Jay L. Wile, formerly of the Ball State University Department of Chemistry, was on campus Tuesday. He's the author of the Apologia home school science curriculum and a noted speaker on creationism, and that's what he was talking about.
His lecture was entitled, "The Earth: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made;" it was a presentation of various wonderful and awe-inspiring features of the natural world that seem to point to a model that involves a designer.
For example, the Earth is the perfect distance from the Sun for life. A change by even a few percent would be devastating to life as we know it. The atmosphere is full of a perfect mix of gases to support us. Wile went into some depth on the ozone layer and its protection of life. Out of the one hundred trillion possible nucleotide bases for DNA, the four we have - adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine - are among the most efficient possible. The human eye (a perennial creationist favorite) is an amazing example of design because of its incredible complexity and efficiency. For example, instead of extending and retracting like a man-made camera to focus light, the eye expands and contracts the lens itself by flexing the ciliary muscles.
Sounds convincing, eh? Well, it should.
For thousands of years, the best model for all of these interlocking relationships and seemingly inconceivable coincidences has been intelligent design. But the progress of the other sciences in building naturalistic models of nature should make us wary of leaping too quickly to embrace a supernatural model of design for biological life and its environment.
You see, for tens of thousands of years, because nature often worked in seemingly arbitrary ways, humans have always assumed that nature was governed by capricious human-like deities. Lightning? Zeus was hurling thunderbolts. Earthquakes? Poseidon hammered the ground with his trident. Rainbows? Yahweh's promising that, no matter how much it just rained, he won't drown the Earth again. Sunrise? Ra safely made it through the underworld, thanks to Pharaoh's nightly intercessions.
Invariably, though, we've found entirely naturalistic explanations for these phenomena. Lightning: charge builds up in thunderclouds, creating a giant capacitor that essentially breaks down, ionizing a pathway through the air in a great burst of current. Earthquake: the Earth's tectonic plates, held in place by static friction, build up tension until friction is overcome and they snap to a new position, releasing thousands of tons of energy. Rainbow: light from the Sun refracts through individual raindrops into a spectrum and then reflects from the opposite side; the cumulative effect from millions of droplets is a giant curve. Sunrise: the Earth simply rotates through the Sun's light.
So when, in the rest of nature, purpose and design have been illusions, why should we embrace it in biology or our environment? Some creationists would argue, as Wile did, that we should embrace it because the evidence of design is intrinsically different - and stronger - than it seemed to our forebears. Wile is an evidentialist. He builds creationist models and contends that they are superior to naturalistic models.
But all too often, instead of presenting specific models, creationists rely on the appearance of design in combination with apparent flaws in the theory of evolution. But the appearance of design is altogether too weak an argument to attack the watchmaker argument - if you found a watch on the beach, you'd assume a watchmaker existed. If we knew of a way for watches to originate naturally, we would not feel nearly so compelled to infer the existence of design.
And that's what the theory of evolution does. It provides a compelling naturalistic argument for why life is the way it is. Why is the Earth so perfectly placed in the Solar System to provide for life? Because life adapted to the Earth's location. Why is the mix of gases in the atmosphere perfect for us? Because organisms that weren't so good at using the atmosphere perished. Why does the eye focus so well? Because focusing is something a good eye has to do, and a good eye is indispensable for survival.
You see, the appearance of design is not the same at all as the actuality of design, and it is important to be able to make the distinction not just in biology, but in all areas of life.
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