It’s a red herring.
The main problem with the argument of irreducible complexity, as advanced by Michael Behe, for example, is far simpler than I think most respondents have described.
What Behe and others do is look at a complex organism the way you could look at an arrangement of thousands of marbles on a gym floor. You look at this arrangement, marvel at it, admire the different colours and patterns that are displayed, and then ask yourself, what kind of force could have placed all these marbles in exactly these locations?
It’s unimaginable: the effort, planning, and skill required to have every marble end up in exactly the place it ended up in! How could anyone believe that it was the result of a random process?
Behe implicitly assumes that the marbles were somehow destined to be in exactly the locations they ended up in. The goal of history was to put each marble in exactly that one place and no other. That is because he implicitly assumes there was a “creator” who intended all of the marbles to be exactly where they were. And he assumes that we humans, exactly as we are, are exactly what the end result of creation or evolution was intended to be all along.
But evolution doesn’t hold the view that the process of natural selection was designed or destined to produce a human being with all the characteristics we now have. The marbles ended up where they were through the process of being spilled onto the floor, hitting each other, bouncing a certain height, rolling and colliding with each other. Evolution holds that innumerable factors under extremely diverse conditions with almost infinite combinations of effects influenced the development of species in ways that may not have been consciously “designed” in a human sense.
Or might have been. Evolution does not claim to know why the marbles rolled onto the floor. They might have been rolled there by God, after all. Evolution doesn’t and couldn’t claim to know that. That is the purview of religion.
I said “human sense” because I don’t believe there is the slightest obstacle, in evolution, to a belief in God, who may well have created the world in exactly the way science suggests it was created: with a big bang millions of years ago, with simple life forms adapting and growing more complex and splattering into diversity as conditions changed, and “evolving” into what we now call human, with the miracle of consciousness, and the inexplicable: a sense of humour, memories, music, and a capacity for tears. Where’s the problem, for the believer? There is none, except, ironically, for the limitations of human knowledge, demonstrated most vividly in the Intelligent Design movement which tries to solve a problem that does not exist.
How constricted is the Intelligent Design hypothesis? What is more amazing, and reflects more vividly the glory of God: the stunning diversity of life forms and geological shapes of the earth? Or those prudish zealots with their black markers and their wagging fingers who don’t know that they don’t know what the act of creation looks like.
I have a solution to the whole problem of religion vs. science on the issue of evolution.
The Bible says that God “created” the world. I hope that even devout, conservative, Bush-loving Christians might agree that the meaning of the word “create” is, at heart, a bit of a mystery. When we say someone “created” a house, we don’t mean he invented wood and glass. We mean he obtained or created a design, gathered all the necessary material components, assembled a crew, and put everything together into a “house”. It beggars, for example, the question of who created glass.
When we say God “created” the world, however, we mean he created the design and assembled the parts, but he also created the parts– from nothing.
We have as much reason to believe that he did it in one literal instant in a human sense as we have for the belief that he did it over billions of years, from a single point in space, outwards, and in a single point of time, outwards. Space did not even exist in a meaningful sense, nor did time, until God filled it.
How dare Michael Behe insist that he knows that “create” means “in the exact space and time in which we now live”?
Obviously, God willed creation into existence. What is the obstacle, then, to believing that science is merely the systematic study of the evidence of that act of creation? Science is the study of how God “created” the world. I would say that we know now that God probably did not make everything appear everywhere (where it is today) in one instant. He appears to have started the act of creation in one specific location, and the event spread outwards from there– and still spreads outwards today.
I need a name for this. How about: “Scientific Creationism”? “Ontological Intelligence”? Then I need to create a private Foundation and a text book and find some fat donors and give some speeches at gatherings of Republican Christians where I rail against homosexuality and gun control and those arrogant educated elites who think they’re smarter than us and the sins our age that are all the result of scientific atheism.
I will soon be rich.
Thank you.
Wiki on Irreducible Complexity