whoops, I missed that...WHO is acting on blind, nonsensical faith?

Ever hear someone who is supposed to be really smart say something so unbelievably non-sensible and stupid that it makes you wonder how they are considered smart in the first place? It happens all the time in politics. It happens all the time in the school system. It happens WAY too much in sports. And it happens all the time in science. It cracks me up how neither side of the "Origin of Life" debate has much regard for the intelligence of the other side. I will admit to being part of that. Time and again I see stuff like the quote I will get to about half-way through this that is easily one of the 10 funniest quotes of the year.

One of the common criticisms of Creationism is their reliance on "blind faith".

"Professing to be wise, they became fools...." it says in Romans 1:22.

Well, one of the easy and oft-quoted replies has been in regard to the "blind faith" that evolutionists have in the mysterious forces of mutation. Despite the fact that mutations are observably harmful and non-repeating evolutionists claim life began with a series of them. Uh...okay. Despite the irreducible complexity of the basic building blocks of human life they continue to believe that is how life started. Okay...well, you folks ARE renowned for your intelligence.

After all, there are people, right now, working hard to create life. They are spending millions...scratch that, BILLIONS of dollars to create life. They are working on the design of various parts. They claim they will have created life within 10 years.*

They have identified three major steps they believe are needed and achievable. There is a bit of a race on to achieve it first. I have to tell you, I am impressed. To achieve on purpose what they believe nature achieved by chance, they are really applying a lot of time, effort, and intelligence to get this done. Wow, that sentence sounded ironic and sarcastic. Oh wait, it was...not as sarcastic as this blast, though...which comes from someone at the fore-front of the life-creating project. Seems Jack Szostak, a researcher at Harvard, thinks he is irrelevant to the process, that it is happening by itself.

"His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said

Uh....yeah. Let's see. You are designing the container...you are deciding what quantity of nucleotides to add in order to create genetics...but you aren't designing anything?

Professing to be wise, they became fools...

Dude, let's think about this rationally. You understand what the basic building blocks of life are. You understand how difficult it is, knowing what the blocks are, knowing how they need to be put together, and knowing they need someway of creating a delicate balance of allowing and disallowing the entry of certain substances, knowing all these things, knowing how difficult it is to create life with tools made specifically for that purpose...you somehow find pure chance violating all 3 Basic Laws of Thermodynamics in some form, particularly the second which is often (though it is sometimes argued incorrectly) relating to everything in the universe running down; without outside influences, things get worse. If you do not have a mechanic work on your car it breaks down, not improves, for example. Your bed is probably not in better shape than it was when you bought it unless someone has worked on it. And so forth.

And here is one of the smartest people on earth (allegedly) declaring that chance itself will do what all the combined intelligence of the scientific community cannot.

I must thank Szostak for the comment. It is easily one of the funniest things I have read this year.


* I should really bookmark this post and in 40 years come back to it when, for the 30th time or so, they are talking about being able to create life within 10 years. Mark my words...this will be said lots of times without seeing life created. The real irony here is I suspect it might be possible to build life from the building blocks God has given us using careful study and planning. Oh, not human life...but something. Of course, that is using the tools He granted to carefully design something, not blind, accidental chance bringing it about.