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Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity. Intelligent Design. Is the name given to the view that the existence of the universe and the features of different things within the universe are best explained if it is accepted that there is an intelligent being who designed it all.
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Intelligent Design • Is the name given to the view that the existence of the universe and the features of different things within the universe are best explained if it is accepted that there is an intelligent being who designed it all. • Argue that religious understandings of the creation of the world are stronger than explanations which remove God from the equation.
Irreducible Complexity • Michael Behe • Modern biochemistry has revealed features of life that have previously been unknown – processes such as X-Ray crystallography have enabled scientists to investigate far further than a Darwinian understanding. • Some aspects of nature are ‘irreducibly complex’ – if you took away any of its parts it would not work at all.
Irreducible Complexity • Behe gives the example of a mousetrap – if any of the parts were missing or did not fulfil their role the whole mousetrap wouldn’t function • Behe applies the same principles to aspects of life – that several different functions need to be present simultaneously for thereto be any result at all
Example 1 - Blood Clotting • Blood clots when we cut ourselves – otherwise even a small cut would cause our blood to leak out gradually until we had none left. But blood cannot continue to clot all the way through our bodies as part of the healing process – it has to clot just enough to heal the cut and then stop, so that the rest of our organs continue to function as normal. • Behe argues that the blood-clotting process is irreducibly complex – it requires a complex interaction of different proteins in order to work at all. • Behe argues that this does not fit with Darwin’s model of evolution – how would it be an advantage to just have a small part of this process
Example 3 – Bacterial Flagella • The flagella (a lash like appendage found on certain types of cells) of certain bacteria constitute a molecular motor requiring the interaction of about 40 different protein parts. • Behe argues that since “an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition non-functional” it could not have evolved gradually through natural selection. • Some scientists have argued against this example pointing to similarities in some other germs such as viruses like salmonella
Example 2 – The Eye • Behe also used the example of the eye as ‘irreducibly complex’. • Darwin himself accepted that the eye presented a problem – it was difficult to see how some light-sensitive cells that can be seen on some creatures could somehow evolve into fully functioning eyes. • To suppose that the eyes with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Irreducible Complexity • Behe concludes that modern biochemistry has lifted the ‘lid’ of ‘Darwin’s Black Box’ – the observations scientists are now able to make are best explained if it is accepted that an intelligent God is in control of the evolutionary process.
