One of the hidden problems with the Darwinian zealots is that although they deny teleology saying that everything can be explained mechanistically, they still surreptitiously use teleological language to talk about biological processes.  They pretend to derive Judeo-Christian values from evolution.  The result is that Julian Huxley propounds the paradox that nature, though devoid of aim and purpose, yet moves towards ever higher levels of order and value. In the more radical Darwinists, they credit a faculty such as aspiration, intentionality and consciousness to genes. But there is a weakness, a glaring one, in this.

Genes make sense only in a known context, but in reality, to know in sufficient detail a context to provide the sought-after predictability, is an impossible goal. It is misleading to speak of genes causing specific conditions such as schizophrenia or aggression.  It is this type of simplistic thinking that has been popularized by writers such as Dawkins but it hold no merit.  The situation is much more complicated than to ascribe to a specific gene certain properties conferred onto the body.

And to claim, as Dawkins does that it is genes that are running the whole show is totally contrary to the way things really are.  For Dawkins and other ultra-‘Darwinists’ genes have acquired properties that in the past we have attributed to thinking persons with goals and strategies. The fact that Dawkins is taken seriously, shows the sorry state in which materialists find themselves.

As I have stated before, DNA on its own is biologically inert, if not useless. It needs to be placed into the context of the living cell in order to function and carry out its biochemical impact.  Genes are important but there are mechanisms which switch genes on and off and these often play a more important role than the mere presence of a given gene.

Genes may supply a switchboard for life, but the complexity of life will depend on something else.  How genes may be recruited to make different products, how the developmental networks change and evolve, and how apparently trivial events such as gene duplication and the presence of protein isoforms (these are forms of similar proteins with very slight differences) open immense new territories for biological exploration. Life may be impossible without genes, but to ascribe to them powers of intentionality misses the mark.

This is something often overlooked by materialist using the theory of evolution to buttress their position, but the moral component, especially for humans, plays a very important role.

To the very end, Darwin failed to appreciate the morally ambiguous character of human progress.  The reason for this was that he had no adequate conception of Man.  Darwin had lost his moorings when it came to value humans and he came to see Man as merely a biological component of the changes that occur in the biosphere. He failed to realize that humans have mental states that transcend, as far as we know, any other sentience on Earth.  Science becomes pointless and even destructive unless it takes on significance and direction from a religious affirmation concerning the meaning and value of human existence.

Michael Polanyi (father of John Polanyi, Canada’s second Nobel Prize winner in chemistry.  The first was Herzberg.), a physical chemist at Manchester University, writes:

The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the frescoes of Michaelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origin of the universe than the representation of the world as a chance collocation of atoms.  For the biblical cosmology continues to express – however inadequately – the significance of the fact that the world exists and that man has emerged from it, while the scientific picture denies any meaning to the world, and indeed ignores all our most vital experience of this world. The assumption that the world has some meaning which is linked to our own calling as the only morally responsible beings in the world, is an important example of the supernatural aspect of experience which Christian interpretations of the universe explore and develop.

To the third point that evolution explains the origin of things such as life – the answer is very clear:  this is simply not true.

The study of the origin of life is set in a paradox because the underlying principles could not be more straightforward. This is because the first chemical steps that led to the process of self-replication and controlled cycles of chemical reactions (otherwise known as metabolism) must have been simple or they would not have survived. Knowing these foundations it surely cannot be difficult to add storey to storey, ultimately to remove the scaffolding, and so reveal the functioning cell, a near-miracle of encapsulated design but arising by unremarkable random processes.

A starting complicating factor in all of this is that we do not know with any precision what the initial conditions were on earth – how salty were the seas, how much methane was there, what was the carbon dioxide/oxygen ratio, what was the pH of the oceans and so on and so on. In spite of the lack of exact information – the general consensus is that far from being a fluke, the emergence of life is more or less a foregone conclusion, an inevitability inherent in the self-organizational properties of bio-organic chemistry.  So, what evidence do we have?

There have been various proposals made by Alexander Oparin, J.B.S. Haldane, and Stanley Miller, to name a few of the exceptional investigators.  But all searches in these proposals have ended up in failure. It has become abundantly clear that the power of self-organization inherent in macromolecules synthesized in cells is based on extremely subtle physical, and chemical, and particularly stereochemical properties which have never been observed in such a highly organized form in prebiotic molecules.

Just as a note of explanation, what is meant by stereochemical is the three dimensional structure of molecules which confers on them a handedness.  Structural isomers are molecules which have the same chemical elements but they are arranged in different sequences of chemical bonds. Thus, both glucose and maltose have the formula C₆H₁₂O₆, but the way the carbon and hydrogen and oxygen atoms are arranged is different. (Just as an aside, notice the ratio of hydrogen to oxygen atoms in the two sugars: it is two to one and where do we find this ratio?  H₂O, the water molecule.  Carbon and water becomes  carbohydrate.  Pardon me, but I just could not resist this.)

 Stereoisomers have the same elements and the same bonding sequences but differ in the way the atoms are arranged in space. They are related as object and non-superimposable (you cannot place the structure and the mirror image over each other in a totally congruent manner) mirror image.

At a first glance it would not seem to be important but in the biological world it can have extremely serious effects.  A case in point is thalidomide, a tranquilizer given to women who were pregnant and were suffering from morning sickness. The drug given had both forms – called a racemic mixture – of the drug for the simple reason that it is difficult and costly to separate stereoisomers.  One form was and still is an excellent tranquilizer.  But the other form – its mirror image –  prevents the formation of blood vessels and this had a disastrous effect in pregnant women as their children were born without limbs and other defects.  To synthesize molecules with a specific handedness is difficult and it is another roadblock in a chemical description of the origin of life.

In light of many insuperable difficulties, the field of the study of the origins of life seems to have come to a stalemate.  There does not seem to be a good experimental proposal which would resolve the intractable issues in the studies on origin of life.  There is a faith that somehow the problem will be resolved because we do have living organisms and they must have arisen in some natural manner.  We simply have to find the correct pathway.

George Wald, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine wrote: One has only to contemplate the magnitude of the task of making life to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible.  Yet, here we are – as a result, I believe, in spontaneous generation. In other words, we don’t really have an explanation but because of our philosophical bias we will go with something that cannot  happen.

It is sometimes forgotten that in its original context the above – as many other speculations on the origin of life – was stated with a very strong assumption that such a process of spontaneous generation could be possible only if there were enough eons of time.  This has been the fall-back position of materialists.  Given enough time anything is possible.  However, we now know that there is insufficient time for spontaneous generation to occur – our amount of time is limited, it is not infinite.

I have said enough in this letter, but the matter is not closed.  We will continue in the next one.

Sincerely,

Bar-Abbas