In the now 160 year-old evolution/creation debate…following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s worldview changing book On the Origin of Species…most of the scientific focus has been placed upon a search for how complex and well-defined living creatures and plants…through a purely naturalistic process without any help from an outside Creator God…could reach…could get to the advanced point of having enough functional development to be able to survive in a competitive environment…and to be able to successfully reproduce.
An equally important question to consider…as profound as any other issue in this area of the human search into the understanding of the origin of life, our world, and our purpose in it…is how conceptually and in actuality…would this development appear to “stop on a dime” in our present day?
In a Darwinian macroevolutionary program…that by pragmatic necessity must have wide-open genetic boundaries for variant traits and natural selection to produce the incredibly complex and well-defined diversity we see in the natural world…of substantial physical changes which theoretically should be able to freely progress forwards but also regress backwards and sideways in all directions…unguided…then what purely naturalistic law, entity, or “good sense” would “tell” the human heart when it has reached the optimum sweet-spot in size, architectural design, and performance…and then stay there fixed at that one optimum point…once achieved?
In a naturalistic program…what would tell the human liver, the two kidneys and the pancreas…when to stop growing in size…and when they had achieved optimum function in their physical architecture, capacity, and performance?
What would tell the human eyes to develop to the point of normal “20/20” vision…then stop there at this fixed point of utility for human usage…and not instead develop further to the point of eagle-eye vision…far beyond the performance quality of 20/20 vision?
What mechanism…in naturalistic materialism…puts up the decisive “stop sign” in the enumerable features in the human body…from the density-to-strength ratio of bones, the tensile strength of muscles and tendons, the pressure, viscosity, and temperature of blood, to the electrical impulses that generate all coordinated movements and functions…from balanced upright walking to formulating understandable speech.
What processes in a naturalistic origin and development of the vast diversity of life…would set the current boundaries around human lifespans at between 80 to 100 years? Why not 200, or 400, or 500 years?
Why would not a blind and mindless naturalistic process of forwardly improving progress…being indifferent and unguided in the area of purposeful intention…continue on in the same direction on a gradual upward incline…to add more years on to the length of human lifespans?
Why would something as important as human lifespans come to an abrupt stop at 80 to 100 years…when the unguided and mindless program of naturalism is supposed to be entirely indifferent to such things?
And if we are allowed to be brutally honest, blunt, and frank here…what purely naturalistic mechanism would invent…by random-chance, trial-and-error accident…the ardor of human sexual anticipation affecting both our bodies and our brains…then limit the time-duration of the pleasurable muscle contractions and fluids production that defines the human sexual climax…to somewhere around 10 seconds…give or take a few seconds?
Why would not the theoretical paradigm of naturalistic materialism…be working to further increase the time-duration and intensity of the human sexual climax to 20 or 30 seconds?
Why are people not out in the streets with protest signs…picketing congress to spend more research funds to discover the genetic means to lengthen our lifespans…and to improve sexual performance?
The logically satisfying sweet-spot in the high performance levels of virtually everything we observe in the natural living and non-living world…confirms our commonsense assessment that the world we live in…and indeed our very selves…are the product of the most brilliant, intentionally well-defined, creatively discriminating, intellectually thoughtful design…and not the random-chance result of complex things like elephants, lions, salmon, eagles, redwood trees, and honeybees blindly falling into individually discreet body-plan architectures and lifestyle habits…through the unguided self-assembly of naturalistic causes alone.
To propose that these decisively governing stopping points…occupying universal and unchallenged precedence for the billions of living things…that are at the centerpiece of the defining characteristics that determine what each of these living things are and are not…that these intelligently arrived-at stopping points are the creation of blind, unguided, mindless, indifferent, trial-and-error, random-chance processes…is nonsensical.
One of the explanations for why we look at the marvels of the living world with awe and respectful wonder…yet take for granted the speed of the cheetah, the power of the lion, and the cunning hunting skill of the leopard…is that we perceive no room for further development in the architectural body-plans and lifestyle habits of the billions of individual life-forms…all performing at the highest optimum end-points of their completed, actualized, conceptual definitions.
We do not look at the African elephant and think that it should be larger, that the giraffe should be taller, that the Labrador puppy should be cuter, or that human babies should be up and walking at 3-weeks old.
The realization of the required role of functional coherence in the successful formulation of complex systems…of completed definition that describes the essence of one thing and by doing so excludes the definition of something else…can be seen in one prime example of computer software language code that facilitates the application for word processing…but not for financial accounting spreadsheets.
From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity.
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The Cross in the Christian Life 