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A Critique of Stephen Meyer’s ‘Return of the God Hypothesis’
I have struggled with writing a review of Stephen Meyer’s book, Return of the God Hypothesis, since I finished it a few weeks ago. Every time I pick it up to reread portions of it I find myself wanting to approach the work from a different perspective. The book is neither a straight popularization of science nor an attempt to frame a clear scientific argument. Rather, it’s a well-crafted work of reporting and speculation at the frothy margins of scientific theory that, combined with a few leaps of logic, is harnessed in support of a foreordained conclusion.
I suspect that the science in this book – and there’s quite a lot of it – will, despite being well-presented by an eloquent and talented author, largely elude most readers. Perhaps more importantly, the context from which the science is drawn will likely be unfamiliar to most readers, who will have little familiarity with physics and cosmology beyond what is presented in this book. If this book were merely a popularization of the science of cosmology, that would be fine: people would gain a feel for the state of the field, for its complexity and nuance, and for the remarkable accomplishments that have been made in recent years. But that’s not what this book is. Rather, it’s an attempt to support a metaphysical argument by portraying science as inadequate both in practice and in principle, and so leave no plausible alternative but the eponymous God Hypothesis. To frame that argument responsibly would require considerably more scope and rigor than this already science-heavy book offers. To do it convincingly, on the other hand, requires much less effort, particularly if the reader is inclined to be generous and knows little of physics.
It has been said of Stephen Hawking’s bestselling book A Brief History of Time that it was purchased by many and read by few. I suspect the same is likely true of Return of the God Hypothesis: for many, it will be a tough read. Yet it is an impressive book, and it has lent a great deal of talk-circuit credibility to its author and his premise. The fact that Mr. Meyer is an eloquent speaker and a clever and charming guest undoubtedly adds to that credibility, and it’s understandable why he and his book have received as much praise as they have. Nonetheless, as I will attempt to explain in this review, I think his arguments are weak and his conclusions unsupported.
The book begins with a review of the relationship faith and science have enjoyed throughout history. Meyer is on solid ground when documenting the history of science, and his recounting of man’s march of discovery is readable, detailed, and entertaining. It isn’t relevant to his argument, but it is well-written and informative.
Then we get to the science. Meyer asserts, based on three “scientific discoveries,” these key ideas underlying his argument:
- the universe had a beginning;
- from the beginning (or shortly thereafter), various physical constants have had values that are unlikely to have arisen by chance – that the universe appears to be “fine-tuned”; and
- the genetic coding in DNA represents a kind of “functional” information that is unlikely to have arisen by chance.
I find Meyer’s defense of each of these claims wanting, but, before I critique them, let me make two brief comments, one about the nature of Meyer’s three claims, and the other about the overall thesis of his book.
Meyer’s core argument is that our universe and the life in it are improbable – so statistically improbable as to defy any explanation other than that God designed and created it. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this: Meyer’s thesis hinges entirely on that alleged improbability.
We can see the probability argument arising from the second and third claims, that of the universe being improbably fine-tuned, and of genetic material having an improbable amount of structure and function. But the first claim is different. It isn’t a claim about probability, but rather part of a necessary precondition to all of Meyer’s arguments. It is essential to his arguments that the universe be finite. It must have had a single beginning; it must eventually end; and there can only be one of them.
Why? Because in order for his statistical arguments of improbability to carry any weight, it’s necessary that the sample space not include an infinite number of instances. This is true because in an infinite number of universes everything that is statistically possible, however statistically improbable, will still happen – in fact, will happen an infinite number of times. And in an infinite number of those instances, the physical constants will have the seemingly improbable values we observe, the seemingly improbable chemistry will have arisen to bring about life such as us, and we will, as improbable as it may seem, be sitting here discussing his book.
Regarding the thesis of his book, I have a problem but I’m not quite sure how to state it. Science, including the science Meyer attempts to disprove in his book, has set itself upon the task of answering the “how, what, and when” questions: how does the world work, what laws govern it, when did or will various events occur? Meyer offers an answer to a question science doesn’t ask: “who?” Meyer wants to tell us who created the universe. He doesn’t attempt to present or defend an answer for any of the questions science asks and seeks to answer.
This seems important to me because it suggests that, contrary to Meyer’s oft-repeated claims, the God Hypothesis actually has no true explanatory power. Rather, it merely claims to name an actor – and an ill-defined actor at that. I wonder, how is Meyer’s claim stronger than this one:
“Some non-sentient but unknown natural mechanism, of which we are as yet completely and utterly unaware, established the conditions under which our observable universe exists and the life within it flourishes.”
That wildly ambiguous claim would at least be rooted in something that is consistent with our universal and repeated experience (as Meyer might put it), that of physical reality and the laws that govern it.
In any case, the fact that Meyer’s hypothesis doesn’t actually answer the questions science asks, and that it opens up a universe of new questions (where did God come from, how does God do what God does, what does the mathematics of God look like, etc.) in the process of not answering them, should give us reason to pause, at least.
Claim: The Universe Had a Beginning
Meyer is a science historian, and his account of the evolution of scientific theory regarding the origin of our universe is readable, detailed, and interesting. Most of what we think of as modern cosmology is quite modern, much of it less than a hundred years old, and some of it only a few decades old. It’s sobering to realize how much of what we know we figured out in just the last 50 years.
Yes, we’re pretty sure that everything in our universe was contained in a microscopic pinpoint about 14 billion years ago, and that that pinpoint expanded with unimaginable speed – and continues to expand today. That idea comports with our observations, and the theory supporting it seems robust. Meyer’s account of how we reached that understanding makes for good reading.
But no, we aren’t sure that the universe had a beginning. We admit that things – matter, energy, physical laws, the nature of space and time itself – were likely very different when the stuff of a billion trillion stars occupied a volume vastly smaller than a pinhead. (How many stars can dance on the head of a pin? All of them, it seems.) But we don’t know how they were different. Nor do we know what came before, nor what prompted the expansion, nor whether it happened exactly once or infinitely many times, or indeed whether or not it’s happening right now elsewhere in our own universe. We speak informally of the Big Bang as the beginning of our universe, but all we really know with confidence is that it was a moment in an evolving series of physical states. We don’t know what states came before, nor what states will follow our own.
Meyer is, in my opinion, too casual in his use of the word “beginning.” In Chapter 6: The Curvature of Space and the Beginning of the Universe, he quotes Stephen Hawking and G.F.R. Ellis as writing (in The Large Scale Structure of the Universe) that the general theory of relativity implies “that there is a singularity in the past that constitutes, in some sense, a beginning of the universe.” (emphasis mine)
What did Hawking et al mean by “in some sense?” I don’t know, and Meyer doesn’t pursue it. But it’s hard to conclude that a beginning “in some sense” is the same as, simply, “a beginning.” And in fact, later Meyer quotes Ellis as observing that some cosmologists now see, in Meyer’s words, “singularity theorems as an interesting piece of pure mathematics, but not as proofs of the beginning of our actual universe.” (again, emphasis mine)
In the same chapter, Meyer quotes Paul Davies, in reference to conditions in the very early universe, as saying: “If we follow this prediction to its extreme….” But must we follow mathematical predictions to their extremes? In particular, when it is widely acknowledged that we don’t know which of our physical laws pertain in the extraordinary conditions in the very early universe, how much stock should we place in predictions followed to that extreme?
It is worth remembering how little we understand of the conditions immediately prior to the expansion of the singularity – assuming there was a singularity. We don’t even know if the view conventionally held, that we can know nothing of the universe prior to the expansion of that initial singularity, is actually correct. We thought it was, but then the late Stephen Hawking made the case that black holes might evaporate through quantum processes, and Roger Penrose theorized that we might find echoes of that evaporation in the cosmic background – echoes of black holes that existed before the singularity itself. We now think that, just a couple of years ago, we may have identified one of these so-called “Hawking points,” these shadows of long-gone black holes of a prior universe, in the cosmic microwave background.
If we did – and it’s still too early to be sure – then the idea that the universe began with the Big Bang will have to be reworked a bit. Indeed, the entire idea of there being only a single universe would be effectively discredited.
Speaking of Roger Penrose, I find the omission of his Conformal Cyclic Cosmology theory odd. Meyer cites Penrose dozens of times in his book, but I’ve found only two references to Penrose’s own recent (2010) theory of how the universe might recur endlessly, both in the footnotes and neither actually engaging the theory. Meyer spends time critiquing less mainstream theories, including that of Max Tegmark whose theory, as Meyer describes it, claims that “every possible mathematical structure imaginable has a physical expression in some possible universe” or, quoting Tegmark now, “All structures that exist mathematically exist also physically.” This seems to me to be a peculiar prioritization on Meyer’s part, and makes me wonder if he is being perhaps too selective in the theories he chooses to present to his readers.
I believe Meyer does his readers a disservice by not accurately portraying the range of multiple-universe theories currently proposed, given that rejecting all of them is critical to his thesis. Meyer requires that there not be an infinite number of universes, either one following another throughout eternity or any number existing simultaneously in parallel. This is perhaps the strongest challenge to his argument from improbability, and it deserves to be treated with more rigor.
Claim: The Universe is Fine-Tuned for Life
Meyer’s second claim is, I think, his strongest, and its defense constitutes the largest portion of his book.
There is a widely held belief that our universe is a very improbable place, and that if any one of a few physical constants differed from its current value by an almost unimaginably small amount, the result would be a universe that could not contain us as observers. Some argue that such apparent precision is unlikely to occur naturally, and so is evidence of intelligence: that these constants were “fine-tuned” to be precisely what is necessary to allow the universe to develop as it has.
This is the core argument Meyer makes, and it can be compelling: accounts of extraordinarily improbable-seeming things can be powerfully persuasive.
But it’s worth considering what is implied by the claim Meyer is making. First, it requires that it be meaningful to speak of “different values for a physical constant,” and it isn’t immediately obvious that that’s the case. After all, we don’t know why physical constants have the values they do, and we don’t know how the various constants might be related to each other through some aspect of physical reality of which we’re still unaware.
Consider Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. Until barely a hundred years ago we didn’t know that space, time, mass, and energy were mathematically related. We didn’t know that these aspects of the physical world were intertwined in mathematically determined and measurable ways, and that a value in one domain couldn’t be “changed” without influencing the other domains as well.
Now we think we know that most of the handful of (what we think are) fundamental forces and particles are mathematically conjoined, not truly independent of each other. It is no longer safe to assume that any of these things is truly independent of the others. And, just as it is nonsensical to speak of, say, the value of pi changing in relation to the circumference and diameter of a circle – because it is inherently linked to and constrained by both of those things – it may be nonsensical to speak of any given physical constant changing as well.
In particular, to the extent that the apparent fine-tuning of constants related to gravitational attraction is prominent in these examples – and it is – we should be particularly careful, as our best quantum theories still struggle to incorporate gravity, and especially under the exotic conditions of the early universe.
Perhaps there’s some meaning to the idea of certain physical constants “having different values.” It’s certainly essential to Meyer’s claim of so-called “fine tuning.” It is also certainly debatable, and debated.
But, for the sake of discussion, let’s assume for a moment that it’s meaningful to discuss the possibility of physical constants having different values than they do. Meyer’s contention is that, in most of these configurations, intelligent life could not form in the universe that unfolded from these different preconditions.
That strikes me as a very bold claim. To make it, one has to believe both of the following: first, that we can accurately predict the nature of a universe that follows laws other than the laws that govern our own universe; and, secondly, that we have a reasonable understanding of the range of conditions under which intelligent life might arise, and the nature of that life, in universes both like and unlike our own.
It’s worth noting that there is a great deal we still don’t know about the only universe of which we’re aware, the one we can actually observe. And it’s worth noting that we really don’t understand the mechanisms of intelligence, nor the mechanisms by which life emerged, nor whether there is life anywhere else in our universe including on those planets and satellites within reach of our own small blue orb.
Given how new and incomplete our own knowledge is of the universe we inhabit and the rules that govern it, we should be skeptical that we’re capable of anticipating the infinite range of alternative universes that might arise through the modification of various physical constants. Certainly, we have not invested thousands of cosmologist-years in studying these hypothetical alternatives.
Similarly, given that we have exactly one example of life from which to generalize in a universe likely containing literally trillions of planets, it seems prudent to hesitate before speaking with authority regarding which possible universes can and can’t support life.
Claim: The Genetic Code is Evidence of an Intelligent Designer
Put simply, Meyer’s argument here is based on the observation that the genetic code – the encoding of information in the DNA of living things – represents a particular kind of “functional” information storage mechanism that is unlikely to have arisen through purely natural processes. I find this the most unsatisfying of Meyer’s claims.
Meyer argues in his book and in his numerous public appearances that, in our consistent and repeated experience, every instance of such functional information storage is the result of a guiding intelligence. It follows, he argues, that the storage of functional information in DNA must also be the product of a guiding intelligence.
This seems to be such an obviously poor and illogical argument that I find myself wondering if I am missing something profound. But let’s break it down.
- We are aware of numerous examples of the encoding of “functional” information in a structured form, from computer programs to grammars to all sorts of artificial symbolic schemes.
- Our experience with all of these is that they are the product of intelligence. Specifically, they are the product of human intelligence.
- It is, therefore, our uniform and repeated experience that such encoding is the product of intelligence.
- But we are also aware of the encoding of “functional” information in a structured form in the DNA that is found in each of our cells. It follows, therefore, that this information too must be the product of intelligence, since it is our universal and repeated experience that all such information is the product of intelligence.
But wait. That is – at best – a circular argument. If we include DNA in our initial inventory of “functional” information, then it’s no longer our uniform and repeated experience that such information is the product of intelligence. Rather, it’s our uniform and repeated experience that man-made encoding of information is man-made. That says nothing about not-man-made encoding of information.
(On the other hand, it does seem to me that Meyer would be more consistent if he argued that, since every instance of encoded information of which we’re aware is actually man-made, DNA must also be man-made. But that would be an even more absurd argument.)
Instances of functional information storage in DNA both predate and outnumber every form which we can trace to an intelligent source – that is, every form which was created by man. Our actual experience is that every cell in every organism contains a vast amount of structured, functional information for which we can identify no creating intelligence. There is no basis, therefore, for his oft-repeated claim that, in our consistent experience, such storage is an artifact of intelligence, and the fact that he continues to repeat the claim strikes me as peculiar.
Note that this is subtly different from a probability argument. The argument is that it is the consistency of our experience regarding the origin of artificially encoded information that compels us to accept an intelligent origin of apparently naturally occurring encoded information.
The error seems too obvious to be overlooked, too often emphasized by Meyer to be accidental, and, frankly, too flagrant to be wholly innocent. Again, perhaps I am misunderstanding his argument in some way which will be immediately evident when it’s explained to me.
God of the Gaps?
Meyer doesn’t like this phrase, and I can understand why. We humans have a long tradition of invoking deities to fill the gaps in our understanding of the material universe. We have probably done it since our earliest moments of awareness – indeed, the utility of having that comforting and ready answer might, one can easily believe, be why we are inclined to believe in the supernatural.
Meyer has written a book that could have been written at any time during our long quest for understanding. The details would change, the sophistication would vary, but the product would be similar: a man standing on the edge of the unknown surveys the wisest men around him and concludes that, since they have no wholly satisfactory answers, one or another god is the most plausible explanation.
Though Meyer objects to the phrase and argues that he is not engaging in an argument from ignorance, here is how he describes, in Chapter 20, the argument he is making:
Premise One: Despite a thorough search, no materialistic causes have been discovered with the power to produce large amounts of specified information required to produce the first cell.
Premise Two: Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information.
Premise Three: Intelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified information in the cell.
Take a look at that Premise One: “Despite a thorough search….”
What does “thorough” mean, in this context? How does “Despite a thorough search” differ from “Thus far?” What aspect of knowledge does Meyer believe we have exhausted, in our thorough but failed search?
There will always be things we haven’t yet figured out. There will always be a precipice, beyond which is something mysterious and seemingly impenetrable. And there will always be those who stand on the edge and give up on the process and think, I guess God did it.
Of course, they could be right. But they don’t have a very good track record, and I think both science and religion suffer when people engage in this kind of end-run around the humble scientific method, or try to co-opt it to make a theological point. (Similarly, science suffers when scientists try to impugn God with their science. But that’s the mirror image of what’s going on here, and a topic for another day.)
The universe is unimaginably vast, at least 90 billion light-years across and perhaps orders of magnitude larger. It contains perhaps trillions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. It is old, several times older than our own sun, and is full of mysteries.
A hundred years ago our best and brightest argued over whether our galaxy was the only one, and whether the universe was older than we now know our own planet to be. We knew a lot – and, it turns out, we knew almost nothing.
Our best understanding, currently represented by quantum field theory, is bizarre and wildly unintuitive – and yet has wonderful predictive power and astounding mathematical rigor: in some ways, it is the most comprehensive and successful scientific theory ever devised.
It’s too early to throw in the towel.
Published in Science & Technology
Even if I do think it’s obvious (even if not everyone can understand it, like Satan not being the hero of Paradise Lost), maybe I actually do know how to teach it.
You just have to connect the five dots:
1. the eyewitness in the foregoing passage,
2. the one who is testifying,
3. the one who wrote it down,
4. the writing he wrote,
5. and the Gospel of John itself.
HW, you can see the first three connections, right? The eyewitness is the one testifying, the same guy wrote it down, and obviously he wrote what he wrote. You just don’t think that the writing referred to here is necessarily the Gospel of John itself?
I may know a way to connect that last dot for you.
No, but that’s an understandably mistaken guess. It’s an oddly effective negotiation strategy originating in the turbulent post-World War II Italian political scene, first used in crony-capitalist machinations intended to transfer the ownership of military aircraft manufacturing to the pseudo-private sector. Hence Old Bathos’ airplane reference.
I’m not sure I understand you. The author of the gospel of John presents a narrative, but he does not tell us where he, himself, exists within the narrative.
Maybe we should go more slowly.
Do you agree that the eyewitness mention in John 21 is the same guy who is said to be testifying in verse 24?
Yes. I think the author is telling us about a person who, supposedly, claims to be an eyewitness.
He was Swiss and a member of an absurdly gifted family.
And you agree that the same guy wrote some down his testimony?
Not necessarily. I have read that the gospel of John is a cut and paste with several “editors” who added pieces of the gospel, resulting in what we now think of as the gospel of John. One author edits a previous author, possibly because the “new” author wanted to add a new detail or a slightly different theological viewpoint.
No. They didn’t have an answer, and wanted physics not to dwell on something they considered unproductive, and possibly embarrassing, eg, that they didn’t have an answer to it. Wigner kept insisting that the interaction of consciousness and quantum events be taken seriously. David Bohm tried to address it, and came up with an iteration of the De Broglie “pilot wave” hidden variables perspective, that was subsequently more or less discredited (some claim a new version of Bohm’s formulation) and Bohm was ostracized (it didn’t help that, unlike Oppenheimer, he was charged for having been a member of the communist party, and his career in physics in the US destroyed; he couldn’t get a job here, was fired from his job at Cornell, I believe it was, went to Brazil for a while and then to Europe. His career was destroyed. Bohr himself nixed Everrett’s thesis which included is multiple universe model for the collapse of the wave equation, which is the favored interpretation of Sean Carroll, who is working on the mathematics of it, though the idea is far fetched, indeed. Everrett left physics and became the originator of the nuclear triad strategy and mutual assure destruction. John Bell, in his spare time, so as not to distract from his work at CERN (and on the down-low) developed his Bell’s theorem or Bell’s inequality on how to test Shrodingers’ conundrum. Alain Aspect,among others, tried to apply Bell’s theorem to assess the phenomenon, with quantumly entangle photons (the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox) and to the extent tested, as I understand it, they have confirmed Shrodinger’s fears. But this remains a backwater of physics. Much more reputable is to doe such things as hypothesize the evaporation of Black Holes, as Hawking did. Or advance string theory, with Green, Susskind, et. al. Still no answer. You can read my perspective here on Ricochet if you wish: Noesis,the boo
They didn’t know what Consciousness is. No one does. So why try to explain the phenomenon? As Feynmann said: No one understands Quantum Mechanics.
You’re answering the wrong question.
When verse 24 refers to an eyewitness who is testifying and to a guy a who wrote down his testimony, is verse 24 referring to the same guy?
I’m going to back-up Heavy on this one. Here is the quote that he copied form the New Revised translation of the Bible:
“This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true.”
Taken in plain English, this author is writing in the third person about somebody else. Unless you have a better translation, or if the original Greek has a slightly different meaning, or if there is another citation where the author explains this, then he is clearly not talking about himself as the witness.
I agree. I’m not sure, SA, where you are going with this.
Correct. And his arguments against Quantum Mechanics (eg, the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox and the impossibility of what are now called Bose-Einstein condensates) resulted in better and better understanding of the mind-boggling nature of Quantum mechanics. When his objections were studied, to the extent possible, the things that were impossible turned out to be the case. What was impossible was real. But real physicists now are too busy to do such science as Einstein. Rather, they are looking for those 10 to the 500th power other Universes that just have to be out there, even though there is no real possibility of ever finding them. Or assessing how to demonstrate the “Inflaton Field” that would have to have a fundamental particle so large we could never achieve the energies needed to detect it. A field pre-existing the Universe in which the Universe arose? Good luck with that. Or more potentially productive, trying to figure out what dark matter and dark energy are.
It’s clearer in Greek, but the English is clear enough. He’s plainly talking about himself, and I don’t know how that can fail to be plain to anyone. But I also don’t understand how anyone can fail to see that Satan is not the hero in Milton.
Let’s just connect the dots one at a time.
Verse 24 refers to an eyewitness from earlier in chapter 21, right?
Is that eyewitness the same guy who verse 24 says is testifying?
Yes.
No. Where does it say he is the same guy? Is it presumed that the entire gospel is written in the third person?
… a bunch of things that you know to be untrue, or just things about which you’re particularly skeptical?
It seems to me that, as long as what they propose is falsifiable, the nuttier stuff is likely to eventually be falsified. And that is what doing science is all about.
For a long time and in a lot of informational texts, it is considered bad form to write in first person about yourself. In history writings, you’ll sometimes find writers refer to personal discoveries as “this author”. Self referential in the third person.
We have gotten away from some of that, but as a document trying to have some legal effect (eyewitness testimony), we shouldn’t be too dismissive of the author referring to self in the third person.
In verse 24. You quoted it yourself.
You’re answering the wrong question.
Is the disciple the guy from earlier in chapter 21?
Is that the guy who’s testifying, according to verse 24?
Is that the guy who wrote these things down, according to verse 24?
For goodness’ sake, don’t answer a question I haven’t asked yet! Go back to # 451 if you need to. I’m not asking if this guy wrote the Gospel of John. That’s a last dot to connect. We’re doing more rudimentary work here.
I’m not sure I believe you. But, that’s an interesting angle.
If an author was an eyewitness to an event such as a man rising from the dead, it would be very strange for that author to not clearly communicate to his readers that he was, in fact, an eyewitness.
Now, even eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate. That’s why there are sometimes people who were sent to prison based on eyewitness testimony and later get released based on DNA evidence plus other evidence discovered years later.
Still, many New Testament scholars say that the writers of the gospels were not eyewitnesses. So, if you read John and think that this author might not be an eyewitness to the events he describes, you are not alone. It’s a mainstream conclusion.
The author refers to the “disciple that Jesus loved” several times. The author is telling his readers that this “disciple that Jesus loved” has provided testimony to him.
Yes, it would.
That’s why he did.
Are you willing to consider the situation step by step? You stopped after connecting just two dots. The third should be easy:
Is the guy identified in John 21:24 as an eyewitness who is testifying the same guy as the guy who, according to John 21:24, wrote these things down?
Way to ignore the question, HW.
I would say no. What do you think?
I was trying to answer the question by telling you what I think that verse is communicating to the reader. Geez.
It’s past 9 PM here in Indiana. Time to get some sleep and take another crack at the gospel of John tomorrow. Peace.
Matthew and John were both disciples and neither of them refer to themselves in the first person anywhere in their respective gospels even when recounting events they name themselves in.
I did not answer a question there. I posed a question.
Yes, presumably.
Yes.
No. The author is simply quoting him in plain English. Again, he speaks of the disciple in the 3rd person.
What question did I answer that you did not pose?
I would say yes. That’s what the sentence means. Look at the English:
The subject of “has written” is “who,” and “who” is a pronoun whose antecedent is “the disciple.” They’re the same guy.
It was a question about verse 24, not about the rest of the Gospel, but you answered with the rest of the Gospel.
I am flabbergasted. The answer is yes. The only possible answer is yes. The subject of “has written” is “who,” which refers to “the disciple.”
The question about whether the author of verse 24 is talking about himself. That, once again, is the last dot to connect. You’re still answering it, apparently; otherwise why would you even mention the 3rd person?