Monday, August 17, 2009
Naturalistic Miracle
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle."--Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 264.
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"such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event."
But that's not what they believe happened. They think life started much, much simpler and only gradually became as complex as even a simple ameoba. We have to argue against the errors in their actual thinking, not oversimplified thumbnail sketches drawn by our apologists.
“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle."--Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 264.
ChrisB:
Michael Denton is not a Christian apologist. He is the Senior Research Fellow in Human Molecular Genetics at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He wrote that quote as an evolutionist over twenty years ago.
I don't believe the statement is oversimplified, but absolutely true and accurate, and counters the myth of the "simple cell", still commonly accepted despite over twenty years of further scientific illumination.
Not only is the cell NOT simple, it is a jaw-dropping collection of nano-technology, the work of a Master Craftsman. Each of its components are masterpieces of engineering: the DNA Information Storage Devices, the Oxidative Phosphorylation Generators, the Ribonuclear Protein Synthesizers. None of these devices are in any way simple. The components of the cell are highly ordered technology, controlled by stored information, and they exist as a mutually-interdependent system.
As the cell is a mutually-interdependent system, it can only be simplified so much. In other words, you can only eliminate so many components before the cell is non-functional, and therefore non-living. Since non-living substances are not subject to natural selection, they lack any mechanism to "become complex" under the Neo-Darwinian paradigm. So, the simplest cell that could participate in Neo-Darwinian evolution would still require advanced metabolic, information storage and reproductive technologies. It is not reasonable to believe that such technology would ever appear spontaneously. That seems to me to be the meaning of the quote.
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