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ITT: Fighting, hate, disappointment, love, laughter, and I discard whatever "forum glory" I did have, which mind you isn't very costly at all. I really don't expect that many of you will read all of this. I hope it remains interesting enough to hold your attention...
These arguments coupled with the irrevocable existent of elegant design throughout our biosphere candidly point towards intelligent design. The fact that we have emotions, feelings, the ability to be self-aware, and foremost that we have an internal association of moral justice is made a mockery of otherwise. Even beyond these inquiries of the beginning of life, one must inquire of the beginning of the universe and matter itself. If in fact extra terrestrials brought life to this planet then from where did they originate? Can organisms within a universe create it? If you are proposing that they are multi-dimensional beings that can create universes you might as well assign them the classification of a god.
In his book, The Science of God, Schroeder explains how the "time solves everything" argument was claimed in 1954 by Harvard biology professor and Nobel laureate George Wald in a Scientific American article entitled "The Origin of Life":
It sounds so authoritative. Who is going to argue with a Harvard Nobelist? The only trouble is, it is wrong. So wrong, in fact, that twenty-five years later Scientific American made the rather shocking decision to print an unequivocal retraction:
Since 1979, observes Schroeder, reputable scientific journals no longer accept articles that cite the origin of life as rising from random reactions over billions of years. "Confirmed evolutionists agree that you just cannot win if the classic concept of randomness at the point molecular level of DNA is the driving force behind the mutations. The time is just not there.
Mathematical probability- Why did time fail the hopeful evolutionist? Time failed because it could not pass the probability test. The origin of life appears theologically suggestive via the probability (and related complexity) argument, just as the striking informational nature of DNA looks theologically suggestive via the probability (and related complexity) argument. Let's look at the evidence:
There are more illustrations of the probability problem--in fact, many more. But the point is that neither time nor chance can solve the naturalist's probability problem. Everywhere we see life--from simple to highly developed forms--we see order. This order involves coded information in the form of DNA. Any serious thinker is confronted with two unavoidable questions: How did non-life first step across the threshold to become life? And how did life encode immensely complex amounts of information on DNA? Time + chance has no answers for these questions. Randomness is a non-starter, not a solution.
However improbable we regard this event [the start of all life], or any of the steps which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it...once may be enough.
Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the "impossible" becomes the possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.
Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time the "impossible" becomes the possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.
Although stimulating, this article probably represents one of the very few times in his professional life when Wald has been wrong. Examine his main thesis and see. Can we really form a biological cell by waiting for chance combinations of organic compounds? Harold Morowitz, in his book Energy Flow and Biology, computed that merely to create a bacterium would require more time than the Universe might ever see if chance combinations of its molecules were the only driving force.
Mathematical probability- Why did time fail the hopeful evolutionist? Time failed because it could not pass the probability test. The origin of life appears theologically suggestive via the probability (and related complexity) argument, just as the striking informational nature of DNA looks theologically suggestive via the probability (and related complexity) argument. Let's look at the evidence:
- Marcel P. Schutzenberger of the University of Paris calculated the probability of evolution based on mutation and natural selection, concluded that 'there is no chance (<10^-1000) to see this mechanism appear spontaneously and if it did, even less for it to remain.'
- Molecular biophysicist Harold Morowitz calculated that if one were to take the simplest living cell and break every chemical bond within it, the odds that the cell would reassemble under ideal natural conditions would be 10^-100,000,000,000.
- Astrophysicist Edward Argyle calculated the probability that even a simple organism arose on the early earth by chance. "It would seem impossible," he wrote, "for the pre-biotic earth to have generated more than about two hundred bits of information," an amount that falls short of the six million bits in E. coli by a factor of 30,000.
- Writes John Horgan in Scientific American: "Some scientists have argued that, given enough time, even apparently miraculous events become possible--such as the spontaneous emergence of a single-cell organism from random couplings of chemicals. Sir Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer, has said such an occurrence is about as likely as the assemblage of a 747 by a tornado whirling through a junkyard. Most researchers agree with Hoyle on this point.
- Physicists Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds that all the functional proteins necessary for life might form in one place by random events as one chance in 10^40,000. They concluded that this was "an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup."
- Thomas Huxley, in apparent support of the "time solves everything" thesis, once said that six monkeys typing randomly for millions of years would eventually type out all the books in the British Museum. Calculating the actual number of permutations of letters, line, and pages in the 700,000 books in the British Museum in Huxley's time, David Foster concluded: "Huxley was hopelessly wrong in stating that six monkeys allowed enormous time would randomly type all the books in the British Museum when in fact they could only type half a line of on book if they type for the proposed duration of the universe."
- A simple calculation, explains physicist Schroeder, can show that the likelihood of producing any particular sonnet of Shakespeare by random typing is about one chance in 10^690. "The statistical improbability of pure chance yielding even the simplest forms of life has made a mockery of the theory that random choice alone gave us the biosphere we see."
There are more illustrations of the probability problem--in fact, many more. But the point is that neither time nor chance can solve the naturalist's probability problem. Everywhere we see life--from simple to highly developed forms--we see order. This order involves coded information in the form of DNA. Any serious thinker is confronted with two unavoidable questions: How did non-life first step across the threshold to become life? And how did life encode immensely complex amounts of information on DNA? Time + chance has no answers for these questions. Randomness is a non-starter, not a solution.
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