Apologetics Part 3

The Teleological (Design) Argument

            Imagine something with me for a moment. It is summer and my car is very dirty, I go to the hardware store and when I return to the parking lot, I find the phrase ‘wash me’ written in the dust on the back window. In telling you about this incident I comment and say, “Isn’t it strange how the wind spelled ‘wash me’ on my back window while I was in the store.” Would your first thought be that I was being rational and logical? I think not.

            Yet many evolutionists would have us place our faith in something incredibly more complex than my strange assertion about ‘wash me.’ We now look at design. An early proponent of the design argument was philosopher and clergyman William Paley. In the late 18^th century he used the analogy of divine watchmaker and compared the regular workings of the solar system to the coordinated and designed movements of a clock or watch. Which led to atheist Richard Dawkins 20^th century work, The Blind Watchmaker. We will come to Dawkins shortly.  

            We begin our review of design with a couple of quotes from Stephen Jay Gould, an ardent evolutionist whose quotes are readily available on the internet. He said the following, “The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualist accounts of evolution.” He also said, “Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.” Obviously Gould responded by repudiating evolution right? No, he simply came up with new theories that he could also not prove.   

            We also have what the famous atheist Richard Dawkins said, “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Gould was among other things an evolutionary biologist, as is Dawkins. Are their comments above any more credible than my assertion that the wind wrote ‘wash me’ on the window of my vehicle? We will see.

            Biochemist Michael Behe, who wrote Darwin’s Black Box, highlighted for us the concepts of irreducible and specified complexity. The black box term comes from the idea that things are happening at a mysterious and unseen level. This of course aligns with scripture, which says the following.

³ All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. John 1:3 (NKJV)

² has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; ³ who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, Hebrews 1:2–3 (NKJV)

What Behe discovered is that the cells in our body are powered by microscopic machines. Machines he described as follows, “In short, highly sophisticated molecular machines control every cellular process. Thus the details of life are finely calibrated, and the machinery of life enormously complex.”[1] These cellular machines demonstrate specified complexity. An example of specified complexity being our DNA code. DNA has a four-letter alphabet and the instructions contained within the DNA in every cell in our bodies are specific, written out in an ordered manner in this four-letter alphabet (the most well-known advocate of specified complexity is Willam Dembski).

We know that instructions don’t write themselves any more than the wind wrote ‘wash me’ on my car window. As Bill Gates of Microsoft fame said in his book The Road Ahead, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” DNA contains specified complexity pointing to the designer of this complex code.

            In addition to specified complexity, we have irreducible complexity. Behe described it in this manner.  

“By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.“[2]

Here Behe directly refutes Darwin’s idea that organisms developed and became more complex through successive slight adaptations. What we have with irreducible complexity is molecular machines that have interdependent parts. One part cannot function without the others, meaning the parts could not have evolved gradually as the organism would then be nonfunctional. We go back to my dirty car. If I have an engine but am waiting for my driveshaft to evolve, I have a useless vehicle. If I want more power and create larger chambers for my pistons but don’t simultaneously include larger pistons I have a non-functional machine. In nature this would have meant creatures unable to survive while they ‘evolved’ the needed parts.             In conclusion, what we see in all living creatures, from the single celled amoeba to the human brain, is function written into our DNA, in a word, design. This is a brief overview of the subject but enough to highlight and identify the importance of design. Next, we will look at fine tuning, another reality that points to both design and a designer.

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[1] Behe, Michael J.. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (p. 14). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Behe, Michael J.. Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (pp. 56-57). Free Press. Kindle Edition.