Lesson

Updated: 8-10-19

Below are some snips from two articles and I have entitled this page

“Crick Was Up Intelligence Creek without a Paddle”

And sub-titled

“It’s Elementary Intelligence My Dear Watson”

(Karl Priest)

Crick’s atheistic faith leads to absurd pseudoscience

(From “Designed by Aliens?” by Gary Bates.)

Francis Crick, a highly intelligent and esteemed scientist, reasoned that life could not have evolved from non-living chemicals under any conceivable earth conditions. But the idea of a creator was unacceptable, since it would go against his atheistic faith. He affirmed this when he said, "People like myself get along perfectly well with no religious views."*

Unfortunately, Crick was not being entirely forthright in this regard. He does hold a religious view. Atheism is a religion in the sense of answering the ‘big questions’, such as ‘Where did we come from?’ and ‘What is our destiny?’, and is foundationally a belief system, since the non-existence of God could hardly be said to have been proven! So he must explain the origin of DNA from his religious perspective, and, subsequently, the origin of life on earth.

He does this with a theory called panspermia. This comes from the Greek words pas/pan (all) and sperma (seed), meaning that the seeds of life are all through the universe

*Do our genes reveal the hand of God? <www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2003/03/19/ecfgod19.xml>, 15 July

http://creation.com/designed-by-aliens-crick-watson-atheism-panspermia-creation-magazine

Directed Panspermia where intelligent life on other planets intentionally seeded other planets with their own form of life.

(From “Problems with Panspermia or Extraterrestrial Origin of Life Scenarios ” by anonymous.)

This is the form of panspermia advocated by Francis Crick in Life Itself. Dr. Crick speculates that a race of space aliens seeking to find a home for forms of life on their dying planet could shoot life into space on rockets, hoping to seed the universe with life. Perhaps a rocket landed on earth. Of course this is a totally untestable and unfalsifiable hypothesis--but critics have stated that it is unlikely that life could have survived such a trip through space. However, what is more interesting about this hypothesis is its reasons for being proposed.

Crick basically proposed directed panspermia because he looked at the state of origin of life theories on earth, and determined that it was highly unlikely that life could have originated naturally on earth. Indeed, many advocates of panspermia do so because they believe that life could not have originated on earth (see Crick, F. H. C. and Orgel, L. E., 1973, Icarus, 19, 341.). Crick, an atheist, then turned to outerspace to preserve a naturalistic mechanism for the origin of life on earth. Thus, this theory is interestingly the result of one scientist who rejected mainstream naturalistic theories on the origin of life. The theory itself appears to have a religious motivation: to escape belief in a Creator-God. Perhaps obviously, Crick's hypothesis only shifts back the question, "Well how did the aliens come to exist?" Perhaps Crick hopes that conditions on their planet were more favorable for naturalistic evolution, so that a fully naturalistic account of life on earth could be retained. Such an untestable hope is clearly the result of philosophy and faith

http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/849

Watson and Crick’s blooper: finding out how a car works proves it had no maker?

(From a sidebar to "Designed by Aliens?")

What was a major argument by Watson and Crick that supposedly disproves the idea of an intelligent Creator God? They discovered a mechanism to copy the genetic information that functions according to the laws of chemistry, and they claim that this disproves the need for a creator. However, this merely knocks down the straw man of the faulty belief called vitalism, which says that living organisms have a ‘vital force’ beyond ordinary physics and chemistry.

But this is not the biblical view. Rather, the Bible states that God finished creating after Day 6, and now works by sustaining His creation ( Colossians 1:15–17, Hebrews 1:3). The Bible implies that a God of order would sustain His creation in a regular, repeatable way, and this led to the founding of modern science itself. Scientific laws are merely our descriptions of this sustaining activity. Atheism cannot provide any logical basis for the order in the universe that makes science even possible.

Watson and Crick’s antitheistic argument is particularly inept, as we can easily see by considering a car. We have no dispute that it works by the laws of physics and chemistry without any miniature intelligent beings controlling the various parts. But this would not show that the laws of physics and chemistry created the car in the first place! Rather, we know that an intelligent designer organized the components in the right way, so they would run by these laws

http://creation.com/designed-by-aliens-crick-watson-atheism-panspermia-creation-magazine

Notes

1. In an article that is loaded with examples of the daffiness of Richard Dawkins there is one quote that is applicable to this subject: “Mathematicians can prove things — according to one strict view, they are the only people who can — but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.” Creationists, now they’re coming for your children (August 24, 2009 ) http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6805656.ece

2. Another Saint of Evolutionism was Carl Sagan. In an interview with NOVA he was asked about the “search for other life forms in the universe.” He responded: “I personally have been captured by the notion of extraterrestrial life, and especially extraterrestrial intelligence, from childhood. It swept me up, and I've been involved in sending space craft to nearby planets to look for life and in the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/sagan-alien-abduction.html Sagan used his book, Contact, to promote his longing for such life and his contempt for the Christian worldview. (Read a review at http://creation.com/carl-sagan-and-contact.)

3. Anyone who claims that Dr. Crick abandoned Directed Panspermia should see the 1-9-13 article at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/01/09/the-origins-of-directed-panspermia/. It is not really important though, since Crick still had no explanation for the origin of life.

4. From: Life itself Francis Crick, Simon & Schuster, 1981

p. 87: “What is so frustrating for our present purpose is that it seems almost impossible to give any numerical value to the probability of what seems a rather unlikely sequence of events.” And p. 88: “At the present time we can only say that we cannot decide whether the origin of life on earth was an extremely unlikely event or almost a certainty—or any possibility in between these two extremes.”
http://ofbacteriaandmen.blogspot.com/2012/08/francis-crick-and-directed-panspermia.html

Also see:

"Is There a Problem with Probability?"

“The Common Thread”

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