Christianity & Evolution
Harrowing Hades to Rescue Charles Darwin
The Sphinx
There is, as it were, an exam, which each of us is forced to write with our lives. However, by the admission of all our wisest professors, no one knows exactly what the course material actually means or how the test is even graded.
This exam asks the examinant to square spiritual and technical knowledge. This may appear to be a problem only for intellectuals with nothing better to think about than misty intangibles, but it is in reality a question confronting us all.
This is simply the furthest extension of the ultimate question:
How do we reconcile our deepest intuitions about the way the world is supposed to be with the way our senses say it is?
How exactly one resolves the tension between the spiritual and scientific worldviews determines how one will understand both, as well as one’s own experiences and intuitions. It is from the solution to the ultimate form of the problem that we derive the formula for basic perception.
It is not about making peace between science and religion, but between yourself and yourself. It is the problem of how to marry Heaven and Earth and wield the knowledge of good and evil.
Even if one retains a nominal agnosticism, the implicit assumptions with which we would have answered will still condition our reasoning, our judgment and everything we do every second of every day. We articulate our solution with our choices, even if we never do with our words.
This is the question.
You must answer it.
Many suppose that if an incorrect solution to the puzzle is given, we shall simply understand one domain (the spiritual or the material) better than the other. Therefore, we favor whichever side of the equation is more important to us and leave the task of balancing it for someone else.
The glaring issue, of course, is that this is not how equations work (and that is what we’re dealing with). You cannot “solve” one side of an equation and leave another for later or for someone else. Those who offer this kind of solution have not even solved the problem of the problem yet.
Some others suspect it wiser to stall, than to give the Sphinx an answer prematurely. But the Sphinx knows your game. She is hungry and she will count your reticence against you if you evade for too long.
As has been said: you tacitly answer with every choice you make.
We cannot understand the spiritual to the exclusion of the material or vice versa any more than we may resolve a marital conflict with only one spouse’s account. Doing this will only produce another, bigger problem later.
Spirit and matter are human contrivances. The two fully interpenetrate each other. They are halves of one reality. It is our finite faculties and fragmented inner life that cause the tangible to appear unconnected to the abstract. It is the human who is disconnected, our inner and outer lives which fail to cohere.
In light of this, the riddle presented by the four-faced cherub of theology, paleontology, physics and astronomy is truly the most important intellectual problem of our time. It is the whole question of who, what, where and why we are. Whoever approaches it flippantly, dismissively or passionately is the same the Sphinx will eat.
Of them all, palneontology seems to have brought the most bitter cup to the table. It is the fossil record that asks the most spiritually troubling questions, and Charles Darwin who gave the most intolerable answer.
The philosophers in the tradition of Darwin have rightly recognized evolutionary theory as the greatest challenge to the Christian picture of the world since the time of Rome. We ought to take them at their word, since most of the modern world agrees, and we owe it to those people to do what has been done for us: we must meet them where they are, understand their point of view and help them to find their way inasmuch as we are able.
This means we have a duty to grapple seriously with what these people actually believe. Not strawmen set up by apologists.
Evolutionary theory is also inextricably linked to important questions about neurology, psychology and teleology. In order to talk about things I plan to in the future, we must address the evolutionary question clearly.
Its ramifications are as metaphysical as they are physical.
I will try to be as balanced and respectful as I can. My goal really is not necessarily to change anyone’s mind, but to elevate the state of the dialogue and the understanding between those with different worldviews.
My real critique is not of any particular “side” of the Christianity-versus-science conversation, but of the conversation itself which has failed to evolve in a meaningful way since I started watching it over a decade ago. I have been on both sides of it since then and neither ever fails to disappoint in that particular arena.
On the whole, such discussions are overwhelmingly shallow and uncharitable. Neither the scientifically nor spiritually inclined are without blame. Rarely is one of either bend seen stepping into the perspective of the other and weighing its merits in good faith. Both are too afraid that some truth may actually be found.
I do have hope, however, that you reading this can understand the world more soberly than those for whom the truth is useless unless it is a cudgel and unacceptable unless it is sweet.
I will address the strengths of the theory and then the shortcomings in that order, so please bear with me and hopefully this exploration will offer some useful perspective, regardless of what you come away believing.
Technology and Revelation
“[Abraxas] is the effective itself, not any particular effect, but effect in general.”
C.G. Jung (Seven Sermons to the Dead)
What we are about to discuss is the key to the whole question. But it will seem at first, a departure from the subject. We must recognize a fact of experience. The simplest way to illuminate it is to look at gravity.
Why is gravity a “force?”
What are the characteristics of gravity, electromagnetism and the other forces which cause them to fall under this classification?
This is not a question for physics, but metaphysics. The answers to such questions are prerequisites to rational empiricism. Without a coherent ontology, true scientific inquiry is not possible.
In physics, a force is defined as a kind of fundamental interaction. It is a way that an object can influence another object, with or without physical contact. Gravity is a force because it is a basic interaction by which one body, such as the sun, may influence another, such as the Earth.
Thus, one of the characteristics of a force is locality. A force has a gradient, in this case, a gravitational field. Gravity intensifies nearer to the center of the field and diminishes with distance.
All of this is to say that one of the primary characteristics of forces is that they are not uniformly active across space and time. There are regions of strong gravity and regions of weak gravity.
So then, part of what defines a force is its inequality of influence throughout the universe. But let’s disregard that and consider a hypothetical: what if there was something like a force that acted with equal strength everywhere? Something which shared all other characteristics, but whose influence was uniformly distributed?
Here we see that this is really a question for phenomenologists.
This answer is: we wouldn’t perceive that to be a “force.”
Such things do exist, but we place them in a separate category — the same one where we once put gravity.
When a “force” is not localized, by definition, it has no gradient. Its potency never varies. Therefore, we perceive it to be part of the inherent conditions of existence. We would be more likely to call it a “law” than a “force.”
It is impossible to measure an invariate. Observation is contrastive.
I have heard it said that “if x cannot be measured, then by definition it doesn’t affect anything. If it interacted with things, we would be able to measure that.” This is one of those falsehoods which sounds true, but hides a secret error.
Consider temperature. We can measure temperature because there are temperature gradients. Things can be hot, cold or a whole a rainbow of temperatures in-between. If you took a very accurate thermometer from place to place, in warmer regions, the liquid would expand and in cooler regions, it would contract. Through this variable interaction, you would measure the local ambient temperature.
Now let’s do a thought experiment:
Imagine a universe where heat is uniformly distributed so that everything is exactly the same lukewarm temperature. Nothing could exist in a world like that, but we’re just using “temperature” as an easy analogy.
If you took that same thermometer from place to place, then no matter where you went or how long you did it, it would never seem to do anything.
The local temperature is affecting the thermometer. If the universal temperature ever changed, the thermometer would tell you. But since it never does, the thermometer seems to say nothing.
In our hypothetical, the universal ambient temperature would not be thought of as a temperature at all, but as a physical constant, like the speed of light. Some intrinsic property of the medium in which we exist.
But how is it that I can say “it is impossible to measure an invariate,” and then cite the speed of light as one such invariate? Have we not measured the speed of light? How did we do that?
You can measure the speed of light because the position of a photon is not invariate.
The constant itself, known in physics as c is not a property of light at all, but of space and time. It is more technically: the maximum velocity with which effects can propagate. “The cosmic speed limit.” The preservation of the invariance of c causes both time dilation and gravity as we know it, (these are secretly the same thing).
The constant cannot be derived from pure theory or first principles. Its very existence actually defies one of the first principles you would naturally start from: that effects proceed instantly from their causes.
A theoretician can never calculate how false his own assumptions are.
This is the point: such paradigmatic discoveries require a revelation. An instrument of nature’s self-disclosure such as light, a representative specimen whose behavior instantiates the omnipresent and otherwise invisible cosmic principle of c.
Light therefore is the image of c, and we can never know c except through the light which reveals it to us.
If there is no visible instantiation of a transcendent ordering principle like a physical constant, this does not mean the invariate constant doesn’t exist or “doesn’t affect anything.” It simply means we have no direct information about its existence and effects, as in the case of the universal temperature. In order to gain some awareness of a uniform condition, something has to disrupt its uniformity and create some kind of differentiable contrast.
Again, this is a principle of phenomenology. A fundamental constraint of observation and interpretation. It is really a uniform condition of the observer’s experience that is being disrupted when such things as the speed of light are revealed.
I can cite a much simpler example from my own life:
As a very small child, it was my initial assumption that everyone I knew had always been the age they were. Some people were children, others were adults and some were old people. Each had always been and would eternally remain in their present stage of life. I had not existed long enough to see a child grow into an adult, or an adult reach old age.
This is the situation we allude to with the “fish that doesn’t know what water is.” The fish has never been outside of water and so it can make no distinction between water and existence itself. For the fish, “to be” means “to be a fish in water,” and whatever lies beyond that is inconceivable — that is, until the fish is abducted by a fisherman.
If some force acted equally everywhere all the time, we would regard it as a precondition of being, not a force.
Why does this matter?
There are two main reasons:
The first reason is because we often mistake local, apparent conditions for universal, actual conditions; the lake we are swimming in for the ground of being itself.
The finitude of light’s velocity was first demonstrated by Ole Rømer in 1676 who observed that the eclipsing of Jupiter’s moon, Io, was delayed by some minutes depending on the distance between Earth and Jupiter.
In order to make that discovery, you need to be observing optical phenomena at an interplanetary scale, which means you need a telescope. Before telescopes, the propagation of light is assumed to be instantaneous because under pre-telescopic observational conditions, it always seemed to be.
In like manner, ancient astronomy assumed the Earth to be the objective astronomical axis of the universe because it always seemed to be. It assumed that the sky was a dome and then a sphere because it always seemed to be.
When things always seem to be, we typically assume they always are.
The second reason is because if there is some invariate transcendental pattern which everything in the universe conforms to and participates in — put another way: if reality has a telos — then there is no way to tease apart that teleological “approaching” behavior from the basic behavior of matter and energy.
This latter point is the main one we will attend to, but that will be later.
The Whale in the Room
Here is the skeleton of a baleen whale.
Notice the flippers. Looking only at the bones, they look more like hands or paws. They have fingers, like us, knuckles and all.
Toward the back of its body, there are two little fragmentary rudiments, one on each side, that just float there, unconnected to the vertebral column.
A whale is a mammal. It looks like a big fish, but it breathes air and it lactates. A fish does neither. Even the whale’s brain is highly gyrified with a complex neocortex, bearing virtually no resemblance to those of any fish in the ocean which are primitive by comparison. Neurologically a whale has more in common with you than a fish.
Here is the skeleton of a great white shark:
A great white shark is a big fish. The picture is not great, but look at the fins. You’ll notice the shark doesn’t have “fingers.” In fact, these are not even bones; it’s all cartilage.
The shark has a quite unimpressive brain compared to that of the whale. Hunting and mating are the only things it knows how to think about. To even call it “thinking” is too generous. The great white is so primevally unconscious that it does not even dream. It cannot close its eyes. It does not enter REM sleep. It does not “sleep” as we sleep at all. It never truly slumbers and never truly awakens. It just is. And it eats and it mates and it dies.
The shark’s ancestors did not walk on dry land. Some of the whale’s ancestors on the other hand, almost certainly did.
Here is the skeleton of Basilosaurus:
The name means “king lizard” because it was initially mistaken for an aquatic reptile. A closer examination of its teeth revealed they were heterodont — canines, molars, incisors — two-rooted unlike the single-rooted teeth of reptiles and fish. They also had a replacement pattern. These creatures had a set of baby teeth and a set of adult teeth; a uniquely mammalian trait.
This is the profile we would expect of a prehistoric proto-whale, an aquatic mammal of comparable size, but still bearing a resemblance to a terrestrial animal.
Notice that Basilosaurus still has hind legs, but they seem to be vestigial. They are clearly too small and frail to support its bulk. Its forelimbs still resemble those of a land mammal skeletally, but they could not support its several tons of body mass on land. Basilosaurus was 15-18 meters (~50-60 feet) long. This thing is longer than a city bus. If those are legs, they’re shorter than yours.
Even the joints don’t have a normal terrestrial range of motion. They wouldn’t move the way legs have to. The bones are short and flat, consistent with the flippers of a cetacean. This creature’s skeleton simply isn’t designed for life on land — so why does it kind of look as if it was?
Here is a quote from Gustav Guldberg, a Norwegian professor of medicine and expert on whales who studied and here described the embryos of dolphins in 1894.
In the present demonstration of rudimentary hind limbs in dolphin embryos — about which I was initially very skeptical — it must nevertheless be regarded as established that rudimentary hind limbs are formed and appear on each side as an external, vessel-shaped appendage at a very early stage of development, and specifically at the stage when the external rudiments of hind limbs generally appear in higher vertebrates.
Dolphins, are closely related to whales, and the embryos of whales have likewise been found to start growing hind legs before quickly losing them in the womb.
All kinds of embryonic anomalies indicate the descent of whales from some very different kind of animal. The embryos of Baleen whales start growing teeth and body hair in the womb, but then, just like the hind limbs, they lose them. Whale embryos form nostrils at the tips of their noses. The nostrils then move to the tops of their heads and become blowholes.
All of this is evidence of a genetic program that was subject to gradual and successive modifications. It initiates by building out the ancestral template and then modifies the anatomy to produce the present form of the animal.
The whale genome does not contain instructions to just make a blowhole. The cells don’t know how to do that. The genetic instructions only explain how to build nostrils and then turn a set of nostrils into a blowhole. This is the simplest way to modify an existing base code and the simplest explanation for what are otherwise senseless and wasteful stages in the developmental process.
I’ve heard many objections to this kind of thing over the years and without fail, the contenders always seem to forget the same thing: science is about explaining what is seen in nature, not explaining it away.
Here is the skull of Basilosaurus:
You can see that the creature is actually part of the way through the nasal drifting that a modern embryonic cetacean follows during its development. Its nasal opening is heading toward the roof of its skull, the place where we find the blowhole in whales and dolphins today, but it hasn’t gotten there yet.
The Missing Links
The waters in which we swim today are as duplicitous as they are gullible, but let us not universalize this present state of affairs. There was a time not too long ago — I remember it — when liars and dupes were not found in such abundance and the man of science was more deserving of his reputation than the many who have since received and tarnished it.
Rejecting the whole scientific endeavor because of the Covid fiasco is no different from rejecting Christianity because of clerical sex scandals. In both cases the reaction is entirely understandable, but it is also simplistic and brutishly reflexive.
Many traditionalists have pounced on this blow to the reputation of science, suggesting almost everything be thrown out in favor of creationism — young-Earth creationism being the increasingly popular choice.
The problem at large according to these people is this: evolution by random mutation and natural selection can account for some kinds of adaptation, specialization, even speciation. What it can’t do is explain what it has to in order to be a complete theory of the origins and history of life. I can agree with that.
A certain kind of finch eats a certain kind of food. Through generations, the individuals with the best beaks for accessing that food have more reproductive success and future generations take after them.
Even young-Earth creationists today believe in this to some extent. They tend to call it “micro-evolution.” They say this kind of evolution can, for example, explain the wide variety of dog breeds. The dog breeds though, are of course, still dogs.
This is the contention. What they, on the whole, do not believe in is what they call “macro-evolution.” This, in their lexicon, is when the nature or high-order identity of an organism changes in a fundamental way. A dog cannot become a non-dog. It cannot evolve into a creature of another “kind.”
One reason for this is that it requires the generation of novel and irreducibly complex structures like organs.
Consider the bombardier beetle:
The bombardier beetle produces and combines hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone with catalytic enzymes inside of a valving system built into its body. The beetle then sprays a jet of scalding quinones and steam at its enemies.
How could this evolve gradually? It looks like something a human military would design. It’s frequently cited as an example of irreducible complexity. The argument goes that this system provides no real benefit to the beetle until it is fully operational.
Even though it is useful at the end of the evolutionary process, it’s not useful before that. So why would generations of beetles carry around unfinished and unusable prototypes of the weapon? And why would nature select for that?
This beetle, however, is not the problem case it is widely believed to be.
Quinones are defensively used by many insects because they taste foul. One kind of quinone they use is p-benzoquinone which several closely related species create by mixing the same chemicals.
Reservoir compartments develop in the beetles’ bodies so they can produce them in large amounts and house them safely, and these compartments need some mechanism that allow the beetles to combine them when needed.
This is another species of ground beetle called metrius contractus which discharges the same mixture as its cousin, but not explosively. It releases it passively as a hot froth that clings to its body.
All the necessary transitional steps are found in the wild. Each one is more protective than the last. Nature is not confined by the limits of our imagination.
To be clear: I do not believe the mechanisms proposed can fully account for such developments. There is no way to demonstrate that “random” mutation even exists, and it’s informationally impossible for chance and selection to generate new structure ex-nihilo. (We will discuss this shortly.)
All that notwithstanding, the point here is about so-called “irreducible complexity.” The bombardier beetle is not an example of that. Neither is the eye, neither is the wing, and we are dragging the name of God through the dirt when we leverage the ignorance of the layman to win converts.
There are real problems in evolutionary theory. The irony is, the theorists themselves are far more likely to tell you what they actually are. Only a small minority of detractors — mostly old-Earth creationists — even show a basic understanding of what the theory is, let alone its limitations.
Typical of those who attack creationists is a similarly shallow grasp of the finer points of theology, metaphysics and spirituality more broadly. This is my point though: isn’t it irritating when they talk about things they don’t understand?
If you do the same to them, why do you do what you hate?
James Tour is a chemist and nanotechnologist. He can make single-molecule nano-vehicles with four independently rotating wheels and a photosensitive motor that can be used to drive them. He’s one of the most brilliant organic chemists working today. He is also a Christian and an incisive critic of evolutionary orthodoxy.
Jim Tour gave a very interesting (and entertaining) talk wherein, with great technical literacy, he rebuked the proponents of contemporary abiogenesis; the idea that life can arise spontaneously from simple chemistry.
The origin of life cannot be explained with current science. Tour, who uses current science to design and construct nanomachines of the kind living cells need to function knows this very well. But the one who explains why the best (because he addresses the problem at the meta-level) is William Dembski, a mathematician and theologian.
Bill Dembski had a huge influence on the development of my own theoretical work because he lays out technically, as a trained probabilist, the objective characteristics of intentionally designed messages contrasted with those of accidental noise.
His best argument in my view pairs the “specified complexity” concept with what he calls the “conservation of information.” Here is a summary of that argument in his own words which I’ve edited down to under 2 minutes:
Dembski says here that insofar as the biology of a living organism is informational, all of the information therein must have been present before it crystallized into biology.
The patterns in the environment have to already encode the future creature, the same way a lock must encode the key that unlocks it. Thus, the evolutionary process is more akin to loading a program already stored in memory than generating a new one out of thin air in an ontological vacuum.
Attacking selection as a mechanism is a losing proposition in the information age. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are Darwinian theory applied. It has been well-demonstrated at this point that such processes can generate entities we wouldn’t initially expect, especially after millions of iterations.
The right move is pointing out, as Dembski does, that the conditions of a problem-space already encode the solutions, and these parameters are, in all real-world examples, specified by a designer for a purpose.
The Dust-to-Man Axis
The bombardier beetle is no significant challenge to evolutionary theory, but the basic intuition is right. Major transitions are the recurring issue. How does dead chemistry become a living, replicating cell? How do bacteria become eukaryotes? How do microbes become multicellular?
These are all secretly the same question:
How do you turn dust into a man?
How do you take dead stuff and put the breath of life in it?
There is almost always a reasonable explanation for how some animal horizontally evolves into another animal. Any such case is unlikely to confound a biologist. There are some perplexing exceptions, but nothing that should raise serious doubts in our entire biological and paleontological paradigm.
The moves that are actually hard to explain are the vertical ones: these are the steps up the dust-to-man axis.
This is the quintessential criticism of mainstream Darwinian evolution, and this is where the critics are right. Chance and selection alone generally only go “across” not “up.” They can sometimes go up, but not fast enough get here on time.
Everything we know seems to support this; the math, the informatics, the chemistry — everything but the fossil record.
Scientific materialism has hitherto concealed this problem even from itself by simply feigning ignorance. It has rested upon the pretense of a philosophy: the idea that this vertical axis simply doesn’t exist. Movement is horizontal and the difference between chemistry and a man is purely sentimental.
Even secular people don’t believe this anymore. I would be wasting your time if I even bothered addressing it. It is an already extinct way of looking at the world. It’s not clear why or when it died, only that it did starting around 2020.
Because of this ontological collapse, now many don’t know what to believe and grasp for religion to avoid a confrontation with themselves. I think it is good that they turn to religion, but I think it is not good that they avoid that confrontation.
The real crisis facing the sciences is not empirical or theoretical. It is ontological and epistemic, and it is largely a function of the paranoid post-Covid zeitgeist.
The collapse of the old paradigm is the reason everything associated with that worldview is now suspect and subject to impassioned, often incoherent scrutiny and ridicule. The validity, not just of the scientific enterprise, but of human reason and observation themselves have been thrown violently into question.
Rejecting the sciences in no way resolves the epistemic problems, it only makes them worse. Rational-empiricism and critical thought are supposed to be nothing more than the application of mental and observational discipline. It is important that we keep this in mind. If you cannot trust a disciplined mind and disciplined senses, you can only trust authority and the group.
The anti-science mindset prevalent among traditionalists today is a first step toward the outright rejection of independent thought, the abdication of the attendant responsibilities and the eventual atrophy of the ability to think for oneself at all.
This will not just poison your ability to understand science, but also Christianity. The two are connected in ways that are hard to see, but it is no accident that the one came out of the other. They are made and meant for each other.
The tradition of reason and observation is the sovereign individual’s cultivation of the capacity to use this mind and these senses to see the once invisible and think the once unthinkable. This is a unique and hard-won pillar of our civilization. It is the sole guarantor of your right to be right when the consensus is wrong.
The Stone the Builders Rejected
The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system, total entropy (disorder) must always increase. It is not without reason that we came to think of matter as stupid and dead. Everything we know seems to suggest that physical systems evolve in the direction of stupidity and death left to their own devices.
The second law is the principle that thwarts mainstream origin-of-life hypotheses. Localized increases in order are not prohibited, but in the case of a living cell, the slope is simply too steep for truly aimless forces to surmount in the time given.
Entropy increases because of the nature of probability distributions. A deck of 52 cards has only one perfect configuration where the cards and suits are rightly sequential.
Believe it or not, the number of possible 52-card configurations is as follows:
80 658 175 170 943 878 571 660 636 856 403 766 975 289 505 440 883 277 824 000 000 000 000
If you’re wondering how to say that, we would call that: ~80.65 unvigintillion.
Most decks of cards have never been made.
If you had ten trillion decks of cards, and each one produced a new configuration every second, and you did this from the start of the universe until now, you wouldn’t even have gone through a significant fraction of a percent yet.
That’s a deck of cards.
Every square nanometer on the surface of the Earth is orders of magnitude more complicated. What thermodynamics says is if you shuffle a deck of cards, the likelihood that you’ll produce more order than you started with is basically zero.
Now, the hidden assumption is that probability is proscriptive, not descriptive. That a statistic is like a natural law — again, because it always seems to be.
The deferents and epicycles of Claudius Ptolemy can accurately explain everything a naked eye astronomer will see in the sky.
Likewise, Aristotle’s schema of five elemental spheres can explain everything a clever ancient Greek will see on the ground. It tells you why a bubble rises in water, why a stone sinks, why a raindrop falls to the ground, why a flame reaches for the sky.
These models are totally consistent with all the contemporaneous observational data. They are even predictively accurate. Nonetheless, in the final analysis, they are incorrect pictures of what nature is really doing.
It is entirely possible (and arguably quite plausible based on the evidence) that the second law of thermodynamics is no different. That the nuts and bolts of the world are not really moving probabilistically.
But this is mere conjecture. If it were true, what would we expect to see?
At the bare minimum: cases of order emerging out of disorder in a spontaneous and statistically anomalous manner. Coherence appearing without intervention in a way or at a rate that a probabilist wouldn’t expect.
The strongest tangible evidence we have of this is, ironically, the evidence for evolution and common descent. Our statistical modelling really doesn’t predict vertical evolution, and yet the evidence does seem to suggest it happened.
This almost necessarily implies that something is wrong with how we model probabilities, because the critics of the theory are right: our statistical models prohibit the story the fossils tell us.
The parsimonious interpretation is not that this story didn’t happen, it’s that probabilistic modelling breaks down at that time scale. That real life is not statistical and statistical anomalies will accrete the further through time that you extend probabilistic projections.
This is just like the speed of light, which you assume is infinite until you’re watching it traverse astronomical units. Then, out of nowhere, something starts to look wrong. It usually happens that what was “wrong” in such cases were your instruments. If it wasn’t your instruments, it was your assumptions.
Perhaps the mean behavior of matter and energy is entropic, but the overall behavior of physical systems is not reducible to the average.
It is worth considering here what negative entropy (or “extropy”) would actually look like. This is really quite simple because “entropy” and “time” are near-synonyms. Negative entropy would look like time going in reverse. It would look like scattered things miraculously coming together. Effects preceding their own causes. Memories of the future.
All of the things we have been documenting since 2020 are what we would expect extropy to look like. Order from disorder. Health from sickness. Life from death.
We can thus account for all of the anomalies which the present paradigm cannot using the exact same elegant solution we’ve been using to account for everything else, no additional propositions required.
Similar to entropy, extropy would not be a localized “force,” but a uniform behavior of systems as such — albeit one that moves like a thief in the night and manifests on its own schedule.
If this is our synthesis, then the same principle responsible for the genesis of life also drives the process of revelation. It is all one movement. That which lit the stars and set them on their courses is that which writes your dreams.
We could say it is the tendency of reality to approach the likeness of God and manifest the divine presence. This, then, would be the supreme ordering principle of the universe. Thus the highest of all natural laws is: the better story wins.
This is why, in principle at least, I do not contend in any way with abiogenesis. I never did. I still do not understand why anyone does.
Life came out of death in the form of a single cell. A “zygote” from which all living things proceed. This zygote miraculously appeared in the womb of the virgin Earth in a way that we are still not able to satisfactorily explain.
In saying so much, those who assert it have, like the Romans, crowned the Christ and do not see it.
What about any of it should offend me?
The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.
Patent pending got a hearty and much needed laugh out of me, bravo!
I think it is also important to note that while we are able to "explain" how things work, which is miraculous and beautiful, we're not able to explain why any of this is here in the first place; why the laws are in place, why a "random mutation" makes for a curious and beautiful creature, why our eyes see this spectrum, but not that spectrum, or why the spectrum is arranged in the way it is at all. There's a fundamental givenness to the Universe that we simply take for granted, and we analyze it as if we are fish visiting another fishbowl and making conclusions: "it is a law that in all universes, there is a treasure chest." "All grass is made of plastic." "The bottom of every universe is made of blue pebbles." We analyze the world as if it is "natural" or arbitrary, but it is made, created, birthed, begotten.