If evolution were ever proven beyond any doubt it would not affect my faith in God. Not one bit. I never really understand why this is an issue for the faithful as if their faith hinged on all of these little details.
God is bigger than a bunch of little details.
Glynn was an physicist and atheist. Eventually he became a believer. His book can get a little technical and uses a lot of scientific terminology and equations that made my eyes cross but overall, shows concrete evidence of ID.
Some scientists believe that lightning struck a primordial soup in ammonia-rich oceans, producing the complex molecules that formed the precursors to life. Others believe that chemical reactions at deep-sea hydrothermal vents gave rise to cell membranes and simple cellular pumps.
In other words, the massively sophisticated molecular machinery of single-cell organisms simply arose spontaneously as a fully functional unit after bombarding mud puddles with lightening for a few hundred million years.
If you believe that, then you should have no problem at all with believing that a Panasonic CF-53 laptop computer with Windows 7 would arise spontaneously if we filled a beaker full of the elemental powders from which it is formed, put some sea water in, and then bombarded the laptop soup in the beaker with lightening for a few hundred million years.
Eventually, we may obtain only a single integrated circuit chip forming in the beaker, but the chip should eventually EVOLVE all by itself into the laptop (with operating system) after being bombarded by cosmic rays for a long time after that.
If organic life formed by accident in a similar scenario, then certainly there should be no problem with obtaining the laptop and operating system in a like fashion, because after all, the laptop and OS are a few thousand trillion times simpler than, say, the Homo Sapiens species. In fact, we should obtain the laptop and OS much much faster because they are so much simpler.
Right?
(BTW, someone recently claimed the fallacy in my logic was that there were possibly billions of mud puddles, not just one, so I was forced to amend my thought experiment to include, not one, but billions of beakers. There. Fixed it.)
“The prevailing view in science today is that physics explains all of chemistry, chemistry explains all of biology, and biology completely explains the human mind; thus physics alone explains the human mind and all it does. This is what you have to believe to not believe in intelligent design”
That’s nonsense.
One can believe that and also believe in intelligent design, or a lot of other things.
I think perhaps the better litmus test is the inability to use commas correctly.
ID proponents all too often don’t understand the science of emergent order, as detailed in the study of chaos, cellular autonoma, etc. ID may be true, but proponents who don’t understand these subjects are grossly ignorant.
I’d say the most powerful argument for intelligent design is simply the fine-tuning argument for God.
If you come to the conclusion of God in explaining the mathematical absurdity that is our universe, you can’t really stop there. If God made sure all of the constants were perfect for life, it seems unlikely he would not have a hand in how that life formed. What would the point be otherwise? Like painstakingly creating a train set, and then going upstairs for eggs.
Our souls are in the image of God, but our bodies are something else entirely. God does not have a physical shape, so where does our shape come from? Why are our bodies as efficient as they are? Why are they as deficient as they are?
I pray all is answered on the other side.
Physics and chemistry cannot alone produce animal/plant life, let alone the abstraction of wondering where one came from, nor to even foolishly postulate "there is no God.".