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Standing firm on creationA number of people have now been warning against Denis Alexander’s Creation or Evolution: do we have to choose? Both theologically and scientifically, this book is seriously in error. The theological issues are dealt with elsewhere (Evangelical Times, October 2008, ‘The Downgrade Controversy of the 21st Century’), and see EN, November 2008, ‘Rescuing Darwin or Wrecking the Faith?’. In this article I concentrate on two major scientific issues — information and thermodynamics. 1. Information in living systemsWhere Alexander and those of an evolutionary viewpoint are at their weakest is in the scientific debate concerning the very nature of information in living systems. Walter ReMine’s The biotic message, Thaxton and Bradley’s The mystery of life’s origin and the classic volume by Werner Gitt, In the beginning was information, are all books which deal with this issue from a creation perspective. It is very notable that Alexander avoids addressing the issue entirely. Gitt’s work shows that information has five levels of operation, all of which indicate that information is essentially non material and yet no less real. Here we just stress two levels which make the basic point. Information uses a language or code to transmit a message. The code can be any consistent set of noises for verbal communication or letters / alphabet / symbols for a written language. Whatever the code used, the code is not defined by the material on which it is written or the medium through which the communication is made. The air through which verbal communication passes does not define the information. Neither does the tympanic membrane of the ear or the tongue or larynx of the speaker. The paper and ink does not define the code used in a book and neither does the computer and electronic disk define the coded information contained within them. Furthermore, the message expressed using a language or code is not defined by the code used. The English code is being used for this article, but if I was proficient in French the same thoughts could have been expressed in that rich language. It could have been expressed in Chinese, where the alphabet itself bears no resemblance to the English and French. Would that have affected the message? No, not in principle. The message transcends the code or language used. DNA’s messageThis is profoundly the case for the DNA encoded message in every living cell of our bodies. The very presence of message at the lowest level shows that there is a non material aspect to all living systems. It is at this point that Crick and Watson, in their brilliant discovery in 1953, failed to follow through the implications. Romans 1.20 states: ‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse’. The intelligent design / creation position, which Alexander rejects, is based on the science not of what we don’t know (Alexander often tries to caricature our position as ‘God of the gaps’) but of what we do know. When one looks at the DNA system of communication, it profoundly shows that there must be intelligence involved behind such a system. The irony is that Michael Faraday, after whom Alexander named the Faraday Institute at Cambridge, referred to exactly the same point, granted not in living systems but in his brilliant research in electromagnetism. Speaking at a lecture in 1847, he said: ‘…And therefore our philosophy [here used as we would now say ‘our science’], whilst it shows us these things, should lead us to think of him who hath wrought them; for it is said by an authority far above even that which these works present, that “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead”’.1 This shows that intelligent design far from being non-science, as, sadly, Alexander advocates, is very much at the heart of mainstream science and has been for many centuries. 2. ThermodynamicsInformation is closely related to the discipline of thermodynamics. Alexander’s sweeping statements on pages 138-139 of his book, that the biological machinery of life could arise by natural selection operating on mutations, shows that he has not grasped the fundamental nature of these laws. The experimental findings of science are that natural selection has no power to create new functional structures. That is, though natural selection, as the name suggests, does show that devices which already are inherently in a system can be selected for, there is no possibility of placing new systems or obtaining new information for such systems by this process. In summary, natural selection does not increase information and does not build new types of machines (either as sub machines or in embryonic form). The reason for this is that the principles of thermodynamics, do not allow a new functional biological structure to be achieved without such machinery in some generic form already being in place. The first law of thermodynamics is the principle of conservation of energy, which means that no energy is either created or destroyed. The second law states that in an isolated system the entropy will always increase in any non equilibrium process. Entropy is dissipated energy (measured as energy per unit degree of temperature) which is no longer available to do work. This then is energy ‘lost’ to the system and means that the energy available to do useful work is always running down in an isolated system. However, the principle of energy loss for useful work still applies to closed systems (where energy transfer to the outside is allowed), and even to open systems (where mass transfer is allowed as well). New machineryIn order to make new machinery, as advocated by the evolutionary beliefs of many scientists today, it is vital to have energy available to do work in a series of precise actions2. Many have suggested that by just adding energy from the sun, new machines can readily be made and that as soon as one moves into the notion of non-isolated systems, the thermodynamics is in favour of evolutionary thinking. Professor Dawkins did this famously when speaking to the author on a programme on Radio Ulster in December 20063. However, just appealing to the notion of adding energy from the sun, solves nothing since there is no benefit unless there is a machine to use the energy added. Boeing 777s cannot be made in a car factory by adding loads of sunlight or electricity unless the machinery is available to use that energy to build Boeing 777s. Similarly the human brain cannot be formed from simpler machines just by adding energy if there is no machinery available to do this. Spontaneous forming of such machinery will not happen. Device which worksIn this discussion we are taking the term ‘machine’ to be referring in a very precise way to mean a device for using energy to do work of some kind. Energy without machines just dissipates (the sun’s energy would be typical). But a machine in this definition harnesses energy to advantage: so a solar cell turns the suns rays into electricity; a Rolls Royce Trent gas turbine turns chemical energy into thrust to power aircraft; the chlorophyll reaction in a plant leaf uses sunlight to enable the plant to grow and absorb carbon dioxide while emitting oxygen; the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) motor in living organisms transfers energy from food and respiration into useable energy to drive the cell machinery of DNA, ribosomes, amino acids and protein building, etc. In this sense, all machines are entropy-lowering devices. But, unlike macro machines, chemical machinery at the molecular level involves setting up proteins of hundreds and usually thousands of polypeptide bonds linking a string of amino acids. And each of these bonds is in a raised energy state such that, left to itself, it would break down and not stay in that state. To suggest, as some are saying, that the raised energy state would be maintained while natural selection favoured, over many generations, single random mutations, one by one, to finally bring together the full complement of necessary amino acids is, frankly, thermodynamically absurd. This is never observed and is contrary to all thermodynamic principles of energy transfer. New machines are not made by simply adding energy to existing machines. Intelligence is needed. And this thesis is falsifiable. If anyone was to take an existing chemical machine and produce a different chemical machine which was not there before (either as a sub-part or latently coded for in the DNA template), then this argument would have been falsified. No one has ever achieved this. In the excellent book by Wilder-Smith called The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution, on page 146, he summarises the argument from Thermodynamics: ‘Today it is simply unscientific to claim that the fantastically reduced entropy of the human brain, of the dolphin's sound lens, and of the eye of a fossilised trilobite simply ‘happened’, for experimental experience has shown that such miracles just do not “happen”.’ No one has ever gainsaid the wisdom of Wilder-Smith in this regard. Straw manAlexander turns the intelligent design argument into a straw man, claiming that it simply amounts to a ‘God of the gaps’ hypothesis. But he fails to understand the design position. Evolution is a paradigm within which evolutionary biologists seek to explain their findings. Contrary to Alexander’s assertions, the Design position is also a paradigm — an alternative to the evolutionary framework and one which often provides superior descriptions of biological systems. The Design argument cannot be a God-of-the-gaps argument because it is based on what we know, not what we don’t know. The design thesis now gaining ground in the scientific world is precisely the reverse of Alexander’s perception — the gaps arise in the just-so stories of the evolutionary camp. What can be understood from ‘the things that are made’ testifies to the awesome power of the Creator. The author is Professor of Thermodynamics at the University of Leeds and writes this in a private capacity. References © Evangelicals Now - December 2008 |