Let us imagine a young man named Preston who upon reaching the age of 22 declares himself to be totally self-sufficient. Let's suppose up until this time Preston has very much relied upon the help of his father. But upon reaching 22 Preston says, "I can now make my way in life without any more help from my parents." Preston spends a few years writing a book. He submits the book to multiple publishers, and one of them agrees to publish it After eagerly awaiting its publication, the book becomes a success, making Preston a nice sum of money. Quite a few people buy the book. Preston proudly declares in triumph, "Now I have shown that I am totally independent of my parents."
But one day in a book store, Preston spots a person who is buying his book, and asks him why the person is buying his book. The person confesses that he was paid money to buy the book. Preston goes to his father, who makes some confessions. The father confesses that he bribed Preston's publisher to accept Preston's book for publication. The father also confesses that he had paid thousands of people to buy Preston's book, so that he could become a successful author.
This enrages proud Preston. He had vowed at age 22 to become totally independent of his parents, but now it seems that his success has depended on the action of his father. At this point Preston vows never to see his father again. "He's dead to me!" Preston declares. Later this sentiment somehow evolves into an actual belief that his father is dead, even though there is no evidence backing up this claim.
But while believing himself to be totally independent in the coming years and decades, there is a reason why proud Preston is not actually independent of his father: the monthly packages that Preston receives from his father. Every month Preston finds on his doorstep a very large box delivered by Amazon, a package he did not order. Each package is filled with all kinds of valuable things. Some times the package contains gold coins. Other times the package is filled with food. Other times the package is filled with items such as jewelry and electronics that Preston is able to easily pawn for cash, to help pay his rent. Each package has some kind of slip of paper identifying it as a gift from Preston's father. Not having much further success in his writing career, Preston's lifestyle very much depends on these monthly packages from his father.
But while this continues to happen year after year, decade after decade, proud Preston continues to believe in his complete independence from his father, and also continues to believe that his father is dead. Preston maintains this belief by some remarkable set of mental gymnastics. Preston tells himself that each package he receives arrived merely because of a random computer error occurring at the Amazon headquarters. He keeps telling himself when he gets his monthly package, "There it is again, another computer malfunction." Proud Preston tells himself that software errors at the Amazon warehouses can result in the generation of a random address. Each time that he sees the paper slip in his monthly package identifying his father as the sender of the package, Preston says, "It's just a coincidence that the random name and random address generated by the computer error happens to match the name and address of my father." Preston justifies this claim by saying, "These packages can't possibly be from my father, because my father is dead."
Of course, this all results in proud Preston believing in a set of coincidences fantastically unlikely to occur. What would be the chance of someone getting month after month for many years a package having a slip saying that the package is from his father living at the father's last known address, when each of these paper slips were generated by a separate computer error matching the name and address of someone's father? Maybe 1 chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. But proud Preston uses some mental gymnastics to prevent him from being bothered by this improbability. One of Preston's pieces of mental gymnastics goes like this:
"Sure, it would be incredibly improbable that someone like me would keep getting all these packages with paper slips saying they came from my father, purely because of random computer errors happening each time, which coincidentally listed my father as the sender. But improbable things happen all the time! Imagine if you take a basket full of dice, shake the basket 10 times and pour the dice in a long line that stretches 40 meters. That would produce a sequence of about 1000 random numbers between 1 and 6. But the chance of getting that exact sequence would be 1 in 6 to the thousandth power. This proves that incredibly improbable things can happen very easily."
Proud Preston's reasoning here is fallacious. The fallacy is that Preston forgot to distinguish between random chance producing results not resembling the product of design, and random chance producing results that do resemble a product of design. It is true that random chance can very easily produce incredibly improbable results that look random and do not resemble a product of intention or design. But is is not at all true that random chance can easily produce incredibly improbable results that resemble a product of intention or design. For example, if you have a large basket filled with letter cubes that each have a letter on one of the six cube faces, and you pour out such cubes in a long line, the chance that you will get a 20-meter string of characters that makes a coherent, grammatical, well-spelled English paragraph is less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.
We can imagine proud Preston using another line of "mental gymnastics" reasoning to persuade himself that he could accidentally keep getting monthly packages with slips saying that they came from his father, even though each time it was merely caused by a separate random computer error. The reasoning would go like this:
"There are computer programs that prove that the most improbable-seeming intentional-looking results can be produced by pure chance. One program runs in a long loop. At the beginning of each iteration the program generates a random letter. Then the program checks whether the letter is a match at a particular position in the text of Shakespeare's play Hamlet. If a match occurs at that position, the letter is saved. After a number of loop iterations equal to the character length of the play Hamlet multiplied by the number of characters in the alphabet, the program generates the entire text of the play Hamlet. This shows that random chance can produce a long series that looks just like intentional results."
Proud Preston's reasoning here is very fallacious. The computer program Preston describes is a program that has random character generation as a kind of "window dressing." But the program is not at all a program showing the power of pure chance results. In each loop iteration the program checks the randomly generated character to see whether it is a match for a character in that position in the play Hamlet. The randomly generated character is saved only if there is a match in the position. Because of this, the resulting text is not at all random text. So the program Preston imagines does nothing to show the power of chance results to produce intelligent intentional-looking results.
Such mental gymnastics might not be sufficient for Preston, so we can imagine him simply starting to lie, as part of the process of fooling himself about the packages he receives every month. We can imagine him starting to tell one of his friends some untrue claims such as, "It is well-known that many people get packages claiming to be from their relatives not because their relatives sent them, but purely because of computer errors at an Amazon warehouse." Once proud Preston started to tell such a lie, we can easily imagine it becoming a habit for him to tell this lie. He might not even think he is lying when he tells such a lie for the hundredth time. By then there may be a kind of "I've said it so many times it must be true" effect.
We may also imagine that in addition to the monthly packages filled with expensive gifts, proud Preston also gets from his father a monthly letter. But Preston simply throws away the letters unread. Telling himself his father is dead, Preston concludes that these monthly letters can be explained by assuming delusions, fraud and hallucinations associated with the letter writers. Before throwing away the letter unread each month, Preston shouts, "Delusions, hallucinations and fraud!"
Through such effects Preston might fool himself into accepting his idea that these monthly packages he keeps getting are all the result of mere computer errors rather than gifts from his father. This story I have given about proud Preston is pure fiction. There is no such person. But very importantly, there are all over academia very many people who year after year keep thinking in a way very similar to the thoughts of proud Preston.
These people are our professors of science. Just as Preston proudly declared about age 22 that he has no more dependence on his father, the science professors of academia have proudly declared that they have no dependence at all on any of the ideas of religion and no dependence on any idea of some divine reality higher than man. Just as Preston rashly decided to believe that his father is dead (without any good basis for such a conclusion), the professors of academia have rashly declared God to be dead, without any good basis for such a conclusion. And just as proud Preston kept getting unwanted evidence of his reliance on his father, science professors have kept getting more and more evidence of mankind's reliance on some higher superhuman causal reality that they would rather not believe in.
In my story it was not merely that Preston discovered evidence of his very great dependence on his father in the past. It was also that Preston kept getting evidence (which he tried to sweep under the rug) of his continued dependence on his father; because he kept getting the packages from his father every month. Does this part of the story correspond to anything that goes on in nature? Yes, it very much does.
Citing failures such as the dismal failure of Darwinism to credibly explain the enormous organization and information-rich fine-tuned complexity of more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in the human body, many people think that human existence would never have occurred were it not for fortunate interventions or some purposeful activity by some higher power long ago. Such thinkers will typically or very often assume that humans have no current dependence on any such power. But nature suggests a very different story. The shocking story suggested by nature is the radical idea of the continuous biological dependence of the human species on some superhuman organizing principle far beyond human understanding. There are four reasons why nature very strongly suggests such an idea.
(1) The origination of every adult human body is a miracle of organization utterly beyond the understanding of science. Without resorting to lies such as the lie that DNA is a blueprint or recipe or program for building a human body, no scientist can tell a credible tale of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the enormously organized state of the human body.
(2) The continued existence of every human depends on the continual occurrence of protein folding, a phenomena by which string-like polypeptide chains (sequences of amino acids) fold into very complex 3D shapes necessary for the function of protein molecules. Scientists cannot credibly explain how protein folding occurs. Don't be fooled by untrue headlines claiming that some AlphaFold2 software "solved the protein folding problem." Such software did no such thing, but merely made progress at a very different problem, the problem of predicting the 3D shape of a protein from its amino acid sequence. That problem is properly called "the protein folding prediction problem," not the protein folding problem. The protein folding problem is still very much unsolved. Scientists simply do not know why it is that proteins form the complex folded three-dimensional structures needed for them to perform their function. Such a structure is not specified in DNA, which merely specifies the one-dimensional string or sequence of amino acids used by a protein. Protein folding occurs continuously in the human body, and the existence of each of us depends on it. You would die within a month if protein folding stopped in your body. So your continued existence depends on the continued occurrence of thousands of types of protein-folding miracles of organization which scientists can't explain. Claims sometimes made that protein folding occurs because of "energy minimization" are not credible. What is called Levinthal's Paradox is that while protein folding occurs with blazing speed, if such a thing were to occur by trial-and-error searching for a minimum energy, it would require eons. A scientific paper states this, using the term "conformation" to refer to the 3D shapes needed for protein function:
"The problem of protein folding is one of the most important problems of molecular biology. A central problem (the so called Levinthal's paradox) is that the protein is first synthesized as a linear molecule that must reach its native conformation in a short time (on the order of seconds or less). The protein can only perform its functions in this (often single) conformation. The problem, however, is that the number of possible conformational states is exponentially large for a long protein molecule. Despite almost 30 years of attempts to resolve this paradox, a solution has not yet been found."
(3) There is another way your continued existence depends on the continued occurrence of a miracle of organization which scientists can't explain: the miracle of protein complex formation. A large fraction or most proteins in the body only function if they are team members within groups of proteins called protein complexes. How do these protein complexes form? Scientists have no credible explanation. DNA does not specify which proteins belong to particular protein complexes. When they attempt to explain how protein complexes form, scientists engage in vacuous hand-waving such as using the empty phrase "self-organization" or vague, empty phrases such as "signal cascading." Scientists have no explanation for the formation of the more complex protein complexes, which are so complex that scientists refer to them as "molecular machines." Examples of such machines (each requiring many types of proteins arranged in just the right way) include the proteasome and the spliceosome. The continued existence of each of us is very much dependent on the continuous formation of such protein complexes in the human body. But scientists have no credible explanation as how the more complex protein complexes appear. Here are some relevant quotes:
- "The majority of cellular proteins function as subunits in larger protein complexes. However, very little is known about how protein complexes form in vivo." Duncan and Mata, "Widespread Cotranslational Formation of Protein Complexes," 2011.
- "While the occurrence of multiprotein assemblies is ubiquitous, the understanding of pathways that dictate the formation of quaternary structure remains enigmatic." -- Two scientists (link).
- "A general theoretical framework to understand protein complex formation and usage is still lacking." -- Two scientists, 2019 (link).
Astonishingly, the different types of proteins that make up very complex protein complexes have their amino acid sequences stored not contiguously in DNA, but in very scattered parts of DNA scattered across many different chromosomes. I have given examples in the post here, showing how the proteins that make up the spliceosome, the RNA polymerase III protein complex and the 26s proteasome have their amino acid sequences stated in very diverse chromosomes in the human body, with the amino acid sequences of each of these protein complexes being scattered across more than 10 different chromosomes, rather than being stated contiguously in DNA. I will give similar examples in a future post. An analogy for the assembly of such protein complexes would be a landowner who has across his acres of land 26 big open boxes of letter cubes, an "A" box, a "B" box, a "C" box, and so forth. Imagine every day very many of the letter cubes mysteriously migrate from the boxes, and form on the ground very many purposeful useful sentences, with the effect continuing day after day, year after year. That gives you an idea of the kind of purposeful assembly going on with protein complexes.
(4) Our existence depends on the continued reproduction of cells in our body. While some types of cells in our bodies (such as neurons) do not reproduce, many types of cells in our bodies frequently reproduce; and the existence of each of us depends on a continual occurrence of cell reproduction. Every time a eukaryotic cell in our body reproduces, it is an event beyond the understanding of science. Cell reproduction does not occur by the reading of a DNA blueprint specifying a cell's very complex structure. The structure of no cell is specified in DNA, which merely specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. The cells in our body are fantastically complex things. The complexity of a cell has been compared to the complexity of a jet aircraft or a factory. So how are our cells able to reproduce? Our scientists cannot credibly explain it. A scientist can no more explain the reproduction of a cell than he could explain a modern automobile splitting into two to become two equally functional automobiles; and a typical cell in our body has a complexity and organization comparable to that of an automobile. Although they have classified various stages in cellular reproduction such as anaphase and prophase, our scientists cannot even credibly explain what causes the reproduction of any eukaryotic cell in the human body. (A search on the biology preprint server for papers with "kidney" in the title returns 250 matches, but searching for papers with "cell reproduction" in the title returns only one match.) Diagrams of the stages of cell reproduction make cell reproduction look a thousand times simpler than it is, since they depict cells with only a few organelles, even though eukaryotic cells have hundreds or thousands of organelles of quite a few different types. M. Pitkanen (who has a PhD in theoretical physics) has written the following about cell division:
The facts of biology strongly suggest the idea that there must exist some continuous biological agency working perpetually with enormous intelligence and unfathomable power to produce many of the known effects of biology such as vast levels of biological organization far beyond explanation by mechanistic chemistry. We can refer to such activity using the term "continuous biological agency" or by using the acronym GOAL, which stands for Global Organizing Activity of a Life-Force. The continuous dependency of humans on such an agency may be described as a continuous transcendent dependency.
We need to postulate such a GOAL force acting not just long ago but every day. One reason is that across the globe inside millions of pregnant women there is unfolding every day the mysterious process of morphogenesis, the progression from a speck-sized egg to a full-sized baby. Nothing understood by chemists or biologists can explain such miracles of organization occurring in bodies in which DNA does not specify any high-level structural information. Other reasons for postulating such a GOAL force include three other reasons listed above: (1) the continued occurrence in the human body of protein folding needed for our existence, (2) the continued formation of protein complexes of very high complexity (called molecular machines), and (3) the continued occurrence of cell reproduction needed for our existence. None of these things is credibly explained by "bottom up" chemical explanations or by DNA.
Because of such continuous dependencies, each of one of us has a continual dependence on some purposeful causal reality beyond himself, just as Preston in my story had a dependence on the monthly packages from his father. The science professors who try to sweep these dependencies under the rug and deny our dependence on something superhuman beyond ourselves are like the proud Preston of my story. And such professors often resort to reasoning as bad as some of the reasoning Preston used.
The utterly fallacious reasoning of Preston quoted above mirrors fallacious arguments by the apologists of materialism. You might think that a publication like Scientific American would never resort to reasoning as fallacious as the computer program argument of Preston that I quote above. But very similar reasoning appeared in an article in Scientific American in 2002, and many writers in that magazine keep linking to the article that used such bad reasoning. Read here for a discussion of that article and a refutation of its reasoning. And just as Preston made a fallacious argument that confused the likelihood of random chance producing results that did not look like intentional results with the likelihood of random chance producing results that did look like intentional results, science professors have often made equally fallacious arguments.
In my story Preston helped to prop up his silly idea that all of his packages were arising by "counterfeits of chance" by inventing and repeating the untrue claim that such "miracle of luck" events were often reported by others. Equally big lies have repeatedly come from the mouths of science professors. One of the biggest is the phony-baloney claim that DNA has a blueprint or recipe or program for how to construct a human body. DNA has no such thing. Read my post here for a discussion of some of the now-dead science professors who taught such a lie, along with many quotes by science and medical authorities telling us that such a claim is not true.
But, you may object, surely our science professors do not believe in miracles of luck as improbable as those imagined by proud Preston. To the contrary, such professors believe in miracles of luck almost infinitely more improbable. Address labels (including a name and address) have a total of about 40 characters; and if we count the number of uppercase letters and the ten possible digits, there are 36 possible values in each character position of an address label. The chance of a random computer output of 40 characters exactly matching a particular person's name and address is a probability of about 1 in 36 to the 40th power, which is probability of roughly 1 in 10 to the 62nd power. There is every reason to believe that the origin of an average new type of protein molecule by unintentional processes would require even greater luck than this. There are twenty possible amino acids used by proteins, and the average eukaryotic protein molecule has a length of more than 450 amino acids. Very generously assuming that only half of these amino acids have to exist for the protein molecule to have its function, we end up with a probability of a new type of functional protein molecule originating by unguided processes as something like 1 in 20 to the 225th power, which is about 1 in 10 to the 292nd power. The improbability of unguided processes producing a particular new type of functional protein molecule turns out to be very vastly greater than the improbability of 40 random letters and numbers exactly matching a particular person's name and address. While proud Preston believed (after 30 years of getting the monthly packages) in no more than about 360 of his "miracles of luck," the person believing in a Darwinian origin of protein molecules has to believe in vastly more miracles of luck: more than 20,000 such miracles of luck to get all the proteins in the human body, and countless millions of such miracles of luck to get all the proteins in all the animal kingdom.
But, you may object, surely our science professors can't have committed "mental gymnastics" as bad as proud Preston did. You may say, "Surely our science professors could not have made a claim as silly as Preston's claim that all of his monthly packages resulted from coincidental computer errors at Amazon's warehouse." But the truth is that very many science professors have spoken in ways every bit as silly as that. Such authorities have asked us to believe that all of the 20,000 types of proteins in our body resulted from miracles of luck. Believing in that requires much greater credulity than believing in some miracle of luck occurring once a month.
But what about the monthly letters from his father that proud Preston kept throwing away unread, while derisively saying, "Delusions, hallucinations, and fraud"? Is there a parallel to that in the behavior of academia's scientists? There surely is. Preston's behavior in throwing away the letters unread reminds me of how mainstream professors almost all refuse to seriously study the hundreds of years of written evidence for the paranormal. Such professors try to dismiss such evidence as delusions and hallucinations and fraud. But what about all the similarities in accounts of the paranormal? For example, those having out-of-body experiences so often report floating parallel to their bodies, about a meter or two above their bodies. And reports of near-death experiences have a remarkable degree of similarity. For example, a study of those in Iran having near-death experiences reports accounts remarkably similar to US accounts, despite all the cultural and religious differences in the two countries. Our "proud Preston" professors refuse to seriously study such matters, saying to themselves angrily things such as "It's all just delusions, fraud, hallucinations and coincidence!"
The proud Preston of my story believed in some fantastically unlikely coincidences, but at least he only imagined hugely improbable events occurring on a single planet, without "going cosmic" in his "sweep things under the rug" effort. But for the proud Prestons of academia, things are much worse. Nowadays they have the dilemma that physics and cosmology have discovered a universe of incredible fine-tuning. There are all sorts of "coincidences" suggesting our universe was purposefully created to allow the existence of beings such as us, such as every proton having an electric charge that is the very precise opposite of the electric charge of every electron (an exact matching that must occur to thirty or more decimal places for planets to hold together). Evoking some imaginary infinity or near-infinity of our universes they call the multiverse, our professors have responded by saying, "Why all that 'cosmic fine-tuning' just means that we must live in the luckiest universe in the multiverse!" Preston did some pretty bad mental gymnastics, but nothing as bad as this; for Preston's mental gymnastics weren't cosmic-sized. Engaging in such stochastic speculations, and ignoring a mountain of important testimony and many mountains of purposeful teleology within biology, our professors smugly declare themselves to be "intellectually fulfilled."
When we examine the topic of mind and memory, we find that mostly the explanations of our professors fail and flop. They try to explain all mental activity by evoking brain activity. A sufficiently diligent study of the brain and its many physical shortfalls leads to the conclusion that this idea cannot be correct. There is no way to credibly explain such basic mental phenomena as self-hood and consciousness and understanding and insight and abstract idea creation through any imaginable theory of the brain. Nor is there any way to explain the wonders of human memory phenomena by any known facts about the brain. We know from human construction of machines that can store and instantly retrieve data the type of things a device needs to have to be a device for permanently storing and instantly retrieving learned information in a reliable way: things such as systems for encoding learned information, addressing, very fast and reliable signal transmission, indexing, read/write heads and storage systems for permanently storing information. The human brain has no such things. And mind and memory can persist with little damage when there is massive brain damage (as discussed here and here). A sufficiently diligent study of the shortfalls of the brain and the wonders of human mental phenomena will lead to the idea that the human mind (including memory) must have some source that transcends the human body. Such an idea meshes very well with the idea that our bodies arise and persist because of some transcendent reality.
To read more about the philosophical justifications of some of the claims made here, read my posts here and here and here.
I may note that professors have some maneuvers to try and make some of the teleological effects described here look less impressive; but such maneuvers are typically futile. One maneuver is an appeal to what is called Anfinsen's Dogma, a claim that the 3D shape of a protein is entirely a function of its amino acid sequence. Such an appeal is futile because it is a "rob Peter to pay Paul" affair rather like "solving" your college tuition burden by charging your tuition on your credit card. If Anfinsen's Dogma were true, then genes would all-the-more-enormously have to be "just right" to allow for a properly folded 3D protein molecule; and in that case the gene origination problem becomes exponentially worsened. The person who appeals to Anfinsen's Dogma lessens the protein folding problem at the expense of exponentially worsening the gene origination problem (the problem of how 20,000+ suitable genes ended up in human DNA). There is no overall decrease in the reliance on the transcendent. It's similar to the situation in regard to the cosmologist's "primordial cosmic inflation" theory, which "robs Peter to pay Paul" by seeming to lessen the required fine-tuning of the universe's initial expansion rate at the Big Bang (something like 1 in ten to the fiftieth power) at the price of introducing a wildly speculative theoretical regime requiring fine-tuning all over the place, with no net reduction in fine-tuning requirements. The known massive reliance of protein folding on chaperone proteins is another reason why Anfinsen's Dogma is not credible.
Another maneuver made by professors to reduce some of the difficulties mentioned above is to offer some idea of intermediate assembly stages of fantastically complex molecular machines in the body, claiming this as a kind of "mechanistic explanation." But in general you do little to reduce the unlikelihood of accidentally unachievable assemblies by showing there were intermediate stages rather than everything instantly assembling all at once. For example, you would not credibly explain wind storms forming junkyard junk into cars if you claimed the windstorms first formed an engine and then formed a chassis, rather than all the parts assembling into a car all at once. After reading claims of step-by-step assemblies of protein complexes, we are still left with the question: with thousands of proteins floating around in the body, why do we seem to get mainly purposeful assemblies of such proteins (protein complexes needed for our existence) rather than the random assemblies of such molecules we would expect chance collisions to produce? The answer isn't DNA, which doesn't specify which proteins belong to particular protein complexes.
