Crank it up, John - 28 June 2009 |
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Having arrived, a little exhausted, at the end of chapter 7 of John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker, you might be forgiven for expecting a gentle drift to the conclusion. Not a bit of it.
Chapters 8 to 12 crank up the pace about 3 gears, as Lennox moves from DNA and genetics to the science uniquely equipped to analyse it – a science for which he, as a mathematician, is admirably equipped as a guide – the science of information.
For a living cell is not merely matter. It is matter replete with information. (p. 126).
Or again, Bernd-Olaf Küppers (yup – his real name):
The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information. (p. 139).
And that information, says Lennox, must have come from somewhere.
Particularly striking is Lennox’s potent demonstration of the question-begging so rampant in many contemporary analogies for evolution (pp. 156ff.). Richard Dawkins, for example, in his book The Blind Watchmaker, attempts to demonstrate how evolution can produce incredibly improbably biological structures by drawing an analogy with a team of monkeys typing at random to produce a ‘target phrase’, in this case Shakespear’s ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’. Dawkins succeeds, at a first glance, in showing how the probability of producing this phrase can be reduced from 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (yup – 40 zeroes) to around 1 in 43. Neat, huh? Suddenly writing plays for a living looks like a workable career option.
Well, not quite – don’t give up your day job. Listen to Lennox:
What … does he mean by introducing a target phrase? A target phrase is a precise goal which, according to Dawkins himself, is a profoundly un-Dawinian concept … the very information that the mechanisms are supposed to produce is apparently already contained somewhere within the organism, whose genesis he claims to be simulating. The argument is entirely circular. … For their plausibility, then, Dawkins’ analogies depend on introducing to his model the very features whose existence in the real world he denies. (pp. 158-159).
Oops.
Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Books, God's Undertaker, Minister's Blog