Understanding Design in Automobiles and Organisms...so you can dump Evolution in the trash bin - part two
Understanding Design in Automobiles and Organisms...so you can dump Evolution in the trash bin - part one
The above post was introductory and meant to take the reader on a journey into the world of automobile manufacturing in order to eventually show why design cannot be ignored in organisms and therefore evolution is a ridiculous concept, a failed 19th Century hypothesis that should be discarded immediately. In that post I did try to give the reader an idea of how automobile manufacturing involves many thousands of raw materials, hundreds of factories and multiple thousands upon thousands of workers and staff, in addition to the use of various means of transportation. Also, people spend years on the planning and design of a new model of automobile. This remarkable amount of time and work and resources is all to make a mere vehicle. Your body has more complexity and machines and functioning systems than all the auto factories in this world! Yep. Think on that for awhile!
DESIGN IS OBVIOUS WHEN REPAIRS ARE NEEDED
I began working on cars as a single digit midget, helping my father do winter maintenance on his 1922 Chevrolet Touring Car by sanding the wooden spoked wheels and polishing brass and silver fittings. I often was doing things I did not understand, for instance, when my father would ask me to put some parts in a big tub of fluid but to wash my hands immediately afterwards. I realize now he was soaking them in some kind of degreasing liquid that was caustic to skin in order to thoroughly clean metal parts before using light oil on them and then beginning to put the parts back together. He treated that automobile with great love. But in the summer, we had a lot of fun with it. All the neighborhood kids and their dads wanted to ride in it and we could drive not only to the beach, but we could drive right ON the beach (Lake Michigan) and those big spoked wheels were superior to any Jeep because we could drive in sand and never bog down. Ah, the smell of real leather after my Dad had rubbed it with whatever that stuff was he used...might have been some kind of mink oil...came in a metal can. He treated the leather with it every year.
credit
As a tweenager I was allowed to begin doing basic maintenance on parental automobiles. I learned to change oil and oil filters and check the fluids and air in the tires. Then I began to do tune-up functions such as changing and gapping spark plugs and gapping the points on the distributer. In 1968 I was given a brand new Chilton's Motor Manual, at which point I could also do engine timing with the funds I requested to purchase the meter needed to check the dwell on a car. My parents had bought me some tools (wrenches, gappers, a socket set, screwdrivers, a hammer, a filter wrench) and now I was ready to be a shade-tree mechanic. I did all the maintenance on my mom's 1959 Oldsmobile (a massive hunk of road yacht that had a trunk that could hold an entire little league team) and often my Dad's 1966 Galaxie as well. But it really got fun when I had my very own car, a 1964 and 1/2 original Mustang convertible. Ow, it still hurts that I don't still have that car! Poppy Red with white top and seats and black floor rug. I had one of the genuine first run Mustangs, made halfway through the year. It had been in an accident and I had a lot of work to do on it, but that baby really purred and growled!
A similar Mustang to mine with white top and Poppy Red paint.
With my own vehicle and experience messing with engines, I engineered my own dual exhaust using some exhaust parts from another model of Ford, Thrush mufflers, a hacksaw, tin cans, radiator hose clamps and exhaust clamps and my secret weapon...I would use wire clothes hangers as exhaust hangers. I would run the wire through a hole in the frame or another firm anchor and wrap it around the exhaust pipe. Then I would take a screwdriver and put it in between the two wires in between the pipe and the frame. I would revolve the screwdriver and turn the wires and twist them until the pipe was snug and then I would pull out the screwdriver and the wire would stay in place. Yes, give me tin cans to turn into flat metal to wrap around joints or holes in an exhaust pipe and wire hangers to make pipe hangers with and I could do wonders with exhaust pipes. Then I put the fancy silver end pipes on and I had both added about 25 horsepower to the car, I had made it sound good and (I thought) look cool. Not having much money, I simply painted the rims black and put shiny Moon hubcaps on in place of the Mustang wheel covers. I painted the back end under the hood black and the grill was black metal weave with no silvery Mustang logo, nope, wanted it to look like a racing machine! Besides, when I bought it there were things to fix and the grill was missing and I had to replace the bent front bumper. I fiddled with the timing to get maximum power, researched the best settings for the 850 four-barrel Holley carb and got the best possible sparkplugs, wires and distributor parts.
1968 Chilton's
No matter what needed to be done, I could look into my big, black Chilton's and learn what to do. When my buddy needed the valves adjusted on his Monte Carlo, I popped open the Chilton's (I had a newer one I bought in high school) and followed instructions. With a dwell meter and a volt meter and all the gap tools and a battery post cleaner and all sorts of auto tools, I did most stuff for my friends no charge. It was fun!
AUTO REPAIR BECAUSE OF AUTO DESIGN
I could use the Chilton's Auto Repair Manual to enable me to do amazing things. I could replace a water pump. I could do brake jobs. I could do engine work. I replaced a piston (I had a ring clamp by then) and the rings and the entire assembly that connected to the cam on a friend's car. If automobiles just happened to evolve by chance occurrences, it would not make sense that anyone could publish a manual to repair them because how could you possibly know what the design of all the parts of the automobile were unless they had been built following a design? If the design of automobiles was not planned by intelligence, in fact if design was not uniform, then one Mustang would be different from other Mustangs.
True, the automobile was once simply a carriage with a rudimentary motor and probably a gear-and-chain method of converting the engine power to move the wagon wheels. Every inventor made his vehicle a different way and often would make each vehicle somewhat differently as he began to develop a more sophisticated model. Even then design was involved, but no design was uniform. So if you did not build it, you might not know how to fix it or diagnose what was wrong with it. Of course early automobiles were pretty simple compared to modern automobiles. But let's apply this to evolution.
IF CARS EVOLVED
If cars evolved like Darwinists believe organisms evolved, then as evolution now teaches, there would be no tree of cars. Evolution now admits that if organisms evolved there was not one common ancestor for modern organisms, like the trunk of a tree, but instead a field of shrubs and weeds with multiple organisms necessarily having different ancestors. If automobiles were similar, there would be hundreds of different designs and the discipline of auto repair would be far harder than it is now.
Whenever a problem with my car was evident, I used diagnostic thinking to determine how to find out what was wrong. In time, I would sometimes know exactly what was wrong with some things. For instance, there was a small part that was part of the electrical system called the solenoid. If the engine would not turn over, one would usually think that the battery was dead or the starter was shot, but in fact on the 1964 and 1/2 Mustangs the solenoid tended to fail. If you tapped it with a small wrench or hammer while someone turned the key, the engine would usually start and, if you were smart, you would purchase a new solenoid before it failed entirely. This discovery was a process of trial and error. But normally I used my Chilton manual to set the gaps, the dwell, and any other tuneup information for any cars I worked on and also to diagnose problems with cars that would not start, or run poorly or stop poorly or make a strange noise.
If the car had not been designed by a few manufacturers and therefore had many random and varied specifications, no reliable descriptions of the construction of the vehicle could be found, for any automobiles would surely all be made differently. How could one know how to fix a Mustang if there was no Ford Motor Company making them all the same basic way with the few models clearly specified and accounted for? Believe me, back when I was working on cars, I could tell you if you had an automobile made by General Motors, Ford or Chrysler just by looking at the way the front disc brakes were designed. You could cover the entire car and only let me see the disc brake and rotor and I'd know for sure, because each company attached the caliper differently even though all three had the same basic idea. A caliper would hold the disc brake pads and a piston would press by hydraulic pressure, pushing the inside pad into the rotor and drawing the outside pad in, thus both pads would rub against the smooth rotor surface, causing friction that would help stop the automobile. Were there cars with all drum brakes? Of course, but front disc brakes became more popular over time and all disc brakes is now often standard on automobiles.
credit
Now here comes another point. When I was repairing my Mustang, I knew all the parts of the automobile had a function. Some of them may have been decorative (such as the chrome Mustang grill) and not necessary for operation but rather meant to enhance the appearance. Some of them were useful but not necessary (I could do without a muffler but the car would be quite noisy and if I had a habit of stepping on the gas constantly it would be possible the lack of back pressure would cause more engine wear? Those pistons were 9.5 compression ratio in the 289 engine. The pistons were vital because without pistons, no power from the engine and your car only moves if you point it downhill. If cars evolved, there would be no certainty that all parts had a function, because some might simply be left-overs from old abandoned ancestral cars.
That 1922 Chevrolet did NOT have a starter, so my father had to crank-start it. Crank starting is dangerous and some folks would break their arms while cranking a car to start it when the engine "kicked back" on them by backfiring. You had to hold the crank right, pull out the choke and set the throttle and ignition levers properly to cold-start a 1922 without an electric starter. Now, if cars evolved, it would be very possible that my Mustang would have a crank fitting and a crank that came with the car, even though the electric starter made it useless. Perhaps it would have a buggy-whip holder left over from the early cars that evolved from carriages? Maybe there would be some reins left over from the days when carriages were pulled by horses rather than engines with horsepower ratings?
My Mustang had been designed and all the parts had a purpose and all the parts could be replaced or repaired and I had a manual to show me how to do it. Not everything was designed optimally, to my mind. But then again, that is a subject for the third post when we look at how design engineers think and why they make decisions that may seem sub-optimal.
DOCTORS ARE PEOPLE MECHANICS
Well? Think about it, how can a doctor know how to treat people unless he understands the design of the human body and how it is supposed to function? With Darwinism being accepted by academia and taught in schools, the stupidity of evolution had convinced doctors that some parts of the human body were "vestigial" and unnecessary. How many tonsils were removed from kids without good cause when NOW we know they have or had a purpose? How many appendixes were removed when they were not a problem? To this day many think there are useless parts of people that are not needed. The truth is that all human parts were designed and devolution has caused some to be less useful, but that is the opposite of the evolution mythology!
Back in 1895, one Robert Wiedersheim listed 86 human organs and parts that he claimed were unnecessary remnants of evolution. For many years, doctors removed useful parts of the human body and caused misery and death. Even now, some doctors do not appreciate the use of some human body parts because they simply do not understand that man was DESIGNED!
In part three, I will go into the thinking of design engineers and then address the idea that God is not a great designer. For now, let's take a look at how evolution has hurt mankind by not understanding that all parts of the human body were designed.
If evolution were true, your great, great, great, great…grandfather was a creature like an ape or a monkey, and you came from him. Over the years, your ancestors gradually changed or evolved from looking like an ape to looking like humans. Your ape-like, distant grandfather, like many primates today, probably would have had a tail, a big jaw, and a lot of hair. He probably also had several other organs you either do not have today, or you have, but unlike him, you do not really need anymore. Those organs which you would no longer need are called vestigial (ves-TI-jul) organs by evolutionists. If evolution is true, then such organs should exist.
The above post was introductory and meant to take the reader on a journey into the world of automobile manufacturing in order to eventually show why design cannot be ignored in organisms and therefore evolution is a ridiculous concept, a failed 19th Century hypothesis that should be discarded immediately. In that post I did try to give the reader an idea of how automobile manufacturing involves many thousands of raw materials, hundreds of factories and multiple thousands upon thousands of workers and staff, in addition to the use of various means of transportation. Also, people spend years on the planning and design of a new model of automobile. This remarkable amount of time and work and resources is all to make a mere vehicle. Your body has more complexity and machines and functioning systems than all the auto factories in this world! Yep. Think on that for awhile!
DESIGN IS OBVIOUS WHEN REPAIRS ARE NEEDED
I began working on cars as a single digit midget, helping my father do winter maintenance on his 1922 Chevrolet Touring Car by sanding the wooden spoked wheels and polishing brass and silver fittings. I often was doing things I did not understand, for instance, when my father would ask me to put some parts in a big tub of fluid but to wash my hands immediately afterwards. I realize now he was soaking them in some kind of degreasing liquid that was caustic to skin in order to thoroughly clean metal parts before using light oil on them and then beginning to put the parts back together. He treated that automobile with great love. But in the summer, we had a lot of fun with it. All the neighborhood kids and their dads wanted to ride in it and we could drive not only to the beach, but we could drive right ON the beach (Lake Michigan) and those big spoked wheels were superior to any Jeep because we could drive in sand and never bog down. Ah, the smell of real leather after my Dad had rubbed it with whatever that stuff was he used...might have been some kind of mink oil...came in a metal can. He treated the leather with it every year.
As a tweenager I was allowed to begin doing basic maintenance on parental automobiles. I learned to change oil and oil filters and check the fluids and air in the tires. Then I began to do tune-up functions such as changing and gapping spark plugs and gapping the points on the distributer. In 1968 I was given a brand new Chilton's Motor Manual, at which point I could also do engine timing with the funds I requested to purchase the meter needed to check the dwell on a car. My parents had bought me some tools (wrenches, gappers, a socket set, screwdrivers, a hammer, a filter wrench) and now I was ready to be a shade-tree mechanic. I did all the maintenance on my mom's 1959 Oldsmobile (a massive hunk of road yacht that had a trunk that could hold an entire little league team) and often my Dad's 1966 Galaxie as well. But it really got fun when I had my very own car, a 1964 and 1/2 original Mustang convertible. Ow, it still hurts that I don't still have that car! Poppy Red with white top and seats and black floor rug. I had one of the genuine first run Mustangs, made halfway through the year. It had been in an accident and I had a lot of work to do on it, but that baby really purred and growled!
With my own vehicle and experience messing with engines, I engineered my own dual exhaust using some exhaust parts from another model of Ford, Thrush mufflers, a hacksaw, tin cans, radiator hose clamps and exhaust clamps and my secret weapon...I would use wire clothes hangers as exhaust hangers. I would run the wire through a hole in the frame or another firm anchor and wrap it around the exhaust pipe. Then I would take a screwdriver and put it in between the two wires in between the pipe and the frame. I would revolve the screwdriver and turn the wires and twist them until the pipe was snug and then I would pull out the screwdriver and the wire would stay in place. Yes, give me tin cans to turn into flat metal to wrap around joints or holes in an exhaust pipe and wire hangers to make pipe hangers with and I could do wonders with exhaust pipes. Then I put the fancy silver end pipes on and I had both added about 25 horsepower to the car, I had made it sound good and (I thought) look cool. Not having much money, I simply painted the rims black and put shiny Moon hubcaps on in place of the Mustang wheel covers. I painted the back end under the hood black and the grill was black metal weave with no silvery Mustang logo, nope, wanted it to look like a racing machine! Besides, when I bought it there were things to fix and the grill was missing and I had to replace the bent front bumper. I fiddled with the timing to get maximum power, researched the best settings for the 850 four-barrel Holley carb and got the best possible sparkplugs, wires and distributor parts.
No matter what needed to be done, I could look into my big, black Chilton's and learn what to do. When my buddy needed the valves adjusted on his Monte Carlo, I popped open the Chilton's (I had a newer one I bought in high school) and followed instructions. With a dwell meter and a volt meter and all the gap tools and a battery post cleaner and all sorts of auto tools, I did most stuff for my friends no charge. It was fun!
AUTO REPAIR BECAUSE OF AUTO DESIGN
I could use the Chilton's Auto Repair Manual to enable me to do amazing things. I could replace a water pump. I could do brake jobs. I could do engine work. I replaced a piston (I had a ring clamp by then) and the rings and the entire assembly that connected to the cam on a friend's car. If automobiles just happened to evolve by chance occurrences, it would not make sense that anyone could publish a manual to repair them because how could you possibly know what the design of all the parts of the automobile were unless they had been built following a design? If the design of automobiles was not planned by intelligence, in fact if design was not uniform, then one Mustang would be different from other Mustangs.
True, the automobile was once simply a carriage with a rudimentary motor and probably a gear-and-chain method of converting the engine power to move the wagon wheels. Every inventor made his vehicle a different way and often would make each vehicle somewhat differently as he began to develop a more sophisticated model. Even then design was involved, but no design was uniform. So if you did not build it, you might not know how to fix it or diagnose what was wrong with it. Of course early automobiles were pretty simple compared to modern automobiles. But let's apply this to evolution.
IF CARS EVOLVED
If cars evolved like Darwinists believe organisms evolved, then as evolution now teaches, there would be no tree of cars. Evolution now admits that if organisms evolved there was not one common ancestor for modern organisms, like the trunk of a tree, but instead a field of shrubs and weeds with multiple organisms necessarily having different ancestors. If automobiles were similar, there would be hundreds of different designs and the discipline of auto repair would be far harder than it is now.
Whenever a problem with my car was evident, I used diagnostic thinking to determine how to find out what was wrong. In time, I would sometimes know exactly what was wrong with some things. For instance, there was a small part that was part of the electrical system called the solenoid. If the engine would not turn over, one would usually think that the battery was dead or the starter was shot, but in fact on the 1964 and 1/2 Mustangs the solenoid tended to fail. If you tapped it with a small wrench or hammer while someone turned the key, the engine would usually start and, if you were smart, you would purchase a new solenoid before it failed entirely. This discovery was a process of trial and error. But normally I used my Chilton manual to set the gaps, the dwell, and any other tuneup information for any cars I worked on and also to diagnose problems with cars that would not start, or run poorly or stop poorly or make a strange noise.
If the car had not been designed by a few manufacturers and therefore had many random and varied specifications, no reliable descriptions of the construction of the vehicle could be found, for any automobiles would surely all be made differently. How could one know how to fix a Mustang if there was no Ford Motor Company making them all the same basic way with the few models clearly specified and accounted for? Believe me, back when I was working on cars, I could tell you if you had an automobile made by General Motors, Ford or Chrysler just by looking at the way the front disc brakes were designed. You could cover the entire car and only let me see the disc brake and rotor and I'd know for sure, because each company attached the caliper differently even though all three had the same basic idea. A caliper would hold the disc brake pads and a piston would press by hydraulic pressure, pushing the inside pad into the rotor and drawing the outside pad in, thus both pads would rub against the smooth rotor surface, causing friction that would help stop the automobile. Were there cars with all drum brakes? Of course, but front disc brakes became more popular over time and all disc brakes is now often standard on automobiles.
Now here comes another point. When I was repairing my Mustang, I knew all the parts of the automobile had a function. Some of them may have been decorative (such as the chrome Mustang grill) and not necessary for operation but rather meant to enhance the appearance. Some of them were useful but not necessary (I could do without a muffler but the car would be quite noisy and if I had a habit of stepping on the gas constantly it would be possible the lack of back pressure would cause more engine wear? Those pistons were 9.5 compression ratio in the 289 engine. The pistons were vital because without pistons, no power from the engine and your car only moves if you point it downhill. If cars evolved, there would be no certainty that all parts had a function, because some might simply be left-overs from old abandoned ancestral cars.
That 1922 Chevrolet did NOT have a starter, so my father had to crank-start it. Crank starting is dangerous and some folks would break their arms while cranking a car to start it when the engine "kicked back" on them by backfiring. You had to hold the crank right, pull out the choke and set the throttle and ignition levers properly to cold-start a 1922 without an electric starter. Now, if cars evolved, it would be very possible that my Mustang would have a crank fitting and a crank that came with the car, even though the electric starter made it useless. Perhaps it would have a buggy-whip holder left over from the early cars that evolved from carriages? Maybe there would be some reins left over from the days when carriages were pulled by horses rather than engines with horsepower ratings?
My Mustang had been designed and all the parts had a purpose and all the parts could be replaced or repaired and I had a manual to show me how to do it. Not everything was designed optimally, to my mind. But then again, that is a subject for the third post when we look at how design engineers think and why they make decisions that may seem sub-optimal.
DOCTORS ARE PEOPLE MECHANICS
Well? Think about it, how can a doctor know how to treat people unless he understands the design of the human body and how it is supposed to function? With Darwinism being accepted by academia and taught in schools, the stupidity of evolution had convinced doctors that some parts of the human body were "vestigial" and unnecessary. How many tonsils were removed from kids without good cause when NOW we know they have or had a purpose? How many appendixes were removed when they were not a problem? To this day many think there are useless parts of people that are not needed. The truth is that all human parts were designed and devolution has caused some to be less useful, but that is the opposite of the evolution mythology!
Back in 1895, one Robert Wiedersheim listed 86 human organs and parts that he claimed were unnecessary remnants of evolution. For many years, doctors removed useful parts of the human body and caused misery and death. Even now, some doctors do not appreciate the use of some human body parts because they simply do not understand that man was DESIGNED!
In part three, I will go into the thinking of design engineers and then address the idea that God is not a great designer. For now, let's take a look at how evolution has hurt mankind by not understanding that all parts of the human body were designed.
Vestigial Organs: Evolution's Left-Overs or Evolutionists' Ignorance?
If evolution were true, your great, great, great, great…grandfather was a creature like an ape or a monkey, and you came from him. Over the years, your ancestors gradually changed or evolved from looking like an ape to looking like humans. Your ape-like, distant grandfather, like many primates today, probably would have had a tail, a big jaw, and a lot of hair. He probably also had several other organs you either do not have today, or you have, but unlike him, you do not really need anymore. Those organs which you would no longer need are called vestigial (ves-TI-jul) organs by evolutionists. If evolution is true, then such organs should exist.
In 1895, an evolutionist named Robert Wiedersheim made a list of 86 different organs that he thought were vestigial—organs that supported the idea that we evolved from ape-like creatures millions of years ago. Evolutionists were excited by this news since they believed it helped to prove evolution. Since then, evolutionists have argued that many parts of our bodies are no longer useful, but are remains of our evolutionary ancestors: our hair, wisdom teeth, appendix, coccyx, tonsils, several genes (“junk” DNA), and even goose bumps have been called leftovers of evolution.
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| Robert Wiedersheim |
As time has passed, Wiedersheim’s list has gotten smaller and smaller. Why? Because scientists have studied more and more about the human body over the years and discovered that there are important functions for each of the organs on Wiedersheim’s list. The problem was never that there were not functions for those organs on the vestigial list. The problem was that scientists did not know enough to figure out what those functions were. In other words, the organs on the vestigial list are not evolution’s left-overs, but rather, they highlight evolutionists’ ignorance about those organs.
Consider the parathyroid glands, which evolutionists long considered to be vestigial organs. These four little glands are usually found sticking to the thyroid in your lower neck, just above your collar bone. If they are functionless, or not that important, then removing the parathyroid glands should not create a problem for humans, right? Why, do you suppose, when I had my thyroid removed several months ago, my doctors were so concerned about my parathyroid glands? They went out of their way to warn me that the glands might accidentally get cut off during my surgery. Why would they want to warn me about that possibility if it did not matter whether or not I had them? The reason is that doctors have discovered that the parathyroid glands are not vestigial. They are very important to humans. Without the parathyroid glands (the last major organ that humans have ever discovered), your body would not be able to regulate its calcium levels within the very narrow range that it requires, and the nervous and muscular systems would not function properly. People who believe in vestigial organs would be more likely not to worry about removing “vestigial” organs, since they do not believe they are important. This makes evolution a dangerous belief.
Consider another way that belief in evolution, and specifically “vestigial” organs, is dangerous and even harmful to us. Have you ever stopped to think about how doctors and scientists learned everything we know about the human body? It was through careful research and study of the body over many years. Usually the way research happens is that doctors or scientists ask others to give them money to pay for their research and study. Otherwise, they would not have a way to live while they are studying, and they would not have the money to pay for the equipment they need to study the body. Now what do you think the effect would have been when Wiedersheim released his list of “vestigial” organs? Do you think as many doctors or scientists would have done research and study on those organs that were considered unimportant? Do you think they could have convinced as many people to give them money to support their study of those organs if they wanted to?
Perhaps you can see now how belief in vestigial organs is a dangerous idea. Less research and study will tend to be done on those organs, since evolutionists do not believe them to be important! If those organs were designed by God, however, we can trust that they do, in fact, have important purposes in our bodies, even if we do not quite understand those purposes yet. Instead of throwing out organs as useless, we should praise God, knowing that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).