William Dembski explains what the debate on origins is really about.

About the speaker:

Dr. Dembski has taught at Northwestern University, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Dallas. He has done postdoctoral work in mathematics at MIT, in physics at the University of Chicago, and in computer science at Princeton University. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago where he earned a B.A. in psychology, an M.S. in statistics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, he also received a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1988 and a master of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1996. He has held National Science Foundation graduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

The lecture:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Summary (snark is in italics)

What is evolution:

• Is it enough for Christian students to just retain their faith in college?
• Or should Christian students seek to transform their universities?
• The word “evolution” refers to a unguided, purposeless, undirected process
• Living organisms are not designed, they just appear to be designed
• Therefore, it is an atheistic theory – there is NO ROOM for God
• Random variations and natural selection can do the creating of life without God
• Nothing about evolution suggest that God had anything to do with it

The appearance of design:

• The cell is a nano-engineered information processing system.
• The cell has engineering, e.g. – signal transduction, message passing, etc.
• There are molecular machines similar to man-made machines, but less efficient
• E.g. – the bacterial flagellum which has 40 parts
• These molecular machines have minimal complexity – all the parts are needed
• can’t build a molecular machine step-by-step – all the parts must be present and integrated

How does evolution try to explain molecular machines:

• The standard naturalistic response is “co-option”
• Each intermediate step has pieces that are used for other purposes
• I.e. – Subsets of the parts can have different functions
• For example, a subset of the bacterial flagellum can be used as a syringe
• The subset, called the Type-3 secretory system, has only 13 parts
• The problem is that evolutionists don’t show all the steps, and all the functions
• For this to be a good response, you need a smooth path from 1 part up to 40
• Each step of the path has to have a working system with a different function
• But the atheists don’t have the path, or the intermediate functions
• It’s like arguing that you can walk from Seattle to Tokyo via the Hawaiian islands

Is the bacterial flagellum a cherry-picked example?

• There are no detailed molecular pathways for any biochemical systems in the cell
• The atheistic response is to speculate that pathways will be found as science progresses
• The pathways are unobservable entities, just like the multiverse and the Cambrian precursors
  

Where does the machinery to create proteins come from?

• The molecular machines are composed of proteins
• The proteins are manufactured by copying protein-building instructions from the DNA
• The instructions are carried to the build site by messenger RNA
• The build site is called a ribosome
• The DNA requires proteins to build, so there is a chicken-and-egg problem
• The problem is that protein transcription systems require everything in place
• There is no materialistic theory about how to build this step-by-step

So what do the molecular machines tell us about how life began?

• The problem of the origin of life is the problem of the origin of information
• What needs to be explained are the functional sequences of parts
• The sequences are identical to sequences of letters that make sense
• The atheist has to say that material processes can create the information
• The problem of finding sequences of amino acids or proteins is a search problem
• A blind search of the space of possible sequences is not efficient
• even with lots time, parts and trials, you can’t converge on functional proteins
• information is required and the only known producer of information is a mind

Bill is one of my favorite people. He’s smarter than practically all of the atheists who dominate the universities. But because he is an outspoken Christian, he never gets the recognition he deserves. He just keeps plugging away on his research. He doesn’t make excuses.

What is intelligent design?

• R.C. Sproul interviews Stephen Meyer on Signature in the Cell
• Stephen Meyer explains what intelligent design is in a CNN editorial.
• Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell in top ten science books on Amazon.com
• Stephen Meyer debate against Michael Shermer on Lee Strobel’s TV show

Related DVDs

Illustra also made two other great DVDs on intelligent design. The first two DVDs “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet” are must-buys, but you can watch them on youtube if you want, for free.

Here are the 2 playlists:

• Unlocking the Mystery of Life (12 videos in a playlist)
• The Privileged Planet (12 videos in a playlist)

I also recommend Coldwater Media’s “Icons of Evolution”. All three of these are on sale from Amazon.com.

Related posts

• The origin of the universe from nothing
• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constants to permit life
• The fine-tuning of the galaxy, solar system, and planet to permit life
• Origin of the building blocks in the simplest replicating cell
• Origin of biological information in the simplest replicating cell
• Sudden origins of all major body plans in the Cambrian explosion
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The limits on what natural selection and random mutation can do
• Peer-reviewed paper says there is no atheistic explanation for the Cambrian explosion
• Does the Cambrian explosion disprove Darwinian evolution?