The amazing complexity of life

Back to my blog on I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. The last blog on this covered the design argument in which the authors claim the basic laws of the universe are set up to allow human life to exist. This time I'll focus on a second type of design in the universe -- the complexity of life. The authors point out that advancing technology has enabled scientists to discover a tiny world of awesome design and astonishing complexity.

The biggest problem for Darwinian believers is to explain the origin of the first life, which is not as simple as once thought. In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA, the chemical that encodes instructions for building and replicating all living things. It's a blueprint, and Bill Gates called it the most complex computer code ever seen. DNA even in a one-celled amoeba is unbelievably complex in its message. Richard Dawkins, an atheist professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all 30 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Darwinists have a difficult task. They have to say life came spontaneously from nonliving chemicals without intelligent intervention. The trouble is, all experiments designed to spontaneously generate life have failed. Another difficulty they have, besides the complexity of DNA, is the origin of DNA. It relies on proteins for its production, but proteins rely on DNA for their production. So which came first, proteins or DNA? One has to be in existence for the other to be made.

So why are Darwinists so committed to their viewpoint? Because they have a philosophy which rules out intelligent causes before they even look at the evidence. Since they have ruled out any possibility of God because of their philosophical foundations, Darwinism has be true since it's the only God-free theory.

A couple of key quotations make this very clear. Phil Johnson, a Christian law professor, states, "Darwinism is based on an a priori [prior] commitment to materialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence." Richard Lewontin, a Harvard University atheistic professor, says, "It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenonal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door." That's an amazing statement, considering he is saying Darwinists start with a philosophical position of atheism and build their science on that. So much for the neutrality of science.



But Darwinists say that they have billions of years to work with, so that may allow spontaneous generation of life to happen. The problem is that nature disorders; it doesn't organize things. Atheists and theists alike have calculated the probability that life could arise by chance from nonliving chemicals. The results are staggering. One biochemist said that the probability of getting one protein molecule by chance would be the same as a blindfolded man finding one marked grain of sand in the Sahara desert three times in a row. And one protein molecule is not even life. You need about 200 of these molecules to get life going.


This is fascinating material, but there is a lot of it. So I'll save some for the next blog.