To all of the materialist OOL researchers who continue to blither about how we are tantalizingly close to discovering how blind unguided natural forces produced the staggeringly complex nano-technology in even the simplest cell, we challenge you to a 100 yard dash.
And there is good news. We will spot you 99 yards and 35 inches.
Here’s how. Take the simplest living cell you can find. Put it in purified water free from any contaminants. At this point you will have every chemical you need for the existence of simple life. You will have all of those chemicals already arranged so that life can exist. You need absolutely nothing else. It is an absolutely perfect chemical cocktail for the existence of life.
Now, poke a hole in the cell membrane. You now have non-living chemicals. But as we just described, you have everything you need for life to exist. In our metaphorical 100 yard dash, you are 99 yards and 35 inches to the finish line.
Now, cross the line. We’ll wait. But we won’t be holding our breath.
HT: Granville
Shouldn’t it be 99 yards and 35 inches?
UD Editors: Indeed. Thanks for the correction Theo.
Barry Arrington, it seems always to be that last inch that kills these schemes. Of course, you have noticed that.
But many people are fooled. We hear verbiage like “we are on the verge of” [computers that think like people… a correct theory of the origin of life that we can replicate … contacting extraterrestrials… explaining human consciousness… ]
And not a single one navigates that last inch.
It doesn’t work quite like that. Reducing a building to its constituent bricks, wood, concrete, etc doesn’t mean it could be rebuilt without all the brick-makers, cranes, cement-mixers, scaffolding and other equipment that were required for its original construction.
It’s the same old strawman which pretends materialists are claiming that something like a complex modern cell could have sprung into existence from inanimate precursors in one fell swoop. That’s not the materialist claim. If it happened it was through a lot of small incremental steps.
Of course, if you or Granville or any other ID proponent could explain exactly how your Designer/God did it or at least ask Him to explain how He did it then you would have a way stronger case.. Take all the time you want. We’re in no hurry.
@seversky @3.
“If it happened it was through a lot of small incremental steps.”
Don’t need to hear all the small steps.
What was the FIRST one?
Why Physics Can’t Tell Us What Life Is
The origin of life can’t be explained by first principles.
There is just something obviously reasonable about the following notion: If all life is built from atoms that obey precise equations we know—which seems to be true—then the existence of life might just be some downstream consequence of these laws that we haven’t yet gotten around to calculating.
By Jeremy England
senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, and the former Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot career development associate professor of physics at MIT
http://nautil.us/
Science discovers spirit!
Seversky: Of course, if you or Granville or any other ID proponent could explain exactly how your Designer/God did it or at least ask Him to explain how He did it then you would have a way stronger case.. Take all the time you want. We’re in no hurry.
Oh dear, oh dear, or dear! Clearly you don’t understand that ID is not about explaining the actual mechanism or procedure that brought about life as we know it. Oh no. It’s about having a greater, larger, less definable explanation for life the universe and everything.
You are setting your standards way too low. You really need to shoot for the stars, figure out how to define your winning target based on your predetermined criteria and then claim to have hit that target. It’s really simple actually. And that makes it a better solution. It covers everything.
You just don’t get it.
Sev,
“It doesn’t work quite like that.”
Of course it does not work like that. It does not work when you are spotted 99 yards and 35 inches. And it does not work when you have to go the whole 100 yards either. That you should think that it is more likely to go the whole 100 yards than the last inch says a lot about your unshakable faith commitments, faith commitments that would make a medieval fideist monk blush.
JVL @ 6:
Your sarcasm would have a lot more force if you could demonstrate the “mechanism” by which you, as an intelligent designer, brought about your comment at 6.
We are much closer to creating life than you think!
Warning: Not for the faint-of-heart.
I’m serious – Don’t Click!
https://tinyurl.com/y5qx9umc
.
Seversky, the mechanism required to organize the origin of life is well known. The physical conditions of that mechanism are well-documented in the literature, and have been explained to you on multiple occasions. It is a matter of historical record that the mechanism was first predicted to exist through logical analysis, and subsequently confirmed through experimental result. The critical observations are not even controversial.
When confronted with these facts, you respond with a clear intent to avoid the conversation and protect your worldview from science and reason. You accomplish this protectionist sleight-of-hand through the application of flawed reasoning, which you then refuse to address.
.
JVL, the mechanism required to organize the origin of life is well known. The physical conditions of that mechanism are well-documented in the literature, and have been explained to you on multiple occasions. It is a matter of historical record that the mechanism was first predicted to exist through logical analysis, and subsequently confirmed through experimental result. The critical observations are not even controversial.
When confronted with these facts, you respond with a clear intent to avoid the conversation and protect your worldview from science and reason. You accomplish this protectionist sleight-of-hand through the application of flawed reasoning, which you then refuse to address.
Bob O’H asked this a couple years ago as have several different people in the past. Here is an answer I provided him two years ago which was based on a comment I made 11 1/2 years ago. Inane comments mocking ID have been around for a long time. Nothing new under the sun.
https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/new-book-from-michael-behe-on-how-todays-dna-findings-devolve-darwin/#comment-661275
Mark, in my comment from 10 years ago was an anti-ID person who roamed this site for years and in all his time here could not provide anything of consequence to undermine it. Here is the link to this comment I made 11 1/2 years ago.
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/complex-specified-information-you-be-the-judge/#comment-305339
seversky:
You have nothing. You can’t even get to biologically relevant molecular replicators. And given those you run smack into Spiegelman’s Monster.
We already have much more to support our claims than you and yours ever will.
Materialists are so clueless. All they have are lies, bluffs and a seemingly infinite supply of promissory notes.
JVL:
You guys win that, hands down.
ID’s explanation is the same as archaeologists’ explanation for artifacts. It is the same as a fire investigator determining arson or forensic scientists determining a crime exists.
So I don’t understand JVL’s infantile response, especially given that they have all of the power to refute ID, just by demonstrating the efficacy of the claims of their own position!
@Seversky ” If it happened it was through a lot of small incremental steps.”
OK, tell us how incremental steps could happen and/or be selected for before life even existed. There had to be a certain amount of genes, software, machines, etc. in order for life to get started. Even if evolution could explain the growth from the first simple cell to the complex cell of today, still life had to exist before evolution could take over.
What did the first “simple” cell look like? Is it really logical to think that it came into existence by pure chance? Like I said, we all have faith/beliefs in something.
How do you know that a so called “simple” cell ever even existed? Simple when compared to today’s cell which has mind boggling complexity, but is it really “simple”? I highly doubt it.
If you don’t even know what the first “simple” cell looked like, then how do you know it could have come into existence by chance? It’s simply what your worldview demands you to believe, so you believe it, but where’s the evidence?
The old “simple cell” line is the traditional go to Materialist claim, but there is no evidence for such a cell nor is there any understanding of how it could have
As Harold Morowitz (Yale) calculated, “if one were to take the simplest living cell and break every chemical bond within it, the odds that the cell would reassemble under ideal natural conditions (the best possible chemical environment) would be one chance in 10^100,000,000,000.”
If Mr Arrington and Dr. Morowitz, in their thought experiment, spotted Darwinists 99 yards and 35 inches and dared them to go that final inch, then Dr. James Tour, (who is one of the leading synthetic chemists in the world), spotted Darwinists 99 yards 35 and 31/32nd inches and dared them to go that final 1/32nd of an inch in the following thought experiment
In the following recent video, Dr. James Tour went even further than the preceding thought experiment and gave Darwinists everything except the last billionth of an inch.,,,
In the following thought experiment, Dr. Tour puts the irresolvable dilemma for Darwinists like this,,,
In trying to answer Dr. Tour’s question, I point out that Stephen Talbott holds, (and I agree with him 100%), that the ingredient that goes missing when a organism dies is (immaterial) information,
Paul Davies himself also holds that it must be ‘non-physical’ information that allows life to ‘resist the ravages of entropy’.
In fact, it has been known for several decades that there might be a fundamental connection between entropy and (immaterial) information
In fact, the information content that is found to be in a simple one cell bacterium, when working from the thermodynamic perspective, is found to be around 10 to the 12 bits,,,
,,, Which is the equivalent of about 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. ‘In comparison,,, the largest libraries in the world,, have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.”
Thus since Bacterial cells are about 10 times smaller than most plant and animal cells.
And since there are conservatively estimated to be around 30 trillion cells within the average human body,
Then that gives us a rough ballpark estimate of around 300 trillion times 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Or about 300 trillion times the information content contained within all the books contained in all the largest libraries in the world.
Needless to say, that is a massive amount of immaterial information that is present within our physical bodies.
As the following article states, the information to build a human infant, atom by atom, would take up the equivalent of enough thumb drives to fill the Titanic, multiplied by 2,000.
As should be obvious, it is impossible for the sequential information on DNA to account for this massive amount of ‘positional information’ that is building ‘a human infant, atom by atom’.
As Doug Axe states in the following video, “there are a quadrillion neural connections in the human brain, that’s vastly more neural connections in the human brain than there are bits (of information) in the human genome. So,,, there’s got to be something else going on that makes us what we are.”
And at about the 41:00 minute mark of the following video, Dr. Jonathan Wells, (who specializes in embryology), using a branch of mathematics called category theory, demonstrates that, during embryological development, ‘positional information’ must somehow be coming into the developing embryo, ‘from the outside’, by some ‘non-material’ method, in order to explain the transdifferentiation of cells into their multiple different states during embryological development.
As well, the preceding finding that information must be coming into a developing embryo for the ‘outside’, fits, hand in glove, with William Dembski’s and Robert Marks’ previous work in ‘conservation of information’
Moreover, in regards to this vast amount of ‘immaterial positional information’ that must somehow be accounted for in multicellular organisms, (immaterial information that cannot possibly be accounted for by materialistic processes), in the following 2010 experimental realization of Maxwell’s demon thought experiment, it was demonstrated that knowledge of a particle’s location and/or position converts information into energy.
And as the following 2010 article stated about the preceding experiment, “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,”
Moreover, classical information is shown to be a subset of quantum, (i.e. positional), information by the following method.
In the following 2011 paper, “researchers ,,, show that when the bits (in a computer) to be deleted are quantum-mechanically entangled with the state of an observer, then the observer could even withdraw heat from the system while deleting the bits. Entanglement links the observer’s state to that of the computer in such a way that they know more about the memory than is possible in classical physics.,,, In measuring entropy, one should bear in mind that (in quantum information theory) an object does not have a certain amount of entropy per se, instead an object’s entropy is always dependent on the observer.”
As well, and as the following 2017 article states: James Clerk Maxwell (said), “The idea of dissipation of energy depends on the extent of our knowledge.”,,,
quantum information theory,,, describes the spread of information through quantum systems.,,,
Fifteen years ago, “we thought of entropy as a property of a thermodynamic system,” he said. “Now in (quantum) information theory, we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”,,,
Again to repeat that last sentence, “we wouldn’t say entropy is a property of a system, but a property of an observer who describes a system.”
Think about that statement for a second.
These experiments go to the heart of the Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design debate and completely blow the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, (presuppositions about immaterial information being merely ’emergent’ from some material basis), out of the water.
In other words, directly contrary to Darwinian presuppositions, immaterial information, particularly ‘positional quantum information’, is now experimentally shown to be its own distinct physical entity that is a product of an ‘observer who describes the system’. And although it can interact with matter and energy, (interact in a ‘top-down’ manner; see George Ellis ‘Recognizing Top Down Causation’), it is still shown to be its own independent entity that is separate from matter and energy and that has a quote unquote ‘thermodynamic content’ that can be physically measured.
In other words, Intelligent Design, and a semi-direct inference to Intelligence that is necessary in order to explain why life is so far out of thermodynamic equilibrium, has, for all intents and purposes, achieved experimental confirmation via these recent experimental realizations of the Maxwell demon thought experiment.
To further establish that the Intelligent Designer who created, and sustains, life must be God, it is first necessary to point out that “quantum information” is now also found to be ubiquitous within life:
What is interesting about finding quantum information to be ubiquitous within life is that quantum correlations are a ‘non-local’, i.e. beyond space and time, affair that requires a beyond space and time cause in order to explain its effect.
As the following paper entitled “Looking beyond space and time to cope with quantum theory” stated, “Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them,”
As well, it is also important to realize that quantum information is conserved. As the following article states, In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
The implication of finding ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, and ‘conserved’, quantum information in molecular biology on such a massive scale, in every important biomolecule in our bodies, is fairly, and pleasantly, obvious.
That pleasant implication, of course, being the fact that we now have very strong empirical evidence suggesting that we do indeed have an eternal soul that is capable of living beyond the death of our material bodies. As Stuart Hameroff states in the following article, the quantum information,,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verse:
It is also very interesting to note how all of the preceding evidence fits, hand and glove, with John 1:1-4 in the New Testament:
That John 1:1-4 should fit, hand and glove, with what was only recently discovered via our most advance science, (i.e. via our advances in quantum information theory and quantum biology), is nothing short of astonishing.
In a world where Christianity would be given a fair hearing among most scientists, (instead of being unfairly dismissed out of hand as supposedly being ‘unscientific’), this ‘prediction’ of John 1:1-4 about the foundational ‘information’ nature of life should count as a rather dramatic ‘scientific’ confirmation for the truth of Christianity.
Namely that only Jesus, as demonstrated by His resurrection from the dead by God the Father, truly has life, and more particularly, the gift of ‘eternal life’ contained within Himself.