Varghese And The Traitorous Bees

Roy Abraham Varghese, theistic apologist and god-bothering author from the "Institute of Metascientific Research", was recently interviewed by the Dallas Observer. Varghese is widely credited as "the man who won over Anthony Flew", and is now currently working on a book called "There Is A God" with Flew.

Varghese is an interesting character because his contention is that without a meta-intelligence, all science devolves into incoherence if you drill-down deep enough, or pull back far enough.

It's a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense of course, a philosophically slick update to the theistic evolutionist's mantra.

More below the fold...

[Varghese] "Information precedes its manifestation in matter," he writes. Matter and energy are merely vehicles of all information in the known universe. "The next breakthrough is realizing that the foundation of it all is intelligence," writes Varghese. "Implicit in all its phases of discovery is the greatest insight of modern science: Everything is intelligence."

This intelligence is clearly visible, Varghese says, in the phenomenon of protein folding, the process by which proteins self-assemble from different sequences of 20 standard amino acid molecules. These proteins, which assume precise structural or functional roles in the flesh, are assembled at a rate of roughly 2,000 per second in every cell in the body (save for sex and blood cells) from thousands of these acids. The process is so complex, Varghese says, citing Scientific American, that a supercomputer programmed with the precise rules for protein folding would take billions of years to generate one final folded protein from 100 amino acids. Schroeder says chemical laws may explain the sugars, bases and phosphate components of DNA but not its rich information content.

Victor Stenger, author of "God: The Failed Hypothesis" argues that Varghese's philosophy is easily refuted. He notes that the "laws" of physics are not really "laws" at all - but rather they are human inventions. Arbitrary guidelines that we create to help us describe our observations.

Mathematics is also a human construction, not a universal truth. It's an arbitrarily-constructed tool that we use to help us observe the universe.

[Stenger] "The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behavior of matter, rather they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior."

"There is no reason that we can see now, from the study of the brain, that would require you to introduce any immaterial element."

But the best part of the article came on the last of 6 pages. Varghese employs the age-old "what about bees?" argument a lot. He says that it is a mystery that will never be solved, and uses it as "evidence" that is mystical over-arching meta-intelligence exists. In fact, he uses it with the author of the Dallas Observer article.

But the closing paragraph sums it all up for me:

[link] Still, it seems wise to remain open to the unexpected strangeness of science. Just two months after that 2005 lunch meeting at Perry's where Varghese rhapsodized on the wonders and mysteries of hovering bees, researchers from the California Institute of Technology and University of Nevada Las Vegas announced a startling discovery based on evidence from high-speed digital photography and sophisticated robotics. After 70 years of confounding confusion, scientists had finally unraveled the secrets of bee flight.

Heheh... Science is not a religion or a dogma. It is a process and a tool that we use to observe and record our universe and discover reality. It is a dynamic and constantly-moving process.

Mystics like Varghese insist on treating it like a religion or a philosophy, but it's not. And that's what gets them every time.