Ken Miller of Brown University, author of Finding Darwin’s God , knows that there cannot be design in nature, based on, among other things, the elephant. Here is what he has to say:
This designer has been busy! And what a stickler for repetitive work! Although no fossil of the Indian elephant has been found that is older than 1 million years, in just the last 4 million years no fewer than nine members of its genus, Elephas, have come and gone. We are asked to believe that each one of these species bears no relation to the next, except in the mind of that unnamed designer whose motivation and imagination are beyond our ability to fathom. Nonetheless, the first time he designed an organism sufficiently similar to the Indian elephant to be placed in the same genus was just 4 million years ago—Elephas ekorensis. Then, in rapid succession, he designed ten (count’em!) different Elephas species, giving up work only when he had completed Elephas Maximus, the sole surviving species. (Finding Darwin’s God p. 97.)
So? Is there some sense in which elephants, of whichever family named, are evil or unhappy or out of sync with their ecology? How would we know that God didn’t explicitly intend or design elephants? I mean, really, exactly. Forget sneery suggestions about “busy” and “stickler.” We should hold the things we cannot ourselves dream of creating from scratch with awe.
Population geneticist J.B.S. Haldane (a traditional Darwinian atheist) argued something similar when he said,
The Creator would appear as endowed with a passion for stars, on the one hand, and for beetles on the other, for the simple reason that there are nearly 300,000 species of beetle known, and perhaps more, as compared with somewhat less than 9,000 species of birds and a little over 10,000 species of mammals. Beetles are actually more numerous than the species of any other insect order. That kind of thing is characteristic of nature.
So God cannot create as many beetles as he thinks right? The Darwinist, Christian or non, does not offer us anything but a sneer in response to questions.
All the while, any given beetle, munching the pot plant in the office in which the Christian Darwinist types away, could be a far more wonderful work of engineering than the computer he uses.
Could any Darwinist, Christian or otherwise, afford a sneer-free investigation of the facts at this time?