Review of Lee M. Spetner: Not by chance!

Quotes and page references are from Dr. Lee M. Spetner: Not by chance! - Shattering the Modern Theory of Evolution, The Judaica Press, Inc., 1998.

All ends well that begins well, and the very first words in the Preface of the book are (cf. p. vii):

Conventional wisdom holds that life arose spontaneously. In the remote past a simple living organism is supposed to have formed by chance out of inert matter. That organism is then supposed to have reproduced and developed into the life of today through random variation shaped by natural selection.

Oh well, yet another strawman on its way to the stakes, it would seem.

According to Spetner, a few bologists have pointed out that discoveries in biology together with elementary principles of information theory have made this view untenable. His key point is that "[t]he information required for large-scale evolution cannot come from random variations." (ibid.) And for Spetner it is not only evolutionary theory that will fall down, it's the whole modern show. On p. viii, he writes:

Why is randomness important? It is important because it has had a profound influence on the shaping of the Weltanschauung of Western Society. It has led to atheism and to the belief that we human beings are no more than a cosmic accident. This belief serves as a basis for the social values and morals held by Western intellectuals, and for their attitudes toward religion. If the belief is unfounded, then the resulting world view and its implications must be reexamined.

So, everything bad can be attributed to that belief in randomnesss, and Spetner is going to show us that randomness just doesn't cut it, and we'll all realize our delusions and go back to church, right?

Not that Spetner is against evolution as such, but he claims that evolution proceeds through a combination of cues from the environment with information already in the genes; that is, nothing new ever comes around, it is only a question of, which information is used when (cf. p. xi). And if random variation cannot be the mechanism of evolution, we must search for some nonrandom mechanism. A mechanism that could not itself have evolved, so how did it ever arise? A question, Spetner claims, science may never be able to answer – however, he asks, is Creation an option? (ibid.).

The Preface ends with the words (p. xii):

I hope you will read the book with an open and inquisitive mind, that you will follow my arguments and finally agree with my conclusion. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Well, as should be clear, I may be somewhat prejudiced against this book, and I may even have decided beforehand not to enjoy it; but I will try as well as I can to follow Spetner's arguments and check how well they work. I think that's as much as I can promise.

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Chapter 1, "Historical Background", is actually well-written and gives, as its name suggests, the historical background from the 18^th century through Darwin's Origin of Species to the Modern Synthetic Theory of Evolution (cf. pp. 20-21), which combined Darwinian evolution with Mendelian inheritance. While Darwin had rejected randomness as the source of variation, attributing it instead to the influence of the environment and use and disuse of organs, the neo-Darwinians rejected environmental influence on variation, which they attributed to random, genetic variations, mutations. As Spetner mentions, after the rediscovery of Mendel's results around 1900, genetic mutations had been observed, but being generally harmful to organisms, they had been rejected as the source of evolutionary variation, and Darwin's theory of evolution was actually in deep trouble in the early 20^th century.

On pp. 21-22, Spetner sums this development up:

The neo-darwinians then built their theory on random variation culled and directed by natural selection. They identified the heritable variations needed by the theory with the mutations discovered and named by De Vries some forty years earlier. A decade later, Watson and Crick identified the heritable variation with the random errors in DNA replication.

So far, so good, and would even be recommended reading for creationists.

It may be worth noting that in Darwin's time, the ideal in natural science was deterministic laws; but increasingly during the last half of the 19^th century, statistics increased in importance, even within natural sciences. The early 19^th century even introduced quantum mechanics and truly random events, so the neo-Darwinists were in many ways dependent on the acceptance of randomness within the scientific community.

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DNA and mutations as random errors in DNA replication is the cue for Chapter 2, "Information and Life", which presents an introduction to DNA.

On pp. 28-29, Spetner introduces the four DNA bases adenine, i>guanine, thymine, and cytosine, and on p. 29 he writes:

There is no chemical restriction on the order of the bases along a strand of DNA; the order can be anything at all. The order of the bases is then free to carry information.

And, according to Spetner, this information is written with the four DNA bases as an alphabet. While what Spetner writes is quite fine, there are a few details of importance left out. The bases are actually read in triplets called codons, which Spetner mentions later (p. 44), and since there are 64 different possible codons, the actual alphabet has 64 letters. The bases in a codon are not like Scrabble blocks with letters painted on them, but otherwise identical. Chemically the bases can be divided into two groups with two bases each: pyrimidines = cytosine and thymine, and purines = adenine and guanine. A codon encodes either an amino acid or functions as a stop code, and since there are only 20 amino acids, some codons have the same translation, and the translation is mostly dependent on the sequence of pyrimidines and purines in the codon, not actually going down to the level of the bases.

For Spetner, the sequence of bases makes up a message, and bottom p. 29 he writes:

How did that message get written in the first place? The standard answer of the biologist is that the message got written by itself, through evolution, and that evolution works the way the neo-Darwinian theory says it does. But I shall show that evolution cannot work that way.

The meaning here being that as DNA is copied, some copy errors may occur and lead to mutations. Spetner's claim is that information theory shows that no new information can be gained this way.

On pp. 31-34, Spetner mentions proteins, including enzymes, that are made up of the amino acids encoded in the DNA, ending with the paragraph:

The information in the genome [= the DNA in the cell] tells the cell what kind of proteins to make. Because proteins play a dominant role in cell function, they play a dominant role in the whole organism. The information in the genome, by controlling the making of protein, fixes the form and function of the entire organism.

So, the organism is basically defined by its DNA.

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In Chapter 3, "The Neo-Darwinian Theory of Evolution", Spetner presents the NDT, and on pp. 68-69 also the theory of punctuated equilibria.

On p. 71, Spetner writes:

According to the NDT, information can be added only through selection. Selection tests if the mutation is positive or negative, preserving it if positive and destroying it if negative. Even the most complicated mutation serves only as grist for the mill of selection.

And a paragraph later:

According to the NDT, the receiver of the information is the genome — not the genome of any one individual, but the average genome of the population. That's where the message is ultimately supposed to be received, and that's where the information is supposed to build up.

What Spetner refers to by "the average genome of the population" would be the gene pool of the population, not actually the avarage genome.

Continuing, Spetner writes:

When a mutation occurs, selection can choose only between the mutant and the rest of the population. It can choose the better from the good, the more adaptive from the less adaptive. In one step, selection can add no more than one bit of information. That's because it makes only a binary choice between yes and no, no matter how complex the two options.

Well, not exactly. Selection does not work in this binary way. The organism with the mutation might reproduce better than any other; but the other organisms don't stop reproducing completely based only on that.

On p. 73, Spetner writes:

If a copying error were to damage a gene so it no longer functioned, the genome will have become less complex, and some of its information will have been lost. You might think the mutation has wiped out all the information in that gene. You might think that after the mutation, the genetic information is as if the gene weren't there. But the damaged gene is still there and nearly intact. The only defect is the one mutated nucleotide.

The meaning here being that either a gene functions or it does not function. In actual practice it is rarely like that; but that is of less importance here. Spetner's point is that just as one tiny mutation can switch off an entire gene, a tiny mutation can switch on an entire gene; but the gene had to be there already. That is, according to Spetner, mutations do not make genes; they only turn them on or off. This indeed is 1 bit of information for a specific genome; but when we talk about evolution, we deal in populations, not in individual organisms.

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As in the last quote from p. 73, Spetner is rather equivocative about 'information'. This tendency gets worse in Chapter 4, "Is the Deck Stacked?". 

On p. 96, Spetner defines two criteria for cumulative selection. The definitions are reformulated on p. 106:

1. [The evolutionary steps] must be able to be part of a long series in which the mutation in each step is adaptive.

2. The mutattions must, on the average, add a little information to the genome.

But what is "a little information"?

Continuing, Spetner writes:

The information a mutation adds in a typical step of cumulative selection must fall within strict limits. On the average. each step must add some information. Yet it cannot be much more than one bit. Each step must add some information on the average so that information can build up over the full chain of steps that make up macroevolution. But if a mutation seems to have much more than one bit it can't be a  part of cumulative selection. We would have to interpret that mutation as the switching on of information already in the genome, as I noted in Chapter 3.

This doesn't make it any clearer, does it? We really need to know, how Spetner measures information in a genome.

On pp. 108-109, Spetner compares cumulative evolution to finding a path through a huge tree-like maze starting at the root. Spetner assumes that it takes 500 evolutionary steps to turn one species into another, so there are 500 levels of nodes in the tree, and with a genome of one million nucleotides, there are one million branches from each node.

First, at any time, there will be more than one mutation in the population gene pool at a time, and second, one million choices corresponds to 20 bits of information, if we interpret information as the bits to indicate the choices not taken, so each step would add 20 bits of information, not a maximum of 1 bit.

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The title of Chapter 5 is "Can Random Variation Build Information?", and that at least sounds promising. Hopefully, Spetner is going  in this chapter to tell us more about, how he measures information.

And we are in luck here. On p. 134, Spetner writes:

Before we enter the subject of mutations and information, let's first see how information is related to specificity. The more specific a gene, the more information it contains. In general, the more specific any message, the more information it contains. The information in a gene is the same as the information in the protein it encodes.

Or, the more possibilities ruled out, the more information.

Spetner's subsequent discussion has a few oddities to it. For example he discusses on pp. 139-142 bacterial resistance to antibiotics such as streptomycin, a drug that attaches to a matching site on a ribosome and interferes with the bacterium's production of proteins. A mutation can change the site so that streptomycin can no longer attach to the site. Bottom p. 141, Spetner sums up:

Although such a mutation can have selective value, it decreases rather than increases the genetic information. It therefore cannot be typical of mutations that are supposed to help form small steps that make up macroevolution. Those steps must, on the average, add information. Even though resistance is gained, it's gained not by adding something, but by losing it. Rather than say that the bacterium gained resistance to the antibiotic, we would be more correct to say that it lost its sensitivity to it. It lost information.

Maybe so, if it wasn't because Spetner is contradicting himself here. On p. 137, he introduces a word-enzyme, that matches to all words that contain a certain string. As an example, Spetner mentions the string "ghtsha", and claims that there is only one english word with that as a substring, the word nightshade. That is, such a word-enzyme would have a high specificity. Spetner then erites (cf. p. 137):

If we reduce the information in the match string by dropping the "a" at the end, and match only to "ghtsh," the match becomes less specific since there are now two more words that match, namely, nightshirt and lightship. These matches, however, would be "weaker" than the previous one because they match to only five letters, whereas the previous match was to six.

Let's reverse this. Assume our word-enzyme starts out with looking for the string "ghtsh" and then changes to "ghtsha", then there would have been an increase in information due to the extra letter and an increase in specificity, because fewer strings match. However, with the logic from the example with resistance to streptomycin, we might as well say that the word-enzyme had lost its sensitivity to nightshirt and lightship and therefore lost information.

As Spetner has it, a loss and a gain in information is only a question of how we look at it. His concluding remarks on p. 143 are therefore somewhat on the comical side:

The NDT is supposed to explain how the information of life has been built up by evolution. The essential biological difference between a human and a bacterium is in the information they contain. All other biological differences follow from that. The human genome has much more information than does the bacterial genome. Information cannot be built up by mutations that lose it.

But since the example of a mutation mentioned by Spetner could be interpreted as an increase in information rather than as a decrease in information, there's really no reason to panic.

Ian Musgrave in the TalkOrigins article Information Theory and Creationism: Spetner and Biological Information goes into much more detail about this.

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Chapter 6, "The Watchmaker's Blindness", is a critique of Richard Dawkins' evolution simulations in the book The Blind Watchmaker. There is little to comment on here – Dawkins' point was to illustrate the difference between no selection and selection, and his examples did that quite well. The mutation rates in the examples are unrealistic high, but in return the population sizes are unrealistic small, so Spetner's critique doesn't quite hit.

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In Chapter 7, "The Deck is Stacked!", Spetner claims that mutations can be induced by the environment and thus are not 'random' as required by the NDT.

Ian Musgarve also comments on this subject in the above linked TalkOrigins article in the section Spetner and "directed" mutation.

Spetner mentions pp. 187-191 experiments by Barry Hall and John Cairns, where mutations occur that enable bacteria to feed on nutrients they usually cannot feed on. And these experiments indicate that it is the presence of the nutrient that induces the mutations as if the bacteria could choose which genes to enable depending on available nutrients.

On p. 190, Spetner writes:

If the results of these experiments indicate that adaptive mutations are stimulated by the environment, they contradict the basic dogma of neo-Darwinism. According to that dogma, mutations are random, and the kind of mutations that occur are independent of the environment. If mutations are really nonrandom in the sense that the environment can stimulate adaptive mutations, then the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, which has dominated the biological sciences for close to 150 years, must be replaced.

How can something that might disprove a statement about mutations force a replacement of the paradigm of Darwinian evolution, when Darwin knew nothing about mutations? It would be the same as disproving the existence of, say, magnetism by disproving a particular theory about magnetism.

Spetner provides us with an answer in a passage in the last paragraph on p. 191:

Resistance to the nonrandom-variation interpretation stems from a refusal to abandon the Darwinian agenda that evolution must confirm that life arose and developed spontaneously. With that agenda, nonrandom adaptive variation, arising from an environmental signal turning on an already present set of genes, is hard to account for.

The reasoning here is that organisms can only turn genes on or off, if those genes already exist, and if all that mutations can do is to turn genes on or off, mutations cannot explain evolution of the genes in the first round.

In general, this chapter presents a neo-Lamarckian concept of evolution, where new traits are acquired dependent on the environment, inclusive the kind of food eaten, and these new traits are inherited. It is unclear to me, if Spetner's examples are not just, what is called forms of a species, environmentally dependent variations that are not actually new traits.

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In Chapter 8, the Epilogue, Spetner sums up his critique of the NDT and proposes a theory called the nonrandom evolutionary hypothesis, NREH, and he concludes with the words (cf. p. 208):

The NREH is a hypothesis that explains many observed phenomena that the NDT does not explain. According to the NREH, adaptive modifications in organisms occur when the environment induces a change in either the phenotype or the genotype. It can account for the environmentally induced adaptive mutations reported in bacteria. It can account for the pervasive convergences found throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. The NREH does not suffer from the contradictions of the NDT, and promises therefore to provide a more consistent picture of life.

And it's even consistent with the Torah.

For the layman, this may all appear very persuasive, and it is beyond my qualiications to give much of an in depth critique. However, even I can see some obvious problems with the NREH as presented by Spetner, such as his inconsistent information metric and what he considers to be different species may simply be different forms of the same species.

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Carl Wieland of AnswersInGenesis has written a review of Not By Chance! (first published in Creation 20(1): pp. 50–51, December 1997), which begins with the words:

‘See, speak, or hear no evidence against evolution’ seems to be the golden rule in the academic world—so it will be interesting to see the response to this devastating assault, by a highly qualified author, on the very core of evolutionary theory.

As should be clear from the above, Spetner's 'assault on the very core of evolutionary theory' can hardly be considered devastating, simply because chance is not the very core of evolutionary theory.

Later, Wieland writes:

In a memorable turn of phrase, he says that anyone who thinks that an accumulation of mutations (information-losing processes) can lead to macroevolution (a massive net gain of information) ‘is like the merchant who lost a little money on every sale but thought he could make it up on volume.’

After such a ‘king hit’, Dawkins’ computer simulations of ‘insects’ and literary weasels seem somewhat puerile, and are easily dealt with by the author, who, from reliable information received, is rather keen to debate Dawkins on this whole issue. Why not, when one appears to be equipped with such decisive scientific weapons?

Except that Spetner is somewhat equivocative about that information thing, so let us try to go more into details about Spetner's method of measuring information.

On TalkOrigins, Edward E. Max has posted an article The Evolution of Improved Fitness by Random Mutation Plus Selection, and subsequently a longer exchange between Max and Spetner followed. This exchange is summed up by Spetner in the TrueOrigins article A Scientific Defense of a Creationist Position on Evolution.

In this article, Spetner writes:

The information content of the genome is difficult to evaluate with any precision.  Fortunately, for my purposes, I need only consider the change in the information in an enzyme caused by a mutation.  The information content of an enzyme is the sum of many parts, among which are:

• Level of catalytic activity
• Specificity with respect to the substrate
• Strength of binding to cell structure
• Specificity of binding to cell structure
• Specificity of the amino-acid sequence devoted to specifying the enzyme for degradation

These are all difficult to evaluate, but the easiest to get a handle on is the information in the substrate specificity.

This is a more elaborated version of, what Spetner wrote in Chapter 5 of Not By Chance! Information rules out possibilities, so the more specificity we have, the more information we have.

Spetner continues:

To estimate the information in an enzyme I shall assume that the information content of the enzyme itself is at least the maximum information gained in transforming the substrate distribution into the product distribution.  (I think this assumption is reasonable, but to be rigorous it should really be proved.)

Who is gaining information here? Are we supposed to think that an enzyme gains information by "transforming the substrate distribution into the product distribution"? What Spetner is refering to is that we can make an experiment involving various substrates and observe the result, if any, of enzymatic activity. So, the one gaining information is the experimenter, not the enzyme. That is, the information content is not something within the enzyme, but something that is generated by the experiment.

But Spetner sees it differently:

We can think of the substrate specificity of the enzyme as a kind of filter.  The entropy of the ensemble of substances separated after filtration is less than the entropy of the original ensemble of the mixture. We can therefore say that the filtration process results in an information gain equal to the decrease in entropy.  Let’s imagine a uniform distribution of substrates presented to many copies of an enzyme.  I choose a uniform distribution of substrates because that will permit the enzyme to express its maximum information gain. …

The products of a substrate on which the enzyme has a higher activity will be more numerous than those of a substrate on which the enzyme has a lower activity. Because of the filtering, the distribution of concentrations of products will have a lower entropy than that of substrates.

That is, for Spetner it is the enzyme that gains information. Are we to think that the enzyme takes a nip of each substrate to figure out which ones are tasty and which ones are not? And even if so, where is the memory of the enzyme, in which it stores the gained information?

The entropy, Spetner refers to, is Shannon entropy (almost defined by Spetner a few paragraphs later), which indeed assumes its maximum for a uniform distribution. However, Shannon's model was a communication system, where the sender can choose among a number of messages to send, where all the messages are possible, but not necessarily equally likely. The entropy measures the receiver's uncertainty about which message was sent, an uncertainty that assumes its maximum, if all messages are equally probable. In Spetner's case the entropy would be the experimenter's uncertainty about, which substrates the enzyme will catalyze. However, that is not related to the substrate distribution, but to the experimenter's prior assumption about, which substrates the enzyme will catalyze. Using equal amounts of the substrates does make calculations easier, but it has nothing to do with entropy.

The word 'ensemble' used by Spetner refers to, what is called a statistical ensemble, the set of possible states of some system, often subject to some conditions. A simple example would be the entire set of sequences of 100 tossings of a coin. Each specific sequence is a member of the ensemble. Tossing a coin 100 times would return a sample from this ensemble; tossing the coin 100 times again would return another sample. If we tossed the coin 1,000 times, there would be be 901 positions, where a sub-sequence of 100 tosses begins, and each such sub-sequence would be a sample from the ensemble of possible sequences of 100 coin tosses. That is, an ensemble only exists conceptually, whereas a sample has real existence. Therefore Spetner's use of the expressions "[t]he entropy of the ensemble of substances separated after filtration" and "the entropy of the original ensemble" is meaningless. What might be meaningfull is to consider the ensemble of samples from these collections, say samples of X ml each.

However, we'll leave this subject and return to Spetner, who defines entropy like this:

The entropy of an ensemble of n elements with fractional concentrations f₁,…,f_n is given by

H = ∑1≤i≤n fi log fi,

(1)

and if the base of the logarithm is 2, the units of entropy are bits.

Well, not quite, unless Spetner actually wants to define entropy in that way. What is missing is a minus-sign in front of the ∑-symbol. 

However, we'll leave that subject as well and return to Spetner, who first illustrates the formula by assuming that the enzyme is active on only one of the substrates, which he describes as perfect filtering; that is f₁,…,f_n = 1/n. The input entropy in this case is given by Spetner as H_I = log n, which is quite correct, though not according to his formula (1); which would give H_I = n•(1/n log 1/n) = log 1/n = − log n. The output entropy is given by Spetner as H_O = 0. The decrease in entropy is therefore H = H_I − H_O = log n, which equals the gain in information.

Spetner next considers the opposite extreme: an enzyme which does not discriminate between the substrates, it leaves products from all substrates. Here the input entropy and the output entropy are the same, H_I = H_O = log n, and the difference, the decrease in entropy is H = 0.

The problem with all this, even if using the correct formula for Shannon entropy, is that it doesn't make any sense. The number n is chosen by the experimenter, so how can it be encoded in the enzyme? Assume the enzyme does not catalyze any of the substrates, then the output entropy is H_O = n•(0 log 0) = 0, just as in the case where the enzyme catalyzes exactly one substrate. How meaningfull is it to say that an enzyme that can catalyze no substrate has the same information encoded as one that can catalyze exactly one substrate? And not only that; while it would be possible to have a collection of substrates, none of which a given enzym can catalyze, the sum of the f_i's must be 1. That is, the experimenter must make sure that the enzyme is able to catalyze at least one of the substrates. How can that have been encoded in the enzyme?

Assume that we are to guess a number between 1 and n, and that we have no reason not to assume each number to be equally probable. We can guess at random, or more systematically start with 1 and increase our guess by 1 until we hit. The minimum number of guesses needed is 1, if we hit in the first guess, and the maximum number is n-1 (if all those guesses were wrong, we know the answer without having to guess the n^th time), and the average number of guesses needed will be n/2. Even better would be to bisect the remaining candidates in each round. That is, first ask if the number is smaller than or equal to n/2. If that returns a 'yes', then ask, if the number is smaller than or equal to n/4, and if it returns a 'no', then ask , if the number is smaller than or equal to 3n/4. And so on. The minimum number of guesses needed will be log n rounded down, and the maximum number will be log n rounded up, and the average number of guesses needed will be log n.

In a situation such as my example with guessing a number, it would be appropriate to talk about entropy, because there is an initial uncertainty concerning which number is chosen, and the information provided by the answer to each guess reduces the uncertainty. But in Spetner's example, this is not the case. If there is some uncertainty, it would be the experimenter's uncertainty concerning the number of substrates among the chosen substrates the enzyme can catalyze. Without any other prior information, this could be from 0 to n, and assuming equal probability, that would give an entropy of  log (n+1), not log n.

In his article, Spetner moves on to giving more details about an example from Chapter 5 of Not By Chance!:

Ribitol is a naturally occurring sugar that some soil bacteria can normally metabolize, and ribitol dehydrogenase is the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in its metabolism.  Xylitol is a sugar very similar in structure to ribitol, but does not occur in nature.  Bacteria cannot normally live on xylitol, but when a large population of them were cultured on only xylitol, mutants appeared that were able to metabolize it.  The wild-type enzyme was found to have a small activity on xylitol, but not large enough for the bacteria to live on xylitol alone.  The mutant enzyme had an activity large enough to permit the bacterium to live on xylitol alone.

As Spetner explains, the mutant bacterium had gained an increased activity on xylitol at the expense of a decreased activity on ribitol. But Spetner warns against seeing this as evidence for the neo-Darwinist position:

An evolutionist would be tempted to see here the beginning of a trend. He might be inclined to jump to the conclusion that with a series of many mutations of this kind, one after another, evolution could produce an enzyme that would have a high activity on xylitol and a low, or zero, activity on ribitol.  Now wouldn’t that be a useful thing for a bacterium that had only xylitol available and no ribitol?  Such a series would produce the kind of evolutionary change NDT calls for.  It would be an example of the kind of series that would support NDT.  The series would have to consist of mutations that would, step by step, lower the activity of the enzyme on the first substrate while increasing it on the second.

Where is the problem? According to Spetner, the problem is that not enough data is considered. As he explains, experiments indicated that the mutant also had increased catalyzation of L-arabitol relative to the wild bacterium, and:

With the additional data on L-arabitol, a different picture emerges. No longer do we see the mutation just swinging the activity away from ribitol and toward xylitol. We see instead a general lowering of the selectivity of the enzyme over the set of substrates.

That is, the mutant bacterium has a lowered activity on ribitol and an increased activity on both of the other sugars. Concluding, Spetner writes:

In Fig. 1 [comparison of activity on ribitol and xylitol] alone, there appears to be a trend evolving an enzyme with a high activity on xylitol and a low activity on ribitol. But Fig. 2 [activity on L-aribitol added] shows that such an extrapolation is unwarranted. It shows instead a much different trend.  An extrapolation of the trend that appears in Fig. 2 would indicate that a series of such mutations could result in an enzyme that had no selectivity at all, but exhibited the same low activity on a wide set of substrates.

And then the punch line:

The point to be made from this example is that conclusion jumping from the observation of an apparent trend is a risky business.  From a little data, the mutation appears to add information to the enzyme.  From a little more data, the mutation appears to be degrading the enzyme’s specificity and losing information.

Well, not exactly, it is only a consequence of Spetner's way of seeing things. The mutation has increased the ability of the enzyme in the mutant bacterium to catalyze other sugars than ribitol, which certainly is quite usefull, if there is no ribitol around, and one of the other sugars is available. Whether it adds information to the enzyme or not depends on, how we measure information and is not really of relevance for evolution. Evolution is not about adding information.

However, Spetner sees it that way and showa that the the mutant has lost information:

Just as we calculated information in the two special cases above, we can calculate the information in the enzyme acting on a uniform mixture of the three substrates for both the wild type and the mutant enzyme. Using the measured activity values reported by Burleigh et al. we find the information in the specificities of the two enzymes to be 0.74 and 0.38 bits respectively. The information in the wild-type enzyme then turns out to be about twice that of the mutant.

Yes, with Spetner's information metric; but as noted above, that metric is Spetner's own artificial product of the way in which these experiments are carried out and has nothing to do with any intrinsic information in the enzyme.

Spetner quotes from the exchange with Max:

Max: I want to make it clear that I don’t buy your interpretation of certain specific mutations as reflecting a ‘loss of information.’ You state that the ‘information content of an enzyme is the sum of many parts, among which are:  level of catalytic activity, specificity with respect to the substrate, strength [and specificity] of binding to cell structure, [and] specificity of the amino-acid sequence devoted to specifying the enzyme for degradation.’ This formulation is vague, non-quantitative, not supported by clear logic, not accepted in the scientific literature (to the best of my knowledge; please educate me if I am wrong), and in my view not useful.

To which Spetner comments:

Ed, the level of your argument here is quite low.  You have seen this entire section (above), and you took from the introduction my list of what characteristics can contribute to the information content of an enzyme and criticized it for being non-quantitative (followed by other pejorative epithets). Is that supposed to be some sort of debating tactic?  In any case, the tactic is out of place in this discussion.  From the context of what I wrote, it should have been clear to you that this partial list of characteristics that can contribute to the information in an enzyme was an introduction to my quantitative estimate of one of the characteristics of specificity of an enzyme.  After I showed how one might calculate the information related to a type of specificity, I showed how a mutation that appeared to enhance activity on a new substrate actually reduced the information by about 50%.

The problem here is that Spetner's "quantitative estimate of one of the characteristics of specificity of an enzyme" doesn't work. It is quantitative indeed, but the quanta will vary depending on the number of substrates (the value of n in Spetner's examples) and therefore it can hardly be considered to prove anything.

Back to Spetner:

It is elementary that specificity translates into information and vice versa. Have you ever played 20 questions? With the YES/NO answers to 20 judicious questions, one can discover a previously-chosen number between 1 and a million. If the questions are well chosen, those YES/NO answers can be worth one bit of information each, and 20 bits can specify one object out of a million. Twenty bits of information translates to specificity of one part in a million. Ten bits—to one part in a thousand.

Well, yes and no. Does specificity translate into information and vice versa? As Spetner writes here, it takes more bits (on the average) to specify an object out of a larger collection than out of a smaller collection, but that's exactly the problem: it's relative to collection size. If we were to guess a number between 1 and a million, we would need 20 guesses, even if that number is less than or equal to one thousand. That is, the information required is not related to the number chosen, but to the size of the collection, from which the number is drawn.

Later, Spetner quotes Max for a critique of Spetner's example with streptomycin. Here Spetner comments:

The wild-type S12 proteins that bind to the streptomycin molecule also form a subset of the universe of all possible S12 proteins.  The set of S12 proteins that allow bacterial growth in streptomycin (i.e. that do not bind to the antibiotic) form a disparate subset of the universe of S12 proteins. My intuition tells me that the set that binds (the susceptible set) is smaller, and therefore has a smaller entropy, than the set that does not bind (the resistant set).  Mutations that appear in the presence of the antibiotic convert one subset to the other.  A mutation that transfers the enzyme from a low-entropy set to a higher-entropy set loses information; it does not gain it.

Ok, if we were one day to guess a number between 1 and 1,000, we would have an entropy of 10 bits, and if we were the next day to guess a number between 1,001 and 1,001,000, we would have an entropy of 20 bits, therefore we have lost information from the first day to the second.

(Note: I am aware that 2¹⁰ = 1,024, not 1,000, and I am aware that 2²⁰ = 1,048,576, not 1,000,000. And I am sure that Spetner is aware of this as well.)

An obvious problem with Spetner's argumentation here is that a potential S12 protein need not be a possible S12 protein. If we toss a coin, we generate samples as we toss along. But that's not how S12 proteins are sampled. Of course, if we were to produce them synthetically, the situation might ne more like coin tossing; but synthetically produced S12 proteins would not be of relevance here. However, since I have no idea about how many S12 proteins of any kind there are, I will not pursue that subject any further.

Another problem is that Spetner's use of 'entropy' is rather confusing here. He considers a smaller set to have a smaller entropy, which would be in analogy to the example with guessing numbers.

In Not By Chance!, Spetner uses an example with specification of a room in an apartment in a building to illustrate specificity of addressing; but in the article he uses another example:

The Zip codes in the US also demonstrate that specificity and information are two sides of the same coin and go hand in hand.  An address in the United States can be completely specified by the nine-digit zip code. One digit of information will narrow down the address from being anywhere in the United States to being in just a few states. Thus if the first digit is a 6, the address is located somewhere in Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, or Nebraska.

A second digit of information will add specificity by narrowing down the address further.  A 3, 4, or 5 in the second digit puts the address in Missouri. A 3 in the second digit puts it in the eastern portion of the state. Two digits of information are more specific than one.

A third digit of information is still more specific, narrowing down the address even more, making it still more specific.  If the third digit is a 1, the address is specific to St. Louis and its suburbs.  The next two digits of information pin down the address to within a few blocks.  The last 4 digits of information can locate a specific building.  Thus, it is clear that the information contained in the digits of the zip code translate into specificity.

There is no question about it:  SPECIFICITY = INFORMATION.

That is, for Spetner, more digits = more specificity = more information. What goes for digits, goes for bits (= binary digits) as well. Assuming there to be 1,000 binding S12 proteins, each of these could be specified with 10 bits, and assuming there to be 1,000,000 non-binding S12 proteins, each of these could be specified with 20 bits. That is, more bits would be required to specify any non-binding protein than to specify any binding protein, and therefore, assuming Spetner's intuition about there being more possible non-binding than binding S12 proteins, then transfering a protein from the binding group to the non-binding group increases information.

I would guess that what goes wrong is that Spetner thinks about it this way: with the Zip code, each additional digit narrows down the area addressed by the Zip code. That is, more information = more digits = smaller area. However, that only works for subsets. St. Louis and its suburbs is not only a smaller area than the eastern part of Missouri, it is a sub-area. But the binding proteins are not a subset of the non-binding proteins, so the analogy doesn't work.

Returning to Wieland's review, Wieland introduces Spetner with these words:

Jewish scientist Dr Lee Spetner’s book aims a death-blow at the heart of this whole Neo-Darwinian story. The crucial battleground has always been the origin of information, and in this field, Spetner is uniquely qualified to comment. With a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, Spetner taught information and communication theory for years at Johns Hopkins University. In 1962 he accepted a fellowship in biophysics at that institution, where he worked on solving problems in signal/noise relationships in DNA electron micrographs. He subsequently became fascinated with evolutionary theory, and published papers concerning theoretical and mathematical biology in prestigious journals such as the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Nature, and the Proceedings of the 2^nd International Congress of Biophysics.

These are fine credentials, and I am certainly not claiming that Lee Spetner doesn't have excellent qualifications. However, for some reason, his use of information theory doesn't quite work. Spetner commits too many simple errors in that use, and considering his qualifications, I would suggest it is because he has let his wish of disproving neo-Darwinism get the better of him. I am quite sure Spetner could have done better than he has.

Wieland ends his review with the words:

To say that Spetner’s book is an absolute ‘must’ for anyone defending Scripture in this increasingly educated age is an understatement. To put it succinctly, it seems that unless evolutionists can pull a brand new rabbit out of the hat, Spetner has just blown the whole evolutionary mechanism out of the water once and for all. The evolutionary/humanist establishment cannot allow this to happen, of course, so it will be interesting to see their reaction and attempts at damage control. I trust that readers of this review will make it as hard as possible for them to ignore this groundbreaking work, by spreading it as far and fast as they can.

Hyperbolic language comes cheap, doesn't it?

To finish off, I must admit that I enjoyed reading Not By Chance!, even if I disagree with Spetner's conclusion. And I must say that the book would have deserved a more thoeough review from the creationist camp than Wieland's review that is little more than standard creationist troop mustering that doesn't even mention the parts of the book that are really good.

Review of C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity

Quotes are taken from C.S. Lewis: Mere Christianity, Fount 1997 (first edition: Geoffrey Bles, 1952).

Having read much acclamation of C.S. Lewis on Internet sites, I decided last year to read some of his books, and I started with The Abolition of Man from 1943 and was actually rather disappointed. To me it was fairly standard conservative propaganda, and I actually gave up finishing reading the book. It was too predictive – not exactly uniteresting, only too predictive. It should be noted that I had just finished writing a paper on a Danish conservative pastor and politician, and there were simply too many similarities for comfort.

Now I have picked up Mere Christianity, which is based on three radio program series from 1942-44 - that is from pretty much the same time as The Abolition of Man. While it is mostly more of the same, Mere Christianity does have a few advantages in that it has a more concrete topic.

According to the Preface, the book explains the common base of Christianity – therefore the title. Lewis had it reviewed by four clergymen, an Anglican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and a Roman Catholic. In general it was accepted by all four, though the Methodist thought Lewis had said too little about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought that he had gone to far about the unimportance of theories in explaining Atonement. That is, the book should give a reasonable impression of the common base of standard British Christianity in the 1940s.

As mentioned, Mere Christianity is based on radio programs, so it is addressed to 'ordinary' people, it's not a philosophical treatise, and I am aware that therefore it should not be read as if it were a philosophical treatise. Also it was written during the WW II, and that war is clearly present as a shadow behind the book – in its beginning question whether there really is a difference between good and evil. If there is not, how can we then condemn Nazism?

The book Mere Christianity actually consists of four books:

1. Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe;

2. What Christians believe;

3. Christian Behaviour; and

4. Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity.

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Book 1: Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

Here Lewis introduces two different meanings of 'natural law'. The first meaning refers to, what today is usually understood by a natural law: a law such as the law of gravity that is obeyed without volition. If you hold a stone in your hand and let it go, it will fall to the ground – the stone cannot 'choose' whether it will fall or not. The second meaning refers to the idea that most humans recognize certain rules for conduct, rules that at least in earlier times were considered so self-evident that they could be considered an unwritten natural law with the same force as written laws. While the human body is subject to the natural laws – such as the law of gravity – according to the first meaning, it is human behavior that is subject to the second meaning of natural law, and we can choose to obey that law or not in the sense that we do not necessarily follow it.

According to Lewis, this natural law – in the second meaning as a moral law – is not an instinctive behavior, because it is used to arbitrate between instinctive impulses (cf. pp. 8-10) and it can therefore not be one of those impulses itself.

It is this moral law that enables us to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. That is, according to Lewis, moral relativism is factually wrong.

More importantly, the moral laws, since they do not describe actual human behavior, are not derivable as actual facts of human behavior and must therefore be something above and beyond the descriptive laws, it most be an actual law as something given by a lawgiver (cf. p. 18).

On pp. 18-19, Lewis discusses two views about the universe. One view is the materialist, according to which matter and space just happen to exist, and development is driven by chance. The other view is the religious, according to which there is a conscious mind behind the universe, a mind with purposes, one of which has been to produce creatures that have a mind as well. According to Lewis, these two views actually sum up all the possibilities in that any intermediate view really just is a form of either of these two.

Since there is the moral law, and we cannot deduce it from observations of actual human behavior, yet we know it from within ourself, we can conclude that somebody must have made that law and put it into us, and that somebody cannot be part of the universe.

That is, our conscience, which is supposedly universal (as Lewis claims in The Abolition of Man) is a proof of the existence of a transcendental consciousness.

This idea can also be found in Paul's Letter to the Romans:

Rom 2:14 (for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves;

Rom 2:15 in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them);

The law Paul is referring to here is the written law. The Gentiles do not have this law, since it was given only to the Jews; but they are still applying the commandments of the law as witnessed by their conscience. This is the same principle of the universality of the law.

The obvious problem both with Lewis' argumentation and Paul's claim is that this law is something rather fuzzy, it's simply 'the law' without any precise specification of exactly, what the commandments of that law are – though later in Romans 2 it is clear that The Ten Commandments are referred to by Paul. Also, Paul's point is that, while the law was given to the Jews, the descendants of Abraham, to whom also was given the commandment of circumcision, the law is universal, and therefore:

Rom 2:28 For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh:

Rom 2:29 but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.

So, Paul is arguing for a change in the definition of 'Jew' from being applied to a certain ethnicity to being applied universally. Are we therefore to assume that sometime during the first century ce suddenly all non-Jews were supplied with a conscience or what?

How universal are Lewis' moral law? It is diffucult to figure out without more precise knowledge about this law. That all human societies acknowledge some moral law does not on its own prove that it is the same law. Actually Lewis takes this question up half-ways in Book 3, where he mentions the four 'Cardinal' virtues that are common to all civilized cultures, and the three 'Theological' virtues (Charity, Hope, and Faith) that are special to Christianity (cf. p. 63).

Actually, I dare even go as far as to say that within the same society, there can be more than one moral law.

One day, when I was in a supermarket, I - as I always do - first went to the check-out line after having gathered all the (not very many) goods I was to buy. At the back of the line was a shopping cart with goods in it, but no person behind it. However, I placed myself behind the cart, expecting its owner to show up very soon. Customers occasionally leave their carts for a very short term, while fetching the last thing or two on a neighby shelf, and I thought that might be the case here. But no one showed up, and the line in front of the cart moved forward, and of course the cart and I then had to follow. Occasionally shop personnel use carts while putting goods on the shelves and leave them, if they momentarily are called to do something else. Also, occasionally, customers simply abandon their carts and leave the shop, if they get tired of waiting in line. That is, from prior experience I had reason to think that the cart might not be 'standing' in line. Still, I decided to keep my place and see, if the owner of the cart didn't show up. The line in front of the cart then moved one more customer forwards, and since the cart didn't show the least intention to follow, I decided that I had to be an abandoned cart, and I moved to the back of the active part of the check-out line. In that very moment a woman came to the cart and yelled at me: "You were sure quick there!" Apparently, in here mind I was an egocentric exploiting the situation. Since fighting about a place back or forth in a check-out line is very low on my priority list of things I consider worth fighting about, I went back to my old place behind the cart without a word, and the woman pushed the cart up to the back of the line, also without a word.

As this story shows, this woman and I apparently were following very different moral laws. Should I say that the law I followed was superior to hers? Of course, otherwise I wouldn't be following it – but I must assume that the woman also considered her moral law to be superior, so what's the point?

On p. 11, Lewis writes:

We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers - people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Or maybe you just consider your own moral rules to be the Real Morality and assign to yourself the right to judge other people as if they were subject to your rules. Isn't Lewis here simply claiming that he can overrule everyone else with whatever moral rules he happens to have accepted?

That is, unfortunately it is all just a question of might makes right; if you happen to have the power to coerce other people to play by your rules, you can claim that your rules are universal, otherwise you can't.

In short, I find Lewis' argumentation insufficient to prove anything else than that everyone's a potential dictator; but we hardly need Lewis to tell us that. By the end of the day, morality only serves to justify that some people can use whatever means of force they might have at disposition to control other people. Morality is nothing but power politics. That's the Real World.

In that real world you find out, what is wrong by being punished, and the one that punishes you is therefore morally superior, even if you think it is the other way around. That is, morality is just another name for pecking order. There is in the real world no other crime than to be punished.

Now, Lewis just prior to the above quoted passage from p. 11 writes:

Have any of the changes [in morality] been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.

This is, of course,  directed against moral relativism – presumably with 'civilised morality' = 'Christian morality' and 'savage morality' = 'Nazi morality'. But that is from the point of view of a British academic, who with the consent of British clergymen is defining the universal moral law and implying that we either accept that moral law or accept to be considered on the level of the Nazis that are universally considered to be bad guys.

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Book 2: What Christians believe

Lewis begins with claiming that "[i]f you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through." (cf. p. 29) This might have been the case for British Christianity; but look to the USA. Such tolerance is not tolerated there: you are either a Christian or completely wrong.

Next Lewis claims that "[i]f you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the world is simply one huge mistake." So, it's the atheists that are intolerant. In my personal experience, there are indeed very intolerant atheists; but maybe Lewis is wrong about, what is the main point in all the religions of the world? I am no expert on religions; but I have taken some courses in the science of religion, and in the course History of Religion, we were told that it was actually a problem to define 'religion', since there was no single thing in common for them, not even the belief in one or more gods. And Buddhism, while acknowledging the existence of (the Hindu) gods, does not assign any significance to them; they are not to be worshipped.

Following the above comments about atheists, Lewis divides humanity into two divisions, the majority that believes in some kind of God or gods, and the minority that does not. Lewis also sees it as Christianity lined up with all other religions against "the modern Western European materialist." The next big division is between those who believe that God is beyond good and evil and those who believe that God is 'good' or 'righteous'. The first view is called Pantheism, the second view is held by "Jews, Mohammedans and Christians."

The obvious problem here is, what kind of sense does it make to say that God is good or righteous? Isn't it merely a definition? If God does it, it is good and righteous? In the Flood story, God almost exterminates all life on earth. That wouldn't be considered a good action, if done by humans; but God isn't measured with the same standard as humans, so the Flood was good, because it was an act of God. A god who is good by definition is a god who is beyond good and evil, isn't it?

However, apparently Lewis sees it differently – but he doesn't tell us, what it means that God is good, so the point appears simply to be that some religions are different from others.

Pantheism, Lewis tells us, also implies that God is part of this world, while the Christian idea is that God is the creator of the universe; like an artist is not part of his products and doesn't die, if they are destroyed. Though God created the world, things have gone wrong in it, and "God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."

The obvious question here is, how could things have gone wrong, unless God was an incompetent artist? According to Genesis 1, every time God made something, he saw that it was good, and he finished his master piece with creating humans in his own image, leaned back and saw that it was very good, and then he went to take a well-deserved rest – and we know what happened in the mean time. Perhaps God had too high ambitions for his qualifications?

Lewis, while he was an atheist, had asked himself the question, how the world could go wrong, how it could be so cruel and unjust, if it was made by a good god (cf. p. 31). Then he asked himself, from where he had got the idea of just and unjust? Using the idea of just and unjust against God destroys the idea – because if it is only a private idea, the world is not really unjust. That is, by trying to prove that God did not exist, that the whole of relity was senseless, Lewis found one part of reality – his idea of justice – that was full of sense. From this, Lewis concludes that atheism turns out to be too simple.

Well, Descartes did pretty much the same four centuries earlier, so why not? The problem here is that different people may have different ideas about, what is just and unjust, but how many gods are Christians allowed to operate with? During his discussion of Pantheism, Lewis rejects the idea that there could be different moral standards, for example that the older you get, the more you tend to see things from more than one point of view. The Christian idea of just and unjust remains the same and doesn't depend on any personal knowledge – Lewis' idea of just and unjust is absolute, everybody has to bow down to, what Lewis considers to be just and unjust. So Lewis is God? He would have said 'no', I'm sure; but modesty is the true sign of divinity, isn't it?

Not only is atheism too simple for Lewis, but so is, what he calls Christianity-and-water, "the view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right" (cf. p. 33). Besides the good God in Heaven there are also "all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption" (ibid.).

Don't we all know it? First there's all the love-bombing to get us inside the church, but when we have come inside, the door is locked, and the whip is pulled out. What else is new? 

Lewis proceeds to discuss dualism, whereby he means the idea that there are two powers, one good and the other bad. He dismisses this idea with the obvious reason that to determine which is which, you need a standard from an even higher power, so really there can be only one ultimate power. Not that there isn't a dark power in the world, which is in rebellion against God and has occupied this world. In the last paragraph on p. 37, this imagery becomes even more war-like:

Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.

But who is the devil? The Nazis would have been easy targets for a projection back, when Lewis held his radio talks, and that's what he is playing on here. If Christians are always liberators, only bad people can be against them. Lewis makes it not a choice, whether you want to be Christian or not; you are either a Christian or the agent of the enemy.

Who is the devil? The communists? The Muslims? The Liberals? The Darwinists? You? The Nazis were a real threat to Britain back in 1942-44; but the same logic can be used to whip up fear for just about anything and anyone, and as a Christian you need to project the devil somewhere – to avoid having it projected on yourself; either you or somebody else is the enemy. In short, I find it too easy to mis-use Lewis' image of Christians as part of a secret society to liberate the world; but then again, Lewis is only telling, how Christians view themselves. And what else could he do? By definition, Christianity is beyond critique; anyone who criticizes Christians is part of the evil enemy, the Dark Power.

Next up is, of course, how could this evil power have "made himself for the present the Prince of this World"? (cf. p. 39). Oh, we know – it's that free will, and if something's free to be good, it's also free to be bad. God is so adorably good that he has given us a free will, and therefore it's of our own free will that things are as bad as they are. We have just listened to Lewis tell us that being Christian is cooperating with a liberator, and going to church is listening to the secret radio messages from our friends, so we went to church. And the door was locked behind us. And the love-bombing pastor suddenly pulls out the whip and starts yelling and screamimg at us that it's all our own fault: we are ourself the baddies. We killed the dinosaurs, and so on. Makes you wonder, if supporting the Nazis could have been worse, doesn't it? Except that they of course also said "Gott mit uns" ("God (is) with us").

But God couldn't have made it in any other way, because free will is the only thing that makes "possible any love or goodness or joy worth having." (cf. p. 40). Lewis writes (ibid.):

The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.

I warned you against all that love-bombing, didn't I? Anyway, it doesn't work: if there is a 50% chance that a human, given the choice, will sin, even God should have realized it won't work. Have just two humans, and it will go wrong. Anyway, it's not the impression you get from the Bible that God wants us to have "the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other"; the impression is that either you join God or you are killed. And since there's a 50% chance that you won't join God, prospects are dire.

How did the "Dark Power" go wrong? Lewis admits – to his credit –  that we cannot give an answer with any certainty to that question; but he can offer a "reasonable (and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong" (cf. loc. cit.):

The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first – wanting to be the centre – wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race.

This sin is, what Lewis in Book 3 calls 'Pride' (cf. the chapter "The Great Sin", beginning p. 100). However, as the Bible has it, God created humans in his own image. Since God wants to be God, humans therefore want to be God as well – they were created that way. It's not a sin, but a design flaw – blame the designer. During creation week, God did that which looked good in his eyes, so humans, created in his image (and therefore looking very good in his eyes), could do nothing else but what looked good in their eyes. No reason to guess; the biblical text is actually rather clear here.

On p. 41, Lewis writes:

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended – civilisations are built up – excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice. That is what Satan has done to us humans.

So, Lewis manages to derive an entire world history out of his guess. Running along with this, we might even say that it applies to Christianity, even that must have been corrupted by Satan. The sin of Adam and Eve was that they wanted to become wise as God and know about good and evil – isn't that what any Christian wants to inform us about? That something is good, and something is evil, and which is which. But for some reason, lewis doesn't apply his own guess to Christianity.

Next Lewis gives a small recap of the story of the chosen people, the Jews, up to Jesus, introducing the latter on p. 42 with these words:

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if he was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time.

It's not quite like that, however. As Lewis points out, for the Jews, God meant "the Being outside the world," so how could Jesus talk as if he was God? Let's us read in the Gospel of Markus:

Mar 10:17 And as [Jesus] was going forth into the way, there ran one to him, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

Mar 10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, even God.

Of course, the question here could be rhetorical; but the simple explanation would be that Jesus is not claiming to be God, though perhaps acting on God's authority. Lewis is right that it would have been a rather un-Jewish thing for Jesus to claim to be God, even to be considered to be God; after all, wasn't the sin of Adam and Eve that they wanted to be like God? And the gospels go around this tricky bit very carefully, even to the extent that Jesus' rôle as the Messiah (a title for humans) was to be kept a secret.  And it isn't Jesus that is going to come and judge the world, it's 'the son of man', whoever that was supposed to be. Sure, Jesus is identified as the Messiah, the son of man, the son of God, and all that – but not as God himself in the gospels.

Lewis mentions that "[a]mong Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it." So, maybe the idea that Jesus was God originated among 'Pantheists'? For a more Hellenized Jew as Paul, the idea of a human as God was less strange. And we even see this in the gospels: it is in general Gentiles that have an easier time acknowledging Jesus.

A religion built up on the idea that no human is God, even that no human is good, isn't exactly the religion, in which it makes too much sense to claim to be God or good. Should we say that it is yet another of God's design flaws?

On p. 43, Lewis writes:

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; ot you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

In a society that only acknowledges God as good, and where God is "the Being outside the world," there is no "Good Teacher" of course, and that's the problem. How can you change that society? It's not possible, because you cannot be good, unless you are God, and God is outside the world, not inside it.

Christians say that we should let Jesus come into our lives; but how can we, if Jesus is God, and God is always outside the world? A lot of speculation has been done to solve that problem. As an aside, being a "Son of God" in the Old Testament doesn't make you a god yourself, this title is used for angels and the kings of the Davidic dynasty; it's simply anyone who serves God and thereby gains divine authority, not someone who's a god himself. Throughout the Old Testament we see these sons of God misuse their divine authority, so it's not as if it's all that promising that Jesus is yet another son of God. Therefore, Jesus must be elevated to be God himself – except that doesn't work, because God is always outside the world. Remember that only a 'Pantheist' can have a god coincide with the world.

Really there is no difference between Christianity and 'Pantheism' – in the eucharist, the believer refuels himself with the god as in all the other mystery cults.

Lewis isn't into speculations either. On p. 46, he treats us to a condensed version of Christianity.

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity.

So, death is disabled, and pigs can fly.

Lewis next writes about repentance and atonement; but we'll scroll forwards to p. 50, where he again picks up the theme about death:

Now the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures. This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching.

And luckily we won't have to marry in that new life, because we'll be like angels, right? Apparently, Lewis doesn't refer to a physical death here, but to the death of our old self and having a new life in Jesus put into us. It's just that not all Christians see it this way; they take it to be literal, physical death that has been disabled, once Jesus returns. Obviously, physical death wasn't disabled in the first century ce, and 2 Peter comes up with many excuses for that. Apparently, the first Christians believed that if they transformed themself into the image of Jesus, they would be recognized as the good guys on Doomsday, and be taken to heaven and never die physically.

What is this new life after non-physical death then? On p. 53, Lewis writes:

And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being 'in Christ' or of Christ being 'in them', this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them; that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts – that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body.

For Lewis, this earthly body of Christ, through which he operates, is like a secret society with the object of undermining the devil. But that's not the whole story; Lewis writes p. 54:

Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think he is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade.

But we have to prepare the invasion, by doing sabotage actions and so on. This idea of being a secret society preparing for the invasion of the main force has its clear drawbacks, when looking at the world today. It can be used to legitimate Christian subversion of regimes elsewhere, but there is another religion that knows the same secret formula, Islam. And don't forget the feminists; they also want to conquer the world – using the same promises of a return to Paradise. Everybody promises a return to Paradise, and why should the one party be chosen rather than any other? By experience we know that no merchandise lives up to its advertising, so why can't we just say that they are all wrong, and that secret societies are the real Satan?

Lewis ends Book 2 with the words (ibid.):

Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

See, I told you: first the love-bombing, then the whip – and the door is locked behind you. You can avoid this by not entering in the first round.

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Book 3: Christian Behaviour

On p. 59, Lewis writes:

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.

Ok, so morality really is crowd control; but who is to control the crowd? That is, by the end of the day, morality is nothing but a power struggle. In actual practise, morality certainly has nothing to do we fair play and nothing at all to do with harmony between individuals. Morality serves the purpose of allowing some people to yell and scream at others – of course not officially, but we are here talking about actual practise.

Lewis continues discussing these three parts of morality, and concerning the second part, he writes p. 61:

Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.

Yes, let's reinvent slavery. If we are tenants in our own minds and bodies, then we'll be cast out, if we don't pay the rent. If you have lost your job, so you can't pay the rent, you'll be out of your mind and body, and you are even to consider that a blessing. If God made us, that means that he is responsible for us, not only that he can use us as zombie soldiers in his silly war against himself.

Notice, how things work here: first the love-bombing, then the threat that you'll be whipped, if you don't do as commanded, and now that you'll be thrown out of your mind, if you should get the idea to develop one of your own.

Beginning the next paragraph, Lewis writes that "Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever," and he ends it by writing:

If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

So, a Christian nation should make no sense; but actually some Christians claim that such a thing exists. The problem is, that even if we live forever, it's not here on earth. Actually, our earthly life becomes of no real importance, if it's just a passing moment before the everlasting life in heaven or hell. This is the kind of stuff that makes suicide bombers.

Over the next pages, Lewis discusses Christian virtues. We won't go into that, except have a small peek at a passage from the chapter on Forgiveness. On p. 97, Lewis writes:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of hinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.

Yes, the devil is really a nice guy, once you get to know him, isn't he? Don't believe all those stories that Christians tell about him. Too bad that the bad guys aren't really bad, and the good guys aren't really good. What happens with the absoluteness of good and evil then? Lewis would probably have said that nothing had happened. It's not the moral standards that are changing, only the assumption about whether some party behaves quite as bad as that party should to become the devil incarnate. But what is the practical difference? Many Christians today consequently focus on negative things to say about Muslims and are not really concerned with to what extent these things are true or not. Islam is the incarnation of the Dark Power, so it must be bad through and through, even if you should happen to know some Muslims that aren't. And let's not talk about Darwinists; not even about OECs (Old Earth Creationists); they have all given in to the Dark Power. Once you have the idea that good and evil are absolutes and identifiable, good will be projected onto your own party and evil onto the opposite party, and evidence will be invented to show that it's the plain and simple truth. But Lewis doesn't mention anything about this.

A little later, Lewis writes (pp. 97-98):

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment – even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.

So, the whole point of "love your neighbor" and "love your enemy" is to kill them, whereby you show that you love them. With love like that, who needs hatred? For Christians, apparently, love and hatred is one and the same.

Can you see, what I warned you against? The love-bombing turns into hate-bombing the longer we stay in the church, and remember that the door is locked behind you, once you step into the church.

Christian morality can be used to defend anything – really, literally anything whatsoever.

What's worse is, what Lewis writes a little earlier on p. 96:

Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.

But if you kill a person, you kill a person, not an action. If you flog a person, you flog a person, not an action. If you imprison a person, you imprison a person, not an action.

No wonder that Christians appear cold , arrogant and self-righteous to other people. If you have the right to kill your enemies, you can simply declare anybody your enemy and then kill them. Or, certainly you have the right to kill anybody that is an enemy of God, and who isn't an enemy of God? Anybody that doesn't do as you command them to do? Why is that different from killing the enemies of the state or the enemies of the revolution?

Lewis is aware there's a problem. On p. 98-99, he writes:

I imagine somebody will say, 'Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed.

In other words, Christians are people that do things for no other reason than that they are written in a book, and they do it with cold blood.

A few sentences later, Lewis continues:

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves – to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him; wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying that he is nice when he is not.

Within its own strange world, this, of course, makes sense. The life here on earth if of little importance compared to the eternal life in heaven or hell, so loving someone means wishing that they end up in heaven, not doing anything for them here on earth. Except, what's the point in charity then? Why not kill poor people, so they can go to heaven? Or do they go to hell? For being poor?

Around a year ago I was invited to a local Islamic Culture Center, where I was told about Islam. It was quite interesting, and it was pretty much the same as the above. There was a story about the daughter of an emir; she had stolen something and was sentenced to have her right hand cut off, a sentence that was executed despite the high rank of this woman. I was off course told that this severe punishment depended on that it wasn't out of need that she had stolen, and the thing she had stolen had been in a locked room, so it wasn't because she was tempted by the ease of the theft. She had committed a deliberate, unexcusable theft. But that wasn't all: the severe punishment was to spare her for an even worse punishment in the afterlife, so it was actually to her own advantage. Still I found the punishment wrong, though without saying it.

Sure, within this line of thinking, the Christian and the Muslim (they are really the same religion) are right in thinking as they do. It's just that, if they are wrong, they are the cold-blooded instruments of Satan.

C.S. Lewis was borne in 1898, he served as a soldier during WW I, and Mere Christianity is based on radio talks from WW II. I have never served as a soldier, nor lived in a country involved in a war against it, so I am prepared to accept that Lewis' view is formed by experiences that I do not have. In return, however, I will say that building an absolute morality on personal experiences and something that happens to be written in some book is a very shaky foundation.

Continuing on p. 99, Lewis writes:

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself.

An alternative way to interpret the commandment of loving others like yourself could be as follows. With yourself you have introspection; you judge yourself knowing why, not only what you did. So to love others like yourself would mean to judge them by the why, not the what. If you cannot find anything lovable by a person, just acknowledge that you know too little about what is really going on inside that person; do not judge outside your understanding. This would, in my humble opinion be more compatible with the gospel texts, even if Lewis' version may be more compatible with standard Christianity.

Lewis ends the chapter with:

Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco...

But people have given up beer and/or tobacco. What is wrong in saying that God loves us because he, maybe even better than we self, knows what is inside us? He doesn't love us for our achievements, but for our possibilities that are more likely to come to the surface through love than through hate or neglect. But that is of course based on this life, not the eternal life, so of no interest to Christians.

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Book 4: Beyond Personality: or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

As the title of this book indicates, Lewis is here introducing the trinity. I don't have anything to say to about this introduction except that it leads up to the idea that Jesus was the first new human (or new man, as Lewis writes, but people have become more gender-sensitive since then), and being a Christian means to let Jesus help you become such a new human yourself by establishing a mutual relationship between you and the Father.

Lewis explains, in my humble opinion, this quite well (just to say something positive for a change). On p. 130, he explains the difference between being 'created' and being 'begotten'. According to the Nicene Creed, Jesus, the Son, is begotten, not created. As Lewis explains it, the difference is that since Jesus is begotten, he is of the same kind as the Father, whereas a created thing would have been of a different kind. Humans can make ('create') various things, such as a wireless set, which isn't itself a human; but humans beget humans. Therefore, this new human the Christian is to become as a son of God is actually to become of the same kind as God.

Lewis ends the book with the words:

Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Such as punishment and death penalty. I am not buying, but how about you? Remember that once you step inside that church, the door is locked behind you.