Image via Wikipedia“The double helix is an elegant structure, but its message is downright prosaic: life is simply a matter of chemistry . . . nothing but a vast array of coordinated chemical reactions” -- James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA(DNA: The Secret of Life, 2003), quoted here.Read that quote again starting with "life is simply..." and see if you see the interesting word, from an intelligent design point of view. Does it jump out at you?
Coordinated. Coordinated chemical reactions. What or who coordinated these chemical reactions? If there is nothing outside of the chemical reactions themselves, no coordinator doing the coordinating, why not reduce life further and simply say it is chemical reactions, and leave it at that?
Watson is, of course, using a reductionist argument, the hallmark of materialists. We are nothing more than animals. Our minds are nothing more than our brains. Life is nothing more than chemicals. Materialism isn't really about climbing mount improbable; it's more like whittling away at God's creation -- what actually is -- to reduce it to a scrapheap of whittles.
As C.S. Lewis has pointed out, if our minds are nothing more than our brains, and our brains are nothing more than chemical reactions, and if these chemical reactions were caused by nothing more than undirected, purposeless, mindless processes, what rational basis do we have for actually believing anything our minds spit out or cough up -- if we are molecular machines, chemistry-at-work, they are, at heart, no different than a belch.
I believe in God because I believe in "me", conscious, moral, irreducible to chemistry alone. And God, and God alone, provides a sufficient explanation, cause, and reason, for "me".
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