Can random mutation and natural selection best explain the assembly of complex working parts into a machine designed to accomplish a specific function, or is an intelligent Creator the best explanation for the irreducibly complex parts that make up so much of us?
“The simplest organ which can be called an eye consists of an optic nerve, surrounded by pigment-cells and covered by translucent skin, but without any lens or other refractive body.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
“…How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated…” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
“You see, a system or device is irreducibly complex if it has a number of different components that all work together to accomplish the task of the system, and if you were to remove one of the components, the system would no longer function. An irreducibly complex system is highly unlikely to be built piece-by-piece through Darwinian processes, because the system has to be fully present in order for it to function.” Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 2004, quoting Michael Behe
“Searching for particular examples of irreducible complexity is a fundamentally unscientific way to proceed: a special case of arguing from present ignorance…gaps shrink as science advances…” Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2006
“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 correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree…” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
“It has been objected that in order to modify the eye and still preserve it as a perfect instrument, many changes would have to be effected simultaneously, which, it is assumed, could not be done through natural selection; but as I have attempted to show in my work on the variation of domestic animals, it is not necessary to suppose that the modifications were all simultaneous, if they were extremely slight and gradual.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
