How Irreducible Complexity Points to God
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for A Creator, chapter 8. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
Simply put, irreducible complexity states that all components of a system or device are necessary for it to function - remove one and it cannot function.
For example, consider a basic mousetrap. It is comprised of five parts: a platform, catch, hammer, spring and holding bar. If any one of these components is missing, it cannot function. It's not that it functions poorly; it cannot function at all.
In his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin said, "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Here Darwin provided a criterion by which his theory of evolution could be falsified. The logic is straightforward and simple: since evolution is a gradual process in which slight modifications produce advantages for survival, it cannot produce complex structures in a short amount of time. It is a step-by-step process which may gradually build up and modify complex structures, but it cannot produce them suddenly.
Cilia, the whip like hairs on the surface of certain ciliate protozoans, beat in rhythmic waves, providing locomotion. To keep it simple for our purposes here, cilia are essentially comprised of rods, linkers and motors, and all of them must be present in order to function. They would not perform less well if missing one of these components. No, like the mousetrap, they could not function at all. And Darwinian evolution can't account for their coming into being via slight modifications over time.
Similarly, bacterial flagellum provide the same problem for Darwinism. Think of an them like the outboard motor on a boat - they’re like propellers. They can spin at 10,000 rpm, stop in a quarter of a turn and instantly begin spinning in the opposite direction at 10,000 rpm. This is far beyond anything we can make, especially considering its size, which is a couple of microns (a micron is 1/20,000th of an inch). Between 30-35 proteins are needed to create a functional flagellum, and science doesn’t even know the role of all of its proteins yet. But you'd need at an absolute minimum a paddle, a rotor, and a motor. And once again, Darwinian evolution can't account for their coming into being via slight modifications over time.
And then there is what is known as the blood-clotting cascade - a highly choreographed cascade of ten steps that use about twenty different molecular components. And - I'm sure you can guess where I'm going here - a gradual Darwinian process cannot be demonstrated in this process either.
Right now, the only principle that can come up with complex interactive systems is intelligence. Complex biological systems have yet to be explained by naturalistic means.
We reason in our everyday lives in a way that's known as abductive reasoning, also called "inference to the best explanation." And it is not overreach to infer an Intelligent Designer here. Of all the possible explanations, I believe it is the best.
Yet the National Academy of Sciences said: “Intelligent Design… [is] not science because [it’s] not testable by the methods of science.”
But "abductive reasoning is not limited to everyday contexts. Quite the contrary: philosophers of science have argued that abduction is a cornerstone of scientific methodology; see, for instance, Boyd 1981, 1984, Harré 1986, 1988, Lipton 1991, 2004, and Psillos 1999. According to Timothy Williamson (2007), '[t]he abductive methodology is the best science provides' and Ernan McMullin (1992) even goes so far to call abduction 'the inference that makes science.'" [1]
And it is important to note the following:
Several branches of science already use the concept of design or intelligence and have even devised tests for detecting the work of an intelligent agent. Consider forensic science. When police find a body, their first question is, Was [sic] this death the result of natural causes, or was it foul play (an intentional act by an intelligent being)? Likewise, when archaeologists uncover an unusually shaped rock, they ask whether the shape is a result of weathering, or whether the rock is a primitive tool, deliberately chipped by some Paleolithic hunter. When a cryptographer is given a page of scrambled letters, how does he determine whether it is just a random sequence or a secret code? When radio signals are detected in outer space, how do astronomers know whether it is a message from another civilization? In each case, there are straightforward tests for detecting the work of an intelligent agent.[2]
When naturalistic theories fail, it's okay to conclude that perhaps the best explanation for the fact that life on Earth appears to be the work of a Designer is because it is.
[1] <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/#UbiAbd> [Accessed 2/16/18]
[2] Nancy Pearcey, “Design and the Discriminating Public: Gaining a Hearing from Ordinary People,” Touchstone Magazine (July/August 1999) as found at Leadership U. Available at: <http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/arn/pearcey/np_touchstone0899.htm> [Accessed 11/25/15]