Let's Get Organized.

In a 747 - none of the individual parts fly - (but TOGETHER they do) - how does this relate to "Evolution" / Creation debates ?


  True.  However, individually the parts do other things.  Computers don't need to be in an airplane to compute.  Wheels don't need to be on an airplane to roll.  Windows don't need to be on an air plane to be seen through.  Hydraulic rams don't need to be on an airplane to move, and so on and on.

    What a creationist forgets or overlooks is that the parts of a living organism used to or still do something simpler then they do now.  All living things are made up of the simplest parts (cells) that used get along by themselves.  All cells can at least sense what is food and what is not food.  The ability to sense things are based on this simple thing.  Cones and rod cells in the eye are just light sensitive cells working in concert.  Some of the simplest animals have light sensitive cells.  Just like an airplane is made of simpler components that do or did something else first, so it is with cells in a body.

   Once you have a cell you have life that can and will organize and change to meet conditions.  You can still argue that something has to create a cell first, because no one has yet found the mechanism for abiogenesis.  Even so there is plenty of evidence that matter self organizes in myriad ways.  Chemistry has 1000s of examples. 


   Creationists like to give the example of a tornado making a 747 by sending a tornado through a junk yard.  True enough that a tornado won't blow junk into a 747.  That is not the process of getting a 747.  What the creationist overlooks or doesn't mention is that tornado itself is a self organized entity.  Air molecules just minding their own business a few minutes ago are organized into a spinning wind by heat and gravity.  George Carlin has a line that Mother Nature wanted some plastic so she evolved man.  That is, plastic is a self organizing property of the universe, and so is a 747. Once the process is understood, that is quite clear.

   I think that the universe is a self organizing entity. As Alan Watts used to say, "the universe peoples in the same way a tree leaves." Even a human is a self organizing entity.  It starts as a single cell zygote and organizes resources into a fetus/baby/kid/teenager/parent/old fart. Where would you put God into that process?  Did he make the 2 bits that made the zygote? No, the parents did that. Even if you want to say, "Adam* and Eve", people have been self organizing entities since then.  If you want to say that God knits (organizes) everyone together in the womb, then you have the problem of birth defects showing God to be an imperfect knitter.  However, the process of gestation is quite well known, and there is no knitter detected.


  The electromagnetic properties of matter assisted by gravity is the force/means/engine that causes it to self organize.  The desire of oxygen to share electrons with 2 atoms (adams?) of hydrogen or of carbon is an example of what gets things going. Two or more things get together to make another thing.  Two or more "another things" get together to make another thing and so on.  It is what happens.

*By the way, it is the case the female is the default sex, not the male. That is why men have nipples. So if you want to stick to creation story, it needs to be revised to "Eve and Adam".