Lettuce pray...
Had a very active sort of day today, jogged to Redcar this morning but ran all the way to the station (Redcar East) which is 4.2 miles, in 35mins, so I was quite chuffed with that. Then we went to the allotment for a bit, though it was too muddy to dig really. An event worth recording though: we harvested our first produce from the land, our "firstfruits" comprising of....a lettuce. Here is that lettuce looking all happy and unsuspecting:
Nice, eh? All letucey and everything.
Had a few e-mails back and forth with Brian about irreducible complexity, it's still the best argument (in my opinion) for design- what brought it to mind was watching Richard Dawkins not really answering the question relating to organisms being irreducibly complex, on "The Atheism Tapes" on BBC Four on Friday. The question was particularly geared to whether a feather would be any use to a "bird" until it had actually fully developed as a feather (millions of years after it first started developing), but it can be applied to the origins of life also, as Michael Behe famously (infamously?) did, using the illustration of the mouse trap, i.e. a mouse trap has no useful function unless all its parts are present and in working order- it is irreducibly complex. This has been challenged, quite imaginatively I think, by many, but I am unconvinced. Even putting Bertrands observation to one side ("If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.") I don't think Evolution can (did) get off the ground, and all this leaves to one side the actual question as to what "sparked" the first chemicals into "life" in the first place? Show me a man who can animate dead chemicals into life, or who can build the "simplest" cell, and I'll re-examine my position.
Nice, eh? All letucey and everything.
Had a few e-mails back and forth with Brian about irreducible complexity, it's still the best argument (in my opinion) for design- what brought it to mind was watching Richard Dawkins not really answering the question relating to organisms being irreducibly complex, on "The Atheism Tapes" on BBC Four on Friday. The question was particularly geared to whether a feather would be any use to a "bird" until it had actually fully developed as a feather (millions of years after it first started developing), but it can be applied to the origins of life also, as Michael Behe famously (infamously?) did, using the illustration of the mouse trap, i.e. a mouse trap has no useful function unless all its parts are present and in working order- it is irreducibly complex. This has been challenged, quite imaginatively I think, by many, but I am unconvinced. Even putting Bertrands observation to one side ("If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.") I don't think Evolution can (did) get off the ground, and all this leaves to one side the actual question as to what "sparked" the first chemicals into "life" in the first place? Show me a man who can animate dead chemicals into life, or who can build the "simplest" cell, and I'll re-examine my position.
posted by John Doran-Armstrong at 5:18 PM
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