Alphabet Soup and The Game of Life

John Maynard Smith - British Biologist

I read recently of an atheist who, like me, became a Christian. He made the point that belief in God is more the result of intuition than a scientifically demonstrable fact. I believe there is merit to this. The discoveries of good science can rationally take us to the door, but intuition helps us step across the threshold of faith.

Intuition also plays a part in the Darwin vs. Design debate. Simply put, belief in darwinism is counter-intuitive.

In his article "Leaping into Trouble" (April 3rd, 2008) Douglas Axe deals with this. (http://biologicinstitute.org/2008/04/03/perspectives/#more-13)

"Darwinists have always recognized the existence of an intuitive barrier that prevents many of us from joining them. Human understanding of complex things is strongly shaped by our experiences with human technology. You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate in some way the extraordinary difficulty of getting physical systems to perform extraordinary tasks. Technology doesn’t just happen. It only comes with sizable investments of genius and diligence, along with more than a little patience.

So Darwin’s suggestion that genius and diligence are optional if patience is plentiful is a stretch for most of us. Richard Dawkins put it this way:

'It took a very large leap of imagination for Darwin and Wallace to see that, contrary to all intuition, there is another way and, once you have understood it, a far more plausible way, for complex ‘design’ to arise out of primeval simplicity. A leap of the imagination so large that, to this day, many people seem unwilling to make it.'"

* * *

Indeed. Who are we to believe -- Darwin and Dawkins, or our own lying eyes?

British biologist John Maynard Smith offered an analogy along the lines of alphabet soup to explain how complex biological systems could naturally evolve from simpler ones. He used this example:

WORD -> WORE -> GORE -> GONE -> GENE.

Each word in the list is an actual, functional word. So it is a simple demonstration how biological materials can evolve from one function to another, given enough time and natural selection.

There are at least three problems with this analogy.

Firstly, there is no explanation of where the initial WORD came from that started things off. (Perhaps this is his homage to "In the beginning was the Word". But, I doubt it.)

Secondly, even the simplest biological material we are talking about is more like a chapter in a book than a single word. You have to imagine one word becoming two words... becoming 5,000 words, all the words evolving into something meaningful and, moreover, being correctly joined by proper syntax.

nonsense get you Otherwise,

Thirdly, in a random world, you are much more likely to get chaos than order, unintelligible gibberish rather than information.

Want a demonstration?

Go over to

http://www.RandomMutation.com/

Type in British biologist John Maynard Smith's "WORD".

Activate the randomizer.

Let me know when you come up with "GENE".

(In fairness to darwinists, each time you come up with a non-word, you discard it on the assumption that it was a harmful mutation that resulted in loss of life to the species -- only the life-supporting mutations survive).

* * *

If you kept at it, your fingers are now probably reduced to stubs.

Ordinary folk are quite within their rights to intuitively reject darwinian evolution in favor of design. Undirected evolution driven by natural processes can never be an adequate or sufficient account for life on Earth.

Some things are just intuitively grasped.

And that's the way the Ball bounces.