A New Axiom for New Atheists, Old Atheists, and Theists of All Stripes

There are three axioms, or general truths, that apply to the consideration of the origin of life.  The first is ex nihilo nihil fit, and is a popular Latin phrase which means, "From nothing, nothing comes."  This axiom is usually used by theists to counter the atheistic notion that the universe came from nothing.  Of course, Scottish philosopher and skeptic David Hume (1711-1776) posited that the cosmos could have always existed, and prior to Big Bang Cosmology in the early 20th century, most cosmologists and many in the field of natural science and of philosophy believed that very thing.  The counter argument to such a view comes from the theist, or what most people have believed since the dawn of time, that "from nothing, nothing comes."  It applied to Hume prior to Big Bang Cosmology, and it applies even more so today.  There is a better axiom for atheists and theists, however, which we will get to shortly. 

Ex nihilo nihil fit, when told to nearly every child, is asked with a follow-up.  When hearing this axiom from her Daddy when she asks him where all of this came from, hears her father speak of the creative power of Almighty God.  Satisfied minds of inquiring children are rare, however, and the next question from the child's inquisitive nature is "If God made everything, then who made God?"  Usually, the father sits back and smiles and appeals to the common sense notion that God is the creator, and has always existed, and that when we say, ex nihilo nihil fit, we are speaking of the created order, or of the physical universe ('physical' here, is used for the sake of simplicity when talking to a child, for we know there are also laws of math, logic, and nature).  The child is reminded of the common sense notion that God the creator does not apply to the realm of "nothingness," and she runs on her merry way to swings and piles of leaves and the things that children do.

The second axiom is popular among the atheist community, and it bears no Latin nomenclature, but is the idea that Man is merely the slow, gradual, evolutionary process of random genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection.  This is what Cornell researcher and geneticist John C. Sanford calls The Primary Axiom in his book, Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Human Genome.  Sanford rejects the Primary Axiom as scientifically unsustainable; hence the title of his book.  Genetic mutations are always deleterious (bad), and lead to death.  Even so-called exceptions, such as the mutation that benefits those with sickle-cell anemia in resisting malaria are still mutations which, when placed back in the original host, die.  The Primary Axiom is upon its dying day, and it's time for a new axiom. 

Evolutionary biologists speak of the Law of Biogenesis.  This law, in Latin is omne vivum ex vivo and means, "all life comes from life."  Even though evolutionary biologists use this phrase, they mean it in terms of materialism, the view that only matter exists.  (Didn't Madonna have a song about materialism?  Some time back in the 80's).  Well, omne vivum ex vivo is a good axiom with which atheists, new and old, and theists of all stripes can agree: all life does indeed come from life. 

Now, the question that origin of life researchers simply cannot answer on a materialist account, is where the original, first life came from.  Since it is obvious that life had to come from non-life, and that life had to start somewhere, the Law of Biogenesis axiom is apropos, especially for the theist, who believes that the Almighty, who is Life, is the Creator of all things.  But even if atheists do not want to submit to the idea of a deity, they should embrace the axiom that "life comes from life," and hoist themselves on the overlook to examine what was required in order for life to arise in the first place.

Cambrian Expulsion of Darwin's Doubt

Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt is an exploration of the fossil record, known as the Cambrian Explosion, as well as a meticulous analyzation of genetic requirements of what novel body plans in animals require in order to arrive on the scene of life.  In addition, it is a case-building exercise in promoting the theory of intelligent design as a viable option to the prevailing view of the neo-Darwinian synthesis that all of life arose by means of random, genetic mutations acted upon by natural selection.  
Readers familiar with the Cambrian explosion know that it is a name given to the sudden appearance in the fossil record of novel body plans, fully-formed and functional, and astonishingly distinct from the eukaryote organisms in the Pre-Cambrian record.  In the first part of the book, The Mystery of the Missing Fossils, Meyer discusses Darwin’s friend and challenger, Harvard paleontologist Louis Agassiz.  Agassiz doubted Darwin’s idea of descent with modification via tiny, incremental changes because he doubted the power of natural selection to produce a specific difference (difference in species).  Agassiz wrote in Darwin’s day, “It is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they all die out,” (11).  It was the Cambrian fossil evidence that provided Agassiz with his antagonism toward the idea of tiny, gradual, accumulations of change in one species could give rise to another.  Further, as Meyer provides in his book by means of photographs and illustrations, there are some downright strange body plans found in the Cambrian layer!  One look at the Hallucigenia sparsa gives reason as to its onomatopoetic name.  
But perhaps this is old hat for those who read the evolutionary literature.  After all, we live in a day of genetic engineering, biomolecular study and gene manipulation, and so forth, and this leaves much to be desired by reasoning about intelligent design by means of studying ancient fossils in rocks.  The second part of Meyer’s book, How to Build an Animal, will satisfy readers who desire a detailed analysis of the origin of genetic information, protein folds, and de novo  origination of new species, as proposed by Manyuan Long, Kenneth Miller and others (Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry), where Meyer challenges the origination of genetic information as unexplained by biologists, who have begged the question “as to the origin of the specified information contained in genes or parts of genes,” and that they must “invoke completely unexplained de novo jumps--essentially evolutionary creation ex nihilo (“from nothing”).  For example, Meyer discusses how, while biologists propose protein folds as plausible evidential scenarios where genes from the folds could be different enough to produce proteins with different folds (critiquing Long again).  However, according to Meyer, the evidence (“in most cases”) is that when protein folds are fragmented off from their original chain, the fold loses its ability to form a stable structure (224).  If that is true “in most cases,” should it be viewed as a viable hypothesis?  To find the answer, readers will have to read through Meyer’s well-researched interaction with current research in the origin of genetic information, epigenetics, and so forth.  

Part three of the book, After Darwin, What?  Meyer states his case that intelligent design should be considered a scientific theory based upon historical reasoning, the ability to make predictions and the inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning).  The book is an enjoyable read.  Meyer’s research is as vast as the cosmos, and yet he offers anecdotes and musings that delight the reader, such as this creative hypothetical: “Perhaps he (Agassiz) retired to his study the better to concentrate, scrutinizing the book’s (Origin) prespossessing title, recalling what he had already heard about the work.  He read the book with deep interest, making notes in the margin as he moved through it, but in the end his verdict would disappoint its author” (8).  No matter what one’s views are on Darwin’s idea of descent with modification via, slow, gradual, incremental changes, and whether natural selection has the creative power to form novel body plans, Stephen C. Meyer’s Darwin’s Doubt will not disappoint, as it is researched to a T, full of diagrams, illustrations and pictures of key figures, fossils, and more, making the book easy to follow, as it gets tedious in its research. In any case, Meyer's book is well-worth the effort in reading it.  

What is Science?

There's a new atheist website up, and it's a good-looking one.  It's called "Christianity Disproven."  Now, it's a good thing to dispel commonly held myths, whether in the Christian world or the atheist world.  To be fair, many atheists have the right to be upset with the Christian church here in America, because it has fostered and encouraged amid its ranks serious maladies including anti-intellectualism, broad, sweeping appeals for a "child-like" and "blind" faith, (where 'child-like' means non-investigative, as opposed to the biblical idea of trust).  Christians in America have been homophobic, racist, and violent.  They have also been greedy, sexually immoral and physically lazy, too.  So, it seems fair that atheists would have some serious reserves about wanting to be Christian! 

Many atheists bring powerful, sophisticated arguments against belief in God, the reliability of Bible, the resurrection of Jesus and so on.  Some of the most powerful arguments deal with the conflict between the divine attributes of omnipotence and omniscience, for example.  Or, they might sound the trumpet with a tight argument against the goodness of God and how that is incompatible with the evil he apparently allows.  These are worthy discussions.  However, there are a number of atheists who use shibboleths, cliches, and one-liners in order to frustrate theistic belief.  An example is found on "Christianity Disproved" 

"This is AWESOME! I hope it helps people to understand where we really come from. We do not need "gods" any longer, we have science to answer our questions."

My response: Science is the interpretation of the natural world. Nothing more, nothing less. In order to do science, you have to presuppose cause and effect, the uniformity of nature, that your senses are reliable, that your mind (or brain, granting physicalism) coheres and corresponds to the external world outside of yourself.

So on what basis does someone believe all these things? 

"Scientism" is an extreme form of classic foundationalism which says that beliefs are justified if they are self-evident or evident to the senses.  On what basis would you say these things are self-evident? Is classic foundationalism self-evident? No. Is classic foundationalism evident to the senes? No. Scientism therefore, is self-referentially incoherent. 

_______________________________________________________________________________

That's the end of my comment on the site.  I'd like to add some further thoughts on what science is.  

Science is the orderly study systematic categorization of the truths in a given field. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn spoke of 'paradigms" that change and evolve through verification, falsification and renewal (we might think of the Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis).

When we use the term "science" alongside (or in opposition to!) other fields of research, study and knowledge ( Latin, scientia), we are thinking of our conclusions regarding the natural world and the way it works, using models and predictions to anchor further speculations as to how things go, the fields of which study are the "hard" sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics, with hydrology, geology und so weiter.

Many of these sciences (fields of study) are used to predict the future and speculate about the past.  In speculating about the past, and calling themselves "science," it is only right that we restore history, theology, metaphysics and the so-called "soft" sciences to the realm of science, making "science" a general, all-encompassing term.  

Philosopher of biology Stephen C. Meyer, (Ph.D Cambridge) notes in his book, Signature in the Cell that since the time of the Greeks, up to the scientific revolution (1300-1700), philosophers, theologians and those who researched the natural world ('scientists'), held to the worldview of idealism, which is to say that they believed mind preceded, originated and often-times sustained matter.  On this worldview, philosophy, theology and studies of the natural realm were rightly called "science" because they pursued fields of knowledge with the express purpose of delineating a systematic and taxonomic set of study in their particular fields.  Theology was the "queen of sciences" because it held the broader scope of all things under the rule and authority of the Almighty, an intelligent creator who orders an intelligent world, ripe for inquiry and study by his creatures (us).   

Enlightenment philosophers like Hume and Hobbes believed the opposite: matter gives rise to mind.  This is the worldview of materialism, that the universe has always existed, and that as time progresses, over eons and eons of flux and flow, simpler forms of life give rise to complex forms of life.  This is basically the Darwinian world-and-life view.  Given this worldview, we can see how belief in God is both unnecessary and quite possibly irrational.  

Today, when people say "Science tells us such-and-such," or, "Science has buried God," they are speaking from the worldview of naturalism.  Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga is known for challenging naturalism in his famous essay, "An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism."  He asks how, given materialistic naturalism, we can trust our cognitive faculties?  Charles Darwin wondered the same thing when he asked in a now famous letter to William Graham Down, 

"But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

When people say "science will give us all the answers," they are both correct and incorrect at the same time.  They are correct in that all the fields study that produce knowledge will give us the answers we need in order to make sense of human experience (crystal balls and the like do not produce true knowledge).   On the other hand, "Science" with a capital "S," understood within a materialistic, naturalist universe, does not tell us anything about whether there is an immaterial world, and it cannot tell us "all the answers" re: the meaning and purpose of life, what is good or evil, whether history has a goal, purpose or end.

And yet, even evolutionary biologists do in fact tell us, from their own perspective, that the plain truth is that materialism is either false, or under serious jeopardy: Meyer on evolutionary biologist George Williams: 

"You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms because they both have mass and charge and length and width.  [But] you can't do that with information and matter....  Information doesn't have mass or charge or length in millimeters.  Likewise matter doesn't have bytes....This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains."  

If matter and information are two separate domains, and even evolutionary biologists support this view, how can we rationally hold to a materialist concept of the nature of the universe?  It stands to reason that the worldview of Idealism (mind produces and sustains matter) is the more rational view than materialism (matter gives rise to mind, and conscious thoughts are reducible to particles that have mass).  

Naturalist understandings of the natural sciences, i.e. the so-called "hard" sciences shows materialism to be false because of DNA and the informational code they produce when making genes.  Evolutionary biologist George Williams again:

""Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter....  The gene is a package of information, not an object.  The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene.  But the DNA molecule is the medium, it's not the message."  

We can see that using our plain reason and observation, that information and matter are two different things, and if they are different, then information must be immaterial.  They must be different, as information cannot be a "different kind of material."  That wouldn't make any sense.  

Information, as non-material, brings us to at least, a non-reductive naturalism that espouses immaterial entities like laws, consciousness, etc.  And we must ask ourselves, "Where does the information come from?"  Not from material sources. 

No, the rational view is that immaterialism is true, and this opens the door for the rational person to feel justified in believing in immaterial things like an intelligent agent or agents involved in the origin and sustainability of life.  Further it shows that belief in God is not irrational, that it is rational, and is not threatened in the least by the studies of the natural world.  To the contrary, as the Belgic Confession (article 2) says, the creation is "a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God." 

Again, "Science" is a simple term from the Latin which means "knowledge."  Will "knowledge" tell us everything we need to know? Does "knowledge" now have the ontological status of personhood? "Knowledge" speaks to us?  Isn't it we who are the ones in pursuit of knowledge?  Yes, our research will "tell" us things, but surely there is a better way to discuss metaphysical questions concerning Ultimate Reality other than resorting to shibboleths like "Science has ruled out belief in God" and other such statements. 

Sources:
Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design.
Alvin Plantinga, "Naturalism Defeated."  pdf file located at http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/articles/plantinga_alvin/naturalism_defeated.pdf
Christianity Disproved located here.  http://www.christianitydisproved.com/

Well, I'm just not so sure...

I was told by a friend of a friend that because I am skeptical about "particles to people" evolution, that I must submit a viable scientific paradigm that replaces the Darwinian paradigm of evolution. But surely this is not the case? Just because I am skeptical about something, that does not mean that I must assert a position to the contrary of that which I am skeptical. For example, I may have my doubts about the alleged Alligator that lives in Lake Hickory, but that does not require me to prove that it surely isn't there. How could I check every nook and cranny of the lake in the first place? But it just seems reasonable that alligators don't live in North Carolina lakes just down from the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains.

Why am I skeptical about "particles to people" evolution? Well, because it seems odd to say that literally all of life came from a single-celled organism. That means pine trees, wheat, gnats, people, camels and strawberries all came from this one organism. I think it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about that. Don't you?

Besides the oddity of the first idea, there is the problem of genetic information. If the neo-Darwinian theory is correct, then that means that either a) all of the information was "kept" in the first, single-celled organism, or b) new information arose at a certain point during genetic mutation that accounts for all of life as we know it. But genetic mutation isn't new information. "A gene mutation is a permanent change in the DNA sequence that makes up a gene," (U.S. National Library of Medicine: Genetics Home Reference). It is true that some genes mutate and combine with other genes to make new ones, but new information is not created here. Mutations are changes in a gene's sequence, not the production of new information in the DNA.

Now, when skeptics like me ask these questions, the questions are tossed aside, and I am told I am a "creationist." Well, I'm just asking reasonable questions.