Origins
The universe, the earth, and life — and what they suggest about a maker.
There are four questions about origins I think are worth taking seriously, in roughly this order:
- Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?
- Why is the something there is finely calibrated to allow life?
- Where did the information in the cell come from?
- How old is the world we are actually living on?
The first two are old questions — Aristotle and Aquinas worked on versions of them — but they have, in my view, gotten stronger with modern physics, not weaker. The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants is a fact about the world that is harder to wave away the more we learn.
The third is a question that did not exist before we understood DNA. The cell is not the simple blob of jelly the nineteenth century took it to be. It runs on a digital code, with error-checking and parallel machinery, and the code has to have come from somewhere.
The fourth is the most contested in this section. I take the position that the earth is young — thousands rather than billions of years old — for empirical reasons set out in evidence for a young earth. The case rests on five independent rate-based clocks (lunar recession, ocean sodium, dinosaur soft tissue, carbon-14 in coal and diamonds, and the persistence of comets in a solar system supposedly old enough to have lost them all), each of which gives an upper bound on the age of the earth or its features dramatically shorter than the textbook chronology, and each of which rests on measurements made by mainstream science (or, in the case of the long-period comet reservoir invoked by the standard chronology, the conspicuous absence of such measurements seventy-five years after it was proposed). The pieces in that subsection take them one at a time.
The pieces below take all four questions in order.