I’m currently rereading Bill Dembski’s No Free Lunch. On page 180 we read:
In The Fifth Miracle [Paul] Davies goes so far as to suggest that any laws capable of explaining the origin of life must be radically different from any scientific laws known to date. The problem, as he sees it, with currently known scientific laws, like the laws of chemistry and physics, is that they cannot explain the key feature of life that needs to be explained. That feature is specified complexity. As Davies puts it: “Living organisms are mysterious not for their complexity per se, but for their tightly specified complexity.”
But then Davies puts blind faith in the notion that once a self-replicator appears, specified complexity (i.e., complex specified information) can mysteriously be had on the cheap, as though there are known laws that can account for this. Of course, there are no known such laws, and, in fact, such a notion is just as much a get-something-for-nothing scam as the origin of the first cell through chance and necessity is.
Even such a brilliant guy as Paul Davies has obviously fallen prey to Darwinian indoctrination (or, perhaps, fear of being labeled a creationist), so that he has uncritically accepted a completely unverifiable thesis.
Davies:
Random mutations plus natural selection are one surefire way to generate biological information, extending a short random genome over time into a long random genome. Chance in the guise of mutations and law in the guise of selection form just the right combination of randomness and order needed to create “the impossible object.” The necessary information comes, as we have seen, from the environment.
(Emphasis mine.)
One “surefire” way? Just the right combination? Information has come, “as we have seen”?
Absolutely none of this is surefire, or has been demonstrated, or has been seen. In fact, it all flies in the face of even the most trivial mathematical analysis concerning probabilistic resources and the barriers presented by combinatoric explosion, not to mention what is now known about the highly complex, functionally integrated, machine-like, information-processing, error-correcting nature of living systems, the sophistication of which exceeds the greatest modern human engineering feats by countless orders of magnitude.
Religious believers are often accused of parking their brains at the church door, but I believe that many “scientists,” even demonstrably smart ones with high IQ’s, could be accused of parking their brains at the Darwin door.