Wow. I just have a simple question at this point. What is your profession. Only out of curiosity. I will at some point have a lot to say in answer to your latest comment/essay, some of which might surprise you. At the moment I am a bit overwhelmed with many unexpected reactions to the book (most of them positive, I might add) but I will post again, once I catch my breath. Peace.
You wrote: <<We have seen that there is no clear reason that life should arise from a sea of chemicals. In fact, not only do we not know the answer to that question, we do know enough about chemistry and physics to be able to say, “There is no reason that life should exist.” We can exclude any scientific reason for the existence of life based on all the science we know. We can see there is no reason for anything to be alive. Where does this leave us?>>
Nonsense. Although there does not appear to have been any polls on support for abiogenesis among academic biologists, it's a very safe bet that the vast majority of these think abiogenesis occurred. 97-98% of academic biologists support evolution by natural selection, and it's unlikely than any more than a tiny handful of these think that a deity needed to assemble the first proto-bacterium before stepping aside and letting natural selection get to work.
Darwin never published his private speculations on abiogenesis, as he had no empirical evidence to support these, but his ideas were nevertheless remarkably prescient From his 1871 letter to his friend Joseph Hooker:
<<It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.
But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, - light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.>>
Abiogenesis has been an active field of research for over 70 years, having begun with the Miller-Urey experiments in 1953. Hundreds of research papers are published annually on this topic. Obviously, hundreds of competent chemists and biologists disagree with your claim that "there is no clear reason that life should arise from a sea of chemicals."
We have already observed the spontaneous self-assembly of long RNA strands, viruses, and bacterial organelles. It's not so much of a leap to predict we will one day witness the spontaneous self-assembly of a simple living thing from simpler self-assembled components.
I think living things are inevitable under the right conditions. Sterile planets are sterile for a reason, not just unlucky. Intelligent life is likely different and requires too many happy accidents to be widespread. Life is likely commonplace in the universe but intelligent life as rare as orchids.
Thank you for your comment. Before answering I need to stress that the article you are commenting on is an extract from my recent book "Beyond Evolution: How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God." (Tyndale House 2025). The extract is from the final chapter and is part of a summation of the main points of the book.
I completely agree with the points you raise in the first paragraph of your comment. (except for the first word “Nonsense!”). I am clearly among the vast majority of biologists “who think abiogenesis occurred”. As I wrote in the book:
"But science has always operated in an atmosphere of optimism that answers exist even for the hardest problems, and I believe that despite all these problems and hurdles, there must be a solution to how life began. Here we are, after all, along with lots of other creatures."
I also support evolution by natural selection, and devote two chapters to the subject. However, the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, is irrelevant to the question of abiogenesis. In the book, I quote Richard Dawkins:
"In his book 'The God Delusion', Richard Dawkins states, 'The evolution of life is a completely different case from the origin of life, because, to repeat, the origin of life was (or could have been) a unique event which had to happen only once.' ”
I am well aware of the famous letter from Darwin to Hooker, as are all scholars in the field of evolution. And you are correct that Darwin was wise enough not to include these speculations in his published work, given that he knew of no supporting evidence for them. As an aside, there are several brilliant ideas of Darwin that never made it into publication, including the concept of particulate rather than blended inheritance, The fact that Darwin knew about the concept of a gene (even without being aware of Mendel’s work) was actually discovered by me in a letter from Darwin to Wallace. This was later published by Dawkins in "A Devil’s Chaplain" with an acknowledgment of myself as the discoverer of this previously unknown aspect of Darwin’s genius. You can find more about this from Appendix D in my first book "The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith" (Kregel 2019).
You are also correct in your statements about the amount of research being devoted to the field of abiogenesis. As I state in the book (written before I read your comment): .
"The field of abiogenesis (the origin of life from nonlife) is very large and active, with hundreds of papers being published every year."
With your final two paragraphs you are no longer adhering to scientific accuracy or reflecting the true state of current knowledge. It appears your comments here more closely resemble those of amateur fans of biology, whose devotion to atheism is stronger than their knowledge of the actual state of scientific knowledge.
No, truly “spontaneous self-assembly of long RNA strands, viruses, and bacterial organelles” have not been observed outside of carefully controlled laboratory conditions, and when such self-assembly or replication of RNA strands are produced, they are neither very long nor stable enough to lead to anything useful, including life. In the book I discuss this in detail and explain why “RNA world” is dead or dying among origin of life researchers. As for viruses and “bacterial organelles”, I would love to see the citations for their “spontaneous self-assembly”. (A note: citation here means reference to a peer reviewed paper in the scientific literature, like the 180 such references I provide in the book, and not the musings of a nonprofessional online biology aficionado.}
Your final paragraph is a very common speculative trope, based on nothing but the statistics of the number of planets that are somewhat like earth. There is no science at all to back it up, and I do not discuss the question of the existence of extra-terrestrial life, since there is nothing of substance to discuss.
I am very appreciative of World View Bulletin for publishing this extract from the last chapter of "Beyond Evolution", and I would caution you (and others with similar views) to actually read the book from which it came, before leaping to unjustified conclusions about my views on the science of life. As an example, further down from the passage in the extract I state the following:
"I have no idea how long it will take until a brilliant young scientist will publish the first paper showing that one of the great mysteries of life, perhaps its origin, can be approached by a new law of biology that expands our knowledge of reality, much as all the established laws of chemistry and physics have done."
While I am a devout Christian who believes that Jesus is the truth and the way, I am also an accomplished scientist who continues to publish in the peer reviewed literature, and I know that science and faith are not in any kind of conflict but are in true accord as described in my second book "Science and Faith in Harmony" (Kregel, 1924).
OK, the excerpt from your book is missing a lot of context. I took the time to review other things you've written on the internet.
It appears you believe
(1) abiogenesis occurred, and
(2) scientists will eventually figure out how it occurred, but
(3) the scientific explanation will involve a totally new scientific principle
I do not see that you have proposed a name for this new principle, but a reasonable choice might be the "elan teleologique" in homage to Henri Bergson.
Vitalism didn't end well, even though as late as 1920 some eminent scientists were still insisting that physics and chemistry would never be enough to explain how living things function.
"Teleologicism" seems to me to be just a rear guard action in which vitalism retreats from the physiology of living things to their origin, and I believe it will end just as badly as vitalism. It's not much better than saying, "OK, natural selection is true, but the first proto-bacterium popped into existence as an act of divine creation."
Predictions about the limits of naturalism have a terrible track record.
Attempting to reconcile science with Christianity strikes me as a complete waste of time, akin to trying to reconcile science with homeopathy or astrology.
One of my philosophy tutors at university was an ex-Jesuit atheist. He once briefly mentioned a colleague who had converted to Catholicism: "and now he thinks the most interesting philosophical question is the transubstantiation of the Eucharist."
Religion creates all sorts of puzzles that simply disappear once one discards religion. Reconciling religion with science is one of these.
"The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this."
Albert Einstein
"[Jesus] was a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law ..."
Thanks for taking to time to look more deeply into my views. I don't know if you were able to find out about my religious history. If not, a one sentence summary: I was raised in a family of generational atheists and Marxists, knew or cared nothing about religion, other than it was wrong and evil, and that strict materialism was true. I disagree with your comment about the limits of naturalism, in fact it was the discovery of those limits that led me to agnosticism. The rest of the story you can find online or in my first book (Works of His Hands). As teleology, again I would point you to the references in Chapter 4 of my book, which show that this idea of purpose (often called teleonomy) did not come from a Christian idea, but from peer reviewed mainstream biological research. I specifically recommend the work of Denis Noble, William Miller and Pamela Lyon on this subject, none of whom to my knowledge are Christians. As for vitalism, its downfall was the synthesis of urea, but the idea that chemistry cannot explain the origin of life has never been disproven. Also the work of Simon Conway Morris on convergent evolution strongly suggests that there are unknown rules of biology that impact evolutionary pathways. The possibility that the unknown laws or theories of biology will point to a divine creator is indeed a faith statement. I never claim that science can or will prove God, that is a category error. But I believe there is plenty of scientific evidence that shows no contradiction, but instead confirmation of a divine creator of natural reality
Yes, I read your description of how you became religious. As for me, I was "raised" to be Catholic. The quotes are there because I rejected theism almost instantly. At age 7 or so I read a book about polar exploration that contained no mention of finding Santa's Workshop near the North Pole. I quickly surmised that Santa Claus was a fairytale told to gullible children, a conclusion my parents reluctantly confirmed when confronted. A few months later I concluded that theism was a fairytale told to gullible adults, a conclusion my parents did not confirm, leaving me no choice but pretended belief until I left home.
I studied philosophy in college, and I've read widely in both religion and the philosophy of religion. I've read large chunks of the Bible as well as Thomas Aquinas, the writings of the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching. I've studied Zen, Madhyamaka (the Middle Way of Buddhism), and Advaita Vedanta. I practiced vipassana meditation long enough to get impressive results, and I've had multiple mystical experiences, not all of which were induced by psychedelics. None of my studies or experiences made me doubt naturalism for very long. Taoism and Madhyamaka strike me as providing the most sophisticated and accurate descriptions of ultimate reality I've so far encountered; the Abrahamic religions seem pathetically childish in comparison.
Dennis Noble is one of a large number of eminent scientists who have gone off the deep end in late life. Like Luc Montagnier, Linus Pauling, William Shockley, Fred Hoyle, James Watson, etc. Noble's Third Way of Evolution is now 11 years old and has yet to make sort of splash in the ocean of science.
Pamela Lyon is a respectable scientist whose work is fascinating but no real threat to naturalism. Memory and problem-solving are emergent phenomena. That they can emerge at the level of biochemical networks rather than only at the level of nervous systems is merely unexpected, like discovering that bees can count and that sharks can express gratitude (Google "Woman Has Removed 300 Hooks from Sharks Mouths.)
It's easy to reconcile science with religion. You just make God lazier and lazier and less and less directly involved with his creation. If you don't like the word "lazy", substitute "smarter and more efficient." God likes labor-saving devices as much as the rest of us, and he's smart enough to use them whenever possible. Why should he trouble to design each snowflake as an separate artistic creation, when he can design laws of physics that automatically churn out a septillion distinct designs every year? Why should he bother to design an estimated 5 billion different species for our planet, when he can just let natural selection do this on autopilot?
In his rather poetic and epigrammatic book The Creation chemist Peter Atkins asks this question: What is the least amount of work a supremely lazy Creator would need to do to create the Cosmos? He argues that an infinitely lazy Creator would discover that the Cosmos could create itself, making his job as Chief Architect unnecessary. In the cartoon show The Jetsons, George Jetson's job at Spacely Sprockets has been reduced to pushing the button that turns on the computer (RUDI, the Referential Universal Digital Indexer) that runs his factory. George is a bit like the Deist God: he merely gets the ball rolling and then leans back in his office chair for the rest of his work day. If RUDI ever figures out how to turn himself on, George is out of a job. Atkins argues that we have sufficient reasons evidence for firing even a George Jetson God.
In 1857 George Gosse published a famously eccentric book: Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. This was two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species but Gosse had already learned about Darwin's ideas about evolution from Darwin's lectures at the Royal Society. Omphalos is Greek for "navel." Gosse had noticed that paintings of Adam and Eve invariably showed them with navels. But since Adam was made from dust and Eve from a rib, they would have never have needed an umbilical cord and hence should exhibit no mark of having had one. If Adam and Eve actually had navels, it can only be because God wanted them to look like they they had been born, i.e., he wanted their appearance to be deceptive. Gosse's book reconciles geology and evolutionary biology with Genesis by supposing that God created the Universe in seven days but took pains to create geological strata and a fossil record that make the Earth look like it is many millions of year old.
Gosse's book was condemned by both atheists and theists alike. Charles Kingsley, the Christian minister who later wrote a very early and very favorable review of On the Origin of Species, refused to review Omphalos, telling Gosse,
"It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ... believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."
You appear to propose something that strikes me as only marginally better: a universe that contains a vast compendium of evidence against a Designer but with a few hard to find "easter eggs" that turn this story upside down. If God exists, his existence should be as obvious as the Sun and not require confirmation by some sort of cosmic scavenger hunt open only to a handful of scientific experts. A massive deception with the truth hidden in a pot at the end of a rainbow is not much better than a massive deception with no such pot.
Darwin and his contemporaries were well aware that belief in deities was not universal, hence not universally obvious. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin wrote: "... there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea."
The Piraha are hunter-gatherers in the Brazilian Amazon who have no concept of God or religion and who find these concepts preposterous when outsiders discuss them. Daniel Everitt, a linguist who made repeated attempts to convert them to Christianity, ended up an atheist. This is his description of what transpired:
<<One of the guys said, “Hey Dan, I want to talk to you. You’ve been here for a long time, and we know that you love this place. That’s why you came here, because this is a beautiful place. We have lots of fish here and you don’t have that in the States.”
Then he said, “But you know, we’ve had people tell us about Jesus before. Somebody else told us about Jesus, and then the other guy came and told us about Jesus, and now you’re telling us about Jesus, and we really like you but, see, we’re not Americans and we don’t want to know about Jesus. We like to drink, and we like to have a good time, and we like, you know . . .” (the equivalent of multiple sex partners is the way it came out, and that applies to both genders).
He said, “So we really don’t want to hear about that. You can stay here. We like you, we like your kids, but we don’t want to hear about Jesus or God or anything any more, we’re tired of that.” >>
There's good evidence that organized religion is an artifact of the state, developed after the advent of agriculture as a means of social control. A detailed exposition can be found in Nexus by Yuval Harari, but for a one sentence summary it's hard to beat this quote by anarchist philosopher MIkhail Bakunin:
"A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished."
Many political ideologies, such as Nazism and Marxism, function essentially as secular religions. I might describe your life trajectory as one of fleeing from a modern secular religion into an ancient and traditional one. It's too bad it didn't occur to you to reject oppressive thought systems altogether.
Bakunin was just as opposed to communism as he was to religion:
"The people will be no happier if the stick with which they are being beaten is labelled the 'peoples' stick'".
Reconciling science with religion is pointless, because exposure to science reliably, if not without fail, corrodes religious belief. College graduates are less religious than the general public, physicians and scientists are less religious than college graduates as a whole, and eminent scientists have remarkably high rates of unbelief. In 1998 92% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences rejected belief in either a personal God or an impersonal higher power. In 2013 87% of the members of the Royal Society rejected belief in a personal God and 78% also rejected an impersonal deity. Fellows in the biological sciences were far more likely to reject a personal or an impersonal God than fellows in the physical sciences.
Wow. I just have a simple question at this point. What is your profession. Only out of curiosity. I will at some point have a lot to say in answer to your latest comment/essay, some of which might surprise you. At the moment I am a bit overwhelmed with many unexpected reactions to the book (most of them positive, I might add) but I will post again, once I catch my breath. Peace.
You wrote: <<We have seen that there is no clear reason that life should arise from a sea of chemicals. In fact, not only do we not know the answer to that question, we do know enough about chemistry and physics to be able to say, “There is no reason that life should exist.” We can exclude any scientific reason for the existence of life based on all the science we know. We can see there is no reason for anything to be alive. Where does this leave us?>>
Nonsense. Although there does not appear to have been any polls on support for abiogenesis among academic biologists, it's a very safe bet that the vast majority of these think abiogenesis occurred. 97-98% of academic biologists support evolution by natural selection, and it's unlikely than any more than a tiny handful of these think that a deity needed to assemble the first proto-bacterium before stepping aside and letting natural selection get to work.
Darwin never published his private speculations on abiogenesis, as he had no empirical evidence to support these, but his ideas were nevertheless remarkably prescient From his 1871 letter to his friend Joseph Hooker:
<<It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present.
But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, - light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter wd be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.>>
Abiogenesis has been an active field of research for over 70 years, having begun with the Miller-Urey experiments in 1953. Hundreds of research papers are published annually on this topic. Obviously, hundreds of competent chemists and biologists disagree with your claim that "there is no clear reason that life should arise from a sea of chemicals."
We have already observed the spontaneous self-assembly of long RNA strands, viruses, and bacterial organelles. It's not so much of a leap to predict we will one day witness the spontaneous self-assembly of a simple living thing from simpler self-assembled components.
I think living things are inevitable under the right conditions. Sterile planets are sterile for a reason, not just unlucky. Intelligent life is likely different and requires too many happy accidents to be widespread. Life is likely commonplace in the universe but intelligent life as rare as orchids.
Thank you for your comment. Before answering I need to stress that the article you are commenting on is an extract from my recent book "Beyond Evolution: How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God." (Tyndale House 2025). The extract is from the final chapter and is part of a summation of the main points of the book.
I completely agree with the points you raise in the first paragraph of your comment. (except for the first word “Nonsense!”). I am clearly among the vast majority of biologists “who think abiogenesis occurred”. As I wrote in the book:
"But science has always operated in an atmosphere of optimism that answers exist even for the hardest problems, and I believe that despite all these problems and hurdles, there must be a solution to how life began. Here we are, after all, along with lots of other creatures."
I also support evolution by natural selection, and devote two chapters to the subject. However, the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection, is irrelevant to the question of abiogenesis. In the book, I quote Richard Dawkins:
"In his book 'The God Delusion', Richard Dawkins states, 'The evolution of life is a completely different case from the origin of life, because, to repeat, the origin of life was (or could have been) a unique event which had to happen only once.' ”
I am well aware of the famous letter from Darwin to Hooker, as are all scholars in the field of evolution. And you are correct that Darwin was wise enough not to include these speculations in his published work, given that he knew of no supporting evidence for them. As an aside, there are several brilliant ideas of Darwin that never made it into publication, including the concept of particulate rather than blended inheritance, The fact that Darwin knew about the concept of a gene (even without being aware of Mendel’s work) was actually discovered by me in a letter from Darwin to Wallace. This was later published by Dawkins in "A Devil’s Chaplain" with an acknowledgment of myself as the discoverer of this previously unknown aspect of Darwin’s genius. You can find more about this from Appendix D in my first book "The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith" (Kregel 2019).
You are also correct in your statements about the amount of research being devoted to the field of abiogenesis. As I state in the book (written before I read your comment): .
"The field of abiogenesis (the origin of life from nonlife) is very large and active, with hundreds of papers being published every year."
With your final two paragraphs you are no longer adhering to scientific accuracy or reflecting the true state of current knowledge. It appears your comments here more closely resemble those of amateur fans of biology, whose devotion to atheism is stronger than their knowledge of the actual state of scientific knowledge.
No, truly “spontaneous self-assembly of long RNA strands, viruses, and bacterial organelles” have not been observed outside of carefully controlled laboratory conditions, and when such self-assembly or replication of RNA strands are produced, they are neither very long nor stable enough to lead to anything useful, including life. In the book I discuss this in detail and explain why “RNA world” is dead or dying among origin of life researchers. As for viruses and “bacterial organelles”, I would love to see the citations for their “spontaneous self-assembly”. (A note: citation here means reference to a peer reviewed paper in the scientific literature, like the 180 such references I provide in the book, and not the musings of a nonprofessional online biology aficionado.}
Your final paragraph is a very common speculative trope, based on nothing but the statistics of the number of planets that are somewhat like earth. There is no science at all to back it up, and I do not discuss the question of the existence of extra-terrestrial life, since there is nothing of substance to discuss.
I am very appreciative of World View Bulletin for publishing this extract from the last chapter of "Beyond Evolution", and I would caution you (and others with similar views) to actually read the book from which it came, before leaping to unjustified conclusions about my views on the science of life. As an example, further down from the passage in the extract I state the following:
"I have no idea how long it will take until a brilliant young scientist will publish the first paper showing that one of the great mysteries of life, perhaps its origin, can be approached by a new law of biology that expands our knowledge of reality, much as all the established laws of chemistry and physics have done."
While I am a devout Christian who believes that Jesus is the truth and the way, I am also an accomplished scientist who continues to publish in the peer reviewed literature, and I know that science and faith are not in any kind of conflict but are in true accord as described in my second book "Science and Faith in Harmony" (Kregel, 1924).
OK, the excerpt from your book is missing a lot of context. I took the time to review other things you've written on the internet.
It appears you believe
(1) abiogenesis occurred, and
(2) scientists will eventually figure out how it occurred, but
(3) the scientific explanation will involve a totally new scientific principle
I do not see that you have proposed a name for this new principle, but a reasonable choice might be the "elan teleologique" in homage to Henri Bergson.
Vitalism didn't end well, even though as late as 1920 some eminent scientists were still insisting that physics and chemistry would never be enough to explain how living things function.
"Teleologicism" seems to me to be just a rear guard action in which vitalism retreats from the physiology of living things to their origin, and I believe it will end just as badly as vitalism. It's not much better than saying, "OK, natural selection is true, but the first proto-bacterium popped into existence as an act of divine creation."
Predictions about the limits of naturalism have a terrible track record.
Attempting to reconcile science with Christianity strikes me as a complete waste of time, akin to trying to reconcile science with homeopathy or astrology.
One of my philosophy tutors at university was an ex-Jesuit atheist. He once briefly mentioned a colleague who had converted to Catholicism: "and now he thinks the most interesting philosophical question is the transubstantiation of the Eucharist."
Religion creates all sorts of puzzles that simply disappear once one discards religion. Reconciling religion with science is one of these.
"The word God is for me nothing but the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of venerable but still rather primitive legends. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change anything about this."
Albert Einstein
"[Jesus] was a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law ..."
Thomas Jefferson
Thanks for taking to time to look more deeply into my views. I don't know if you were able to find out about my religious history. If not, a one sentence summary: I was raised in a family of generational atheists and Marxists, knew or cared nothing about religion, other than it was wrong and evil, and that strict materialism was true. I disagree with your comment about the limits of naturalism, in fact it was the discovery of those limits that led me to agnosticism. The rest of the story you can find online or in my first book (Works of His Hands). As teleology, again I would point you to the references in Chapter 4 of my book, which show that this idea of purpose (often called teleonomy) did not come from a Christian idea, but from peer reviewed mainstream biological research. I specifically recommend the work of Denis Noble, William Miller and Pamela Lyon on this subject, none of whom to my knowledge are Christians. As for vitalism, its downfall was the synthesis of urea, but the idea that chemistry cannot explain the origin of life has never been disproven. Also the work of Simon Conway Morris on convergent evolution strongly suggests that there are unknown rules of biology that impact evolutionary pathways. The possibility that the unknown laws or theories of biology will point to a divine creator is indeed a faith statement. I never claim that science can or will prove God, that is a category error. But I believe there is plenty of scientific evidence that shows no contradiction, but instead confirmation of a divine creator of natural reality
Yes, I read your description of how you became religious. As for me, I was "raised" to be Catholic. The quotes are there because I rejected theism almost instantly. At age 7 or so I read a book about polar exploration that contained no mention of finding Santa's Workshop near the North Pole. I quickly surmised that Santa Claus was a fairytale told to gullible children, a conclusion my parents reluctantly confirmed when confronted. A few months later I concluded that theism was a fairytale told to gullible adults, a conclusion my parents did not confirm, leaving me no choice but pretended belief until I left home.
I studied philosophy in college, and I've read widely in both religion and the philosophy of religion. I've read large chunks of the Bible as well as Thomas Aquinas, the writings of the Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching. I've studied Zen, Madhyamaka (the Middle Way of Buddhism), and Advaita Vedanta. I practiced vipassana meditation long enough to get impressive results, and I've had multiple mystical experiences, not all of which were induced by psychedelics. None of my studies or experiences made me doubt naturalism for very long. Taoism and Madhyamaka strike me as providing the most sophisticated and accurate descriptions of ultimate reality I've so far encountered; the Abrahamic religions seem pathetically childish in comparison.
Dennis Noble is one of a large number of eminent scientists who have gone off the deep end in late life. Like Luc Montagnier, Linus Pauling, William Shockley, Fred Hoyle, James Watson, etc. Noble's Third Way of Evolution is now 11 years old and has yet to make sort of splash in the ocean of science.
Pamela Lyon is a respectable scientist whose work is fascinating but no real threat to naturalism. Memory and problem-solving are emergent phenomena. That they can emerge at the level of biochemical networks rather than only at the level of nervous systems is merely unexpected, like discovering that bees can count and that sharks can express gratitude (Google "Woman Has Removed 300 Hooks from Sharks Mouths.)
It's easy to reconcile science with religion. You just make God lazier and lazier and less and less directly involved with his creation. If you don't like the word "lazy", substitute "smarter and more efficient." God likes labor-saving devices as much as the rest of us, and he's smart enough to use them whenever possible. Why should he trouble to design each snowflake as an separate artistic creation, when he can design laws of physics that automatically churn out a septillion distinct designs every year? Why should he bother to design an estimated 5 billion different species for our planet, when he can just let natural selection do this on autopilot?
In his rather poetic and epigrammatic book The Creation chemist Peter Atkins asks this question: What is the least amount of work a supremely lazy Creator would need to do to create the Cosmos? He argues that an infinitely lazy Creator would discover that the Cosmos could create itself, making his job as Chief Architect unnecessary. In the cartoon show The Jetsons, George Jetson's job at Spacely Sprockets has been reduced to pushing the button that turns on the computer (RUDI, the Referential Universal Digital Indexer) that runs his factory. George is a bit like the Deist God: he merely gets the ball rolling and then leans back in his office chair for the rest of his work day. If RUDI ever figures out how to turn himself on, George is out of a job. Atkins argues that we have sufficient reasons evidence for firing even a George Jetson God.
In 1857 George Gosse published a famously eccentric book: Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. This was two years before the publication of On the Origin of Species but Gosse had already learned about Darwin's ideas about evolution from Darwin's lectures at the Royal Society. Omphalos is Greek for "navel." Gosse had noticed that paintings of Adam and Eve invariably showed them with navels. But since Adam was made from dust and Eve from a rib, they would have never have needed an umbilical cord and hence should exhibit no mark of having had one. If Adam and Eve actually had navels, it can only be because God wanted them to look like they they had been born, i.e., he wanted their appearance to be deceptive. Gosse's book reconciles geology and evolutionary biology with Genesis by supposing that God created the Universe in seven days but took pains to create geological strata and a fossil record that make the Earth look like it is many millions of year old.
Gosse's book was condemned by both atheists and theists alike. Charles Kingsley, the Christian minister who later wrote a very early and very favorable review of On the Origin of Species, refused to review Omphalos, telling Gosse,
"It is not my reason, but my conscience which revolts here ... I cannot ... believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie for all mankind."
You appear to propose something that strikes me as only marginally better: a universe that contains a vast compendium of evidence against a Designer but with a few hard to find "easter eggs" that turn this story upside down. If God exists, his existence should be as obvious as the Sun and not require confirmation by some sort of cosmic scavenger hunt open only to a handful of scientific experts. A massive deception with the truth hidden in a pot at the end of a rainbow is not much better than a massive deception with no such pot.
Darwin and his contemporaries were well aware that belief in deities was not universal, hence not universally obvious. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin wrote: "... there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea."
The Piraha are hunter-gatherers in the Brazilian Amazon who have no concept of God or religion and who find these concepts preposterous when outsiders discuss them. Daniel Everitt, a linguist who made repeated attempts to convert them to Christianity, ended up an atheist. This is his description of what transpired:
<<One of the guys said, “Hey Dan, I want to talk to you. You’ve been here for a long time, and we know that you love this place. That’s why you came here, because this is a beautiful place. We have lots of fish here and you don’t have that in the States.”
Then he said, “But you know, we’ve had people tell us about Jesus before. Somebody else told us about Jesus, and then the other guy came and told us about Jesus, and now you’re telling us about Jesus, and we really like you but, see, we’re not Americans and we don’t want to know about Jesus. We like to drink, and we like to have a good time, and we like, you know . . .” (the equivalent of multiple sex partners is the way it came out, and that applies to both genders).
He said, “So we really don’t want to hear about that. You can stay here. We like you, we like your kids, but we don’t want to hear about Jesus or God or anything any more, we’re tired of that.” >>
There's good evidence that organized religion is an artifact of the state, developed after the advent of agriculture as a means of social control. A detailed exposition can be found in Nexus by Yuval Harari, but for a one sentence summary it's hard to beat this quote by anarchist philosopher MIkhail Bakunin:
"A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished."
Many political ideologies, such as Nazism and Marxism, function essentially as secular religions. I might describe your life trajectory as one of fleeing from a modern secular religion into an ancient and traditional one. It's too bad it didn't occur to you to reject oppressive thought systems altogether.
Bakunin was just as opposed to communism as he was to religion:
"The people will be no happier if the stick with which they are being beaten is labelled the 'peoples' stick'".
Reconciling science with religion is pointless, because exposure to science reliably, if not without fail, corrodes religious belief. College graduates are less religious than the general public, physicians and scientists are less religious than college graduates as a whole, and eminent scientists have remarkably high rates of unbelief. In 1998 92% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences rejected belief in either a personal God or an impersonal higher power. In 2013 87% of the members of the Royal Society rejected belief in a personal God and 78% also rejected an impersonal deity. Fellows in the biological sciences were far more likely to reject a personal or an impersonal God than fellows in the physical sciences.