Before you use the "shake a bag with broken watch parts" argument, do you even understand WHY it doesn't work?

Question

Creationists, many of you use the example, "if I shake up a box of watch parts, it doesn't come together and form a watch" as an argument for intelligent design as opposed to evolution.

Forgetting for a moment that a watch is dead, why, when I shake up a box with a seed, water and dirt, do I get a plant?

The answer is, when you have right ingredients, AND as source of energy, life happens. THE SUN is that source of energy. Humans are nothing more than a complex arrangement of the basic elements (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, etc) that existed on this planet four billion years ago. It just took the earth & sun a few billion years to shake & bake the right combination to make you.

You can get order (life) out of disorder (random elements) if you add energy.

cucumberlarry1 - prove that DNA was created by god instead of a random act of nature.

5Solas - correct, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. At the very least, my theory is no less credible than "god."

phoenix_slayer2001 - READ the question. I said you need the RIGHT ingredients. Also, your assumption is premature. Suppose they do find life?

Andy - sorry but I disagree. Just because YOU don't feel it's possible for it to happen randomly, doesn't make it statistically impossible. Trillions of amino acids over billions of years makes for a LOT of possible combinations.

SearchForTruth - There is no "Law of Biogenesis" as far as the scientific community is concerned. That is part of the creationist mythology. All I can say is CRITICAL THINKING. Learn it. Live it. Know it.

icheeknows - friend, you are seriously misinformed as to what evolution is. Dogs and wolves ARE the same species. Your ranting has me completely flabbergasted.

Andy - when you rule out the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. Until you can rule out that the random assembly is a statistical IMPOSSIBILITY, my "luck" holds more water than your "faith."

Answer 1

You have no evidence for your hypothesis. No one has ever observed life being formed from matter plus energy.

Your trust in this theory takes much more "faith" than believing in a Creator.

Answer 2

You're looking at the problem from the wrong direction. Remember that you are looking at empty rhetoric. The problem is that if you put watch parts together you get a watch. If you put biological parts together, you get nothing. Why? Life is dynamic. Seeds have energy to keep them ready to germinate. When seeds get to old and that energy is depleted, the are dead. With one notable exception, all life derives from life.

The "Law of Biogenesis" was derived from an elegant experiment of Louis Pasteur to disprove spontaneous generation of life, the previous "Law". It was previously thought that small creatures (from microbes to maggots) were derived from what they grew on. Pasteur developed an aparatus to demonstrate that life was carried in the air, not the air itself. He never saw life arise from nowhere. Of course, absence of proof is not proof of absence. It should be noted that another Pasteur experiment "disproved" the existence of enzymes.

Rather than focus on the process of generation of life which has occured once, the point is life has acquired complexity in an unbroken chain tracing back to the simplest life form. Shake the box enough times and you don't get a watch, but you might get something with a regulated movement. If watch parts could evolve, you might even get a wristwatch in half a billion years.




Now for some fun shooting down Creationist illogic:

Okay, let's try to stick with science.
#I'll do it without making up facts.

Evolution is a "theory", and has never been observed in a controlled experiment.
#Controlled experiments demonstrating evolution:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/20/11388
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/15/8/931

A Law in Physics is something that has been scientifically proven to be true all of the time.
#Wrong. A physical law, scientific law, or a law of nature is a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior. They are typically conclusions based on repeated scientific experiments over many years, and which have become accepted universally within the scientific community.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law

The Law of Biogenesis states that life can only come from life.
Evolution tells us that Life came from non-living matter. The Law of Biogenesis says that is not possible.
#Biology isn't physics.

There are many other Laws of Science that would have to be broken for evolution to be true. I won't try to address them all here.
#Because I'd shoot them down.

It takes faith to believe in evolution because evolution really does break the "laws" of science.
# No, it takes understanding of science and making a few oservations.

Answer 3

The bag of watch parts argument isn't refering to a fully formed organism such as a plant or animal. It refers to amino acids and proteins. No matter how much you shake up a bag of amino acids you'll never get even one functioning protein.

You argue that the sun adds the order necessary. How exactly does the sun line up amino acids to create proteins? It doesn't. The DNA inside living cells control how proteins are assembled. Where did the DNA come from, Mr. Evolutionist? Did the sun write out these these instructions?

How did the DNA assemble itself? Why don't we see zillions of failed strings of DNA floating around? You don't seem to understand how enormously complex even 1 single protein is.

A titins protein has over 27,000 amino acids. Randomly arranging the 20 known alpha amino acids into a length of 27,000 units that result in a functioning protein is virtually impossible. A billion years wouldn't do it even if you had trillions of amino acids bumping into each other. And that is just one kind of protein.

To believe that it could happen randomly takes a tremendous amount of FAITH.

Answer 4

you really need to back to your drawing board and crayons and math book. Consider the climate cataclisms, temperature changes here on earth, numerous times that volcanic eruptions made exrtensive climate changes. Study the new climate charts. Silly person there is no way Life evolved to it's present state here on this planet. Study rates of mutation. Yeah some buch showed flies evolve within their own species, Frankly I doubt even the staunchesest creationist would state that species do not evolve within their own species to survive. Look at the wide vartiety of combination of dog that was one time carried by wolf and Jackal or whatever that other was maybe chow.

Do the math on developing one single species from another, add in survival on a planet in vast amounts of turmoil, wide temp fluctuations and all that is needed to proceed to develope even one speciies from another (which there is no evidence of ever happening, consider we now know australopithicus is in no way related to man) and the obvious result is that while DNA has most likely been tinkered with, in order to develop the life forms we have today it had to have been done in a controled environment like a lab, and under the direction of the the department of Galactic Oversight of DNA, whose department head is called GOD for short.

You spout your silliness all you like but in less than 10 years we will have our own department of creation, playing with DNA and are you then going to keep thinking this is all an accident of random combinations. Take a step back we have come way to far in the field of gemnetics to think all life on earth has a common ancestor which started here. That thought is so full of pride it can only be called arrogance of the foolish variety.

Answer 5

Okay, let's try to stick with science.

Evolution is a "theory", and has never been observed in a controlled experiment.

A Law in Physics is something that has been scientifically proven to be true all of the time.

The Law of Biogenesis states that life can only come from life.

Evolution tells us that Life came from non-living matter. The Law of Biogenesis says that is not possible.

There are many other Laws of Science that would have to be broken for evolution to be true. I won't try to address them all here.

It takes faith to believe in evolution because evolution really does break the "laws" of science.

Answer 6

The seed is more complex than a watch spring. The seed contains DNA designed by God. The seed already contains life without the dirt, water, and sunlight.

It's all way too complex to be by chance.

So I can't prove God put the DNA there. You can't prove He didn't. I will believe with all my heart and soul because it's what I have to do. I will pray for you because it's what Jesus wants me to do. I'm sorry you don't believe that we are more important than a shaken up bag of elements. I believe we are the children of God. That belief makes my life much happier and much easier than it would be otherwise.

Answer 7

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Answer 8

If you can prove that you can get life from a lifeless planet, I'd like to see the proof.

When they send a robot to the subsurface ocean of Europa and find no life, what will be your argument then?

Answer 9

You forgot their original question: Who created the seed, water, dirt and sun? Those things are not created by accident.

Answer 10

Your argument's gonna fall on deaf ears.

It's not in the Bible, and science is always wrong, so it's not true, and bibbity-bobbity-boo.