Is OOL Science's road to LUCA really another bridge to nowhere?

Origin-of-Life Researcher Admits, It’s “A Long, Long Way to LUCA”
Evolution News | @DiscoveryCSC

As David Klinghoffer noted briefly here already, a recent paper in Nature Reviews Chemistry, “Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning,” opens with a striking admission. In the article, British biochemist John Sutherland concedes the lack of progress in explaining a naturalistic origin of life. Let’s look at this in some more detail. Sutherland writes:

Understanding how life on Earth might have originated is the major goal of origins of life chemistry. To proceed from simple feedstock molecules and energy sources to a living system requires extensive synthesis and coordinated assembly to occur over numerous steps, which are governed only by environmental factors and inherent chemical reactivity. Demonstrating such a process in the laboratory would show how life can start from the inanimate. If the starting materials were irrefutably primordial and the end result happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to extant biology — for what turned out to be purely chemical reasons, albeit elegantly subtle ones — then it could be a recapitulation of the way that natural life originated. We are not yet close to achieving this end, but recent results suggest that we may have nearly finished the first phase: the beginning. [Emphasis added.]

(John D. Sutherland, “Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning,” Nature Reviews Chemistry, Vol. 1:12 (2017))

Here, Sutherland admits, as others have done, that scientists are nowhere near figuring out how life arose naturally. Later on in the paper he elaborates on just how far away they really are. More on this in a moment, but let’s quickly examine his claim that scientists are “nearly finished” explaining “the first phase” of the origin of life.

Most theorists think that the origin of life will ultimately be explained as a series of steps, including:

The creation of monomers via prebiotic synthesis

The formation of polymers from those monomers

The formation of a self-replicating molecule

The formation of cells to encapsulate those self-replicating molecules

Of course, there are many other steps along the way, but these are the main ones involved. The first two are thought to have involved pure chemistry — what one might call “necessity,” or things bound to happen given the deterministic laws of nature.

The last two steps are considered to be more a matter of contingency. That is, they things that did not have to happen and may have simply occurred due to lucky happenstance. This is because, as we’ll see, forming complex polymers (like RNA) — which scientists are still nowhere near explaining — provides no guarantee that you’ll generate the right sequences of nucleotides in those RNAs to yield a self-replicating molecule.

So what Sutherland claims we’re close to explaining is merely the first step: forming simple organic monomers via chemical reactions that were bound to happen under chemical processes on the early earth. Or were they?

We’ve reviewed Sutherland’s work here at Evolution News in the past. He and his team have focused on how to explain the origin of nucleotides under natural chemical conditions. His research produced some nucleotides. Whether it mimicked plausible conditions that might have existed naturally on the early earth is an entirely different question.

For example, in 2009 he co-authored a paper in Nature purporting to produce activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides under “prebiotically plausible conditions.” An evaluation of his paper showed the conditions weren’t so prebiotically plausible after all. After the New York Times praised Sutherland’s paper, Discovery Institute’s Stephen Meyer wrote a response noting that it “fail[s] to address the fundamental issue that has generated the longstanding impasse in the field: the problem of the origin of biological information.” Later, Meyer observed that “not only does this study not address the problem of getting nucleotide bases to arrange themselves into functionally specified sequences, but the extent to which it does succeed in producing biologically relevant chemical constituents of RNA actually illustrates the indispensable role of intelligence in generating such chemistry.”

In a subsequent post, Casey Luskin asked various pro-ID chemists to review Sutherland’s research. They concluded that Sutherland’s reactions required substantial intelligent intervention and would certainly never occur under blind and unguided natural conditions:

“The starting materials are ‘plausibly’ obtainable by abiotic means, but need to be kept isolated from one another until the right step, as Sutherland admits. One of the starting materials is a single mirror image for which there is no plausible way to get it that way abiotically. Then Sutherland ran these reactions as any organic chemist would, with pure materials under carefully controlled conditions. In general, he purified the desired products after each step, and adjusted the conditions (pH, temperature, etc.) to maximum advantage along the way. Not at all what one would expect from a lagoon of organic soup. He recognized that making of a lot of biologically problematic side products was inevitable, but found that UV light applied at the right time and for the right duration could destroy much (?) of the junk without too much damage to the desired material. Meaning, of course, that without great care little of the desired chemistry would plausibly occur. But it is more than enough for true believers in OOL to rejoice over, and, predictably, to way overstate in the press.”

“They used pH manipulation, phosphate buffers, and irradiation all at the correct times and amounts to achieve their goal, which was to produce ‘activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides.’ Indeed, they could have shortened their title by chopping off the last four words and sent the paper to the Journal of Organic Synthesis and had a good chance of getting it accepted as a novel synthetic route with full credit to themselves for their clever manipulations. Certainly the fingerprints of several intelligent chemists are all over this pathway if not their rather ham-fisted signatures.”

Senior origin-of-life researcher Robert Shapiro chimed in and criticized Sutherland’s work, saying: “Although as an exercise in chemistry this represents some very elegant work, this has nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever….The chances that blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA is highly unlikely.” Meanwhile, a peer-reviewed paper in Accounts of Chemical Research took Sutherland and his team to task for using unrealistic, implausible pathways to generate the nucleotides:

Notwithstanding is merits, Sutherland’s approach is discounted by many in the bio-origins community. It is perhaps easy to see why. In their attempt to avoid the “water problem” for the glycosidic bond, Sutherland et al. drive themselves back into the “asphalt problem.” Their alternative synthesis requires human addition (at the right times) of high concentrations of two carbohydrates, glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde. These carbohydrates are too reactive to accumulate prebiotically, even with borate.

Reviewing Sutherland’s proposed route, Shapiro noted that it resembled a golfer, having played an 18 hole course, claiming that he had shown that the golf ball could have, through some combination of wind, rain, heating, cooling, dehydration, and ultraviolet irradiation played itself around the course without the golfer’s presence.

Perhaps recognizing this, Sutherland and his co-workers wrote, “Although the issue of temporally separated supplies of glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde remains a problem, a number of situations could have arisen that would result in the conditions of heating and progressive dehydration followed by cooling, rehydration and ultraviolet irradiation. Comparative assessment of these models is beyond the scope of this work.”

In Shapiro’s view, the need for “temporally separated supplies of glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde” is more than “a problem…beyond the scope” of this work. It is a fatal flaw.

(Stephen Benner, Hyo-Joong Kim, and Matthew A. Carrigan, “Asphalt, Water, and the Prebiotic Synthesis of Ribose, Ribonucleosides, and RNA,” Accounts of Chemical Research, Vol. 45:2025-2034 (2012))

Then, in 2015 Sutherland co-published a paper in Nature Chemistry purporting to create the precursors of pyrimidine nucleotides in a manner that also produced precursors to amino acids (which build proteins) and lipids. This led the journal Science to excitedly proclaim, “Researchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrum.” But the research had the same problems as before. Again Casey Luskin asked an ID-friendly biochemist to weigh in:

I read the article by Patel et al (2015) that appeared in Nature Chemistry. While it is full of fascinating chemistry, given all of the manipulation of pH, precursor mixes, temperature, metal co-ions, etc., it is beyond the pale to pretend that anything in this paper represents undirected pre-biotic chemistry. The only way this paper represents a solution to origin-of-life issues is for Patel et al. to be time travelers who manipulated the pre-biotic environment to produce the building blocks of life….To claim that the whole suite of “precursors of ribonucleotides, amino acids and lipids can all be derived by the reductive homologation of hydrogen cyanide and some of its derivatives” rests on how one defines what are plausible early Earth conditions. By admitting that the products vary depending upon reaction conditions and metallic co-ions, the idea of a one-pot synthesis is not viable in this scenario. They also stretch the concept of “plausibility” to a new extreme. While it is easy to imagine a series of pools of the appropriate conditions and with the appropriate precursor compounds all feeding into a single pool, it would be wrong to conclude that what we can imagine is science.

In short, from the prebiotic perspective, Sutherland’s research up to now has been implausible. This brings us to his new article in Nature Reviews Chemistry. He candidly discusses the gap between prebiotic chemistry, which happens without enzyme catalysts, and biological chemistry, which uses all kinds of biomolecules to regulate biochemistry:

Biology almost always relies on chemistry that does not proceed efficiently in the absence of catalysis, because this allows chemistry to be regulated by dialling various catalysts up or down. However, most prebiotic chemistry must proceed of its own accord, and this surely suggests that it must generally be different from the underlying chemistry used in biology….Nevertheless, despite the inevitable widespread differences between their individual reactions, prebiotic reaction networks ultimately have to transition into biochemical networks; hence, there must be some similarities between the two, if only at the level that practitioners of synthesis would view as strategic.

Sutherland thus views similarities between biological chemistry and blind, nonbiological (and possibly prebiotic) chemistry as hinting at how biological chemistry arose. As in his 2015 paper, in the 2017 review he outlines a scenario for generating the precursors of nucleotides, amino acids, and lipids. He seems aware that this scenario, requiring a long series of steps and the addition of chemical species at just the right stages, might not be convincing. He sums up his explanation as follows:

Remarkably, when these few reduction reactions are combined with several addition reactions and a dry-state phosphorylation (conditions for which were discovered nearly half a century ago but are still being rediscovered), a reaction network leading from hydrogen cyanide 2 (and a few of its derivatives) to the pyrimidine nucleotides, and to precursors to a dozen amino acids and glycerol phosphate lipids, can be defined. The reactions are all high yielding and lead to little else besides biomolecules or their precursors. It is not definitive proof that the building blocks of biology arose in this way, but it is compelling and indicates that the requirements for these reactions to take place should be used to constrain geochemical scenarios on the early Earth. A requirement for ultraviolet irradiation to generate hydrated electrons would rule out deep sea environments. This, along with strong bioenergetic and structural arguments, suggests that the idea that life originated at vents should, like the vents themselves, remain “In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” The chemistry places certain demands on the environment of the early Earth: for example, the high concentrations of certain species through evaporation of solutions. Supporters welcome these demands as constraints that help refine primitive Earth scenarios. Detractors view them as unacceptable but must surely then demonstrate that other scenarios can be equally productive.

Aside from the fact that Sutherland’s model refutes the ever-popular “hydrothermal vent” hypothesis for the origin of life, don’t miss the last sentence where he commits the “burden of proof” logical fallacy. This basically says that if you view his scenario as “unacceptable” then you can’t dismiss it unless you can produce a scenario that’s better or “equally productive.” This is obviously fallacious: the merits of his hypothesis do not fall or rise on the ability of a given critic to provide a more “productive” explanation. After all, what if the entire project — the attempt to produce biomolecules in the absence of living organisms under natural earthlike conditions — is impossible? If that’s the case, then all explanations of prebiotic synthesis are ultimately doomed to fail, including our “best” attempts. Perhaps the fact that he ends on this note hints that he knows his case isn’t really all that strong.

Indeed, he reassures skeptics, saying: “The resemblance to modern biochemistry might not be obvious to the non-chemist at first, but it is to those with chemical acuity.” That’s another logical fallacy for you — the “genetic fallacy,” which attacks people personally, in this instance for being “non-chemists,” rather than their arguments.

In any case, the scenario of prebiotic synthesis he outlines once again suffers from the problems that his earlier work did. As Robert Shapiro put it, it is “highly unlikely” that “blind, undirected, inanimate chemistry would go out of its way in multiple steps and use of reagents in just the right sequence to form RNA.”

Sutherland’s reference in his paper’s title to “the end of the beginning” means he thinks we’re near the end of explaining how simple biological monomers might have arisen on the early earth in the absence of living organisms. That is step (1) (“the beginning”) in the list above. However, if Shapiro and other critics are correct, then Sutherland is probably still pretty far from the end of the beginning. And even if Sutherland were correct, he admits just how far a full-fledged explanation for step (1) is from explaining the origin of life:

[T]he prebiotic synthesis of building blocks — to which we have devoted so much of our time — only corresponds to a small increase in the complexity of the system and to no increase in its aliveness (a humbling thought).

Figure 3 in his review paper illustrates the distance that origin-of-life theorists must traverse to explain the chemical origin of life and the origin of LUCA — the last universal common ancestor of all living organisms:

Note the box indicating “The current state of the field.” It’s pretty far down the road of things needing to be explained. Thus, even in Sutherland’s overly optimistic view, they haven’t begun to explain how these prebiotic monomers could combine to form larger polymers such as RNA and then begin to explore sequence-space. This is, in his own words,  “A long, long way to LUCA.”

But what if somehow Sutherland et al. could solve all of these problems and could thus produce RNAs via unguided chemical reactions? Benner et al. 2012 (quoted above) point out why this would likely be a dead end for origin-of-life research:

[C]urrent experiments suggest that RNA molecules that catalyze the degradation of RNA are more likely to emerge from a library of random RNA molecules than RNA molecules that catalyze the template-directed synthesis of RNA, especially given cofactors (e.g., Mg2+). This could, of course, be a serious (and possibly fatal) flaw to the RNA-first hypothesis for bio-origins.

That’s a major issue. Even if you can produce random RNA molecules, you’re much more likely to produce RNAs that degrade other RNAs than those that can replicate new ones. This goes back to Stephen Meyer’s original criticism of Sutherland’s work: without intelligence to generate information and properly order nucleotides, you are exceedingly unlikely to get the needed sequences to produce a living, self-replicating organism. Or to put it in Sutherland’s language, only input from an intelligence can allow you to cross the necessity-contingency boundary and produce something that approaches “aliveness,” much less something that is “fully alive.”

In fact, Sutherland seems aware that this is a problem for naturalistic models. As he writes:

However, this synthesis is necessary to put the system on the right path, and knowing the steps that have been taken can give some hints as to the nature of the steps that follow, at least up to a point: the necessity-contingency boundary when the synthesis of macromolecules from multiple monomers reaches the stage in which only a fraction of all possible sequence variants can be sampled owing to the number of possible permutations exceeding the number of molecules.

In other words, even if we explain how to generate lots of RNAs, how do we get the very unlikely sequences that yield living organisms? The answer is staring him and other origin-of-life theorists in the face, but most aren’t willing to see it: In all of our experience with the origin of complex and specified information, only intelligent design can generate the sequence-specific digital information necessary to cross the necessity-contingency boundary and generate a self-replicating living organism.

Proto life and the case for design

Can physics determine whether time had a beginning?

How did the Universe begin?

Is there an origin to time itself, and if so, what did it look like?

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams

It’s only human to ask the most fundamental of all questions: where did all this come from? And we like to think we know the answer; it all came from the beginning.But if you think about it for a little while, that simplistic answer — an answer that at first glance, might appear to be a tautology — presumes something very important about our Universe: that it had a beginning!

For a long time, scientifically, it didn’t appear that we knew whether that was true or not. The Universe could have had a beginning, before which nothing existed (or, at the very least, nothing as we understand it to be), or it could have existed eternally, like an infinite line extending in both directions, or it could have been cyclic like the circumference of a circle, repeating over and over again infinitely.Multiple competing ideas were, for a time, all consistent with the observations. Most prominent among them were the Big Bang (which favored a finite past) and the Steady-State (which favored an infinite past) models, but there was no surefire way to confirm or refute them for a time.

But then, everything changed in the 1960s, when a low-level of microwave radiation was found emanating from all directions in the sky.

This radiation was the same magnitude everywhere, the same in all directions, and just a few degrees above absolute zero. As better data came in, we learned that it followed a blackbody spectrum, and was not only consistent with being the leftover glow from the Big Bang, but was inconsistent with all other alternative explanations. It started to look like there was a beginning after all.Here’s why.According to the Big Bang, the Universe was hotter, denser, more uniform and smaller in the past, and only looks the way it does today because it’s been expanding, cooling, and experiencing gravitation (and gravitational collapse on scales small and large) for so long.Back in the early stages, it was once so hot that even neutral atoms couldn’t form without being blasted apart. Even earlier than that, because radiation’s wavelength stretches as the Universe expands, today’s microwave radiation was so short-wavelength that photons were more energetic than even matter was in the young Universe.And at still earlier times, it was too energetic to form atomic nuclei, or even bound protons and neutrons.

And if we continue extrapolating all the way back, we’d arrive at the beginning, where not only was all of space contracted down to a point, but where we encountered a singularity. At first glance, it appears that it doesn’t even matter what dominates the Universe; a singularity appears inevitable!

Singularities are incredibly interesting, because they’re where the overriding law of gravitation in the Universe — Einstein’s General Relativity — breaks down, and becomes mathematical nonsense. Relativity, remember, is the theory that describes space and time. But at singularities, not only do spatial dimensions cease to exist, but so does time. In other words, asking questions like “what came before this” is as nonsensical as asking “where are we” if you take away space, or “what’s north of the north pole?”

Indeed, this is the argument that Paul Davies — Australia’s Carl Sagan — makes when he claims that there is no “before” the Big Bang, because the Big Bang is where time began. But as interesting as this argument is, we know that the Big Bang isn’t where time began anymore. Because ever since we’ve made modern, detailed measurements of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — in the Big Bang’s leftover glow — we’ve learned that this extrapolation to a singularity is wrong.You see, these patterns of fluctuations can tell us a number of things about the properties of the Universe when it was very young: how much matter was present in protons, neutrons and electrons, what its spatial curvature is, how much dark matter/dark energy there is, how many hot neutrino species there are, etc. But they can also tell us whether there was a maximum temperature the Universe reached back in its early hot, dense, expanding state.According to the data that’s been in since WMAP (and Planck has confirmed it), the Universe “only” ever achieved a maximum temperature of around 10^29 Kelvin. You might think this number is huge, and I’ll grant you that it is pretty big. But it’s still about a factor of 1,000 too small to get the Universe into a state that could possibly become a singularity.

In fact, the particulars of this tell us that not only did time not begin at the Big Bang, but that we know what happened before the Big Bang: there was a period of cosmic inflation, where a tremendous amount of energy intrinsic to space itself dominated the Universe, and it expanded exponentially quickly at a fantastically large rate!But there’s something else that inflation — our best scientific theory as to what preceded the Big Bang (now, possibly, with extra evidence) — tells us about where this all came from that is, perhaps, very surprising. Let’s zoom into that graph I generated earlier of how the Universe grows when it’s dominated by different types of energy.It tells us that rather than a singularity at “t=0”, or where the Big Bang occurred, it tells us that the Universe existed in an inflationary state, or a state where it was exponentially expanding, for an indeterminately long amount of time.Now, there are a wonderful number of new questions that arise with this knowledge:

First, was the inflationary state a constant one? As in, was the Universe inflating at the same rate everywhere and for long periods of time? Or was it inflating in ways that changed very quickly and varied from location-to-location?

Second, did the inflationary state last forever going backwards? Inflation has the potential to be eternal, and in fact we have good reason to believe that — in the majority of parts of the Universe — it is eternal to the future. But what about to the past? Was it always inflating in some form or other, or was there a non-inflationary state preceding it that gave rise to inflation?

Third, we can look at dark energy, today, as form of exponential expansion. Are these two inflationary stages related, and will our dark energy expansion ever give rise to a truly inflation-like stage again, rejuvenating it in some sort of cycle?Observationally, we don’t know the answer to any of this. The Universe we can observe only contains information remaining from the final ~10^-34 seconds (give or take a few orders of magnitude) of inflation; whatever occurred prior to that is wiped out by the nature of inflation. And theoretically, we don’t fare much better. There is a theorem that tells us that an inflationary Universe is past-timelike incomplete: that an ever-expanding Universe must have began from a singularity.

But whether that means an inflating Universe couldn’t have lasted forever or whether that means our current rules of physics are not applicable to figuring out whether it lasted forever, had a beginning or is cyclical are unknown. It’s even possible that time is cyclical, and that the cycles change with each iteration!But even though we can trace back our cosmic history all the way to the moment of the Hot Big Bang, and even before that (a little bit) to the epoch of cosmic inflation, that’s where our knowledge ends.

So thousands of years later, we’re right back to where we started.

Did time have a beginning? We not only don’t have the answer, we don’t have the prospect of observations that could tell us, and our current theories only tell us where our predictive power breaks down, not what the answer is. So we have the same three possibilities that philosophers and theologans have pondered for as long as history has been recorded: time is finite, time is infinite, or time is cyclical. The only thing we know is that if there was a singularity in the past, it didn’t have anything to do with our Hot Big Bang that every particle of matter-and-energy in our observable Universe is traceable to.

And unless we figure out a new way to gain information about what happened before the Universe observable to us existed in any meaningful sense, the answer may forever be beyond the reach of what is knowable.

It's the science stupid.

A bed sheet of cobweb?

Only Humans Understand “Significance”
Wesley J. Smith

Materialists believe that, in the end, we are only so many carbon molecules, signifying nothing. Hence, most deny human exceptionalism, arguing essentiallty that we are just another species in the forest — when they aren’t castigating us as the enemy of the Earth.

Comes now materialist philosopher Nick Hughes of University College Dublin — a self-declared “disenchanted” free-thinking atheist — to declare while it is true from the Universe’s perspective that humanity is utterly insignificant — never mind that a materialistic Universe has no perspective — that doesn’t mean we should despair. From “Do We Matter in the Cosmos?”  published in Aeon.

For the disenchanted, it is hard to deny that our causal powers are insignificant from the point of view of the entire Universe. But should we be troubled by this? Should it lead us to nihilism and despair? I don’t think so. To see why, we need to go back to the issue of value and draw another distinction.

Some of the things that we care about – happiness and human flourishing, for example – are intrinsically valuable to us.

I think Hughes misses a big point. Even if we are merely thinking carbon, our existence itself is inherently valuable. Indeed, only we have the capacity in the known universe to understand — much less contemplate — the concept and importance of “significance.” That is one of the things that makes life worth living.

To put it another way, we are the only true moral beings (again, in the known universe). That — which also implies our unique rationality — is one of the distinctly human attributes that make our existence itself exceptional.

But Hughes can’t see that. He just gives readers an empathetic pat on the back, telling us not to despair because, well, we’ll always have art:

Whether or not they are objectively valuable, the ends that matter to us, the things that we care about most – our relationships, our projects and goals, our shared experiences, social justice, the pursuit of knowledge, the creation and appreciation of art, music and literature, and the future and fate of ours and other species – do not depend to any considerable extent on our having control over a vast but largely irrelevant Universe.

We might be distinctly lacking in power from the cosmic perspective, and so, in a sense, insignificant. But having such power and such significance wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway.

To lament its lack and respond with despair and nihilism is merely a form of narcissism. Most of what matters to us is right here on Earth.

No. It’s not about power. It’s not about cosmic perspectives. Only we understand there is such a thing as the cosmos.

It’s also not what we can do, the art we can create — creativity is another uniquely human attribute — but about who we are inherently. We think, therefore we are. We contemplate meaning, therefore the universe itself comes to have meaning because a species exists that can find it.

Hughes bemoans the authoritarianism that sometimes befouls our thriving. But authoritarianism can only exist when human exceptionalism – our unique and equal individual value, coupled with our duties to each other (among others) — is denied. That’s when those with power feel free to exploit and oppress those they falsely denigrate as being without it.

In his proud disenchantment, Hughes tells us not to despair because there are aspects of life to enjoy until we are snuffed into non-thinking carbon.

That’s a dangerously nihilistic view no matter how much Hughes strives to whistle past the graveyard.

On OOL Science's continuing quest for a free lunch.

Materialist Origin-of-Life Solutions All Depend on a “Free Lunch”
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

This from Nature Reviews Chemistry caught our eye – an unexpectedly candid admission of how far origin-of-life research is from shedding real light on its subject. From “Studies on the origin of life — the end of the beginning,” by John D. Sutherland of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England:

Understanding how life on Earth might have originated is the major goal of origins of life chemistry. To proceed from simple feedstock molecules and energy sources to a living system requires extensive synthesis and coordinated assembly to occur over numerous steps, which are governed only by environmental factors and inherent chemical reactivity. Demonstrating such a process in the laboratory would show how life can start from the inanimate. If the starting materials were irrefutably primordial and the end result happened to bear an uncanny resemblance to extant biology — for what turned out to be purely chemical reasons, albeit elegantly subtle ones — then it could be a recapitulation of the way that natural life originated. We are not yet close to achieving this end, but recent results suggest that we may have nearly finished the first phase: the beginning. [Emphasis added.]

In other words, they’re nowhere near a solution, if purely materialistic processes are taken for granted as the only possible means toward life’s beginning.

And no wonder. As Center for Science & Culture research director Brian Miller explains in a new ID the Future episode with Sarah Chaffee, all the available solutions depend on expectations of a “free lunch.” As we know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

It sounds like that is why, 65 years after the Miller–Urey experiment (see Zombie Science, pp. 50-56), the search for answers is not even past the “beginning” stage. It remains the case that the only known source of the information needed for abiogenesis is intelligence.

In an admirably clear discussion, Dr. Miller debunks some common misunderstandings surrounding the topic. Listen to the podcast here, or download it here.

The kind of extremism this world needs more of II:Irony of ironies.

On the Rube Goldberg approach to design.

Oracle Soup – Dialogue with a Theistic Evolutionist, Continued
Douglas Axe | @DougAxe

This is the third part of my discussion with theistic evolutionist Hans Vodder about my book, Undeniable. I describe the background in the  first post, and I end the  second post by asking Hans to clarify what he means when he says that conditions on the early Earth may have been conducive to biological evolution. Here is his reply:

I used “conditions” as a catch-all term for any physical circumstances relevant to life’s emergence. When I suggested circumstances may have been “conducive to biological evolution,” yes, I roughly meant they may have been sufficient to cause biological evolution. So, I guess I’ve conflated two separate issues here: a) the question of abiogenesis and b) the question of evolutionary development — sorry!

However, I don’t wish to dogmatize. Even though I’m no biologist, I realize that “origin of life” questions have not been settled definitively (as Stephen Meyer has argued in Signature in the Cell). So, I won’t say such conditions actually were conducive to abiogenesis.

My point is far more modest. It is this: even if a completely naturalistic account of life’s origin and development turns out to be true — and I’ve been arguing we can’t rule that out on probabilistic grounds alone — design doesn’t automatically disappear. As Antony Flew put it in his book God and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (p. 71):

“It is…useless to try to dispose finally of the [design] argument with a reference to the achievement of Darwin… [T]he regularities discovered and explained with the help of the theory of evolution by natural selection, like all other regularities in nature, can be just so much more grist to the mill.”

So, even if neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory coupled with some theory of abiogenesis turns out to be completely spot on, that doesn’t obviously remove design (let alone God) from the equation. A universe capable of permitting the evolution of life from non-life would arguably be a remarkable indication of cosmic fine-tuning. So, I don’t think the stakes in the “evolution/design” debate are necessarily as high for theism as is commonly thought.

But the way we think about the divine action across natural/supernatural divide in these contexts is also important. Perhaps we can discuss the Collins quotation to explore these issues further?

Thanks again for clarifying, Hans — very helpful!

You nicely summarized our main point of disagreement by saying you think we can’t rule out a completely naturalistic account of the origin of living things on probabilistic grounds alone. Since I think we can, and this is a major theme of Undeniable, I’d like to unpack this more before we move on.

In my first reply, I used the example of searching blindly for a diamond in the Sahara to show why improbabilities can’t be erased by invoking “conditions” to narrow the search. Briefly: fortuitous conditions that narrow the search so helpfully as to ensure success are themselves improbable. So, invoking these helpful conditions is the explanatory equivalent of the shell game — it only pretends to make the improbability disappear.

We agree on this point, Hans, which is a very good start!

By my understanding of our discussion, here’s where we still disagree: you think the “rigging” needed for the universe to have produced things like fireflies and horses and humans can fit within the regularities described by science, whereas I don’t.

Think of oracle soup — the imaginary version of alphabet soup I describe in the second chapter of my book. As the story goes, you boil this soup in a covered pot, and then, after allowing it to cool, you lift the lid to reveal written instructions for building something that’s very clever — “worthy of a patent.”

Now, we have no trouble rattling off any number of “conditions” that are relevant to the process of boiling alphabet soup: the broth’s viscosity, density, surface tension, and boiling point, the sizes, shapes, and consistencies of the pasta letters, the thickness and conductivity of the pot material, etc., etc. The point is that it’s manifestly inconceivable for any combination of these mere conditions to provide a satisfactory explanation for how instructions appeared on the soup’s surface.

Think of it this way. If we imagine a pot of oracle soup actually working, all of us would recognize this as something astonishing to the point of spookiness, and none of us should be content with an explanation in terms of mundane properties like viscosity and conductivity. Why? Because it’s the startling coincidence that must be explained, and none of those ho-hum parameters diminish this coincidence at all.

As for what’s at stake here, I think it has to do with the fact that life seems to compel everyone to acknowledge a Designer from an early age, whereas arguments about the fine-tuning of the physical universe have been accessible only to relatively few people relatively recently.

The kind of extremism this world needs more of.

Officials in Russia Honor Jehovah’s Witnesses, Including Jailed Danish Citizen, for Outstanding Community Service

NEW YORK—On June 2, 2017, officials in the Russian city of Oryol gave special recognition to the local congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, expressing gratitude for their participation in the city’s annual cleanup efforts on April 22, 2017. There were 70 Witnesses who volunteered to spend the day removing trash from the streets of Oryol and from the Orlik River that winds through the city. As a token of their appreciation, city officials presented the Witnesses with a small gift and a handwritten note stating, in part: “In gratitude for a good deed for the community and for the environment.”

  

However, one month after the cleanup, and one week before being formally thanked by city officials, one of the Witness volunteers, Dennis Christensen (pictured in above inset), was arrested for so-called extremist activity while attending a peaceful religious meeting on May 25. Russian authorities have been using the claim of extremist activity to target Jehovah’s Witnesses throughout the country.

“It is no surprise to those who know Jehovah’s Witnesses that Dennis, and the other members of the congregation, would voluntarily participate in the cleanup of their city. They have been performing this service for many years, continuing even after their legal entity was liquidated in 2016,” states David A. Semonian, a spokesman at the Witnesses’ world headquarters. “Jehovah’s Witnesses in Oryol and in other cities around the world are known for being model citizens. That is why it is ironic that Dennis, a diligent, law-abiding Christian, would be treated like a criminal shortly after making a positive contribution to his community that was recognized as honorable by officials in Oryol. We believe that Dennis should be released immediately and be allowed to continue his peaceful worship and positive community service in association with his fellow worshippers.”

The arrest of Mr. Christensen took place almost a year after the local legal entity used by the Witnesses in Oryol was liquidated on June 14, 2016. The charges leveled against Mr. Christensen also came on the heels of the April 20, 2017,   decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to liquidate the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, near St. Petersburg. Mr. Christensen is still being held in pretrial detention by authorities in Oryol.

Media Contact:

David A. Semonian, Office of Public Information, +1-845-524-3000

Man's best friend v. Darwin.

No, Your Dog Is Not a Barking Exemplar of Macroevolution
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

Dogs are yet another evolutionary icon that  Jonathan Wells, perhaps in his next book, could handily leash and take for a walk. The idea expressed by Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others is that the descent from a common ancestor with wolves demonstrates not only the power of artificial selection, but by extension that of natural selection to sculpt brand new animals. In other words, your pooch is a barking exemplar of macroevolution.

One problem with this, among others, is that the virtue we value most in our dogs – the ability to form relationships with humans – appears to be no product of their evolution. At least it did not evolve from scratch. Dogs have it, but so, in their way, do wolves.

Here’s the tentative conclusion of research published in Royal Society Open Science, based on a limited sample of ten wolf cubs raised and cared for by humans as we would dogs, complete with “daily walks on leashes, cuddling, grooming, etc.”:

[W]e demonstrated that human-raised wolves can develop an individualized relationship with their human raisers which may not include attachment to and dependency on this person but which, at least before the sexual maturation of the animals, is characterized with a higher level of affiliation with the foster parent than with other closely familiar humans. Finally, we confirmed that intensive socialization and hand rearing result in general affinity towards humans.

This “affinity” may be more developed in dogs, which is to be expected, but it sounds like the seed is present in wolves. That would suggest it characterized the wild common ancestor of both dogs and wolves that existed 15,000 years ago.

From the story about this at Gizmodo:

[S]cientists have also documented some behavioral similarities between dogs and wolves. When greeting each other, for instance, wolves like to lick each others’ faces—a trait that’s all too familiar to dog owners. Wolves are also capable of following a person’s gaze into space, and they understand gestures like finger pointing (not even chimps can do this).

Given these similarities, [researcher Dorottya] Ujfalussy sought to learn more about the kinds of relationship that wolves, when socialized to humans, can have with their human caretakers. A primary aim of the study was to figure out what makes dogs so unique in their relationship with humans, and where their traits may have originated. Ultimately, Ujfalussy was trying to learn if dog behaviors were already present in ancestral wolves, or if they’re a product of domestication and artificial selection. This new research suggests the former may be true. [Emphasis added.]

The wolves were not found to be dependent on humans, as dogs are. But this is unsurprising. As geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig has described, the “evolution” of dogs from wolves “represents no increase in [biological] information but rather a decrease or loss of function on the genetic and anatomical levels” (as we reported here at Evolution News, see “The Dog Delusion”). Meaning no disrespect to them and certainly no lack of affection, but dogs are dependent because they are, in a sense, “degenerate” wolves.

A wolf is an apex predator, at home in a wild environment where your typical dog could not survive long or at all. In evolutionary terms, it’s a long step down. This explains, if you follow the interesting neighborhood-based social networking app Nextdoor, the constant refrain of panicked dog owners notifying everyone to be on the lookout for their lost pets. Even in a sheltered suburban context, dogs aren’t safe on their own.

In short, what’s most precious about them was likely there in the pre-dog ancestor. The rest was bred through loss of fitness. All of which is the opposite of what people typically mean when they talk about evolution.

I know, I know – some of this sounds unkind to them. But we love dogs just the same. They are our best friend. What they are not is a legitimate mascot for evolutionary advocates.

On letting the Bible speak for itself:The Watchtower Society's commentary.

“Let Us Compare Scripture With Scripture”

A MAN found a pamphlet on the floor of a railway car bound for New York City. ‘The human soul is mortal,’ said the pamphlet. Intrigued, the man, a minister, started to read. He was amazed because he had never before doubted the teaching of the immortality of the soul. At the time, he could not tell who had written the pamphlet. Still, he found the argument plausible and Scriptural and the material worthy of serious study.

The minister was George Storrs. The incident took place in 1837, the year that Charles Darwin first recorded in his notebook thoughts that would later develop into his theory of evolution. The world was still religious, and most people believed in God. Many read the Bible and looked up to it as having authority.

Storrs later found out that the pamphlet was written by Henry Grew of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Grew held fast to the principle that “the scripture . . . is its own best interpreter.” Grew and his associates had been studying the Bible with the aim of conforming their lives and activities to its counsel. Their studies revealed some beautiful Scriptural truths.


Stimulated by Grew’s writing, Storrs carefully looked into what the Scriptures had to say about the soul and discussed the matter with some of his fellow ministers. After five years of serious study, Storrs finally decided to publicize his newly found gem of Scriptural truth. At first, he prepared one sermon to give on a Sunday in 1842. However, he felt the need to give a few more sermons to do justice to the subject. Eventually, his sermons on the mortality of the human soul numbered six, which he published in Six Sermons. Storrs compared scripture with scripture in order to uncover the beautiful truth buried beneath the God-dishonoring doctrines of Christendom.

Does the Bible Teach the Immortality of the Soul?

The Bible speaks of Jesus’ anointed followers putting on immortality as a reward for their faithfulness. (1 Corinthians 15:50-56) If immortality is a reward for the faithful, Storrs reasoned, the soul of the wicked cannot be immortal. Instead of speculating, he went to the Scriptures. He considered Matthew 10:28, King James Version, which reads: “Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” So the soul can be destroyed. He also referred to Ezekiel 18:4, which says: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” (KJ) When the whole Bible was put into  perspective, the beauty of the truth stood out. “If the view I take of this subject be correct,” wrote Storrs, “then many portions of Scripture, which have been obscure on the common theory, become clear, beautiful and full of meaning and force.”

But what about scriptures like Jude 7? It reads: “Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.” (KJ) Reading this text, some may conclude that the souls of those who were killed in Sodom and Gomorrah are tormented by fire forever. “Let us compare Scripture with Scripture,” wrote Storrs. He then quoted 2 Peter 2:5, 6, which reads: “And spared not the old world, but saved Noah . . . , bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly.” (KJ) Yes, Sodom and Gomorrah were turned into ashes, destroyed forever with their inhabitants.

“Peter throws light on Jude,” Storrs explained. “Both together show most clearly what displeasures God has manifested against sinners. . . . Those judgments inflicted on the old world, Sodom and Gomorrah, are a standing, and perpetual, or ‘eternal’ admonition, warning, or ‘example’ to all men to the end of the world.” So Jude referred to the effect of the fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah as eternal. That in no way alters the fact that the human soul is mortal.


Storrs was not putting together scriptures that supported his view while ignoring others. He considered the context of each text as well as the overall tenor of the Bible. If a verse seemed to contradict other scriptures, Storrs looked into the rest of the Bible for a logical explanation.

Russell’s Studies in the Scriptures

Among those who became associated with George Storrs was a young man who was organizing a Bible study group in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His name was Charles Taze Russell. One of his first articles on Scriptural themes was published in 1876 in the magazine Bible Examiner, edited by Storrs. Russell acknowledged that earlier Bible students had an influence on him. Later, as the editor of Zion’s Watch Tower, he appreciated Storrs’ giving him much assistance, by both word and pen.

At the age of 18, C. T. Russell organized a Bible study class and established a pattern for studying the Bible. A. H. Macmillan, a Bible student associated with Russell, described this method: “Someone would raise a question. They would discuss it. They would look up all related scriptures on the point and then, when they were satisfied on the harmony of these texts, they would finally state their conclusion and make a record of it.”


Russell was convinced that the Bible, when taken as a whole, must reveal a message harmonious and consistent with itself and with the character of its Divine Author. Whenever any part of the Bible seemed difficult to understand, Russell felt that it should be clarified and interpreted by other parts of the Bible.

Scriptural Tradition

However, neither Russell nor Storrs nor Grew was the first to let the Scriptures become their own interpreter. The tradition goes all the way back to the Founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ. He used a number of scriptures to clarify the true meaning of a text. For instance, when the Pharisees  criticized his disciples for plucking heads of grain on the Sabbath, Jesus demonstrated from the account recorded at 1 Samuel 21:6 how the Sabbath law should be applied. The religious leaders were familiar with that account, in which David and his men ate the loaves of presentation. Jesus then referred to the part of the Law that said that only the Aaronic priests were to eat the showbread. (Exodus 29:32, 33; Leviticus 24:9) Still, David was told to go ahead and eat the loaves. Jesus concluded his persuasive argument by quoting from the book of Hosea: “If you had understood what this means, ‘I want mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless ones.” (Matthew 12:1-8) What a wonderful example of comparing a scripture with other scriptures to reach an accurate understanding!


The apostle Paul proved his point by references to scriptures
Jesus’ followers held to the pattern of using scripture references to shed light upon a scripture. When the apostle Paul taught people in Thessalonica, “he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving by references that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead.” (Acts 17:2, 3) In his divinely inspired letters too, Paul let the Bible become its own interpreter. Writing to the Hebrews, for instance, he quoted one scripture after another to prove that the Law was a shadow of the good things to come.—Hebrews 10:1-18.


Yes, sincere Bible students in the 19th and early 20th centuries were simply restoring this Christian pattern. The tradition of comparing scriptures with other scriptures continues in the Watchtower magazine. (2 Thessalonians 2:15) Jehovah’s Witnesses use this principle when they analyze a scripture.

Let the Context Speak

When we are reading the Bible, how can we imitate the fine examples of Jesus and his faithful followers? First, we can consider the immediate context of the scripture in question. How can the context help us understand the meaning? To illustrate, let us take Jesus’ words recorded at Matthew 16:28: “Truly I say to you that there are some of those standing here that will not taste death at all until first they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” Some may feel that these words were not fulfilled because all of Jesus’ disciples who were present when he said those words died before the establishment of God’s Kingdom in the heavens. The Interpreter’s Bible even says of this verse: “The prediction was not fulfilled, and later Christians found it necessary to explain that it was metaphorical.”


However, the context of this verse, as well as that of the parallel accounts by Mark and Luke, helps us understand the real meaning of the scripture. What did Matthew relate right after the words quoted above? He wrote: “Six days later Jesus took Peter and James and John his brother along and brought them up into a lofty mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them.” (Matthew 17:1, 2) Both Mark and Luke also linked Jesus’ comment about the Kingdom with the account of the transfiguration. (Mark 9:1-8; Luke 9:27-36) Jesus’ coming in Kingdom power was demonstrated in his transfiguration, his appearing in glory in the presence of the three apostles. Peter verifies this understanding by speaking of “the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ” with regard to his witnessing Jesus’ transfiguration.—2 Peter 1:16-18.

Do You Let the Bible Be Its Own Interpreter?

What if you cannot understand a scripture even after you have considered its context? You may benefit from comparing it with other scriptures, having in mind the overall tenor of the Bible. One excellent tool  for doing this can be found in the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures, now available in whole or in part in 57 languages. This tool is a list of marginal references, or cross-references, that appears in the center column of each page in many of its editions. You can find more than 125,000 of them in the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures—With References. The “Introduction” to that Bible explains: “A careful comparison of the marginal references and an examination of the accompanying footnotes will reveal the interlocking harmony of the 66 Bible books, proving that they comprise one book, inspired by God.”

Let us see how use of the cross-references can help us to understand a scripture. Take the example of the history of Abram, or Abraham. Consider this question: Who took the lead when Abram and his family went out of Ur? Genesis 11:31 reads: “Terah took Abram his son and Lot, . . . and Sarai his daughter-in-law, . . . and they went with him out of Ur of the Chaldeans to go to the land of Canaan. In time they came to Haran and took up dwelling there.” Just reading this, one might conclude that Abram’s father, Terah, took the lead. However, in the New World Translation, we find 11 cross-references on this verse. The last one takes us to Acts 7:2, where we read Stephen’s admonition to the first-century Jews: “The God of glory appeared to our forefather Abraham while he was in Mesopotamia, before he took up residence in Haran, and he said to him, ‘Go out from your land and from your relatives and come on into the land I shall show you.’” (Acts 7:2, 3) Was Stephen confusing this with Abram’s leaving Haran? Obviously not, for this is part of the inspired Word of God.—Genesis 12:1-3.

Why, then, does Genesis 11:31 state that “Terah took Abram his son” and others of his family and went out of Ur? Terah was still the patriarchal head. He agreed to go with Abram and thus was credited with moving the family to Haran. By comparing and harmonizing these two scriptures, we can see in our mind’s eye exactly what took place. Abram respectfully convinced his father to go out of Ur in accord with God’s command.


When we read the Scriptures, we should take into account the context and the overall tenor of the Bible. Christians are admonished: “We received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that have been kindly given us by God. These things we also speak, not with words taught by human wisdom, but with those taught by the spirit, as we combine spiritual matters with spiritual words.” (1 Corinthians 2:11-13) Indeed, we must implore Jehovah for help to understand his Word and try to “combine spiritual matters with spiritual words” by checking the context of the scripture in question and by looking up related scriptures. May we keep finding brilliant gems of truth through the study of God’s Word.

And even yet more iconoclasm.

Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire — An Important New Voice in the Evolution Debate
David Klinghoffer | @d_klinghoffer

The crisis of evolutionary biology is spoken of openly here and by scientists who are professed advocates of intelligent design. It is acknowledged in much more circumspect terms by other scientists who know they would be hounded and punished by colleagues for doing so in the public arena. You have to look carefully at what they admit in professional journals, when they think laypeople aren’t listening.

However, a forthcoming book by biologist J. Scott Turner,  Purpose & Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It,  is a real shot across the bow. Dr. Turner’s last book, from Harvard University Press, was The Tinkerer’s Accomplice: How Design Emerges from Life Itself.  The new book, from HarperOne, is aimed not at an academic audience but straight at the broadest thoughtful reading public.

Turner is a delightful, clear, and highly engaging writer, and he sets out his argument against smug Darwinism forthrightly. As he shows, biology itself is in crisis, having failed to grapple with the enigma of what life really is.

From the Preface:

[T]here sits at the heart of modern Darwinism an unresolved tautology that undermines its validity. We scientists might not be troubled by this, but we should be, not least because the failure to recognize it closes off modern evolutionism from many big problems it should be capable of answering: the origin of life, the origin of the gene, biological design, and the origins of cognition and consciousness, to name a few. Intentionality and purposefulness are important to all these unresolved big questions, and yet we are very quick to fence these off behind a wall of denial. Instead of a frank acknowledgment of purposefulness, intentionality, intelligence, and design, we refer to “apparent” design, “apparent” intentionality, “apparent” intelligence.

The latest biologist to come out swinging at Darwinism, Turner is not an ID proponent. He teaches at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

And this is not a review – you will be hearing more about Purpose & Desire, here and elsewhere, in weeks to come and more so when the book is published on September 12. Instead I want to invite you to take advantage of a great pre-order deal.  See here for details All you have to do is pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other selected venders, and you get two free e-books, Fire-Maker: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet, by Michael Denton, and Metamorphosis, which I edited as a companion to the Illustra Media documentary of the same name.

It’s as simple as this: order, and then  click on the button at the bottom  to let us know your order number. The two free e-books are then yours. Needless to say, this deal is of limited duration, so don’t dawdle about it!

Between Necessity and sufficiency:Seeking answers on the OOl

Is the Universe “Rigged” for Life? Conversation with a Theistic Evolutionist, Continued
Douglas Axe | @DougAxe

This is the second part of my discussion with theistic evolutionist Hans Vodder about my book, Undeniable.See this earlier post for background. Hans replied to the response I gave there as follows:

In one sense, I might agree with you that “accidental explanations for life necessarily invoke unbelievable coincidences.” But I’m not sure this says anything definitive about the particulars of life’s history, specifically with respect to the question of whether or not some form of biological evolution occurred.

Continuing the Sahara scenario, a successful search would defy the odds and require an explanation. However, because there’s more than one way to “rig the game” (i.e., there are various possible restrictions which might all lead to a successful search), the historical particulars of those explanations may look very different. In other words, “design” is a multiply realizable concept.

If the ancient Earth’s conditions were conducive to biological evolution, this would be a form of restricted search. Biological evolution might be within the realm of possibility given the conditions of the early Earth (i.e., the specific restrictions), even if the very possibility of life in the universe still requires an explanation. In this way, empirical considerations and accurate probability measurements might be relevant for determining the restrictions that enable evolutionary searches to work, assuming they do.

Two questions suggest themselves here. First, would evolutionary explanations that depend in this way on restricted searches still qualify as “accidental explanations for life”? Or would they more accurately be considered the outcome of design once removed (or design “displaced,” as Dembski might put it)? Second, and related to the first question, is the primary target of probabilistic arguments biological evolution or metaphysical/philosophical naturalism?

I hope that clarifies my approach a bit and gives a sense of how I currently think about these things.

Yes, this is very helpful, Hans. We may have to circle back to these two questions in order to understand better how we think about “rigging the game.”

However the various kinds of life on Earth first came to exist, we agree that the physical circumstances that enable life to work — everything from the stable orbit of our planet to the extraordinary properties of water — seem remarkably well suited for life. As theists, you and I attribute these circumstances to God.

But as necessary as these circumstances are for life to work, I think it has become very clear that they aren’t at all sufficient to explain how the various kinds of life came to exist in the first place. So, I disagree with Francis Collins’s view that God’s role in creating life is hidden from our view by having been woven into the physical backdrop of the universe. In The Language of God, he put it as follows (p 205):

God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future. That could include the formation of the stars, planets, and galaxies, all of the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology that led to the formation of life on earth, and the evolution of humans…. In that context, evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus, God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process.

Contrary to Collins, I say random and undirected processes are clearly and obviously incapable of inventing new living things. God’s creative activity is therefore clearly attested to by each distinct form of life over and above his action in specifying a universe that produced a planet where life could flourish once it did exist.

I’m unclear where you stand on this, Hans. When you say “conditions” on early Earth may have been conducive to biological evolution, I’m thinking you’re referring to planetary conditions — prevailing aspects of the atmosphere, surface, crust, etc., under the influence of the sun and moon. And by “conducive to biological evolution” I take you to mean sufficient to cause biological evolution.

But I could be misreading you. Can you clarify this for me, Hans?