What a pity Prof Lennox defers to Prof Atkins on probability and the second law of thermodynamics and accepts that evolutionary gradualism is in some way valid. Without going into too much detail when Prof Atkins used the design and development of aircraft as some sort of analogy to evolution I nearly fell off my chair. Dr Richard Dawkins does the same with motor cars and it reveals nothing short of profound ignorance of technology, probability and the second law.

Human technology does not proceed by infinitesimal Darwinian steps… it jumps forward in leaps and bounds. (oil to gas to electricity, analogue to digital, etc). At no stage in the design is random action involved (other than Monte Carlo methods which are set up to optimise a given outcome by adjusting parameters - nothing to do with ‘mutation’). All technology is functional complexity based on specified semantic information not attainable by any random process.

If you insist on the evolutionary algorithm in order to reject a creator you loose the only part of the creation process that can account for the drop in entropy represented by the improbability of the creation. Just to take the flagella motor, any one of its 40 proteins has an improbability which far exceeds the total event capacity of the universe to account for. ie nature can roll the dice but it does not have enough time or dice to get such an outcome.

See my blog at [ vh-mby.blogspot.com ]
regards to all
Mike

It seems to me that this whole dialogue from the position of Dr. Atkins is self defeating. According to Dr. Atkins it took philosophy to squelch the lazy mind of the theologian and it took science to squelch the lazy mind of the philosopher. Science therefore for Dr. Atkins becomes the source of all knowledge. In other words science has put to rest any other field of knowledge that does not derive its knowledge from science. I find this fascinating as nowhere in this dialogue does Dr. Atkins use science in any way to convey his position. He attempts to justify his scientism by using the very philosophy that he claims science has done away with!! Of course he cannot be blamed for his philosophical ineptness for to him philosophy is dead! If this were in fact true Dr. Atkins’s science would have died out by now as it is impossible to transmit scientific fact merely by the experiment. It takes interpretation of the evidences which in turn requires a philosophical presupposition or a way to look at the evidence for communication of said evidence. Even Dr. Atkins has a presupposition which he explicitly denotes in this dialogue. That simply being, God does not exist. This colors his interpretation of the evidence just as Dr. Lennox’s belief that God does exist colors his. To deny this is sheer absurdity which Dr. Atkins does when he claims philosophy dead. One need go no further than pointing out Dr. Atkins self defeating worldview to show him untenable in fields of endeavor outside his own. Come to think of it he cannot speak even within his own field for the reasons considered above.