Quote of the Day: "Nonsentient Contrivance "

"Intelligent design (ID)—the latest incarnation of religious creationism—posits that complex biological features did not accrue gradually via natural evolutionary forces but, instead, were crafted ex nihilo by a cognitive agent. Yet, many complex biological traits are gratuitously complicated, function poorly, and debilitate their bearers. Furthermore, such dysfunctional traits abound not only in the phenotypes but inside the genomes of eukaryotic species. 

Here, I highlight several outlandish features of the human genome that defy notions of ID by a caring cognitive agent. These range from de novo mutational glitches that collectively kill or maim countless individuals (including embryos and fetuses) to pervasive architectural flaws (including pseudogenes, parasitic mobile elements, and needlessly baroque regulatory pathways) that are endogenous in every human genome. 

Gross imperfection at the molecular level presents a conundrum for the traditional paradigms of natural theology as well as for recent assertions of ID, but it is consistent with the notion of nonsentient contrivance by evolutionary forces. In this important philosophical sense, the science of evolutionary genetics should rightly be viewed as an ally (not an adversary) of mainstream religions because it helps the latter to escape the profound theological enigmas posed by notions of ID."

Footprints of nonsentient design inside the human genome - 

John C. Avise - 

PNAS - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

It is OK for darwinists to speak of God in peer-reviewed science journals, as long as he is their God -- harmless, non-interferring, ignorable; the reverse courtesy is rarely afforded those who believe we are the products of an intentional Creator. According to PNAS, the only proper view of God is a Being who had no real role in our creation. In other words, a God not worth knowing, not worth worshipping, and not worth worrying about.

Still, you have to wonder why a guy like this would have any confidence whatsoever in the thoughts bubbling up in his brain. His thoughts are, after all, the product of a nonsentient contrivance, and nothing more. 

As I've said before, darwinists love to dis the creation, but they rarely if ever doubt the functional integrity of their own brains. Or maybe they do. Maybe they get up in the morning. The theist begins his day happily singing: "I am wondrously made in your image, O Lord...".  The darwinist, brushing his teeth, sputters and mutters, "My mind is a nonsentient contrivance, my mind is a nonsentient contrivance..."

Regain your humanity. Rebel against the atheist machine.™

PS:  There are at least three errors in the scientist's formulation of what ID is and says. Can you spot them?


PPS: Stephen Meyer weighs in on this issue, here:


"... one of the strongest challenges to intelligent design has always been the observation of things in nature that are not going well or don’t look like they were intelligently designed. In the book I have a section on pathogens and virulents. There have been these horrific diseases in the history of life — like the plague. People ask me, “Do you really want to say the plague was intelligently designed by God?” And as Christian and a design theorist, of course I don’t want to say that. So there are then three options to respond to this, sometimes called the problem of natural evil. One option is that there really is no evil, natural or otherwise; it’s just that you’ve got random mutations producing things that we like and things that we don’t like. That was essentially the Darwinian view. He was going to let God off the hook by saying essentially that God had nothing to do with it. He didn’t want to make God responsible for evil, so he made God responsible for nothing at all. The other view is that it looks like you’ve got design, but it looks like you’ve got a good designer and a bad designer at the same time. A third view — which I think is more in line with a Christian view of design — is that the world is simply evidence of a good design gone bad."