TFY’d: Information’s Origin
Getting up one morning, keen to get to the beach as soon as possible, Dave stumbles bleary eyed downstairs for a bowl of his favourite cereal: Alpha-Bits, the cereal that’s shaped like the alphabet. To his surprise, the box is already on the table, and it looks like it has been knocked over and spilled. Getting closer he sees that amongst the jumble of letters is this message, “Take out the rubbish – Mum.” He’s understandably surprised at the message, but thinks back to what he learned in Biology at uni and decides that his mum actually isn’t responsible. After all, the complex information contained in the DNA molecule is the product of mindless, natural causes, right? Since that’s the case, this simple message must also be the product of mindless, natural causes. The cat must have knocked the box over, and the letters just happened to spill out in a way that looks like his mum wrote him a message. Satisfied with this explanation, and because he really didn’t want to take out the rubbish anyway, Dave ignores the message, has a bowl of Alpha-Bits, and grabs his surfboard.
When he gets to the beach, he sees this written in the sand “Jonnie + Patricia” with a love heart around it. Dave is momentarily saddened by this news, because he was planning on asking Patricia out, but then thinks back to his Biology classes, and decides that there must be natural explanation for this, too. Like sand crabs. He’s seen sand crabs leave a trail behind them, so this must a trail that looks like a message. Phew – he can still ask Patricia out after all!
After a few hours surfing, he’s ready to get back in the car and go home when he notices the words “Drink Coke” in the sky. What a strange cloud formation, he thinks. Could this just be caused by the wind? Finally, Dave admits that a natural explanation can’t account for this message: the best explanation is that intelligent skywriters have written it, even though he didn’t see the plane himself. Besides, he’s thirsty – a coke sure would hit the spot right about now!
Puzzle Piece 5: Life – Where did it come from?
In the story above, we have a bit of fun at the expense of naturalism, but the point is still a good one - very few people would be prepared to seriously consider that natural forces alone are responsible for the messages that Dave kept finding throughout his morning, yet this is what is taught in almost every high school and university today: that mindless natural processes are the source of messages far more complex than what Dave was dealing with. This is done to try and account for the origins of life. Darwinists (those who hold to Darwinian evolution) assert that life was generated spontaneously by naturalistic causes without the help of an intelligent agent. But this naturalistic theory flies in the face of everything we know about biological systems and natural laws. Ever since Louis Pasteur first sterilised a flask back in the 1800s scientists have known that life only comes from one place – other life.
This is the supreme problem for Darwinists. Forget the idea that all creatures are interrelated (the so-called goo-to-you-via-the-zoo idea which we will deal with next time), the key problem is how do you get life to begin with? Unfortunately, the more we learn about the building blocks of life, the more complex it becomes. The idea that the cell is ‘simple’ (as was thought in Darwin’s day) is just not held by scientists any more. Since the discovery of the double-helix in the 1950s we’ve learned that the DNA molecule actually contains information, and lots of it! The information that DNA contains is written in a language, a language that uses only four letters: G, A, C, and T. These letters are arranged within the cell just like the words are arranged on this page: as a message that governs how and what the cell does. Four letters sounds simple, right, especially compared to the 26 letters in the English language and the over 5,000 characters in Chinese. But these four letters are used in amazing and complex ways. Even Richard Dawkins, Oxford Biologist and anti-theist, recognises this: he admits that the information contained within the DNA of a single celled amoeba is equivalent to what is contained in 1,000 complete sets of an encyclopaedia! And this isn’t just random info – it’s what’s called specified complexity. The information isn’t just specific, not just complex, but both specific and complex (more on this later).
Darwinists themselves don’t deny that everything looks designed, just that it was. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins says this: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” but then goes on to state that it is just an appearance – no design actually happened. Francis Crick, the co-discover of DNA and a staunch evolutionist, says that, “biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.” Why is it that people like Dawkins and Crick ignore the evidence that is staring them in the face? It’s because they have a philosophical commitment to naturalism. This means that they have already decided that the natural world is all that exists, and no supernatural answer may be considered. This leads us into the next section of this discussion: good science vs bad science.
Good Science vs Bad Science:
Most often when the debate about intelligent design comes up it is characterised as science vs religion, or faith vs reason. People say things like “here come those crazy religious folk who ignore objective scientific facts!” But this simply isn’t the case. This debate is not about science vs religion, it’s about good science vs bad science, reasonable faith vs unreasonable faith, and it turns out that it’s the naturalists who are practicing bad science and exercising an unreasonable faith.
Science is the search for causes: what causes lightning, what causes volcanoes to erupt, and what caused life to begin. Logically, there are only two types of causes: intelligent and non-intelligent (naturalistic). The Grand Canyon has a natural cause; Mount Rushmore has an intelligent cause. Unfortunately, naturalists like Dawkins and Crick rule out intelligence as a cause before they even look at the evidence! Philosophers use the term a priori to describe this: it means that assumptions are made prior to looking at the evidence. For people like Dawkins, life must have been generated spontaneously because it’s the only option they allow!
There is no evidence for this spontaneous generation, in fact the idea of getting life from non-life violates one of the rules of science, but since an intelligent cause had been ruled out from the start it’s the only possible option. This poses immense problems for Darwinists. Biochemist Klaus Dose says that after more than thirty years working on this problem they are no closer to a solution. In fact, they keep coming up with more questions! Even Francis Crick admits this. He says that “every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I swear I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.” So intractable is this problem that some leading scientists like Francis Crick have been forced to postulate that life didn’t originate on Earth – it was seeded here. This idea is called panspermia, and it claims that life came to Earth on a meteor from some distant part of the galaxy. Others, like Dawkins, are prepared to admit that life might have been designed – so long as it was designed by aliens, not God, and those alien life forms arose by some kind of naturalistic, Darwinian process. Let’s look at what he says (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoncJBrrdQ8). Can you see the lengths he goes to just to avoid the most logical inference from the evidence?
SETI – the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence[1]
Since the 1960s scientists in America have been running an organisation called SETI – the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. SETI is an organisation that was set up to try and discover life on other planets. But how will they know if they find it? Scientists differentiate between three things: randomness, simple order and information. Let’s look first at randomness. Suppose you had alphabet soup, and you threw it up in the air and it scattered all over the floor. Here you would have an upside-down “t”, there you would have a “3” laying on its side, and so on. This would be random. How would you make a computer generate a random set of letters? Simple – you give it two instructions.
1. Select any letter.
2. Repeat.
Do you notice how simple that is? Only two instructions. Notice also that we aren’t telling the computer to select a particular letter, just any letter. So randomness is not specific, and it’s very simple to produce. Contrast that with simple order. Suppose that we had 500 “me”s in a row: mememememememe... now this is not random, is it? This is ordered. How would you tell a computer to generate this string of letters?
1. Select an “m”.
2. Select an “e”.
3. Repeat x 500.
Notice, firstly, that once again this is very simple: it only takes three instructions. Randomness was two, now simple order takes three. Secondly, it’s specific: we told the computer exactly which letters to pick. Thirdly, it’s repetitive. This simple combination has been repeated over and over and over again. Fourthly, the parts are prior to the whole. If each part is a “me” how many parts do we have? 500. So we have 500 little parts all stuck together. Now which came first, the individual “me”s or the entire string of “me”s? It’s pretty obvious that the individual “me”s came first because the whole is just a string of the individual parts. Now, what happens if we take out an “me”? Suppose we took number 75 out, so that we had 1-74 and 76-500. If we did that, and there was a little gap in our line, would “me” #276 sitting way down the line care? Would it make any difference to #276 if #75 was there or not? No, it would still be sitting there fine just as it was before. This shows that the parts are prior to the whole; if you can remove a part and it doesn’t do anything essential to the rest of the whole, then the parts are prior to the whole.
The third kind of configuration would not be random, and it wouldn’t be simple order, it would be information. An example of this is “John loves Mary”. Notice that to tell a computer to generate “John loves Mary” we first have to be specific (print a “J”, print an “o” etc). Secondly, note that this is not simple: it’s complicated. Instead of three instructions this would take 15. If it were a whole speech or an entire book...now we’re getting up to a lot of instructions. Thirdly, it’s not repetitive. Notice that in this sentence you don’t just have a little unit that’s repeated over and over again. Fourthly the whole is prior to the parts. The whole would be a thought that I have that I can express in English, or German (or Klingon), and once I have selected the right English sentence that sentence is adequate if it expresses my meaning. What if I took a letter out and substituted it for another one? If I took the “M” out and replaced it with an “H” I’d have “John loves Hary” a completely different whole, but if I put the square root of -1 in there we’d have gibberish, we wouldn’t have a real sentence.
Now the important thing about the SETI research is that the make the following assumption: information can only come from an intelligent mind. If they discovered a signal from outer space that was random, or was simple order, it would not cause any suspicion that an intelligence lay behind it. But, in the movie Contact, the movie that made SETI famous, Jodi Foster’s character discovers a signal that contained the first 20 prime numbers in a row; that’s information bearing! In the movie she immediately drew the conclusion that this signal was not produced by randomness or by the laws of nature but by an intelligent agent. Why? Because information only comes from an intelligent mind. Now what’s sauce for the SETI goose ought to be sauce for the DNA gander. We’ve already seen that the DNA of the simplest single-celled organism contains as much information as 1,000 sets of encyclopaedias. That’s specific and complex!
At this point in the discussion many Darwinists say, “given enough time, given millions and billions of years, we might be able to generate a DNA molecule” but there are two massive problems with this idea. Firstly, if this is true then the same argument could be used to shut down SETI, because any time we discovered a signal from outer space like the first 20 prime numbers in a row someone could always respond by saying, “don’t draw the conclusion that that came from an intelligent agent. It’s more reasonable to think that given millions and billions of years and the laws of nature that natural law and randomness would produce that.” But no one would ever draw that conclusion! So why should we draw the same conclusion when we are talking about the information contained in the DNA molecule, information that is unbelievably more complex than the first 20 prime numbers?
Secondly, even the 15 billion years since the big bang is not long enough. Dr Steven Myer of the Discovery Institute and author of the recent book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design calculated that the probability of natural causes resulting in a single protein as 1 in 1064; that’s one chance in 1 followed by 64 zeroes. The problem is that the number of events in the entire history of the universe is only 1039! This means that if every event in the history of the universe was dedicated to trying to get a protein to form naturalistically by random combinations of amino acids you would only have time to search one trillion trillionth of all the possible combinations![2] It’s like sending a blind man into the Sahara desert and expecting him to find a particular grain of sand on his first try! And this is just one protein! When
you consider how many different proteins exist, and what combinations of
proteins then produce and so on until you get life the likelihood dwindles even
further! I think we should side with the SETI researchers: information only comes from an intelligent agent; that’s the most reasonable explanation.
God-of-the-Gaps
The most common response to the type of argument we have been discussing is that it is simply a god-of-the-gaps argument. A god-of-the-gaps argument is when we identify a gap in our scientific knowledge and simply use God to fill that gap. For example, ancient societies that did not understand lightning thought it was the Lightning God who caused it. We now understand that lightning is an atmospheric discharge of electricity, therefore God is not needed to explain lightning. Isaac Newton did not understand why the planets moved the way they did, so he said that God was the cause. Today, our scientific knowledge has advanced to the point where we understand what causes the motion of the planets and we don’t need to say that God is responsible. Thus, critics of ID allege that it is simply a god-of-the-gaps argument: we don’t know how life originated so we’ll say God did it. Is this allegation accurate? In a word: no.
Modern ID theorists are not simply advancing a negative argument where they tear down all the naturalistic theories that are offered. They are not just saying we don’t know how it happened so we will say God did it. What they are advancing is both a negative and positive case. It’s because of what we do know that makes an intelligent agent the best explanation. Because we understand the number of possible combinations of amino acids that can form proteins and we know the amount of time the universe has been around we know that there is not enough time for a naturalistic explanation. Because we know where every source of information ever detected has come from we know that the information in the DNA molecule is best explained as coming from the same source: an intelligent agent. This is not an argument from what we don’t know: it’s an argument from what we do.
ID isn’t science – science is the search for naturalistic answers.[3]
Even if you’re successful in showing people that ID isn’t merely the old god-of-the-gaps you will probably hear the following retort: “ID isn’t science.” Never let this pass! This is the perfect opportunity to ask one of the best questions you can ever use: “what do you mean by that?” What do they mean “it isn’t science”? They mean that it doesn’t fit the definition of science, and by asking this question you are forcing them define what they mean by “science”. What they will probably offer you is the standard definition of science that is used most commonly across all scientific fields: “science is the search for naturalistic explanations.” Therefore, because ID offers a supernaturalistic explanation, it isn’t science. But what’s the problem with this definition?
It rules out a possible answer a priori – prior to an examination of the evidence. To define science as the search for naturalistic answers means that you cannot, even theoretically, arrive at an answer that is supernatural if you want to be doing “science”. But what if God is responsible? What if the correct answer is supernatural? Science, thus defined, will never be able to arrive at the truth! Let me give an illustration.
Say you are a police detective, and a high profile person has been murdered, maybe the mayor or the premier. The chief of police calls you in and tells you that she wants you to use every possible means to solve the crime: forensics, interview techniques, DNA sampling, psychological profiling, everything you can to find the killer. But there is one condition. You cannot implicate a white man; you must come to the conclusion that a black man is responsible. What’s the problem with this scenario? It rules out a possibility right from the start! Maybe a white man is actually responsible. With your investigation structured in this way, you are prevented from following the evidence wherever it leads. If a white man actually is responsible, you will never be able to arrive at the truth because you’ve ruled that out as the wrong kind of answer right from the start. So it is with the current definition of science. If a scientist is forced to arrive at a certain type of answer then we are no longer searching for the true answer, just an acceptable one!
Next time we’ll zoom out a little and look at the issue of evolution itself, and see if there is sufficient evidence that all life evolved from a common ancestor.
[1] Taken from J P Moreland’s lecture “Has Science Made Belief in God Obsolete?” given at the Saddleback Church Apologetics Conference 2009
[2] Interview with Greg Koukl on Stand to Reason radio, 11 August 2009.
[3] I owe the observations in this section to Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason (www.str.org)
