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» Elephant in the Room
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» the Light is Good
» the Mask of Nature
» Divine wisdom vs Human Wisdom
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» Almost a Miracle
» The Bite of Rationalism
» The March of Science
» Afterword
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Sfarim
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** Elephant in the Room **
"Through the evidence of divine wisdom displayed in himself, he will become cognizant of the Creator as Job said (Job 19:26) From my flesh, I see G-d" - Shaar Bechina ch.5

Here is an excerpt from a lecture [1] by Dr. Michael Behe, professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University:
Imagine a room in which a body lies crushed, flat as a pancake. A dozen detectives crawl around, examining the floor with magnifying glasses for any clue to the identity of the perpetrator. In the middle of the room next to the body stands a large, gray elephant. The detectives carefully avoid bumping into the pachyderm's legs as they crawl, and never even glance at it. Over time the detectives get frustrated with their lack of progress but resolutely press on, looking even more closely at the floor. You see, textbooks say detectives must "get their man," so they never consider elephants.

There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life. The elephant is labeled "intelligent design." To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity. Rather, they were planned. The designer knew what the systems would look like when they were completed; the designer took steps to bring the systems about. Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity.

The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself, not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day.

...So as this talk concludes we are left with what many people feel to be a strange conclusion: that life was designed by an intelligent agent. In a way, though, all of the progress of science over the last several hundred years has been a steady march toward the strange.

People up until the middle ages lived in a natural world. The stable earth was at the center of things; the sun, moon, and stars circled endlessly to give light by day and night; the same plants and animals had been known since antiquity. Surprises were few.

Then it was proposed, absurdly, that the earth itself moved, spinning while it circled the sun. No one could feel the earth spinning; no one could see it. But spin it did. From our modern vantage it's hard to realize what an assault on the senses was perpetrated by Copernicus and Galileo; they said in effect that people could no longer rely on even the evidence of their eyes.

Things got steadily worse over the years. With the discovery of fossils it became apparent that the familiar animals of field and forest had not always been on earth; the world had once been inhabited by huge, alien creatures who were now gone. Sometime later Darwin shook the world by arguing that the familiar biota was derived from the bizarre, vanished life over lengths of time incomprehensible to human minds. Einstein told us that space is curved and time is relative. Modern physics says that solid objects are mostly space, that sub atomic particles have no definite position, that the universe had a beginning.

Now it's the turn of the fundamental science of life, modern biochemistry, to disturb. The simplicity that was once expected to be the foundation of life has proven to be a phantom. Instead, systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell. The resulting realization that life was designed by an intelligence is a shock to us in the twentieth century who have gotten used to thinking of life as the result of simple natural laws. But other centuries have had their shocks and there is no reason to suppose that we should escape them. Humanity has endured as the center of the heavens moved from the earth to beyond the sun, as the history of life expanded to encompass long-dead reptiles, as the eternal universe proved mortal. We will endure the opening of Darwin's black box..."
Dr. Behe writes in his book "Darwin's Black Box" (pg.232):
"Over the past four decades, modern biochemistry has uncovered the secrets of the cell. It has required tens of thousands of people to dedicate the better parts of their lives to the tedious work of the laboratory. The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell, to investigate life at the molecular level-is a loud, clear, piercing cry of "design!". The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science... Instead a curious, embarrassed silence surrounds the stark complexity of the cell. Why does the scientific community not greedily embrace its startling discovery? Why is the observation of design handled with intellectual gloves? The dilemma is that while one side of the elephant is labelled intelligent design, the other side must be labelled G-d."

>> Next: Greetings from The Cosmos

Footnotes