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So my close christian friend lends me a book, because I've always been bugging her and questioning christianity, and she told me it'd answer most of my questions.

So I start reading the book and the very first chapter talks about this.

Say you are walking down a field, and you see a wooden chair in middle of no where. Now you know someone must have made that chair, because chair's don't just "happen". You've never witnessed the builder of the chair working on the chair, but you could only assume that someone out there, made the chair and placed it there for whatever reason.

Now if something as simple as a wooden chair can't just "happen" the book argues that something as complicated as humans, cell structures, plants, animals, countless laws of physics that govern the universe could not have just "happened". Somebody must have created us. If you think a wooden chair could not exist with out a builder, consider how infinately more complex body structures we humans have.

And I think the reasoning is fairly solid. I do now think that it is silly to imagine things like mitosis, DNA, human eyes could have appeared by random chance.

The book also goes into absolute lack of evidence in macro-evolution (aka missing links) and how the scientists were still unable to create life out of chemical reactions as they proclaim.

But I do not want to get into the macro evolution/ biogenesis theory stuff, but just would like a discussion on use of logic in the chair anology.

thanks.

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Buddy - you really need to read <u>The Blind Watchmaker</u> by Richard Dawkins. He has done enough to refute this simplistic argument.

Also, why do you say a chair is more "simple" than the biochemical reactions of life. (For instance, unless you switch to an anaerobic metabolism (like when you run and your muscles don't get enough oxygen), your body's chemistry is the same as buring wood.) What the Christian author did was frame the issue in manner that seems convincing, but the way he framed the issue was incorrect.

A chair is more complex that biochemical reactions when you look at the issue in this manner.

Biochemical reactions, all of them without question, simply follow the laws of thermodynamics. In other words the molecules behave the way they are supposed to behave (i.e., reactions that increase the amount entropy in the Universe). The chair on the other hand, was created by matter being forced to something it would not do on its own. Trees had to be cut, shaped and sanded.

The aetheist version on the origins of life is simply that "life" is the result of a mixture on chemicals (namely aromatic-carbon rings with nitrogen) behaving in full accord with the laws of thermodynamics.

Now, are you thinking that some one had to create the laws of thermodynamics? That to me is a better argument that a stinking chair? But still wrong, IMO. If we take for a <u>given</u> that the Universe exists, then everything in it has to behave in a predictable and certain fashion (i.e., the laws of thermodynamics). If it didn't, then you couldn't get drive to work because it would be a crap shoot as to whether or not gasoline felt like cumbusting with oxygen on that particular day. So if we exist, then there has to be a set of underlying rules. The two are inseparable, so why does there have to be a god because we have both.

Incidentally, it seems to me that "miracles" are supposed instances where the laws of thermodynamics or physics were supposedly violated in the presence of humans. So if a miracle (or violation of the laws of physics or thermodynamics) is proof of god, then how can nature acting as it should also be proof of god.