The Watchtower Society's commentary on the envisioned beast of bible prophecy.

Beasts, symbolic

Wol.JW.org

From time immemorial, mankind has observed the characteristics and habits of animals and has applied them in a figurative or symbolic sense to persons, peoples, governments, and organizations. The Bible makes good use of this effective means of illustration. Examples pertaining to the figurative use of the qualities residing in an animal, or suggested by its characteristics, are listed in the accompanying charts.

Beasts as Symbols of Governments. Certain major world powers of history appear directly in the Biblical record, and all of these, as well as other nations, have used animals as symbols of their governments. In Egypt, the serpent figured prominently, the uraeus, the sacred asp, appearing on the headdress of the Pharaohs. However, Egypt was also represented by the bull, as was Assyria. Medo-Persia used the eagle (the shields of the Medes bore the golden eagle; the Persians bore an eagle fixed to the end of a lance). Athens was designated by the owl; Rome, the eagle; Great Britain is designated by the lion; the United States, the eagle. From the most remote times China has been symbolized by the dragon. Well known is the German “two-headed eagle.”

The Wild Beasts of Daniel and of Revelation. That the beasts described in these books represent political kingdoms or governments, exercising rulership and authority, is clearly stated. (Da 7:6, 12, 23; 8:20-22; Re 16:10; 17:3, 9-12) A consideration of the Biblical passages reveals that, while these political ‘wild beasts’ vary in symbolic form, yet all have certain characteristics in common. All are shown as standing in opposition to God’s rule by the Messianic Kingdom over mankind. They are also depicted as in opposition to God’s “holy ones,” his covenant people, first the Jewish nation, then the Christian congregation. Those specifically named (Medo-Persia and Greece) were major world powers, and the great size attributed to the others or the description of their actions indicates that these too were not minor kingdoms. (It may be noted that subordinate kingdoms are symbolized by horns in some cases.) All the beasts are represented as very aggressive, seeking the dominant position over the nations or peoples within the reach of their power.​—Compare Da 7:17, 18, 21; 8:9-11, 23, 24; Re 13:4-7, 15; 17:12-14.

Many commentators endeavor to limit the fulfillment of the visions of the beasts in the book of Daniel so that it does not extend beyond the time when Jesus Christ was on the earth, at which time the Roman Empire was the dominant power. The prophecies themselves, however, make plain that they extend beyond that time. The final forms of the beasts are shown as reaching down to the ‘arrival of the definite time for God’s holy ones to take possession of the kingdom’ in “the appointed time of the end.” Then the Messiah destroys such beastly opposition for all time. (Da 7:21-27; 8:19-25; compare also Re 17:13, 14; 19:19, 20.) It may be noted that Christ Jesus expressly foretold that opposition to the Messianic Kingdom would continue into the time of the end, so that his disciples then preaching that Kingdom would be “objects of hatred by all the nations.” (Mt 24:3, 9-14) This obviously does not allow for any nation, particularly world powers, to be excluded from possible identification with the final forms or expressions of the symbolic wild beasts.

Daniel’s vision of the beasts out of the sea. After Egypt and Assyria had finished their respective periods of dominance, and toward the close of the Babylonian Empire, Jehovah God gave Daniel a vision of “four huge beasts” coming up out of the vast sea. (Da 7:1-3) Isaiah 57:20 likens persons alienated from God to the sea, saying: “But the wicked are like the sea that is being tossed, when it is unable to calm down, the waters of which keep tossing up seaweed and mire.”​—See also Re 17:15.

Bible commentators regularly link this vision with that of the colossal image in the second chapter of Daniel. As a comparison of chapters 2 and 7 shows, there are definite similarities. The colossal image had four principal parts or sections, to compare with the four beasts. The metals of the image began with the most precious, gold, and became successively inferior, while the beasts began with the majestic lion. In both visions the fourth part, or “kingdom,” receives particular consideration, shows the greatest complexity of form, introduces new elements, and continues down till the time when divine judgment is executed upon it for standing in opposition to God’s rule.

Briefly the four beasts were: a lion, first having eagle’s wings, then losing them and taking on human qualities; a bear (a less majestic and more ponderous creature than the lion), devouring much flesh; a leopard with four wings (adding to its great speed) and four heads; and a fourth wild beast not corresponding to any actual animal, unusually strong, with large iron teeth, ten horns, and another horn developing with eyes and “a mouth speaking grandiose things.” Much of the chapter relates to the fourth beast and its unusual horn. While each beast was “different from the others,” this was especially true of the fourth one.​—Da 7:3-8, 11, 12, 15-26.

In the last quarter of the seventh century B.C.E., Babylon became the dominant power in the Middle East. The Babylonian kingdom swiftly extended its domain over Syria and Palestine, overthrowing the kingdom of Judah with its line of Davidic rulers who sat on the glorious throne of Jehovah in Jerusalem. (1Ch 29:23) It may be observed that, when warning Judah of its impending fall to Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah likened the future conqueror to ‘a lion going up out of a thicket.’ (Jer 4:5-7; compare 50:17.) After the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah said that Babylon’s forces had been “swifter than the eagles” in their pursuit of the Judeans. (La 4:19) History shows that Babylon’s expansion, at one time reaching as far as Egypt, before long came to a halt, and in the latter part of the empire, Babylon’s rulers showed little of the earlier aggressiveness.

Babylon fell to the Medo-Persian kingdom, with its heartland in the hills to the east of the plains of Mesopotamia. The Medo-Persian Empire was quite different from the Semitic Babylonian Empire, being the first Japhetic (or Aryan) power to gain the dominant position in the Middle East. The Jews, though allowed to return to Judah, continued as a subject people under the Medo-Persian yoke. (Ne 9:36, 37) This empire showed an even greater appetite for territory than had the Babylonian, extending its domain from “India to Ethiopia.”​—Es 1:1.

Medo-Persia’s domination was ended by the lightning conquest of the Grecian forces headed by Alexander the Great. In a few short years he built up an empire that embraced parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This was the first European-based power to hold such a position. After Alexander’s death his generals struggled for control of the empire, four of them eventually gaining the rulership of different sections. Palestine was fought over by the rival Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms.

The Grecian Empire was eventually taken over completely by Rome. The Roman Empire surpassed all the preceding empires not only in the extent of its domain (covering the entire Mediterranean area and in time reaching to the British Isles) but also in the efficiency of its military machine and the firmness of its application of Roman law to the provinces of its far-flung empire. Rome, of course, was the political instrument used to execute the Messiah, Christ Jesus, as well as to persecute the early Christian congregation. The empire extended for nearly a thousand years thereafter in different forms but eventually broke up into various nations, with Britain finally gaining the dominant position.

Historian H. G. Wells makes the following interesting observations on the distinctiveness of the Roman Empire: “Now this new Roman power which arose to dominate the western world in the second and first centuries B.C. was in several respects a different thing from any of the great empires that had hitherto prevailed in the civilised world. It was not at first a monarchy, and it was not the creation of any one great conqueror. . . . It was the first republican empire that escaped extinction and went on to fresh developments. . . . Its population was less strongly Hamitic and Semitic than that of any preceding empire. . . . It was so far a new pattern in history, it was an expanded Aryan republic. . . . It was always changing. It never attained to any fixity. In a sense the [administrative] experiment failed. In a sense the experiment remains unfinished, and Europe and America to-day are still working out the riddles of world-wide statecraft first confronted by the Roman people.”​—The Pocket History of the World, 1943, pp. 149-151.

The ram and the male goat. In the vision Daniel received two years later (Da 8:1), the powers represented by the two symbolic beasts involved are clearly named. The kingdom of Medo-Persia is here pictured as a male sheep (a ram) having two horns, the taller horn coming up afterward. History shows that the Medes first were the stronger, and the Persians thereafter gained the ascendancy, though both peoples remained united in a dual power. A he-goat, moving very fast across the earth, symbolized the world power of Greece. (Da 8:3-8, 20, 21) The prophetic vision shows that the goat’s “great horn” located between its eyes, representing the first king, was broken “as soon as it became mighty,” and four kingdoms resulted, though of inferior strength. (Da 8:5, 8, 21, 22) The rapid conquest of the Medo-Persian Empire by Alexander has already been commented on, as well as the division of his kingdom among four of his generals.

It is worthy of mention here that the same nation or its rulers may be represented by different animal symbols in different prophecies. Thus, the kings of Assyria and Babylon are represented by lions at Jeremiah 50:17, while at Ezekiel 17:3-17 the rulers of Babylon and Egypt are pictured by great eagles. Ezekiel elsewhere likens Egypt’s Pharaoh to a “great sea monster” lying in the Nile canals. (Eze 29:3) Hence the fact that Medo-Persia and Greece are represented by certain symbolisms in Daniel chapter 8 does not eliminate the possibility of their being represented by other symbolisms in the earlier vision (Da 7) nor in subsequent prophecies.

The seven-headed wild beast out of the sea. In the vision had by the apostle John and recorded at Revelation 13, a seven-headed, ten-horned wild beast comes up out of the sea, leopardlike, yet with feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion. It is thus a composite form of several of the symbols appearing in Daniel’s vision of the four beasts. The dragon, identified at Revelation 12:9 as Satan the Devil, gives the beast its authority and power. (Re 13:1, 2) This beast’s seven heads (bearing ten horns) distinguish it from the one-headed beasts of Daniel’s vision. Seven (and ten) are commonly acknowledged as Biblical symbols of completeness. (See NUMBER, NUMERAL.) This is corroborated by the extent of this beast’s domain, for it exercises authority, not over one nation or a group of nations, but “over every tribe and people and tongue and nation.” (Re 13:7, 8; compare 16:13, 14.) Noting these factors, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible comments: “The first of these beasts [of Re 13] combines in itself the joint characteristics of the four beasts of Daniel’s vision . . . Accordingly, this first beast represents the combined forces of all political rule opposed to God in the world.”​—Edited by G. Buttrick, 1962, Vol. 1, p. 369.

Two-horned beast. Then John saw a beast out of the earth with two horns like those of a harmless lamb, yet speaking as a dragon, exercising the full authority of the first wild beast, just described. It directs making an image of the globally ruling seven-headed beast, putting all persons under compulsion to accept its “mark.”​—Re 13:11-17.

It may be recalled that the two-horned ram of Daniel chapter 8 represented a dual power, Medo-Persia. Of course, that power had long since disappeared by the apostle John’s day, and his vision was of things yet future. (Re 1:1) Other dual powers have existed since John’s day, but among these the historical association of Britain and the United States is particularly notable and of long duration.

The other notable characteristic of the two-horned beast, its speaking like a dragon, recalls the “mouth speaking grandiose things” on the outstanding horn of the fourth beast of Daniel 7 (vss 8, 20-26); while its ‘misleading’ earth’s inhabitants compares with the deception practiced by the ‘fierce king’ described at Daniel 8:23-25.​—Re 13:11, 14.

The scarlet-colored wild beast. At Revelation 17 the apostle records his vision of a scarlet-colored beast with seven heads and ten horns, mounted by the symbolic woman “Babylon the Great.” This beast thus resembles, or is in the image of, the first beast of Revelation 13 but is distinct because of its scarlet color and the fact that no crowns are seen on its ten horns. Beholding the beast, John is told that five of the seven kings represented by the seven heads had already fallen, while one existed at that time, and the seventh was yet to come. The scarlet-colored beast itself is an eighth king but springs from or is a product of the previous seven. The “ten kings” represented by the ten horns exist and exercise authority in association with the scarlet beast for a short time. Warring against the Lamb, Jesus Christ, and those with him, they go down in defeat.​—Re 17:3-5, 9-14.

Some scholars would apply this vision to pagan Rome, and the seven heads to seven emperors of Rome, followed by an eighth emperor. They disagree, however, as to which emperors should be included. The Bible itself does not mention more than three Roman emperors by name, with a fourth (Nero) being mentioned under the title of “Caesar.” Other scholars understand the “heads” or “kings” to represent world powers, as in the book of Daniel. It is noteworthy that the Bible does name five world powers in the Hebrew Scriptures, namely, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece, while the Greek Scriptures name a sixth, Rome, ruling in John’s day. While this would leave the seventh ‘king’ unnamed, the fact that it had not yet appeared when John recorded the Revelation would allow for such anonymity. The eighth king, the symbolic scarlet beast, in some way unites in itself these seven heads while at the same time springing from them.

JEHOVAH Continues to school the wannabes.

 Artificial General Intelligence: Machines vs. Organisms

William Dembski

In this series about Artificial General Intelligence, it may seem that I’m picking too much on Ray Kurzweil. But he and I have been crossing paths for a long time. He and I, over the last few years, have frequented the same Seattle area tech conference, COSM, where we both speak, albeit on opposite sides about the question of artificial intelligence. He and I also took sharply divergent positions on the Stanford campus back in 2003 at the Accelerating Change Conference, a transhumanist event organized by John Smart. Yet our first encounter goes back to 1998, at one of George Gilder’s Telecosm conferences.

From “Intelligent” to “Spiritual”

At Telecosm in 1998, I moderated a discussion where the focus was on Ray Kurzweil’s then forthcoming book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which at the time was in press. Previously, Kurzweil had written The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990). By substituting “spiritual” for “intelligent,” he was clearly taking an even more radical line about the future of artificial intelligence. In his presentation for the discussion, he described how machines were poised to match and then exceed human cognition, a theme he has hammered on ever since. For Kurzweil, it is inevitable that machines will match and then exceed us: Moore’s Law guarantees that machines will attain the needed computational power to simulate our brains, after which the challenge will be for us to keep pace with machines, a challenge at which he sees us as destined to fail because wetware, in his view, cannot match hardware. Our only recourse to survive successfully will thus be to upload ourselves digitally. 

Kurzweil’s respondents at the Telecosm discussion were John Searle, Thomas Ray, and Michael Denton, and they were all to varying degrees critical of his strong AI view, or what we would now call his AGI view. Searle rehearsed his Chinese Room thought experiment to argue that computers don’t/can’t actually understand anything, an argument that remains persuasive and applies to recent chatbots, such as ChatGPT. But the most interesting response to Kurzweil came, in my view, from Denton. He offered an argument about the complexity and richness of individual neurons, pointing out how inadequate our understanding of them is and how even more inadequate our ability is to computationally model them. At the end of the discussion, however, Kurzweil’s confidence in the glowing prospects for strong AI’s (AGI’s) future remained undiminished. And indeed, they remain undiminished to this day. The entire exchange, suitably expanded and elaborated, appeared in Jay Richard’s edited collection Are We Spiritual Machines?

Denton’s Powerful Argument

I want here to focus on Denton’s argument, because it remains relevant and powerful. Kurzweil is a technophile in that he regards building and inventing technology, and above all machines, as the greatest thing humans do. But he’s also a technobigot in that he regards people of the past, who operated with minimal technology, as vastly inferior and less intelligent than we are. He ignores how much such people were able to accomplish through sheer ingenuity given how little they had to work with. He thus minimizes the genius of a Homer, the exploration of the Pacific by South Sea Islanders, or the knowledge of herbs and roots of indigenous peoples captured in oral traditions, etc. For examples of the towering intelligence of non-technological people, I encourage readers to check out Robert Greene’s Mastery. 

Taken with the power and prospects of artificial intelligence, Kurzweil thinks that ChatGPT will soon write better prose and poetry than we do. Moreover, by simulating our human bodies, medical science will, according to him, be able to develop new drugs and procedures without having to experiment on our human bodies. He seems unconcerned that such simulations may miss anything crucial about ourselves and thus lead to medical procedures and drugs that backfire, doing more harm than good. Kurzweil offered such blithe assurances about AGI at the 2023 COSM conference.

Whole organisms and even individual cells are nonlinear dynamical systems, and there’s no evidence that computers are able to adequately simulate them. Even single neurons, which for Kurzweil and Marvin Minsky make up a computer made of meat (i.e., the brain), are beyond the simulating powers of any computers we know or can envision. A given neuron will soon enough behave unpredictably and inconsistently with any machine. Central to Denton’s argument against Kurzweil’s strong AI (AGI) view back in 1998 was the primacy of the organism over the machine. Denton’s argument remains persuasive. Rather than paraphrase that argument, I’ll use Denton’s own words (from his essay “Organism and Machine” in Jay Richards, ed., Are We Spiritual Machines: Ray Kurzweil vs. The Critics of Strong A.I.):

Living things possess abilities that are still without any significant analogue in any machine which has yet been constructed. These abilities have been seen since classical times as indicative of a fundamental division between the [organismal] and mechanical modes of being. 

To begin with, every living system replicates itself, yet no machine possesses this capacity even to the slightest degree… Every second countless trillions of living systems from bacterial cells to elephants replicate themselves on the surface of our planet. And since life’s origin, endless life forms have effortlessly copied themselves on unimaginable numbers of occasions.

Living things possess the ability to change themselves from one form into another. For instance, during development the descendants of the egg cell transform themselves from undifferentiated unspecialized cells into [widely different cells, some with] long tentacles like miniature medusae some hundred thousand times longer than the main body of the cell… 

To grasp just how fantastic [these abilities of living things] are and just how far they transcend anything in the realm of the mechanical, imagine our artifacts endowed with the ability to copy themselves and … “morph” themselves into different forms. Imagine televisions and computers that duplicate themselves effortlessly and which can also “morph” themselves into quite different types of machines [such as into a microwave or helicopter]. We are so familiar with the capabilities of life that we take them for granted, failing to see their truly extraordinary character. 

Even the less spectacular self-reorganizing and self-regenerating capacities of living things … should leave the observer awestruck. Phenomena such as … the regeneration of the limb of a newt, the growth of a complete polyp, or a complex protzoan from tiny fragments of the intact animal are … without analogue in the realm of mechanism…

Imagine a jumbo jet, a computer, or indeed any machine ever conceived, from the fantastic star ships of science fiction to the equally fantastic speculations of nanotechnology, being chopped up randomly into small fragments. Then imagine every one of the fragments so produced (no two fragments will ever be the same) assembling itself into a perfect but miniaturized copy of the machine from which it originated — a tiny toy-sized jumbo jet from a random section of the wing — and you have some conception of the self-regenerating capabilities of certain microorganisms… It is an achievement of transcending brilliance, which goes beyond the wildest dreams of mechanism. 

Between Organism and Mechanism 

The lesson that Denton drew from this sharp divergence between organism and mechanism is that the quest for full Artificial General Intelligence faces profound conceptual and practical challenges. The inherent capacity of living things to replicate, transform, self-organize, and regenerate in ways that transcend purely mechanical processes underscores a fundamental divide between the organic and the artificial. 

Organisms demonstrate a level of complexity and adaptability that no machine or artificial system shows any signs of emulating. The extraordinary characteristics of life recounted by Denton suggest that full AGI, capable of the holistic and versatile intelligence seen in living organisms, will remain an elusive goal, if not a practical impossibility. We therefore have no compelling reason to think that the pinnacle of intelligence is poised to shift from the organismal to the artificial, especially given the fantastic capabilities that organisms are known to exhibit and that machines show no signs of ever exhibiting. 

At the top of the list of such fantastic capabilities is human consciousness. If AGI is truly going to match and ultimately exceed humans in every respect (if we really are just computational devices, or computers made of meat), then AGI will need to exhibit consciousness. Yet how can consciousness reside in a computational device, which consists of finitely many states, each state being binary, assuming a value of 0 or 1? Consciousness is a reflective awareness of one’s identity, existence, sensations, perceptions, emotions, ethics, valuations, thoughts, and circumstances (Sitz im Leben). But how can the shuffling of zeros and ones produce such a full inner life of self-awareness, subjective experience, and emotional complexity?

This Is Not a New Question

In pre-computer days, it was posed as whether and how a mechanical device composed of material parts could think. The philosopher Gottfried Leibniz raised doubts that such mechanical devices could think at all with his thought experiment of a mill (in his 1714 Monadology). He imagined a giant mill and asked where exactly thought would reside in the workings of its gears and other moving parts. As he saw it, there would be an unbridgeable gap between the mill’s mechanical operation and its ability to think and produce consciousness. He saw this thought experiment as showing that matter could not be converted into mind.

More recently, philosopher John Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment (in “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” 1980) highlighted the divide between mechanical processes and the subjective experience of consciousness. In Searle’s Chinese Room, a person translates Chinese by mechanically applying rules to items in a large database. The person’s success in translating Chinese follows simply from faithfully following the rules and thus requires no understanding of Chinese. This thought experiment illustrates that processing information does not equate to comprehending it. 

For me personally, the most compelling thought experiment for discounting that computation is capable of consciousness is simply to consider a Turing machine. A Turing machine can represent any computation. It includes two things: (1) a tape consisting of squares filled with zeros and ones, or bits (for more than two possibilities in each square, put more than one bit per square, but keep the number of bits per square fixed); and (2) a read-write head that moves along the squares and alters or leaves unchanged the bits in each square. The read-write head alternates among a fixed number of states according to transition rules that depend on the other states and where the head is on the tape, changing or leaving unchanged the present square and then moving left or right one square. 

So Here’s the Question

Where is consciousness in this reading and writing of bits? As a reductio ad absurdum of this thought experiment, I imagine a world with an unlimited number of doors. Doors can be open or closed. An unlimited number of people live in houses with these doors. Let closing a door correspond to zero, opening it to one. As these doors open and close, they could be executing an algorithm. And if humans are computers, then such an algorithm could be us. And yet, to think that the joint opening and closing of doors could, if the doors were only opened and closed in the right way, achieve consciousness, such as sharing a glass of wine with your beloved while overlooking a Venetian veranda, seems bonkers. Such thought experiments suggest a fundamental divide between the operations of a machine and the conscious understanding inherent in human intelligence.

One last thought in this vein: Neuroscientific research further complicates the picture. The brain is increasingly showing itself to be not just a complex information processor but an organ characterized by endogenous activity — spontaneous, internally driven behaviors independent of external stimuli. This perspective portrays the brain as an active seeker of information, as is intrinsic to organic systems. Such spontaneous behavior, found across all of life, from cells to entire organisms, raises doubts about the capacity of machines produce these intricate, self-directed processes.

Ancient humans remain just as human according to the fossil record

 Fossil Friday: New Evidence for the Human Nature of Neanderthals

Gunter Bechly

The reconstruction of Neanderthal appearance and behavior has quite a checkered history. After an initial controversy over whether the fossils really represent ancient humans or just malformed modern humans, Neanderthals were described in 1864 as distinct hominin species, Homo neanderthalensis. For a long time they were considered as brutish cavemen with a club and almost gorilla-like appearance. Then the scientific opinion shifted and Neanderthals were more and more recognized as human-like and even as geniuses of the ice age (Husemann 2005, Finlayson 2019), based on an avalanche of new evidence for complex human behavior (Nowell 2023, Vernimmen 2023). We now know that Neanderthals used fire (Angelucci et al. 2023), buried their dead (Balzeau et al. 2020, Dockdrill 2020), created stone circles (Jaubert et al. 2016, Callaway 2016) and bone tools (Soressi et al. 2013), made jewellery from eagle talons (Radovčić et al. 2015, Rodríguez-Hidalgo et al. 2019) and used feathers as body decoration (Peresani et al. 2011, Finlayson et al. 2012), made cave art with paintings and engravings (Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014, Hoffmann et al. 2018a, Marquet et al. 2023), played music with bone flutes (Turk et al. 2018), used ochre as pigment (Roebroeks et al. 2012, Hoffmann et al. 2018b) and sophisticated fibre technology (Hardy et al. 2020), produced flour from processed plants (Mariotti Lippi et al. 2023), dived for seafood (Villa et al. 2020), cooked food and self-medicated with herbal painkillers and antibiotics (Hardy et al. 2012, Weyrich et al. 2017), and even produced glue from birch bark with a complex chemical procedure (Blessing & Schmidt 2021, Schmidt et al. 2023).

New Anatomic Data

But it is not just new evidence for Neanderthal behavior that overturned our previous crude image of Neanderthals as dumb brutes, but also new anatomic data. Contrary to earlier beliefs, more recent studies have demonstrated a fully upright posture with typical human spinal curvature called lordosis (Haeusler et al. 2019). The latter authors concluded that ”after more than a century of alternative views, it should be apparent that there is nothing in Neandertal pelvic or vertebral morphology that rejects their possession of spinal curvatures well within the ranges of variation of healthy recent humans.” There even exists compelling new evidence for hearing and speech capacities (Conde-Valverde et al. 2021), which “demonstrates that the Neanderthals possessed a communication system that was as complex and efficient as modern human speech” (Starr 2021).

Correlated with this fundamental rethinking of Neanderthals (Nowell 2023) in terms of their anatomy, culture, and mental capabilities, their classification has also changed over time. At first they were considered as a different species, Homo neanderthalensis, then they were just considered as a subspecies of modern humans, Homo sapiens, and since the late 1990s again as “an unambiguously demarcated morphospecies” (Tattersall & Schwartz 2006; also see Harvati et al. 2004, Márquez et al. 2014, and Wynn et al. 2016). The new field of paleogenomics brought insight into their DNA (Green et al. 2010), which was considered as sufficiently dissimilar to warrant a separate species status again (Clarke 2016), even though there was also evidence for hybridization and genetic admixture with modern humans (Meneganzin & Bernardi 2023). Paleogeneticist and Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo (2014) called the controversy of the species status of Neanderthals as unresolvable, because of the arbitrariness and fuzziness of species concepts (also see Meneganzin & Bernardi 2023, Nowell 2023, and Stringer 2023). The controversy still continues as is evident from a recent article titled “Are Neanderthals and Homo sapiens the same species?” (Heidt 2023), which discusses the fact that “scientists have been vollying the question back and forth for more than a century”. Nowell (2023) wrote: “From their initial discovery until today, Neandertals have shifted between “being recognized as human or being pushed to the constitutive outside of humanness,” what Drell (2000, p. 15) describes as “the oscillating dichotomy of Same and Other.”

Of course, the undeniable evidence for significant and common genetic admixture (Kuhlwilm et al. 2016, Villanea & Schraiber 2019, Callaway 2021), which makes up 1-4 percent of the modern human genome (Reilly et al. 2022), would suggest that Neanderthals and modern humans shared a common gene pool and belonged to the same biospecies. Even the skeptic and ID opponent Michael Shermer (2010) agreed in an article for Scientific American that the genomic evidence suggests that our Neanderthal brethren were not a separate species. Strong reproductive isolation barriers that limited the amount of introgression were proposed by Overmann & Coolidge (2013), but many experts remain

unconvinced. Paleoanthropologist Bence Viola from the University of Toronto said (quoted in Vernimmen 2023): “Homo sapiens clearly recognized Neanderthals as mating partners, which suggests they thought of them as humans — maybe ‘the weird guys living behind the mountains,’ but still, fellow humans.”

But what do we make of the anatomical differences between Neanderthals and modern humans? Don’t they support a separate species status? Actually, this would not follow even if the differences lay outside the range of variability of modern humans, because that is also the case in many other subspecies of living animals. However, some human populations such as Australian aboriginals indeed share with archaic humans like Neanderthals a robust skull with pronounced brow ridges, which lead Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Huxley (in Lyell 1863), to compare them with Neanderthals. Of course this also had some typical Darwinist racist connotations. Just like Neanderthals, native Australians were considered primitive and inferior. Nevertheless, the similarities are real and have been confirmed by modern anatomical studies (e.g., Wolpoff & Caspari 1996), which concluded that “the interpretation of Neanderthals as a different species is very unlikely.” Anatomical and cognitive differences between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans were also affirmed by Wynn et al. (2016), who nevertheless emphatically rejected labeling these differences as implying inferiority or superiority. More recent research even suggests that the characteristic skull features may rather be based on phenotypic plasticity than an evolutionary heritage from ape-like ancestors (Curnoe 2011).

Why So Much Debate?

So, why is there still so much debate and controversy about the species status of Neanderthals? Well, what is at stake is not just some esoteric species problem in the scientific ivory tower of a few paleoanthropologists, but the very question of human nature and human uniqueness, thus what it even means to be human. The recognition of Neanderthals as a distinct species would make the uncanny valley a bit shallower, as Peeters & Zwart (2020) put it, and would challenge “longstanding ideas about the uniqueness of our species” (Seghers 2018). A so-called multiple species model was proposed for the origin of behavioral modernity (Moro Abadía & González Morales 2010). Even mainstream evolutionary biologists recognize that this is a “politically charged context” (Nowell 2023), and thus certainly subject to bias when you approach this question from either a Darwinist viewpoint of modern materialist and atheist science, or from the Judeo-Christian viewpoint of human exceptionalism, where humans are made in the image of God.

In my humble opinion, the evidence for symbolic thinking, language, and genetic admixture clearly suggests that Neanderthals belong to our very own species. They were no inhabitants of the uncanny valley of objects that just resemble humans (think of Sophia the robot or CGI characters), but they are fully human and should again be classified as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. The latest technical literature shows that such a view is well rooted in up-to-date mainstream science. McCrae (2023) concluded, in an article titled “Neanderthals might not be the separate species we always thought,” that even though “it’s unlikely we’ll finally see the classification of Homo neanderthalensis fade into obscurity any time soon. … Still, as more sibling than cousin, it seems the poor old Neanderthal deserves to sit right by our side in the Homo sapien[s] family portrait.”

References

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Paul Sutter and the madness of multiverse?

 From Astrophysicist Paul Sutter — Multiverse Madness

Casey Luskin

Yesterday I commented on a fantastic article by astrophysicist Paul Sutter at Universe Today on “The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth.” Sutter now has a follow-up article there, “The Seeming Impossibility of Life,” which provides additional insights into the complexity of life — though I don’t agree with his attempts to dodge the design inference for fine-tuning of the universe. We’ll get to that in a moment. He starts by rightly marveling at the “complexity of the human brain” which he calls “remarkable”:

We are, to put it bluntly, remarkable. There is nothing in this cosmos that even begins to approach anything resembling the complexity of the human brain. There is no other world that we have discovered, within our solar system or without, that can support the dizzying array of chemical reactions that we call life, let alone consciousness.

No doubt life on Earth has impressive characteristics. But is life on this planet unique? Sutter thinks it probably is:

Sure, with enough planets around enough stars within enough galaxies, life is probably bound to happen one way or another, but it appears that life only happened here, once, billions of years ago, when it didn’t appear — or was snuffed out — even in our own solar backyard.

It’s no accident that Earth is home to the only known life in the universe. That’s because our planet appears to be special. Sutter recognizes this as well:

Even our planet is special. Take a look at the other planets of the solar system. If doesn’t matter if you’re using a backyard telescope or the latest NASA robotic gear, the answer is always the same. While every planet looks and acts (and probably smells) different from all the rest, they all share one thing in common: they’re dead.

Lifeless. Uninhabitable. Inhospitable. Barren balls of cold rock. Barren balls of molten rock. Barren balls of exceedingly hot rock buried under thick layers of atmosphere. Barren.

Doubting Fine-Tuning

So Earth is especially suited for life. But what about our universe? Sutter recounts the argument that the fine-tuning of the universe shows “divine intervention” — but then he goes on to disagree with it. Here’s how he frames the pro-fine-tuning position: 

Some argue that the way the universe is constructed is a little too particular. That if any one small thing were to change, from the speed of light to the amount of atomic matter assembled during the big bang, life as we know it would be outright impossible. Perhaps some other form of intelligence could rise up in that strange cosmos, shuddering at the impossible thought of creatures anchored to a planet and swimming in its water oceans. Perhaps not. Either way, it appears that our universe is especially tuned for the appearance of life as we know it, indicating either divine intervention or some conspiracy of physics too far beyond our comprehension to grasp.

But this is where I would have my first major disagreement with Sutter. Here’s how he responds to the design argument: 

To that line of thinking I have this response. We have but one universe for us to study; it is all we’ve had and all that ever will be. As peculiar as this universe of ours appears, we cannot access or interrogate other possibilities. We do not know how special or generic this cosmos is, the same way you could not measure the probability of the Queen of Diamonds appearing in your hand if you did not know the contents of the full deck. That stark reality does not rule out divinity or exotic physics, but it also does not demand them. If you wish to believe in either of those, I will not begrudge you.

This Seems Like a Dodge

Ironically, the rebuttal to Sutter’s skepticism is found in a comment he himself makes: “We have but one universe for us to study”. That’s right — and that’s why Sutter is wrong to dismiss the possibility that we can know our universe is fine-tuned: Science is based upon studying what we know. We know our universe exists, and we know that its laws are fine-tuned to allow life to exist. We know these facts to be true, and thus we can take them into account when asking whether our universe exhibits design. 

Sutter wants to avoid this conclusion through an analogy to a deck of cards. He argues that determining the probability of selecting a particular card requires knowing something about the deck of cards from which it came. That’s fair, but he then claims that if we can’t know anything about the “deck of cards” from which our universe came, then we can’t know whether it’s probable or improbable. For example, maybe that “deck” only includes universes fine-tuned for life (but then we’d have to ask why?), or maybe that “deck” is so large that it is likely that at least one “card” (i.e., one universe) would have the right parameters needed for life — just by chance. The latter argument is essentially the multiverse hypothesis. 

Sure, perhaps we don’t know that there isn’t a multiverse where untold numbers of other universes out there lack the right physics for life. But we shouldn’t assume that this is a realistic possibility that prevents us from making inferences to design based upon what we do know exists. If we can’t infer design from the fine-tuning of the universe, there may be other dangerous implications for science. 

A Hypothetical Cancer Cluster

In the past I’ve argued that “multiverse thinking” destroys scientific logic. My argument involves a hypothetical “cancer cluster” in a town with a chemical plant.

Imagine that 100 percent of an entire town of 10,000 people got cancer within one year — a cancer cluster. It turns out the chemical plant in the town produces carcinogenic chemicals, so the townspeople sue the chemical plant. 

During the trial, the townspeople hire scientists as expert witnesses who testify that the odds of this occurring just by chance are 1 in 1010,000. Under normal scientific reasoning, they argue, such low odds establish that chance cannot be the explanation, and that there must be some physical agent causing cancer in the town. In this case, the best explanation is that chemicals from the chemical plant caused the cancer. 

The chemical plant has a lot of money, and they hire a wily defense attorney who invokes the multiverse defense, saying: 

Yes, 1 in 1010,000 is a very low probability. But there could be 1010,000 universes out there in the multiverse, and our universe just happens to be the unlucky one where this unlikely cancer cluster arose — purely by chance! You can’t say there aren’t 1010,000 universes out there, right? That means you can’t conclude that my client’s chemical plant had anything to do with this — the whole thing could have happened as a chance occurrence!

Should the jury trust the scientists and conclude the cancer cluster is highly improbable and caused by chemical plant, or should they trust the lawyer and invent 1010,000 universes where this kind of cancer cluster becomes probable enough to happen by chance? 

The shady attorney deflects criticism saying: “You can’t say there aren’t 1010,000 universes out there, right?” Right — but that’s the point. There’s no way to test the multiverse, and science should not seriously consider untestable theories. Multiverse thinking makes it impossible to rule out chance, which essentially eliminates the basis for drawing many scientific conclusions. What we have before us is a cancer cluster and a chemical plant, and that’s enough to make a sound scientific conclusion. 

What We Have Before Us

In the same way, Sutter doesn’t argue that there is necessarily a multiverse. Rather, he argues that if we can’t know that there isn’t a multiverse then we can’t draw a conclusion of design. This isn’t all that different from the shady attorney who says, “You can’t say there aren’t 1010,000 universes out there, right?” But as the hypothetical cancer cluster shows, we could extend multiverse logic and appeals to unknown causes to destroy virtually any scientific conclusion. But that’s not how science works. What we have before us is a universe that is, to all appearances, finely tuned for life. That’s data, and that’s enough to draw a sound scientific conclusion: design. 

Once we allow the unknown or the unknowable to prevent us from making inferences to design that are justified based upon what we know, we’ve let philosophy — or personal preference — influence our science. 

Again, science doesn’t deal in speculations about what might exist. Science deals in what we know. And based upon what we know, our universe appears “a little too peculiar,” as Sutter puts it. We don’t know that there’s a multiverse because we can’t observe it. But we do observe that our universe exists, and we do observe that our universe has special properties that allow life to exist. We can conclude those properties point to design.

Britain's really bad year?

 

Newly revealed evidence for ID

 Hidden, Now Revealed: Amazonia, Fitness Landscapes, and Fibonacci Numbers

David Coppedge

Here are some news items of interest for those who have followed my previous articles about Amazonia, fitness landscapes, and Fibonacci numbers. They are united by the theme of “hidden” things now revealed.

Hidden Cities in the Jungle

In 2022 (here), I shared news about “mind blowing” discoveries made with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) in the Amazon rainforest. The forest-penetrating technology uncovered “geoglyphs” (large structures) that were made by previously unknown people groups. Last fall (here) I updated the story with new estimates that there might be many thousands more to discover. This was a classic test of The Design Inference: eliminating chance by specified complexity and small probability.

Since then, a “huge ancient city” has been revealed by LIDAR, reports BBC News, and was explored by ground crews. Some 6,000 mounds are at the large site, probably foundations for homes. 

“It changes the way we see Amazonian cultures. Most people picture small groups, probably naked, living in huts and clearing land — this shows ancient people lived in complicated urban societies,” says co-author Antoine Dorison.

The city was built around 2,500 years ago, and people lived there for up to 1,000 years, according to archaeologists.

It is difficult to accurately estimate how many people lived there at any one time, but scientists say it is certainly in the 10,000s if not 100,000s. 

See New Scientist’s article on this find, with a LIDAR scan of the extensive site. It adds,

In 2015, Rostain’s team did an aerial survey with lidar, a laser scanning technique that can create a detailed 3D map of the surface beneath most vegetation, revealing features not normally visible to us. The findings, which have only now been published, show that the settlements were far more extensive than anyone realised….

The survey also revealed a network of straight roads created by digging out soil and piling it on the sides. The longest extends for at least 25 kilometres, but might continue beyond the area that was surveyed.

This month, Jay Silverstein, an archaeologist renowned for the detection of hidden artifacts in Amazonia and elsewhere, wrote in The Conversation about these amazing discoveries. The title of his essay promises big news ahead, “Valley of lost cities found in the Amazon — technological advances in archaeology are only the beginning of discovery.”

A valley of lost cities has been discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon. When you hear of such a discovery you might think of archaeologists with chisels and brushes or explorers in pith helmets stumbling across sites deep in the forest. Instead, without needing to brave the hazards of the forest, Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) has revealed networks of buried roads and earthen mounds.

The point of exploratory science is to reveal what has so far been hidden. Whether at the edge of the universe with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the bottom of the sea with Underwater Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs), or through the canopy of the densest forests with Lidar, we are discovering things that reshape our understanding of the world. 

It’s like finding the key to a cryptogram, or the figures in a stereogram, to see these city-scale structures under the forest canopy for the first time. Silverstein believes that scientists are nowhere near running out of things to discover. LIDAR and aerial search systems have revolutionized archaeology, but there will always be a need for ground-based searches and excavations — meaning, there will continue to be ample opportunities for design detection. (This is not to imply that design in the forest leaves, loaded with ATP synthase motors, does not warrant its own design inference.)

Hidden Assumptions in the Fitness Landscape

Like letters crossing in the mail, scientific papers can contradict one another. The authors of a paper in Oxford’s International Journal of Organic Evolution, blithely assuming there is wisdom in Wright’s “fitness landscape” metaphor, were apparently unaware of the PNAS paper the previous month that debunked it (see my post on that paper here). True, authors can innocently miss others’ work due to lag times between research, writing, and publication, even if they do a literature search, but this points to a problem in peer-reviewed scientific publications: wrong notions can persist even after they have been falsified.

The Oxford Evolution paper, “The fitness landscape of a community of Darwin’s finches,” by 18 authors, builds its case on the notion of a Gaussian landscape, not realizing that the landscape is flat with trapdoors (according to the PNAS authors), and that “holey landscapes” represent “the dominant evolutionary process.” 

The drivers of adaptive radiation have often been conceptualized through the concept of “adaptive landscapes,” yet formal empirical estimates of adaptive landscapes for natural adaptive radiations have proven elusive. Here, we use a 17-year dataset of Darwin’s ground finches (Geospiza spp.) at an intensively studied site on Santa Cruz (Galápagos) to estimate individual apparent lifespan in relation to beak traits.

Onward they go, eager to perpetuate this icon of evolution that Jonathan Wells debunked 24 years ago. Now, with the collapse of Wright’s “fitness landscape” metaphor (at least the smooth Gaussian kind with curving hills and valleys), their work has been doubly debunked. It’s kind of sad. They mention fitness peaks 90 times, fitness valleys 16 times, landscape 154 times, and “fitness” 194 times. It would be one thing if they argued that Dochtermann et al. were wrong in their assessment of the landscape metaphor being “holey” in their PNAS paper, but these authors seem oblivious to the problem that composite traits cannot gain fitness on a flat landscape. They can only disappear through one of the trapdoors.

One can only wonder how long it will take for the landscape myth — organisms gradually ascending to higher fitness by natural selection — to collapse. Since the “fitness landscape” metaphor has been extremely useful to Darwinians, as in this new paper, it is likely to continue as a useful lie for some time. Perhaps Dr. Wells can use it as another case of Zombie Science.

Hidden Glories in the Infrared

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission Team revealed a blockbuster set of images at the end of January: a catalog of spiral galaxies displayed in exquisite detail. Adding to the splendor of the gallery, NASA scientists combined images from the Hubble Space Telescope and data from other instruments, including the “the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, including observations in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light.” The combined data sets provided a multicolored, high-resolution gallery of images that is sure to tantalize astronomers and delight the public.

The caption for one image of spiral galaxy NGC 628 (pictured at the top) includes this note: “The spiraling filamentary structure looks somewhat like a cross section of a nautilus shell.” This recalls posts here at Evolution News about the uncanny ubiquity of phenomena exhibiting the Fibonacci series (here, here, here, here, here). Why should a nautilus shell mimic the structure of a spiral galaxy differing in size by many orders of magnitude? As I remarked in this link, the question remains unanswered in spite of modelers’ attempts to explain one example in plant stems.

Darwinism's simple beginning nowhere in sight?

 Astrophysicist: “We Do Not Yet Know How, Where, or Why Life First Appeared”

Casey Luskin

A fantastic article at Universe Today reports on “The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth.” It opens with a striking admission of our ignorance about how life arose:

We do not yet know how, where, or why life first appeared on our planet. Part of the difficulty is that “life” has no strict, universally agreed-upon definition.

The author is Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist at Ohio State University — and he’s absolutely right: there’s presently no natural explanation for the origin of life. 

What Is Life?

Sutter provides some useful definitions of life, starting with what he calls a “simple statement”:

Life is that which is subject to Darwinian evolution. That is, life experiences natural selection, that unceasing pressure that chooses traits and characteristics to pass down to a new generation through the simple virtue of their survivability.

If we accept this definition at face value, life must be highly complex. That’s because Darwinian evolution requires both survival and replication. Survival requires the ability to metabolize materials from the surrounding environment into energy needed to power the chemical reactions of life, and replication requires the ability to make copies of yourself with some minimal level of fidelity. Both of these requirements entail highly complex systems.

Here’s how Walter Bradley and I described the minimal complexity of life in our chapter “Did Life First Arise by Purely Natural Means?” in The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, published in 2021:

[A]ll living systems (1) process energy, (2) store information, and (3) replicate. In nature, these processes are performed primarily by molecules from three families of large biopolymers: proteins, DNA, and RNA. The mystery of how life began is essentially the mystery of how these three types of biopolymers formed and congregated within a cell with a barrier made of lipids as a self-replicating system.

Sutter seems to unwittingly agree with this description of life, because he then elaborates on what is necessary to make Darwinian evolution possible, and lands on exactly the same three requirements for life (though listed in a different order):

To succeed at evolution and separate itself from mere chemical reactions, life must do three things. First, it must somehow store information, such as the encoding for various processes, traits, and characteristics. This way the successful traits can pass from one generation to another.

Second, life must self-replicate. It must be able to make reasonably accurate copies of its own molecular structure, so that the information contained within itself has the chance to become a new generation, changed and altered based on its survivability.

Lastly, life must catalyze reactions. It must affect its own environment, whether for movement, or to acquire or store energy, or grow new structures, or all the many wonderful activities that life does on a daily basis.

Again, this is exactly right. And doing these “three things” — “store information,” “self-replicate” and “catalyze reactions” — isn’t simple. The whole process requires complex DNA and RNA molecules and molecular machines. Sutter appreciates this fact and gives a decent sketch of the complexity of life:

[L]ife on Earth has evolved a dizzying array of chemical and molecular machines to propagate itself — a menagerie so complex and interconnected that we do not yet fully understand it. But a basic picture has emerged. Put exceedingly simply (for I would hate for you to mistake me for a biologist), life accomplishes these tasks with a triad of molecular tools.

Sutter is correct that life is full of molecular machines and that we’re still untangling its complexity. And the molecular triad he refers to is composed of DNA, RNA, and proteins. 

The Molecular Triad of Life

Regarding DNA, he says strikingly that, “The raw ability of DNA to store massive amounts of information is nothing short of a miracle.” 

Regarding RNA, Sutter says that it “stores information but, again speaking only in generalities, has the main job of reading the chemical instructions stored in the DNA and using that to manufacture the last member of the triad, proteins.” Of course he’s right that RNA stores (and transports) information that is used in manufacturing proteins, but I would argue he understates its other important functions. As we recently discussed, we can now identify “RNA genes” which produce RNAs as an end in themselves that perform numerous important cellular functions. 

As for proteins, Sutter provides a nice summary of their importance and their diversity:

“Proteins” is a generic catch-all term for the almost uncountable varieties of molecular machines that do stuff: They snip apart molecules, bind them back together, manufacture new ones, hold structures together, become structures themselves, move important molecules from one place to another, transform energy from one form to another, and so on.

But there’s a catch: proteins are also necessary for replicating DNA. Sutter explains: “DNA stores information, RNA uses that information to manufacture proteins, and the proteins interact with the environment and perform the self-replication of DNA.” 

The Irreducible Complexity of Life

But then Sutter closes with a powerful conclusion that the “interconnected” nature of this triad means that all aspects of the system must be present for life to function:

The interconnected nature of DNA, RNA, and proteins means that it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze, because if only one component is missing then the whole system falls apart — a three-legged table with one missing cannot stand.

This almost sounds like a description of “irreducible complexity” — if “one component is missing then the whole system falls apart.” And once again, he’s absolutely right: Life as we know it requires DNA, RNA, and protein to function, and it can’t arise in a stepwise manner on the early earth.

A Potent Challenge to Chemical Evolution

What about his comment that life’s “interconnected nature” means “it could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze”? That sounds like a potent challenge to chemical evolution. 

Now make no mistake, Sutter clearly endorses evolution at multiple points in his article, and I have no idea what he thinks about intelligent design. And while he thinks that life “could not have sprung up ab initio from the primordial ooze,” it’s not entirely clear if that wording is intended to leave the door open to some other unspecified types of models for a natural origin of life. Nonetheless, his arguments here about obstacles to a stepwise explanation of chemical evolution — even alluding to the irreducibly complex nature of life’s fundamental biomolecules — are exactly right. 

It’s good to find another scientist — with no connections to intelligent design — who sees the issue so clearly

The great apostasy: The Watchtower society's commentary.

 

Man of Lawlessness

An expression used by the apostle Paul at 2 Thessalonians 2:2, 3 in warning of the great anti-Christian apostasy that would develop before “the day of Jehovah.” The Greek word for “apostasy” here used, a·po·sta·siʹa, denotes more than a mere falling away, an indifferent sliding back. It means a defection, a revolt, a planned, deliberate rebellion. In ancient papyrus documents a·po·sta·siʹa was used politically of rebels.

A Religious Revolt. This rebellion, however, is not a political one. It is a religious one, a revolt against Jehovah God and Jesus Christ and therefore against the Christian congregation.

Foretold. Other forecasts of this apostasy were made by the apostles Paul and Peter both verbally and in writing, and the Lord Jesus Christ himself warned of its coming. In his illustration of the wheat and the weeds (Mt 13), Jesus said that the Devil would sow “weeds,” imitation Christians, “sons of the wicked one,” among the “wheat,” the “sons of the kingdom.” These would exist until the conclusion of the system of things, when they would be identified and ‘burned up.’

Paul warned the Christian overseers of Ephesus that after his going away “oppressive wolves” would enter in among true Christians and would not treat the flock with tenderness but would try to draw away “the disciples” after themselves (not just making disciples for themselves but trying to draw away the disciples, Christ’s disciples). (Ac 20:29, 30) He wrote, at 1 Timothy 4:1-3: “However, the inspired utterance says definitely that in later periods of time some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to misleading inspired utterances and teachings of demons, by the hypocrisy of men who speak lies, marked in their conscience as with a branding iron [feelingless, seared, so that they do not feel any twinges of conscience because of hypocritically speaking lies]; forbidding to marry, commanding to abstain from foods which God created to be partaken of with thanksgiving.”

Paul later wrote to Timothy that “there will be a period of time when they will not put up with the healthful teaching, but, in accord with their own desires, they will accumulate teachers for themselves to have their ears tickled; and they will turn their ears away from the truth.”​—2Ti 4:3, 4.

The apostle Peter drew a parallel between the apostasy from Christianity and that which occurred in the natural house of Israel. He said: “However, there also came to be false prophets among the people, as there will also be false teachers among you. These very ones will quietly bring in destructive sects and will disown even the owner that bought them, bringing speedy destruction upon themselves. Furthermore, many will follow their acts of loose conduct, and on account of these the way of the truth will be spoken of abusively.” Peter goes on to point out that these would exploit the congregation but that “the destruction of them is not slumbering.”​—2Pe 2:1-3.

A composite “man.” The “man” of 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 is, therefore, not an individual, but a composite “man,” a collective group, as the foregoing scriptures show, and this “man” was to continue after the apostles’ death and exist down until the time of the Lord’s presence.

Treason against God. The “lawlessness” that this composite apostate “man” commits is lawlessness against Jehovah God the Universal Sovereign. This “man” is guilty of treason. He is called “the son of destruction,” as was Judas Iscariot, the traitor who betrayed the Lord Jesus Christ and who was instrumental in bringing about his death. He, like Judas, is to be annihilated, sent into extinction forever. This “man” is not “Babylon the Great,” who also fights against God, for she is a woman, a harlot. However, since he carries on a religious rebellion against God, he is evidently a part of mystic Babylon.​—Joh 17:12; Re 17:3, 5.

“The man of lawlessness” sets himself in opposition to God and is therefore a “satan,” which means “resister.” And, indeed, his “presence is according to the operation of Satan.” (2Th 2:9) In the days of the apostle Paul, there was “mystery,” or a religious secret, about the identity of this “man of lawlessness.” To this day mystery shrouds his identity in the minds of many persons, because his wickedness is practiced under the guise of godly devotion. (2Th 2:7) By his lying teachings contrary to or superseding, as it were, the law of God, “the man of lawlessness” sets himself up over Jehovah God and other ‘gods,’ mighty ones of the earth, and also against God’s holy ones, true spiritual brothers of Jesus Christ. (Compare 2Pe 2:10-13.) Since he is a hypocrite, a false teacher claiming to be Christian, he “sits down in the temple of The God,” that is, what such false teachers claim to be that temple.​—2Th 2:4.

A restraint. Paul speaks of “the thing that acts as a restraint.” (2Th 2:6) It appears that the apostles constituted this restraint. Paul had told the Ephesian overseers that after his going away wolflike men would enter in. (Ac 20:29) He repeatedly wrote admonitions about such apostasy not only here in Second Thessalonians but in many exhortations to Timothy. And he counseled Timothy to commit the things he had heard from Paul to faithful men who would be qualified to teach others. He spoke of the congregation of the living God as being “a pillar and support of the truth.” He wanted it built up as strongly as possible before the great apostasy blossomed out.​—2Ti 2:2; 1Ti 3:15.

Much later, at the command of Christ, the apostle John was told to write, warning against sects, mentioning especially the sect of Nicolaus and speaking of false prophets like Balaam and of the woman Jezebel who called herself a prophetess.​—Re 2:6, 14, 15, 20.

At work in apostles’ days. The apostle Paul said that the mystery was “already at work.” (2Th 2:7) There were those trying to teach false doctrine, some of these even disturbing the Thessalonian congregation, prompting, in part, the writing of his second letter to them. There were antichrists when John wrote his letters, and doubtless before that. John spoke of “the last hour” of the apostolic period, and said: “Just as you have heard that antichrist is coming, even now there have come to be many antichrists . . . They went out from us, but they were not of our sort; for if they had been of our sort, they would have remained with us. But they went out that it might be shown up that not all are of our sort.”​—1Jo 2:18, 19; see ANTICHRIST.

Revealed. Following the apostles’ death, “the man of lawlessness” came out into the open with his religious hypocrisy and false teachings. (2Th 2:3, 6, 8) According to Paul’s words, this “man” would gain great power, operating under Satan’s control, performing “every powerful work and lying signs and portents.” Persons deceived by the operation of the composite “man of lawlessness” are referred to as “those who are perishing [literally, “destroying themselves”], as a retribution because they did not accept the love of the truth that they might be saved.” The apostle shows that they “get to believing the lie” and they will all “be judged because they did not believe the truth but took pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2Th 2:9-12; see Int.) The judgment is therefore a condemnatory one.​—See RESURRECTION (Sin against the holy spirit).

Destroyed. This composite, hypocritical “man of lawlessness” is to be done away with by the Lord Jesus “by the spirit of his mouth” and brought to nothing “by the manifestation of his presence.” The annihilation of this wicked opposer of God will be visible, concrete proof that the Lord Jesus Christ is sitting and acting as Judge. He will not judge according to his own standards, hence the destruction “by the spirit of his mouth” evidently means in expression of Jehovah’s judgment against this wicked class of persons.​—2Th 2:8; compare Re 19:21, as to “the long sword . . . which sword proceeded out of his mouth.”

The formalizing of design detection and the case for ID

 

ID has made Darwin Skepticism less unfashionable?

 Dembski and Ruse Look Back on 20 Years of Debate — And a Special Anniversary

Subboor Ahmed

In 2004 Cambridge University Press published Debating Design: From Darwin to DNA, edited by William Dembski and Michael Ruse, a brilliant landmark anthology showcasing the vibrancy of the debate between intelligent design and evolution. Contributors included Angus Menuge, Kenneth Miller, Elliott Sober, Robert Pennock, Stuart Kauffman, Paul Davies, John Polkinghorne, Richard Swinburne, Walter Bradley, and Stephen Meyer. In 2024, it seemed worthwhile to look back at the two intervening decades and see how the debate has developed. So with great pleasure I invited Dembski and Ruse for a conversation on my podcast: When Debating Design was published, an ambiguity hung over it. Was this the beginning of a new chapter for ID? Or was it a swansong? Critics believed there were good reasons to think ID would peter out. The New Atheism — new at the time, in the years immediately following 9/11 which called it into being — was on the rise, enjoying far more popularity than ID did. People read New Atheist books and came away feeling courageous and victorious. Yet the New Atheism has since turned passé. Nothing guaranteed that ID would not suffer the same fate. 

Intelligent Design in Two Senses

Twenty years later, ID is still here. How did it persevere? The secret, I think, has to something to do with ID being the flipside of discontent with Darwinian orthodoxy. Design can be thought of in two senses: a strict one, and an expansive one. The strict sense is design as advocated by ID proponents. It is the positive case for ID. Most atheist-leaning scientists remain averse to this. The expansive sense is design as a critique of current evolutionary theory, with the latter’s difficulties in explaining features of biology. That explanatory weakness is not, per se, evidence of design, but it does cause one to wonder about the possibility of intelligent design. Many scientists acknowledge the shortcomings of current neo-Darwinian theory. These two senses of design were discernible in Debating Design. 

Debating Design gathered essays arguing respectively for four different viewpoints: Darwinism, Complex Self-Organization, Theistic Evolution, and Intelligent Design. As presented in the book, the ID viewpoint argued forcefully for design in nature. It is also true that out of the four viewpoints represented, three recognized that Darwinism by itself was an insufficient explanation for the sublime complexities in life. Seen this way, design in its expansive sense, reflected in a mass of pointed, well-reasoned criticisms, dwarfs Darwinism. By leveraging design in its expansive sense, ID proper provided a platform for scientific discussion. ID then became a viable option by championing the strict sense of design. Critics of ID who are nonetheless skeptical of Darwinism can be read as agreeing with ID that in principle evolutionary theory is not the end-all explanation for biological complexity. 

Growing Doubt About Darwin

Since 2004, doubts about neo-Darwinian mechanisms have only grown. In 2014, Laland, Uller, Feldman, et al.published in Nature an influential article calling for an urgent rethink of evolutionary theory. They wrote: 

The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science. We contend that evolutionary biology needs revision if it is to benefit fully from these other disciplines. The data supporting our position gets stronger every day.

Yet the mere mention of the EES often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science. Some might fear that they will receive less funding and recognition if outsiders — such as physiologists or developmental biologists — flood into their field.

…This is no storm in an academic tearoom, it is a struggle for the very soul of the discipline.

LALAND, K., ULLER, T., FELDMAN, M. ET AL. DOES EVOLUTIONARY THEORY NEED A RETHINK? NATURE 514, 161–164 (2014)

The protest about the “spectre of intelligent design” was telling. When critics start talking that way, as if looking over their shoulder, you can’t help wondering if the ID program is onto something. Darwinian mechanisms, as they stand today, are widely recognized as out of tune with the latest scientific discoveries in a variety of fields. This lends credence to ID, in its expansive sense, as the passage above grudgingly let’s slip. The ID community can take it as a matter of pride that from the very beginning, it has consistently been pointing out the inadequacies of evolutionary thought. Contrast this with recent fledgling viewpoints popping up in the scientific community where weaknesses in the evolutionary narrative are belatedly recognized under the euphemistic terms of “puzzles” rather than “problems,” in need of “revisions” rather than a brand new perspective. It is this trend that has encouraged a certain conciliatory quality in the debate. 

Eschewing Polarization

As I listened to Dembski and Ruse, what struck me most is how their views today eschew the bitter polarization that characterized earlier discussions of ID. In the conversation, Ruse acknowledged that contemporary science has not explained how molecules could have led to mind. The mind-body problem is a fundamental question that science cannot answer. Ruse also explicitly distanced himself from the crude materialism championed by Daniel Dennett, one of the New Atheism’s Four Horsemen. While crucial differences between them remain, as Dembski aptly highlighted, overall the discussion was characterized by amiable restraint, cordiality, and even chumminess. Moreover, Dembski is a Christian, Ruse is an agnostic, and I am a Muslim, and it is significant that all three of us can take ID seriously as a topic deserving of critical engagement rather than dismissive caricaturing. It can be hoped that ID will continue making inroads in the evolution debate. Grand victories are not needed. Slow-but-steady will be far more productive than a quick-dash attempt to the finish line.

Any biological theory that cannot adequately explain the “appearance” (as Richard Dawkins puts it) of design cannot adequately explain life. ID positions itself as explaining this appearance — seen as actual, not illusory — while allowing ample space for competing non-ID theories to air their dissatisfaction with Darwinian orthodoxy. The stricter sense of design can thus be defended as a more reasonable, and a more intuitively straight-forward option amongst this plurality of the dissatisfied. Using this strategy, the ID community can hope to bolster its credibility and contribute to a greater push for a paradigm shift in origins science. 

The continuation of ID across two decades where New Atheism failed shows that ID is closer to the scientific enterprise than the New Atheism ever was. The debate is not over. But as of now, it is clear that ID is heading in the right direction. Theodosius Dobzhansky’s famous saying, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” has gradually evolved into “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of design.”