SURROUNDED BY IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY (IC)

IC represents the understanding that any biological structure requires that multiple pieces of genetic information have to be in-place simultaneously before it can function and provide the organism with a survival advantage. Michael Behe, the originator of this term, used a mouse-trap as an illustration. All five parts – spring, lever, base, trip-rod, and hook – have to be in their designed place before it is possible to catch a mouse.

Bruce Malone of searchforthetruth.org offers hundreds, perhaps even thousands of examples of this phenomenon:

·       The Bristle-thighed curlew is an amazing bird!  When the Alaskan-born chicks are just five weeks old, the parents abandon them and migrate to the South Pacific. For the next few weeks, the chicks go on a feeding frenzy, fattening themselves for the same 5000-mile journey.  The young birds are on their own to find the tiny islands of Fiji in the vast Pacific Ocean.  They travel non-stop without a guide and arrive with pinpoint accuracy to the same mudflats and sandy beaches where their parents have flown. 

It is unfathomable that such a guidance system could be constructed gradually, as Darwinism requires. Each small step, requiring new genetic information, would have to impart to the curlew a survival advantage or it would represent an encumbrance. Malone therefore concludes that this system requires a Designer:

·       The Creator coded within the curlew the route to take.  When there is a code, there must be a code-maker, and that code-maker is the Creator God.

It is not the curlew alone that requires such a sophisticated guidance system. Thousands of species, including other birds, butterflies, salmon, and turtles, have comparable but evolutionarily unrelated navigational systems. It strains credulity that a blind, undersigned process could have constructed them.

Of course, the evolutionist can dream up a “possible” scenario, although entirely lacking in evidence and details. Their fallback assertion is the God-of-the-gaps argument, which denies the existence of any evidence for the Designer.  However, lacking any evidence that anything has ever had a natural cause or that any substance is natural – even the smallest atom is a marvel of design – a more likely scenario is that naturalism persists only because of a pervasive cultural bias.