Playing catchup with GING

In the next few posts, am going to attempt to address Chapters 6, 7 and 8, which deal with (respectively) intelligent design and the Old and New Testaments.

In a previous post I remarked on the irony of the pains that Hitchens went through to elucidate how the human eye is an incredibly inefficient and backwards structure if made by a designer. This sort of ajudication on what Hitchens perceives to be "poor design" shows up a couple of times in this chapter. Hitchens makes a tongue in cheek reference to humans with their "adrenal glands too big and prefrontal lobes too small" and comments on the strange nature of human genitalia.

In this, Hitchens has painted himself into a corner with such blatant obviousness that I feel like the stupid one for bringing it up (were you ever in a class where the whole group was asked a question with such a ridiculously apparent answer that you hesitated to raise your hand because you thought there must be some catch?): If we are here as a result of evolution, which weeds out the weak and allows (through random mutation) the strong and best species to survive, then how can anything about the human race be said to be "too" anything or "not enough" of something else? If I accept the theory which Hitchens believes, I have to accept that the human race has been endowed by its blind, unguided "maker" with those attributes that are just right for survival and reproduction (until chaos throws us another curveball and some of us adapt and others die, of course).

Indeed, Hitchen's offers this quote: "evolution is smarter than you are." So why is he second guessing the smarter process? On the one hand, he wants to say how "smart" and magnificent evolution is, and offers up creation as testimony too it; on the other, he wants to point to flaws and say an intelligent creator would have done better. Which is it, sir?

Hitchens is so busy with "drive by" ad hominem against religion that he has very little time to dwell on scientific fact. And when he does mention science, it's usually to say something like (this is a specific, albeit paraphrased, example) 'scientists have recently demonstrated that gene expression can account for what appears to be irreducible complexity. So there.' And that's it. No delving into the facts of the matter.

I will not pretend that I have any idea beyond a most basic understanding of how cells and genes work, but if Mr. Hitchens may want to think twice before taking the ID movement on in this arena. New discoveries are being made every day that elucidate the mind-blowing complexity of the cells in the simplest of organisms. In regard to the multitude of functions, quality control mechanisms and infrastructure, the cell has been likened to a miniature city. Here's a recent study that shows just one of many examples of how cells function with what appears to be eerily intelligent engineering.

There's a fundamental question to cell function that Hitchens doesn't (dare not?) touch upon: what is it that makes all of that tiny molecular machinery within the cell work? What is it that animates the "stuff" of the cell? Data. Information. Code. Language.

Where did that come from? It's one thing to have a bunch molecules structured together in the right manner to form amino acids and nucleotides. How is it that these molecules became alive? How is it that they became programmed?