文档介绍：What are other evidences of
‘design’?
BRIDGES AND BONES
EAR NOW
VENUS: CAULDRON OF FIRE
OCTOPUS SUCKERS
LOBSTER EYES
STARTLING STICKINESS
Is it enough to point out the evidence of ‘intelligent design’ in the world? • What is the ‘bottom line’ issue when using the design argu-
ment? • Is the ‘plexity’ argument still valid? • What are other evidences of ‘design’? • What about ‘chaos theory’?
CLOSE PDF PROJECT 3:15 • DESIGN 1
Bridges and bones, girders and groans
by Carl Wieland
First published in:
Creation 12(2):20-24
March-May 1990
Some years ago, while driving across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, my (then) small daughter*
asked me why the bridge was made with all those funny poles and cross-cross things. Why not in
one smooth piece?
I asked her to imagine beginning with a bridge of solid steel, strong enough so that it wouldn’t
buckle and collapse as cars drove over it. I pointed out how heavy and expensive it would be. So
we had to cut pieces out, in our imagination, to make it lighter and cheaper. Which pieces would
be the best ones to leave behind, so as to stop it from crumbling? In time, playing with these
ideas, the two of us non-engineers began to see how and why trusses supporting garage roofs,
for example, could keep most of the strength of a solid, more heavy and expensive beam just by
‘eliminating the pieces’, in a sense, that were not actually acting as braces against the load.
Several years later, owing to a major car accident, I was walking around with a massive pin run-
ning right down the centre of my thigh bone (femur). Because the fracture in that bone was not
healing, all the weight of my body was being supported by the pin, locked in place by sturdy hori-
zontal screws top and bottom. The metal in the pin and screws was the finest space-age steel alloy.
So why was the orthopedic surgeon advising yet another major operation to try to get the bone to
heal? After all, I was able