THE CREATION IS ENGINEERED – NOT EVOLVED!
Most people have at least a basic understanding of the human skeleton. There are skeletal reconstructions in doctor’s offices, in science textbooks and in popular horror movies. I think most people also take the skeleton for granted until injury or old age make it clear to them how important the skeleton is to each individual’s comfortable existence.
The skeleton is what many have described at an engineering marvel. Consider some of its engineered characteristics and functions:
- It provides rigid support for the body’s organs and protects the brain, heart, lungs and spinal cord.
- The bones act as mechanical levers, and in conjunction with the muscles and ligaments, allow the body to move about.
- The bones also contain a large percentage of the calcium, phosphorus and other trace elements needed for the body to stay alive.
- The skeletal system is the chemical factory where red blood cells, certain white blood cells and platelets are manufactured. (This work takes place in the bone marrow.)
Engineers today can only imagine that they will someday be able to design and manufacture artificial “bones” for their machines and devices that would repair themselves when broken like human and other vertebrate bones do. Man has come a long way with the development of strong yet lightweight structural materials over the past few hundred years. But, none of the inventions of men are near the complexity of the bones designed by the Creator Engineer. Yes, bones are strong, and bone tissue is a complex framework of living elements and minerals in a state of constant renovation. It is extreme foolishness for anyone to teach that our bones and our skeletal structure are the result of evolutionary processes over deep time.
There are many details of the skeleton that are amazing and let’s look at just one amazing component of the body in this article. In a book by Dr. Stuart Burgess, he devotes the complete first chapter (23 pages) to the “irreducible knee joint.” (See more on irreducible complexity here.)
Many people (athletes especially) have experienced serious injuries to their knees that cause them to question the design of the knee. It is often described as a hinge joint which is true, but it is a very complicated hinge joint that is irreducibly complex. The images below are all from Hallmarks of Design by Dr. Burgess.
Figure 1-1 above diagrams the basic anatomy of the human knee joint and shows the six major components of the knee. Figure 1-2 below illustrates the sophisticated “four-bar mechanism” that allows for the operation of the knee.
Figure 1-3 is a schematic of the four-bar mechanism in the knee joint. Dr. Burgess writes, “One important feature of the four-bar mechanism is that it does not have a fixed point of rotation as does a pivot hinge. The knee joint is a particularly sophisticated kind of four-bar mechanism because the cruciate ligaments are kept taut by the rolling action of the bones. In order for the cruciate ligaments to be kept under the right tension, the four-bar mechanism must produce a motion which is exactly compatible with the curved profile of the bones.”
Here, again, we see the necessity for all parts of the mechanism to be present with a specific and exact design from the beginning of its operation. It is irreducibly complex. The evolution over time of the knee joint can only be imagined by one with an unbelievable amount of faith in a process never witnessed in reality.
Dr. Burgess has many more examples of the evidence for intelligent design of the knee joint by the Creator Engineer in his book that is shown below.
J.D. Mitchell
