Eric's Beijing Diary

One-cell bacteria showing the flagellum. Our concern in this lesson is with the highly complex motor on the inside that makes this whip spin.

What is a flagellum? It is a whip that acts as a propeller. It is used for the purpose of propelling bacteria.

In Lesson 12, we talked about the fact that complex organisms clearly demonstrate design. Dr. Behe used the example of a mouse trap to show how complex micro-machines in a cell could not have evolved, because all the parts had to be there for the machine to work at all. Natural selection doesn’t work if you start with something that doesn’t work even a little bit. If you haven’t been through that lesson, you might want to take a look at it. But if not, this one reiterates much of what was introduced in that lesson, so if you pay attention to this lesson, you will be able to get the basic idea.

As you watch the video below, you will need to remind yourself continually that the motor you are seeing is tiny. As you are watching, it will fill the screen (actually an animation of it). But it is microscopic. You can’t see it without a microscope. Darwin did not know it existed, because he did not have a microscope. If he had, he never would have been able to write On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. But he did not have a microscope, so he had no idea how incredibly complex microorganisms are. So it was easy for him to imagine that life forms developed through a series of mutations.

Don’t get me wrong, even without a microscope, the highly religious doctrine of evolution is ludicrous, or at least very incomplete. Why do I say this? Because even if you allow yourself to suppose that higher organisms evolved from very primitive life forms, that does not explain where the environment in which they developed came from. That is why when I am talking to students, I rarely ask them about biology. I say, “Who put the stars in the sky.”

I once watched a debate between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins. I can’t remember exactly how Lennox put it, but his question to Dawkins was very similar to the one I often ask students in China. Dawkins said, “I don’t know. Maybe there will be a Darwin for that part some day.”

I was flabbergasted. I thought, “That’s the best you can do??” You see, even though evolutionists have so many explanations for how life developed, they have no theory at all about how the universe in which these organisms have flourished came to be. The universe in which those organism supposedly evolved could not itself have evolved by natural selection, because the universe is made of inorganic matter.

So where do we go from here? I have had a love-hate relationship with apologetics all my adult life. It just never made sense to me to waste time arguing with someone who chooses to believe something stupid. Why? This is what the Bible says:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. (Proverbs 26:4)

Don’t lower yourself to argue with someone who is spouting nonsense. No one with any sense is going to believe him anyway. So I stayed away from apologetics. I liked C.S. Lewis. But I refused to read Mere Christianity. And I had no interest in the creation—evolution debates that were a common place of 70s academia. Then one day I was sitting in the library reading a science magazine—I think it was Scientific American. They were talking about how “debate was not really the proper format for resolving these issues.” Obviously they were losing. If they had been winning the debates, they would be talking about how important debates are.

You see, if an idea—such as the idea that a highly sophisticated motor that spins at 100,000 rpms could have evolved by a series of random mutations—begins to be regarded as not only legitimate, but even respectable, then sometimes you need to get down into the arena and debate that idea to expose it for the stupid nonsense that it is. Why? This is what the Bible says:

Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit. (Proverbs 26:5)

So watch the video. The most interesting part of this video is about a curator in Germany who was setting up a display to celebrate Charles Darwin. He had set up a scale with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life on one side, and a few books written by “creationist” nut cases on the other side. The display showed the side of the scale with Darwin’s book on it to be lower, showing that all the objections to Darwin’s idea put together could not outweigh Darwin’s logic. As he was building the display, he picked up one of these books he has dismissed as nonsense and started reading it. He couldn’t put it down. He had come from a totally secular, non-religious background, and had taken a lot for granted. But in reading these well reasoned arguments, he saw that these people were not stupid. They were intelligent scientists who were pointing out serious flaws in Darwin’s thinking. The curator who built the display to honor Darwin now no longer believes in Darwin. And you won’t either after you have seen this video.

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Labels: Intelligent Design

Click for larger image.

Watch this seven-minute video. Can you decipher Meyer’s basic thesis? What he is basically saying is that if you are going to look for a cause for something, you should look for a cause currently observable that is known to produce the kind of thing you are looking for. So what current cause is known to produce information? He quotes Henry Quastler:

The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.

The essence of DNA is information:

The information density of DNA is remarkable — just one gram can store 215 petabytes, or 215 million gigabytes, of data. For context, the average hard drive in a laptop can house just one millionth of that amount. —John Cumbers

So what is the cause of the massive amount of information contained in the DNA molecule? Clearly it would involve some sort of conscious activity. The idea that the bringing in of DNA would be associated with conscious activity is not only rational, it is nonsensical to assume that something with such massive information storage capacity could come about without conscious activity, as a result of a crude accident of nature.

Meyer goes as far as to say that if Darwin had applied his own methods using the information we have available to day, he would have drawn very different conclusions than the ones we all study in our science books. Not sure about that, because I don’t know if mere lack of information was the primary cause of Darwin’s conclusions. But I guess I would say that if Darwin had had access to a microscope, the conclusions he came to would have been much harder to justify, which is why they are being challenged today. And there is no way his book Origin of Species could have been published today, because the title, at least, is overtly racist. Here is the full title of Darwin's classic: Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

Click for larger image.

In the video below, Michael Behe explains his growing skepticism of Darwin's theory, and he outlines some of the problems with it, particularly that scientists in Darwin's day had no idea how complex the human cell is, because they had never seen it.

If I could summarize the basic thesis of the Intelligent Design folks re: Darwinian evolution, it would look like this:

Darwin’s methods + today’s information = Intelligent Design

The general idea seems to be, “Now that we have microscopes and can see how complex the human cell actually is, there is no more excuse for believing a theory as juvenile as Darwin’s theory of evolution. The complexity of the cell makes obvious the existence, at some point in the process, of a vastly intelligent mind.”

I don’t know if I have expressed it just the way they would, but I would say that, while I agree with the Intelligent Design folks that the irreducible complexity of the cell makes evident the presence of intelligence in the development of this complexity, I believe that intelligent design was more than obvious long before there were microscopes. The question I pose to Chinese young people when I am talking about this, is not “How can something as complex as the human cell have evolved without direction?” My question is “Who put the stars in the sky?” You see, even if you believe that all life evolved originally from some sort of “primordial soup,” you still have to explain where that primordial soup came from. And where did the planet on which it existed come from? So the existence of an intelligent designer is not just obvious to anyone with a microscope. It is more than obvious to anyone who has ever looked into the night sky and tried to count the stars.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” (Psalm 19:1)

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Labels: Evolution, Intelligent Design

Charles Darwin

What started this was a book by Stephen Meyer called a Darwin's Doubt. David Gelernter from Yale read this book and wrote an essay called Giving Up Darwin, in which he says that Darwin's theory has failed. He also mentions David Berlinski, a long time Darwin doubter, in his essay. It is this essay that got the attention of the Hoover Institution, and this discussion with those men is the result.

Gerlernter seems to feel a need to honor Darwin while refuting him. Berlinski feels no such obligation. As to what is the problem with Darwin, it starts with the Cambrian Explosion, a problem Darwin himself acknowledged. The issue there is that varieties appear that seem to be very abrupt. Too abrupt to be evolutionary. I personally don't think that is the main problem with Darwin, but that is probably because I have never been a believer in Darwinian evolution. But if you are, you have some explaining to do, because the time frames just don't fit the numbers of years you would need for those life forms to emerge, even according to Darwinian evolution. I'm not interested in that, because I don't believe in evolution as an explanation of such massive changes.

Evolution just means change, and I have no problem with changes in population variations influenced by natural factors. But expanding Darwin's theory to explain going from single-celled life to highly complex life forms is ridiculous in my opinion. Berlinsky refers to the massive complexity of the cell and when you consider this complexity, it is so improbable that this complexity came about accidentally. David Gerlernter is very charitable toward Darwin, saying that Darwin couldn't have known what we know now. He seems inclined to forgive Darwin for not being aware of the complexity. I'm not sure about that. I think Darwin was trying to develop a theory that left God out of the picture. But it is probably fair to say that Darwin would have had a much harder time pulling it off today.

Think about mutations. Mutations are genetic accidents. When have they ever been positive? If a calf is born with two heads, it isn't going to be more prosperous. So the idea of all high order organisms being developed by successive mutations is completely bizarre, unless you can show me a single example of a mutation had a good result or made the creature in question more survivable.

Gelernter and Berlinski are not giving themselves over to Meyer's ideas of intelligent design. But Gelernter is very defensive of Meyer and his approach. In other words, even though he is not ready to accept Meyer's ideas himself, he is annoyed with those who dismiss them out of hand. Gerlernter asks if there is a designer, why did he back himself into so many corners? In other words, why would a designer make so many bad things. My answer to that would be the Fall. Creation now is not the way it was intended to be. Romans 8 says that the whole creation groans. Gerlernter says "I would fail this world." I agree. But I don't think that militates against the existence of a creator.

Meyer very tactfully says that his Christian perspective informs his answer to that question. In other words, from a Christian point of view, you would expect design, but you would also expect to see signs of something that has gone wrong. Exactly.

The group moves on to a discussion about consciousness, and how it could have come about. The problem of the mind. This issue deserves a separate blog post and podcast, which I may do in connection with the subject of artificial intelligence.

The event ends with Peter Robinson bringing up three "has beens." The first is Karl Marx. The second is Sigmund Freud. The third, of course, is Darwin. Agreement on Karl Marx was universal, but he got some pushback about Freud. They weren't all willing to accept that Freud is finished. And there seemed to be some hesitation to cast Darwin on the ash heap of history, even as they all agreed that Darwin's theory was fatally flawed.