Visual Aid: Chance or Design?
03/01/2005 A TV commercial for the Honda Accord has
been circulating around the net as a popular download (see Steel City’s
Finest). It shows the parts of a car, without human
intervention, interacting in strange ways like a Rube Goldberg
device, resulting in a finished car rolling off the ramp.
Garrison Keillor adds the punch line, “Isn’t it nice when things just
work?”
If you teach science or Sunday School,
this could be a great visual aid to stimulate thinking about intelligent
design. It is fun to watch and quite amazing to think about how
the production team had to spend $6 million and perform 606 takes to get
it right. Applying William Dembski’s explanatory
filter, how could you rigorously conclude that the sequence was
designed, and not the result of chance? Contrast this scene with
the familiar analogy of a tornado in a
junkyard producing a 747, popularized by the late Fred
Hoyle. What’s the difference? Put even a micro-tornado
on the Honda set and the whole sequence would fail. That’s irreducible
complexity – a picture is worth a thousand words. Life is like
that.
[2005/03/01] Visual Aid: Chance or Design?
