ss is not going in any predictable direction, but after it happens it is perfectly explainable. Or as journalist George Johnson puts it, "We can reduce downward, but cannot explain upward." The order of the universe is accidental and is intelligible only after the fact.
To return to Michael Behe, Darwinists explain the evolution of an eye that can see by beginning with the chance occurrence of a spot that is sensitive to fight and gradually, by random variation, evolves into a seeing eye. On the contrary, says Behe, "Modern science has shown that the 'simplest' eye-spot requires a cascade of protein molecules -- rhodopsin, transducin, rhodopsin kinase, and more -- which must interact with one another at the level of the cell to produce vision." Furthermore, they must interact in exactly the right proportion and the right way for vision to be possible. Behe concludes that "the interactive complexity of life's machinery fits poorly with a theory of gradual development."
Darwinian evolution is thus a constant process of getting more out of less without an adequate cause. It is not merely that the parts of an eye, and the complex molecules that compose them, are said to evolve by slight random variations, but that they evolve into an organ that did not exist as such before and is capable of performing an action (seeing) that was impossible before. An eye is not a mere sum total of parts in a new conjunction. It is an order of parts so intricately complex that it is questionable whether it is the result of a series of random changes which, by Darwinian definition, were not going anywhere except by sheer accident. Such a process far exceeds the chances of finding a checkerboard of stones on the surface of Mars: The more outruns the capability of the less, because the effect seems to exceed the given Darwinian cause or causes.
There is a further question to be considered: Is complexity all that needs to be explained? Darwinian evolution not only produces more out of less, it brings forth the higher out of the lower. But agere sequitur esse: Action follows upon essence. We know what a thing is by what it does, and therefore has the power to do. The nature (constitution, composition, inherent order) of a being is an interior principle or source of action. But some actions are higher in themselves than others, and they, too, require explanation in a theory of evolution.
The eye is the organ of sight. But seeing is an action that is new, distinct in kind, and does something that is not merely more than earlier organisms could do. It is something on a totally different and higher level of action, therefore of being. Can it be understood or explained simply in terms of the evolution of the organ?
I remember a Catholic of liberal views once asking me whether, if a television camera had been present at the resurrection of Christ it would have seen anything. There are several answers to that question, but the one that is relevant here is that a television camera does not see. It receives an image carried by light and transmits it to audiences around the globe. But the machine, being a machine, does not see. Only living, bodily creatures do that. They cannot do it without eyes and light to see by. But is the act of seeing reducible to the necessary conditions of sight? Or is it a reality for which they alone are not a sufficient explanation?
Your materialist will of course say that the necessary conditions are a sufficient explanation of sight; given the evolution of organs that make sight possible, living beings will see. Implicit in that answer, however, is a denial that evolution is a rising curve. There are no actions that lie beyond the capacity of purposelessly evolving matter. The movement is from simplicity to growing complexity, nothing more. Complexity makes new actions possible, but since effects do not exceed causes, they are actions that matter was always capable of producing, and they do not attain any higher level of being or action. All that was lacking was the development of the necessary conditions of the actions, which