There being no law without a lawmaker…

Bertrand Russel had some wise words on that topic: “…the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave…” (Emphasis added.)

“Natural laws” represent our best current understanding, that’s all.

I mean, why do electrons have a particular mass or charge? Because we call objects with those particular properties ‘electrons’! We don’t find electrons with the same mass and a positive charge – we find positrons. If we find an object with a larger mass and an inverted charge, we haven’t found a particularly wicked and unruly electron – we’ve found a proton.

I don’t see any “value add” with the notion that electrons have to be actively maintained by God to hold their particular values… though apparently Richard Swinburne seems to think so, for one.

The problem is, each time we’ve been able to press down into underlying causes, it’s turned up like water. “Of course water freezes like that – given how electron valences behave, and those dipole moments, how could it not?” Not because of a ‘law’ – a “behest”, in Russell’s terms – but because of the nature of things at the underlying level. Even electrons have those properties, apparently, because of quantum mechanics, not a tiny tablet with “Thou shalt not have a spin other than 1/2″ written on it.

I thoroughly enjoy discussing these matters with you. I have to give you credit for being doggedly persistent in defending your views.

I don’t know when I will get back to this discussion. I hope it will be before too long. Check this thread every now and then — don’t give up on me. ;o)

Thanks

The more intricate functionality becomes the easier it is for it to break.

Not necessarily. That’s a good rule of thumb but it’s not universally true. As a simple example, a triple-redundant system is inarguably more complex than a system without redundancy, but is nevertheless more reliable.

The more complex the functionality of those units of replication becomes, the more those units demand of their environment to sustain their functional complexity and the ability to replicate that functionality.

Vitamin C.

Many types of simians retain the ability to synthesize ascorbic acid (vitamin C) but humans are in the other group that does not. We have to get it from our diet, or we get scurvy.

But so long as we eat a varied diet, we get enough. It’s no big deal unless you go on a restricted diet for a few months (hence the incidence of scurvy on ship voyages).

Now, this argues against your point – because synthesizing vitamin C was important at one point, but became less so. Eventually, it wasn’t needed at all – there was so much vitamin C around that a mutation that ‘knocked out’ the gene for synthesizing it became neutral, not affecting survival much either way. It could have been retained, had it remained necessary.

…what is continually enhancing the environment such that it continues to support the ever more intricate requirements of our replicating units?

The other replicating units, of course. Google up the ‘oxygen catastrophe’. Indeed, the kind of life that lived several billion years ago couldn’t survive the Earth now… and vice versa. We require an entirely different environment now – an oxygenated atmosphere being only one obvious example – because of the feedback loop of life altering its own surroundings.

It seems to me that there is now, for the most part, a consensus that the natural Universe had a beginning.

No, actually, we’ve only managed to ‘reverse engineer’ what happened as far back as a few femtoseconds after the Big Bang. Before that point, our models break down.

What that means is that we don’t – yet – have a handle on what happened before that point. We don’t know that there was a singularity, or a brane collision, or what.

We used to wonder where mountains came from. Then continents. Then we worked out how the solar system formed from a nebula. Then we worked out how galaxies form. We keep pushing further back. It’s not at all clear that the Big Bang is the ‘final frontier’.

One could say a ‘singularity’ had been there from all eternity, but why would it suddenly go “BANG!” after an eternity? Whatever laws that had kept it from doing so for an eternity were suddenly not applicable?

Well, actually… so far as we can tell that’s more or less what happens with radioactive decay. Uranium has a half-life of about four an a half billion years. A uranium atom can just sit around, nothing happening, for many billions of years… and then suddenly, for no particular reason, fission. Things are weird at the quantum level.

Modeling anything the size of the early universe must take quantum effects into account. So while I don’t particularly think it’s likely that an eternal singularity just spontaneously blew up… that’s not a good argument against it.

Coming up with life, as we discussed before, is like getting heads a thousand times in a row when flipping a coin

What if you only need, say, five in a row to start with? And then when a head comes up, now and again, it attaches itself to the sequence?

That’s the thing, and we’ve been over it. Things “like television sets… space ships… transistor radios… circuit boards… crude vacuum tube[s]… computers” don’t reproduce with occasional errors.

Functionality can develop in that case. It can ‘rachet up’ in stages. And if it’s possible that a reproducing system can be simple enough to get started by chance – and autocatalytic systems sure look more and more like they are – then it doesn’t need intelligent intervention to get started.

It seems to me that there is now, for the most part, a consensus that the natural Universe had a beginning. It should be obvious that this requires it to have had a supernatural origin, since there was nothing natural around to bring it about before the natural Universe began. One could say a ‘singularity’ had been there from all eternity, but why would it suddenly go “BANG!” after an eternity? Whatever laws that had kept it from doing so for an eternity were suddenly not applicable? That would be like gravity suddenly not working anymore, only far more unlikely as gravity has only been doing its thing for a finite amount of time and our singularity would have been there for an eternity. It seems to me to be far more likely that our singularity was brought forth specifically to go “BANG!” by a preexisting, supernatural reality – and supernatural it would, of course, have to be since it precedes nature. Except, I suppose, for people who actually worry that gravity might stop working, it seems like most reasonable people would, and indeed have, gone with the preexisting supernatural reality rather than the eternally existing singularity that suddenly and inexplicably popped. In other words, most people believe in God.

Regardless of that question, there was in fact a “BANG!” and matter was brought forth and did and continues to do exactly what we would expect, which is of course, to always end up in its most probable state under the current circumstances. What else would it do? At this point what we should expect are the most probable events and phenomena coming about according to the laws that had been built into nature. This turned out to be a lot of dust and debris from the “BANG!”, some of it coalescing into things like stars and rocky, barren planets and some other interesting things, but none of it coalesced into things like television sets or space ships. Why didn’t that happen? There were no transistor radios. Not even circuit boards that might have been functional if they, by chance, got plugged into the right object. There was not even a crude vacuum tube to be found anywhere. No computers – not even an abacus. What was the problem? Or should we expect that there are yet to be discovered things like that in the Universe that were not intelligently designed? I don’t think so and I don’t think you think so. Let me know if I am wrong about that.

The question is then, why is that not a reasonable expectation? And if it is not, then how can it be reasonable to expect that the extremely improbable, if not virtually impossible, vastly more functionally complex technology found in life is simply a mindless accident? It seems far more likely it was the intended result of the same supernatural reality behind the Big Bang.

I know. Replication, like duct tape, takes care of nearly everything, right? If a prebiotic environment that allows for units of replication naturally came about , and allows for slight modifications in that replication that occasionally enhance the likelihood of continued replication, then there are no limits to the amount of functional complexity that can be achieved, right? Wrong. The more intricate functionality becomes the easier it is for it to break. The more complex the functionality of those units of replication becomes, the more those units demand of their environment to sustain their functional complexity and the ability to replicate that functionality. So if the replication is bringing about increased functional complexity, what is continually enhancing the environment such that it continues to support the ever more intricate requirements of our replicating units? Was the prebiotic environment always ready to support life? We know otherwise. Replication may have been mindlessly increasing functional complexity in that prebiotic world (although I doubt that, at least not mindlessly), but what mindless process was continually enhancing the ability of the environment to support that increasing intricacy? It seems unlikely that anything was. On the contrary, because a prebiotic environment coming up with and allowing for self replicating units of matter to continue replicating would be an aberration – matter ordered other than in its most probable state – the only process working on that environment would have been the second law destroying it.

Coming up with life seems to be a hopelessly impossible project, unless of course, our preexisting supernatural reality intended on that happening and either made arrangements for that that were quite mysteriously built into the Universe from the beginning, or, being playful, supernaturally intervened every now and then simply because He enjoyed doing that.

You wrote:

Ah, but wait a second – are you going to claim that 150-amino-acid proteins (essentially) never have any function? That they are (almost universally) completely inert molecules that in no way interact with their environment?

OK, let’s say that the required supernatural miracle actually happens and we come up with a 150-amino-acid protein that would actually have some kind of functionality given an appropriate context. Let’s say (again miraculously) that our protein does indeed find itself in an appropriate context. Then let’s say (again miraculously) that its functionality is not destructive or neutral, but is actually beneficial in terms of keeping the replication of our lifeless, replicating unit going, the emergence of which was miraculous. The environment that allows that replication to continue, of course, is another ongoing miracle. What are we to conclude from all this supernatural activity? What I have been saying all along: You can’t get life without the involvement of the supernatural.

Let’s say he is way off and the use of only half of the number of events that could have occurred since the Universe began would be enough to come up with a single 150-amino-acid functional protein.

Ah, but wait a second – are you going to claim that 150-amino-acid proteins (essentially) never have any function? That they are (almost universally) completely inert molecules that in no way interact with their environment?

‘Cause we keep finding more and more reasons to think that there were plenty of long-chain-molecules around – not just proteins, but RNA molecules and more. And, again, we’ve found that autocatalytic chemical cycles are indeed possible – even with just RNA, no proteins needed.

And, of course, evolution doesn’t start from scratch each time. Once reproduction of some kind gets started, it proceeds by tweaks from there. If there’s a molecule that does even a half-ass job at some function, then occasional mutations can nudge it to a more optimized form.

Not only that, but we see how gene duplication indicates that a molecule that performs one function well can evolve and diverge to perform some other function well, so long as the starting point has any utility at all at that new function.

It’s a key mistake that often gets made – humans break things down into discrete components that perform a single function. It’s so much easier to think about. But part of the reason life is “light years beyond that” is because evolution doesn’t have to operate with the constraint of single-function components. Practically everything in a living organism serves more than one purpose. There aren’t a whole lot of proteins that have just one function. Molecules and structures get co-opted all the time to perform other jobs.

So the question isn’t “How unlikely is one specific 150-amino-acid protein?” The question is, “Given untold quintillions of proteins of varying lengths… how likely is it that none of them will be in any way functional?”

If you’ll give me half the life of the universe to get that pool of macromolecules… the more we look, the more it looks like that’s all we need.

As for the generalization of the application of the second law of thermodynamics, its essence is that matter tends to end up in its most probable state, and if it isn’t there it tends towards that state whenever the restraints to it being there are removed. It is painfully obvious that the most probable state of matter is not highly ordered functional complexity. Aside from the spectacular exception to this which is life, the entire observable Universe testifies to this fact.

There are, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of arrangements of matter that are not life. Coming up with life, as we discussed before, is like getting heads a thousand times in a row when flipping a coin – only much more spectacular not only because it is vastly more unlikely, but also because it would be in spite of the second law continually working against that happening. As unlikely as our getting heads a thousand times in a row turned out to be, that was still without a force inexorably working against that happening.

You wrote:

How exactly does he know every other sequence is ‘nonfunctional’? Research today on how ‘sparse’ the functional space of proteins might be doesn’t support that – many sequences can support the same function, at varying levels of effectiveness. Especially when the fact that variations can be co-opted to perform different, novel functions is taken into account, this model is hopelessly inadequate.

Come on, Ray, give me a break. Think about what Meyer is saying. Read it again. Let’s say he is way off and the use of only half of the number of events that could have occurred since the Universe began would be enough to come up with a single 150-amino-acid functional protein. Does that solve the problem? It is not like life is only a single protein. The complexity of life is light years beyond that and we have already used up half of our probabilistic resources coming up with a single protein. It should be easy to see that the situation is far, far worse for the nature-is-all-there-is crowd than Meyer indicated.