It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part VI - The Origin Of Life

Abiogenesis is the process whereby once upon a time life arose from non-life. We are not entirely sure how this process arose (although we are not entirely unsure either), but given that God has created a universe of such ingenious proportions, it's not difficult to accept that bringing life from non-life is well within the scope of His cosmic narrative. What we know this far is that all physical things that exist are made from a finite set of constituents called the elementary particles. The manner in which these elementary particles interact with each other is well known; quarks come together to form nucleons, nucleons come together to form nuclei, nuclei combine with electrons to form atoms, atoms combine with each other to form molecules and materials, and so on.

We know about the compounds that pervaded the early solar system, because we know what comes out of stars and what can be carried in by comets. We know this because we can do astronomical spectroscopy and observe the contents of newly formed solar systems. We even know that amino acids, the constituents of proteins (life’s 'workhorses'), are found in space and can be synthesised in a lab by mimicking lightning striking the earth’s primordial oceans. We also know that ancient clays can catalyse the reaction of some of the early compounds on earth into nucleic acids - which are often touted as the 'building blocks' of life. Not only that, but we also know that nucleic acids can spontaneously form the molecule known as RNA. RNA can not only speed up chemical reactions which could confer a biological advantage, but it can work as a template for itself - perhaps the first mechanism of reproduction. However, not all these environments are conducive to the forming of life - in fact, many are impossible incubators. As none of the elementary particles, nor their simplest combinations, can self-replicate in an evolvable way, life can only spontaneously form in environments that enable life to retain its specific configuration of elementary particles that allow reproduction.

We have a universe that is more than 14 billion years old - most of which cannot produce life. However, the elements of the periodic table still allow a rich range of chemistry to emerge; so rich, in fact, that many complex chemicals do exist and undergo reactions. We know that the vast majority of these compounds cannot reproduce under any known environment, but the underlying engine of our physics and chemistry shows that reproduction (self-replication) can happen - it is just such a rare event that it needed a molecule to form a template of itself, against which the compounds in the environment spontaneously formed a copy of the template. Even though our universe has approximately 100 billion galaxies, each with around 100 billion stars in it, nucleotides bonding to create the first RNAs would still be an amazingly rare event in our universe.

What we can extrapolate about the origin of life question is this. In this world, the common states are liquid, solid and gas. We know such incipient life could not exist in solids, because things in solids cannot diffuse around, and atoms vibrate around an average position with too much restriction for life to flourish. Equally, life isn't likely to exist in the gas phase, because the replication machinery has a necessary complexity and weighs too heavily to thrive in the gas phase. The fact that life exists in liquids is because liquids allow signal transduction by diffusion and can act as a suitable solvent for bio-machinery. Life was unlikely to exist in any other state apart from liquid - hence the ‘primordial soup’ metaphor.

The high surface tension, the low viscosity, the boiling point, the melting point and the fact that water expands upon cooling can all be explained by the way water molecules interact with each other - namely that it is capable of making four hydrogen bonds. Why it does this ultimately lies with the laws of quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger equation, when solved for a given collection of atoms, tells us the properties of that collection of atoms. It tells us how much energy we need to pull it apart, or equivalently, how much energy is released when it forms. The same can be said for collections of water molecules. The solution to the Schrodinger equation is found using the same methods, whether we are dealing with water, or ammonia, or caffeine or any other compound we care to study. The properties of water and all other molecules are the inevitable outcome of the natural dispositions of electrons and nucleons. The properties of water aren't arbitrary; they are emergent phenomena of the properties of the universe - just one of a myriad of consequences of the laws of physics.

That fact that life on earth depends on water is a testament to how life has adapted to the aqueous environment found on the planet on which it arose. It seems true that many of water’s special properties played a significant role in allowing life as it is to exist - however, given that the properties of water are just a consequence of the combination of fundamental particles from which it is made, it is no surprise that we complex beings find ourselves on a planet which has this life-enhancing molecule in abundance, as opposed to anywhere else in the universe.

As I recall, biologist Nick Lane has a theory that proton power is no late innovation, but evolved much earlier in the tree of life than we first thought. The first branch in the tree is between the two great groups of simple cells, bacteria and archaea, and Lane reminds us (rightly) that both of these groups have proton pumps and both generate ATP from proton currents, using a similar protein. It seems very likely indeed that both inherited this machinery from a common ancestor, and that this source was the progenitor of all life on earth, including you, me and the oak tree down the road.

It must be said, though, that although traits found in both the archaea and bacteria are most likely inherited from the common ancestor of all life, a few must have been acquired later by gene exchange, thus giving credence to our belief that ‘distinct’ means, in many cases, ‘evolved independently’. We know that this common ancestor possessed DNA, RNA and proteins, a universal genetic code, ribosomes (which are protein-building mechanisms), ATP and a proton-powered enzyme for making ATP. These intricate mechanisms for reading off DNA and converting genes into proteins are rather like a modern cell. Yet there are nuanced differences as well - in particular, the detailed mechanics of DNA replication would have been quite different. Moreover, it looks as if DNA replication evolved independently in bacteria and archaea; that is, most scientists seem to agree that the defining boundaries of cells evolved independently in bacteria and archaea.

So the question ‘what sort of a cell was this common ancestor?’ is, as Nick Lane concedes, a difficult question. Clearly not a cell with no boundaries, that would defy every known chemical law – but seemingly it was a very simple yet sophisticated entity in terms of its genes and proteins, and was powered by proton currents rather than fermentation, but with membranes that are no longer seen in cells today. To compound the point, back then the oceans were very different to what they are now; the primordial oceans were saturated with carbon dioxide, making them acidic, whereas the seas today have more alkaline. Also there was practically no oxygen, and without oxygen, iron dissolves readily – and we can see from our geological studies that the vast banded-iron formations around the world are a result of iron that once dissolved in oceans. As oxygen levels slowly rose, billions of tonnes of iron precipitated out as rust. This almost certainly means that the interface between the alkaline vents and the primordial seas would have been much more conducive to biochemistry than they are today – in fact scientists have found ancient vents with a similar structure and even reproduced them in the lab.

So the theory that ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents were the incubators for life looks very plausible, particularly if hydrogen and carbon dioxide did in fact react in those vents to form simple organic molecules and also release energy. But we still might be wise to proceed with some caution, because although hydrogen with carbon dioxide may well be central to life, energy is still required in the first place to engender this process, so much so that it is probably nigh-on impossible for bacteria to grow by chemistry alone without the catalysing energy. Let me offer an analogy. Think of the energy stored by ATP as equivalent to £1. If it takes £1 to kick-start a reaction, which then releases £2, in theory a cell has gained £1. However, if the only way a cell has to store energy is to make ATP, it can make only one molecule; to make two new ATPs would cost £2. So one ATP would have been spent to gain one ATP, and the spare change wasted as heat. That's not consistent with being alive. Yet Nick Lane is suggesting that the hydrothermal vents would provide a good explanation to this problem, claiming that::

“The fluid from the vents would have contained reactive molecules such as methyl sulphide, which would generate acetyl phosphate, a molecule that some bacteria today still use interchangeably with ATP. What's more, the natural proton gradient would have supplemented this energy source by spontaneously generating another primitive form of ATP called pyrophosphate. Pyrophosphate also acts in much the same way as ATP and is still used alongside ATP by many bacteria and archaea. These bacteria speed up its production using a simple enzyme called pyrophosphatase”.

So the common ancestor of life could harness the natural proton gradient of ancient vents to produce energy, and by some reversing process store energy too, as this system seems to allow cells to save up small amounts of energy, much the same as we save up our loose change and buy something so it no longer becomes waste. This is equivalent to saying that the proton gradients enable cells to grow and then, by their accumulative energy, leave the vents. This means it may well be true that the last common ancestor of all life was not a frivolously spending cell at all, but a thrifty rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that engendered the energy for primordial biochemical reactions. This natural flow reactor, power-driven by hydrogen and proton gradients, catalysed organic chemicals and brought about proto-life (both bacteria and the archaea) that would become the first living cells – eventually producing you, me and the oak tree.

Given the intractability of this subject and the vast domains of time, it may never be possible to know for sure whether or not life evolved by this mechanism, or whether the initial elemental organism with the properties of self-replication happened just once (maybe only once in the entire history of the universe) or several times. But a good case may have been made that hydrothermal vents had the answer. It's worth adding a point I made in my book The Genius of the Invisible God:

"I won't even bring to bear the complication that the tem 'life' is a human construct, upon which we have created a descriptive term for the purposes of classification. The emergence of life is referred to as abiogenesis - which is the point at which the earth's chemistry evolved into a self-replicating system. But the point at which chemistry becomes biology is not an instantaneous moment (and even if it were, it would be an arbitrarily defined human classification). But let's pretend there is one single point in history when we can say that life began - an A to B event of causation.  The putative conclusion begins with 'Therefore, all life is designed' - and from what I've said it is self-evidentially obvious that there are no philosophical conditions under which one can identify a particular point in history as being the beginning of the design of life. All one is doing is looking for the transition from chemistry to biology, but they overlap, and they give no exhibition to any kind of process of divine choreography, because they can be reduced to particles that simulate mere possibility as fluctuations in a quantum field."

The upshot is, the abiogenesis that brought about early life isn't a direct object of empirical study for us - it is probably a one-off or exceedingly rare event that we may only simulate in the lab, where the exact conditions of the actual event are always likely to elude us. But whichever way we cut the cloth, when describing creation - from abiogenesis all the way through to the rich and diverse complexities of life we see after a few billion years of natural selection - we are describing how God has engineered the laws of physics to behave so that it administers His grand narrative.

 

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part V - How & Why We Evolved Two Sexes

 

In this blog post, I thought I'd offer a brief explanation for how evolution came to produce two sexes within the species of most organisms. The mixing of genetic material has great advantages. Genetic tricks can be shared between simple life forms to create better adapted life forms. Sex overcomes many genetic problems because a good copy of the mutated gene can be inherited from the parent without deleterious mutations. Mixing of genetic information over populations is a mechanism that has been retained throughout the majority of evolutionary history, because it is so beneficial in washing out deleterious genes.

This mechanism is also part of the reason why distinct sexes evolved in the first place in multicellular organisms - they constitute an advantageous breeding strategy. Imagine that the genetic information is mixed together by the combination of two identical sex cells (these are called 'gametes'). Now, offspring with more nutrients available during development will have a greater change for survival than their more nutritionally impoverished peers, so sex cells would evolve to get bigger, in order to contain more nutrients (these are called 'eggs'). However, the bigger they get, the more cumbersome they are and the smaller the chances of two meeting and exchanging genetic material, so sex cells that are small and quick will have an evolutionary advantage as cells grow (this is one of the reasons why sperm cells are so small).

Consequently, identical members of the same multicellular species will almost invariably evolve into two forms. This asymmetry results in a fork of two reproductive strategies; a multicellular species will have a 'sperm'-strategy from which we call male, and an 'egg'-strategy form which we call female. Sperm combining with sperm do not have enough nutrients to support a developing offspring, and eggs are too bulky to meet one another. One sperm and one egg, however, will form a viable offspring, so that is why there has been an evolution of males and females over the years emerging from those tiny gradual changes in the genetics of the organisms. Male and female evolve concomitantly because two-sex sexual reproduction produces more viable offspring than both asexual reproduction and single-sex sexual reproduction.

Conversely, single-celled life has no need for distinct sexes, as there is no need for nutrient stores for development. All mono-cellular cells can reproduce, and one main motivation for doing so is to obtain good versions of damaged genes. In fact, single-celled organisms have machinery that can detect damaged genes, and that machinery starts a cascade of events which result in sex with the nearest available cell that can respond to those signals. Multi-cellular life reproduces with specific sex cells, and only those specific cells are used for reproduction. Because of the increased utility of the process of recombination of genes, it is unsurprising that over time a mechanism which suppresses the growth of non-sex cells in multi-celluar life would have taken precedence. Evolution works by small increments, and we would therefore expect that the signals for reproduction in single-celled organisms, which detect DNA damage, would be used for exactly the opposite function in multicellular organisms - to suppress their growth and division. This is exactly what we see. The same molecules (caspases, cytochromes and others) are involved in initiating sex in unicellular life and in initiating DNA repair and cellular suicide in multicellular life. Moreover, when this particular mechanism is damaged, single cells in multicellular life are likely to grow out of control, and this is what we see with cancer. These same molecules are very frequently in a mutated form in cancer tissue.

The upshot is, all organisms have a limited lifespan and all reproduce themselves to create offspring. The traits of an organism, called the phenotype, are determined by a heritable mechanism, called the genotype. The genotype is passed on to organisms' offspring through a process that creates randomly imperfect copies of the genotype. Therefore the offspring of an organism demonstrates variability in their phenotype as compared to each other and the offspring's parent. The varied phenotype of each offspring creates a varied probability of survival to reproduction age within that competitive environment. Those offspring that do survive to reproduction age pass on their more heritable phenotype to the next generation.

The laws of physics and chemistry completely determine the mutations and subsequent selection process, just like the laws of physics determine the outcome of a spinning roulette wheel, rolling dice, or where water runs when it lands on the ground. From the fact that all organisms are modified descendants of their parent(s), and that any two organisms, whether living or dead, have a common ancestor, we can infer the primary axiom discussed earlier in the series: that evolution produces a nested hierarchy. As we've seen, since each generation of offspring produce their own generations, organisms can diverge from each other in their succession of traits, especially when they are geographically isolated from each other. When plotted on a graph, this nested hierarchy forms a tree-like structure where the branches are the separate paths that come about as the traits diverge.

We have already covered the fact that, in evolutionary history, millions of traits and genetic differences have been evolving gradually slowly over the course of 4 billion years, so the tree like structure has a huge number of branches on it. Everything that has ever lived fits somewhere on that nested hierarchy, and where it fits can be evidenced by studying the configuration of its genotype to such a precise degree that evolution is as demonstrable a fact as any fact we know. 

We also talked about how all life belongs in a nested hierarchy resembling a tree of life. One caveat though, the roots of the tree, the early formations of life, are not quite hierarchical in the same way - they are more like an intertwined network rather than a hierarchical tree, and it's for reasons I'll explain. Firstly, there are a few of examples when branches on the tree fuse - such as the mitochondrial merger and subsequent endosymbioses, which resulted in the evolution of eukaryotes; or the later merger which resulted in chloroplasts. Horizontal gene transfer is quite common in bacteria, but there is still a core set of genes for each species which can be used to define the species and place it on the tree of life. However, to place a branch on the tree requires a lineage from which it can branch. This is fine for all recent life - tracing back gives three clear lineages from which all modern life arose: prokaryotes (bacteria), archaea and eukaryotes. But the meeting point of these three lineages is where the problem arises.

Simplified, we can't say that archaea split from bacteria and eukaryotes then split from archaea, because there are some eukaryotic 'core' genes which are also present in bacteria, but not archaea. We can't say that eukaryotes split from bacteria then archaea split from eukaryotes because there are genes shared with bacteria and archaea but not eukaryotes. Eukaryotes and archaea couldn't have split from bacteria separately because they share core genes which aren't in bacteria. The only reconciliation is to assume that all three lineages (or at least two of them) were rapidly exchanging genetic material. Generally, the tree of life genes are transferred predominantly by inheritance, but horizontal gene transfer also played a major role in shaping these three lineages from which all life is derived.

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part IV - On Speciation

As we've seen in the last three blog posts, it's impossible to have even the sketchiest understanding of biology, seek the truth, and fail to observe that genes provide an undeniable map of evolution. In biological evolution, we know that taxonomic ranks are consistent (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and we know that genetic sequencing and our observations of the tree of life are also consistent with each other, where every species that is supposed to have evolved from its ancestors fits into the tree of life exactly as is expected if we are genetically related – there are no inconsistencies or anomalies. The computational information within every piece of DNA contains the history of the mutations of each generation, where every single living thing fits into these nested hierarchies of similarities and differences. And the pattern of relatedness that can be observed between any pair of living things through genetic resemblances, and the fact that every single time we do this they fall consistently and hierarchically within a family tree of relatedness, means evolution is as undeniable a fact as there is.

With this in mind, be wary of one trick creationists play when hearing this. They'll say they admit that there are genetic changes within species, but God created all unique species in their 'kind' and no single species ever evolved into another distinct species. Here is an example of the kind of thing they say, from the execrable Answers In Genesis site:

"As creationists, we must frequently remind detractors that we do not deny that species vary, change, and even appear over time. The biodiversity represented in the 8.7 million or so species in the world is a testament, not to random chance processes, but to the genetic variability and potential for diversification within the created kinds."

Let's not focus on the long-standing misunderstanding about evolution being "random chance processes" (it is not), as I've covered that in other blog posts, but instead focus on the attempt to mislead by denying that creatures can evolve into different species. The first thing to point out here is that just as God gave Adam the dignity of naming the animals - which is not a literal story, of course, but a story that conveys the sovereignty and responsibility God has given humans over the planet. It is also humans who get to name creatures according to markers, and it is those markers that we've called 'species', based on our empirical observations in biological evolution. 

We have classified two organisms as being different species if they will not or cannot produce fertile offspring together. That is how we've defined species - it has nothing to do with how different things look. Two organisms can look very similar and be a different species, and they can look quite different and still be the same species. Speciation is usually the consequence of gradual change in isolation from the species from which it departed. So as the progeny of each generation accumulates more and more slight genetic differences, at some point there is enough distinction so that some of them will not or cannot produce fertile offspring. At that point, it is not hard to understand that the future generations of these two different species will be growing farther and farther apart in whatever changes happen in them because they will not interbreed.

At this point you have two separate branches on the family tree that constitute two different species. Some species adapt to live so closely together that they cannot survive without one another. We, for example, cannot live without bacteria in our guts. There are also conditions under which two species have merged, and the genome of one has been almost completely transferred into the other, such as when bacterial consortia are found. A consortium is a group of different bacteria where the waste product of one, be it ammonia or oxygen or hydrogen sulphite, etc, is the food of another. The material coming into the consortium is recycled, often leaving a very efficient colony. The transfer of materials between consortia members is limited by the surface area that they can share. If only one member could get inside another then the whole process would be even more efficient. This has happened at least twice in the history of life (although probably much more often), including in our lineage. Once one species is inside the other, a strange situation occurs. Both have separate genomes that compete with one another, yet they still rely on one another. It is like a battle between co-dependent friends.

As natural selection tends towards survivability on a fitness landscape, and as interbreeding has now ceased, new species will gradually become more and more genetically different over time from the creatures with which they were once more closely related. It is perhaps difficult to imagine how those gradual changes could produce so many diverse creatures in the animal kingdom, and why it can be hard for creationists to believe humans are genetically related to chimpanzees, elephants, cats and fish. But if you think of the rich diversity of domesticated dogs in just a few thousand years of artificial selection in dog breeding, and a few tens of thousand of years since their descent from grey wolves, then it should be possible to contemplate how much diversity of change can occur with the animal kingdom over millions and billions of years.

This is a passage from Francis Collins’ brilliant book The Language of God, in which he sums up the sheer magnitude of time that we are considering:

“If the 4.6 billion years of the earth’s existence from initial formation to today were compressed into a twenty-four hour day with the earth being formed at 12:01am - life would appear at about 3:30am.  After a long day of slow progression to multicellular organisms, the Cambrian explosion would finally occur at about 9pm. Later that evening dinosaurs would roam the earth. Their extinction would occur at 11:40pm, at which point the mammals would begin to expand. The divergence of branches leading to chimps and humans would occur with only one minute and seventeen seconds remaining in the day, and anatomically modern humans would appear with just three seconds left. It is not surprising that many of us have a great deal of difficulty contemplating evolutionary time.” 

The human genome project has provided for us accurate information about the whole history of evolution through analysis of DNA and the chain of events which led to ourselves and other primates. Scientists are even very sure that they know at which point in the tree of evolution the chromosomal fusion occurred in our ancestors for Homo-sapiens to evolve. 

I am certain that most of the Christian objections to the long history of evolution on our planet are psychological objections; after all, we are so used to seeing that if the devotional aspect of our inner-self has planted a tree of Divine hope in our hearts, the harsh realities of a long protracted ‘tooth and claw’ evolutionary process tend to wave a threatening axe in front of the tree. But it is not so.

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part III - Assigned DNA Codes

 

Evolution-denying creationists actually believe that God created every single species as entirely distinct from every other species, so that there is no evolutionary connection at all. That's why they say misinformed things like they believe in microevolution but not macroevolution (note: this bogus distinction as an argument against evolution is not one that anyone who understood science would ever make). If God had wanted to create all species as entirely distinct, not giving the appearance of having any evolutionary connection, then the genetic relationships between species is not something you'd expect to see in a single act of creation. All of the world's organisms (with the exception of a few bacteria and archaea strands) use the exact same set of 20 amino acids to code for their proteins. And with that set of 20 amino acids, they use the same specific 3-bit DNA sequences to code for their specific amino acids. 

Why would God do that if we are not genetically related to all other species, and they to each other? It's especially strange when you look at the genetic sequence for these same-function genes in a bacterium and then at the genetic sequence for the same protein in a human - they have a remarkable similarity. In fact, some of the genes are almost identical, despite being hundreds of bases long. In a special act of creation, like the one to which the Genesis 1 literalists subscribe, would God really have wanted to create a system in which we share the blueprinting for the same proteins with the bacteria in our mouth?

But it gets even deeper. If each of the world's creatures were all created in a single act of creation, this 3-bit DNA sequence could have easily been assigned to code differently for the 20 common amino acids between groups; and furthermore the DNA sequences themselves could have been radically different between groups, or radically unique to species. God could have shuffled it around and made every species different for these attributes; with a 3-bit system of 4 varying nucleotides, and with a total of 64 different codons being issued across 20 different amino acids independently, there are literally enough combinations of codons and amino acids to assign each living species its own unique genetic code. In other words, there is absolutely no reason for God to give each organism the same genetic coding blueprint, and exhibit the computations of the relational distance of every species to each other, unless He wanted to make it look like all evolved in the same family tree of life over billion of years. Creationists are encouraged to go figure that one out! 

Why Did God Use So Much Space & Time?

A conversation came up the other day, in which I was asked why I thought God decided to spend such an inordinate amount of time and space to do His creating. Here are my thoughts on the matter.

Given that the universe is 14 billion years old, and that life has been evolving on this planet for over 4 billion of those years, one might reasonably ask why God chose to create nature over such vast expanses of time and space when He could have wrapped it up a lot sooner. I think the first thing to note is that in doing it this way, God has created a universe with lots of information that gets rinsed out in the mathematical wash. In other words, the notable things in the universe - like stars, planets, chemistry, biological life and, ultimately, humans - are highly unrepresentative of the exceeding mathematical profligacy in the rest of the universe.

This seems to be a truth reflected in the natural order of things: there is a plethora of thermonuclear spillage when planets are created; there are dozens of thorns for every rose; there are many more non-beneficial mutations in DNA than beneficial ones; there are millions of sperm that are unsuccessful alongside the one successful one that engenders a fruitful union in fertilisation. Even in the arts, or the economy, or in trade-based competition, or in sport, or in epistemology, the winners are far outnumbered by the losers.

How much truer that is of life in the universe too. To consider just how vast even our galaxy is; if you shrunk our galaxy to the size of the earth, then the solar system we inhabit within that galaxy would be about the size of a bowling ball. And as far as we know, we are the only life in that whole galaxy, maybe even the whole universe (a remarkable fact if it's true, given that there are around 1 billion trillion stars in the observable universe). One thing is abundantly clear: the special things in nature are very very rare and highly unrepresentative of the rest of the mathematical baggage in it.

The upshot is, there are many patterns in physics that are mirrored in human behaviour too, especially when it comes to power laws, and Pareto distributions. Perhaps the nature of the universe is some kind of symbolic representation of deeper truths related to God's creation story. Perhaps it's a part of the 'all good things to those who wait' philosophy, or a 'big rewards to those who work hard' philosophy, where value comes at a cost, and takes time and effort. All the most impressive designs in human terms require prodigious amounts of planning, foundational work and intricately executed design techniques that factor in the complexity of the whole project, not just individual parts.

Knowing how we emotionally and intellectually engage with reality at a human level, I can conceive of what might be behind the Divine wisdom of a vast, lengthy creation story, in which the banality of the gas, dust, rocks and gravitational and magnetic fields could represent a symbolic demystification of creation as a fait accompli event spanning much shorter execution time. Perhaps the vastness of creation is God's way of illustrating just how much cosmic magnitude went into the intellectual process - and how comparably meagre our own intellectual prowess really is in trying to fathom such a mind. Intelligence is, after all, the ability to explore avenues of possibility by sifting and selecting - so why should we be surprised if God exhibits this with the creation of the universe, like all artistic geniuses do? Perhaps we shouldn’t expect anything less.

We are told two big things about this creation in terms of God's cosmological masterwork: in Romans 1:20 we are told that "Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse." And in Psalm 19, we are told that "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands". That is perhaps a good conclusion one can draw for why God used such vast amounts of time and space: they are the revelation of the huge mathematical permutations in designing something so complex: a design that has His fingerprints on it in the constitution of the mathematical bias written into nature's fundamental blueprint of a biased random walk. And if you don't understand how amazing a fundamental blueprint of a biased random walk is, you don't understand it at all. Consequently, a signature from God of that level of mathematical genius is going to require a physical substrate spanning vast stretches of time and space, just as a painter would require a vastly spacious canvas in order play out the exhibition of his artistic genius on a grand, iridescent scale.

Linking those two concepts together: the vastness of space and time, and the highly unrepresentative pockets of order painted onto a giant canvas of disorder - ask yourself this. Don't we feel that bit more special being one in a billion than one in a small group? If Jack says to Jill "I love you more than anyone in our social group" or "I love you more than anyone in our church congregation" we all know that that is not anything like as powerful as saying “I love you more than anyone else in the world”. The more unrepresentative a love is when it deviates from the mean of weighted experience, the more it is treasured as something amazingly rare, special and wondrous. Perhaps God’s capacious expanse of the skies and His chronologically extensive timeframe for dong His creation is an illustration of just how exorbitantly rare, special and wondrous we are.

Or maybe think of it in terms of the mathematically biased random walk - perhaps as redolent of our two beloveds, Jack and Jill, having no chance of meeting without their mutual friends getting together and making special arrangements for that to happen. Perhaps those two beloveds would have been lost without the intervention of those that loved them. And perhaps when we think of the vastness of the matter in the universe, that those particles would be 'lost' in the interstices of a prohibitively large search space without God’s intervening genius to bring them together with the blueprint of a biased random walk. The vastness of the universe and the broad timescales could well be an exhibition of the Divine genius (Romans 1) unlocking the vastly complex combination lock that helps gritty 'lost' matter 'become 'found' - like two beloveds finding each other against all the odds. God’s story is, after all, a love story between Creator and creation.

That’s my best conjecture for why God used an enormously complex, spatially vast, chronically extensive canvas to demonstrate His artistic genius: it is the genius of a rare, unique, profoundly beautiful, deliberate love story where that which is lost becomes found, and is embraced by the Creator through the Incarnation, just as when the father embraces his prodigal son on his return from the doldrums. The grandeur of the universe may well be a simulacrum of the entire gospel story: that the whole creation narrative is based on Christ dying for our salvation - and the mathematical cost of life, represented in the vastly expressive canvas of mathematical and physical nature, may be an illustration of the cost of life in terms of salvation - the price God paid for the creatures He loves. That is to say: our Father God has shown through His Son Jesus that He is willing to bear the greatest costs imaginable (Philippians 2:7, 2 Corinthians 5:21) for the things He loves - and that may be as true of the universal nature of things as it is the individuals He created, and for whom He died.

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part II - Alleles & Genetic Algorithms

As we observed in the last blog post, the nature of genetics is that genes are transcendent - and this is what is meant by the notion that genes are like passengers using bodies as vehicles. Genes are contained within individual organisms, but because they are duplicated in numerous offspring they can propagate themselves even at the cost of host agents. Individual alleles can manifest unique attributes greater than the sum of their parts, thereby ensuring information is spread throughout the nexus of the biological landscape.

There is even a formula Pn=P0e^-nu to measure the allele frequency in a population of organisms - where Pn is the frequency of an allele in a specific generation of your liking, P0 is the frequency of the original gene you are mutating, -n is the generations passed, u is the mutation rate, and e is the mathematical constant, an irrational number of a value of roughly 2.7. The formula accounts for mutations from the wild type allele to the mutant variant, and it accounts for reproduction, assuming the fitness is indiscriminate between the wild type and the new mutant. It's very useful for assessing the changing allele frequency in a population - assuming no natural selection - but when the changing allele does have an impact on fitness, you can integrate the new information in the form of a fitness coefficient (w), which takes into account for the new rate of faster or slower allelic spread into the formula following the mutation rate, u.

So, for example, suppose every 100 wild types develop with no mutant alleles, (or Aa) where out of the individuals that reproduce successfully only 80 of the aa individuals succeed in doing so. The fitness (w) of the recessive phenotype would then be 80% or 0.8. So you would put in a 0.8 at the end and this will correspondingly slow allelic spread.

The formula then becomes Pn=P0e^-nuw

Anyone can try out a calculation on a hypothetical allelic frequency change, although bear in mind mutation rates vary between organism to organism, and even gene to gene. In a human cell, the average mutation rate is something to the tune of 1 mutation in every 30 million base pairs, per generation.

As I've said in previous blog posts, a system contains information by virtue of its relation to another agent or system capable of perceiving, interpreting and responding to that information. The biological substrate is a system whereby we've delineated terms like 'law' and 'disorder' and actively played out those delineations through the fundamental dialectic of structure, mechanism and function. This process has active information that gets scrambled by the second law of thermodynamics under severe mathematical constraints and, after enduring biochemical facilitation, gives rise to the biological landscape we see before us. Under these conditions, and mathematically speaking (which is what the universe is - one big mathematical object), new information is being created all the time, where under these conditions the amount of information in a system is quantified by how much it reduces the uncertainty for the receiver.

The genetic algorithms in biology are implicitly part of the whole constraining process; they are informationally connected through interconnected mathematical pathways. You can take any two distinct species and chart their evolutionary relationship through the similarities in their genetic sequence. Differences vary depending on which two species in particular you select, but they all share something in common. Even between the two most distantly related groups, such as between a bacterium and a human cell, you'll find the groundwork for many similar genes and genetic sequences - which play crucial roles in cell maintenance and reproduction - has already been laid out. Genes and regions of DNA responsible for carrying out the process of DNA replication, of coding, regulating, and carrying out the process of creating proteins, are present in both taxonomic groups more or less in nearly the same DNA sequences between groupings.

The genome is suffused with self-replicating elements, known as transposons, which are regions of the gene that are highly mobile elements, often cutting themselves out of a region of the gene, or copying themselves and migrating elsewhere. One class operates by cutting and pasting itself around, with minimal duplicating activity. But in cutting in pasting itself around, it often leaves broken edges of DNA where it comes and goes, which, invariably, is going to be identified and filled by DNA polymerase and its coenzymes. Because DNA polymerase in this instance is working blind, so to speak, it has no idea what nucleotides to use to glue the broken pieces together, so it will use random ones. This chain of events gives transposons of the cutting and pasting class an innate property of causing mutations at the joining sites of wherever they go and leave.

There is second class as well - known as retrotransposons. They are more like 'copy and paste' to the transposons' 'cut and paste' - and they are a large source of new genetic information, because in their very nature they carry genetic regulation sequences responsible for making certain proteins (without which they would be inefficient self-replicators) and regulatory sequences for initiating the production of the aformentioned proteins. They copy themselves, and the translocated copy is carried about by proteins and randomly inserted at a new site on the genome. Since there is no natural selection acting on them - because they don't play a vital role in survival - the copies are free to mutate and mutate successively through generations. And with those promotion factors already in place, whatever the DNA sequence happens to mutate into will engender a new gene. If it turns into something biologically ineffectual, it will just keep mutating until its regulatory sequence is destroyed. If it mutates into something useful for the genotype/phenotype, then voila, here is the new gene. This process plays a big role in the formation of new genes.

Another mechanism of gene duplication comes from what's called 'meiotic recombination', wherein chromosome pairs adjoin to one another and transfer genes between themselves. The net gain of the genes is always zero; there are only two to work with; one per chromosomes, and generally, the recombination yields an equal count of genes between chromosomes when they are done trading. But sometimes an unequal number of genes may be traded; one chromosome may get both genes, and the other none. If the chromosome with both genes becomes a gamete that merges with another gamete to form a new lifeform, then you have a net gain of one gene for every generation following that lifeform to come.

And this is just one aspect of it in genetics - compound it with other discoveries, with the observation of gain of function mutations, of emergence of new traits, new behaviours, homologies in anatomy and physiology, and so on, and there is a picture so comprehensive that it cannot be denied by a genuine truthseeker.

More to come in Part III

 

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution

Since the genomes of hundreds of animals have been sequenced, it is impossible to grasp even the basics of genetics and deny the fact that evolution happened over millions of years, and to deny the fact that every species is genetically related to each other in a tree of life. These are biological facts that are impossible to reject. Don't get me wrong, evolution denial has never been in the least bit credible, and always shameful and intellectually repressive, but these days it's so abundantly and incontrovertibly clear that evolution by natural selection is the correct explanation for the diversity of life on this planet that the remaining attempts to persist in its denial are merely cases of scraping the barrel and feeding a scientifically and theologically impoverished minority.

The story of evolution over four billion years is this; all organisms can be traced back to a common ancestor, and so all of the diversity in life we see today is due to common descent with modification, through natural selection, genetic mutation, and genetic drift. We have a lot of evidence to back up this theory, including the fossil record, geologic evidence, and most comprehensively, genetic data. There are three mechanisms for evolution: natural selection, genetic mutation, and genetic drift.

Natural selection: Organisms who are better suited for their environment have a higher probability of surviving long enough to reproduce and pass on their genes. This is pretty much common sense.

Genetic mutation: Changes in genetic code occur naturally during reproduction, and at random. There are several types of genetic mutations, including the insertion of a base pair, the deletion of a base pair, and the switching of positions of two pre-existing base pairs. These mutations occur all the time.

Genetic drift: This is the relative frequency of how often an allele (a specific genetic trait) appears in a population, based on how many currently-existing organisms contain that trait. Over time, some alleles that are not well-suited for the environment may become less common and eventually disappear completely. This can reduce genetic variability.

The axioms of evolution claim that all life evolved slowly and gradually from the first life forms. Traits are inherited from one generation to the next with slight variations. This being true, we should be able to create a kind of family tree of organisms and their traits, just like we create a family tree for our human ancestors. If you hired a professional genealogist to study your genealogical tree, you'd find the branches form nested groups of families based on the name of the husbands. As new generations marry, the daughter lineages create branches with the names of their new husbands, and the sons simply create newer and more complicated branches with the same name. In my father's and mother's family tree, for example, even in just a few generations we have family members with over a dozen different surnames.

In biological evolution over 4 billion years, traits in organisms evolve in the same way. If you replace the new family line where the husband's name comes in with a new novel trait in an offspring, you find the same thing. That organism with a new trait creates a new branch where the descendants keep that trait and also accumulate new ones as they go along, much like how all the grand-daughters will take on new marital names and form their own branches. This is what is called in biology a "nested hierarchy".

The genome of every single organism contains the totality of genetic information within that organism – we each have a unique one (it’s mostly the same, but every individual has slight variations). A genome is like a book, consisting of chromosomes, which are like paragraphs. These paragraphs are made up of genes (sentences in this book analogy) and they act as instructions to make molecules. Each gene is like a sentence that defines its protein structure, and the letters in the sentence convey the building blocks of the DNA strand (a subset part of the gene). DNA is a molecule in the shape of a double helix, which is a long spiral staircase made up of nucleotides – and it is these that determine the genetic code of all living things.

As the genomes of so many animals and plants have been sequenced, we have a picture of evolution so clear that we know where every living thing appears on the tree of life. We know this because the information available to us from genome sequencing is computational – that is, from the sequences we can compute the relational distance of every species to each other, just as if we subjected books to a computational process and saw them undergo mutations, we would track the computational steps at every part of the journey and know which copies of books emerged from which other books and so forth. This is because genes are best thought of as passengers that use bodies as vehicles for propagation – just as in this analogy, letters and sentences would be using the book structure to get themselves passed on. The DNA code is a digital code that has no non-trivial difference from computer coding that can be mapped in precise accordance with the journey its constituent information units have taken. A gene is a sentence that conveys the structure of a protein, and just as would be the case if we subjected books to the same kind of evolutionary process and read every intermediary stage as the sentence structures changed bit-by-bit over time, the same computational process is analysable when it comes to code read in the cells of every living thing.

We can look at the rich diversity of species and map the phenotypic variation – variation due to underlying heritable genetic variation. We know from our genetic story that we are equally related to dogs as we are whales, and bats as we are hippos, and hedgehogs as we are deer, because the last common ancestor we have with, say, the dog, is the same as the last common ancestor shared with, say, the whale – even though regarding the appearance of an organism, characters and traits, the difference between a dog and a whale, or a bat and a hippo, is immense. Because we can read the code in the cells of every living thing, we also know that regarding the genetic distance on the phylogenetic tree, we are more closely related to mice, rats, rabbits and guinea pigs than any of the animals of the previous list (take most other animals and we’d know the genetic distance too). And genome sequencing shows us, beyond any doubt, that we are most closely related to other apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, bonobos, etc) and all primates diverged from a common ancestor.

These studies show other conclusive evidence too. For example, inherited strands of past viruses (called endogenous retroviruses) show clear relatedness between species, and in a way that is exactly consistent with the tree of life. So too do the homologies – the common features and traits shared by organisms also matches both the genetic data of the family tree of all species, and the data that shows the trajectory of endogenous retroviruses.

The upshot of all this is, if you reject this as conclusive evidence for evolution, and remain unwilling to reject creationism and embrace these facts as instruments of God's creative genius, then you don’t understand how significant and decisive these data are, and how deep and wondrous the theology can get. There is simply no way of denying the fact of evolution and living with a clear conscience and a content mental state.

It's Not That Easy To Help The Poor

Let me tell you something very interesting about economics: it is hard to make the poor better off if they don’t make themselves better off. When we do anything in a complex economy, there is a chain of events that extends way beyond our sensory apparatus. The reason why it is very hard to make the poor better off if they don’t make themselves better off is because it’s hard to make any one poor person better off without making another person worse off somewhere else. It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true. Here’s an illustration to explain.

You have £1000 savings, so you decide to give Jack £200 to buy some shopping at Sainsbury’s. The food had to come from somewhere. It didn’t come directly from you, so it either came from other people producing extra food or other people going without that food. Or to break it down more perspicaciously, here’s an individual scenario. Jack gives Jill £10; Jill buys a £10 bottle of wine that would have gone to Tom, who instead buys a cake that would have gone to Dick, who instead buys a turkey that would have gone to Mavis, and so on, until somewhere down the line somebody misses out on something and goes without. Jack’s £10 gift to Jill created a chain of events where someone, somewhere is bereft.

Or here is another scenario. Luis works a bit harder in his vineyard to produce that extra bottle of wine, sacrificing some other task or pleasure. Perhaps the knock-on effect is that he doesn’t buy a cake in Henrietta’s café, which means Giuseppe misses out on Henrietta's purchase of his flowers, and so on, until someone somewhere can’t get the pair of trousers they want. If Jack only had £10 and he gave it to Jill, then Jack gives up £10 worth of goods that he now can’t afford. But if Jack gives up £10 and it means he still doesn’t have to give up anything, then someone else down the line gives up something against their will. If Jack never spends the £10, then he leaves the wine, cake or flowers for somebody else.

It may be slightly easier to grasp this complex chain of events if we instead think of it this way. Jack is quite well off, so draws £500 from his bank account and gives it to Jill. Somewhere down the line the banking system has £500 less, so someone somewhere misses out on a mortgage, or on a loan so buys one less car, whereby a car salesman buys one less laptop, and so on. If Jack took it from his wallet, and had never banked it, his £500 being put in circulation drives up prices to the tune of £500 (not that it would be noticeable to the naked eye), which means Tom, Dick or Harry responds with a bit less consumption or a bit more work. The converse of that point is if you worked for £500 and never spent it then you worked for free, because you cost society nothing in consumption. Your gift to society was £500 of consumption that you never cashed in.

That's not a reason to neglect being kind and generous to the most vulnerable in society - but it remains true, and will always remain true, that increased productivity is the only way to reduce a nation's poverty. 

Boris Johnson Misunderstanding Democracy

 

I've just seen this woeful Twitter video from our Prime Minister, where he tells us that:

"If we want to achieve a truly representative Parliament, then we cannot rest until 50% of MPs are women."

This has to be Boris at his absolute worst! Knowing the sort of character Boris is, we all know he doesn't really give two hoots about whether 50% of MPs are women - he's just making this disingenuous appeal because he thinks it's what people want to hear. But even if we grant him this sincerity, then once broken down, his statement is incoherent. The Parliamentary system is not set up to be representative on account of resembling the demographic of society; it is set up to be representative on account of reflecting the voting preferences of society. Desiring Parliament to resemble the demographic of society on arbitrarily chosen traits like sex misses the point of the democratic process. There are lots of xenophobic people in society, but we don’t want a proportion of Parliament to be xenophobic; there are lots of religious fanatics, football hooligans, polyamorists, adulterers and drug addicts in the UK, but we wouldn’t wish for that sub-section of the demographic to be reflected among our 650 MPs.

Some might object on grounds that sex is a different category of consideration, and that desiring a more equal representation of males and females in Parliament is to be lauded. Ok, even though that’s not a good counterpoint – let’s grant it for the sake of generosity. But even allowing for this, the desire for equal representation between males and females is still a preference that goes against the grain of the electoral system, because MPs are elected from 650 individual constituencies, and an individual person cannot resemble a demographic. If 1 individual cannot resemble a demographic, then 1 x 650 individuals cannot resemble a demographic without seriously departing from the rubric under which the electoral system is mandated. To do this would mean straying into something that selects on a different kind of preference to the one in which voters are being asked to participate.

Attempts could be made by political parties in the selection stage to artificially increase the number of women standing as candidates for election, but this no longer necessarily reflects the preferences of the electorate. If there is not a 50-50 split between male and female MPs when Parliament reflects the voting preferences of society, then why does Boris’s preference that this is redressed trump society’s revealed preferences after they have voted in their own constituency for the candidate of their choice? How does Boris (and the like) know that the current ratio is unjust and needs correcting? What if there are many other complex factors involved in the process, and that, actually, the fact that men outnumber women in Parliament occurs for perfectly reasonable reasons based on a complex range of preferences and considerations – Boris and other party politicks have no justification for imposing their preference over ours. If enough people do care significantly about having more women in Parliament then we can expect that to be reflected in constituencies, when more people could vote on the basis of sex than anything else.

My instinct is that, however prudent or infelicitous, what people mostly care about when they vote is the party of the candidate, and the perceived qualities, polices and ethics of the individual candidate and their party. Even those who care a lot about how many women there are in Parliament are unlikely to see that preference supersede the other factors at an individual constituency level – and it is therefore always likely to be the case that the revealed preferences of the electorate (at the individual level) are more representative than artificial attempts to make Parliament resemble the population demographic.

An Evening With The Philosophical Muser #2: Discussion with Extinction Rebellion's Mark Fletcher

 In this edition, I'm joined by Mark Fletcher from Extinction Rebellon:

The Biggest Bang

I saw an interesting blog on the big bang - it was Tim Reeves' response to astrophysicist Ethan Siegal's Big Think Article stating that the big bang isn't the beginning of the universe anymore. I'll paste Tim's article below, and I'll add my response to the responses.

SIEGEL: Extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play. After all, if we can trace the hot Big Bang back some 13.8 billion years, all the way to when the universe was less than 1 second old, what's the harm in going all the way back just one additional second: to the singularity predicted to exist when the universe was 0 seconds old? The answer, surprisingly, is that there's a tremendous amount of harm - if you're like me in considering "making unfounded, incorrect assumptions about reality" to be harmful. The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity - at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes - will have consequences for our universe that aren't necessarily supported by observations. For example, if the universe began from a singularity, then it must have sprung into existence with exactly the right balance of "stuff" in it - matter and energy combined - to precisely balance the expansion rate. If there were just a tiny bit more matter, the initially expanding universe would have already recollapsed by now. And if there were a tiny bit less, things would have expanded so quickly that the universe would be much larger than it is today. And yet, instead, what we're observing is that the universe's initial expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy within it balance as perfectly as we can measure. Why? If the Big Bang began from a singularity, we have no explanation; we simply have to assert "the universe was born this way," or, as physicists ignorant of Lady Gaga call it, "initial conditions. Similarly, a universe that reached arbitrarily high temperatures would be expected to possess leftover high-energy relics, like magnetic monopoles, but we don't observe any. The universe would also be expected to be different temperatures in regions that are causally disconnected from one another - i.e., are in opposite directions in space at our observational limits - and yet the universe is observed to have equal temperatures everywhere to 99.99%+ precision. We're always free to appeal to initial conditions as the explanation for anything, and say, "well, the universe was born this way, and that's that." But we're always far more interested, as scientists, if we can come up with an explanation for the properties we observe.

REEVES: Siegel is warning us against the extrapolating right back to a space-time singularity. That makes sense to me on this basis: I always have doubts when a theory predicts an infinity and I'm inclined to believe that this is a sign of an incomplete theory that is being pushed too far.  But in the above quote Siegel's reason for rejecting an initial singularity is to do with scientific prediction: For unless one is to engage in the ad hoc business of patching in arbitrary initial conditions, a cosmos that starts with an arbitrarily high temperature doesn't perform well on the prediction front. Siegel then goes on to tell us that a good origins theory would predict important cosmic features like the  flatness of space, the absence of magnetic monopoles, and the uniformity of temperature and density across the observable universe. As we shall see Siegel doesn't contradict Einstein's great theory of gravitation which predicts the possibility of a space-time singularity. Instead he conveniently side steps the question of whether space time space-time singularities are physical by telling us to stop yourself before you go all the way back to a singularity.

My Comment: The universe is a mathematical object, and mathematics is more primary than physics, and God is more primary than mathematics. So while the notion of a singularity may be a difficult concept in physics, it is less difficult as a comprehension of the creation of God the cosmic mathematician. We shouldn't use theology to answer scientific questions, but equally we shouldn't rob the universe of theological gravitas by attempting to explain it only with scientific concepts, because science is only confined to physical descriptions. We've been doing sophisticated science for a few hundred years now, and have a deep understanding of much of the universe. But there will always be a hiatus in certain areas of potential discovery, and it's in those areas where the tools of science are going to remain too blunt - because if the observable universe has its origin in a singularity, it is likely to be something akin to God speaking it into being, rather how Genesis conveys. But, as we'll see below, the singularity isn't the end of the consideration, even in physics.

SIEGEL: Inflation accomplishes [(correct) predictions] by postulating a period, prior to the hot Big Bang, where the universe was dominated by a large cosmological constant (or something that behaves similarly): : the same solution found by de Sitter way back in 1917. This phase stretches the universe flat, gives it the same properties everywhere, gets rid of any pre-existing high-energy relics, and prevents us from generating new ones by capping the maximum temperature reached after inflation ends and the hot Big Bang ensues. Furthermore, by assuming there were quantum fluctuations generated and stretched across the universe during inflation, it makes new predictions for what types of imperfections the universe would begin with.

REEVES: So, inflation theory predicts a) a near enough flat universe, b) the absence of high energy relics (like magnetic monopoles), c) essentially a uniform distribution and d) makes predictions about the magnitude of fluctuations away from perfect uniformity.  Sounds good so far.

My Comment: Yes, inflationary theory purports to explain why opposite ends of the universe exhibit the same temperature and density, without which they wouldn't have been in thermal contact at the point of origin. Inflation theory also purports to explain the observation that, to a very good approximation, the universe appears to be flat. Inflation theory is still tentative: we don't know the source of the energy needed to generate inflation (although it could be dark energy). There is also the long-standing matter of unifying gravity and quantum mechanics, and that's probably not an area for Inflation or dark energy to solve, because when the inflation is pegged back, we hit the discrete barrier of the so-called quantum gravity limit, when space-time curvature is in the order of the uncertainty principle, prior to gravity being formally quantised.

SIEGEL: But things get really interesting if we look back at our idea of "the beginning." Whereas a universe with matter and/or radiation - what we get with the hot Big Bang - can always be extrapolated back to a singularity, an inflationary universe cannot. Due to its exponential nature, even if you run the clock back an infinite amount of time, space will of time, space will only approach infinitesimal sizes and infinite temperatures and densities; it will never reach it. This means, rather than inevitably leading to a singularity, inflation absolutely cannot get you to one by itself. The idea that "the universe began from a singularity, and that's what the Big Bang was," needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today. This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity - and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since - is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there's a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

REEVES: Yes, I get the point: Running a positive exponent exponential backwards means that it never reaches that mathematically mysterious singularity.  And yes we may well need to jettison the singularity postulate. I for one regard it as ontologically suspicious and unlikely to be physical.

My Comment: At the big bang, the universe inflated with astounding rapidity, but we don't know what set up the conditions for the big bang. We know about the big, but not exactly what caused the bang, because we don't know everything about what inflated the inflation. What they call cosmic inflation is supposed to have lasted only a trillionth of a second, and is supposed to be an even more rapid event than the big bang itself. And then there is conjecture about what they call a 'reheating' process, where the relatively cooler matter became hot enough to bang and set the universe in motion. Whichever way we cut the cloth, the beginning of the universe required extreme energy, and astounding mathematical complexity in the initial conditions.

Moreover, I think some physicists are being a bit slippery here, talking about what's prior to the big bang here. Considering what short timescales we are dealing with here, in terms of kickstarting the universe, they can for all intents and purposes be treated as two parts of the same event. Furthermore, the singularity or cause of the universe is ultimately theological in nature. Being physical beings, we are locked in physical descriptions of science - and it seems certain that we can only wind the clock back 14 billion years to the very hot & dense big bang, beyond which we stop describing reality using a physics we've been built to understand. This is compounded by the fact that time itself is measured using the physical ticks provided by the material substrate (such as vibrations), and given that gravity modifies these ticks by slowing them to zero, time for us reaches a cul-de-sac at t=0 because there is no up and running physical standard by which it can be measured (the cosmic microwave background provides limited data on this as it only extends back to just after the big bang, and even future sophisticated particle accelerators are unlikely to ever reach the astronomical energies needed to recapitulate the very early universe).

SIEGEL:  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how - or even whether - the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn't the beginning we once supposed it to be.

REEVES: Yes, I can accept Siegel's talk about our ignorance: in fact Siegel himself doesn't comment on two outstanding questions: Viz: What provides the energy for inflation? The nearest he gets to this question is a reference to a the cosmological constant which is another patch-in not greatly different to patching in initial conditions to fix the problems. The other baffling issue is this: As we follow the shrinking exponential of inflation back in time there comes a point where the scales of gravity and quantum theory collide: What happens then?   But quoting Siegel once more we've at least got this to hang onto: The [Big Bang] picture is still largely correct, but there's a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it. So further extrapolation beyond the hot big bang period is an extrapolation into the dark unknown. Therefore, apart from speculation on all sides, I guess that is how the situation will remain for some time to come. As I said in my last post on Big Bang: People still hanker and yearn after the idea that there was something  before the big bang. But what was it? Was it God or just more  algorithmically compressible bytes and bits?  It might help when the incommensurability of gravitational theory and quantum theory is sorted.

My Comment: As above, I think any notion of before the big bang is so distinctly minuscule that it's ostensibly part of the same physical process - where, what sits outside of it, belongs in the realms of the mathematical algorithms that bootstrap the event, and ultimately thoughts in God's mind. The upshot is, not only do we reach a natural limit with physics, we also have every reason to believe that the physics we have been bestowed is expressed with Intelligence at the heart of its mathematical engine. As mathematics is more primary than physics, then the way we view quantum mechanics is as a form of mathematical information signalling that channels a form of random walk, but in a way in which it imposes a restriction (a mathematical bias, described in this blog post) on the combinatorial search space in which the walk can take place - a bit like putting up barriers in a city so when the drunk man stumbles out of the pub he has restricted pathways that favour a route in which he will eventually find his hotel. As I said in my book on God's Genius:

"This is a truly astonishing element for God to have incorporated into creation. It's so profound that we have to ask: which is real, the practical limit on the physics of the body, or the infinite equations that embed the reality? And here we return to the primacy of mathematics, in that the physical truths are accurate through the physical lens, and the theoretical parts (zeros, infinities, and difficult to interpret negative numbers) tap us into the more complex reality of mathematics that exists over and above the physical universe. This is a mindblowing example of how we dance with the finite and the eternal in one complex embrace. What the above shows is that we are forced to dance with eternity. Here's another one to consider; take the example of gravitational singularities in black holes. Suppose an object was approaching the black hole; the object would be torn apart by tidal forces. As the debris settled into the event horizon, time would pass much more slowly for the stuff than it passes for an outside observer of the stuff. But then the debris would be trapped in a 'forever falling around the hole' situation, never making it into the hole, because time becomes distorted at the event horizon and approaches infinity as a limit (for anything to happen in the event horizon). This propounding shows another clear discontinuity between the theoretical and the actual; terms like 'event horizon' and even 'infinity' or even time coming to a stand still at c cannot really be literally true in a finite spatio-temporal cosmos. They are only useful as theoretical approximations, not as actual facts about physical reality. Although current physics does come up with two infinities in the form of gravitational singularities and in re-normalisation in quantum field theory, this involves the hypothetical subtraction of one infinity from another, so it is only applicable as a concept of ideals rather than as practically useful in dealing with nature. There are no such things as physical infinities. Imagination is not merely a way of transcending reality - the imagined is our ability to dance with a part of reality at an eternal conceptual level, where the real and the imagined lock horns and give us a glimpse of a greater reality outside of spacetime, and of what is to come."

An Evening With The Philosophical Muser #1 - God's Genius

Given that the spoken word has became such a prominent source of online communication in recent years, I thought it would be interesting to invite some guests to have a chat, record them, and put the videos on YouTube. Here is the first one, with my guests Terry Houser, Nina Russ and Conor Duffy:

For future reference, you'll be able to access all these videos in the link below under My Other Writing:

Writer's Update: It's Been A While

Greetings, it seems like ages since we said hello. As I write this, I've realised that this blog is approaching its 10th birthday. If it were a human, it would probably be wondering whether it was happy with its gender, and be convincing itself that to have any chance of reversing the impending planetary doom its parents must rally to get rid of that ghastly secretion called carbon. But I digress.

Thank you for joining me today, on what is post number 737 on the Philosophical Muser's journey in blogosphere. I think overall my blog has settled into a pretty good steady state. I'm averaging about 3,000 hits a month and I'm hardly producing anything new, for which I'm grateful. My blog-writing paucity has been largely down to the fact that I've been working on the final edits of two more books - which means I'm pleased to say that I have now finished the first drafts of four books from my list of books to do. It feels so good to have ticked the first four off:

A book about Christianity called The Genius of the Invisible God P

An epistolary of wisdom and general philosophies for life P

A book on morality P

A comprehensive book on economics P

A book about love

A book about Christianity called The Economics of being a Christian

A book called Marvin The Supercomputer, based on a massive thought experiment

A book on psychology and human behaviour

A book on fundamentalism ,cults and other dangerous in-group tribalisms

A couple (maybe three) of books of essays comprising the material that doesn't belong in any of the above

There are plenty of scraps that didn't make the books, and some of that will make good blogging material, so you might see a rise in new material published, especially as the drive to carry on with the others is still alive. I suppose writing is a little like Lord Wotton’s remark in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray about a cigarette being the perfect type of pleasure, because it is exquisite but yet it leaves one unsatisfied. A pleasure that leaves you satisfied is one that ceases to be a pleasure the moment it stops. In terms of physical responses, sex and food are of this kind. Right after you’ve had either, the last thing you immediately want is more (This was brilliantly phrased by Shakespeare in one of his sonnets – “Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, past reason hated”). 

Writing (for me at least), on the other hand, has usually been like the opposite of sex and food, in that the more one engages with it the more exquisitely satisfying it becomes. I suppose that’s because writing is an extension of thinking, and thinking is one of those delights that just keeps opening up new vistas and horizons in one’s cognition, reminding us that even with a full life our actual time on earth is dwarfed by our aspired achievements.  

In other news, I'm also going to be making a foray into the area of publishing videos, which is exciting, so watch this space! 

The Seven Real Reasons for Unbelief

If Christians are to make a significant evangelical difference in the lives of atheists, it will help to understand more about the real reasons that people are not Christians. Don't assume the plausibility of what you hear superficially, because things on the surface are rarely everything they seem. Atheists like to give us a multitude of so-called intellectual reasons why they claim to not believe in God - but I think this needs exploring further, because I believe it is built on self-deception.

Even a reasonably competent thinker can discover with a little effort that there are no scientific or reason-based arguments against God. Even though most atheists claim their position to be based on philosophical and empirical grounds, the reality is, there is nothing in these categories that provides reasonable ground for disbelief in God. To think otherwise is to fool oneself with a cheat. Believing that you're an atheist because of rational persuasion and a well thought out set of views merely provides a cushion to the psychology that drives the beliefs.

I believe that if we could drill down right into the heart of why unbelievers are not Christian - the real reasons apart from what people claim on the surface - we would find that they are based on a combination of the following seven reasons:

1) Inadequate knowledge or consideration of the propositions
This is far and away the biggest reason why people are not Christians; for them, the Christian faith is simply not something they have ever explored properly or learned about, and its central tenets have never been deeply contemplated. All of us not born into a Christian household can recall a time when we were significantly unapprised of the basics so as to have only a trivial regard for what Christianity offers us. But although this is the biggest cause of unbelief, there are many who have a fair understanding of Christianity and still claim not to believe. For those people, numbers 2-7 are more prominent.

2) Unwilling to become the person Christ wants us to become
This one applies to those who understand enough of the faith to fear it and be apprehensive about it, but who have done a fair job of suppressing those realisations so they don't have to undergo any radical transformations. I know this feeling as well - to begin to realise that becoming a Christian is going to involve life-changing standards and improvements we've not yet attempted, and accountability and responsibility of which we've never felt the full force - it's pretty unnerving - and it's little wonder that so many people stay in the comfort zone of their own much less challenging moral system. To use an analogy; Christ wants to take our house and help us refurbish it, and eventually turn it into a palace, whereas left to our devices, we think we are quite happy with just a light spring clean every now and then.

3) Pride, ego and narcissism: the need for status over substance
People love being lord of their life, they love to court status, seek prestige, covet admiration, behave as they want, make rules that suit themselves, and find comfort in superficial approval - this stuff really matters to people, and it's not easy for them to give it over to pursuits with more meaning and substance. I've known people who have admitted that they think Christianity is probably true, but they are not willing to sacrifice their idols for religious discipline just yet. Giving up things that are going to be futile in the end is not an easy thing to do when the pleasures are so immediately satisfying.

4) Too many other priorities in life
This is linked to number 3, and often number 1 - but for a great many people, the everyday priorities of life (relationship, family, home, job, career, hobbies, health) are just so consuming on their time, energy and resources that religious considerations just don't get a look in.

 5) The PR problem of Christianity
There are those who have a reasonable understanding of Christianity, and regard for its core strengths, but make an easy excuse not to explore further on the basis of some of the whacky, extreme, nonsensical and sectarian elements of the faith. There will be elements of 2, 3 and 4 in this too. Sometimes the church makes it too easy for potential members of the ecclesia to disregard it.

 6) A personal psychological barrier
For this group, there is some underlying issue - to do with guilt, past traumatic legacies, sexuality, parental upbringing, disability, and so forth - that acts (either consciously or subconsciously) as a barrier to further exploration of the faith.

 7) They've never been asked or invited
This is a very interesting group. Think about it - there are lots of potential Christians out there that no one is reaching out to - people who would accept what Christ is offering if only they were exposed to some good hearted Christians.

 (To some extent numbers 2-7 are also likely to contain elements of number 1 too)

I think it will do both Christians and non-Christians a lot of good to contemplate those human factors that act as barriers to belief. People are forever telling us why they don't believe, and they usually try to justify their unbelief with a suite of argumentation around science or philosophy or rational viewpoints. But these arguments are not why they don't believe; they are a mask used to conceal the real causalities listed above. It is for this reason as well that you can never talk an atheist out of their unbelief using the same language they use to defend it. There is no argument that will ever persuade them, because arguments are not the cause of their unbelief.

I hope that the identification of these states of mind can help bring about helpful dialogue about what people are really thinking - because it can do a lot of good for progress if folk who are predominated by these positions can learn to identify the deception and stultification those standpoints prolong. Understanding these seven principal factors gives us a route into the heart and the psychology of a person; into fears, insecurities and barriers.