Are We Alone in the Cosmos?

In an interesting piece at Evolution News physicist Jonathan Witt asks whether there other thinking, speaking creatures living on faraway planets? What are the chances? Just focusing on the odds of intelligent life forms existing on planets in our galaxy the improbabilities are daunting.

There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy and possibly several trillion planets so it might seem likely that intelligent life has arisen on at least one of them, but there's much more to be considered than just the number of stars and planets.

As scientists' knowledge of the factors necessary for a planet to produce intelligent life grew it became apparent that it could very well be that our earth is the only planet in the entire galaxy, and maybe in the entire universe with its up to two trillion galaxies, that satisfies the conditions necessary for life.

Witt points us to a book written by astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards titled The Privileged Planet, in which the authors compile a list of factors necessary for a planet to be habitable. Here's the list with some explanation that I added in parentheses:

• Orbits an early G dwarf type star (These are stars that are very close to the sun’s mass, temperature, brightness, and spectral type. Most stars are either much more massive or much less massive than G dwarf type stars) that is at least a few billion years old.
• Orbits a star in the galactic habitable zone (The habitable zone is a region not too close to the galactic center and not too distant from it).
• Orbits a star near the co-rotation circle (This is the circular band around a spiral galaxy’s center where the stars move at about the same speed as the spiral arms) and with a low eccentricity galactic orbit (This is an orbit that's almost circular).
• Orbits a star outside the spiral arms (A planet within a spiral arm would be constantly bombarded with space debris).
• Is a terrestrial planet the right distance from the host star to have liquid water on the planet’s surface (a distance known as the circumstellar habitable zone).
• Is near enough the inner edge of the circumstellar habitable zone to allow high oxygen and low carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
• Orbits a star with no more than a few giant planets comparable in mass to Jupiter and that are in large, nearly circular orbits (so that the gas giants do not mess up the earth-like planet’s orbit).
• Has a low eccentricity orbit outside of regions around a star that would destabilize a planet’s rotation axis and orbit due to the gravity of giant planets.
• Is in the right mass range (A planet that's too massive would retain toxic gases in it's atmosphere due to it's strong gravity. If it were not massive enough, its graavity would be too weak to hold oxygen and nitrogen which are necessary for life).
• Has the right concentration of sulfur in its core.
• Has a large moon and the right planetary rotation period to avoid chaotic variations in its obliquity (i.e. its tilt on its axis).
• Has the right amount of water in the crust.
• Has steady plate tectonic cycling (No planet without crustal movements can recycle nutrients to the surface).
• Is a habitable planet where single-celled life actually emerged.
• Experienced a critically low number of large (meteorite) impacts during its history.
• Experienced a critically low number of transient radiation events from outer space during its history.
• Is a planet where plant and animal life successfully evolved from single-celled life.
• Is a planet where an intelligent, technology-wielding life form evolved from lower animals.
• Is among that subset of planets that have hosted technological life where the technological life has not destroyed itself or otherwise gone extinct.

Witt goes on to explain that,

Gonzalez and Richards assign a 10 percent chance for each of these 19 factors, but they make a strong case that the odds are much slimmer in many instances. Some of the factors may have an infinitesimally small probability of occurring by happenstance. For instance, perhaps the origin of the first self-reproducing cell is improbable or even impossible given the limited tool kit of materialists (chance + natural laws). The same may hold for the origin of plants and animals.

Richards and Gonzalez are skeptical that chemistry and natural selection alone can evolve fundamentally new forms of life, as am I. But for the sake of argument they generously grant even these factors a 1 in 10 chance of occurring on any terrestrial planet where all the other necessary factors are in place.

We are multiplying out fractions here, so the odds get geometrically smaller with each additional factor. Multiply out just the first 13 [to avoid the controversial evolutionary assumptions] and we find that the odds of any one star system having a habitable planet is less than one in a trillion, meaning that even with all the billions of stars in the Milky Way, the odds are strongly against there being even one other habitable planet in our galaxy besides Earth.

And note, Gonzalez and Richards further low-balled the odds by leaving out several factors. Also keep in mind that for some time now the calculated odds have been getting slimmer and slimmer as new habitability requirements are discovered.

So, is it reasonable to think that there are intelligent beings elsewhere in our galaxy? No. Such a phenomenon is exceedingly improbable, unless, Witt points out, our galaxy is not the product of chance and natural forces at all, but is instead the product of a unfathomably intelligent and powerful Creator.

If that's the case, our galaxy could be teeming with life, but unfortunately that's not a hypothesis open to the naturalist.

Read more on this topic at the link.

Is Torture an Absolute Evil?

Yesterday's post was instigated by a remark by Senator Angus King during the hearing for President-elect Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Hegseth didn't answer King's questions on the use of torture to the senator's satisfaction which elicited from him the rather gratuitous comment that Hegseth must think "torture's okay."

I argued yesterday that this was unfair inasmuch as torture is not an easy thing to define. Today, I'll argue, furthermore, that even though it's morally wrong, evil, in fact, to use torture purely to punish or for a sick amusement, it's not an absolute wrong.

To make my case I've dredged up an old post from several decades ago. See what you think:

So there I was the other night in thrall to the taut drama and machinations unfolding in the second season DVD of the thriller series called 24.

Determined to be patient with several gaping holes and other silliness in the story-line, I let myself be caught up in the suspense as terrorists planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in Los Angeles and set it to go off "today." The Counter Terrorism Unit led by superhero Jack Bauer is tasked with saving the lives of millions of people.

Well, what should happen but that one of the terrorists who knows where the bomb is located falls into Jack's hands. Time is short and he has to discover the whereabouts of the weapon before it explodes, incinerating everything and everyone within a radius of a couple of miles and spreading a deadly cloud of radiation for hundreds of miles more.

Naturally, the terrorist refuses to talk. Jack cuffs him about the head once or twice but he knows that such measures are futile. He could, of course, employ waterboarding but that seems to be unknown to the script writers and besides it would violate the tenets of woke ideology, not to mention the Geneva Conventions which sagely affirm that the lives of millions of Americans are simply not worth the panic experienced by a single thug who wishes to slaughter them.

So, what does our superhero do? Those of you who are fans will find this to be very old news, but for those of you who have more important things to do on Monday nights than to watch a television show, I shall tell you and then ask some questions.

Jack has anticipated his prisoner's reticence and, unbeknownst to the viewer, has had the police in the terrorist's home country (which for some reason is never named) arrest the man's family (two sons and a wife). They bind and gag the hapless innocents in chairs and train a television camera on them. The video feed is up-linked and sent to a computer screen that the prisoner in L.A. can see. Already I can envision Andrew Sullivan and the editorial staff of the New York Times yelling at their televisions that Bauer can't do this, he's flouting the Geneva Conventions, he's a cruel, amoral imperialist pig, he's no better than the terrorists, etc. But it gets worse.

Agent Bauer then tells the prisoner that unless he spills the beans right now about where the bomb is to be found he will order the police in the unnamed foreign country to execute the man's eldest son. The terrorist's resolve is shaken but not broken. Bauer gives the order by phone, and the viewer sees on the computer screen a policeman kick over the boy's chair and shoot twice. The terrorist's family screams, the terrorist is traumatized, and the viewer is stunned, mostly at how little regard Bauer seems to have for the Geneva Conventions, international law, and enlightened moral opinion.

Now Bauer is screaming at the terrorist to tell him where the bomb is or he will order the execution of the youngest boy. The terrorist cannot withstand the psychological and emotional torture any longer. He breaks and gives Bauer the information he needs. The terrorist is then taken out of the room, and the scene focuses on the computer screen where we see the foreign police untying and releasing the man's family, including the boy who was supposedly shot.

The whole thing was a set-up, a ruse to deceive the prisoner into thinking that his family was being murdered when in fact they were not.

Now this ploy was certainly a violation of the Geneva Conventions on torture, even if no one was physically harmed (although no doubt both the prisoner and his family were terrified). So here's my first question: Given the circumstances, was Bauer justified in deceiving the prisoner in this way?

Is what he did so beyond the pale that it would have been better to allow millions of people to die a horrible death than to lie to this man in such a way as to make him believe that his silence was costing the lives of his loved ones when it really wasn't?

A great many people would answer that question with a resounding "Yes, it would be better that millions die than that this man have to endure the pain of that awful deception". Certainly the authors and signatories of the Geneva Conventions would answer this way, and presumably so would Senator King.

Does that strike you as absurd?

Suppose your family were visiting the city in which the bomb was planted and you are somehow privy to the events as they unfold. You're terrified. Your children could be incinerated if that bomb goes off. Would you object to what Bauer was doing?

If after the bomb is disarmed and you're hugging your spouse and children and thanking God that everyone is okay could you say to your children and spouse that you're so happy that they're okay, that they weren't harmed, but that, truth to tell, you think it would've been better had they been burned to death in a nuclear fireball, than that the terrorist be administered the ghastly treatment to which Bauer subjected him?

Those who insist that torture is an absolute moral wrong would have to answer that, yes, they would.

Some say that it's unchristian to engage in such dehumanizing behavior, but is it Christian to be able to possibly prevent a great evil but choose to not do so? Would it be loving to refrain from preventing the suffering of thousands of people out of moral squeamishness? Sometimes life hands people excruciating choices. At such times one has to do what in their honest judgment is least evil and most loving.

Saving the lives of one's family and tens of thousands of others at the cost of traumatizing the terrorist is, I think, both. Feel free to disagree.

"So, You're Saying That 'Torture's Alright.' "

During yesterday's Senate confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, Senator Angus King (I. ME) quizzed him on his views on torture. Mr. Hegseth's answers didn't satisfy the senator who concluded with implicit disdain that Mr. Hegseth was simply acknowledging that "torture's alright."

This is the sort of intellectual muddle-headedness that gives politicians a bad name.

The problem with trying to answer Senator King's questions is that there really are at least two issues with the use of torture by the authorities of the state which need to be teased apart unless one is simply trying to score political points to titillate the media.

One question is definitional or ontological, the other is ethical. They are: What actually constitutes torture, and, secondly, whatever torture is, is it ever justified? The argument in some quarters seems to boil down to this: "Don't worry about what torture is. Just don't do it." This position is quite unhelpful and more than a little ludicrous.

To start let's agree that torture is at least almost always wrong. If we're going to absolutely prohibit it, however, we have to have a pretty good idea what it is, especially if we risk abolishing a useful tool in preventing terror attacks that could potentially take the lives of our spouses and children.

The Geneva Convention of 1984 defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person...."

Let's apply that definition to one of the most notorious, and effective, means of coercing cooperation among suspected terrorists interrogated by the CIA - waterboarding. The CIA is believed to have used waterboarding in certain special cases to prevent the deaths of innocent victims.

In waterboarding a detainee is strapped to a table, his face is covered with a thin cloth and water is poured over it. This somehow produces a gag reflex, the sensation of drowning, and induces panic in the person to whom it's done. It's said to be very effective in eliciting accurate intelligence, intelligence which has saved lives.

Be that as it may, let's set aside the question of its justification for now and ask why we should think that this particular technique, if not abused, constitutes torture according to the Geneva Convention. What are some possible answers to that question?

Perhaps it's torture because it's painful.

But apparently there's not much pain involved, and if there were it would only be brief since people only hold out for a few seconds when subjected to it.

Perhaps it's torture because it does lasting harm to the detainee.

Evidently not. If done properly, the individual is no doubt shaken but none the worse for the experience. In fact, interrogators have had it done to them as part of their training just so they know what it feels like.

Perhaps it's torture because it's done to punish.

No. It's done to elicit information. Once the subject cooperates the treatment ceases.

Perhaps it's torture because it's unpleasant.

It is unpleasant, but surely an unpleasant experience is not ipso facto torture. If it were, then putting someone in restraints or feeding them institutional food would be torture.

Perhaps it's torture because it frightens the terrorist.

Indeed, it does frighten the terrorist, but so does the prospect of being executed for their crimes or being put in prison for the rest of their life. Should they not be threatened with these possibilities? Why must we be so squeamish that we're reluctant even to scare people who are trying to murder our children?

Perhaps it's torture because it elicits information against the detainee's will.

It certainly does motivate the terrorist to divulge information, but the fact that they don't do so willingly is hardly reason to think that the method is somehow tainted. If it were then phone taps, etc would be torture since they are means by which we obtain information from people who would not otherwise willingly give it.

Perhaps, it's torture because some men are exerting power over another.

Yes, but so is a police officer who stops you for a traffic violation, and we don't consider that torture.

Perhaps it'storture because it can be abused by the interrogator causing lasting harm to the suspect.

True enough, but any treatment of a suspect can be abused and cause lasting harm. The objection here is to the abuse not to the technique.

The fact is that the suspect has complete control over how long the process lasts or whether it will even begin. This is an important point. The terrorist is essentially in complete control of what, if anything, happens to him. He's no more damaged when it's over than when it started. He experiences no sensation other than panic and though he's frightened, he knows that he really is not drowning.

So why would waterboarding be considered torture but, say, lengthy imprisonment, which may do some, or even all, of the things mentioned above, is not? I really have no answer to the question.

Whatever one thinks about waterboarding there are certainly other forms of coercion that might violate the Geneva Convention, but the definition that the signatories to the Convention have endorsed appears to be inadequate.

Defining torture is difficult enough, but insisting that it's use is absolutely wrong and should never be employed is perhaps even more difficult, as tomorrow's post will attempt to show. Please don't draw any conclusions about the present post until you've read tomorrow's offering.

The Rise of Non-denominational Christianity

Ryan Burge is a sociologist of religion and he has an interesting graph on his website. It'll come as no surprise to anyone who's been tuned into what's going on in the Christian church for the past decade or two, but it might be a surprise to those who haven't been paying much attention.

Here's Burge:

A lot of what I do is talk about decline. I am painfully aware of that fact. Religious attendance is down in the United States. The proportion of young people who identify as Christian has declined significantly over the last couple of decades. The share of Americans who don’t believe in God has risen, as has the share of folks who take an agnostic view of God. Many religious groups are significantly smaller now than they were twenty years ago....

· However, there is one group that is much larger and is growing. It’s not really a denomination. And it’s not really a tradition. They are united by what they reject - that is the idea of organized denominations. I always tell people that the rise of the nones (those who reject religion entirely) is the biggest story in the faith space. But the second most important story is the rise of the nons - that is those folks who identify as non-denominational Christians.

In the early 1970s, non-denominational Protestants were little more than a rounding error. Just 2% of all respondents said that they were non-denominational - it was 3% of the Protestant sample. You could forgive any religious demographer for ignoring this part of the sample.

Both figures slowly began to increase over the next couple of decades. But, really noticeable growth would not begin until the mid-1990s. By 2000, about 10% of all Protestants and 5% of the entire sample were non-denominational.

By 2010, the percentage of Protestants who were non-denominational would rise to about 20% and they were about 10% of all Americans. In the most recent survey, which was collected in 2022 - one in three Protestants did not identify with a denomination like Southern Baptists or Evangelical Lutherans. That was a twelve point increase from just a few years earlier.

Here's the graph:

Nearly 35% of all protestants identify as non-denominational as of three years ago and the trajectory appears to have been almost straight up. What do the numbers look like today? What will they look like by 2030? If I may be permitted a prediction based on nothing more than a hunch and perhaps some wishful thinking, I think the decline in the overall numbers of Christians is soon going to bottom out, if it hasn't already, and begin to reverse.

People are looking for something that can put meaning, hope, and objective moral values into their lives and the secular worldview does not, and cannot, offer any of these. We may well be on the threshhold of another "Great Awakening."

Naturalism Excludes a Trustworthy Reason

In past VP posts (see here for example) I've written that the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism and the biological doctrine of evolution cannot both be true. It may be that one or the other is true, but they can't both be true.

If matter, energy, and physical forces like gravity are all there is then everything is ultimately reducible to material, non-rational particles. If so, our beliefs are just brain states that can be completely explained in terms of non-rational chemical reactions, but any belief that is fully explicable in terms of non-rational causes cannot itself be rational.

Therefore, if naturalism (which entails materialism) is true, none of our beliefs are rational, reason itself is a non-rational illusion, and both truth and the reliability of scientific investigation are chimerical. Thus the atheistic naturalist has no rational basis for believing that naturalism, materialism, or anything else, is true.

Moreover, naturalism is dependent upon evolution as an explanation for the origin of our cognitive faculties, but evolution is, theoretically, a process whi ch leads to survival, not truth.

As Stephen Pinker of MIT has said, "Our brains were shaped [by evolution] for fitness, not for truth." Only if our reason is an endowment from an omniscient, good Creator do we have actual warrant for placing confidence in it. We may, if we don't believe that there is a Creator, decide to trust reason simply as an act of faith, but it's very difficult to justify the decision to do so since any justification must itself rely upon rational argument.

And, of course, employing reason to argue on behalf of its own trustworthiness begs the question.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, presents a defeater for the belief that both naturalism and evolution (N&E) are true.

Philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes Plantinga's argument as follows:

1. The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and evolution, is low.

2. If someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable.

3. If someone has a defeater for the belief that his cognitive faculties are reliable, then he has a defeater for any belief produced by his cognitive faculties (including his belief in naturalism and evolution).

4. Therefore, if someone believes in naturalism and evolution and sees that, therefore, the probability of his cognitive faculties’ being reliable is low, then he has a defeater for his belief in naturalism and evolution.

Conclusion: Naturalism and evolution cannot both be rationally accepted. If one is true the other must be false.

Premise #1 is based on the fact that if our cognitive faculties have evolved then they have evolved for survival, not for discerning truth. This is not a fringe idea. It's admitted on all sides by atheists and theists alike. The quote from Steven Pinker above is an example and here are a few more among the many that could be cited:

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” - Atheist philosopher Patricia Churchland.

Modern [naturalism] is the faith that through science humankind can know the truth and so be free. But if Darwin's theory of natural selection is true this is impossible. The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. - Atheist philosopher John Gray

Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.- Atheist biologist Francis Crick

Oddly none of these thinkers carried their idea to its logical conclusion, but the theist C.S. Lewis does it for them in his book On Miracles where he writes:

Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no Creative Mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought.

But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?.... Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.

If theism is true then, of course, the evolution of our cognitive faculties could be goal-directed by God toward discovering truth, but that possibility isn't open to the naturalist since she doesn't believe theism is true.

Thus, the argument outlined above leads to the conclusion that it can't be rational to believe in both N&E.

The naturalist is faced with a defeater for any belief that he holds since none of his beliefs are reliable. He can't believe that N&E are both true, nor can he believe that either one or both are false.

On naturalism no belief, especially no metaphysical belief, is rational since our cognitive faculties are not reliably geared toward truth. If they happen to hit upon truth it's just a serendipitous outcome, and we can't even be rationally assured that we've hit upon the truth.

This is bad enough for the naturalist, but it gets worse, as Craig points out:

The naturalist is caught in a logical quagmire from which there is no escape by rational thought. He cannot even rationally conclude that he cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution and that he therefore ought to abandon naturalism. He can’t rationally conclude anything. He's caught in a circle from which there is no means of rational escape.

And yet, despite all this, the naturalist accuses the theist of being irrational for believing in God. It'd be funny were it not so sad.

Fantastic Design (Pt. II)

Yesterday I posted an excerpt from Your Designed Body, a book that grows more fascinating the deeper one gets into it.

Today I'd like to post another excerpt in which the authors raise a number of questions that highlight the incredible complexity of bone formation in the human body:

Since bones are made by many individual (and independent) bone cells, building a bone is an inherently distributed problem. How do the individual bone cells know where to be, and where and how much calcium to deposit? How is this managed over the body's development cycle, as the sizes and shapes of many of the bones grow and change?

Surely the specifications for the shapes, their manufacturing and assembly instructions, and their growth patterns must be encoded somewhere. There must also be a three-dimensional coordinate system for the instructions to make sense.

Is the information located in each bone cell, or centrally located and each individual bone cell receives instructions? If each bone cell contains the instructions for the whole, how does it know where it is in the overall scheme? How do all those bone cells coordinate their actions to work together rather than at odds with each other?

As yet no one has answers to these questions. One thing we can expect, though: whoever solves these mysteries will likely win a Nobel Prize - which invites a question: If it takes someone of a Nobel-caliber brilliance to answer such questions, why wouldn't it have taken similar or greater intelligence to engineer it in the first place?

Here are some further questions: How do bones know when to stop growing? Where is the information located that tells each bone to stop? How is that information turned on and off and how is it translated into chemical signals and how do those signals work?

Moreover, why is it that the ossicles in the middle ear, the "hammer," "anvil" and "stirrup," are full-size at birth and are the only bones in the body that don't grow as the body grows? How is that unique specification coded and transmitted only to these bones and no others?

And how is all of that produced by an unguided, mindless process like naturalistic evolution?

Finally, given all we know about the marvels discussed in yesterday's post and today's, why is there so much resistance to the hypothesis that living things are not the product of chance mutations and serendipitous selection, but rather the product of intentional engineering?

Fantastic Design (Pt. I)

A couple of years ago I read the book Your Designed Body by Steve Laufmann and Howard Glicksman, MD and was truly dazzled by the amazing degree of engineering that the human body displays.

The book is an impressive catalog of the innumerable design problems that the human body overcomes in order to function. Reading it with any degree of objectivity makes it very difficult to think that the body is merely the result of a long chain of fortuitous accidents over a billion or so years of genetic mutation and natural selection.

Indeed, it takes an enormous effort of blind faith in the ability of impersonal mechanistic processes to convince oneself that the human body came about without any input from a super-intelligent bio-engineer.

Of course, some might reply that it takes an enormous exercise of blind faith to believe that such an engineer exists, but if the preponderance of evidence points to intelligence as the cause of what we see in the human body, if the preponderance of evidence is best explained by an intelligent cause, then the only reason we have for ruling out such a cause is an apriori commitment to metaphysical naturalism.

Setting such commitments aside, the probability that any complex, information-rich mechanism (like the human body) would exhibit the features it does is greater if it is intentionally designed than the probability that these features arose through purely undirected and random natural processes, and since we should always believe what's more probable over what's less probable, the belief that the body was intentionally designed is the most rational position to hold.

Here's an excerpt from pages 49-50:

To be alive, each cell must perform thousands of complicated tasks, with both functional and process coherence. This includes…containment, special-purpose gates, chemical sensing and controls (for many different chemicals), supply chain and transport, energy production and use, materials production, and information and information processing.

What does it take to make these work? Designing solutions to problems like this is hard, especially given two additional requirements.

The first, orchestration, means the cell has to get all the right things done in the right order at the right times. The activities of millions of parts must be coordinated. To this end, the cell actively sequences activities, signals various parts about what to do, starts and stops various machinery, and monitors progress.

The second requirement is reproduction. As if being alive weren’t difficult enough, some of the body’s cells must be able to generate new cells. This imposes a daunting set of additional design problems. 

Each new cell needs a high-fidelity copy of the parent cell’s internal information, all the molecular machines needed for life, and a copy of the cell’s structure, including the organelles and microtubules. And it needs to know which internal operating system it should use.

Once these are all in place, the cell walls must constrict to complete the enclosure for the new cell, without allowing the internals to spill out.

Somehow cells solve all these problems. Each cell is a vast system of systems, with millions of components, machines, and processes, which are coherent, interdependent, tightly coordinated, and precisely tuned—all essential characteristics of the cell if it’s to be alive rather than dead.

There remains no plausible, causally adequate hypotheses for how any series of accidents, no matter how lucky and no matter how much time is given, could accomplish such things. 

Presently it even lies beyond the reach of our brightest human designers to create them. Human engineers have no idea how to match the scope, precision, and efficiencies of even a single such cell, much less organisms composed of many cellular systems of systems, each system composed of millions or billions of cells.

One has to be extremely uncurious and intellectually indolent not to be astonished at the incredible complexity and information-level of even the simplest cells in our bodies. And one must be intellectually negligent not to ponder whether it's within the power of unguided and unaided physics and chemistry to produce such a marvel.

I'll have another excerpt tomorrow.