Readers say scientists can, indeed, knock on heaven’s door

Keith Schofield raises some interesting points in connection with Lisa Randall’s book Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. He makes a statement about extrapolating our meager knowledge acquired over a mere few hundred years into a broad claim regarding the intervention of a supernatural being animated with a purpose. The statement would seem to suggest he believes that at least one such problem has appeared, perhaps the question of how life could originate without divine intervention.

Although Schofield is undoubtedly justified in claiming that the question of how life originated is not presently understood, it takes a rather willful lack of imagination to believe that questions about the origin of DNA, the genetic code, and the rise of self-replicating and evolving structures in our active chemical universe are forever unanswerable.

The issue of the chicken and the egg, which Schofield mentions, is easily addressed. Eggs have been around longer than chickens, and not all the egg-laying animals from whom modern chickens descended were in fact chickens. The relationship between short-term recurrence and long-term trending (in a thermodynamic setting) has been labeled “equilibrium” by Richard Feynman. That is when all the fast things have already happened but none of the slow things have yet. Intriguing, perhaps, but not necessarily a profound mystery.

Finally, to say that questions we currently don’t or can’t fully understand will never be understood and answered is, well, arrogant.