Harold remarks that even a bacterial cell “displays levels of regularity and complexity that exceed by orders of magnitude” anything found in the nonliving world. Besides, “A cell constitutes a unitary whole, a unit of life, in another deeper sense: like the legs and leaves of higher organisms, its molecular constituents have functions…. Molecules are parts of an integrated system, and in that capacity can be said to serve the activities of the cell as a whole.”
The cell, in other words, shows the marked signature of design. It is crucially important to recognize that this basic template of life, with all its intricate machinery of RNA and DNA, came fully formed with the first appearance of life. Evolution presupposes cells that have these built-in capacities. And scientists have found that the first traces of life go back between 3.5 and 4 billion years, only a short time after the earth itself was formed.
Is it even reasonable to speculate that random combinations of chemicals could have produced so marvelously complex and functional a thing as a living cell? That’s like positing that chance combinations of atoms could have assembled themselves to produce an airplane. “However improbable the origin of life might be,” Dawkins writes, it must have happened this way “because we are here.” It takes a lot of faith to believe things like this.
Nor can evolution explain consciousness, which illuminates the whole world for us.We know as human beings that we are conscious. Other creatures, such as dogs, also appear to be conscious, although perhaps not quite in the same way that we are. It does seem incredible that atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on can somehow produce our capacity to perceive and experience the world around us. So what is the evolutionary explanation for consciousness? What adaptive benefits did it confer? How did unconscious life transform itself into conscious life?
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