The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [106]
“Now, if you take away any of these parts—the spring or the holding bar or whatever—then it’s not like the mousetrap becomes half as efficient as it used to be or it only catches half as many mice. Instead, it doesn’t catch any mice. It’s broken. It doesn’t work at all.”
He pointed down at the trap again. “And notice that you don’t just need to have these five parts, but they also have to be matched to each other and have the right spatial relationship to each other. See—the parts are stapled in the right place. An intelligent agent does that for a mousetrap. But in the cell, who tells the parts where they should go? Who staples them together? Nobody—they have to do it on their own. You have to have the information resident in the system to tell the components to get together in the right orientation, otherwise it’s useless.”
Behe sat back down. “So the mousetrap does a good job of illustrating how irreducibly complex biological systems defy a Darwinian explanation,” he continued. “Evolution can’t produce an irreducibly complex biological machine suddenly, all at once, because it’s much too complicated. The odds against that would be prohibitive. And you can’t produce it directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor system would be missing a part and consequently couldn’t function. There would be no reason for it to exist. And natural selection chooses systems that are already working.”
I studied the mousetrap. “You said an irreducibly complex system can’t be produced directly by numerous, successive, slight modifications,” I said. “Does that mean there couldn’t be an indirect route?”
Behe shook his head. “You can’t absolutely rule out all theoretical possibilities of a gradual, circuitous route,” he said. “But the more complex the interacting system, the far less likely an indirect route can account for it. And as we discover more and more of these irreducibly complex biological systems, we can be more and more confident that we’ve met Darwin’s criterion of failure.”
I asked, “Are there a lot of different kinds of biological machines at the cellular level?”
“Life is actually based on molecular machines,” he replied. “They haul cargo from one place in the cell to another; they turn cellular switches on and off; they act as pulleys and cables; electrical machines let current flow through nerves; manufacturing machines build other machines; solar-powered machines capture the energy from light and store it in chemicals. Molecular machinery lets cells move, reproduce, and process food. In fact, every part of the cell’s function is controlled by complex, highly calibrated machines.”
Behe motioned toward the mousetrap. “And if the creation of a simple device like this requires intelligent design,” he said, “then we have to ask, ‘What about the finely tuned machines of the cellular world?’ If evolution can’t adequately explain them, then scientists should be free to consider other alternatives.”
Before I began investigating that issue any further, though, I wanted to stay focused a while longer on Behe’s whimsical use of the mousetrap to illustrate irreducible complexity. Ever since Darwin’s Black Box was published, the lowly rodent-catcher has become something of a new icon in the debate over evolution versus design. As such, it has been pelted by opposition from Darwinists—and I needed to know if Behe could fend off the best challenges.
MESSING WITH THE MOUSETRAP
“Your mousetrap has generated quite a bit of controversy,” I began. “For instance, John McDonald of the University of Delaware said mousetraps can work well with fewer parts than yours—and he even drew a picture of a trap that’s simpler than the one you drew. Doesn’t this undermine your point that your mousetrap is irreducibly complex?