Questions For Camille Paglia

I'm a fan of Camille Paglia.  I think that she's an honest and original thinker who is also a gifted communicator.  As such, I take interest in her recent comments at Salon - especially as they pertain to theology.   

Ms. Paglia is an atheist, but of the thoughtful and respectful variety.  She has no trouble identifying the positive contributions that religion has made to society.  As she says:

"I respect every religion deeply. All the great world religions contain a complex system of beliefs regarding the nature of the universe and human life that is far more profound than anything that liberalism has produced. We have a whole generation of young people who are clinging to politics and to politicized visions of sexuality for their belief system.  They see nothing but politics, but politics is tiny.  Politics applies only to society. There is a huge metaphysical realm out there that involves the eternal principles of life and death."

She also has scant respect for atheists who never really did their homework.  She was asked "what do you make of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the religion critics who seem not to have respect for religions for faith?"

She answered:

"I regard them as adolescents. I say in the introduction to my last book, “Glittering Images”, that “Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination.”  It exposes a state of perpetual adolescence that has something to do with their parents– they’re still sneering at dad in some way. Richard Dawkins was the only high-profile atheist out there when I began publicly saying “I am an atheist,” on my book tours in the early 1990s. I started the fad for it in the U.S, because all of a sudden people, including leftist journalists, started coming out of the closet to publicly claim their atheist identities, which they weren’t bold enough to do before. But the point is that I felt it was perfectly legitimate for me to do that because of my great respect for religion in general–from the iconography to the sacred architecture and so forth. I was arguing that religion should be put at the center of any kind of multicultural curriculum."

Fair enough.  But it seems to me that there are questions that atheists should struggle with - ones that I would think would challenge much of the fascinating world-view that Ms. Paglia has developed. If I could, I would ask her:

1. As an atheist, you most likely don't believe in free will.  Do you believe that people should be held accountable for their "wrong-doings?"  If so, why?  Clearly, they have no choice to act in any other manner.
2. Do you believe in concepts like justice and morality which have no scientific or material basis?  What do you view as the source of these concepts? 
3. What is the origin of matter, life and consciousness?  Would our lack of explanatory ability in these matters cause you to suspend your judgement as to weather or not a creative intelligence could have brought them about?  If not, are you accepting your atheism on the basis of faith? 
4. If you believe that life (and as an extension, thought) are the results of blind and impersonal forces, how do you know that your mental faculties are reliable?  Do you have confidence that what your brain tells you (whoever "you" actually is) is coherent?  How do you know?
5. Are any ideas superior to any others?  Given that, materially speaking, ideas are nothing more than haphazard firing of neurons, and that neurons have no actual worth or meaning, how could an idea be said to have any actual value?  As such, should we refrain from all critique of ideas that we subjectively find displeasing? 

That should do for now.  Camille, if you happen to come across this, let's talk!  I would truly be interested to hear what you have to say.

The Origin of Life Problem - Still Not Solved

A reader was kind enough to send me this article from ScienceMag.org entitled "Researchers May Have Solved The Origin-Of-Life Conundrum."  While this is certainly an interesting approach, the title is a tad misleading.  What it boils down to is something akin to oncologists declaring that the most recent theoretical anti-cancer treatment "may have cured cancer" (except that that one could actually be tested).  In their own words "could life have kindled in that common pool?  That detail is almost certainly forever lost to history."  And "this general scenario raises many questions and I am sure that it will be debated for some time to come."

So, yes, while they may indeed have solved the conundrum, our knowledge of it (and theirs) will remain hidden for some time.  As of now, the issue remains perplexing as ever and should once again serve to highlight the formidable obstacle that abiogenesis (how animate life arose from the inanimate) still poses for origin of life researchers.  With that in mind I'd like to re-post something that I wrote for the Huffington Post a few years back called "A Reasonable Argument For God's Existence" - I don't think that much has changed since then.

Friends,

In our recent dialogue I have noticed a consistent theme. It was frequently remarked that religious lines of argumentation lack reason. The contention seems to be that most, if not all, religious systems rely solely on wholly unsubstantiated faith to support their beliefs.

Is this contention in fact true? From a theistic perspective the reality seems quite inverted in that it would appear to require an unreasonable commitment to naturalism to maintain a denial of the transcendent.

Rabbi Moshe Averick has done yeoman's work in deconstructing the arguments in favor of naturalistic explanations to the origin of life and has concurrently demonstrated the high degree of intellectual vigor of theistic reasoning. This post is a paraphrase of his analysis of the origin of life problem that confronts the naturalist camp within the scientific community. A full treatment is available in his indispensable book Nonsense of a High Order.

One might suppose that in the six or so decades since the discovery of the DNA molecule by Watson and Crick during which researchers have been investigating the origin of life they might have come up with some pretty solid leads to explain it. The truth of the matter is that we see scientists coming up surprisingly empty-handed and that even within scientific circles, the few hypotheses they do have are shredded to ribbons by their colleagues within the scientific community.

So how is a non-religious scientist expected to contend with this dearth of hard evidence? Some seem to have recognized the dead ends within the maze and the subsequent outgrowth of a scientific version of a "faith" in light of the problem:

"One must conclude that ... a scenario describing the genesis of life on Earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written." (Dr. H.P. Yockey, physicist, information theorist and contributor to the Manhattan Project)

"The theory behind theory is that you come up with truly testable ideas. Otherwise it's no different from faith. It might as well be a religion if there's no evidence for it." (Dr. J. Craig Venter, Biologist and one of the first people to sequence the human genome)

And there's the rub: There just is no evidence for it. Not one of them has the foggiest notion about how to answer life's most fundamental question: How did life arise on our planet? The non-believer is thus faced with two choices: to accept as an article of faith that science will eventually arrive at a reasonable, naturalistic conclusion to this intellectual black box or to choose to believe in the vanishingly small odds that the astonishing complexity, intelligence and mystery of life came about as a result of chance, which of course presents its own problems:

"Suppose you took scrabble sets, or any word game sets, blocks with letters containing every language on Earth and you heap them together, and then you took a scoop and you scooped into that heap, and you flung it out on the lawn there and the letters fell into a line which contained the words, 'to be or not to be that is the question,' that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule appearing on the Earth." (Dr. Robert Shapiro, Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University)

Ask yourself, do you believe in the RNA molecule? Do you accept Dr. Shapiro's scrabble analogy as an actual possibility? Most people intuitively recognize that it's not a reasonable position to hold. Everybody knows that too many good hands at the blackjack table will get you kicked out of Vegas and that arguing to casino security that your three hours of consecutive 21s are theoretically possible will not be accepted as a valid defense. Nonetheless, these odds are what many are suggesting we accept. The resulting cognitive dissonance seems to have a negative effect on some of those making the argument:

"It is this combative atmosphere which sometimes encourages scientists writing and speaking about the origin of life to become as dogmatic and bigoted as the creationist opponents they so despise." (Dr. Andrew Scott, Chemist and science writer)

This inescapable conundrum is what has driven otherwise brilliant minds to concoct such exotic (and evidence-averse) theories as directed panspermia -- the notion that life was seeded on Earth by space aliens -- posited by Nobel Prize winning biologist Francis Crick and at times seconded by Richard Dawkins. The (unfalsifiable) multiverse theory is another example. At times these researchers, despite themselves, seem to grasp the sheer unlikelihood of the whole enterprise and start groping for the most unscientific of words to explain themselves:

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle." (Francis Crick)

Amazingly, even Richard Dawkins has written that, "I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859." Why? Because in 1859 Darwin published his Origin of Species. But so what? This entire discussion is taking place outside of an evolutionary context. Evolution can only begin once we already have a dazzlingly complex, self-replicating, living cell with which to work. That -- the origin of that first cell, not what happened thereafter -- is the fundamental basis of disagreement between theist and atheist. I make that statement with a full awareness of the fact that scientists hypothesize the prior existence of "simple" self replicating molecules that led up to the emergence of the DNA based bacterium; but this just pushes the question back a step. There is no conclusive evidence that such molecules ever did, or could, spontaneously self-assemble on the prebiotic earth. Again, even Dawkins candidly admits regarding this notion that, "I don't know how [it started], nor does anyone else."

I posit to you that all the evidence points, in an obvious and inextricable way, to a supernatural explanation for the origin of life. If there are no known naturalistic explanations and the likelihood that "chance" played any role is wildly minute, then it is a perfectly reasonable position to take that a conscious super-intelligence (that some of us call God) was the architect of life on this planet. Everyone agrees to the appearance of design. It is illogical to assume its non-design in the absence of evidence to the contrary.

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to understanding the real struggle between Science and the Supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism ... for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door." (Richard Lewontin, Geneticist)

Strange But True: Atheist/Materialists are Anti-Science

Important Introductory Note for the Reader: The purpose of this article is not to present a case for Intelligent Design nor to argue that the Origin of Life enigma is definitive evidence for the existence of a Creator of life. The purpose is to document that most atheist/materialists have a definitively anti-scientific attitude when confronted with the challenge of explaining how life could have emerged from non-life through an unguided naturalistic process.

Point #1: It is an indisputable fact that scientists haven’t the slightest idea how the yawning chasm between non-life and life could have been crossed through an unguided process:

“The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science…Origin of Life research has evolved into a lively, interdisciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the “dirty” rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure – we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life…these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle.” - The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution, Dr. Eugene Koonin (Upper Saddle River, NJ, FT Press, 2011, pg. 391)

Origin of Life expert Dr. Paul Davies from Arizona State University put it this way in a 2010 lecture on the subject: “How? [did life begin] We haven’t a clue.”

Point #2: Not only is the Origin of Life field a failure but in the last 70 years it has actually moved backwards by many orders of magnitude. Nobel Prize winning chemist, Dr. Ernst Chain, wrote the following in 1945:

“I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago.” Dr. Ernst Chain, Nobel Prize – Medicine, 1945 (The Life of Ernst Chain: Penicillin and Beyond, (R.W. Clark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London (1985), pg. 148)

Fast forward to 2012: The Origin of Life Gordon Research Conference: “The origin of life on Earth, and its possible existence elsewhere in the universe, offer some of science’s greatest unsolved problems” (from the website: Gordon Research Conferences – Origin of Life Conference, January 2012, Galveston, Texas) http://www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2014&program=origins

….and in 2013: The Origin of Life Gordon Research Conference: “Originating Life in the Lab, 7:30-9:30 pm - Ok. Maybe we cannot solve the historical question: How did life actually arise on Earth. Can we originate some of our own life by “intelligent design?”… (Description of a session to be held at the Gordon Research Conferences – Origins of Life Conference, January 2014, Galveston, Texas) http://www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2014&program=origins

In 1945 scientists were clueless about the Origin of Life and in 2014 they remain clueless. However, over the past 70 years with the incredible breakthroughs and advances in microbiology and genetics, their understanding of the magnitude of the problem that needs to be solved has grown exponentially. The following were written in 1988 and 1989 respectively:

 “More than 30 years of experimentation on the origin of life in the fields of chemical and molecular evolution have led to a better perception of the immensity of the problem of the origin of life on Earth rather than to its solution. At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.” – Dr. Klaus Dose

“In one sense the origin of life remains what it was in the time of Darwin – one of the great unsolved riddles of science. Yet we have made progress…many of the early naïve assumptions have fallen or have fallen aside…while we do not have a solution, we now have an inkling of the magnitude of the problem.” (Carl Woese, Microbiologist and Gunter Wachtershauser, Chemist - “Origin of Life” in Paleobiology: A Synthesis, Edited by Briggs and Crowther, Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1989)

…and in 2010: Dr. Milton Wainwright: “So much has been written about the Origin of Life that it might seem that little else needs to be said. Despite the lack of conclusive or convincing evidence it is generally accepted that life originated on Earth from simple chemicals…Are we getting any closer to an understanding of the origin of life?...The reality is that, despite the egos of some, the existence of life remains a mystery. It is not merely that biology is scratching the surface of this enigma; the reality is that we have yet to see the surface!”

Point #3: In light of all of the above, any rational truth-seeking individual must at least acknowledge that the notion of a Creator of life is a reasonable possibility that warrants serious discussion. 

Nobel Prize winning biochemist, Dr. Christian DeDuve wrote the following in 2009:

“[We have no naturalistic explanation for] the origin of life, which is unknown so far. It thus remains permissible…that life was flipped into being by a Creator…As long as the origin of life can’t be explained in natural terms, the hypothesis of an instant divine creation of life cannot objectively be ruled out.”(The Genetics of Original Sin, DeDuve)

Nobel Prize winning biologist Dr. Werner Arber: “Although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about…I consider that life only starts at the level of a functional cell. The most primitive cells may require at least several hundred different specific biological macro-molecules. How such already quite complex structures may have come together remains a mystery to me. The possibility of the existence of a Creator, or God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.” (From Cosmos, Bios, Theos: Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo Sapiens – Part 2, Chapter 2)

In other words, any objective-minded person, to borrow Dr. DeDuve’s phrase, must consider the possibility of a divine creation of life. Yet other than a few notable exceptions, non-believers, in a decidedly anti-scientific manner, reject the possibility of, and consideration of, the existence of a Creator:

Dr. George Wald, Nobel Prize winning Biologist: “There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of God. There is no third possibility…a supernatural creative act of God; I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to evolution.” (Scientific American, 1954)

Dr. Harold Urey (mentor of Dr. Stanley Miller), Nobel Prize winning chemist: “All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We all believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did.”  (Christian Science Monitor, 1/4/62)

Dr. George Whitesides, Chemist, Harvard University: “Most chemists believe as I do, that life emerged spontaneously from mixtures of molecules in the prebiotic Earth. How? I have no idea.” (from his speech upon the receiving the Priestley Medal for Chemistry, 2007)

Dr. Alexandre Meinesz: “In sum, all of these vestiges of very ancient life provide no precise clues to the place, time, and mechanism of the genesis of the first living organisms. Therefore the currently popular idea that life probably arose in warm, subsurface waters along a mid-ocean ridge…is a hypothesis without any scientific basis…no transition process between inorganic matter and bacteria has been found in nature…it is a fact that at the beginning of the third millennia, we cannot yet describe and illustrate the processes and the stages in the genesis of bacteria. The exact time and place of the spontaneous generation of the first bacteria remain unknown…we must humbly recognize that…the birth of life on Earth is only an unsupported hypothesis; all research trying to confirm it is at an impasse. It is just an idea…that has been taught. This idea has become a dogma.” (How Life Began, Alexandre Meinesz, University of Chicago Press, 2008. p. 30-33)

Dr. Euan Nisbet: “Life is improbable, and it may be unique to this planet, but nevertheless it did begin, and it is thus our task to discover how the miracle happened.” (Professor of Geology, University of London)

Dr. Robert Hazen, Mineralogist: “How did life arise...? Barring divine intervention, life must have emerged by a natural process – one fully consistent with the laws of chemistry and physics…Scientists believe in a universe ordered by natural laws; they resort to the power of observations, experiments, and theoretical reasoning to discover those laws…Scientists surmise that life arose on the blasted, primitive Earth from the most basic of raw materials: air, water, rock. Life emerged nearly 4 billion years ago by natural processes completely in accord with the laws of chemistry and physics…” (Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin, Robert Hazen)

Dictionary.com: Surmise: “To think or infer without certain or strong evidence; conjecture, guess” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/surmise?s=t)

Dr. Jerry Coyne, Evolutionary Biologist: “Nope, we don’t yet understand how life originated on Earth…I’m pretty confident that within, say, 50 years we’ll be able to create life in a laboratory under the conditions of primitive Earth,” (from his blog “Why Evolution is True”)

Dr. Iris Fry, (non-believing) Philosopher of Science, Tel-Aviv University: “This paper calls attention to a philosophical presupposition coined here “the continuity thesis”…this presupposition, a necessary condition for any scientific investigation of the origin of life problem has two components. First, it contends that there is no unbridgeable gap between inorganic matter and life. Second, it regards the emergence of life as a highly probable process… The various principles of continuity might indeed push forward the experimental investigation of the emergence of life; as such they do represent the heuristic [educational] advantage of the continuity thesis. However, the decision to adopt the continuity thesis is a philosophical one…and this decision does not depend on the success of a specific experimental program, nor can it be revoked on the basis of its failure.” – In other words, it is a non-falsifiable postulate accepted without any evidence for its truth.

…Dr. Fry continues: “In addition I identify the rivals of the [continuity] thesis within the scientific community – “the almost miracle camp.”…This camp [includes Nobel Laureates Jacque Monod and Francis Crick, famed biologist Ernst Mayer, and philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper] regards the emergence of life as involving highly improbable events…The basic philosophical assumption underlying the “almost miracle” notion becomes apparent, once we learn that for Crick, the emergence of life was “a happy accident.” (“Are the different hypotheses for the emergence of life as different as they seem?” – Dr. Iris Fry, Biology and Philosophy, October, 1995)

Dr. Jacque Monod, Nobel Prize winning biochemist on how life could have possibly come from non-life: “Our number came up in the Monte Carlo Game.”

Conclusion: What is glaringly absent when atheist/materialists discuss the Origin of Life is empirical or experimental scientific evidence. What they offer us is the following:

·        Philosophical presuppositions

·        Miraculous events

·        Happy accidents

·        Monte Carlo games

·        Highly improbable events that occurred at some unknown time billions of years ago

·        Lame non-scientific phrases like “I’m pretty confident”

·        Belief

·        Non-falsifiable axioms based on an arbitrary “decision”

·        Cluelessness

·        “I have no idea”

·        Surmise, conjecture, speculation

·        Foolish tautologies like “barring divine intervention life must have emerged through a                 natural process” – Please note, there are only two possibilities to begin with. Of course if you arbitrarily reject one, only one possibility remains. Try this on for size: barring natural processes life must have emerged through divine intervention.

·        Hypotheses without scientific basis

·        Articles of faith

·        Astoundingly irrational statements like: “I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible”

·        And last but not least: “an idea that has become a dogma”

Call this what you will, but one thing is certain: It has nothing to do with Science.