Evolution: materialism explanation doesn't work (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, October 07, 2018, 20:27 (2238 days ago) @ David Turell

It is difficult to avoid intelligent design:

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/from-barren-planet-to-civilization-in-fo...

"There are four steps in the usual materialist explanation of how advanced civilizations can spontaneously arise on barren, Earth-like, planets, without design:

"Three or four billion years ago a collection of atoms formed by pure chance that was able to duplicate itself.

"These complex collections of atoms were able to preserve their complex structures and pass them on to their descendants, generation after generation.

"Over a long period of time, the accumulation of duplication errors resulted in more and more elaborate collections of atoms.

"Eventually something called “intelligence” allowed some of these collections of atoms to design computers and airplanes, and write encyclopedias and science texts.

"The first step is the origin of life: even most materialists will admit that this is a very difficult problem which has not yet been solved by science. Regarding the fourth step, we may feel that we understand how humans design and build computers and airplanes, because we see it happen all the time. But seeing something happen and understanding how it happens are two very different things, and again I think even most materialists will agree that science cannot yet explain human consciousness or intelligence in terms of unintelligent forces alone.

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“'Gaps among known orders, classes and phyla are systematic and almost always large,” writes Harvard paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson. And new organs and new systems of organs do not appear very gradually, as Darwin had expected, for the same reason that major new technological advances do not appear very gradually: gradual transitions would have to involve puzzling new but not yet useful features. Although he calls evolution “axiomatic,” University of California geologist Joseph Le Conte acknowledges in his 1888 book Evolution that in the fossil record, “species seem to come in suddenly” and that gradual transitions could not be explained by natural selection if they did exist: “An organ must be already useful before natural selection can take hold of it to improve it,” he concedes. (my bold)

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"Reproduction is the most fundamental characteristic of life, we see it happen everywhere, so we may feel there is no mystery to reproduction. But again, seeing something happen and explaining how it happens naturally are two very different things. Is it really true that if cars were able to give birth to other cars—that is, if they were able to reproduce themselves almost perfectly, with occasional minor duplication errors—that would make the evolution of cars easier to explain without design?.....We are so used to seeing animals make nearly perfect copies of themselves that we dismiss this as just another “natural” process; but if we actually saw cars with fully automated car factories inside, making new cars with car factories inside them, maybe we would realize what an astonishing process reproduction really is, and we might conclude that reproduction actually makes evolution even more difficult to explain without design.

***

" The argument for intelligent design here could not be simpler or clearer: unintelligent forces of physics alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and Apple iPhones. And the counterargument consists of four steps, each of which–to put it very generously–is full of dubious and unproven assertions."

Comment: The two items that stick in the craw of Darwinism are reproduction and consciousness, Neither are explained by chance evolution. The last objection is my bolded sentence. How does natural selection select an organ unless it is functional to begin with? The only answer is an intelligent designer running the show.