Excerpt from Chapter 4:
Why there almost certainly is no God

Page 105

...The Ultimate Boeing 747

The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today’s most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist’s intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. The label I give to the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.

The name comes from Fred Hoyle’s amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the scrap yard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrap yard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist’s favourite argument, an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn’t understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense of chance - it is the opposite.

http://faculty.erau.edu/ericksol/courses/ms603/shuttle.html

http://fitness.howstuffworks.com/space-shuttle.htm?printable=1

http://fitness.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=space-shuttle.htm&url=http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/shutref/verboseindex.html

I went to my bookshelf and pulled a book off called “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution.” In it, Michael Behe spends one chapter (23 pages) explaining the system of blood clotting. I offer just one quote from this chapter:

“The landing of an airplane is just one example of a system that has to work within very tight restrictions to avoid disaster. … A little too short or a little too long on the landing, or aiming a little too low or a little too high, and the plane and passengers are in big trouble. But imagine the greater difficulty of landing a plane on autopilot – with no conscious agent to guide it! Blood clotting is on autopilot, and blood clotting requires extreme precision. When a pressurized blood circulation system is punctured, a clot must form quickly or the animal will bleed to death. If blood congeals at the wrong time or in the wrong place, though, then the clot may block circulation as it does in heart attacks and strokes. Furthermore, a clot has to stop bleeding all along the length of the cut, sealing it completely. Yet blood clotting must be confined to the cut or the entire blood system of the animal might solidify, killing it. Consequently, the clotting of blood must be tightly controlled so that the clot forms only when and where it is required.” (Behe, pp. 78-79)

In describing this one subsystem of your circulatory system, Behe touches on no less than 25 proteins that are activated and/or used to form a blood clot. This is not counting the proteins that are used to stop the clotting process once it has begun, or to remove the clot once the vessel has repaired itself (How does it do that?). I’m not a biochemist, but I know there are hundreds, even thousands of systems in our body machines. The respiratory system, the nervous system, skeletal, lymph, reproduction – it just goes on and on! These systems work together constantly and flawlessly, most of the time. When they don’t work, our best “Medical Machines” (doctors) can only repair things to a certain point.