Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 24 May 2002

Modelling the Universe

Lawrence Keleman wrote an essay, in Jewish Matters: A pocketbook of knowledge and inspiration, in which he attempts to show that modern science about the origins of the universe are in line with Genesis. In the so-called “Open Model” of the universe, it started in a singularity which exploded and will continue to expand until it dies a heat death, when it will be utterly empty.

It is this model that many scientists now think might be the right one, and Keleman wants us to believe that, if it is, then God must have caused the explosion that started it. The reason is, Keleman tells us, that the singularity must have existed in a stable state for the whole of preceding eternity and must have needed a supernatural impulse to explode. There it is again—God’s finger waggling about.

Einstein’s theory of relativity published in 1916 implies that the universe is expanding as Danish astronomer, Willem de Sitter, and Soviet mathematician, Alexander Friedmann, independently showed. Then American astronomer, Vesto Slipher, using the powerful telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered that galaxies were shooting outwards. This was confirmed by American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, in 1925. Using the largest telescope in the world, he found that every galaxy within 6 x 10¹⁷ miles of earth was receding.

Ten years after Einstein died in 1955, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson with a supersensitive microwave detector at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, found it picked up a steady 3K background noise where ever it was pointed. This was just what the heat of the universe should have fallen to at this distance in time from the “Big Bang” as it was now called.

Laughably, Keleman says that this proof of the “Big Bang” “inspired panic in many quarters of the scientific world”. These loyal little believers love to think they are fighting against Satanic Science, even when they are Jewish. Keleman tells us that a research project was set up, apparently to disprove God, under the leadership of Dr Robert Jastrow of the NASA’s Goddard Center for Space Studies. Keleman says:

For fifteen years Jastrow and his team tried to demonstrate the validity of the oscillating model, but the data told a different story.

In the Beginning

In 1978, Jastrow released NASA’s definitive report. Big Bang was upheld. God was saved. The scientific plot against God was defeated! But, you have to doubt a man supposed to be talking science who subtracts 65 from 78 and gets 15! Jastrow wrote about his findings to the New York Times Magazine:

This is an exceedingly strange development, unexpected by all but the theologians. They have always accepted the word of the Bible: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”.

Jastrow implied that the theologians knew all this all along, and after massive endeavours, scientists have only pulled themselves up to the level of the theologians. It sounds very much as though Jastrow is one of them!

Dr Geoffrey Burbidge, chairman of the meeting of the American Astronomical Society at Columbia University in 1990, commented on a favourable response by the audience to a presentation on the whole subject by Professor John Mather, also of NASA:

It seems clear that the audience is in favour of the book of Genesis—at least, the first verse or so, which seems to have been confirmed.

This is an interesting brief review that Keleman gives of the scientific study of the universe, but he is not, of course, trying to impress his readers with science, though that is what it ought to do. He is trying to show that science proves that Genesis was correct, whence the quotations above by Burbidge and Jastrow.

Is that what it does though? When Genesis says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”, how is it predicting the “Big Bang” and the heat death of the universe? Believers see in the “Big Bang” a creation, fair enough except that it begs the question of a Creator, but it is not the creation of the heaven and the earth. “The Beginning” or the “Big Bang” are both neutral terms that do not suppose a Creator, but that would defeat Keleman’s purpose. And, according to “The Beginning”, the biblical creation was not in the beginning at all.

Is this quibbling? Not at all. Science tries to be precise. It is one of the ways it has led to useful discoveries. Theologians like to be imprecise, then they can claim they are right when they are not. Nearly every cosmogony invented by humans had a beginning. So, there is nothing remarkable in this respect about this one. As soon as it gets into detail, it is wrong! If Burbidge and Jastrow think they were right, they have not actually read what Genesis says. It does not say, “In the beginning was a singularity that did not look at all like heaven and earth!”

Does heaven and earth simply mean the universe—expressed in a circumlocuted way because the authors had no proper concept of the universe—and therefore making Genesis 1:1 right? In that case Genesis 1:2, where the earthly part of the newly created universe was made of water, is wrong. The early earth was hot not wet. It did not need to have light made, it probably emitted plenty of its own. There really is no way that any honest person can get modern science out of this myth, which is not even Jewish. It is Babylonian as everyone competent to pronounce on the matter knows.

Incidentally, Burbidge does not himself accept the Big Bang idea wholeheartedly. He supports the idea of continuous creation in a series of little bangs. His criticisms of the Big Bang are really criticisms of the scientific establishment to consider alternative ideas like this little bang theory.

Are Scientists Seeking Permission to Believe?

Keleman changes his tack a little now saying that Newsweek reported in 1998 a swing in opinion among the once passionately agnostic:

Forty percent of American scientists now believe in a personal God—not merely an ineffable power and presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray.

No doubt Keleman attributes this supposed move in scientific opinion to the finger of God being revealed in the “Big Bang”, but the report as quoted tells us not much. If 40 percent believed in a God then 60 percent did not believe. That is a bigger figure not believing than there was in the 1970s when only 45 percent if US scientists were positively atheistic. If Newsweek is right, then the move must have been a miniscule move back on the general trend for scientists to get increasingly atheistic.

Of course, there are some scientists, mainly second rate ones, who proselytize for the God of the Jews and Christians (although, it is hard to see that they agree with each other that the God is actually the same one). Keleman adds to his list of citations Dr Allan Sandage, an astrophysicist on the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who in 1998, was quoted in The New Republic saying:

The big bang is best understood as a miracle triggered by some kind of transcendent power.

Keleman concludes:

For many in the scientific community… modern cosmology offers permission to believe.

But not for those who want to remain rational, or those who are not so consumed with guilt that they need a figmentary father to punish or love them as the case might be. The evidence that the universe came into existence is not supernatural evidence. It is still more parsimonious to consider a spontaneous event as beginning the universe rather than an interferring meddler whose finger never ceases to squash the ants of his own creation.

Anthropic Principle

A dishonest believing “scientist”, Professor Nathan Aviezer tries to tell us that the so-called Anthropic Principle is proof of God.

People like him say that scientists now think the laws and constants of nature are “by coincidence” or “by fine-tuning” just right for life, so the universe must have been planned by a super intelligence. They say the “Anthropic Principle” is that the universe was deliberately made for humanity—by, who else but, God! Notable citations “prove” it:

If you change a little bit the laws of nature, or you change a little bit the constants of nature—like the charge on the electron—then the way the universe develops is so changed, it is very likely that intelligent life would not have been able to develop.

Dr Dennis Scania, head of Cambridge University Observatories

If we nudge one of these constants just a few percent in one direction, stars burn out within a million years of their formation, and there is no time for evolution. If we nudge it a few percent in the other direction, then no elements heavier than helium form. No carbon, no life. Not even any chemistry. No complexity at all.

Dr David D Deutsch, Institute of Mathematics, Oxford University

The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural “constants” were off even slightly. You see, even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life—almost contrived—you might say a “put-up job”.

Dr Paul Davies, author and professor of theoretical physics at Adelaide University

The truth is the Anthropic Principle is an identity. For humanity to have evolved and be able therefore to consider the nature of the universe, it had to be suitable. Nothing in the least seems remarkable about this. Fish could not have evolved without water, nor could birds unless there had been air. Life arises where it can do, because conditions are suitable for it, and nowhere else. Had the universe been different—evidently even slightly—it would not have yielded life and no one would be thinking about the problem of why not. It was suitable, yielded life, and so we can sit here wondering about it.

Yet Aviezer and similar God-Botherers say it is proof that God designed it all to be so! As ever, they never address the question of what created God. This is an important question, if you believe that God created what we see on earth, because the question we are asking is about absolute creation, not about the local creation of existence where we happen to be in the universe. To say that God created the universe, therefore, just begs the question. It does not tell you how creation occurred because it omits the question of the creation of God. It is hard to see how anyone with a brain cell remaining can be satisifed with the answer that God created the world, but Aviezer evidently is, and there are many like him, though mainly they do not have brain cells anyway.

Aviezer, supposedly trying to enlighten us, but really intent on confusion, says the Anthropic Principle is that even minute changes in the laws of nature would have made any life impossible, and human life only happened because of a large number of highly improbable events in the past. A large number of highly improbable events is impossible for this supposed scientist unless there is a Creator making the “highly improbable” highly probable, in this one case of humanity anyway.

Improbabilities

When Sir Fred Hoyle was researching how carbon came to be made in the stars, he found that often factors matched as if they had been deliberately adjusted to be able to produce carbon:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce within stars.

In his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking, the more recent cosmologist, writes:

The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers (the constants of physics) seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded. It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers (for the constants) that would allow for development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty.

Hawking admits some might see this as evidence of “a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of the laws of science”. That is just what Aviezer wants to hear! He himself tells us that solar energy occurs within narrow bounds of the magnitude of the “nuclear force” which conditions how a neutrons and protons combine. If it were a few percent larger, the sun would collapse much too quickly as protons combined with each other, but if it were a few percent smaller, the sun would produce no heat at all because protons would not combine with neutrons at all. Aviezer comments:

It is an extraordinary fact that the strength of the nuclear force just happens to lie in the narrow range in which neither of these two catastrophes occurs.

What would have been a truly astonishing fact would have been if Aviezer was writing this tripe and we were reading it even though the “nuclear force” was quite unsuitable for life to appear!

In the same vein, Aviezer tells us the earth just happens to be the right distance from the sun so that its surface water neither evaporated nor decomposed, as happened on Venus, yet the temperature is high enough to prevent all the oceans from freezing permanently, as happened on Mars. Aviezer says:

In the course of time, all surface waters on Mars and Venus disappeared. How did earth escape this catastrophe? By sheer accident!

Our neighboring planets, Venus and Mars, are both devoid of water and breathable air, and hence are devoid of life. No Martian or Venusian could therefore be writing in wonder why only earth is suitable for life! If anyone were looking on from elsewhere in the universe, noting the accident that the earth were suitable for life but its neighbours were not, you know where they would look to see if there was life. On the earth! Life cannot occur where the conditions are wrong.

This rogue of a man continues with his wonders. If the earth were a little closer to the sun, surface temperatures would be higher than the boiling point of water, precluding all life. If earth were a little farther from the sun, the concentration of carbon dioxide would be so high that the atmosphere would not be breathable. Fortunately, our planet just happens to lie at the crucial distance from the sun that permits the formation of a life-sustaining atmosphere.

Aviezer informs us that this remarkably fortunate coincidence is known among scientists as the “Goldilocks problem of climatology”. Things are “just right” for us! One has to assume that a professor is not an idiot, though some make you wonder, so the man must know what he is saying. Life can only arise within certain limits. If it has arisen, then that environment is between those limits, by definition. It is not fortunate that our planet is just right for us. If it were not, then we should not be here to comment on it. We live where we are able and not where we cannot. There is nothing remarkable in that.

Dr Gerald Schroeder, formerly with MIT and author of Genesis and the Big Bang and The Science of Life is one of the crooks for God who likes to baffle his class with large numbers. So, Schroeder says “the likelihood of the universe having usable energy (low entropy) at the creation is even more astounding, namely, an accuracy of one part out of ten to the power of ten to the power of 123. This is an extraordinary figure”.

Roger Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford who derived the figure from a formula of Jacob Beckenstein and Stephen Hawking continues:

Even if we were to write a zero on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe—and we could throw in all the other particles as well for good measure—we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed.

Penrose is actually saying that there is only one possible starting point for the universe we see about us, and put like this it sounds far less remarkable. It is remarkable nonetheless. Why should only this one starting point have been possible? No one is sure. Yet!

Penrose says that the problem is that there is as yet no adequate mathematics of quantum gravity, and that is needed when everything is compressed into a tiny space early on in the life of the universe. The formulation of the mathematics is likely to solve the problem. Without it, perhaps a degree of circularity is getting into the mathematics. On the face of it, the zero possibility of any other starting point seems no more than an expression of the fact that in the primaeval singularity all matter and energy is pressed into zero volume. All the universe’s eggs are in the same basket, literally, so only a single state exists. That single state signifies high order and low entropy, by definition. The effectively infinite number Schroeder throws at us seems simply to be saying that there is only one possible starting place for our universe!

Aviezer tries to make out to his fellow lovers of the figment they call Yehouah—when the are allowed to call Him anything—that when the conditions for life are met, then some miracle has happened that can only be laid at the hands of God. The Aviezer of gut bacteria would be saying to his little Yehouah worshippers, “Look at all this shit! Without it we should be dead. It proves there is a God. Halleluiah!”

Mass Extinction

Aviezer’s theme is one of life existing merely through accident or good fortune. One might say that this is the same as having the conditions right for life but throughout time. Needless to say, God has to be responsible for us coming through! It is the old trick of the priests thanking God that some people survived a disaster. The school bus crashes and six children are killed: “Thank God it was not worse”, says the professional religionist. A passing comet collides with the earth on one of its passes and kills off the dinosaurs, but not the rats whence we came. “Thank God!” It is God’s providence we are still here! Nice God. Pity about the rest.

The point of central importance to our discussion is that the collision between a meteor and the earth was a matter of sheer luck.

Comets hit the earth and kill off life, but they might have brought it in the first place!

That particular one was, though they do strike with some regularity. If our own predecessors in evolution had been killed then humanity would not exist. Or perhaps Aviezer regards the dinosaurs as palaeontological Canaanites whom God would wipe out so that those He chose could survive. Yet Aviezer is supposed to be a scientist and must be aware of the laws of chance and the various distribution laws which allow for rare events. He does not want to “complicate matters” for his little dupes, no doubt.

He thinks he has an argument here against evolution, though quite what it is no one can guess.

The extinction of a given species or higher group is more bad luck than bad genes. Pure chance would favor some biologic groups over others.

He cites Professor David Jablonski of the University of Chicago, a “world authority” on the subject of mass extinctions, as saying:

When a mass extinction strikes, it is not the “most fit” species that survive; it is the most fortunate. Species that had been barely hanging on… inherit the earth.

Jablonski seems not to understand evolution either, a remarkable observation for a professor who is supposedly an expert on extinction. The fitness of a species is its fitness in a particular environment. What was fit before the cosmic impact is not likely to be fit after it—even if they survive! The ones that ultimately survive are the ones that are fit in the new conditions after the impact. The dinosaurs were not, but any number of genuine experts will vouchsafe the fact that the dinosaurs were also not well adapted to the environment even before the impact. They had been in decline for millions of years.

Evolution for Dumkopfs

Apologists are fond of saying that evolution is just a theory, showing that they do not understand how people acquire knowledge. All knowledge is just theory. Even something as self evident as the rising of the sun every morning is a theory. Observations of it can be made daily and these are called facts but no amount of facts can predict what will happen tomorrow. The facts have to be linked by a theory. The theory we have is that the globe of the earth rotates once every twenty four hours and so every twenty four hours the sun rises as the place where we are on the globe rotates into sight of the sun. Is that just a theory to apologists?

Evolutionary theory is of the same kind. We all have genes that differ from person to person and species to species, but we know by observation that genes are passed from parents to children—half from each parent. The genes control the appearance and behaviour of the species, and through the perpetuation of certain genes and not others, appearance and behaviour can change with time. That is evolution. It is a theory to explain certain biological facts, just as the theory of the rising of the sun explains certain facts.

Many apologists do not like the theory of evolution because it gets rid of what for them is an important gap for God—the creation of species and people. They call evolution atheistic because it has no role for God, ignoring that most things are therefore atheistic because there is no role for God in them. Less bigotted varieties of Judaism and Christianity accept evolution as the scientific explanation for biodiversity.

Some apologists try to refute evolution as an unfalsifiable tautology, apparently not realizing that their idea of God is exactly that, but evolution is actually not. What is seen around us must have had a creator, they say, and they call the creator God. They then tell us that Nature exists because it was created by God. Or, they say the bible is God’s word, and proof of God is the bible. The theory of evolution is a hypothesis based upon observation and tested against observation to verify or refute it. So far it has been overwhelmingly verified. The evidence for historical evolution—genetic, fossil, anatomical—is so overwhelming that there is no doubt about it.

Apologists are also fond of criticising evolution because there are gaps in the fossil record. They are so used to having everything on authority and therefore, to them, certain, that they cannot understand how real knowledge is acquired. In the case of the fossil record, the chances of any creature being fossilized is extremely low. Mostly animals are eaten by other animals, by maggots and worms or they decay by fungal and bacterial activity. The bones of small animals are also eaten or rot, and the bones of large animals are crushed by herds until they are mere sherds. Fossilization is therefore rare and the most common fossils will be those of animals that lived in high populations and for a long time. Transitions between species are uncommon in the fossil record.

Fundamentalists ask, “Where are the transitional fossils?” But transitional species by definition do not exist for a long time and, being in isolation and transition, do not exist in large numbers. They are among the least likely species to be fossilized, and so the record looks like a series of jumps between the fossils of populous species. Despite this, it is not true to say that transitional fossils have never been found, and fairly complete examples can be shown for species evolution in the last few million years, particularly. Even the record of human evolution is slowly emerging.

Apologists claim that evolution has never been observed, but that is false unless they want to insist that they mean the evolution of, say, a whale from a quadrupedal land animal. Plainly the time involved in such evolution is millions of years, but the processes of evolution in RNA variants have been studied in the laboratory, the ongoing process of evolution can be seen in the wild such as the evolution of cichlid fish in Africa, and, of course, human beings have been making use of selection in breeding for centuries before natural selection was even imagined.

Fundamentalists love to talk of the perfection of Creation because any totally good and perfect god must create whatever He creates perfect, but few creatures are prefect. In fact, the pain of human childbirth is an example, but the apologists excuse that because it was a deliberate curse put on to human women by their perfectly loving god.

Apologists always try to pretend that evolution is formulated as a purely chance process. It is not. The mutations of the genes are mainly chance processes, but the subsequent survival of the mutant species is a function entitely of the environment. The mutants which are fitted to the environment survive in it, but those that are not so fitted die out because they have to struggle harder to survive at all, and eventually the struggle proves too difficult against better adapted species.

Slightly learned apologists sometimes say that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics, which is that Nature proceeds from order to disorder, other things being the same. They forget the condition. Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. Order emerges from disorder all the time, even inorganically such as the crystallization of snowflakes or diamonds. What is required is some source of energy to overcome the tendency to randomness. Overall, randomness (entropy) nevertheless increases, but locally the opposite frequently happens. That is what life is.

Some apologists claim that Darwin renounced evolution on his deathbed, but whatever Darwin decided in later life is irrelevant. He did not own the theory of evolution and have any right to discard it because he decided he did not like it. Scientific hypotheses are in the public domain once published. Science lives and dies on checking its hypotheses against whatever happens in the natural world. Even if Darwin had had any reason to deny his hypothesis, other scientists would have shown that it did in fact work, and the great man was in this instance wrong. Again, this is an example of the fact that apologists either through stupidity or wilful ignorance refuse to take the trouble to understand science. They prefer to be told what to believe even if it is false. In any case, the Darwin deathbed story is false.

Luck in Evolution

Aviezer, of course, wants to emphasize the misfortune of those who were directly killed by the impact, or rather the good fortune of those who were not thus killed.

The Darwinian principle of the “survival of the fittest” is irrelevant in such a process.

“They were lucky”, Aviezer insists, and so they were, but so what? The ones who still remain have to make the best they can of their environment from the variation they have in their genes. Such extinctions cause a lot of evolutionary niches to be left empty and the surviving species have a chance to get into them, if they have the right attributes—if they are the fittest!

The feeling you get from all such apologists as Aviezer, is that they are not arguing against you but setting up false demonstrations for their charges, the gullible of God. Here Aviezer and his quotations seem to be arguing against the thesis that only the fittest ever survive whatever happens. It is not what anyone believes, but it serves its theological purpose for the ten year old reader!

Moses might have been killed by the Pharaoh, but was saved by God’s providence, as Aviezer would doubtless argue. Moses might have been killed by the Pharaoh, and reinvented by the priests of the Jewish temple. Moses might never have existed at all, and was invented by the priests of the Jewish temple! There is no evidence except the bible that Moses existed. He is a superhero like Captain Marvel. This shows that priests can find excuses for anything at all, but they will use it as a proof of God, and will be believed!

Many great geniuses have been killed mainly in warfare before they could show the world their genius. The equivalent has happened in evolution, and happens continuously in the phenomenon of genetic drift that all biological scientists are aware of. But the over-riding principle of evolution, “survival of the fittest”, nevertheless continues second by second, operating through all this background noise.

Importance of the Impact?

The sudden destruction of all the dinosaurs worldwide is a dramatic example of the Anthropic Principle, Avizer now tells us, because as long as the dinosaurs dominated the earth, “there was no possibility for mammals to exist”. Yes, this supposed scientist actually says this, a falsehood that almost any ten year old could correct. Mammals existed while the dinosaurs did for tens of millions of years. Aviezer’s point, that mammals could only “flourish” after the dominant dinosaurs had died out, is still true but he shows he is not to be trusted in anything he says when he makes such basic errors. Anyway, he cites Alvarez:

From our human point of view, that impact was one of the most important single events in the history of our planet. Had it not taken place, the largest mammals alive today might still resemble the rat-like creatures that were then scurrying around trying to avoid bring devoured by dinosaurs.

Or perhaps everything would have happened as it has, but a bit more slowly because the dinosaurs were dying out anyway. Or perhaps the dinosaurs might have evolved intelligence, and we might have been saved Aviezer’s dishonesty. He again quotes Alvarez as saying:

If the impact had been weaker, no species would have become extinct; the mammals would be subordinate to the dinosaurs, and I wouldn’t be writing this article. If the impact had been stronger, all life on this planet would have ceased, and again, I wouldn’t be writing this article. That tells me that the impact must have been of just the right strength [to ensure that] the mammals survived, while the dinosaurs didn’t.

When Alvarez wrote this is not mentioned, but it is only broadly true. Since the dinosaurs were weakening, many palaeontologists think they were going extinct anyway, in which case, the cometary impact merely hurried things along. In other words, the lower strength of the impact seems likely to have been relatively unimportant to the demise of the dinosaurs. As for the upper limit, who knows? A much larger impact might have destroyed the planet all together, but what size would have killed off all the mammals is hard to guess. As Alvarez says, they were rats.

What Does Unlikely Mean?

Professor Raphael Falk, a geneticist at the Hebrew University, has already demonstrated that Aviezer is a fool, but Aviezer feels he has to reply to him. All he does is prove that even when he is proven to be a fool, he cannot understand it. He actually gives examples that disprove his own case while thinking that they prove it. Falk writes:

I pull a $1 note from my wallet and observe its serial number to be G65538608D… a less than 1 in 10 billion chance. Thus, undeniably, I am faced here with an extremely rare event… but I am not surprised. What is essential is to make the crucial distinction between improbable events that are genuinely surprising and those that are not…

The real odds were certainty because that was the serial number on the note he had in his pocket:

A rare, extremely improbable event occurs if one defines the conditions before knowing what will happen. For example, if one chooses a serial number before pulling the $1 note from the wallet, and then find that the number chosen is exactly the same as the number on the note, we would all be absolutely astonished—and with good reason!

Poor dimwit Aviezer cannot see that he has not been defining the event before hand but afterwards, just as Falk said. The fact that intelligent humans are here is the equivalent of already having the dollar bill. Just as there is nothing remarkable about having some particular serial number, the presence of human life is not remarkable because it is here and now, and we are considering it, just like wondering at the improbability of having that particular dollar. The big difference is that we are the dollar bill considering itself, and asking, “Why me?”

Many extremely unlikely events, “a staggeringly improbable series of events—quite unrepeatable” says Aviezer, citing Stephen Jay Gould, had to occur to make possible the appearance of human beings on earth. This has to be the work of God, our “scientist” thinks. However unlikely it was, it happened because we are here. An equally unlikely chain of events has led to the presence in the world of pigeons and dolphins. This is the same as the next man getting out another dollar bill and being amazed that it too has a rare serial number. Falk is right, but our instructor in God’s creation is too thick or drunk with his fancied piety to understand.

More Improbabilities

Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith, a master of exercises in metaphor and analogy, otherwise known as mendacity, talks about the argument by design, Paley’s Watchmaker. He relates Paley’s story and says:

Somebody made that watch. It didn’t just happen. Design implies designer.

Unfortunately for the rabbi, the argument is in tatters. The watch is broken. Even Christian theologian, John Polkinhorne cannot deny it has been superseded by evolution, so apologists that still use it are deceiving. If they were fair they would give the refutation and let their charges make up their own minds. They rarely, if ever, do. He passes on immediately to the Numbers Racket. Amaze the Little Ones with enormous numbers. The brain has ten billion nerve cells—unless you are a believer when you need none at all. Each brain cell can connect to 100,000 others. That is a lot of connections. They form an incredibly intricate network system. It is meant to amaze you with God when it should amaze you with Nature.

The cheating rabbi now cites a tenth century rabbi to show that characters on a page cannot appear by throwing ink at it.

Imagine a person bringing a sheet of handwriting that could only have been composed with a pen. He claims that ink spilled on the paper and these written characters had accidentally emerged. We would charge him to his face with falsehood, for we could feel certain that this result could not have happened without an intelligent person’s purpose.

You would not believe the same of the characters appearing on tablets of stone, would you, rabbi, unless Moses said so? The rabbi, neverthless, wants us to believe that it cannot happen in Nature unless someone has written the words, but much more subtle things have appeared, including the writer of the symbols on the page—by evolution with no designer needed.

Robert Shapiro, a professor of chemistry at New York University, in Origins, points out that the odds against winning the lottery are ten million to one but a lottery ticket every day for the next thirty thousand years, makes a win likely. Few people have a sufficiently good concept of geological time. At say four generations per century we are only about 80 people away from Jesus. We are 240,000 people from the dinosaur demise. As we get further back to simpler organisms, they multiply faster, annually, daily, hourly. So the number of generations since life began is incredibly huge.

The rabbi and his scientific friends, all equally dishonest, talk about such absurdities as writing Shakespeare’s sonnets at random, or assembling a 747 by a tornado. Clever stuff. The calculations give immensely enormous numbers. The usual question is, “So what?” Nature is cleverer than these stupid men. After all, it built them without all the fuss they make about it. It builds things a bit at a time, making use of the bits as it goes along, and storing other bits for later use. This is a natural process requiring no supervision by some infinite creature wasting away His dull days.

The rabbi tells us that Fred Hoyle and Wickramasinghe calculated that the odds against assembling a bacterium from scratch, at random, is 1 in 10^40,000. It is far too large a number for the model to have actually been how it was done. “It means God”, cry the rabbis, the bishops and assorted charlatans. No, it shows that Nature does not try to make things at random. It does it by evolution!

The rabbi ends up by making us the judge and deciding between the natural and the supernatural. He points out that some things are genuinely impossible. He does not include among them the idea that God will waggle his finger in history supposedly to show He is mighty but in the most stupid and thoroughly human way. An Almighty God that behaves like a dolt. That really has to be unlikely. Nature wins.

More Large Numbers for God

Another scientific deceiver for God is the aforementioned Dr Gerald Schroeder who readily gets a publisher for his deceitful publications. Still aiming to create amazement with large numbers, Schroeder asks, “Can random mutations produce the evolution of life?”

He works out some hypothetical calculation that there should be some number of the order 12 proteins in life, but there are actually far less. He admits that the assumptions are false, so what is his point? We shall see.

He wants to work out the likelihood that any of these proteins could form by chance. He reckons, by assuming 20 amino acids and an average chain length of 300 amino acids per protein that the possible combinations of amino acids in such a protein is of the order 390. Only a maximum of order 12 could be correct and so there are some number of the order 378 wrong possibilities for each correct one—an impossibly low ratio. So we finally get his point. He has picked out a dollar bill with a very long serial number from his pocket, but if the serial numbers are that long, then there is still nothing remarkable in what he has done.

He hopes to make the reader gasp with astonishment and agree with him that it is simply impossible. He lets his audience think that all the ingredients come together and there are 10³⁷⁸ ways in which they must before they get the right one. That is randomness! It is for his audience! In fact, the situation is not at all like that.

If there are 20 amino acids then there are 20 x 20 ways for any two to come together to form a dimer. That is only 400 ways, and of the 400 many will not be able to form, or will be unstable or unsuitable in some other way, so only a few of these will actually form. The dimers equally can meet with other dimers or other separate amino acids and make a trimer or tetramer, if it is stable. And so on.

So from the original mixture of 20 amino acids in the primaeval soup, before long there are large numbers of polymers formed. Soon, proteins are formed without the need to try out every possible combinations of the 20 amino acids along a chain of 300, because the vast majority are simply not possible at much shorter lengths. This is evolution in action. Only the stable combinations of amino acids that form remain in the soup, and these are the one which eventually form life. The utterly brainless amino acids have a much greater intellect than God-Botherering scientific authors.

Put a lot of small rings like curtain rings into a bag and shake them. They will not join together. The same is true of straight pieces of wire, like pins. But put a lot of paper clips together and Schroeder will be invoking God! Some of them will be found to be linked, perhaps even into chains. Creation! Halleluiah! The ones that formed chains, did not all come together at the same time and link simultaneously. That is what Schroeder want his kiddies to think, but it is obviously not true, as this simple example demonstrates without any need for a PhD in deception.

Burgess Shale

Schroeder is fond of pointing out that all the 34 major phyla of the living kingdom formed very early on in evolution in the Cambrian “explosion”. Now, this is called an explosion but it is an explosion on a vast time scale and therefore in exceedingly slow motion. The Burgess shales which testify to it, are over 500 million years old, and the explosion that led to them might have taken 50 million years. Certainly, in the pre-Cambrian life was simple, then it became complex suddenly on this vast timescale by the Cambrian age, but it still had a huge length of time to do it.

On this scale, the 34 phyla appeared to come into existence together, but they really had 50 million years give or take a few million to do it, and perhaps longer if the evolution actually occurred in a corner of the earth where it remained for a long time before escaping. Indeed, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe think that life enters the earth from space regularly, so we are not even looking just at whatever happens on earth. Even so, 34 phyla could emerge at the rate of one per million years and seem to be appearing instantly in the fossil record.

It is true enough that species or major changes can apparently occur instantly in the fossil record, but “instantly” in the fossil record is quite different from instantly! There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come into existence. And they do, fully formed. These seem like puzzles, and, of course, they are real puzzles in the sense that we shall never be certain of an answer since it has all happened long ago and cannot be repeated, but perfectly sensible reasons can be thought of why the fossil record should not be complete. Much more recent history such as the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites was thought to be certainly known from God’s holy scriptures but now it is rejected. And that is only 3000 years ago, rather less than 500 million years.

Schroeder is trying to invent a gap for God to hide in. A plain reason why things suddenly appear is that the development phases are usually confined to small localized populations. Some insect developed wings in a rudimentary form in some evolutionary backwater, but, when they had developed, they proved to be so amazingly successful that they quickly led to a population explosion in the creatures that had them. What does the fossil record show 400 million years later? Wings suddenly appear from nowhere. Schroeder says:

We may have to change our concept of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these sudden developments.

Comment by Tim Prorok

God as Infinity

Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith tells his little charges a new gamut of lies. God couldn’t create the world and then just walk away. God’s act of creation is completely different since God is infinite. Infinite means no boundaries. Therefore nothing can exist independently from God, since anything independent would draw a line between itself and God, rendering God finite.

The rabbi is telling people things he does not know. How does he know that God is infinite? He does not even understand infinity, let alone God. Cut infinity into two, and what do you get? Two infinities! Any part of infinity is infinite itself, so, if we are all a part of God, we are all infinite. If nothing exists independently of God, everything is God! The rabbi continues:

God is continuously creating and sustaining the universe. Just as a shining light is in constant need of electricity, nothing can exist without His constant will generating it. Cut the current, the light immediately ceases.

These apologists love their misleading analogies delivered with the assurance of a fool. Why does the universe need a God to be continuously creating and sustaining it? Why cannot the universe be self-sustaining? Why should it need sustaining? If the universe needs sustaining, how does the rabbi know that God does not need sustaining? If the need for sustaining ends with God, why could it not have ended with the universe? The God of the rabbis answers nothing except how empty headed rabbis can afford lots of children.

The rabbi continues with unfounded opinion on unfounded opinion sold like candy to his babies of whatever age:

Every molecule in the universe stems from one single, pervasive, infinite source. Just as every brushstroke of a Picasso has his signature on it, everything in creation is an expression of the higher, infinite dimension.

More false assumptions, more false analogies. If the Big Bang theory is true, then the opposite to his assertions is the case. The source was a singularity. Everything was compressed into infinitesimal space. It was of zero dimensions not infinite dimensions. It is the density of the singularity that is notionally infinite.

How do these people get away with it? The man is a Chelmer chochem, a blathering dunce, who must have been a source of grief to his mother, but now expounds the wisdom of God for people even simpler than he is. He succeeds only in proving that God is revealing nothing to him, whatever illusions he might have. He mentions Kurt Vonnegut appearing in one of his own novels. Where, though, is God appearing in His novel? Perhaps he appeared as a fly, and no one noticed. He is Baalzebub. The rabbi continues:

Our finite world is all an expression of God’s oneness. Without a new act of creation every instant, nothing could exist. The only true, real existence is the Infinite.

If God is infinite the world is part of God and so it too must be infinite, but he tells us it is finite. Idiotic assertion is piled upon idiotic assertion. Why should anyone believe any of it? They should not, and it is a sad reflexion of the state of humanity that many people still believe the hocus-pocus of these magicians and tricksters. The fact that no honest rabbi or bishop ever stands up and tells the tricksters they are dishonest proves that they all are. It is a requirement of the job.

The rabbi continues:

Whenever we peel back the outer layer of this world and get a glimpse of the higher Infinite dimension, we have a moment of awe-filled transcendence. We lift beyond our finite limitations and touch eternity. Perfection itself.

When did the rabbi last do this trick. It sounds better than Yuri Geller! The feeling of awe that people sometimes get is the feeling that they are in unity with the rest of being, not with God who only exists in their heads. The rabbi still continues:

There are moments in everyone’s life that burst with the discovery of the Infinite, where we see God’s fingerprints on the universe. Even the most common spiritual experiences can be an encounter with an aspect of God’s oneness as it intersects the finite world.

The rabbi’s God is his assumption. The only evidence he offers for it are natural phenomena like these experiences of awe. There are no fingerprints in it, but there are over the descriptions made by people like him—the forger’s fingerprints, the pickpocket’s fingerprints and the hoaxer’s fingerprints. If God were good, this man could be assured he would be cooking in Hinnom before he ever gets to Abraham’s bosom.

The forger now blatantly purloins the truth and bends it into evidence for his figmentary father.

Within nature we are struck by the quiet harmony of a smoldering sunset. We shiver from the absolute power of Niagara Falls. We gape in awe at a mighty tornado plucking trees, or a raging thunderstorm ripping open the sky. We sense the vastness of eternity when gazing at the endless expanse of stars at night, or viewing the majestic grandeur of the Grand Canyon.

The sober reader will have noticed that all of these examples of awe are natural. They are expressions of the direct wonder of Nature, not the imagined wonders of God. Only the fraudster steals them for his own bent purposes.

Unity, Perfection, Eternity, Oneness, Absolute Power, Truth are all aspects of God, our instructor informs us. How does he know these amazing things? When did God tell him? Surely he is not just passing on hearsay evidence? The rabbi concludes:

Have we become jaded to the pervasive wonders of God’s world? To increase the dosage of awe and joy in daily life, transform the mundane into something more spiritual. Open your eyes and see God’s ever-present fingerprints.

To increase the awe and wonder in your life, look at the world in its own right. It is truly wonderful, and there for you to explore to your heart’s content, guided by teachers who know something about it from their own studies, and do not go about telling you lies that confuse you. Spirituality is the sense of unity with Nature, not something that does not exist. Open your eyes, most certainly, but open them too to the crooks who know nothing but pretend that they know the infinite. They are liars!

God: Explanation or Excuse?

It is right and proper for biologists to say, “I am not satisfied”, and to look for a better and more specific explanation, but “God made them” is no explanation. It is worse than a poor explanation, because, if people took God seriously, interfering in history or evolution, they would not bother looking for explanations. For over a thousand years in Europe that is exactly what happened. God was responsible for everything and it was blasphemy to suggest otherwise, and heresy to contradict Church dogmata. These lost years are called the Dark Ages because scholarship stopped and nobody in Christendom discovered anything new for centuries.

Schroeder makes a big thing about the the Pax-6 eye gene which is essentially the same for all life forms showing it is a very early development. Schroeder thinks it is incompatible with the Cambrian explosion because earlier forms of life did not have eyes. What he does not consider is that the Cambrian explosion was caused by the evolution of a primitive eye spot, and it was this sudden remarkable advantage that caused a sudden radiation of types.

Another possibility is that evolution quickly becomes directed in a sense. Not that it knows where it is headed, but that it is able to respond to certain extreme stimuli, such as temperature or poisons. It does this by mutating faster when the organism is under stress, giving a better chance of producing a surviver.

Another possibility that Schroeder does not want to consider is that bacteria exchanged genes much more readily in the conditions then pertaining than they do now. It would mean that a useful variation might be spliced quite naturally between species that soon varied to such an extent that they became different phyla. Whether any one of these or other suggestions is the right one will have to be shown by genetic experimentation, but any one of them is better than bypassing the issue by saying, “It is God’s finger waggling in Nature!” Biblicists and God lovers do just that.

Schroeder’s final passage is:

What has produced the wonders of life that surround us? The answer may be implied by those very surroundings. In that case the medium would be the message!

He cannot understand what he is implying, he is so besotted with his private fetish. The wonders of life are wonders of Nature. The answer is not implied, it is there before your eyes. Patriarchal religionists cannot see it, they have been so blinded by people like themselves—confidence tricksters that they now call God. But God has never explained anything. He has been an excuse.

From Tim Prorok

About the Burgess Shale and rapid evolution you may want to look into the work of Eshel ben-Jacob. He is a physiscist that spent five years working on E Coli and his conclusions were what you are alluding to with your writing. I read of his work in Global Brain by Howard Bloom.

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