Picking up the book again, I'm moving on to chapter 3, where the author interviews Jonathan Wells, of the Discovery Institute of Seattle (which is a think tank dedicated to much more than promoting Intelligent Design).
The subject of the chapter is Jonathan Wells' fisking of four icons of evolution:
The Miller Experiment
Jonathan Wells says that the significance of the Miller experiment depends on the accuracy of the recreation of earth's early atmosphere, and in this regard it fails. "Miller chose a hydrogen-rich mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor, which was consistent with what scientists thought back then. But scientists don't believe that anymore....The best hypothesis now is that there was very little hydrogen in the atmosphere because it would have escaped into space. Instead, the atmosphere probably consisted of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water vapor." Strobel asks Wells what happens if you repeat the experiment with those components, and Wells tells him you'll get organic molecules, but not amino acids; what you'll get is formaldehyde, a toxic substance.
Going on from there, Strobel asks what if amino acids could be produced somehow - maybe we're wrong to throw out Miller's hypothesis; could amino acids produce life? Wells replies that it is a long way to go from a soup of amino acids to a living cell. He asks Strobel to think about what is involved by considering putting a single living cell in a sterile salt solution, and then poking a hole in it so that its contents leak into the solution. All the components of life are there, indeed more than the Miller experiment actually produced, but there is no life there; it's just a solution of molecules. It's not enough to have the molecules at hand, they have to be put together correctly, a mind-boggling task.
The bottom line of all this is that natural selection may offer an explanation of how life changes, but it is woefully inadequate in explaining how life first began. Strobel quotes another origin-of-expert, Walter Bradley, a former professor at Texas A&M University, "I think people who believe that life emerged naturalistically need to have a great deal more faith than people who reasonably infer that there's an Intelligent Designer."
Anoter way of perceiving the problem of life's beginning is to imagine yourself walking along the beach, and suddenly you see the words of Homer's The Iliad written in the sand. No reasonable person would conclude they were the product of random motions of waves on the sand - we recognize the vast improbability of that. We know that another person was there before us and wrote those words in the sand. The components of our cells, including our DNA, is much more complicated than words written in the sand, yet naturalists continue to deny that an intelligent being "wrote them down", insisting they are the product of random motions of molecules from a long time ago. (This example is from Lee Strobel's previous work, The Case for Christ)
The other topics from the list will be covered in future posts.
*****
A big thank you to David Heddle (He Lives), for providing me with a copy of a presentation he gave on Intelligent Design. His material complements Lee Strobel's book rather well.