Darwinian Chemistry

Over the last couple of days, I've had a fascinating conversation with some atheists on Twitter. Hats off to them, they never fell back on name-calling or insults, they offered a very well-crafted argument for their faith.

Their argument boils down to molecular Darwinism. To quote one of them, "it's machine code all the way down." What we see in biology, where single-celled algae turns into blue whales over sufficient time, driven by the forces of competition, is happening at every level. For example, quoting again, "carbon loves to experiment" with different molecular arrangements as the atoms and molecules compete for the resources of space, energy and opportunities to form chemical bonds.

It's simple, smart and makes use of the central pillar of the atheist's profession of faith - Darwinian evolution. I really like it. I can respect it, too. Like all religions, it's giving a holistic description of reality.

There's a moral aspect of it, too, but that's much weaker. It involves cherry-picking cooperative animal behaviors and stacking the deck so you can draw conclusions about the evolutionary advantages of what you want morality to be - a watered-down derivative of Christianity. No mention is made of what moral conclusions might have been drawn had the Nazis focused all their efforts on the Caucasus oil fields in 1942 instead of dividing their offensives into several goals with forces too small to accomplish any of them. Evolution is blind, after all.

Getting back to the chemical Darwinism, it seems to me that they've taken God and shoved Him into the role of software engineer. All of the crazy magic is in the compiler design. The atoms and whatnot can then be blind agents, rushing about this way and that, living lives dictated by the Intelligent Compiler Designer.

It's a variation on the multiverse theory. The multiverse solves the empirical constant problem, where we can't explain why the gravitational constant and other such random numbers are exactly what we need them to be, by claiming that there are an infinite number of universes and we just happened to get the one with the Kardashians. There, the unsolvable mysteries are crammed into a multiverse-generation box, then the box is welded shut and guarded by ninjas so no one ever asks inconvenient questions about their origin.

Here, the compiler design is taken as a given so the atheists can get on with the important things in life, most of which involve sex acts proscribed by the world's major, monotheistic religions. It gives them a neat and tidy, supposedly Godless explanation of reality so they can feel intellectually safe as they download their porn and shake their heads ruefully at the superstitious people who still believe in the Sky Fairy.

Locking the Sky Fairy into a room full of servers and sending him pizzas and Mountain Dew every day to keep things going doesn't mean you don't have a Sky Fairy, it just means you never have to talk to Him.

The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew-pearl'd;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His server farm—
All’s right with the world!