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It is very difficult to
define what life is. After describing the many branches of biology the
1997 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica remarks:
Despite the enormous fund of information that each
of these biological specialities has provided, it is a remarkable fact
that no general agreement exists on what it is that is being studied. There
is no generally accepted definition of life.
Why, up till the present time, are scientists not able
to make life out of lifeless matter? It could be believed that `life' involves
a dimension of reality that goes beyond the scope of our four dimensional
world of space-time and therefore beyond complete scientific definition,
or it could be that one day simple organisms will be manufactured by humans.
Whatever is the case a reason why life seems so hard to produce is its
sheer intricacy - way, way beyond the intricacy of anything ever made by
humankind.
When Christ spoke of the lilies of the field and said
that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these, some
of his listeners may have thought he was exaggerating. But he wasn't. Indeed
it is one of the great understatements of the Bible. The more the botanist's
learning penetrates into the lilies of the field the more complexity, wonderful
mystery, and beauty he finds. According to Richard Dawkins the `information'
storage capacity of a single lily seed, that enables it to grow into a
lily, is more than sufficient to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica sixty
times over.
Walter Hearn a biochemist who, at present, is adjunct
professor of science at New College for Advanced Studies at Berkeley, has
been aware for thirty years of efforts to try to understand prebiological
or "chemical" evolution that would be a necessary precursor to the formation
of the simplest form of life. He comments:
There is a certain irony in experiments set up to
show that life was produced in small steps in an appropriate chemical environment
by random molecular motions. In all such experiments, "pure" chance is
"contaminated" by the purposeful intent of the researchers, who go to great
lengths to control the variables in their experimental set-ups. If the
"world inside the flask serves as a model of the random processes of nature,
what does the "investigator" beyond the apparatus represent?
So is the cell of life `only' an extremely complicated
mechanism like a computer? It is much more than this and very much mystery
remains. For example I quote from the non religious artificial intelligence
expert Douglas Hofstadter:
...if you wanted to find some piece of your
DNA which accounts for the shape of your nose or the shape of your fingerprint,
you would have a very hard time. It would be a little like trying to pin
down the note in a piece of music which is the carrier of the emotional
meaning of the piece. Of course there is no such note, because the emotional
meaning is carried on a very high level, by large "chunks" of the piece,
not by single notes. Incidentally, such "chunks" are not necessarily sets
of contiguous notes; there may be disconnected sections which, taken together,
carry some emotional meaning.
Many falsely assume that the DNA is merely a scaled down
version of the living creature, or that the creature is a scaled up version
of the DNA. This is not so. Research Chemist Ernest Lucas tells us: "The
single fertilised egg does not have miniature arms and legs. These new
structures appear later as the cells multiply and divide". As well as the
reason given in the previous paragraph, complicated and wonderful though
the DNA may be, it cannot, of itself, account for the enormously greater
complexity of many parts of my physical body. It might even seem, that
in order for the DNA to be changed into an individual life form, a set
of mechanisms far more complex than the DNA must operate on it. In this
case the various parts of the DNA would serve as triggers for these mechanisms.
So where could this greater mechanism be which controls and is controlled
by the DNA?!
Paul Davies writes:
If every molecule of DNA possesses the same global
plan for the whole organism, how is it that different cells implement different
parts of that plan? Is there, perhaps, a `metaplan' to tell each cell which
part of the plan to implement? If so, where is the metaplan located? In
the DNA? But this is surely to fall into infinite regress.
Up to this point I have not made any assessment
of `evolution'. That is the presumed very gradual process that is supposed
to have begun after the simplest life form came into being by a
single-step move. I have no strong Biblical or theological reason to reject
this theory. So I am not a `Creationist' who as a matter of principle rejects
evolution. However I do not believe that purely accidental process and
random changes, even given millions of years of the `survival of the fittest',
could change a single cell (without brain, nervous system, liver, eyes,
ears, blood, lungs, leaves, feathers, bark, roots, petals, etc. etc.) into
all the wonderful forms of animal and vegetable life we see around us.
Both anti-evolution creationists on the one hand and
those who merely accept evolution because it is the current orthodoxy need
to heed the warning given by Daniel Osmond (Professor of Physiology and
Medicine - University of Toronto) who writes:
I do not wish to build a "God of the Gaps" argument
built upon gaps in evolutionary knowledge. This would be dangerous because
science has a habit of filling gaps, sooner or later. Nor would I wish
to predict that, because these particular data are either unavailable or
very difficult to obtain, evolutionary gaps will never be filled and use
this prediction to argue in favour or Creatorship and Purpose. My point
is simply that, in the presence of such huge gaps in knowledge concerning
their most important theory pertaining to biological origins, all scientists
should exhibit a more realistic, humble attitude. With such huge gaps staring
us in the face in the empirical domain, we should refrain from usurping
other domains, not accessible to empirical study, with an air of arrogance
of superconfidence.
John Polkinghorne quotes Augustine in his commentary on
Genesis and compares the quotation with words of Darwin:
St. Augustine in his great commentary on Genesis
wrote that "in the beginning were created only germs or causes of the forms
of life which were afterwards to be developed in gradual course" - words
that are not far removed from those of Charles Darwin himself when he wrote:
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having
been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and
that ... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been , and are being evolved."
According to the the Bible the Eternal Logos or Word who
is the source of the rational structure of the physical universe, is also
the `Word of Life'. (1 John 1:1)
John says of the Eternal Word:
"In Him was life and the life was the light of men"
John 1:4
Life comes from relationship and therefore with
a fully reconciled relationship with the Source of life that life will
be Eternal.
John 17:3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
John 1:11 He came to that which was his own, but his own did not
receive him. 12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his
name, he gave the right to become children of God-- 13 children born not
of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born
of God. (NIV)
The full article
considers these discussions in more detail and also refers to such diverse
scientists as: Polanyi, Behe, Dawkins, Fred Hoyle, Hofstadter, Sheldrake,
Polkinghorne; the philosopher John Haldane, and the theologian Lesslie
Newbigin.
Copyright
© 2000 Howard Taylor
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