|
MATTER
AND CHANCE
The
argument we have so far brought forward against the
view that natural laws and causes are self-existent,
self-sustaining, even, in some sense, eternal, holds
true for related views which attribute creativity to
chance and matter.
Matter
is obviously changeable and susceptible to external
interventions; it cannot be eternal or capable of
origination. Also, matter is deaf, blind, lifeless,
ignorant, powerless, and unconscious; how can it be
the origin of sensible life, knowledge, power and
consciousness? It is evident that something cannot
impart to others what it does not possess.
When
there is in the universe such abundant
evidence of purposive arrangement,
organization and harmony, it is irrational to
speak of chance or coincidence as its cause.
Whether
defined according to the principles of classical
physics or new physics, matter is obviously
changeable and susceptible to external
interventions; it cannot be eternal or capable of
origination. Also, matter is deaf, blind, lifeless,
ignorant, powerless, and unconscious; how can it be
the origin of sensible life, knowledge, power and
consciousness? It is evident that something cannot
impart to others what it does not possess.
When
there is in the universe such abundant evidence of
purposive arrangement, organization and harmony, it
is irrational to speak of chance or coincidence as
its cause. There are 60 million million cells in a
human body and a single cell contains about one
million proteins. The possibility of a protein
occurring by chance are infinitesimally small.
Without One who has the power of choice to prefer
its existence and the absolute power to create, it
who has an absolute, all-comprehensive knowledge to
pre-arrange its relations with other proteins, with
the cell and all parts of the body and place it just
where it must be, the existence of a single protein
is not possible. It is when they admit this One-God,
the Creator of all things-that the sciences will
find their true course. (One day they will have to
do so).
The
following simple scientific experiment, reported in
Discover, 20 August 1993, will help in understanding
this significant argument:
Overbeck
and his co-workers at the Baylor College of
Medicine in Houston were trying to practice
some gene therapy techniques by seeing if they
could convert albino mice into colored ones.
The researcher injected a gene essential to
the production of the pigment melanin into the
single-cell embryo of an albino mouse. Later
they bread that mouse’s offspring, half of
which carried the gene on one chromosome of a
chromosome pair. Classic Mendelian genetics
told them that roughly a quarter of the
grandchildren should carry the gene on both
chromosomes- should be ‘homozygous’, in
the language of genetics- and should therefore
be colored.
But
the mice never got a chance to acquire color.
‘The first thing we noticed,’ says
Overbeck, ‘was that we were losing about 25
% of the grandchildren within a week after
they were born.’ The explanation:
The
melanin-related gene that his group injected
into the albino mouse embryo had inserted
itself into a completely unrelated gene. An
unfamiliar stretch of DNA in the middle of a
gene wrecks that gene’s ability to get its
message read. So in the mice, it seems
whatever protein the gene coded for went
unproduced, whatever function the protein had
went undone, and the stomach, heart, liver,
and spleen all wound up in the wrong place.
Somehow, too, the kidneys and pancreas were
damaged, and that damage is apparently what
killed the mice.
Overbeck
and his colleagues have already located the
gene on a particular mouse chromosome and are
now trying to pin down its structure. That
will tell them something about the structure
of the protein the gene encodes, how the
protein works, and when and where it is
produced as the gene gets ‘expressed’, or
turned on, ‘Is the gene expressed
everywhere, or just on the left side of the
embryo or just on the right side?’ Overbeck
wonders, ‘And when does it get expressed?’
These
questions will take Overbeck far from the
gene-transfer experiment. ‘We think there
are at least 100,000 genes,’ he points out,
‘so the chances of this happening were
literally one in 100,000.’
There is no trial and error in creation
It
will take many thousands of tests therefore, and
cost the lives of many thousands of mice, for this
type of experiment to be carried out with success.
However, there is no trial and error in nature, and
any seed under earth, unless some impediment like
lack of enough moisture intervenes, germinates and
ultimately becomes a tree. Likewise, an embryo in
the mother’s womb grows into a living, conscious
being equipped with intellectual and spiritual
faculties.
The
human body is a miracle of symmetry, as well as of
asymmetry. Scientists know how an embryo develops in
the womb to form this symmetry and asymmetry, but
they are completely ignorant of how the particles -
the particles that reach the embryo through the
mother and function as building blocks in the
formation of the body - can distinguish between
right and left, how they are able to determine the
place of each organ, how each goes and inserts
itself in the exact place of a certain organ, and
how they understand the extremely complicated
relations among cells and organs, and their
requirements. This is so complicated a process that
if a single particle which should be placed in, for
example, the pupil of the right eye, were to go to
the ear, it could lead to malfunction or even death.
Another point concerning this is that all animate
beings are made from the same elements coming from
earth, air and water, and similar to one another
with respect to the members and organs of their
bodies, yet they are almost completely different
from one another with respect to bodily features,
visage, character, desires and ambitions. This
uniqueness of the individual is so reliable that one
can be identified absolutely by one’s finger
prints.
Whatever exists gives the message: “Either
each ‘particle’ possesses almost infinite
knowledge, will and power or One who has such
knowledge, power and will creates and
administers each particle.”
How
do we explain this? There are the two alternatives
we mentioned at the beginning: either each particle
possesses almost infinite knowledge, will and power
or One who has such knowledge, power and will
creates and administers each particle. However far
back we go in an attempt to ascribe this to cause
and effect and heredity, these two alternatives
remain valid.
Even
if the existence of the universe is attributed o
some entity other than God-to evolution or causality
or nature or matter or coincidences and necessity-no
one can deny that everything displays, though its
coming into existence, its subsistence and death, an
all-comprehensive knowledge, and an absolute power
and determination. As we saw in the experiment
referred to above, a single misplaced or misdirected
gene, may suffice to ruin or prevent life. The
interconnectedness of everything, from galaxies to
atoms, is a reality into which every new entity
enters and wherein it must know its unique place and
function. And is there not a further demonstration
of the existence and free operation of an
all-comprehensive knowledge, and absolute power and
will, that particles made up of the same
bio-chemical constituents should be able to produce
through the subtlest adjustments in their pattern of
mutual relationships, entities and organisms which
are unique? Is it satisfactory to explain this as
heredity or coincidence, seeing that all such
explanations again rest upon the same
all-encompassing knowledge, absolute power and will?
We must not be misled by the apparent fact
that everything happens according to a certain
program or plan o process of causes. This
process of causes is a veil spread over the
flux of the universe, the ever-moving stream
of events.
We
must not be misled by the apparent fact that
everything happens according to a certain program or
plan or process of causes. This process of causes is
a veil spread over the flux of the universe, the
ever-moving stream of events. The ‘laws of nature’
which may be inferred from this process of causes
have a nominal, not a real and concrete existence.
Unless we attribute to nature the attributes we would
normally attribute to the Creator of nature, we must
accept that it is, in essence and reality, a
printing mechanism, not a printer, a design, not a
designer, a passive recipient, not an agent, an
order, not an orderer, a collection of nominal laws,
not a power. The same argument holds if, in place of
‘nature’, we choose the terms ‘matter’ or
(the preference of French biologist Jacques Monod)
‘coincidence and necessity’.*
*Suppose
you take ten pennies and mark them from 1 to
10. Put them in your pocket and give them a
good shake. Now try to draw them out in
sequence from 1 to 10, putting each coin back
in your pocket after each draw. Your chance of
drawing No. 1 is 1 in 10. Your chance of
drawing 1 and 2 in succession would be 1 in
100. Your chance of drawing 1, 2, and 3 in
succession would be 1 in a thousand. Your
chance of drawing 1, 2, 3, and 4 in succession
would be 1 in 10,000 and so on, until your
chance of drawing from No. 1 to No. 10 in
succession would reach the unbelievable figure
of one chance in 10 billion.
The
object in dealing with so simple a problem is
to show how enormously figures multiply
against chance.
So
many essential conditions are necessary for
life on our earth that it is mathematically
impossible that all of them could exist in
proper relationship by chance on any one earth
at one time. Therefore, there must be in
nature some form of intelligent direction. If
this be true, then there must be a purpose.
(Morrison, op. cit., p. 13)
The purpose, harmony and interrelatedness in
existence
In
order to understand better why blind, deaf, inert,
unconscious, and ignorant chance, nature and causes
cannot have any part in existence, we had better see
more closely the purpose, harmony and
interrelatedness in creation and therefore observe
some plain facts. Again, Morrison draws our
attentions to some of these facts:
The
bulk of the earth in now reduced to very
permanent dimensions and its mass has been
determined. Its speed in its orbit around the
sun is extremely constant. It rotation on its
axis is determined so accurately that a
variation of a second in a century would upset
astronomical calculations. Had the bulk of the
earth greater or less, or had its speed been
different, it would have been farther from or
nearer to the sun, and this different
condition would have profoundly affected life
of all kinds, including man.
The
earth rotates on its axis in twenty-four hours
or at the rate of about one thousand miles an
hour. Suppose it turned at the rate of a
hundred miles an hour. Why not? Our days and
nights would then be ten times as long as now.
The hot sun of summer would then burn up our
vegetation each long day and every sprout
would freeze in such a night. The sun, the
source of all life, has a surface temperature
of 12,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and our earth is
just far enough away so that this “eternal
fire” warms us just enough and not too much.
If the temperature on earth had changed so
much as fifty degrees on the average for a
single year, all vegetation would be dead and
man with it, roasted or frozen. The earth
travels around the sun at the rate of eighteen
miles each second. If the rate of revolution
had been, say, six miles or forty miles each
second, we would be too far from or too close
to the sun for our form of life to exist.
The
earth is tilted at an angle of twenty-three
degrees. This gives us our seasons. If it had
not been tilted, the poles would be in eternal
twilight. The water vapor from the ocean would
move north and south, piling up continents of
ice and leaving possibly a desert between the
equator and the ice.
The
moon is 240,000 miles away, and the tides
twice a day are usually a gentle reminder of
its presence. Tides of the ocean run as high
as fifty feet in some places, and even the
crust of the earth is twice a day bent outward
several inches by the moon’s attraction. If
our moon was, say, fifty thousand miles away
instead of its present respectable distance,
our tides would be so enormous that twice a
day all the lowland of all the continents
would be submerged by a rush of water so
enormous that even the mountains would soon be
eroded away, and probably no continent could
have risen from the depths fast enough to
exist today. The earth would crack with the
turmoil and the tides in the air would create
daily hurricanes.
Had
the crust of the earth been ten feet thicker,
there would be no oxygen, without which animal
life is impossible; and had the ocean been a
few feet deeper, carbon dioxide and oxygen
would have been absorbed and vegetable life on
the surface of the land could not exist. If
the atmosphere had been much thinner, some of
the meteors which are now burned in the outer
atmosphere by the millions every day would
strike all parts of the earth.
Oxygen
is commonly placed at 21 per cent [in the
atmosphere]. The atmosphere as a whole presses
upon the earth at approximately fifteen pounds
on each square inch of surface at sea level.
The oxygen which exists in the atmosphere is a
part of this pressure, being about three
pounds per square inch. All the rest of the
oxygen is locked up in the form of compounds
in the crust of the earth and makes up 8/10 of
all the waters in the world. Oxygen is the
breath of life for all land animals and is for
this purpose utterly unobtainable except from
the atmosphere.
The
question arises how this extremely active
chemical element escaped combination and was
left it the atmosphere in the almost exact
proportion necessary for practically all
living things. If, for instance, instead of 21
per cent oxygen were 50 per cent or more of
the atmosphere, all combustible substances in
the world would become inflammable to such an
extent that the first stroke of lightning to
hit a tree would ignite the forest, which
would almost explode... If free oxygen, this
one part in many millions of the earth’s
substance, should be absorbed, all animal life
would cease.
When
a man breathes, he draws in oxygen, which is
taken up by the blood and distributed through
his body. This oxygen burns his food in every
cell very slowly at a comparatively low
temperature, but the result is carbon dioxide
and water vapor, so when a man is said to sigh
like a furnace, there is a touch of reality
about it. The carbon dioxide escapes into his
lungs and is not breathable except in small
quantities. It sets his lungs in action and he
takes his next breath throwing into the
atmosphere carbon dioxide. All animal life is
thus absorbing oxygen and throwing off carbon
dioxide. Oxygen is further essential to life
because of its action upon other elements in
the blood as well as elsewhere in the body,
without which life processes would cease.
On
the other hand, as is well known, all
vegetable life is dependent upon the almost
infinitesimal quantity of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere which, so to speak, it
breathes. To express this complicated
photo-synthetic chemical reaction in the
simplest possible way, the leaves of the trees
are lungs and they have the power when in the
sunlight to separate this obstinate carbon
dioxide into carbon and oxygen. In other
words, the oxygen is given off and the carbon
retained and combined with the hydrogen of the
water brought up by the plant from its roots.
By magical chemistry, out of these elements
“nature” makes sugar, cellulose and
numerous other chemicals, fruits and flowers
[all in different smell, taste, color and
shape according to the kind of plant or tree.
Can this infinite difference or variation be
attributed to tiny seeds, blind, ignorant and
unconscious?]. The plant feeds itself and
produces enough more to feed every animal on
earth. At the same time, the plant releases
the oxygen we breathe and without which life
would end in five minutes. So all the plants,
the forests, the grasses, every bit of moss,
and all else of vegetable life, build their
structure principally out of carbon and water.
Animals give off carbon dioxide and plants
give off oxygen. If this interchange did not
take place, either the animal or vegetable
life would ultimately use up practically all
of the oxygen or all of the carbon dioxide,
and the balance being completely upset, one
would wilt or die and the other would quickly
follow.
Hydrogen
must be included, although we do not breathe
it. Without hydrogen water would not exist,
and the water content of animal and vegetable
matter is surprisingly great and absolutely
essential. Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon dioxide,
and carbon, singly and in their various
relations to each other, are the principal
biological elements. They are the very basis
on which life rests.
We
pour infinite variety of substances into this
chemical laboratory-the digestive system,
which is the greatest laboratory of the world-
with almost total disregard of what we take
in, depending on what we consider the
automatic process to keep us alive. When these
foods have been broken down and are again
prepared, they are delivered constantly to
each of our billions of cells, a greater
number than all the human beings on earth. The
delivery to each individual cell must be
constant, and only those substances which the
particular cell needs to transform them into
bones, nails, flesh, hair, eyes, and teeth are
taken up by the proper cell. Here is a
chemical laboratory producing more substances
than any laboratory which human ingenuity has
devised. Here is a delivery system greater
than any method of transportation or
distribution the world has ever known, all
being conducted in perfect order. From
childhood until, say, a man is fifty years of
age, this laboratory makes no serious
mistakes, though the very substances with
which it deals could literally form over a
million different kinds of molecules-many of
them deadly. When the channels of distribution
become somewhat sluggish from long use we find
weakened ability and ultimate old age.
When
the proper food is absorbed by each cell, it
is still only the proper food. The process in
each cell now becomes a form of combustion,
which accounts for the heat of the whole body.
You cannot have combustion without ignition.
Fire must be lighted, and so [you are provided
with] a little chemical combination which
ignites a controlled fire for the oxygen,
hydrogen, and the carbon in the food in each
cell, thus producing the necessary warmth and,
as from any fire, the result is water vapor
and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is
carried away by the blood to the lungs, and
there it is the one thing that makes you draw
in your breath of life. A person produces
about two pounds of carbon dioxide in a day,
but by wonderful processes gets rid of it.
Every animal digests food, and each must have
the special chemicals it individually needs.
Even in minute detail the chemical
constituents of the blood, for instance,
differ in each species. There is, therefore, a
special formative process for each.
In
case of infection by hostile germs, the system
also continuously maintains a standing army to
meet, and usually overcome, invaders and save
the entire structure of the man from premature
death. No such combination of marvels does or
can take place under any circumstances in the
absence of life. And all this is done in
perfect order, and order is absolutely
contrary to chance’ (Morrison, 14, 16-9, 22,
24-7, 76-7).
Does
all this require and point to One Who knows man
thoroughly, with all his needs, environment, and the
mechanism of his body, One Who is the All-Knowing
and able to do whatever He wishes? As, again,
Morrison puts it (p.65), ‘purpose seems
fundamental in all things, from the laws that govern
the universe to the combinations of atoms which
sustain our lives. Atoms and molecules in living
creatures do marvelous things and build wonderful
mechanisms, but such machines are useless unless
intelligence sets them in objective motion. There is
the directive Intelligence which science does not
explain, nor does science dare say it is material.’
|
|
