| Creation Truth Outreach, Inc. Pamphlet |
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| Chapter 6. Limitations On Natural Selection. Intelligent Design Characteristic Number 3. Design To A Target. There are basically two approaches used in design. One is called top down. The other is called bottom up. The things we see in nature—from paramecium to people—give the appearance of a well thought out, top-down design. This points to an existence due to an Intelligent Designer. Top-down design is the approach where a person has a complete target design specification worked out before anything is actually designed. The first step of the design effort is then to break apart the specification into major functional blocks. An example of this would be how the various functions to make a living man are distributed among various specialized organs. Next, details of the blocks are represented in their own functional overviews, such as the various tissues comprising each of the organs. Each step further down is defined in more and more detail. Finally, at the lowest level, the tiniest of details are worked out, such as the structures of individual molecules suitable to perform tiny tasks. By contrast, a bottom up design starts at the bottom and works up. It would be like a person building a house a wall at a time and having no idea what the house would look like when it was finished. He would not even know if a room were a bathroom or kitchen until it was almost finished. He would constantly need to back up to compensate for details (doors, windows, insulation, electrical wiring, plumbing, carpeting, etc.) he didn’t know he would need when he started. Bottom- up designs tend to be very chaotic, very disorganized and very inefficient in their use of materials. This chaos becomes so deeply imbedded it is essentially impossible to undo to an appreciable degree. In industry, the ability to perform a top-down design normally requires a lot of experience. The engineer needs to have an implicit understanding of what can be done at the detailed level so that he can focus at the high levels and understand how a detail will be carried out with out actually needing to work through it first. On the other hand, junior engineers fresh out of school typically do a bottom-up design. They will start by defining extreme details of some portion of a specification before they have even considered how it will fit in with other portions. They do not have the experience that allows them to start at a high level and really have no choice but to work at low levels first. An experienced design engineer can readily determine the approach used when reviewing a design. A good engineer using a top-down approach will have a design that is extremely efficient and organized. It can do complicated tasks with a minimum of materials. Multiple functions can be performed by a common structure. By contrast, a bottom-up design is an organizational chaos. Simple jobs require lots of materials. Nothing ever seems to work quite like it should. Evolution represents bottom-up design. Evolutionists like to talk as though evolution is a random walk. In the words of Dawkins, “Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection….” 26 Yet, there is an awesome beauty in the organizational perfection of living systems, no matter at what level they are studied. When one looks at external form, there is beauty. When one looks at the division of labor by the various organs of the body, there is beauty in its perfect distribution of tasks. When one looks at the various kinds of cells that can be used by the various organs, there is a marvelous perfection. When one looks at cell structure, there is again an overwhelming amount of organization, with a very logical breakdown of tasks into organelles, which are like tiny organs within a cell to perform various specialized tasks within the cell. Then, when one analyses the actual biochemical molecules used to perform some very specific, detailed, low-level task, there is again tremendous organization and efficiency. There truly is beauty in the perfection of how function fits form at every level. No matter at whatever level one looks, even down to the choice of individual molecules to perform a tiny task, he finds structures and processes that give the appearance of a very well thought out top-down design. There is an awesome beauty in the perfection between top-level function and detailed implementation. This awesome beauty displays itself in perfection across all levels of living organisms, from man to bacteria. This perfection is characteristic of a top-down design worked out by an extremely intelligent Designer. It is not characteristic of designs produced by a wanderer who had no idea of where he was headed. It is not representative of the chaotic design of a junior engineer who did not have a sufficient intuitive understanding of options at the detailed level to focus on higher level issues first. A person may refuse to recognize these things because he does not want them to be true. However, his unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious does not change the fact of its existence. Living organisms at every level give the appearance of something designed by a very good Design Engineer, who had a specific target in mind as he designed it. |