My last blog remarked on the fact that Richard Dawkins, one of the world's leading atheists, now believes in the possibility of "intelligent design." Dawkins is quite willing to grant that life may have originated on earth not by evolution nor by some chance combination of chemicals. He knows how infinitesimal are the odds of random chemicals simply mixing together to produce, say, the first cell. Even the simplest cell is more complicated than the most elaborate human inventions, such as the jet airplane or the most advanced computer. Consequently Dawkins told Ben Stein that maybe smart aliens deposited life on earth. I call this the ET explanation. Intelligent design is okay with Dawkins as long as that intelligent design does not involve a supernatural creator.
Some atheists on this blog are not happy with Dawkins' ET explanation. They want to go back to the early twentieth-century view that somehow the chemicals must have assembled together to produce the first cells. And the favorite piece of evidence is the 1953 experiment conducted by Harold Urey and Stanley Miller. Urey and Miller were operating on Darwin's hopeful assumption that perhaps life originated accidentally in some "warm little pond." They mixed together various chemical compounds, including hydrogen, ammonia, methane and water. To their delight they were able to generate organic compounds, including a small tincture of amino acids.
For a decade or so this generated enormous excitement in the scientific community. But then two things happened to take the wind out of the Urey-Miller balloon. First, scientists found that the early conditions on earth were nothing like the ones that Urey and Miller envisioned. For one, there was virtually no oxygen on the earth in its early stages. So even if chemicals somehow came together to produce organic compounds and amino acids, they could not have done so in anything like the way that Urey and Miller showed.
Second, biologists seeking to try and create life in the laboratory discovered that the really difficult thing is not producing amino acids. It is converting those amino acids into proteins. Here is where things get really complicated, and here is where chance really collapses as a reasonable explanation. For the details I direct you to Franklin Harold's scholarly yet accessible The Way of the Cell. Harold notes that as a consequence of the two developments listed above, the Urey-Miller experiments are now largely dismissed as a viable hypothesis of life's origin. And of course knowledgeable atheists like Dawkins and Francis Crick know this, which is why they have fled to the ET explanation--an explanation that would seem to require at least as much faith as believing in divine creation.
If you enjoy seeing atheist arguments exploded in this way--or even if you're an atheist with masochistic tendencies--you may want to attend one of my "God v. Atheism" debates this week. On Monday, April 21 I'll be debating philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong at Dartmouth College. The debate is at 8 pm in Alumni Hall on the Dartmouth campus. On Tuesday, April 22 I'll be debating Dan Barker, head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, at Harvard. The debate is at Memorial Church, 1 Harvard Yard, at 8 pm. Finally on Friday April 25 I debate the controversial philosopher Peter Singer at Biola University. The debate is at Chase Gymnasium on the Biola campus near Los Angeles. You can get tickets at the door or at apologeticsevents.com.
Reader Comments ( Page 2 of 61)
16. brian "jesus said no one comes to god but through me. no one!! jesus said he was the truth. the way,the life,the alpha,the omega,the creator,the sustainer,jesus said and proved he was god in the flesh"
Lots of people say lots of things. But Ed W. is right. All we have is second hand information regarding the "magical rabbi".
Ryan Anderson at 9:04AM on Apr 21st 2008
17. "
jesus was a historical figure who it is well documented, lived,died and was raised from the dead."
Bigfoot and UFO's are even more well documented than Jesus raising from the dead is. The accounts of his resurrection rhat have come down to us are a couple of second hand accounts given by people who were not even there. If five people posted here that they knew somebody who claimed to have been there when along with hundreds of others at any sort of supernatural event we'd have as much documentation of that event as we have of the resurrection.
Ed W. at 9:05AM on Apr 21st 2008
18. Ryan - "Also, I'm not a biologist, so I'm not looking for the origins of life either. "
brian - "so you are a biologist? when in the heck do you work?"
As if you really needed proof that he doesn't actually read the posts.
Michael at 9:07AM on Apr 21st 2008
19. ryan,
please, realize that you mistake disagreement with hate. i strong feel that atheism is bankrupt. i actually pity atheist as a mixed up lot. i fee they are decieved by satan himself. i wish they would change. i wish they would come to jesus,same as i do you. in your beliefe system you can only compare yourself to others,thats why you think i hate. but i am not comparing you to me,but you to God and me to God and in that light we all fall short. thats really it. you are the one making the comparison. i just said the belief of atheism id a shart. "expecting one thing getting another"
brian at 9:08AM on Apr 21st 2008
20. brian; Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww, thanks buddy. You still have a log in your eye.
Ryan Anderson at 9:08AM on Apr 21st 2008
21. ryan,
ok ryan so you are not a biologist then what do you do? you are on her all day everyday? i got to go to work
brian at 9:10AM on Apr 21st 2008
22. brian; and I feel christianity is bankrupt (all religion really), but I wouldn't resort to using a 3rd grade slang to describe something you hold dear.
Disagree all you want, but don't think that we are "hating" when we react to your childish and ignorant description of our world view.
Ryan Anderson at 9:11AM on Apr 21st 2008
23. ryan, no looooooooooog. noooooooooooooooooo!!! just equipped with the truth of god's word. not mine. God does not care what either of us think. he knows best. atheism is like the clay telling the potter how it wants to be shaped. its a shart!!!
brian at 9:12AM on Apr 21st 2008
24. brian; "ok ryan so you are not a biologist then what do you do? you are on her all day everyday"
I multi-task. Work is slow.
Ryan Anderson at 9:13AM on Apr 21st 2008
25. Odd that Dinesh didn't link to Dawkins' actual comments on this subject:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,2394,Lying-for-Jesus,Richard-Dawkins
"Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be... I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design."
Ray Ingles at 9:17AM on Apr 21st 2008
26. brian; you are a shart. I mean that with love of course.
Ryan Anderson at 9:15AM on Apr 21st 2008
27. ryan,
you hold atheism dear? what is dear about it? it offers no hope.even dawkins"sheer luck" richard,said that humanity has no hope,none. thats atheisms leading voice of reason speaking. thats atheisms main man saying what therest of us already knew. he himself said your belief has none and offers no hope.period. what is dear about that?
brian at 9:15AM on Apr 21st 2008
28. Why does everyone think that it is only the =exceptions= or the rare events that constitute evidence? Given that there is no a priori reason why natures should behave lawfully, surely it is the teleological aspect of nature - its tendency to move toward an end - that is the better evidence. Natural selection, for example, moves species toward greater fitness in a niche, and has in general moved life toward forms of greater complexity, internal coherence, and independence from the immediate environs. Looking for God in the unlikely events of nature is like looking for Frank Whittle in the measurements and clearances of a jet engine. The existence of Frank Whittle is simply not an engineering problem.
Also, as Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna has pointed out, the Bible clearly states that God commanded the sea and the earth to bring forth life, and they did so. This is the medieval doctrine of secondary causation: they believed that God had endowed the natures of things with the ability to act directly upon one another, and, supposing their God to be both rational and true, these actions would be lawful and permanent and accessible to human reason. Hence, the concept of "natural" laws. There is no need for theokinetics. If God saw that what he created was "good," it was unlikely to need continued interventions by a cosmic maintenance tech.
Mike at 9:33AM on Apr 21st 2008
29. ryan,
now you know better, i am no shart. i have found in jesus exactly what i needed and more. he is all sufficient, i am not. no,no christianity is totally fulfilling and more so. jesus said i came that we may have life and abundant life. i do not have to prove anything with God. you guys are the ones who have to exhaust yourselves trying to prove their is no god. its 2% and maybe some figure more,but not much
brian at 9:18AM on Apr 21st 2008
30. If anyone's interested in actual scientific hypotheses about how life began - ones that take into account the decades-old objections Dinesh makes here - you could do worse than to check out this article:
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/feb/did-life-evolve-in-ice
Ray Ingles at 9:20AM on Apr 21st 2008