Opus 2023-029: Dark Thoughts: Unanswered Questions

The culturally accepted standard for science has picked different approaches about the big mysteries that confront them, the ones that they really have no answers to.  The first is the beginning of the universe.  How did something happen when there was no action to cause the reaction?  What made the Big go Bang?  How did something infinitely small become something almost infinitely big and in micro-seconds?  They have come to accept that the universe exploded out of the sinularity in the twinkling of a very quick eye.  They just can’t find any explanation for how or why.

The second problem is the existence of life, let alone complex life that thinks it is intelligent.  For this they have set aside billions of years and it still isn’t enough to make the magic happen.  I could give you some spiffy quotes from a scientist, Stephen Meyer and talk about proteins and amino acids and give you numbers like 20300 but let me go to fiction.  Michael Crichton was a well known author.  You may have seen the movie “The Lost World”.  It was based on a book by the same title.  I didn’t see the movie.  I read the book.  Crichton, a true believer in evolution has one of his characters say this,

“First of all, there’s a time problem.  A single bacterium - the earliest form of life - has two thousand enzymes.  Scientists have estimated how long it would take to randomly assemble those enzymes from a primordial soup.  Estimates run from forty billion years to one hundred billion years.  But the earth is only four billion years old.  So, chance alone seems too slow.” pages 226-7

Then he has this dialogue,

“‘Maybe.  Or maybe there’s something else going on that we don’t understand.’
    “‘Like what?’
    “‘Like other rules that influence the outcome.’
    “Thorne said, ‘Are you saying evolution is directed?’”    “‘No,’ Malcolm said.  ‘That’s Creationism and it’s wrong.  Just plain wrong.  But I am saying that natural selection acting on genes is probably not the whole story.  It’s too simple.  Other forces are also at work.’”  p. 228

Which brings us to That Which Must Not Be Mentioned.  Both Meyer and Crichton describe things that sound like God did it.  I have not finished Meyer yet.  I think he will come to that point but Crichton never did.

It was “something”.  Their answers include crystals.  That one I don’t get.  Then they have aliens that came to earth and seeded it with life.  Okay, where did the aliens come from.  If there is not time for human life to evolve how did the aliens get there with even less time?

The Theory of Evolution is a great story.  It made sense to me in 7th grade.  Now I see it is like proclaiming that a billion monkeys typing for a billion years would come up with the theory of evolution.  That I could believe because what they produced would not make any sense.

We keep learning only as long as we keep paying attention and thinking.

Crichton, Michael.  The Lost World.  New York:  Ballantine Books, 1995.

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