The Problem with Christians

[JuliaL]

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So what evidence led you to conclude the existence of design? You're being remarkably evasive on this point: don't you have any?

Evidence of design would include any multi-part system but let's go with the human eye, a topic you've probably debated many times before, so I'll hopefully be taking a different approach. Here is a brief description of the major parts of the eye.

Anterior chamber: The chamber between the back surface of the cornea and the front surface of the lens. The anterior chamber holds the aqueous.

Aqueous humour: Clear watery liquid that fills the anterior chamber of the eye; helps to maintain pressure and feeds the cornea with nutrients to keep it healthy.

Blind spot: Small area of the retina where the optic nerve leaves the eye: any image falling here will not be seen.

Choroid: Thin tissue layer containing blood vessels, sandwiched between the sclera and retina; also, because of the high melanocytes content, the choroid acts as a light-absorbing layer.

Ciliary muscles: The muscle that controls the small fibres that hold the lens in place. The ciliary muscle controls the shape of the lens as it narrows and thickens to focus on objects at different distances.

Lens: The lens is found behind the pupil. The function of the lens is the change the focus of the eye so that we can see things close up. A health lens looks clear and transparent. Sometimes the lens can become cloudy and prevent light getting through. This is called cataract. If there is a lot of cataract, we can sometimes see the lens because the pupil looks white instead of black.

Macula: Small central area of the retina that provides the finest vision. We use this for fine work and reading. The macular naturally degenerates over time, called age-related macular degeneration.

Optic nerve: Made up of over 1.1 million nerve cells, the optic nerve is like a cable that carries visual signals made by the retina all the way to the back of the brain.

Retina: Layer of tissue on the back of the eye that contains cells responsive to light (photoreceptors). The nerves of the retina change the light to messages that travel to the brain to make the images that we can see.

Sclera: The white, tough, outer layer of the eyeball; made from very strong connective tissue and is continuous with the cornea.  The sclera acts like a shell for the eye and gives the eyeball its shape. You can see the front part of the slera through the conjunctiva. Extraocular muscles attach to the sclera to move the eye.

Vitreous humour: Clear, jelly-like fluid that fills eye. The vitreous helps the eye to keep its shape. It makes a clear pathway for the light as it travels from the lens to the retina.  https://www.hollows.org.nz/eye-health/an...vAodYZ8MDQ

What we have is an integrated system of many parts and each part is supposedly a product of random  genetic mutation. However, on their own, the vast majority of these mutations would have been useless, since they are dependent on the other parts in order to function. For instance, you could have a perfectly formed eye, but with no optic nerve you won't see anything, and even if you had an optic nerve, you still couldn't see unless you had millions of neurons, with hundreds of millions of connections in the brain to interpret and process the data.

So what are the chances that random mutations (of the sex cell)s could write the code for a complete visual system? I would say none. As I demonstrated with the haemaglobin example, the chances of randomly generating the correct sequence of amino acids to create this one protein was one in 10 to the power of 650. But now we have to have a very large number of random mutations to produce thousands of different proteins required to make vision possible. If we look at a tiny part of the whole visual system, the aqueous humor, we see that it contains hundreds of different proteins,

"Proteomic analysis of hAH identified 676 nonredundant proteins. More than 80% of these proteins are novel identifications.". http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3066620/

We also need to know what the average protein size is;

"The average human gene contains 4 exons totaling 1,350 base pairs and thus encodes an average protein of 450 amino acids". http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultrane...H/HGP.html[\hide]

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So what is the statistical probability that random mutations of the DNA would end up coding for the 676 proteins found in the aqueous humor? That would be (on average) one in twenty multiplied by one in twenty, 450 times for each protein, multiplied by 676 for the total number of proteins. Since 10 to the power of 50 is considered absurd, and the chances of correctly constructing each of the 676 proteins by chance is vastly more than 10 to the power of 50, this equates to zero probability that the aqueous humor proteins could develop by random chance.

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Bear in mind that the AH proteins are a tiny part of the visual system, the chances of having random DNA mutations being responsible for the thousands of essential protein components in the rest of the visual system is just plain absurd.

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Here's another probability calculation.
If average, your father produced on the order of  two trillion (10^12) sperm in his lifetime exactly one of which produced you.
Your mother started with about two million eggs exactly one of which produced you.
These probabilities are multiplicative.
So the probability in one generation, of you being genetically roughly who you are is on the order of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ignoring mutations here.)
Going back one more generation: the probability of your father being genetically who he was is also ~1 in 10^18 same for your mother.
So the chances of them just having the right genetics for you to be exactly you is
1/10^18 times 1/10^18 times 1/10^18 or one chance in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
Go back more generations and the string of zeros gets longer quickly.  You get to 1 in 10^50 pretty much right away.
This is before all the other required contingencies involved are considered like whether your great, great, great grandparents were friends of the Czar or peasants on the steppe that came to the new world to avoid starvation.
So is God tweaking every sperm and every potato in order to produce exactly, specifically you?
With all that interference, you'd think there would be clearer evidence of tampering.  The best you can do is argue that it's complicated and you don't see how it could have happened naturally.
Perhaps you are absurd.