Evolution’s Brute Spontaneity

"The basic idea is traceable to Antiquity. More specifically, it is one of those respects in which Athens had to go to school to Jerusalem, for it was only in the highest reaches of the monotheistic tradition of thought—Augustine, al-Farabi (left), Ibn Sina, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides—that the problem of the mystery of existence finally became clearly articulated.

In a nutshell, it’s this: There is no contradiction involved in supposing that the universe never existed.

In other words, while I cannot consistently imagine a square circle, I can consistently imagine that nothing at all ever existed.

This means the universe is what philosophers call “contingent” (meaning not logically necessary).

This means that, since the universe apparently did not have to exist, we are entitled to ask why it does in fact exist." -  James Barham

Yes, and once you get to why then the next question is how and then immediately afterwards, by whom?  Scientists and philosophers agree that the Universe had a beginning and so therefore something or someone caused it to begin.  A what cannot cause the Universe because all whats belong to the subset we call the Universe.  Frankly, no what can do  anything when it does not yet exist.   So you need a someone, no matter what age you credit to the Universe, and the only apparent candidate for the role of Universe Creator is God.

I am making a number of blog posts that are all like puzzle pieces in that they will eventually all fit neatly together into a neat picture of What Evolution is Not or Things Evolution is Not.   There are so many things about the concept of Evolution that are relatively easy to inspect and reveal as canards that it is going to take some time to expose them all.  In fact, I probably will only do a few of the major ones as it would take a ve-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ery long time to deal with all of them. 

Today we take a look at one of the most ridiculous arguments of Darwinists, which is the idea of multiverses.   Frankly, to resort to such an argument is basically like saying, "I give up, I have no argument so I am going to pick up a magic lamp and rub it and a genie will come and take me away so you don't get to win the discussion."   Stephen Hawking has already given up and cried "Uncle" by resorting to multiverses.   As Dr. John Lennox kindly explains, in a multiverse scenario in which an infinite number of universes exist, one of them would be the Universe created by an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God and suddenly He would be the Creator of all that exists so all the other imaginary pseudoverses would suddenly be falsified.  

This blog has often scrutinized the concept of nothing being the cause of everything several times.  It is an idea long-falsified philosophically and it makes no sense whatever scientifically BUT (and this is a but that makes Bertha's Butt seem tiny) it is necessary for Darwinism to be true.   That is the ONLY reason the concept still gets brought up.   Darwinists are quite good at depending upon falsified concepts (spontaneous generation, anyone?) so this is par for their course.  Before the main course, the appetizer is a blogpost by Cornelius Hunter about spontaneous generation:

Evolution’s Brute Spontaneity

As Michael Ruse and others have pointed out the language evolutionists use can be telling, but what is not discussed is that the language evolutionists do not use is also telling. Anyone familiar with the evolution genre cannot help but notice the curious use of design language. Teleology abounds as natural selection is described as “solving” this or that “problem.” As Ernst Mayr pointed out in Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, “The use of terms like purposive or goal-directed seemed to imply the transfer of human qualities, such as intent, purpose, planning, deliberation, or consciousness, to organic structures and to subhuman forms of life.”

Of course for Ruse, Mayr and the evolutionists these are merely interesting asides. The persistence of teleological language in the literature is nothing more than a commentary on how we think and do science. Perhaps it reveals a certain laziness of thought, or perhaps it is a useful way of problem solving, but either way it is nothing more than a fiction. Sure the world looks designed, but we all know that such primitive teleological thinking has long since been exposed and rejected. After all, evolution is a fact.

This brings us to that language that evolutionists do not use. They explain that evolution is a fact, and they give long, flowery descriptions of this process. Organic chemicals coalesced in warm little ponds or along deep sea concentration gradients. Single celled organisms emerged and natural selection proceeded to act on naturally occurring biological variation. The drama unfolded as volcanoes, lightning and comets created just the right mix. Neutral and positive mutations produced innovative solutions to the challenges of the evolving biosphere, resulting in common ancestors and clades. Evolutionists display beautiful, detailed murals depicting this epic history.

But what is not said is that all of this just happened to occur, all on its own. In short, the world arose spontaneously. While evolutionists readily adopt design and teleological language, they eschew accurate, objective descriptions of what their theory actually claims. Evolutionists insist it is a fact that the world arose spontaneously, but they avoid such stark terms. They avoid this because such clarity reveals the absurdity of evolutionary thought.

Spontaneous action is an important concept in science. Everything from thunderstorms and snowflakes to proteins arise spontaneously. Indeed evolutionists often appeal to this phenomena as support. Snowflakes and proteins arise spontaneously, so why not everything else? As I have pointed out this argument fails badly, and in fact merely points out yet more problems for evolution.

But yet another fundamental problem for evolutionists is that the spontaneous formation of things like thunderstorms, snowflakes and proteins occurs within a context. Yes proteins fold spontaneously, but only in the right type of aqueous solution. Even more important, you need an unfolded protein to begin with. That is, you need hundreds of amino acids to be covalently bonded, one to the next, by peptide bonds. And furthermore, it must not be just any arbitrary sequence of amino acids, but from a special class of sequences which, yes, spontaneously folds.

So the right type of amino acid sequence needs to be specified, those amino acids need to be held together by peptide bonds, and the resulting unfolded chain needs to be placed into the right kind of aqueous solution. Then, yes, it will fold spontaneously.

The same logic applies to thunderstorms, snowflakes and everything else. There is a context within which these things spontaneously form, and the context is crucial. These things don’t just happen spontaneously without the proper context. And so whenever we speak of spontaneous action in science, it is understood that there is an implied context. Molecules A and B spontaneously bond to form molecule AB, but it is understood that molecules A and B are mixed together in the same test tube, at an appropriate temperature, concentration, and so forth.

So in science spontaneous action is not action that is free of context. There is no such thing, we might say, as brute spontaneity. Unless, that is, you are an evolutionist. Here we have yet another absurdity of evolutionary theory. You won’t find this in their beautiful murals or flowery textbook descriptions, but evolutionary thought is based on context-free, brute spontaneity.

Evolutionists appeal to changing allele frequencies, genetic mutations and other means of biological variation as their sources of innovation. And while such mechanisms show little evidence of being capable of designing nature’s incredible array of species, even if they could they would rely on the context of molecular biology—a context which according to evolution arose via, yes, evolution.

But it does not stop here. Molecular biology must have evolved within a context. A terrestrial environment, providing the right mix must have led to the origin of molecular biology, cellular life and the underlying biochemistry.

And again, the terrestrial environment must have evolved within a context of an early earth. And the earth must have evolved within a context of an evolving solar system. And the solar system evolved from a cloud of gas. And the gas evolved from, well, you get the idea.

Ultimately evolution has no starting point except for nothing. For evolutionists there can be no Prime Mover. Everything we see must have arisen from nothing. And while one might, with sufficient wine or song, dream of such unlikely possibilities, evolutionists insist that all of this is a scientific fact that must be acknowledged by all rational parties. Evolution’s absurdity is exceeded only by its confidence.

But in their insistence, evolutionists will never use such clarity. Like the cult that hides its true beliefs to newcomers, evolution covers over its absurdities with beautiful murals and descriptions. They scoff when they hear their theory accurately described. For that is the language that evolutionists do not use.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bravo!  Every Darwinist assertion turns out to be another Great Wizard of Oz, all show and no go.

Allow me to remind you of two of the posts I made on the subject of NOTHING last year:

Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...

Why belief in The Big Bang is a Stretch! Nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

Let's see what the non-Christian blog TheBestSchools.org Blog has to say on the subject...

What Part of Nothing Don’t You Understand, Dr. Krauss?

James Barham

 

“There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew.”


That’s the title of a glowing write-up in the New York Times Science section two days ago (Feb. 21) about the latest in a series of book trumpeting a supposed solution to the mystery of existence.

The book under review is Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (Free Press, 2012). It is basically a superior and accessible rehashing of the concept of the “landscape,” also known as the “multiverse”—the idea that our universe is embedded within an ensemble of other universes.

Though according to this hypothesis our universe is a “part” of the landscape in some sense, it has no spacetime connection with any of the other universes. This means that they can have no causal influence on us, or we on them.

That makes it tough to gather evidence that these other universes actually exist—but let that pass.
I won’t go into the details of the arguments for and against the landscape hypothesis here. There is no lack of popular books covering this material.(1)

In any case, the point of greatest interest is the extent to which the proposal is ad hoc speculation—as opposed to a genuine inference from hard facts—and on this point, expert opinion is divided. So, being no expert myself, I reserve comment.



In any event, it’s irrelevant to Krauss’s extravagant principal claim in the book—that the problem of the mystery of existence has been solved (more on that in a moment). With respect to this claim, it is pretty obvious that the landscape (if it exists) is no closer to being nothing than the visible universe we observe around us.

Rather the contrary, I’d have thought.

But more to the point, the landscape idea as such is not even directed at the mystery-of-existence question. Rather, it is directed at the fine-tuning problem.

This is the problem of explaining why there seems to be no good reason why a large number of physical constants take the exact values that they do. What makes this problem more interesting is the fact that if the values in question had been only slightly different, then various conditions necessary for the presence of life would not have been fulfilled.

This leads, naturally enough, to the idea that the universe is a “put-up job,” in the memorable words of the late Fred Hoyle, a distinguished astrophysicist who valued plain speaking.

The reason why the landscape idea seems to solve the fine-tuning problem is that it makes room for the thought that the values of the physical constants of all the different universes are set as they are at random.
In that case, it is hardly surprising that we find ourselves living in the universe with the values that make our existence possible. So, the theory does seem to address the fine-tuning problem—assuming, that is, the landscape exists and the random-constant concept make sense (and those are big assumptions).

But none of this has anything to do with Krauss’s principal claim about science’s now having explained the mystery of existence. So, let’s take a look at that.

If you haven’t encountered it before, the idea can be a little elusive. Indeed, it seems to have eluded Krauss.



The basic idea is traceable to Antiquity. More specifically, it is one of those respects in which Athens had to go to school to Jerusalem, for it was only in the highest reaches of the monotheistic tradition of thought—Augustine, al-Farabi (left), Ibn Sina, Anselm of Canterbury, Maimonides—that the problem of the mystery of existence finally became clearly articulated.

In a nutshell, it’s this: There is no contradiction involved in supposing that the universe never existed.

In other words, while I cannot consistently imagine a square circle, I can consistently imagine that nothing at all ever existed.

This means the universe is what philosophers call “contingent” (meaning not logically necessary).

This means that, since the universe apparently did not have to exist, we are entitled to ask why it does in fact exist.

Note that it does not help to say that the universe had to exist according to the laws of nature—by physical necessity as opposed to logical necessity—because the concept of natural law already assumes the existence of nature. Or, if one prefers to take a Platonist view of natural law, then one can simply move the question to that plane and inquire into the reason for the existence of Plato’s heaven. Therefore, invoking the laws of nature in this context is question-begging.

As an aside, one might well wonder: How is God an improvement over the laws of nature, in this respect? That’s a good question.

Theologians speak of God’s mode of being as “necessary,” unlike the world’s, which is contingent, as we have seen. So, it is a crude mistake simply to ask, as atheists are wont to do: “Who made God?”
However, it is not clear (to me, at any rate) that the concept of necessary being is fully intelligible. The question is: What sort of necessity are we really talking about? It certainly seems like we can imagine that God doesn’t exist without contradicting ourselves. But if that is so, then all really existing things—not just the universe, but God as well—turn out to be contingent.

There are several ways to go here, for the theist. One is to distinguish a third type of necessity, stronger than physical necessity, but weaker than logical necessity. Another is to distinguish among different modes of being. For instance, one might argue that God—as the source of Being (upper case) itself—must be distinguished from all individual beings (lower case), including the universe as a whole. And if that is right, then it is easier to see how the former can be necessary, whereas the latter are contingent.

This is a vast subject. Luckily, though, it need not detain us further here. For, I am not defending the claim that God is a sufficient solution to the mystery of existence.

What I am doing is attacking Krauss’s claim that science provides such a solution.

To return, then, to the main thread of my argument: It seems a perfectly coherent question to ask why the universe exists, and if that is so, then we evidently have every right to seek an answer to the question.

The late-antique and medieval Christian and Islamic thinkers who first clearly saw all this liked to express the point slightly differently: Creator and creation are two radically distinct things.

As Robert Sokolowski, a distinguished philosopher at the Catholic University of America, has put it:

[T]he Christian understanding introduces a new horizon or context for the modes of possibility, actuality, and necessity . . . [it] distinguishes the divine and the world in such a way that God could be, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if everything were not.(2)

The idea received its classical modern statement in a little essay by Leibniz (right) called “On the Radical Origination of Things” (1697). Here is how he put the problem:

For a sufficient reason for existence cannot be found merely in any one individual thing or even in the whole aggregate and series of things. Let us imagine the book on the Elements of Geometry to have been eternal, one copy always being made from another; then it is clear that though we can give a reason for the present book based on the preceding book from which it was copied, we can never arrive at a complete reason, no matter how many books we may assume in the past, for one can always wonder why such books should have existed at all times; why there should be books at all, and why they should be written in this way. What is true of books is true also of the different states of the world; every subsequent state is somehow cpied from the preceding one (although according to certain laws of change). No matter how far we may have gone back to earlier states, therefore, we will never discover in them a full reason why there should be a world at all, and why it should be such as it is.(3)

In modern parlance—following Leibniz’s lead—the problem of the mystery of existence is most often expressed by means of the formula: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This phrase also forms the subtitle to Krauss’s book.

Put like that, the idea does not seem so difficult to grasp. In fact, it can be reduced to three little words:
Why not nothing?

Nevertheless, Krauss doesn’t get it. He titles one of his chapters “Nothing is something.” What does he mean by this?

Just the familiar idea that according to quantum field theory, the vacuum state has complex properties such that matter can be created through quantum fluctuation events. As Krauss puts it in the title of another chapter: “Nothing is unstable.”

But the properties of the quantum vacuum are simply irrelevant to the question under discussion—the reason for the existence of anything at all—which Krauss has brazenly claimed to have solved in the title of his book. For, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, the quantum field is obviously not nothing in the relevant sense.

What, then, is the final verdict on Dr. Krauss’s latest book?

Yet another example of a perfectly good scientist out of his philosophical depth.(4)

___________________
(1) Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010); Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford UP, 1997); Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape (Little, Brown, 2005); Alex Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One (Hill and Wang, 2006).
(2) Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason (University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); p. 41. See, also, Lloyd P. Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy (Routledge, 1990).
(3) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. by Leroy E. Loemker (Kluwer Academic, 1989); p. 486.
(4) For further discussion, see John Leslie, Universes (Routledge, 1990); Milton K. Munitz, The Mystery of Existence (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965); and Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Harvard UP, 1981).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I have to disagree with Jame's conclusion somewhat.    Science and philosophy are intrinsically linked, so a good scientist must consider what he asserts from empirical and philosophical observations.   Therefore, when a scientist writes a book in which he makes such a philosophically bankrupt statement as "nothing is something" when actually, until you have something you do not even yet have nothing as a concept, let alone a theoretical null set.   Zero is a number with meaning and substance and it is part of the created Universe.   The idea that nothing existed before creation is illogical.  Before the Universe existed there was not even nothing as a concept.  Think on it for awhile?

'Something Good' - from the soundtrack to Rodgers & Hammerstein's 1965 film 'The Sound of Music'. Sung by Julie Andrews Maria) and Christopher Plummer (the Captain).   The actual footage is no longer available online, but the music remains as wonderful as it was when first I heard it.   When "The Sound of Music" went on tour, my Dad took me to Chicago to watch the cast perform the musical and, at that time, it was probably Florence Henderson and Theodore Bikel in the lead roles.   I was too young to remember the actors, as it was before the movie was made.  

(Maria and the Captain)

"Nothing comes from nothing

Nothing ever could" 

I  hope you are at LEAST as smart as Rogers and Hammerstein? 

For those unfamiliar with Bertha and her Butt I present the video below as an addendum.   This is what passed for funny in the 70's?  Remember the generation of platform shoes and disco?  Yeah.  Like that.  It has nothing to do with anything but an obscure cultural reference but, if you enjoy it?  You are welcome!