Science is a discipline that theists should be able to enjoy and appreciate–after all, theists invented science in their quest to learn about God. Science should not seen as a potential threat to religious belief. Anyone who claims that science somehow eliminates any need for a God simply doesn’t understand existential science very well.
Over the past decade or so, I’ve read a number of “popular” books about biology, paleontology, cosmology, Darwin’s theory of natural selection (or “evolution”) and other related topics in a personal quest for answers to my personal philosophical/existential questions: Who am I? Why am I here? How did I come to exist?
When contemplating those questions one must also ask related questions like: How was the universe created? How did life originate?
These latter questions are considered scientific by nature. Of the numerous books I’ve consumed on related subjects, among the very best I’ve read was a book titled The Living Cosmos written by Chris Impey, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona. While I disagreed with some of Professor Impey’s conclusions, he is without question an extremely talented writer. He mixes in plausible-sounding scenarios that create vivid imagery that convey his secular ideology regarding religion and evolution, whether he’s providing a fictionalized account of the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno or one of an asteroid strike causing the K-T extinction, while grazing dinosaurs remained oblivious to their imminent doom. Professor Impey very accurately described the highly improbable cosmological factors allegedly “fine tuned” to allow for the origin of life when he asks the reader,
Where did life come? [The Universe is] made of 99.9% hydrogen and helium atoms, the two simplest elements, and in chemistry hydrogen and helium combine to make…nothing. On the other hand, a typical living organism is 40% carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Those three elements plus about a dozen trace elements on which life depends combine to give the richness of organic chemistry. The number of different molecules that can be made using carbon is essentially infinite. The origin of life begins with the birth of its chemical ingredients.
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 53
As we learned from Lawrence Krauss when he tried to explain how a universe came from nothing, we are allegedly composed of stardust. Professor Impey seems to agree with his less talented colleague:
[L]uckily for us, gravity created stars to form in the expanding soup of galaxies, and stars picked up where the universe left off, first fusing hydrogen into helium and then moving on to create even heavier elements, as we’ll soon see.
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 54
Impey cleverly created an analogy using decks of playing cards to illustrate the significance of the rarity of certain chemical elements essential for the creation of life, writing:
Suppose a deck of cards represented randomly selected atoms in the universe. In one deck of cards, the aces would be helium atoms and the other 48 would be hydrogen atoms. You’d need 30 decks of cards before you’d expect to find one carbon atom….You’d need to search 300 decks to find a single iron atom.….How do we know what the universe is made of? Astronomers use remote sensing by spectroscopy to measure the composition of star stuff. Each element has a unique set of sharp spectral features that acts like a fingerprint, so by identifying that fingerprint in starlight, astronomers can measure contributions of different elements.
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 54
However, readers also need to understand that raw data never becomes useful information until it is intelligently processed. an intelligent application of rules to force conformity. Order does not evolve from chaos if simply “given enough time.” At the most fundamental level, binary computer machine language may be compared to DNA in terms of relative complexity, and there simply is no comparison–DNA is far more complex than machine language stored and processed by a computer.
And naturally, being human, even a great writer like Chris Impey is capable of making a mistake or two. For example, he wrote:
If the story ended here, there would be no life. In fact, since most stars are less massive than the sun, they trap their heavy elements and take them to the grave. They become cooling embers called white dwarfs, with scores so dense that a teaspoonful brought to Earth would weigh as much as a mountain. Their carbon rich material is a crystalline form of carbon: Pink Floyd gave a nod to white dwarfs in their 1975 song “Shine on you crazy diamond.”
Sounds nice and perhaps convincing to people who know nothing about the band or the song, but any Pink Floyd fan worth his or her salt knows the song was actually an homage to former bandmate Syd Barrett. Therefore, it’s relatively safe to assume the lyrics had absolutely nothing to do with white dwarfs, and Roger Waters and company weren’t thinking about any stars in the sky when they wrote it. Great song, though. And if you’ve got thirteen minutes to spare, you can click the link below and enjoy a classic Pink Floyd tune. I don’t recommend watching the animation only because I didn’t watch it myself–I’m listening to the song playing in the background as I’m typing these words.
Quite frankly, I’m not interested in watching a hallucinogenic cartoon when I just want to hear a great song, and I’m stone cold sober. Perhaps it’s just me.
Regarding the hypothesis about the origin of life known as abiogenesis, Professor Impey recounted an interesting joke that alludes to the probability problem associated with the origin of life:
[C]hemists tell a joke among themselves, when nobody else is around. Life is impossible, they say: we’ve put simple chemical ingredients in water, we’ve added energy in the form of heat or electricity, and all we ever get is an organic sludge. We never see replicating molecules. We never make a cell. The astronomer Fred Hoyle once said that the act of assembling the simplest living organism from simple molecular ingredients was as unlikely as a tornado whipping through a junkyard and assembling a jumbo jet. Yet somehow it happened. Was it blind luck? And if it happened here, could it happen somewhere else?
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 73
I’ve asked similar questions after coming to the conclusion that the sheer improbabilities of a universe created from nothing and a living organism from inanimate matter lead to two most logical explanations for existence: either God or some really unbelievable good luck is ultimately responsible.
About the theory of natural selection, Professor Impey wrote,
[L]ike all great ideas in science, Darwin’s theory of natural selection is compelling in its simplicity. Reproduction leads to variation, a fact well known to animal breeders for centuries. Also, living creatures tend to produce more offspring than the environment can sustain. The probability of survival is shaped by environmental pressure. Endless changes in the world lead to small but incremental changes from one generation to the next, and when they have accumulated to the point that one group can no longer produce fertile offspring, a new species emerges. After reading Darwin’s book, the naturalist Thomas Huxley remarked,” How incredibly stupid of me not to the thought of that.”
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 170
Conversely, I would argue that it is incredibly stupid to argue for common descent as the best, or only explanation for some hypothetical relationship between humans and fish that indirectly but ultimately resulted from sexual reproduction. According to logical extrapolation of Darwin’s theory (as well as current scientific teaching) humans are literally related to fish by sex after genetic isolation over lots of time. According to Darwin, every living organism should ultimately be able to trace its lineage back to an original life form that must have been some sort of single-celled organism.
According to Darwin’s theory, descent with gradual modification taking place over long periods of time explains how “monkeys make men.” In fairness, Professor Impey attempts to address a few of the problems that appear when trying to reconcile the theory with the actual scientific evidence, specifically that observed in the fossil record:
The recurrence of certain successful forms, alongside the ephemerality of most species, has led to tension between two ideas in the theory of evolution: contingency and convergence. Paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould was the most vocal champion of the idea that chance plays a decisive role in evolution. Gould was a commanding but divisive figure in the field of evolution – masterful as a researcher and popular writer yet sometimes arrogant and contrarian in his thinking.
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 172
With all due respect, Gould could afford to be arrogant because the scientific evidence in the fossil record supports his theory of punctuated equilibrium, which seems counterintuitive to traditional Darwinism. Impey dares to tread even further into the domain of the biologist, writing,
[L]et’s return to wings and eyes. Flight has evolved separately among insects, birds, mammals (the bat), and reptiles (notably the pterosaur, a flying leviathan of the Triassic). The design of wings is different in each case, but the evolutionary advantage of taking to the sky is undeniable. Vision has been discovered, and sometimes reinvented, in creatures as different as mammals, cephalopods, and insects. If you stare at an octopus, the eye you look into is eerily like your own, but it has a completely different ancestry. These are all examples of convergence.
Chris Impey, The Living Cosmos, page 173
Once again, we have a conclusion in search of a theory to support. The “evolutionary advantage of taking to the sky” — who thought of flight? More importantly, how did merely thinking of flight lead to an ability to grow wings? Did an animal look up, decide “hey, there’s no competition up there, so if I can just grow some wings I’ll be in business…” especially if eyes haven’t already evolved? I’m reminded of a favorite but very silly Monty Python skit about sheep that wanted to learn how to fly.
I find it amusing that humans can look at something like Stonehenge and realize that natural objects were deliberately manipulated to execute an intentional design and model complex, sophisticated technology such as sonar and computers to mimic behavior observed in nature, which invariably outperforms the very same technology allegedly produced by intelligent human designers.
Now, in fairness, Impey isn’t shy about admitting that we don’t really know much how the universe was formed, or how life began so it could later evolve. Even so, he confidently bases conclusions about scientific evidence on some pretty important unknowns. About planet formation he writes,
[T]he theory of planet formation is still fairly primitive. Complexity is part of the problem. Newton’s elegant law of gravity allows a precise calculation of trajectory only for the case of two objects. With hundreds of objects, there are tens of thousands of forces as each object acts on all the others; in this case, the gravity calculation is only a good approximation. But as the planets in the solar system accreted from thousands of chunks of rocks called planetesimals, which means millions of forces must be tracked. And those planetesimals each formed from billions of dust grains, so…you get the idea. This complexity makes it impossible to reverse engineer planet formation by running the calculation backwards to see how things looked at the beginning. The converse is also true; a slight change in the starting conditions can lead to the formation of a totally different set of planets.
This seems to be just another way of stating the probability problem, which boils down to a basic choice of accepting God created the universe and life, or that we should assume our existence is due to some extraordinary good luck.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Living Cosmos and especially appreciated the spectacular photography that accompanied Impey’s crisp prose. It seemed rather apparent from reading the book that Professor Impey’s personal religious beliefs are more compatible with those of Richard Dawkins than mine, but didn’t appear to be the work of an anti-theist. Reading Professor Impey’s interesting and informative book was a genuine pleasure, not an ordeal.
I would rate it five stars (out of five.)
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