Nanotechnology and Abiogenesis: Investigating the Origin of Life from a Tiny Perspective

Faith & Science Conversation
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You continue to frame your comments in what I’ve claimed to be a false dichotomy: either God did it or nature did it. My claim continues to be that discovering a scientific explanation for something does not mean that God had nothing to do with it. To claim otherwise is essentially deism (God must sit idly by while nature goes about its business), so I’d like to hear you address this.

Thus when you say nanotechnology in nature is evidence of ID, I’d like you to give a definition of ID for that instance. If we had a camera rolling, what would we see? Something poof into existence, or a process that could be described scientifically? As such, I don’t think it preposterous at all to think the existence of nanotechnology in nature to be evidence of the remarkable providence of God–just like I’d claim the birth of a baby, photosynthesis, and stellar synthesis of heavy elements to be.

Note that I’m not claiming everything to have a scientific explanation. But the normal processes of nature (into which I would put the development of nanotechnology and bacterial flagella and eyes), I think it is most reasonable for us to expect that there will be scientific explanations.

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Let’s bracket “the birth of a baby, photosynthesis” - all events for which we do not have good scientific explanations for their origin - from “synthesis of heavy elements” - something whose origin I believe scientists think they do have a good scientific explanation.

Now it may or may not turn out that we someday obtain good scientific explanations for the items in the first bracket. Assume that we do: in that case, theists will claim that God created nature with the ability to originate those things. However, atheists and agnostics might find our claim hard to believe.

Now let’s turn to the subject of nanotechnology. Normally, any type of technology implies, by definition, that an intelligent agent invented it. That’s just what technology means. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that nanotechnology in nature might be a different: a case where a technology was not invented by an intelligent agent. In that case, we can still make a very reasonable inductive inference from all the other cases of technology that nanotechnology in nature was also invented by an intelligent agent. And I would think a reasonable atheist or agnostic might find it a little more difficult to deny our inference. Now it could be that God created nature with the ability to invent nanotechnology, in which case nature is the proximal cause, and God the ultimate cause. And since you think everything in nature must have a scientific explanation, you are welcome to believe that, even though you have no evidence for your belief. Meanwhile, nanotechnology is evidence for ID - the belief that an intelligent agent invented it, whether that agent be God, a demiurge, space traveler, or something else. And the means of invention doesn’t really matter for the inference to be reasonable. We don’t need to know what events were or were not observable. What we would reasonably believe is that whatever they were, their origin was ultimately mind-dependent.

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My bad: a very important “not” was inadvertently left out of my previous comment (which you might have gathered from the context of that sentence). I’ve just edited it.

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Perhaps we’re starting to move toward common ground here… but not all the way yet. I don’t think we should say that nature invents things. “Inventing” is the sort of thing that an agent does. Nature is not an agent. God is an agent. Agents act for reasons, for purposes; their actions are described with final causes. Scientific explanations are given in terms of efficient causes. To say that nature is the proximal cause and God the ultimate cause could be construed as claiming that God started the chain of efficient causes, and then lets nature do the rest. Hence my concern about the latent deism in your view from a couple of comments ago.

But if instead we take God’s action as an agent to be the final cause and the scientific description of God’s action to be the detailing of efficient causes, then there is no problem acknowledging both kinds of cause to be operative at the same time (hence no false dilemma between nature did or God did it).

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Hi Biblo,

Nanotechnology, as you mentioned, includes a word that implies an intelligent agent by definition (techne has the original meaning of “craftsmanship”, and the cognates in English have not lost the sense that a craftsman is to be implied). The obvious conclusion is that to call some complex of proteins in our body “nanotechnology” and then to use this as a platform to argue that its creation must therefore involve an intelligent agency is very obviously a fallacious argument. Applying the word to such structures can only be done by analogy in the first place (they are complex and they perform highly specific functions, making the analogy solid enough).

From what I understood, I think you probably see that such an argument is circular (we are including the implied existence of a craftsman by definition as soon as we use the word technology) and can’t be legitimately used, so you have moved on to the inductive argument. The inductive argument is no less problematic.

If we said that all technology is created by an intelligent designer, restricting technology to its original definition, then the statement would be true. We could then say little more than that these protein complexes in nature have certain parallels to technology, but it would be impossible to say what more could be implied by these parallels. The reason that the analogy is not a good basis for any argument in this case is that there are also a large number of obvious differences: these protein complexes are made of continuous or discontinuous strings of units (amino acids) folded into complex tertiary and quaternary structures, an approach not employed for human technology, and they are apparently generated and modified by known natural mechanisms, changing and adjusting to novel functions organically, also unlike human technology. The differences hardly end there (leaving room for the fact that some human technology is inspired by organic structures or makes use of organic materials), but the bottom line is that any argument from analogy is stuck at this point since there are enough differences to make any inference extremely doubtful.

The inductive argument that you use is implicitly merged with this faulty argument from analogy when you say “…inductive inference from all the other cases of technology…”. The use of the term “technology” as an umbrella term to cover everything that is complex and has a function confuses the issue. It plays a double game by allowing us to include proteins (and other biomolecules) while automatically referring us back to what we commonly think of as technology (evoking the thought: “everything made by a designer”) in order to make the induction work.

Yes, it is true that all cases of technology are known to involve an intelligent agent, but it is entirely false that all other instances of functional complexity are known to involve intelligent agents. Naturally occurring complexity pervades the universe and results in complex interactions and unique outcomes. This is not in doubt. We only tend to identify functions when it comes to technology for the simple reason that we produce and consume the stuff, so we know exactly why it’s there and what it’s used for. It is similarly easy to identify function for organic beings, since for known reasons, most of their structures contribute in some way to survival and reproduction within a given environment, an outcome that is wholly explicable in evolutionary terms. When it comes to anything outside of technology and the organic world, “function” becomes a relative term. The elaborate pattern making up our solar system can be said to serve the function of providing an ideal environment for life on earth, just as the complex and periodic patterns underlying basic chemistry may be said to have the function of enabling the same outcome. Complex nutrient cycles and weather patterns are all contributors to what we as humans consider to be favorable outcomes (except for freezing rain;-). Not just complexity, but function as well seems to pervade the universe; although just how we define any given function seems to be almost entirely relative to our own needs and wants or to needs that are analogous to our own.

In any case, even just restricting our consideration to organic structures, there are far more “machines” in nature than in our technology, so it is only a small sliver of all functional complexity, only the limited subset which is known to have been man-made, is known to have been directly produced by designers. We don’t have any other examples outside of what humans have produced that could support this induction and we seem to have a large number of counter-examples. Given that natural mechanisms are well known to have produced so many of the arguably functional complex patterns in the universe, that we have a well tested and characterized mechanism for producing functional complexity in biology, and that all of this natural complexity was definitely not produced by man (the only identified agency on record from a scientific standpoint), the argument from induction completely fails to gain traction.

I think that making use of the Aristotelian categories of efficient versus final cause is probably the best and most theologically sound way of dealing with these issues, and it moves us beyond the so-far unrewarding task of looking for God’s activity as a competing cause in the natural world.

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Yes, I’m aware, and it is a misunderstanding (no doubt fostered by infelicitous comments by some). I have addressed this directly on more than one occasion in blog posts (start with this one). The only way you can get deism out of what we say is if you combine it with scientism. And we completely disavow the latter. Yes we think it is the right approach to look for scientific explanations. No, we don’t think science can explain all of reality. It only explains the part of reality that is susceptible to being explained with efficient causes.

Just because I invoked the Artistotelian notion of final causes, please don’t saddle me with everything he said. I don’t think the brain is just a radiator; I do think moving objects have inertia; and I think women are fully human. Accepting ID is not a necessary consequence of accepting that agents act for reasons.

Your “no I’m not, you are” defense to my question to Bilbo about deism doesn’t answer the question, which seems to be the same one you’re pressing me for. Unless you are invoking divine interventions almost continuously, you too need an account of God’s continuous involvement in the world to keep from lapsing into episodic deism. What is it? I suspect we could come to agree on that kind of account on purely philosophical/theological grounds, and then our disagreement over interventions would be reduced to the efficacy of scientific explanations.

I wish you’d ease up on the sweeping generalizations about what BioLogos believes. If it doesn’t say it in our What we believe statement, it’s not fair to say we believe it. There may be individuals who have some connection to BioLogos who do, but that doesn’t make it an organizational commitment. As for the fact-value distinction, we explicitly deny it in the introductory section of this Common Question. And I myself have published on the topic, claiming the distinction to be highly problematic.

Finally, stick around for two weeks. The first part of May we’re launching a major series on divine action with some of the leaders in the field contributing posts.

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Eddie, in your view does God have a “substantive” role in how planetary systems form? In how carbon atoms are made?

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Let me try one more time (this will be my last attempt) to extract from you an account of what you’re demanding from me. How much supernatural causation (of the efficient variety) do you invoke to explain the way things are in the world? Presumably this isn’t happening constantly, or the regular interventions of God become indistinguishable from laws. But then you have the same problem of needing to say what else God is doing lest he be relegated to a deistic observers gallery. Right? What am I missing about your position that is any different in this respect than mine? If you have God occasionally intervening in the chain of causes, then you have stretches of time that God is not doing that, right? And spread over an infinity of time, there is no difference between that and what you accuse me of. And in a finite amount of time, there will only be a (small) difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. So we both need an account of God’s creatio continua. I’ve yet to hear anything from you on this.

I (I’m not speaking for BioLogos here, just as an individual philosopher who espouses evolutionary creation) think the problem is more linguistic than usually admitted. The scientific and the personal (or what Sellars called the “manifest”) are two different discourses that have developed. Each have their own ontology in a sense, and they cannot be reduced to each other. One appeals to particles and forces and efficient causes; the other to intentions and will and reasons. We will not get one seamless account that integrates the concepts derived from each. So, I’m going to keep saying “God intentionally created humans” and “evolution is the best scientific description we have of the process by which human beings developed.” Each discourse has its own history, methodology, and logic (in the Hegelean sense). God as an agent does things, and we can talk about them theologically. And we have scientific explanations for some things.

That is only a paragraph summary of what needs a monograph to unpack. But please stop saying no TE/EC people treat this problem seriously.

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Of course God a has a big role and he needs to have one! Evolution could NOT do it!It is considered by atheist a “mindless un-directed process”.!

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So I think we’d make some further headway on our disagreements if when you’re objecting to “BioLogos” you’d confine that to the people who are actually part of BioLogos now (unless you’re addressing history). These include the staff members, our Board of Directors, and members of the Advisory Council. These people don’t agree on every point, but they are the only people who have publicly identified with BioLogos and with whom BioLogos has publicly identified. I don’t mean this in the silly “distance ourselves from our founder” way that these guys tried to spin it, just that we are an organization that develops (and adapts?!) over time.

I don’t think you’ll find anyone on those lists who disagrees with my claim that God intentionally created humans. And I don’t think you’ll find any “BioLogos leaders constantly exhibit horror” about the possibility of supernatural causation in origins. Our blog is intentionally a place for conversation among people who are interested in these topics. I’d guess that the majority of our blog authors largely agree with our positions, but their blog posts aren’t somehow determining BioLogos doctrine. And certainly the “commentators” are speaking for themselves, not the organization.

Fair enough?

I’m still curious about your view of divine action, but I promised to stop asking. I’m sure it will come up again. By the way, Bob Russell is one of the contributors to our forthcoming series on divine action.

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Thanks Eddie. I appreciate it.

Sorry to keep messing with your image of the organization, but you owe us some money! (there’s a “give” button in the upper right of most screens). Ted didn’t have anything to do with the divine action series. He’s working hard on other things.

Which is why I keep insisting that EC is no more prone to deism than ID.

We’re getting closer when you say this. Language causes all kinds of problems in this area (and in philosophy of action in general). More to come…

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Hi Eddie,

Your schematization seems fairly solid, and I think you are right that where ECs and IDs differ (your variety of ID that is, and I am convinced that this is not a majority view for those who identify themselves with the position) is in their tendency to admit special divine action as a likely causal factor at key stages in natural history. Such a difference in outlook, being reduced to a simple matter of intellectual inclination when considering likely hypotheses for the formation of life on this planet, strikes me as a fairly trivial issue on which to build such a strong disagreement.

If this is really the crux of the issue, then this strikes me as hardly worth discussing, especially when both sides seem to concede that the question is open, regardless of what they personally happen to find more convincing. I have long guessed that the reason this might disturb you is that you strongly suspect the motives (and perhaps the naturalistic bias) of those who don’t think that special divine action is a likely solution for abiogenesis. If this is the case, I think you may be jumping to conclusions, and in spite of your frequent characterization of your dialogues with ECs, in any discussions I’ve seen you having with the biologos staff, their replies always struck me as being anything but shady, evasive and disingenuous. Maybe this characterizes some of your earlier discussions that I did not read, but I’m sort of hesitant to accept this (though I’m open to any link you want to provide).

It is clear that the ECs under discussion have no trouble with the idea that God can intervene (your well-considered concern for what this term might be thought to imply is noted), so it is a good guess that something else is driving the disagreement. It could be that social pressures stemming from an ambient naturalist worldview are hard at work behind the scenes. But on the other hand, it could be a whole range of other influences.

It could be that abiogenesis left us with nearly no evidence at all (for obvious reasons), so we have good reason to suspect that scientists addressing the question have essentially been flailing about in the dark with very few helpful pointers, like detectives at an 80 year-old cold-case crime scene. It may be the consideration that scientist have only been at it for half a century in a limited number of labs with highly limited ideas of what to look for, while the formation of early replicators would have arisen in an abiotic world-wide lab filled with an immense range of conditions and deriving from an unparalleled high-throughput experiment with infinitesimally graded variables and an enormous range of substrates over millions of years, making it a bit absurd for us to throw up our hands and admit failure (yes I realize you aren’t suggesting we do this). It may be due to the consideration that in every one of the untold number of times when some feature of the natural world did not seem susceptible to a natural explanation, further scientific investigation has proven that this intuition was wrong, with this pattern playing out this way so often that to bet against this outcome has become a bad idea. It may be because science has progressively uncovered such a self-consistent vision of the natural world through space and time, that any interruption in continuity (a causal gap) starts to look like an unlikely bet unless it has some purpose other than connecting the dots in an otherwise continuous space-time matrix (this is how special divine action leading to the creation of life tends to look, like it or not). Is it not reasonable to consider that a combination of these factors might result in what you end up viewing as an unreasonable bias?

I admit that I see no problem in principle with your view, but special divine action leading to the creation of life would strike me as an odd and surprising outcome given the elegant self-consistency that scientific investigation has otherwise uncovered. It is difficult to avoid automatically associating it with the idea of angelic adjustments of planetary motions, whether or not it is the same thing. It is easy to interpret it in this way, whether you call it an intervention or a special divine action, and whether or not you normalize it against the backdrop of the Hebrew perspective.

I also understand where the admittedly denigrating term “tinkering” comes from, since from this point of view, it becomes odd and inexplicable, when the rest of the picture seems to have unfolded from a singularity with such astonishing uniformity, that some unique feature was not made available in this unfolding. It simply becomes a kneejerk reaction to picture it as the boss showing up to handle some glaring lacuna in the company SOPs, even if this isn’t the necessary interpretation. The bottom line is that the conclusion that abiogenesis likely has a natural explanation is probably usually an induction from what we know about the natural world and the history of science rather than a deduction from what we think should be the case based on some bias toward naturalism.

This is really quite separate from questions of general divine action, which is something that both ECs and IDs need to consider without either position really offering much of an advantage.

That said, your observations about the worldview that is codified by the Hebrew language are well expressed and I think very helpful, as are your caveats about the terminology being used for these debates.