Another post from 35,000 ft -slightly delayd

About an hour away from Portland I find my mind wandering all over the place. I’ve just taken a break from reading Monster, a novel written by Frank Peretti about a year or so ago. I’ve been meaning to purchase it for sometime, but just recently did. I really don’t want to get too much into the whole story, but needless to say it involves some of the heavily debated topic of evolution. Now, I do understand that Peretti does put some of his characters to the extreme of both sides of the spectrum in some ways, but an old friend and mentor of mine always said, “We are really ourselves when we’re at our worst.” NO I might be misconstruing this comment, but I think that it does include us when we are at our most extreme. When we take the view we think is right and we wish to defend it at all costs, that is us at our worst. That is when the primal urges that dwell in the deepest part of our being come to the surface. I believe a real world example of this in the present would be the senseless destruction of human life by those believing that it is the best way to foist their beliefs on others.

(While there are many tangents that I know that I could go on, I will try to keep those thoughts on track, and save the others for another time, possibly in the near future.)

Getting back to the Peretti novel, I found a quote in the middle of the novel that struck me. Now, I can’t quote it word for word, just because I read it about 250 pages or so ago, but it was something along the lines of “People will believe what they want, and even when all the facts are telling them different, they will overlook them to believe what they want.” Now, you might read this and say one of two things. “Your out of your mind, how could someone look at the facts and still not believe.” Or you could say, “You could have a point there, but I’d never do that, I’m too objective to do that.” And both of those statements are completely false. I can prove it because I know that as objective and logical as I try to be in analyzing something, I will admit that there is a good chance I will or have overlooked some facts that don’t fit into my worldview in order to maintain an uncorrupted belief in my worldview and belief system. So as I write this, I write not as a hypocrite, but as one who knows about it because there’s a good chance that I’ve done it myself, and now that I’ve recognized it, I will try to avoid it as best as is possible.

That being said, what is the big deal about this? Why would I write about it?

***February 20, 2007, 3:26 am***

Ok…almost two months since I’m completing this, but finally some things congealed in my cognitive areas, and I felt them best to complete this post.

Why would I write about this whole thing? Well think about the whole theory of evolution. It is, for the most part, taught as the definitive manner by which human beings appeared on the earth, as a long cycle of accidental trial and error, occurring over millions and billions of years. Why is it taught as fact? Because it fits into a secular, and human centric worldview that allows mankind to rationalize anything it wants to as being ok. And honestly I can understand it. It allows us to get away with doing things that in the depths of our being – those frequently ignored places that cry out to our anesthetized consciences – we know are not right. I know because I’ve done it, and rationalized things myself. The “if it feels good, it must be ok” syndrome really is a byproduct of this worldview. Here’s the sort of facts and evidence that they might overlook in order to maintain a façade that nature is truly impartial, and therefore we have no higher authority to be held accountable by.

If we are to take for a fact that evolution – as espoused by Darwin’s Origin of Species – is the method by which man came to be as he is today, we must go back beyond the first amoeba. The fact that the correct amino acids happen to combine together in just the right way, in order for the spark of unintelligent (that is life forms with more that one cell) life to come to pass the environment had to be in just the right order, accidentally, for those amino acids to form.

Side note: Now, there are a lot of different things about the start of “life,” or even what the exact definition of life is. For the purpose of this particular writing, I’m only going to look at those forms of early life that might have “evolved” into humans. Seeing as humans are some, ninety percent (give or take a few) water I’m going to use for an example those amoeba that formed in water. I know that a plethora of other “life-forms” exist within the bacterial world, but funny enough, we haven’t seen any bacteria “evolve” into anything other than bacteria over the last billion or so years. . .

Going back to the water in which the first proteins combined in. That water had to randomly come to be. This also means that the different atoms that create the elements that water consists of had to just happen to be in the right form at just the right moment. Let’s think about this. Water, everyone knows, consists of an Oxygen atom and two Hydrogen atoms. What make up these atoms? Hydrogen (which, by the way has two or three different forms, I can’t remember at this hour) is formed, normally, out of one proton and one electron. Oxygen, slightly more complex (also having another form or two) is made of eight protons, eight neutrons and eight electrons (in its most abundant form). If you want to break it down even further you wish, protons having two up quarks and one down and neutrons having two down quarks and one up. Those also can be broken down, but I don’t really see the need to. The question is this – how likely is it that subatomic particles that make up the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons that make up the atoms of Oxygen (which is diatomic, two atoms together) and Hydrogen that make up one molecule of water just happen to accidentally be at just the right place at just the right time to form those protons?

I mean seriously – think about this. I wasn’t able to find out what the size of a quark was, but a proton (which has three quarks, like a neutron) has a diameter of .8 x 10-15 meters and a mass of 1.672 621 71(29) × 10−27 kg. That is not big – I mean we can’t even see these things with the unaided eye – heck not even with electron microscopes with tips that are one atom wide. What are the likely chances that out of the big bang (which is the most widely accepted theory, based on observable evidence – see the Wikipedia article) those small particles would just happen to come together in exactly the right way? Not to mention all the potential things that could have gone wrong in the big bang itself (again, see the Wikipedia article).

So I’ll leave at this for now, since it is 4:30 in the morning, and I have read (and to some degree understood and retained) way to much information about particle physics and cosmology and cellular biology concerning prokaryotes and eukaryotes, for a human being to sanely do and still get sleep. Honestly though. Ask yourself about that. I know there’s some whiz mathematician that’s probably done some probability study on the chances of those particular things happening randomly so you can probably seek them out should you want to. Even if you don’t look that up, does it cause some question in your mind about how random it really was? If it wasn’t random, how’d it happen?

Blessings, and good night (or really, good morning)

(PS: Hyperlinked words will take you to Wikipedia articles)