Saturday, July 24, 2010

's , the book by which he has become best known to posterity, is a sustained ar.... design intellig

's , the book by which he has become best known to posterity, is a sustained argument explaining the obvious design of humans and their parts, as well as the design of all sorts of organisms, in themselves and in their relations to one another and to their environment. His book has chapters dedicated to the complex design of the human eye; to the human frame, which, he argues, displays a precise mechanical arrangement of bones, cartilage, and joints; to the circulation of the blood and the disposition of blood vessels; to the comparative anatomy of humans and animals; to the digestive system, kidneys, urethra, and bladder; to the wings of birds and the fins of fish; and much more. Others, because they wished to see the theory of intelligent design taught in schools as an alternate to the theory of evolution, avoided all explicit reference to God in order to maintain the separation between religion and state. The call for an intelligent designer is predicated on the existence! of irreducible complexity in organisms. In Michael Behe's book Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996), an irreducibly complex system is defined as being 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. In other words, unless all parts of the eye come simultaneously into existence, the eye cannot function; it does not benefit a precursor organism to have just a retina, or a lens, if the other parts are lacking. As is discussed more fully below in the section , different kinds of eyes have independently evolved at least 40 times in animals, which exhibit a full range, from very uncomplicated modifications that allow individual cells or simple animals to perceive the direction of light to the sophisticated vertebrate eye, passing through all sorts of organs intermediate in complexity. Evolutionists have shown that! the examples of irreducibly complex systems cited by intellig! ent-design theoristssuch as the biochemical mechanism of blood clotting ( see ) or the molecular rotary motor, called the , by which bacterial cells moveare not irreducible at all; rather, less-complex versions of the same systems can be found in today's organisms. Defective design seems incompatible with an omnipotent intelligent designer. This statement, evolutionists have responded, may have theological validity, but it destroys intelligent design as a scientific hypothesis, because it provides it with an empirically impenetrable shield against predictions of how intelligent or perfect a design will be. For this reason theologians and religious authors have criticized the theory of intelligent design, because it leads to conclusions about the nature of the designer at odds with the omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence that they, like Paley, identify as the attributes of the Creator. Both were acknowledging the irony that the theory of evolution, which at first h! ad seemed to remove the need for God in the world, now was convincingly removing the need to explain the world's imperfections as outcomes of God's design. design intellig

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