Dear Friends,
Mr. Javed I. Chaudry has
sent us an article for our reading and the words he has chosen for
the title of his post are "Another Blow to the Evolutionists". The
article he has shared with us is regarding the conversion of Antony
Flew, an atheist philosopher who has renounced his atheism and that
is the supposed blow to the Evolutionists. I obviously need to be
educated on what Antony Flew had to do with Evolution in his
atheistic days that his conversion now is considered a blow to it.
The word "another" in Mr. Chaudry's title implies that there have
been other “blows” before this one. I am aware of some of them and
they have come from Christian Movement of Intelligent Design and
none from science. The ones from ID Movement are of no better
quality than the blow in question i.e. Antony Flew's renouncing the
atheism. One person’s conversion shouldn't be such an earth-shaking
event but somehow it is made out to be in the case of Antony Flew. I
know many Muslims who have renounced their faiths but I have never
considered that fact a blow to Islam. That isn’t even the point. The
article in question has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution
but I will come back to that later. Let me first discuss Antony Flew
and his conversion.
The article written
by Jeffrey Fall, a regular contributor to the publications of Living
Church of God, gives you an impression that Mr. Flew has somehow
converted to Christianity or something similar. Does the article
contain the word 'Deism' in it? No, it doesn't, although it should
have because that's what Mr. Flew has actually converted to
according to his own description. It's a curious fact that Mr. Fall
left that important piece of information out. In an interview with
Philosophia Christi, an Evangelical publication, the interviewer
asked Mr. Flew whether Deism would be a fair designation of Mr.
Flew’s new position. Following was Mr. Flew's answer.
"Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as
Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence,
believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to
design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for
any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions
between that God and individual human beings."
In his article,
Jeffery Fall also kept us in dark about Antony Flew’s thoughts about
Mr. Fall’s own God. In one of his public lectures the same year, Mr.
Flew described the Christian and Muslim Gods as "omnipotent Oriental
despots” and “cosmic Saddam Husseins".
As I implied earlier,
Antony Flew had nothing to do with Evolution so this "blow"—if it
can be called that—can only be to the philosophy of atheism. Ever
since his conversion, I have not seen Antony Flew giving any
detailed scientific explanation of his new intellectual position and
I would love to see it if he has. All he has been saying is that
Gerald Schroeder and Roy Verghese convinced him that there are
unbridgeable gaps in nature that can only be bridged if there was an
intelligent designer. Flew seems overly impressed with Schroeder's
book “The Hidden Face of God”. In the above-mentioned interview too,
he referred to Schroeder’s work saying that he [Schroeder]
demonstrated how Genesis 1 is scientifically accurate. I haven’t
read Verghese so I can’t possibly comment on his work but I have had
the dubious honor of reading Gerald Schroeder. So let’s move on to
Mr. Schroeder.
Mr. Schroeder is
famous for his books “The Science of God” and “The Hidden Face of
God” among his other work. Victor Stenger once wrote that
Schroeder’s work could be summarized in the following sentences.
“I
cannot understand how the universe and the enormous complexity of
living things we see around us can have come about naturally.
Therefore, they must have been created supernaturally.”
I would like you to
sample the quality of Schroeder’s scientific arguments. In his book
“The Science of God”, Schroeder writes that Bible talks about
dinosaurs. Bible doesn’t contain the word ‘dinosaur’ but that’s not
a problem for Mr. Schroeder. Mr. Schroeder says that Bible talks
about “big reptiles” and dinosaurs were biggest reptiles. Right!!!
Let’s see some gems
from Schroeder’s book “Genesis and the Big Bang” (in which,
according to Mr. Flew, he has demonstrated that Genesis is a
scientific account of Creation)
1-
“The mass (or weight) of the object
while at rest is called, in technical terms, its rest mass."
In technical terms mass and weight are not
the same.
2-
“Light shining on certain metals,
knocks free a stream of electrons.”
Certain metals? How about all
metals?
3-
“we use a maser, a gun that can fire
one atom at a time”
The only place
where masers do such naughty things is the movie Godzilla
which my kids forced me to watch. In real life, masers cannot fire a
single atom.
In his book “The
Hidden Face of God”, which Antony Flew is particularly smitten by,
Gerald Schroeder derives the following equation
hf = mc2
Schroeder has derived
the equation from following two equations
E = hf
(Planck’s equation) and
E = mc2
(Einstein’s famous equation)
Schroeder saw that
E on the left side is common in both equations so hf must be
equal to mc2. A high school student with good knowledge
of physics can tell Gerald Schroeder that E in Planck’s
equation is variable energy of moving particle and in
Einstein’s equation it denotes constant rest energy of a
particle so Schroeder’s derivation is actually saying that
constant rest energy of a particle is equal to its variable energy
while it moves with whatever the momentum.
Such is the quality
of the scientific scholarship that convinced Antony Flew of
an intelligent designer. In this letter, I won’t even go into the
claimed scientific accuracy of Genesis 1 according to Schroeder and
referred to by Antony Flew but if someone is interested, s/he can
read Victor Stenger’s book “Has Science Found God?”
It is worth noting
that Mr. Gerald Schroeder, who currently resides in Israel and works
for an organization whose stated goal is to bring the non-observing
Jews back in to the fold, holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. Another
physicist, who is a working scientist unlike Gerald Schroeder,
commenting on Schroeder’s books said that Schroeder’s qualification
is a testament to the holes in the degree-awarding system of MIT.
Let’s go back to the
article sent by Mr. Chaudry titled “Evolution Takes a Major Hit!”.
Following is an excerpt from the part that can be called the
backbone of this article [all emphases from the article]
“The
amazing complexity of DNA (in all life forms) makes it totally
illogical that natural random chance could form the complex DNA
of the very first living cell. Since it is claimed
that natural selection chose life forms that were more effective at
reproducing and surviving, it would be a total
contradiction for the same natural processes to selectively have
chosen clumps of chemicals that can’t reproduce themselves. Everyone
knows that natural selection could not impact the non-living, such
as rocks, chemicals, or computers.”
The Theory of
Evolution, in its main framework, doesn’t deal with how the first
living cell was created. Evolution pre-supposes life and takes the
story from there. How the first living cell came into being from
inanimate matter is in the purview of a different field of research
called a-biogenesis. Evolutionists are frequently challenged to show
how life first emerged on the planet from inanimate matter and
sometimes they attempt to answer the question using one of the
hypotheses of a-biogenesis but that’s not their major area of
expertise or interest and, in my personal opinion, they should
either refuse to answer such questions or always preface it by
saying that that has got nothing to do with Evolution. It is also
said sometimes that without explaining how life first arose, the
Theory of Evolution is useless. It is like saying that the Theory of
General Relativity was useless without the Theory of Big Bang, which
obviously it wasn’t. So the question that how the complex DNA of the
very first living cell was formed is not a question for
Evolutionary biology, neither the inability to answer the question a
blow or a hit to Evolution.
The quoted paragraph
above also smacks of author’s ignorance about the available
hypotheses of a-biogenesis. The author seems to know that the
first living cell not only had DNA but it was complex too. What is
the source of that knowledge is not provided in the article. Of many
hypotheses being debated in the circles of a-biogenesis, none, to
the best of my knowledge, claims that the first living cell had to
be DNA based or if it were, it had to be complex. In one of the
hypotheses, usually called RNA World hypothesis, the first living
cell could have been an RNA Replicase without any DNA. In
another hypothesis, neither RNA nor DNA is required and the simple
and abundant phenomenon of crystallization can possibly give rise to
a simple DNA-based or RNA-based cell. Then there is the oldest
hypothesis of a-biogenesis that says that God created life from
inanimate matter. The difference between this one and all the other
hypotheses is that the other ones try to speculate within the
boundaries of known scientific facts and none of the scientists
today believes anyone of them because there is no evidence available
so far for any of them. At the same time, the God hypothesis is free
from scientific limitations, doesn’t require any evidence and yet
millions upon millions continue to believe in it.
What happens is that
scientists never shy away from saying, “I don’t know”. The moment
these words are uttered by a scientist, hordes of theologians rush
in shouting, “oh, but we do”. "You don’t know how the first living
cell emerged? Since you don’t have the answer to that,
whatever else you say is thus proven false. But don’t despair
because we have the answer for you. God created it." Should the
scientists at this stage say, “oh golly, why didn’t it occur to us?
Let’s shut down the labs please. No need to find out anymore. The
question has been answered and blessed are those who have provided
the answer to us”? Thankfully, they don’t do any such thing. The
glorious journey of human knowledge continues despite the drag that
the god-crowd puts on it. The forces of human enlightenment keep
reducing the gaps where the theologians’ god lives. Quite
interestingly, Mr. Antony Flew used to use the phrase “God of the
Gaps” frequently and the only reasonable thing for him to do now is
to take it upon himself to debunk his own arguments from the olden
days of his hedonistic beliefs. Let’s see when does that happen but
I would suggest against holding your breath.
Cheers,
Rafi
11/25/05
