Interlude:

The Theory of Evolution.

I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to bear with me for a while. I want to discuss the theory of evolution and what's wrong with it, and I can't unless I get into some pretty deep water. Just hang on, and I'll try to hold your head up; but realize that I'm going to be summarizing things that would take a fairly large book to do justice to, but we can't get on with a discussion of the New Morality and be honest with the facts unless we dive in. So take a deep breath.

I could stand corrected on this, but I think that Darwinism is the first agenda-driven theory in the natural sciences. (There have been others since, of which global warming is an egregious example, and previously there were theories not in the natural sciences--for instance, Marx's views were almost certainly driven by his outrage at the way workers were being treated in his time.) Whether from the beginning this was how it was in Darwin's mind, or whether it rapidly got that way from people who saw what it could imply, it certainly has been used as a vehicle by which it is "scientifically" proved that no God is needed to explain how the world came to be the way it is. This is why it has to be looked at very, very carefully, to see if the data haven't been fudged to lead to the conclusion desired.

But this sword cuts both ways. And, for this reason, I want to begin with a word to the "seven-day creationists." If you say that evolution can't be true, because we've got to believe what God said, and he said he made the world in seven days, then I have a problem for you to consider. Presumably, you hold this because you have to believe what the Bible literally says, not some interpretation you "feel comfortable with."

The problem is this: Genesis 2:2 says (I'll give the King James Version, because that seems to be what's relevant for the people I'm discussing this with) "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made." How do you reconcile this with the literal meaning of John 5: 17: "My father worketh hitherto, and I work."? The Greek for "hitherto" is hes arti, which means "hitherto" in the sense of "up to the present." The Greek is clear; it can't mean (as the English sometimes can) "at some time before"; and this is confirmed by the use of the present tense, "worketh," not "hath worked." This ergazetai, the present tense after "up to now," is used because Greek does not have a perfect progressive tense, "has been working," and using the perfect would imply that the Father has "now" stopped. So the only meaning of the Greek (and the KJV English) has to be, "My Father has been working up to now, and I am working too." or, as the New English Bible translates, "has never stopped working."

So the literal sense of John 5:17 says that God never rested "up to now" (and is still working even now), and the literal sense of Genesis 2 says that God finished all his work and then rested on the seventh day. So you either have to interpret one passage or the other not in a strictly literal sense, or the Bible contradicts itself. To put it another way, John 5:17 clearly implies that the seventh day hasn't got here yet.

And, as I mentioned earlier, St. Augustine interpreted the seven days of creation not as literal 24-hour days, but as the whole of creation, including history, with the "seventh day" the end of time; and most Protestants go back (with Luther) to Augustine. So it's hardly un-Biblical to be a Christian and accept that some kind of evolution actually occurred. Certainly the Pope (no New Moralist he) thinks so.

The reason I say this is that I'm going to show that if you once are willing to take the fossil evidence and so on (which is overwhelming, it really is) as establishing the fact of some kind of evolution, then examining it fairly screams that it can't be just due to chance, but has to be under the control of a benevolent being who directs it (and even helps it surpass itself) while respecting its reality. In other words, if you want to believe in a chance evolution, you are being more irrational than believing in a God and even a Jesus who rose from the dead (since his body, having been alive, had nothing in principle preventing it from re-living).

With that out of the way, though I realize that by saying it I have perhaps turned off a good chunk of my Religious Right readers (which would be a shame, because we're on the same side--but truth is truth), let us try to take an honest and fearless look at evolution and see what it implies. And I want to look at radical evolution, including the evolution of the whole universe from the Big Bang on.

In the beginning.

Physics doesn't want to examine the Big Bang itself, largely because it spells trouble. We know several things from physics which no one disputes: First, any system which explodes is unstable. Second, any system in equilibrium will remain as it is unless its equilibrium is disturbed from outside. Third, energy as we now see it isn't lost, but just transformed when it leaves a system (the First Law of Thermodynamics).

Now the observations on which the Big Bang theory is based are that the farther out you look through our ever-more-powerful telescopes, the longer it takes for light to get to you, since light travels at a finite speed: 186,000 miles per second. So the light from the sun we see now started out some seven minutes ago (it had to go 93,000,000 miles). But distances to stars are just a tad farther. The closest star is some three and a half light-years away, meaning that the light we see from it started out three and a half years ago (so it's 186,000 x 60 x 60 x 24 x 365.25 x 3.5 miles away; get out your calculator and multiply it out, if you want--it's a lot of miles). Well it turns out that for various reasons, astronomers can say that some of the other galaxies (systems of stars whirling around each other) are millions and even billions of light-years away. And that means that when we see these distant galaxies, the light that finally gets now to our eyes had to have left them millions or billions of years ago. We see them now, in other words, as they existed those billions of years ago.

Another thing that's observed is that the farther out we look, the redder these stars appear (and by the spectra--rainbows--emitted by their elements, we know that this isn't because they've got more red stuff in them). This is only explainable if they are moving away from us, faster and faster as you go back in time (that is, slower and slower as time goes on). And this means that everything in the universe is getting farther away from everything else as time progresses, or the whole universe (that is, the set of all material objects) is expanding, but more slowly as time goes on. Which in turn means that it was very small many many years ago.

In fact, it was so small several billion years ago (the actual time is not important) that it was a very dense, small mass of all the stuff there is, so dense and small that it was unstable and exploded.

At this point, physicists stop, and say, "We'll concede the fact, but we won't ask questions about it. We can't." Well, sure they can; they're just timid. Because there are three possibilities. (1) Either the material universe suddenly came into existence (with nothing material to be "made out of"), (2) it came out of preexisting material, which was in equilibrium beforehand, or (3) the explosion was the result of a previous phase of collapse of the same material which is now expanding--in an eternal cycle of expansion slowing and then stopping, once gravitational attraction is greater than the explosive force that started it, and then collapsing, faster and faster, back to the unstable lump that blows up in a new Big Bang.

The third alternative has been explored by physicists; but the problem is that in order for it to happen, there has to be an enormous amount of mass beyond what we can observe. So some scientists have simply said, "Okay, that mass exists, but can't be seen." The trouble with this, of course, is that it's a pure act of faith that there is this mass; there's no evidence for it but this third alternative.

On the first hypothesis, obviously there has to be something that caused the material of the universe to begin to exist in such a way that it exploded, and started its own activity of formation; and on the second hypothesis, something other than the material universe would have to have interfered with it, making it unstable. Either of these two sounds like a good candidate for a God of some sort.

The point, of course, is that right from the get-go, it's not possible simply to accept the fact of the Big Bang as if it were self-explanatory, because, as unstable, it isn't. So if you're honest with the data, you have to assume something not observable: either a "creator," a "disturber," or a bunch of matter that can't be detected. No one of these is preferable, based on the observed data, to any other--unless, of course, you subscribe to the dogma that there can't be anything other than the material universe

The driving force.

Now then, we know the driving force of the universe: the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that "the entropy of the universe is always increasing." When I asked my professor in thermodynamics class what entropy was, he pointed to the equation and said, "This part of the expression," and when I asked "Yes, I know; but what does that refer to? What does it describe? What is entropy?" He looked at me and said, in effect, "The equation works, so just learn it." But of course, entropy isn't a set of letters and numbers; those things are a mathematical language that describes something-or-other. Well, when I turned it over and looked at what was going on, what this Law amounts to is this: Any interaction involving energy always loses some energy out of the system of interacting objects; the entropy isn't a "something"; it's the amount of loss of energy from the system "into the universe" (i.e. outside the system) because (by the First Law of Thermodynamics) the energy doesn't just vanish; it's there, but "free," outside the system, as a lower-grade energy. (To be fair to my thermodynamics professor, he said this, more or less.)

So what the Second Law of Thermodynamics amounts to is this: Any unstable physical system changes from a higher-energy state to a lower-energy state when it interacts with its environment, spilling the excess energy into the environment. That means that its equilibrium is its "ground state": the lowest energy-level possible for that type of system. It also implies (for reasons I won't bore you with) that systems which are more organized tend naturally to break up and become less organized.

Add something from General Relativity and we can take a look at what happened immediately after the Big Bang. Einstein said that space (by which he meant the path that anything moving had to follow) was curved around massive objects. Now the initial material of the universe was a colossally massive object; and so the extremely high radiation of this explosion (much more energetic than heat or visible light) would be bent into a very tight circle, and come back on itself, so that the photons would tend to knock against each other as they completed their circuits. At this point, by the way, there wasn't anything we could call "stuff" any more; there was just this super-light. (I can't resist: "And God said, 'let there be light,' and there was light.")

But one of the ways photons can interact, or interfere with each other, is what is called "pair production" in which they don't just make brighter or dimmer light, but the energy is now wrapped into itself in a new way, giving us, for instance, an electron and a positron (which still has electricity and magnetism, but in a new form, as a field, and now has mass, the tendency to resist motion, and the source of a gravitational field of its own), and probably other, more massive particles, depending on the energy of the light that interacted.

Stop a second. Where did this new energy (called "mass") come from? Obviously, from the light. The first thing to note is that it takes an immendolossal amount of light to "restructure" itself into mass; one unit of mass is equal to 3,000,000,000 units of light, as I recall--which is why atomic weapons are so potent, because they convert a tiny amount of mass-energy back into radiation-energy (light). But more importantly, this new form of energy is not just a fancy kind of light; it's different from light (which is just electricity and magnetism), and so while it came from them, it isn't a version of them. In other words, the light is, as it were, "creating" something brand new out of what used to be itself.

Now that potential had to have been built into the light from the beginning, or it couldn't have happened. It wasn't there, except as a potential, from the beginning; but it had to have been there as a potential from the beginning, or there would just be light interfering with itself by being brighter or dimmer.

In any case, since we know in hindsight light has this marvelous potential, we can predict from this tightly-knit, small universe in which light is forced to interact with itself, a transformation into subatomic particles. And, of course, some electrons zipping around space would be bound to hit protons; and so hydrogen atoms would be formed (creating a new form of energy, the internal field of the atom, its "binding energy"); and as the universe expanded and cooled somewhat, these atoms would likely find other hydrogen atoms, and we would see hydrogen molecules, which have their own special form of internal energy, and are not simply "connections" of two atoms; the molecule behaves differently from the parts. And so now we have to say of this initial light that it had the potential to form particles, which themselves have the potential to unite things into something which is different from a sum of the particles themselves.

Once again, the potential to do this had to have been in the light from the beginning; but it wasn't an immediate potential to turn into hydrogen molecules, but only mediately through the formation of subatomic particles with definite properties of their own. Very mysterious, when you think about it.

Fine. But now what you would predict from this is a random distribution of hydrogen molecules. And based on the Second Law, these would not organize themselves further, but would simply stay randomly distributed throughout space.

But they didn't. They coagulated into lumps (clouds), somehow (just by chance, of course), and each cloud had greater mass than a single particle (mass "just happens to be" one of those things which is "additive" when a bunch of things are together), and so the cloud swept their immediate area clean of hydrogen--and eventually, some of these (we can still see plenty of them) got big enough so that they formed a center, drawing all the hydrogen inward, until this center got so hot that the molecules were turned into atoms again, and then the atoms lost their electrons, (notice, we've got destruction of the gain so far) and then the protons banged into each other--but in some cases not so hard as to turn back into light, but hard enough that they fused like a hydrogen bomb (and the "strong force" which lay dormant all the time--or was it even there previously?--made helium nuclei, and then oxygen nuclei, and so on), and a star was born.

But note again that the potential to be oxygen and nitrogen and all the rest had to have been there in the light from the beginning. But this particular potential can only be activated by the catastrophic destruction of the advance that had been made up to this point.

Pay attention to this. The advance is not straight-line. It happens only by the annihilation, as it were, of the "advanced" stage that went before. And all just by chance, of course. Of course.

We can skip the details at this point, though the wonders just keep piling up. But what I want you to pay attention to is that the universe was organizing itself into complex systems--and it's still doing it. Stars are still being formed; and the stars in a given area orbit each other and form galaxies, and it's the galaxies we see moving apart. But if the Second Law of Thermodynamics is what's driving all this, this means that the basic direction of the the universe as a whole is the opposite of what you would predict from the Law, in its probabilistic form.

Now, of course, since this is a probabilistic law, it's possible that the universe could be doing this by itself, just as it's possible that you could win the lottery five times in a row; because with probability, however improbable some event is, the theory never lets you say that it's actually zero. But it's suggestive, no? This is not some isolated event that happened once in the universe; it's the basic direction of the universe as a whole. But predicting from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you would say that the basic direction would be from more organized to less, not from less to more.

What I'm saying is this: Probability predicts that if you do something like drop a dark green dye into the clear water of your swimming pool (as when you add chlorine), it spreads through the water making the whole pool slightly greenish. You never find the slightly greenish water organizing itself into perfectly clear water except for a cupful of dark green stuff in one corner. It could, but you can confidently predict (from probability) that it won't. But that's what seems to be happening with the organizing universe.

And of course, pure probability is all that's operating here, Right? Not.

But before considering what seems to have gone on, I have to make a few remarks about chance and its laws.

A word about probability.

The laws of probability are sometimes called the "laws of chance"; but that is precisely what they are not. Chance, by definition, is what is random, which is another way of saying is not systematic, or "lawful."

I've been pointing to what I'm going to say here when I talked earlier about the "potential" that had to have been there from the beginning. A little experiment will show what I'm driving at. Flip a coin. How often will the heads turn up, in the long run? If you said "Half the number of flips," you win the prize. If I take one of a pair of dice, how often will the one-spot appear on top as I roll it? One-sixth of the time. Oh? Not half? Why not? Because the die has six sides, not two. Ah! So if I had a ten-sided die, the one would appear one-tenth of the time, right? Right. Elementary, my dear Watson.

Now what does this mean? The fact that the die always has the same number of sides for every throw means that this constant structure prevents the results from being totally random, and the ratio of a given possibility to the number of throws will equal the ratio of the real outcome of one throw to the number of possible outcomes in that one throw. (There can be complications, but they're all variations on this basic theme.)

That is, it's the fact that the die always has six sides, only one of which can appear on any throw, means that in the long run any one of them will appear one-sixth of the number of throws. (Technically, what it means is (a) there will not be absolute randomness, and (b) the number you get will not systematically diverge from this number.)

There are two important points here. First, of course, is that the "lawfulness" of the laws of probability is due to the constant underlying structure of what is operating randomly, not to the randomness itself. And you can test this by making a "die" of soft clay and throwing it in such a way that when it hits the table, part of it will flatten, so that on a given throw, the number of "sides" of the "die" will vary from one to infinity. Put a spot somewhere on it, and now tell me what proportion of the time the spot will come on top. You can't. By having everything random, you destroyed all "lawfulness" or statistical predictability. So the laws of probability are not the laws of the chance or random element in what is behaving randomly; they are the laws of what is left over to shine through the random operations.

The second point, and this is a subtle one, is that this basic law of probability is an empirical law, not a law of logic or mathematics. Why not? Well, flip a coin. Have you any reason to expect heads to come up? No. Have you any reason not to expect heads to come up? No. You have no reason to expect either outcome. Now flip the coin three times. Have you any reason to expect three heads? No. Have you any reason to expect that three heads won't come up?

You might say yes, you do, because in the three flips, there are eight possible combinations of heads and tails, and only one of them is three heads. So what? All you're saying here is that three flips is the same as rolling an eight-sided die (with HHH on one face, HHT on another, HTT, on a third, and so on) once. Now. Have you any reason for HHH to come up on this throw? No. Have you any reason for it not to come up? Not really; because if it doesn't, some other face (say HHT) comes up, and there's no reason to expect the one that actually does come up. So you have no real reason for saying that the outcome won't be HHH. Of course you don't.

My point is that a lack of a reason for something is not the same as the presence of a reason for saying it won't happen. There's no reason for saying HHH can't come up. And if you flip the coin eight times, then this is just the equivalent of a 256-sided die, and there's no reason for any one face on this die appearing either; so you can't say that you have a reason for saying that all heads won't happen. The same goes for a die of however many sides you want to name.

Of course, it sort of "stands to reason" that if there are 256 possibilities, only one of which is the one you want, you ought to expect that it won't happen. What I'm saying is that this is not a logical reason for saying it won't happen.

And you have to be careful of of what "stands to reason." It's following a kind of logic that leads to the gambler's delusion. He has in the back of his mind, "Well, my number will either come up or it won't"; and so that gives him the kind of gut feeling that it "stands to reason" his odds of winning are fifty-fifty, no matter what the odds makers say. He'd never consciously reason this way, but something like this is what keeps him playing. The point, however, is that his inclination is just as logical as saying, based on probability, "Forget it; the odds are too high against it."

Similarly, there's the (more sensible, perhaps) gambler's fallacy, also based on logic. You've been flipping the coin (and let's say you know it's not fixed); you got a hundred heads in a row. Wow! But a hundred and one heads in a row is extremely improbable (it is; 2¹⁰¹ is twice as big a number as 2¹⁰⁰ so the actual difference between them is enormous); and so you bet the farm that the next flip will be tails. Your logic is flawless; the only trouble is that it doesn't work. Once you've had 100 heads, then the probability of getting 101 heads in a row is exactly--surprise!--1/2.

My point in all this is that, whatever "stands to reason," the constant number of sides doesn't logically allow you to predict (i.e. give you a positive reason for predicting) anything that's going to happen. There is no logical connection between the possibilities involved in one event and the ratio of outcomes of any given one to the total number of tries. There's nothing to prevent the outcomes from being absolutely random. That is, there's nothing logically inconsistent in saying that if you threw a die six hundred million times, you'd get six hundred million ones, or five hundred million ones, one two, and all the rest threes. Or any other combination. And that's true of six trillion or any other number of tries.

So what I am saying is that the real world happens to be so constructed that the laws of probability actually work, and the gambler's delusion and the gambler's fallacy don't.

That's a very important point. It has to do with the structure of the world, not "chance." Chance by itself explains nothing, allows the prediction of nothing. Probability allows for prediction, in spite of (partial) randomness, because that's just the way the world is. But it didn't have to be this way; it could have been totally random. But it isn't. How come? Just by chance, of course. Of course.

Are you beginning to get my drift? We have a world whose beginning (as unstable) can't be accounted for by just what is in it, and which "just happens" to have a structure such that all these amazing new things "just happen" to emerge so that, contrary to what you would predict from the probabilistic law driving the universe, it organizes itself into something "wonderfully, fearfully made," as the psalmist says--just by chance, of course.

The leap to life.

Another rough spot is coming. When we get from the destruction of a star a smaller mass cooling in the presence of another star (that is, a planet, an extremely unlikely event in itself), then it might just happen that this planet now can form the kind of molecules we find on earth, with water and so on, because it's now cool enough.

And the most complex inanimate chemical is the carbon chain called a virus. Viruses are not alive; but they look a lot like what is in the nucleus of a living cell. What's the difference between them and a simple living organism, and how do you get from one to the other?

That's two questions. As to the first, a virus is a complex chemical, which, however, is in equilibrium (it just stays as it is unless interfered with). But living organism starts existing in an unstable condition whose energy is both too high for it to be in equilibrium physically (so it loses energy with every act it performs, like an obedient slave of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, trying to get to its ground state), and too low for it to be what biologically it "wants" to be--so it spontaneously pulls in energy and material from the environment, transforms them into itself, and gains energy and complexity, until it reaches its high-energy biological equilibrium; and there it stops growing and maintains itself at this super-high (physically unstable) energy level for the rest of its life by absorbing energy when it falls below this level, and getting rid of the excess when it's above it.

But of course, its nature as a physical body wins out, it seems, in the end, though as living it's fighting this physical nature all the time to maintain its biological equilibrium, and it loses the struggle and dies, and then decays to its ground state. But in the process, as if it knew that as an individual body it was doomed, it creates another body with the same form of organization (but with a different level of biological equilibrium that it "points toward" as living), which survives it, so that the form of living body (the species) goes on indefinitely, in spite of the physico-chemical tendency of everything to run down and stop.

Now I ask you, how can the tendency of any physical or chemical system to "run down" account for the tendency of a living system to "run up and stay there," especially when it is struggling against this physical tendency in it all the time? You're asking the force of nature to do what is directly the opposite of what it is trying to do, while at the same time it does what it is trying to do. That doesn't make sense.

In other words, the leap from non-life to life is not only improbable based on the laws of physics and chemistry; it's impossible. It is directly contrary to them; and the physics and chemistry of the very system in question are constantly fighting this biological tendency. That is, from physics and chemistry, it isn't just that you couldn't predict that it would happen (even if extremely unlikely); you can positively predict that it can't, and therefore won't happen, because it goes against what these forces are trying to do.

Now we know (from geology) that the earth existed for millions of years with no life on it. Yet life suddenly emerged at one point. We also know that, since every living thing has genetic material in common with every other living thing, we seem to have all developed from one leap millions of years ago from the inanimate to life, which then proliferated into what we now see. But the point is that that one leap is an impossibility, based on physics and chemistry.

So what do you do? You either say, "Something is fooling around with the physical objects here and raising them to a new level they can't attain by themselves," or you say, "Well, it just seems impossible; but it must be possible somehow, because it happened; and therefore, there's a physical law that we just don't know that explains it."

Isn't the faith of the materialistic scientist touching? Rather than draw the logical conclusion from the evidence as it presents itself to him, he resorts to some occult--but material, always material--force that wars against the very physical laws he claims are the only things that exist.

(And I'm willing to bet that I haven't converted any New Moralist who's reading this. This faith they have, far from being the most logical conclusion based on the evidence, is impervious to evidence.)

Now then, back to probability. The DNA molecules in even the simplest bacterium are horrendously complex. But the thing that makes DNA DNA is that it's an enormously long carbon chain, with things like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and so on sticking out at intervals (these are the genes), and it just happens that, like other nucleic molecules, the elements sticking out of the chain attract elements to them, which can (by chance) hitch together by a stronger chemical bond than the one that attracted them to the chain, and form a chain themselves, which breaks away. (The set of all these genes in an organism is the "genome." We just listed all of them for humans; that was what the human genome project did.)

The DNA chain just happens (by chance, of course) to be constructed so that the atom on the tail end attracts a copy of the atom on the head end, and the next-to-tail atom attracts a copy of the next-to-head atom, and so on, so that the molecule that gets attached and then breaks away is an exact copy in reverse of the original DNA molecule.

Now what is the probability of something like this happening? On the order, I would say, of trillions if not quintillions to one against. After all, if one event is unlikely (that the one atom on the tail of the parent would attract one on the child that happens to be the same as the one on the head of the parent), and you also need another unlikely event also (the one next to the tail which just happens to be the same as the one next to the head), and both have to happen, then the improbabilities are multiplied, not added--for the same reason that it's 1/6 probable that a one will come up on a single die, but 1/36 probable for snake eyes with two dice (since there are now 36 possible combinations of sides, and only one is snake eyes).

So even if there were only five carbon atoms in the chain, the probability that it would form a replica of itself is millions to one against (given that it's unlikely that any actual molecule would be formed at all by stuff that stuck to its outside). But here we have chains of carbon atoms that are hundreds and hundreds of atoms long.

Add to this that these molecules are extremely fragile (as we can see from mutations), and so it's extremely unlikely that any self-replicating molecule could last long enough (even in that "primordial soup" they used to hypothesize existed--against which there's now a good deal of evidence) to reproduce even once, let alone suddenly spread all over the place. But it "just happened," presumably, to be in a benign environment--which it proceeded to transform by its own waste products (remember, it's pulling in energy and material all the time and transforming it and discarding what it can't use).

And just by chance, it happened that the waste of one organism was the food for another which just happened to be one of its offspring. Just by chance. The odds against something like this aren't just staggering, they're mind-boggling.

And we know from bringing organisms into new ecologies that there are three possibilities here. By far the most likely is that the organism will die because it's not adapted to the environment. Second, it might be like the kudzu plant, and find itself so well adapted that it destroys everything else, including its own food supply, and so everything dies. Notice, this is the natural tendency of any organism. It doesn't care about what's around it except insofar as it can use it for its own development. And it doesn't know that it's not supposed to go too far or it'll kill itself off in the process; it just "does its thing."

The third possibility is that this natural tendency of the organism is (by chance, of course, of course) thwarted by the selfishness of the other organisms, but just to the degree that it fits right in, and its selfish use turns out to be a contribution to the environment, and the other organisms' selfish use of it turns out to be a basic benefit to it. Just by chance. The probability of this happening even once is infinitesimal, so close to zero that you couldn't see any difference.

But of course it does happen; it has happened billions and billions of times. And so the basic selfishness of the living organism (which uses up the environment for its own benefit) is cheated into being a marvelous cooperation with all its neighbors; love is brought out of hate, if you want to put it that way.

Now as I said, you don't predict from the laws of probability that the water in your swimming pool is going to collect itself into a cupful of pure chlorine in a poolful of pure water. And here we have events that are billions--gazillions, inquantillions--of times more unlikely than this.

But there's more. At any stage, an organism or virus like some super-ebola could emerge which would be able to eat up everything under the sun, including itself, and so it would eat itself and everything else right out of existence. That this isn't a far-fetched scenario is demonstrated by the fear we have in importing foreign organisms into a new ecology. It's what scares the pants off those who are against genetically altered organisms getting into the environment. It's not only conceivable, it seems to be rather likely.

And that's by no means all you need for evolution to happen. At each stage of advance, the organism--just by chance--has to have the potential to mutate into another organism that (a) can survive, (b) is better adapted to the environment it finds itself in, and (c) won't so ruin the environment that you don't have a regression of practically everything else. Any one of these is billions-upon-billions-to-one unlikely; but unless all three occur in an unbroken stream from the first organism to what we have today, evolution either stops in its tracks or goes backwards toward destruction. The stream doesn't have to be straightforward, without blind alleys appearing and then disappearing; but it has to be there, just as when you get into a maze, there is a way out, even though you might take a while to find it.

And remember, the laws of probability are laws of the structure of the universe, not "laws of chance." But according to these laws, not only is each event horrendously unlikely, but the improbabilities multiply insofar as they all have to happen, and happen in sequence. The upshot of this is the following.

Simply on the grounds of probability, the unlikelihood that biological evolution would occur is so great that it would be impossible to write so large a number.

Now I don't know about you, but if I were playing dice with someone and he threw a hundred twelves in a row, I wouldn't just sit back on my haunches and say, "My, my, what an extremely improbable event!" I'd say, "Let me look at those dice; they've been fixed."

Precisely. You have to make an enormous act of faith in randomness to take even the probability-aspect of all of this and say, "It's all just due to chance; there's no intelligence behind it fixing the dice." Let me put it another way: What you would predict from the laws of probability is just exactly the opposite of what actually happened in evolution; it's just that, since the laws never reach a zero probability, you can't (based on these laws) deny that the whole thing could have happened, however irrational it might be to say that it did happen.

But that's the faith of the Darwinian evolutionist.

Now let me add something that molecular biologists have discovered fairly recently. The simplest advance (like a light-sensitive spot on some organisms, which is supposed gradually to have developed into that wondrous thing we call the eye) is, at the molecular level, not simple at all, but an enormously complex technological marvel, each of whose parts has to be there and function, or the whole thing is useless. It's like a watch. If you take out even one gear or spring, the watch won't run, and it just sits there, a lump weighing down your wrist.

What these people are saying is that "classical" natural selection can't account for the molecular structure of these "simple" proto-organs, because the original view of natural selection is that slight modifications which were better adapted survived and led to greater complexity when they got modified. But how do you construct all the parts of this biological watch by gradual accretion? Until the whole thing is there, it has no function and is just an impediment--which means that natural selection would select away from it long before it formed.

So you have to accept a kind of "catastrophic advance," with a mutation that just happened to be "defective" in a thousand different ways at once, and the thousand--surprise, surprise!--just happened to work in this new way which adapted the whole organism much better than before to its environment.

That these organs got formed seems to be without doubt. How they got formed is the question. The improbability of a mutation so complex that it would produce a whole functioning organ isn't just enormous; there's no word to express how fantastic the improbability is. And remember, this new organ has to be adapted in such a way that it fits into the environment without destroying it, in spite of the natural tendency of a living thing to regard the environment simply as a vehicle for its use. And this had to have happened hundreds and hundreds of trillions of times for evolution to have reached the stage it's at now.

And remember we know also that there's at least one instance--the leap from the non-living to the living--that can't be accounted for by the laws of nature that underlie the otherwise random operations of probability.

But it turns out that there's a bit more on this point; and here we're at another rough spot. I'll try to be as simple as I can. (I have a bit longer treatment in my textbook Living Bodies, and a somewhat more rigorous one that takes about a hundred pages in Part II of Modes of the Finite.)

The leap to consciousness.

Certain living things developed nervous systems which give them what we call "consciousness." Now for the New Moralist scientist, consciousness is nothing but the nerves firing (discharging bursts of electrical energy) in the brain. Thus, as you read this page, the nerves in your visual centers are firing in complex patterns, and you are conscious of seeing it.

Oh come on, now! If seeing the page is nothing but the energy-output of the nerves, then (a) how can there be energy in the nerves "below the threshold of perception"; that is, without consciousness? Further, (b) if the energy-output in the visual center is identical with the energy-output in the auditory center (and it is), and the nerves in the visual center are identical with those in the auditory center (and they are) how come seeing and hearing are different kinds of consciousness?

But more significantly, you not only see (react to) the page and its words, you know you are seeing it, and what you are seeing. Now this "second act" can't actually be a different act, because, like the pilot light on the stove, if it were, it would not know what it was reacting to; but you do know more than just the fact that your eyes are turned on; you know what the contents of this act of seeing is (for instance, you are probably aware at the moment that you are puzzled by what you are reading). But you don't see yourself seeing or hear yourself hearing; so the knowing-that-you-are-seeing is at one and the same time not the same as the seeing, but not anything but the seeing. The act of seeing contains the whole of itself within itself as (only) part of itself. That is, your act of seeing contains within it the consciousness that you are seeing (as part of the "whole" act of seeing); and simultaneously, the consciousness that you are seeing contains as part of itself the act of seeing (which contains it, as I said, as only part of itself). Put it another way: the act reacts directly to itself as well as to what it's reacting to. It is two acts without actually being two.

I'm sorry; I'm not trying to play games with words; I'm just telling it like it is. And the reason your mind is boggling is that what it implies is that you can't think of acts like this in terms of numbers. They are limited, to be sure, because seeing is only seeing and not hearing; but they are not limited in degree, or measurable, because if they were, then the act (as double itself) would have to have a degree twice as great as the one it has, which is absurd. No form of energy can "do itself" twice in any sense, nor can anything measurable contain the whole within a part of itself.

Something that can't be described in terms of numbers, in case you're wondering, is what is called "spiritual." The evidence, therefore, indicates that consciousness as such is spiritual.

Things get enormously complicated at this point and much more difficult to analyze honestly. For instance, sensation (seeing, hearing, and so on) is a basically spiritual act, but one which in one of its "duplications" of itself limits itself quantitatively as the nerve-energy in the brain, while thinking (knowing what the relationship is between connected sensations) has to be a purely spiritual act, without any energy-"component," except indirectly through the energy-"component" of the sensations it sees the relationship in.

But let's leave this aside for purposes of this discussion, except to remark that it's no wonder scientists deny things like this, because scientists like to measure; and they have the dogma that what isn't measurable doesn't exist. But that means that in their "explanations" of consciousness, they have to be dishonest with the data, and make the silly oversimplification that consciousness is nothing but the nerves firing in the brain--which is as sensible as saying that because your liver reacts to food in your stomach by secreting bile, the bile secretion is knowledge that you're eating.

For our purposes here, what this implies is that physical forces are totally incapable of explaining or causing what is infinitely beyond them. Since physical forces all have a quantity (and so are "no more than" a given amount of the form of activity in question) and spiritual acts are not limited at that level, it follows that spiritual acts (though finite in kind) are infinitely beyond any physical force or energy.

Then how did consciousness evolve out of non-conscious life? Exactly. How? It did; but it couldn't. Not by itself it couldn't. Then the only sensible conclusion is that it didn't do it by itself. The potential for this wasn't there in the light at the beginning.

What evolution shows, then, if you face the evidence squarely, is (a) that a pure chance process founded on the basic forces of physics and natural selection is "selected away from" by any reasonable look at the evidence, and is only sustainable by a supreme act of faith against the overwhelming weight of the evidence. But it also shows (b) that the "cosmic watchmaker" theory of a God who "started things off" and established the laws of the universe, which then ran "by itself" just won't work. The laws (basically, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the laws of probability) would not, if left to themselves, result in evolution as it actually happened.

There's only one reasonable conclusion you can draw. In order for it to have reached the stage it's at at the moment, it had to have been helped all along the way, so that the excessively improbable advance actually occurred, and this led to the next excessively improbable advance (which doesn't contradict the laws of probability, but isn't what you'd expect from them if they were operating by themselves), and so on. A gentle helper is leading things, respecting their reality, and only manipulating the chance element in their operations.

But also, at certain stages, the advancing bodies had to have been lifted above their own capabilities, so that life emerged from non-life, and consciousness emerged out of non-consciousness. And all the while, good was being brought out of evil, and greater constructs out of destruction, and the selfishness of the living body was being cheated into cooperation with its neighbors, with the result that everything works harmoniously for the good of all.

And think: What would you predict but this from a universe created by a God who is love? As the creatures become more complex they acquire more control of themselves, and they are left more in control of themselves, except that the probabilistic, random element in their nature is tampered with in such a way that without imposing upon them, they develop into greater and greater beings, manifesting in themselves (almost in spite of themselves) a love and respect for each other which is a pale reflection of the One who is directing them.

As I said, a close look at evolution fairly screams that there is a benevolent God who is managing it. But the stage it has reached now is critical. There has emerged in the course of evolution the human being, who can understand and know relationships, and whose spirit can control by choices the energy-flow in his brain, which in turn controls his body, and through his body, the world.

Humans, then, have used their spiritual acts to set about remaking the world unto their own image and likeness; first, the material, physical universe, with buildings instead of caves, the human transformation of the world gradually evolving into the computer I am writing this on now; and then the living, biological universe, from farming and breeding and the manipulation from outside of the organisms by human-directed selection, to genetic engineering and the actual creation of organisms that didn't exist before.

Natural selection now is almost irrelevant. We can get inside the chromosomes of organisms and produce tomatoes that can grow in cold climates, corn that resists predation by insects, and even Dolly the Sheep. The universe that humans touch is now consciously directing itself from within--and all this just by chance, of course. Of course.

A final remark.

Let me finish off this long chapter--and "segue," as they say, into the Fourth New Commandment--by looking briefly at sexual reproduction. We know that most of the organisms in the world (the one-celled ones) reproduce asexually, by simply dividing (even though some of them have a kind of sexuality and occasionally reproduce by "conjugation"). Therefore, asexual reproduction hasn't been selected against, since the ancestors of these organisms are among the most ancient of all organisms.

Now when you consider it, organisms such as these have a priori an enormous reproductive advantage over sexually reproducing ones, since the sexual ones have to seek another member of the species in order to reproduce; and especially if they're not mobile (as they weren't for a long, long time), this is a huge handicap. Asexual organisms also have the advantage of the fact that better adaptive mutations immediately spread through the whole population, and maladaptive ones are immediately got rid of, leaving the uninfected members of the population intact.

Biologists counter this by saying that sexual reproduction, with the duplication of genes, allows greater variation and therefore adaptability for the organism, and this is a greater survival-value, which is why sexual beings took over. But is this really true? It would be true, if either gene could express itself, depending on the environmental circumstances; but as Mendel showed, one gene is always dominant (no matter what the situation) and the other recessive. So if the better-adapted trait is on the recessive gene, then too bad; it won't show up, and all but the double recessive offspring will be killed off.

And the more you look at it, the more puzzling it gets. If (1) a better-adapted mutation occurs in the dominant gene, then only three-fourths of the organisms will be better adapted (those with two recessives will die out), and two-thirds of them will be "infected" with this ill-adapted gene that they can't get rid of. If (2) the better-adapted mutation occurs in the recessive gene, then only one-fourth will be better adapted, and only those with two identical recessive genes will take over.

Questions: How are either of these scenarios a priori reproductively more advantageous than asexual reproduction, and where are all the organisms with the two identical recessive genes?

On the other hand, if (3) a maladaptive mutation occurs in the dominant gene, then three-fourths of the population will be wiped out, and we will be left with only those with two recessive genes again.

Finally, if (4) a maladaptive mutation occurs in the recessive gene, a fourth of the population is lost, but two-thirds of the rest are left with the maladaptive gene, which will show up in the double recessives for the rest of time.

Questions: How are either of these scenarios reproductively advantageous, and where again are all the organisms with identical recessive genes?

Any sensible person would say, "They're not advantageous at all; there has to be some other reason why so many organisms reproduce sexually." The New Moralist's answer, however, is, "Well, it happened, and so it must somehow be better adapted than the alternative. What other explanation is there?" There's the blind faith again. He's reasoning in a circle. He says, "Only what's better adapted survives. But these survived; therefore, they're better adapted." But how do you know that "only what's better adapted survives"? These things seem not as well adapted and they survived. "They have to be better adapted, because they survived." So "only what's better adapted survives" isn't a conclusion based on observation; it's a dogma you have to fit the recalcitrant observations into, come what may. See what I mean by blind faith?

But then what is the likely explanation? Well, consider this: Apart from any question of reproductive success, isn't it fitting that an in-itself-selfish organism should (a) have an urge to do something that benefits itself not at all--since what gain does Daddy Guppy get from having a lot of little Junior Guppies born from Mommy? Daddy eats them (implying that he could care less about "multiplying"). Further, (b) in performing this act, which benefits that abstraction called the "species" (which doesn't exist as such) rather than itself as an organism, it has to go outside itself and find a different organism to perform this amazing function? The answer: it's nature is being directed toward love in spite of its natural selfish tendency.

And the function it performs is amazing--astounding. The act of reproduction is a physical act; but it is a physical act that results in something far above the mere physical, and in the case of animals infinitely beyond the physical, though united to it, and in the case of humans a body organized with a spiritual, immortal soul. The organism participates in a miracle, in other words--it cooperates with God in producing what is infinitely beyond its own physical capacity. (Ask any pregnant woman who's just looked at the ultrasound.) Sexual reproduction is by far the most glorious, noble physical act that in the providence of God can be performed.

Compare this with what Bill Clinton and Monica were doing beside the oval office. It's not food, Mr. President, nor is it an adornment for a dress. How can you look at Chelsea and not know that your act is the kind of thing that teams up with God to bring into the world a new, independent person who nonetheless is the actual, physical union of the two of you: both, but neither, and master of her own destiny?

And what have you done with this sublime ability you have? You are like Belshazzar, carousing with the sacred vessels from the Temple in Jerusalem. And the handwriting is on the wall. And so it is, God help us, for all of us who join with you in this type of feast.