Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Only with genetics that requires molecules of billions of atoms that can only be based on the chemistry of carbon, the only one that can do it."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: By tracing vital development on our own planet, science tells us that biological life seems to adapt to its environment to survive over eons in an astonishing way. From the most primitive stages, cells begin to mutate in the face of various geological challenges. How does biology describe this apparent natural process?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "Life seemed to give no more of itself, but once there is a living cell, when it reproduces it can have some change, some small error in reproduction and this gives rise to an increasingly greater variety of living beings, this is what we call evolution."
In the second part of this series of four installments, we will continue breaking down Father Carreira's thought (from minute 33 to 67 of his lecture), delving into the colossal mystery of genetic programming, the statistical impossibility of Darwinian "chance", and the absolute ontological abyss that separates human intellect and freedom from the rest of animal determinism.
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We continue with our exhaustive analysis of the masterful lecture by the eminent astrophysicist, philosopher and theologian, Father Dr. Manuel Carreira S.J. In this second installment, we address minutes 33 to 67 of his video presentation.
After having demolished the idea of an eternal universe and having laid the strict physical foundations so that material life can exist (based exclusively on carbon and liquid water), Father Carreira now enters the field of evolutionary biology and anthropology. With implacable logic, he unmasks the intellectual laziness of invoking "chance" to explain the infinite complexity of DNA, and draws the absolute and uncrossable border between animal instinct and the freedom of the human spirit.
We remind our readers that this is a conceptual interview structured didactically based on his conference. All Father Carreira's answers are pure, textual and literal quotes extracted from his presentation.
Below is the original audiovisual document for those who wish to go deeper:
Dr. María Victoria Ibáñez-Soto: Father Carreira, in the previous installment we reached the point where the first anaerobic microbes populated the primitive oceans. From there, biology tells us about a process of mutations over eons. What happened about 600 million years ago that dramatically changed the history of life on Earth?
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "About 600 million years ago there was an explosion of life forms, they call it the Cambrian explosion, in which almost all the basic life forms that exist today appeared in a very short time and we don't know why."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: And this mysterious biological explosion laid the foundation for increasingly complex lineages, which eventually dominated the entire planet before giving way.
Father Dr. Manuel Carreira: "They evolve like reptiles... large dinosaurs... that were the kings of the Earth 150 million years ago but disappeared 65 million years ago. If they had not disappeared we would not be here."
Dr. Ibáñez-Soto: We come here to one of the most sacred dogmas of modern reductionism: chance. Strict Darwinists claim that all this astonishing complexity, from a chick building itself inside an egg to the human brain, is the work of random coincidences. When we look at biological development from physics and genetics, what do we really find at the core of life?