Cosmic ChemistryJohn C. Lennox, Lion Books, 2021Preface Names this book the same as his opening section of his 2019 book "Can Science Explain Everything?", which in turn he compared to "God's Undertaker" which was the first of his books that I read and which got me hooked on his books. I am reproducing the "two sides" he proposed in "Can Science Explain Everything?"
Part 1: Surveying the Landscape 1. Introduction The introduction is a good source of quotes:
p12
p 2. Matters of Evidence and Faith p19 "..we point out the important principle that statements by scientists are not always statement of science." "Humanity should accept that science has eliminated the justification for believing in cosmic purpose, and that any survival of purpose is inspired only by sentiment." "It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow' disease and many others., but I think that a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion." p20 Lennox continues to hammer on Dawkins' willingness to assert that faith has no evidence without even attempting to show that it has no evidence. Dawkins' "scientific belief is based upon publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence; its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops." p21 Lennox quotes Romans 1:20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. p22 Lennox quotes approvingly one statement in Dawkins' "The Devil's Chaplain": "Next time that somebody tells you something is true, why not say to them: 'What kind of evidence is there for that?' And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say." But then he uses it to hammer him again with: "One might be forgiven for giving in to the powerful temptation to apply Dawkins' maxim to him- and just not believe anything he says." p22 Cites Alvin Plantinga from "Where the Conflict Really Lies" pg xi: "the new atheists are but a temporary blemish on the face of serious conversation in this crucial area." p23 Survey of scientists belief in God, sent to 1000 in 1910 with 70% reply Response to "I believe that science and religion occupy non-overlapping domains of discourse and can peacefully coexist (NOMA)" Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University survey: 50% of evangelicals believe science and religion can work together. But for general population of U.S. only 38% belived so. p25 Returns to his statement p19 "..we point out the important principle that statements by scientists are not always statement of science." and then suggests "it could be worth exploring what exactly the relationships between science and atheism and between science and theism are. In particular, which, if any, of these diametrically opposing worldviews of theism and atheism does science support?" 3. A Historical Perspective: The Forgotten Roots of Science and Arguments from Design p26 Starts with the Paley Watchmaker quote. p27 Note the monotheism of Melvin Calvin (Nobel prize, Calvin Cycle) like the quotes of Psalm 19:1 and Psalm 94:9 which points to the one God who formed life. Counters the popular conception that the ancient Greeks set aside polytheism to pave the way for the scientific revolution. The Hebrews' monotheism was much earlier. p28-29 Discusses "argument to design" in which we expect a creating God to show design and find it, and "argument from design" in which we find design in creation an infer a Creator. Cites the teleological argument from Del Ratzsch. p30-31 Interesting discussion about Hebrews far preceding Greeks in rejecting polytheism - so it was not the Greeks who aided science's agenda. The Greeks got so messed up in polytheism that they eventually emerged on one of two trajectories - Xenophanes (and the Hebrews) believed in one creator God, and the other branch was atheist and materialist. Tempting to do graphic, and tempting to do concept map of all these philosophers to help me keep track. p30-36 would be a good place to start with it. Leucippus and his better known student Democritus founded the atomic theory. p32 Feynman quote about the importance of the atomic hypothesis. p32 #3 Democritus a younger contemporary of Socrates (469-399BC) and in School of Athens of Plato(423-327) and Aristotle(385-323). Plato "unreason and chance...or ..ordered and governed by a marvelous intelligence and wisdom." p32-36 Material I need to clarify my picture of Aristotle and his four ways and Aquinas and his five ways. Plutarch's view of chance on p34. Also discussion of Maimonides, whose statue we viewed while walking on the street in Cordoba, Spain after viewing the massive mosque structure with imbedded Christian cathedral. P36 quote Aquinas and Ward. The 5th way of Aquinas is the teleological argument. Note the difference from Aristotle. p36-37 Lots of thinkers on p36-37 and useful list of theist scientists to use for the earlier list. p38 Dawkins and Chinese picture. p38 "We are by no means claiming that all aspects of religion in general and Christianity in particular have contributed to the rise of science.What we are suggesting is that the biblical doctrine of a unique Creator God, who is responsible for the existence of and order in the universe, has played an important role in the history of science." p39 Whitehead and Torrance on the examples of hindering science by religious ideas. Brooke and Harrison contribute to the discussion. Newtonian Mechanics and Determinism p40 Some critique of Aristotle for trying to derive from philosophical principles how the universe ought to be. There had to be a departure from such an approach to the idea of a contingent universe. Examples were Galileo and Kepler who "went and looked". p41 Isaac Newton had a strong theistic worldview, but the laws of mechanics which he discovered contributed to an atheist-materialist worldview. Cites quantum physicist Henry Stapp. Interesting idea that if Newtonian deterministic mechanics prevails where everything is determined by the initial conditions and the deterministic laws, this destroys the basis for human moral responsibility. Of course the quantum view must enter here, but Lennox defers detailed discussion of this until Ch 21 p42 Myths of Conflict: Galileo and the Roman Catholic Church, Huxley and Wilberforce p42-47 Review of these two. p47 Historian of science Colin Russell "The common belief that ...the actual relations between religion and science over the last few centuries have been marked by deep and enduring hostility ... is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability" p48 "..institutional power played a key role.Huxley was on a crusade to ensure the supremacy of the emerging new class of professional scientists against the privileged position of clerics, however intellectually gifted. He wanted to make sure that it was the scientists who wielded the levers of power. The legend of a conquered bishop slain by a professional scientist suited that crusade, and it was exploited to the full." p48 Lennox notes that his debate with Richard Dawkins was in the very same place as the Huxley/Wilberforce debate. p48 Paley and his watch p48-50 Discussion of the watchmaker argument. p51 Interesting quote of Bertrand Russell, not known for his sympathy to theism. "This argument contends that,on a survey of the known world, we find things which cannot plausibly be explained as the product of blind natural forces, but are much more reasonably to be regarded as evidences of a beneficent purpose. This argument has no formal logical defect; its premises are empirical and it s conclusion professes to be reached in accordance with the usual canons of empirical inference. The question whether it is to be accepted or not turns therefore, not on general metaphysical questions, but on comparatively detailed considerations." p51-56 Has to deal with Hume in some detail since Hume is considered to be a major enemy of design. p51 Of course he has to deal with Hume in this discussion of Paley to "comment on the claim that his arguments were demolished by David Hume's earlier onslaught against design. He quotes a segment from Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Another part of Hume's argument against design in this work was set in the form of a discussion in which a person Cleanthes is addressed: "If we see a house, Cleanthes, we conclude, with the greatest certainty, that it had an architect or builder; for this is precisely that species of effort that we have experienced to proceed from that species of cause. But surely you will not affirm, that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house, that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect. The dissimilitude is so striking, that the utmost you can pretend to is a presumption concerning a similar cause..." p52 Hume's argument against design on a purely inductive basis begins to look a lot weaker, as observed by philosopher Eliot Sober, compared to judgments of likelihood. "You don't have to observe the process of Intelligent Design and chance at work in different worlds in order to maintain that the two hypotheses confer different probabilities on your observation." p52 Hume's dependence upon induction means he's out of luck with unrepeatable things that happened in the past. Points to abduction, and notes "Hume's argument leaves abduction untouched." p52 Hume seems to perceive that attacking evidence by analogy makes a strong case against design. Lennox's response: "Also, it is easy to overlook the fact that analogical argument by no means exhausts all inferences to design. The impression of design in nature is not so much argument by analogy as it is a perception: living systems simply look designed. Del Ratzsch says that proponents of design arguments were and are convinced that the evidences they adduced for design are the kind of thing that a mind might generate. This means that their evidential power does not depend on prior known instances of design." p53 Cites Ratzsch "When we see a text version of the Gettysburg Address, that text says mind to us in a way totally unrelated to any induction or analogy from past encounters with written texts ..intricate, dynamic, stable, functioning order of the sort we encounter in nature was frequently placed in this category. Such order was taken to be suggestive of minds in that it seemed nearly self-evidently the sort of thing minds, and so far as was definitively shown, only minds were prone to produce. It was a property whose mind-resonating character we could unhesitatingly attribute to intent." p53 Lennox's next two paragraphs contain strong arguments against Hume's case against Paley. "Paley's argument ... is considerably strengthened by the observation that .. there are many kinds of systems within living organisms for which the term 'molecular machine' is entirely appropriate." p54 Continues with Ratzsch's arguments. p55 Polkinghorne "So where is natural theology today, two centturies after William Paley? The short answer is, 'Alive annd well, having learned from past experience to lay claim to insight rather than logical necessity, and to be able to live in a friendly relationship with science, based on complementarity rather than rivalry.'" p55 Intelligent Design p55 Review of Anthony Flew's coming to "find the design argument convincing". p55 Del Ratzsch in 'Science and its Limits' gives definition "A design is an intentionally produced (or exemplified) pattern, where a pattern is an abstract structure that resonates, matches or meshes with mind, with cognition." Lennox reflects that perhaps the 'intelligent' in ID is redundant since design implies some intelligence. Then moans a bit about the controversy and the connection of ID with YEC creationism. p57 Lennox suggests that we might use "intelligent causation" rather than ID to avoid all the misleading rhetoric. p58 Interesting discussion of Nagel's comments on intelligent design. Nagel also critical of standard evoluttionary theory. Part 2: Science and Explanation 4. Science, its Presuppositions, Scope, and Methodology p62 Cites C.S Lewis "Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator." p62 The international character of science "truly international community transcending all kinds of frontiers.." p63 "It is precisely because of this ideal of an international community, free to get on with its scientific work untrammeled by extraneous and potentially divisive intrusions,that scientists understandably begin to get nervous when metaphysics threatens to rear its head, or worse still when the God question appears." p63 Defining science p64 .. and the other from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out "As a matter of fact, science can be defined as a method for, and a body of information obtained by, trying to answer only questions which can be put into the form: If I do this, what will happen? The technique of it, fundamentally, is 'Try it and see.' Then you put together a large amount of information from such experiences. All scientists will agree that a question - any question, philosophical or other - which cannot be put into the form that can be tested by experiment .. is not a scientific question; it is outside the realm of science." This section is very good and hard to condense any further. Several good quotes, but my favorite ones were from Feynman. p 66-67 From The Meaning of it All" p26-27 "All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe it is of very great value and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to solve any problem that has not beeen solved before, you must leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to pursue the possibility that you do not have it exactly right. Ohterwise , if ou have made up your mind already, you might not solve it... So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of knowledge of varying degrees of certainty." p66 Repeated Experimentation p67 Abduction: Inference to the Best Explanation 5. Worldviews and Their Relation to Science: Naturalism and its Shortcomings p p p p 6. Theism and its Relationship to Science: God of Gaps, Complexity of God, and Miracles p114 Dawkins' complexity of God objection p114-118 Extended discussion to refute Dawkins' "complexity of God" objection. Dawkins' statement: "Any God capable of designing a universe ... must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide." The God Delusion p147 p114 Lennox points out that Dawkins' major logical error here is the presumption that explanations must proceed from the simple to the complex, like atoms to molecules to proteins. He asserts that Dawkins' argument falls apart like a house of cards when you consider that simple phenomena have complex foundations as explanations, the key being explanatory power:
p118 Miracles, chance, and the supernatural God and nature p118 God is the reason the universe exists p119 Francis Crick "The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going." p119-131 Mostly a discussion of God's creative activity and discussion of miracles, noting the kinds of objections to the possiblity of miracles. p120 One of the most scornful rejections of miracles comes, unsurprisingly, from Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion", p187 "The nineteenth century is the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When pressed, many educated Christians are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know that it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked." Lennox counters by naming Sir John Polkinghorne, Dr Francis Collins, and Dr William Phillips, physics Nobel laureate, all of whom have publicly asserted belief in the resurrection. p120-121 Cites Ian Hutchinson, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, who says that "he and millions of other scientists around the world think that the literal miracle of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is not only possible but it actually happened." A short quote is added on p124 "Still, the fact that the resurrection was impossible in the normal course of events was as obvious in the first century as it is for us. Indeed that is why it was seen as a great demonstration of of God's power." p121 Cites Francis Collins on miraculous events: "It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand." p121-129 Extensive discussion of David Hume in regard to miracles and other issues related. p121 "David Hume .. asserted .. that miracles are 'violations of the laws of nature'. He regarded the laws as firmly established by experience and so the argument against them based on experience is as complete as you could ask for." p122 Hume: "A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined. ... It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must,therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation." p123 "Philosopher Anthony Flew, a world authority on Hume and once a much-feted atheist, radically revised his assessment of Hume": "in the light of my new-found awareness that Hume was utterly wrong to maintain that we have no experience, and hence no genuine ideas, of making things happen and preventing things from happening, of physical necessity and physical impossibility. Generations of Humeans have ... been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws ... Hume's scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study." p125 Just touches on reflection of the role of quantum mechanics and divine action and refers off to Alvin Plantinga and his book "Where the Conflict Really Lies". p125-126 Quotes of philosopher Daniel von Wachter relevant to the possibility of miracles. p127 and 128 two relevant quotes of C. S. Lewis. Lennox precedes the quote with the comment "In denying that there is a Creator, the atheists are kicking away the basis for their own position. As Lewis puts it: "If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us - like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. It can be trusted only if quite a different metaphysic is true. If the deepest thing in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves - if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from it - then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature's Creator and ours." p109 of Miracles p129 At the close of this extensive discussion of David Hume, he adds a somewhat surprising quote sympathetic to theism and intelligent design! "The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion." From Introduction There is also a similar thought from the participant Cleanthes in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that we seem to see "the image of mind reflected on us from innumerable objects in nature." Lennox's response: "Many who quote Hume assiduously against miracles do not seem to be aware of his sympathy with intelligent design." Part 3: Understanding the Universe and Life 7. Understanding the Universe: The Beginning and Fine Tuning p p p 8. The Wonder of the Living World p p p p 9. The Genetic Code p p p p 10. A Matter of Information p p p p 11. Algorithmic Information Theory p p p p 12. Life's Solution: Self-Organization p p p p Part 4: The Modern Synthesis 13. Life's Solution: Evolution? p p p 14. Evolution: Asking Hard Questions p p p p 15. The Nature and Scope of Evolution p p p p 16. Natural Selection p p p p 17. The Edge of Evolution p p p p 18. The Mathematics of Evolution p p p p Part 5: The Information Age 19. Systems Biology p298 Intro highlights McClintock, Noble, and James Shapiro (McLintock's student and collaborator). "Can an organism modify its own genome? " McClintock's work recognized in 2016 meeting of Royal Society, which recalls the Wistar Institute meeting in 1966, "Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution". p298 Nobel Laureate Peter Medawar introduced the Wistar meeting: "The immediate cause of this conference is a pretty widespread sense of dissatisfaction about what has come to be thought of as the accepted evolutionary theory in the English-speaking world, the so-called neo-Darwinian Theory ... There are objections made by fellow scientists who feel that,in the current theory,something is missing ...These objections to current neo-Darwinian theory are very widely held among biologists generally, and we must on no account, I think, make light of them. The very fact that we are having this conference is evidence that we are not making light of them." p299 As a part of the Wistar conference, "mathematician D.S.Ulam argued that it was highly improbable that the eye could have evolved by the accumulation of small mutatioins, because p p p p p p p p p 20. The Origin of Information: A Word-Based World p p p p 21. Brain, Mind, and the Quantum World p p p p Epilogue: Beyond Science But Not Beyond Reason It is plausible, as an inference to the best explanation, that the universe and life in it appear to be products of a divine Mind because that is precisely what they are.
p367 Comments by: Neils Bohr "I therefore suggested that the very existence of life might be taken as a basic fact in biology in the same sense as the quantum of action has to be regarded in atomic physics as a fundamental element irreducible to classical physical concepts." Neils Bohr, 'Light and Life', Nature 308, pp421-423,456-459. Neils Bohr's father was invested in microbiology and has the "Bohr Effect" for enhancing oxygen release in cells from hemoglobin named after him. Sara Walker and Paul Davies James Tour "We synthetic chemists should state the obvious. The appearance of life on Earth is a mystery. The proposals offered thus far to explain life's origin make no scientific sense." Inference Online, Inference 3(2) p368-374 Amazing reflection by Lennox on his quest. p368 "I have argued in the foregoing that the results of the natural sciences - cosmology, physics, chemistry, and biology - give strong support for the intuition that there is a supernatural Mind/Logos behind the universe and life." p369-370 "Although there are many questions that the natural sciences as such cannot address, nevertheless the universe contains rationally accessible clues as to its provenance. It's rational intelligibility, for instance, points towards the existence of a Mind that was responsible both for the universe and for our minds. It is for this reason that we are able to do science and to discover the beautiful mathematical structures that underlie observable phenomena. Not only that, but our increasing insight into the fine-tuning of the universe increases the sense that we are meant to be here. All of this constitutes a rational argument from design. However, it works even more strongly as an argument to design. That is, if we believe on other grounds that there is a Mind behind the universe, that there is a God, then we might expect to find that the universe is rationally intelligible, that it is fine-tuned for life, that life is based on information, etc. Since that is what we have found, it strengthens the evidence for the existence of God considerably by a process of cumulative evidence." "In addition, if there really is a Mind behind the universe, and if that Mind intends us to be here, the really big question is: Why are we here? What is the purpose of our existence? It is this question above all that exercises the human heart. As we have seen, scientific analysis of the universe cannot give us the answer, any more than scientific analysis of Aunt Matilda's cake could tell us why she had made it. Scientific probing of the cake may tell us that it is good for humans, even that it was highly likely to have been designed specifically with humans in mind, since it is fine-tuned to their nutritional requirements. In other words, science may be able to point towards the conclusion that there is a purpose behind the cake, but precisely what that purpose is, science cannot tell us. It would be absurd to look for it within the cake. Only Aunt Matilda can reveal it to us." "The natural sciences are not embarrassed by their inability at this point. They simply recognize that they are not equipped to answer such questions. It would therefore be a serious logical error only to look within the ingredients of the universe - its material, structures, and processes - in order to find out what its purpose is and what we are here for. The ultimate answer, if there is one, will have to come from outside the universe,from something or someone who stands in a similar relationship to the universe to Aunt Matilda does to her cake." p p
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