Valter\u2019s Osteria<\/a> Tuesday evening.\u00a0 I had never even heard of the place before, let alone eaten there.\u00a0 But wow.\u00a0 It was a really enjoyable reminder of how remarkably good very good food can be.\u00a0 One of the best meals I\u2019ve ever had, I think.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And, by the way, the meal that we had was designed and intentionally created.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t arise by chance.\u00a0 With that in mind, I now share a few notes that I\u2019ve extracted from a prior reading of Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet<\/em> (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999):<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I have the impression from reading popular literature dealing with the early alleged \u201ccosmic soup\u201d, from which life is supposed to have developed, that the writers and their readers feel that the soup was a random and rather homogeneous mixture.\u00a0 On the contrary, Stanley Jaki tells us that, in the succession of stages through which the expanding cosmos developed, baffling asymmetries occurred.\u00a0 \u201cDiscovery of some anomaly in the decay of the\u00a0K2<\/sub>\u00a0mesons led for instance to the recognition that ten billion and one protons had to be on hand for every ten billion anti-protons if the present preponderance of ordinary matter in the universe is to be accounted for.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nYet the uniformity in all directions of the background radiation from the first moment, a cold afterglow still bathing the entire universe, \u201chad to be set up by astoundingly uniform initial conditions in the Big Bang.\u00a0 If the radiation\u201d, observes astronautical engineer Eugene Mallove, \u201cwere not highly uniform. (217), for various reasons the temperature of space would now be intolerably high and the universe could not support chemically organized life.\u201d\u00a0 (217)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not personally pretending to relevant scientific expertise, I would love to hear from people who know whether the statements above are still (or ever were) accurate.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mallove has set down three more traits.\u00a0 One is that atoms be bound together just exactly as they are bound, neither more nor less tightly.\u00a0 Another is that stars burn precisely at the rate that they do, slowly consuming themselves over billions of years.\u00a0 A third is that space and time expand at exactly the rate that they do, neither more nor less slowly.\u00a0 Scientists find these exactitudes astonishing because \u201cour universe is set up to do three very unusual things: foster the complexity epitomized by life, permit highly complex objects to stay intact over long periods of time and yet allow for gradual change that can lead to even greater complexity.\u201d\u00a0 He concludes that no matter how we might try to imagine more simple possible universes, in almost any of these \u201cthe odds for the development of anything as complicated as life \u2014 no matter how you imagine it \u2014 would be nil.\u201d\u00a0 More reasons to kneel.\u00a0 (218)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Our final example occurs deep within the roaring nuclear infernos we call stars.\u00a0 In them are manufactured the heavy elements absolutely indispensable for our human bodies to work.\u00a0 McCabe puts the matter well.\u00a0 Human life could not have happened except \u201cfor the occurrence of thermo-nuclear synthesis in the stars to build up heavy elements necessary for the correct functioning of our protein structure.\u00a0 For example, the metal zinc is an essential component of one of our digestive enzymes: so also iron for the formation of haemoglobin.\u00a0 Modern bio-chemistry demonstrates the enormous complexity of what used to be called \u2018the simple cell\u2019 and how extraordinarily critical are the conditions necessary for the correct functioning of an enzyme inside a cell which may contain as many as 2,000 different enzymes.\u201d\u00a0 The reader will notice here how the macrocosm is marvelously and causally connected with the microcosm, while both are indispensable for what we have called the midicosm, the realm in which I at this moment write this sentence and you read it at another moment.\u00a0 All this is more stunning and compelling evidence of an original plan of most elegant beauty.\u00a0 (218-219)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
When we ponder the history and the present state of our universe, \u201cone cosmic specificity leading to another, and in staggeringly exact and specific quantitative terms\u201d, we easily understand why cell biologist E. J. Ambrose \u201csees with wonder a mastering intelligence at work\u201d.\u00a0 Henry Margenau, associate of Einstein and Heisenberg, called the anthropic principle \u201cabsolutely convincing\u201d evidence of a Creator, and astronomer Robert Jastrow has declared that it is \u201cthe most theistic result ever to come out of science.\u201d\u00a0 (220)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dubay quotes the late biochemist Lewis Thomas:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I cannot make my peace with the randomness doctrine: I cannot abide the notion of purposelessness and blind chance in nature. . . .\u00a0 It is absurd to say that a place like this place is absurd, when it contains, in front of our eyes, so many millions of different forms of life, each one in its way absolutely perfect.\u00a0 (cited on page 200)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
He also cites the physicist Henry Pierce Stapp, of the University of California at Berkeley:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
[E]verything we know about nature is in accord with the idea that the fundamental processes of nature lie outside space-time but generate events that can be located in space-time.\u00a0 (cited on page 200)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And the illustrious twentieth-century physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
If from the indubitable fact that the world exists, someone wants to infer a cause of this existence, his inference does not contradict our scientific knowledge at any point.\u00a0 No scientist has at his disposal even a single argument or any kind of fact with which he could oppose such an assumption.\u00a0 This is true, even if the cause \u2014 and how could it be otherwise \u2014 obviously has to be sought outside this three-dimensional world of ours.\u201d\u00a0 (cited on pages 200-201)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
And, to conclude for this blog entry, he also cites the biochemist Michael Behe:<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The observation of design flows completely from the observations of science.\u00a0 It\u2019s not deduced from going into a sacred book and seeing what is written there.\u00a0 (cited on page 201)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 But, first: \u00a0 A few of my odd but obsessive anonymous critics will be unsurprised at my life-long interest in Tyrannosaurus rex; they\u2019ll surely point out the almost embarrassingly obvious family resemblance between me and the dinosaur with regard to our character and temperament.\u00a0 Nonetheless, I press forward.\u00a0 This latest find, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9409,551,6234,120,572,16193,16403,18125,10127,545,123,2210,6171,22751,16424,22745,22748],"class_list":["post-90959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-appearance-of-design","tag-argument-from-design","tag-cosmic-design","tag-design","tag-design-argument","tag-design-inference","tag-designed","tag-designer","tag-fine-tuned","tag-fine-tuning","tag-intelligent-design","tag-salt-lake","tag-salt-lake-city","tag-slc","tag-universal-design-intuition","tag-valters","tag-valters-osteria"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"T-Rex,](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2021\/04\/800px-T._rex_in_Sosnowiec_white_background-1.png\")
<\/a>