{"id":3089,"date":"2016-10-27T03:17:08","date_gmt":"2016-10-27T10:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=3089"},"modified":"2016-10-27T03:17:08","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T10:17:08","slug":"the-irreducibly-complex-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/?p=3089","title":{"rendered":"The Irreducibly Complex Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

Question from Robert:<\/strong>
\nHi! I’ve recently had a Christian professor of mine talk about the creation of the universe, and say the spontaneous creation of life was impossible due to irreducible complexity. As an atheist, how would you refute that?
\n
\nAnswer by SmartLX<\/a>:<\/strong>
\nI’ve covered irreducible complexity<\/a> before, so I’ll let you read that piece for a primer. It’s often claimed to be the case with biological features like the eye, the immune system and the blood-clotting cascade. In every one of these cases, there’s a great deal of scholarship that’s produced feasible evolutionary paths that work up to these mechanisms that supposedly can’t get any simpler without being useless, because in most cases they simply did something else first. As I pointed out in the other piece, most of the research happened well before the claims of irreducible complexity were made, if they’d cared to look. If you want to respond to any such claim, just Google “evolution of” the subject.
\n
\nTo apply the same principle to the origin of life itself is a naked argument from ignorance, though at least it’s one where there isn’t already an answer. If you don’t know how the first life could have come together from non-living components, to presume that there’s no possible way is to assert that your knowledge on the subject of biology is not just vast but absolute and all-encompassing, beyond the reach of any human biologist. If it wasn’t life if it got any simpler, then okay, it wasn’t life before. That’s the point, it was something else. It could still have been a set of components in a membrane with some autonomous functions, from movement (optional, since tides or winds could have moved it instead) up to and including reproduction using the material around it. There are compounds like that around right now, as this TED Talk<\/a> explains.
\n
\nIf your professor is also trying to apply the idea of irreducible complexity to the whole universe, he’s stretched it way too far. Irreducible complexity is only a barrier to natural development in something which has to develop or emerge gradually, and supposedly couldn’t get over some hurdle without divine help. All evidence points to a very sudden origin of the universe as we know it, inasmuch as our concept of time applies to the event. It probably wasn’t a half-universe first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Question from Robert: Hi! I’ve recently had a Christian professor of mine talk about the creation of the universe, and say the spontaneous creation of life was impossible due to irreducible complexity. As an atheist, how would you refute that? Answer by SmartLX: I’ve covered irreducible complexity before, so I’ll let you read that piece … Continue reading “The Irreducibly Complex Everything”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[561,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-2","category-text"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pB6tr-NP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3089"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3091,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3089\/revisions\/3091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asktheatheist.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}