The gospel in a nutshell

There are parts of the Bible that are so hard to understand, you can spend your life wrestling with them and still not be sure. There are other parts that require a lot of work to understand, but if you have a passion for it, you can figure it out. Then there are other parts that are so obvious there's no excuse for not understanding them.

Thankfully, the most important things are easy and obvious. I'm going to explain, in the simplest terms I can, what I take to be the basic message of the Bible and why it's relevant to you. This is all in summary, so I'm not going to quote scripture.

There is one God whose name is Yahweh. In Hebrew, it looks like this:

He is the creator and ruler of the cosmos and everything in it. He is a being on which everything else depends, and he's at the top of all authoritative heirarchies. He is a being of absolute perfection. He is all knowing, all powerful, and wholly good.

God imposes moral obligations on all of mankind. There is a real difference between right and wrong. This difference is rooted in God's character and is made manifest in his commands and requirements. He cares how we live our lives. His moral will is revealed in the Bible, but it's also revealed in our own consciences. We all possess an innate sense of right and wrong even if we are sometimes mistaken about the details.

Every one of us violates our moral obligations. Not one of us is morally perfect.

God holds people accountable for how they live their lives. There will be a day of judgment in which we all have to give an account of ourselves to God. We all have to answer to him. God will judge people for everything they said or did, whether good or bad. There will be punishment for the bad things we said or did, and there will be rewards for the good things we said or did.

Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, aka the Christ. That means he is an anointed king. Originally, the messiah was thought to be the fulfilment of a promise God made to king David that his dynasty would last forever, and so there would always be a man to sit on the throne of Israel. But Jesus is not only king of Israel; he is king of the whole cosmos. As Christians put it, he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

God is three persons--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is one being, but that one being is tri-personal. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons, but they share the same divine essence. In other words, they are the same being. Jesus is the Son of the Father, which makes him the Son of God. But he is also God.

Although Jesus was God, he humbled himself by taking on the nature of humanity. He was born into the world through a human woman named Mary. He came into the world, not only to reveal God's will through his teachings, but to save people who cannot save themselves. It was out of love and a desire to glorify himself through the demonstration of his mercy that Jesus came into the world. Although Jesus was just as human as the rest of us, he lived a sinless life in perfect obedience to the Father. He is the only human to have ever done so.

Jesus died to atone for our wrong-doing. God is not just a harsh inflexible ruler who is out to get us. Since he is wholly good, his character consists both of justice and of mercy. None of us are morally perfect, and we all stand to face judgment for our moral imperfections, but God has provided a means of obtaining a pardon through Jesus. Jesus paid the penalty we deserve by willingly dying by crucifixion, and his death is sufficient to cover our moral imperfections.

After dying for our sins, Jesus rose physically from the dead. He did not rise back to a normal mortal life. Rather, he rose to immortality. Although it was a physical resurrection, it was also a transformed physicality. His resurrection vindicated his claim that he was the Messiah and that he was sent by God the Father. His resurrection vindicated everything he taught about himself, his kingship, and his mission to save people through his death.

Jesus' death on the cross saves to the uttermost all of those who put their trust in him. If you confess that Jesus is king, and you trust that he died for your sins, you will have eternal life. You will not be judged for your moral failures. You will be pardoned. God will treat you as if you had the same righteousness that Jesus himself had. You will, in a sense, be clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. And just as Jesus was raised to immortality, you too will be raised to immortality. Once you have been raised to immoratlity, you will no longer suffer any pain, sickness, or death.

Once the resurrection and judgment have taken place, those who have put their trust in Jesus will forever bask in the glory of God. We will be able to behold him in a way that we are not able to see him now. We get a glimpse of who God is through reading the scriptures and learning about Jesus, but in eternity, we will come to know him more fully and directly. God will make his dwelling with mankind. We will be able to learn about and appreciate all his glorious attributes, including his love, kindness, power, and every conceivable good thing. We will be forever happy. We will experience love to its fullest extent.

This is the gospel--the good news about what God did to save sinners. People who embrace the gospel (i.e. put their trust in Jesus) do so not only out of self-interest, but out of a love for their creator. To love God is to want to be the kind of people he requires us to be. So it is impossible to honestly embrace the gospel without also wanting to be better people. Primarily, God wants us to love people, and we love people through how we treat them. This includes not only our family and friends, but even people who dislike us or even hate us. We are to love our enemies, remembering that before we knew Jesus, we were enemies of God, and he loved us anyway.

Once we have put our trust in Jesus, we have crossed over from eternal death to eternal life. There is a sense in which we have become new people. God gives us the Holy Spirit as a deposit guaranteeing what is to come. The Holy Spirit dwells in us for the rest of our lives. His indwelling manifests itself in a desire to please God. The result is a life long process of deeper understanding and moral improvement. We will never reach moral perfection in our mortal lifetime, but the desire to be part of God's kingdom will drive us to positive character development.

The indwelling of the Holy Spirit will also give us a hunger for God, to learn about him through reading and studying the scriptures. This desire to be part of the kingdom of God will also manifest itself in a desire to be in communion with our fellow citizens of heaven, i.e. other Christians. Christians gather together in churches to worship God and to learn about him. We strengthen each other throguh mutual edification. We are all gifted in different ways for our mutual benefit. Some are gifted in teaching, some are gifted in helping, some are gifted in encouragement. The Bible lists various ways people are gifted for the sake of mutual benefit, but I suspect it is not exhaustive in listing these gifts. Just by being at church, worshipping together with like-minded people, you encourage those people, strengthen their confidence, given them a sense of belonging, etc. They, in turn, do the same for you.

So I encourage you to put your trust in Jesus. Jesus is God, but that did not stop him from becoming a man and enduring the same things all humans have to endure a result of living in this world. He did so out of love, to save his people. We all have to die, but Jesus came into the world when he didn't have to, and he did so for the purpose of dying so that we might have eternal life. Having defeated death by rising from the dead, Jesus sat at the right hand of the Father and became King of Kings and Lord of Lords. He is a King worthy of honor, respect, gratitude, love, and worship. I encourage you to loves, serve, and trust in the one true King--Jesus.

The cosmological "constant" is in trouble again

No long ago, I made a post about the Λ-CDM v. the Timescape models of the universe where I talked about two papers that came out claiming the apparent acceleration of the expansion rate of the universe might be an illusion caused by time dilation due to growing cosmic voids and changing clumpiness over time. This alternate view is called the Timescape model, and it does away with the cosmological constant (Λ) altogether. I found that interesting because Λ is often cited as the most fine-tuned of all the fine-tuned constants, but if Timescape is true, then there is no Λ, much less a fine-tuned one.

Now, Λ faces a new challenge. There's a new paper that came out claiming that Λ isn't a constant after all. It changes over time. It was stronger in the past.

Λ resurfaced over two decades ago when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since the cause of the acceleration was unknown, it was called "dark energy." It was assumed, at least, that the accleration was constant. But now, it looks like the accleration hasn't been constant.

Several YouTube science channels have talked about this recently, including Becky, Maggie, and Sabine. They all discuss the threshold of statistical significance (σ). At this point, the threshold for "definitely a fact" hasn't been met, but I think it's been met for reasonablness. One of them, I think, said it amounted to around a 99% probability, which is good enough for most ordinary people even if it falls short of astrophysics standards.

If Λ is not constant, then it can't very well be a fine-tuned constant. But I don't think that means there isn't some sort of fine-tuning involved. It may just be a fine-tuning of the initial conditions. Or maybe it's a fine-tuning of the second or third derivitive of the expansion rate. In other words, while the rate of acceleration may not be constant, the rate of change of acceleration could be constant. The initial conditions, plus the rate of change of acceleration could both be fine-tuned. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Does light experience time, and does Neil DeGrass Tyson know what he's talking about?

Lately, a bunch of videos have been popping up on my Instagram feed where Neil DeGrass Tyson explains that photons do not experience time. Since learning about special relativity, his reasoning really rubs me the wrong way because it's completely flawed.

Special relativity deals with how things like distance and time differ depending on relative motion between inertial frames of reference. If an object is in an inertial frame, that means it is not experiencing acceleration. While you're sitting on your couch, it may seem that you're not experiencing acceleration since you aren't moving, but you are at least experiencing gravitational acceleration. So you're not actually in an inertial frame. If you were in an inertial frame, you would be experiecing weightlessness.

An object moving at a constant speed and direction (i.e. a constant velocity) is in an inertial frame. That is true regardless of the speed or direction which means there can be multiple inertial frame all in motion relative to each other.

No matter what frame of reference you are in, time will tick at the same rate with respect to yourself. In other words, whether you're moving very fast, very slow, or not at all relative to something else (like the earth), you will not notice a difference in the rate at which time ticks in your frame of reference. However, if an object is moving relative to you, time in its frame of reference will tick at a different rate relative to you. The difference in the rate at which time ticks in different frames of reference is called time dilation.

Let's say you're in an inertial frame, and you're watching something fly by at some fraction of the speed of light relative to you, and you want to know the rate at which time for that object is ticking relative to you. You can calculate it using the formula for time dilation, which is derived from the Lorentz transformation. The equation is:

$$\normalsize \Delta t' = \frac{\Delta t}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}$$

See here for an explanation of where this forumula comes from.

Δt is the amount of time that has passed in the frame that is moving relative to you.

Δt' is the amount of time that has passed in your stationary reference frame.

𝑣 is the velocity of the moving frame.

c is the speed of light, which is the same in both frames. This is one of the postulates of special relativity, which will become important in a minute.

Notice that if the "moving" frame isn't moving (i.e. 𝑣 = 0), then Δt = Δt'. In other words, if there's no relative motion between the two inertial frames, time will tick at the same rate in both.

Notice, on the other hand, that the higher the velocity of the moving frame, the smaller the denominator. The smaller the denominator, the larger the whole fraction. Since the fraction is equal to Δt', it follows that the faster an object is moving relative to you, the more time will pass in your frame than in the moving frame. That means time is ticking slower in the moving frame compared to your frame.

Now, imagine what happens when the moving object approaches the speed of light. Notice it can never actually reach the speed of light because if 𝑣 = c, then the denominator = 0, and that don't make no kinda sense. But we can take the limit of Δt' as 𝑣 approaches c. When we do, we discover that Δt' approaches infinity as 𝑣 approaches c. That means in your frame of reference, if something were moving close to the speed of light relative to you, its time would be nearly at a stand still.

Neil thinks that photons don't experience time. His reasoning is that since photons move at the speed of light, it must be that from our point of view, time is not moving at all in the photon's frame of reference.

But there is a huge boo boo in Neil's reasoning. One of the postulates of special relativity is that light has the same speed in all inertial frames. If we imagined an object moving at a constant velocity relative to us, it would have its own inertial frame. It would not be moving in its own inertial frame. But there is no inertial frame for light. There is no frame in which light is not moving. So it's completely meaningless to talk about a photon's inertial frame. A photon does not have an inertial frame. Neil's major boo boo is to treat a photon like an ordinary object in an inertial frame. That's nonsense.

Another mistake is that by treating the photon like an ordinary object moving at the speed of light, and applying the time dilation equation to it, he'd have to be dividing by zero, which doesn't make sense. The time dilation equation shows that an inertial frame can get arbitrarily close to the speed of light, but it can't reach the speed of light. You can't apply the time dilation equation to anything moving at the speed of light, and that includes light itself.

It wasn't long ago that Neil's reasoning would've made sense to me. Thankfully, I've discovered FloatHeadPhysics on YouTube, and he has really helped to straighten out a lot of confusion I was having while trying to understand special relativity. He has one video where he addressed the subject of whether light experiences time. I highly recommend this video because it explains very clearly what's wrong with Neil's reasoning. Neil is simply forgetting the postulates of special relativity.

It just shows to go you that even physicists can get stuff wrong. You have to be especially cautious when it comes to popularizers, and Neil is one of the worst. I saw another video where he butchered the Andromeda Paradox.

The necessity of targeted proteins

Please forgive me. My brain often operates a 0.5x speed compared to the brains of other people. I can have somebody explain something to me multiple times, and still not understand it. Then, one day, without them adding any more explanation, I'll suddenly understand what they were trying to tell me. It just took me a while to get there.

This morning, I think I finally grasped something Paul Scott Pruett has repeated to me multiple times (see his last comment here for example). Scott has mentioned there and elsewhere that evolution has to target certain specific proteins for things to evolve. When I did my calculations on functional protein probabilities (part 1, part 2, and part 3), I was just trying to figure out what the probability was that the observable universe might, in some way, cough up a protein that could be functional, and I was assuming that whether it could be function was based solely on whether it could fold up into a stable shape.

It seemed to me to be a mistake to run these calculations as if evolution had to target specific proteins since any protein that could fold into a stable shape had the potential of being functional. If you were considering a protein with a length of 150 amino acids, the probability of getting any one specific sequence of amino acids with one random try would be 1 in 20¹⁵⁰, which is pretty low. I thought that was cheating since the real question, as far as potentionally functional proteins were concerned, was what fraction of those 20¹⁵⁰ possible combinations could fold up into stable shapes. It could have been, for all I knew, that half of all the possible sequences could fold into stable shapes and were therefore potentially functional. It turned out to be far less than half (Douglas Axe estimating 1 in 10⁷⁷ while others estimated 1 in 10¹¹), but I still ended up calculating that it's not unlikely at all that the universe would cough up at least one functional protein given the vast probabilistic resources in the universe due to its size and age.

Life requires more than one functional protein, though. Life requires many proteins that work together. Let me use an analogy to explain what I mean. Let's say a protein folds up into the shape of a bolt. To get a nut that fits that bolt, the nut would have to be targeted in some way. It would have to have the right size and have its threads match the threads on the bolt. You might be able to imagine a wide variety of different kinds of bolts, all with different sizes and different thread pitches, but for any particular bolt, the nut that goes with it has to be targeted in specific ways.

In the same way, if proteins are to work together in a machine, they have to somehow fit together. While you may be able to get a random protein that folds into a stable shape, you have to get a targeted protein that "fits" the original protein before you can get anything approximating a machine with different parts that work together. You can't get life just by gathering a collection of stable proteins. Some of the proteins have to be targeted in such a way that they are able to work with or fit together with other proteins.

For a nut to fit a bolt, it has to have the right sized hole and the right thread size, shape, and pitch, but there can be variation elsewhere. It can have an exterior with a hexagon shape or a square shape. It can have a different wall thickness, and it can fit bolts of different lengths. In the same way, it may be that for a given protein to function in a cell, there can be some variation in its companion proteins and still be able to work together. But there are far fewer proteins a given protein can work with than the range of all stable proteins within any given length. That means if we want to grant the existence of some random functional protein, and we want to calculate the probability of getting a simple machine that contains that given functional protein, we are going to have to calculate the probability of some targeted proteins--proteins that "fit" the original given protein.

Since the range of targeted proteins is smaller than the range of stable proteins, it's going to end up being far less probable that life could evolve significantly than it is that the universe could just cough up a stable protein. I think that's what Scott has been trying to tell me.

I don't know how I would even begin to try to run a calculation on this, though. There are too many variables and too many unknowns.

I want to say one more thing Scott said that I think I did kind of understand. The fact that evolution targets certain genes and proteins is evident in the fact that there is convergent evolution, not just on the macro scale (e.g. eyes, sonar, etc.), but also on the micro scale (genes and proteins). I'm not sure whether we should consider this sort of targeting to be unlikely, though. On the one hand, a naturalist could say that since evolution seems to favour certain outcomes, they're not that unlikely after all. We may just lack an explanation of why evolution tends toward certain outcomes. On the other hand, a supernaturalist could say that since convergent evolution is statistically improbable, the fact that it happens over and over favoures an intelligent cause. I don't know who wins that argument. Maybe my brain will eventually catch up on that in the future.

There is always the possibility that I am still misunderstanding Scott about targeted proteins.

Debates: nothing new under the sun

I've been thinking lately about a lot of debates between protestants and Catholics and between Calvinists and non-Calvinists. It seems to me that pretty much everything that can be said on these subjects has already been said. It's rare that anybody has anything new to add to these discussions that have been going on for centuries.

So, what's the point in having debates on these subjects anymore? It seems like the debates are going to come down to who is better read on the subject or who has more skill as a debater, neither of which can really tell you who is right.

If somebody wants to find out which side is right, all the information that's relevant to the question is already out there. They just have to go look for it. New debates only rehash argument that have already been made. If you're already familiar with the subject, it's like they're just reading a script. You already know what the arguments are, and you're rarely surprised.

For people who are not familiar with a subject, adding more debates just increases the volume of material they have to weed through to familiarize themselves with the information that's available.

Sometimes, I wish there were fewer books and fewer debates. I wish that as a species, we were more efficient with our words. We could provide the world with the same amount of information in far fewer words. Most of it is just repetition. People are just saying the same things in different words. It's all already been said. If we had just a few books and debates, and they were very well done, it would be easier to learn about any subject. Sometimes you have to weed through a lot of material to find a nugget of good information either because you've already heard it all or because most of it is fluff. It can be time-consuming.

This is just something I've been thinking about lately. I'm not sure I would really want to get rid of debates. I enjoy having them sometimes, even though it can feel like I'm reading a script. Debates are entertaining in the same way MMA is entertaining. Maybe they can still be useful by exposing people to subjects or points they aren't familiar with yet and maybe wouldn't have ever bothered to look into except for having been exposed to the debate. So I suppose they can still serve a purpose.

I think people might put too much emphasis on them, though. I used to think debates were important because "the first to present his case seems right until another comes forward to question him." Debates were a way of subjecting a person's point of view to scrutiny and seeing how it held up. I think that is still the case when it comes to novel arguments, but there are very few novel arguments anymore when it comes to protestant vs. Catholic and Calvinist vs. non-Calvinist. Now, I think debates are mostly entertainment. A lot of the internet chatter that comes after a debate often center more around personalities than arguments. It's kind of like how the ancient Greeks used to tell the same stories in their plays over and over again each year, and the novelty was more in the presentation than in the substance.

For people who are new to a subject, debates can be starting places, but nobody should completely change their mind about a topic because of how a debate turned out. They should use what they learned in the debate as a starting place to study the subject more thoroughly. Debates, by their very nature as short interactions, are not thorough enough to base your views on. People do, though.

Debating can be useful to the participants. Participating in a debate can force you to study in a way you might not otherwise. It can force you to think more carefully. So, I guess there's value to debate beyond trying to find out who's right. Debating is a good mental exercise.

One other benefit I just thought of is that debate can keep us from living in a bubble. Catholics, protestants, Calvinists, and non-Calvinists shouldn't isolate from each other because we're all Christians. Debating is a way for us to come together every now and then and engage with each other. That way hopefully we don't take whatever we are accustomed to for granted. It forces us to consider views other than our own. When you live in a bubble, you tend to have cartoonish and inaccurate assumptions about others who believe differently than you. If you're honest and fair-minded, debates can disabuse you of those inaccuracies.

But aren't there enough of them already? Can't we just go read/watch the ones that have already been done? Does anybody have anything new to say?

Debate: The Jehovah's Witness view on death and resurrection is false.

I thought for sure I posted this debate before, but now I can't find it. Anyway, this is a debate I had on debate.org a long time ago on the Jehovah's Witnesses view about death and resurrection. I'm just going to post my opening statement, and you can click the link if you want to read the whole thing.

In the set up for the debate, I explained what I took the Jehovah's Witness view to be, and my opponent agreed with my explanation. Here is the explanation:

Basically, Jehovah's Witnesses believe that when we die, we cease to exist. We are not immaterial souls who survive in any consicous state after physical death. We are purely physical beings animated by what they call a "life force," which in some publications is likened to electricity. But a "life force" is not the same thing as people traditionally think of as a soul. It is not a person and therefore has no personal identity.

After we are dead, Jehovah remembers us perfectly and completely. At the resurrection, Jehovah uses his perfect memory of us to bring us back into existence, albeit with some improvements. Although the resurrection entails physical humans coming into existence, it is not a raising up of the same body that died. Rather, Jehovah fashions a new body which he brings to life.

It is important to note that in the view of Jehovah's Witnesses, the person who rises at the resurrection is the same person as the one who died. That means that we ourselves will be raised up at the resurrection. It won't just be a replica.

Now, to my opening. . .

Con's clarification on the JW view of resurrection is perfectly aligned with my understanding of it, so we can just dive right in.

What I'm going to argue and it's implications

What I am going to argue is that it is impossible for a person to cease to exist, then to come back into existence. And it does no good to appeal to the omnipotence of Jehovah because the impossibility is not due to a lack of power any more than the impossibility of creating a square circle. Regardless of how powerful Jehovah is, he could not make the person who comes into existence actually be the same person as the one who died rather than a mere replica. The reason is because there is nothing that could possibiliy be done that could make the person who comes into existence be the same person who died.

If I am right, then there are two possible implications. One implication is that JWs are wrong to think we cease to exist when we die. If resurrection is a reality, it would imply that we continue to exist in a disembodied state between death and resurrection so that the same person who once animated the body that died can reanimate the body that is raised at the resurrection, therefore preserving personal identity.

Another possibility is that there will be no resurrection, at least not of original people. If there is something like a resurrection, it would only be the replication of previously existing people, which does us no good since we ourselves will have permanently ceased to exist. Either of these possibilities will have even further implications. It will mean that either the Bible does not teach the JW position on death and resurrection or else the Bible is not the word of God. So clearly if I'm right, it will require a paradigm shift in thinking for a JW. As for me, I once held the JW position. After changing my mind, I went with the first option above.

I think the reason it is so hard for people to change their minds, even when the evidence is sometimes overwhelming, is because it's rarely possible to change your mind about just one thing. Changing your mind about one thing has implications for other things because all of our beliefs are connected to each other, and you can rarely just change one in isolation from the others.

By I digress. Let me get into the arguments now.

The arguments

If you've read me carefully, you've noticed that I make a bold claim. Rather than claim it's unlikely that the JW position is true, I claim it's impossible for it to be true, which means it doesn't just happen to be false, but it's necessarily false. My arguments may be hard for some people to understand, but I think they prove with absolute certainty that the JW position is false.

I am going to use some thought experiments to show why it is impossible for a person (or anything for that matter) to cease to exist then come back into existence.

First thought experiment

Given Jehovah's omniscience, his knowledge of you now is just as exhaustive as his memory of you after you're dead. That means whatever information he uses to recreate you at the resurrection is information he already has. It is possible, then, for him to use that information now to fashion a body, bring it to life, and cause it to have all of your memories and personality traits.

But clearly if he did so, that person would not actually be you. You would be you! The other person would be an exact duplicate. It is impossible for two persons to be the same person. The fact that the other person would have all of your memories and personality and even think he was you doesn't change the matter. From the moment of his or her creation, he or she will begin to have different experiences from you. For example, if the person were created five feet away from you, and a moment later a bird pooped on his head by not yours, one of you would experience something the other wouldn't, which makes it impossible that you could be the same person.

If Jehovah happened to wait until after you were dead before he did the exact same thing, it wouldn't for that reason be you that he was bringing into existence. If it's only a replica while you're alive, then it would only be a replica after you were dead because Jehovah would be doing the exact same thing. You're death doesn't change anything.

Second thought experiment

Suppose that at the resurrection, instead of using his perfect memory to bring one person into existence who had died, he brings 12 versions of that person into existence, each exactly alike both physically and mentally. Well, clearly 12 persons cannot be the same person. At least 11 of them are replicas. So which one is the original?

None of them are the original! Thnk about it. If the 12th person is made just like the 11 replicas, then the 12th person is a replica, too. They're all replicas, and there is no original.

It wouldn't change the matter if Jehovah happened to only create one. If all 12 would be replicas if he created them, then if he only created one of them, it, too, would just be a replica.

Conclusion

The only way it's possible for a person who has died to rise from the dead is if they continue to exist in a disembodied state between death and resurrection. If they cease to exist when they die, they are gone for good. At best, Jehovah can create a replica of them.

To overcome this argument, Pro will have to think of some criteria of personal identity that makes the resurrected person be the same person as the one who died. The problem is that there is nothing that could do that. Memories are not sufficient because Jehovah could put the same memories into several different persons, which shows it's possible for two people to have all the same mental properties (memories and all) and still not be the same person. There is nothing Jehovah could do to a risen person that he couldn't do to a replica, yet a replica is still just a replica and not the original person.

Therefore, not even Jehovah can bring a person into existence who has ceased to exist.

Cameron changes his mind about John 6

Cameron Bertuzzi, a YouTuber who converted to Catholicism not long ago, made this post on YouTube linking to this post on substack where he explained how he has changed his mind about whether John 6 teaches transubstantiation. As a protestant, he thought Jesus' statement in John 6:53 about eating his flesh and drinking his blood was a metaphor, but now, as a Catholic, he thinks it's literal. I had a few thoughts on Cameron's post while I was reading it, so I figured I'd go back through and make a blog post about it.

I don't want to talk about everything Cameron said, just a few things that jumped out at me.

Cameron used to think Jesus' statement that "the flesh is of no avail," (vs. 63) undermined a literal interpretation of Jesus' statement that you can have no life in you unless you eat his flesh (vs. 53). I used to think the same thing, but Cameron does make a good point. Since verse 53 refers to "my flesh," but verse 63 refers to "the flesh," they're probably not talking about the same thing. When Jesus said the flesh counts for nothing, that was probably about the fact that you can't have spiritual life by your own effort. You need the quickening power of the Spirit.

Cameron may be right, but it would've been nice if he had explained how his new understanding fits with Jesus' flow of thought in the passage rather than hanging everything on the difference of one word. This is something that jumped out at me throughout Cameron's post. He didn't really explain the passage. He doesn't walk through it or try to make sense of Jesus' flow of thought. I'll cut him some slack, though, because his intention probably wasn't to give a full exegesis of John 6. He just wanted to make a few bullet points.

Cameron no longer thinks the Old Testament command to abstain from drinking blood serves as a good argument against the Catholic position because there are multiple occasions where Jesus superceded cermemonial laws (e.g. regarding the Sabbath, sacrifices, etc.).

I'm not sure that works, though. When Jesus declared all foods clean in Mark 17:18-19, yeah, he did kind of supercede dietary laws, which is why it's okay for Christians to eat bacon. The same thing cannot be said of drinking blood, though. When the apostles had the council in Jerusalem to figure out whether gentile converts had to obey the whole law or not, James explicitly included the command to abstain from blood, and he did not qualify it in any way (Acts 15:19-20). Jesus could not have superceded the command to abstain from drinking blood since that remains a Christian obligation. It's actually pretty striking that James thought this command was important enough to include in his short list of requirements.

Cameron used to think the rabbinic use of metaphor somehow meant Jesus was using a metaphor in John 6, but now he thinks context should decide. I agree with him that context should decide. Unfortunately, Cameron didn't discuss the context. If you read the whole chapter, the context makes it clear that eating and drinking Jesus is a metaphor for coming to and believing in Jesus. Notice the parallel:

6:40: every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

6:54: he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day

Speaking of parallels, there's a strong parallel between Jesus's teaching in John 4 with his teaching in John 6. In John 4, Jesus is talking to a women who wants some water. In John 6, he's talking to a crowd who wants some bread. Jesus uses "living water" as a metaphor in John 4:10, and he uses "living bread" as a metaphor in John 6:51, and they both refer to himself as the source of eternal life. Notice the parallels.

John 4 - woman at the well	John 6 - bread of life discourse
Whoever drinks the water Jesus gives them will never thirst (John 4:14).	Whoever comes to Jesus (the bread of life) will never go hungry or thirst (John 6:35).
Give me this water (John 4:15).	Give us this bread (John 6:34)
Water will give eternal life (John 4:14).	Bread of God gives life to the world (John 6:33)

Cameron goes on to say, "The crowd’s shocked reaction and Jesus’ refusal to correct their literal understanding undermines a purely metaphorical reading." I responded to this statement in a comment on his post, so I'll just cut and paste what I said here.

The point Catholics often make about the fact that had Jesus given his audience the wrong impression, he would have corrected them strikes me as being problematic. Imagine what you would think had you been there. Keep in mind that you don't have the advantage of hindsight. The last supper hasn't happened yet. Is there anything in what Jesus said that would lead you to believe there would be a ritual meal in which actual bread and wine would be converted into the flesh and blood of Jesus while retaining all the properties and appearances of bread and wine? No, there isn't. So what would your impressive have been had you only listened to Jesus tell you that you must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, and you took him literally? The only conclusion you could have come to was that Jesus means for you to butcher and eat him, i.e. to butcher the actual man standing in front of you, and to eat the meat off his bones and drink the blood that poured out of his wounds. That's why it was so shocking to his listeners.

There's no doubt that's the impression his audience had, and it was the wrong impression even by Catholic standards. Yet, Jesus did not clarify for his audience that what he REALLY meant was that there would be a ritual meal in which actual bread and wine would be turned into the flesh and blood of Jesus while still looking and tasting like bread and wine. If Jesus had made this clarification for his audience, it might've still struck them as being weird, but it would be nowhere near as offensive or off-putting as the impression he left them with.

So the fact that Jesus didn't clarify or correct the wrong impression he left his audience with does not in any way mean that the impression he left them with was true. Whether you're Catholic or protestant, Jesus left his audience with the wrong impression, and he made no effort to clarify. So Catholics should stop using this argument. It doesn't help you.

One more point I'd like to make is that throughout John 6, Jesus is explaining why the crowd doesn't actually believe in him. It's because they were not given to Jesus by the Father (vs. 36-37), and they were not drawn by the Father (John 6:44). After saying, "But there are some of you that do not believe," he explained, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father" (John 6:64-65). The reason he told them nobody could come to him unless the Father granted it is because some of them didn't believe. He was explaining their unbelief. Since Jesus was explaining their unbelief, it wouldn't make sense for him to disabuse them of their objection to what Jesus was teaching about himself. Their rejection of Jesus is recorded for us to illustrate their unbelief and to confirm Jesus' teaching about the necessity of the giving and drawing of the Father.

Cameron used to think the issue of bi-location was an insurmountable problem for transubstantiation, but now he thinks this is just a human limitation he was inappropriately applying to God. Since God can perform miracles, he can perform the miracle of bi-location.

This objection makes me question why Cameron thought bi-location was a problem to begin with. Nobody, as far as I know, raises this objection because they don't think God can do miracles. The problem is deeper than that. God's ability to do miracles does not enable him to engage in absurdity. If I told Cameron that God's ability to do miracles should allow him to make married bachelors, I'm sure Cameron would object. The impossibility of bi-location is not a mere human limitation, and I seriously doubt that's what Cameron thought it was when he was a protestant.

The philosophical problems facing transubstantiation go beyond bi-location, too. There is a problem of identity. Allegedly, the first transubstantiation happened at the last supper when Jesus identified the bread with his flesh, then broke it and gave it to his disciples to eat. How could the bread actually be Jesus' flesh?

Suppose Jesus miraculously turned bread into human flesh, which he can surely do since he turned water into wine. What makes it Jesus' flesh rather than, say, Peter's flesh? If Jesus had wanted to make it somebody else's flesh, what could he have done differently? If all Jesus did was turn the bread into human flesh, there isn't anything that could make it the flesh of somebody in particular.

If I created an exact duplicate of the Mona Lisa, my duplicate would not be the actual Mona Lisa no matter how good of a job I did. It would just be a replica. There's nothing God himself could do to cause my replica be the same object as the original Mona Lisa sitting in the Lourvre. In the same way, there's nothing Jesus could've done to a loaf of bread to cause it to be one person's flesh rather than another person's flesh. The problem isn't that it's a miracle. The problem is that it's a violation of identity. It's very similar to the problem Jehovah's Witnesses face when it comes to resurrection and the problem Captain Kirk faces when using a transporter.

There's another way Jesus might've performed a transubstantiation, though, besides turning the bread and wine into flesh and blood. He could've created a miracle in which the bread and wine instantaneously poofed out of existence while simultaneously causing flesh and blood to poof into existence in exactly the same location. This idea is similar to how wood becomes petrified by replacing wood with minerals, molecule by molecule, except that it happens instantaneously. But this scenario creates the same problem of identity. In this scenario, flesh and blood are being created ex nihilo to replace the bread and wine, and there is nothing that can make the flesh and blood be Jesus' flesh and blood rather than somebody else's or nobody's at all.

Jesus did not lose any body parts when he fed the disciples that night. So whatever the disciples ate or drank, however it was created, it wasn't literally Jesus' flesh and blood. Cameron says that philosophical discomfort doesn't dictate theological truth. I wonder if Cameron's philosophical discomfort with married bachelors still dictates what he thinks God can or can't do.

I think transubstantiation is to Catholics what the Book of Abraham is to Latter Day Saints. It is essential to Catholicism because it is essential to the Mass. It is the most obviously false doctrine of all the teachings of the Catholic church, and since it is essential, it utterly undermines Catholicism. I found Cameron's responses to his old objections so weak that it makes me wonder what was going through his head back when he used those objections.

I've written on this subject a few other times, so I'll leave a few links here for further reading.

Transubstantiation This is my opening to a debate I had on this subject.

Catholic vs. protestant interpretation of John 6 This is my opening to a debate on a broader topic that includes transubstantiation.

An Argument Against Transubstantiation This is something I wrote a long long time ago on a message board that used to exist on Stand to Reason's website.

Catholics and Communion This is a post on Stand to Reason's old blog in which I argued with some people about transubstantiation. I'm "Sam" in the comment section.

Zeitoun, Evidentialism, James White, and Cameron Bertuzzi

Yesterday, I watched this podcast by James White where he criticized evidentialism in light of this crazy post where Cameron Bertuzzi claimed that "Zeitoun provides stronger evidence for Christianity than does the Bible." One thing James said that jumped out at me was that, "You don't prove the highest authority by an appeal to lesser authorities" (50:17). This is the crux of his argument against evidentialism and for presuppositionalism. Whenever we appeal to something external to the word of God for verification of God or the word of God, we are appealing to a lesser authority to prove a higher authority.

Presuppositionalists begin with the Bible. Since the Bible contains the words of God, and God is the highest authority, there isn't anything external to the Bible that can serve as evidence for the veracity of the Bible. Since God is the highest authority, he can't appeal to anything higher to guarantee the truth of his own words. He can only swear by himself (Hebrews 6:13). This is the heart of the presuppositional point of view.

I wonder, though, if this is all consistent with what James has said about the Canon. I remember James saying on a few occasions that we don't have a divinely inspired table of contents for the Bible. James rightly makes a distinction between what makes something part of the Canon, and how we recognize that something is part of the Canon. What makes it Canon is that God inspired it. I'm not entirely sure how James thinks we recognize what belongs in the Canon.

James thinks the scriptures are self-authenticating. I'm not sure what that means. If it means the Scriptures attest to their own truth, that's true. 2 Timothy 3:16 and various other places confirm the truth of scripture. But I've heard other people talk about "self-authentication" in a different way. They say it has more to do with the truth of scripture being self-evident. So you should be able to read the Bible and recognize that it's the word of God. I don't know for sure if that's what James thinks or not.

If that is what he thinks, then the Canon could be settled by appeal to self-authentication. I would be surprised, though, if James thought we could know the Canon that way. I don't know if anybody in the history of the church has attempted to come up with a table of contents for the Bible based merely on "recognizing" the voice of God when reading the scriptures.

So how do we know the Canon if not by appeal to self-authentication? It seems to me the only way to know is by looking at historical evidence. We look at evidence of who wrote the scriptures, how early they were, whether they cohere with the rest of what is accepted, what the early church said, etc. History is a fallible process, though. If it is through history that we know which books contain the word of God, then aren't we appealing to a lesser authority to prove a higher authority? I would love to know what James thinks about this. Since he doesn't think we have a divinely inspired table of contents, then doesn't he ultimately need a lesser authority to prove a higher authority? He needs some fallible evidence or line of reasoning in order to demonstrate which books contain the word of God and which don't. If James appeals to history as evidence for some particular book being the word of God, then he's being inconsistent with his claim that you can't prove a higher authority by appeal to a lesser authority.

There are a couple of issues I have with James' claim that you can't prove a higher authority by appeal to a lesser authority. One problem I have with this claim, at least as he applies it to evidentialism, is that an appeal to evidence is not an appeal to authority. An appeal to authority is when you take somebody's word for something because you believe that person knows the truth. You trust a doctor to diagnose you because they are experts in medicine. You take a lawyer's legal advice because they are experts in the law. A Catholic might take the Pope's word for some theological truth because they think the Pope knows what he's talking about. But that is not how appeal to evidence works. Appeals to evidence are not appeals to authority, so evidentialism does not amount to appealing to a lesser authority to prove a higher authority.

A second problem I have with James' claim is that it seems to confuse or conflate the reliability of how you came to believe the Bible is God's word with the reliability of the Bible itself. It is possible for the Bible to be 100% reliable without you knowing it with certainty. There is nothing inconsistent with believing the Bible to be the infallible word of God even though you're not 100% certain about it. I think James is just wrong to say you can't use a lesser authority (or less than certain evidence) to demonstrate a higher authority. I think James is making the same mistake he made when criticizing Cameron Bertuzzi for using Bayesian reasoning to evaluate the probability that the Papacy is legitimate, which I exlained in another post.

Interestingly, James appears to be making the same mistake that Catholic apologists make when they challenge protestants on Sola Scriptura. The Catholic argument assumes that before you can know that any book is an infallible source of authority, you need another infalliable source of authority to tell you so. You need one infallible source to tell you about another infallible source. Catholics have the infallibility of the Church and/or Tradition to tell them what books belong in the Canon, but since protestants reject the infallibility of the Catholic Church and Tradition, protestants supposedly can't know the Canon.

However, this idea that you need an infallible source to tell you what sources are infallible is clearly wrong, and it seems to me that both James White and Catholic apologists are inconsistent in this area. If you need an infallible source of authority to establish an infallible source of authority, then you're either going to face an infinite regress or resort to a circular line of reasoning. There's no escaping it.

Catholic apologists often go the circular route. They believe they need an infallible Church to tell them what books are the infallible word of God. But how do they know the Church is infallible? Well, they allgedly know that because of passages like 1 Timothy 3:15. And again, they know 1 Timothy is the infallible word of God because the Church says so.

Every time I've pointed out the circularity of this reasoning to Catholics, they have attempted to avoid circular reasoning by appealing to historical arguments for the authority of the Church. So they eventually have to resort to fallible evidence to establish an infallible source of authority. If you can establish an infallible source of authority by appealing to a fallible line of reasoning or assessment of evidence, then there's no reason you can't establish the list of infallible books by appeal to fallible evidence and reasoning.

Since James doesn't think there is an infallible table of contents for the Bible (i.e. there's not an infallible list of books that belong in the Bible), he has no choice but to appeal to some fallible evidence and reasoning to establish which books are actually the infallible word of God. James has to do exactly what he criticizes evidentialists for doing. He has to engage in evidential arguments to prove what books have infallible authority. He has to prove a higher authority by appeal to a lesser authority.

He does the same thing when it comes to textual criticism. The actual words inspired by God are infallible, but James relies on the fallible methods of textual criticism to establish what those words are. He uses a lesser authority to establish a higher authority.

Before I go, I want to make sure I'm not misunderstood. Cameron claimed that the Marian apparition at Zeitoun is better evidence than the Bible for the truth of Christianity. James attacked this claim by attacking evidentialism in general. I attacked James' argument against evidentialism, but I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea and think I'm defending Cameron's claim. I think Cameron's claim is absolute nonsense. Maybe I'll blog on that at another time. In the meantime, you could watch James' video I linked to above. Besides his miguided criticism of evidentialism, he does have some valid arguments against Cameron's claim.

Protein evolution probability, take three

Wow, this is my third post in a week on this one topic. You'd think I found it interesting or something!

I've been reading around to try to find out how controversial or accepted Douglas Axe's 1 in 10⁷⁷ functional protein estimate is, and it turns out it's very controversial. There have been other estimates made by other people in which the ratio of functional to non-functional proteins are a lot higher than what Douglas Axe estimated. This paper, for example, estimates that 1 in 10¹¹ proteins are functional. It says,

In conclusion, we suggest that functional proteins are sufficiently common in protein sequence space (roughly 1 in 10¹¹) that they may be discovered by entirely stochastic means, such as presumably operated when proteins were first used by living organisms. However, this frequency is still low enough to emphasize the magnitude of the problem faced by those attempting de novo protein design.

Since this estimate is many orders of magnitude greater than what Douglas Axe estimated, I want to do a rough back-of-the-napkin estimate of what the probability is of getting a functional protein just in the Milky Way Galaxy within 1 billion years and some much stingier probablistic resources than I used in my last couple of posts on this subject (here and here).

I'll assume there are 100 billion stars in the galaxy, 7% are G-type stars, only G-type stars are working on the problem, and only 20% of them have planets in the habitable zones. That's 1.4 x 10⁹ planets working on the problem.

I'll assume the same proportion of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen in the lithosphere of each planet, but only a small fraction is available to try to make proteins. Instead of taking the elements out of the entire lithosphere, I'll take them out of a volume about the size of Crater Lake.

I asked two different AI's to estimate the mass of the water in Crater Lake. One said about 10¹³ kg, and the other said about 10¹² kg, so let's go with 10¹² kg. I'll spare you all the details I didn't spare you last time and just tell you I calculated that there would be 2.5 x 10³⁶ carbon atoms which allows you to make 1.67 x 10¹¹ proteins with 300 amino acids each.

With 1.4 x 10⁹ planets making 1.67 x 10¹¹ proteins per second for 1 billion years (i.e. 3.1536 x 10¹⁶ seconds), that comes out to a total of 7.37 x 10³⁶ tries in all. Let's simplify that to 10³⁶ and plug it into our equation to get the probability of finding a functional de novo protein.

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(1 - \frac{1}{10^{11}}\right)^{10^{36}}$$

There you have it. It looks like you'd be guaranteed to find a functional protein. Again, I have no idea if the estimate for the fraction of functional to non-functional proteins is correct, so I still don't know if these calculations are worth anything. But based on these estimates, it looks like it's very likely you could get de novo proteins, even with stingy probablistic resources, somewhere in the galaxy.

Unless I hear of some solid uncontroversial estimates of the ratio of functional to non-functional proteins of average length, I think I'm probably going to say the argument against evolution from the improbability of de novo protein evolution is not a good argument. It relies too heavily on controversial estimates. It may turn out to be valid if more information comes in, but we'll just have to wait and see. It could also be made valid by taking into consideration more of the details about how proteins are made and how cells work. More knowledge about exo-planets and the chemistry in the early earth may also contribute.

Some final thoughts

I emailed Mr. Pruett, who I mentioned in the first post, to solicit his feedback on that first post. He knows a lot more about this topic than I do. Based on what he said, there's a lot more complications in coming up with probablities than are reflected in my thought experiment. For example, I ignored how genes actually work, including all the machinery needed to build proteins. I ignored the fact that genes can be altered somewhat without altering the resulting protein. There's also the issue of some proteins requiring other proteins in order to fold up correctly. They don't all just fold themselves. A realistic thought experiment, I'm afraid, would be really complicated.

My strategy has been similar to what we used to do in my calculus classes in college. I remember in one of the classes, we had to figure out whether an equation that spits out a series of numbers was convergent or divergent. If the equation is too complicated to figure that out, you can simplify the equation in such a way that you know it's either more or less likely than the original equation to be convergent or divergent. If you're testing for convergence, and you know your simplification is less likely to be convergent than the original equation, but it converges anyway, then you know your original equation is convergent.

Mr. Pruett also pointed out that I over-complicated part of my calculation. I could've just started with 10⁸⁰ atoms in the universe and figured out how many of them are carbon atoms, and gone from there. I didn't have to talk about star types, habitable planets, lithospheres, etc.

Mr. Pruett made a good point I wish I had considered. I gave very generous time constraints on building proteins, but if I wanted to test de novo genes in already existing species, those appear to pop up pretty quickly in nature. The Cambrian Explosion only lasted maybe 30 million years, and lots of new genes (and their corresponding proteins) had to have come into existence during that short window of time. That's three orders of magnitude less time than my original 13.8 billion year estimate and two orders of magnitude less than my more restricted estimates of 1 to 5 billion years.

Mr. Pruett made an interesting psychological point. Suppose we calculated that it's nearly impossible for the universe to cough up certain functional proteins, but we went out in nature and discovered that they exist. It's unlikely that a biologist would say, "Wow, that's a miracle." It's more likely they would say, "I guess nature is more clever than we thought." When it comes to trying to figure out whether nature could do something on its own or whether it needs divine assistance, our worldview presuppositions are probably going to carry more weight than our calculations.

I'm not saying necessaily that it shouldn't. After all, a person might have good reason for subscribing to their worldview. If I make some calculation that allows me to make a prediction about what I should expect to find in nature, and I go out in nature and find that things are very different, I probably should doubt the assumptions that went into my calculation. I mean that's how science works. You come up with a hypothesis, you make a prediction based on your hypothesis, and you test it by making observations to see if the prediction pans out.

I think what the protein evolution probability argument attempts to do is not test the assumptions that go into the calculation, but to test the worldview of naturalism. If you assume naturalism as part of your hypothesis, and you use various assumptions to make a calculation that predicts something about proteins, and you go out in nature and find out that your prediction was wrong, that is supposed to cast doubt, not on the assumptions that went into your calculation, but on the assumption of your worldview. Somebody who subscribes to naturalism who runs the same experiment and falsifies their prediction is going to questions the assumptions that went into their calculation rather than their naturalistic worldview. And maybe they should. I don't know. I guess at that point it depends whether you're more sure about your worldview or you're more sure about the assumptions that went into your calculations, not to mention your confidence in entering them in your calculator correctly.

Anyway, thank you for joining me on this journey. It's been interesting for me.

Alvin Plantinga and Sean Carroll are on the same page

I recently read an article by Sean Carroll called "Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad." What jumped out at me when I read this article was how similar it was to Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).

Boltzmann Brains are not in a position to know true from false because all the information that comes their way just fluctuated into being without having any connection with reality. This could happen because the information fluctuated inside their brains, or it could happen because the world in their immediate vicinity fluctuated into existence. Either way, they cannot use their perceptions or any of their tools of reasoning to reliably come to true beliefs about the world.

If you have a model of the universe that predicts you are a Boltzmann Brain, then that model undermines any justification you would have for believing that model. The model is self-stutilfying because as soon as you believe it, for whatever reason, you lose your justification for believing it.

Carroll thinks this is a good reason to reject models that generate Boltzmann Brains. Since Boltzmann Brains are "cognitively unstable," we shouldn't even consider models that generate them. They could still be true, of course. It's just that we could never be justified in believing them since they undermine the reliability of the very process we used to come up with them.

This argument is just like Alvin Plantinga's EAAN. According to Plantinga, if both evolution and naturalism are true, then it's unlikely our brains would be able to reliably distinguish between true and false. Evolution combined with naturalism generates unreliable belief-producing cognitive faculties. So if we believe in both evolution and naturalism, then we have an undercutting defeater for all of our beliefs, including our belief in evolution and naturalism.

In both cases, they are considering models of the world that generate unreliable belief-producing brains, and they are both saying that even though it's possible for such models to be true, we can never be justified in believing them. We shouldn't even consider a model of the world that makes it likely that we can't tell true from false because if we can't tell true from false, then we can't know whether the model is true or false.

Neither of them claim to have proved these models to be false. They only claim to have shown the models are not reasonable to believe or even consider.

Fraser Cane against the fine-tuning argument

Fraser Cane, one of my favourite science news commentators on YouTube, recently made a video where he explained why he doesn't think the fine-tuning argument is a good argument (begining at the 4:13 point in the video). He gave a few of the standard responses, and I didn't think any of them were good responses, so I'm going to respond to them.

Most of the universe is uninhabitable

First, he said the universe is only barely habitable. The vast majority of the universe is uninhabitable. First, you have all the vast emptiness of space. Then you have stars that can't support life. Then most planets are also lifeless. Then, only the thin surface of some planets (like earth) are habitable.

This is not a good argument against the fine-tuning argument, and there are a few reasons. One reason is because it doesn't dispute the fact that if you changed any of the laws or constants by a hair, life wouldn't be possible at all. As I explained on on another post, the universe could be fine-tuned for the possibility of life even if there happened not to be any life at all. The existence of just one life form proves that the universe is habitable. If the constants of nature have to be fine-tuned before that could be possible, then the universe is fine-tuned for life even if life is extremely rare.

A second reason that I also mentioned on that post is that even given ideal conditions, the actual emergence of life might be an extremely improbable event. I discussed that in two posts recently where I tried to calculate the probability of getting a functional protein given the vast probablistic resources in the universe. My estimates and assumptions were rough, but based on them, it looks like we should expect the actual emergence of life to be rare. But the fact that it's even possible means the universe is fine-tuned.

A third problem with this argument is that empty space is necessary for habitability. Imagine if the entire universe were filled with a life-friendly atmosphere like here on earth. If that were the case, there would be two major problems. One problem is that there would be too much mass, causing the universe to collapse, ending any chance of life. The second problem is that there couldn't be any stable orbits. You need empty space so there isn't friction when planets orbit stars and stars orbit galaxies.

The universe would have to be habitable for us to be observing it.

The second point he makes is the anthropic principle. The universe would have to be habitable for us to be here observing it.

This is not a good response to fine-tuning either. If a thousand people aimed their rifles at me and fired, but they all missed, nobody would say, "There's nothing remarkable about the fact that you're alive since you'd have to be alive to consider whether there's anything remarkable going on." Of course it would be remarkable if I were alive! Me being alive would require an explanation because of how unlikely it would be for me to survive that many people shooting at me.

The anthropic principle is a version of the observer-selection effect. The observer selection effect would explain why we find ourselves in a habitable universe rather than an uninhabitable universe if we assumed both kinds existed (e.g. if we assumed a multiverse with random combinations of laws and constants). If there is a multiverse, and the vast majority of univereses were uninhabitable, the anthropic principle would explain why we find ourselves in one that's habitable. It's because a habitable universe is the only kind of univeres that can be observed. All observers observe habitable universes.

The anthropic principle only works as an explanation of fine-tuning if you combine it with a multiverse. But Fraser doesn't even suggest a multivere. If there are far more ways the universe could've been uninhabitable than there are for the universe to have been habitable, and there's just one universe, then the probability is that the one universe would be uninhabitable. The fact that we're alive at all shows that the universe is habitable. That requires an explanation just as being alive in the firing squad analogy requires an explanation. Why has the most unlikely thing happened? It won't do to dismiss the question on the basis that if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be around to wonder about it.

I said more about this argument, including the puddle analogy that's often invoked, here.

Any universe is improbable.

A third thing he said was that if you threw a dart out of an airplane, no matter where the dart lands, it's improbable that it would've landed at that particular spot.

That's an argument I used to have as a college freshman against teleological arguments in general, but that's a terrible argument. As somebody who has a basic understanding of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, Fraser ought to know better. While any random arrangement of parts in a closed system is equally improbable, there are certain kinds of arragements that are less probable than other kinds. Some are ordered kinds, and some are random kinds. To use an analogy, imagine dumping a box of alphabet cereal on the floor. Any random arrangement is equally improbable, but there are certain kinds of arragements (namely, the kind that spell words and sentences) that are far less probable than other kinds (namely, the kinds that don't spell words or sentences). In the same way, any random combination of values for the constants of nature might be equally improbable, but the combinations that result in habitable universes are extremely rare. That's the real issue.

We just don't know why the universe is habitable.

The fourth thing he said was that the fine-tuning argument shuts down scientific inquiry. If we don't know why the universe appears to be fine-tuned for life, we should say, "I don't know," and try to find out instead of suggesting God did it.

The problem with this argument is that it begs the question against a theistic explanation. It just assumes theism is the wrong answer. This is a response one could use against any hypothesis.

Consider the big bang as an explanation for the CMBR and the red shift of distant galaxies. One could just as easily invoke Fraser's argument and say, "I don't know why there's a CMBR or why there's a red shift to distant galaxies" instead of suggesting a big bang did it. You could run the same argument against cosmic inflation.

If Fraser doesn't think God is a good explanation, he needs to say specifically why. Is there a better explanation? Is God an insufficient explanation? Is there some reason to think God doesn't exist? Any of these could be a good reponse, but that's not where Fraser goes.

Imagine applying the same reasoning to an alleged crime scene. You look around and see what appears to be evidence that a murder took place, but your supervisor says, "Hey, if you don't know how the person died, then don't just assume a murderer did it. You should suspend judgment until you find out what did cause the death." Well, if everything at the crime scene points to a murderer, then that's what you should think is the explanation.

If you have good reason to think you've identified the correct explanation for some observation, then you're perfectly within your rights in concluding that your explanation is correct. There's no reason to say, "I don't know," and wait for the alledged right explanation as if you don't already have the right explanation.

Coming to a conclusion about the correct explanation for your observations doesn't mean you shut down inquiry. You can hold your belief provisionally and be open to changing your view if new information comes along. But you don't need to suspend judgment when you have evidence that points to a particular explanation.

Notice that nobody ever says the same sort of thing about any other explanation besides God. When they came up with the dark matter as an explanation for flat galaxy rotation curves, nobody said, "Don't use dark matter to explain galaxy rotation because that shuts down scientific inquiry. Instead, hold out for a better explanation." Dark matter didn't put an end to inquiry. People still proposed other explanations, like Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). Whether you think the correct explanation for flat galaxy rotation curves is MOND or dark matter, you are free to be open to new information that might point to a different explanation. Having an explanation doesn't shut down further inquiry.

Science is provisional. So is every field of inquiry. We make our best conclusions based on the evidence that's available to us. We don't withhold judgment about every single conclusion we come to merely on the basis that it's possible some new piece of information will come along in the future that overturns what we previously thought we knew. We don't stop investigating the world or testing what we think we know just because we think we already have the right answers. So there's no reason in the world to think that belief in God as the explanation for fine-tuning will put a stop to scientific inquiry.

Functional protein probabilities using ChatGPT's estimates

Yesterday, I made a post talking about the probability of one functional protein 200 amino acids long being formed through undirected processes somewhere in the observable universe. I had to make a lot of guesses, but to give our protein its best chance, I made very generous estimates. Based on my estimates, I calculated a near 100% probability of the universe spitting out at least one functional protein 200 amino acids long.

Today, I thought I'd see what ChatGPT would say. I'll use the same probability equation, and the same line of reasoning, but I'll let ChatGPT come up with my estimates for me. Whenever ChatGPT gives a range, I'll use the upper end of the range (with one exception). Here's what ChatGPT said:

Stars in the universe: 1 x 10²¹

Fraction of stars that could host planets in the habitable zone: 25%

How much carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen are on an average planet like earth?:

For rocky planets like earth. . .

H: 2%
C: 0.5%
N: 0.3%
O: 50%

ChatGPT didn't say, but I'm going to assume those percentages are by mass. It looks like ChatGPT is just considering earth's crust, too, which is good. That's what I want.

I wanted to know which of these would be the limiting factor, so I asked ChatGPT how many of each atom we would have if we took one of each of the 20 usual amino acids and added up all the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in them. A couple of them have Sulpher, but I'm going to ignore that for simplicity. ChatGPT said,

C: 101
H: 161
N: 29
O: 49

It looks like either carbon or hydrogen is going to be the limiting factor. Let's go with carbon.

What is the average length of a protein?

ChatGPT said 300 to 400. This time, I'm going to go with that lower limit of 300.

What is the average lifespan of a star?

Chat GPT gave three estimates--one for red dwarves, one for high mass stars, and one for sun-like stars. The red dwarves live a really long time, but are mostly uninhabitable because of how active they are, and massive stars don't live very long at all, so I'm just going to go with sun-like stars. The average there is 10 billion years.

It seems unreasonable to use the entirety of earth's mass in my calculation because proteins aren't going to form in the mantel or in earth's core. So I asked ChatGPT how much of earth's mass makes up the lithosphere. ChatGPT said 1 to 2%, so I'm going to go with 2%. Earth's mass is 5.7 x 10²⁴, so the lithosphere must be 1.14 x 10²³ kg.

Let's do some calculations.

First, I'm still going to assume 1 try per second.

I'm going to assume all the amino acids are in one big soup.

The mass of the earth's lithosphere is 1.14 x 10²³ kg. 0.5% of that is carbon, so there's 5.7 x 10²⁰ kg of carbon in the lithosphere. An average carbon atom weights 1.99 x 10^-26 kg, so there are about 2.86 x 10⁴⁶ carbon atoms in the lithosphere.

You need 101 carbon atoms for a full set of the 20 standard amino acids, so with those carbon atoms, you can create 2.83 x 10⁴⁴ full sets. Each set has 20 amino acids, so that's 1.42 x 10⁴³ individual amino acids per planet.

An average protein has 300 amino acids, so that's 4.73 x 10⁴⁰ proteins per planet. That's going to be the number of tries per second per planet.

There are 1 x 10²¹ stars, and 25% of them have planets in the habital zone, so that's 2.5 x 10²⁰ planets in the habitable zone.

Although earth has 10 billion years, only 5 billion of that will have life on it. Proteins need to form in a shorter span than 5 billion years if there are to be multiple species and diversity, so I'm going to give each planet 2 billion years to create an average protein. That's 6.31 x 10¹⁶ seconds.

Now, I think we can calculate the number of tries.

(1 try per/sec) x (6.31 x 10¹⁶ sec) x (4.73 x 10⁴⁰ proteins/planet) x (2.5 x 10²⁰ planets) = 7.46 x 10⁷⁷ protein tries. This is getting interesting.

Now, we can plug that into our equation using the Douglas Axe estimate of 1 functional protein for every 10⁷⁷ proteins of a given length. He used 150 amino acids, but I'm assuming the fraction is the same for all lengths.

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(1 - \frac{1}{10^{77}}\right)^{7.46 \times 10^{77}}$$

The exponent is pretty close to the denominator, so we could get a real probability here. Since I can't put those huge exponents in my calculator, I played around. I tried replacing the 10⁷⁷ in both places with 2, 10, 100, 1000, and 1,000,000. I got pretty close to the same result each time, so I'll bet that's what it is. The probability came out to be 99.9%, which means you'd be practically guaranteed to get a functional protein.

It is possible that I made a math error. I've gone through and corrected myself two or three times since posting this, so there's a possibility I could go through it again and find another mistake.

A lot of these numbers are speculative. I guess you can get whatever probability you want depending on how you massage the numbers. You can be generous or stingy with your assumptions. As I said in the last post, I think the pivotal unknown is the fraction of proteins of a given length that could be functional out of all the possible sequences of amino acids in a given length. I suggested in the last post how we might be able to figure that out with the new AlphFold AI thingy. Since nobody has done it, as far as I know, I used Douglas Axe's estimate, which, as I explained in the last post, I'm not so sure about.

One thing I learned in this whole thing is that if you're just looking for any functional protein, the length of the protein doesn't figure into the probability (except when you're determining how many proteins you're going to get per planet with your available amino acids). All that matters is what fraction of proteins of any given length will be functional. That fraction may, for all we know, be the same regardless of length. But like I said in the last post, we don't necessarily know that the fraction is the same in all lengths. The only way to figure that out is through experimentation or simulation. Assuming it's the same for all lengths, the length only figures into the probability if you're looking for one particular sequence of that length. Then the length matters a great deal to the probability.

You could make the length relevant if you considered the probability of different lengths with any sequence. It does seems like the longer a sequence is, the less probable it is. On the other hand, that may have a lot to do with how it is formed. If you had two proteins 200 units long, and they merged in one event, you'd have one 400 units long. That would be easier than if you had one 200 units long and it mutated through successive generations until it grew to 400 units. It's probably simpler to leave this probability out.

One interesting thing I took from this is that if you ignore the 1 x 10²¹ stars in the universe and all the planets surrounding them, and you focused only on earth, the probability of getting any functional protein on earth would be almost non-existent. But if you include the whole observable universe, then you're guaranteed to get the functional protein somewhere in the universe. So there's a sense in which we really did win the lottery here on earth.

That's assuming, of course, that there's some validity to my thought experiment. It is, admittedly, speculative. It uses a lot of really rough estimates and simplifications. If there is some validity to it, it would answer the Fermi paradox. Life in the universe is extremely rare. Advanced intelligent life like ours even more so.

Wait! There's more! I wrote a third post on this topic after looking further into estimates for functional to non-functional amino acid sequences and after getting some feedback from Paul Scott Pruett.

Evolution's mathematical obstacle

There are a few equations I put in this post using a new trick I learned recently. Sometimes, the equations look really tiny. If that happens to you, just hit the refresh button, and they should be big again. The issue may just be my browser.

One of the most interesting things I've read or heard about concerning the mathematical obstacles to evolution is an argument that says the probability of getting just one functional protein of average length in the entire history of the universe, even given unrealistically generous probablistic resources, is so vanishingly small, that it's not reasonable to believe that new proteins could form through undirected natural processes.

One particularly good presentation of an argument like this is "The Statistical Case Against Evolution" by Paul Scott Pruett. He notes that there are examples of convergent evolution, not just on the macro scale, but on the scale of genes and proteins as well. That means nature seems to aim at particular target proteins. The odds of getting particular target proteins are much smaller than the odds of getting just any functional protein, yet nature seems to produce the same target proteins over and over.

I also saw this video on YouTube, but based on what Scott told me, it's a little sketchy. Scott thought some of his assumptions were either too generous or just arbitrary. I have issues with this presentation, too, but it's at least easy to understand.

I have been skeptical of this argument for a number of reasons, but I thought it might be interesting for me to try to work through the line of reasoning myself and see what I come up with. While trying to work through it, I came up against some unanswered questions that prevented me from completing the argument. I've put this blog post on hold and revisited it from time to time over the last few years, but now I thought I'd just make a post about where I'm at. Maybe if I posted about my unanswered questions and why I think they are relevant, somebody will have something to say about them.

So, here we go.

An amino acid is an organic molecule made of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. There are 20 different kinds of amino acids that make up the proteins in all life on earth. Proteins are strings of amino acids. Depending on the length of these sequences and their order, proteins can be folded into stable shapes. The shapes of the proteins are what give them their function. You can think of them like car parts.

The amino acids can be strung together in any order. You can think of them like letters in the alphabet. You can string a bunch of letters together in any order. Just as some of those arragements will produce gibberish while other arrangements will produce coherent words and sentences, so also some sequences of amino acids can be folded into stable functional proteins, and others cannot.

Proteins come in different lengths, but the average protein is about 200 amino acids long. Since each position along the string could contain any of 20 different amino acids, there are 20²⁰⁰ possible sequences in a protein that's 200 amino acids long.

If you were to randomly pick out a sequence of amino acids 200 units long, the odds that you would get any one particular sequence would be 1 in 20²⁰⁰, which is pretty small. However, there are more things to consider in this argument, which brings me to some of my unanswered questions.

Any low probability can be overcome if you have enough chances for it to happen. If you were trying to guess the combination of a lock, you may have a 1 in a million chance of making the right guess on the first try, but if you tried a million times, you'd have a good chance of guessing correctly in at least one of those tries.

Let's suppose you want to aim for a particular sequence of amino acids 200 units long. You start on day one at the beginning of the universe, and you do one try per second continuously until today. There's no need to be precise, so roughly. . .

13.8 billion years x 365 days/year x 24 hours/day x 60 minutes/hour x 60 seconds/minute = 4.35 x 10¹⁷ seconds

With that being the case, what are the chances of getting the correct sequence if you made one attempt every second for 13.8 billion years?

Let me make a detour here and clarify something I used to be confused about.

If you have a six sided dice, and you rolled it, the odds of getting any given number would be 1 in 6, right? So you'd think that if you rolled it six times, the odds of getting any given number would be 1. In other words you'd be guaranteed to get the right number. But that obviously isn't right because it's possible to roll it six times and never get a 2. So here's the correct way to figure out the probability of getting a 2 if you rolled it six times.

Each time you roll the dice, you have a 5 in 6 chance of not getting a 2. So if you roll it six times, the probability of not getting a 2 on all six rolls can be given by,

$$\normalsize \left(\frac{5}{6}\right)^6$$

Since that's the probability of not getting a 2 in the six rolls, you can subtract that number from 1 to get the probability that you will get a 2.

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(\frac{5}{6}\right)^6$$

That comes out to a 66.5% chance, or about 1 in 1.5, which is obviously lower than a 100% chance.

Now, let's apply that same reasoning to figure out what the chances are of getting our target protein. Since the chances of getting the right sequence in one try is 1 in 20²⁰⁰, the chance of not getting the right sequence is,

$$\normalsize \frac{20^{200} - 1}{20^{200}}$$

And the chances of getting the right sequence in 4.35 x 10¹⁷ tries is,

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(\frac{20^{200} - 1}{20^{200}}\right)^{4.35 \times 10^{17}}$$

Unfortunately, my dinky calculator can't handle those kinds of numbers, but if you think about it, the probability is really small. That means if you were to make one random attempt every second for 13.8 billion years to get a particular sequence of amino acids 200 units long, there's almost no chance that it would happen. But I would love to see the actual number.

We can improve these odds, though. We know that in reality, there could be tries happening simultaneously all over the universe each second (relativity of simultaneity notwithstanding). Let's imagine some really generous probablistic resources to improve our odds.

The internet estimates that there are 10⁵⁰ atoms in the earth. Let's suppose all these atoms are just hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, that they are currently part of amino acid molecules, and that they are all joining in the effort to make our target protein. The average amino acid contains 10 atoms, so there would be about 10⁴⁹ amino acids that make up the earth.

$$\normalsize \frac{10^{50} \, \text{atoms}}{10 \, \text{atoms/amino acid}} = 10^{49} \, \text{amino acids}$$

The internet also estimates that there are 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. That's 200,000,000,000 x 1,000,000,000,000 = 2 x 10²³ stars. Let's imagine there are two earth-like planets for each star, and they have all existed for the entirety of the 13.8 billion years of the universe. That's 4 x 10²³ earth-like planets, all trying to make this one protein.

In that case, there would be 4 x 10⁷² amino acids available to make proteins.

$$\normalsize 10^{49} \, \text{amino acids/planet} \cdot 4 \times 10^{23} \, \text{planets}= 4 \times 10^{72} \, \text{amino acids}$$

Since each try uses up 200 amino acids, there are 2 x 10⁷⁰ tries going on each second.

$$\normalsize \frac{4 \times 10^{72} \, \text{amino acids}}{200 \, \text{amino acids/try}} = 2 \times 10^{70} \, \text{tries}$$

Since we already figured out that there are 4.35 x 10¹⁷ seconds in 13.8 billion years, that means there are 8.7 x 10⁸⁷ tries in the history of the universe.

$$\normalsize 2 \times 10^{70} \, \text{tries/sec} \cdot 4.35 \times 10^{17} \, \text{sec} = 8.7 \times 10^{87} \, \text{tries}$$

Now we can adjust the original probability we got to account for all these generous probablistic resource. Now, we get,

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(\frac{20^{200} - 1}{20^{200}}\right)^{8.7 \times 10^{87}}$$

That's an improvement, and although my dinky calculator can't give you the actual number, you should be able to tell that it's still an extremely small number. Look at that fraction. The numerator and denominator are almost exactly the same because if you subtract 1 from a number as big as 20²⁰⁰, you haven't subtracted much, relatively speaking. That means the fraction is extremely close to 1, which means that number raised to 10⁸⁷, though smaller, is still going to be very close to 1. And that means 1 minus that number is going to be very close to zero. And that means there's nearly a zero percent chance of getting the target protein.

Up until now, we have only been trying to calculate the odds of getting one specific sequence of amino acids 200 units long. But if we are just trying to find out what the odds are of getting any functional protein given the same probablistic resources, our odds should greatly improve. The reason is because for any sequence of amino acids of some given length, there is more than one sequence that could be functional.

There are two things necessary for a protein to be functional. First, it needs to be able to fold up into a particular shape and hold that shape. Second, it needs to exist in an environment in which it serves a purpose. I'm going to ignore that second requirement for the sake of this thought experiment because that would complicate things. Whether a protein serves a purpose depends on the shape of every other protein in its evironment. For the purposes of this thought experiment, I'm going to assume that any protein that can fold up into a stable shape has the potential to be functional. I just want to know what the odds are of getting any potentially functional protein in the history of the universe given our generous probablistic resources.

It is at this point in the game that I have run up against a wall. To continue the thought experiment, I need to know, out of all the 20²⁰⁰ possible sequences of amino acids in my protein, what fraction of them are capable of folding up into a stable shape.

We know already that you can alter a few of the amino acids in a sequence and still end up with the same functional protein. If that weren't the case, we'd all be genetically identical. It is our genes that store the information to build our proteins. Two people can have the same gene that codes for the same protein, but there will be slight differences between them. Those differences are what make us genetically unique. It's why DNA evidence is useful in criminal investigations. It's also why 23andME can find your relatives. The closer the relation, the more similar the DNA sequence.

Besides variations in the same protein, you can have completely different proteins (i.e. proteins that fold into a different shape and perform a different function) that are the same length, or close to the same length.

If all we looked at were the proteins that exist in nature, almost all of them are functional. Otherwise, nature wouldn't have preserved them. So we can't just look at the existing proteins to estimate how many sequences in 20²⁰⁰ could be functional. I've seen people make that mistake.

It would be great if we could build that many and just see for ourselves what fraction of them fold into stable shapes. But 20²⁰⁰ is too many, and they're not easy to make anyway. Another way is to use computer simulations. We could just have a computer predict how they would fold.

Predicting how a sequence of amino acids will fold up has been a nortoriously difficult problem for a while now. Veritasium recently posted a video about it you should check out. Mithuna Yoganathan at the Looking Glass Universe channel also made a video about it a while back. The good news is that it looks like, thanks to AI, the notorious protein folding problem has been solved. AI can now predict, with 90% accuracy, how a given string of amino acids 30 units long will fold up. Until this breakthough came along, I don't see how anybody could possibly know what fraction of proteins of a given length could fold up into stable shapes. Now, it looks like it's possible to figure it out.

How would they do it, though? One way would be to try every sequence. There's probably not enough computing power for that, though. It might work if you were only considering sequences 10 or 20 units long, but if you try 200 units long, no computer has that kind of power.

Another way is to try a representative sample size and extrapolate. Maybe they could try a million random sequences to see what fraction of them fold up into stable shapes. Then they could try another million and see if they get the same fraction. If they do, then they can extrapolate to the whole 20²⁰⁰ possibilities and estimate the fraction of them that can make functional proteins. Will somebody out there please try this? I would love to know.

I was recently reading Stephen Meyer's book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, and I was relieved to see that Meyer addressed this issue I was having. This exerpt gave me hope that I was at least thinking it through correctly. He said,

Nevertheless, when I first met Denton, he told me that it was not yet possible to make a conclusive mathematical determination of the plausiblility of a random mutational search for new functional genes and proteins. Molecular biologists, he told me, could not yet quantify how rare functional DNA sequences (genes) and proteins were among all the possible sequences of nucleotide bases and amino acids of a given length. Consequently, they couldn't yet calculate the relevant probabilities - and thus assess the plausibility of random mutation and natural selection as a means of producing new genetic information.

This looks to be on page 309 or 310, but I'm using a Kindle, so I can't be sure. Anywho, when I read that recently, I was all like, "That's what I've been saying!" A few pages later, he repeated basically the same thing. He said,

They also need to know how rare or common functional arrangements of DNA are among all the possible arrangements for a protein of a given length. That's because for genes and proteins, unlike in our bike-lock example, there are many functional cominations of bases and amino acids (as opposed to just one) among the vast number of total combinations. Thus, they need to know the overall ratio of functional to nonfunctional sequences in the DNA.

That's on page 312, I think. A few pages later, Meyer said he met Douglas Axe who had tried to answer this question. Axe determined that functional proteins are extremely rare. Meyer writes,

How rare are they? Axe set out to answer this question using a sampling technique called site-directed mutagenesis. His experiments revealed that, for every one DNA sequence that generates a short functional protein fold of just 150 amino acids in length, there are 10⁷⁷ nonfunctional combinations - combinations that will not form a stable three-dimentional protein fold capable of performing a specific biological function.

If I'm reading that right, it would mean only 1 in 10⁷⁷ sequences 150 amino acids long are functional. How many is that? We can figure that out with a ratio.

$$\normalsize \frac{x}{20^{150}} = \frac{1}{10^{77}}$$

So,

$$\normalsize x = \frac{20^{150}}{10^{77}} = 2 \times 10^{73}$$

The probability of not getting a function sequence in 1 try would be,

$$\normalsize \frac{20^{150} - 2 \times 10^{73}}{20^{150}}$$

And the odds of getting a functional sequence in 8.7 x 10⁸⁷ tries are,

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(\frac{20^{150} - 2 \times 10^{73}}{20^{150}}\right)^{8.7 \times 10^{87}}$$

Will somebody out there with a fancy schmancy calculator please calculate that and leave a comment with the answer? We can probably simplify it with an approximation. This should give close to the same result:

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(1 - \frac{1}{10^{77}}\right)^{10^{88}}$$

That looks to me like it would give a result close to 1, meaning nearly a 100% chance. I wonder what would happen if I assumed more realistic probablistic resources.

After playing around on my calculator, using more manageable numbers, I noticed that if the outer exponent (e.g. the 10⁸⁸ in the above equation) is higher than the number in the denominator (e.g. the 10⁷⁷ in the above equation), the probability is close to 100%, and if it's lower, the probability is close to 0%. It's only when they are close to each other that you get a probability in the 20 to 80% range. Let me see what happens if I take Douglas Axe's word for the 1 in 10⁷⁷ figure and use more reasonable probablistic resources.

Let's keep the assumption of 2 x 10²³ stars in the observable universe. Not all stars are going to have habitable planets because, for example, red dwarf stars are more active and are likely hostile to life. About 70 to 80% of stars are red dwarves. I also suspect that stars living near the centers of galaxies aren't as conducive to life. A generous, but more realistic estimate, for the number of habitable star systems, then, would be half of the total stars, so let's go with that: 1 x 10²³. That's a simpler number anyway.

Let's assume all these star systems have 1 planet or moon with amino acids, temperatures, and other conditions capable of supporting life. Now we have 1 x 10²³ planets.

Red dwarves live longer than medium sized or ginormous stars, but we've elminated most of them. The more massive a star is, the shorter its life, so the less time there is for life to emerge. Since our star is medium sized, and since they say life has maybe 1 billion years left, let's assume the average planet has 5 billion years in which to produce a functional protein. So instead of calculating the number of seconds in 13.8 billion years, we're going to use the number of seconds in 5 billion years. That's 1.57 x 10¹⁷ seconds.

Let's stick with 1 try per second, but this time, we're not going to assume each planet is nothing but amino acids. We'll still make a generous assumption, though. Let's assume 1/4 the mass of earth's oceans are made of amino acids. According to the internet, there are estimated to be 4.64 x 10⁴³ water molecules in earth's oceans. A water molecule is made up 3 atoms, so that's 13.92 x 10⁴³ atoms. We're taking 1/4 of that, so that's 3.48 x 10⁴³ atoms. The average amino acid is made up of 10 atoms, so there are 3.48 x 10⁴² amino acids. Our target protein this time is 150 amino acids long because we're using Axe's number. So there are 2.32 x 10⁴⁰ proteins on each planet at any given moment.

Now we can calculate the number of tries.

$$\normalsize 1 \frac{\text{try}}{\text{sec}} \cdot 2.32 \times 10^{40} \frac{\text{proteins}}{\text{planet}} \cdot 1 \times 10^{23} \, \text{planets} \cdot 1.57 \times 10^{17} \text{seconds}$$

$$\normalsize = 3.5 \times 10^{80} \, \text{protein tries}$$

Our new probability is,

$$\normalsize 1 - \left(1 - \frac{1}{10^{77}}\right)^{3.5 \times 10^{80}}$$

It looks like with the more realistic assumptions, albeit still generous, we still have a probability near 100% that at least one functional protein will be created somewhere in the observable universe. Of course in reality, you need thousands of proteins for life, and you need them all on the same planet, so maybe, just maybe, things will turn out to be unlikely after all.

I'm not totally convinced by Meyer's argument, even if the probability is small, because I don't really understand how Axe came up with this number, and I don't know whether his number is accepted by the community of geneticists and biologists out there. I don't know if there's any controversy about it or whether it's a widely accepted estimate.

I'm a little skeptical for the reasons I explained earlier--the fact that until recently, there was no way to predict how proteins would fold just from knowing the sequence. Whatever method Axe used, it seems like the method I suggested earlier would probably work better. I feel arrogant saying that given how little I know and understand, and I don't mean to sound that way. I'm just expressing what makes sense to me.

There's another issue that's relevant to this whole conversation, and that's how new genes/proteins are formed. There are lots of ways they can come about, and the way they come about should have some bearing on their probabilities. If you were just creating a fresh protein from scratch, the probability of getting a functional sequence would be far less than if you took two already existing functional proteins and spliced them together. Since we already know that each half folds into a stable shape, it's not that unlikely that the combination will also fold into a stable shape.

There are other ways to create new proteins, too. One way, is to cut one in half. Another way is to insert a sequence in an already existing protein. You could even insert a sequence that existed in a different functional protein. You could take a functional protein and delete a section, and it would probably result in a different functional protein. So there are all kinds of ways to get new functional proteins from old ones, and those don't strike me as being nearly as improbable as creating one from scratch.

However, according to what I've read, there are genes and proteins that do emerge seemingly from scratch. They call them de novo genes or orphan genes. They don't have any known precursor. Some of these de novo genes might have precurors that are just lost to biological history. It doesn't mean they didn't exist. But some appear to have somehow emerged from what used to be called the "junk" part of the DNA. In a sense, they did emerge from scratch. It seems to me this argument I'm trying to think through would only apply to de novo genes that emerged from scratch or from the "junk" part of DNA, if there is such a thing.

If there's a section of DNA that doesn't code for proteins or that doesn't serve some other purpose, it should be blind to the forces of natural selection. Natural selection tends to preserve useful sequences and gets rid of harmful sequences. But if there's a sequences that is neither useful nor harmful, then for all practical purposes, it's random. If a gene emerges from a random sequence, then that would be an example of a de novo gene. A de novo gene like that can't be built up over time by making small improvements to an already existing functional sequence. These types of genes must feel the full force of the improbability we tried to calculate earlier. These types of genes used to be thought rare, but it turns out they are more common than once thought.

If anybody ever does the experiments I suggested earlier, here are a couple of things I would like to know.

First, I would like for somebody to pick some length to test, using simluations, AI, or whatever, and get an estimate of what fraction of sequences of that length can form functional proteins.

Second, I would like for somebody to do the same thing with a handful of other lengths. They could maybe test lengths of 20 amino acids long, 50, 100, 150, 200, etc. I would be curious to know if the fraction is the same for each length or if it's different. If it's different, I would like to know whether the fraction increases or decreases with length. Maybe you could plot it on a graph. It would be interesting to know if there's a curve to it. Maybe somebody could come up with an equation to describe the curve and discover a new law of biology or something.

That's where I'm at right now. I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject, so leave a comment.

Here's tomorrow's post on the same subject where I asked ChatGPT to pick my estimates.