2 Peter 1:16

1. 2 Peter 1:16 16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

2. The Master Designer Timothy G. Standish, Ph. D.

3. Outline • Does the Bible say that God designed life? • Does life look designed? • How do we decide if something is designed? • Can nature design the kind of things seen in living systems?

4. Creator, Maker, Designer • Is there a difference between being Creator, Maker, or Designer? • Perhaps - To make something does not mean that you planned in advance (I have made a mess many times with no forethought at all) • An engineer may design a spectacular bridge but not be the craftsman that builds it. • A scriptwriter may create a character, but that character will be played by an actor and may be perpetuated by other scriptwriters

5. Creator is a Title of God • Ecclesiastes 12:1 Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them. • Isaiah 40:28 Hast thou not known: has thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching his understanding. • Romans 1:25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. • 1 Peter 4:19 Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.

6. Being Creator Makes God God Isaiah 45:5-12 5 I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: 6 That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else. 7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things. 8 Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation, and let righteousness spring up together; I the Lord have created it. 12 I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I commanded.

7. To Be Owned By God • The word translated “Creator” in the New Testament is always ktizo (ktizo ktid’-zo) meaning to fabricate. • This word comes from the root ktaomai (ktaomai ktah’-om-ahee) a verb meaning to acquire or purchase. • God both fabricated us and purchased us • We are owned by God

8. God The Maker Pslams 119:73 Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments. Psalms 139:14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. I Corinthians 12:18 But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.

9. God’s Claim to be Designer Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. • The Bible claims that God planned in advance to make beings using Himself as the model.

10. God Made A Plan First Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. • This text clearly outlines the order of events in creation of man: First a model was made and then life was given to it. • In the creation of man there was planning and forethought - Design then fabrication.

11. Does life look designed?

12. Highly probable? Yes Law No Intermediate probability? Yes Chance No Specified/ Small probability? Design Yes No Chance Start William Dembski’sExplanatory Filter From Mere Creation: Science, Faith and Intelligent Design. William A. Dembski, ed. 1998. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p 99.

13. Is The Pattern Random Or Designed? Probability: =2-256 =8.6 x 10-78 =0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000086

14. Is The Pattern Random Or Designed? Probability: =2-256 =8.6 x 10-78 =0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000086

15. Arguments for a Designer • Organisms look designed for at least three (3) reasons: • Redundancy - A Designer can engineer redundancy into a system, but chance is unlikely to do this. An example of this is the presence of degeneracy in the genetic code and other features that minimize or negate the effects of many point mutations. • Excess potential - Organisms have potential that may never be used. For example, Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection, pointed out that primitive people have the capacity to do calculus when trained. Natural selection is unlikely to select for capacity that is not used. • Complexity - Life exhibits a kind of complexity that is hard to produce by processes involving chance.

16. Design and Deductive Reasoning • In general, arguments for a designer are arguments against the alternative. This does not mean these are just arguments against evolutionary theory. All arguments, by definition, are characterized by taking one side while arguing against another side. • Arguments against a theory are about eliminating possible explanations. There is nothing inferior about this, in fact, it is deductive reasoning which is used by scientists all the time in their quest for truth.

17. The Likely and the Unlikely • Arguments for a Designer frequently revolve around probability. Meaningful complexity is unlikely to result from random events. Organisms are meaningfully complex. Some claim that natural selection overcomes much of this problem as, while change may be random, selection is not. • Science is about predicting what is likely and what is unlikely. Everyone is in agreement that the events leading to production of living organisms are unlikely.

18. In a Long Time and Big Universe • It has been argued that given massive lengths of time and a universe to work in, the unlikely becomes likely: • “Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities, anything is possible. The large numbers proverbially furnished by astronomy, and the large time spans characteristic of geology, combine to turn topsy-turvy our everyday estimates of what is expected and what is miraculous.” Richard Dawkins (1989) The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. W. W. Norton and Co., NY, p 139. • Dawkins says that while life looks designed, the designer was not God, but massive chance coupled with natural selection. Nature was the designer. • In The Panda’s Thumb, Stephen J. Gould argues that life does not look designed.

19. Little or Big Changes? • Not all changes improve fitness, they may: • Improve the fitness of an organism (very unlikely) • Be neutral, having no effect on fitness • Be detrimental, decreasing an organisms fitness (most likely) • The bigger the change the more likely it is to be significantly detrimental • Darwin argued that evolution is the accumulation of many small changes that improve fitness, big changes are unlikely to result in improved fitness. • “Many large groups of facts are intelligible only on the principle that species have been evolved by very small steps.” • The Origin of Species Chapter VII under “Reasons for disbelieving in great and abrupt modifications”

20. Board Trigger Staple Cheese Bait holder Hammer Spring Behe’s Insight • Michael Behe contends that when we look at the protein machines that run cells, there is a point at which no parts can be removed and still have a functioning machine. He called these machines “irreducibly complex” (IC) • We encounter irreducibly complex devices in everyday life. A simple mousetrap is an example of an irreducibly complex device:

21. I. C. Protein Machines • Cells are full of irreducibly complex devices - Little protein machines that work only if all the parts (proteins) are present and arranged correctly. • Natural selection does not provide a plausible mechanism to get from nothing to the collection of parts necessary to run a number of irreducibly complex protein machines vital to living cells • Evolution of these protein machines must occur in single big steps, not gradually, as to be selected a protein must be functional in some way. Each protein machine is fairly complex, thus evolution in a single step seems unlikely.

22. Cilia and Flagella • Cilia and Flagella are examples of irreducibly complex protein machines. • Both cilia and flagella are found in the simplest eukaryotic organisms, single-celled protists, as well as much more complex animals. Some members of the plant kingdom also have flagella. • As complicated structures are thought to have evolved only once, evolutionary theory suggests flagella evolved in a very ancient common ancestor of modern plant and animal cells.

23. Components of Flagella and Cilia • Flagella and cilia are made of a number of different protein components: • Three types of microtubules - singlet, doublet, and triplet - composed of a and b tubulin • Nexin to separate the tubules • Protein spokes connecting tubules to maintain a constant diameter • Spoke heads • Dynein arms that interact with adjacent microtubules • A basal plate • Each of these components must be present if the flagellum or cillium is to work.

24. Radial spokes Dynein arms Microtubule doublet Plasma membrane Central microtubules Flagella Parts

25. Are Little Jumps Possible? • Cilia or flagella, missing any single part, will not bend; they are thus irreducibly complex • Parts having functions enhancing fitness independent of a role in locomotion, after developing some functionality, could evolve via random change and natural selection • Microtubules are an important part of the cytoskeleton of all eukaryotic cells, thus they could evolve independently • No other protein components of cilia and flagella have known functions independent of their role in movement • Thus, all proteins, other than tubulin in microtubules, would have to spontaneously come into existence simultaneously if they were to increase fitness and be selected. • That seems like a big jump!

26. There Is More • Cilia and flagella represent the tip of the iceberg of our current understanding of the little machines that make up cells. Our current understanding of how cells function is still fragmentary, but even in this limited set of knowledge, numerous examples of irreducible complexity exist. • Irreducible complexity at the biochemical level represents a powerful challenge to the theory that natural selection can account for the origin of modern living organisms.

27. Evolution of Complex Organs • The Origin of Species Chapter VI "Difficulties of the Theory" • Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication • “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correcting of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

28. Evolution of the Eye • To go from nothing to an eye would be a very big jump • Darwin proposed a series of what appeared to be relatively small steps (they are still gigantic leaps) that might be able to produce an eye

29. The End