The Three Creations

Reconciling Science and Religion

Ray Menegus

An excellent short treatise on the three mysteries that we have not been able to fully explain in human terms, the beginning of the universe, the beginning of life, and the beginning of human consciousness. It is hard to get in book form, but I contacted him by email and he sent me a pdf version which I have on my phone and consult regularly.

Page numbers are from pdf version.

PART ONE: Of Quarks, Quails, and Quakers

p8 Ch 1. The Three Creations

p11"...words in the opening chapter of Genesis. For in chapter 1 we read the account of the creation of the universe by God, Elohim. The Hebrew word bara is translated to the English word created, and is used with surgical precision by its author to indicate the three-fold creative efforts of God. The first is in the creation (bara) of the "heavens and the earth" in verse 1. This comprises the creation of all the matter, the space to contain it, and the physical laws and parameters to govern the dynamics of the constituents, and the system as a whole. The second time the word bara appears in verse 21 it refers to the creation of animal life, and the final time in verse 27 it applies to the creation of human beings. The account concludes in chapter 2 verse 3, by saying that God rested from all of His creating."

p12 Ch 2. Bara

p12 The first Bara: So not only does the matter and space come into existence, so too do the laws that govern their dynamics. We read in the Text that the Spirit moved on the face of the waters. This line is an indication that God through

p14 The second Bara: for life to appear on the earth, new organizing principles were needed to be put into place; that life could not have spontaneously arisen on the planet given the laws that were enacted at the singularity. The universe required a second infusion of information in order for the first DNA molecules to be arranged and for the first living cells to be formed. His Spirit also enacted the dynamics or the laws that govern the motion of the particles.

p15 The third Bara: During the sixth day God creates man in His own image. The word bara is once again used by the author to emphasize that man is not a product of the natural forces at work in the cosmos. ...God introduced a very special creature into His creation; a creature that can contemplate God; a creature with the capacity for good and evil; a creature that is subject to moral law.

PART TWO: for the Love of Knowledge

p17 Ch 3. The Role of Presuppositions in Science

p17 The Failure of Monism

p18 A Lesson from Zeno

p20 A Lesson from Modern Science The Bohr theory taught us a lot, but was shown to be in error.

p20 Presuppositions are Always Tentative

p21 Open Systems, Hilbert's program, Bertrand Russell's Conundrum of Catalogs,

p22 What We Can Learn from Turkeys about Uncertainty

p24 Ch 4. Presuppositions of Science and Religion

p24 Realism: Realism is the belief that the universe has an existence independent of human observers, that is, that the world is really out there.

p25 Rationalism

p28 Order Has science been about the business of discovering order in nature or has science imposed order on nature?

p29 Causality

p29 Non-contradiction Science demands that there be internal consistency with any claims of its theories. This notion is tied to the philosophical principle of non-contradiction.

p30 Closed or Open? Monotheism and science differ on one main presupposition; on whether the universe is open or closed in the sense of thermodynamics. Naturalistic science assumes that the material universe is all that exists. There can be no transfer of energy or information into or out of the universe. This also means that all dis-cussions of alternate universes are scientifically meaningless, because the universe is everything that is directly measurable. If something can have a measurable effect on us, then it is in our universe. If not, then it is meaningless. There are no events that can be said to be "supernatural". Naturalism assumes that the universe is not contingent (dependent) on anything outside of itself. A strong corollary of naturalism is the dogma "Science is the only road to knowledge."

p32 Ch 5. The Mind of the Naturalist

p32 Educating a Naturalist

p33 The Universe of the Naturalist .. the Naturalist has come to believe that the universe is a closed sys-tem. The definition of the universe is stated to be all that we can interact with and measure. Or stated an-other way, it is everything in the past that can be linked causally to a present event, and all future events that flow causally from the present.

p34 The Naturalist Answers Thales particles and fields, fermions and bosons, Pauli Exclusion Principle,

p37 Any scientist, working as a scientist, must account for observations of the natural world in strictly natural-istic terms. This is true for the Christian as well as the Naturalist. A description of the color of the sky must be the same for both. There can be only one valid theory for the appearance of a blue sky. ...For a Christian to say that the sky is blue because God wanted to give us a pretty sky is clearly not a statement within the scope of science, and as such is bad science or rather, not science at all.

p37 The fact that science must deny the use of teleological language does not in any way imply that there are no purposeful events in the universe. Further, it does not mean that the universe as a whole has no pur-pose. For many scientists the universe seems too beautiful of a place to be the product of blind, purpose-less forces. It is not uncommon to read in the literature statements like the one by leading biologist Christ-ian de Duve: "I have opted in favor of a meaningful universe against a meaningless one." We will expand on this view in a later chapter. To other scientists, the often-quoted statement by Steven Weinberg can summarize their feelings: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." The point I want to stress is that notions of meaning or meaninglessness are considerations strictly outside of the scope of science. They can serve to motivate, inspire or depress the scientist, but they cannot serve as explanatory tools of natural phenomena.

p38 Probability not Certainty, Gauss discussion

p39 Ch 6. The Mind of the Christian

p39 Maker of Heaven and Earth Genesis discussion

p40 Sin

p40 The Historicity of Christianity

p42 Educating a Christian

PART THREE: Mathema

p43 Ch 7. Time and the Age of the Universe

p46 Stated in the simplest terms, the age of the universe, as measured with clocks based on the rotation of the earth, is to the best estimates on the order of 13.7 billion years.

p47 The natural reading of the text leads me to conclude that a day must refer to a period of time, or perhaps metaphorically an epoch. Thus Genesis is describing the process of creation and maturation of the uni-verse in six epochs. The last epoch is when humans appear on the earth.

p48 Ch 8. Chance or Information

One particularly outstanding part of Menegus' treatise is Ch 8: Chance or Information, his discussion of the inability of chance to construct meaningful information, the kind of information that Dembski calls specified information.

He starts with reference to Monod's "Chance and Necessity" book and his reaction to it.

p48 The main thesis of his work was to elaborate on the idea that life on earth is not a product of necessity. By this he meant that if one could go back to the pre-biotic earth and run the exper-iment forward a second time, then the outcome would likely be entirely different. And successive repeti-tions of the experiment would lead to many different outcomes. Thus, Monod would say, that life on earth, as we know it, is a particular outcome of the product of chance working on the material substrate over an enormously long time. In this chapter I wish to challenge the idea that chance could have played any role in the formation of life on earth. To do that, we will need to develop the idea of chance from the point of view of the mathematical physicist.

p48 Chance is not a Force
There must be a top-down view in the design of a painting, an automobile, a computer and just about anything that involves complex systems; systems that have many interrelated parts that work together as a coherent whole. Or to put it another way, the end product must be in mind before beginning the design process. In stark contrast to this top-down theory of design, many scientists and philosophers support the view that complex systems can evolve by small piecewise steps from simpler parts. It is important to note that each step in the process is taken independently of the steps that preceded it. Then the sum of the parts makes up the whole. And, they would argue, that given the independence of the steps, this evolutionary process is not dictated by purpose or design. These systems arise, according to the Naturalist, by chance over time. The term "complex adaptive systems" is used to describe systems that contain the necessary hardware to change or adapt in response to changing environments. We all recognize that complex systems do exist, and I wish to show that chance is an insufficient explanation for how these systems arise in nature.

Chance is a word that can appropriately be used only in the field of mathematics. The mathematician assigns a 50% chance that heads will appear after the toss of a "fair" coin. In some ways this statement is tautological, in the sense that a fair coin is a coin that yields a 50% chance of the outcome being a head. By fair it is meant that there is not a physical process, like the weighting of the coin, which would yield any other proportionate outcome. At the heart of the definition of chance is the notion of ignorance. That is, that the person tossing the coin is ignorant of the physical-parameters that produce a particular outcome. The laws of physics dictate that the outcome of the toss is determined by the initial conditions of the toss. If the initial conditions, such as height, speed, impulse, angle, etc., were all precisely known then the outcome could, in principle, be calculated with exact precision. The outcome of the toss flows inexorably from the laws of physics that act on the initial conditions. The chance in the phenomena comes not from the fact that there are random, i.e., independent, forces acting on the coin changing its trajectory and making its flight uncertain, rather the chance comes from ignorance about the initial conditions. The lack of precision and control over the initial conditions leads to the unpredictability of the outcome.

p49Chance is not a force that can work on a simple system and turn it into a more complex one; rather chance is only a statement of the observer's ignorance about the details of the process. Ignorance cannot bring about change. If the history of the universe is a story of how simple systems changed into more complex systems over time, then there must have been built into the system principles that helped achieve the higher organization, or there must have been information infused into the universe from the outside that acted on the initial conditions in a way that is not yet fully understood. What is true about a coin toss is also true in biological evolution. If organisms do evolve from simple to complex, then they do so by following the strictly deterministic laws of nature. We are ignorant of the details of the process and describe it as random or happening by chance, but again to describe the process by the word "chance" is a misleading statement especially after one considers the underlying causes. If complex organisms do adapt and modify as a response to changing conditions in their environment, then this principle of adaptability must have been infused into them during the second creation.

So we have argued that chance is not a mechanism that can bring about change, no matter how much time one chooses to invoke. The only forces that can bring about change and increase complexity are the four known forces of physics, for they are the only forces that act directly on the material substrate of the universe. Or, stated in the language of chapter 5, fermions can only be arranged in differing combinations by the bosons. There are no other sources of change in the universe. So how did this diverse universe that supports complex living systems arise out of the seemingly simple initial conditions of the early universe?

Temporal Correlations
Information is the opposite of ignorance. Information theory provides us with an important clue as to how complexity could have arisen in our universe.

p50 DNA could only exist in the universe under the conditions of a finely tuned, temporal correlation, and this correlation required an infusion of information.

p51 My argument states that if the universe started as a non-correlated sea of fermions, then the laws of physics are insufficient to allow for the degree of correlation necessary, i.e., organization, for sentient beings to emerge in a way that is consistent solely with the laws of physics. Rather there had to be at least two additional infusions of in-formation into the sea of particles that had the effect of fine-tuning the temporal correlations. The first infusion was at the singularity. The second came at the threshold of life. The third gave rise to emergence of human beings.

p52 Information Theory

p56 Ch 9. Reductionism

p58 Critique of Reductionism
We can use the same tools of analysis that Emmanuel Kant applied to his critique of pure reason and bring them to bear on the claims of reductionism. One can show that reductionism is indeed successful at explaining the parts, but is insufficient at constructing the whole. Within reductionism, the mind is part of a closed, self-referencing system.

p59 The situation in science is that in order to make the transition from physics to chemistry and then to biology, new organizing principles must be invoked. These principles come from outside of the science. They are imposed on the science, and they come from the real creativity and imagination of the human mind. Going in the direction of the more complex to the simple, Karl Popper describes the situation as residues that are left be-hind. There are many scientific principles in biology that have no correspondence in chemistry. They become the residues of biology.

p60 Another important interface in the hierarchy of being is that of the brain and the mind; of particular importance is that of the human brain/mind interface. To say that there is not something new is also to say that there is no mind. Or rather that the mind is describable purely in terms of the electro-chemical properties of the brain, which themselves are rooted in the physics of atoms.

p60 In summary, evolutionism and reductionism are inexorably linked. If one can demonstrate that reductionism fails to explain the whole show, then the evolution from simple to complex systems that we observe in our universe could not have taken place by random mechanisms.

p60 The transition from the geologically active planet to a living biosphere required new organizing principles, that is, new information was required to make the transition to a living planet in what I have called the second creation.

p61Ch 10. The Metaphysical Necessity

p61 In this section I wish to show that the existence of a reality that is beyond the physical, i.e., the metaphysical, is an absolute necessity for the progress of science, and that the physical universe is contingent on something outside of itself. I will argue that mathematics is a candidate for such a metaphysical reality and that it constrains or even defines the possibilities for the properties of the universe.

p61 In trying to define the metaphysical, he uses electric field and the work of Maaxwell: "The concept of the electric field is, again in the strictly philosophical sense, not empirical. What? Why? This is because the electric field is not directly measurable. It is a metaphysical idea. It is an artifact of one person’s mind. It is a mathematical or conceptual tool for calculating and predicting the behaviors of charged particles. What we measure in the lab are forces or displacements, not fields."

p62 "Although the notion of the field is metaphysical, it is of paramount importance in science. Once armed with the notion of the field and with the some sophisticated mathematical tools, James Clerk Maxwell was able to achieve what would not have been possible without it. He was able to complete a synthesis between the separate disciplines of magnetism, electricity, and optics. This led to a revolution in technology that has brought about the modern age of electronics and computers. Without the work of Maxwell, that was founded and supported by completely metaphysical reasoning, our world would literally be in the dark ages. After Maxwell the metaphysical ideas of electric and magnetic fields became "real" for no one could imagine the universe without them."

p63 "Fermions are what we see and what we see move; bosons are how we see and account for how the things we see move. But bosons themselves are never seen; rather they are the instrument by which we see. Their existence is inferred by the changes we see in fermions. Fermions are real in the empirical (physical) sense; bosons are real in the metaphysical sense."

p64 My original thinking on this subject was motivated by an essay written by the physicist Eugene Wigner entitled The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

p64 The Interface between Math and Physics

p65 So it appears that the role of the mathematician is to open doors into new worlds of mathematics. The questions posed in the arena of the material world serve as portals to another reality, and the mathematician becomes like Alice chasing down a rabbit hole. (Lewis Carroll, by the way, was a good mathematician. He held a Mathematical Lectureship at the University of Christ Church for 26 years). The world of mathematics was there waiting to be discovered.

p66 Menegus uses the inverse square of gravity to approach the Anthropic Principle. "The point being that the geometry of the sphere that is a purely mathematical object dictates the form of something physical. The fact that the power in the exponent of the radius is precisely "2" is of crucial importance to the structure of the universe. I refer you to the last chapter of Stephen Hawking's popular book A Brief History of Time, where he fleshes out the consequences on the features of the universe if the power were either a tiny bit higher, or a tiny bit lower. His conclusion is that there would be no universe."

"I was first introduced to the idea of the Anthropic Principle through the work of the famous American Physicist and Cosmologist John Wheeler in his enormous treatise on General Relativity entitled Gravitation. In one of the later chapters, in a very challenging mathematical book, he allows himself to speculate and philosophize a bit. He discusses the Large Number Hypothesis of Paul Dirac, a giant in the physics community, where he points out that Dirac had discovered that when one constructs different ratios of the fundamental constants in such a way so as to yield a dimensionless number, that is, a number without physical units, then the result are these large whole numbers. This was a startling fact to Dirac. Physicists understand that units are not fundamental properties of the universe. They are human artifacts. The length of a King's foot or the circumference of the earth, are completely arbitrary values. But when combined in ratios so as to eliminate the units, the capricious nature of the units is also eliminated and out pops, what appeared to Dirac and others, an outstanding beauty. This seemed to shout of a hidden internal structure that unifies all of physics, and the unifying feature stems from pure mathematical reasoning. When mathematicians and physicists alike speak in awe and in almost religious terms of the beauty of mathematics it is this type of encounter of which they speak. It explains the motives behind the words about "God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists." as spoken by Albert Einstein."

"Every physicist that I have read on this subject accepts the anthropic principle. It appears therefore, as stated in popular writings, that the universe is fine-tuned to support the existence of complex adaptive systems. The implication of what this means depends on one's presuppositions. The Naturalist would say, "Of course, that is a happy coincidence. Among all of the possible universes we are in the one in which life can exist." The Supernaturalist would say, "Of course, the universe was created as a habitat for humanity.""

p67 Summary
Their are two foundational principles of science. One is observation: empirical data. The second is hypothesis: analytical and creative reasoning. Our ability to reason critically and creatively is enhanced by mathematics. I argued that mathematics is a metaphysical reality, as well as a necessity for the progress of science. Science as it is practiced today would be impossible without the aid of this metaphysical tool. At their very core all of our cognitive faculties are metaphysical. Where would theories and experiments originate if not in the minds of scientists? But a stronger argument can be given to show that the very existence of the physical universe is contingent on the apriori existence of a metaphysical reality that pro-vides an ontological ground for the universe. I show a proof of this in the appendix.

p68 Ch 11. The Impact of Quantum Mechanics on Epistemology

p68 The impact of twentieth century physics on epistemology, the study of knowledge, has been profound. For the first time in human intellectual history we have a sound cognitive basis for the recognition of the limitations placed on our ability to extract information from nature. At the core of this lies Heisenberg's quantum mechanics. Through his work and that of many others, we understand that the statements of science are statements of probability and not statements of certainty. The limitations come in the form of a relationship among what are called conjugate variables. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that there is an absolute limit on our ability to simultaneously measure any two conjugate variables.

p71 Language makes the ex-change of knowledge among humans possible because it is exchanged within a system that allows for tol-erances. Ultimately this goes back to the design of nature. Nature was designed, it seems, with the long view, and with the anticipation that there would be some inhabitants that possessed a neuro-network of sufficient complexity that would support speech and make possible communication between creator and creature.

PART FOUR: A Play in Three Acts

p72 Ch 12. From Quarks to Quakes

p72 A Very Brief History of the Physical Universe

p74 "This brings me to a tangent that I can't resist. Many people say that they believe in extra-terrestrial life. One of their arguments, the argument put forth by the Jodie Foster character in the movie Contact, "Why is the universe so big if we are the only planet with life?" The answer to this question is that the universe had to be very big before the first atoms of carbon-based life forms could exist. Whether the universe is inhabited on one planet or a million planets is irrelevant; the universe would need to be as big as it is if there were to be the potential for any life at all. ...and God saw that it was good."

p75 Ch 13. The Origin of Life

p75 Cites Oparin and then J.B.S Haldane."The basic thesis is that life on the earth arose naturally from a prebiotic environment. By naturally, it is meant that life was a result of the physical and chemical properties of the elements that existed in the earth's crust in combination with the physical conditions, such as temperature, radiation, lightning, volcanism, etc., and, it should be emphasized, with no external intervention. This mechanistic view of our origins has continued to be refined and dominates the intellectual landscape." "Nobel Laureate Christian Duve" ..."sees a universe that was carefully designed and prepared to sustain life. This resonates with the anthropic principle that has been proposed by the cosmologists." Briefly describes Miller-Urey, with very pessimistic assessment, culminating in the L-R amino acid conundrum. Touches on RNA world.

"The central dogma of biology is that the cell is the basic unit of life. Everyone who has made a study of the mechanisms and the structures of the simplest cells should be awed by their enormous complexity. Membranes serve to isolate the cell from its environment and act to compartmentalize specific tasks within the cell. Each organelle within the cell is comprised of phospholipid-membrane structures with enormous surface areas all tightly packed and networked by a matrix of microtubules that exceed by orders of magnitude any man-made distribution system. Although we have discovered the genetic code, this only serves to heighten our sense of amazement because we understand that the only biological functions of DNA are to replicate and to be transcribed."

"Each of these tasks could not be carried out without the attendant support structures, and would serve no biological function. Thus, the Riddle of the Code perplexes us. DNA needs RNA, macromolecular proteins, and a host of other complexes to function, and yet each of these macro-molecular compounds was of necessity produced and coded in the DNA. It seems as if the entire complex must have evolved simultaneously in order to have the ability to survive. How could this have evolved naturally? One may hope (believe) that someday the mechanistic process will be fully described, but to say that today we have any certainty of how life came to be on the earth would be foolish, and I would say that no serious biologist can propose such a mechanism. However, the presuppositions of the Naturalists force them to believe that someday the mechanism will be discovered."

"The point of the brief argument just outlined is to demonstrate that although we have learned much about the biochemical and physical processes within living organisms, we have no real grip on understanding how such systems appeared on earth. What should we then think about the origin of life?"

p79 "On scientific grounds, both the Naturalist and the Theist are on a shaky footing when it comes to the question of the origin of life. The Naturalist must admit that his current level of knowledge is not capable of addressing the question, but has within him the hope that someday the process will be understood. This hope is what fuels the desire to find water on other planets, and conditions that could support life, as we understand it. NASA has channeled billions of dollars into experiments that seek to locate extra-terrestrial life."

"The Theist must also admit that he doesn't understand the origin of life, but takes solace in the knowledge that the difficulty of the problem aligns with his view that God is directly responsible for the origin of life and therefore has the hope that a mechanistic pathway will never be successfully produced. These two hopes are based on two different paradigms of science. Neither hope could ultimately be undermined by any phenomenological findings. If a mechanism is never proposed, then the Naturalist just keeps on hoping. If a successful mechanism were demonstrated in the lab, then the Theist would fall back on the fact that God had even fine-tuned the initial conditions to a higher degree of refinement than first thought. The origin of life on earth remains a mystery of science."

p80 Ch 14. The Origin of Species General discussion of evolution.

p81 List of 4 axioms of biology and discussion of them.
1) There was clearly a point in the early earth in which there was no life.
2) There was a time, indicated by the fossil records, in which simple life forms appear in old geological strata.
3) Life-forms become increasingly complex as the geological strata become younger.
4) The mechanism of change must be consistent with the laws of science.
Conclusion: Although there is no understanding of how life began, once it started, life has continued to diversify into a myriad of forms. The only allowable explanations for the changes must be framed in a naturalistic language. To date the only explanation that is offered is that of descent with modification.

p83 The Debate between Christians and Naturalists

p85 Answer the Question
But if you choose to embrace science at any level, i.e., if you choose to go to a doctor or take modern medicines, then to act consistently, you must say that evolution is the best explanation that has been offered for the origin of species. How did life originate on the planet? No scientist knows. When discussing the origin of the universe and the origin of life one needs to step outside of the strict domain of science.

p86 Ch 15. The Final Frontier

p87 The Complexity of the Human Brain

p87 Computational Model of the Human Brain

p90 The Uniqueness of the Human Brain

p90 Comparison of the human brain with that of other intelligent animals

p91 The morphological changes in the bodies of early hominids in order to accommodate the energy requirements of the modern brain.

p92 Differences between Hominids and Homo sapiens

p93 Human and Chimp Genomes
"Even more recent has been the complete sequencing of the chimpanzee genome and with it the revelation that the human and chimp genomes are 94% identical."

p93 Insight into the process of evolution

PART FIVE: Heart and Soul

p95 Ch 16. Mind Games

p96 A Model of the Mind

p97 The Human Mind

p100 Ch 17. The Heart of Man

p103 Epilogue

p105 Appendix. A Proof for a Metaphysical Reality