Not because they’re terrorists or black-and-white thinkers, as claimed. A simple computer program shows the limits of creating information by chance:
Engineers are more likely to be creationists because they are familiar with what it takes to design complex things for specific tasks. Which is exactly what we see in the biological world. Additionally, engineers who work with computers know about randomized methods, which include evolutionary algorithms. We are aware of their significant limitations…
Let’s set my evolutionary algorithm a simple, fundamental task — to count by ones…
Exponential is bad news. Exponential means it took the evolutionary algorithm twice as long to count to 10 as it did to count to 9.
Let’s put exponential on a cosmological scale. The heat death of the universe is projected to occur in 10106 years. This is well beyond the lifetime of anyone who’ll even remotely know we existed. Seems like a lot of time, but not for exponential doubling!
If we generously say that a step of P’‘ runs in a nanosecond, which is nine decimal places to the right of the dot, then the universe will undergo heat death before the evolutionary algorithm can evolve a program that counts from 0 to 500. And it takes even longer if the program must start from 1 instead of 0. To go up to 501 doubles even that. Completely impossible.
Eric Holloway, “The Salem Hypothesis: Why engineers view the universe as designed” at Mind Matters News (June 7, 2022)
Takehome: Engineers doubt chance evolution because a computer using an evolution-based program to do simple tasks would be chugging away well past the heat death of our universe, as Eric Holloway demonstrates.
Note: The hypothesis was named in honor of Talk.origins contributor Bill Salem.
You may also wish to read:
Dawkins’ Weasel program vs the information life acquires en route To demonstrate what is wrong with fully naturalist assumptions like those of Richard Dawkins’ Weasel program, I developed Weasel Libs, modeled on Mad Libs. When we apply a Mad Libs “epigenetic” approach to Dawkins’ claims about how life’s information can be created, we quickly see a glaring flaw. (Eric Holloway)