Seriously, Aren’t Atheists Embarrassed by P.Z. Myers?
At this point in his PowerPoint presentation there is a photograph showing a rather large pile of driftwood along what is obviously a coastline. Myers informs us that it is Rialto Beach in upper Washington State. He continues:
“And this is a very common thing along beaches . . . driftwood. You find these walls of driftwood between you and getting down to the beach, real walls, very complicated walls. It has been constructed, who did it? We know the answer, natural processes did it. We don’t need a designer to build this kind of wall. This is complex, you simply can’t deny it. If I turn the projector off would you be able to draw it? No.”
To be honest, when I saw this lecture for the first time, I thought Myers was joking. A pile of driftwood as being analogous to the “complexity” of a living cell?! Myers is arguing that since a “complex” and “complicated” pile of driftwood can accumulate through an undirected natural process, so can a living cell. I guess if by “complexity” you mean a chaotic collection of junk, then I would have to agree; a large pile of driftwood is certainly “complex.”
. . . It may be hard to believe, but it gets worse . . . Does Myers actually expect us to believe that the simplest living organism that exists, a bacterium – which is, in the words of Australian microbiologist Michael Denton, “a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of elegantly designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of all together one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and without parallel in the non-living world . . . an object resembling an immense automated factory . . . carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth,” – is assembled like a pile of driftwood on a beach?
Isn’t it glaringly obvious that it resembles, not the “functionally unspecified” and chaotic collection of driftwood, but the “functionally very specific,” “built with a purpose,” and “built with intent,” brick wall?! Has he gone mad? Has this man completely abandoned any semblance of rationality? How is it possible that his audience continues to sit through this nonsense, bobbing their heads up and down in approval like a pack of toy dogs on the back window of a car?
. . . I have to admit that I would find the prospect of a debate with Dr. Myers to be quite daunting. After all, between his still-lifes of driftwood and his rich vocabulary of four letter words, it’s clear that this man is packing a devastating level of intellectual firepower. But all sarcasm aside, I have a heartfelt question for all you skeptics out there and I want you to answer seriously: Doesn’t P.Z. Myers make you embarrassed to be an atheist?
