The Truth about Science and Religion. Fraser Fleming
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of the universe, which he believed stemmed from uncovering God’s purposeful design.24 John’s Gospel opens with a statement that explains the source of the purposeful order as stemming from God’s nature: “In the beginning was the Word,”25 the logos, the personal force, the understandable, ordered, rational principle on which all creation rests. In light of the logos infusing the world with rationality, including people, the validity of this understanding reflects the two-way, rational relationship intended between God and man. Einstein, in reflecting on the intelligibility of the universe and the ability to understand much of the complexity through science wrote: “God is subtle but malicious he is not.”26 In other words, the universe may be complex and contain unexpected patterns, but those are part of an orderly fundamental structure that can be understood. The world is not capricious but is a structured universe capable of being understood.
2. Nature is Uniform. The forces of nature are uniform throughout space and time. What happens in one laboratory in one country is reproducible under the same conditions anywhere around the world at any time.
3. Senses Perceive Reality. Coupled with the underlying order of nature is the ability of the human intellect to detect patterns and understand the meaning of the information inherent in the patterns. Reliable data can be obtained from the human senses or their extensions. Scientific instruments are assumed to give consistently reliable information about the way the world is despite not being able to directly “see” the object being interrogated. No-one has actually seen an electron, though scientists all believe they exist. Sensing reality is critical in scientific discovery because all abstract scientific discoveries are made first in the mind and then tested. Most of Einstein’s work falls in this category precisely because many of his theories were counter-intuitive.
4. Simplicity. If two theories or explanations fit the data, the simpler is usually to be preferred. For example, Copernicus’s solar-centric system did not provide more accurate data than that of the Ptolemaic geo-centric system—the advance, recognized by mathematicians, was a simpler calculation. Similarly, the most famous scientific equation of all time, E=mc2, simply and elegantly summarizes an awesome, fundamental truth underlying the universe’s structure.
The axioms on which science rests are philosophical assumptions. Scientist’s faith in these assumptions leads some individuals to make statements that are actually philosophical assertions. Each episode of the television show Cosmos began with Carl Sagan intoning that “The Universe is all there is . . .”—clearly a belief statement.27
Science cannot tell us why the universe is understandable or why the patterns in nature are so easily comprehended. Scientists simply make these assumptions, consciously or unconsciously, because they are so fruitful. Why people have brains capable of understanding remarkably intricate features from quantum theory to cosmology when these intellectually demanding areas have little immediate biological survival value is perplexing. From a religious perspective, the attributes of intelligence, power, and understanding are a natural consequence of people being made in God’s image.
The Origin of Information
Prebiotic evolution assumes a key role of chance, in the sense of a random occurrence, to provide the right chemicals for the transition from non-living components to the first living organism. Direct laboratory simulations of conditions on an early earth must address the problem inherent in trying to reproduce a process that apparently took millions of years. Detecting chance events with small probabilities requires a long time. A scientific approach to shorten the time requires an intentional, rational experiment to replicate the “chance” events that might have produced living organisms from non-living components. Usually, experiments with low probabilities are performed under intense conditions with greater frequency to improve the chance of a favorable outcome. Experimental design involves selecting pure chemicals that are subjected to geologically plausible conditions of energy input (heat, electric discharge) and environment (temperature, concentration, and pH). Successful experiments generate biologically significant molecules whereas unsuccessful experiments are refined and repeated until they are successful. This repeated give and take constitutes a necessary input of information from the experimentalist and a sorting of the output to find what is experimentally relevant.
Experimentally, the sorting is provided in the analysis of the reaction mixture. Most reactions generate a mixture of products from which one or two potential precursors are carefully identified and separated. Any intervention represents an input of information. Which products are significant? This depends on what you’re looking for, in other words, the experimental design has a specific type of product in mind for selection. This is like going to the beach and collecting shiny shells from the morass of sand and dead sea-life left along the shoreline.
The sorting process imparts information through selecting for what is important. Evolutionary models often trace the sorting mechanism to the environment, an ecological niche in biology or crystals capable of absorbing biological molecules, for example. Complex biological environments allow information to flow between organisms, such as changes to an animal’s coloring to blend into the environment. In this sense biological evolution is a natural process that distills information from the environment and captures the information in the genetic code. More difficult to understand is the generation of information from simple environmental features, such as crystals, which are regular and repetitious but have minimal information content. In the beginning of earth’s development there were no obvious sources of complex information. The search is for a natural process capable of amplifying minimal information inherent in minerals into complex genetic information.
The difficulty inherent in disentangling the origin of information is illustrated in spark discharge experiments. Mixtures of amino acids are generated that differ in a very subtle spatial orientation. The spatial complexity stems from an unusual peculiarity of carbon: the orientation of the four bonds allows two molecules to be assembled together with exactly the same connectivity but different arrangements in space. Each carbon center is like a hand with projecting fingers, thumb, and forearm attachments. The carbon center can have a “left” and “right” handedness, each of which naturally interlocks only with another left or right. In biological systems, the carbons of each amino acid is comprised of only one “hand.” Proteins have very specific, and usually very long, sequences all with the same geometric sequence—all “lefties” in a sense. The resulting sequence imparts very specific molecular complexity, particularly near the active site of enzymes where changing just one amino acid out of hundreds can render the enzyme inactive. Spark discharge experiments generate an equal mixture of two mirror-image amino acids that are very difficult to separate because their physical and chemical properties, like melting and boiling points, are identical. Randomly incorporating amino acids of each mirror image series from a mixture also containing natural and non-natural amino acids generated in discharge experiments is not likely to lead to a functional protein.
For the chemical synthesis of proteins, all of the amino acids must have the same handedness in a very specific order. As an analogy, if a house (protein) were to be built from an array of a hundred Lego blocks comprised of twenty different colors (amino acids) then the chance of assembling only a red house would be one in 20100! The chance of randomly assembling a functional protein is roughly the same as finding one grain of sand in a desert many times the size of the Sahara.
One estimate for the probability of assembling a functional enzyme through random chance puts the odds at one chance in 1020. Getting the sequence right is vital because proteins serve extremely diverse biological functions. Some proteins act as enzymes, some act as ropes that anchor bone and tendons together, while others form rubber-like soft tissue that surrounds the major arteries. Random chance seems unlikely to explain the complexity required for assembling the large, “handed,” three-dimensional structures so prevalent in nature. Is this the hand of God?
Assembling a functional protein requires positioning the amino acids in a specific sequence that encodes information. Enzymes contain very specific sequences of amino acids that create three dimensional “biological machines” where the sequence codes information specific to each type of enzyme. The information cannot come from some underlying attraction between amino acids because otherwise only one amino acid sequence would result. The amino acid sequence is flexible, allowing different sequences to code for different