Atheism Debate

the existence of the earth defies probability. Years ago, famed astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there are two necessary criterion for a planet to support life: the right kind of star and the planet must be the right distance from that star. That meant that there should have been an innumerable amount of life supporting planets in the observable universe. Therefore, scientists were optimistic when they launched the S.E.T.I program (search for extra terrestrial intelligence) equipped with a vast array of satellites in order to pick up anything that resembled an encoded signal. Over the years the silence from the universe was deafening. It was then that they realized that the early estimations were no longer tenable. Today, the number of stipulations for a planet to support life have risen to 200+ all of which must be met perfectly or else the whole thing falls apart. Mathematicians have come to the conclusion that the earth is a 1 in 700 quintillion oddity. At what point do we recognize that it requires far MORE faith to assume that it all "just happened" than to believe that an intelligent force ensured that all of these criteria were met? However, the fine tuning required for the earth to exist is nothing compared to the requirements for the Universe to exist at all. Scientists now know that the four fundamental forces: the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, and the strong and weak nuclear forces needed to be determined within one millionth of a second after the creation of the universe ( be it by the Big Bang, God, whatever) and any slight modification of the values of the forces would have resulted in the Universes non-existence. for example, if the ratio between the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force were altered by the tiniest most inconceivable fraction stars could not form and the universe would not exist. The fine-tuning of the laws of physics and chemistry to allow for advanced life is an example of extremely high levels of CSI in nature. The laws of the universe are complex because they are highly unlikely. Cosmologists have calculated the odds of a life-friendly universe appearing by chance are less than one part in 1010^123. That"s ten raised to a power of 10 with 123 zeros after it! The laws of the universe are specified in that they match the narrow band of parameters required for the existence of advanced life. As an atheist cosmologist Fred Hoyle observed, "a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology." The universe itself shows strong evidence of having been designed. Studies of the cell reveal vast quantities of biochemical information stored in our DNA in the sequence of nucleotides. No physical or chemical law dictates the order of the nucleotide bases in our DNA, and the sequences are highly improbable and complex. Moreover, the coding regions of DNA exhibit sequential arrangements of bases that are necessary to produce functional proteins. In other words, they are highly specified with respect to the independent requirements of protein function and protein synthesis. Thus, as nearly all molecular biologists now recognize, the coding regions of DNA possess a high "information content" where "information content" in a biological context means precisely "complexity and specificity." Even atheist zoologist Richard Dawkins concedes that "biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." Atheists like Dawkins believe that unguided natural processes did all the "designing" but intelligent design theorist Stephen C. Meyer notes, "in all cases where we know the causal origin of "high information content," experience has shown that intelligent design played a causal role." The scientific method is commonly described as a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. In this regard, ID uses the scientific method to claim that many features of life are designed"not just the information in DNA. After starting with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI), design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be tested and discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures through genetic knockout experiments to determine if they require all of their parts to function. When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. This method has been used to detect irreducible complexity in a variety of biochemical systems such as the bacterial flagellum. Moreover, the more we discover about the cell, the more we are learning that it functions like a miniature factory, replete with motors, powerhouses, garbage disposals, guarded gates, transportation corridors, and most importantly, CPUs. The central information processing machinery of the cell runs on a language-based code composed of irreducibly complex circuits and machines: The myriad enzymes used in the process that converts the genetic information in DNA into proteins are themselves created by the process that converts DNA into proteins. Many fundamental biochemical systems won"t function unless their basic machinery is intact, so how does such complexity evolve via a "blind" and "undirected" Darwinian process of numerous, successive, slight modifications? Since cellular language requires an author, and microbiological machines require an engineer, and genetically encoded programs require a programmer, increasing numbers of scientists feel the best explanation is intelligent design.