The Gaia Hypothesis and the existence of God.

To My Anonymous contributor,

First I must apologize for my delayed response. This time of year can be hectic as we all try to take advantage of the nice weather for a change. I wanted to first thank you for taking the time to pose these questions to me. They are well thought out and rational questions. I read your post several times in order to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. I will break down your statements for ease of dissection.

In the first part you ask,

“What are your ideas about the Gaia hypothesis? It states, in short, that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism that actively works to create a favorable environment. Clearly, this hypothesis disproves your hypothesis.”

There are two ways to answer this section and they both depend on what Gaia you are referring to. I will assume that since you capitalized the word that you are referring to the ancient Greek supreme goddess of the earth, Gaia. Yet your definition of what your interpretation of the Gaia hypothesis is refers to a theory first articulated by British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock in 1965. Lovelock’s original definition of the hypothesis states “that the temperature and composition of the Earth’s surface are actively controlled by life on the planet. It suggests that if changes in the gas composition, temperature or oxidation states of the Earth are caused by extraterrestrial, biological, geological, or other disturbances, life responds to these changes by modifying the abiotic environment through growth and metabolism. In simpler terms, biological responses tend to regulate the state of the Earth’s environment in their favor.“

How does this statement disprove my hypothesis? It provides no terms, no conclusions, definitions, and no contradictions with the idea of an omniscient God. It merely states a scientific proposal. In fact, the term self regulating is a mechanical term. Machines need to be designed and created. This would cause me to think of all of the complex systems that this statement envelops. Biological, chemical, geological, hydrological, atmospheric, and nuclear systems all must be fine tuned to such precision, that new numbers have had to be created, in order to define the probabilities of random assemblage.

Allow me to separate us from the argument by way of an illustration. It is simple, yet I feel adequately sums up the ideas that we are discussing. Imagine for a moment that you are walking through the tropical jungles of Papua New Guinea. As you clear your way through the brush, you pull aside some plants to reveal Michelangelo’s David sculpted in flawless black marble. Could this have resulted by black marble gathering in all corners of the globe in an effort to create something beautiful at a agreed upon location? Or did it take thought, design, intelligence, and skill?

Here is the catch. I neglected to mention some other things that you observed on your stroll. You watched hypertonic, isotonic, and hypotonic osmosis in action. You saw sunlight being converted to energy using this equation which cannot be altered – 6CO₂+6H₂O –> C₆H₁₂O₆+6O_2. You walked upon a self recycling machine of plate tectonics floating on top of a controlled core of boiling iron and rock. Your skin absorbed vitamin D and you felt only a small portion of the sun’s rays, as most of the gamma radiation and other harmful rays are diverted by our magnetosphere as a result of the properties of our molten core. You also autonomously breathed in a perfectly balanced mix of 78.084% Nitrogen, 20.9476% Oxygen, 09.34% Argon, 0.0314% Carbon Dioxide, 0.001818% Neon, 0.0002% Methane, 0.000524% Helium, 0.000114% Krypton, 0.00005% Hydrogen, and 0.0000087% Xenon.

My question to you is, how is it possible to go through life observing complexity and design in various systems everyday and find it perfectly acceptable to reason that something more intelligent than the systems themselves must have been involved: yet when complexity is observed in nature, where there is a possibility of the same logic being applied wherein the result must be God, it is denied? This is a paradox of reason. Either complexity and design merit intelligence or they do not. One cannot hold contradictory viewpoints without intellectually imploding like a neutron star.

The idea that the world is a self regulating; super organism that actively works to create a favorable environment raises several questions for the one holding this to be more than a proposal from someone hired by NASA as a research scientist. Where does morality come from? Where do right and wrong come from? How can matter regulate morality? When have rocks banded together in protest against the social injustice being committed towards all the other rocks currently being crushed at quarries across the globe? When has a tree condemned another tree for stealing the water from a neighboring plant? Does a hurricane wager the morality of its destruction of innocent lives? I would ask you to provide any such evidence of so, other than a spiritual and philosophical distortion of Lovelock’s original theory.

In actuality, nature cares nothing for morality or right and wrong. We know this to be true because it is within our observable reality. Animals kill when they want to or when they need to. There is no moral thought process for the lioness snapping the neck of a baby water buffalo. Morality does not exist in the kingdoms of animals and plants. There is no great Darwinian jungle court to hear and try the crimes of nature. Therefore, I would ask what evidence have you observed in nature that would lead you to believe that morality could be regulated by nothing more than mitochondria, algae, or a single celled bacteria. Do you consult the amoeba in order to find out if you should rob a bank? Or do you already posses the knowledge that it would be wrong to do so? These questions may sound a little extreme, but they are none the less accurate conclusions of a spiritual application of the Gaia hypothesis.

“No matter what you say about evolution being a hypothesis FAITH in a greater being is not substantial proof that creation came about from an all-knowing, all-powerful God.”

If I ever gave the impression that faith alone is what validated something, than I must apologize, for here we are in agreement. Faith is not substantial proof for an all knowing all powerful God. Nor is faith proof that God created everything. I may place all of my faith in glorifying my desk as god, yet that would not make it so. Instead, the strongest argument for God’s presence is within our own hearts.

As you are a human being, I will assume that you wrestle with the same things that all humans have questioned at some point and time in their lives. I believe if one has not struggled with these questions yet, they will. We all struggle with the questions of origin, purpose, destiny, and meaning. Where did I come from? What am I here for? Where am I going? What does it all mean?

If we apply Darwinian logic, these thoughts are meaningless. These ideas and concepts are nothing more than neurons firing short, small bursts of electricity over synaptic gaps. Yet I do not need to convince you that anyone who has had these thoughts will defend their legitimacy to the end. Why? They are intrinsic to us. Yet evolution would suggest that we evolved these thoughts. I ask you, what possible naturalistic advantage would we have by creating things to wrestle with in our minds that were meaningless? This is the necessary conclusion of naturalism as a philosophy and worldview. Everything becomes meaningless. All value and beauty are lost and hopelessness and despair come as a result of believing that you are just a valuable as a grain of sand.

Does your claim that Darwinian evolution is true have rational inference? Is it able to be defended when viewed through the lens of reality? Does it stand up when scrutinized with statistics, reason, logic, chemistry, paleontology, biology, nuclear science and archaeology? I would conclude that in fact it does the opposite. It falls apart.

Can you tell me any one thing from Darwinian evolution that you know to be true? Are you sure of any one thing that has been empirically proven? Is there one piece of evidence that exists to show that life can come from non-life? Where are the missing links? Where are the innumerable transitional forms that should exist? We have hundreds of thousands of fossils in museums scattered across the globe from all corners of the earth, and yet, no transitional forms. Not one. If you fancy yourself a person of science, I ask you to evaluate these questions the same as you would if I were proposing that Darwin was correct.

“Your idea of creation is nothing more than a hypothesis, and what I believe about evolution. Both sides hold evidence to prove their correctness. It seems to me that faith would be required on both sides. What makes your faith in a greater being, more right than my faith in the universe and science?”

This comes back to a certain modicum of agreement. This statement again reveals the importance that you put upon faith. As stated above, faith alone in something is not enough to make it true. But what is faith? Is it not a belief or trust? I would suggest that it is not the amount of faith that you or I can put into our respective sides, but rather what we use as our foundation of that faith.

What is your faith in the universe? From where does it come? It must come from within for there it would be contradictory to base it upon anything else. As man is the center of the naturalistic universe, there is no need for God. He is freed from all moral and logical obligations to create his own reality. Yet again I ask if this has rational inference in our lives. Are we truly free to do whatever we see fit? Or must we adhere to moral guidelines that are present within every one of us via our conscience?

I would suggest that the only difference between your view of the universe and mine is one of moral absolutes. What is preventing you from saying that it is not the universe that designed, ordered, and set in motion the things we see? What prevents you from acknowledging a holy creator? The minute that you say that there is a possibility of God being in control, now there is accountability. The desire to avoid accountability to God can be a powerful motivator when choosing a worldview. It can be so strong as to make great thinkers and amazing scientists to believe a theory that cannot explain why if humans came from apes, how it is that we still have apes reproducing apes. Yet, that is what naturalism and evolution have afforded us.

Darwinian evolution and Naturalism have tried to illustrate a model of the world that is incomplete because it does not deal with intangibles. They have innately, and by design removed the very thing that would allow resolution of such a conflict; the presence of an intelligent God. They have attempted to explain construction of stealth jet fighters without first explaining the toothpick model plane. They have said that men are no more than beasts and should be treated as such. They have attempted to convey that humans evolved morality, only to contradict our own evolution by violating it constantly.

In conclusion, the combination of the following factors allow me to make a claim for the presence of God as truth: evidence of irreducible complexity in our observable reality, the four questions that are intrinsic to us, the scientific errors in evolutionary theory, the complete lack of a naturalistic account for morality, and the presence of a conscience in every human.

It is not our levels of faith that make us right or wrong, it is what we are placing our faith in. The things that we hold to be true must be able to withstand the scrutiny that is brought against it. The Gaia Hypothesis simply falls miles short when a deeper level of scrutiny is applied.