how is science today?

Version 4.3 December 17, 2020

How is science today?

Leonardo da Vinci� �All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of allKnowledge.� �

1. Power of Science

To some readers, “How is science today?” is a strange question. It is like asking “How are you?” Thefrequent replies include (I am) “fine” and “good”. But really? Is science fine and good today?

For a start, it is necessary to define what science is. Rather than giving you the dictionary definitionof science, I would like to instead tell a story about my own journey into science. This narrative approachhopefully will give you a more concrete illustration of what science is.

I was raised in a non-Christian migrant family before Singapore became an independent nation. Myparents were born in China and they did not have the opportunity to go through many years of formal ed-ucation. They were however neither superstitious nor religious. From young, I was an atheist. My parentswould sacrifice their own little enjoyment to ensure that their children have better education. In school,I was taught physics, chemistry, and biology from the textbooks. As any ordinary youth, it never cameacross to me that there could be mistakes in what our science teachers were telling us in the classroom.We learned the three laws of Newton and how to solve problems that involve the concepts of mass, mo-mentum, velocity, force, and so on. The reality of these concepts is intuitively experienced in our daily life.Everyone knows intuitively that a fast moving car has a higher momentum than the slower car of the samemake.

We also learned the periodic table of elements. Though we cannot see or smell oxygen, nobody willdoubt its gaseous existence. We can see its effect. I remember in an experiment how easily a fire couldstart with a tiny amount of heat, when oxygen from a small gas tank was supplied to a beaker that containsmoist paper pieces. From helium balloon, lithium battery, neon light, aluminum foil, iron bar, platinum ring,to gold chain, chemistry is in our daily life.

For the rich, possession of a prized diamond gives unmistakable statement about the owner’s status.But diamond is no more and no less than a solid form of pure carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal.This is science—knowledge about the details of matter and how things interact.

Pragmatists may say, “so what?” What is the point of knowing diamond is carbon crystal? Indeed, itwill not make you more money by knowing this fact, much less the knowledge about the origins of theuniverse and life. Why then do most schools in the secular education system teach science? Historically,many countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South Americas were colonized or conquered by theimperialistic European nations, which were scientifically and technologically much more advanced, espe-cially in their military weapons. China, in particular, was easily defeated by the British Empire, America,France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, as well as Imperial Japan, toward the end of the Qing dynasty inthe 19-th century. Japan had the foresight to learn as much as possible from the West and modernizedthe economy rapidly during the Meiji Restoration. By the early 20-th century, Japan took control of theKorean peninsular, Taiwan, and the North-Eastern region of China.

So, “knowledge is power” is not a mere cliche. Countries and territories that do not become richprimarily by natural resources and commodity exports yet are rich when measured by the GDP per capitatend to have an education system that places emphasis on science and mathematics. According to theOECD’s 2018 Pisa test results for 15-year old students, excluding the four provinces/municipalities of

Christopher Hian Ann Ting (CHAT) of 19


mainland China, Singapore, Macao, Hong Kong, and Estonia occupy top spots among 78 participatingeducation systems. Not many people can rationally deny the benefits of providing good science educationto empower the citizens to create wealth.

To illustrate the power of science further, allow me to continue my journey in natural science. At theend of high school (commonly known as junior college in Singapore), as any high school student did, I satfor the Cambridge GCE A Level Examination. My A Level results were good enough to earn a scholarshipto study in Japan.

By law, I had to go for National Service. At that time, they put most of the medically fit students whohad already secured an overseas scholarships in Foxtrot company of four platoons with other more street-smart 18-year-old youths. We went through three months of basic military training, including throwing a livegrenade, and live firing of M16 assault rifles at the range. Thereafter, we went through the Officer CadetSchool, where we learned additionally how to fire a machine gun, a mortar, and an anti-tank 84-millimeterhowitzer in the live firing areas. Little did I realize then that these weapons have a common ancestor: theexplosives invented by Alfred Nobel, a chemist and a successful business man. Again, “science is power”literally, and in the case of Nobel, wealth as well.

I graduated from the Officer Cadet School and was commissioned as an officer. I was further trainedfor about a month in the infantry officer conversion course. As a 19-year-old youth, like many other freshlycommissioned fellow officers, I was posted to a battalion to serve as a platoon commander toward the endof 1980. Some of my former fellow officer cadets were disrupted from the National Service and had alreadyleft in early September 1980 to study at either Cambridge or Oxford, the two most popular destinationsfor scholarship winners at that time.

In Japan, however, the term started in April. So I had to serve until March 1981. The first three monthsof 1981 were a long wait. I felt a sense of freedom when I was released from the National Service onthe basis of disruption. Under the terms and conditions of the scholarship, I was supposed to studymechanical engineering after a year of intensive training of Japanese in a language school affiliated tothe Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The teachers there were experts in teaching Japanese to non-Japanese, from scratch, without using English at all. Not only did we learn Japanese, we also had to studymathematics and science in Japanese.

By then, I was already a Christian and went to church every week. How I became a Christian froman entirely non-Christian background is another narrative altogether. Suffice to say now is that I startedreading the Bible regularly. Since I did not take biology during high school, I was not exposed as much tothe paradigm of Darwinian evolution. In my memory, the churches I had ever attended in Singapore andJapan, if at all, seldom touched on Genesis from the pulpit. I too, read Genesis in passing and did notreflect much on it. I just believed then (and now) that God was the Creator, Maker of heaven and earth,which is in the Nicene Creed. At that time, I was more absorbed in study than to think more about theBible. I would rather spend more time reading a few textbooks on physics, and trying to figure out howone equation leads to another, and another.

Why study physics on my own? I still can remember vividly that my interest in physics was piquedby a question posed by the physics teacher in the Japanese Language School. She asked, “Newton’ssecond law says that the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force acting on it. Sinceacceleration is the change of velocity over time, if there is no force, then there is no change in velocity,i.e., the object will be at rest or move at a constant speed, which is Newton’s first law. Why then is the firstlaw needed?” This question astonished me. I had never thought about this kind of question that touchesthe foundation of physics. It was an eye-opening experience.

I became even more interested in physics after reading in the newspaper about the death of HidekiYukawa and his works on a warm September day in 1981 when I was still in the Japanese LanguageSchool. The newspaper had a lengthy biographic description about Yukawa and his research in particle



(素粒子) physics in the front page. He was the first ever Japanese to be awarded the Nobel Prize in1949. It was barely four years after Japan surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, with terrifying shocks,suffering, and humiliation, after atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ended WorldWar II in the Pacific theater. For a country struggling to rebuild in the aftermath of war, Yukawa’s NobelPrize brought uplifting encouragement to the Japanese people at that time. Nevertheless, it is an ironythat Yukawa’s Nobel-prize winning research was on nuclear energy, which brought the angels of death tothe two cities—the first ever in human’s tragic history to be destroyed by the atomic bombs1.

Such is the devastating power of science, which allowed some European countries, Russia, America,and Japan to create the meme of racial supremacy over the peoples of Asia and Africa, lording over themas the colonizers. When men do not regard other men of different ethnicity as equally created in the imageof God went to war, atrocity increases exponentially with the progress in science and technology. Warsare horrible. Wars bring man-made hell in the Holocaust, in Nanjing, and in the fallout of the Little Boy thatexploded at the Hiroshima city center2. There is no winner—even for countries that are highly advancedin scientific and technological development.

In case readers may think that I am against science, or Christians are against science, I need toarticulate clearly that Christians in general are not against science, but against how we humans use thepower enabled by science. In itself, science or knowledge is amoral. But it provides the possibility. Nuclearforce was intensely researched in the 20th century by Yukawa and other scientists before and after him.Prior to the discovery, nuclear weapon was not even on the table for the generals to even think about it.

2. Science at Its Best

I entered the University of Tokyo on the basis of admission quota for foreign students in the spring of1982, when pinkish white cherry blossoms could be spotted in the Komaba Campus. At that time, theKomaba Campus was hived with activities. Everyday without fail, the campus was filled with cacophony.Some students put up big boards with writings to impeach certain political leaders, and they used loudhailers to shout that so and so in the politics did something bad and must be impeached. Some of thepeople were handing out invitation leaflets; they were members of a cult called the Unification Church. Iwas approached several times because I was usually alone. But I declined and avoided them, as I wantedto make time to study physics.

Rather than joining an extra-curricular club, I was interested to learn more about particle physics. Itis a branch of physics that addresses a big question: “What is the fundamental constituent of matter?”Particle physics describes and explains the quantum behaviors of subatomic particles such as electronsand protons. Sometimes, it is called high-energy physics, as different types of particles are produced inan accelerator where electrons or protons are given the high energy to accelerate to nearly the speed oflight. Their trajectories are precisely tuned in such a way that the elementary particles will collide head-on.

I was fascinated by how a pure theory could predict the existence of certain subatomic particles beforethey were actually discovered in a high energy accelerator. The really amazing one is Dirac’s theory,which combines quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Dirac’s 1928 paper entitled“Quantum Theory of the Electron” led to the prediction of anti-particles. For an electron, its anti-particle is a

1For a vacation in September 2020. I went to Okunoshima (大久野島), a small island off the coast of Hiroshima Prefecture.To give a balanced perspective, I saw the dilapidated facilities and buildings for making and storing sarin, and visited theOkunoshima Poison Gas Museum. It must be said that Japan was an aggressor in World War II, invading several Asian countriesto create the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere (大東亞共榮圈).

2In September 2020, I paid a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and saw the man-made hell. There were picturesand drawings of surviving Japanese who were terribly burnt by the atomic bomb. Their searing heat from the explosion meltedthe skins, and they were like walking zombies.



positron, and vice versa. Both particles have exactly the same mass and same quantum properties suchas spin. The only difference is the electric charge—electron is negative, whereas positron is positive.Sometimes called anti-electron, positron’s existence was established experimentally in 1932, through anexperimental apparatus called the cloud chamber invented by Charles Wilson.

On a family vacation trip to Japan in 2015, we visited the National Museum of Nature and Science inUeno, Tokyo. An underground exhibit of cloud chamber was there and I saw many mist-like trails appearingand disappearing in it. These trails were caused by the charged particles of cosmic ray, much like the whitecontrails caused by airplanes high in the clear blue sky. Anything that begins to exist has its cause. Thetrails that begin to appear have their cause in the cosmic ray.

This is science at its best. Dirac’s theory produced a speculation about the existence of anti-matter. Ifyou pause and think about it, anti-matter is quite a crazy idea. Nevertheless, experimentally, it was provenover and over again, so much so that the technicians of a national museum could create an exhibit to let thegeneral public know about the existence of subatomic particles in the cosmic ray, among which are Dirac’spositrons, and pions. Incidentally, pion is the particle predicted in Yukawa’s theory “On the Interaction ofElementary Particles”, which was published in 1935. The experimental verifiability and repeatability of thesetheoretical speculations constitute the backbone of scientific research. It is also a vindication that quantummechanics is how Nature really works at the subatomic level.

Have you heard of a PET scan? These days, we know that positrons are emitted by certain radioactivematerial and the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan is a medical diagnosis tool to detect braintumors etc. Science at its best often leads to beneficial applications.

Now, my self-study in quantum mechanics has reached a stage where I could convince my supervisingprofessor Dr. Naomasa Nakajima (中島尚正) to approve my senior year thesis on the simulation of aquantum particle colliding with and transmitting through a barrier3. It must have been a bizarre topicbecause Professor Nakajima’s research was in the field of mechanical engineering, specifically, in thearea of industrial robotics. Though I was able to read and write in Japanese, he was kind enough to letme write my graduation thesis in English. I also had the help of a fellow student Takashi Hasegawa (長谷川隆) to develop a PCB interface with the printer—a kind of robot—for me to print the simulation picturesin C language.

I solved the Schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics for one- and two-dimensional spaces nu-merically by programming in C. The Schrodinger equation is the most fundamental equation of quantummechanics. It is the subatomic analog of the Newton equation of motion in classical physics. For eachnumerical simulation, I constructed a Gaussian quantum packet and gave it a speed to move toward aquantum barrier. When it hits the quantum barrier, the simulation results show that there is a reflectionor rebound, which is what you would expect when you throw a tennis ball at a wall. But the strange thingabout quantum mechanics is that the rebound is only a portion of the original packet. Certain portionis trapped in the quantum barrier, and certain portion goes through it! This transmission of a quantumparticle through a barrier is crucial; without it, microscopy with electrons will be a fantasy.

Engineers make use of the weird quantum property of transmission to construct a microscope. It isthus fitting that “transmission” is attached to “electron microscope” and we have the acronym TEM in thefield of cryo-electron microscopy. It turns out that I had a chance to operate a TEM subsequently in mypursuit of a master degree by research.

This is another example of science at its best. In the Schrodinger framework, transmission of a beam ofelectrons through a barrier—the specimen to be magnified—is predicted and TEM is a working testimonyof this scientific fact. For a simple quantum barrier, one can even compute the percentage of transmissionanalytically. But Nature is not so simple. Most of the practical problems involve not-so-simple quantum

3My graduation thesis is downloadable from http://cting.x10host.com/CT/Bachelor Thesis.pdf.


http://cting.x10host.com/CT/Bachelor_Thesis.pdf


barriers and analytical solutions are not obtainable. One can nevertheless solve the Schrodinger equationnumerically and dynamically simulate the behaviors of the quantum system under investigation. Today,this research approach is known as computational physics, and more generally, computational science.

Most importantly, science at its best tells us where its limits are. In quantum mechanics, the Heisenbergprinciple states that it is theoretically impossible to measure both location and momentum of a particleprecisely at the same time. Separately, you can measure either the position or momentum as precisely aspossible, but not both simultaneously. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root in the probabilisticstructure of quantum mechanical duality between particle and wave.

There is also the energy-time uncertainty principle, i.e., quantum state that exists for only a short timecannot have a definite energy. Conversely, if energy is measured precisely, then you can’t tell for howlong the quantum state can exist. In a later chapter, I shall examine the implication of this energy-timeuncertainty principle in the context of cosmology.

3. Real Science versus Fake Science

When I was in my fourth year at the Mechanical Engineering Department, I sat for the entrance examina-tion of the Physics Department of the Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo. It was at the tailend of 1986 summer. This time round, I had to compete with top Japanese physics students for a spot. Tomy surprise, I qualified. I also won a scholarship to continue my graduate study in Japan. My first choicewas to do particle physics. I went for the interview for the qualified candidates, and I recalled ProfessorTohru Eguchi (江口徹), a famous theoretical particle physicist, was in the panel. Somehow I was quitenervous and I didn’t impress them. My second choice was in biophysics, which was not popular at thattime. So for the next two years, I did experimental physics on the 3-dimensional structure of a protein inthe laboratory spearheaded by Professor Takeyuki Wakabayashi (若林健之). Meanwhile, I continued myown study in theoretical physics, out of pure interest.

Experimental physics requires a lot of hard work. Professor Wakabayashi had developed and set upa laboratory and a system to analyze the 3-dimensional structure of a protein. The most difficult partwas to slaughter a rabbit acquired from a supplier for the extraction of fresh muscle proteins. ProfessorWakabayashi was a medical doctor as well. I followed his medical procedure to inject certain drug througha vein in the rabbit’s ear for sedation. Then I used a surgical knife to slit the rabbit’s throat. I had tofollow the laboratory procedures very closely; no margin of error was allowed. I then took the flesh sample(myofibrils) from the rabbit’s back in a test tube and processed it with a centrifuge at some stage to obtainfilaments that contain a muscle protein called the single-headed heavy meromyosin4.

Let us not be hypocrites. For every meal of fish fillet, sashimi, crispy chicken chop, lamb chop, pork rib,and well-done steak, somebody has to slaughter the animals to take their lives away. By the way, rabbitmeat is used in the Italian and French cuisines. Throughout my master program, I killed two rabbits underthe supervision of Professor Wakabayashi and the instruction of a very hardworking postdoc, Dr. MakioTokunaga (德永万喜洋), and a very capable laboratory technician, Ms. Kimiko Saeki (佐伯喜美子). Ourscientific research was to find out how muscle produces force at the molecular level5.

From killing a rabbit to low-dosage electron microscopy of the muscle proteins as shown in Figure 1, Ihad to conduct 36 hours of operations non-stop. The reason is because proteins decay easily. Any slightdeterioration will distort the 3-dimensional structure of the protein. When that happened, all the work up

4The laboratory procedures are much much more complicated than this simplified description. See my master degree thesisdownlodable from http://cting.x10host.com/CT/Master Thesis.pdf.

5My first scientific paper was published in 1989 in The Journal of Biochemistry. In the Japanese custom of the pecking order ofauthorship, the last author is usually the research group leader and in our case, Professor Wakabayahi, who secured the researchfunding and provided the research ideas.


http://cting.x10host.com/CT/Master_Thesis.pdf

https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/biochemistry1922/106/4/106_4_606/_pdf/-char/en


Figure 1: This is a low-dosage electron micrograph of the actin-tropomyosin-single-headed-meromyosinfilaments I took with a scanning transmission electron microscope (TEM) during my master degree pro-gram by research. The bar represents 100 nano-metres. Characteristic appearances of “arrowhead” can beseen along the filaments. A particularly long filament has “arrowheads” running vertically from the topto the bottom of the micrograph.



to that point of time of making a mistake would be wasted, and I had to start all over again. From thisexperience and training in biophysics/molecular biology, I learned that proteins do decay rapidly outsideof a living cell. In other words, the same muscle fiber made of proteins at the molecular level will not decayrapidly in the rabbit; but shortly after they are extracted and shelved even in a special-purpose fridge, theprocess of decay begins and accelerates. In fact, you don’t need to be a scientist to know that frozenmeat, when left too long—say, three months—in an ordinary refrigerator, will surely become inedible.

This everyday, common sense evidence does not seem to be taken into consideration by the propo-nents of evolution who speculate that life began from a non-living primordial soup—Darwin’s “warm littlepond”. In a letter to J. D. Hooker in February 1871, Darwin wrote,

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are nowpresent, which could ever have been present.— But if (& oh what a big if) we could con-ceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts,—light, heat,electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergostill more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, orabsorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.—

In Darwin’s own admission, the primordial soup was a wild speculation of the origin of life—(& oh whata big if). It is against common sense and a fundamental law of physics. Proteins disintegrate—due to heatand the invisible cosmic ray—rather than “undergo still more complex changes” in the open, even in theabsence of bacteria and other biological agents. This is the second law of thermodynamics at work—yournew mobile phone becomes old and requires more frequent charging of its battery. Every hotel roombecomes untidy after a customer has lodged in it. The room will never tidy up itself; you need to employsomeone to clean it. Likewise, disintegrated proteins will not self-assemble back to its initial state. This isa fundamental law of Nature: ordered things become irreversibly disordered. As the saying goes, don’t cryover spilled milk—literally. But by faith, evolutionists believe they can become ordered again. The catch,however, is that you must wait for billions of years. You can’t disprove it if deep deep time (DDT) of billionyears is thrown at you. Neither can evolutionists prove their extraordinary claim either.

Proteins are fragile. That is why when I did my electron microscopy, to minimize the damage to thespecimen, the dosage of radiation at the specimen was no more than 10 electrons per atom size over 2.8seconds. The electric current flowing through each atom is about a quintillionth6 of the current you use tocharge your mobile phone with a USB.

It is irrational to go against a law of Nature about the irreversibility of deterioration. As trivial as itmay seem, my hypothesis of protein devolution can nevertheless be tested scientifically. Suppose a freshchicken egg is contained in a fully sanitized and perfectly sealed box at room temperature in a lockedroom underground. If, after a year, anyone who knows how to analyze the 3-dimensional structures ofthe egg proteins—which are known—and find that they do disintegrate, then my devolution hypothesis isproven correct or verified. But if the egg proteins remain intact, then my hypothesis is proven wrong orde-verified. This is a simple illustration of a basic principle of science (and accounting7)—verifiability.

Science is based on the principle of verifiable empirical evidence. But as any scientist will confess,being proven wrong scientifically is the most undesirable outcome in the career of a scientist. To avoid

6A quintillionth is 10−18, which is a decimal point followed by 17 zeros and then 1.7Interestingly, the definition of verifiability—a key principle of accounting—is as follows: “A company’s accounting re-

sults are verifiable when they are reproducible, so that, given the same data and assumptions, an independent accountantcan produce the same result the company did. Say your business lists a piece of equipment as an asset worth $10,000. Ifyou told an outside accountant how much the equipment originally cost, how old it is, and what schedule you used todepreciate the equipment, that accountant should come up with the same figure. If not, the result is not verifiable.” Seehttps://smallbusiness.chron.com/verifiability-accounting-56715.html.


https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-7471.xml

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/verifiability-accounting-56715.html


the embarrassment, I can cheat and say, “Let us wait for 4 billion years and then open the box to test.”Common sense tells you that given a longer time, everything else being equal, the chance of devolutionwill increase. So if I insist to wait for 4 billion years, then my hypothesis cannot be tested to be either rightor wrong—which is unscientific—for nobody will live that long to perform the empirical test. The hypothesisis just an untestable speculation. It is not science anymore.

From the verifiability perspective and by the same token, Darwin’s speculation of the historical processof evolution is unscientific. The reason is straightforward. It is no different from the protein deterioration ormy egg devolution experiment, except that evolution is in the exact opposite direction. Instead of long longtime to wait forward for the future, it is to wait deep deep time (DDT) backward to the past, and instead ofdevolution of protein structure, it is evolution of more complex protein varieties from non-life chemicals inthe pond.

By definition, the origin of life is a one-off historical event. No one can travel back in time to find “somewarm little pond”, somewhere no one knows, and some millennium no one can tell. Darwin’s hypothesis isuntestable, as he (cheated and) said, “at present, such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed.”You must go back to unknown time “before living creatures were formed”, which is also impossible. andthen come back to the present to publish your findings. You have to wait for negative 4 billion years.Darwin’s “warm little pond” cannot be tested, and so it is unscientific. Without verifiability, it is fake science8.It has the appearance of science when it is not, for a gold standard of scientific enterprise—i.e., unbiasedobservations that are evaluated for reproducibility—are no way to be found.

Any practicing synthetic chemist or biochemist can testify that it is extremely difficult to synthesize achemical with sufficient yield even in a controlled laboratory setting. The procedures and timing must beexactly right. If a mistake is made at step number 7, everything is undone and you have to go back to step1 and try again. That is, you must go back and gather sufficient quantities of starting materials. You mustknow the exact ingredient, the exact proportion, the exact timing, as well as concentration, temperature,etc. There are so many details; not an iota of margin of error is allowed. How can a mindless pond knowwhat to do?

The Darwinian pond—life from non life—is practically no different from astrology, which is a fake sci-ence. Why not start from the chicken egg proteins in a pond and see whether life will appear after 4 billionyears? As I have already demonstrated in my egg devolution hypothesis, insistence on waiting for billionsof years is unscientific. The Darwinian pond with “all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts” is even moreunscientific than my devolution hypothesis. Rather than deterioration, the claim of evolutionists is that,contrary to the law of decay and degeneration (second law of thermodynamics), the virgin egg proteinswill progressively evolve—into a chicken through dinosaurs—after billions of years.

4. Abiogenesis—Forget about Jesus!

A modern version of the Darwinian pond is abiogenesis, life from non life through natural processes. Thereis a Wikipedia entry about abiogenesis:

The earliest known life-forms on Earth are putative fossilized microorganisms, found inhydrothermal vent precipitates, that may have lived as early as 4.28 billion years ago,relatively soon after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and not long after theformation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.

Abiogenesis, or informally the origin of life, is the natural process by which life has arisen

8See an article, “Fake science and the knowledge crisis: ignorance can be fatal” by Hopf et al, which is published in May 2019 bythe Royal Society Open Science on the definition of fake science.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190161


from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds. While the details of this processare still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living toliving entities was not a single event, but an evolutionary process of increasing complexitythat involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergenceof cell membranes. Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among sci-entists, its possible mechanisms are poorly understood. There are several principles andhypotheses for how abiogenesis could have occurred.

The first two paragraphs of this Wikipedia entry has as many as 12 citations. Nevertheless, I have under-lined certain words and phrases, such as “details . . . are still unknown”. But as the saying goes, the devilsare in the details, especially in science and in particular, synthetic chemistry and biochemistry. Takingthese underlined words together, it is not an overstatement that no scientist has a clue of the “putative”origin of life.

Abiogenesis—life from non-life material in unknown conditions—is unscientific. Since no one can ob-serve the hypothetical set of conditions present on earth long long time ago, you can say anything youwant. Anything that is possible to happen will become probable to happen, and anything that is probableto happen will become a reality. This is rhetoric, not science. “anything can happen” sounds more like theexcuse of fund managers when the unknown unknowns happen. It is not science. Like Darwin’s “warmlittle pond”, which is unverifiable, abiogenesis is unscientific.

Also, why 4.28 billion years? Why not x number of years? Is there a theoretical model to compute x

backward for how long it would take to synthesize a protein in a pre-biotic open environment? Without aspecific mechanism and any possibility of observing the hypothetical evolutionary process in situ, abio-genesis is hardly what I have ever come across as science. Without verifiability, abiogenesis qualifies asa fake science—having the appearance of science but it reality is not.

The fragility of a muscle protein shows that, if one were to assemble it from scratch, I doubt 4.28billion years would be enough time to synthesize one single-headed heavy meromyosin, not to mentionthat you also need actin, myosin, troponin, and other proteins simultaneously for a muscle fiber to functionproperly. Furthermore, it is a biological fact that a living cell needs DNA to give instructions for assemblingevery protein in it, and DNA needs proteins to replicate. You need both to be present at the same time.But without a protective cell membrane, proteins and DNA will decay easily, like the muscle proteins forwhich I had to take the utmost care not to deteriorate the fragile myofibrils.

Throughout my two-year experimental research program, I did not need evolution theories, neither didmy professor and all the members of the Wakabayashi research laboratory9. I suspect in many areas ofbiomedical, pharmaceutical, physiological, and clinical research, big-scale evolutionary theory of any sortis not needed as well. Living organism is so complex that a theory as elegant as the Dirac equation issimply impossible in biology. A vast majority of the research areas are done at the present time, for thepresent time, and with the observables in the present time (PT). That is, the findings of one researchgroup are repeatable by another research group—at least critically checked by rival research groups.

How is Science doing today? It is not good. Unscientific hypotheses such as the primordial soup inparticular and abiogenesis in general are advertised as real science. There can be no observational proof,since no one can go back in time to directly verify the primordial abiogenesis by observations as evidence.If it existed long time ago, in principle, it should exist today somewhere on Earth. Suppose abiogenesisscientists said they found one. But then how would you prove that it is really the historical primordialabiogensis soup? Oh, you have to wait for billions of years to see how it evolve. Since nobody can livethat long, the hypothesis can neither be proven nor dismissed. The magic wand is always deep deep time

9This is a fact of our research projects. But it does not mean that Professor Wakabayashi et al. do not believe in Darwinism.Through education and mass media, Japanese are taught from young about evolution as science.



ORIGIN OF LIFE

−4.1 BILLION YEARS

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Figure 2: Relative time scale of purported human evolution

(DDT). How is it different from “Once upon a time,”? A wild speculation without concrete evidence and theabsence of verifiability can hardly qualify it as science.

Deep deep time of big evolution

To gain some intuitive grasp of DDT, according to the time line of human evolution, the commencementof life was 4.1 billion years ago10. Time line is an euphemism for history. As you can see, Big Evolution istelling a story about the past—history, not science.

In any case, let us take this amount of history as equivalent to the 11-th hour when the purportedcommon ancestors in the biological family called Hominidae, consisting of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas,and orangutans, are said to have appeared at around 17.5 million years ago. Certain members of thisfamily of animals somehow decided that they wanted to become “better”. The human called Homo Sapiensis said to start around 0.55 million years ago. From the commencement of hominids to that of humans, ittook only about 15 seconds to midnight. By contrast, in the evolutionary history, it took 51 minutes for theprimeval animal life form to appear, 3.1 minutes for the cold-blooded tetrapods, 2.6 minutes for the worm-blooded mammals, 90 seconds for the primates, 51 seconds for the Hominidae, and only 15 seconds formodern humans endowed with non-material consciousness and mind to evolve. To come to grips with thetime scale, I plot the commencements of new life forms in Figure 2.

How could it be that within such a relatively short span of time, a race called humans could feelcompelled and know how to “sew fig leaves together and make for themselves loin coverings”? Isn’t thispractice of covering the reproduction organs an impediment to “natural selection” to supposedly producemore offspring?

From Figure 2, it looks like the process of evolution is accelerating. Over the last 55 thousand yearssince humans were said to have first appeared, and given the acceleration of the process of evolution, whydon’t we have a human with wings? Also, why don’t we have amphibian humans? Clearly the additionalability to be in the air or in the water provides a clean competitive advantage in the struggle of survivaland dominance. If the idea of supermen sounds crazy, what about from a frog to a prince after 4 billionyears?

Also, evolutionists seem to focus on animals, What about plants? Why can trees of different speciescoexist in the same land while constantly competing for nutrients in the ground and sunlight? Why is theresuch a wide diversity of plants?

10This estimate is different from 4.28 billion years ago in abiogenesis. The discrepancy of 0.18 billion or 180 million yearsis massive, given the “fact” that anatomically modern humans appeared only 0.55 million years ago in the grand history ofevolution. Won’t an accountant raise a red flag if he finds that there is an irregularity of 180 million dollars?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution


The idea of Big Evolution raises more questions than the answer it tries to provide. Yet many abio-genesis hypotheses, which inescapably require DDT, are marketed with a ringtone of science. “Don’t youknow that the famous experiment done by Miller in May 1953 and many later experiments have shownconclusively that organic compounds can occur with electric sparks or ultra-violet light?” Sure. Theseexperiments are scientific and repeatable, at least qualitatively. But there is a fatal assumption: oxygenwas assumed to be absent DDT ago. In “A Reassessment of Prebiotic Organic Synthesis in Neutral PlanetaryAtmospheres”, Miller’s research group reported in 2007 that to increase the yield of a handful amino acids,oxidation inhibitors such as iron must be added. But is it verifiable that such oxidation inhibitors existed,concomitantly, in the primordial soup DDT ago? Also, the amino acids are fragile and easily destroyed byultra-violet light or heat created by each electric discharge. The surviving traces are so little and incom-plete. Yet people with purely naturalistic worldview or orientation are eager to believe in a grand digitizedpicture painted by evolutionists about the past history, singularly by just an infinitesimally small fraction ofa pixel.

When synthetic chemistry is motivated by unverifiable and unknown conditions DDT ago, it is nomore than an exercise in experimental organic chemistry. After more than half a century, research grantsspent on prebiotic chemistry—that is, abiogenesis, life from non-living chemicals—produce no practicalimplication in biology. By contrast, the research in finding out the bio-molecular structure and mechanismof skeletal muscle at present time is at least linked to physiology, food science, and sports science.

When verifiability and reproducibility—two of the basic criteria of science—are untenable, we shouldmake a stand to call any evolution theory that requires the belief in DDT a pseudo-science, or fake sciencelike astrology. Nobody has any living experience of DDT. One has to believe that there is such a god ofthe gap called DDT. Leonardo da Vinci was right, all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not bornof Experience.

How is science today? It is not good, because fake science is embraced as mainstream.

5. Forget about Jesus

Most of the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry are well established and some famous, imperialis-tic scientists are not willing to work on mopping up the details at the home soil of present-time (PT) sciencebut to venture into colonizing the biblical genesis of time, space, matter, life, as well as consciousness,mind, and personality.

Any scientific challenge to the grand evolutionary paradigm of the origin of life is always stereotypedas religious bigotry, which is what militant atheists like to criticize Christians for backsliding into believingin myths. For example, Lawrence Krauss eloquently said during a talk,

. . . I wrote that book because it is the most poetic thing I know about the universe . . ., andI wrote a book that was about a different ancestor. Still it’s called Adam but the amazingthing is that every atom in your body came from a star that had exploded and the atomsof your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is themost poetic thing I know about physics. You are all star dust. You couldn’t be here if starshadn’t exploded because the elements—the carbon nitrogen, oxygen, iron—(and) all thethings that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They’re createdat the nuclear furnaces of stars and the only way they can get into your body is if the starswere kind enough to explode.

To the rousing applause of all the atheists in the audience, Krauss gleefully delivered the punch line:



So forget Jesus! The stars died so that you could be here today.

Krauss was saying that you are alive not because of Jesus’ death on the cross. Rather, it was thedeath of stars that give you life. The implication is that Jesus died in vain. I wonder how our Christianbrothers Francis Collins and Hugh Ross who also believe in cosmological evolution would comment aboutthis “poetic” implication.

In the culture of today, despite the current evidence of living Jews, doubting the historicity of Adamand Eve about 6 thousand years ago (according to the Jewish calendar) is branded as scientific. But onthe evidence of dead fossils, doubting the historicity of the evolution process that was somehow startedbillions of years ago is often ridiculed as unreasonable, laughable, and mockable. Should Christians then,in order not to be “embarrassed”, surrender and accept evolution as an additional belief?

But who am I, to critique our Christian brothers and sisters who accept cosmological & biologicalevolution? Not until recently, I was a believer in cosmological evolution too; I did not examine the detailsand I trusted what mainstream physicists, biologists, and mathematicians are saying. I even gave a talkabout the Big Bang cosmology in a small church gathering. But when I started to think carefully, whichis not really that difficult, I realized that the scientific foundation of the big-scale evolution “theories” isdubious.

But why then do so many people believe in evolution, especially after Darwin published a monographentitled “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in theStruggle for Life”? I am not a sociologist but perhaps it could be described as a phenomenon of collectivedelusion when God of the Bible is rejected outright. After all, recent history shows evidence of collectivedelusion. With few exceptional minority, majority of Germans bought into Hitler’s fascism, and majority ofJapan was into militarism. To die for the emperor of the heaven in the battle field, some in the suicidalmissions of Kamikaze (神風) were honorably lauded. Collective delusion also happened in the CulturalRevolution launched by Mao Zedong and those loyal to him were called Maoists. The Maoist Red Guards’revolution ravaged the lives of intellectuals and China. Countless books were burned.

But who am I, to critique them? Let us be honest. Are we also not collectively deluded, since we boughtinto capitalism and secularism that come with exploitation, cut-throat competition, and the winner takingall? In the grand scheme of cosmic history, may be a monarchy ruled by God is the best yet to come? Sofor me now, without the shackle of the belief in cosmological evolution, and with a new sense of academicfreedom, I can respond to Krauss’ mockery of Bible easily with scientific arguments as follows.

Firstly, high-energy radiation from supernovae is harmful to life rather than life giving. You don’t need tobe a scientist to know that ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun is harmful to the skin. To test this claim,we just need to spend a few hours at the beach. Without a shade and without applying sunscreen, wewill suffer from sunburn. Now, in addition to high-energy particles, star explosions produce deadly potentgamma rays, which are about 13 thousand times more energetic than the UV radiation. We all knowthe biologically damaging power of UV light. How much more deleterious if a cell is radiated by gammaradiation? As an illustration, if it takes 4 hours to get sunburn from the UV light, under gamma radiation,about one second will be enough to kill the skin cells.

Secondly, take for example Supernova 1987A. It is about 168,000 light years from Earth, the nearest inrecent centuries. Suppose we grant that most of the explosion debris that contains elements heavier thanhelium arrived on Earth. But this supposition is contradictory to the Copernican principle, which basicallysuggests that the location of Earth in the universe is not special, just like every celestial body. From sucha great distance over such a vast expanse of space, Supernova 1987A must have aimed in such a wayas if with a laser guidance device to shoot the atoms at Earth as the target. Since the location of Earth isnot special, there is no reason to believe that most atoms from Supernova 1987A had ever reached us.



At the end of the day, where on earth is the experimental evidence for the claim that “every atom inyour body came from a star”? How is it “scientifically” possible to say that atom x on earth is from star y,which supposedly had already “died” long long time ago? It is always the unverifiable story that requiresDDT years. The puddle of water we see today must always be it had rained a thousand years ago. Otherpossibilities are ruled out dogmatically by sticking to naturalism.

How is science today? Not good. Some scientists have forgotten about verifiability and the limits of sci-entific methods. It looks like accountants are far more scientific than scientists such as Lawrence Krauss.Present time science is misused by atheistic scientists to propagate their anti-Christ agenda. By misusingscience to speak on matter other than science, Krauss is anti-science, because his claim can neither beunverified nor empirically substantiated at present time.

6. Dogmatism of Big Evolution

Big evolution of something from absolute nothing, and from non-life to a conscious human over billions ofyears has become a belief system, i.e., a sort of proto-religion or a philosophical religion about the histor-ical development of the natural world. If you were to look up a Biology Reference article entitled “History ofEvolutionary Thought, you would find that in this short article, the keyword “belief” appears five times.

At its core, Big Evolution is a philosophical position that information and complexity can somehow becreated by Nature alone over the course of a very ancient history since the beginning of the universe untilnow. In the case of biological evolution, it is an extrapolation from the scientific facts of adaptive changes tothe progressive transmutation of species from the less complex organisms to the more complex life forms,and then to humans by random mutations that favor the appearance of new beneficial traits. We don’tobserve or notice such changes as the accumulation of beneficial mutations, because, as evolutionistsalways claim, for a transmutation to finally occur, it takes millions of years.

Today, we know that genetic mutations within a population of fruit flies are scientific facts. But tosuggest that fruit flies are descendants from some other unobservable primordial flies requires belief.Also, to suggest that fruit flies will evolve into some higher biological entities requires even more faith.Experimentally, thanks to the short life span and high reproductive rate, scientists have thousands uponthousands of generations of fruit flies. Yet, we have not heard of fruit flies “evolving” into, say, house fliesor other more complex insects.

We all know change is the only constant. So do bacteria such as E. Coli due to genetic mutation.But what is important to note is the fact that E. Coli, after countless generations experimented in thelaboratories worldwide, remain as bacteria. They don’t and can’t evolve into some biological entity of ahigher or more complex life form such as moss. Incidentally, geneticists have found that moss has 10thousand more genes than the human genome contains11.

If the scientists-guided or supervised selection of fruit flies by some “desirable” traits in a closelycontrolled environment cannot produce a house fly, how do you expect “natural” selection in an openunsupervised environment will do better? If you do expect and believe Nature to do so, isn’t big biologicalevolution a belief?

From the perspective of informatics, you cannot gain new information without an intentional editionof the existing information. Anyone who has any experience in writing an essay or a computer programwill intuitively know that the essay or a program will not improve unless you add new information to itand delete some of the old parts. Now, DNA inside a cell functions as a bio-molecular storage of geneticinformation. If no new information is added, its main information content will not change. For example,there is no DNA in human genome to express the information for the development of two or more large

11See Science news entitled Moss beats human: Simple moss plants outperform us by gene number.


http://www.biologyreference.com/Gr-Hi/History-of-Evolutionary-Thought.html

http://www.biologyreference.com/Gr-Hi/History-of-Evolutionary-Thought.html

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130805112953.htm


wings that allow humans to fly, a trait that most people will find it desirable. Evolutionists tell us that theearlier life forms are without visual perception. So the question is, where did the genes that express thedevelopment of eyeballs and the associated nervous circuits come from?

As an illustration, suppose this subsection contains one thousand words. Through biotechnology, thethousand words are represented and encoded as DNA sequences. No one will, in their right mind, be-lieve that the DNA sequences would, after billions of years, by some kind of mechanism, become DNAsequences of different makeups that encode a master piece of Shakespeare. The simplest reason is thatthe number of words in this subsection is much less than, say, Romeo and Juliet.

Biological Big Evolution is impossible. Most scientists—Christians or non-Christians alike—have cometo the conclusion that this theory is fundamentally wrong. For example, evolutionist Stephen Jay Goulddescribed scientific evidence as “. . . all the intermediate stages are missing” in the prologue of his bookEver Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. He wrote,

To sidestep this unpleasant truth, paleontologists have relied on the extreme inadequacyof the fossil record—all the intermediate stages are missing in a record that preservesonly a few words of the few lines of the few pages left in our geological book.

It always baffles me why some Christians still cling to the philosophical belief of evolution when somescientists have already ditched it on the empirical ground. One reason could be that Darwinism has be-come an ideological orthodoxy. Look, nobody celebrates “Mendel Day” or “Newton Day” every year. But“Darwin Day” is observed annually by humanists/atheists to celebrate the birth of Darwin, to promotethe teaching of evolution and Darwinism in schools, and to educate the general public about Darwinianevolution.

Isn’t it quite strange that Big Evolution need promotion? For the present time science, nobody will findit necessary to promote Kepler’s three laws, Newton’s mechanics, Maxwell’s electromagnetism, Heisen-berg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s theories, or the periodic table of elements. Why? Because theseare experimentally verifiable physics and chemistry, and many technologies such as GPS are based onthe understanding of these foundational fields of science. The very fact that promotion with “evangelical”fervor exposes the ideological if not the religious agenda of some evolutionists.

Criticism of Darwinism is usually met with robust responses from ardent believers. Take, for example,the book entitled Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker. The veteran writer A. N. Wilson started the writingproject with the position of a believer of Darwinism. He writes, “. . . it did not even cross my mind that Iwould come to disbelieve in Darwin’s theories”. But he apparently changed his position after research intoDarwin for writing the biography.

Predictably, Wilson’s biography of Darwin was met with harsh criticisms. For example, Jerry A. Coyne,a professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, wrote abook review published in the Washington post:

Wilson’s claim (that Darwin was wrong) is grossly misleading and, frankly, ridiculous.

I don’t know of any scientist who is so robustly defended, not even Einstein—ubiquitously recognized forhis many experimentally proven revolutionary ideas on how Nature works at present. By contrast, Darwin’stheory and its offshoots are a philosophical worldview about past history.

Another example is Thomas Nagel. The renowned philosopher, who is a self-confessed atheist, wrotea book called Mind and Cosmos to enunciate his arguments for the proposition summarized by the subtitle:Why the materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of Nature is almost certainly false. He argues that Darwinismcannot explain the emergence of life, consciousness, and cognition. If Darwinian models cannot explain


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-attack-on-evolution-disguised-as-a-darwin-biography/2017/12/28/ce3df238-b502-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html


how life began as Nagel argues, his book will pronounce the demise of Darwinism and its modern off-shoots. He concludes his philosophical analysis as follows:

In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculativeDarwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacksfrom religion, I have thought it useful to speculate about possible alternatives. Above all, Iwould like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of howlittle we really understand about the world. It would be an advance if the secular theoret-ical establishment, and the contemporary enlightened culture which it dominates, couldwean itself of the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps—to adapt one of its own pejo-rative tags. I have tried to show that this approach is incapable of providing an adequateaccount, either constitutive or historical, of our universe.

As anticipated, Nagel’s book stirred up a hornet’s nest. Prominent neo-evolutionists were quick todenounce his apostasy for betraying naturalistic materialism. National Post evaluated the reception of“Mind and Cosmos” as “vicious”.

Among many others, a lucid description of the vicious responses to Nagel’s latest book is found inan article entitled The Heretic by Andrew Fergusion, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. Fergusiondescribes a leading atheist Daniel Dennett who was frustrated and saddened by “this sort of retrogradegang, going back to old-fashioned armchair philosophy with relish and eagerness.” Dennett summed upthe feelings of the workshoppers: “It’s sickening. And they lure in other people. And their work isn’t worthanything—it’s cute and it’s clever and it’s not worth a damn.” Alex Rosenberg, author of The Atheist’s Guide,was quick to add, “And then there’s some work that is neither cute nor clever, and it’s by Tom Nagel.”

If neo-Darwinism is almost certainly false as Nagel bravely proclaims, where else can atheistic mate-rialists turn to for the intellectual foundation of their belief?

That is why you see that staunch believers of Darwinism who are supposedly free-thinkers can be-come emotional when intellectually honest arguments are made against Darwinism. They are also againstChristianity’s belief in the Creator of everything, labeling Christians as being irrational, emotional, dog-matic, intolerant, and so on. But wait a minute. Here, we find that they were emotional, dogmatic, andintolerant when an established atheist philosopher openly denounced Darwinism. Of course, neither theChristian belief, nor Darwinism, nor Nagel’s alternatives are scientifically testable. Scientific approaches,like any other human endeavors, have limits. Scientific methods are not invented to test beliefs about thepast history but hypotheses that can be verified—experimentally repeatable at the present time.

Therefore, ultimately, with regard to past history, it boils down to faith. Christians need to exercise faithin the almighty God. Atheists need to have faith in the purely materialist philosophy. So it is not wrong tolabel Darwinism as a philosophical religion.

7. Science in Crisis

In March 1988, I graduated with a master degree in science. I delayed my departure on a one-way ticket toreturn to Singapore, as I had applied to the Public Service Commission (PSC) of Singapore Governmentto permit me to continue with the PhD program with scholarship12. I was waiting for the reply. When mywife13 and I were strolling in the Yoyogi Park, we found ourselves in the flurry of falling cherry blossom

12Although my scholarship was funded by the Japanese Government, PSC had the final say.

13I was married in the second year of the master program. We met in church during the forth year of my undergraduate study.The additional two years in the master program gave me the time needed to obtain the approval from her parents.



petals (桜吹雪). It dawned on me that PSC still would not approve my staying on to complete a PhDresearch program, as I had written an appeal letter to them. So when the final negative reply from PSCarrived, I was mentally prepared to accept it. Reluctantly, I returned to Singapore and started to serve inthe army for the balance of a year and a few months of my National Service duty. After the run-out-date(ROD) as it is called in the army, I was posted by PSC to the Ministry of Defence and then to the DSONational Laboratories in 1989 as a defence science engineer. I was to work in the Software Lab then.

I proposed to do a project on recognizing handwritten numbers with rotation invariance and parallelprocessing. This project allowed me to be stationed at the Image Processing Lab founded by ProfessorHock Lim. The reason for this project was because, for the most part, I had obtained the consent ofProfessor Choy Heng Lai to do a part-time PhD program in theoretical physics under his supervision.At that time in 1989, Dr. Lai was still a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore. From hispoint of view, perhaps I was an ideal candidate. He need not worry about job placement as I already hada job. He also need not supervise me closely as I could pretty much do research in theoretical physicsindependently. During my spare time since 1982, even when I was serving my second stint in the armedforces, I had been reading up textbooks and papers on quantum field theory and string theory. Mostprincipally, Dr. Lai was busy with setting up a department called Computational Science.

Neural networks and self-aware machines?

The late 1980s saw the resurgence of neural network approach to artificial intelligence. Instead of the rulesand algorithms meticulously coded by programmers, the neural network approach is to train a network ofinterconnecting nodes to learn from data how to perform a certain very specific task, for example, patternrecognition. Rather than coding the patterns as convoluted if-else rules with a computer language calledLISP, a neural network learns by adjusting each weight of the connection from one node to the other node.A particular learning algorithm is known as “back propagation”. It is one of the many methods of makinga machine learn from a large amount of data.

This neural network approach was something new in the software laboratory I was affiliated to at thattime. I learned as quickly as possible so as to produce and deliver a software prototype for a proof ofconcept before the project deadline, so that I could focus on my research in theoretical physics.

By serendipity, I zoomed into an artificial neural system called Neocognitron proposed by Fukushima inthe late 1980s. I developed an adaptive algorithm that enabled the Neocognitron to recognize gray-scaleimages, as Fukushima’s original model was developed for recognizing binary handwritten characters. Al-though journal publication was not within my job scope of a defense science engineer, I was academicallymotivated to put all the research work together and published a paper in a journal called “Neural Networks”in 1993 under the pen name of Christopher Ting. I had also published another paper on the “magnocellularpathway for rotation invariant Neocognitron” in another journal.

Having done an in-depth study of simulating physiological vision, I realized that computers were dumb.At the substrate level, computer consists of myriad on-off switches based on the physics of semiconductor.It is quite nonsensical to believe that Neocognitron has any consciousness or mind when it is trying torecognize handwritten numerals. I was busy programming Neocognitron in parallel C language, so muchso that I was oblivious to the view of a giant in artificial intelligence (AI)—Marvin Minsky. In a book entitled“The End of Science”, with the subtitle of “Facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age”, JohnHorgan—a celebrated science writer—reported his interview with Minsky:

He expressed contempt for those who doubted whether computers could be conscious.Consciousness is a trivial issue, he said. “I’ve solved it, and I don’t understand why peopledon’t listen.” Consciousness is merely a type of short-term memory, a “low-grade system


https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/089360809390022O?token=ECF59D0F53FF7DDAB5670DCE932305CFA952FB6FDE64A6F0B7A0ED6F5579335AB3ABC99B3D084E3038380EC60CF96DDE

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0129065793000067

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0129065793000067


for keeping records.” Computer programs such as LISP, which have features that allowtheir processing steps to be retraced, are “extremely conscious,” more so than humans,with their pitifully shallow memory banks.

I certainly would be a subject of Minsky’s contempt. But Isn’t Minsky’s definition of consciousness as atype of short-term memory too simplistic? In his definition, your mobile phone would have consciousness.But can soulless computers be conscious through the process of constantly re-configuring digital sym-bols? Does non-living computers really have a mind? How do you scientifically test self awareness of acomputer? Is there any scientific evidence for the materialistic existence of mind?

Francis Crick, after working on the double-helix DNA and a little further, switched gear to move ina different direction and proposed what he called the Astonishing Hypothesis. In his mind, “a person’smental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, andmolecules that make them up and influence them.” This hypothesis exudes reductionism and materialismto its core. But today, research papers are piling up that suggest something contrary to Crick’s proposition.Consciousness is not reducible to only the activities in the neural circuits of the brain. Quite the opposite,mental activities can change the brain chemistry. For example, research has shown that when a personmakes a mistake, and when he makes a mental effort to learn from the mistakes, his brain actually grows.Mental activities can change the brain. Science has falsified Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis.

Afterlife

After criticizing philosophers for having “had such a poor record over the last two thousand years that theywould do better to show a certain modesty rather than the lofty superiority that they usually display”, Crickwent on to criticize religion, and in particular, Christianity. He wrote,

Not only do the beliefs of most popular religions contradict each other but, by scientificstandards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can makethem acceptable. If the members of a church really believe in a life after death, why dothey not conduct sound experiments to establish it? They may not succeed but at leastthey could try.

The Nobel laureate makes no excuses whatsoever to espouse his scientism. He is right, though, toremark that beliefs of different religions contradict each other. But this is a trivially self-evident statement—for otherwise you would have only one religion if the beliefs were homogeneously consistent with eachother. Crick is wrong, however, to assert that the belief in Jesus is an act of blind faith, as I have elaboratedin the previous chapter that there are rational reasons to hold the view that the Bible is divinely inspired,and thus trustworthy for Christians to believe in the Word of God.

In relation to Crick’s challenge to produce the evidence of life after death, there were eyewitness ac-counts recorded in the four gospels about Jesus’ bodily resurrection, and Paul’s encounter of Jesus on theroad to Damascus. Additionally, in the transfiguration, the gospels also recorded that the transfigured Je-sus was talking with Moses and Elijah. Moses died about 14 centuries ago before the three eyewitnesses,Peter, James, and John were born. Elijah went up by a whirlwind to heaven 8 centuries before their births.Most importantly, Jesus affirmed life after death when He corrected the Sadducees who, like Cricks andmany atheists today, did not believe in life after death. In Mark 12:36-27 (and also Luke 20:37-38), Jesussaid,



But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses,in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I AM THE GOD

OF ABRAHAM, AND THE GOD OF ISAAC, AND THE GOD OF JACOB’? He is not the God ofthe dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken.

By quoting Exodus 3:6 (and also 3:15), and by saying that God is God of the living, Jesus told the fact thatAbraham, Issac, and Jacob were living in an afterlife. Crick was “greatly mistaken”.

Above all, Jesus’ tomb is empty, and His “afterlife’s” address in heaven is at the right hand of God.So Christians do have concrete evidence and documentation of a life after death. All these are histor-

ical narratives and it is common sense that no one can perform experiments to repeat history in a labo-ratory. By the same token, nobody could perform sound experiments to establish that the Great BritainEmpire, through imperialistic colonization, had sun never set on it. Going forward, the possibility of yetanother Great Britain Empire in the future seems nothing short of a preposterous proposition. Still, thereare documents and artifacts to suggest the historicity of the British Empire as the first superpower in theworld.

Being a self-confessed humanist and hostile opponents of Christian beliefs, Crick’s suggestion of doingexperiments on life after death is a form of mockery, void of any subtlety such as the one in the questionposed by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. I wonder how would Stephen Hawking respond to Crick whohypothetically challenged him, saying “Steve, if you really believe in Hawking radiation from a black hole,why do you not conduct sound experiments to establish it? You many not succeed but at least you couldtry.” If Hawking was modest, he would concede that the Hawking radiation from a black hole is so weakthat it is buried in the cosmic background noise. Even in science, it is impossible for experiments to becarried out, unless you have the technology to generate a mini black hole in a laboratory, which seemsextremely hazardous as it may devour the entire planet earth. If it is almost impossible to conduct anexperiment—in practice, but not in principle—should Crick then write off Stephen Hawking’s claim aboutthe tiny black hole radiation?

The culture today almost surely embraced by Crick is that ancient narratives in the Bible are assumedto be scientifically guilty unless proven innocent, whereas the hypotheses about the historical origins ofNature DDT ago are assumed to be scientifically innocent unless proven guilty. That said, I emphasize thatneither life after death, nor the very process of life from non-life over DDT can be examined by scientificobservations. Both beliefs are well beyond the methodology of science.

Nobody should not be intimidated or awed by what the scientists say about things outside their areasof expertise. When they do so on matters crucial to Christianity such as afterlife, they speak not in thecapacity of a scientist, but as any man in the street or any patient in the hospital; many atheists who arenot scientists also do not believe that there is such thing called afterlife. Famous scientists are authoritativein their respective scientific fields, and they are certainly highly intelligent, but their authorities in sciencedo not necessarily extend to matters outside their fields, especially to Christian theology.

When top scientists such as Marvin Minsky and Francis Crick, just to name a few prominent ones,left their respective scientific home grounds at which they deservedly made a name for themselves, andattempted to invade the traditional territory of philosophers—in ways like the Europeans colonizers did—there could only be one possible scenario: an implicit acknowledgment that most of the fundamental lawsand structures of Nature had been discovered.

When most of the most mysterious things about Nature have already been unveiled by the revolution-ary ideas and methods in the 20-th century, one cannot help but think that science in the 21-st century isin crisis; the emperor needs a new mind. It is also a reluctant recognition that the current state-of-the-arttechnology and mathematics, despite all its uncanny ability to beat human champions in the game of Go,



bring no revolutionary breakthrough in solving the holy grail problems such as protein folding, how exactlydoes a fertilized egg develop into an adult, generation of artificial sun, the intrinsic incompatibility betweenquantum mechanics and Einstein’s general theory of relativity (gravity), and so on.

How is science today? Not good. Some top scientists left their fields of expertise behind and did a poorjob in philosophy. Science is in a midlife crisis.


how is science today?

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