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Grace of God (the chance theory is the grace of God)?

Expressions researched:
"So the chance theory is the grace of God"

Conversations and Morning Walks

1976 Conversations and Morning Walks

Yes, because if God sees that the rascal is trying for so many years, "All right, give him a chance." (laughter) That is His mercifulness. So what they call chance theory, that is grace of God.
'Life Comes From Life' Slideshow Discussions -- July 3, 1976, Washington, D.C.:

Sadāpūta: So mathematics shows that chance alone would never begin to produce the things that go into life, because this, say, is just for one protein, but it's estimated in the simplest cell that they experiment with that there are some three thousand proteins. This is what they estimate. And in a human, in a single cell of the human body, they estimate three hundred thousand, or even three million. It's just an estimate. But it shows that chance is completely unrealistic. Now the scientists will say that both chance and natural laws somehow mysteriously go together in what they call natural selection to produce living structures. In the next slide, this is also a calculation, and it shows that that is not correct either, at least as far as the mathematics goes. What this says is suppose you look at the earth and you're going to wait four point five billion years—that's what they estimate is the age of the earth—and ask what is the chance of finding a given organized structure. And mathematically there's a thing called information theory, and you can show that the chance of getting an organized structure with a high level of information goes down exponentially, so that for an amount of information higher than that of the laws that cause these things to move, the chance goes down practically to zero. So it wouldn't happen. So this gets kind of complicated, but there's a basic point behind it; namely it indicates that the natural laws that are causing things, like that list of those laws, must already have in them, built into them, whatever is going to be manifested. That is, if some given structure can be manifested in the material world, that means the laws that are causing things must already have at least that much built into them. But their understanding of natural laws, the laws are too simple, too short to have that kind of thing built into them. So there's that argument. We'll go on to the next one. This is some mathematical formulas related to that. I don't think we should dwell on that. This slide right here gives an example of the kind of structures you find even in simple organisms. This is a bacterium. When they look at it under a microscope, they can see that this bacterium has a reversible motor built into it, and this motor spins a spiral flagellum, and by spinning it it propels the bacteria through the water, just like a submarine. So this very sophisticated motor is built into the wall of the bacterium. So that shows the kind of structures for which designs would have to be there. Actually, the scientific explanation, the way that they explain how this comes about, is completely impossible, because they would say that either by chance it came about all at once—and the chances are way too small, so that would never happen—or else it would have to come by small stages somehow. But what would be a small stage in the formation of a workable motor? Can't even think of how that would work. So it doesn't make much sense. So what we wanted to argue was that these living structures are very highly complex, they have a very great amount of information needed to specify them, and then mathematically it follows that this evolution process can't happen, because the probability is way down, it's something impossible. So we wanted to argue that. The next slide—whoops, we're going the wrong way, there. We wanted to compare some structures. This is the chemist's idea of what a diamond..., the top picture is a chemist's idea of what the structure of a diamond looks like. It's based on very simple repeating patterns. It's reasonable perhaps that chemical pushes and pulls could produce a simple design like this just by pulling the molecules together. The lower thing is a structure for graphite, which is another simple design built on hexagons. But on the other hand, in living systems you have things like this. (shows slide) According to the way they've analyzed it, there are chemical structures of this complexity. So we'd like to argue that this requires a very large amount of information to specify this thing, and so the simple natural laws couldn't account for this. On the other hand, it's very reasonable to suppose that an intelligent designer can account for things like that. These protein structures that Svarūpa Dāmodara was pointing out, it's not just any old structure, but it performs a very specific function within the cell, just like a little automatic machine of some kind. So we'd like to argue that the chance and molecular forces theory won't explain things like this, but to say that there is an intelligent designer would be a sensible explanation. The next slide, this shows some of the complexities of what goes on inside a cell, and it's only a fraction of what is there. It's hard to read, but each little bit of print refers to some very complicated chemical reaction involving big molecules like the one in the last slide. So there are hundreds of reactions like that on this one page, and this page is one out of four from a chart that we found detailing some of these things. This metabolism goes on even in the most primitive cells like this bacterium, and yet it's only a fraction of the total of what goes on. The scientists will admit they've only made a fractional study of all that's going on in these cells. So that kind of argument is one line of reasoning we'd like to present. (another slide) Now this refers to another thing. We'd like to describe the concept of consciousness as being something not material—nonphysical and nonchemical. And it turns out that actually in modern physics that's already a basic principle, and it's been that way for the last fifty or sixty years, but that's not widely admitted or taught in the schools. But actually in modern physics, it's called quantum mechanics. They realize that in order to describe physical processes you have to include the observer in the picture; you can't describe these things without accounting for the observer, and so they made an analysis. This was done by von Neumann, who was one of these physicists. He analyzed the difference between the observer and the observed. So here we have a man looking through, say, a microscope at some object, and you can see that in this case you can draw the line between the observer and the observed. So the man is observing the microscope plus object. And physically there are, according to the physicist's idea, there are these equations, represented by number one, equation number one, which describe all the molecules and forces of interaction on the observed side. But there's another kind of equation that goes in quantum mechanics, which corresponds to the observer's side, and this equation is completely different from the first equation. So this indicates that the observer must be something different in nature from the observed. Now the next slide shows here the boundary between the observer and the observed is moved. It's kind of arbitrary. You can move the boundary back so now the observed becomes the eyeball and the microscope and the object, and the observer is still on the other side. And the basic idea is you can move this boundary back, step by step, and on one side you can put, at least in principle, more and more of the parts of the body into the observed system, but on the other side you still have the observer, and he continues to be described by an equation that can't be reduced to the force laws that are used to describe the observed. So the conclusion is that the observer must be something nonphysical. He's not actually part of that physical body at all. So that's actually basic in quantum mechanics. So we wanted to present that. Now this slide... There's another line of evidence here. It's the inspiration, and Śrīla Prabhupāda has said that intelligence is the form direction of Supersoul. So it's interesting, it's really striking to observe how various people create things in mathematics and science and art, like that. It's very striking. So we made two examples here. This one is a mathematician names Gauss. He lived in the nineteenth century, and his concern was to solve mathematical problems. The interesting thing is that in a very difficult mathematical problem, the person never solves it by figuring it out consciously, step by step. But what happens is that he tries very hard to figure it out for a long time, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden the answer comes to him. So it's hard to read that quote. This is a quotation by this Gauss describing how that happened to him.

Devotee: "I've succeeded not on account of my painful effort, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say but when the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible."

Prabhupāda: So the chance theory is the grace of God.

Svarūpa Dāmodara: Grace of God?

Prabhupāda: Yes, because if God sees that the rascal is trying for so many years, "All right, give him a chance." (laughter) That is His mercifulness. So what they call chance theory, that is grace of God.

Svarūpa Dāmodara: So God is all-merciful.

Prabhupāda: Oh, yes. That is the proof.

Sadāpūta: Actually, this couldn't come about by just chance, because the number of possibilities...

Prabhupāda: There is, but he takes it as chance. All the possibilities taken together he is given by God. That he does not know. He takes it as chance. But there is no question of chance. It is the gift of God.

Page Title:Grace of God (the chance theory is the grace of God)?
Compiler:MadhuGopaldas, Rishab
Created:04 of Aug, 2011
Totals by Section:BG=0, SB=0, CC=0, OB=0, Lec=0, Con=1, Let=0
No. of Quotes:1