Pattern and Design
I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of design
Charles Darwin
It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring
Carl Sagan
I hope this chapter might release the reader from an existential ache that has caused millions of sane people to doubt the evidence of their own common sense, and to thus have their self-confidence seriously shaken. If we accept the rationality of Idealism/DarwinPlus, it is now acceptable to believe the evidence of our own eyes and common sense:
Pattern in Nature does exist, as everything in Nature has been designed and made by Mind
All of Professor Dawkins’ efforts to use his own fraction of this Mind to deny pattern have been in vain.
§ Please check Chapter 3 to confirm the mental and linguistic contortions the Professor puts himself through as he attempts to deny the screamingly obvious fact that pattern is within us and all around us, and claims instead that these ‘non-patterns’ are all artefacts of accident and randomness. There are millions of Materialist Don Quixotes like RD, all heroically fighting off Reality. They are all wrong, if Idealism/DarwinPlus is sound, which it simply is, if logic means anything at all.
In other words, Wm Paley’s ‘Argument from Design’ is rational and not a delusion, as you and I and millions of others have been confidently told by biology teachers and far too many others. If you find a fine pocket watch, WP says, you infer that it must have been designed; that there must thus be a designer. And if you see a robin or a buttercup, creatures that show much greater evidence of design than even the finest pocket watch, you infer that there must be a designer for them too. ‘Not so’, says RD and the Materialists. ‘Absolutely so’, says DarwinPlus.
(Pattern means ‘design’, but please don’t jump to conclusions. We’ll sort out the confusion which swirls around ‘Creationism’ and ‘Intelligent Design’ in Chapter 26.)
First of all, let’s look at the sheer scale of design we are faced with. We’re not just talking a few flowers and polar bears here. According to current Big Bang theory, this yotta-slew of expanding energy gradually settled down into particles, which later settled out into atoms, then condensed into molecules, each step being an example of Order from disorder: and each step is one of design. A proton is not a non-proton, or a sort-of proton, or proton-ish. It is a proton. This name-fact alone recognises it as a design: an entity clearly distinct from everything that is a ‘not-proton’. Every other particle, and every atom, and every molecule is also a design, involving ever greater and regularly controlled assemblies of sub-components. And every design requires a designer, by definition.
The reason Materialists have a problem with this fact, and the obvious meaning of words, is that they dogmatically refuse to accept the need for an outside force to produce order from disorder, despite science requiring every Effect to have a Cause, and a new force to enable a change in the status quo, thus enabling Cause to produce Effect.
§ Just to be sure: in order to convert a pile of quarks into a smaller pile of protons, science requires us to evoke an outside force to enable this alteration in the status quo. Every deviation from the status quo requires an added force. This is standard science. To claim that quarks somehow ‘just do it’ is to wilfully evade this requirement.
Similarly, for protons and electrons to ‘self-assemble’ into very specific ordered relationships as atoms, some force must have pre-defined the nature of those relationships (ie, the pattern), especially the strange parameters of electronic quantum jumping and energy levels.
For dogmatic Materialists, what is patently obviously a design, can not be so. It must just be something vaguely called complexity, or emergence, and/or an accident arising from lots of time.
When we accept Idealism the problem simply drops away. Intelligence lies behind the Big Bang. It designed the Big Bang, and everything ensuing from it. The fact that we cannot comprehend Intelligence on this scale, or track down its source is irrelevant. A microbe cannot understand Michelangelo’s David or the Taj Mahal. This does not make David nonsense, or an accident.
§ Strong words? In an infinite universe (as assumed by both Religion and Science) there is an infinite amount to know. Thus, as Man’s Mind is clearly not infinite, the Man who knows a lot knows insignificantly more than the Man who knows a little. The greatest genius is but a tinkling bell.
And anyway, what matters is not how much we know, but what we know and how we interpret and integrate it.
The man who wins every quiz show on the planet is not ‘cleverer’, and certainly not ‘better’ or ‘wiser’, than the humble villager who knows how to care for his goat and his environment and that he should be kind to his neighbour. And yet we continue to value knowledge above wisdom.
Every other layer of Order, of which there are endless googols, requires intelligence, design/form, and means of construction: all non-material, mental, attributes.
§ The fact that we (here meaning ‘I’) can’t explain the full process of creation in Nature does not mean that the Yogic/Esoteric Hypothesis is wrong. It just means that I’m not smart enough to figure it out, or not well enough informed. My money’s on both.
§ ‘Matter’ is extremely odd stuff. Solids are nothing of the kind once you look closely at them. The molecules and atoms of a solid are held in more or less firm relationships by electromagnetic forces. It is these forces which give the illusion of solidity. Is ice a solid? Only at a certain level of bond-energy. Is glass? No, it just flows really slowly. Moreover, each constituent atom of a ‘solid’ is made up of over 99% literally nothing. The space between the nucleus and the orbiting electrons is ‘absolutely nothing’, in terms of conventional physics (Yogis etc may make mention here of etheric or astral etc matter). Take away all these nothingnesses and you have the stimulating statistic that the bodies of every one of the world’s nearly 8 billion people could fit into a space the size of a sugar cube. The entire world and everything in it would fit into a modest handbag, I suppose.
So you are not ‘made of carbon, oxygen and sulphur’ after all. You are made of (on overwhelming average).. nothing. That’s the logical extension of the Materialist fallacy. So if I’m made of nothing, I can’t be writing this book, and you can’t be reading it.
Add to that Einstein’s formula of E=mc2 which parallels the Big Bang notion that Matter is ‘frozen’ Energy…. and Matter simply doesn’t matter any more. It effectively does not exist, except as a temporary state of ‘low-energy energy’. So what is it, bearing the Wet Fish Test firmly in mind?**
***
In the course of my journey I needed to investigate many fields of knowledge. Modern biology was obviously one of these. To illustrate the layers and intricacy of design in a human body, may I refer you to any book on anatomy or physiology, which will show, for example, how many thousands of miles of carefully laid blood-piping we each contain, and will confirm that the active surface of your book-sized lungs is actually the size of a tennis court (some 250 square metres: the same active area as your gut contains); and take a look at any description of the workings of the cell (which appears to be the smallest unit of life, and within which DNA is employed to do its stuff).
§ On my shelf is a textbook called Molecular Biology of the Cell, which runs to some 1,150 pages. It took six people to write it, and takes two to lift it. Every page has at least one diagram on it, most of them incomprehensible to the layman. Greek letters, graphs and formulae abound. It contains hundreds of technical terms and jargon words. And it is just a pointer to a world of unimaginable complexity: ie, the world of one single cell.
We each have an estimated 40,000,000,000,000 cells in our body, or maybe more, give or take a few hatfuls of trillions.
§ Nobody knows how many we have, but clearly a midget or a pygmy has enough to be a fully functional being, just as a giant three times his size has. What are we to make of that? How does the design cope with such an extraordinary size range?
Every single one of these forty trillion, or whatever, needs to be in the right place. That alone requires organisation on a super-colossal scale, wouldn’t you say? Could you imagine organising a library of a hundred million volumes, let alone forty million million million?
And each one of these forty trillion cells is of incredible complexity in its construction and in its work. At any one moment a typical cell may be carrying out twenty functions, including nutrition, repair, reproduction, communication, and waste disposal. And all these functions must be coordinated to support the economy of the body as a whole. The forty trillion operate as one unit. No gene-selfishness here.
There is no space here to go into it in even trivial depth, (I refer you to the six-man book, above) but perhaps this diagram will help to give some tiny impression of the complexity of one typical cell among your forty trillion …
(Picture thanks to?).
Your body somehow reproduces itself in all its co-ordinated complexity at the rate of dozens of millions of cells every minute of the day accurately, on time, and in the right order. Amazingly, your overall body shape is maintained throughout, with no noticeable errors. Over the years, every single cell and atom will be replaced up to a dozen times, and yet You will still be You, and recognizably You to others. Even the chemical we call DNA, (Life Itself, to some Dogmatists), has its component atoms regularly replaced.
Each time a cell splits, it goes through a series of processes of stunning complexity. The diagram below hints at it. The circular/oval item is the nucleus as in the diagram above. The little ribbony things are the chromosomes, which are made up of genes, which are made up of DNA: all chemicals, and thus not alive, but performing the most astonishing stunts of self-duplication, down to the last detail; even down to duplicating the unimaginably complex machinery needed for self-duplicating itself again; and then again; and again, down apparently endless generations.
(Diagram thanks to?)
When I first read of this process (‘mitosis’) I counted eighteen procedures, with dozens more implied in the background. Heaven knows how many there actually are. And this all happens in every one of your forty trillion cells (except for red blood cells, which are routinely destroyed and replaced, and a few others) in a rolling process of regeneration and renewal, that operates non-stop over seventy or eighty years. I don’t know about you, but I, who can not organise a pleasant evening in a brewery, am profoundly impressed. I also find it unbelievable that anyone who knows about even a little of this can ever say ‘It all came about at random, and continues at random’, or ‘There is no design in Nature’.
§ The gecko’s feet have billions of tiny hairs which enable it to walk up glass walls, each hair adhering by the minute force that holds molecules together. There can’t be a person alive who isn’t just a little perplexed by the assertion that these billions of hairs spontaneously and randomly evolved themselves out of chemicals alone.
In order to reduce over-crowding and rampant monsterism, cells are preprogrammed to die off and be replaced after a certain while, via a process called apoptosis: this is a highly complex process, teleological (purposeful) in nature, which ensures that there are no fatal gaps in supply and demand. The dead cells are disassembled and flushed out of the system without you even being aware of the fact. Over the course of a few years, you actually flush away your entire body at the rate of multiple billions of cells a day (estimates vary between 50 and 300 billion; but it seems that your skeleton needs 10 years or so to be entirely replaced), as the programme of continuous refurbishment rolls on.
§ If cells divide outside the pattern allotted to them we develop a cancer. A definition of cancer should be ‘growth and division of cells without pattern’, but you are unlikely to find the word ‘pattern’ in any dictionary definition. You will know why by now.
§ Try John Gribbin’s In Search of the Double Helix, bearing in mind that he is a Materialist who recommends reading the first edition of Darwin’s Origins. Why? Would he recommend the first edition of Britannica? Or the first edition of one of his own fine books, on the basis that it is ‘in many ways the strongest statement of his ideas’?
The process of reproduction of sex cells is called ‘meiosis’. A sperm gets to an egg after an extraordinary journey. The fertilised egg then splits into two; then four; then eight…. Eventually, and for no apparent reason it then develops a line within the cluster, and ‘lateralises’ into left and right. That single cell is eventually converted into 250 or more different sorts of cells: muscle, brain, blood, nerve, liver, fat, bone, all in the correct sequence and position Then, again for no apparent reason, some 70+ organs with complex inner structures, and limbs, begin to appear out of the mass and gradually become perfected, again, all in the right place and at the right time. The whole process is completed in every detail in just 48 ‘doublings’ from the first cell to the finished human being.
The algorithm for this astonishing process would require yottagoogolplexes of lines of computer code, if it could ever be even attempted,
§ If you’re feeling creative, try working out the algorithm for making a nostril, say, then work your way up to a toenail. Leave the eye for when you’ve got the hang of it, especially as the eye will need to be able to distinguish a million different colours.
and yet the ‘holder of the code’ (DNA) has only some 21,500 units to work with (according to recent estimates), and of course, DNA is just a chemical, with no mental or organising capacity whatsoever.
Power to the People
I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria
Lewis Thomas
Mitochondria, our energy-creators, are very tiny: some 1000 would fit onto this full stop→. They work inside your body cells: sometimes one per cell, sometimes 10,000. Your liver has about 1,000 per cell; the average is about 200. Your body has ~40 trillion x 200 of them (or 100,000 trillion, depending upon who you ask).