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https://twitter.com/darwintojesus/status/1969212844324299005

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Darwin to Jesus

@darwintojesus

Aug 28

There are only two possible theories for life’s origin: blind chance or intentional design.

The problem for naturalists is that the more we learn about life, the more impossible their theory becomes.

But just how unlikely is it?

Here’s why life is 100% designed🧵

How Simple Can a Cell Be?

To determine how unlikely life is to arise without a mind, we must first ask “how simple can a cell be and still survive?”

In 2016, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute created JCVI-syn3.0, the simplest self-replicating cell ever made. They stripped away every gene that wasn’t absolutely necessary for survival.

Here’s what they found:
•The cell still needed 473 genes in total.

•438 of those genes coded for 438 distinct, functional proteins, each one a precision molecular engine built from amino acids.

•Every one of those proteins was essential for the cell to live, metabolize, and reproduce. Remove any of them, and the cell would die.

From this study we can safely say that 400 distinct functional proteins is the bare minimum for life.

So how easy is it to get these proteins?

Not easy at all.

Proteins are chains of amino acids that must fold into precise 3D shapes to work. If the fold is wrong, then the amino acids fall apart and the protein is useless.

Studies show that the odds of getting a single functional protein fold from random amino acids are about 1 in 10⁷⁷ (Axe, Journal of Molecular Biology, 2004).

To help you understand how large this number is, the number of particles in our observable universe is about 10^80.

That means the odds of mindlessly assembling just one functional protein is almost as small as the odds of a blind man picking out the one marked atom from the entire observable universe.

Read 10 tweets

Darwin to Jesus

@darwintojesus

Aug 7

𝐃𝐢𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐳𝐢𝐬 𝐃𝐨 𝐀𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠?
𝑾𝒉𝒚 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒋𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒆 𝑴𝒐𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝑰𝒔 𝑵𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒆𝒏𝒔𝒆

One of the most popular moral beliefs in the modern world, especially among atheists, is that morality is subjective.

What’s right or wrong, they say, isn’t written into the fabric of the universe.

There’s no objective standard, no divine law, no transcendent good.

Morality, in this view, is just a human invention, shaped by culture, emotion, and social contract.

What’s “right” in one culture might be “wrong” in another.

There are no objective moral truths, only preferences and local agreements between people.

That’s it.

This view is often called moral relativism or cultural relativism, and it’s easy to see why it appeals to people today.

It sounds tolerant. It avoids uncomfortable judgments.

It tells us we can all live our truth without forcing it on others.

But is that really what we believe?

Does this theory really capture our moral experience?

This question was formally asked and answered 80 years ago…

After the Second World War, the world was horrified by the crimes committed by the Nazis. The systematic slaughter of six million Jews, the execution of political prisoners, the abuse of civilians, the inhumane experiments, they waged a total war waged on conscience itself. When the Allies won, they put the leaders of Nazi Germany on trial for crimes against humanity. These became known as the Nuremberg Trials.

Surprisingly, the Nazi leaders didn’t deny that they had done these things. In fact, many of them openly admitted to it. What they denied was that they had done anything wrong.

“We were only following orders.”
“We were acting according to the laws of our country.”
“You have your laws, and we have ours. Who are you to judge us?”

That was their defense.

In other words, they made the same argument that today’s moral subjectivists and relativists make. They claimed that morality is just a construct of society and law. And since Nazi Germany made these actions legal under their own system, they were not morally culpable. They weren’t “murderers.” They were patriots. Bureaucrats. Soldiers. Loyal Germans doing what was considered right in their culture.

And if morality is subjective and relative, they were right.

If morality really is subjective or culturally relative, then there is no ultimate moral standard we can appeal to. We can’t condemn the Holocaust. It might be emotionally offensive to us. It might be unpopular. But “wrong”?

No.

That’s why Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson delivered one of the most important statements in legal and moral history. He said:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. They are wrong whether or not the particular nation which committed them is in the dock.”

He went on to declare that there exists a law above the law, a moral standard that transcends all national laws, all cultural customs, all societal norms. This moral law is not made by man and cannot be undone by man. It is higher than Hitler, higher than America, higher than every government and every opinion. And it is only on that transcendent moral ground that the Nuremberg trials could stand.

Because if there is no such law, if there is no God and no transcendent moral standard, then the Nazi defense stands.

Read 6 tweets

Darwin to Jesus

@darwintojesus

Jul 26

Every worldview has to face the problem of suffering.

But which one gives the best answer?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky takes it head on.

We might flinch.

But he doesn’t.

Here’s what he says about it🧵

The scene takes place in Russia during the late 1800s.

A woman comes to the monastery in tremendous grief.

She needs to speak to Elder Zosima, he is a holy man of God.

She’s just lost her fourth child.

He was only three years old…
She can’t stop thinking about him.

She tells Zosima:

“They threw him in the ground like a little dog.”

Her voice trembles.
Her hands shake.

She’s beside herself with grief and doesn’t know what to do.

Read 16 tweets

Darwin to Jesus

@darwintojesus

Jul 12

https://twitter.com/speedwatkins/status/1944021189279510941

This is a pretty standard argument from atheists trying to defend materialism and explain consciousness.

But there are at least four major problems with this view.

Let’s walk through them… (make sure you read number 4)🧵

https://twitter.com/speedwatkins/status/1944021189279510941

1. It Begs the Question.

Ben argues that because every brain state has a complete physical cause, there’s no need for the mind. But this assumes that the brain is a closed system governed solely by physical causes… which is materialism.

But “materialism is true” is the very thing Ben needs to demonstrate.

Right now he’s not arguing for materialism. He’s assuming it.

That’s textbook question begging.

2. Ben Conflates Necessity with Sufficiency.

Ben argues:

“The mind, if it moves the brain, must act through matter, for each neural state proceeds from one complete and physical cause, with no redundant force in parallel.”

In other words, he’s saying:
“If the mind is going to influence the brain, it must interact physically—but we already have a full physical explanation, so there’s no room (or need) for a non-physical cause.”

This line of reasoning completely misses the nature of what’s being claimed about the mind.

Here’s why:
Imagine someone says, “Every movement of the tongue and vocal cords has a physical cause, so we don’t need to posit a mind to explain speech.”

Would that follow? No. Tongues don’t compose sentences. Vocal cords don’t understand grammar. They are instruments, not origins. The movement of atoms and muscles is necessary* to get speech, but it is not sufficient* to get speech. Atoms and muscles alone would never cause a tongue to make meaningful speech.

Likewise, the fact that brain states involve electrochemical processes doesn’t mean those processes are self explanatory. A mind could very well use the brain, just like a speaker uses vocal cords. And yes, a speaking agent must interact with matter in order to speak, but that doesn’t mean the agent is reducible to matter.

The error here is assuming that if we can find a necessary condition for something to be the case, then that explanation is also sufficient to explain the phenomenon. Ben is conflating these two concepts.

Read 5 tweets

Darwin to Jesus

@darwintojesus

Jul 11

No God.
No soul.
No afterlife.

That’s what he believed.
Until… his heart stopped.

That’s when he experienced something he never believed in: Hell

This is the story of Howard Storm 🧵

Like most college professors today, Howard was a convinced atheist.

“I was a professor at Northern Kentucky University. I was the chairman of the art department. I was a hardcore atheist. I believed the physical world was all that existed. There was no soul, no afterlife, no God. Religion was for weak people.”

But in 1985, during a trip to Paris, everything changed.

He suddenly collapsed from a perforated stomach and was rushed to the hospital. While waiting for surgery, he slipped out of consciousness to find himself outside of his body.

“I was standing next to the bed, watching my wife cry and seeing my body lying there. But I was very much alive. More alive than I’d ever felt before.”

Read 18 tweets

Darwin to Jesus

@darwintojesus

Jul 10

Is your mind just your brain?

Over the past century, serious philosophical arguments have exposed this view as incoherent.

These arguments are so strong that even many atheists have abandoned materialism.

Here are 𝐟𝐢𝐯𝐞 of the most powerful, starting with zombies 🧟 🧵

1. The Zombie Argument

Imagine there’s a person exactly like you in every conceivable way. They walk like you, talk like you, and have a brain identical to yours down to the last atom.

But they have no inner experience.
No feelings.
No awareness.
No qualia.

They say “I’m in pain,” but they don’t actually feel pain.

They describe the color red, but never experience redness.

They act conscious, but there’s nothing it’s like to be them.

This is the concept of the philosophical zombie, a being physically identical to a conscious human, but completely devoid of consciousness.

David Chalmers uses this thought experiment to challenge materialism. He writes:

“It is conceivable that there be a creature physically identical to me, but without conscious experience. If so, then consciousness is not physical.”
(The Conscious Mind, 1996)

If such a zombie is logically possible, then consciousness cannot be identical to physical brain states. You could recreate the entire brain and still leave out the mind.

The zombie argument doesn’t claim zombies exist, it just claims they are possible in principle. And that’s enough.

Because if the mind were nothing but the brain, then any physical duplicate would necessarily have consciousness. The very fact that we can coherently imagine a zombie shows that consciousness must be something more.

The brain can explain behavior, but it cannot explain experience. And unless materialism can account for what it’s like to be you, it leaves the most essential part of you out of the picture.

2. The Knowledge Argument (Frank Jackson)

Imagine a scientist named Mary who has lived her entire life in a black-and-white room. She’s never seen color, but she’s the world’s leading expert on color vision.

She knows every physical fact there is to know about wavelengths, neural firings, optics, brain chemistry. She even knows exactly what happens in the brain when someone sees red.

Then one day, Mary steps outside her black and white room and she sees a red rose for the first time.

And in that moment, she learns something new.

She learns what it’s like to see red.

This is Frank Jackson’s famous thought experiment, and it raises a simple but devastating question for materialism:
If Mary already knew ALL the physical facts, but still learned something new upon seeing red, then there must be more to consciousness than physical facts.

In Jackson’s words:

“It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo, there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.”
(Epiphenomenal Qualia, 1982)

The conclusion is unavoidable: physical science can describe the mechanics of vision, but it cannot capture the experience of seeing.

Mary’s story shows that subjective consciousness, aka qualia, is a kind of knowledge irreducible to brain states. You can know all the objective data about what’s happening in someone’s brain, and still not know what they’re experiencing.

If experience goes beyond the physical, then so does the mind.

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