Irreducible complexity

You're walking down the street with a toddler and come upon the sight of sneakers tied end to end and draped over the telephone wire. I almost said "thrown" over the telephone wire, but that would be begging the question.

How do they happen to be there, that's what the kid wants to know. Your adult mind, at this point, races through a rolodex of childhood pranks, and you mentally reconstruct the incident. But until you explain it, for all he knows the things spontaneously erupted from the wire like lichen.

None of us was around when the first human eye appeared, so one could say "your guess is as good as mine" --- Evolution or Creation. But nobody believes one guess is as good as another for explaining the wristwatch you find on the beach; nobody countenances for one second that it's a fortuitous collision of glass and metal. You know design when you see it.

It's all about choices, isn't it. One person sees irreducible complexity and considers the staggering improbability of simultaneous and co-adaptive mutations, or a series of cumulative fortuitous mutations just hanging on till the payoff arrives of a whole functioning eye. The other person (perhaps smuggling a little teleology into his atheism unawares) invokes time plus chance to silence all objections.

The mechanisms of biology are complex but the concept is simple enough (Matthew 11:25). I don't suspend everyday logic and the ordinary rules of evidence which I apply to wristwatches when it comes to the "big" question of origins.

"To the person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biological systems were designed" (Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box)