NOTE: This entry is a compilation of thoughts written down throughout 2007. Therefore, they date from before the publication of the article by Oliver R. Barclay in Aletheia, n.º 31, 1/2007, pp. 39-52 [a publication of the Spanish Evangelical Alliance], and do not constitute a point by point reply to it; however, I do provide some reflections to some of the questions raised by the said author.
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Qualitative differences between origins and operation
The detectability of special design does not exclude at all a general design in the so-called Natural Law. But the Natural Law as a framework is qualitatively different from the system of engines and inventions of the gadgets of life, of its mechanisms. The vast system of Natural Law is a system of uniform cause and effect, and constitutes the operational framework within which life is made possible but not necessary; it certainly shows design and purpose. But this system of uniform operation of cause and effect is not the cause, cannot be the origin, of the computer-like, cybernetic system of life; in the same way as the electrical, magnetic, mechanic laws that a set of machinery obeys in its operations cannot explain the origin of the machinery, of all its gadgetry —all this results from an inventiveness that belongs to another level.
Information cannot be explained by matter nor by energy. Information is the expression of a purpose that has as its ed to materialize the said purpose in its execution and to communicate information for the performance and control of the processes that bring about a proposed end.
The key lies in that in the summit of the hierarchy is the purpose of a Being that, in the last term, must be recognized necessarily as God. And information is the key of life and of Revelation. Both things come from God. He is the source of the one and of the other.
Direct intervention and providence
DI does not pretend to attribute EVERYTHING to a direct action, to a direct intervention of God —God acts often through secondary causes. What DI does is to bring in some rigorous instruments to distinguish the action, the embodiment, of a purpose, of a design through a plan that is not apparent but real, produced in an intelligent way (for instance, the production of some devices, of a machinery), in contrast with what is produced by the uniform operation of causes and effects governed by laws (the operation of the designed machine). The issue discriminated by the analytical apparatus (the filter) of the ID is that the properties of the system CANNOT give rise to the elements of this said natural or technological system. Only when this system has its components formed and in their corresponding place (chlorophyll, flagella, ribosomes, mitochondria, etc.) can it then be maintained by a whole series of conservative processes. But these processes of operation and conservation of the system CANNOT explain its origin; these demands an inventiveness, an intelligent activity, OUT OF REACH of the forces and laws by which the system works.
The criterion
The essential question is: Can the origin of all the system of nature be explained by means of the forces that we can observe in our own times? This is what is derived from the ideological position —expressed by Carl Sagan in the Cosmos series— that «the Cosmos is all that there has been, is or will be».
According to materialism, the basic phenomena and processes found in a system are the same ones as those that gave it its origin. "All is matter and movement". The argument of materialists seems to be that the properties of the systems explain the origin of the system. Rather, what comes from the exam of the forces that act in nature, in the operation of its systems which follow a CHAIN OF CAUSES and EFFECTS in the natural system, is that they are INCOMPETENT and qualitatively different of what is necessary to ORIGINATE the said system.
When performing an analysis of the facts, what is observed is that the properties of the system proceed from the design of the system. The origin of a system must be governed by a deliberate plan, with the application of energy directed by an information which applies the plan for the constitution of this organized system.
Stages and actors
Physics and chemistry are spheres of activity of the uniformity of the law of cause and effect —in biology we have an added magnitude. To pass from physicochemical systems to biological systems the need arises to SELECT the components [concept of Maxwell's demon], and for this it is necessary that an intelligent agent has INFORMATION upon which to act deliberately so as to embody DYNAMIC systems —away from the equilibrium to which physicochemical systems tend, and with a necessary specified complexity beyond (a) all possibility of chance or (b) of the uniform operation of natural law.
Thus, we have a background or stage, a physical-chemical universe where we have evidence of a uniform operation of cause and effect. And it must be said that this same universe gives evidence of design due to the absolute improbability of its structure, which requires «fine tuning», as it is shown by González and Richards in their book The Privileged Planet (see sidebar). But against the background of this universe and of these operations ruled by physical and chemical laws, the extrinsic operation of an informational activity can be detected by which the biological structures have acquired forms and functions which they would never have acquired by the uniform operation pf the said laws, but which require an intelligence to select for this purpose. This Intelligence is made evident in this way, and this both from the most direct intuition as under the most demanding criteria of a conceptual and mathematical analysis, as is shown by Dembski with his filter to ensure the presence of a design, of a deliberate purpose, in the making of an object or in the occurrence of an event, which provides the tool to establish a rigorous distinction between a true design, on the one hand, and a possible or certain happenstance. See the recommended books by Dembski, and also of Woodward, in the sidebar.
The role of chance in Chemical systems
“Throwing dice” in a chemical system will introduce irrelevant differences in that chemical system, changes in it, but it will not transform it upward into an integrated biological system, which belongs to another ontogenic nature.
Throwing dice can only bring out the potentiality already present in a dice, it cannot go beyond.
And giving more space and more time?
A bigger sphere and a longer time may in theory increase the chances that a hormone and its receptor may appear by chance —but it will also mean that their appearance by chance will be much more apart in space and in time. They will certainly dissolve by much more probable processes before they have the slightest chance to meet. Therefore, the theoretical increase of the scopes of space and time will not increase at all the probabilities of the chance occurrence of an integrated biological structure.
About science – its origin and role
Science used to be that enterprise of man to study the works of God, that is, the universe in its totality and in each of its parts. Its workings and interrelationships. Its cause and effect relationships. 1) To follow God’s thoughts after Him, 2) To fulfil His mandate of dominion as His stewards and beneficiaries. It was not a search for materialistic explanations of the origin of the Universe, but a search for the interrelationships of the matter-energy phenomena in God’s created and ordered universe. The search has revealed now that the created order includes matter / energy (physics, chemistry) and information / information treatment mechanisms (biology).
A word to Christians
"Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth."
(John 11:43-44).
If God should operate only through natural processes and laws, the resurrection would be effectively IMPOSSIBLE, because it is something diametrically opposite to all the tendency of the natural processes. In fact, the theological positions of the so-called "modernism" and of dialectic theology deny the reality of resurrection and the "prodigies and miracles" of the Scriptures. At most, from these perspectives, they would serve as didactic "myths", but they would not be at all realities that happened in time and in space.
However, this position is not "modern" at all. We find it already in Plato, Galen and many other Greek naturalistic philosophers.
For instance, the celebrated physician Galen (130-201 A .D.), who spoke against the Genesis record in the following words:
“It is precisely this point in which our own opinion and that of Plato and of the other Greeks who follow the right method in natural science differ from the position taken up by Moses. For the latter it seems enough to say that God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should he wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes. We, however, do not hold this; we say that certain things are impossible by nature and that God does not even attempt such things at all but that he [sic] chooses the best out of the possibility of becoming.”
On the usefulness of
the parts of the body, 11:14.
the parts of the body, 11:14.
Paul had to confront all this already, amongst other passages in 1 Corinthians 15. The fundamental factor is: The power of God that has wrought in Creation, which has intervened in history and which shall be manifested bringing His kingdom in.
It is obvious that a consistent reading of the Scriptures leads to a rejection of Naturalism as a limiting concept to the special actions of God in Creation and in His interventions in the History of Revelation.
Santiago Escuain
Santiago Escuain
On the specific but most important question of the present state of the research on the Origin of Life, we recommend reading The Last Testament of Leslie Orgel, just published.
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