Design's Appeal

A quest for knowledge can at times take one to places they would never have imagined. This was my experience on my second posting to Butterworth, Malaysia, with the RAAF in the latter half of the 1970s.

Soon after arriving I took up Taekwondo, determined to achieve black belt in the 30 months I would spend there. I did. But as I got fitter I began to wonder about diet and whether or not I could improve physically through it. So I began to read. The first book I read was  written by Adelle Davis. She advocated high amounts of meat protein along with whole grain foods and vegetables, a strange start for someone who eventually reached the conclusion that a predominantly plant based diet was the way to go. But that is a different story.

I remember reading a discussion on a wheat grain. It has all these layers, each one providing something essential for our wellbeing. Once we start playing with that, throwing one part away to get more of another, we begin to upset our nutritional balance. For the first time in my life I began to wonder at the complexity of life, how one thing seemed so dependent on another, and I came to the firm conviction that all of this could not happen by chance.

You may have heard of the anthropic principle. In effect, this says the entire universe looks as if it was designed to support life as we know it. According to proponents for life to exist the universe must be a certain age, the expansion of the universe after Big Bang must have been at the right speed - not too fast or too slow. Our sun must likewise be a certain age, our planet a certain size and distance from the sun, have the right atmospheric mix, and more. The odds of one of these factors occurring by pure chance is astronomical, the odds of them all occurring makes our existence as a result of pure chance entirely unbelievable.  

Of course those such as Professor Richard Dawkins dismiss the idea, arguing that we are here and as improbable as that may be, luck happens.

Michael Denton, in his 1985 book ‘Evolution: A Theory in Crisis’, writes:

The intuitive feeling that pure chance could never have achieved the degree of complexity and ingenuity so ubiquitous in nature has been a continuing source of skepticism ever since the publication of the Origin of the Species; and throughout the past century there has always existed a minority of first-rate biologists who have never been able to bring themselves to accept the validity of Darwinian claims …

Perhaps in no other area of modern biology is the challenge posed by the extreme complexity and ingenuity of biological adaptations more apparent than in the fascinating new molecular world of the cell … To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity …

… Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which - a functional protein or gene - is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the very antithesis of chance, in every sense of anything produced by the intelligence of man?

Not the latest military jet. I spent more than seven years with the Mirage
Australia's first supersonic aircraft.

That, for me, is the challenge. Imagine if you will a room full of all the components to make something like a car, computer or the latest military jet. Then imagine we could in some way continually shake and shift that room, allowing all the components to move around and come in contact with each other. How long would it take for that car, computer or jet to be ready for use? And remember, we have already assembled the various components. For that living cell, something far more complex, to develop by chance each of its component parts would first need to self assemble from raw materials.

Science is basically built on observation, measurement, experimentation and testing. The more we observe, measure, experiment and test the more certain we can be of our conclusions, provided of course that our efforts and that of others lead to the same results.

We have all seen something as common as a house brick of a wooden plank. Intuitively we know that someone somewhere designed that brick or plank, and that whoever made the product followed the designer’s pattern. Bricks and planks have been fundamental to human housing and other projects for thousands of years, yet there is no known incident of such simple articles happening by chance. This afternoon I walked up the street. No one in their wildest imagination would suggest the road, the footpath, telephone poles or fences I saw all just happened as a result of chance, let alone be assembled in the way they are in my street. Yet I am supposed to accept that the flowers, trees, birds and other living things I saw, exceedingly more complex, just happened.

I can’t. It contradicts everything I observe, and it contradicts all that has ever been observed, measured and tested in human history. You all know the story of the Emperor's New Clothes - everyone commended the Emperor on how magnificent he appeared until a little boy called out ‘The Emperor has no clothes.’ I feel the same way about the claims that we are all here by nothing other than chance random processes.