... doesn't exist.
I'm currently making my way through the audio version of The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian. It's an atheist tract purporting to explain how life came into existence. Instead, it's the healing crystals - essential oils version of science. I didn't buy the Kindle version, so I'll summarize from memory instead of quoting here.
The book acknowledges the problems with the scientific explanation for the origin of life on Earth. Life appeared almost as soon as it was possible for it to survive and the odds against that happening by random chance are so enormous as to be completely unbelievable. Either way, when it comes to life, you have to believe a miracle occurred.
Almost immediately, Bobby dismisses the miraculous origin, but gives no reasons other than that he doesn't like it. With metaphysics arbitrarily dismissed, he embarks on a trip to Neverland, claiming that life was inevitable because the universe naturally tends towards greater and greater complexity and nothing is more complex than life.
Well.
The most obvious objection is to ask, "Why does the universe tend towards greater complexity?" The why questions are the ones that science cannot answer and so he doesn't. He doesn't even address it. He just blasts on into deep space.
The book staggers around, alternating between describing real science, such as entropy, and completely misapplying the same. For example, he claims that the universe is not heading towards an entropy death because life is constantly adding complexity and structure. He confuses open and closed systems as well.
In the book, Earth is a closed system until it isn't and life is turning energy into structure and information, ignoring the fact that life can only do that because the sun's energy is what is being consumed. In reality, the solar system is effectively a closed system for thermodynamic purposes and it is indeed heading towards and entropy death as the sun devours all of its available fuel.
Bobby desperately wants the universe to be immortal and life to have meaning, but he simply refuses to acknowledge even the existence of metaphysics.
The Romance of Reality is not a scientific book, it's a propaganda tract by a side that knows it is defeated. It's like watching one of the Nazi speeches, circa 1944-45. "No, really, we're going to win!"
Scientific atheism is hopelessly obsolete, something the author acknowledges, at least implicitly. The origin of life problem has gotten more difficult over time instead of getting easier. Going back to my WW II analogy, the irreducible complexity of life is the Normandy invasion and the information theory problems of DNA mutations leading to advantageous mutations in bodily structure is the breakout from Normandy.
I suppose the materialists' problems deriving meaning and ethics without metaphysics would be the Eastern Front, where the situation is collapsing as well.
It's all so silly and pointless. Science describes how, not why. These people need to accept that and fall in love with real science about actual reality, not engage in fantasies, trying to turn it into something it's not.
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| And there is so, so much to love about both reality and science. |
4 comments:
When you read things like "Life appeared almost as soon as it was possible for it to survive", you need to remember that this is being said by geologists and evolutionary biologists, whose definition of "soon" is rather different from what the normal person thinks of as "soon".
Specifically, the oceans formed about 4.5 billion years ago, the earliest confirmed life was 3.77 billion years ago, and it is speculated that the first life might have been as early as 4.28 billion years ago. The difference between 4.5 billion years and 4.28 billion years, is 220 million years. That's 3.4 times longer than the 66 million years since the non-avian dinosaurs died, and is almost as long as the time since the very first dinosaurs even existed. It is almost half as long as the entire timespan since plants and animals moved out of the ocean onto land.
220 million years is a long time for things to happen, and a whole planet is a lot of area for things to happen in.
Tim, I don't have a coelacanth in the fight, so I can look at the problem dispassionately. I simply can't see how you could get from random molecules floating around to a living cell. You need too many things all working in harmony all at once to make random chance a reasonable hypothesis. For example, if you have everything but a cell wall, you've got nothing. If you have everything, but your randomly-generated DNA sequence is whacked, you've got nothing. And so on and so forth.
When the CA lottery gets over $1B, we play, typically with 20 tickets. I think the most we've ever won is $2. The origin of life problem is 10**200 times more difficult or something like that. Random chance just isn't a reasonable explanation for me.
It hardly matters to me whether life came about because God willed it or not because the existence of physical laws in the first place is impossible to justify with science. It's obvious to me that books like this one are polemics instead of explorations because they immediately dismiss valid avenues of explanation simply because they don't like them.
I guess my direct reply to your question is that even with all that time and space, you're still many, many, many orders of magnitude away from any hope of life being generated through random chance. I'll give the author credit for one thing - he explicitly describes how hopeless that theory is. In fact, it's the primary motivation for writing the book in the first place.
==Science describes how, not why.==
I'm not convinced even of that.
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