Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Illogical evolution: Design without a designer

For those who tried to understand the very educated and intellectual letter last week that describes how we can get a design in the universe without a designer, I want to help you understand what is being proposed.

Consider the following example. Suppose you found a book lying on the ground. It is a book like any other with a cover, a binding and many, many pages. You notice on the cover of this book are the words, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.”

You open the book and see a title page with the same words, you see a table of contents with entries like “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet,” and you see page numbers associated with them.

You notice that the pages in the book are numbered and when you turn to the pages given in the table of contents, there appears to be a story beginning on that page with the same title given in the table of contents. You read through the stories and enjoy their characters, their plots and their messages immensely.

According to the inferences drawn by last week’s writer to some work done by Dr. John Horton Conway of Princeton, you should not logically assume that this book you have just picked up had an intelligent design behind it.

Because some random order can be found in the universe, then it would be illogical to proceed with your life based on the assumption that “The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare” is anything more than an example of this random order.

You must decide whether you think this is a rational conclusion or not.

But before you do, let me make a couple of more points in response to information given or implied in this same letter.

One implication given is the Intelligent Design (ID) movement is based on the idea that undirected order cannot be found in nature. This would mean that finding order in nature negates the Intelligent Design movement.

Sorry, but this is all wrong. I have seen no one in the ID movement claim that order cannot be found in nature. One example of a natural phenomenon that exhibits order is a snowflake. What you cannot get from nature ANYWHERE is an example of how extreme order and information can be generated by nature.

Nature can give you a waterfall but nature cannot give you a hydroelectric plant. Nature can you give you a mountain that looks sort of like a face but nature cannot give you a mountain that has the faces of four presidents. Nature can give you a cloud but nature will not use the clouds to spell out “See Rock City.”

Nature may give us a snowflake but nature will not give us DNA.

Also, for a second time this writer tells us that a computer model developed by Daniel Milson and Susan Pelger in 1994 has shown how a human eye could evolve by natural processes in a historically short order of time and uses examples found in the animal world today of the progress of the eye.

Sorry, but this is completely wrong also. First of all, Nilsson (not Milson) admits there never was a computer model; it was done by hand.

Second, the calculations make many assumptions that have no supporting documentation.

Third, the calculations were such that the 400,000 generations conclusion was meaningless. Any number of generations could have been concluded based on the calculations.

Fourth, the end result was simply an eyeball, not a complete eye.

Fifth, giving examples of the different types of sight of living creatures is completely irrelevant unless you can explain the mechanism whereby one type of sight can change into another or at least show some evidence that this change has actually taken place.

Sixth, the human eye is just one of many examples given for the “irreducible complexity” argument used by the ID proponents.

The Nilsson-Pelger evolutionary eye claim is an urban myth that has been adopted as real science by the Darwinists who desperately grasp for anything that may prop up their dying theory.

But you can understand the reasoning of these arguments which is the philosophical underpinning of the Darwinists. If you assume there is no Intelligent Designer, then how do you explain our existence, or the existence of the human eye? By offering naturalistic explanations regardless of the rationality of those explanations, the accountability to a Creator can be avoided.

So before you make your decision about what the evidence tells us regarding the existence of an Intelligent Designer, understand that the Naturalist philosophy is just that, a philosophy that is often in complete disagreement with the evidence. Christians believe that the heavens reveal the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of his hand.

Is “The Complete Works Of Jesus Christ” a product of purely natural forces or does the design require a Designer? He provides you the evidence but what you do with that evidence is up to you.

Pepper Adams

Peachtree City, Ga.