Why Nature Isn’t God
The concept that life spontaneously appeared from non-life is as old as man’s quest for the nature of his creation. Immediately after the Renaissance of the 1500s, this concept though popular, came under direct attack. Until this period of history the schools of thought were guided by the overreaching philosophy of the times. Science, however, began to make gargantuan strides in the field of discovery of nature and its place in our own human history and it began to make observable discoveries in the investigations of reproduction and the life cycle of living things. Philosophy no longer held sway in the school of measured results from actual performed experiments.
Prior to this period, human origins were directed by two schools of thought, either God or the intuitive, mechanistic mysticism that supposed that merely the movement of matter had in some way created the life that appears upon the Earth. The logical conclusions of empirical thought introduced a third school, and now, no longer was it a matter of Holy writ or biased thinking. Numerous and repeated conclusions began to be drawn as the field of biology investigated life’s origins. They discovered and put forth something now known as the “Law of Biology”, or basically: “life comes from other life”.
This law stipulates that there is something rather special about life, an unusual quality. And this special quality ONLY applies to living things. If you want life, you need OTHER life to get it. Amazingly, and I say that due to the centuries that have passed, this came about as a result of observation. It does make one wonder if indeed there is an intellectual ebb and flow to all of history as surely man had to know this at some time in the past, but lost the impression only to re-discover it again. This was experimental truth, yet despite the obvious logic of it, the school of philosophical thought had lead large numbers of people to believe that life could be spontaneously generated.
The truth of this law is available anywhere you look, in a farm, a park or a laboratory. But do you realize how many of us fail to realize that it is still true? Despite all the magical thinking we are surrounded with, no one has ever produced life from non-life. You and I may read articles somewhere or hear on the news about how life was created in a test tube from chemicals, but although these impressions seem intuitive and possible, they simply aren’t. They are propaganda. No one creates life from non-life.
Naturally of course the experiments that attempt to produce life from non-life fall into two categories. Those that are performed with life and those that are performed without life. When we start with life to create life, we succeed, but that doesn’t count because we know that this is supposed to happen anyway. Succeeding without the use of life is simply an impossibility, because we CAN’T succeed.
Romantic ideas of accidental assembly and inevitable miracles are never true. Modern scientific insight into the nature of biological origins effectively outlaws the idea of self assembly which is needed to create this kind of life form. Certainly, winter can create snowflakes, but in the same way the snowflake cannot survive the summer, nature itself cannot create life. And why is that? It is because Mother Nature herself is “sterile” if you will, perhaps even “impotent”. She loses more than she wins, as the laws of entropy will tell you. What does she lose? She loses information, the information needed to create a whole life form which is tied up in the blue print of that life form’s DNA code.
The greater the complexity of a living object, the more information is needed to describe it. This is an important fact because recent science has shown that the object and it’s describer are separate parts of an overall system, namely our world. We now know that the information contained within the observer’s description of a living thing is important to the entire system. Therefore, any description of something we observe, say for instance your house cat, is as much a part of the overall characteristic of the house cat as is the immediate description of said house cat. So it’s not just whiskers and a tail and a thing that goes meow. The cat is also what you describe it to be, including how Mr. Whiskers makes you feel when he’s around.
This a tough concept to understand but it’s vital if we are to understand correctly the nature of origins of life. It is also fundamental to understanding the laws of the universe. The reason is that each one of these laws is nothing more than our description of how the universe and everything in it behave for US. Our perception of physical reality IS what is real, and the only things we can logically prove to be real are those things which we can observe either directly of indirectly by their effects on objects around them; say for instance something like Dark Matter.
Natural law is ultimately the description of things which we observe, and their behaviors, these are the definitions of what we see the universe to be. Internal information is therefore common to our observation and also to natural law. It ties us directly to physical reality, somewhat like a placenta, if you will. Information is something that intelligence produces and nature loses. Plants, animals and people all had the “code” for what they are to become within them from the beginning and when they finally perish they disassemble into a lesser form with lesser information. Describing the baby in your wife’s tummy will take more work because of it’s current potential and literal makeup to describe than it will take to describe the dust that the baby will ultimately turn into when it is no longer a viable life form. Vast quantities of information were present at the creation of the first life form and science has proven that this information did not originate within nature itself.
So if this is the case, that nature loses information over time, as we see in life and death everyday; the losing being the disintegration from an information state at birth or origin to the non-information state of death is the logical course for any life system to take, and this goes for the overall life system record. But that is NOT what is scientifically observable! Over the fossil record that we can observe, we see life forms increasing in complexity, not narrowing down toward non-information.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates that the increase in life form complexity did not arise from a natural process, and it actually cannot. It would be the height of illogical to see a group of life forms losing information individually while at the same time gaining complexity over time. That’s just crazy talk! Nature’s natural biological processes are designed to dissolve life forms, not to add to their complexity, to say otherwise is to think intuitively and not observationally. It’s a day dream. To accept that natural laws explain life on earth instead of merely describing the observational reality is to practice faith, not fact.
Biochemists may indeed work in a lab with special chemicals they find in living cells, but they can’t make the life itself. Bits and pieces of chemicals under a microscope appear to act in ways that mimic life and they are reported as being tiny parts of a living cell. There are those who even report these chemicals as a piece of life’s proteins. But do these fragments qualify as life?
When we hear about the test tube babies, the experiments require the fertilizing of an egg with sperm. The two components however, come from other life. And what about RNA, the template on which life’s protein is assembled, hasn’t this been made to multiply in a test tube? Some claim this is how life started, but once again the chemistry used here is either done from a source that starts with life or non-life. When done with non-life, the chemical structures created have virtually NO information.
When enzymes are used in the RNA experiment that uses the one that starts with life, they contain information that directs which chemical goes where. Thus a string of chemicals CAN grow in length because the code for doing so is present. But when done with a non-life experiment, the biological structures are sterile, much like the cloned sheep, because the strings of chemicals are short and have limited information, one of those limits being the code for reproduction. This code for reproduction is systematically “locked out” of the coded information over and over again, there is NEVER a time when it does not happen. For some higher reason, there is a code within the code that does not allow for this. Hmmmm.
Scientific data seems to indicate that the universe may indeed be about 13 billion years old, and that may or may not include Earth, and it also stipulates that the universe is about 30 billion light years wide. This being the case, it nevertheless does not leave enough time and distance for the universe to have created all of the information needed to create a single living being. Even the simplest structures contain more information than the entire universe.
What about lightning? Can we shoot lightning through gases and create life? Can we make protein this way? Sorry Frankenstein, but lightning can’t create life anymore than dust storms can make sessnas. The special chemicals chosen for electrical discharge within cells are just that, biological chemical discharges of electricity. Functional biomolecules are chemicals organized to live. They contain information from intelligence, not electricity. Intelligence is the horse that pulls the cart, not the other way around.
When reading about the recent disaster in Haiti, you gained much information from the letters of the article you read due to letters that had been arranged into a readable code, namely your language. But if there had been no organization before hand, you would stare at the article without gaining any information much like a westerner seeing a Japanese website that is all text. (Unless, of course, you can read Japanese.) It’s the way chemicals are ordered that creates protiens, if those chemicals are not ordered in a certain way - THERE IS NO LIFE. Life does not consist of chemicals in a molecule, it is “coded” into a molecule from exterior intelligence. Without that preordained code, you have death, or non-life. Needed information exceeds what nature is able to provide from the inorganic universe.
Natural processes destroy the way things are organized, and therefore they annihilate information. Therefore if life evolved on Earth at the mercy of natural processes, then the fossil record would show a decrease in the complexity of natural structures. This isn’t to say life could NOT have evolved, but it does mean that if life DID evolve, then it utilized a process that included all the information needed from the very beginning. If each of the species originated as the result of the previous one, then the constraints imposed by the sheer magnitude of the information contained in just one human cell disallow nature as the energizing agent. If not, then nature becomes a perpetual motion machine and you would see no increase or decrease of information EVER.
Prior to this period, human origins were directed by two schools of thought, either God or the intuitive, mechanistic mysticism that supposed that merely the movement of matter had in some way created the life that appears upon the Earth. The logical conclusions of empirical thought introduced a third school, and now, no longer was it a matter of Holy writ or biased thinking. Numerous and repeated conclusions began to be drawn as the field of biology investigated life’s origins. They discovered and put forth something now known as the “Law of Biology”, or basically: “life comes from other life”.
This law stipulates that there is something rather special about life, an unusual quality. And this special quality ONLY applies to living things. If you want life, you need OTHER life to get it. Amazingly, and I say that due to the centuries that have passed, this came about as a result of observation. It does make one wonder if indeed there is an intellectual ebb and flow to all of history as surely man had to know this at some time in the past, but lost the impression only to re-discover it again. This was experimental truth, yet despite the obvious logic of it, the school of philosophical thought had lead large numbers of people to believe that life could be spontaneously generated.
The truth of this law is available anywhere you look, in a farm, a park or a laboratory. But do you realize how many of us fail to realize that it is still true? Despite all the magical thinking we are surrounded with, no one has ever produced life from non-life. You and I may read articles somewhere or hear on the news about how life was created in a test tube from chemicals, but although these impressions seem intuitive and possible, they simply aren’t. They are propaganda. No one creates life from non-life.
Naturally of course the experiments that attempt to produce life from non-life fall into two categories. Those that are performed with life and those that are performed without life. When we start with life to create life, we succeed, but that doesn’t count because we know that this is supposed to happen anyway. Succeeding without the use of life is simply an impossibility, because we CAN’T succeed.
Romantic ideas of accidental assembly and inevitable miracles are never true. Modern scientific insight into the nature of biological origins effectively outlaws the idea of self assembly which is needed to create this kind of life form. Certainly, winter can create snowflakes, but in the same way the snowflake cannot survive the summer, nature itself cannot create life. And why is that? It is because Mother Nature herself is “sterile” if you will, perhaps even “impotent”. She loses more than she wins, as the laws of entropy will tell you. What does she lose? She loses information, the information needed to create a whole life form which is tied up in the blue print of that life form’s DNA code.
The greater the complexity of a living object, the more information is needed to describe it. This is an important fact because recent science has shown that the object and it’s describer are separate parts of an overall system, namely our world. We now know that the information contained within the observer’s description of a living thing is important to the entire system. Therefore, any description of something we observe, say for instance your house cat, is as much a part of the overall characteristic of the house cat as is the immediate description of said house cat. So it’s not just whiskers and a tail and a thing that goes meow. The cat is also what you describe it to be, including how Mr. Whiskers makes you feel when he’s around.
This a tough concept to understand but it’s vital if we are to understand correctly the nature of origins of life. It is also fundamental to understanding the laws of the universe. The reason is that each one of these laws is nothing more than our description of how the universe and everything in it behave for US. Our perception of physical reality IS what is real, and the only things we can logically prove to be real are those things which we can observe either directly of indirectly by their effects on objects around them; say for instance something like Dark Matter.
Natural law is ultimately the description of things which we observe, and their behaviors, these are the definitions of what we see the universe to be. Internal information is therefore common to our observation and also to natural law. It ties us directly to physical reality, somewhat like a placenta, if you will. Information is something that intelligence produces and nature loses. Plants, animals and people all had the “code” for what they are to become within them from the beginning and when they finally perish they disassemble into a lesser form with lesser information. Describing the baby in your wife’s tummy will take more work because of it’s current potential and literal makeup to describe than it will take to describe the dust that the baby will ultimately turn into when it is no longer a viable life form. Vast quantities of information were present at the creation of the first life form and science has proven that this information did not originate within nature itself.
So if this is the case, that nature loses information over time, as we see in life and death everyday; the losing being the disintegration from an information state at birth or origin to the non-information state of death is the logical course for any life system to take, and this goes for the overall life system record. But that is NOT what is scientifically observable! Over the fossil record that we can observe, we see life forms increasing in complexity, not narrowing down toward non-information.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates that the increase in life form complexity did not arise from a natural process, and it actually cannot. It would be the height of illogical to see a group of life forms losing information individually while at the same time gaining complexity over time. That’s just crazy talk! Nature’s natural biological processes are designed to dissolve life forms, not to add to their complexity, to say otherwise is to think intuitively and not observationally. It’s a day dream. To accept that natural laws explain life on earth instead of merely describing the observational reality is to practice faith, not fact.
Biochemists may indeed work in a lab with special chemicals they find in living cells, but they can’t make the life itself. Bits and pieces of chemicals under a microscope appear to act in ways that mimic life and they are reported as being tiny parts of a living cell. There are those who even report these chemicals as a piece of life’s proteins. But do these fragments qualify as life?
When we hear about the test tube babies, the experiments require the fertilizing of an egg with sperm. The two components however, come from other life. And what about RNA, the template on which life’s protein is assembled, hasn’t this been made to multiply in a test tube? Some claim this is how life started, but once again the chemistry used here is either done from a source that starts with life or non-life. When done with non-life, the chemical structures created have virtually NO information.
When enzymes are used in the RNA experiment that uses the one that starts with life, they contain information that directs which chemical goes where. Thus a string of chemicals CAN grow in length because the code for doing so is present. But when done with a non-life experiment, the biological structures are sterile, much like the cloned sheep, because the strings of chemicals are short and have limited information, one of those limits being the code for reproduction. This code for reproduction is systematically “locked out” of the coded information over and over again, there is NEVER a time when it does not happen. For some higher reason, there is a code within the code that does not allow for this. Hmmmm.
Scientific data seems to indicate that the universe may indeed be about 13 billion years old, and that may or may not include Earth, and it also stipulates that the universe is about 30 billion light years wide. This being the case, it nevertheless does not leave enough time and distance for the universe to have created all of the information needed to create a single living being. Even the simplest structures contain more information than the entire universe.
What about lightning? Can we shoot lightning through gases and create life? Can we make protein this way? Sorry Frankenstein, but lightning can’t create life anymore than dust storms can make sessnas. The special chemicals chosen for electrical discharge within cells are just that, biological chemical discharges of electricity. Functional biomolecules are chemicals organized to live. They contain information from intelligence, not electricity. Intelligence is the horse that pulls the cart, not the other way around.
When reading about the recent disaster in Haiti, you gained much information from the letters of the article you read due to letters that had been arranged into a readable code, namely your language. But if there had been no organization before hand, you would stare at the article without gaining any information much like a westerner seeing a Japanese website that is all text. (Unless, of course, you can read Japanese.) It’s the way chemicals are ordered that creates protiens, if those chemicals are not ordered in a certain way - THERE IS NO LIFE. Life does not consist of chemicals in a molecule, it is “coded” into a molecule from exterior intelligence. Without that preordained code, you have death, or non-life. Needed information exceeds what nature is able to provide from the inorganic universe.
Natural processes destroy the way things are organized, and therefore they annihilate information. Therefore if life evolved on Earth at the mercy of natural processes, then the fossil record would show a decrease in the complexity of natural structures. This isn’t to say life could NOT have evolved, but it does mean that if life DID evolve, then it utilized a process that included all the information needed from the very beginning. If each of the species originated as the result of the previous one, then the constraints imposed by the sheer magnitude of the information contained in just one human cell disallow nature as the energizing agent. If not, then nature becomes a perpetual motion machine and you would see no increase or decrease of information EVER.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment