Understanding Design in Automobiles and Organisms...so you can dump Evolution in the trash bin - part three

FINALLY  back to design.   Part one.  Part two.

You should be very grateful that God made all of creation rather than some kind of mythical chance-driven process.   Your doctor should be grateful!  Because automobiles are designed, mechanics can fix them with manuals or (now) online programs with all the repair and maintenance information for every single model of automobile that is manufactured.  Because God designed organisms, doctors and veterinarians can be trained with books and curriculum with the design features of bodies and they can have online programs to help them diagnose problems from symptoms.   If chance is the creator of organisms, then logically every single person will be different in macro ways rather than micro ways.  My fingerprints are different from yours, but my basic design is just like yours from egg to eighty-eighth birthday! 

First, let me show you a YouTube video that will give you an idea of how mankind is developing design processes via IT technology upgrades:



It used to be that designers would keep designs in their heads as they made things.   No idea who invented the first design on paper, but certainly Leonardo da Vinci would make drawings of his inventions in a manner similar to blueprints.  In order to prevent people from stealing his ideas, he would deliberately make mistakes in the design so if someone got a copy and tried to make it, it would not work.  Later the classic blueprint was invented.   Many years after actual blueprints were replaced by whiteprints and other similar styles.  When I came into the auto industry, drawings on big sheets, rolled up and transported in tubes were the standard method of sharing designs around the industry.   But more modern ways of designing and sharing designs had been invented and soon the auto industry began to convert to digital rather than paper designing and sharing.

 AutoCAD was the first such program I encountered.   Wikipedia is actually worth using when dealing with something like this, so here is how they describe the program:

 "AutoCAD
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

AutoCAD is a software application for computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting. The software supports both 2D and 3D formats. The software is developed and sold by Autodesk, Inc.,[1] first released in December 1982 by Autodesk in the year following the purchase of the first form of the software by Autodesk founder John Walker. AutoCAD is Autodesk's flagship product and by March 1986 had become the most ubiquitous microcomputer design program in the world, utilizing functions such as "polylines" and "curve fitting".[2] Prior to the introduction of AutoCAD, most other CAD programs ran on mainframe computers or minicomputers, with each CAD operator (user) working at a graphical terminal or workstation.

According to Autodesk company information, the AutoCAD software is now used in a range of industries, employed by architects, project managers and engineers, amongst other professions, and as of 1994 there had been 750 training centers established across the world to educate users about the company's primary products.[1]
AutoCAD uses their own fork of the ACIS geometry modelling kernel.[3]"
Back in the days I was working in automobile manufacturing, actual documents were still being used even with computer modeling programs becoming commonplace.  Engineers would haggle with the money guys over whether or not to allow for a hole to be put into the trunk panel to allow for a rubber grommet to be placed right over the fuel pump of a gas tank.  This is true with the Sunbird series of Pontiacs, for instance.  But the money guys would see another three cents or five cents per vehicle (something like that) would be spent to punch out the hole and perhaps another four cents for the grommet and one more operation (putting the grommet into the hole) would be a percentage of labor costs and so no grommet!  You would see a place in the metal where a hole COULD have been placed and a rubber grommet pushed in, but you dare not cut a hole there (with the gas tank below, BOOM would be too likely) so, if your fuel pump failed in your 1990's Sunbird, you would have to (at least with some models) move the exhaust and take one end off of a shock and lower the gas tank just to get to this cheap little part that might cost 60 bucks for the pump to perhaps 200 bucks for the entire assembly...but a few hundred dollars would go into labor (more now) just to get to it and then put the whole thing back together.

 Our company would fight over 1/4 of a penny per part to get a profit and sometimes we took a loss on some parts if the manufacturer would purchase some parts only we could make and we would get our profit on those.  Being the only company in the world with one process to make an insulator no one else could make made us grow like weeds in the 80's and early 90's until some other company reverse-engineered or perhaps got a spy into the company and we had a competitor for that one.  That company decided to get rid of all the senior employees and staff, then went out of business and the building burned down when they tried to remove the equipment with cutting torches (what dolts!) so it is gonzo now.  But I digress...

 I had a buddy in college who had a Mercury Cougar that required the motor mounts to be disconnected and the motor lifted up so the mechanic could get to one of the spark plugs!!! In fact, there are many such stories of bad design like the following:

"The identical badge-engineed Buick Skyhawk, Chevy Monza, Pontiac Sunbird, and Olds Starfire of the '75-'80 model years were equipped with a 3.8 liter V-6 that was very large for the size of the engine compartment on these small cars. The result was that, in order to change the spark plugs on the right bank of the engine, you had to disconnect the motor mounts, attach a chain hoist, and lift the engine at least a few inches in order to be able to access those plugs." from Cartalk.

Why does this happen?   Well, automobile manufacturers have any number of kinds of automobiles and the cheaper models are the ones they scrimp on the most.   The idea is to get the car to the dealer and sold to the customer.   If someone owns a Sunbird and never lets the gas tank get down near empty, the fuel pump might not ever fail and it will be the engine or the transmission and then it goes to the junk yard, never revealing the ridiculous design decision. 

 But that is a problem created by management.  Automobile engineers would always prefer to make good cars.   Some manufacturers like Subaru make consistently reliable and well-designed vehicles in part because they allow their engineers to have more say in final designs and their plants are big on quality processes and continual improvement.  Even the El Cheapo cars have to meet certain standards, though.  The vehicle has to be designed to take the stresses of turns, stops, accelerations and so on of normal driving.  So engineers have to take a lot of things into consideration.  

 When designing things, it always helps if a part is interchangeable with another part.  For instance, if the four wheels of a car were all different, it would cost more to make the car.   So for the wheels to be interchangeable is beneficial.  If the lamps that light the brake lights also can act as running lights in another vehicle, the cost of purchasing them is less because you can purchase in more quantity.   So therefore you can understand why automobile manufacturers would design several models of cars that would all be built on one frame.  The GM C-Body car was the base frame for several cars.  The Chrysler K-Body cars (generally some of the crummiest cars on the road) were made in the multiple millions.  The Ford Taurus and the Mercury Sable were basically the same car with almost all the components being identical.   C-Body GM cars were Cadillacs, Buicks and Oldsmobiles.  But my factory also made the same parts for B-Body for Chevrolet as well and they were so similar we simply called them all C-Body.   We made many Taurus parts and a good percentage would go into Sables but our company didn't care, they were the same parts.

 When engineers get together, they talk about things like "Moment Arm" and "Load Path" while non-engineers just sit there quite left behind.   
credit

 From MIT - "The Moment of a force is a measure of its tendency to cause a body to rotate about a specific point or axis. This is different from the tendency for a body to move, or translate, in the direction of the force. In order for a moment to develop, the force must act upon the body in such a manner that the body would begin to twist. This occurs every time a force is applied so that it does not pass through the centroid of the body. A moment is due to a force not having an equal and opposite force directly along it's line of action."
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Making sure whatever you construct has a load path that will withstand the forces that may be exerted on it is necessary in design.   Here is an illustration from an explanation of the continuous load path as applied to buildings.

 From ABAG - "Load path is a chain
  • It is only as strong as its weakest link.
  • The figure shows a complete load path
  • The roof and floor diaphragms and shear walls are links in the chain.
  • The connections between the roof, walls, floors and foundation are additional links.
  • These additional links serve as the connective points that complete the chain.
  • The connections are just as important as the diaphragms and shear walls.
  • The seismic loads imparted on a building must successfully pass through all of these elements in order to reach the ground and effectively resist an earthquake’s damaging forces.
  • In other words, the load path or chain must be continuous and complete. There can be no weak links in the load path chain."
Do you need to know this if you are not an engineer or design professional?  No.  But to design automobiles or airplanes or houses or such things, you need to know all the forces that will be exerted on all portions of the designed thing, you need to know all the functions expected to be performed and all the features needed to make the designed thing what is needed.

God is a Designer and the designs of God have been copied by mankind for as long as history has been recorded.   It continues to happen today.  All organisms use the DNA coding system.  There are similarities between organisms because a wise designer uses good design concepts and applies them over a wide variety of things.  Most houses have a slanted roof of plywood attached to struts, then covered with a tar-paper of some kind and then covered with shingles.  Just because a small one-story home uses such a roof does not mean a three-story house cannot also have a similar roof, right?   God settled on a few basic designs for organisms, for instance inner skeletons for some, exoskeletons for others and even no skeletal structure at all for something like a worm.  Animals have hearts, some have more than one, some have legs and some do not.   God designed a tremendous number of organisms to fit into all sorts of ecological niches and gave them far more genetic material than needed for the individual organism so that there would be both redundancy built in but also traits for many contingencies.  

There are scientific disciplines devoted to studying organisms and trying to copy their designs.   Remember the YouTube at the top of the page, in which they discuss sharing the design of a 787 aircraft online with three-dimensional interactive visuals that could be more effective than blueprints?   Well, one of your cells is more complex than not only the 787 but the factory that made them.  


How ridiculous!  Engineers, do you really expect us to believe that millions of species of organisms all evolved, just by chance, form and function to work together to do what they do and go where they go efficiently?  The bumblebee is too big for its wings, but the wing paths have a pattern that create an uplift that allows for the bee to fly.  Ants calculate the most efficient paths to their food sources faster than modern computers can compute them.  Before mankind invented the electric motor, organisms had similar motors that not only run more efficiently but repair and maintain themselves on the fly!

Biomimetics and Biomimicry are subjects I have blogged on before if you wish to do a search?

DNA is a far more efficient coding system than anything man has devised.  We cannot yet really use it, we are still learning to "read" it ourselves.  In fact, to say DNA is the only code in organisms would be wrong.  The cell has meta-information within it.  The process of reproduction and also second-to-second function of cells is so remarkably complex that we do not yet understand it all, not even close!   We do have a pretty decent idea of how organisms work from a macro point of view, thus doctors and vets can treat people and dogs and horses.  

Automobiles did not evolve, they are designed and built.  Therefore mechanics, knowing the design and function of the parts of an automobile, are able to diagnose problems with the car and fix them.

People did not evolve, they were designed and not only built, but built to reproduce more people.  Therefore doctors can diagnose and treat problems in people.  If people evolved, there would be no way to know how each individual was constructed and we might as well go to a witch doctor as anyone else.  It is only logical, after all.

I think Charles Darwin would be working for an organization like Creation.com if he was a modern scientist living today.  I just do not think he would be dumb enough to throw away the overwhelming evidence for design and would realize the so-called facts of long ages are nothing more than opinions based on assumptions unsupported by evidence.   What we CAN observe and test supports design and therefore creation.   No engineer should believe in evolution!   Nor should any doctors or vets...it simply makes no sense.  We are more complex than all the factories in the world.  There are no people factories, we are able to reproduce as well as live.  We are utterly amazing!

All the scientists and engineers in the world could not make a simple living creature today.   So why would any of them think that random stuff colliding into itself could do it???   Dumb.  Just dumb.

A brief history of design

By Russell Grigg
For over two millennia, people have argued that the ‘design’ in nature points to a Designer.1 In 44 BC, the Roman writer, orator and statesman, Cicero (106–43 BC), used this concept in his book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods)2 to challenge the evolutionary ideas of the philosophers of his day.

Greek evolutionism, the gods, and fear of death

The two main schools of philosophy then were Epicureanism3 and Stoicism.4 The Epicureans sought happiness through bodily pleasures and freedom from pain and anxiety. The two chief causes of anxiety were fear of the gods and fear of death, so Epicurus sought to nullify both of these by teaching an evolutionary atomic theory.5
He denied that there was any purpose in nature, because everything was composed of particles (atoma: atoms), all falling downwards. He said that these sometimes spontaneously ‘swerved’ to coalesce and form bodies—non-living, living, human, and divine. The gods were made of finer atoms than humankind. They did not create the world or have any control over it, so they were not concerned with human affairs, and there was therefore no need for man to fear them. At death, the soul disintegrated and became non-existent, so there was no need to fear death or the prospect of judgment after death.
If chance collisions of particles could make a world, why then cannot they build much less difficult objects, like a colonnade, a temple, a house, or a city?

Cicero used the Stoic character in his book to refute these ideas with arguments from design, aimed to show that the universe is governed by an intelligent designer. He argued that a conscious purpose was needed to express art (e.g. to make a picture or a statue) and so, because nature was more perfect than art, nature showed purpose also. He reasoned that the movement of a ship was guided by skilled intelligence, and a sundial or water clock told the time by design rather than by chance. He said that even the barbarians of Britain or Scythia could not fail to see that a model which showed the movements of the sun, stars and planets was the product of conscious intelligence.6
Cicero continued his challenge to the evolutionism of Epicurus by marvelling that anyone could persuade himself that chance collisions of particles could form anything as beautiful as the world. He said that this was on a par with believing that if the letters of the alphabet were thrown on the ground often enough they would spell out the Annals of Ennius.7,8 And he asked: if chance collisions of particles could make a world, why then cannot they build much less difficult objects, like a colonnade, a temple, a house, or a city?9

More recent users of the design argument

In the 18th century, the most notable user of the design argument was William Paley (1743–1805). In his book,Natural Theology, he put the case of someone finding a watch while walking in a barren countryside. From the functions which the various parts of the watch fulfil (e.g. spring, gearwheels, pointer), the only logical conclusion was that it had a maker who ‘comprehended its construction and designed its use’.10 Paley also discussed evidence of design in the eye—that as an instrument for vision it showed intelligent design in the same way that telescopes, microscopes and spectacles do. And he went on to discuss complex design in many other human and animal organs, all pointing to the conclusion that the existence of complex life implies an intelligent Creator.
David Hume, the 18th century Scottish sceptical philosopher, tried to counter the watch argument by pointing out that watches are not living things which reproduce. However, Paley wrote 30 years after Hume, and Paley’s arguments are proof against most of Hume’s objections. For example, a modern philosopher has countered Hume: ‘Paley’s argument about organisms stands on its own, regardless of whether watches and organisms happen to be similar. The point of talking about watches is to help the reader see that the argument about organisms is compelling.’11

National Eye Institute

Charles Darwin and Paley

Charles Darwin was required to read Paley during his theological studies at Cambridge (1828–31). He later said, ‘I do not think that I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.’12
However, he then spent the rest of his life developing and promoting a theory to explain how ‘design’ in nature could occur without God.13 Darwin proposed that small, useful changes could occur by chance, and enable their possessors to survive and pass on these changes—natural selection. Natural selection would work on even the tiniest improvements and, over vast ages, would supposedly accumulate enough small changes to produce all the ‘design’ we see in the living world.

Modern science vs Darwin

Evolutionists, including the stridently atheistic Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins, still use Darwin’s theory to oppose the design argument. But now, they believe that natural selection acts on genetic copying mistakes (mutations), some of which are supposed to increase the genetic information content (see aside). But Dawkins’ arguments have been severely critiqued on scientific grounds.14,15,16,17 Dawkins’ neo-Darwinism has several flaws:
  • Natural selection requires self-reproducing entities. Producing even the simplest self-reproducing organism (see aside) by a chance combination of chemicals is even more incredible than producing the Annals of Ennius by dropping letters on the ground. Living things require long molecules with precise arrangements of smaller ‘building blocks’. Not only will the ‘building blocks’ not combine in the right order, but they are unlikely, by natural means, to build up large molecules at all! Rather, large molecules tend to break down into smaller ones.18 Also, the ‘building blocks’ are unstable.19
  • There is complex biological machinery of which Darwin was simply ignorant. Biochemist Dr Michael Behe lists a number of examples: real motors, transport systems, the blood clotting cascade, the complex visual machinery. He argues that they require many parts or they would not function at all, so they could not have been built in small steps by natural selection.20
  • Biophysicist/information theorist Dr Lee Spetner points out that mutations have never been observed to add information, but only reduce it—this includes even the rare helpful mutations. And he points out that natural selection is insufficient to accumulate slight advantages, as it would be too weak to overcome the effects of chance, which would tend to eliminate these mutants.21
The evidence of design in nature is enough to condemn men, but it is not enough to save them.

The Bible and the ‘design argument’

Design is not enough!

The Apostle Paul used the design argument in Romans 1:20, where he declares that God’s eternal power and divine nature can be understood from the things that have been made (i.e. evidences of design in nature). And he says that because of this, the ungodly are ‘without excuse’. But Paul continues that people willingly reject this clear evidence.
This evidence of design in nature is enough to condemn men, but it is not enough to save them. The Bible makes it clear that the preaching of the Gospel is also needed to show how we are to come into a right relationship with the Creator (see next section).22
Cicero lived in the century before Christ and probably had never heard of the God of Genesis; he used design in support of the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses of the Stoics. Today, ‘New Agers’ may attribute design to Mother Nature or Gaia (the Greek goddess of the earth).

Creation Evangelism

When Christians use design and other arguments from science, they are properly engaging in pre-evangelism, i.e. they are seeking to expose the fallacy of the evolutionary presuppositions that blind the eyes of people today to the truth of the Word of God. This is shown by the Apostle Paul’s experience in Athens. Paul ‘preached Jesus and the resurrection’ (Acts 17:18), which challenged both the Epicurean and the Stoic philosophers of his day—i.e. both Cicero’s opponents and his fellow believers. Paul challenged their faulty ideas by pointing them to the one true God who had created everything. But Paul didn’t stop with creation.23

Chris 73/Wikimedia Commons
He urged them to repent, and he said they could know there would be a Day of Judgment because God had appointed the Judge and given assurance of this by raising Him from the dead (Acts 17:18–31).
The only way to be saved is to believe in the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12), the Creator and Kinsman-Redeemer (Isaiah 59:20), who died and rose again to pay the penalty for mankind’s sin. We should follow the way Paul presented the Gospel in 1 Cor. 15—N.B. verses 1–4, 21–22, 26, 45, which make sense only with a literal Genesis—a literal Creation, Fall, death penalty for sin, etc.
John the Evangelist wrote his Gospel ‘so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His name’ (John 20:31). But he began his Gospel by declaring that Jesus is the Creator (John 1:1–3), the Second Person of the Trinity, who took on human nature (John 1:14). Thus evangelism must present Christ as Creator or it is deficient—if Christ is not God, then He cannot be our Saviour (Isaiah 43:11).
Without Christ, the design argument cannot save.

Conclusion

Without the message of design and the Creator, ‘gospel preaching’ lacks foundation. Without Christ, the design argument cannot save. We must present a full Gospel, starting with creation by the Triune God, and combine it with the message of Christ’s death for sin and His Resurrection.

Information: A modern scientific design argument

All the design in living things is encoded in a sort of recipe book with lots of information. Information describes the complexity of a sequence—it does not depend on the matter of the sequence. It could be a sequence of ink molecules on paper (book)—however the information is not contained in the molecules of ink but in the patterns. Information can also be stored as sound wave patterns (e.g. speech), but again the information is not the sound waves themselves; electrical impulses (telephone); magnetic patterns (computer hard drive).
The anti-theistic physicist Paul Davies admits: ‘There is no law of physics able to create information from nothing’ (Quantum leap of faith). Information scientist Werner Gitt has demonstrated that the laws of nature pertaining to information show that, in all known cases, information requires an intelligent message sender,1 a conclusion rejected by Davies on purely philosphical (religious) grounds. Thus a modern version of the design argument involves detecting high information content. In fact, this is exactly what the SETI project is all about—the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence involves trying to detect a high-information radio signal, which they would regard as proof of an intelligent message sender, even if we had no idea of the nature of the sender.
In living things, information is all stored in patterns of DNA, which encode the instructions to make proteins, the building blocks for all the machinery of life. There are four types of DNA ‘letters’ called nucleotides, and 20 types of protein ‘letters’ called amino acids. A group (codon) of 3 DNA ‘letters’ codes for one protein ‘letter’. The information is not contained in the chemistry of the ‘letters’ themselves, but in their sequence. DNA is by far the most compact information storage/retrieval system known.
Now consider if we had to write the information of living things in book form. Dawkins admits, ‘[T]here is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopædia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.2 Even the simplest living organism has 482 protein-coding genes of 580,000 ‘letters’.3
Let’s suppose we had the technology to go the other way, and store books’ information in DNA—this would be the ideal computer technology. The amount of information that could be stored in a pinhead’s volume of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books 500 times as tall as the distance from Earth to the moon, each with a different, yet specific content.4 Putting it another way, a pinhead of DNA would have a billion times more information capacity than a 4 gigabyte hard drive.
Just as letters of the alphabet will not write the Annals of Ennius by themselves, the DNA letters will not form meaningful sequences on their own. And just as the Annals would be meaningless to a person who didn’t understand the language, the DNA ‘letter’ arrangements would be meaningless without the ‘language’ of the DNA code.

References

  1. Gitt, W., In the beginning was Information, CLV, Bielefeld, Germany, 1997. 
  2. Dawkins, R., The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton, NY, USA, p. 115, 1986.
  3. Fraser, C.M. et al., The minimal gene complement of Mycoplasma genitalium’, Science 270(5235):397–403, 1995; perspective by Goffeau, A., Life With 482 Genes, same issue, pp. 445–446.
  4. Gitt, W., Dazzling Design in Miniature, Creation 20(1):6, 1997.

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References and notes

  1. Philosophers often call this the teleological argument. Return to text.
  2. A fictitious dialogue involving an Epicurean, a Stoic, and a speaker from the Academy (the philosophical school founded by Plato). Return to text.
  3. Based on the teachings of Epicurus (341–270 BC). Return to text.
  4. Based on the teachings of Zeno of Citium (335–263 BC ). The Stoics were pantheists. For them, happiness lay in emulating the calm and order of the universe by enduring hardship and adversity with fortitude and a tranquil mind. The name derives from the porch (Greek: stoa) where Zeno taught. Return to text.
  5. Derived from Democritus (460–361 BC). These philosophies were of Greek origin. Return to text.
  6. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Book 2, sections 87–88. Return to text.
  7. Ref. 6, Book 2, section 93. Return to text.
  8. Compare Grigg, R., Could monkeys type the 23rd Psalm? Creation 13(1):30–34, 1990; updated in Apologia 3(2):59–64, 1994. Return to text.
  9. Ref. 6, Book 2, section 94. Return to text.
  10. Paley, W., Natural Theology, first published 1802, republished by Bill Cooper as Paley’s Watchmaker, New Wine Press, Chichester, England, pp. 29–31, 1995.Return to text.
  11. Sober, E., Philosophy of Biology, Westview Press, Boulder, CO, USA, p. 34, 1993, cited in Behe, Ref. 20. Return to text.
  12. C. Darwin to John Lubbock, Nov. 15, 1859, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, D. Appleton & Co., 2:15, 1911. Return to text.
  13. Wieland, C., Darwin’s real message: have you missed it? Creation 14(4):16–19, 1992. Return to text.
  14. Gitt, W., Weasel Words, Creation 20(4):20–21, September 1998. Return to text.
  15. Bohlin, R.G., Up the River Without a Paddle—Review of River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Journal of Creation 10(3):322–327, 1996. Return to text.
  16. Sarfati, J.D., Review of Climbing Mt Improbable, Journal of Creation 12(1):29–34, 1998. Return to text.
  17. Truman, R., The problem of information for the Theory of Evolution: Has Dawkins really solved it? 14 July 1999. www.trueorigin.org/dawkinfo Return to text.
  18. Sarfati, J., Origin of life: the polymerization problem, Journal of Creation 12(3):281–284, 1998. Return to text.
  19. Sarfati, J., Origin of life: Instability of building blocks, Journal of Creation 13(3):124–127, 1998. Return to text.
  20. Behe, M.J., Darwin’s Black Box, The Free Press, NY, USA, p. 217, 1996. He calls this property: ‘irreducible complexity’. Return to text.
  21. Spetner, L.M., Not By Chance, The Judaica Press, Brooklyn, NY, USA, 1997; see A review of Not by chance!. Return to text.
  22.  Matthew 28:18–20; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:47; Romans 10:13–15. Return to text.
  23. For further reading: Morris, H.M., Design Is Not Enough! Back to Genesis No. 127, ICR, CA, USA. 

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