An Untangled Problem for Evolution: DNA Topoisomerase.

Background

DNA replicates itself. That is Biology 101. The process is quite complex and any biology student required to rattle off the procedure on an exam can confirm. Although there are separate kinds of topoisomerase,1 they perform the same essential function within the process of replication.

What is topoisomerase?

In each human cell, there are approximately 2 meters of DNA compacted within a nucleus of the diameter of about 10 micrometers.2 For perspective, imagine that the nucleus is represented by a standard basketball. The length of all the DNA compacted into the ball would go round-trip between the earth and the moon just shy of twice. Topoisomerase has the job of ensuring that the shape of DNA is manageable. Add in the fact that DNA is not just a helix, but a double-helix. As one might imagine, the task of trying to do anything productive with this material presents very serious concerns that need to be dealt with. During replication, the topology (i.e. the shape and structure) of DNA and the movement in unzipping result in issues like tangling and kinking, so the process faces a formidable and complex challenge of bioengineering.3 It’s topoisomerase’s job to alleviate those issues so they don’t halt the replication process.4 If DNA cannot replicate, then an organism cannot grow. Additionally, DNA doesn’t just unzip for replication. It unzips in a process called transcription, which, with the help of RNA, is the first half of producing vital proteins in the cell.

Two examples might help illustrate some of the mechanical concerns that arise. Without even trying, the ordinary use of a wired phone produces coiling in the helical cord. No extraordinary spinning or energy is required to produce the effect, but it doesn’t take long for the cable to go from fresh and neat to knotted spaghetti, which seem to never come out. Even if the tangle is gone, there always seems to be a small bend or a missing turn were the tangle was. The second illustration may serve to demonstrate the problem of kinking just prior to cutting the DNA strand in two. To demonstrate the concept, you can take a piece of twine and try to unwind it by pulling away both its twisted strands away from each other. A "Y"-shape forms: the two strands being pulled apart are each the top segments of the "Y" and the rest of the twine is the bottom. Now at some point, enough tension will build up at the center of the "Y" to where you can no longer pull the strands apart. Fortunately, topoisomerase is there to work out these sorts of problems. Its process is so vital and complex that some have referred to topoisomerase as the "magicians of the DNA world"5 because of their uncanny ability to manipulate the DNA strand and master its topology. 

The Problems for evolution

1: Does not fit early evolutionary models for an ancestral topoisomerase

It is still unclear how exactly topoisomerase originated on an evolutionary model, particularly because all the different types of topoisomerase appear to have originated independently of one another.6 A core tenet of evolutionary biology is that all life can be traced to a common ancestor (more technically, LUCA: last universal common ancestor). It is natural to assume that LUCA would have some master topoisomerase that would have developed into the varying domains7 of natural life: Achaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota. But, this seems to be an incorrect inference that does not align with the actual data.8  It is speculated that topoisomerase might have emerged with either an ancient viral lineage or a LUCA that began with RNA genetic information or a combination of the two.9

These RNA-infused models would be controversial, because such scenarios involve the already contested10 (among researchers in that field) RNA-world hypothesis for the origin of life. And, the progressive introduction of topoisomerase and other necessary replication proteins into the evolutionary lineup seems an inventive proposition, but requires massive amounts of biological informational leaps that are unfounded, especially within the limited time window for the emergence of life on earth that evolution demands. 

2: Conceptual Paradox11

Most of all, the origin of topoisomerase presents a chick-and-egg paradox. To replicate itself the DNA molecule needs topoisomerase to unwind it. And, DNA would need to code for a protein to do the unwinding (in order to pass on the genes to code for topoisomerase). It’s like having a car with no gas. You need to drive to the gas station to get gas, but you need gas to get to the gas station. DNA might have obtained topoisomerase from somewhere else, but the instant it makes a copy of itself, the other strand needs topoisomerase also. The scenario requires the leap to the reality, where DNA actually codes for this protein itself. That is not to mention that the actual mechanics of unwinding get even more complicated, because topoisomerase is able to cut and re-join small sections of DNA, which require precise biochemistry to ensure the right pieces get linked back up with each other and at the proper speed. Too slow, and the DNA doesn’t unwind fast enough for cell division (mitosis) and the cell dies before replication can occur.12 Too quickly, and the cell can set off its own self-destruct sequence (apoptosis) or cause irreversible damage to the genes that results in cancer.13

Conclusion

Lastly, it is also important to keep in mind that this is only a piece of a wider issue for evolutionary biology to explain DNA replication in general: proteins that function as stabilizing clamps, ones that actually unzip the DNA strand, others that error-check the new copies, or the fact that one side of the DNA is duplicated backwards and in sections…

References

1. For the sake of simplicity, all types of topoisomerases will just be noted as 'topoisomerase'.

2. Joseph E. Deweese and Neil Osheroff, "The DNA cleavage reaction of topoisomerase II: wolf in sheep’s clothing," Nucleic Acids Research 37, No. 3 (2009): 738-748.
3. Ibid.
4. James J. Champoux, "DNA topoisomerases: structure, function, and mechanism," Annu Rev Biochem 70 (2001): 369–413.
5. James C. Wang, "Cellular roles of DNA topoisomerases: a molecular perspective," Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 3 (June 2002): 430-440. Wang also makes use of this phrasing in his conclusion of his ‘Minireview’ in "Topoisomerases: Why So Many?" in The Journal of Biological Chemistry vol. 286, 11 (April 1991): 6659-6662.
6. Patrick Forterre and Daniele Gadelle, "Phylogenomics of DNA topoisomerases: their originand putative roles in the emergence of modern organisms," Nucleic Acids Research (2009), 1. The two coauthored a similar article with Simoneta Gribaldo and Marie-Claude Serre, called "Origin and evolution of DNA topoisomerases," in Biochimie (April 2007): 426-446. 
7. A domain is the largest formal classification of living organisms on earth. By contrast, a species is the smallest formal classification.
8. Forterre and Gadelle, 1, 12 (and throughout the article in fact).
9. Ibid.
10. Patrick Forterre, one of the authors mentioned in this article, notes the RNA-world hypothesis, but references its implausibility on page 146 in the chapter entitled Origin and Evolution of DNA and DNA Replication Machineries of "The Genetic Code and the Origin of Life," published by Kluwer Academic and Plenum Publishers. Jonathan Filée and Hanny Myllykallio.
11. This paradox seems lost on some. The article by Allyn J. Schoeffler and James M. Berger entitled, "DNA topoisomerases: harnessing and constraining energy to govern chromosome topology," Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics 41, 1 (2008): 41–101, puts forth: "Understanding topoisomerase specialization is necessary to illuminate the evolutionary interplay between supercoiling homeostasis and the requirement for multiple topoisomerase activities to shepherd DNA through transcriptional, replication, and recombinational processes." The authors acknowledge that topoisomerase is subject to the mechanisms of evolution. How exactly does a mechanism necessary for evolution to work – even at the basic level – get thrown into the mix if it’s not functional with the first strand of DNA? That is not to say that it cannot improve or adapt with time, but it must work from the onset to begin with. And not just it, but DNA and its other requisite enzymes and processes.
12. Deweese and Osheroff, 741-742.
13. On the other hand, however, the essential nature of topoisomerase to cell replication (which requires DNA replication) has been exploited in anti-cancer drugs, which target the topoisomerases within the unwanted cells.

Image entitled "Replication complex" by Boumphreyfr - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Why the Law of Gravity Cannot Create the Universe

Stephen Hawking is a very smart man. I think that statement is uncontroversial. Hawking is recognized as a brilliant mathematician and theoretical physicist, and the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held for thirty years. That was the same position Isaac Newton held when his writings were changing the face of science and mathematics simultaneously. Some have even called Hawking one of the smartest men alive. So when in his recent book The Grand Design, Hawking and co-writer Leonard Mlodinow seek to answer what they term "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" people take notice.

But because someone is brilliant, especially in their field of study, it doesn't always make them right. One of those ultimate questions (they really list three) is "Why is there something rather than nothing?"1 Hawking and Mlodinow's answer is simply, "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing"2. They rely on the simple actions of gravity at a quantum level to balance the positive and negative energy of the universe and to create matter, time, and space.

I've written on some of the issues with quantum vacuums before, but there's a fundamental problem with this scenario, that may be easy to grasp. One cannot rely on a law to do anything by itself. The law of gravity cannot be the starting point because laws don't exist if there is nothing upon which the law governs. For a familiar comparison, let's look at traffic laws such as the speed limit.

Everyone who drives is familiar with a speed limit. The speed limit is a law set by a governing body in order to control the flow of traffic and keep the drivers safe in their vehicles. Some areas such as Germany's autobahn have no speed limit. But for a speed limit to mean anything, you have to have at least two other things: a vehicle and a road. If no road exists and there are no vehicles yet invented, limiting someone's driving to 65 miles per hour is not only foolish, it doesn't mean anything. How can you limit driving when no vehicles exist? And if there's no road to drive on, then there's no way to begin forward motion.

Imagine if you will creating laws as to how high and how fast the winged horse Pegasus can fly and you might see the problem. While your laws can be very specific and detailed, it doesn't matter because there is no wined horse for those laws to govern.

In The Grand Design, the authors use John Conway's Game of Life as their example of how a simple set of laws can lead to new patterns that weren't originally anticipated3. Hawking and Mlodinow extrapolates this into how all matter interacts and says we are the result of the same kind of new, surprising patterns. But the same problem applies. Conway's rules are just fine, but if there is no grid of squares and there are no lights to "live" or "die" as his rules define, then the game never gets off the ground. There's nothing to blink, so no new shapes appear. Of course, beyond even these problems, there's still one additional question that hasn't been answered. We know that Conway wrote the rules to his Game of Life, but who wrote the Law of Gravity?

It is unfortunate for the authors of The Grand Design that in their zeal to dismiss God from the creative process they assume that the Law of Gravity can answer all their problems. The question "why is there something rather than nothing" cannot be answered with gravity because gravity is a something. It's actually part of the question. Gravity and those objects that gravity affects are part of the something that needs explaining.  Postulating gravity before the creation of anything else is simply trying to place a speed limit on a flying horse. The outcome produces no effect at all.

References

1 Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Random House Pub., 2010. 10.
2 Ibid. 180.
3 Ibid. 172-179.

Evolution's Problem of Plagiarism

The name Jayson Blair sends shivers down the spine of editors in the New York Times. It isn't that Jayson was some mass-murderer or terrorist that makes the editorial staff of the nation's largest newspaper tremble. It was the fact that Jayson Blair was a Times reporter who plagiarized stories and then the Times published them. Macarena Hernandez, a reporter from the Antonio Express-News first contacted the Times and said that Blair's story had copied “major chunks” of her story and passed them off as his own. Jayson Blair resigned and is considered to be disgraced as a journalist for stealing other people's work.

The crime of plagiarism isn't only found in the written word though. Musical acts have been accused of stealing a melody or a hook from another artist. Graphic designers will copy from well-known pieces. Students will plagiarize from the Internet to get their homework assignments finished. In each medium, the plagiarized content is identified by comparing the new work to the original. If there are enough points of similarity, then one can assume that the work in question is a derivative of the original, that is the original creation was used a second time without crediting the original author. It also implies that without Hernandez's article in the Antonio Express-News, Blair's New York Times piece would read radically different than it did.

The reason I bring all this up is that when we look at the claims of the neo-Darwinists, they face a problem very similar to that of the editors of the Times. The current Darwinian model holds to a form of common descent, where all species diverged and differentiated from a very simple single ancestor millions and millions of years in the past. As the progeny of that ancestor experienced genetic mutations, some proved beneficial within the specific environment in which they found themselves and thus became more prominent. So, the Darwinian model seeks to explain the diversity of biological systems such as why some animals have gills, fins, and scales while others have lungs, wings, and feathers. Different created systems came to be through different avenues.

Because the mutations are random and the environment that bestows that mutation an advantage is different, so the story goes, the variations can be incredibly diverse. In fact, those two features are why paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould remarked that any replay of the tape of evolutionary development “would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the one taken.” But there's problem with this picture: we don't see radical divergence in all biological structures. There are structures, such as the eye, that have the same components in animals as diverse as mammals, octopi, and jellyfish, even though those branches were supposed to have split from one another well before the animal's sight apparatus evolved.

Jonathan Morrow, writing for the Discovery Institute, gives one great example of this type of duplication in the echolocation chemistry of dolphins and porpoises, an ability they share with the bat. The aquatic mammals and the bats share at least 14 amino acid sites that are needed for echolocation. That's fourteen points of similarity on a molecular level, even though these lines would have split when their ancestors were ground-dwellers, long before echolocation became an advantage for them. Morrow goes on to list other examples, but the point is made: how does one account for such similarities when evolution can take so many divergent paths? One may wave off one or two instances, but as more and more of these convergent evolutionary systems are being discovered, it becomes harder to ignore.

With all of the data showing independent, complex systems having multiple points of similarity, what should we conclude? It would be unreasonable to think that so many systems were developed independently over and over and over again just as it is unlikely that Jayson Blair just happened to have the same thoughts and phrasing in his story as Macarena Hernandez. No, it is much more reasonable to conclude that there is a single creative source for this kind of repeating structure across divergent lines.

The simple story of evolution suffers from acts of plagiarism, and as such it simply doesn't ring true.

Why Your Mind Cannot Be Your Brain

When I was a child, my mother used to look in at the clutter of room and exclaim, "How in the world can you leave your room in such a mess? Have you lost your mind?!" My mom's statement was hyperbole. She was expressing both disapproval with my living in a way that contradicts appropriate practice and bewilderment at why I would even want live in such a state of disarray. It simply made no sense to her how a teenage boy could say he cared for his things while treating them as such. Of course a lot of this was simply immaturity expressing itself through laziness. Today, it does not take a pole vault to get from my door to my bed.

However, I fear that our today culture is in danger of losing our collective minds. As I've stated before, we live in an age where science is lauded above all else. With the overemphasis on science comes a presumption of materialism—that is that the material aspects of ourselves are the only things that are real or they are the only things that really describe us and our actions. Neuroscientists scan the brains of serial killers, looking for some physical trace as to why those individuals would commit such heinous acts, even if the findings show that they themselves have the same physical traits as the killers!

The problem is that while modern scientists assume that brain scans are all we need to understand the mind, no one should make the mistake that the mind is the brain. The mind is something completely different than the brain and one can see that in several ways.

Mental states are fundamentally different than physical states.

First off, when we talk about the mind, we are referring to things called mental states. These include thoughts about something, experience, will or desire, intentions and things of this sort. A serial killer has intent to hunt and kill a victim even before he does so. After News Year's Day, many of us change our eating habits because we have an intent to lose weight, so we conform our actions to our intent. Notice that biologically, the drive to eat would make sense. We feel hunger. But our intention overrides that natural feeling and we curb our eating anyway.

Things like thoughts, ideas, desire, intention, and will are qualitatively different from brain states. A thought contains content that is not physical at all. Think of the sentence "I think, therefore I am." That sentence holds an idea, a concept that doesn't exist physically. If you are reading this on a computer right now, you cannot understand the sentence in the least bit if you were to measure its length and width on your screen. Neither will it help you if I explained the inner workings of my computer and told you how electrons traveled from my keyboard through my CPU, how data is stored on servers on the Internet and how it's delivered to your device. None of this tells you anything about the sentence, what it means, or whether its true. The idea is independent of the mechanism by which it is delivered. The idea is understood by the mind, regardless of how it was perceived by the senses and brain.

Because ideas are fundamentally different, we must recognize that they are not physical, and the same is true for thoughts, desires and other mental actions. It makes as much sense to say that my intent to lose weight rests 4.5cm from my right ear near my cerebellum as it does to measure the letters on your screen to understand a sentence. Mental states simply cannot be described using physical descriptors. That should be a tip off that mental states are fundamentally non-physical. The working of the mind, therefore, is not the same thing as the working of the brain. The mind is an immaterial aspect of a person. Thus, a person must be made up of material and immaterial components. That part of a man that is immaterial is the part Christians identify as the soul and the mind is one part of a man's soul.

In the rush of science to reduce knowledge to those things that are physical, they have run roughshod over the idea that the mind is distinct from the brain. Brain scans are supposed to tell you your thoughts, even though such a process is completely incapable of so doing. Such a concept bewilders me as much as my messy room confused my mother. It shouldn't be considered appropriate practice and I believe it reflects a level of ignorance and immaturity among its adherents.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Don't lose yours in the hype.

Science is founded on faith as much as religion

Dr. Paul Davies, Regents' Professor and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University is a very well-known name in astrophysics. His contributions to his specialty have resulted in him being awarded the Templeton prize, the Kelvin Medal from the UK Institute of Physics, and the 2002 Michael Faraday Prize from the Royal Society. He's a scientist's scientist.

Below is a quote from Davies from an article he wrote for the New York Times where he comments that science has as much a faith component as religious belief. Davies states:

The multiverse theory is increasingly popular, but it doesn't so much explain the laws of physics as dodge the whole issue. There has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and bestow bylaws on them. This process will require its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete account of physical existence. 

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. 

And just as Christians claim that the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case, so physicists declare a similar asymmetry: the universe is governed by eternal laws (or meta-laws), but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe.

Read his whole article here. For more on science versus scientism, see my series of articles here.

Has Science Found Consciousness in the Brain?

Yesterday, I talked about how brain imaging techniques could not read your thoughts. I said that it is not really possible to know which areas of the brain are responsible for discreet thoughts. Some may say, "Sure, we can't know exactly what thoughts people think, but we can certainly identify consciousness." It turns out that the brain doesn't have a true sign of consciousness. It has normal patterns that we see in most people, but as Dr Alva Nöe states, simply because there is a deviation from that pattern does not mean that the person is not conscious. He writes (The emphasis is mine):

Here what confronts us is not so much direct evidence of the lack of consciousness as the absence of normal brain-imaging findings. Does the absence of normal brain profiles in patients in the persistent vegetative state help us decide whether they are sentient or not? Would the mere absence of normal patterns of neural activity as modeled by functional imaging technologies such as fMRI or PET satisfy you that your loved one was now little more than a vegetable?

Actually, things are more complicated. Although patients in the persistent vegetative state show markedly reduced global brain metabolism, so do people in slow-wave sleep and patients under general anesthesia. But sleepers and surgery patients wake up and resume normal consciousness, whereas patients in the persistent vegetative state rarely do. Remarkably, in the small number of cases in which brain imaging has been attempted in patients who have recovered from the persistent vege­tative state, regaining full consciousness, it would appear that global metabolic levels remain low even after full recovery. Moreover, external stimuli such as sounds or pinpricks produced. Significant increases in neuronal activity in primary perceptual cortices. Interesting new work by Steven Laureys and his col­leagues in Belgium indicates that vegetative patients show strik­ingly impaired functional connections between distant cortical areas and between cortical and subcortical structures. In addi­tion, they show that in cases where consciousness is recovered, even if overall metabolic activity stays low, these functional con­nections between brain regions are restored. These findings are important and point in the direction of a deeper understanding of what is happening in the brain in the persistent vegetative state.

But this doesn't change the fact that at present we are not even close to being able to use brain imaging to get a look inside the head to find out whether there is consciousness or not. Consider these simple questions: Does a patient in the persistent vegetative state feel physical pain—for example, the pain of thirst or hunger, or the prick of a pin? Does she hear the sound of the door slamming? We know she turns her head in response to the sound, and we know she withdraws her hand from the pin­prick. We also know that there is some Significant neural activity produced in primary perceptual cortices by these stimuli. Is the patient in the persistent vegetative state a robot, responding reflexively to stimulation, but without actually feeling anything? And, more important, is this something that brain imaging could ever help us decide?

We don't know how to answer these questions. It is disturbing to learn that so far there are no theoretically satisfying or practically reliable criteria for deciding when a person with brain injury is conscious or not. At present, doctors and relatives have to deal with these questions without guidance from science or medicine. For example, the press tended to treat the widely discussed case of Terri Schiavo as one in which science, armed with cold hard facts about the nature of Schiavo's brain damage, did battle with family members who were blinded at once by their love for their daughter and their religious fundamentalism. Sadly, science doesn't have the hard facts.1

It's interesting that we don't hear these kinds of nuanced explanations from the press when they cover such stories. We're led to believe that science will always have all the answers and that because the brain-imaging scanners make multi-colored maps we can really see inside the head. I appreciate Dr. Nöe's explanation and I think that it shows how cautious we must be when dealing with issues like consciousness. Tomorrow, I will talk more directly about what consciousness is and why it cannot be based on something physical. But for now, let us take some care before assuming that we've already got everything worked out. Such sentiments are more a sign of hubris than knowledge

References

1. Nöe, Alva  Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons of Consciousness.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. 19

Can Neuroscientists Use MRI Imaging to See Thoughts?

Is it possible to see someone think? Can a machine ever capture the thoughts of another person, their dreams or imaginations? A lot of people think that science is almost to that point, but they really don't realize just how different thoughts are from brain activity.

Some of this confusion stems from the fact that the media are not really good at nuancing their stories when they report on things like brain scanning techniques. One such example is the reports that began to circulate when scientist used an fMRI scanner to measure blood flow through the visual cortex of the brain while people were looking at a specific image. They then built a computer to map the blood flow and they reproduced a kind of silhouette of the image itself. This isn't surprising, really, since blood flow to the visual cortex is a chemical response to stimulus from the optic nerve, kind of the same way film has a chemical reaction to light exposure. However, UC Berkeley's newsroom carried the story with the headline "Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind" and  wrote, "Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach."

This makes for great sharing on the Internet, but fMRI imaging is nothing like understanding what someone dreams or imagines. In fact, it has a really hard time telling scientists what is even going on when they can see activity in the brain. Alva Nöe, another professor at UC Berkeley and a member of the Institute for Cognitive Brain Sciences does a great job describing just how crude tools like fMRI really are. In his book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons of Consciousness, he explains:

"PET and fMRI yield multicolored images. The colors are meant to correspond to levels of neural activity: the pattern of the colors indicates the brain areas where activity is believed to occur; brighter colors indicate higher levels of activity. It is easy to overlook the fact that images of this sort made by fMRI and PET are not actually pictures of the brain in action. The scanner and the scientist perform a task that is less like gathering a photographic or X-ray image than it is like the process whereby a police sketch artist produces a drawing of a suspect based on interviews with a number of different witnesses. Such drawings carry valuable information about the criminal, to be sure, but they are not direct records of the criminal's face; they are, rather, graphical renderings based on perhaps conflicting reports of what different individuals claim to have seen. Such a composite sketch reflects a conjecture or hypothesis about, rather than a recording of, the perpetrator. Indeed, there is nothing in the process that even guarantees that there is a single perpetrator, let alone that the sketch is a good likeness.

"In a similar way, images produced by PET and fMRI are not in any straightforward way traces of the psychological or mental phenomena. Rather, they represent a conjecture or hypothesis about what we think is going on in the brains of subjects. To appreciate this, consider that we face a problem from the very beginning about how to decide what neural activity is relevant to a mental phenomenon we want to understand. Scientists start from the assumption that to every mental task—say, the judgment that two given words rhyme—there corresponds a neural process. But how do we decide which neural activity going on inside you when you make a rhyming judgment is the neural activity associated with the mental act? To do that, we need to have an idea about how things would have been in the brain if you hadn't performed the rhyming judgment; that is, we need a baseline against which to judge whether or not the deviation from the baseline corresponds to the mental act. One way to do this is by comparing the image of the brain at rest with the image of the brain making a rhyming judgment. The rhyming judgment presumably depends on the neural activity by virtue of which these two images differ. But how do we decide what the brain at rest looks like? After all, the brain is never at rest. For example, there are stages of sleep when your brain is working harder than it does at most times during the day!" (Emphasis added)1

So, to see things like thoughts that exist only in your conscious mind and are not produced by external stimulus are nothing like the images that MRIs produce. You may say, "But at least we can see what happens when someone is looking or talking, right?" Nope. You still have to ask the patient what he or she is experiencing. Nöe goes on:

"Comparison provides the best method available for uncovering the areas of the brain that are critically involved in the performance of a cognitive function. For example, suppose you were to produce a bunch of PET images of people listening to recordings of spoken words and then making judgments about whether given pairs of words rhyme. To isolate the activation responsible for the rhyming judgment, as distinct from that responsible for the auditory perception of the spoken words, a standard procedure would be to compare these images with a second set of images of people listening to recordings of spoken words but not making rhyming judgments. Whatever areas are active in the first set of images, but not the second, would be plausible candidates for the place in the brain where the rhyming judgment takes place.

"This method of comparison is cogent and it holds promise. But it is worth stressing that its reliability depends on a number of background assumptions, not all of which are unproblematic, as Guy C. Van Orden and Kenneth R. Paap have convincingly argued. For one thing, sticking to our example, the comparison method assumes that there is no feedback between what the brain is doing when we make a rhyming judgment and what the brain is doing when we perceive the words. If there is indeed feedback, then it would follow that overlapping regions in the images do not necessarily correspond to a common neural factor."2

Because there is so much activity in the brain, it becomes really difficult to construct an objective model of even which areas of the brain are involved in which discreet process. And even that makes an assumption that thoughts can be relegated to a single area of the brain. We don't know that to be true. What we do know is that consciousness is something completely different than brain activity. I'll talk more about that in an upcoming post. Just don't let news reports or popular movies lead you to believe otherwise.

References

1. Nöe, Alva  Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons of Consciousness.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. 20.
2. Ibid. 21.

Science vs. Scientism: Scientism Refuses to Have Its Authority Challenged

In recent blog posts, I've been outlining the difference between science and scientism. As I noted at the start, scientism is like the evil twin of science in some B-grade Hollywood movie, it looks like science, but it ultimately leads to a different outcome.

Up to this point in watching our movie, the signs of the evil twin replacing the good scientist have been subtle. Many who aren't personally close to the goodly scientist don't notice a thing. But friends and family are beginning to have their doubts. Now the plot turns and suddenly the evil scientism does something completely contradictory to the good Doctor—he demands that his way must be obeyed. Only his ideas count. He has the brilliance and training and therefore no one should question his pronouncements! In our society today, we see certain leaders in the scientific community doing the exact same thing . We see it whenever someone mentions the theory of intelligent design.

Because scientism views faith as an enemy, those who follow scientism will seek to shut down any evidence that points towards the existence of God. The intelligent design debate is a primary example. Our understanding of the origin of the universe and the origin of the diversity of life on this planet are big questions. They have become flashpoints of argument and debate, precisely because they put the question of God's existence on the table. But if the question of God's existence is allowed as a viable option, it would mean that there are things that science cannot tell us. Worse, for those who see science as the only way to gain knowledge, it would prove that there are other sources of knowledge out there, sources that fall outside the domain of science itself.

To the person clinging to scientism, this is completely unacceptable. Therefore, such possibilities are dismissed as not even worthy of considering. Note that this dismissal is not because of the strength or weakness of the scientific content. It is simply because the answer to the question would show that science does not have the ultimate authority in all questions of life. But, here's where the evil twin of scientism has given himself away: in order to reject views that are counter to his understanding of the origin of life and the universe, he must also give up a key tenet of science. He must reject the concept of falsification.

Falsifiability and Intelligent Design1

The scientific method is grounded in the concept of falsification. Experiments are attempts to see if the scientist's hypothesis will break under certain circumstances. Basically, the scientist is trying to falsify his hypothesis, his description of how natural laws will behave given a set of conditions. This is exactly what Galileo did when he wanted to test the idea that gravity pulls on everything with the same acceleration. By dropping two cannonballs of different weight from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and demonstrating that they landed simultaneously, Galileo showed that his theory was correct. If the heavier ball were to have hit the ground first, Galileo's theory would have been falsified and therefore abandoned for some other explanation.

Because of this power to confirm or disprove theories about the way the natural world works, falsification is taken very seriously by the science community. In fact, some scientists hold that without the ability to falsify a theory, you are simply not doing science. 2 Indeed, this charge is very often leveled against those who resist the idea of Neo-Darwinian evolution3, but instead hold that life displays in its existence and construction an underlying intelligence. Wishing to dismiss any idea that a source other than a natural one could produce life, our villain will simply dismiss any claims or evidence for intelligent design with a wave of his hand. "It's not falsifiable" he charges and quickly dismisses any evidence the theory provides.4 But again, he's made a crucial mistake! In using such criteria, our evil twin has undercut his own view that evolution is science.

Intelligent design and Neo-Darwinian evolution are two sides of the same coin, the coin of origins. To choose one side means the other doesn't show itself. But both sides must exist for the coin to exist! Those who hold to scientism would tell you that you must choose your scientific theory on the development of life from a coin that has only one side—there is no other side that's a legitimate choice. If the concept of falsification excludes intelligent design from being considered science, then by extension, it must also exclude it opposite, the theory of evolution. This criterion applies to both equally, which means they are either both considered such or neither are. Scientism would have you believe in one-sided coins, but thoughtful people should never fall for such ridiculousness.

References

1. A version of this portion of the article originally was post to the blog last. year. You can access it here.
2. Karl Popper was the leading proponent of using falsification to distinguishing which theories are scientific and which are not. He believed the concept that Hume had stated where one cannot universally prove a claim, but he saw that one can easily disprove a claim if it fails only one time. Therefore, to falsify a claim is the heart of science. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#SciKnoHisPre for more.
3. Neo-Darwinian evolution may be defined as a belief that all life has arisen from a single source through unguided mutations coupled with natural selection. See Chapter 10 for more details on this.
4. Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. No. 04cv2688 United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. December 2005. p22.

Science owes a debt to theology

Although we hear a lot today about faith and science being enemies, the scientific enterprise as we know it today wouldn't exist without Christianity and how it saw the world. This may seem surprising to you, but when you think about it, you can see how it makes perfect sense. Prior to the modern era, the primary view of how we can know things was based on the thinking of Aristotle, who believed that we can only start with things we know and simply reason to an outcome. This "First Principles" idea infiltrated much of science since Aristotle, until the 13th century, when a couple of Franciscan monks began to challenge the idea.1 What ultimately fuelled their investigation was the idea that the Christian God was a rational being, and therefore we could uncover His ways if we investigated his creation in a rational manner.

Asking a question about the function of the world

Is the world discoverable? Before we can begin any scientific enterprise, we must first know if it is ever possible to find the answer to certain questions we are asking. This is no trivial point. If you were to have all the latest brain scanning and most sensitive neurological equipment, you could tell a person is dreaming, but you could never tell what that dream is about. The question of content is outside of science altogether and must be reported by the dreamer. However, Christians such as Robert Grosseteste, Roger and Francis Bacon, and others knew they could begin to investigate the world scientifically, because God would create a world to work in a specific order.2 And since the Christian God isn't capricious, he wouldn't "change the rules" so to speak and change the laws of nature from one day to the next.

So today, when a scientist builds a hypothesis, he or she has already assumed that the world is really the way we experience it. But why is he or she justified in such an assumption? Remembering the hit movie The Matrix may help you get a clearer picture of my point. In The Matrix, most people believed they were living normal lives in a well-developed world when in reality they were simply being fed a computer simulation straight into their brains. The things they experienced weren't real, but a forgery. However, science assumes that we can talk about the real world and find out new things about it. Grosseteste and other Christians answered such objections by appealing to their theological framework: that God is the kind of God that wouldn't lie or change the rules on us. Science needs this grounding in theology to justify its assumption of consistency in experimental results.

Scientism dismisses theology as a fairytale

Of course, science's evil twin scientism would never acknowledge that Christian theism is the basis for the modern scientific enterprise. In fact, you many times hear scientism's claim that theistic beliefs are the enemy of science3; they hold back the true advancement and if we would only throw off the shackles of belief in God, we could somehow progress to a new era of scientific discovery.

Physicist Paul Davies, who is by no means Christian, reflected on why scientists should believe the laws of nature exist at all and why they're rational. He questioned his colleagues about them. Davies writes, "Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from 'that's not a scientific question' to 'nobody knows.' The favorite reply is, 'There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.' Davies goes on:

"All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed… The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science."4(emphasis added)

As Christians, we believe that God orders the universe and makes it discoverable. It offers reasons why we can trust our senses as reporting reality, and trust the fact that there are certain laws undergirding specific interactions in the world. Scientists assume a framework that theology grounds. This is why historian Lynn T. White writes:

"The preaching of a monk in the fastnesses of the German forests may seem far removed from the modern laboratory; yet the monk was an intellectual ancestor of the scientist. As the triumphant chant, 'I believe in one God, the Father Almighty,' rang through the new churches of the northern frontier, another foundation stone of the modern world was laid, the concept of an orderly and intelligible universe."5

To read the previous articles in this series, click here and here.

For the next article, click here.

References

1. For a good overview of this point, see Schmidt, Alvin J. How Christianity Changed the World.
Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004 218-219.
2. Schmidt. Ibid.
3. See MacKenzie, Richard "Is Faith the Enemy of Science?" where MacKenzie argues that it is. Lawrence Krauss responded affirminigly to MacKenzie and commented, "I have asked Richard if his recent purpose is to destroy faith or teach science, and he has indicated that destroying faith at the moment is a higher priority. I accept that argument, however for me the latter purpose, teaching science, is higher priority."
4. Davies, Paul. "Taking Science on Faith" The New York Times. 24 November 2007.
5. White, Jr., Lynn T. "The Significance of Medieval Christianity". The Vitality of the Christian Tradition, 3d ed., edited by George F. Thomas New York: Harper & Bros, 1944. 97.

Scientism rejects philosophy as a form of knowledge

Yesterday, I began a series called "Science versus its Evil Twin: Scientism:." I had written that there are five major clues that distinguish the pursuit of science, and I examined the first in yesterday's post. Today, I'd like to look at the first part of Clue #2 – Scientism rejects other forms of knowledge.

In most cheesy b-movies, we see the storyline play out predictably. The villain has made some advancement in pushing his agenda and the world starts to play by his rules. Therefore, in order to maintain his grip of power, our villain seeks to silence anyone who may disagree with him. He will discredit, disgrace or imprison anyone who offers up a contrary view to his plan. He seeks to be the only authority on all matters that he wants to control. In our look at science versus scientism, we also see a wrestling for power. There are those using science as one way of understanding the world, and there are those who say since science tells us about the natural world, that means that only science can tell us about anything. Scientism discounts all other forms of knowledge as either imperfect or not really knowledge at all.

Science owes a debt to philosophy

As we mentioned above, science has at its core the idea of observing interactions and critically examining their causes. Anyone beginning to study the subject of science is taught the scientific method, one of the primary ways scientists accomplish their task. Usually the method is divided into basic steps: a person has a question about some function of the natural world, he constructs a hypothesis, then tests that hypothesis with experiments, and analyzes the outcome. Lastly, he determines whether the original hypothesis is true and reports the results. This is a fundamental notion of what makes up our lab sciences. However, assumed in those steps is a lot of philosophy! Several philosophical principles must exist before the scientific method can even get started! Let's take a look at the components more closely and see where these assumptions lie.

Testing Hypotheses with Experiment

When scientists perform tests, one of the things they assume is a cause and effect relationship. If we are studying some effect, such as the attraction of magnets, we assume that there is a cause and effect relationship between the material of the magnets and their attraction. But we only make such an assumption because our past experience has shown that whenever material of this nature gets close to certain metals, a force is exerted between the two. How do we know that making such an assumption is warranted? Isn't one of the goals of science to eliminate assumptions and instead provide explanations for why functions happen? But then, aren't we starting with an assumption that cause and effect relationships are going to show us that? How do we know that the relationship we see isn't just a fluke of timing? Since it is only our experience that tells us about cause and effect, we are assuming our experience can tell us about the relation between the two, but we have no other reason to do so.

Realize, this line of doubt is not my own. Skeptic David Hume argued at great lengths to say that our experience may work for us, but that does not mean there is really a causal connection between two things, simply because one happens to come prior to the other.1 Basically, Hume asserts that science cannot test its own assumption about repeatability. Hume says trying to prove such things by experiment is really question-begging since you're using the very testing method that's in question! Therefore, in order to say that we know condition A produces effect B, we must rely on theories of what makes our knowledge justified. This again is the realm of philosophy. The scientist cannot scientifically prove that experience is a good indicator of what will happen in the future if the same conditions were to be produced; he relies on a philosophical framework to justify his assumptions.

Analyzing Outcomes

Once the scientist has performed experiments, he analyzes the outcome and draws conclusions as to whether it matches his hypothesis or not. But how can he be sure whether the results do indeed match his expectations? Philosophy comes into play here as well. In chapter 6 of this book, we took a moment and discussed the Three Standard Laws of Thought, also referred to as the Laws of Logic. We discovered that these laws were the main way that anyone compares and contrasts claims to see if they make sense or not. The Law of Identity states that a thing is equal to itself. So if the results of an experiment match the hypothesis, then the hypothesis can be considered valid in that instance.

We also learned from the Laws of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle that the result has to be either consistent with the hypotheses or inconsistent with the hypothesis.2 That means scientists use the Laws of Logic in analyzing their outcomes. Logic in all its forms is clearly identified as the only way a scientist can draw any conclusions that would continue to make sense.

Scientism dismisses philosophy as unnecessary

So, philosophy plays a crucial role in doing science well. It becomes the measuring stick on truth claims. But when our evil villain scientism enters the picture, he challenges this authority. While he uses philosophy, he sees anything other than what he defines as science as a threat and therefore dismisses it as unimportant or dead. Famous physicist Stephen Hawking, began his most recent work The Grand Design by doing just that. He writes:

"…philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. The purpose of this book is to give the answers that are suggested by recent discoveries and theoretical advances."3

Of course, such claims as "philosophy is dead" and "Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge" are highly problematic. For one thing both claims are themselves not scientific; there is no test that fits the scientific model one may perform and come up with those statements. No, saying "philosophy is dead" is making a philosophical statement itself; it's doing philosophy! The claim becomes self-refuting and can be dismissed. This is why Hawking's claim has been so widely criticized by philosophers of science, even those who are atheists!4

To read the next article in this series, click here.

References

1."This proposition, that causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experience…You say that the one proposition is an inference from the other. But you must confess that the inference is not intuitive, neither is it demonstrative. Of what nature is it, then? To say it is experimental, is begging the question. For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities. If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future. All experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future, since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance." (Emphasis mine) Hume, David. ""Skeptical Doubts Concerning Human Understanding"." Paul Edwards and Aurther Pap, Eds. A Modern Introduction to Philosophy. New York: The Free Press, 1973. 131, 136.

2. I am assuming here that the hypothesis in question is well-formed and the results can be accurately determined. Many times experiments either do not factor I all the initial values or perhaps the hypothesis is so broadly stated that results can be inconclusive. Usually, those instances will be studied further or other scientists will try to refine the original experiment to find a more specific answer to the question at hand.

3. Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Bantam Books. 2010. p5.

4. To see several critiques of this stance, see Christopher Norris' "Hawking contra Philosophy" in the March/April 2011 magazine Philosophy Now, Roger Penrose has taken the entire thesis proposed by the book and dismissed it by saying, " What is referred to as M-theory isn't even a theory. It's a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations…" (http://afterall.net/clippings/491891).

Science versus Its Evil Twin: Scientism

One of the difficulties Christians face in defending their faith today is this misplaced elevation of science above everything else. I've had conversation with people who, like the trident chewing gum ad, think that if a majority of scientists hold a view then that somehow provides evidence for that view being correct. They believe this even if the point we're discussing is not a point of science! They claim that science is the only way we can know truth and if a claim doesn't have its basis in science then it's either not knowable or not worth discussing.

Those who claim that science is the only way to find truth remind me of actors cast in a 1950's b-grade movie, a flickering sci-fi tale where our hero (science) is replaced by his evil twin, intent on ruling the world. All those in the film who should know better continue to mistake the twin for the original, even though signs are clearly there to tell the two apart. The name of this evil twin is scientism, and while it may look like science on the surface, all the signs are there to prove that it's nothing like science at all. Of course everyone watching the movie can easily see the differences, but those poor victims never see the clues and usually fall right into scientism's evil clutches. So, to make sure we don't become scientism's next victims, let's take a look at the first of five clues that show the differences between the role of science and the philosophy of scientism.

Clue #1—Scientism selfishly believes only its own rules apply

Those practicing science make theories based on observable evidence.

Whenever school children begin science programs, the first thing that they are asked to learn is what the concept of science entails. Usually, this includes some nod to the scientific method of observation, hypothesis, testing and reporting results. The National Science Teachers Association defines science as "characterized by the systematic gathering of information through various forms of direct and indirect observations and the testing of this information by methods including, but not limited to, experimentation."1 C. John Collins, in his book Science and Faith comes up with this definition:

"A science is a discipline in which one studies features of the world around us, and tries to describe his observations systematically and critically."2

Whichever definition one uses, it's normally understood that the study of science has at its basis observations. Many times we picture a scientist in a lab doing experiments, but as Collins rightly points out we cannot also discount someone like the ornithologist whose specialty is migratory patterns of birds. Although he does not gather his information in the lab, he does observe birds and makes predictions and conclusions from those observations. So, science has observation as a necessary condition of its practice at some point in its process.

Those holding to scientism exclude any theories that cannot produce observable evidence as unworthy or not true.

Given the above, things we know to be real or true and are yet unobservable must be learned by some way other than science. Moral knowledge is one example. Moral laws are not things we can see or feel. We cannot measure them with a ruler or say "They occupy this amount of space and have this much mass." While we can observe the effects of people breaking moral laws, we cannot see the laws themselves. Therefore we know them by ways other than science. But we know moral laws are real.3

However, those who hold to scientism are not satisfied with the possibility that there are ways of knowing beyond the scientific method. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in a recent debate gave a stark example of scientism. He opened his talk by noting that colleague Peter Atkins, when asked to give a talk at Windsor Castle was questioned by Prince Phillip who asked "You scientists are awfully good at answering the ‘how' questions but what about the ‘why' questions?" According to Dawkins, Atkins replied "Sir, the why questions are just silly questions."4 In one sweeping generalization, Atkins and Dawkins dismiss all those "big questions" of life, the ones that humanity has held in the highest regard for most of our existence! They reject wholesale the pursuit of understanding for why there is a universe at all, whether man has a purpose, how we fit into the grand scheme of things.

What motivates such a dismissal of the very issues that have been at the center of human consciousness throughout recorded history? It's because those who hold to scientism believe in another proposition that you may not know about. They believe that the natural world is the only world there is; that anything that cannot be explained by exclusively natural causes is either not real or not worth knowing. Dawkins alluded to as much in the quote above. But notice, this is a belief; a philosophical one known as methodological naturalism.5 The evil twin has contradicted himself! In stating that only things that can be explained by nature are knowable, he has made a statement of knowledge. But there's no way that the statement itself can be found in nature! Those who hold to naturalism as the only way to know things have undercut their own position because they start with a belief not found through science! Like our study in moral relativism, we see that scientism has a problem in that it cuts its own legs out from underneath itself. Yet, those who cling to it continue to deny that there are other ways of knowing. They believe their own rules only apply. Anything that doesn't fall within the realm of scientific investigation is considered a "silly question."

Science's evil twin, scientism, has made a mistake as bad guys always seem to do. He has tried to fool the world into believing that only his rules apply and are worthy of consideration. Some may believe that for a time. However, if you are sensitive to this trick, you can see that it really makes no sense to hold onto such a belief at all. Naturalism is self-refuting, which makes scientism the position that's silly.

For part two of this series, click here.

References

1. "National Science Teachers Association. The Nature of Science Position Statement. July 2000. 9 March 2011 .

2. Collins, C. John. Science & Faith: Friends or Foes? Wheaton, Il: Crossway Books. 2003. p34.

3. For reasons on why moral laws are real things, see "The Case for Morality" section of chapter two.

4. Dawkins, Richard. "Debate: Does the Universe have a purpose?" 10 November 2010. YouTube. 09 March 2011 .

5. In a recent trial on the merits of teaching school children intelligent design along with evolution, Judge John Jones III, after hearing testimony from three scientists, stated "Methodological naturalism is a 'ground rule' of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify." Jones III, John E. "Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District;Decision of the Court, Part 2." 31 December 2005. The Talk Aroigins Archive. 21 March 2011.

Science, God, and Knowing

Today, people look to scientists to find the answers to our problems in the world. But does science have limits? Are there other ways to know something as fact? And how are questions about God and religion tested scientifically? In this series of audio podcasts, Lenny shows why scientific objections to God fail.

• Science, God, and Knowing (Part 1)
• Science, God, and Knowing (Part 2)
• Science, God, and Knowing (Part 3)
• Science, God, and Knowing (Part 4)

Review of the Ken Ham-Bill Nye Creation Debate

Yesterday, Ken Ham and Bill Nye debated their concepts of creation and evolution at Ham's Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. I watched the debate live with a group at a local church (you can watch a recording for a few more days here), and given that there were nearly 500,000 streams of the event around the globe, it would be easy to estimate that well over half a million people viewed the exchange. Many have commented on the event, but as someone who has previously participated in a formal debate, I thought I would put down some of my observations here.

The Good

I thought the debate was very well run and it went better than I expected. Both Mr. Ham and Mr. Nye were respectful in tone and were genuine in their approaches. I think each participant understood that this event was important and each wanted to make his best case. CNN's Tom Foreman moderated and did an excellent job as well.

The debate platform was clean and the podiums for the speakers were spaced comfortably for both audience viewing and the television cameras to get a two-shot. (The graphics on the front of the podiums were my favorite part.) Using a pre-submitted set of questions from the audience allowed the Q & A time to flow quickly and more questions were presented in the 45 minute allotment than could be had with a queue in front of microphones.

I thought some of Bill Nye's arguments concerning the ice core evidence for 680,000 of winter/summer cycles and the abundance of species variation that argues against such diversification taking place in only a few thousand years were his strongest points. I thought that Ham did a great job in showing how science education today does hold a bias against a creator, even including a clip from a previous interview Bill Nye did. He was particularly strong when referencing a new study that shows all dogs came from a single ancestor and declaring how changes in finch beaks are variations within an instruction set. He also notes that cave fish "evolving" to have no eyes is not a net gain; there is no new information there. The fish have only lost the capability of seeing. Ham was also bold enough to present the gospel a few times during the evening, which I appreciated.

The Bad

The most unfortunate thing in this debate is that neither debater focused on the actual debate question! At the beginning of the debate, Foreman clearly stated that the debate question was "Is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?" Ham was to argue the affirmative and Nye was to take up the negative. Neither person in their initial opening five minute speech nor in their longer thirty minute second presentations built an argument focused on this question. Ham continually claimed that one must start with certain assumptions when trying to understand the past. However, this doesn't address whether or not creationism is a viable model. Several times throughout the night he highlighted scientists who were also creationists, although most of those had specialties that had nothing to do with creationism or evolution at all. If the debate question were "can good scientist hold to a creation model?" this would be prime evidence. Alas, that was not the topic at hand.

Nye actually changed the question when he began his 30 minute presentation. He begins by saying, "Let's take it back to the question at hand. Does Ken Ham's creation model hold up?" What? Is that now the topic of the debate? If so, I wouldn't have bothered watching because I'm not interested in Ham's version. Nye offered several strange lines of evidence, such as the shipbuilding capabilities of Noah and his family. Huh? What in the world does that have to do with creation as a viable model in science? In any account of Noah and the flood, the creation has already been established.

Nye also went off on a tangent about fish reproducing asexually versus sexually with others. He notes how asexual reproduction is less desirous but sometimes necessary (that's a straight line for too many jokes.) But again, how does this prove or disprove the question at hand? Could the fish not be designed for such contingencies? It shows neither evolution nor creation but the fact that certain fish in a certain environment have the capability to reproduce asexually. There are other animals that reproduce asexually, too. This completely misses the question.

Neither presenter provided an actual argument—you know, a series of premises and a conclusion—that I would have expected in a debate. It would have been a much more powerful presentation had the opponents laid out their arguments first and then expounded on them. And it was clear that both presenters were guilty of something I've stressed before: creation conflation.

The Ugly

There were a few missed opportunities in the debate that could have been capitalized on. The first is Nye's claim that if you can find "even one example" of a fossil crossing layers you would change science forever and "the scientists of the world would embrace you." Well, polystrate fossils have been well-documented, and it hasn't led the scientific community to embrace creationism. There are simply new theories that justify the find as a natural, not a supernatural occurrence.

The point that made me laugh out loud, though, was how Nye insisted that scientist WANT to embrace new ideas. We know that scientists resist upsetting their current models, as this 1961 article from Science shows. The more relevant work is that of Thomas Kuhn. In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn demonstrates how the history of science is not one gradually increasing understanding of the world, but it is more how a certain model becomes the status quo and is accepted until someone (whom Kuhn labels "an outsider") upsets the status quo by offering a new paradigm. Thus science advancement comes in fits and stages as those who hold the existing model are forced to give way to the newer paradigm.

Two examples of Kuhn's paradigm shifts were items that Bill Nye mentioned in the debate: the emergence of plate tectonics and the abandonment of spontaneous generation after Louis Pasteur's experiments. Another I could add was the emergence of the Big Bang model from the previous steady state theory of the universe. Like the other models, the theory was not met with open arms by the scientific community, but by much resistance. Nye seemed to imply that Fred Hoyle liked the idea, when he actually named it in derision and was one of its most vocal opponents. Though it was first proposed by Roman Catholic priest Georges Lemaître in 1927, it took Wilson and Penzias' discovery of the cosmic background radiation in the 1960's that led it to be the primarily accepted model among cosmologists.

Another wince-inducing point was how Nye tried to assert that the Biblical text was transmitted to us through a method like the telephone game. This is simply, demonstrably false and even non-believing scholars flatly reject such an assertion.

Ham had some egregious moments as well. When he for the third and fourth time referred to his small sampling of scientists who were also creationists, his argument moved from a non-sequitur to a fallacious appeal to authority, and it became annoying from the audience's standpoint. Ham never answered Nye's stronger points above, but simply dismissed them with the rhetorical "how do we know, we didn't see it!" Well, if that's the criteria for knowledge about historical events, then we need to fire all the CSI lab technicians and set the murderers free.

Ham also lost points in my opinion when he was asked if he was provided evidence, would he still believe in God. Instead of beginning with the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus, Ham stated that everyone has to have certain presuppositions and the Bible was his presuppositional choice. But doesn't that beg the question? Nye similarly begged the question when asked about things like the emergence of consciousness or how the Big Bang happened from nothing. He simply claimed these were "great mysteries" and we should be glad they are there to study.

The final question of the night, "What is the one thing, more than anything else, upon which you base your belief" was offered to both participants and they basically responded the same way they had been all night long. Ham said one must presuppose the truth of the Bible in order to know history and origins. Nye answered that he based his beliefs on the joy and love he receives from the information and the process of science. Their presuppositions are noted, but each is rather subjective. I know that many creationists also feel Nye's excitement and love of scientific discovery. I know there are many other people who presuppose the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, or some other text as their starting point for interpreting history and creation. Neither answer satisfies a seeker who is honestly trying to make heads or tails out of all this, and while this question may be tangential in itself, neither response helps us answer the question of the debate.

Conclusion

In all, I am truly excited that the interest in this debate was so high. I think there are many, many people who really want to discover the facts that are out there and that we as Christian communicators can find fruitful ground in providing some of those answers. There are a lot of holes left open by the participants in the debate. Let's see if we can go out and close some of them with good evidence.

If We're Only Our Bodies, Life Is Meaningless

What is the thing that makes me me? I found an interesting comic on the Internet the other day that does a great job in unpacking one of the problems of the materialist position that all we are is the sum total of our physical makeup. You can read the whole thing here, (it's rather long) but I will summarize.

The comic depicts a day where science has finally invented a machine to transport objects instantly from one location to the other. Think Star Trek. Of course, everyone hails this great technological feat, but at least one man, the protagonist of the strip, is disturbed. The comic states:

The machines did more than transport people. They also killed them. Since the machines didn't use exactly the same atoms in exactly the same position, what arrived on the other side wasn't the original but only a copy. However, because the copy had the memory of the original's past, it believed it was the same person.

The man is disgusted at the wholesale death that people were accepting for the sake of convenience, which he deems immoral. He eventually meets the inventor of the machine and confronts him on such wanton disregard for human life. The inventor counters by answering, "My boy, surely you don't think that 'you' are the individual atoms of your body, do you? One carbon atom is the same as the next! And your body itself flushes out and replaces atoms all the time, yet you say nothing of copies. 'You' are not the atoms in your body but the pattern of the atoms." The man realizes now that every day he awakes his atoms are different. He dies every night as he loses consciousness and a copy wakes in the morning with the memories of the past. The man goes into an existential crisis.

The question of identity that the strip portrays is one that has a long history in philosophy, going back to ancient Greece. Known as Theseus' Paradox, it is usually represented as a ship piloted by Theseus whose weather-worn components are replaced one at a time until eventually there are no original parts. Is this still Theseus' ship? What if one were to take all those original pieces and reassemble them right next to the repaired ship? Which would properly be Theseus' ship now?

What is the Essential Element?

Both the transporter machine and Theseus' paradox ask the question of what makes up the essential element of a thing. If we are only a pattern of atoms arranged in a certain way, then can two specific identical patterns of atoms both claim to be the same person? The comic assumes that our material nature is really all there is to us. Our consciousness and our memories are what inevitably come from a specific arrangement of those atoms. That means the mental reduces to the material, and you can recreate a consciousness by duplicating the specific material components.

As the comic shows, if this is true then life can be seen to be meaningless. What one does doesn't matter since a real you doesn't continue through life, but a bunch of copies. When viewed through a materialist lens, there is really no meaning to life at all. However, Christianity offers an answer to this dilemma. The Christian view of humanity teaches that we are not merely the assembly of atoms. Human beings have not only a body but a soul, an immaterial aspect of ourselves that stays the same throughout our existence. The soul is not replaced bit by bit. It is fundamentally the same thing. The soul is our essential self. While humans are made to be both body and soul, it is in our souls where our conscious selves reside. Even when we sleep, our souls continue and we don't cease to be.

Implications of a Soul

The idea that each of us possesses a soul has incredible implications. It not only provides continuity in this life (I am the same person tomorrow when I awake and I am today), but it gives us an understanding that people who are born without things like arms and legs are still fully valuable as human beings because they do not have less of a soul. It helps us understand why unborn human beings are valuable individuals. It also helps us to understand that what we do in this life matters because even if our material elements are destroyed in death, our souls will continue on.

J. P. Moreland has quoted J. Gresham Machen who said, "I think we ought to hold not only that man has a soul, but that it is important that he should know that he has a soul." We can clearly see why it is so important. If we are to take the materialist position, we are entirely consistent to believe there is no meaning to anything at all and there's really nothing to live for. But because we are body and soul, God has given us real meaning for this life as well as for the next.