The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [119]
Since our last discussion, philosopher and scientist Stephen Meyer had moved with his wife and three children to the outskirts of Seattle so he could focus on his role as Director and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. 9 He continues to keep one foot in academia, however, as professor of the Conceptual Foundations of Science at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
Meyer earned his doctorate at Cambridge University, where he analyzed scientific and methodological issues in origin-of-life biology. For his master’s degree, also from Cambridge, he studied the history of molecular biology and evolutionary theory.
He has written about DNA and the problem of the origin of biological information for the books Debating Design, published by Cambridge University Press; Darwinism, Design, and Public Education, published by Michigan State University Press; Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe; Signs of Intelligence; and Mere Creation. Lately he has been finishing a book called DNA by Design: The Signature in the Cell, which further expands on his analysis of biological information.
We got together on an unusually sultry summer day, had a pleasant lunch in an avant-garde Asian restaurant, and then settled into an office at the Discovery Institute. Meyer lowered his lanky frame into a plain wooden chair, his back to a half-opened window through which random traffic noises could be heard. It was nearly midafternoon before we got started with our discussion.
It was clear that Meyer likes the give-and-take of interviews. Although Meyer is typically more professorial than pugnacious, I’ve never heard of him shying away from tough questions or even rhetorically bloody debates with fervent Darwinists.
In fact, I once hosted the videotaping of an intellectual shoot-out between Meyer and an atheistic anthropologist on the legitimacy of intelligent-design theories, and I remember walking away amazed at Meyer’s finesse in deftly dismantling the professor’s case while at the same time forcefully presenting his own. Maybe that’s a throwback to Meyer’s earlier years when he trained as a boxer, learning to overcome fears of taking a punch and how to jab away at an opponent’s weaknesses.
As for me, I wasn’t after blood in this interview; I was merely seeking straightforward answers to an issue that has befuddled origin-of-life scientists for the last five decades. Even though most Darwinists concede they are stumped on the question of how DNA and life itself came into existence, 10 they don’t like Meyer’s conclusions on the matter. I didn’t care much about that; my criterion was simple: what makes the most sense from a purely scientific perspective?
THE DNA-TO-DESIGN ARGUMENT
I began our discussion by reading Meyer a quote that I had encountered in my research and scribbled in my notes. “According to Bernd-Olaf Küppers, the author of Information and the Origin of Life, ‘The problem of the origin of life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information,’ ” 11 I said. “Do you agree with him?”
“Oh, absolutely, yes,” Meyer replied. “When I ask students what they would need to get their computer to perform a new function, they reply, ‘You have to give it new lines of code.’ The same principle is true in living organisms.
“If you want an organism to acquire a new function or structure, you have to provide information somewhere in the cell. You need instructions for how to build the cell’s important components, which are mostly proteins. And we know that DNA is the repository for a digital code containing the instructions for telling the cell’s machinery how to build proteins. Küppers recognized that this was a critical hurdle in explaining how life began: where did this genetic information come from?
“Think of making soup from a recipe. You can have all the ingredients on hand, but if you don’t know the proper proportions, or which items to add in what order, or how long to cook the concoction, you won’t get a soup that tastes very good.
“Well, a