Design
In the beginning God . . . Genesis 1:1 (various translations)
God – Over the last decade I haven’t engaged very much with the typical arguments for the existence of God. There’s plenty of material written about these classical arguments, mostly to no avail since I don’t really know of anyone who was ever convinced to believe in a personal God based on some philosophical argument. Belief seems to me to be a function of emotional experience, not rational semantics. Of course, once you believe, the arguments become useful, but as purely rational exercises they don’t seem to be compelling. Nevertheless, there are some things that simply defy the imagination that the universe, and life in the universe, could have just happened. Epigenetics is a field where the notion of a divine design skirts around the edge of the research all the time, as my recent reading of Nessa Carey will illustrate.[1]
Carey does her best to defer any religious explanation for the apparently intelligent behavior of tiny bits of proteins in the epigenetics world. She flatly states:
“A religious person may prefer to invoke the soul, just as a Freudian therapist may invoke the psyche. Both of these refer to a theoretical construct that has no defined physical basis. Moving into such a model system, where it is impossible to develop the testable hypotheses that are the cornerstones of all scientific enquiry, is deeply unattractive to most scientists. We prefer to probe for a mechanism that has a physical foundation, rather than defaulting to a scenario in which there is something which is assumed, somehow, to be a part of us, without having any physical existence.”[2]
I appreciate her emphasis on “observable” causal explanations, but then every once in awhile you catch her saying things like this:
“Even in nature, in a system which evolved over billions of years, nothing is perfect and occasionally the replication machinery makes a mistake. It might try to insert a T where a C should really go. When this happens the error is almost always repaired very quickly by another set of proteins that can recognize that this has happened, take out the wrong base and put in the right one. This is the DNA repair machinery, and one of the reasons it’s able to act is because when the wrong bases pair up, it recognizes that the DNA ‘zip’ isn’t done up properly.”[3]
“But we know that the two copies of the X chromosome in a female ES cell somehow communicate with each other. . . They kiss. That’s a very anthropomorphic way of describing the event, but it’s a pretty good description. The ‘kiss’ only lasts a couple of hours or so, and it’s startling to think this sets a pattern that can persist in cells for the next hundred years . . . the two copies of the X find each other and make physical contact.”[4]
“Our cells have therefore developed very sophisticated and fast-acting pathways to repair chromosome breaks as rapidly as possible, in order to prevent these sorts of fusions. To do this, our cells must be able to recognise loose ends of DNA. These are created when a chromosome breaks in two.”[5]
Doesn’t it sound like Carey is providing “human” intelligence descriptions to these DNA occurrences? She even admits the language is “anthropomorphic.” Is that because we simply lack the proper, emotionally-stripped, technical language to communicate these mysteries, or it is because everything about the behavior of these tiny bits of protein looks like intelligent design? In other words, if the whole process is simply the random arrangement of serendipitous events, could we possibly expect such an intricately-involved sequence? How does this happen if it isn’t part of a plan?
Epigenetics will rock the world of DNA determinists. It suggests that behavior modifies genes and that these genes transmit newly encoded behavior to offspring. Suddenly what you do has multi-generational consequences. Maybe God knew that all along.
Topical Index: epigenetics, Nessa Carey, design, Genesis 1:1
[1] Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (Columbia University Press, New York, 2012).
