Darwinism II

(The preface to this is in the previous entry, Darwinism I)

As I was out in the woods the other day sitting with our three-year-old on the Sitting Rock (which is, to my knowledge, of no relation to The Village's Resting Rock), and looking at all the Spring-ing nature around us, with the two-year old bringing me caterpillars, inchworms, beetles, and other members of the smaller majority, right before the black racer (Coluber constricter) came down the draw and interrupted me, I was thinking about the concept of a Darwinian origin of life through blind, undirected, unintelligent natural processes. Although darwinists have concocted different scenarios to explain how exactly life purposelessly began with no direction or guidance, the standard most 'scientifically' accepted hypothesis goes about like this: Billions of years ago as lifeless earth churned geologically, somewhere in the oceans or in some bywater or at least some slippery sludgy wet place, natural processes somehow began to develop Complex Protein-Chain Pre-life. These were not living things, but had most of the physical requirements for life bound up in them. Then 'somehow' in some sort of electrical storm or cataclysmic meteor strike, 'something' happened that 'changed' these pre-living protein chains to the most elementary of single cell living organisms, and life was born; changing over billions of years to eventually produce all the various creatures that we all see and hear and learn about today.

Now scientists have tried and failed to accomplish anything remotely like this, and you can see after a little consideration just how preposterously unlikely such an event would be to have even the remotest, remotest chances of happening. Michael Behe in Darwin's Black Box wrote that Darwin's original concept was at least partly explicable since the best they could do then was to view down to the level of a single cell which for all intents seemed just a nothingful little blob, but that we today can see deep into a cell and know that a cell is actually an incredibly, incredibly complex thing with a mind boggling array of chemical and mechanical activity going on. Behe's contention is that life at the simplest levels is far too complex to credibly consider just 'happening' as there are so many things that have to be in place right from the start for there to be anything at all.

I can't possibly condense into this space any reasonable facsimile of the complexity that Behe wrote a whole book to convey, but suffice it to say that just the description of one biological function can be dizzyingly complex.

And as I was there contemplating the difficulty of such an event ever coming to place apart from an intelligent designer, I had a realization that really struck me.

Assuming that you grant to them the incredible infeasible reality of the simplest, simplest form of life suddenly springing into being in any fashion; just say you don't argue the point at all and you grant that at some point, blindly, meaninglessly, suddenly, a tiny microscopic wad of proteinish goo just 'became' the first living creature – oops, I guess you can't say creature can you? – became the first living thing, the very first actually alive barely functional but functional enough to actually call it a living thing, completely alone in all the world in all the oceans, wiggling or wriggling, or drifting or whatever it did to 'live'... ...the 'however-it-happened-whatever-it-was' would have had to have sprang to life with full reproductive capacity already completely present and functional and ready to go! ...or the little guy would have died in a few hours and that would have been the end of that for another billion, billion years until the goo got lined up properly to give it another run...

Hmm. I dunno... Maybe it just took a few billion billion tries, each separated by a few billion billion years...how many billions would that get us up to..?

...seems a good bit easier to me to believe that Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies of Messiah written in the Law and the Psalms and the Prophets (Luke 24:44)...