A Brain?  No Intelligence Needed!

 

 

Some years ago while on a plane to who knows where, I read a couple of articles written by Tom Siegfried, a science writer for the Dallas Morning News.  One was a laudatory piece examining the last published work of the late Harvard paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould.  The other article was titled “Life’s Complexity Defies Demand for a Designer”.  Nothing like a little good fiction to start your day off right! 

 

Everyone agrees that a “creator” is necessary for a watch or a new Boeing 747 jet, but not so for a blade of grass, or, for that matter, the human brain.  This astonishing conclusion according to physicist, Dr. Stephen Wolfram, who has written a book titled A New Kind of Science.  Commenting on the variety of organisms, Mr. Siegfried says of Dr. Wolfram’s theory:

 

“But can the simple laws of physics really produce devices of such complexity?  Surely a watch could not assemble itself from random molecules of metal and plastic.  How could nature on its own hope to produce something really complicated, like a human brain?  The answer, says physicist Stephen Wolfram, is that making a brain is easy (emphasis mine).  Crafting a timepiece is hard.  You need a designer, he says, not to produce complexity, but to ensure simplicity.”

 

Is he serious?  This means that creationists need not worry about Dawkins’ “Blind Watchmaker”!  We have now been introduced to “The Blind Brainmaker”!  And why is the “Blind Brainmaker” necessary?  I guess for the same reason that the Gould-Eldridge theory of punctuated equilibrium has become so popular.  To be honest, Wolfram’s book is about computers, but if the analogy of simple to complex works in computers, it must work in natural science as well, right?  You be the judge.   

  

Those of the scientific community who are atheists have finally admitted that Darwin’s scheme of micro-evolution and natural selection has not and cannot explain the sudden appearance and existence of such a diverse number of living organisms.  Over 150 years and tens of millions of fossils after Darwin’s theory was proposed, it doesn’t fit the existing record.  However, the atheist cannot accept God and Biblical creation as set forth in Genesis 1.  So each time the reigning theory of evolution falls into disrepute, a new theory must be proposed, regardless of its seeming implausibility.     

 

Since entire species suddenly appear in the fossil record, the evidence now confounds what Darwin claimed was the mechanism for the slow, gradual evolution of all living organisms in the world, both extinct and extant.  Enter Dr. Gould and Niles Eldridge some years ago, when they proposed the punctuated equilibrium theory.  Never mind that it violates existing physical laws; laws these men learned in undergraduate science courses.  Never mind there is NO physical evidence for these massive spasms of creativity within nature.  Common sense and compatibility with known physical laws have never impeded the formulation of new scientific theories designed to keep God out of their equations.       

 

Some still maintain that computers are or will be more complex and more mystifyingly marvelous someday, than is the human brain.  Maybe so in computing numbers, but will computers ever be capable of rational thought, of judgment, of love, hate, envy, greed, pain, sorrow, jealousy, lust, honor, courage, shame, regret, self-sacrifice?  As a matter of fact, show me a computer that was not intelligently designed by a human being with a BRAIN! 

 

And we have not even begun to discuss those physiological and psychological aspects of the human mind such as consciousness.  What about the ability to be aware of our own existence?  We are unique in the universe in our ability to make conscious, reasoned choices. 

 

Immoral or anti-social decisions are absolutely non-existent in the animal kingdom.  There are no serial-killer goats, pedophile bears, or birds who take their food each morning to the nest of another prettier bird down the street.  If these animals have been around for millions of years longer than humans, why haven’t their mental abilities evolved further?  As for humans - we’ve come a long way, baby, in a very short time.  If time and a little luck is all that is necessary, certainly some species other than man would have come a little further by now.            

 

What’s next?  Stay tuned.  Elaborate calculations, computer models, and hopeful hypotheses abound in the hearts and minds of those desperate to escape the need of a Creator God.

 

Gould and Eldriges’s punctuated equilibrium and Dr. Wolfram’s “Blind Brainmaker” are not compatible with the laws of probability, biogenesis, or thermodynamics.  The creation account we find in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, however, is easily reconciled with these natural laws.  Further, the Holy Spirit, through the pen of Moses, even tells us the basics of genetics (“according to its kinds” is used how many times in Genesis 1?), thousands of years before these laws were researched, studied and quantified through experimentation and observation.  Real science!     

 

Paul was not speaking of the 19th, 20th, and 21st century scientists when he wrote Romans, but 1:22 certainly fits:  “Professing to be wise, they became fools.”