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Friday, September 28, 2018

Journey into the Cell

A video titled Journey Inside the Cell narrated by Dr. Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, gives a glimpse of a small part of the amazingly complicated process by which proteins are produced in the cell.

As Meyer's Signature in the Cell makes clear the process is much more complex than what the video shows, but even so, the video does a nice job of illustrating why so many people today have trouble believing the materialist story that the astonishing complexity of the cell is all a product of blind chance and natural selection.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be the result of intelligent minds. To think that it could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that so many bright people are convinced that that's what happened.

Nevertheless, the acumen of these thinkers notwithstanding, none of them has ever been able to explain how it could have happened. Their reasoning goes something like this: Only material, physical processes can be considered in science. Enormously complex structures like cells exist. Therefore these structures must have been produced solely by physical processes.

The error here, of course, is confusing what science has limited itself to considering with what the best explanation for biological entities might be. Just because some people think that science should be restricted to allowing only physical causes to play a role in their explanations it certainly doesn't follow that only physical causes operate in the world.

Nor does any scientist who insists on dealing exclusively with physical causes - and not all scientists think this is wise - have any right to rule out intelligent causes.

The most a scientist can say is that he chooses not to theorize about causes that can't be observed or measured. He cannot say that such causes don't exist or haven't operated in the world or can't be inferred from what we are able to observe and measure.

Yet many scientists do say this, but when they do they're not speaking as scientists, they're speaking as philosophers making metaphysical pronouncements.