Chapter II — There is no evidence that God exists
Immediately and, to me, not surprisingly, Jacob invokes an argument from beauty and design. "Imagine you are walking along a sandy beach and you stumble upon a robot. Would you conclude that someone had assembled the robot. Would you conclude that someone had assembled the robot and left it there? Or would you decide that this robot had assembled by random chance?" Naturally, one would assume that someone assembled the robot as robots are not naturally occurring and require an agent to be assembled. Non-synthetic life, however, is naturally occurring given the present state of, say, Earth. A friend of mine said this after reading the Jacob's example about the robot, "Put another way, it can be said, "Imagine you are walking along amidst things that were not intelligently designed, and you find something that was intelligently designed. Naturally, that means everything is intelligently designed!". Oddly, Jacob does not go too much more into the robot and human example but, rather, asks a question, "How did humans get here? Did God create us?". Again, immediately, Jacob makes an argument from intricacy or complexity starting with, of course, the brain and goes on to include the eyes, heart, circulatory system, body, et al in a rather magniloquent manner that I wish to reply to briefly. Jacob initially simply states that the brain is too amazing to not have been created by his god without considering simpler alternatives; his argument then turns into a sort of an argument from ignorance. Later, we will find notice how Jacob denies macroevolution which is relevant to his argument from complexity. Without an understanding of macroevolution, there probably is not an alternative explanation as to the complexity of the human body and so creationism is the foundation or leading ideology supporting Jacob's argument. As early humans have been proven to have evolved over time, the brain became as complex as it is now; Jacob, of course, would deny this. Natural selection, essentially, selected for a hominid/hominin species—which managed to adapt and survive to its environment— that allowed for Homo sapiens to be extant. Beginning with, say, Homo habilis, natural selection favored a hominid species that was able to use tools which requires a higher brain function; with tools, the early hominids were able to consume more meat and protein that would increase brain function. This begins a positive feedback loop wherein the better brain function, the better tools and the better tools, the better brain function. The species with higher brain function abilities would have the better tools that allow for increased potential adaptiveness and so forth. As the brain increases in complexity, so too does the rest of the body; or, perhaps, as the rest of the body furthers in complexity, so too does the brain. Evolution via natural selection equipped the Homo sapiens to survive and so Homo sapiens survives. Homo sapiens is far from perfect but it is just good enough to remain extant.
Furthermore, Jacob includes something I find quite funny. "The hair on your head never stops growing, yet eyelashes, eyebrows, and arm hair do. Teeth stop growing. Fingernails do not. How does each body part "know" this?" From a biological perspective, the one word answer would be DNA. The genetic material, deoxyribonucleic acid, does what it does after the result of evolution. In regards to the length of arm hair, the length of time that the hair is able to spend growing during the growth phase controls the maximum length of the hair. The human hair growth cycle goes through three phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen. Anagen, the growth period or phase, has a duration for about two to six years—the longer the anagen phase, the longer the hair. The catagen phase is, essentially, the beginning of the hair follicle's dormancy wherein the hair length is reduced to where the hair is about one-sixth the original size. The telogen is when the hair follicle is in rest for about four or so months before being pushed out to make way for a new hair strand to grow in its place—shedding, essentially. [1] So, in a sense, the hairs are always growing.
To my benefit and to the disadvantage of Mr. Jacob, Jacob decides to quote Darwin in a way to support his position that the human eye is too finely tuned or perfect to have been the result of evolution.
Even Charles Darwin, the creator of the theory of evolution, acknowledged that is was "absurd to the highest degree" to conclude that the eye happened by chance: To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. (Jacob 17)
Two problems are present here. One, Darwin was an exceptional scientist, one that I absolutely adore, but he was a man of his time to a degree. He had limited evidence to work with to construct his theory that holds true to this day. Perhaps Darwin was unable to understand how the eye came to be. Two, Darwin actually accounts his lack of knowledge sequent to the quote used by the purposely misleading Mr. Jacob.
When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of vox populi, vox dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory (Darwin 190). If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case (Darwin 194).
As the quote above follows directly after the quote used by Jacob, I wonder if Jacob even read the Origin of Species, operating under hearsay, or used only part of the quote by Darwin with the intent of furthering his claim—the eye could not have been the result of evolution. Simply put, something as complex as an eye does not require a designer—a designer whose existence has to be argued for. Jacob's argument boils down to "Wow, this is so amazing, therefore my god did it." Unfortunately, such an argument does not
substantiate a claim that someone must have designed it. Furthermore, it is often implied that the only choices we have are that chance or a designer is the cause of the complex—this is falsely implied. Both are not able to account for the complexity of life. Natural selection, however, is the only working alternative for the explanation of complexity seen within life due to end products of natural selection—the accumulation of small pieces that result in a rather complex organism. This accumulation is a gradual slope from basic to the more complex order of things. As for the designer, well, Richard Dawkins answers this.
Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with violence (Dawkins 120).
Jacob continues stating how amazing the body. He states, "Is this 'machine' brought to you by random chance or by an almighty God who had the power and ingenuity to create the most amazing machine ever? King David, of David-and-Goliath fame and one of Israel's greatest kings, credited God for our bodies." and then quotes Psalm 139:14. Firstly, I have no idea why Jacob continues to refer to the human being as a machine—the most amazing one at that. The Homo sapiens is pretty amazing but there are many more animals that are pretty unique and as, if not more, complex. Secondly, I suppose the quote from Psalms adds substance to Jacob's claim which does, in a sense. The main audience of Jacob's book is probably Christians seeking to reaffirm their faith and the Bible is supposed to be infallible; so I can not quite bemoan about how he feels it necessary to quote the Bible on a topic regarding biology and whatnot. Secondly, Jacob points to conception. At conception, two microscopic cells join together in order to multiply billion-fold. Quite amazing it is, yes. However, Jacob is trying to tackle the "improbability" of evolution by pointing at the top of the biological complexity. Evolution is known for being a "bottom-up" structure sort of thing as the most complex organisms are the result of gradual change from the not quite complex towards the complex. The reason why human conception is seemingly complex and functional is because there existed ancestors that were not as complex but evolved via natural selection. Apparently Jacob is astounded that his lawn-mower, remote control, and computer cannot evolve and procreate. Honestly, I laughed quite hard.
This newborn develops into a "machine" that has the ability to create new machines. I know of no other machine with that capability. My lawn-mower cannot do that; my car cannot do that; my remote controller cannot do that; my car cannot do that; even my computer cannot do that (Jacob 20)
Hopefully, my few readers will simply face-palm after reading that quote by Jacob and say, "Jacob, firstly, a newborn is not able to procreate at birth; secondly, you are comparing a living organism to a bloody remote controller? What." Your remote controlling is not a living organism. Surely Jacob knows better? If so, then by releasing a book based on proving the existence of a god based on self-known false equivalencies and information he is exploiting his audience—that is, if his audience actually takes him seriously.
Jacob decides to leave some bullet-points and additional intriguing facts about the human body that, I suppose, help substantiate his claim. A lot of them refer to the amount of cells and DNA is harbored within our bodies and how our DNA, if unraveled, would reach the moon. How this invokes "God did it" I know not. One thing I found interesting was that Jacob states "[t]he probability that the average gene would form spontaneously is 1 in 419,000 —a virtual impossibility!". The keyword is "virtual". A virtual impossibility fosters a possibility regardless how unlikely. In a grand-scale perspective of things, a virtual impossibility is more than likely in a sense. The Earth has been around for 4.54 billion years; that is a lot of time for a miracle to occur [2]. A lot of the other facts that Jacob uses is able to be answered from basic evolutionary studies. Though I dislike the word "miracle", I will agree with Jacob that we are, indeed, miracles. The Homo sapiens managed to survive on Earth for a million and more years. That is quite astounding but, knowing better, it is very easily for the Homo sapiens to go extinct. All it takes is some sort of catastrophic volcano, asteroid or alien projectile, or a disease to be able to bottleneck the human population. It is quite unfortunate but it is simply the nature of things.
1: http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/hair-loss/science-hair?page=2 2: http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
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