Scientific evidence
Fine-tuning of the Universe and proof of Intelligent design
According to
Dr. Sy Garte
“The general scientific idea is that life began through what's called chemical evolution, and chemical evolution is very different from biological evolution, because there's no natural selection and there's no replication, or you see, there's no mutations. Chemical evolution is when you take chemicals, you put them together, and they either react or they somehow can do things only based on chemistry, without any mutation, without any replication, and without any natural selection.
And that's pretty hard to do.
You know the way life works, and you can get evolution, but you can't get it started.
And I started thinking about this years ago, especially related to one of my interests, which is how the DNA works by coding the existence of proteins that cause life, and Stephen Meyer has written about this and the signature of the cell. He, in his recent book, “The Return of the God hypothesis,” talks a little bit about an aspect, which is critical to the origin of life, to the origin of evolution, and that is the accuracy of self-replication, because nothing in the universe self-replicates accurately, other than living cells.
No chemical self-replicates.
No machine self-replicates.
Crystals don't self-replicate.
Even DNA doesn't self-replicate, but a living cell can make copies of itself that are 99.9999 accurate…That's astonishing.
How does that happen? It involves a tremendous number of really complex things, including the genetic code, ribosomes, and DNA.
DNA replication and protein synthesis are things that are just too complicated to describe without a semester of biology or chemistry.
If you have to have self-replication to have evolution, how do you get all this?
It couldn't have evolved, because there's no evolution, and that's what I've been studying by using various models (…) there are thresholds, and if you don't start with a cell that already is pretty good at self-replication, you can't do it.
You'll never get living cells, and you'll never get evolution going.”
A Living Cell
It is quite beautiful in its complexity.
(image taken from haleo.co.uk)
Could Life arise from natural processes, without any outside intelligent intervention?
“Spoiler alert...Not. A. Chance.
There are very few laws of science and nature. A scientific law only becomes a law because the observations have been consistent, repeated numerous times, never failing and with no contradictions. There are two scientific and natural laws which specifically address this idea that life could arise from natural processes:
The law of biogenesis, and the laws of thermodynamics (specifically the second law of thermodynamics).
The law of biogenesis came out of research conducted by Louis Pasteur in 1864. It was his experiments that led to the Pasteurization process we know of today. Basically, the law of biogenesis is that Life only comes from life, and that like begets like. We have never seen an exception to this scientific and natural law. So any process that produces life from non-life is neither natural, nor scientific because it defies this well established, scientific and natural law. Such a process would be, by very definition, an extra natural / supernatural process!
A miracle.
let's look at the cell
There are very good reasons why life only comes from life. The only way life can arise from a rock sitting in a pond is imagination. Let me give you a quick example of why that is, pointed out to me by my good friend, Stan Lutz, many moons ago.
The cells in your body and brain are composed of, and even controlled by, proteins, the basic building blocks of life. Some proteins act as building blocks, others as enzymes, still others act as hormones. These proteins are built up from smaller components called amino acids.
There’s about 20 different amino acids to choose from and you can think of them like Lego™. You have 20 different Lego pieces to build with, and what you use and how you assemble them radically changes the design and shape of the final construction. In fact, if you get one wrong piece or even the right piece put in in the wrong way, you may not be able to complete your construction. It’s the same way with proteins.
combining amino acids
If you put two amino acids together and you have 20 amino acids to choose from, how many different combinations can you make? 20 x 20 = 400 different combinations. It’s calculated as 20² – 20 options, and 2 in a sequence. If you add a third amino acid to the construction, and it too can be any one of the 20 amino acids available, then you can have 20³ (written out that’s 20 x 20 x 20) = 8,000 different combinations to choose from. Add another amino acid to the construction and you have 20⁴ = 160,000 different combinations. And by the way, during this construction you have to get the correct combination all the way along. You have to add the correct piece out of a choice of 20 pieces, add it in to the construction in the right sequence, over and over again. Or else, like our Lego construction, you will be unable to successfully build the construction.
You can quickly start to see where Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, gets his numbers in his book Life Itself. (1) He used a smaller protein of only 200 amino acids long as an example. The number of combinations is simply written as 20²⁰⁰. This equates to approximately 10²⁶⁰ different combinations. Written out, that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000 combinations of amino acids you can achieve.
how old is the universe?
Effectively, only one of those combinations is the correct one.
To help you grasp the sheer astronomical size of that number, it has been estimated that the total number of atoms in the entire Universe is around 10⁸⁰!
(Yes, someone with apparently too much time on their hands actually sat down and figured that out.)
The universe is claimed by the naturalists to be around 13.8 billion years old – give or take a week or two. I don’t believe that number, but let’s go with it.
13.8 Billion years x 365 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds means the universe is 435,196,800,000,000 seconds old.
more combinations...
So you have 435,196,800,000,000 seconds in which to try out all 10²⁶⁰ different combinations.
So dividing 10²⁶⁰ different combinations by 435,196,800,000,000 seconds means you have to mix and match
2,297,811,013,316,274,384,370,473,312,303,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00
00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different combinations of amino acids every second, for 13.8 billion years to be guaranteed you’ll arrive at the single correct combination of amino acids to construct one protein.
And that was a short protein.
chances are...
Do you know how many proteins you ate for breakfast this morning?
Your body produces at least tens of millions of proteins every day, so you can like, keep on being alive and stuff.
This isn’t a simple formula of odds or chance. What I’ve shown here is what would be required of a process unguided by intelligence to produce one relatively short protein.
This is not at all like the seemingly impossible odds of a major lottery. The odds of winning the lottery can be exceedingly small. But someone, somewhere will win in spite of the exceedingly small odds.
Our protein-formed-by-chance doesn’t even have a chance. The odds are not exceedingly small, they are literally zero. You cannot win this lottery for the simple reason that the lottery cannot be set up with a draw and a prize. It’s physically impossible. There are literally not enough atoms in the universe to make the lottery – the “natural” process by with which to try the astronomical numbers of combinations you need to try for the chance forming of the correct combination.
And then you’d need to repeat that process at least dozens of times more just to make enough proteins to make some basic components of a single cell. And even then, you still do not have “life.”
life could not evolve from non-life
It is a literal, physical impossibility for life to arise from unguided processes. It has to have been assembled by a higher intelligence. So to make claims like “Hey, life evolved here, surely it evolved somewhere else!” is not only a non-sequitur, it’s a nonsensical statement. The impossibility I just described is for the formation of one protein in our entire known universe. So the “odds” against alien life are now infinite x 2 because you will need to accomplish the impossible not just once, but twice within the same universe.
No, life could not evolve from non-life here and so therefore could not have evolved elsewhere. That is a major, scientific reason why we can confidently deduce there is no intelligent, alien life on other planets.
Can you start to see a theme here?
If we were created by a supernatural, hyper-intelligent being, then we should ask the question “Who is that Creator?” It’s important. There’s only one person ever to visit planet earth who claimed He was the Creator incarnate.
the creator
Who demonstrated his supernatural abilities in front of countless witnesses, including multitudes of hostile witnesses.
He demonstrated his ability to go between dimensions, even walking through solid walls into a room, startling those who were gathered there (John 20:19). He was the only one to say “...I am the way, the truth, and the life...” (John 14:6) and then demonstrated his authority to that claim by defying scientific and natural law and doing what the combined sum of all of our best minds on planet earth cannot do: He rose from the dead.
If Jesus Christ is our Creator (and I would contend He is), then the things He said become of paramount importance. He described angels both in heaven, and those cast out of heaven, to earth. (Luke 10:18) We know from the things Jesus said and also the testimonies of multitudes that these angels are extra-natural beings who can take on different forms in our natural world.
"aliens" visiting earth?
If the “aliens” visiting planet Earth are simply fallen angels, then suddenly everything makes sense. Their distinct
hate-on for Christ would make sense, as He is the one they rebelled against and tried to overthrow, only to find themselves hurled out of the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth.
They can’t hurt Christ directly, so they instead hurt those whom He loves: the human race. They still want a kingdom for some strange reason, and so they deceive people and try to start their own kingdom here on earth. Hence their strong interest in a one-world government which, interestingly, the Bible discusses at great length in the final book of Revelations.
That book tells us this one-world government will happen, headed by the “anti-Christ.” If Jesus is the Creator, and these alleged aliens are simply created, fallen angels, then He has power over them. This explains why the “aliens” respond to the name of Jesus Christ when people who have repeatedly been attacked (“abducted”) call upon Him to save them." (taken from "Piercing the Cosmic Veil" - Joseph Jordan & Jason Dezember)
