Opus 2025-312: Interchangeable Parts

We often look at society-changing ideas and attributed them to the genius of the inventor.  No problem.  Give credit where credit is due.  Often, though what we consider genius is simply a matter of observing the patterns and principles that God is laid down and applying them.  It is original for us.  It is truly created for us.  An example would be heavier than air flight.  The principle was demonstrated by birds as long as their were birds but it took humans ages to discover the Bernoulli principle.  Or think of Eli Whitney coming up with the concept of interchangeable parts.  Revolutionary.  It changed the whole process of making things and advanced the industrial revolution.  It brought greater comfort and prosperity to people around the world.  And yet it’s just an application of ideas that God has already been using for millennia.

I’m thinking of God’s patterns.  Recently I read a discussion of spirals that have been observed in nature.  The technical terms are Phyllotaxis spirals and the Fibonacci sequence.  Fibonacci was a mathematician in the 13th century who came up with an observation that there is a universal principle of spirals.  He came up with the fancy name for it.  If you are a mathematician or a physics major, you may know it by heart.  But he noticed that the way in which a conch shell spiraled was duplicated precisely throughout nature.  I believe one of the illustrations had to do with the inside of a sunflower, and how the different seeds were organized.  It was applied to a hurricane.  The curves, the angle, the math was the same in all of them.

When God find something that works and is very useful as a building block, He tends to reuse it. I’ll transfer your thinking over to one of the arguments of evolutionists.  They compare the similarities in DNA between human beings and chimpanzees.  The estimates I could find ranged from 95 to 99.5% similarities.  Take any number.  It sounds really impressive but means little.

It proves nothing about evolution.  And evolution since it’s arbitrary, and if you were a chance, you would have to have all kinds of things changing to make a major difference.  You wouldn’t design all of your parts to fit together in multiple ways.  Enter God.  When God finds something that works he continues to use it.  Sometimes small differences can make significant changes when you plan ahead.  Sometimes small parts make a device totally useless or useful depending on how they’re assembled.

As an example, I remember once when my friend convinced me that he knew how to rebuild the engine on my Volkswagen bus.  We took it apart.  We put it back together.  We installed it.  It ran just fine until I got out on the freeway and suddenly the engine froze up.  What was our mistake?  We put in one of the bearings on the driveshaft backwards.  It was a small piece of metal.  It looked the same as the others.  It was a fraction of a percentage of the weight and mass of the engine.  All we did was simply turn it around 180 degrees.  It fit fine.  We brought the engine to a screeching halt.

Evolution tends to go to a screeching halt with minor variations.  I don’t know what the differences are between a donkey and a horse.  It seems to me that their DNA should be compatible, but my understanding is that when you breed a donkey and a horse, you come up with a mule which may be bigger than a donkey, and possibly stronger than a horse, but is incapable of reproducing.  It’s called a dead end.

God doesn’t design dead ends.  He designs bearings to go in a certain way and you must insert them that way.  It’s not a matter of 50% chance of being good.  It’s a matter of requiring 100% chance.

I’m sure there are holes big enough in my logic to drive a mastodon through.  Fortunately, we believe that mastodons are extinct.  That itself doesn’t mean there isn’t one wandering around somewhere up in Canada or in the Rocky Mountains but for our purposes, the argument is sound.

homo unius libri