Mitchell’s Journey

Part 4 of 7

At home Sam thought to himself, “There’s something more that I should tell Mitch. He is sincere about finding the truth. I’ll email him.”

“Mitch, I appreciate the commitment you show to discovering what’s right. Therefore I feel free to add something to what I told you in the last few weeks. The whole premise of survival of the fittest on which evolution depends demands that enough is present all at the same time for something like an organ to appear and thrive. It’s called irreducible complexity. A part in a motor missing, a cable for a computer not there, a section of the optic nerve gone renders each one non-functional. Even a simple thing like a mouse trap has to have all the essential parts present or it is useless. You can’t have one part appear by accident and then wait for thousands or millions of years for the next part to appear. That partly formed item would be gone as quick as it came.

Not only does one organ or feature have to be complete all at once in order to function, there are untold millions of complex systems and organs in the inanimate and animate world that must be in place in there totality or the item will not even form. The idea of hanging on to the beginnings of an eye until after millions of years the optic nerves and receptor brain cells just happen to develop to match it, is preposterous. The level of complexity is such that if anything is missing from the system it will not work. The mathematical probability of any of those millions of organisms or structures coming into place by chance is effectively zero.

In Darwin’s day the cell was thought to be a very simple blob of protoplasm. Not so! Remember what I told you earlier? You started in your mother’s womb as a one-celled zygote the size of a period at the end of this sentence. In that cell a six foot coiled-up strand contained all the coded information, the computer software program that determined who and what you would become as a human being. Hardly a simple cell. Think about what that means, Mitch. Crucial components in non-living structures and critical organs in living organisms have to occur in completed form immediately to work. They cannot slowly develop over millions of years one part at a time. I’m not trying to put you down, Mitch. I just want to get at the truth.”

Mitchell puzzled and agonized a bit over that one. He decided to check with an expert. He was sure there would be an answer, and he’d find it.

Henry Wiebe

more next week