Journey Inside the Cell

A three and a half minute video titled Journey Inside the Cell, narrated by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, the author of Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis, gives us a glimpse of a very 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 dogma that the astonishing complexity of the cell is solely a product of blind chance and natural selection.

If you don't know the biology the video illustrates, don't worry. Just get a sense of how complex the process is and bear in mind that, if naturalism is true, it's a process that must have emerged almost instantaneously early on in the history of life. It can't be the product of gradual evolution since until this process or one like it was in place evolution couldn't even get underway.

The kind of information required to operate a structure like the cell is only known to be produced by intelligent minds. To think that such information could come about by sheer accident would be risible were it not for the fact that some 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 complex structures must have been produced solely by material, physical processes.

The error here, of course, is in the first premise. It imposes an arbitrary limitation on scientific explanation that potentially rules out explanations for biological complexity which might be true. Just because some people think that scientific explanations should be restricted to physical causes 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 business ruling out intelligent causes.

The most a materialist 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 that go well beyond what a materialist scientist can affirm.