I can't argue at all about The Ultimate Beginning Point. But from then on, it's certainly arguable that natural law governs. The universe exhibits too many well-observed regularities to think otherwise. The character of life, which makes a living cell different from a dead one, is the sort of thing which BB and I were discussing. She labels the difference "information."
I've been expressing a concern that she's reading too much into that word. If life is merely an emergent property of the constituent components (whatever that means, and I'm not at all certain what that may be) then it's arguably not a "message" slipped in by some supernatural agency. That's my only point. And I had assumed, perhaps wrongly, that BB had taken the opposite position.
Conversely, if the information is not an emergent property of the consituent components then it must have originated externally. The external source may be physical such as the sun or space aliens - or God.
I of course would point to God as the external source!
PH, I don’t think information is a “message slipped in by some supernatural agency” at various points along the line of natural development, as if God were constantly interfering and intervening with his creation, so to speak. If you think that’s my position, I guess I haven’t been very clear. (Which would hardly be surprising, since I’m struggling to understand and articulate these ideas myself.) Rather, I suspect that, somehow, the information was loaded in, "once and for all," at the beginning. That is, the Second Law of Thermodynamics requires a beginning and a very highly ordered beginning at that (i.e., one with low entropy).
Now I might be mistaken in this, but I assume you believe that the evolution of the universe is essentially a random process, based exclusively on the laws of chemistry and the physical laws. If my assumption is incorrect, you should let me know. I don’t know whether you think the universe had a beginning, or just “always was (is).”
Roger Penrose has calculated that the probability of the universe occurring by chance is one in 10300. Yet I gather you feel that a random process, pushing up from “below” as it were, accounts for everything we see all around us.
But this does not seem to square at all with certain evidence we have from the fossil record:
“The fossil record indicates that the temperature of the Earth’s surface and the composition of the air appear to have been continuously regulated by … the entire biota. Although the complex network of feedback loops [i.e., successful communication of information necessary to such “global” regulation] is not well understood, much evidence suggests that the entire biota is responsible. For example, the stabilization of atmospheric oxygen at about 21 percent was achieved by the whole biota millions of years ago and has been maintained ever since.
“If the oxygen concentration were only a few percent higher, the volatile gas would cause living organisms to spontaneously combust. If it had fallen a few percent lower, aerobic organisms would have died from asphyxiation. This whole [i.e., the total biota] also appears to have prevented nitrogen and oxygen from degenerating into substances that would have poisoned the entire system -- nitrates and nitrogen oxides. As Margulies and Sagan explained, ‘If there were no constant, worldwide production of new oxygen by photosynthetic organisms, if there were no release of gaseous nitrogen by nitrate- and ammonia-breathing bacteria, an inert or poisonous atmosphere would rapidly develop’….” [Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe, 1999; emphasis added]
In other words, it appears as if certain extant global conditions had to be satisfied in order for life to begin in the first place. All the different parts of the whole biota had to “play ball” in a synchronous manner in order for life to emerge and sustain itself.
“Physics also indicates that the total luminosity of the Sun, or the total quantity of energy released as sunlight, has increased during the last four billion years by as much as 50 percent. According to the fossil record, however, the temperature of the Earth has remained fairly stable, about 22 degrees centigrade, in spite of the fact that temperatures resulting from the less luminous early Sun should have been at the freezing level. Since the level of carbon dioxide is mediated by cells, one of the emergent properties of the whole of the biota that maintained the Earth’s temperature was probably regulation of atmospheric levels of this gas.” [ibid.]
So it seems to me a whole lot of “fine-tuning” was going on very early in the natural history of our planet that facilitated the emergence and evolution of the entire biota and its species. Their development was, of course, according to the natural laws that we know; but the point is, were it not for the fact of the “fine-tuning” of the parameters of atmospheric conditions and solar radiation, the biota could not have emerged in the first place, or survived very long if it did emerge. Certainly the necessary conditions for life weren’t produced “pushing up from below in a random process” (so to speak; sorry for the clumsy language). Rather the specifications for the emergence of life preceded such emergence and were what facilitated it, made it possible in the first place.
That is, the fact that the biota could emerge at all is because it could synchronize with a kind of “cosmic blueprint” that set the basic tolerances necessary for the successful emergence of life on our planet, which I speculate were specified in the beginning, in the mind-bogglingly extraordinary, highly-ordered singularity. For life to begin, these tolerances had to be satisfied, and then collaboratively maintained by the entire biota in order for life to survive.
In short, there had to be “successful communication” between life forms and a sort of “life template” or paradigm or what I like to call “cosmic DNA” in order for the natural laws that we know about to kick in and result in the evolution of the whole biota and its individual constituting “parts” (e.g., organisms, species, etc.)
One way to describe this process would be to say the “parts” had to somehow be able to “decode and read” the information contained in encoded form (given by the singularity of the beginning and perhaps carried and transmitted by a universal vacuum field), so that successful communication could then take place such that life could (can) emerge. Admittedly, this description is pretty unscientific. Yet Nadeau, Kafatos, and many others point out that there’s a whole lot of work left for science to do precisely in this area.
And fortunately, many people today are doing this work -- in the fields of information science, microbiology, physics, complex systems theory. We'll just have to wait and see what develops.