Richard Dawkins admits the possibility that life on Earth was Intelligently Designed?

I recently watched Ben Stein’s film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

The basic point of the movie is to show how scientists who believe we may have been intelligently designed are expelled from the community of “real scientists”.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the film. For example, Stein portrayed himself as an unbiased investigator, and even being on the side of ID myself, I have to say this film was blatantly biased against Dawkins & Co. from the start. I wasn’t surprised to read afterwards that certain people interviewed for the film felt they’d been misled, and that quotes had been carefully edited to fit what the producers wanted them to say. Scientific American has Six Things That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You To Know.

I also think Hitler should have been left out of a film about the scientific validity of Intelligent Design. Whether the Nazis based their principles on natural selection or not has no bearing on the accuracy of Darwin’s theory. It is also pointed out that the notion that life was intelligently designed and the acceptance of the theory of evolution are not mutually exclusive.

I can also understand that using the idea of Intelligent Design to just say “this is complicated, God must’ve done it”, is not really very useful science, so some concerns are about allowing ID-ers into the realm of serious science are understandable. However, many people seem to be under the impression that anyone who believes in God is completely incapable of doing anything useful in science. If that’s true, then I guess we should abandon everything Newton and Einstein did.

Anyway, onto the part my title is referring to. Dawkins said that, while he cannot believe in the God or gods of the world’s various religions, there is a possibility, albeit very unlikely, that life on our planet is a result of ‘directed panspermia’, i.e. that life was designed by beings of higher intelligence elsewhere in the universe, although those beings would of course have had to evolve by chance themselves. He said it’s possible there could be some design signature observable in the world around us that would point to this conclusion. (Sorry I can’t be bothered to watch the film again to get exact quotes, but I don’t think I’m bearing false witness to what he said.)

Now, if there’s even the slightest chance that we could find evidence that life was designed (even if it was by aliens), why is science currently outlawing any suggestion that it was anything but the result of chance? What if that evidence is there, but you’re ruling out the possibility of ever finding it because of your obstinate faith in the creative powers of chance?

Nobel Prize-winner Fred Hoyle likened the possibility of life starting by chance to the chance of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and producing a 747 jet ready for take-off… “even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe” (Source: ICR). I know the argument that, given infinite time and possibly and infinite number of universes, it was bound to happen eventually, but there’s certainly no more evidence for universes other than our own than there is for a designer.

In conclusion, I don’t think it’s unreasonable that you evolutionists should allow those with alternative theories to put forward their ideas for serious consideration. You talk about how oppressed people like Darwin and Galileo were when they came out with radical theories that challenged the understanding of established scientists, and yet the current science establishment seems no better at allowing free-thinkers to get their theories considered. If the evidence for evolution purely by chance is really that overwhelming, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of in debating with these nutters, because all sane people will be able to see who’s got the evidence to back up their theories.

A Creation Fairytale

Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong? (click image to be taken to iPlayer)

You don’t like the existing descriptions of how the universe came to be. It’s time to write a new one.

It looks like the universe is expanding, so clearly there’s no other possible explanation than that it used to all be compressed into a very small space, before it exploded.

Cool, so the universe started with a big bang, that explains everything.

…

Hang on, all normal explosions lead to random lumpy debris that’s really hot in some places, but cooler in others. How do we explain why our universe is really smooth and all the same temperature? I guess we could say it started off expanding slowly, so it got smoothed out while it was still small, then it suddenly inflated really quickly for some reason to get to the sort of size it is now. No idea how or why that would’ve happened, but it means we can stick to the big bang story, so we’ll go with it.

…

Those galaxies don’t look right. The stars at the edge should be moving slower than the ones in the middle, like the planets in our solar system, but they’re going the same speed. How can we fix that? I’ve got an idea. How about if there was a load of extra mass that we can’t see? If there was enough of the stuff, the physics would work. How much do we need? 5 times as much of this dark stuff as the matter we can see?! That seems like we’re relying pretty heavily on something we invented without being able to detect it, but it’s the simplest explanation I can think of, it’ll have to do.

…

Um, guys… why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?

Could there be a load of energy we can’t see, too? Yeah, call it dark energy and we won’t have to prove it exists by detecting it or anything silly like that; people will just have to accept it ‘cos we’re the clever people and we can’t come up with anything better.

…

Dark flow? Mate, is it just me, or is the whole idea that the present can tell us everything we need to know about the past becoming less and less convincing?

And, fun as it might be to have a go at those religious nuts who use a scientifically unobservable God to explain where we came from; taking an honest look at what us scientists are putting our faith in, it’s not really any more sensible. And if we judge a theory’s success by how well it resists people trying to rip it apart, those guys have a bit of a head start.

Like that whole Jesus rising from the dead thing, it’s actually surprisingly well supported by historical evidence. Is there really a scientific reason we can say for certain that miracles like that could never happen? I mean the whole point of a miracle is that it’s not a normal event, so we probably shouldn’t expect to be able to apply the normal rules of science. And if he actually rose from the dead, he probably deserves to be listened to…

…

So God wants everyone to be perfect like him, I guess that’s fair enough, but no one lives up to that, do they? What are we supposed to do?

Nothing? Just trust that God took the punishment I deserve on himself? That’s too easy, I want to earn my forgiveness…

…

Ok yeah, that’s not gonna work…

So it’s really all been done for me? That’s actually unbelievably awesome.

Can’t Work On A Snow Day

This should totally count as a mitigating circumstance.

…and it’s still snowing. Could be interesting trying to get my car to its MOT tomorrow.

Do We Have Free Will To Think About Jennifer Aniston?

In The Secret You (available on iPlayer until 27/11/09), Professor Marcus du Sautoy (a mathematician) goes in search of answers to one of science’s greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are?

It’s basically about the search for a natural explanation for our consciousness. Are our thoughts just neurons firing? or is there something more going on?

In one experiment, where Marcus decided whether to press the button in his left or right hand, the scan of his brain apparently indicated which side he was going to choose 6 seconds before he even knew himself.

Obviously scientists like things to have a natural cause, and this seems to indicate that our thoughts are predictable, and hence that our concept of free will is a bit messed up. I began to wonder if a criminal could argue that he wasn’t in control of his actions based on this, but the guy did insist that our subconscious is obedient to our conscious wishes.

In other experiments, people were shown a load of pictures, and the response of a certain neuron detected. With one patient, out of 100 pictures, it only responded to the 6 pictures of Jennifer Aniston, and only when she was photographed on her own, it didn’t respond to a picture of her with Brad Pitt.

There was other stuff in there like sticking spots to babies’ faces and giving Marcus an “out of body experience”, and I found it very interesting, but in conclusion, there’s still plenty we don’t understand.

All Animals Are Equal, But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others

First, if you don’t recognise the title, you need to read Animal Farm. Not that this post is really anything to do with the book, you just should read it.

It's only available 'til 8pm Thursday, so get watching

I watched Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Born Equal? the other day.

How many times have you heard that religion is clearly evil because of all the wars it’s caused?

As if the Theory of Evolution is harmless.

Yes, people have done some seriously bad things in the name of religion, but I think you’ll find in most cases (certainly in the Christian ones) those people were twisting their religion to justify their own ambitions. Hence, a Christian will tell you to look not at Christians for an example of how to live, but to Jesus.

Meanwhile, whether Darwin would have approved or not (I’m sure he wouldn’t, but), the goals of the Nazis actually made some sense in relation to the Theory of Evolution.

I’m thinking that’s quite a controversial statement.

Of course, perceived evil doesn’t have any bearing on whether a religious belief or atheism is true or false. It’s not a valid argument either way.*

I do wonder why we should think anything “evil” though. You know, if there’s no such thing as right and wrong.

*I know, I know, evolution and religion aren’t mutually exclusive, but this is a comparison of evolutionary thinking with religious belief. I’m thinking of atheistic evolution, let’s ignore the theistic evolutionists for now, their views are too confusing.

Well, you say that

I wrote previously about parts 1 & 2 of Adam Rutherford’s The Cell. I just watched part 3 (the final part) and the confusion continues.

The main point of this episode was to tell us how life first started on Earth through spontaneous generation. As I noted before, this seemed rather odd since the first episode told how Louis Pasteur showed the idea to be ridiculous. Basically, scientists have changed the rules since Pasteur’s time (note: I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to do this, if there’s good reason).

Louis showed that organisms did not form spontaneously in his mixture of useful chemicals.

These days, scientists just have to show that certain chemicals that are important parts of living organisms can form in the right conditions. Rutherford kept talking about what early Earth was like, but as far as I can see, the only reason people believe Earth was ever like that is because it needed to be for life to have the slightest chance of starting spontaneously. He gave a few examples of experiments producing important chemicals, but never tried to explain how they could have come together in exactly the right way to form the first living cell. If I remember rightly, there were 161 different structures, all immensely complicated, necessary for life.

It was admitted that this sort of science is actually just intelligent guesswork. “We can’t go back there so we have to come up with reasonable sounding ideas.” This really puts it into perspective. Even if life could have started like they suggest, that doesn’t mean it did.

A few statements made in the show:

All cells come from other cells. Over the three episodes the Doc repeatedly emphasised this as a basic bedrock fact of science. I don’t have any problem accepting this. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for spotaneous generation though.

All organisms on Earth came from one cell at the beginning. Hang on, assuming for a second that spontaneous generation could have happened, why did it only happen once? If the right conditions were present, why didn’t it happen repeatedly?

DNA makes RNA makes proteins. A scientific “dogma”. Interesting. People who have tried to explain spontaneous generation to me before have suggested that DNA evolved from RNA, from proteins, from amino acids.

Parts of this animation were used in the show:

I know it’s only a computer animation, but presumably it is based on reality, and I think it’s awesome. Personally, it puts me in awe of the designer of this incredible machine. I’m all in favour of studying it more and more deeply, but don’t try and explain how it evolved from nothing all by itself, you just sound bonkers.

Astro-biology. Seriously? Us theists are always told we’re just pushing the question of why there’s something rather than nothing further back, by suggesting God created matter. To be fair, Rutherford didn’t just suggest that “life came to Earth from space”, he spoke to someone who found some important molecule on a meteorite.

Thankfully the whole hour wasn’t spent speculating on how life might have started on Earth, he also looked a bit at where genetic engineering could go in the future. I found this bit really interesting, and some of the possibiblities are really exciting, but there are some questions about where lines should be drawn. I think I’m less against playing around with this stuff than some Christians, but there are points where playing God could go too far. Producing a synthetic organism to kill cancer would obviously have great benefits, but I can see some scientist in the future trying to mess with the human genes themselves, probably not to make a glow-in-the-dark person, but there could be all sorts of problems. The concept of designer babies isn’t exactly brand new, but if it means selecting an embryo with the right properties and destroying the others then (like abortion) it’s definitely wrong.

Atheism Gets Pasteurised (+Science Outdoes Hollywood)

I just watched The Hidden Kingdom and The Chemistry of Life, parts 1 & 2 of 3 part series The Cell.

It looks like these are only available to watch til the 2nd September.

There was a lot of good stuff in them.

Louis Pasteur is a legend, he showed that life does not generate spontaneously from non-living matter, whether we’re talking making mice by mixing wheat and sweat, or simple bacteria forming in an environment that would suit them, it just doesn’t happen. The presenter made it sound properly ridiculous and mocked the scientists who held onto the medieval belief for so long.

Yet atheists today still hold onto this medieval belief to explain how the first living cells arose from non-living matter.

But funny things start to happen in part 2, the fact that injecting a mouse’s eye DNA into fruit fly embryos produces extra eyes shows that, despite the eyes themselves having very different structures, the two creatures are made up of very similar genes. He claimed this was evidence of evolution from a common ancestor, but surely that’s going too far? I would think it’s evidence of a designer using basically the same materials to make all living beings.

I will have to wait ’til Wednesday to see part 3, but it looks like he’s going to explain how the first life could have spontaneously generated. This seems odd to me after he so emphatically mocked the idea in episode 1, so I await with interest.

Science vs. God?

What do you get if you divide science by God?

I think Martin Rees makes some sense, but you have to be sure about this stuff, diffidence is not an excuse for ignorance.

I like Roger Penrose’s point, I’m currently reading Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time, and he mentions Penrose quite a lot.

My position is similar to John Polkinghorne, but I’d be interested to know how he argues that the religious direction is the best.

I wonder if Rachael Amato, Bristol really thinks she knows better than Albert Einstein.

“Science without religion is lame. Religion without science in blind.”

The God Delusion

The Dawkins Lennox Debate

I just watched the debate (see link above) between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox.

I’ll probably do a longer write-up at some point, but I’ve got a couple of initial observations.

I grew more and more frustrated with Lennox as the debate went on. I’m supposed to be on his side, but I thought he made less and less sense, so I don’t imagine atheists thought much of him either.

However, I did think he made a couple of good points that Dawkins did not respond to.

1.  On rationality: If our thoughts are merely the products of chemical reactions, how can we know that they reflect truth? Science is supposed to be a search for truth, but this is useless if we cannot rely on our senses.

2. On the question of the origin of the designer: Dawkins did not say whether he believes matter has always existed. If it has always existed, he’s in no better position than someone who believes God has always existed. If not, where did it come from?

Some things never change…

…but some do!

http://uk.creation.com/images/pdfs/cabook/chapter4.pdf

Some bits went over my head, but there are plenty of reasons to doubt that things can reliably be dated as millions of years old.