Time Runs Out For The Atheist gods Of Probability And Random Chance - Stunned Mail

Stunned as you are, you might be even more stunned if you knew what a profound effect this passage from the Nobel laureate Christian Afinsens, talking about his prizewinning work on the folding of amino acid chains into working proteins has had on me.

If the chain explored all possible configurations at random by rotations about the various single bonds of the structure, it would take too long to reach the native configuration.  For example, if the individual residues of an unfolded polypeptide chain can exist in only two states, which is a gross understatement, then the number of possible randomly generated conformations is 10⁴⁵ for a chain of 150 amino acid residues ( although, of course, most of these would probably be sterically [spacially] impossible ones  If each conformation could be explored with a frequency of molecular rotation (10¹² sec.^-1) , which is an overestimate, it would take approximately 10²⁶  years to examine all possible conformations.  Since the syntnesis and folding of a protein chain such as that of ribonuclease or lysozyme can be accomplished in about 2 minutes, it is clear that all conformations are not traversed in the folding process.  Instead, it appears to us that, in response to local interactions, the peptide chain is directed along a variety of possible low-energy pathways (relatively small in number), possibly passing through unique intermediate states, toward the confirmation of lowest free energy.  


10²⁶  years is a friggin' long time, longer than the universe has been in existence, longer, by may multitudes than the entire history of all of life on Earth and all of the,who knows, nonillions of  times that organisms have performed these acts successfully?  That alone is a profound clue that the classical materialist-atheist reliance on random chance and probability having produced the phenomena of life as we experience it - AS CONSTITUTES THE ENTIRETY OF WHAT WE CAN EXAMINE SCIENTIFICALLY - is not only wrong, belief in it is best seen as anti-scientific.  It simply could not happen that way.   

That is a long way from "proving" that God's intentionality is behind the relatively small set of evolutionary consequences from that fact about protein folding though it exposes a belief that biology is, in fact, designed by intelligence is more in line with the facts than that synthetic substitute, the ersatz gods of probability and randomness were what unintelligently produced it.   We have only our own experience to judge the reliability of proposed scenarios and we have to ask ourselves, from what we know so strongly that even atheists make resort to it constantly, what would do the choosing among all of those possibilities so as to produce the effects we can observe in the very, very limited time in which we know they happened.  Even the 3 billion years and change that is the best scientific estimate for that is a tiny fraction of the 10²⁶  years Christian Afinsens estimates for it to have happened once and it happened by a factor of far more than three billion years times more than that of times to produce the entire repository of information that can inform the human study that is biology.   

So, no, dopey, what I'm thinking about isn't based on the Genesis stories, it's based in Nobel level science and understanding how the conventional notation of large numbers works and understanding that in this context, it has to work in the time available to produce the results the argument is about.  What you're thinking seems to be based on the most vulgar levels of pop kulcha and the conventional non-wisdom of middle-brow guys who might have a degree in some branch of the humanities or who have a stand-up act.  Which, in a tragic number of cases, isn't that far removed from what the humanities under the brow-beating of scientists has come to. '

The traditional fundamentalist use of the Genesis narratives - the entire Bible, actually - pretty well destroys their usefulness and value.  Which is certainly related to the demonstrable and amoral depravity on display in so many fundamentalists who support the adulterous - far worse than the Herod condemned by John the Baptist by many times - high-priest of Mammonism, Donald Trump.   Jesus gave the very useful means of judging the authenticity of those who claimed to follow him, "by their fruits you will know them".   I've found it always works.  

Update:  The cellular chemistry mentioned in that quote - unspecified by Afinsens and, as far as I know, pretty much totally unknown - since they produce a vast number of different working proteins, must, themselves, work within realms of possibility that would add to not subtract from the problem for the results being by random chance working on possible variations.  My argument is that the reliance on random chance and probability that has produced what only on a most vulgarly naive level seems like a good atheist argument is stupendously inadequate.  I think that given we only have human experience to guide us to understanding - or, in fact, to construct human theories of random chance and probability from - it is entirely reasonable to believe that intelligence must be making those choices.   You have to really take the Jewish God, who I believe is the real God,  very seriously to come to an even more profound belief that an intelligence we can hardly begin to understand is at work in it.  

It was human beings who invented the mathematics of random chance and probability, you know.   We can't even begin to have any faith in those without human observation coming to something of a confirmation of them.  So arguing any of this as if human thinking and observation debunks it is rather stupidly forgetting that human beings are at work in it at every level, including having invented the mathematical gods of such atheist arguments.