Wiki on
Irreducible Complexity
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 the sins our age that are all the result of scientific
atheism.
I will soon be rich.
Thank you.
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 like this?
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.
All Contents Copyright
© Bill Van Dyk
2009 All Rights Reserved
Font: Verdana
This is just a quick test of Expression Web 3.
