Below are four lectures that lay the foundation for my understanding of the relationship between Scripture and Science as they relate to origins.
I have probably posted at least some (if not all) of these links elsewhere on this board, but I thought it might be helpful to some if posted all four of these lectures together in a single post.
I hope you find this information as beneficial as I have.
The topics of these four lectures are:
- Genesis 1 and Science
- The Historical Adam
- Evolution
- Scientific Evidence for a Creator
I think Behe's "irreducible complexity" argument is a very powerful argument against any possibility of God-less creation of complex things by blind, random processes. In the first place, JUST the right supporting things / elements must have first come into existence beforehand, to make ANY such things possible - and the chance of that is exceedingly improbable. And the designs of things like cells, the human eye, etc. - these are so brilliantly designed that we have only a small grasp on them - especially a biological cell. And blind things and processes see nor design ANYTHING.
Behe's fellow biochemist Michael Denton describes the complexity of an irreducibly complex organism like the cell - as ALL components of it must exist all at once, or it cannot function as a cell, nor would their have been advantages leading up to it that might explain it - much less to be the result of blind/random processes:
“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.”
“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred-thousand-million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world.”
