Friday, December 12, 2008

Fantasy World

The system in this video, passed along by Robert Crowther at Evolution News and Notes, is a good metaphor for the cellular machinery that operates in every one of the trillions of cells in our bodies, and it illustrates nicely the difference between Intelligent Design theorists and Darwinians. IDers would recognize that the sequence of events in the system evinces intelligent conceptualization and engineering. The Darwinians would say that given random mutation, natural selection, chance and enough time, this sort of thing could have developed on its own, and, indeed, has developed on its own billions, if not trillions, of times in living things throughout the evolutionary past.

Maybe a system like this could have developed on its own through purely physical processes with no intelligent input, but if experience rather than mere logical possibility is to be our guide, we have to admit that whenever metal parts are left to the forces of nature, they invariably wind up as scattered rust. Darwinian materialists chide theists for believing in the existence of a divine mind, but one has to wonder which belief is the more fantastic - that a biological system similar to that portrayed in the ad could have happened by accident or that such systems were designed intentionally by intelligent agents.

RLC