Thursday, January 10, 2019

EVOLUTIONISTS SAY THE DARNEDEST THINGS





I am amazed that evolutionists find fault with even the most amazing examples of design.  The challenges of explaining freewill, consciousness, or life do not daunt them. They have too much faith for that. Let's just take one small example of design - the human eye, which enables us to see in real time.

Darwin had great faith in his naturalistic theory. Although he wasn’t about to reject natural selection, he at least admitted:

·       To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree (On the Origin of Species, 1909, p. 190).

Despite his incredulity, Darwin remained committed to natural selection. What is so astounding about the eye that would lead Darwin to temporarily waver?

·       The human eye possesses 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones that convert light into chemical impulses. These signals travel at a rate of a billion per second to the brain. https://www.ucg.org/the-good-news/the-miracle-of-the-human-eye

Despite the fact that evolutionists are no closer today to explain this marvel, they still exult that evolution is a proven fact. Nevertheless, human sight laughs at such hubris. It requires the coordination of billions of chemical impulses into instantaneous mental pictures. It also depends upon the immediate destruction of the former mental images to make room for a continuous and seamless stream of images.

While an unbiased mind is awe-struck, the skeptic thinks that he can provide a better design. In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Richard Dawkins offers the vertebrate eye, including the human eye, as evidence against design:

·       Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain…Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired backwards.

A hot-wired commitment to evolution and naturalism drives the evolutionist to provide “evidence” for a “failure” in design. In Douglas Futuyma’s text on evolution (2005), he concluded that:

·       “no intelligent engineer would be expected to design” the “functionally non-sensical arrangement” of cells in the human retina. (Jonathan Wells, Salvo Magazine, Winter 2017, 45-46)

In another biology text (2014), Singer, Mason, and Losos also concluded:

·       “an excellent example of imperfect design is the eye of vertebrate animals, in which the photoreceptors face backward, toward the wall of the eye.” (46)

The evolutionist suggests that this “excellent example” of non-design has produced a “blind-spot” in our vision. However, it is possible that they are magnifying the “problem,” since the blind-spot goes undetected by us. I am still able to get on my bicycle and successfully navigate the traffic despite this “blind-spot.” Interestingly, the skeptic doesn’t dream that our eyes might be wired this way for a reason that he fails to perceive.

Perhaps the Designer had a good reason for such a design, one that has been overlooked or ignored by the evolutionists in their zeal to promote their theory. This is the claim of biologist Jonathan Wells – the evidence against the “poor-design, non-design theory” has been available but ignored for a longtime:

·       But Dawkins and the other critics of intelligent design didn’t bother to check the scientific literature. They simply assumed that evolution is true and that they knew how as eye should be designed. Then they concluded that the human eye is badly designed, claimed it as evidence for evolution, and ignored the contrary evidence. (47)

Evolutionists are men of great faith and claim that evolution is a settled fact. However, anything can be considered a “settled fact” when counter-evidence is either ignored or denied. Even if they don’t have a naturalistic explanation, they assure themselves and everyone else that in due time science will arrive at the correct explanation.

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