So the question that is going through my mind as I look at a National Geographic issue devoted, in part, to Stonehenge is "What's all the fuss about anyway?" The article said, essentially, that people have been thinking about this pile of rocks for more than a thousand years in order to figure out where it came from, who made it, and what it's for.
Stonehenge is, relatively speaking, a grouping of rocks... one might say a pile of rocks. Arguably they're pretty big rocks strewn about in a unique way within a large circle of earth. Oh yeah, there is a graveyard nearby... and some really old houses not too far away also. One interesting point is that they found a guy with a wrecked leg (probably walked with a really bad limp they said) in one of the tombs who was definitely from Germany - and he was rich. They could tell he was rich because he was buried with cool and expensive stuff. Didn't cross their mind I guess that he might have been a thief who stumbled and broke his leg running from the guys he stole from, fell into a hole that was subsequently covered with blowing debris. I mean, that's also a plausible explanation.
Well, I jest, to some degree. To be honest, Stonehenge is incredibly fascinating. I rarely read National Geographic. Not because I find it uninteresting, but rather because of my A.D.D. I just have difficulty staying focused in the long articles. But this one really interested me. My family has visited the replica in the Columbia Gorge. There's just something cool and appealing about it... enough so that someone thought it would be worthwhile to build a replica of it 6000 miles away from the original so that some of us, who haven't made it to England, could have the experience of it in some small way.
So what's the point of taking up space on the blog to think about it a little. It's just this that suddenly struck me as funny. How many of the people who have spent more than a thousand years studying the thing have denied the existence of God, out of hand. That is to say, many people who suggest that God doesn't exist and that all we see happened by chance have spent a good bit of their livers trying to find out WHO erected the stones at Stonehenge, and WHY they erected them. Is there anyone who has ever posited the theory that "Stonehenge was an accident... just happened... though it sure looks designed for a purpose." I'd like to know if anyone knows of one serious archaeologist or philosopher has ever made that case. I'd almost bet there isn't one.
Truth is, intuitively, we look at something as simple as Stonehenge and its surrounding, and know that there was a designer who designed it for some purpose, even if we don't completely see and understand what that purpose was. However, on the order of complexity Stonehenge is less complex than a single strand of DNA - yet there are those running all over the place suggesting that there isn't a designer. Doesn't it make sense that if we routinely, and intuitively apply design, and subsequently a designer, to a pile of cool rocks that something like the human eye might have also had a designer? Just sayin'.
2 comments:
There's a replica in the gorge? Umm... we won't be at church this week... We have something to visit...
On a more serious note, I really like a lot of what the ID folks have to say. Here's the problem I run up against when I start talking about the issue of complexity with others. When is something considered "complex?" I don't really know how to get around this because the term "complex" is, from what I can tell, is somewhat subjective. What I find complex mathematically or technically probably wasn't complex for a mathematician like Russel or a computer dude like Dave the district tech guy. I understand why scientists object to ID. Sure there are those who object because if there is a Creator, then there are consequences. But there are others who object because some of ID - like specified complexity - can't be quantified. In other words, how do we know when something has reached complexity?
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