God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (14 page)

As Dr. Came pointed out, it is a logical fallacy to say you have to have an explanation for an explanation because it sets up an infinite regress. Philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga have dealt brilliantly with the utter nonsense of this claim.

Suppose we land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover some machine-like objects that look and work just like a 1941 Allis Chalmers tractor; our leader says “there must be intelligent beings on this planet—look at those tractors.” A sophomore philosophy student on the expedition objects: “Hey, hold on a minute! You have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are!” No doubt we’d tell him a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two.
²⁵

The rebuttals given for the argument for complexity are almost humorous in their absurdity. Dawkins spelled out one such argument at a
TED.com talk
:

The standard creationist argument is . . . living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance. Therefore, they must have had a designer. This argument of course shoots itself in the foot. Any designer capable of designing anything, something really complex has to be even more
complex himself. Complexity is a problem that any theory of biology has to solve. And you cannot solve it by postulating an agent even more complex. Thereby simply compounding the problem.
²⁶

This is a rather astonishing attempt at using a logical device called Occam’s razor. It is a principle attributed to the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar William of Occam in England. “The most useful statement of the principle for scientists is, when you have two competing theories that make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is better.”
²⁷
So atheists seize on this concept of simplicity (forgetting it was proposed by a theist
)
and rule out God as a possible explanation because the idea of God would be too complex to be the answer to why things appear designed. That’s like saying that a painting couldn’t be produced by an artist because an intelligent human with a complex brain being the artist would be more complex than the painting. These kinds of arguments are more like word games that serve as a red herring to divert the dialogue away from a truly simple conclusion: design points to a designer.

C
AN
E
VOLUTION
E
XPLAIN
E
VERYTHING?

As was mentioned, the probability for a cell, an organ, or any of the millions of complex species coming into existence naturally is so fantastically small that biologists have to give natural selection godlike qualities. They justify their claim by arguing that all changes can be broken down into small steps. That’s because the probability is so vanishingly small for random chance to explain
the
origin of life
as well as the fantastic development of millions of complex species. Dawkins tried to explain:

It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don’t need to be a
mathematician
or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and all the other living wonders is precisely the problem that
any
theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely
does
solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound.
²⁸

But without an intelligence behind the universe, could chance alone so easily find the step-by-step paths envisioned by Darwin? Such a claim is based almost exclusively on a massive
leap of
faith. Even more problematic, evidence from molecular biology over the past several years has all but disproven in many cases the possibility of such scenarios.

I
RREDUCIBLE
C
OMPLEXITY

I opened this
chapter
with a quote from Darwin: “Is there any complex organ or aspect of life for that matter that couldn’t have
evolved or been produced by natural selection?” Here’s a term that the naturalists love to hate:
irreducible complexity
. This states that many structures in organisms must have numerous parts all at once, or they do not function. Remember, if something is to be considered a true scientific theory, it must be falsifiable. The claim that natural selection can explain every living thing fails when tested according to this principle.

Specifically, Dawkins’s argument of life climbing Mount Improbable completely breaks down when applied to real living systems. Most organs, biological processes, and cellular machines contain multiple pieces that are all needed simultaneously to operate properly. Therefore, they cannot develop through a step-by-step process of adding or modifying one piece at a time.

B
ACTERIAL
F
LAGELLUM

The most common example is the bacterial flagellum, which acts like an outboard motor. It includes dozens of essential pieces, such as the filament (propeller), bearings, drive shaft, hook, and motor. If even one piece is missing, the flagellum cannot be built. Only an intelligent Designer could arrange so many pieces so precisely for the specific purpose of locomotion.
²⁹

In response, biologists again deny the obvious by appealing to several implausible scenarios. They typically claim that irreducibly complex machines could have come about through a process called co-option. Namely, similar pieces from other parts of the cell could have been borrowed and then brought together to form a new structure. For instance, wood from a doorstop, a spring from a clock, and a wire clothes hanger could be borrowed to form a mousetrap. Such claims are understandable from biologists who have no experience in engineering. However, anyone
who has been involved in any sort of design process will immediately reject such a claim.

Imagine receiving a self-assembly bookcase. Even if all the pieces are present, randomly arranging them will not magically cause a functional bookcase to come together. Tools and assembly instructions are needed to put the pieces together in the correct order. Similarly, the construction of the flagellum is directed by an assembly program that builds the pieces in the correct order while several other molecular machines assemble the different pieces together properly.
³⁰
Therefore, a cell cannot borrow new pieces from someplace else without simultaneously creating the assembly program and finding the needed assembly tools. Such coordinated events are fantastically improbable.

The flagellum is easiest to discuss since its pieces are identifiable, and we are quite familiar with the design of outboard motors. However, the difficulty of the flagellum evolving pales in comparison, for example, to the
evolution
of the eye.

T
HE
E
YE

Ming Wang, a world-renowned eye surgeon, received his MD from
Harvard
and his PhD in laser physics from MIT. He has performed over fifty-five thousand eye surgeries and holds ten patents in this field. He came to America from
China
and was led to Christ by a professor at Harvard. He flatly stated, “As a medical doctor and a scientist I can firmly attest to the fact that it is impossible for natural selection to explain the amazing intricacies of the eye.”
³¹
The eye contains countless components that focus images, adjust for brightness, and process information to create a picture in the mind. In addition, the visual system is coordinated with locomotion and balance. Such a system clearly
requires numerous parts to function together properly to be of any use.

Darwinists have responded to this challenge by presenting a vague story of how the eye could have developed through a series of stages. However, their description resembles the description of Calvin from the
Calvin and Hobbes
comic strip imagining a box turning into an airplane.
³²
Calvin could imagine such a scenario, since a six-year-old boy has no
knowledge
of engineering or aerodynamics. Similarly, evolutionists can present such stories only by ignoring virtually all relevant details.

G
OD OF THE
G
APS

Such fantastic theories are justified by the claim that any theory is better than looking to God as an explanation. The skeptics claim that such an appeal is giving up on science and appealing to a “God of the Gaps” in areas where we may be ignorant of certain details, which could be explained at a future date. Using such
language
is a part of the diversionary tactics of people who are desperate to find any possible alternative to God. The argument goes as follows: “Yes, there are many things we don’t know as scientists, but it is lazy and cowardly to simply attribute something that we don’t understand to the ‘work of God.’ ” Hugh Ross explained it this way:

Typically, whenever Christians present this degree of scientific evidence for God and the Bible, non-theists will attempt to dismiss the evidence by claiming that such Christians are committing the God-of-the-gaps fallacy. Gaps in our
understanding of the record of nature, these non-theists will point out, are continually being filled in by advancing discoveries in science. The filling in of such gaps, they assert, establish that God is not necessary to explain the record of nature.

From a Christian perspective the record of nature bears testimony of both natural processes and the miraculous handiwork of God. Our understanding of both should increase as we learn more about the record of nature. The real difference between non-theists and Christian theists is that non-theists predict that
all
phenomena manifested in nature’s record can be attributed to strictly natural causes whereas Christian theists hold that there will be
some
phenomena that only can be attributed to divine intervention.
³³

First, what is overlooked by the naturalists are the enormous and ever-increasing gaps in the
naturalistic
worldview. For instance, as science advances cosmologists have increasingly difficult times explaining why so many features of nature were designed with us in mind. In addition, as the intricacies of the cell are better understood, a naturalistic origin seems increasingly implausible.

Even more important, the identification of design is based not on what we do not know about science but on what we do know about signs of intelligence.
Mathematician
Bill Dembski has developed a system for detecting design, which has proven reliable in diverse fields such as forensics and the search for extraterrestrial life.
³⁴
The detection process involves identifying patterns that meet three criteria:

1. They could not have been produced by natural causes (such as ice crystals).

2. They are highly improbable.

3. They contain specified complexity.

When these criteria are applied to the cell, particularly the information contained in
DNA
, the conclusion of design becomes apparent. The term
specified complexity
simply refers to patterns that contain some sort of identifiable pattern, such as the faces on Mount Rushmore. Applying these criteria to life, such as the information in the cell, clearly shows that life must be the product of intelligence.

Moreover, it’s not lazy to attribute a work of art to a painter we’ve never met or the ingenuity in some technological gadget we have purchased to the work of an inventor. In addition, just because we see the marks of design in something doesn’t mean we cease to attempt to understand how it works. A very simple example is that every device in our home was designed by someone we never met. When we purchased these items and brought them home, it was our passion to read and understand how they worked. To this day we strive to grasp all the potential the designer or inventor put in them.

Believing God designed life causes us to seek to understand how He did it, not lazily turn off our minds. Likewise, recognizing a Creator behind our universe does not prevent us from understanding how the creation unfolded. When the evidence for an intelligent Creator is overwhelming, we should listen to the advice of everyone from
Plato
to Lawrence Krauss and follow the evidence wherever it leads. Acknowledging our Creator would not hamper science but free it from the shackles of naturalistic
dogma. Scientists could then ask new questions and design new studies that would only enrich our understanding of nature.

A
RGUMENT FROM
I
MPERFECTION

A last assault on design is the argument from imperfection. Skeptics often point to apparent examples of poor design in nature. A classic example is “junk
DNA
,” which are regions of DNA without any seeming purpose. However, the argument from imperfection has grown increasingly weak over time. As science advances, most examples of what originally appeared to be poor design or even useless remnants from some ancestor (e.g. appendix) were later shown to be very well crafted and to have clear purposes. For instance, increasing numbers of examples of
junk DNA
have been shown to likely perform useful functions. When skeptics appeal to imperfection, they are making an “imperfection of the gaps” argument based on ignorance, not evidence.

The great irony is that natural selection is given all the credit for producing the amazing structures of life with all its varieties, but any breakdown or misfiring of a system is seen as evidence for the absence of a Designer. However, such examples, even if genuine, do not challenge the notion of design any more than rust on a car indicates that the entire car was the product of the blind forces of nature. A car can be designed and built by intelligence, but a multitude of factors can lead to its breakdown or malfunctioning. This breakdown due to human error or environmental impact does not prove it was not a product of intelligence.