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Saturday 5 January 2019

Why we can dare to deny:By David Berlinski

The Deniable Darwin



The fossil record is incomplete, the reasoning flawed; is the theory of evolution fit to survive?
  Charles Darwin presented On the Origin of Species to a disbelieving world in 1859 - three years after Clerk Maxwell had published "On Faraday's Lines of Force," the first of his papers on the electromagnetic field. Maxwell's theory has by a process of absorption become part of quantum field theory, and so a part of the great canonical structure created by mathematical physics.
By contrast, the final triumph of Darwinian theory, although vividly imagined by biologists, remains, along with world peace and Esperanto, on the eschatological horizon of contemporary thought.
"It is just a matter of time," one biologist wrote recently, reposing his faith in a receding hereafter, "before this fruitful concept comes to be accepted by the public as wholeheartedly as it has accepted the spherical earth and the sun-centered solar system." Time, however, is what evolutionary biologists have long had, and if general acceptance has not come by now, it is hard to know when it ever will.
In its most familiar, textbook form, Darwin's theory subordinates itself to a haunting and fantastic image, one in which life on earth is represented as a tree. So graphic has this image become that some biologists have persuaded themselves they can see the flowering tree standing on a dusty plain, the mammalian twig obliterating itself by anastomosis into a reptilian branch and so backward to the amphibia and then the fish, the sturdy chordate line - our line, cosa nostra - moving by slithering stages into the still more primitive trunk of life and so downward to the single irresistible cell that from within its folded chromosomes foretold the living future.
This is nonsense, of course. That densely reticulated tree, with its lavish foliage, is an intellectual construct, one expressing the hypothesis of descent with modification.
Evolution is a process, one stretching over four billion years. It has not been observed. The past has gone to where the past inevitably goes. The future has not arrived. The present reveals only the detritus of time and chance: the fossil record, and the comparative anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry of different organisms and creatures. Like every other scientific theory, the theory of evolution lies at the end of an inferential trail.
The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; prominent biologists shake their heads at the obduracy of those who would dispute them. Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin's theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time-theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead.1
Before the Cambrian era, a brief 600 million years ago, very little is inscribed in the fossil record; but then, signaled by what I imagine as a spectral puff of smoke and a deafening ta-da!, an astonishing number of novel biological structures come into creation, and they come into creation at once.
Thereafter, the major transitional sequences are incomplete. Important inferences begin auspiciously, but then trail off, the ancestral connection between Eusthenopteron and Ichthyostega, for example - the great hinge between the fish and the amphibia - turning on the interpretation of small grooves within Eusthenopteron's intercalary bones. Most species enter the evolutionary order fully formed and then depart unchanged. Where there should be evolution, there is stasis instead - the term is used by the paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in developing their theory of "punctuated equilibria" - with the fire alarms of change going off suddenly during a long night in which nothing happens.
The fundamental core of Darwinian doctrine, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has buoyantly affirmed, "is no longer in dispute among scientists." Such is the party line, useful on those occasions when biologists must present a single face to their public. But it was to the dead that Darwin pointed for confirmation of his theory; the fact that paleontology does not entirely support his doctrine has been a secret of long standing among paleontologists. "The known fossil record," Steven Stanley observes, "fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."
Small wonder, then, that when the spotlight of publicity is dimmed, evolutionary biologists evince a feral streak, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, Richard Dawkins, and John Maynard Smith abusing one another roundly like wrestlers grappling in the dark.

Pause for the Logician

Swimming in the soundless sea, the shark has survived for millions of years, sleek as a knife blade and twice as dull. The shark is an organism wonderfully adapted to its environment. Pause. And then the bright brittle voice of logical folly intrudes: after all, it has survived for millions of years.
This exchange should be deeply embarrassing to evolutionary biologists. And yet, time and again, biologists do explain the survival of an organism by reference to its fitness and the fitness of an organism by reference to its survival, the friction between concepts kindling nothing more illuminating than the observation that some creatures have been around for a very long time. "Those individuals that have the most offspring," writes Ernst Mayr, the distinguished zoologist, "are by definition . . . the fittest ones." And in Evolution and the Myth of Creationism, Tim Berra states that "[f]itness in the Darwinian sense means reproductive fitness-leaving at least enough offspring to spread or sustain the species in nature."
This is not a parody of evolutionary thinking; it is evolutionary thinking. Que sera, sera.
Evolutionary thought is suffused in general with an unwholesome glow. "The belief that an organ so perfect as the eye," Darwin wrote, "could have been formed by natural selection is enough to stagger anyone." It is. The problem is obvious. "What good," Stephen Jay Gould asked dramatically, "is 5 percent of an eye?" He termed this question "excellent."
The question, retorted the Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, the most prominent representative of ultra-Darwinians, "is not excellent at all":
"Vision that is 5 percent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. And 6 percent is better than 5, 7 percent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series."
But Dawkins, replied Phillip Johnson in turn, had carelessly assumed that 5 percent of an eye would see 5 percent as well as an eye, and that is an assumption for which there is little evidence. (A professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, Johnson has a gift for appealing to the evidence when his opponents invoke theory, and vice versa.)
Having been conducted for more than a century, exchanges of this sort may continue for centuries more; but the debate is an exercise in irrelevance. What is at work in sight is a visual system, one that involves not only the anatomical structures of the eye and forebrain, but the remarkably detailed and poorly understood algorithms required to make these structures work.
"When we examine the visual mechanism closely," Karen K. de Valois remarked recently in Science, "although we understand much about its component parts, we fail to fathom the ways in which they fit together to produce the whole of our complex visual perception."
These facts suggest a chastening reformulation of Gould's "excellent" question, one adapted to reality: could a system we do not completely understand be constructed by means of a process we cannot completely specify?
The intellectually responsible answer to this question is that we do not know -- we have no way of knowing. But that is not the answer evolutionary theorists accept. According to Daniel Dennett (in Darwin's Dangerous Idea), Dawkins is "almost certainly right" to uphold the incremental view, because "Darwinism is basically on the right track." In this, he echoes the philosopher Kim Sterenly, who is also persuaded that "something like Dawkins's stories have got to be right" (emphasis added). After all, she asserts, "natural selection is the only possible explanation of complex adaptation."
Dawkins himself has maintained that those who do not believe a complex biological structure may be constructed in small steps are expressing merely their own sense of "personal incredulity." But in countering their animadversions he appeals to his own ability to believe almost anything. Commenting on the (very plausible) claim that spiders could not have acquired their web-spinning behavior by a Darwinian mechanism, Dawkins writes: "It is not impossible at all. That is what I firmly believe and I have some experience of spiders and their webs." It is painful to see this advanced as an argument.

Unflagging Success

Darwin conceived of evolution in terms of small variations among organisms, variations which by a process of accretion allow one species to change continuously into another. This suggests a view in which living creatures are spread out smoothly over the great manifold of biological possibilities, like colors merging imperceptibly in a color chart.
Life, however, is absolutely nothing like this. Wherever one looks there is singularity, quirkiness, oddness, defiant individuality, and just plain weirdness. The male redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti), for example, is often consumed during copulation. Such is sexual cannibalism -- the result, biologists have long assumed, of "predatory females overcoming the defenses of weaker males." But it now appears that among Latrodectus basselti, the male is complicit in his own consumption. Having achieved intromission, this schnook performs a characteristic somersault, placing his abdomen directly over his partner's mouth. Such is sexual suicide-awfulness taken to a higher power.2
It might seem that sexual suicide confers no advantage on the spider, the male passing from ecstasy to extinction in the course of one and the same act. But spiders willing to pay for love are apparently favored by female spiders (no surprise, there); and female spiders with whom they mate, entomologists claim, are less likely to mate again. The male spider perishes; his preposterous line persists.
This explanation resolves one question only at the cost of inviting another: why such bizarre behavior? In no other Latrodectus species does the male perform that obliging somersault, offering his partner the oblation of his life as well as his love. Are there general principles that specify sexual suicide among this species, but that forbid sexual suicide elsewhere? If so, what are they?
Once asked, such questions tend to multiply like party guests. If evolutionary theory cannot answer them, what, then, is its use? Why is the Pitcher plant carnivorous, but not the thorn bush, and why does the Pacific salmon require fresh water to spawn, but not the Chilean sea bass? Why has the British thrush learned to hammer snails upon rocks, but not the British blackbird, which often starves to death in the midst of plenty? Why did the firefly discover bioluminescence, but not the wasp or the warrior ant; why do the bees do their dance, but not the spider or the flies; and why are women, but not cats, born without the sleek tails that would make them even more alluring than they already are?
Why? Yes, why? The question, simple, clear, intellectually respectable, was put to the Nobel laureate George Wald. "Various organisms try various things," he finally answered, his words functioning as a verbal shrug, "they keep what works and discard the rest."
But suppose the manifold of life were to be given a good solid yank, so that the Chilean sea bass but not the Pacific salmon required fresh water to spawn, or that ants but not fireflies flickered enticingly at twilight, or that women but not cats were born with lush tails. What then? An inversion of life's fundamental facts would, I suspect, present evolutionary biologists with few difficulties. Various organisms try various things. This idea is adapted to any contingency whatsoever, an interesting example of a Darwinian mechanism in the development of Darwinian thought itself.
A comparison with geology is instructive. No geological theory makes it possible to specify precisely a particular mountain's shape; but the underlying process of upthrust and crumbling is well understood, and geologists can specify something like a mountain's generic shape. This provides geological theory with a firm connection to reality. A mountain arranging itself in the shape of the letter "A" is not a physically possible object; it is excluded by geological theory.
The theory of evolution, by contrast, is incapable of ruling anything out of court. That job must be done by nature. But a theory that can confront any contingency with unflagging success cannot be falsified. Its control of the facts is an illusion.

Sheer Dumb Luck

Chance alone," the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Jacques Monod once wrote, "is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, is at the very root of the stupendous edifice of creation."
The sentiment expressed by these words has come to vex evolutionary biologists. "This belief," Richard Dawkins writes, "that Darwinian evolution is 'random,' is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth." But Monod is right and Dawkins wrong. Chance lies at the beating heart of evolutionary theory, just as it lies at the beating heart of thermodynamics.
It is the second law of thermodynamics that holds dominion over the temporal organization of the universe, and what the law has to say we find verified by ordinary experience at every turn. Things fall apart. Energy, like talent, tends to squander itself. Liquids go from hot to lukewarm. And so does love. Disorder and despair overwhelm the human enterprise, filling our rooms and our lives with clutter. Decay is unyielding. Things go from bad to worse. And overall, they go only from bad to worse.
These grim certainties the second law abbreviates in the solemn and awful declaration that the entropy of the universe is tending toward a maximum. The final state in which entropy is maximized is simply more likely than any other state. The disintegration of my face reflects nothing more compelling than the odds. Sheer dumb luck.
But if things fall apart, they also come together. Life appears to offer at least a temporary rebuke to the second law of thermodynamics. Although biologists are unanimous in arguing that evolution has no goal, fixed from the first, it remains true nonetheless that living creatures have organized themselves into ever more elaborate and flexible structures. If their complexity is increasing, the entropy that surrounds them is decreasing. Whatever the universe-as-a-whole may be doing -- time fusing incomprehensibly with space, the great stars exploding indignantly -- biologically things have gone from bad to better, the show organized, or so it would seem, as a counterexample to the prevailing winds of fate.
How so? The question has historically been the pivot on which the assumption of religious belief has turned. How so? "God said: 'Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven."' That is how so. And who on the basis of experience would be inclined to disagree? The structures of life are complex, and complex structures get made in this, the purely human world, only by a process of deliberate design. An act of intelligence is required to bring even a thimble into being; why should the artifacts of life be different?
Darwin's theory of evolution rejects this counsel of experience and intuition. Instead, the theory forges, at least in spirit, a perverse connection with the second law itself, arguing that precisely the same force that explains one turn of the cosmic wheel explains another: sheer dumb luck.
If the universe is for reasons of sheer dumb luck committed ultimately to a state of cosmic listlessness, it is also by sheer dumb luck that life first emerged on earth, the chemicals in the pre-biotic seas or soup illuminated and then invigorated by a fateful flash of lightning. It is again by sheer dumb luck that the first self-reproducing systems were created. The dense and ropy chains of RNA -- they were created by sheer dumb luck, and sheer dumb luck drove the primitive chemicals of life to form a living cell. It is sheer dumb luck that alters the genetic message so that, from infernal nonsense, meaning for a moment emerges; and sheer dumb luck again that endows life with its opportunities, the space of possibilities over which natural selection plays, sheer dumb luck creating the mammalian eye and the marsupial pouch, sheer dumb luck again endowing the elephant's sensitive nose with nerves and the orchid's translucent petal with blush.
Amazing. Sheer dumb luck.

Life, Complex Life

Physicists are persuaded that things are in the end simple; biologists that they are not. A good deal depends on where one looks. Wherever the biologist looks, there is complexity beyond complexity, the entanglement of things ramifying downward from the organism to the cell. In a superbly elaborated figure, the Australian biologist Michael Denton compares a single cell to an immense automated factory, one the size of a large city:
On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecule.... We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were, astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery....Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
And whatever the complexity of the cell, it is insignificant in comparison with the mammalian nervous system; and beyond that, far impossibly ahead, there is the human mind, an instrument like no other in the biological world, conscious, flexible, penetrating, inscrutable, and profound.
It is here that the door of doubt begins to swing. Chance and complexity are countervailing forces; they work at cross-purposes. This circumstance the English theologian William Paley (1743-1805) made the gravamen of his well-known argument from design:
Nor would any man in his senses think the existence of the watch, with its various machinery, accounted for, by being told that it was one out of possible combinations of material forms; that whatever he had found in the place where he found the watch, must have contained some internal configuration or other, and that this configuration might be the structure now exhibited, viz., of the works of a watch, as well as a different structure. It is worth remarking, it is simply a fact, that this courtly and old-fashioned argument is entirely compelling. We never attribute the existence of a complex artifact to chance. And for obvious reasons: complex objects are useful islands, isolated amid an archipelago of useless possibilities. Of the thousands of ways in which a watch might be assembled from its constituents, only one is liable to work. It is unreasonable to attribute the existence of a watch to chance, if only because it is unlikely. An artifact is the overflow in matter of the mental motions of intention, deliberate design, planning, and coordination. The inferential spool runs backward, and it runs irresistibly from a complex object to the contrived, the artificial, circumstances that brought it into being.
Paley allowed the conclusion of his argument to drift from man-made to biological artifacts, a human eye or kidney falling under the same classification as a watch. "Every indication of contrivance," he wrote, "every manifestation of design, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
In this drifting, Darwinists see dangerous signs of a non sequitur. There is a tight connection, they acknowledge, between what a watch is and how it is made; but the connection unravels at the human eye -- or any other organ, disposition, body plan, or strategy -- if only because another and a simpler explanation is available. Among living creatures, say Darwinists, the design persists even as the designer disappears.
"Paley's argument," Dawkins writes, "is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong."
The enormous confidence this quotation expresses must be juxtaposed against the weight of intuition it displaces. It is true that intuition is often wrong-quantum theory is intuition's graveyard. But quantum theory is remote from experience; our intuitions in biology lie closer to the bone. We are ourselves such stuff as genes are made on, and while this does not establish that our assessments of time and chance must be correct, it does suggest that they may be pertinent.

The Book of Life

The Discovery of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1952 revealed that a living creature is an organization of matter orchestrated by a genetic text. Within the bacterial cell, for example, the book of life is written in a distinctive language. The book is read aloud, its message specifying the construction of the cell's constituents, and then the book is copied, passed faithfully into the future.
This striking metaphor introduces a troubling instability, a kind of tremor, into biological thought. With the discovery of the genetic code, every living creature comes to divide itself into alien realms: the alphabetic and the organismic. The realms are conceptually distinct, responding to entirely different imperatives and constraints. An alphabet, on the one hand, belongs to the class of finite combinatorial objects, things that are discrete and that fit together in highly circumscribed ways. An organism, on the other hand, traces a continuous figure in space and in time. How, then, are these realms coordinated?
I ask the question because in similar systems, coordination is crucial. When I use the English language, the rules of grammar act as a constraint on the changes that I might make to the letters or sounds I employ. This is something we take for granted, an ordinary miracle in which I pass from one sentence to the next, almost as if crossing an abyss by means of a series of well-placed stepping stones.
In living creatures, things evidently proceed otherwise. There is no obvious coordination between alphabet and organism; the two objects are governed by different conceptual regimes, and that apparently is the end of it. Under the pressures of competition, the orchid Orphrys apifera undergoes a statistically adapted drift, some incidental feature in its design becoming over time ever more refined, until, consumed with longing, a misguided bee amorously mounts the orchid's very petals, convinced that he has seen shimmering there a female's fragile genitalia. As this is taking place, the marvelous mimetic design maturing slowly, the orchid's underlying alphabetic system undergoes a series of random perturbations, letters in its genetic alphabet winking off or winking on in a way utterly independent of the grand convergent progression toward perfection taking place out there where the action is.
We do not understand, we cannot re-create, a system of this sort. However it may operate in life, randomness in language is the enemy of order, a way of annihilating meaning And not only in language, but in any language-like system -- computer programs, for example. The alien influence of randomness in such systems was first noted by the distinguished French mathematician M.P. Schutzenberger, who also marked the significance of this circumstance for evolutionary theory. "If we try to simulate such a situation," he wrote, "by making changes randomly . . . on computer programs, we find that we have no chance . . . even to see what the modified program would compute; it just jams.3

Planets of Possibility

This is not yet an argument, only an expression of intellectual unease; but the unease tends to build as analogies are amplified. The general issue is one of size and space, and the way in which something small may be found amidst something very big.
Linguists in the 1950's, most notably Noam Chomsky and George Miller, asked dramatically how many grammatical English sentences could be constructed with 100 letters. Approximately 10 to the 25th power, they answered. This is a very large number. But a sentence is one thing; a sequence, another. A sentence obeys the laws of English grammar; a sequence is lawless and comprises any concatenation of those 100 letters. If there are roughly (1025) sentences at hand, the number of sequences 100 letters in length is, by way of contrast, 26 to the 100th power. This is an inconceivably greater number. The space of possibilities has blown up, the explosive process being one of combinatorial inflation.
Now, the vast majority of sequences drawn on a finite alphabet fail to make a statement: they consist of letters arranged to no point or purpose. It is the contrast between sentences and sequences that carries the full, critical weight of memory and intuition. Organized as a writhing ball, the sequences resemble a planet-sized object, one as large as pale Pluto. Landing almost anywhere on that planet, linguists see nothing but nonsense. Meaning resides with the grammatical sequences, but they, those sentences, occupy an area no larger than a dime.
How on earth could the sentences be discovered by chance amid such an infernal and hyperborean immensity of gibberish? They cannot be discovered by chance, and, of course, chance plays no role in their discovery. The linguist or the native English-speaker moves around the place or planet with a perfectly secure sense of where he should go, and what he is apt to see.
The eerie and unexpected presence of an alphabet in every living creature might suggest the possibility of a similar argument in biology. It is DNA of course, that acts as life's primordial text, the code itself organized in nucleic triplets, like messages in Morse code. Each triplet is matched to a particular chemical object, an amino acid. There are twenty such acids in all. They correspond to letters in an alphabet. As the code is read somewhere in life's hidden housing, the linear order of the nucleic acids induces a corresponding linear order in the amino acids. The biological finger writes, and what the cell reads is an ordered presentation of such amino acids-a protein.
Like the nucleic acids, proteins are alphabetic objects, composed of discrete constituents. On average, proteins are roughly 250 amino acid residues in length, so a given protein may be imagined as a long biochemical word, one of many.
The aspects of an analogy are now in place. What is needed is a relevant contrast, something comparable to sentences and sequences in language. Of course nothing completely comparable is at hand: there are no sentences in molecular biology. Nonetheless, there is this fact, helpfully recounted by Richard Dawkins: "The actual animals that have ever lived on earth are a tiny subset of the theoretical animals that could exist." It follows that over the course of four billion years, life has expressed itself by means of a particular stock of proteins, a certain set of life-like words.
A combinatorial count is now possible. The MIT physicist Murray Eden, to whom I owe this argument, estimates the number of the viable proteins at 10 to the 50th power. Within this set is the raw material of everything that has ever lived: the flowering plants and the alien insects and the seagoing turtles and the sad shambling dinosaurs, the great evolutionary successes and the great evolutionary failures as well. These creatures are, quite literally, composed of the proteins that over the course of time have performed some useful function, with "usefulness" now standing for the sense of sentencehood in linguistics.
As in the case of language, what has once lived occupies some corner in the space of a larger array of possibilities, the actual residing in the shadow of the possible. The space of all possible proteins of a fixed length (250 residues, recall) is computed by multiplying 20 by itself 250 times (20 to the 250th power). It is idle to carry out the calculation. The numbers larger by far than seconds in the history of the world since the Big Bang or grains of sand on the shores of every sounding sea. Another planet now looms in the night sky, Pluto-sized or bigger, a conceptual companion to the planet containing every sequence composed by endlessly arranging the 26 English letters into sequences 100 letters in length. This planetary doppelganger is the planet of all possible proteins of fixed length, the planet, in a certain sense, of every conceivable form of carbon-based life.
And there the two planets lie, spinning on their soundless axes. The contrast between sentences and sequences on Pluto reappears on Pluto's double as the contrast between useful protein forms and all the rest; and it reappears in terms of the same dramatic difference in numbers, the enormous (20 to the 25th power) overawing the merely big (10 to the 50th power), the contrast between the two being quite literally between an immense and swollen planet and a dime's worth of area. That dime-sized corner, which on Pluto contains the English sentences, on Pluto's double contains the living creatures; and there the biologist may be seen tramping, the warm puddle of wet life achingly distinct amid the planet's snow and stray proteins. It is here that living creatures, whatever their ultimate fate, breathed and moaned and carried on, life evidently having discovered the small quiet corner of the space of possibilities in which things work.
It would seem that evolution, Murray Eden writes in artfully ambiguous language, "was directed toward the incredibly small proportion of useful protein forms. . . ," the word "directed" conveying, at least to me, the sobering image of a stage-managed search, with evolution bypassing the awful immensity of all that frozen space because in some sense evolution knew where it was going.
And yet, from the perspective of Darwinian theory, it is chance that plays the crucial -- that plays the only role in generating the proteins. Wandering the surface of a planet, evolution wanders blindly, having forgotten where it has been, unsure of where it is going.

The Artificer of Design

Random mutations are the great creative demiurge of evolution, throwing up possibilities and bathing life in the bright light of chance. Each living creature is not only what it is but what it might be. What, then, acts to make the possible palpable?
The theory of evolution is a materialistic theory. Various deities need not apply. Any form of mind is out. Yet a force is needed, something adequate to the manifest complexity of the biological world, and something that in the largest arena of all might substitute for the acts of design, anticipation, and memory that are obvious features of such day-to-day activities as fashioning a sentence or a sonnet.
This need is met in evolutionary theory by natural selection, the filter but not the source of change. "It may be said," Darwin wrote,
that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good: silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, as the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
Natural selection emerges from these reflections as a strange force-like concept. It is strange because it is unconnected to any notion of force in physics, and it is force-like because natural selection doessomething, it has an effect and so unctions as a kind of cause.4
Creatures, habits, organ systems, body plans, organs, and tissues are shaped by  natural selection. Population geneticists write of selection forces, selection pressures, and coefficients of natural selection; biologists say that natural selection sculpts, shapes, coordinates, transforms, directs, controls, changes, and transfigures living creatures.
It is natural selection, Richard Dawkins believes, that is the artificer of design, a cunning force that mocks human ingenuity even as it mimics it:
Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventually to organized and adaptive complexity, to mosquitoes and mammoths, to humans and therefore, indirectly, to books and computers.
In affirming what Darwin showed, these words suggest that Darwin demonstrated the power of natural selection in some formal sense, settling the issue once and for all. But that is simply not true. When Darwin wrote, the mechanism of evolution that he proposed had only life itself to commend it. But to refer to the power of natural selection by appealing to the course of evolution is a little like confirming a story in the New York Times by reading it twice. The theory of evolution is, after all, a general theory of change; if natural selection can sift the debris of chance to fashion an elephant's trunk, should it not be able to work elsewhere- amid computer programs and algorithms, words and sentences? Skeptics require a demonstration of natural selection's cunning, one that does not involve the very phenomenon it is meant to explain.
No sooner said than done. An extensive literature is now devoted to what is optimistically called artificial life. These are schemes in which a variety of programs generate amusing computer objects and by a process said to be similar to evolution show that they are capable of growth and decay and even a phosphorescent simulacrum of death. An algorithm called "Face Prints," for example, has been designed to enable crime victims to identify their attackers. The algorithm runs through hundreds of facial combinations (long hair, short hair, big nose, wide chin, moles, warts, wens, wrinkles) until the indignant victim spots the resemblance between the long-haired, big-nosed, widechinned portrait of the perpetrator and the perpetrator himself.
It is the presence of the human victim in this scenario that should give pause. What is be doing there, complaining loudly amid those otherwise blind forces? A mechanism that requires a discerning human agent cannot be Darwinian. The Darwinian mechanism neither anticipates nor remembers. It gives no directions and makes no choices. What is unacceptable in evolutionary theory, what is strictly forbidden, is the appearance of a force with the power to survey time, a force that conserves a point or a property because it will be useful. Such a force is no longer Darwinian. How would a blind force know such a thing? And by what means could future usefulness be transmitted to the present?
If life is, as evolutionary biologists so often say, a matter merely of blind thrusting and throbbing, any definition of natural selection must plainly meet what I have elsewhere called a rule against deferred success.5
It is a rule that cannot be violated with impunity; if evolutionary theory is to retain its intellectual integrity, it cannot be violated at all.
But the rule is widely violated, the violations so frequent as to amount to a formal fallacy.

Advent of the Head Monkey

It is Richard Dawkins's grand intention in The Blind Watchmaker to demonstrate, as one reviewer enthusiastically remarked, "how natural selection allows biologists to dispense with such notions as purpose and design." This he does by exhibiting a process in which the random exploration of certain possibilities, a blind stab here, another there, is followed by the filtering effects of natural selection, some of those stabs saved, others discarded. But could a process so conceived -- a Darwinian process -- discover a simple English sentence: a target, say, chosen from Shakespeare? The question is by no means academic. If natural selection cannot discern a simple English sentence, what chance is there that it might have discovered the mammalian eye or the system by which glucose is regulated by the liver? A thought experiment in The Blind Watchmaker now follows. Randomness in the experiment is conveyed by the metaphor of the monkeys, perennial favorites in the theory of probability. There they sit, simian hands curved over the keyboards of a thousand typewriters, their long agile fingers striking keys at random. It is an image of some poignancy, those otherwise intelligent apes banging away at a machine they cannot fathom; and what makes the poignancy pointed is the fact that the system of rewards by which the apes have been induced to strike the typewriter's keys is from the first rigged against them.
The probability that a monkey will strike a given letter is one in 26. The typewriter has 26 keys: the monkey, one working finger. But a letter is not a word. Should Dawkins demand that the monkey get two English letters right, the odds against success rise with terrible inexorability from one in 26 to one in 676. The Shakespearean target chosen by Dawkins -- "Methinks it is like a weasel"-is a six-word sentence containing 28 English letters (including the spaces). It occupies an isolated point in a space of 10,000 million, million, million, million, million, million possibilities. This is a very large number; combinatorial inflation is at work. And these are very long odds. And a six-word sentence consisting of 28 English letters is a very short, very simple English sentence.
Such are the fatal facts. The problem confronting the monkeys is, of course, a double one: they must, to be sure, find the right letters, but they cannot lose the right letters once they have found them. A random search in a space of this size is an exercise in irrelevance. This is something the monkeys appear to know. What more, then, is expected; what more required? Cumulative selection, Dawkins argues- the answer offered as well by Stephen Jay Gould, Manfred Eigen, and Daniel Dennett. The experiment now proceeds in stages. The monkeys type randomly. After a time, they are allowed to survey what they have typed in order to choose the result "which however slightly most resembles the target phrase." It is a computer that in Dawkins's experiment performs the crucial assessments, but I prefer to imagine its role assigned to a scrutinizing monkey-the Head Monkey of the experiment. The process under way is one in which stray successes are spotted and then saved. This process is iterated and iterated again. Variations close to the target are conserved because they are close to the target, the Head Monkey equably surveying the scene until, with the appearance of a miracle in progress, randomly derived sentences do begin to converge on the target sentence itself.
The contrast between schemes and scenarios is striking. Acting on their own, the monkeys are adrift in fathomless possibilities, any accidental success-a pair of English-like letters-lost at once, those successes seeming like faint untraceable lights flickering over a wine-dark sea. The advent of the Head Monkey changes things entirely. Successes are conserved and then conserved again. The light that formerly flickered uncertainly now stays lit, a beacon burning steadily, a point of illumination. By the light of that light, other lights are lit, until the isolated successes converge, bringing order out of nothingness.
The entire exercise is, however, an achievement in self-deception. A target phrase? Iterations that most resemble the target? A Head Monkey that measures the distance between failure and success? If things are sightless, how is the target represented, and how is the distance between randomly generated phrases and the targets assessed? And by whom? And the Head Monkey? What of him? The mechanism of deliberate design, purged by Darwinian theory on the level of the organism, has reappeared in the description of natural selection itself, a vivid example of what Freud meant by the return of the repressed.
This is a point that Dawkins accepts without quite acknowledging, rather like a man adroitly separating his doctor's diagnosis from his own disease.6
Nature presents life with no targets. Life shambles forward, surging here, shuffling there, the small advantages accumulating on their own until something novel appears on the broad evolutionary screen-an arch or an eye, an intricate pattern of behavior, the complexity characteristic of life. May we, then, see this process at work, by seeing it simulated?
"Unfortunately," Dawkins writes, "I think it may be beyond my powers as a programmer to set up such a counterfeit world."7
This is the authentic voice of contemporary Darwinian theory. What may be illustrated by the theory does not involve a Darwinian mechanism; what involves a Darwinian mechanism cannot be illustrated by the theory.

Darwin Without Darwinism

Biologists oftenaffirm that as members of the scientific community they positively welcome criticism. Nonsense. Like everyone else, biologists loathe criticism and arrange their lives so as to avoid it. Criticism has nonetheless seeped into their souls, the process of doubt a curiously Darwinian one in which individual biologists entertain minor reservations about their theory without ever recognizing the degree to which these doubts mount up to a substantial deficit. Creationism, so often the target of their indignation, is the least of their worries.
For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin's doctrine. In a paper of historic importance, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed their dissatisfaction with what they termed "just-so" stories in biology.8
It is by means of a just-so story, for example, that the pop biologist Elaine Morgan explains the presence in human beings of an aquatic diving reflex. An obscure primate ancestral to man, Morgan argues, was actually aquatic, having returned to the sea like the dolphin. Some time later, that primate, having tired of the water, clambered back to land, his aquatic adaptations intact. Just so.
If stories of this sort are intellectually inadequate -- preposterous, in fact -- some biologists are prepared to argue that they are unnecessary as well, another matter entirely. "How seriously," H. Allen Orr asked in a superb if savage review of Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, should we take these endless adaptive explanations of features whose alleged Design may be illusory? Isn't there a difference between those cases where we recognize Design before we understand its precise significance and those cases where we try to make Design manifest concocting a story? And isn't it especially worrisome that we can make up arbitrary traits faster than adaptive stories, and adaptive stories faster than experimental tests?
The camel's lowly hump and the elephant's nose -- these, Orr suggests, may well be adaptive and so designed by natural selection. But beyond the old familiar cases, life may not be designed at all, the weight of evolution borne by neutral mutations, with genes undergoing a slow but pointless drifting in time's soft currents.
Like Orr, many biologists see an acknowledgment of their doubts as a cagey, a calculated, concession; but cagey or not, it is a concession devastating to the larger project of Darwinian biology. Unable to say what evolution has accomplished, biologists now find themselves unable to say whether evolution has accomplished it. This leaves evolutionary theory in the doubly damned position of having compromised the concepts needed to make sense of life -- complexity, adaptation, design - while simultaneously conceding that the theory does little to explain them.
No doubt, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin's scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow.
"Darwin," Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude, "made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." This is an exaggeration, of course, but one containing a portion of the truth. That Darwin's theory of evolution and biblical accounts of creation play similar roles in the human economy of belief is an irony appreciated by altogether too few biologists.

On the Derivation of Ulysses from Don Quixote

I imagine this story being told to me by Jorge Luis Borges one evening in a Buenos Aires cafe.
His voice dry and infinitely ironic, the aging, nearly blind literary master observes that "the Ulysses," mistakenly attributed to the Irishman James Joyce, is in fact derived from "the Quixote."
I raise my eyebrows.
Borges pauses to sip discreetly at the bitter coffee our waiter has placed in front of him, guiding his hands to the saucer.
"The details of the remarkable series of events in question may be found at the University of Leiden," he says. "They were conveyed to me by the Freemason Alejandro Ferri in Montevideo."
Borges wipes his thin lips with a linen handkerchief that he has withdrawn from his breast pocket.
"As you know," he continues, "the original handwritten text of the Quixote was given to an order of French Cistercians in the autumn of 1576."
I hold up my hand to signify to our waiter that no further service is needed.
"Curiously enough, for none of the brothers could read Spanish, the Order was charged by the Papal Nuncio, Hoyo dos Monterrey (a man of great refinement and implacable will), with the responsibility for copying the Quixote, the printing press having then gained no currency in the wilderness of what is now known as the department of Auvergne. Unable to speak or read Spanish, a language they not unreasonably detested, the brothers copied the Quixote over and over again, re-creating the text but, of course, compromising it as well, and so inadvertently discovering the true nature of authorship. Thus they created Fernando Lor's Los Hombres d'Estado in 1585 by means of a singular series of copying errors, and then in 1654 Juan Luis Samorza's remarkable epistolary novel Por Favor by the same means, and then in 1685, the errors having accumulated sufficiently to change Spanish into French, Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, their copying continuous and indefatigable, the work handed down from generation to generation as a sacred but secret trust, so that in time the brothers of the monastery, known only to members of the Bourbon house and, rumor has it, the Englishman and psychic Conan Doyle, copied into creation Stendhal's The Red and the Black and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and then as a result of a particularly significant series of errors, in which French changed into Russian, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Anna Karenina. Late in the last decade of the 19th century there suddenly emerged, in English, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and then the brothers, their numbers reduced by an infectious disease of mysterious origin, finally copied the Ulysses into creation in 1902, the manuscript lying neglected for almost thirteen years and then mysteriously making its way to Paris in 1915, just months before the British attack on the Somme, a circumstance whose significance remains to be determined."
I sit there, amazed at what Borges has recounted. "Is it your understanding, then," I ask, "that every novel in the West was created in this way?"
"Of course," replies Borges imperturbably. Then he adds: "Although every novel is derived directly from another novel, there is really only one novel, the Quixote."

Endnotes

  1. A.S. Romer's Vertebrate Paleontology (University of Chicago Press, third edition, 1966) may be consulted with profit.
  2. The details have been reported in the New York Times and in Science: evidence that at least some entomologists have a good deal of time on their hands.
  3. Schutzenberger's comments were made at a symposium held in 1966. The proceedings were edited by Paul S. Moorhead and Martin Kaplan and published as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press,1967). Schutzenberger's remarks, together with those of the physicist Murray Eden at the same symposium, constituted the first significant criticism of evolutionary doctrine in recent decades.
  4. Murray Eden is, as usual, perceptive: "It is as if," he writes some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that a natural force of unknown origin held the planets in their courses. The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory."
  5. Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck (1986).
  6. The same pattern of intellectual displacement is especially vivid in Daniel Dennett's description of natural selection as a force subordinate to what he calls "the principle of the accumulation of design." Sifting through the debris of chance, natural selection, he writes, occupies itself by "thriftily conserving the design work . . . accomplished at each stage." But there is no such principle. Dennett has simply assumed that a sequence of conserved advantages will converge to an improvement in design; the assumption expresses a non sequitur.
  7. It is absurdly easy to set up a sentence-searching algorithm obeying purely Darwinian constraints. The result, however, is always the same -- gibberish.
  8. "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," Proceedings of the Royal Society. Volume B 205 (1979).
David Berlinski, who has taught mathematics and philosophy in American and French universities, is the author, most recently, of A Tour of the Calculus (Pantheon) and of The Body Shop, a novel forthcoming from St. Martin's). His article, "The Soul of Man Under Physics," appeared in our January issue.

Martin Luther and William Tyndale on the state of the dead.

Martin Luther and William Tyndale on the State of the Dead


n December 19, 1513, in connection with the eighth session of the fifth Lateran Council, Pope Leo X issued a Bull (Apostolici regimis) declaring, "We do condemn and reprobate all who assert that the intelligent soul is mortal" (Damnamus et reprobamus omnes assertentes animam intellectivam mortalem esse). This was directed against the growing "heresy" of those who denied the natural immortality of the soul, and avowed the conditional immortality of man. The Bull also decreed that "all who adhere to the like erroneous assertions shall be shunned and punished as heretics." The decrees of this Council, it should be noted, were all issued in the form of Bulls or constitutions (H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils, 1937, pp. 483, 487).

In 1516 Pietro Pomponatius, of Mantua, noted Italian professor and leader among the Averrorists (who denied the immortality of the soul), issued a book in opposition to this position called Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. This was widely read, especially in the Italian universities. As a result, he was haled before the Inquisition, and his book publicly burned in Venice.

Then, on October 31, 1517, Luther posted his famous Theses on the church door in Wittenberg. In his 1520 published Defence of 41 of his propositions, Luther cited the pope's immortality declaration, as among "those monstrous opinions to be found in the Roman dunghill of decretals" (proposition 27). In the twenty-seventh proposition of his Defence Luther said:

However, I permit the Pope to establish articles of faith for himself and for his own faithful — such are: That the bread and wine are transubstantiated in the sacrament; that the essence of God neither generates nor is generated; that the soul is the substantial form of the human body that he [the pope] is emperor of the world and king of heaven, and earthly god; that the soul is immortal; and all these endless monstrosities in the Roman dunghill of decretals—in order that such as his faith is, such may be his gospel, such also his faithful, and such his church, and that the lips may have suitable lettuce and the lid may be worthy of the dish.—Martin Luther, Assertio Omnium Articulorum M. Lutheri per Bullam Leonis X. Novissimam Damnatorum (Assertion of all the articles of M. Luther condemned by the latest Bull of Leo X), article 27, Weimar edition of Luther's Works, vol. 7, pp. 131, 132 (a point-by-point exposition of his position, written Dec. 1, 1520, in response to requests for a fuller treatment than that given in his Adversus execrabilem Antichristi Bullam, and Wider die Bulle des Endchrists).

Archdeacon Francis Blackbume states in his Short Historical View of the Controversy Concerning an Intermediate State, of 1765:

Luther espoused the doctrine of the sleep of the soul, upon a Scripture foundation, and then he made use of it as a confutation of purgatory and saint worship, and continued in that belief to the last moment of his life.—Page 14.

In support, Blackburne has an extended Appendix section dealing with Luther's teaching as set forth in his writings, and discusses the charges and countercharges.1

Here follow certain of the leading witnesses of recent centuries, with Luther and Tyndale in some detail.

Sixteenth Century

MARTIN LUTHER (1493-1546), German Reformer and Bible translator

'The immediate cause of Luther's stand on the sleep of the soul was the issue of purgatory, with its postulate of the conscious torment of anguished souls. While Luther is not always consistent, the predominant note running all through his writings is that souls sleep in peace, without consciousness or pain. The Christian dead are not aware of anything—see not, feel not, understand not, and are not conscious of passing events. Luther held and periodically stated that in the sleep of death, as in normal physical sleep, there is complete unconsciousness and unawareness of the condition of death or the passage of time.4  Death is a deep, sound, sweet sleep.2  And the dead will remain asleep until the day of resurrection3 which resurrection embraces both body and soul, when both will come together again.5

Here are sample Luther citations. In the quaint 1573 English translation we read:

Salomon judgeth that the dead are a sleepe, and feele nothing at all. For the dead lye there accompting neyther dayes nor yeares, but when are awaked, they shall seeme to have slept scarce one minute.—An Exposition of Salomon's Booke, called Ecclesiastes or the Preacher, 1553, folio 151v.

But we Christians, who have been redeemed from all this through the precious blood of God's Son, should train and accustom ourselves in faith to despise death and regard it as a deep, strong, sweet sleep; to consider the coffin as nothing other than our Lord Jesus' bosom or Paradise, the grave as nothing other than a soft couch of ease or rest. As verily, before God, it truly is just this; for he testifies, John 11:11; Lazarus, our friend sleeps; Matthew 9:24: The maiden is not dead, she sleeps. Thus, too, St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, removes from sight all hateful aspects of death as related to our mortal body and brings forward nothing but charming and joyful aspects of the promised life. He says there [vv. 42ff]: It is sown in corruption and will rise in incorruption; it is sown in dishonor (that is, a hateful, shameful form) and will rise in glory; it is sown in weakness and will rise in strength; it is sown in natural body and will rise a spiritual body.—"Christian Song Latin and German, for Use at Funerals," 1542, in Works of Luther (1932), vol. 6,  pp. 287, 288.

Thus after death the soul goes to its bedchamber and to its peace, and while it is sleeping it does not realize its sleep, and God preserves indeed the awakening soul. God is able to awake Elijah, Moses, and others, and so control them, so that they will live. But how can that be? That we do not know; we satisfy ourselves with the example of bodily sleep, and with what God says: it is a sleep, a rest, and a peace. He who sleeps naturally knows nothing of that which happens in his neighbor's house; and nevertheless, he still is living, even though, contrary to the nature of life, he is unconscious in his sleep. Exactly the same will happen also in that life, but in another and a better way.6 —"Auslegung des ersten Buches Mose," in Schriften, vol. 1, cols. 1759, 1760.

  Here is another sample:

We should learn to view our death in the right light, so that we need not become alarmed on account of it, as unbelief does; because in Christ it is indeed not death, but a fine, sweet and brief sleep, which brings us release from this vale of tears, from sin and from the fear and extremity of real death and from all the misfortunes of this life, and we shall be secure and without care, rest sweetly and gently for a brief moment, as on a sofa, until the time when he shall call and awaken us together with all his dear children to his eternal glory and joy. For since we call it a sleep, we know that we shall not remain in it, but be again awakened and live, and that the time during which we sleep, shall seem no longer than if we had just fallen asleep. Hence, we shall censure ourselves that we were surprised or alarmed at such a sleep in the hour of death, and suddenly come alive out of the grave and from decomposition, and entirely well, fresh, with a pure, clear, glorified life, meet our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the clouds . . .

Scripture everywhere affords such consolation, which speaks of the death of the saints, as if they fell asleep and were gathered to their fathers, that is, had overcome death through this faith and comfort in Christ, and awaited the resurrection, together with the saints who preceded them in death.—A Compend of Luther's Theology, edited by Hugh Thomson Ker, Jr., p. 242.



WILLIAM TYNDALE (1484-1536), English Bible translator and martyr

In Britain William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English, came to the defense of the revived teaching of conditional immortality. This, as well as other teachings, brought him into direct conflict with the papal champion, Sir Thomas More, likewise of England. In 1529 More had strongly objected to the "pestilential sect" represented by Tyndale and Luther, because they held that "all souls lie and sleep till doomsday." In 1530 Tyndale responded vigorously, declaring:

And ye, in putting them [the departed souls] in heaven, hell, and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection.... And again, if the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be) And then what cause is there of the resurrection?—William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue (Parker's 1850 reprint), bk. 4, ch. 4, pp. 180, 181.

Tyndale went to the heart of the issue in pointing out the papacy's draft upon the teachings of "heathen philosophers" in seeking to establish its contention of innate immortality.

Thus:

The true faith putteth [setteth forth] the resurrection, which we be warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put [set forth] that the souls did ever live. And the pope joineth the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers together; things so contrary that they cannot agree, no more than the Spirit and the flesh do in a Christian man. And because the fleshly-minded pope consenteth unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupteth the Scripture to stablish it.—lbid., p. 180.

In yet another section of the same treatise, dealing with the "invocation of saints," Tyndale uses the same reasoning, pointing out that the doctrine of departed saints being in heaven had not yet been introduced in Christ's day:

And when he [More] proveth that the saints be in heaven in glory with Christ already, saying, "If God be their God, they be in heaven, for he is not the God of the dead;" there he stealeth away Christ's argument, wherewith he proveth the resurrection: that Abraham and all saints should rise again, and not that their souls were in heaven; which doctrine was not yet in the world. And with that doctrine he taketh away the resurrection quite, and maketh Christ's argument of none effect.—Ibid., p. 118.

Tyndale presses his contention still further by showing the conflict of papal teaching with St. Paul, as he says in slightly sarcastic vein:

"Nay, Paul, thou art unlearned; go to Master More, and learn a new way. We be not most miserable, though we rise not again; for our souls go to heaven as soon as we be dead, and are there in as great joy as Christ that is risen again." And I marvel that Paul had not comforted the Thessalonians with that doctrine, if he had wist [known] it, that the souls of their dead had been in joy; as he did with the resurrection, that their dead should rise again. If the souls be in heaven, in as great glory as the angels, after your doctrine, shew me what cause should be of the resurrection)—Ibid.



JOHN FRITH (1503-33), associate of Tyndale and fellow martyr
   A Disputacyon of Purgatorie ... divided into three Bokes, c. 1530
   An Answer to John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester


Notwithstanding, let me grant it him that some are already in hell and some in heaven, which thing he shall never be able to prove by the Scriptures, yea, and which plainly destroy the resurrection, and taketh away the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul do prove that we shall rise;... and as touching this point where they rest, I dare be bold to say that they are in the hand of God.—An Answer to John Fisher.

On 'the Cave'


Saturday 29 December 2018

The death of privacy? I


The death of privacy? II

Never mind the police state,thanks to technology,your next door neighbour could be as big a threat.


How long will it be before common criminals are walking around with drones in their pockets.What will become of our privacy then.

Darwin's tree vs. the real world's forest.

Nature's Dis-Continuum: Why Structural Explanations Win Hands Down:
Michael Denton February 22, 2016 3:26 AM

Editor's note: In his new book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton not only updates the argument from his groundbreaking Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1985) but also presents a powerful new critique of Darwinian evolution. This article is one in a series in which Dr. Denton summarizes some of the most important points of the new book. For the full story, get your copy of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. For a limited time, you'll enjoy a 30 percent discount at CreateSpace  by using the discount code QBDHMYJH.

There is no evidence to support the Darwinian claim that the biological world is a functional continuum where it is possible to move from the base of the trunk to all the most peripheral branches in tiny incremental adaptive steps.

On the contrary, all of the evidence as reviewed in the first six chapters of Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis implies that nature is a discontinuum. The tree is a discontinuous system of distinct Types characterized by sudden and saltational transitions and sudden origins of taxa-defining novelties and homologs, exactly as I claimed in Evolution thirty years ago. The claim has weathered well!

The grand river of life that has flowed on earth over the past four billion years has not meandered slowly and steadily across some flat and featureless landscape, but tumbled constantly through a rugged landscape over endless cataracts and rapids. No matter how unfashionable, no matter how at odds with current thinking in evolutionary biology, there is no empirical evidence for believing that organic nature is any less discontinuous than the inorganic realm. There is not the slightest reason for believing that the major homologs were achieved gradually via functional continuums. It is only the a priori demands of Darwinian causation that have imposed continuity on a basically discontinuous reality.

No matter how "unacceptable," the notion that the organic world consists of a finite set of distinct Types, which have been successively actualized during the evolutionary history of life on earth, satisfies the facts far better that its Darwinian rival.

Firstly, the absence of transitional sequences leading from antecedent structures to the each of the thousands of Type-defining homologs actualized during phylogeny is far more consonant with typology than Darwinism. The Darwinian claim that all the homologs were gradually achieved over millions of generations by incremental functionalism -- the genetic code, human language, the flower, the feather, the diaphragm, etc. -- is a phantasm. The near-universal absence of intermediates leading from antecedent structures to the homologs speaks volumes.

Secondly, on any Darwinian account, one must assume that previously plastic forms, "the homologs in the making," became fixed for some absolutely mysterious reason at specific points in phylogeny and thereafter remained invariant. This is a curiously non-adaptive picture, and highly incongruous in the context of a biology wedded to pan-adaptationism and a biological worldview that posits all living forms as part of an ever-mutating continuum.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in the case of many of the homologous patterns -- and particularly the Bauplans like the tetrapod limb -- there is no evidence that they are basically adaptive forms. Certainly in the vast majority of cases, they have never been shown to serve some functional end. Self-evidently, in accounting for the evolutionary emergence of homologs that serve no specific adaptive function, structural explanations win hands down.

Matthew Henry's commentary on Michael the Great Prince of Jehovah's people.

It is usual with the prophets, when they foretel the grievances of the church, to furnish it at the same time with proper antidotes, a remedy for every malady. And no relief is so sovereign, of such general application, so easily accommodated to every case, and of such powerful efficacy, as those that are fetched from Christ and the future state; thence the comforts here are fetched.

I. Jesus Christ shall appear his church’s patron and protector: At that time, when the persecution is at the hottest, Michael shall stand upDan. 12:1. The angel had told Daniel what a firm friend Michael was to the church, Dan. 10:21. He all along showed this friendship in the upper world; the angels knew it; but now Michael shall stand up in his providence, and work deliverance for the Jews, when he sees that their power is goneDeut. 32:3. 6. Christ is that great prince, for he is the prince of the kings of the earthRev. 1:5. And, if he stand up for his church, who can be against it? But this is not all: At that time (that is, soon after) Michael shall stand up for the working out of our eternal salvation; the Son of God shall be incarnate, shall be manifested to destroy the works of the devil. Christ stood for the children of our people when he was made sin and a curse for them, stood in their stead as a sacrifice, bore the cure for them, to bear it from them. He stands for them in the intercession he ever lives to make within the veil, stands up for them, and stands their friend. And after the destruction of antichrist, of whom Antiochus was a type, Christ shall stand at the latter day upon the earth, shall appear for the complete redemption of all his.

II. When Christ appears he will recompense tribulation to those that trouble his people. There shall be a time of trouble, threatening to all, but ruining to all the implacable enemies of God’s kingdom among men, such trouble as never was since there was a nation. This is applicable. 1. To the destruction of Jerusalem, which Christ calls (perhaps with an eye to this prediction) such a great tribulation as was not since the beginning of the world to this timeMatt. 24:21. This the angel had spoken much of (Dan. 9:2627); and it happened about the same time that Christ set up the gospel-kingdom in the world, that Michael our prince stands up. Or, 2. To the judgment of the great day, that day that shall burn as an oven, and consume the proud and all that do wickedly; that will be such a day of trouble as never was to all those whom Michael our prince stands against.

Ps.here is John Wesley's take on Michael in Daniel 12:1

For the children - The meaning seems to be, as after the death of Antiochus the Jews had some deliverance, so there will be yet a greater deliverance to the people of God, when Michael your prince, the Messiah shall appear for your salvation. A time of trouble - A the siege of Jerusalem, before the final judgment. The phrase at that time, probably includes all the time of Christ, from his first, to his last coming.

MicroRNAs = Macro-problems for Darwinism.

MicroRNAs Don’t Fit the Evolution Model
Cornelius Hunter

MicroRNAs are small RNA gene products, typically consisting of 20-24 nucleotides, which help to regulate protein synthesis, for example by pausing or halting the ribosome translation process. Like the small drill bit that is inserted into the much larger drill tool, the small microRNAs are attached to a much larger molecular machine that performs the regulation. The microRNA role is to help the molecular machine recognize the correct RNA target.

In other words, instead of the cell having to construct a large quantity of different molecular machines to perform the regulatory role on a large quantity of RNA targets, the cell can construct a more generic type of molecular machine, and then simply attach the instructions — the microRNA — as needed.

This design approach requires the existence of these two entities: the big molecular machine and its little instruction set. Remove either entity, and this particular regulatory process isn’t going to happen.

That does not fit the evolutionary narrative. According to evolution you need a slow, gradual buildup of designs, not all-or-nothing scenarios. But not surprisingly biology is chocked full of the latter. And so with evolution we must say that the different parts just happened to arise, perhaps serving some other roles, and then just luckily they worked fantastically together to achieve a new function.

MicroRNAs are yet another finding that must be force-fit into evolutionary theory. But this irreducible complexity is only the beginning of the problem. With microRNAs, it only gets worse.

A completely different problem that microRNAs pose for evolutionary “theory” is that microRNAs do not fit the common descent pattern. As a recent paper in Genome Biology and Evolution admitted:

There is no evidence of conservation of miRNAs between the phylogenetic groups, indicating that miRNA systems evolved independently in each lineage
Evolved independently?

In other words, microRNAs do not fit the evolution model. The evidence contradicts the theory. Of course one can always make up an explanation. In this case, we say that the microRNAs “evolved independently.”

There you go, problem solved.

But let’s be honest — this is not indicated by the evidence. When the paper states that there is no evidence of conservation of miRNAs between the phylogenetic groups, thus “indicating” that miRNA systems evolved independently, it is simply misrepresenting the science.

There is precisely zero scientific evidence that microRNAs “evolved independently.” Zero. That is not my opinion. That is not conjecture. That is scientific fact.

Evolutionists talk a lot about scientific “fact.” They insist evolution is such a “fact.” But let’s just be honest. What is a scientific fact here is not evolution, but rather the exact opposite. The “fact” is the microRNAs show “no evidence of conservation.”

That fact does not “indicate” evolution, it contradicts evolution. Let’s just be honest. For once.

The paper finds yet another example of this failure in the microRNAs in brown algae. The study investigated the microRNAs in the species Saccharina japonica and compared them to previously investigated microRNAs, including those in a different brown algae species. Their findings were, as usual, “surprising.” The microRNAs in the two brown algae species were different. Completely different.

There was not a single pair of microRNAs, between the two species, that showed any sign of statistically significant sequence similarity.

Interestingly, the microRNAs in the two species did generally share some structural and genomic features. So the evolutionists had to conclude that the microRNAs in the two species evolved from a common ancestor, but then their respective sequences evolved like crazy, leaving zero trace of sequence similarity.

This. Makes. No. Sense.

Here how the paper spun the results:

Surprisingly, none of the S. japonica miRNAs share significant sequence similarity with the Ectocarpus sp. miRNAs. However, the miRNA repertoires of the two species share a number of structural and genomic features indicating that they were generated by similar evolutionary processes and therefore probably evolved within the context of a common, ancestral miRNA system. This lack of sequence similarity suggests that miRNAs evolve rapidly in the brown algae (the two species are separated by ∼95 Myr of evolution). The sets of predicted targets of miRNAs in the two species were also very different suggesting that the divergence of the miRNAs may have had significant consequences for miRNA function.
“Probably evolved within the context of a common, ancestral miRNA system”? So what does “within the context” mean?

The answer is this is a meaningless cover phrase that masks the fact that the evidence contradicts the theory. It is evo-speak for “We don’t know what we’re talking about.” A more polite description is “hand-waving.” A less polite, but more accurate description won’t be repeated here.

I will now consider the elephant in the room: Why is evolution being used to interpret the results in the first place? The theory is superfluous. It is redundant. It is vacuous. It is non-parsimonious. It is meaningless.

The theory does nothing to help us understand, interpret, elucidate, guide, or formulate meaningful predictions. Its only justification is itself. We use the theory of evolution to interpret the results because the theory is true. And how do we know it is true? Because it is true?


The theory is self-referential. It is circular. It is famous for being famous. It is a hold-over from the Epicureans of antiquity, the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, the rationalists of the 17th century, and the Darwinists today, and it has made a mockery of science.

The South American century?:Pros and cons.


Why the talking ape is undeniably exceptional.

I and Thou — Roger Scruton on What Makes Human Beings Unique - 
Wesley J. Smith

Writing in the New York Times, philosopher Roger Scruton denies the divine spark argument that supports human exceptionalism — which I agree is not required to support HE — and focuses instead on our unique moral natures. He cites the “astonishing moral equipment of the human being — including rights and duties, personal obligations, justice, resentment, judgment, forgiveness,” which Scruton believes arises solely out of evolution.

Yes, I note before going on, this appeared in the New York Times, a newspaper that publishes articles  denying or attacking human exceptionalism  so often that when it publishes a piece supportive of our uniqueness, fairness requires that notice be taken.

Whatever its cause, our moral natures do indeed distinguish us from fauna. But Scruton adds our ability to relate to each other — and use language consistent with — all of us being subjects rather than objects. From“If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We ?“:

We human beings do not see one another as animals see one another, as fellow members of a species. We relate to one another not as objects but as subjects, as creatures who address one another “I” to “you” — a point made central to the human condition by Martin Buber, in his celebrated mystical meditation “I and Thou.”

Yes. And this is a distinction between us and animals that extends beyond mere biology to the moral realm. Scruton concludes:

By speaking in the first person we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that bypass all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: Hence as persons we inhabit a life­world that is not reducible to the world of nature, any more than the life in a painting is reducible to the lines and pigments from which it is composed.

If that is true, then there is something left for philosophy to do, by way of making sense of the human condition. Philosophy has the task of describing the world in which we live — not the world as science describes it, but the world as it is represented in our mutual dealings, a world organized by language, in which we meet one another I to I.

This is not a matter of pins and angels. Accepting human exceptionalism is a crucial predicate to attaining and philosophically defending universal human rights.

Because if human interactions are not always subject-to-subject — as Roger Scruton contends correctly — but, in some cases, can be reduced to subject interacting with human object, those denigrated as the latter will be vulnerable to oppression, exploitation, and destruction.

















Not so elementary after all.


Saturday 22 December 2018

On science and magic in the new millenium.

Unbelievable: Science Fiction, Science Fact, and How to Tell the Difference
Mike Keas

Editor’s note: Unbelievable: 7 Myths About the History and Future of Science and Religion is currently available at a 50 percent pre-order holiday discount from the publisher, ISI Books.

My box of books just arrived. Now you know what all of my family and best local friends are getting for Christmas this year. In Unbelievable: 7 Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion I show how science fiction shapes science, especially speculative scientific inquiry into the likelihood and cultural impact of superhuman AI and the arrival of super-intelligent extraterrestrials. The publication date is January 7, 2019.


The topics I discuss are timely. Last year, in response to political fears, George Orwell’s 1984 became a bestseller on Amazon. The full scenario of this dystopian novel, written in 1949, did not actually come to pass in 1984, or in 2017. But some of its plot elements are becoming increasingly feasible. One of the hottest Christmas gifts this season is pocket-size drones with HD cameras that enable even Little Brother to watch over you. Big Brother has even more sophisticated toys by which human privacy is invaded, especially if you live in China.

A Game of Catch-up

Science is playing catch-up with science fiction, and this is nothing new. For example, some of Johannes Kepler’s (1571-1630) imaginative story of space travel, Dream or Astronomy of the Moon (posthumous, 1634) , became reality in my lifetime. But some sci-fi scenarios, such as the one where artificial intelligence comes to exceed human intelligence and achieves self-awareness, are just impossible. My book Unbelievable helps you sort the possible from the impossible. Kepler and H.G. Wells figure in my survey of the history of science fiction and how this history has influenced futuristic mythology. I show how anti-religious ideology has shaped the picture of the future found in textbooks, on TV, and elsewhere in our culture.

Here is a test of your ability to distinguish plausible scientific technology from stuff that is implausible given the limits of natural law. Do you think it is possible to buy a device that would project your cell phone’s GPS mapping software into the space above your dashboard, so you can see it and the road at the same time? Answer: yes, and this is another popular gift this Christmas season. Of course military and airline pilots have had similar heads-up displays for quite a while, but now this technology is available to any automobile user with a smartphone. 

How about a device that allows you to upload your mind to a computer so you can have conditional immortality after your body dies? I’ll leave that one for homework.

Horror and Euphoria

Arthur C. Clarke, the influential writer of science fact and and science fiction, commented in a prophetic manner that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He cowrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which depicts the horror and euphoria of an encounter with techno-magical AI and ET.

The movie ends with a vision of the starchild, a human fetus floating serenely in space. This appears to be the new humanity after ET enlightenment. For those disenchanted with traditional religion, 2001 sketched a space-age faith. Clarke’s imagination has shaped some of the mythic elements of futuristic AI-ET storytelling. But much of what he wrote is simply unbelievable. 

Futuristic myths of this sort come into better focus in my book Unbelievable, which, I don’t mind repeating, would make a fine gift, at Christmas or anytime!

On "The only true God" II



1.
Some of the many trinitarian sources which admit that the Bible actually describes men who represent God (judges, Israelite kings, etc.) and God's angels as gods include:

1. Young's Analytical Concordance of the Bible, "Hints and Helps...," Eerdmans, 1978 reprint;


2. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, #430, Hebrew and Chaldee Dict., Abingdon, 1974;

3. New Bible Dictionary, p. 1133, Tyndale House Publ., 1984;

4. Today's Dictionary of the Bible, p. 208, Bethany House Publ., 1982;

5. Hastings' A Dictionary of the Bible, p. 217, Vol. 2;

6. The New Brown-Driver-Briggs-Gesenius Hebrew-English Lexicon, p. 43, Hendrickson publ.,1979;

7. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, #2316 (4.), Thayer, Baker Book House, 1984 printing;

8. The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia, p. 132, Vol. 1; and p. 1265, Vol. 2, Eerdmans, 1984;

9. The NIV Study Bible, footnotes for Ps. 45:6; Ps. 82:1, 6; and Jn 10:34; Zondervan, 1985;

10. New American Bible, St. Joseph ed., footnote for Ps. 45:7, 1970 ed.;

11. A. T. Robertson, Word Pictures, Vol. 5, pp. 188-189;

12. William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 1, pp. 317, 324, Nelson Publ., 1980 printing;

13. Murray J. Harris, Jesus As God, p. 202, Baker Book House, 1992;

14. William Barclay, The Gospel of John, V. 2, Daily Study Bible Series, pp. 77, 78, Westminster Press, 1975;

15. The New John Gill Exposition of the Entire Bible (John 10:34 and Ps. 82:6);

16. The Fourfold Gospel (Note for John 10:35);

17. Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible - Jamieson, Fausset, Brown
(John 10:34-36);


18. Matthew Henry Complete Commentary on the Whole Bible (Ps. 82:6-8 and John 10:35);

19. John Wesley's Explanatory Notes on the Whole Bible (Ps. 82:1).

20. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament ('Little Kittel'), - p. 328, Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985.

21. The Expositor's Greek Testament, pp. 794-795, Vol. 1, Eerdmans Publishing Co.

22. The Amplified Bible, Ps. 82:1, 6 and John 10:34, 35, Zondervan Publ., 1965.

23. Barnes' Notes on the New Testament, John 10:34, 35.

24. B. W. Johnson's People's New Testament, John 10:34-36.

(also John 10:34, 35 - CEV: TEV; GodsWord; The Message; NLT; NIRV; David Guzik -
http://www.blueletterbible.org/commentaries/comm_view.cfm?AuthorID=2&contentID=7942&commInfo=31&topic=John; Pastor Jon Courson, The Gospel According to John.)


And, of course the highly respected and highly popular Jewish writer, Philo, had the same understanding for "God"/"a god" about the same time the NT was written.

And many of the earliest Christians like the highly respected NT scholar Origen (and others including Tertullian; Justin Martyr; Hippolytus; Clement of Alexandria; Theophilus; the writer of "The Epistle to Diognetus" - Staniforth, p. 181; and even super-trinitarians Athanasius and St. Augustine) also had this understanding for "a god." And, as we saw above, many highly respected NT scholars of this century agree. (For example, Ernst Haenchen tells us in his commentary on the Gospel of John:

"It was quite possible in Jewish and Christian monotheism to speak of divine beings that existed alongside and under God but were not identical with him. Phil 2:6-10 proves that. In that passage Paul depicts just such a divine being, who later became man in Jesus Christ". - John 1, translated by R. W. Funk, 1984, pp. 109, 110, Fortress Press.)

2.
"I say, 'You [human judges representing God] are godssons of the Most High, all of you'" - Ps. 82:6, RSV. Footnotes in NIVSB for Ps. 82:1, 6 say: "In the language of the OT ... rulers, and judges, as deputies [representatives] of the heavenly King, could be given the honorific title 'god' ... or be called 'son of God'...." God Himself (as Jesus noted in Jn 10:34) said these representatives of Him were gods!

"Jesus, Son of the Most High God" - Lk 8:28, RSV.

"you [Jesus' disciples] will be sons of the Most High" - Luke 6:35, RSV.

Just these three scriptures alone show who the "only true God" and "most high God" is and  that other persons may be called "a god" and "son of God" or "son of the most high" in a subordinate but still proper (not "false") sense.

3.
"5:20 him who is true. God the Father." And next, the same footnote admits: "He is the true  God. [This] Could refer to EITHER God the Father OR God the Son." [Emphasis added - as usual]


4.Commentators who Professor Harris says support Jesus not being called "true God":
Huther, Alford, Haupt, Westcott, Holtzmann, Law, Brooke, Dodd, Preisker, Stott, Smalley, Grayston.


Authors of general studies who Dr. Harris says support Jesus not being called "true God": Findlay, Harnack, Dupont, W.F. Howeard, Wainwright, Taylor, Segond

Grammarians who Professor Harris says support Jesus not being called "true God":
Winer, Buttman, Schmiedel, A.T. Robertson, N. Turner, Zerwick, Grosvenor, see also BADG37a, 340c

....................................................


"...it is more likely that the word 'this' has a wider and vaguer reference. The writer is gathering together in his mind all that he has been saying about God- how He is light and love, how He is revealed as the Father through his Son Jesus Christ, and 'this', he adds, 'is the real God' ... For illustration of this we need only recall John 17:3." C. H. Dodd, Moffatt New Testament Commentary.

"[1 John] 5.20-21. Knowing the true God;... The Greek of 5:20 has only the true (one) and reads literally: we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding 'so that we know the true(one) and we are in the true (one)', in his Son Jesus Christ. 'This (one) is the true God and eternal life.' It is clear from this that 'the true (one)' is God throughout. Christ is his Son. In the final sentence this (one) most naturally refers still to God, not to Christ, as some have suggested. It is not unknown for Christ to be given God's name(Phil. 2:9-11) or even to be called 'God' (Heb. 1:8-9; John 1:1), but that would run contrary to the theme here, which is contrasting true and false understandings of God for which Christ's revelation is the criterion. 5:20 reminds us of Jesus' prayer according to John 17:3: 'This is eternal life: to know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent...."- William Loader, The Johannine Epistles, Epworth Commentaries, 1992, p.79.(This commentary uses the Revised English Bible (1989) for it's quotations.)

"The final sentence of verse 20 runs: This is the true God, and eternal life. To whom does this refer? Grammatically speaking, it would normally refer to the nearest preceding subject, namely his Son Jesus Christ. If so, this would be the most unequivocal statement of the deity of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, which the champions of orthodoxy were quick to exploit against the heresy of Arius. Luther and Calvin adopted this view. Certainly it is by no means an impossible interpretation. Nevertheless, 'the most natural reference'(Westcott) is to him that is true. In this way the three references to 'the true' are to the same Person, the Father, and the additional points made in the apparent final repetition are that this is this One, namely the God made known by Jesus Christ, who is the true God, and that, besides this, He is eternal life...."-The Epistles of John, An Introduction and Commentary by The Rev. J. R.W. Stott, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, Tyndale Press, London, 1st edition, July 1964, p.195, 196.

"Him that is true (ton alethinon). That is, God. Cf. 1:8. In him that is true (en to alethino). In God in contrast with the world 'in the evil one' (verse 19). See John 17:3. Even in his Son Jesus Christ (en to huio autou Iesou Christo). The autou refers clearly to en to alethino (God). Hence this clause is not in apposition with the preceding, but an explanation as to how we are 'in the True One' by being 'in his Son Jesus Christ.' This (houtos). Grammatically houtos [or outos] may refer to Jesus Christ or to 'the True One.' It is a bit tautological to refer it to God, but that is probably correct, God in Christ, at any rate. God is eternal life (John 5:26) and he gives it to us through Christ."-Robertson, A.T., p. 245, Vol. 6, Robertson's Word Pictures of the New Testament.

"As far as the grammatical construction of the sentence is concerned the pronoun [houtos, 'this one'] may refer to 'Him that is true' or to 'Jesus Christ'. The most natural reference  however is to the subject not locally nearest but dominant in the mind of the apostle. (compare 1 John 2:22; 2 John 7; Acts 4:11; 7:19) This is obviously 'He that is true', further described by the addition of 'His Son.' Thus the pronoun gathers up the revelation indicated in the words which proceed."-Brooke Foss Westcott, The Epistles of St. John: The Greek Text with Notes and Essays, London, Macmillan and Co, 1883, p. 187.

"The KJV by adding here the word 'even,' implies that him that is true now refers to Christ...But the natural sense of the passage and the charecteristic thought of the epistle and the Gospels preclude this interpretation. It is through Christ that we are in God. This God so known is the true God. The thought centers in God from Vs. 18 on, and the contrast with the idols in the last verse confirms it."-The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. XII, p. 301.


"houtos ["this one"] in the Gospel and Epistles is not used merely to avoid the repetition of a name. It seems often to refer to the previous subject as previously described.Here (verses 18-20) God has been described as truly made known in Jesus Christ. The God who completely fulfills the highest conception of the Godhead is the God who has been revealed in Jesus Christ as contrasted with all false conceptions of God, against which the readers are warned in the next verse...Holtzman aptly quotes 2 John 7 as proof that in the Johannine writings houtos ["this one"] may refer to the subject of the preceeding sentence rather than to the name which has immediately preceded."- A. E. Brooke, The International Crititcal Commentary: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Johannine Epsistles, p 152-153.