Dragonfly

This will be a brief entry. I have not had much time this weekend to think about what I would write today, and this may be the case for the next few weeks. I hope to add some more of my older writings to this site as well as to finish a couple of poems in progress.

In my August 1 journal entry I mentioned the existence of dragonflies as an intuitive argument against the idea that living things have evolved by purely random processes. I mentioned to my wife that it would be nice to have a picture of a dragonfly to go with the text. She was very willing to make the attempt, but it turned out that taking a dragonfly’s picture is no easy matter. It really needs a long lens and a lot of time. Dragonflies are skittish and timid and they don’t stay put for very long. But eventually she succeeded.

Which of these, the dragonfly or the radio antenna on which it is perched, shows more evidence of being the product of deliberate and intelligent design? The dragonfly is by orders of magnitude more complex and more precisely organized. It seems to me that only prejudice could lead one to answer that it is the antenna that seems to be the product of intelligence. Such an appeal to intuition and common sense proves nothing, but it might suggest, to a person truly open-minded on the question, that educated opinion for the past hundred years and more may have been insufficiently skeptical of the doctrine of atheistic evolution.