The Obvious Answer

I was online the other day and someone said the oddest thing: He asked why people thought the joke, “Why did the chicken cross the road?,” was funny. He said it wasn’t funny to him when he heard it at the age of four and he still doesn’t think it’s funny now. He just didn’t get it.

To me it seems obvious. What makes it funny is that people search for some deep meaning and overlook the obvious one. It’s like the similar joke: Q. Why do firemen wear red suspenders? A. To keep their pants up. My daughter asked me a modern version but with the same theme: Q. What did the farmer say when he lost his tractor? A. Where’s my tractor? It's just funny when people can't answer such an obvious question.

It occurred to me that this is often the case for evolutionists. They overlook an obvious answer in search for a natural (yet far more unlikely) explanation. Darwin, for example, said in his book:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Question: how was something as complex as the eye created? One obvious theory is that God created it. Ah, but Darwin didn’t get it. He went on to say:

“Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.”

Wow. That’s the long way around a simple question. I wonder how he might have answered the chicken crossing the road question.

Consider also these quotes:

Aldous Huxley said, “Organisms are built as if purposefully designed, and work as if in purposeful pursuit of a conscious aim. But the truth lies in those two words 'as if.' As the genius of Darwin showed, the purpose is only an apparent one.”

Might I paraphrase? “Things really look like they’ve been designed but I know they aren’t!”

But perhaps the most brazen denier is Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of the DNA molecule). In his book, What Mad Pursuit, Crick wrote, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see is not designed, but rather evolved.”

That’s a hoot. Biologists see design everywhere. The evidence for design is so overwhelming that Crick advises they should constantly remind themselves that things are evolved – not designed!

Question: Why does everything appear to be designed?
Answer: Because it was designed!

Watching these evolutionists groping around for answers while overlooking the most obvious one always makes me chuckle. It’s the funniest thing since, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”!