Ever heard of the Fibonacci sequence? It is a sequence of numbers where each one is the sum of the previous two numbers. The sequence runs 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on. What’s fascinating about the Fibonacci sequence is that when you make squares the size of the numbers, […]
via A Spectacular Sequence — God does not believe in atheists
I spent the weekend at a fair talking to people about science and faith. While some believe the two topics are incompatible with each other, I beg to differ. The compatibility of science (and math) and faith is the theme of the article I have reblogged here. (Please take some time to read it at the link above.)
The article got me thinking about some conversations I had or overheard at the fair. We usually post a question and invite people to vote on it. The question on Sunday was this: Do humans and apes share a common ancestor? The question draws people who want to weigh in, and sometimes it sparks conversation.
In more than one conversation triggered by a “yes” vote on our question, people cited for support the commonalities between apes and humans for evidence of common origin. Indeed, the commonalities can be seen at almost every level, from body design to DNA.
It’s a reasonable argument, but common ancestry isn’t the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence, as the article I have reblogged observes. The evidence could be explained by common design.
As an example, the article linked above notes:
The “Fibonacci spiral” is found everywhere. It is to be seen in plant leaves, pine cones, seashells, pineapples, ferns, daisies, artichokes, sunflowers and even galaxies. It’s in the arrangement of seeds on flowers. It’s in starfish. It’s in the cochlea of your inner ear, which is not simply a spiral shape, it’s the actual Fibonacci spiral, with the exact number sequence.
The Fibonacci spiral is present in our bodies, as it is present in things as diverse as plants, shells and galaxies. The Fibonacci spiral is even present in storm patterns. So it seems fair to ask: are the commonalities we observe evidence of common descent? Or evidence of common design?
If you will indulge me a moment, the commonality of the Fibonacci spiral in animate things and inanimate things are diverse as shells, galaxies, and weather patterns is more suggestive of common design than common descent. Common descent might account for the appearance of the Fibonacci spiral in living things, but common descent does not explain the presence of the Fibonacci spiral in non-living things. Common design, however, can account for the repetition of the Fibonacci spiral in animate and inanimate, living and non-living, things.
The growing field of Evolutionary Developmental Biology has identified “toolkit genes” that are “turned on” to direct changes in certain ways. The toolkit genes are present, but when and where they are triggered determines the direction of the change in the organism. These scientists have also identified “developmental bias” that makes some changes “easy” and other changes impossible to occur. These things channel evolution in certain directions, making evolution something other than random.
Scientists in the field of epigenetics are seeing similar things. They have observed that environmental stressors can trigger mechanisms in the genetic code on or off. The mechanisms are programmed in, but they get are triggered by outside forces. Epigenetic “tags” can be passed down so that the environmental stressors (experiences) of ancestors can affect the traits of the next generation. The mechanisms are nonrandom; they are built in, and they are triggered by environmental pressures. They see “phenotypic plasticity” built into living organisms that allows a single genotype to produce different phenotypes (forms) depending on the environment.
The toolkit genes, developmental bias, epigenetic tags, phenotype plasticity, and other observable mechanisms are coded into the DNA, epigenetic materials, and other components of cells in living things to direct changes in those living things over time that we have called evolution. The evolution we see today (and which always existed) is not driven by purely random mutations as we once thought.
The ways that living organisms change over time is driven by embedded determiners. Environmental and “experiential” factors trigger these mechanisms, which cause the change to occur in predetermined directions. It is not random in the way we previously thought.
All of these modern discoveries are changing our understanding of how living organism change and adapt over time. All of these discoveries make our understanding more consistent with the idea of common design, and they open the door wider than previously thought to the idea of a common Designer.
As Stephen Meyer postulates in his book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, whenever we see complex design, especially interactive design like DNA, epigenetic materials, and the panoply of interdependent mechanisms in cellular structures, we need to ask: what is the most likely explanation for that communicative complexity? What models do we see in our experience that can account for that? Meyer says there is only thing that can account for that complex interworking of communicative expression, and that is a mind. Nothing else in the universe that we have been able to observe produces that kind of interactive complexity built into a functional entity.
Navigating by Faith 