Is the Living Molecule Designed or the Product of Blind Chance?
Early one morning a military pilot is flying over the Atlantic ocean when he spots a small island on the horizon. As he moves in, he notices a group of logs laid out in a pattern. A closer look reveals the logs arranged to spell the word HELP. Knowing the unlikelihood of wind and rain producing a pattern with a message, he radios his aircraft carrier for assistance. Nobody on the carrier questions his judgment, so the ship changes course and heads towards the island.
Most people understand that patterns encoded with information do not come about by simple chance and therefore must be the source of some kind of intelligent agent. The word HELP, because of the information it contains and the complexity of the arrangement, must mean that someone is stranded on the island. The message in the composition has the intrinsic evidence of design, and therefore it can be inferred that an intelligent agent must have organized the logs for the purpose of conveying that message.
It is well known that any arrangement of characters which contain information is the product of a mind. In the case of molecules, you need the instructions in the DNA to build the proper amino acids and then you need the proper arrangements of these amino acids to arrive at the proteins which make up living organisms. Using the analogy of an alphabet, the DNA sequences necessary to build, say a functioning organ, can string across millions of very specifically arranged four letter characters. These sequences build specific sequences of amino acids. The amino acids necessary to build certain proteins arrange specifically in 20 letter characters with arrangements stretching for hundreds of characters. Each sequence of DNA (genes) and amino acids arrange like a book in a specific way, to produce a specific protein molecule. Specialized proteins then bind to form blood cells, butterfly wings, heart tissue, fins, eyes and so forth. These arrangements are so sophisticated that they ultimately produce chickens which know how long to lay on their eggs, a baby goat that knows how to find its mother's milk, spiders that know how to produce a web, and the skin of a chameleon that changes color.
If these complex sequences were not enough to convince the skeptic of the existence of a creator, there are other obstacles for the naturalist, primarily the origin of the language. That is, as you are reading this, you understand it because we know that the arrangement of certain letters in the English alphabet produces certain words which have specific meaning. This was predetermined by those who wrote the English alphabet. In the same way, the arrangement of certain DNA and amino acid sequences have very specific meaning and information, every time they organize in those patterns. This is clear indication that a mind was instrumental in writing out the language in the molecule.
The Origin of Life
The origin of life remains one of the greatest enigmas for naturalists. Over the years, scientist have studied the inner workings of single-celled organisms to determine how the first self replicating cell could have emerged through strictly natural causes. While many theories have come and gone, the mystery of life's origins remains unsolved. The reason this problem has been so elusive is not because biologists haven't exerted a tremendous amount of time and effort, but because life, even single-celled life, is so complex it challenges our imagination. Agnostic and microbiologist Michael Denton put it this way, “The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
How complex is single-celled life? Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle and mathematician N. Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds of life forming by natural processes in single-celled life. This is not a difficult undertaking because we know how many DNA sequences we need, how many amino acid sequences, how many polypeptides and so forth. They estimated the chances that life could have originated by random trials. The result: 10 to the 40,000th power. 10 to the 40,000th power is a 1 with 40,000 zeroes after it! How can one gain some conception of the size of such a huge number? According to evolutionists, the universe is less than 30 billion years old, and there are fewer than 10 to the 18th (1018) seconds in 30 billion years. So even if nature could somehow have produced trillions of genetic code combinations every second for 30 billion years, the probabilities against producing the simplest one-celled animal by trial and error would still be inconceivably immense! Paul S. Taylor, Origins Answer Book. More recently, Stephen Meyers came up with similar calculations in Signature in the Cell proving conclusively that life could not have emerged by strictly natural causes.
Because the origin of life problem has become so insurmountable, scientists and atheists have developed a new theory called Panspermia. Its claim is that life got here from another planet, transferred by a comet. Of course this is not scientific and does not solve the problem of how life emerged from naturalistic causes. This theory just pushes back the date.
Singled Cell Life and the Modern City
Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winning chemist, observed that, "Just one living cell in the human body is more complex than New York City.” Singled celled life is as intricate as a modern city, except that it fits in the head of a needle, making it vastly more precise. Both contain:
There is no theory available today for the origin of life. Why? Because life, even single-celled life is so vastly complex, that all natural explanations have failed. Therefore, we do not need to argue from the "God of the Gaps" rather we can argue from complexity, information, and design. That is; we do not have a theory because single-celled life is so precise, sophisticated, and laden with information that natural causes fail to explain such an event.
The Genetic Code
Over the past half century, molecular biologists have probed the inner workings of living molecules to find a complex language of encoded information. By studying the genetic code, they have stumbled across powerful evidence of a communication system so complex it challenges our imagination.
DNA consists of chain-like molecules known as polynucleotides which combine to form a DNA molecule. Scientists refer to the coding sequence along the DNA strand as a gene. While the DNA strand’s nucleotides function as alphabet letters, the genes function as words. Charles B. Thaxton, Ph.D., notes, the DNA code is a genetic “language” that communicates information to the cell. The cell is very complicated, using millions of DNA instructions to control every function within the cell. As an example, there are 4,639,221 DNA sequences in E. coli bacteria, one of the simplest life forms, and over 3 billion sequences in humans. These sequences must be in a close to perfect arrangement, otherwise the organism does not survive.
Anthony Flew was the most prominent atheist of the 1990s. It was the information laden in the DNA molecule that convinced him that it necessitates an intelligent agent to explain its origins. Writing in There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, he states, “Yes, I now think it does point to a creative intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements to work together…I now believe there is a God.”
John Lennox, Ph.D., Oxford notes that, "Like a computer hard disc, DNA contains the database of information and the program to produce a specified product. Every one of the 10 to 100 trillion cells in the human body contains a database larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica … a molecular structure with an information processing capacity." According to geophysicist Stephen Meyers, just one gram of DNA holds the equivalent amount of data as 600 billion CD-ROMs. One book holds about 1 megabyte of data-storage, then one gram of DNA could store 455 trillion books. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft put it this way, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
Amino Acids - God’s Language
All life forms begin with cells that contain proteins, amino acids, molecules, and ultimately the DNA that holds the information which determines the many functions within that cell. In complex life, it determines our hair color, our height, our fingernails, ligaments, and taste buds. All the intricacies of our eyes, from the color to the lens to the cornea to the retina to the smallest molecule, are driven by our genetic code. And it applies to bees, alligators, birds, fish, and single-celled bacteria.
Proteins are the building blocks that make up all advanced life. Proteins are made up of polypeptides with specific functions which are driven by the sequence of the twenty different amino acids that make up the cell’s chemistry. Just like a sequence of letters determines the information in a word, so each polypeptide is laden with a sequence predetermined for a specific function within the protein cell.
Just as letter combinations form different words, different combinations of amino acids form different proteins with very different functions. The 20 amino acids link up in any of billions of possible sequence combinations. To say it another way, the protein’s amino acid sequence determines its structure, and hence, function. In their book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, chemists Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen argue that, the probability of undirected processes assembling a specific protein 100 amino acids in length, becomes roughly 10 to 191st power (1 chance in 10 with 191 0s after it). The number is greater than the chance of marking one atom somewhere in the universe, blindfolding a person and having them pick it on the first and only try. Most statisticians agree that anything greater than 10 to 30th power is a complete impossibility and therefore requires an alternative explanation,
Information Theory
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the heat in the universe always moves from order to disorder. Information Theory, its close cousin, demonstrates that over time, information will always diminish rather than advance. For example, the further we go back in time, the harder it is to piece together archeological findings because information is diminishing. If you close your garage door and come back ten years later, the information you had when you left would be affected. Colors fade, weather erodes, bugs damage, etc. It has been empirically proven that information moves from order to disorder.
Yet for evolutionary biology to hold true, the opposite would have to happen. Massive advances in molecular information would have to surge forward, but that’s never been empirically tested and affirmed. It seems logical to conclude that a strictly materialistic world could never produce a well-written book, much less a huge library of books which is required in the DNA sequences of every living organism including bacteria.
Articles
Harvard Scientists Write the Book on Intelligent Design Dr. Fazale Rana
Can DNA Prove the Existence of an Intelligent Designer? Stephen C. Meyer
Not by Chance: From bacterial propulsion systems to human DNA, evidence of intelligent design is everywhere Stephen C. Meyer
The Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of Intelligent Design Gregory J. Brewer, Ph.D.
Most people understand that patterns encoded with information do not come about by simple chance and therefore must be the source of some kind of intelligent agent. The word HELP, because of the information it contains and the complexity of the arrangement, must mean that someone is stranded on the island. The message in the composition has the intrinsic evidence of design, and therefore it can be inferred that an intelligent agent must have organized the logs for the purpose of conveying that message.
It is well known that any arrangement of characters which contain information is the product of a mind. In the case of molecules, you need the instructions in the DNA to build the proper amino acids and then you need the proper arrangements of these amino acids to arrive at the proteins which make up living organisms. Using the analogy of an alphabet, the DNA sequences necessary to build, say a functioning organ, can string across millions of very specifically arranged four letter characters. These sequences build specific sequences of amino acids. The amino acids necessary to build certain proteins arrange specifically in 20 letter characters with arrangements stretching for hundreds of characters. Each sequence of DNA (genes) and amino acids arrange like a book in a specific way, to produce a specific protein molecule. Specialized proteins then bind to form blood cells, butterfly wings, heart tissue, fins, eyes and so forth. These arrangements are so sophisticated that they ultimately produce chickens which know how long to lay on their eggs, a baby goat that knows how to find its mother's milk, spiders that know how to produce a web, and the skin of a chameleon that changes color.
If these complex sequences were not enough to convince the skeptic of the existence of a creator, there are other obstacles for the naturalist, primarily the origin of the language. That is, as you are reading this, you understand it because we know that the arrangement of certain letters in the English alphabet produces certain words which have specific meaning. This was predetermined by those who wrote the English alphabet. In the same way, the arrangement of certain DNA and amino acid sequences have very specific meaning and information, every time they organize in those patterns. This is clear indication that a mind was instrumental in writing out the language in the molecule.
The Origin of Life
The origin of life remains one of the greatest enigmas for naturalists. Over the years, scientist have studied the inner workings of single-celled organisms to determine how the first self replicating cell could have emerged through strictly natural causes. While many theories have come and gone, the mystery of life's origins remains unsolved. The reason this problem has been so elusive is not because biologists haven't exerted a tremendous amount of time and effort, but because life, even single-celled life, is so complex it challenges our imagination. Agnostic and microbiologist Michael Denton put it this way, “The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
How complex is single-celled life? Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle and mathematician N. Chandra Wickramasinghe calculated the odds of life forming by natural processes in single-celled life. This is not a difficult undertaking because we know how many DNA sequences we need, how many amino acid sequences, how many polypeptides and so forth. They estimated the chances that life could have originated by random trials. The result: 10 to the 40,000th power. 10 to the 40,000th power is a 1 with 40,000 zeroes after it! How can one gain some conception of the size of such a huge number? According to evolutionists, the universe is less than 30 billion years old, and there are fewer than 10 to the 18th (1018) seconds in 30 billion years. So even if nature could somehow have produced trillions of genetic code combinations every second for 30 billion years, the probabilities against producing the simplest one-celled animal by trial and error would still be inconceivably immense! Paul S. Taylor, Origins Answer Book. More recently, Stephen Meyers came up with similar calculations in Signature in the Cell proving conclusively that life could not have emerged by strictly natural causes.
Because the origin of life problem has become so insurmountable, scientists and atheists have developed a new theory called Panspermia. Its claim is that life got here from another planet, transferred by a comet. Of course this is not scientific and does not solve the problem of how life emerged from naturalistic causes. This theory just pushes back the date.
Singled Cell Life and the Modern City
Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winning chemist, observed that, "Just one living cell in the human body is more complex than New York City.” Singled celled life is as intricate as a modern city, except that it fits in the head of a needle, making it vastly more precise. Both contain:
- Energy plant
- Highways
- Defense department
- Hospital
- Data processing center
- Manufacturing plant
- Sewage plant
- Library
There is no theory available today for the origin of life. Why? Because life, even single-celled life is so vastly complex, that all natural explanations have failed. Therefore, we do not need to argue from the "God of the Gaps" rather we can argue from complexity, information, and design. That is; we do not have a theory because single-celled life is so precise, sophisticated, and laden with information that natural causes fail to explain such an event.
The Genetic Code
Over the past half century, molecular biologists have probed the inner workings of living molecules to find a complex language of encoded information. By studying the genetic code, they have stumbled across powerful evidence of a communication system so complex it challenges our imagination.
DNA consists of chain-like molecules known as polynucleotides which combine to form a DNA molecule. Scientists refer to the coding sequence along the DNA strand as a gene. While the DNA strand’s nucleotides function as alphabet letters, the genes function as words. Charles B. Thaxton, Ph.D., notes, the DNA code is a genetic “language” that communicates information to the cell. The cell is very complicated, using millions of DNA instructions to control every function within the cell. As an example, there are 4,639,221 DNA sequences in E. coli bacteria, one of the simplest life forms, and over 3 billion sequences in humans. These sequences must be in a close to perfect arrangement, otherwise the organism does not survive.
Anthony Flew was the most prominent atheist of the 1990s. It was the information laden in the DNA molecule that convinced him that it necessitates an intelligent agent to explain its origins. Writing in There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, he states, “Yes, I now think it does point to a creative intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements to work together…I now believe there is a God.”
John Lennox, Ph.D., Oxford notes that, "Like a computer hard disc, DNA contains the database of information and the program to produce a specified product. Every one of the 10 to 100 trillion cells in the human body contains a database larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica … a molecular structure with an information processing capacity." According to geophysicist Stephen Meyers, just one gram of DNA holds the equivalent amount of data as 600 billion CD-ROMs. One book holds about 1 megabyte of data-storage, then one gram of DNA could store 455 trillion books. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft put it this way, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
Amino Acids - God’s Language
All life forms begin with cells that contain proteins, amino acids, molecules, and ultimately the DNA that holds the information which determines the many functions within that cell. In complex life, it determines our hair color, our height, our fingernails, ligaments, and taste buds. All the intricacies of our eyes, from the color to the lens to the cornea to the retina to the smallest molecule, are driven by our genetic code. And it applies to bees, alligators, birds, fish, and single-celled bacteria.
Proteins are the building blocks that make up all advanced life. Proteins are made up of polypeptides with specific functions which are driven by the sequence of the twenty different amino acids that make up the cell’s chemistry. Just like a sequence of letters determines the information in a word, so each polypeptide is laden with a sequence predetermined for a specific function within the protein cell.
Just as letter combinations form different words, different combinations of amino acids form different proteins with very different functions. The 20 amino acids link up in any of billions of possible sequence combinations. To say it another way, the protein’s amino acid sequence determines its structure, and hence, function. In their book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, chemists Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen argue that, the probability of undirected processes assembling a specific protein 100 amino acids in length, becomes roughly 10 to 191st power (1 chance in 10 with 191 0s after it). The number is greater than the chance of marking one atom somewhere in the universe, blindfolding a person and having them pick it on the first and only try. Most statisticians agree that anything greater than 10 to 30th power is a complete impossibility and therefore requires an alternative explanation,
Information Theory
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the heat in the universe always moves from order to disorder. Information Theory, its close cousin, demonstrates that over time, information will always diminish rather than advance. For example, the further we go back in time, the harder it is to piece together archeological findings because information is diminishing. If you close your garage door and come back ten years later, the information you had when you left would be affected. Colors fade, weather erodes, bugs damage, etc. It has been empirically proven that information moves from order to disorder.
Yet for evolutionary biology to hold true, the opposite would have to happen. Massive advances in molecular information would have to surge forward, but that’s never been empirically tested and affirmed. It seems logical to conclude that a strictly materialistic world could never produce a well-written book, much less a huge library of books which is required in the DNA sequences of every living organism including bacteria.
Articles
Harvard Scientists Write the Book on Intelligent Design Dr. Fazale Rana
Can DNA Prove the Existence of an Intelligent Designer? Stephen C. Meyer
Not by Chance: From bacterial propulsion systems to human DNA, evidence of intelligent design is everywhere Stephen C. Meyer
The Imminent Death of Darwinism and the Rise of Intelligent Design Gregory J. Brewer, Ph.D.