The Wonders of Life (BBC): a personal perspective

 



Earth rise as seen from Apollo 8

In my post Professor Cox’s limited world view I criticised the first episode of the BBC series Wonders of Life for presenting what I can only conclude was Cox’s world view, one of philosophical materialism (a form of atheism) as science. To avoid irritating people like me, who think they are more than a bag of chemicals, all he had to do was admit that the present neo-Darwinist view of evolution is not the only attempt to explain the reality of which we are part and that it is full of holes and contradictions.

 

Happily for me and I believe many others,  the subsequent 4 episodes did not try to move us in this direction, although uncomfortable subjects like cosmic fine tuning and epigenetics in evolution  (see this youtube video) were conveniently ignored.

In the last episode he finished up with a recording of an Apollo 8 astronaut reading from the book of Genesis as the spacecraft circled the Moon in 1968. I remember witnessing this on TV as an agnostic in my early adulthood and feeling there was something moving about the whole situation. Inability to understand the Holy Bible without invoking God's help prevented me from becoming a confirmed Christian until only 3 years ago but, looking back, the Apollo 8 event certainly gave me a push in the right direction.

 

Another push came in 1975 as I was flying back to England after visiting my brother in San Francisco. A delicately structured wisp of cloud was caught by the rising sun and it stirred up an epiphany, a feeling that this moment was charged with significance. Some intelligence had conspired to give me this experience at this time and it had to be God.

 

 

The third push was a book I read in 1992. It was one purporting to be on evolutionary science and I was particularly interested to obtain a clear explanation of how new species appear in nature. Instead I got an assertion that this simply happened under certain conditions and had something to do with genetic mutations. The main point was a diatribe on the pointlessness of existence. This seemed totally fallacious and I knew it could not be true. (The book was River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins.)

 

 It still took another 25 years of reflection and historical probing, a touch of mysticism and the discovery of how to approach prayer and the reading of the Bible, to get me into a church. It was a long hard road but I thank God for both the destination and the journey.

 

John

 

Author 2077 AD

Reach me at cosmik.jo@gmail.com

 

Prof Cox's limited worldview (updated 1 Feb 2013)

The new BBC series Wonders of Life  (BBC2, 27 January 2013), presented by Professor Brian Cox, implied in its first episode the standard world view of some evolutionary biologists and cosmologists:

• Life consists of ‘nothing but’ a chemical process and arrangement for converting one form of energy into another. It is no different in kind from an internal combustion engine converting chemical energy into mechanical movement and waste heat

• All consciousness, thought and mental experience are ‘nothing but’ evolutionary accidents and therefore without meaning (presumably this means that everything anyone has ever said is without meaning, significance or truth; this would include the words of Prof Cox)

• The evolution of life, and before that the unfolding of the universe from the quantum event horizon to the formation of the Earth, is entirely without purpose, despite the fact that the physics is preternaturally fine tuned for the emergence of life , as Cox admitted at the end

Many would say that such a worldview is self-contradictory and without any evidential foundation. It is certainly metaphysics rather than science. Yet the BBC still appears to be in the grip of a naturalist mafia that adheres to such a view and presents it  as scientific fact, in the same vein as Einstein's empirically verified equations, rather than as an empirically shaky working hypothesis.

I believe these people are driven by a fear of young earth creationists who they think will invoke god as the direct causative agent of all phenomena. This is an understandable but exaggerated concern. Plenty of scientists prior to modern geology and palaeontology made powerful discoveries yet some of those must have been young earthers, since geological and fossil evidence for an old earth (4.3 billion years) has only been available and understandable for the last couple of centuries.

In essence we are all creationists. It is entirely rational to believe that the universe, including our home planet, was created; but most of us believe it all started 13.7 billion years ago.  The weight of evidence and rational thought points to a creation event.  If you think that a rational God did not create the universe, or that there is no god, you have to come up with something else and deal with the likelihood that the universe does not operate in a rational way.

 Monotheism does not mean ascribing any natural phenomenon to a miraculous intervention. Paganism would ascribe everything to a chaotic multitude of gods invented by people, a view which would have prevented the emergence of scientific knowledge.

So how could Brian Cox have presented this programme without annoying those viewers who, like me, do regard themselves as more than bags of chemicals?

All he had to do was admit that theistic beliefs are entirely compatible with scientific enquiry and model building and that there are rational reasons in support of that worldview. For me, a programme conceding at the outset that many viewers are justified in believing that science is only part of reality would have made this expert documentary inspirational rather than visually engaging and informative at a scientific level but offensive to many people’s intuitive feel for the real world.

This was only the first of 5 in a series and it may be that the omission is corrected in future episodes. This would be as welcome as it would be surprising.

See also this Scientific American blog
Is scientific materialism almost certainly false?
which appeared only about 12 hours after writing the above. This reassures me that it won't be long before the BBC science editors will be forced to break out of the epistemological strait jacket which removes the wonder and reality from much of their reporting. As a Christian I find the new emerging worldview refreshing and supportive of my faith but if you are an atheist please note that some leading thinkers who have more or less disproved materialism are still adherring to atheism, although how they can do so mystifies me. 


 See also these posts;

The end of eternity (updated 30 Jan 2013)

Consciousness without a brain

Are some scientists from the planet Vulcan?

John
Author, 2077 AD

Reach me at cosmik.jo@gmail

The proton size puzzle

The proton is one of the so-called ‘building blocks’ of the nucleus of an atom, along with neutrons, although these basic constituents themselves consist of three  much smaller entities called quarks.

a proton comprises
3 different kinds of quark bound together

Over the decades the mass and size of the proton has been determined with increasing accuracy and the received view of physicists has been that they are both constant. For proton mass, this still holds; but for proton size the situation changed with a measurement made in 2010 by Pohl et al (Max Planck Institute, Germany) and published in Nature.

It had been determined that the diameter of a proton was 0.87 femtometres (1 fm = 1 metre divided by a quadrillion, i.e. a 1 followed by 24 zeros). It was always assumed that this was a constant property of a proton throughout space and time, independent of the measurement method, which was normally done using a hydrogen atom, which comprises a proton and an orbital electron.

 The method used in 2010 was a new one and involved focusing a fine laser beam onto a muonic hydrogen atom. Like ordinary hydrogen this comprises a central proton of positive charge attended by a negatively charged particle. In the case of normal hydrogen the negative particle is an electron whereas with muonic hydrogen it is a similar but heavier particle called a muon.  The larger mass of the muon, 200x that of an electron, would indirectly result in a more accurate measurement of proton size than the method employing the usual electron. That was the reason for using it; but the result was entirely unexpected: a 4% smaller radius.

 Another experiment in 2012 employed a slightly different method, though it still used muonic hydrogen, and the same result was obtained –i.e. a diameter of 0.84 instead of 0.87 fm.

No one has been able to find any fault in the methodology of these new measurements and existing physics does not explain why the size of the proton depends on whether an electron or a muon is accompanying the proton. Does this mean that the photons in the laser beam interact with muons in a fundamentally different way than with electrons? Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will give a clue. The chase is on, one of many in modern physics that will hopefully converge to reveal more of the splendour of God’s creation.

see also
 http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/hydrogen-made-with-muons-reveals-proton-size-conundrum/

http://www.nature.com/news/shrunken-proton-baffles-scientists-1.12289

Radioactivity half life is not contant

 John

cosmik.jo@gmail.com

Author of 2077 AD