Wednesday, April 7, 2004

Design without a creator? Yes, it’s possible

I had a flashback to ninth grade as I read Jeremy Conley’s article of Wednesday, March 24, 2004 entitled: “If you want real science, consider some of evolution’s many contradictions.”

A newspaper article intrigued me: “Einstein Wrong! Matter can travel Faster Than Light,” or some such headline. At 14 years old, I believed that newspapers (and of course books) printed facts and you could trust them. I brought the article to science class, and all of us marveled at this “breakthrough” in science. It wasn’t until I took a nuclear physics course in my junior year of college I learned the truth about Einstein and about printed claims of fact.

The article was half true: Shine light through a dense medium and fire subatomic particles through the medium as well, then mass can move faster than the speed of light because the light is slowed and the particles are sped up.

I was gullible then, and Jeremy Conley is gullible now. A couple of examples of gullibility will indicate that arguments offered by creationists are mainly smoke and mirrors.

The improbability argument doesn’t apply! The organization of atoms into molecules and molecules into more elaborate and complex structures are governed by the laws of nature and the inherent mathematics involved. A complex organ, the eye for example, can arise naturally and in a finite number of steps in a “short” amount of time. Let me quote myself from a previous article:

The “human eye” question is answered in two parts: Eyes have evolved gradually and in different ways. Snakes use infrared light (heat) to sense your presence so they can bite you. Electric eels use fluctuations in their electromagnetic fields to sense you so they can shock you. Spiders spin webs with “flower patterns” on them to attract insects who see in the ultraviolet spectrum.

In short, there are lots of different kinds of “eyes out there” which let their owners do better than their rivals.

Now, for the human eye. Could this organ evolve (without a designer) through a multitude of stages and reach the complexity it now has? How could you demonstrate this?

Modern computers come to the rescue. A computer model of the human eye, developed by Daniel Milson and Susan Pelger in 1994, describes the evolution of the human eye and gives the number of steps required to form a completely functional eye, and very nicely validates once again the principles of Darwinism.

Now let me address intelligent design without a creator from another point of view. Here, my friends, the natural numbers come into play with remarkable consequences.

Grant me that we can count things: Raindrops as they fall, stars as they twinkle, grains of sand on a warm beach, and so on. The question then arises whether every very large collection of raindrops, atoms in matter, and so on must, by logical necessity, possess recognizable order at some level?

Yes, this is a very abstract and mind-bending idea, and how could you ever get a handle on this kind of idea? So, here is a very simple case of this idea:

At any party with at least six people, there are either three people who are all mutual acquaintances (each one knows the other two) or mutual strangers (each one does not know either of the other two).

Here is another statement of the same problem: Place at least six dots anywhere on a sheet of paper and join a pair of dots with either a red or a blue line. There is always a blue triangle formed or a red triangle formed. (How nifty!)

This problem is a simple example of Ramsey Theory in action familiar to most math students.

Ramsey Theory, a branch of pure mathematics, investigates the existence of ordered patterns in sufficiently large sets of randomly selected objects: Gatherings of people, piles of pebbles, stars in the night sky, or sequences of numbers generated by the throw of a die.

Ramsey Theory goes further: It shows that complete disorder is impossible! No matter how complicated, chaotic, or random something appears to be, deep within that mess is a smaller entity with a definite structure. That is, regularities must arise even in a universe without a creator! So grant me the natural numbers, then I can guarantee you that there is order in the universe without the need for a God.

Moral: Probability arguments, without the initial constraints specified, are meaningless and serve merely to mislead the unwary reader.

Conclusion: Specified initial constraints plus randomness lead to order. Ramsey Theory, a branch of pure mathematics, proves this to be so.

The scientists Jeremy Conley mentioned are unaware of this branch of mathematics and related disciplines and made their remarks based only on probabilistic arguments which is incorrect.

You may ask whether “intelligent design” is possible with a “dumb” creator or no creator. Dear reader, consider the task of tiling a wall. You can tile it with squares so there are no gaps and no overlaps. Can you come up with another regular polygon that also tiles the wall?

Well, the honeybee knows one of them. Bees make their hives in the shape that uses the least amount of wax. No bee has ever received a degree from Georgia Tech in civil engineering, so what is the story? Again, initial constraints determine order even by “dumb” creators.

Birds aren’t that smart either. They, nevertheless, fly in patterns that conserve energy and much more. Again, a simple constraint determines the flight pattern.

Let me emphasize again that initial constraints plus randomness can, and does, create elaborate, intelligent designs without the intervention of a creator.

A comment for fun: 10 to the 80 power is a good guess at the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe; a huge number for physicists, but small potatoes for mathematicians. Dr. John Horton Conway at Princeton University, a number theorist among other things, routinely imagines and computes huge numbers. Conway, on a daily basis, thinks about 24 dimensional space and its geometry.

Conway discovered a new finite group, which is the set of symmetries of a geometric object. A cube, for example, has 24 symmetries. There are 24 ways to rotate it to an identical position. But the Conway group, as it became known, has more than 10 to the 18 power symmetries, making it the largest finite group known at the time of its discovery. (It was later superseded by the so-called Monster group, which has more than 10 to the 53 power symmetries.)

Conway was forced to develop a notation, beyond exponents, so mathematicians could write down even bigger numbers; numbers so large they are uncomputable for all time.

Peter Duran

Fayetteville, Ga.