The Big Picture

George Gilder, like the Intelligent Design proponent he is, desperately wants things to be the way he thinks they should be in accordance with his religious beliefs. He does not rigorously examine what he is actually saying but merely judges whether it appears to conform to his ideology, and whether or not it will sound convincing enough to those who don’t know any better. His perverse think tank is called The Discovery Institute; its mission is to employ choplogic, obfuscation and misinformation in order to distort scientific knowledge and sell their specious presentation to the public as the genuine article. Gilder wants his baloney to be thought of as prime rib. For that he needed to hire a public relations firm, CRC, to assist in his deceptive selling campaign.

Gilder and his ilk are exactly who Monod is talking about when he says, “They owe their… moral weakness to those value systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer.”

In pointing to the complexity found in living organisms Gilder and Behe claim that that is proof of an intelligent designer. But when I look at a tRNA MOLECULE, or CHAPERONIN, for instance, I see a complexity that is more chaotic than not. Actually, they seem overly complex to be the workmanship of an intelligent designer. They appear to be the result of the order that can bubble up in otherwise chaotic systems as detailed in Stuart Kaufman’s Origins of Order. Again, chaotic cancer-like cells might have been the norm in the “primal soup” before incidentally hitting upon the order able to compose coherent organisms. Cancer cells and normal cells are different but not so much as to make their detection fool-proof by a given immune system.

Even the association of codons (triplet nucleotides that specify a particular amino acid) to amino acids seems very unlike intelligent design. There are twenty amino acids and sixty-four codons, sixty-one of which code for specific amino acids. Most amino acids have multiple codons that code for them and there’s just no way that the assignment of codon to amino acid bears any resemblance to forethought planning. It is totally arbitrary. Some amino acids have two codons associated with them and others have four. Two of them have only one and another has three. Also, three codons are stop signals found at the end of a coded sequence.

Would an intelligent designer be compelled to employ all possible triplets of the four nucleotides? Or is this just a matter of a blind chemical system at the mercy of its chemical properties? Why not design twenty codons to code for twenty amino acids, for instance? Or, why only twenty amino acids? Why not 62 for a one to one relationship between codons and amino acids with two set aside for stop signals? Or if some redundancy is prudent how about 31 amino acids with two codons assigned to each? Why not 14 amino acids with dual nucleotides serving as codons making a total of 16 with two set aside for stop signals?

Gilder calls evolutionists “reactionaries” because he says they think that proteins came first in the origin of life. Again Gilder is giving erroneous information because the protein-came-first idea is only one theory that has been posited by evolutionists. There are a couple of others. But calling evolutionists reactionaries is Gilder’s way of saying that he’s a revolutionary. But all he is doing is dressing old dogma in different concepts - intelligent designer as God. And it is information that, according to Gilder, came first. Information is the source of life. But, what information? The information in DNA? But there is no information in DNA without its relation to proteins. Even an intelligent designer would have to have had proteins in mind first and then put together the DNA to code for them. According to an intelligent designer, then, proteins would have come first.

Gilder wants to find ways by which to justify our existence as inevitable from the get-go – to see the big bang as the beginning of the development of a universe whose sole god-directed purpose was the advent and on going existence of human beings. And it was all precipitated by some preexisting pure information in the mind of the intelligent-designer-god.

A fixation on the big bang as a singular event inevitably leading to the evolution of human beings is concomitant with the fixation we once had with a geocentric universe. It’s a product of anthropocentrism whereby it is believed that the whole universe is all about the existence of human beings. The sole purpose of the explosion of heat and light 15 billion years ago was to ultimately project the spectacle of human drama. Then perhaps God is a filmmaker/projectionist!

In the entire scope of things, however, the big bang was a rather inconsequential event. Its ensuing products account for a minuscule part of the universe’s total content. We now know that there is such a thing as dark energy that comprises more than two-thirds of the content of the universe and is responsible for its ever-accelerating expansion. And about one-third seems to be made up of what is called dark matter. Also the universe seems to be adamant in its relentless pursuit to undo the anomaly resulting from the big bang. Within galaxies are massive black holes devouring them apace. The repulsive force of the dark energy pushes them apart and ultimately threatens to tear them apart whenever a vulnerability in there cohesiveness occurs.

But even so one might say that the visible universe is all that really matters and that the burst of light we call the big bang was for us the beginning of everything. In the bible God says ‘let there be light’ and there was light. But is there such a thing as light independent of the eyes of a living being to perceive it? There were photons created to be sure, but without some way of processing those photons as a visual experience would stars really shine?

The universe we are conscious of exists by virtue of the anatomical nervous systems that the universe has fashioned - nervous systems that are able to process the potential information provided by the universe. For instance, we receive through our eyes photons and we process an image out of them that describes a world that is relevant to living organisms such as ourselves. Otherwise that world would not be seen and would not exist as we know it. But everything would be in place for it to exist.

A useful analogy here can be found in a mirror. The image of a room, for instance, that we see reflected in a mirror is not actually imaged by the mirror. A mirror has no capability of processing photons and rendering an image from them. If there were no one or no camera, no photon processing equipment in front of the mirror to receive the photonic output and process it as information then there would be no image occurring in the mirror. The room and its objects would be right where they were as potential images but their image would not be realized in the mirror itself and the room would not be recorded there as a reflected image. A mirror merely reflects photons and has no ability to create an image, no ability to process photons as information. All it is capable of doing is reflecting them. One might say that without classical-world life forms only the quantum world could really exist. Not that we create the reality of the classical world, but, rather, we realize it. We realize it by processing information that is provided by the quantum world. The quantum world makes our world possible, realizable, but it does not realize our world. We realize our world. On the quantum level the various objects of our macroscopic classical world exist as various concentrations of energetic particles. A particular set of those concentrations has created creatures like us who are capable of rendering the particular arrangements of those concentrations as realized objects.

As with the mirror, there is nothing visible in the universe without living things capable of processing quantum world activity into sensible perceptions. There is no light per se emanating from stars, there are photons, but no light. The phenomenon of light is dependent on the existence of optic nerves.

The universe in its actual state bears no resemblance to the way in which we perceive it - just like a DVD disc bears no resemblance to the sights and sounds that appear on the monitor of a DVD player. The information on the DVD has been encrypted in such a way so as to enable it to be read and transformed into a motion picture by the DVD player that is equipped to process the information encoded on the disc. Without the DVD player the information stored on the DVD is pure potential, the disc itself remains unfulfilled.

The world of quantum particles is like the DVD – it needs something to read its information in order to reveal that which we know as the classical world. In this case, however, the quantum world creates its own readers in the form of living things to decipher the information. We are readers and our consciousness is the monitor.

To put it in terms of my individual existence I might say that I am an ensemble of quantum world particles capable of processing those particles in such a way as to effect the materialization of classical world objects. The processing all takes place at the microscopic and unconscious levels. Optic nerve cells receive photons as raw data. That data is processed as information from which my brain produces an image of the world that does not exist for photons. Particular photons are either absorbed or reflected by the molecular structures they come in contact with. We perceive them as objects according to the photons that are reflected. As for my sense of smell, chemical components interact with the receptor cells in my nose to produce a sensation of odor that exists only in my head but which is particular to the actual existence of the various chemicals involved. All my senses operate at the quantum level. My central nervous system processes the data provided to me by photons, chemical components and atmospheric vibrations. The images, tastes, smells, sounds and feel of the world that we experience are sensations developed by our nervous systems with respect to phenomena that we are not consciously aware of. So, for example, the conscious image we have of our surroundings is an accurate rendition of the behavior of photons resulting from their interactions with the molecular structures that we produce images of. The image corresponds exactly to the reality of the molecular structures and the reflected photons but the image is special to our consciousness. Our reality is based on the reality of the quantum world, which informs us about how we must relate to what is really out there at the quantum level. The apparent world is presented to us by a world that is not apparent to us. And to the question - Is our world only a creation of our sense perceptions? I would answer - yes and no.

The bible has it wrong - light was not created by god at the beginning- light was created by living things. Light is a subjective experience of an objective reality as are all other sensations. Such subjective experience, being universal, makes for an objective reality. The world that living things experience was not realized beforehand for them to inhabit. Living things realize the world they inhabit.

We are part of an objective reality that we perceive subjectively in a special way that describes our objective reality. For example, what is solid to us is part of our objective reality although solidity is not a characteristic of the quantum world through which we experience solidity. Photons are an objective reality and the light that we process from them is also an objective reality even though it is a subjective perception. We do not see the color red. Our brains code a particular frequency of light as the color red. A particular frequency of light is the same for everyone and the way in which the light is processed is the same and therefore color is a shared objective reality as are all our other perceptions and sensations. If, as some might insist, there are variations from individual to individual in our sense perceptions it would be so miniscule as to be non-existent. Major variations, such as colorblindness, indicate abnormalities in ones processing equipment.

What does Gilder have to say about all this? Well, again, his fear of science leads to muddled thinking resulting in statements like, “…classical physics collapsed after the discovery of the atom.” That’s like saying - since there is no such thing as solidity in the quantum world we can now walk through walls.

Fear of science, fear of our roots in biology and evolution only leads to misconceptions about ourselves and the world we live in. Gilder does, however, admit to our natural selves. “We already know we’re animals,” he says, but, he goes on, “…to celebrate the view of human beings as modified apes, trousered apes is destructive.”

As soon as Gilder mentions our primate nature he runs from it and gets lost in romantic nonsense like, “Human intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe.”

In that assertion Gilder celebrates nonsense. For, in reality, human intelligence is not even the most powerful force on Earth. Nature is. That’s a fact Gilder and many others find intolerable. Human beings cannot be subjects of nature, they say, we are much too special for that to be the case. We must be somehow supernatural. This earthly existence cannot be all there is. Perhaps it’s not. But the distortion of earthly matters is no way to approach the question.

Wanting to believe things that contradict the nature of things leads to miscomprehension, misinterpretation and misstatements, like a George Gilder who cannot help but indulge in grand buffoonery in his pathetic attempts to establish an intelligent designer. Celebrate the view of human beings as apes??? Who is celebrating that? To acknowledge it is not a celebration. He imagines naturalists like myself celebrating our common ancestry with other primates and our genetic proximity to chimpanzees. But it is not about celebrating that reality. It’s about facing up to it and finding the courage to acknowledge our roots and our biological determinism so that we might intelligently consider how best to configure our civilizations with respect to who and what we really are.

Gilder and his ilk are of course subject to the A/R dynamic. They are powerfully attracted to a metaphysical explanation of human existence, of some higher power that is responsible for all creation. And they are absolutely repelled by the prospect of a totally natural explanation.

I would be the first to admit the powerful attractiveness of the higher power scenario but I am also painfully aware of the fact that strong attraction to something is not necessarily an indication of its validity. A strong attraction to communism or capitalism, for example, is no curative to each one’s inability to serve as a stand-alone operating system for a society.

We also have a strong attraction to empirical knowledge that applies to facts or ideas acquired by study, investigation, observation, experiment and experience - the stuff of authentic discourse.

Note: Gilder quotes are from an NPR program called The Connection on which he was a guest.