John Wilkins wrote:
Well I blogged and posted on Flew's "conversion", but it seems to me he
is not arguing the anthropic principle, nor even the design argument for
God, but only that the origin of life is too low a probability to occur
naturally. It's a bad argument, and he relies on the rather pathetic (I
am told - never read him myself) book by Gerard Schroeder, which has
been roundly debunked anyway.
From
http://www.philosophynow.org/issue47/47flew.htm
[2004 Flew]"I will here confine myself to recommending two books by
individuals who started as believers in two different revealed
religions. .... The second book is Gerald L Schroeder's _The Hidden
Face of God: Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth_ (Touchstone; New York
2001)"
John, do you agree or disagree with this Schroeder?:
Schroeder, Gerald L. 2001. _The Hidden Face of God:
Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth_ (USA: Touchstone/
Simon & Schuster), 224pp. A paragraph on 63:
The laws of nature that govern interactions among atoms
are simple and fixed. They produce repetitive
formations, such as the crystals at the Dead Sea. Being
highly repetitive, they contain little novelty. They do not
produce the complex, information-rich molecules we
find in life. There is no clue in nature as to how these
simple laws could induce the nonrepetitive, multifaceted
information we associate with the genetic code or the
proteins made from the information stored in those
genetic codes.
Compare
1999 Paul Davies, 1992 Hubert Yockey, & 1968 Michael Polanyi:
[Davies]"life cannot be 'written into' the laws of physics" presently known:
Davies, Paul. 1999. _The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the
Origin and Meaning of Life_ (New York: Simon &
Schuster), 304pp. Two paragraphs on 254-5:
The heart of my objection is this: The laws of physics
that operate between atoms and molecules are, almost by
definition, simple and general. We would not expect
them alone to lead inexorably to something both highly
complex and highly specific. Let me try to spell out
where the problem lies. In chapter 4, I pointed out that
genomes are more or less random sequences of base
pairs, and that this very randomness is essential if they
are to play the role of evolvable, information-rich
molecules. But this fact flatly contradicts the claim that
genes can be generated by a simple, predictable, lawlike
process. As I explained in that chapter, a law is a way to
compress data algorithmically, to boil down apparent
complexity to a simple formula or procedure.
Conversely, no simple law can generate, alone, a
random information-rich macromolecule to order. A
law of nature of the sort that we know and love will not
create biological information, or indeed any information
at all. Ordinary laws just transform input data into
output data. They can shuffle information about but
they can't create it. The laws of physics, which
determine what atoms react with what, and how, are
algorithmically very simple; they themselves contain
relatively little information. Consequently they cannot
on their own be responsible for creating informational
macromolecules. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim,
then, life cannot be "written into" the laws of physics--
at least, not into anything like the laws of physics that
we know at present.
If we accept that the genome is random and
information-rich, appealing to nonrandom chemistry to
make life is a clear contradiction. Nonrandomness is the
exact _opposite_ of what is needed to produce a random
macromolecule. The whole point of the genetic code,
for example, is to _free_ life from the shackles of
nonrandom chemical bonding. A genome can choose
whichever amino-acid sequence it wants, regardless of
the chemical preferences of molecules. It achieves this
by deploying special enzymes designed precisely to
override the nonrandom tendencies of chemistry. That
is why life goes to all the trouble of having coded
information and software-mediated assembly, via the
nucleic-acid/protein contract. Life works its magic not
by bowing to the directionality of chemistry, but by
_circumventing_ what is chemically and
thermodynamically "natural."
Yockey, Hubert P. 1992. _Information Theory and
Molecular Biology_ (GB: Cambridge University Press), 385
or more pages. From the Epilogue on 335:
The reason that there are principles of biology that
cannot be deduced from the laws of physics and
chemistry lies not in some esoteric philosophy but
simply in the mathematical fact that the genetic
information content of the genome for constructing even
the simplest organisms is much larger than the
information content of these laws. Chaitin (1985,
1987a) has examined the complexity of the laws of
physics by actually programming them. He finds the
complexity amazingly small.
Polanyi, Michael. 21 June 1968. "Life's Irreducible
Structure" _Science_ 160: 1308-12. On 1309:
....whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration,
it can function as a code only if its order is not due to
the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically
indeterminate as the sequence of words is on a printed
page. As the arrangement of a printed page is
extraneous to the chemistry of the printed page, so is the
base sequence in a DNA molecule extraneous to the
chemical forces at work in the DNA molecule. It is this
physical indeterminacy of the sequence that produces
the improbability of occurrence of any particular
sequence and thereby enables it to have a meaning-- a
meaning that has a mathematically determinate
information content equal to the numerical improbability
of the arrangement.
On 1312, the "Summary" section:
Mechanisms, whether man-made or morphological, are
boundary conditions harnessing the laws of inanimate
nature, being themselves irreducible to those laws. The
pattern of organic bases in DNA which functions as a
genetic code is a boundary condition irreducible to
physics and chemistry. Further controlling principles of
life may be represented as a hierarchy of boundary
conditions extending, in the case of man, to
consciousness and responsibility.
.
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