I was spending some time the other day reading about Andy McIntosh, a professor of thermodynamics in the UK, who states that evolution is impossible based on the current understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. He is a vocal proponent of intelligent design. I decided to read up on him and found myself on the familiar webpage of Answers in Genesis.

Browsing the AiG website, I came across an article Andy McIntosh wrote about flight. He writes,

Controlled flight requires a balance of main surfaces, coupled often with a tail or extra aerodynamic surfaces that can alter lift and change direction of the flying machine. And none of these give any advantage if there is no control mechanism to alter these surfaces with knowledge and coordinated control—flight is an example of irreducible complexity. That is, all the surfaces and control mechanisms need to be there together to have a controllable machine…For controlled flight, there are four fundamental requirements: (1) a correct wing shape to give a lower air pressure on the upper surface; (2) a large enough wing area to support the weight; (3) some means of propulsion or gliding; and (4) extra surfaces, or a means of altering the main surfaces, in order to change direction and speed.

The thing is, there isn’t just one type of animal that flies. There are four: birds, insects, bats and reptiles (pterosaurs). Evolutionists believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that still means that the miracle of flight evolved not once but at least three separate times, because insects, bats and reptiles are not on the same branch of the evolutionary tree.

So the evolutionist is faced with not just one impossible hurdle—that some reptiles grew feathers and began to fly—but two further hurdles. Flight evolved again when some rodents (mice? shrews?) developed a skin-like surface over their front legs to become bats. Also, hundreds of millions of years before, some insects had grown very thin scales to become flies, bees and butterflies!

How can anyone believe such an absurd claim? The odds are against flight developing even once, but evolutionists believe it happened on three separate occassions! I don’t know, but I get the idea that evolutionists are insulting our intelligence.