27:05 - Lennox: If I pick up The God Delusion, it's a very sophisticated book. As I look at page 1, I conclude that it comes from something more complicated than that book itself. Namely, you. (D agrees - Obviously, complex things exist, and brains exist.) Why can't he look at the universe that includes Dawkins and Lennox like that? (D disagrees - Because his brain that produced the book has an explanation, i.e. evolution, we go back and back and back to the origin of the universe. That provides an explanation for complex brains. And complex brains produce books and museums and cars and computers. Of course, we have complex things that produce other complex things. Science has an explanation for where complex brains come from, in terms of simple beginnings.) L doesn't think so.
L is mistaken about the book: without knowing the whole background, he'd have no way of knowing it's a book to begin with, let alone that it was created by a complex being. D, in turn, is mistaken about going back and back to the origin of the universe: knowing Steps 3 - n doesn't resolve the problem of not knowing Steps 1 - 2. We don't know how matter came about, and how simple life began. And since the nature of Steps 1 - 2 is vastly different from all subsequent steps, we can't reasonably extrapolate the knowledge we have back to the origins.
28:04 - 28:48 Lennox: At the level of the origin of life, reading the literature, the word miracle comes up far too often. They go from the self-organisational properties of some low-level molecules in a primeval situation to the phenomenal self-organisation and potentialities of macro-molecules. There's just no way you can get there. (D disagrees - L is asserting there's no way. We don't yet know what it is, because there's a lot of work to be done. Science doesn't yet know everything, there are still gaps.)
L is right, simple molecules, or even RNA, do not combine into DNA on their own. Speculation about 'special' conditions under which DNA may come into existence equals 'miracle'. Worse for D, DNA is only a fraction of the complex mechanism of reproduction, the rest of which would also require a string of miracles to come into existence. Observing how pre-existing DNA reproduces says nothing about its origin. This isn't a case of 'some more work to close the gap', but a completely different gap. Whether Shakespeare's Hamlet could have written itself by random natural processes is already a hopelessly big problem, yet it's dwarfed by the problem of what it would take for Hamlet to be capable of reproducing itself relatively accurately. (A paper mill, ink factory, copying/type-setting mechanism, printing press and binding machine integrated in the book itself? Preposterous? All that, and more, is integrated in the cell.) D vastly underestimates the task.
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