Mind and Intelligence – Can evolution explain rationality and original thought?

[1]

I leave you to decide whether this debater is ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked, because I don’t accept evolution. By evolution I do not mean adaptation; I mean the idea that molecules became men and protons became prime ministers and presidents.  Again, I don’t mean adaptation. As a person believing in creation, I accept there is variation, but there is no common descent; we are not descended from the same creature originally, such as apes or an ape-like creature; there is no connection directly between us.  C S Lewis said this:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong.  The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.[2] 

In other words, you often hear discussions where each party doesn’t take the other one seriously. We must avoid such a lack of engagement. Professor John Lennox, the well-known mathematician from Oxford University has said:

The issue between the atheist and the believer is not whether it makes sense to question ultimate fact, it is rather the question: What fact is ultimate?  The atheist’s ultimate fact is the universe; the theist’s ultimate fact is God. That is the burning question: In which direction does science point – matter before mind or mind before matter?[3]

Clearly, my thinking is in the latter category.

My opponent tonight, Dr Glenn Geher, evolutionary psychologist and chair of evolutionary psychology here at the State University of New York in New Paltz, in an article,[4] has said:

Fundamental Christians, who necessarily reject ideas that are premised on evolution as an accepted theory of speciation, reject EP [Evolutionary Psychology] simply due to its reliance on evolutionary theory.  This ideological hurdle is by no means small.

A recent survey found that 87% of United States citizens do not believe that evolutionary forces in general (and natural selection, in particular), unaided by a supernatural deity, are responsible for human origins (CBS News Poll, November 2004). Such individuals, whose numbers are, simply, daunting, are likely to reject EP as a sustainable perspective on any aspect of human functioning.

I maintain that the reason that the percentage of people in the US who reject evolutionary theory is so high is because many of them have thought it through and actually see that there is every reason, rationally, to say that evolution doesn’t fit the bill.

We are this evening going to look at (1) some basic science – thermodynamics and information, (2) rationality, mind, reality and intelligence and lastly (3) morality – right and wrong. We will look at these three headings in order to show that the evidence is indeed strong for the presence of a Creator.

Turning to basic science first, we will touch upon my own field of study, thermodynamics.  Some of what I am going to say is in a paper I wrote some years ago,[5] where you can read about it in greater detail. I argue in this paper that information has to come first – mind before matter, that mind has organised matter, not vice versa – matter has not produced mind.

So let us consider some basic science – a little bit of thermodynamics and then information systems.

1a) Some basic science – Thermodynamics

Many people who work in the field of thermodynamics propose that all you need in order to build machinery is a vast amount of energy; that a massive blast of a lot of energy will produce incredible molecular machines, such as our brains – and this is also connected to what I have to say later about our minds. My position is that energy will do nothing unless there is a machine there ready to use it usefully. No machines were produced by blasting random energy on a pile of molecules in a pea-soup 4½ billion years ago. Despite what those who oppose my position say, photosynthesis is a supreme example of a machine already being there, ready to constrain the energy that is coming in and to use it usefully to produce sugars for the plant, and oxygen, as well as taking in carbon dioxide. That is a clear example where a machine is needed in situ before you can make use of any random energy available. Random energy on its own coming into what we call an open system, does not cause useful work to be done. Simply put, cars need engines – you can put all the fuel you want into the car, but with no engine it won’t go anywhere. Energy on its own will not do anything unless there is an engine ready to use it. Theodore von Karman, a famous aerospace engineer, once said wryly:

Science studies what is there but engineering brings into existence what was not there before…. 

This is so relevant in that the minds of engineers designing and building various technologies from aeroplanes to molecular machines are actively creating something which was not there already. But in order for this to be done, there must be present minds first, not matter first. The idea that random energy builds machines is therefore patently wrong.

1b) Some basic science – Information

Now let us consider information systems. DNA is full of masses of information, conveyed in a coded way from the sequence of nucleotides to the single-stranded RNA, which the ribosome will read, and using amino acids, will eventually build the proteins that we need in our bodies. To make that DNA string together, to polymerise the DNA and to make those strands, another machine has to be close by. This is the ATP molecule. But the sugar phosphate bonds of the ‘vertical’ part of the DNA are endothermic (they require energy being put in to make them join up). These endothermic reactions cannot be made to work unless you have precisely the right system to put the energy in to make them work; you must go through an energised intermediate – an energy has to be supplied that activates the individual components of the DNA and makes the vertical connections work. Therefore, DNA cannot be made simply by putting the raw building blocks of DNA into a Petri dish; It will never produce actual DNA. This can only be done through ATP (adenosine triphosphate) – a miniature electrical motor in all living cells energises the building blocks and is itself a very unstable molecule that cannot arise by accident in a Petri dish either. Yet, all these systems are going on in every single living thing! That is the way the information system in our cells works, and the four nucleotide bases, cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A) and thymine (T), in various triplet combinations, form the codes to make 20 amino acids. Those 20 amino acids combine to form strings, which make the proteins that the ribosomes string together. Special proteins such as enzymes are also involved in the reproduction of our DNA with the (over) twenty-thousand genes in human beings. This goes on as an information system in every living cell, in every living biological system today.

2) Rationality, mind, reality and intelligence

So now we ask, where does rationality come from? Where do our minds come from, our intelligence? Are we really saying that matter produces intelligence, or did mind come first? There exist not just matter and energy, but three fundamental quantities – Matter, Energy and Information[6]. Information is not defined by matter and energy. In the coded system of DNA, the code and the language of DNA are not defined by the material. We know that in our own experience, as we use whatever language we speak, we use sound waves but the sound waves do not define our language. The same can be said for writing; ink on paper does not define the patterns of writing; that is something that is transcendent to the matter of the ink and paper. On top of this, there is another major principle – the message is not defined by the code and the language. If I was able to write this in French or Chinese, the message you hope would still be the same. Message is not defined by language and language is not defined by matter and energy. A message implies a mind.

Professor John Lennox, the Oxford University mathematician and philosopher has summarised this point succinctly when he wrote:

The whole point about the nucleotide bases (A, C, G, T) is that they may be positioned essentially randomly. If there were any affinities between them, their information-carrying potential would be drastically reduced.[7]

The very fact that there is no chemical affinity, that there is no chemical reason that the nucleotide bases should be in their specific order (triplet form), is what gives DNA the very capacity to carry information; that information is non-material.

The polymath and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, FRS (1891-1976) put it brilliantly, when he wrote:

Whatever may be the origin of a DNA configuration, it can function as a code only if its order is not due to the forces of potential energy. It must be as physically indeterminate as the sequence of words on a printed page.[8]

(Emphasis added).

In other words there is no chemical reason why the DNA code is in the form it is. The biologist James Shapiro from the University of Chicago, has written:

It has been a surprise to learn how thoroughly cells protect themselves against precisely the kinds of accidental genetic change that, according to conventional theory, are the sources of evolutionary variability. By virtue of their proofreading and repair systems, living cells are not passive victims of the random forces of chemistry and physics. They devote large resources to suppressing random genetic variation and have the capacity to set the level of background localized mutability by adjusting the activity of their repair systems.[9] (Emphasis added).

So, according to Shapiro, cells guard against mutations happening in the DNA system, using several countermeasures against it. To say, like many evolutionist do, that mutations brought about information doesn’t really ring true at all to those who know a lot about the biochemistry of DNA and its accompanying systems.

So what defines the information in DNA? In short, it is similar to computer programming; it doesn’t come about by accident. Information implies intelligence. Intelligence implies a mind.

Glenn Geher, in a radio interview on Evolutionary Psychology ‘Mind Matters’ said

…cultural anthropology has a large focus on how details of particular cultures have broad and important ramifications for behavioural patterns within these cultures. Humans are, largely, the cultural ape…[10] (Emphasis added).

He also said:

…On the one hand our genes coded for us, created us and are the reason we exist. On the other hand, the genes essentially created a system within our body, the nervous system, that is all about allowing us to modify [the] behaviour in the light of different situations….[11] (Emphasis added.)

Dr. Geher, I ask you this evening, from your writing just quoted who, in this framework, is ‘us’ and ‘we’?

Francis Crick once remarked, on the DNA code:

If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.[12]

Fair enough, yet Crick the avowed materialist went on to state:

You, your joys, your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.[13]

He is stating here that we are effectively automatons, governed by nothing but neurons, chemistry, and so on. Yet this is a worldview assumption. This is not a deduction from science. We find actually that the scientific world is littered with such assumptions!

Eugene Wigner, the Quantum physicist, on mathematics, stated:

The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.[14] (Emphasis added).

Speaking of truth and logic, John Lennox writes:

If the concept of truth itself results from ‘nothing more than a behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells’ how in the name of logic would we know our brain was composed of nerve cells?[15]

This is some question indeed. How come we are aware of the fact that we can think rationally?  Charles Darwin stated it well, when he wrote:

With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, [in his opinion!] are of any value or at all trustworthy?[16]

Quite so! It is indeed a very horrid doubt, and may it grow in the minds of all evolutionists!

Professor John Polkinghorne, FRS, expressed the same doubt when he wrote:

If Crick’s thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenological scrap-heap, it also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen…. The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses.[17]  (Emphasis added).

J B S Haldane, no friend to my own position, aptly summarised the dilemma of the materialist when he wrote:

If my mental processes are determined solely by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true… And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.[18]

Rational thought has gone out of the window! Lennox again:

There is patent self-contradiction running through all attempts, however sophisticated they may appear, to derive rationality from irrationality.[19]

C S Lewis has written on the absurdity that materialism leads to:

Nature is quite powerless to produce rational thought: not that she never modifies our thinking but that the moment she does so, it ceases (for that very reason) to be rational. For, as we have seen, a train of thought loses all rational credentials as soon as it can be shown to be wholly the result of non-rational causes.[20] (Emphasis added).

There can only be one conclusion. We know that we are rational human beings, and our minds transcend the chemistry of our brains.

Atheism starts with a desire for freedom; freedom from God. In the atheist mind-set, there is no authority, no foundation for Truth. We are all just molecules with no soul; we are simply genes. Atheism says there is no individual, because genes don’t have individuality, and it says there is no free will, because molecules don’t have free will. But if we have no free will, there cannot be any freedom which is what they started with! This is a well-known philosophical dilemma showing the intellectual cul-de-sac that the position of atheistic materialism leads to. If a person takes this reductionist position that we are just a set of neurons, then there is no coherent basis for rationality. There can’t be, because molecules don’t think.

Put another way, the philosophy of naturalism undermines the very naturalism one starts with, because it says that even rationality has no meaning. The only real basis for rationality is that there is a rational God who made us, and we are made in His image. It is the only basis for true science, which is why science grew out of the Christian worldview.

Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961), who laid the basis for much of modern mathematical physics, when writing on reality, meaning and life itself, stated:

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.[21] (Emphasis added).

3) Morality – right and wrong

This then raises the question of morality, of right and wrong. Where does it come from? It is reflected, for example, in the appreciation of art. How can we say that a piece of modern art is insightful, compelling, or exemplary, or even upside-down? We can’t make sense of art, poetry, or beauty unless we have values; yet values have no meaning in a meaningless world that has no basis for rationality.

Jerry Coyne, an outspoken atheist, of the University of Chicago said:

Evolution is unique amongst the sciences because it strikes people in the solar plexus of their faith directly. It strikes them at the idea that

1. They are specially created by God, because evolution says you’re not.
2. It says that there’s no special purpose for your life because it’s a naturalistic philosophy. We have no more extrinsic purpose than a squirrel or an armadillo.
3. And it says that morality does not come from God; it is an evolved phenomenon.

And those are three things that are really hard for humans to accept, particularly if they come from a religious tradition.[22]

Jerry Coyne is entirely consistent – there is no basis for meaning or morality in this position. It is cold, meaningless and indifferent.

But Dr Glenn Geher, my opponent this evening, has stated:

I am, further, from a personal standpoint, not someone who encourages males to engage in promiscuous behaviour and not someone who supports men who fly into violent jealous rages with females as targets of their anger and aggression.  Additionally, I am strongly opposed to war, murder, rape, and filicide. I would feel a moral obligation to reject outright any doctrine which is inconsistent with these fundamental aspects of my belief system.  In sum, I would see such a doctrine as downright evil.[23]

So we know from our experience that there is such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Thus, Dr Geher, may I ask you, what do you mean by ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in this statement I have just noted from your own writings?

Let me be clear here. I am not saying that people who are atheists or who believe in evolution, have no belief system when it comes to morals, but I am saying that there is no basis for such moral beliefs in their worldview, if they are to be consistent with those beliefs.  What is the meaning of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ to someone who is an atheist?

The atheist Will Provine, an historian of science and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, and who I debated in 2010 on the supposed evolution of Flight, famously states:

No life after death; no ultimate foundation for ethics; no ultimate meaning for life; no free will.[24]

He also has written:

No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.[25]

The eminent French scientist Jacques Monod (1910-1976) who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, similarly has stated:

One of the great problems of philosophy is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what “is” and values are what “ought” to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including communism have tried to derive the “ought” from the “is”. This is impossible. If it is true that there is no purpose in the universe, that man is a pure accident, you cannot derive any ought from is.[26]  (Emphasis added).

Atheists, if they are being consistent to their worldview, cannot derive absolute laws from anywhere. They are lost in a quagmire of relativism. Monod again:

[Man] must at last awake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation.  He must realise that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music and is indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering and his crimes.[27]  (Emphasis added).

Monod was correct: This is the logical endgame to evolution. Richard Dawkins put the despair of the atheist brilliantly, when he states:

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.[28]

And to a friend of mine, at Oxford, Dawkins said recently:

My brain is just a lump of meat.[29]

How deeply sad! Not only is there no basis for rationality, in the atheist’s worldview, but also there is no rational foundation for right and wrong either. Terry Pratchett, the brilliant inventor of the fictional Discworld series of books, well expressed the frustration of the atheist with his own moral framework when he wrote:

I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight. I’m sure you’ll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water, and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while it was of course still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes and they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to us to become his moral superior.[30] (Emphasis added).

But Terry, on what basis? Atheists do not have a moral basis! Some atheists, although not all, are of the same view as Thomas Nagel, who said:

I want atheism to be true and I am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the Universe to be like that.[31] (Emphasis added).

That is being honest! He is showing that he wants to live as he pleases – he wants autonomy from God. Aldous Huxley said the same many years ago:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; I 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… freedom.[32] (Emphasis added)

That is really what is going on in this interchange between atheist and theist!  Not all atheists openly admit to what Nagel and Huxley have stated, but there are definitely some that do.

So atheism has motives. It is not neutral as some would have us believe. It is the natural friend of evolution and the worldview itself will not allow the evidence for design and a mind behind the Universe to be carefully considered. And yet we know rationality is vital to all thinking. We intuitively know there is right and wrong. But evolution can give no coherent understanding of:

• The machinery in life systems
• Rationality and truth
• The human experience of morality and conscience

Some concluding remarks

G K Chesterton, on materialism and reductionism, once wrote:

Take the first more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist… and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything and everything does not seem worth understanding.  His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cogwheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.[33] (Emphasis added)

Chesterton here is saying that if we take reductionism to its extreme, we have the sense of it covering everything, and leaving everything out. If you reduce everything just to chemistry and neurons, then you have not grasped the whole picture.

We have seen that reductionism fails to grasp that machines are essential to transmit information. True information is not built by random energy coming into a pea-soup of chemicals; rather, true information transfer requires free energy devices, machines to be there already in order to have information carried by those machines.

And one also needs to realise that reductionism fails to realise that information is non-material; it is transcendent to matter and energy. Information uses symbols and patterns which convey a message. The symbols and the message are independent of the carrier.  We have to go deeper than the superficial observation of matter and energy in order to understand the true nature of software controlled systems engineering.

Thus reductionism misses the big picture. As Chesterton says, the reductionist ‘…understands everything and everything does not seem worth understanding.’ In other words, we are missing non-material mind / intelligence and ultimately God out of the picture.

We all know that Origins have implications: Who am I?  Where did I come from? How did I get here? What does life really mean? The atheist ‘endgame’ that many people take evolution to, doesn’t fundamentally understand the science of design, doesn’t have a coherent explanation for rationality, and it doesn’t have a coherent explanation for the origin of information. Not only this, but it doesn’t have a coherent explanation for morals, and it doesn’t understand the Person of Christ, His birth, life, teaching, death; it will deny His resurrection and, what is more, evolutionary psychologists and many evolutionists who are atheists will deny real conversion.

Let me say a word about death. Many years ago my wife and I were going through the usual routine in the morning before I went off to work. My wife went to get our 3^rd son up from his cot, and she called me from upstairs. The tone in her voice told me immediately something was wrong. My 3 month-old son had died in his sleep. We had come face to face with death. I maintain that believing in a reductionist philosophy means that you cannot deal fundamentally with the reality of what life is at its end. I am not saying that evolutionists do not have deep feelings; of course they do. But they don’t have a rational framework in which to understand their subjective and very real experiences. The Christian philosophy and worldview works in practice. If I were to adopt Dawkins’ philosophy, a child that dies is ‘just a lump of meat’.  Could he say that of his own daughter, if his daughter had just died? I very much doubt it!

Charles Darwin had a problem with the Design argument. A suffering creation seemed to deny a good God. Why, he asked, would a benevolent Designer make cats that play with mice before killing them? But Darwin wrongly saw nature to have been always the same. He did not understand that the Fall described in the early chapters of Genesis, had changed nature to become “red in tooth and claw.” It was not like that at the beginning. Similarly, Sir David Attenborough today asks the same question: why would a benevolent Designer make parasites that eat their hosts from the inside? But Attenborough has made the same mistake; he also has ignored the same Biblical account of suffering arising from the Fall of man described in the Bible.

Many evolutionists have not grasped what the Creation Model says: Yes it does state that there was a perfect world in the beginning. But it also states that there were moral conditions, and that we rebelled – and that is most important for us to grasp. Evolution proposes that death is a stepping-stone to progress, endlessly discarding the individual in the process. But the Bible states that death is the tragic result of rebellion. All evil in the world is the result of one person in history rebelling against God, and that all humans, because of that rebellion, are now also in a state of rebellion against God. However, the Bible also says that man can be redeemed, but only through God’s intervention – redemption through the Cross of Christ, who is the Creator. Conversion is a real experience, it is not just psychology. All true Christians have met with a God who is transcendent, who made them in His image, and who has saved them, and there is a power of conversion at work in this world that no amount of analysing of neurons or behavioural psychology can explain. May God help us to understand the true nature of mind and intelligence and the true nature of the Creator who has made us!

Professor Andy McIntosh

April 2013

Glossary of terms

Thermodynamics:      the study of heat flow and energy dynamics.

Rationality:                 the ability to think logically, eg the ability to do mathematics.

Naturalism:                  the belief that one can only do science from a natural position and no supernatural thinking is allowed, particularly in the area of origins.

Materialism:                the belief that all that really exists is matter and energy. This is going further along the road of naturalism.

Reductionism:             the belief that everything that exists (even thoughts) can be broken down into tiny bits of matter and energy. It is a bit more extreme than materialism.

Worldview:                 a way of looking at the world that a person has.

Mind-set:                     similar to the concept of worldview – the mind that a person has in looking at the world.

Intellectual cul-de-sac:   a dead-end in a person’s thinking.

Morality:                     the ethics of what is right and wrong.

Theism:                      the belief that there is a God who made everything.

Atheism:                     the belief that there is no God who made everything.

Transcendent:             that something is not made of what we are considering. So a software code or computer program is transcendent to the material on which it is written. A document such as you are reading is not defined by the language in which it is written though it uses that language. We also say that God is not part of his creation – He is transcendent to it. The Christian position is that an all-powerful God made all things but is outside that Creation.

Conversion:                 the Christian teaching that a person can come to know God personally through the Lord Jesus Christ who comes by his Spirit to live within that person and change them from the inside.

Notes:

[1] Richard Dawkins Put Your Money on Evolution, The New York Times Review of Books, 9 April 1989, pp34-5.

[2] C S Lewis, ‘Bulveris’, in Undeceptions (1971).

[3] John C Lennox, God’s Undertaker – Has Science Buried God?  Lion 2007, p174.

[4] Dr Glenn Geher, Evolutionary Psychology is Not Evil! (…and Here’s Why…). Psychological Topics 15 (2006), 2, 181-202.

[5]A C Mcintosh, Information And Entropy – Top-down Or Bottom-up Development In Living Systems? Int. J. of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics, 4(4), pp351-385, 2009. http://journals.witpress.com/paperinfo.asp?pID=420&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=400&width=600

[6] Werner Gitt (1989) Information: the third fundamental quantity. Siemens Review 56 (6):36-41.

[7] John C Lennox, God’s Undertaker – Has Science buried God, Lion, 2007, p137.

[8] Michael Polanyi, A Third Way, Boston Review, Feb/March 1997, see also John Lennox, Ibid, p137.

[9] James Shapiro, A Third Way, Boston Review, Feb/Mar 1997, see also John Lennox, Ibid, p134.

[10] Glenn Geher, Evo Studies Blog, 6 December 2012.

[11] Glenn Geher, Radio Interview Evo Psychology “Mind Matters”, Hartford WWUH Aryeh Herman, February 2008.

[12] Crick, F, On the Genetic Code, Nobel Lecture, Dec 11, 1962 and also recorded in Science 139(3554), 8 February 1963.

[13] Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, p3.

[14] Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) famous for his deep exploration into quantum physics – The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, Comm. in Pure and Applied Maths, 13, 1-14, Feb 1960.

[15] John C Lennox, Ibid., p56.

[16] Charles Darwin, Letter to William Graham, 3 July, 1881.

[17] John Polkinghorne, One World, London, SPCK, 1986, p 92.  See also John C Lennox, Ibid, p56.

[18] J B S. Haldane, Possible Worlds, 1927, p209.

[19] John C Lennox, Ibid, p56.

[20] C S Lewis, Miracles, Harper Collins, 1947, pp38-9.

[21] Erwin Schrodinger, Q Mechs, and famous Schrodinger’s Wave Equation – Nature and the Greeks, Cambridge University Press, 1954.

[22] BBC, Andrew Maxwell Conspiracy Road Trip – Creation Oct 2012.

[23] Dr Glenn Geher, Evolutionary Psychology is Not Evil! (…and Here’s Why…). Psychological Topics 15 (2006), 2, 181-202

[24] William B Provine, quoted in How now shall we live?, Charles Colson & Nancy Pearcey, Marshall Pickering, 1999, p91.

[25] William B Provine, Scientists, Face It!  Science and Religion are Incompatible, The Scientist, 5 September 1988 – see also, John C Lennox, Gunning For God, Lion, 2011, p107.

[26] Jacques Monod and A. Wainhouse, Chance and Necessity, London, Collins, 1971, pp110, 167.

[27] Ibid, see also John C Lennox, Ibid, p107.

[28] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden.

[29] Richard Dawkins, Reported Communication, 2012.

[30] Terry Pratchett – See page 312-3 of Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett, ISBN 9780552153379, Transworld Publishers, 61-63 Uxbridge Road, London, W5 5SA.  See also – http://totaldrek.blogspot.com/2011/04/well-put.html.

[31] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word, 1997, pp130-131.

[32] Aldous Huxley, Confession of a Professed Atheist, Report: Perspective on the News, Vol 3 (June 1966) p 19. From an article by Helming, An Interview with God.

[33] G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy.