scholars, who were repeating – embellishing – making up stories often from decades earlier, could not even agree if he was a man or son of god. That was decided for ‘certain’ when the Roman world converted, it suited to have him as a supernatural figure, the Romans needed control – I’d imagine there was a lot of ‘lobbying from various sects as to his status.
I’m not sure if there was a question in your comments. John 1:3 says “Before anything else existed, there was Christ, with God. He has always been alive and is Himself God. He created everything there is-nothing exists that He didn’t make.” Jesus is God, and that means He had everything to do with the Old Testament. Your argument is a cultural inference in that it has many thinking that because the New Testament is with us, then the Old is not relevant. God’s Scriptures are recorded in sixty-six books. We must take all of them consistently and literally in order to construct a contextual reference. Hebrews 1:3 says “By faith we understand that the universe was created by God’s command, so that what is seen has been made from things that are not visible. I believe”not visible” is a reference to atoms, electrons, or anything that makes up our universe, that the scientific disciplines have presented to us through research. I referenced earlier that the questions we must ask ourselves when we are speaking of general revelation, are ‘How did God use a word?’ and ‘ How did that look?’. It’s very simple, Stuart. It doesn’t take a college degree or a theological degree to understand how the Biblical Creation has everything to do with science.
Perry, I will personally work to give YOU (or to any charity you name) the sum of one thousand dollars ($1,00000) if you can prove, scientifically, that DNA is a code. By prove, I mean publish your findings in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and have your findings verified by other scientists. One other scientist isn’t enough; you must have a fair sampling of scientists who agree with your published findings.
It’s not a million, but it’s a good challenge. The question is: Are you up to the challenge? Can your ideas withstand the scrutiny of the scientific method?
So if I can show you in numerous peer reviewed scientific journals that an appreciable number of scientists agree that DNA is code, then you’ll give me $1000?
Provided that you follow the rules, I’m willing.
Rule #1: The “peer” review cannot be just a bunch of creationists you’ve gotten together to rubber stamp your idea.
Rule #2: The peers reviewing the paper (again, YOUR published paper, not someone else’s) must all be qualified scientists. That is, they have an ACTUAL degree from an ACTUAL university (not some worthless piece of paper from a so-called college which is no more than a PO Box), AND — on top of that — must be in the correct field – i.e., geneticists. I don’t care what some cosmologist or botanist or geologist has to say on this subject; that is the logical fallacy of appeal to the wrong authority.
Rule #3: In the review, there should be at least a fair sampling of either non-theists, or else theists from other traditions, i.e., Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Buddhism, etc.
In the mean time, I’d appreciate it if you posted a link to ONE single paper. I have been unable to find ANY on the web, despite searching several different ways.
Mind you, I’m asking YOU, personally, to present a scientific argument to back up your assertions here, and then to publish THAT in a peer-reviewed journal, in accordance with the rules I’ve posted.
If you think, “I can’t do that because I’m not a scientist,” that itself is problematic; ANYONE can look for empirical evidence and perform repeatable, falsifiable tests. The fact that ANYONE (not just ‘scientists’) can perform these tests is what validates the system. Peer review, of course, MUST be through qualified scientists. If you ARE a geneticist, I’d like to know what your credentials are.
Thank you in advance.
There are dozens, or perhaps hundreds of books, textbooks and papers explaining exactly and precisely why DNA is code. There are thousands more which base their logic on the fact that DNA is code. The entire field of bioinformatics is based on this fact. There is no shortage of such literature. If you believe otherwise, it is because you have not studied the history of the subject or the reasons for the original definition of the genetic code.
You can locate all the references you might care to find near the bottom of this page, which was written about 12 years ago:
http://evo2.org/dna-atheists/dna-code/
The best books you should consult are “Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life” by Hubert Yockey and “Matter to Life” by Davies, Walker and Ellis. Davies invited me to present the EV2.0 prize at ASU in August and I had dinner with him and Sara Walker after my presentation.
So what you are really asking for is a peer reviewed paper by me.
I expect that sooner or later I’ll publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal. Whether you make good on $1000 is of no consequence. I have $5 million of capital investment on the line, and I spent many tens of thousands of dollars of my own putting this prize in place, including complying with SEC regulations, paying fees to HeroX etc.
I have three editors of peer reviewed journals (John Torday who edits Biology, Denis Noble who edits Royal Society’s Interface Focus and Kwang Jeon, editor of International Review of Cell and Molecular Biology) and all endorse my work and prize. The leading Geneticist at Harvard (George Church) on my judging panel for the Evolution prize.
more at
https://evo2.org/peer-review/
and
http://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
I’ve discussed this question with some of the best origin of life scientists in the world, including three Nobel Prize winners, and my definitions are quite tight. George Church made some useful suggestions in August, at which time I amended the prize specification in a few spots.
Everything you linked to – with the exception of the two books by other people – are articles (non-scholarly) that YOU wrote. I’m not looking for BOOKS. I’m looking for peer-reviewed scientific papers… at least one. I have been able to find NONE.
You didn’t read the links I sent you.
Or the books I told you to read.
You didn’t listen at all. Try again. Go to the links above and look very carefully. Buy the books I told you to buy.
And buy a copy of my book. It won’t cost you $1000. It will cost you $12. Buy the paperback. On the outside, endorsements from scientists at Oxford, King’s College, UCLA. On the inside, 300+ scholarly references canvassing every question you raise in rigorous detail.
Then go read those references.
As I said, ALL of the links you posted were things written by yourself – NOT articles in peer-reviewed journals. Also, ANYONE can write a book. I can write a book saying that unicorns love to play baseball; it doesn’t mean that it’s true. “Endorsements” don’t mean a thing either. A scholarly paper, in a peer-reviewed journal, DOES mean something. Where are they??
You will have to click through the link and there you will find a long list of textbook and other references near the bottom of the page.
http://evo2.org/dna-atheists/dna-code/
As I said there is a plentiful supply.
The book has over 300 references and more than half of them are from peer reviewed science journals. Every major assertion I make is backed by an abundance of references.
After you have checked these references, come back and we can discuss.
I clicked through your link (which takes me to an “ad” webpage for evolution 2.0); there is NO list of textbook or other references on that page. There are occasional quotes in the BODY of the page (most referring to Yockey’s book), but no list. Also, I’m not interested in BOOKS.
Please, simply post a link to ONE paper which has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thank you.
It is as though we are on two different websites. Please send a screen shot.
Refereed journal articles:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24943758?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Crick, F. (1968). “The Origin of the Genetic Code.” Journal of Molecular Biology, 38, 367–379.
303 Crick, F. (1962, December 11). “Nobel Lecture: On the Genetic Code.” Retrieved from
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1962/crick-lecture.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022519381903702
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0097848500800108
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022519377900431
http://symposium.cshlp.org/content/31/3.short
Ji, S. (1999). “The Linguistics of DNA: Words, Sentences, Grammar, Phonetics, and Semantics.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 870, 411–417.
http://www.pnas.org/content/43/5/416.short
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022519374900058
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.950170115/full
500 Andrianantoandro, E., Basu, S., Karig, D. K., & Weiss, R. (2006, May 16). “Synthetic Biology: New Engineering Rules for an Emerging Discipline.” Molecular Systems Biology, 2:2006.0028.
Perez, J.-C. (2010). “Codon Populations in Single-Stranded Whole Human Genome DNA Are Fractal and Fine-Tuned by the Golden Ratio 1.618.” Interdisciplinary Sciences, 2(3), 228–240.
Sadovsky, M. G. (2006). “Information Capacity of Nucleotide Sequences and Its Applications.” Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, 68, 785–806.
Yockey, H. P. (2000). “Origin of Life on Earth and Shannon’s Theory of Communication.” Computers & Chemistry, 24, 105–123.
Searls, D. B. (2002). “The Language of Genes.” Nature, 420, 211–217.
Witzany, G. (2008). “Bio-Communication of Bacteria and Their Evolutionary Roots in Natural Genome Editing Competences of Viruses.” Open Evolution Journal, 2, 44–54.
Andrianantoandro, E., Basu, S., Karig, D. K., & Weiss, R. (2006, May 16). “Synthetic Biology: New Engineering Rules for an Emerging Discipline.” Molecular Systems Biology, 2:2006.0028
http://mmbr.asm.org/content/56/1/229.short
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-009-9180-z
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1202370/?reload=true
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3191013/Godfrey_InformationBiology.pdf?sequence=2
http://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jbsc/026/02/0145-0151
Shannon, C. E. (1948). “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379–423.
If you want an especially good one, start with this:
Origin of life on earth and Shannon’s theory of communication
Hubert P. Yockey
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0097848500800108
These two books alone are sufficient to establish everything I say about DNA being code:
https://smile.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Evolution-Origin-Life/dp/0521802938/ref=sr_1_1
https://smile.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality/dp/1107150531/ref=sr_1_1
AFTER you read one or both I will be happy to discuss this with you.
Thank you. I will research these and see how many of them (if any) support your claims. If I’m wrong – well, I’ve been wrong before. This is the essence of science. However: If I’m right, and you’re cherry picking, taking out of contacts, misinterpreting, misappropriating, etc. … well then …
I reserve further judgment until I’ve read what you’ve posted. Your earlier link only put me to the evolution 2.0 website, which didn’t contain ANY of the information you just posted (as far as I could see, anyway).
Send a screen shot please.
David,
Yockey’s 2005 book, published by Cambridge University Press (which you strangely refuse to acknowledge as a credible source) draws significantly from this paper:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1fe2/f3b11b3219a2d7de41fe4297369cde747fab.pdf
Again, if your offer of $1000 was not just a bluff, I suggest you spend some of your money and purchase Yockey’s book and sift through his references, which run from page 219 through 249.
I’ve done my homework. It’s your turn now.
David, I suggested Who Was Adam and you may also like Darwin’s Dilemma by Stephen Meyer. All of the information is well beyond peer reviewed amongst the scientific community. You’ll find reference material in the remaining pages of each book.
Actually neither of these publications are formally peer reviewed though they do have high levels of scholarship.
The research comes from peer-reviewed publications, and both are highly regarded publications. If anybody needs more specifications, the information and research on the content provided can be found amongst the scientific community. For example, when I hear, or read, information from Hugh Ross or Fazale Rana, I know their research withstands the scrutiny within the scientific community.
Yep. There are probably more books and Hidtory channel ‘documentaries’ stating aliens built the pyramids than ones stating Egyptians did. Doesn’t mean it’s true. The writers believe equally passionately they are right, Just one set have evidence and the other don’t. However, the pseudo-scientists make more headlines and a better living, just like the tv evangelists.
I’d imagine you get a few Bible Belt university physics and biology professors (assume they exist) peer reviewing your paper, the same genius lot who voted Trump…
Jose, you will also find that atheists like to post rants like this one, insulting you with snide remarks about the Bible Belt etc. even as they refuse to read the carefully researched literature you cite. This is called the Genetic Fallacy.
Stuart, one more insulting diatribe like this and you’re permanently banned. The rules are: You MUST be polite at all times. I’m tired of your snobbery.
I agree. However, I’ve been insulted, and called, just about anything in the atheistic dictionary.
And even as they insult you, they will ask you to do research that they themselves could easily do; and rely on the books you have purchased with your own money that they refuse to buy with their money.
I certainly wasn’t being insulting, just pointing out the confirmation bias – as you were. I’ve read many ‘non mainstream’ books and subscribe to a few science news sites with peer reviewed papers, I keep an open mind until the evidence is there. ‘Bible Belt’ isn’t my term, and it’s simply a description for a part of America where a good portion of people are Christian? No more insulting than calling an area the ‘Rust Belt’ as the ex industrial areas are referred to?
I’m not sensitive about being called an atheist, non-believer etc.
David, you may be interested in Who Was Adam by Fazale Rana.
Jose: Ok, perhaps the “research comes from peer-reviewed publications”… if so, all I’m asking for is a link to the publication or publications from which their work was derived.
David,
You’re stretching my patience thin. Stop asking other people to do homework for you which you can EASILY do for yourself.
Just buy the books. They’re full of good references. (And they cite them honestly). If your previous $1000 offer was any good then you’ll have no problem purchasing a book or two. It’s OK to buy books by people you disagree with.
As I stated, I’m not interested in the books at all. I am going to read ALL of the articles you posted.
However: You gave me links to twenty-two separate articles, only half of which have been written in the last twenty years, and only four of which have been written in the last ten years. Five of these articles were written by your “Poster Boy,” Mr. Yockey, who was NOT a biologist or geneticist; that’s 22% of your list. And while the name Crick may sound impressive (it was, after all, he and Mr. Watson who discovered DNA,” these papers are 50 years out-of-date. Several of them concern mathematics, not biology. Thus far, I’m not impressed.
However, until I’ve read them ALL, in their entirety (and done some side research to see if anyone has supported their hypotheses or shown them false), I will keep an open mind, AND reserve further judgment.
The one writer who recently posted, Stuart Norey, made a good point, though; this channel is VERY creationistic, and tends to use sources which are, (or sound like they are) in support of creationism / intelligent design – neither of which, of course, are science. Thank you for your patience, and for your assistance. I’ll be busy for a while doing research.
The fact that DNA is a code was firmly established in the 1960’s. Crick and Gamow worked this out a long time ago and there’s nothing controversial about it. There is hardly a more fundamental fact in biology. One need not refer to any recent papers to confirm this fact. In that sense, the older the better. The more recent existence of the field of bioinformatics is relevant, however, if what you want is recency.
David, I addressed your Creationist issue in my response to Stuart.
Add this to the list – 2013:
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short
2014:
http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/5/3/424/htm
2016:
http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/374/2063/20150057?utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Philosophical_Transactions_A_TrendMD_0
All the authors you mention are very very Christian. Creationists. Hardly unbiased. It’s ok having a ‘god’ theory, but faith cannot be allowed to get in the way – good scientists will ditch a theory in the presence of solid evidence against it, creationists theory is too intertwined with their faith (which needs have no logical foundation), in fact rejecting creation rejects god.
Jose,
You will get nowhere citing books written by Christians to most atheists. You have to do what I did which is use (almost) exclusively peer reviewed mainstream science papers and/or academic books and textbooks from credible secular sources. Quoting Fazale Rana or Stephen Meyer to atheists will get you nowhere. For the most part, atheists won’t even bother to read it for themselves at all. They will just dismiss it as creationist poppycock, as Stuart is doing here. It’s called Confirmation Bias.
For the record, however, both of the authors that Jose recommends are quite scholarly and if you’re intellectually honest I think you’ll read them.
Thanks, Perry. I appreciate your honesty.
”You will get nowhere citing books written by Christians to most atheists.”
Well, unless you are discussing Christianity, then it is ok to quote Christian authors.
”You have to do what I did which is use (almost) exclusively peer reviewed mainstream science papers and/or academic books and textbooks from credible secular sources.”
This would be preferable,yes, but even in this activity, CONTEXT is the key ingredient. If you quote a peer reviewed study only to point out that it uses the word ”code” when talking about DNA, then you are using it wrong. 🙂
Also, if you quote studies done decades before, you should do a follow up to make sure their results weren’t found wrong by more recent and refined studies. It’s all in the details, Perry, it is never as simple as just ”quoting a peer-reviewed article”. 🙂
”Quoting Fazale Rana or Stephen Meyer to atheists will get you nowhere.”
Same as quoting an automechanic when discussing astronomy.
”For the most part, atheists won’t even bother to read it for themselves at all.”
Patently false, at least in my case. You need more then assuming that your opponents in a debate ”didn’t bother doing anything”. How would we know that the arguments are invalid if we didn’t read them? I got banned from so many creationist debates/sites for providing actual paragraphs and commenting them with an objectively analytical mind. 🙂
”They will just dismiss it as creationist poppycock, as Stuart is doing here. It’s called Confirmation Bias.”
Confirmation Bias is the foundation of Creationism – if a scientific study shows something that sorta kinda can be twisted to support a religious notion – creationists accept it. If it cannot – it’s ”not true”. That is as pure as a confirmation bias can be. You yourself claim that you grew up in a creationist family and that it was the main driving force behind your search for claims which you can fit in your religious narrative. 🙂
”For the record, however, both of the authors that Jose recommends are quite scholarly and if you’re intellectually honest I think you’ll read them.”
Being scholarly doesn’t automatically equate to being right. And if someone declares himself as a creationist, then they are automatically painting themselves in confirmation bias and it really makes it hard to listen/read their arguments, because it always (and I do mean ALWAYS) turns out to be a waste of time – they either manufacture information and call it ”fact”, misinterpret an actual claim (for instance, equating DNA with software, even though they are fundamentally different, just because the word ”code” is used for both), or plainly quote-mine the hell out of a credible secular source.
I have yet to find a creationist argument that doesn’t do any of the things I have listed. 🙂
Stuart, I think you need to be careful in ignoring scholars, such as Hugh Ross and Fazale Rana, of which both have had much of their work peer reviewed by the scientific community because they are both respected scientists in their respective disciplines. I think you must also be careful not to place all Creationists in the “young earth” box. I am a Creationist. However, I believe the sun was created before the earth. Why? Because astronomical scientists can show us, be they Christians, or not. They see the same thing regardless if they believe in Jesus Christ, or not.
”I think you need to be careful in ignoring scholars, such as Hugh Ross and Fazale Rana, of which both have had much of their work peer reviewed by the scientific community because they are both respected scientists in their respective disciplines.”
Not sure where you got your source for this poppycock. Here:
https://ncse.com/library-resource/review-cells-design
To quote directly, ”Rana’s book, which starts with the foregone conclusion that the cell is designed, by explaining the principles (with reference to Dembski and Behe) of “intelligent design” (in chapter 1). Thereafter, everything is presented through this lens…One must read this book in a fog of scientific denial and delusion, and accept the fact that the author totally ignores and neglects to inform the reader of the most important and wonderful aspect of science, namely the process of scientific inquiry. ”
Doesn’t really sounds ”respectful”, does it? 🙂
Hugh Ross is not much better:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/ross.cfm
”We learn from the information provided in Ross’s books that he is the head of an organization named Reason to Believe. This organization adheres to the “doctrinal statements of the National Association of Evangelicals and of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.” Ross has also served as a minister of evangelism. ”
Not really a respectable scientific position, wouldn’t you say? 🙂
”On the other hand, the readers of Ross’ books are advised that he has a Ph.D. degree in astronomy from the University of Toronto and that he had been a post-doctoral fellow at Caltech, studying quasars and galaxies. Indeed, in his Curriculum Vitae we find a list of only five published papers on certain astrophysical matters in which Ross is either the author (in two of them) or a co-author (the last such publication dated 1977). ”
Jose, I have more studies published than that, and I have yet to finish my phd. 😀
”I am a Creationist. However, I believe the sun was created before the earth. Why? Because astronomical scientists can show us, be they Christians, or not. They see the same thing regardless if they believe in Jesus Christ, or not.”
…but when those same scientists, regardless of their religious beliefs, say to you that evolution is a fact, you go ”nuh-uh, no, nope, no, only an ahteists would say that”. Curiously selective, don’t you think? 😀
Veljko, Ross Rana and Myers are more than qualified, for you or anybody, in their respective fields. Does the fact that they’re professed Christians change that? I think not. Do you think that these men, or myself, are not intellectually qualified because we believe in Jesus Christ?
”Ross Rana and Myers are more than qualified, for you or anybody, in their respective fields.”
Qualified based on what? How do you know my qualifications? What are their qualifications? What are yours? Writing books hardly qualifies – books don’t pass peer-review, and the few scientific studies that they have published don’t deal with the subject of the origin of life. None of those people has any qualifications in biology. That should be enough for anyone to say that they are not really qualified to talk about a biological phenomenon.
”Do you think that these men, or myself, are not intellectually qualified because we believe in Jesus Christ?”
”Intellectually qualified” is a meaningless term. Academically qualified, on the other side, you are most definitely not. And neither are those gentlemen you quote. On the flip-side, I have my Masters in Biology, and am close to a phd at the same faculty.
I don’t think you have a basis to say that I reject someone’s claims just because they are Christians, Jose. I accept some of Darwins claims, don’t I? 🙂
David,
You forgot to pay up. I’d like to collect my thousand dollars now.
In reference to our conversation of December 3-4, 2017. Above and below https://evo2.org/prove-god-exists/comment-page-23/#comment-43926
Please send the money to Perry Marshall, 800 Lake Street #295, Oak Park IL 60301.
Perry, I didn’t forget. I read through what you sent – and it took a while, I can tell you.
What you’ve done is called “cherry picking” in informal logic.
You take this piece of this, and another piece of that, string them together and then claim that they say a certain thing.
None of the articles you gave me, either individually or collectively, define DNA as being a “code” in the way that you’re trying to define it.
When the authors use the word “code,” they are doing so as an analogy, so that what is going on can be understood.
Yes, it’s true that every code that we know of was designed, DNA is manifestly NOT a code in that sense.
DNA is a combination of amino acids in a pattern. That is all.
“None of the articles you gave me, either individually or collectively, define DNA as being a “code” in the way that you’re trying to define it.”
Hubert Yockey clearly and unambiguously stated this both in books (Cambridge University Press 2005 for example) and peer reviewed journals. I have quoted him in my prize specification. The leading geneticist at Harvard medical school agrees with everything I’ve said in the prize specification; George Church helped me write it. I announced us raising the prize to $10M at the Royal Society of Great Britain on 31 May 2019, with two Oxford professors present.
Plenty of other scientists back me up as you can clearly see. I gave well over a dozen references.
Not only does every biology book in the library tell you it’s a code and provide a coding table, the fields of bioinformatics and genetics are based on this definition. As is biosemiotics. Plus all the tech blogs talking about storing internet information on DNA etc.
Starting with Watson and Crick and Gamow in the 1950s.
Anyone who can read, can check the references and verify this for themselves. I called your bluff.
You are lying as anyone can plainly see. You are banned from this forum. Goodbye.
Clearly, you can’t take it when people call you out on your bs. Instead of admitting you’re wrong, you ban them.
Yockey compares DNA to a code; that’s a far cry from saying it IS a code, like c#, or Morse code.
The only people you listen to are your echo chamber. I hope that one day you will see the light.
I suggest you read Yockey before making demonstrably false claims about what he says.
“Information, transcription, translation, code, redundancy, synonymous, messenger, editing, and proofreading are all appropriate terms in biology. They take their meaning from information theory (Shannon, 1948) and are not synonyms, metaphors, or analogies.” (Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2005)
How is an atheist who says DNA only appears to be a code, any different than a Young Earth Creationist who says the universe only appears to be 14 billion years old?
Because we can show, with multiple and almost universally accepted methods that the earth is billions of years old, not thousands. We can also see the processes that shaped its geology (like volcanic, sedimentary rocks, tectonics etc) and biology (evolution). There is abundant evidence.
DNA does hold what we would term ‘instructions’ and we call it a ‘code’. But it’s not shown in any way to be a ‘code’ in the sense that a being of some sort sat down and came up with it, there is simply no evidence for that. The evidence we do have points to an entirely ‘natural’ process and progression and diversification from more simple forms. RNA based life, in all probability, was the first that arose. We know bacteria and viruses played a huge part in development of complex cells (eg bacterial source of mitochondria) and in evolution today (eg horizontal gene transfer and other methods spreading antibiotic resistance). We can see this bacterial and viral heritage in our own nuclear dna, both the stuff we’d call ‘active’ and what used to be termed ‘junk’.
So, the atheist is basing their views of our universe, planet and life on evidence. Those views change as evidence arises. A good scientist doesn’t base their view on faith in what has come before or their own results, they constantly challenge and test. If shown wrong, they’ll immediately or eventually acknowledge it or face being ‘exiled’.
The creationist bases their pretty much fixed views on the bible or another equally (in)valid holy book, it’s almost entirely about faith. Where it’s not about faith entirely, there is a huge bias involved because of faith, they’ll often seek and see only the answers they set out to find. They ignore or cherry pick from and misrepresent evidence that goes against their beliefs and challenges their faith.
When you can demonstrate how a natural process creates codes (and not merely make unsubstantiated assertions), I’ve got ten million dollars for you. http://www.naturalcode.org.
The genetic code is a set of 64 base triplets (nucleotide bases, read in blocks of three). A codon is a base triplet in mRNA. Different combinations of codons specify the amino acid sequence of different polypeptide chains, start to finish.
-Cell Biology and Genetics, Starr and Taggart, Wadsworth Publishing, 1995
Genetic Code: The sequence of nucleotides, coded in triplets (codons) along the messenger RNA, that determines the sequence of amino acids in protein synthesis. The DNA sequence of a gene can be used to predict the mRNA sequence, and the genetic code can in turn be used to predict the amino acid sequence.
-50 years of DNA, Clayton and Dennis, Nature Publishing, 2003
“The problem of how a sequence of four things (nucleotides) can determine a sequence of twenty things (amino acids) is known as the ‘coding’ problem.” –Francis Crick
“The unique mark of a living organism, shared with no other known entity, is its possession of a genetic program that specifies that organism’s chemical makeup. The program has two essential and related features: first, it is ‘read’ by the organism, and the instructions embodied therein expressed, second, it is replicated with high fidelity whenever the organism reproduces….DNA carries genetic specificity. This structure immediately suggests that genetic specificity, the “information” that distinguishes one gene from another, resides in the sequence of nucleotides.
“Genetic information flows in linear fashion from the sequence of bases in DNA to that of amino acids in proteins. The parallel with letters and words is inescapable… the quantity of information transmitted can be estimated with the aid of algorithms derived from wartime researches on the fidelity of communications.”
“The most compelling instance of biochemical unity is, of course, the genetic code. Not only is DNA the all but universal carrier of genetic information (with RNA viruses the sole exception), the table of correspondences that relates a particular triplet of nucleotides to a particular amino acid is universal. There are exceptions, but they are rare and do not challenge the rule.”
-The Way of the Cell, Franklin M. Harold, Oxford University Press, 2001
“A code is a set of rules governing the order of symbols in communication. This defines a code, regardless of the nature of the symbols, be they alphabetic letters, voice sounds, dots and dashes, DNA bases, amino acids, nerve impulses, or what have you. Codes are generally expressed as binary relations or as geometric correspondences between a domain and a counterdomain; one speaks of mapping in the latter case. Thus, in the International Morse Code, 52 symbols consisting of sequences of dots and dashes map on 52 symbols of the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks; or in the genetic code, 61 of the possible symbol triplets of the RNA domain map on a set of 20 symbols of the polypeptide counterdomain.
“In intercellular communication the domains and counterdomains are the signal molecules and their receptors, and the code is like the base-pair rules of the first-tier code of the DNA, a simple rule between pairs of molecules of matching surfaces.
Why There are no Double-Entendres in Biological Communication: The basic information for the encoding in intercellular communication (a high-class encoding complying with Shannon’s Second Theorem) is all concentrated in the interacting molecular surfaces. And this information is what makes the communications unambiguous. We can now define an unambiguous communication: a communication in which each incoming message or signal at a receiver (or retransmitter) stage is encoded in only one way; or, stated in terms of mapping, a communication in which there is a strict one to one mapping of domains, so that for every element in the signal domain there is only one element in the counterdomain.
“The table in Figure 7.9 tells us at a glance that a given amino acid may have more than one coding triplet: UUA, UUG, CUU, CUC, CUA, CUG, for instance, are all synonyms for leucine. A code of this sort is said to be “degenerate.” That is OK despite the epithet, so long as the information flow goes in the convergent direction, as it normally does. The counterdomain here consists of only one element, and so a given triplet codes for no more than one amino acid. Thus, there is synonymity, but no ambiguity in the communications ruled by the genetic code.”
-The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication and the Foundations of Life, by Werner R. Loewenstein, Oxford University Press, 1999
“(George) Gamow devised a scheme, illustrated by means of playing cards, that involved sets of three adjacent nucleotides per amino acide unit (“triplet” code) in a sequence of overlapping triplets. That proposal spurred Francis Crick and his colleagues to examine the coding problem more critically and to use knowledge gained from genetic experiments to test the possible validity of Gamow’s scheme and its variants. By 1961 they had concluded that the nucleotides of each triplet did not belong to any other triplet (“nonoverlapping” code); that sets of triplets are arranged in continuous linear sequence starting at a fixed point on a polynucleotide chain, without breaks (“commaless” code), thus determining how a long sequence is to be read off as triplets; and that more than one triplet can code for a particular amino acid (“degenerate” code).
-Proteins, Enzymes, Genes: The Interplay of Chemistry and Biology, Joseph S. Fruton, Yale University Press 1999
“The genome of any organism could from then on be understood in a detailed way undreamt of 20 years earlier. It had been revealed as the full complement of instructions embodied in a series of sets of three DNA nitrogenous bases. The totality of these long sequences were the instructions for the construction, maintenance, and functioning of every living cell. The genome was a dictionary of code words, now translated, that determined what the organism could do. It was the control center of the cell. Differences among organisms were the result of differences among parts of these genome sequences.”
-The Human Genome Project: Cracking the Genetic Code of Life, by Thomas F. Lee, Plenum Press, 1991
“The three-nucleotide, or triplet code, was widely adopted as a working hypothesis. Its existence, however, was not actually demonstrated until the code was finally broken…
“With a knowledge of the genetic code, we can turn our attention to the question of how the information encoded in the DNA and transcribed into mRNA is subsequently translated into a specific sequence of amino acids in a polypeptide chain. The answer to this question is now understood in great detail… instructions for protein synthesis are encoded in sequences of nucleotides in the DNA molecule.”
-Biology, 5th Edition, by Curtis & Barnes, Worth Publishers, 1989
Perry, unfortunately I, some people choose not to agree, believe or change no matter how much peer-reviewed, or knowledgeable, documentation you throw out there.
You’re absolutely right.
But at least I can make it crystal clear to everyone else who is able read, that they reject the most fundamental facts in biology.
Nobody but you is rejecting facts. You are unable to grasp the arguments posed by the other posters on this thread and so you assume they’re lying or making things up.
YOU are the one making a positive claim.
YOU are the one who needs to back it up.
But you’ve proven nothing. Please PROVE without a shadow of a doubt, that your god and your way of explaining DNA is the only possible conclusion.
Prove your god is real.
Until then, you’re just talking out of your a**.
What have I asserted?
I have asserted that we do not know the origin of the genetic code. I have pointed out that all of the other codes are designed. The inference is obvious; this is why atheists [and pretty much ONLY atheists!] try to assert that DNA isn’t really code. It’s as though atheists have invented their own version of science – much like the creationists have.
I have offered $10 million for a naturalistic solution to this problem – with judges from Oxford, Harvard and MIT; the $10M prize was announced at the Royal Society, one of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world.
I have truthfully asserted that nobody has solved the design problem in biology. Not David Hume, Not Charles Darwin, Not Richard Dawkins.
Atheists have made the claim that codes occur through blind chemical processes.
No one has ever proven this. We have no experimental evidence that presently verifies this is the case.
Therefore burden of proof is on you.
Until then, you are no longer allowed to dispense optimistic folklore about the origin of life, lucky lightning strikes, warm ponds and happy chemical accidents.
True, these articles aren’t from peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, it’s very clear that what science has discovered about DNA has been, to some point at least, demystified by the people writing these articles.
The bottom line is this: DNA is NOT, has NEVER been, and NEVER will be – a code in the way that Perry (and others like him) want to define it.
https://livinglifewithoutanet.wordpress.com/2009/07/05/dna-is-not-a-code/
https://www.science20.com/chatter_box/dna_when_code_not_code
https://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2014/09/10/dna-is-not-like-a-computer/
So, you are lying too. (I would find this astounding, had I not spent 7 years in Infidels, dealing with the wall of atheist psychological denial there.)
Anyone who can read and go through the above threads with David Altman – read them line by line – anyone can read the dozens of peer reviewed papers I am using for my definitions.
I quote a lot of texbooks – but I also cite about two dozen peer reviewed papers.
Scarcely anybody challenges me on my assertion that the pattern in DNA is code. I’ve never had a credentialed scientist do it. 99% of the people who say DNA is code are devout atheists. (Few of them have a rigorous science background.)
Jackson, the links you provided above are not even from scholarly sources!
I’m not asking anyone to believe me, though. Don’t take my word for ANY of this. All those with the ability to read can reference my conversation with David Altman, look up the papers, and compare the quality of your sources to the quality of my sources.
Marshall.
You are fighting a lost battle.
And FYI: calling people infidels while claiming to be trying to convince them of your religion just shows how disingenuous you really are.
http://www.infidels.org. Was the largest atheist website from 2005-1010 and I was there 7 years defending myself. It’s where this prize was born. INFIDELS is the term they used for themselves, not my terminology.
https://evo2.org/infidels/
Perry, you’ve asserted god did it. Your post is entitled “if you can read this I can prove god exists” isn’t it?
You haven’t. You can’t.
DNA is almost totally certainly the example of the naturally produced ‘code’ you seek. Logic says it is. It’s fairly stable, but not stable enough to be something designed by an all powerful being. It mutates. Bacteria and virus insert their own DNA into that of other creatures. Why would a god designer create a code for life that goes wrong and causes genetic ‘diseases’ and brain cancer in children? ‘It’ would design that on purpose? Is it evil? Or sick?
I believe the world is divinely ordered.
The question is much more profound than this, because we know that cells can redesign themselves in 30 minutes. So the design problem is vastly deeper than anything William Paley or David Hume ever conceived of.
You have just suggested the real reason you don’t believe in God: The existence of suffering and disease.
My answer to your question about why there is disease and competition in the world is addressed in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQWXn_jCVFc
Perry, all that you listed simply states that the word “code” and terminology and principles from information theory are “useful” in descriptions of the genetic code. However…
…that STILL doesn’t in any way prove that “genetic code” is similar to “computer code”, and that it, as computer code requires a programmer. Why do you think that you are unable to publish YOUR conclusion that those two are similar in a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Instead, you are forced to publish your conclusions in a non-peer-reviewed book, which you peddle for money, and you offer your arguments on blogs.
In fact, your biggest mistake is that your premise IS your conclusion. You assume DNA is an intelligently designed code, and from there you draw the conclusion that…DNA is an intelligently designed code. 🙂
The peer reviewers work for me. http://www.evo2.org/peer-review.
That is NOT peer review!
Perry, the reason I’m atheist is not sickness and disease. God is the least likely explanation for every single thing it is credited with. God is as likely to exist as Santa and the tooth fairy, both of which we grow out of when we start questioning and reasoning.
I understand illness. My kids have genetic conditions. I know it’s nothing to do with a god, it’s imperfect natural processes at work.
God is a human construct.
Marshall.
You weren’t defending yourself. You were trolling an atheist website. Don’t pretend you’re a victim.
That is not true.
This is what happened.
On August 30, 2005, a member of the infidels online forum (screen name “wdog”) posted the following on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.
“I have been emailing back and forth with Perry Marshall, the author of this site http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm and since it quickly expanded in scope I invited him to come here and present his ‘evidence’ and proof. You might find the site amusing anyway. Feel free to critique his statements as i am sure he may at least read this since i will make him aware of this thread. please be polite. Thanks”
See http://evo2.org/dna-atheists/
I was never a victim. I was the victor.
Michelle:
All you would need to do is simply READ the links I had already provided, and you would not be making the above silly accusation. The nature of the infidels situation is plain and obvious.
It is interesting that all of the atheists in this conversation today have lied (or else unwilling to be bothered to read what was in front of them) in the last 24 hours. You – Jack Ellis – C Jackson Park – Veljko.
Blatantly misrepresenting peer reviewed scientific literature. Inventing your own atheistic version of science. Ignoring facts that are as solidly established and documented as anything in modern science.
The level of self deception and denial here is nothing short of impressive.
Don’t take my word for it. Anyone willing to follow the links can verify everything I’ve said.
Marshall.
Of course I’m not taking your word for anything.
And you – and your links – have not said anything I’ve not heard from any theist in the years since I’ve been out as an atheist.
Calling me silly and refusing to acknowledge the fallacies in your argument that have been shown all over this thread, and by multiple people, does not endear you to people who care about the truth.
The facts have been laid out for you.
And you’ve ignored them.
Prove god is real.
For REAL, and not just your pseudo science you’re clearly regurgitating.
Or admit there’s nothing to support your claim.
You already have everything you need in order to face the facts of evolution and naturalistic explanations for the way of the world and this universe. Everything science knows for SURE is explained without supernatural input.
No god required.
Perry
It is hardly ”peer” if they work FOR you. And they have a strong incentive NOT to disagree with you if they aren’t independent, anonymous and randomly picked. 🙂
For the benefit of those following this thread:
This article alone is sufficient peer reviewed testimony, such that David Altman ought to be sending me $1000 as he promised in December 2017:
“It is highly relevant to the origin of life that the genetic code is constructed to confront and solve the problems of communication and recording by the same principles found both in the genetic information system and in modern computer and communication codes. There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences. The existence of a genome and the genetic code divides living organisms from non-living matter.”
REF:
Origin of life on earth and Shannon’s theory of communication
Hubert P.Yockey
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0097-8485(00)80010-8
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0097848500800108?via%3Dihub
And here’s one more paper establishing the parallels between genetics and computer code:
“biological information is distinctive because it possesses a type of causal efficacy [23,24]—it is the information that determines the current state and hence the dynamics (and therefore also the future state(s)).3 In this paper, we postulate that it is the transition to context-dependent causation—mediated by the onset of information control—that is the key defining characteristic of life. We therefore identify the transition from non-life to life with a fundamental shift in the causal structure of the system, specifically a transition to a state in which algorithmic information gains direct, context-dependent, causal efficacy over matter.”
“In terms of computer language, in living systems chemistry corresponds to hardware and information (e.g. genetic and epigenetic) to software [27].”
“Explaining the chemical substrate of life and claiming it as a solution to life’s origin is like pointing to silicon and copper as an explanation for the goings-on inside a computer.”
“The instructional, or algorithmic, nature of biological information was long ago identified as a key property, and an early attempt to formalize it was made by von Neumann. He approached the problem by asking whether it was possible to build a machine that could construct any physical system, including itself. Identifying the parallels between biological systems, such as the human nervous system, and computers, and drawing inspiration from Turing’s work on universal computation, von Neumann [56] sought a formalism that would include both natural and artificial systems.”
“A key feature of Turing machines is that both the state of the machine and the current symbol on the tape being read in, are necessary to determine the future evolution of the system. As such, the algorithm encoded on the tape plays a prominent role in the time evolution of the state of the machine. At least superficially, this appears to be very similar to the case presented by biological systems where the update rules change in response to information read-out from the current state (as we discuss below, both are an example of top-down causation via information control). However, it is not obvious exactly how Turing’s very abstract formalism might map onto biological systems. This was the problem von Neumann wished to solve.”
“By analogy with Turing’s universal machine, he therefore devised an abstraction called a universal-constructor (UC), a machine capable of taking materials from its host environment to build any possible physical structure (consistent with the available resources and the laws of physics) including itself. An important feature of UCs is that they operate on universality classes.4 In principle, an UC is capable of constructing any object within a given universality class (including itself, if it is a member of the relevant class). An example of such a universality class relevant to biological systems is the set of all possible sequences composed of the natural set of 20 amino acids found in proteins. The relevant UC in this case is the translation machinery of modern life, including the ribosome and associated tRNAs along with an array of protein assistants.5 This system can, in principle, construct any possible peptide sequence composed of the coded amino acids (with minor variations across the tree of life as to what constitutes a coded amino acid [58]).”
The algorithmic origins of life
Sara Imari Walker
and Paul C. W. Davies
Interface Focus (published by the Royal Society)
Published:06 February 2013https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2012.0869
Perry, came across this today, it’s an interesting article on proteins.
https://ncse.com/cej/5/2/new-proteins-without-gods-help
Perry
You clearly didn’t read Yockey enough. But since you already cited him, you should be familiar with his work. You see, he clearly states the difference between ”information” and ”meaning”. A DNA sequence contains ”information”, but so does an empty hard drive (the same amount of information as a full hard drive). A gibberish random sequence of symbols also contains ”information”. What differentiates ”intelligent” from other information is that it has MEANING. Now, information is something that can be measured, and in that sense, the information theory applies and is useful in dealing with DNA. However, ”meaning” is NOT MEASURABLE, since it is RELATIVE. Meaning only exists in the minds of the people using information to communicate. For example, if you find a message written in a dead language, it doesn’t have any ”meaning” to anyone (since the minds who created them died, and you would not be able to KNOW FOR CERTAIN that the sentence actually means something and wasn’t a random sequence). Also, a single sentence can have multiple meanings depending on how it is read, so again, it is impossible to discern ”meaning” even from a language you KNOW how to read.
Taking all that into account, even if your hypothesis (that DNA is an intelligent code) was true, there would be NO WAY OF KNOWING/PROVING it. Because DNA, even though it has ”information”, lacks any ”meaning” (in the context of intelligent communication). And, since we know today how evolution works (through observation), there is no need to believe there is some intent behind DNA coding (remember, extinctions). 🙂
If you understand Claude Shannon (which I do, I’m author of an Ethernet book) the meaning of any information is what you obtain in decoded form. In the genetic code, the meaning of GGG is Glycine.
Don’t know why you need to point out that you understand something, that should be obvious from your work.
OK, if the ”meaning” of GGG is Glycine, answer me these questions:
1. Is the meaning of a mixture of HCl and NaOH ”salt and water”?
2. Is the meaning of a river ”erosion”?
3. Is the meaning of a rock ”being hard”?
4. Does the word ”mother” simply describe a real person, or does it code the person (as in, creates it)?
Answer to these simple questions should clear things up a bit. 🙂
Veljko,
Anyone who understands information theory knows these are – to put it bluntly – silly questions. #4 is totally nonsensical.
You do not understand codes, or Shannon’s theory, or digital communication.
Educate yourself.
Read Evolution 2.0. Cover to cover. It explains EXACTLY why DNA is a code with meaning in its own context – and why rocks and rivers etc (if devoid of life) have no such thing.
Let me remind you that this project has the support of some of the most respected scientists in the world. Harvard, Oxford, MIT, ASU, UCLA, Penn State, Notre Dame, King’s College, University of Tennessee. Numerous editors of academic journals. Not to mention investors. They understand something that you have completely missed thus far.
You are telling me what you think Yockey means – but you still do not comprehend what he is saying.
I will not waste any more time with you until you take the time to learn the basic terms and definitions. Anyone purporting to have advanced degrees in biology like yourself ought to understand the difference between pure physics and chemistry vs algorithmic information.
I understand this probably makes you angry. But I have had this argument MANY times with MANY people and I win EVERY time. Why? Because I know my facts very very well. One has to if one is going to put ten million dollars on the table.
I have LOT of skin in the game.
You are going to need to back off, cool your jets – as another person said here, “Get off your high horse” and accept some education from people more learned than yourself.
Do not comment again until you have apprised yourself and you can show that you understand these subjects.
I also recommend that you read and understand Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper.
You are doing it again. A scientist talking about the genetic ‘code’ has nothing to do with god. You can’t say a scientist uses the word code, all (a limited number given the size of the universe and near statistical certainty we are not alone) codes I know of are made by creatures based on DNA (and RNA) code, so that code must have been made by a creature too and that creature must be ‘god’, therefore it proves god exists…
There are far too many unknowns to draw your conclusion.
You ignore a huge amount of science. Yockey May said that “It is concluded that at present there are no scientifically valid origin of life scenarios. Consequently, belief in little green men in outer space is purely religious not scientific”, suggesting he had far less time for the non-science based religious stories. He may have said “self organization must yield only genetic message ensembles of information content much too low to constitute a genome” but at least he suggests (which recent science shows) that self assembly is a possibility in the process? We don’t need to get from zero to DNA as we know it in one leap. The universe is a big place, it is billions of labs running and repeating billions of ‘experiments’ over billions of years. At least one got a result – earth. We know some of the building blocks are common, delivered everywhere by comets. We know self assembly is possible. We see evidence of early RNA based life, the common roots of all life we know of – even theist scientists like Woese confirmed that. We know parts of the ‘machinery’ within our own cells are of bacterial origin. There are gaps of course, we are talking about processes that began 4 billion or so years ago on earth, but we don’t need to insert god into them, we just need to look more!
You’ve had debates on here where you’ve defended genesis by totally twisting the story and even acknowledged you might be pushed back as far as ‘the big bang’ in terms of what god did – a point where space and time as we know it began and one hard or impossible for science to see beyond, convenient eh?
I have no issue with people believing in a god, as I don’t have an issue with my kids and Santa, but I think attempts to convince people your fantasy is real are as distasteful as the forced ‘gay conversion therapy’ going on in some countries today. People should not be forced to listen to this nonsense, keep it to yourself. If god is so great, surely he’ll help people find him?
And stop twisting the words of real scientists, or quoting them out of context alongside unqualified religious authors.
Perry
Why did you stop your citation of Yockey at the precise point which benefits you? The rest of the abstract reads (emphasis added by me):
”If the historic process of the origin and evolution of life could be followed, it would prove to be a PURELY CHEMICAL PROCESS (Wächtershäuser, G., 1997. The origin of life and its methodological challenge. J. Theor. Biol. 187, 483–694). The question is whether this historic process or any reasonable part of it is AVAILABLE TO HUMAN EXPERIMENT and reasoning; there is no requirement that Nature’s laws be plausible or even known to mankind. Bohr (Bohr, N., 1933. Light and life. Nature 308, 421–423, 456–459) argued that life is consistent with but undecidable by human reasoning from physics and chemistry. Perhaps scientists will come closer and closer to the riddle of how life emerged on Earth, but, like Zeno’s Achilles, never achieve a complete solution.”
It is pretty obvious from this that Yockey believes that the ”genetic code” came from purely chemical processes, and that his point is that he doubts that human minds and the scientific method will ever be able to experimentally prove beyond a doubt exactly how did those chemical processes occur.
That in no way, shape, or form, supports any variation of intelligent design. You cannot apply the process of elimination to scientific conclusions, Perry – if one solution is unlikely, it doesn’t make any of the infinite alternatives more likely, it just requires further study of evidence and acquiring of new evidence. 🙂
So, if anything, you are arguing AGAINST Yockey’s point – you are claiming that the origin of genetic code IS actually available to human reasoning, and that you have cracked what it is. Which is a standard creationist viewpoint. 🙂
If that is not enough for you, here is Yockey himself, refuting creationist misuse of his findings and claims:
https://ncse.com/files/pub/legal/kitzmiller/2005-10_amicus_briefs/2005-11-16_Hubert_Yockey_reply_to_FTE_amicus.pdf
Here, a quote:
”Evolution and the origin of life are separate questions. My publications on information
theory show that the origin of life is unknowable through scientific methods. All that can
be taught in the science classroom about the origin of life is why it is unknowable and
why past theories, such as chance and self-organization, had to be discarded. There are
many things in science and mathematics that are true, but unknowable.”
THIS is why your $10M prize is void, and why you have no problems offering it. You have studied Yockey and you KNOW that his stance (and the stance of any reasonable scientist) is that the origin of ”genetic code” is something which cannot be proven conclusively (and you know that he refused the need for ID). You also knew that selling books makes money and that no peer-reviewed journal would publish your ”conclusion” that DNA is an ”intelligently designed code like software is”.
That is extremely dishonest, Perry. But, again, that is the foundation of Creationism, no matter how you try to dress it up – it is dishonest. And it is sad if you truly cannot see that. 🙁
I’m assuming he means a code as in a code made by intelligence, ie not natural? Of course dna is code made by nature – unless you happen to use god as a reason.
I believe in God, but I think the analogy used here, between Google ads and biological evolution, doesn’t work to discredit blind evolution. The reason is that in the example, a single ad is mutated many times, causing the rapid accumulation of errors. In biology, a population of say, a million rats might have 1,000 with one genetic error each – each rat with a different error. 999 of these rats die, leaving one rat with an adaptive genetic mutation, just by chance. This rat, being superior to his unmutated peers, goes on to eventually have a million descendants. Now you have a million superior rats and the process starts all over gain. Multiply that times three or four billion years and you get the biosphere we see today.
One thing I think many people who have visited this site have failed to consider is this: If the author of this page is right, and he can “prove” God exists, then every Christian is doomed – at least, according to the Bible.
You don’t need faith when you have proof. Faith becomes irrelevant. It doesn’t matter what I think, feel, or believe concerning the shape of the earth (an oblate spheroid), the age of the earth (4.5 billion years), or whether or not biological evolution happened (it did). The facts remain, the evidence and proof are there. I can choose to be willfully ignorant of the facts, I can choose to “disbelieve” them, but that does not alter reality. I can’t have “faith” in these things with proof of them; faith is unnecessary.
According to the Bible, without faith, it’s impossible to please God. Also, salvation ONLY comes by faith. So, without faith, you can’t have salvation, you can’t please God – and therefore, you can’t go to heaven.
So it only makes me wonder why so many Christians are out there either looking for proof of God, or else asserting that they have proof of God. With proof of God, you destroy Christianity. Good job.
David Altman, the faith that I have is that a young virgin named Mary, thru God’s Holy Spirit, became pregnant, and had an Israeli baby named Jesus. He’s God in a human body, like you and I, and He lived and walked on this planet, that He created, for 33 years. His message to every human being from the time that He was on Earth to now, was if we ask Him to save us from our sinful nature, He will give us eternal life, and we will reside, with Him, in a place called Heaven after we physically die. That was His purpose on earth. He then was sentenced to death, and He was crucified beyond anything that any movie director can recreate. He was buried, and He was risen from the dead three days after His death, and He ascended back to Heaven, where He now sits and waits next to God, who now completes the Trinity. When Jesus decides, He will return for every saved Christian. He will then recreate a new earth that can be considered the eighth day. New physics, new everything. On a side note, some of Jesus’s prophets and followers wrote the words of Scripture, thru His Holy Spirit, that we have come to know as the Bible. Jesus instructed us to read, follow, and Believe these Words. That’s my faith as a Christian, and that faith goes beyond anything that I haven’t seen, can see or will see. Hope that helps.
Yet, if someone told you that they believe in, for example, Hercules – you would laugh at them, and call their beliefs silly (I mean, Hercules was born to a mortal girl being impregnated by the Supreme God, and he went on to make miracles on his travels helping people with impossible problems, and finally died after great suffering and betrayal, joining his divine father in the sky). You would call such a person ”gullible” and ”childish”.
Do you see now why there are people not convinced by the tale of Jesus? 🙂
You mentioned why are Christians looking for proof, or claiming proof. Here’s my take. I’m skeptical. Why? Because I’m a human being. It’s part of my nature, and our nature. You can even say it’s part of our sinful nature. I say that because skepticism can lead to doubt about a living God who created us thru these codes of instructions to create proteins that eventually leads to our body plans. We can doubt that God created this universe billions of years ago. So, any proof of the Biblical God that we find is just that……proof that the the words of Scripture are right. The other part of that is proof of the Biblical God is for people like you that may be skeptical, or doubt. Christians use these proofs as a resource for the person who chooses not believe, or is looking for answers. Jesus sent out His followers just before He ascended back to Heaven with one directive. That was to tell as many human beings as they could about the salvation plan that Jesus spoke of. We know that as the Great Commission. I still do that and will continue until God takes me. As a matter of fact, I’m doing that very thing right now. So, lack of faith does not destroy Christianity. If we ever we’re to prove Jesus’ blood atonement wasn’t meant for human beings, then the Christian faith would die. In my opinion, that’s an impossibility.
“Christians use these proofs as a resource for the person who chooses not believe”?
There are not any ‘proofs’ for god, none at all. The bible is not proof. The fact that science might have an incomplete understanding of something is not proof. Even if we have zero understanding, that’s not proof for god – that would be ‘stoneage’ thinking, where god made thunder because we didn’t know what did!
If there was proof, it wouldn’t be a case of us atheists choosing to have belief/faith or not, we’d know.
All this stuff you quote above is not proof. Jesus might have existed, he might be a combination of many stories of real people plus a few myths, there’s not really much proof for the ‘jesus’ – but he was very likely a ‘real’ man. There is no proof of a virgin birth, walking on water, feeding the 5000, making the blind see, ascending and descending etc. Because something is in a book and several billion people choose or were brainwashed into believing it, does not make it any more true. What we know about the universe makes all this so improbable we can be pretty certain it did not happen, you should be as sceptical of this as you feel about other aspects of what your religion asks you to accept, it’s actually even more unlikely than the universe having a creator – we know jesus would break the laws of physics/nature today, we don’t know they even existed/what they were prior to ‘the Big Bang’ / God doing his ‘minecraft’ thing.
Stuart, brainwashing falls into the same category of the myths you’re speaking of. That’s not an argument. And, your “what if” thinking on our physical laws existing before our universe came into existence is faulty. Our universe came into existence in a single, miraculous moment. That included space, time, matter, and our space time laws, knowingly called the laws of physics. That’s a fact. How do we know? We can see it and measure it. Everything is put to a test. We’re not lead by blind Faith, in terms of astronomy. This universe we live in is quite miraculous, whether you believe Jesus created it, or not. That’s a fact. Proof? Some refer to it as the Anthropic Principle. So, when I read “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the earth” there’s no doubt in my mind that something or someone created this thing. Take that verse, and that person was the Biblical God. Reject it and you still have the same question: who made this universe and how? You don’t need to be a Christian to comprehend this issue. Common sense? That helps.
Why does someone or something need to have started/created the universe, especially someone with so many human like qualities – based on humankind of roughly the last 10,000 or so years? You are just assuming that based on how (most) things happen in the universe now, which wasn’t there with all it’s laws of physics etc at the time so does not apply, and our limited human knowledge and experience?
Maybe it has always been there, expanding and contracting?
Maybe it is recycled from an infinite number of prior universes?
Or spawned from one of many current universes, like a bubble appearing in a whirlpool?
Clearly the people writing the bible were trying to make sense of it. They had limited tools to do so. They borrowed an awful lot from other cultures creation stories. They did a pretty poor job of the creation story in reality – timescale, order of events, nature of objects, long term dominant but extinct species on earth not given a mention etc are all over the place despite creationists insisting days were not actual what was meant by days etc etc.
Humanity has grown up in so many ways, yet we are still clinging to bedtime stories. We’d send any mature adult to see a shrink if they wandered round saying Thor or Odin was real or that the earth was flat (although we seem to let a lot get away with that one still)!
Stuart, are you saying our universe didn’t have a beginning?
Jose
I am saying our one did in its present form. But before that? Did all time and space start then, or just our version? Was there some sort of infinite expansion and contraction – almost like a tiny black hole that contained all the energy from the universe before ours? Or are we bouncing off or rubbing up against other universes? Or did it just come into being, we have trouble with that concept because we live within the physical laws of the universe (which maybe can’t have applied before it was here) and everything we experience is finite – we are conceived, born, live a very short time, die, decompose etc.
I personally don’t think we will ever find out what was here before, because there wasn’t our time or space for it to be visible from/in. We will develop some strong theories though, maybe some we can partly test?
Stuart, astronomical research has already shown us that our universe came into existence out of nothing. They call it the big bang. Call it what you want but space, time,matter including the laws of physics came into existence. How do we know that. We can see it thru our telescopes. That doesn’t require a theistic or a philosophical response.
David. While I do agree with all your views in where we came from, I don’t think you’ll ever stamp out religion – because much of humanity seems to ‘need’ mysticism, our brains seem to have become wired that way?
While I think There is as much evidence for God as there is Santa Claus, I don’t think proof would remove faith and ‘do him in’. You’d not have to have faith in his existence, but you still have to have faith he would answer your specific prayers – Whether they be to get better, make you rich, make crops grow or make the girl next door fancy you?
Perry, that was awesome!
I’m a layman. I have a high school education. What I’ve typed below is not an explanation of anything but more like my attempt to understand how life evolved.
What I don’t understand is how life evolved to distinguish between bad experiences like pain, fear, depression etc., and good ones. The way I see it, it’s not possible without something existing prior to life, maybe the message you are talking about. Anyway, here is my explanation or maybe it’s a question that someone can explain.
What is suffering? Suffering is what advanced forms of life experience in response to certain types of brain activity. Why does suffering exist? The ability to suffer evolved (was naturally selected) because it gave life forms that had it a survival advantage over those that didn’t.
A mutation occurred that created the necessary neural apparatus to suffer. Prior to this mutation, no organism ever experienced suffering.
What was the selection criteria for this particular mutation that created suffering? After all, not just any random arrangement of cells would produce suffering in the organism that had them. No – just as only a specific structure of cells (an eye) is responsive to light, only a specific structure in the brain would be responsive to pain.
How did the organism that first possessed the neural apparatus to experience suffering, know that it was suffering? What was the selection criteria for that particular neural structure that we now identify as the one that produces pain? There could be none, unless there was some thing that already knew what suffering was.
In other words, without a prior ability to experience suffering, there would have been no selection criteria for any mutation capable of producing suffering.
So like I said, I have no education or background to sensibly discuss this, and I know it’s very possible that I am missing somthing obvious. Anyway, that’s my idea.
Perry, I read your thesis and would like to comment on how much I enjoyed it. I think your strength is to take a basically simple message–cell design/replication is intelligently designed–and explain it in simple, no-nonsense, no-frills terms. I am a former Christian turned deist. I could not believe in the god of the Bible because of the Bible’s flaws and because of morality problems with how the Old Testament Yahweh is portrayed but I could not give up my belief that an Intelligence had to have jump-started all this and then put natural laws into place to guide it to where we are today. I liken what you say to the belief by some atheist biologists arguing that chance could explain billions of English letters floating in a giant bowl of soup and then spelling out the complete works of Shakespeare when it is poured onto a table, given enough time. Just curious: have you ever been drawn to deism as a better explanation for the origins of life–an Intelligence that has no note of or concern about the unspeakable levels of suffering that goes on down here regardless of how many prayers are sent up to Him?
John,
I can well relate to the disappointment that leads one to prefer a deist God over a personal one. And I can understand the scientific logic that nonetheless indicates the supreme level of order in the universe.
But even if I were to try very hard, I’m not sure it would be possible for me to be a deist. Because I have had too many direct personal spiritual experiences. Ignorance is bliss but you can’t un-learn a truth.
Just two trails you can follow for now, of my personal story:
http://www.coffeehousetheology.com/miracles
https://www.perrymarshall.com/34766/the-story-behind-the-story/
Re: the Bible…
I think the Old Testament makes a great deal more sense if you look at it from an evolutionary viewpoint. The pivot point is the modern notion of equality, which I describe here:
http://www.evo2.org/faq/#equality
The notion of equality of human beings simply did not exist anywhere in the human race before Jesus. I flesh this out in the link above.
I would argue that before Jesus the very possibility of equality didn’t even exist. It was a darwinian world. Period. There was no law or rule that said when you fight your enemies you should not kill them dead and take whatever you want.
There was no equality between the Jews and the Canaanites. A person from 1000 BC listening to our horror at those wars would be utterly mystified.
The only reason that you have this notion of “Old Testament Genocide” is from New Testament equality and visions of peace.
For those reasons you can’t hold Old Testament God to New Testament morality, because there was no basis for spiritual equality of human beings which is entirely a metaphysical construct, and it comes from Christianity. (Where ALL men, not just royalty, are literally regarded as sons of God; and suddenly evolution means something entirely different than it ever did before. Equality post Jesus might even mean that we attempt to provide free health care for everyone on earth.)
No one in 1000 BC would have ever imagined such a thing.
PS please use your full name when posting. I like talking to real people.
Perry. Christianity and equality have rarely been bedfellows. The church works on hierarchies. The feudal system and kings relied on god having made some people above others. So did slavery. Christianity has consistently persecuted other faiths and even sects within itself. We’ve had crusades, inquisitions, genocide in e.g. the Americas all in the name of god and one type of religion, culture and race being ‘better’ and favoured by god. Religion has, and still does, drive inequality between the sexes (marriage, entry to priesthood etc) and people’s sexual preferences (Aids was a curse from god etc).
Our distant ancestors, hunter gatherer tribes for example, seem to have had more equality than one seed in the biblical, post Christ and even modern religions! Pre Christ we had female rulers, multicultural cities and empires, the Greeks and many other cultures didn’t even have the hang ups we do now about homosexuality!
“Our distant ancestors, hunter gatherer tribes for example, seem to have had more equality…”
Wow. You just flat out made that up.
No I didn’t. Studies of modern Hunter gather cultures as well as archaeology give us insights. They had and have sex equality and little hierarchy.
Here is a quote summarising what studies found “In each of these societies, the dominant cultural ethos was one that emphasized individual autonomy, non-directive childrearing methods, nonviolence, sharing, cooperation, and consensual decision-making. Their core value, which underlay all of the rest, was that of the equality of individuals“.
As one inquisitive mind to another, it’s interestimg. See for starters
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6236/796
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
Distribution of wealth (and to some extent power) is about as unfair as it’s ever been in our culture.
I’m not a bible expert. I’ve read it, but can’t recall quotes. Equality is not something that ever came across and doesn’t seem, until recent history, to have been an important interpretation for many – there were plenty of slave owning church goers Pre civil war for example. The Jews certainly saw themselves as set apart and above by god? Jesus doesn’t seem to have challenged that view much? I’d suggest that, when talking about people, the reference was often to those of your group or claiming all people were of and for god rather than equal under him? I know you are a diverse bunch in terms of interpretation, but see http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/november/bible-never-says-all-men-are-created-equal.html
You didn’t read Tocqueville.
How is your fundamental argument different from the classical teleological argument?
Great question. Paley’s watch argument always had the weakness that the analogy between a watch and a living organism was unclear. However, the definition of code in biology and the definition in computer science (Claude Shannon) are identical.
Paley tried to force you to a conclusion. I give you five options for where the first code came from:
1. Humans (time travel)
2. Aliens
3. Random accident
4. Unknown law of physics
5. God
Take your pick. By the way, not only is #3 not science, it’s anti-science.
My $5 million prize is a quest for #4. http://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
Excuse me, it’s late and I’m tired, but I know what I’m trying to say! Why does number 3 have to be a random accident? Physics, chemistry, biology seems to almost seek order and structure in bonding of chemicals, formation of crystals etc. Unstable things don’t last.
You could argue the recipie for water or chemical compounds is a code, it’s just not self replicating but it does carry the information you’d need to make more of it – but then neither are words or DNA self replicating?
You need other apparatus to do that? Isolated DNA is just like a random word – no context, meaning, use etc unless you have something to read it and a factory to make more of it, just like words or chemical compounds?
Codes or instructions are everywhere surely, all made by ‘nature’, and you can read and copy them with intelligence and the right tools?
Evolution is not entirely random or accidental, it’s surely driven by lots of things like responding to environment – stick antibiotics on a load of bacteria (environmental change) and you get survivors with traits that enable life in that environment + dead ones with traits that don’t, reproduction fixes those traits in the population. Hardly random or accidental?
It probably takes a lot of time, environments and resource/material to get from e.g. chemistry to biology to complex life but the universe has those things in abundance and no doubt there were many failures on the way – hard work.
God seems almost a lazy alternative and an impossible one, like giving up figuring out how a computer chip is made and assuming it’s magic. God seems the easiest but the least likely of your scenarios!
If you can prove that Physics, chemistry, biology seems to almost seek order and structure in bonding of chemicals, formation of crystals etc can create codes; and that “Codes or instructions are everywhere surely” — then demonstrate it and win the prize.
We attach letters to elements and order them to illustrate the way they bond. So we can ‘read’ water (h2o) or carbon dioxide (co2). Those elements and bonds a real, regardless of how we choose to portray them ourselves. A magnet could be a 0 and a 1 for positive and negative, join them together and you have 101010 or whatever. We could have chosen colours and numbers for example, or pictures.
They are therefore simple codes, or recipes, we can read them. They are not intelligent or of intelligent design. Alone, they cannot self replicate.
You can even have a recipie to make a star?
DNA is of course more complex but essentially an recipie too. We attach letters to it so we can represent it in a way we understand, nature doesn’t do that. DNA also does not self replicate or even construct itself, you need other cellular machinery to read and reproduce it.
If you sent carbon dioxide and water off into space and someone found them, they’d need a way of reading both and replicating both, neither can do that itself, but they would both be codes as both hold information.
How you get to DNA and the Machinery around it in a cell is of course far more complex, but a code does not have to be complex – it just needs to convey information. On/off is 0/1 and a coded instruction that is at the heart of the modern world (the chip in my phone uses that simple code to enable me to write this message). It’s no less relevant or valuable for being the ultimate in simplicity.
I don’t want the cash, just stop making DNA and life out to be something other than it is – the universe and everything in it is amazing, it does not need magic too.
I would also point out:
If you sent that bit of DNA and Co2 into space and it was found, you’d need to be fairly sophisticated to read the recipe for either of them. But you can read both. DNA is more complex, but it has no self awareness or ability to do anything on its own. You’d need to follow the instructions and have all the machinery and ingredients to know what DNA was an instruction book to build. Same with co2, you might have some carbon and oxygen about, but you’d need to follow the code and have the right machinery/environment to make it.
Chemical compounds need certain conditions and ingredients to to form from more basic elements, so does complex life.
Chemical compounds, gases etc and DNA only stick around if they are stable, thats why I said it seems nature strives for stability – of course it does not, it’s just that unstable things dont get to stick around in unstable forms.
Both are therefore influenced by environment. DNA is remarkably stable, mutations are rare (or rather the machinery is very good at creating copies) unless it is acted upon by an external environmental force – either small mutations find favour in a changed environment or something like radiation causes unwanted mutations? Stable compounds, gases etc are similar, they will be broken down or become more complex with the right external inputs?
You also need the right ‘reading and writing’ machinery and ingredients to make both.
– OCO is the code for co2 / carbon dioxide. It is natural. We know how to make it, and how ‘nature’ makes it. We know how to change it into something else, and how nature does that.
– DNA is made up from 4 different bases (nucleotides), adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G) and cytosine (C) (just names we assigned to them). An example of a short sequence of a single strand of DNA is ATTGCTCAT (not my words). It is far more complex but exactly the same sort of code, natural. We know how to make and change it – we can both create simple DNA codes and change, e.g. via CRISPR, existing DNA. We know the DNA we see today is the result of evolution, we can map similarities and changes in our own and other species over both long and short periods of time, even trace common ancestors – I dont think you can argue with that. We have theories as to how the first bit of life (as we know it) and DNA came to be, we can and have tested or observed some of this. We are a long way from proving those theories of course, but we can see ways it most likely happened and are pushing the boundaries of our understanding every day, week, month and year through good scientific practice? I personally think one day we will run a process from start to finish that takes us from chemicals, organics to simple life. Of course that wont be exactly how life started billions of years ago, but it will show you don’t actually need a god to do it. I am sure the argument will still rage on though – “yes, but you have not proven our DNA came about this way, just that DNA can and does come about this way”.
Life, at cellular level, is not self aware in that it knows it is dealing with a code any more than a fire or combustion engine knows it is coding co2. Both are codes because they convey information in a format that can be read consistently, whether you create, read and act upon that consciously or not, that is surely what a code is – i.e. it does not require the presence of intelligence?
You can postulate all you want but nobody knows any way to get from chemicals to code without intelligence.
If someone solves it, it’s the biggest discovery of the century.
Believe what you will but making up stories doesn’t solve it.
I assume you are familiar with the work of Jeremy England at MIT?
Yes, I know him.
What do you think of Jeremy England’s work? It appears he is on track to win your prize, if he hasn’t won already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cVVHKCRWw
I think it’s interesting, I respect his work and I personally like the guy. On top of that he’s a conservative member of Judaism so I’m philosophically friendly to his views. So far as I can tell his work is fairly theoretical and I’m not aware of any aspect of it that solves the code problem.
I linked to this elsewhere, but you’ll find it interesting I hope.
New Proteins Without God’s Help
HideCreation Evolution Journal
Title:
New Proteins Without God’s Help
Author(s):
William M. Thwaites
Volume:
5
Number:
2
Quarter:
Summer
Page(s):
1–3
Year:
1985
Creationists seem to be proud of their calculations that supposedly show how thermodynamics and probability prevent the chance formation of biologically useful macromolecules such as enzymes. Their “evidence” usually consists of quotations from such authors as Hubert P. Yockey, who agrees that catalytically active proteins cannot occur by chance. Yockey (1977a and b), looking at fully evolved proteins, says that their information content is too high for their chance formation.
Creationists do their own calculations to show that the chance formation of biologically useful proteins is impossible. These calculations almost always involve the erroneous assumption that each of the many amino acid positions in a protein must be filled by the one particular amino acid suitable for that position. Since there are twenty different amino acids available for each position, the chance of randomly getting a string of 200 amino acids all in the right order is (1/20)200. If you plug this expression into a calculator, it will tell you that it equals essentially zero. Thus, the creationists say, you can’t get such a protein by a chance ordering of amino acids. As Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) put it (1976), “The time required for a single catalytically active protein molecule to arise by pure chance would be billions of times the assumed age of the earth.”
But proteins, even modern highly evolved specialized proteins, are not built with that degree of specificity. What’s more, many proteins show in their structure that they were built of smaller subunit sequences of amino acids (Doolittle, 1981) or they have a simple metalo-organic core that could have functioned alone as a primitive precursor of today’s complex enzyme. So the creationist calculations give an answer of zero probability because the creationists make at least two major errors in their assumptions: they assume a degree of specificity that has not been shown to exist in real proteins, and they insist that newly formed proteins must be as efficient as their older and highly evolved counterparts.
page 2
We’ve been trying to explain all this to the protein “experts” at ICR for the last seven years. We have told them that new proteins could indeed form from the random ordering of amino acids. We have warned them that their calculations were based on faulty assumptions and soon someone would document the natural formation of a new protein from the random association of amino acids.
Now it has happened! Not one, but two, new proteins have been discovered. In all probability new proteins are forming by this process all the time, but this seems to be the first documentation of this phenomenon. The newly discovered proteins are enzymes that break down some of the byproducts produced during nylon manufacture. Since nylon first came into commercial production in 1940, we know that the new enzymes have formed since that time.
When the enzymes were first discovered about 1975 (Kinoshita, et al, 1981), it was at first thought the new enzymes arose through the modification of preexisting enzymes that had similar functions. To test this notion, the discoverers looked to see if the other enzymes in the same organism would react to antibodies made against the new enzymes. But by this criterion the new enzymes were unique. Antibodies against them found nothing similar with which to react among the array of other enzymes in the organism.
Again it was reasoned that if the new enzymes were just old enzymes with minor changes to allow digestion of nylon byproducts, they should retain at least a slight amount of activity with their original substrates. But the new enzymes had no activity on biologically derived molecules having similar chemical structures. So, by this attribute as well, the new enzymes were seen to be unique.
It seemed that if the new enzymes were indeed derived from randomly ordered amino acids, they would be very inefficient compared to the usual highly evolved enzyme, since the new enzymes would not have had billions of years of natural selection to reach a pinnacle of biological perfection. It has been shown that one of the new enzymes (the linear oligomer hydrolase) has about 2% of the efficiency demonstrated by three other enzymes that perform similar reactions with biologically derived substrates (Kinoshita, et al). Thus, by this criterion, as well as the others, the enzyme appears to be newly formed.
page 3
More recently, another analysis (Ohno, 1984) added further evidence that at least one of the proteins was formed from an essentially random sequence of amino acids. This evidence is a little bit more difficult to understand since its comprehension involves some understanding of how the genetic code works. I’ll just have to refer readers who do not have this background to an explanation such as Suzuki, et. al, 1976. It appears that the DNA that formed the gene was somewhat unusual since it could be “read” without finding a “stop” word in any of the three “reading frames.” It can be shown that such DNA sequences could easily occur through the well-known process of duplication. The DNA sequence suggests that a simple “frame-shift” mutation could have brought about the chance formation of at least this one enzyme. “Frame-shift” mutations are known for forming totally new and essentially random arrays of amino acids since the code is “read” in a new reading frame. Usually the proteins that are formed by frame-shift mutations are totally useless sequences of amino acids that have no structural, antigenic, or enzymatic relationship to the original protein. This time, however, the new protein was useful. Being useful, it was retained by natural selection and was finally discovered by biochemists who noticed a bacterium that could live on industrial waste.
All of this demonstrates that Yockey (1977a and b), Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (1981), the creationists (Gish, 1976), and others who should know better are dead wrong about the near-zero probability of new enzyme formation. Biologically useful macromolecules are not so information-rich that they could not form spontaneously without God’s help. Nor is help from extraterrestrial cultures required for their formation either. With this information in hand, we can wonder how creationists can so dogmatically insist that life could not have started by natural processes right here on earth.
References
Doolittle, R. 1981. “Similar Amino Acid Sequences: Chance or Common Ancestry?” Science 214:149-159.
Gish, D. 1976. “The Origin of Life: Theories on the Origin of Biological Order.” ICR Impact #37.
Hoyle, F., and N. C. Wickramasinghe. 1981. Evolution from Space. J. M. Dent, London.
Kinoshita, S., T. Terada, T. Taniguchi, Y. Takene, S. Masuda, N. Matsunaga, H. Okada. 1981. “Purification and Characterization of 6-Aminohexanoic-Acid-Oligomer Hydrolase of Flavobacterium sp. K172.” European Journal of Biochemistry 116:547-551.
Ohno, S. 1984. “Birth of a Unique Enzyme from an Alternative Reading Frame of the Preexisted, Internally Repetitious Coding Sequence.” Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences 81:2421-2425.
Suzuki, D. T., A. J. F. Griffiths, R. C. Lewontin. 1976. An Introduction to Genetic Analysis. W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco.
Yockey, H. P. 1977a. “A Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67:377-398.
Yockey, H. P. 1977b. “On the Information Content of Cytochrome c.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 67:345-376.
About the Author(s):
Dr. Thwaites is a professor of biology at San Diego State University where he conducts a two-model creation-evolution course. He has debated creationists on various occasions.
© Copyright 1985 by William M. Thwaites
This version might differ slightly from the print publication.
My point is, this shows many of your basic assumptions are wrong about proteins.
It’s as though you think I’m a creationist from 1985.
Jack, AFTER you have read my book and can demonstrate some level of real familiarity with my work and thesis, your posts will no longer be ignored. http://evo2.org/ny2018/