The Anthropic Principle
The Anthropic Principle presents a strong evidence for God, but what is this principle?
Reevaluation of a Pillar of My Talks on Evidences for God. The Odds of Making a Functional Protein (a little bit technical)
This is a little technical, though the general ideas can be followed by a broad audience. I view the origin of life as a strong argument for God. Yet, I see Internet chatter saying the origin of life has been solved except for minor details. I don’t know where these people come up with that idea. Many reputable sites say the whole issue remains a mystery. For example, look at the first paragraph here: https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/origin-life-earth-explained. When I have done talks on evidences for God’s existence, I have almost always mentioned one particular issue related to the life’s beginning. The issue is the amazing odds against making a functional protein from a random linking of amino acids (even with major assumptions like having a way to link them). Exact estimates vary, but I have used 1 in 1064. This comes from work by Hubert Yockey on the protein cytochrome c (1). I have said that purely natural pre-life processes could not have made such rare amino acid sequences. However, I recently began wondering if such projections really make a strong case. Background. When I say protein, you may think of drinks like Ensure or muscle contraction proteins. However, a huge number of proteins function in a lot of ways in living beings. Many act as enzymes that stimulate all kinds of chemical reactions. Other proteins build structures, act as antibodies, and do many other jobs. Proteins are composed of chains of amino acids (usually combinations of 20 of them). One can think of the order of amino acids like the order of letters in writing. Some orders are meaningless while others portray meaning. So, xDefgmZe tells nothing because it has complexity but no order. AAAAA also tells nothing because it has order but no complexity. On the other hand, the following Shakespeare quote has order and complexity; this writing contains understandable communication. For proteins, the question is: how rare are amino acid sequences that have functional ordered complexity? Some people, including me, have stated how incredibly rare these sequences are. If this is true, then before life, it would be virtually impossible to get this right by randomly linking amino acids. So, what’s the matter with this thinking? First off, some advocates of both divine creation and natural origin of life have said the whole issue is irrelevant. For the latter, some say an RNA world came before proteins. I discard that objection because of all the problems with proposing a pre-life RNA world (see this writing and this one). And, even if an RNA world did exist, proteins would get made eventually. On the divine creation side, some scientists call attention to pre-life chemistry. They say this chemistry could never get to a situation where the right 20 amino acids in the right geometry would have the right machinery to link them correctly. Even today, when proteins are made in a laboratory, they are usually assembled using biological systems. In addition to this problem, even if functional proteins were made pre-life, a huge chasm still exists to get to actual cellular life. I agree that arguments can be made for a life creator without discussing the rarity of functional amino acid sequences. Even so, I still wanted to revisit whether this consideration still holds. One objection to the tiny odds projections is that any particular protein doesn’t need only one exact amino acid sequence to function. For instance, a rat hemoglobin has some different amino acids from a human version. To reuse the writing analogy, small changes can retain an idea: To be or not to be, that is the question (original) To be or not to be, this is the question. To be vs not to be, that is the question For proteins, some substitutions don’t mess up the function. However, the Yockey calculation given above already accounts for that. Moreover, proteins can have stretches that are conserved or mostly conserved among species. However, another objection has been raised: Very different amino acid orders can have the same function. I see this in my work on antioxidant enzymes named superoxide dismutase 1, 2, and 3. They have one function, but different structures and locations (cytosol, mitochondria, and outside cells). To use the writing analogy again, someone can change Shakespeare’s quote completely and still have the same meaning: To be or not to be, that is the question (original) Should I keep living? I am contemplating this decision. What should I do? Live on or not live on? Going back to the proteins, it needs to be asked: How many different amino acid orders can give a single function? This may vary depending on the function and size of the proteins involved. Do all protein functions need equally rare amino acid sequences? No. In light of this, some origin of life scientists propose the following idea. The earliest life used relatively small proteins with functions that didn’t need the most narrow amino acid sequences. Once life started, these proteins evolved into some bigger proteins that require fairly strict amino acid arrangements. Now, just because this idea has been proposed doesn’t mean it happened. One of the first problems I see comes from looking at the bacteria Mycoplasma genitalium. By certain criteria, this could be called the simplest form of life present now (2). This bacteria has 484 proteins though not all are necessarily essential for life. Bacteria like this were discussed in a short commentary called “Small, but Not Simple” (3). This paper notes that many of the “simple” bacteria enzymes have multi-functions. That’s a trait that would seem to increase the need for specificity in amino acid sequences. In addition, Mycoplasma genitalium has an average of close to 400 amino acids per protein. This is pretty much the same as the average human protein. More importantly, this average amino acid chain length is about 3 times the size of cytochrome c, the protein used for the 1 in 1064 odds cited above. Although Mycoplasma genitalium lacks
Natural Science and Religion are Separate. The Former Can’t Be Used to Study the Latter (or Can It?)
On this website, I talk about research pointing to the possible need for a creator in the origin of the universe, life, life’s species, and consciousness. In response to such writings, I hear often that natural science and religion occupy different realms. Therefore, we can’t use natural science to examine religion. In most cases, there is also an underlying thought that we don’t need God to explain origin issues. However, the different realm attitude says we shouldn’t even try to see if God is needed. A number of years ago, I addressed this issue in the context of the origin of life. I was an invited speaker at an international conference titled:Religion and Science: Tension, Accommodation and Engagement. The presentation was titled: “Is it unscientific to say that God started life?” This was not a Christian conference, but was organized by a professor from the Ohio State University Department of Philosophy. Here are some of the points I made. First off, I want to address the sometimes unstated background thought: we don’t need to bring God into the discussion because natural explanations work. For origin of life, that’s an unjustified statement. For instance, the University of Chicago says this: “The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified” (https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/origin-life-earth-explained#research). Next, there is the thought that if a God like that of the Bible exists, then that God resides outside the natural world. Therefore, natural science cannot comment on whether God exists, or on how that God would act if that God does exist. For natural science, I grant that in some sense, God cannot be studied by the scientific method. If the God described in the Bible exists, that God goes beyond human understanding and can’t be accessed directly by natural science. This is why I don’t like studies where a group of plants or sick people receive prayer and the other group doesn’t. The God of the Bible doesn’t have to consent to be in such experiments. On the other hand, science can study whether it’s reasonable to say outside design was involved in some aspects of origins. In fact, this can be taken a step further. We can study whether outside design is more reasonable than purely naturalistic explanations. This happens in forensic science, which has to distinguish intent vs accident. Also, research has been done to see if certain phenomena reflect natural undirected events or extraterrestrial intelligent life. As a side note, I think such research wastes money. I side with the person who asked why look for intelligence in space when it’s so hard to find intelligence in Washington DC. However, my main point here is that looking for intelligent activity vs lack of it has been considered scientific research. Another issue has also been raised. Even if God does exist and has created, science has to keep looking for other answers. I don’t have a problem with this, but with one big caveat. If the data shows evidence that an outside creator could be needed, then researchers should be allowed to honestly state that. Right now, that tends to be off limits in mainstream research journals. To summarize: Postscript. This presentation does not necessarily apply to moments where God might break into the natural. For example, the Bible teaches that Jesus died and rose from the dead. Natural science cannot go back to confirm this, though social science can evaluate the historical evidence for the claim.