Brand Now Has a Brand New Book: Origin (Part 3)
Doubleday published in 2017 Dan Brown’s (whom we’re calling Brand Now by scrambling the letters in his name [he likes that]) new book, which is titled briefly Origin. So far we have noticed that he plays fast and loose with facts, giving the reader impressions that are not accurate. In most instances, that might be a detriment; in today’s climate of “fake news,” one can get away with it if the message is one people want to hear. Brand Now denigrates creationists and scientists who see the design in God’s creation. He even holds up Stephen J. Gould, who developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain “some of the gaps in the fossil record,” as the scientific expert. In fact, the fictional character, Robert Langdon, claims to have had a conversation with Gould who asserted things that were refuted in article 2 of this series. But since Brand Now brought up Gould’s name and evidently considers him a real scientist, why not consider a few quotes from Gould that are not found in Origin?
I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know ["Evolution as Fact and Theory," Discover 2(5):34-37 (1981).]
Paleontologists have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin’s argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life’s history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study [The Panda’s Thumb (1882), pp. 181-182.]
Gould is not the only scientist who admits that problems with the theory of evolution exist. Mary Leakey, a dyed-in-the-wool evolutionist, spent years, as did other members of her family, searching for fossils, and their findings were published frequently in National Geographic. Three months before her death in 1996, she told Associated Press that she
agreed it was impossible for scientists ever to pinpoint exactly when prehistoric man became fully human. We shall probably never know where humans began and where hominids left off. …all these trees of life with their branches of our ancestors, that’s a lot of nonsense.
Notice four important points here.
These statements are made by ardent evolutionists.
These statements acknowledge that the evidence for evolution is greatly lacking.
This lack of evidence has not caused any of them to doubt the theory of evolution.
To say, as Brand Now does, evolution is “an irrefutable scientific fact” (385) is a false statement.
The Miller – Urey Experiments
The author acknowledges that the experiments done by the chemists, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey back in the 1950s, failed, but the way he describes it raises questions. He writes that they “had attempted to re-create the conditions at the dawn of the earth’s creation—a hot planet covered by a churning, lifeless, ocean of boiling chemicals.” The primordial soup (383).
This set-up, as exciting as it is supposed to sound, may cause some to react the way Captain Kirk did when a self-proclaimed god, who could take away every person’s pain, set forth his plan for healing the universe. Captain Kirk raised his hand and asked, “What does God need with a starship?” Hmm.
In this case the question is, “Who cooked up the batch of primordial soup?” Where did it come from? Is the idea that matter is eternal? How does that work? “In the beginning was Matter, and Matter said, ‘Let there be a Big Bang,’ and Primordial Soup appeared.” Unlike Genesis, however, this creation was not instantaneous (Ps. 33:6-9); it took 10.2 billion years.
A second question is, “How does any evolutionist know what ‘the conditions at the dawn of the earth’s creation’ were in order to re-create them?” Precisely who was there as a witness? That’s right. No one. So all we have are computer models and simulations based on what scientists think, according to their own presuppositions. This passes for science? They suggest that there was no life in the soup to begin with, but somehow, with lightning, it developed, and then life evolved. So how did lifeless matter develop intelligence and the use of logic? In the Bible, we start with intelligence (God), and He creates matter (Gen. 1:1). In evolution we start with matter that possesses no life and end up with intelligence. Which sounds the most logical?
To return to the Miller-Urey experiments, when they attempted to re-create what they thought the primordial soup was like, they used water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. They did not use oxygen because they knew that it would inhibit the formation of amino acids. Therefore, it could not have been part of earth’s atmosphere at that time. Later they discovered ancient rocks on earth that had oxygen in them. So, was oxygen part of the ingredients comprising the soup or not? On the one hand, if oxygen is present in the atmosphere, amino acids cannot form in the first place (which is the reason Miller and Urey did not use it). On the other hand, ozone (O2) is needed to keep the sun from damaging the amino acids once they form in the soup. So, scientists face a dilemma on this issue.
Miller and Urey managed to create some amino acids with their experiments. Is that human life? Not by itself. The way the media reported on the Miller-Urey experiment made it sound like a tremendous breakthrough. What was omitted was that Miller and Urey created some amino acids in ratios and proportions, along with tar, from which the proteins of life could never originate. They created both right-handed and left-handed amino acids equally, but it takes 300 left-handed amino acids to form a typical protein. Furthermore, the amino acids cannot be chain ending.
A Boeing 747
According to Geoff Rowe, who works at the Kennedy Space Center, the following analogy helps understand the problem evolutionists have. According to Gary Parker, the “simplest” cell imaginable is more complex than an operating Boeing 747, which contains almost a million parts. Not one of those parts can fly on its own. Not only must the parts of the airplane be available, they must be assembled properly to fit the design of the airplane. The parts (even if they all existed and to the right specifications) would not get anyone anywhere without the design.
Showing how an airplane's components might have evolved without any intelligence is not the same thing as showing how the airplane could have been organized (designed) without any intelligence. So showing how amino acids could have formed does not show how life evolved, let alone connect to form proteins that then fold up, that then act as keys in a lock (right dimensions and shape) that then act to speed up chemical reactions (enzymes). And without these protein enzymes there is no life.
The Main Thesis in Origin
With less than 70 pages left in the book, Brand Now gets to his brand new theory that is supposed to explain the origin and design of the universe—and the winner is—entropy (392). What? No, he’s serious. He provides examples of the way entropy can organize things—in conjunction with such phenomena as gravity or electromagnetism. However, the greater the entropy, the greater the randomness and disorder that occurs. Anyone who wants to see a puzzled reaction on the face of a scientist should tell him that entropy is responsible for the orderly universe in which we live.
In the novel, Brand Now cites a scientist named Jeremy England (394), who is both an MIT professor and an orthodox Jew (394-95). He purportedly wrote an article titled, “Dissipation-Driven Adaptive Organization,” which (allegedly) agrees with Brand Now’s “Creation Through Entropy” theory. England admits that the theory is not proven (396).
As it turns out, there really is a Jeremy England. He is a professor at MIT. And he is a devout Jew. And he disagrees with Brand Now. According to information supplied by John Ellis, posted on October 16, 2017, the real Jeremy England wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal with the interesting title, “Dan Brown Can’t Cite Me to Disprove God.” Ellis quotes England as saying:
I’m a scientist, but I also study and live by the Hebrew Bible. To me, the idea that physics could prove that the God of Abraham is not the creator and ruler of the world reflects a serious misunderstanding—of both the scientific method and the function of the biblical text.
The Popularity of Evolution
Why do so many people buy books that promote evolution? In The Da Vinci Code, Brand Now disparaged Christianity the way the Bible teaches it in favor of some far-out legends about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene and settling down somewhere in France. In Origin he champions evolution as the explanation of where we came from rather than from God, as the Bible teaches in its very first verse. What motivates someone like this author? It’s obvious that he is a committed evolutionist and antichristian. Why?
The answer for him could be what it is for others—its teachings on morality. Some would never oppose a religion if it did not require moral behavior. For example, who opposes the New Age religion? Actually, only Christians do, and the reason is that, by believing their precepts, one can be “spiritual” and also commit adultery or any other sin. What people object to in the Christian religion is that they are told they must behave morally. They cannot be a homosexual, an adulterer, a drinker, a liar, covetous, lascivious, etc. (cf. Rom. 1:28-32; Gal. 5:19-21). Because some want to engage in these practices, they reject Christianity and embrace evolution. Think that’s a stretch? Then consider the words of Aldous Huxley, who promoted vigorously Darwin’s theory of evolution.
I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do…. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
No charge of immorality is being laid at Brand Now’s feet, but feeling free from God’s moral laws does motivate many who reject God. Those who choose randomness as their Creator will (unfortunately) come to a specific end designed by God for Satan and his followers.