RE: The vast complexity of living things proves that God exists (proof 1)
October 2, 2013 at 9:03 am
Yawn. The Argument from Design. William Paley did a better job on it in the 18th century, and with more excuse since the facts telling against design were largely unknown then.
As a young man Charles Darwin believed in the watchmaker argument for a creator. After he had spent about 3 decades piling up a mass of facts, he could see it wouldn't work, and he came up with something much better.
First, it is wrong to say that natural objects never organize themselves. The waves do a very nice job of sorting stones by size on a beach.
Second, living organisms have so many design flaws that it is ludicrous to think they are the product of intelligent design. That was why I finally stopped clinging to pantheism years after I had abandoned Christianity. Just a few examples.
The human eye is very poorly designed. The optic nerve produces a huge blind spot on the retina, which we don't notice because of the software in our brains. It has been said, that an engineer would be fired if he designed a digital camera with a similar flaw. Apparently, the octopus has a much better designed eye. However, what evolution gave us is a lot better than some animals have, and so it gave homo a competitive advantage.
My favorite example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve. It runs from the brain, down into the chest, loops around the aorta, and comes back up to connect with the larynx, which is what it controls. In humans the detour adds 18 inches; in giraffes it adds some 15 feet. The reason for this bizarre arrangement is that evolution produced the larynx from the gills of our fishy ancestors, so the nerve had a short route from the brain to the gills looping in behind one blood vessel, but as we evolved that blood vessel sank way down into the chest.
If anyone is interested, dozens of design flaws in organisms are listed at Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes.
As a young man Charles Darwin believed in the watchmaker argument for a creator. After he had spent about 3 decades piling up a mass of facts, he could see it wouldn't work, and he came up with something much better.
First, it is wrong to say that natural objects never organize themselves. The waves do a very nice job of sorting stones by size on a beach.
Second, living organisms have so many design flaws that it is ludicrous to think they are the product of intelligent design. That was why I finally stopped clinging to pantheism years after I had abandoned Christianity. Just a few examples.
The human eye is very poorly designed. The optic nerve produces a huge blind spot on the retina, which we don't notice because of the software in our brains. It has been said, that an engineer would be fired if he designed a digital camera with a similar flaw. Apparently, the octopus has a much better designed eye. However, what evolution gave us is a lot better than some animals have, and so it gave homo a competitive advantage.
My favorite example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve. It runs from the brain, down into the chest, loops around the aorta, and comes back up to connect with the larynx, which is what it controls. In humans the detour adds 18 inches; in giraffes it adds some 15 feet. The reason for this bizarre arrangement is that evolution produced the larynx from the gills of our fishy ancestors, so the nerve had a short route from the brain to the gills looping in behind one blood vessel, but as we evolved that blood vessel sank way down into the chest.
If anyone is interested, dozens of design flaws in organisms are listed at Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people — House
