Monday, August 24, 2015

A Cosmic Primordial Accident

This past week I started reading Richard Dawkins' book A River Out of Eden. Which is Dawkins' break down of how basically evolution works, and how through evolution one could explain away the need for creationism, and the need for God. I am aware that this is a very shallow explanation of Dawkins' book however, I am only 2 chapters in. Once I finish the book I am sure I will have much more to say on the matter. However there were things in the first chapter that he said and through trying to follow his train of thought that really jumped out at me.

For those of you who don't know who this Richard Dawkins character that I am talking about is, I will give a brief bio. Mr. Dawkins was a professor of zoology at Cal Berkeley and Oxford, he has been the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford since 1995. Dawkins has written numerous works his most famous being The God Delusion. I would also like to say that Mr. Dawkins is a brilliant thinker and one could learn a lot by reading his work.

Now that you know a little more about the man we are discussing it is time to dive into what I have found to be a glaring problem in his logic which began to arise in the first chapter of A River Out of Eden. Dawkins starts off in the first chapter explaining the basic gist of how evolution works, comparing generations and genes to a sieve or a filter, the good, strong, genes make it through the sieve and the weak, faulty, genes get filtered out. He then goes on to explain how speciation (the origin of new species) occurs. "The feature that defines a species is that all members of one species have the same river of genes flowing through them, and all the genes in a species have to be prepared to be good companions to one another. A new Species comes into existence when an existing species divides into two." Then he says something that is in my opinion the achilles heel of his position on evolution. "Why would two species divide? What initiates the long goodbye of their genes? What provokes a river to split and the two branches to drift apart, never to meet again? ...accidental geographical separation." Now I would like to note here that Mr. Dawkins failed to answer the why, he did succeed however in answering the how. But take a minute to think about what he has said here. We, as human beings, are essentially nothing more than an accidental geographic separation from a distant ancestor whom of which we share in common with chimpanzee's and bonobos. 

He then goes on to explain some more about this accidental geographic separation in which he begins to explain the complexity of genetic code. "The odds of arriving at the same 64:21 mapping (this is the mapping of a genome 64 possibilities out of 21 amino acids) twice by chance are less than one in a million million million million million. Yet the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria that have ever been looked at." This is a point at which I start having my doubts about what Dawkins is trying to sell me. He states that species occur as accidents, and that the odds of all animals sharing traces of the same genome is extremely unlikely almost un-imaginable even, yet the fact that we are all made of essentially the same stuff means we are descended from a common ancestor through evolution. Even though human beings share more DNA with bananas than anything else...

Eventually after more explaining of this process through metaphor and parables he tells one parable which I believe to be the ultimate flaw in his reasoning. Dawkins tells the story of a scientist who is captured and charged with creating a biological weapon. Being that the scientist cannot communicate with the outside world he resorts to coding a message into the DNA of the virus he is charged with spreading. He begins his message with a flag sequence of prime numbers because he knows when scientists begin mapping the DNA of this virus they will see the prime numbers and know that this was not by accident because they could not occur naturally.

By now there is a major issue glaring you directly in the face, at least it was for me. How is it Mr. Dawkins, that you could say that a sequence of prime numbers encoded in DNA is not accidental then stare at the whole of creation and say that it is all an accident? I truly struggle to understand this. Even if evolution is true it doesn't hinder my belief in God nor should it hinder any of you reading this post. We do need to think critically about this theory though. First you want to say the universe started by accident, then life began by accident, then evolution began by accident, all of these incredibly unlikely events potentially even more unlikely than prime numbers occurring naturally in a sequence in DNA are accidents. Yet, this sequence of numbers could not have been an accident? Where is your logic? Where is your reason?

Perhaps this post came off as a rant, but I hope it goes to show you all that even in the face of great adversity, that we should keep a hold of our faith. So many at this very moment are beginning to attend university and you will be challenged greatly in your faith. I urge you to hold strong. There are several resources available to you. I would suggest researching Dr. William Lane Craig, and even going to his website reasonablefaith.com and even listen to some of his podcasts. "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect." Romans 12:2



Sources:

Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden: a Darwinian View of Life (Science Masters Series). Reprint ed. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996.

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