Science Loves Miracles More Than Religion

by Richard Lewis, PhD

All photos submitted by R. Lewis

A not usual topic of conversations is the concept of miracles in both religion and science.

In religion, a miracle is when a spiritual input makes something really unlikely to happen. Striking a rock and creating a spring in a desert is highly improbable, but can happen when guided to a particular point.

In science, miracles involve a measure called ‘entropy’—a sophisticated tech term for a measure of disorder. The physical universe is ruled by a simple, commonsense principle:

In any history of any change, the disorder will always increase (or at best, stay constant). Mothers with children know this from exhausting experience. In the delightful brevity of mathematics, this translates to ΔS ≥ 0. Google it for more info.

Seemingly going against this, of course, is the history of a living entities, e.g., a moss, which takes disordered carbon dioxide and water and turns it into a well-ordered plant. While Life seems to disobey the law, actually when the total environment is added to the picture, the entropy is huge, and the law is globally obeyed.

So Life does not disobey the Law of Entropy, just the law in thermodynamics, but Life is a huge generator of environmental entropy.

Whenever a natural process ends up with extra order (a decrease in entropy), rather than the lawful decline, we can define this as a mini-miracle, as it is improbably skirting the universal law somewhat.

Most of the useful proteins have hundreds of the 20 amino acids strung in a chain (the Primary Structure). Their structures are improbable, even for a simple heart medicine polypeptide of just 20 amino acids in a specific sequence. Big Pharma paid big bucks to find this specific sequence, tiny needle in a sun-sized haystack.

Christianity has a few miracles, some metaphorical, and some substantial. A real one is probably Moses striking rocks into springs in the desert, or Jesus curing a disease by spiritual power. On the hand, bones coming to life or the Earth that stops revolving are decidedly metaphorical for a spiritual change.

Darwinism, on the other hand, has it accidental changes in histories (mutations) are occasionally happening, even with chances of one in a billion. As everyone knows, someone's gonna win the Powerball eventually. Trust me, every Powerball winner thinks a minor miracle occurred or even a major miracle.

Everyone knows this. They also know that never in cosmic history has anyone won 1,000 multimillion-dollar Jackpots over a lifetime. That is just too many miracles; cheating is suspected.

The real problem with Darwinism is that its description of the history going from a simple bacteria to the first amoeba is scientifically known to have involved thousands of sophisticated, multi-step changes—mutation miracles—in metabolism, structure, eating, etc. Like a Hallmark movie, it’s Darwin zillion mini-miracles.

Darwinism, therefore, depends on miracles that most people, most religions, think is way overboard in improbability.