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Wednesday, August 12, 2020

The Miracle of Metamorphosis

One of the most breath-taking feats of nature, a feat that occurs everyday in flower gardens in almost every neighborhood, is the metamorphosis of an egg to a caterpillar to a butterfly. It's an astonishing transformation, and it's remarkable that some people can go through their entire lives without giving it a second thought.

As you watch the beautifully filmed eleven minute video below, ask yourself how this process could have ever developed through undirected mechanisms like blind chance and fortuitous mutations. You might ask, too, why such a process would have ever occurred. After all, it certainly wasn't necessary for the caterpillar's survival, and, indeed, any chance development of any of the events that occur in metamorphosis would've been fatal to the insect unless the whole process was already in place.

And one more point to ponder: Why and how did the exquisitely beautiful patterns of butterfly wings evolve from a mindless series of random events?

It takes an extraordinarily tenacious commitment to a naturalistic worldview and an abundant supply of blind faith in the power of random chance to produce the astonishing organization of parts and the choreography of steps that occur in the transition from caterpillar to butterfly to insist that, however this all arose, intelligent agency played no role in the process.