How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [76]
The evolution of the eye from a simple eyespot to the complex eye, which has occurred independently at least a dozen times in natural history, shows that the eye is neither irreducibly complex nor intelligently designed. It was constructed by natural selection in fits and starts over hundreds of millions of years from available parts and systems already in use.
The anatomy of the human eye shows that it is anything but “intelligently designed.” It is built upside down and backwards, with photons of light having to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizonal cells, and bipolar cells, before reaching the light-sensitive rods and cones that will transform the signal into neural impulses. From the rods and cones, the impulses are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful images.
3.
The “intelligent design” argument, similar to Aquinas’s fifth way to prove God, also suffers from the fact that the world is not always so intelligently designed! Look at the animal on the following page. It is Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between the quadrupedal land mammal Mesonychids and the direct ancestor of modern whales, the Archaeocetes. Ambulocetus natans, say the paleontologists who discovered it, swam “by undulating the vertebral column and paddling with the hindlimbs, combining aspects of modern seals and otters, rather than by vertical movements of the tail fluke, as is the case in modern whales.” First of all, why would God, in His infinite wisdom and power, create a mammal that appears midway between a land mammal and a modern marine mammal, that combines the movements of both land and marine mammals, and, most uniquely, paddles with hind limbs obviously well designed for land locomotion? For that matter, why would He create air-breathing, warm-blooded, breast-feeding marine mammals only moderately well “designed” for living in the oceans, when he could have just stuck with the much more efficient fish design? Finally, on a larger scale, why would God design the fossil record to look like descent with modification was the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, rather than sprinkling geological strata willy-nilly with, say, trilobites in Cretaceous strata, and a T-Rex or two alongside some Neanderthal fossils? The fossil record screams out evolution, not creation.
4.
When Michael Behe defines irreducible complexity, he concludes: “An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.” Philosopher Robert Pennock has pointed out that this last phrase employs a classic fallacy of bait-and-switch logic—reasoning from something that is true “by definition” to something that is proved through empirical evidence. Creationists counter the above arguments about the eye by redefining what constitutes an eye, reducing its complexity until they get one that does not work. This is not allowed in the rules of right reasoning.
The frequent rallying cry of creationists and other antievolutionists demands proof of the existence of “just one transitional fossil.” The discovery of Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between the landbased Mesoynchids and the marine mammal Archaeocetes, the direct ancestor of modern whales, answers that demand. This fossil record has all the earmarks of an evolutionary process of Darwinian “descent with modification” rather than a creationist “abrupt appearance.”
The new creationists have also mounted an attack on the very foundations of science—its philosophical naturalism (sometimes called methodological naturalism, materialism, or scientism). This is the belief that