Sorry for going back quite a bit in this thread:-

David Palmer - 24 March 2008 05:43 PM

By applying Darwinian theory to human culture, suddenly a scientific theory concerning biological evolution is expanded to cover the world of culture, in other words we now have a metanarrative to rival the power of religion.

Or do we?  Strangely enough, I found being introduced to the field of memetics by Dawkins et al softened my adolescent atheist fanaticism to the point where I could more dispassionately examine the impact of various religions on societies.  After all, it is conceptually possible for virii to be symbiotic with their hosts.

Thanks David Palmer! Very interesting and enlightening. It must be much effort to sum up Lennox’s work. God bless.

Scientific enquiry rests on the notion that all manifestations in the universe are explainable in natural terms, without supernatural intervention. Strictly speaking, this notion is not an a priori philosophical stand or profession of belief. It is a postulate, a working hypothesis that we should be prepared to abandon if faced with facts that defy every attempt at rational explanation. ... (p 33)

It seems to me it is difficult to explain the origin of the big bang in natural terms (unless you invoke multiverse theory - which is untestable I dare say). So I suspect the attempt to explain all reality in natural terms breaks down here.

since Paley’s time, developments in science have shown that there are many kinds of systems within living organisms for which the term ‘molecular machine’ is entirely appropriate and among which are to be found biological clocks that are responsible for the vital molecular timekeeping function within the living cell and which are of vastly greater sophistication than Paley’s illustrative watch. Indeed, ‘machine’ language is ubiquitous in cutting-edge molecular biology

I liked Lennox’s observation about the machine nature of cells outranking the complexity of Paley’s watch.

Lennox seems to write very well about this difficult subject matter
rgds

I wish to say that I have just gone back through all my Lennox posts and corrected spelling, grammatical errors and a couple of unclear and incorrect statements - however, I don’t think there is a need to recheck.

I hope to come back Monday or Wednesday next week to continue the review.

The remaining chapters of John Lennox’s “God’s Undertaker – has science buried God” are:

Chapter 7: The origin of life

Chapter 8: The genetic code and its origin

Chapter 9: Matters of information

Chapter 10: The monkey machine

Chapter 11: The origin of information

with an Epilogue to complete the book

These not very long chapters are densely packed scientific arguments which go beyond what is presented in Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and certainly David Stove’s “Darwinian Fairytales”. I really struggled to keep up with Lennox, not necessarily being a bear of small brain, but rather because of their technical nature touching upon the details of molecular biology - meeting terms like DNA, genome, genes, etc and information theory which appears to be highly mathematical, bread and butter no doubt to some who come fluttering in to see what I’m making of it all. It is possible that some scientific geniuses out there have ploughed through these chapters and can explain far better what Lennox is saying.

However, for what it is worth, this is what I have found out.

In Chapter 7: The origin of life, we are introduced to the complexity of life. Lennox begins by quoting the geneticist Michael Denton, to the effect that

“the break between the non¬living and the living world ‘represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.’ Even the tiniest of bacterial cells, weighing less than a trillionth of a gram, is ‘a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of’ exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made it[) altogether of 100 thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world’.

Furthermore, according to Denton, there seems to be little evidence of evolution among cells” ‘Molecular biology has also shown us that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually Identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of (heir basic biochemical design, therefore, no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.’”.  (p116)

Lennox goes on to describe the mind boggling complexity of cells:

The cell is restlessly productive as its many micro-miniature assembly lines produce their unending quotas of protein machines (p117)

leads to a discussion of irreducible complexity and thence to the improbability of generating the necessary amino acids from a hostile oxidising atmosphere, let alone the generation of proteins, those immensely specialised and intricate constructions of long chains of amino acid molecules.

The chapter is concluded with this quote from Francis Collins:

‘But how did self-replicating organisms arise in the first place? It is fair to say that at the present time we simply do not know. No current hypothesis comes close to explaining how in the space of a mere 150 million years, the prebiotic environment that existed on planet earth gave rise to life. That is not to say that reasonable hypotheses have not been put forward, but their statistical probability of accounting for the development of life still seems remote.” (p126)

In Chapter 8: The genetic code and its origin, Lennox introduces us to “the information-bearing DNA macromolecule”, telling us that

“the human genome is over 3.5 billion letters long and would fill a whole library.’ As a matter of interest the actual length of the DNA tightly coiled in a single cell of the human body is roughly 2 metres. Since there are about 10 trillion (= 1013) cells in the human body the total length of DNA is a mind-boggling 20 trillion metres.” (p129)

And the issue is that the complexity has always been there. Lennox quotes a Werner Loewenstein, who we are told has won world renown for his discoveries in cell communication and biological information transfer,

“This genetic lexicon goes back a long, long way. Not an iota seems to have changed over two billion years; all living beings on earth, from bacteria to humans, use the same sixty-four word code.” (p136)

Chapter 9: Matters of information takes a careful look into the question of information, drawing out the extraordinary complexity and specificity of information conveyed by the genome. After that it was all downhill for me!

However, I did get the message: naturalistic explanations for the origin of genetic information come nowhere near explaining how life started. This leads Lennox to introduce the concept of the non existence of perpetual motion machine. Just as we know all machines require an injection of energy from outside to keep them running, why can’t we visualise

“something like an information-theoretic parallel to the law of energy conservation? Such an investigation might lead to scientific evidence against the validity of any explanation of biogenesis that did not involve an input of information from an external intelligent source. (p150)

The observation that the materialist will not entertain an external intelligent source, yet is willing to cobble together speculative just-so stories with no evidential basis, leads Lennox to propose an “evolution of the gaps”, which I think might be on the money

In Chapter 10: The monkey machine, Lennox turns to mocking Dawkins’ attempt to simulate the origin of the specified complexity of DNA by means of natural processes.

First there are a number of quotes to do with the impossibility of purely random processes accounting for the origin of complex information laden systems.

Next we are introduced to Dawkins Climbing Mt Improbable argument for constructing a haemoglobin molecule – instead of going up the sheer face of Mt Improbable, let’s go around the back and up the gentle slope, “inch by million year inch”. What Dawkins tries to do, and succeeds spectacularly, is to drastically increase the probabilities. His method is to set a lot of small steps, but each step representing a target with a method of measuring the difference from the target, and then when the target is achieved, conserving that achievement and moving up the next step to repeat the exercise.

And bingo - out pops a fully specified haemoglobin molecule!

This of course is a fraud.

Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker uses the TH Huxley typing monkeys analogy and sets his monkeys to type the Shakespearian phrase from Hamlet, “Methinks it is like a weasel”. This phrase has 28 letters (including spaces) with a monkey on each letter with a typewriter able to punch 26 letters and one space. Apparently the probability of the monkeys punching out Methinks it is like a weasel by random hitting of the keys in a billion goes is 1 in 10 raised to the power 31, ie incredibly small. However Dawkins little stratagem noted above has the monkeys going the job in 43 goes!

This is what Lennox has to say about the matter:

We have now reached the heart of Dawkins’ argument. Remember what it claims to show – that natural selection – a blind, mindless, unguided process – has the power to produce biological information. But it show nothing of the kind. Dawkins has solved his problem, only by introducing the two very things he explicitly wishes at all costs to avoid. In his book hi tells us that evolution is blind, and without a goal. What, then, does he mean by introducing a target phrase? A target phrase is a precise goal which, according to Dawkins himself, is a profoundly un-Darwinian concept. And how could blind evolution not only see that target, but also compare an attempt with it, in order to select it, if it is nearer than the previous one? Dawkins tells us that evolution is mindless. What, then, does he mean by introducing two mechanisms, each of which bears ever evidence of the input of an intelligent mind – a mechanism that compare each attempt with the target phrase, and a mechanism which preserves successful attempt? And, strangest of all, the very information that tit mechanisms are supposed to produce is apparently already container somewhere within the organism, whose genesis he claims to be simulating by his process. The argument is entirely circular. (p158)

Lennox summarises where he has got to at the beginning of Chapter 11: The origin of information:

The existence of complex specified information, therefore, provides a substantial challenge to the notion that unguided natural processes can account for life and makes scientifically plausible the suggestion that an intelligent source was responsible.(p164)

In this chapter Lennox draws attention to the many ways in which all kinds of design inferences are made – thus the archaeologist seeing scratches on a cave wall knows he is dealing with an artefact. NASA is spending millions looking for extra terrestrial intelligence

If we are prepared to look for scientific evidence of intelligent activity beyond our planet, why are we so hesitant about applying exactly the same thinking to what is on our planet?

….

What, then, should we deduce from the overwhelming amount of information that is contained in even the simplest living system? Does it not, for example, give evidence of intelligent origin of a far stronger kind than did the argument from the fine-tuning of the universe — an argument which, as we have seen, convinces many physicists that we humans are meant to be here? Could it not be the real evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence? (p166)

Lennox point about information (and I suspect this is an area of expertise for him) and intelligence is that both

are fundamental to the existence of the universe and life and, far from being the end products of an unguided natural process starting with energy and matter, they were involved from the very beginning. (p167)

I will close this review of Lennox’ excellent little book with a quote that takes us back to where we began.

There is more than a whiff of suspicion that reluctance on the part of some scientists to make a design inference from the existence of information-rich biomolecules has less to do with science than it has to do with the implications of the design-inference as to the possible identity of the designer. It is, therefore, a worldview issue, and not simply a scientific one. After all, scientists seem to be perfectly happy to make (scientific) design inferences to human or even alien agency; so the difficulty certainly does not lie in our incapacity to make design inferences as such.  (p170)

Perhaps my review of “God’s Undertaker” has whet your interest for Lennox’s visit to Sydney in August, I believe.

My intention is now to return to the new atheists and review the books by Onfray, Harris and Hitchens. I wouldn’t recommend purchase of either Onfray or Harris, though Hitchens is a significant literary figure and his book “God is not Great” has sold in large volume. I WILL NOT go into the depth that I did with Dawkins - there is a high level of textural correlation across them all.

‘If it walks like a duck…

and quacks like a duck...’

David, I have to congratulate you: An inspired ruse to launch the 2,493rd episode of the Creation - Evolution debate under the guise of actually ‘taking it up to those pesky atheists’.

How can I possibly hold on to my foolish notions after such a devasting critique (presented for the umpteeeeeeenth time)

Surely I will see the error of my ways?

...

...

“Neigh!”

Rob

Rob Callander - 29 April 2008 12:01 AM

‘If it walks like a duck…

and quacks like a duck...’

blah, blah, blah........

Rob

But you seem to keep checking out what I have to say.....??

I’m sure if the deep thinkers on Sydney Anglican Forum think I should take my ruminations elsewhere I will be told.

Greg Clarke writing about the 2020 Summit before it took place, wrote:

In his fascinating new book, British academic Graeme Smith argues that the West has entered not a post-Christian age, but a new Christian age in which secularism is the ‘latest expression of the Christian religion’. ‘Secularism,’ he writes, ‘is not the end of Christianity nor is it a sign of the godless nature of the West…Secularism is Christian ethics shorn of its doctrine. It is the ongoing commitment to do good, understood in traditional Christian terms, without a concern for the technicalities of the teachings of the Church.’

For instance, much of Western thinking gives a very high position to the individual, but understands that this position is modified by the needs and desires of the ‘society’. Or, put differently, individuals who are free to make moral and ethical choices, will generate a new set of social relations. We in the West often take for granted this high status afforded to the individual, but it only takes a small amount of historical and cross-cultural education to recognise that it is far from universal. Rather, the idea that an individual has a moral will and ought to be free to exercise it has emerged from Christian re-thinking of the ancient Greek understanding of persons and the Jewish notion of conforming to God’s own will.

What do others think of this?

‘Secularism,’ he writes, ‘is not the end of Christianity nor is it a sign of the godless nature of the West…Secularism is Christian ethics shorn of its doctrine. It is the ongoing commitment to do good, understood in traditional Christian terms, without a concern for the technicalities of the teachings of the Church.’

What do others think of this?

Sure western secularism is heavily influenced by Christianity but I don’t find it convincing that a Christianity shorn of its teaching about Jesus grounded in history can be considered Christian in any meaningful way.

However I agree that ‘Secularism ... is not the end of Christianity’ and sometime I wonder if secularism is perhaps a short-lived phenomenon. For most of human history most people have believed in God or gods ... I don’t believe that human nature has changed, and people have the same needs for security, love and significance as always.

Thinking about it a bit more, to some extent secularism depends on Christianity as a base. If secularism however destroys or diminishes that Christian base, then arguably it is destroying the good will and respect for others on which secularism depends. If that is the case then secularism would tend to destroy itself.

Thinking about it a bit more, to some extent secularism depends on Christianity as a base. If secularism however destroys or diminishes that Christian base, then arguably it is destroying the good will and respect for others on which secularism depends. If that is the case then secularism would tend to destroy itself.

Precisely, and they haven’t got the good grace to admit it.

No, I will correct that.

It is not so much lack of grace, though it is certainly that, but rather that they are so self unaware that they are blind to what should be obvious to them, although to give him credit, Michel Onfray comes closest to acknowledging the debt when he spends a chapter searching for an alternative self designation, for what do (a)theism and (a)theist tell you?

Dawkins and Dennett kind of acknowledge the debt as well, without admitting it by the adoption of the appellation, “brights”. I ask you. Even their own (Michael Ruse for example) treat that with the derision that it deserves.

Some time ago Rob Callander made this comment

And I’m not sure if you’re aware, but it is precisely the forcefull presentation from people such as yourself which have ignited the responses from Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens et al - much more so than 11/09/01.

I realise that for many people, religion provides the only respite for the insurmantable travails they experience in daily life - and that my undermining of that certainty is a source of pain and discomfort to many.

which at the time we let go through to the keeper, and probably shouldn’t have.

I am of course happy to accept Rob’s unintended compliment that I with some fellow co-religionists forced Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and their fellow irrational fundamentalists (I accept Janice Money’s earlier correction of me on this point) into writing, but I think we know that their books arise rather from their dismay concerning:

1. religion is not dying off, if not rather making a comeback

2. Islam is a huge shock to them – you only need to read what Hitchens and Harris have to say about Islam to realise the potency of this factor

3. intelligent design strikes at the heart of their alternate meta narrative

Complementing all of this is their sheer hatred of Christianity, including often thinly veiled hatred of Christians, that I grew up with as exemplified by my own father, who could never fail when observing a religious figure (back in the days when nuns wore habits and parsons clerical collar) to give utterance to blasphemy and anti religious bigotry which I grew to know off by heart (and thank God and according to the sovereign purposes of God rejected by my mid teens).

I agree that religion does provide “respite for the insurmountable travails that people experience in daily life”, but I would have thought that grossly reductionist, falling far short of the full story of why people become professing Christians.

I admit to a degree of nervousness approaching the task of reading the new atheist literature – having bought the books it took me a full 6 months to get around to reading them. It may be right that some Christians do feel personal angst and doubt in reading these books but when you read their arguments and measure them against what you know of the Bible, history, and the personal experience of being a follower of Jesus Christ, united to the body of Christ with fellow believers, then you recognise them for what they are: shallow, arrogant, ideologically blinkered, full of nonsense, selective reading of the historical evidence, venom, and you end up saying, “is THIS their best argument?”.

Hi David P.,

I just wanted to say thanks for your great material on this thread, incuding the reviews/summations of Stove and Lennox.

As has already been said, it would make a great series of articles on a web site or blog [with html and pdf versions please 8-) ]

In the meantime I can just google my way back here when I have the time or need to chew on it further.

Grace & peace,
Terry

David, I would be interested in your critique of Dawkins next 2-parter on Compass this Sunday and I think next.

Thanks David, and maybe others will watch and we can compare notes Monday morning.

Compass is starting on ch 2 ...

I only saw half of Dawkins on Compass last Sunday night but IMO he is just as big a ratbag as many fundamentalist Christians.Dawkins set Science against Christianity as an argument , apparently forgetting that many Christians are Scientists. The arguments for Christianity are God’s world here now and before and the Millions of believers over 1000’s of years . Both these are facts independent of human words or authorities or Archeology or miracles.
Millions of people over 1000’s of years.