The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [121]
THE LIBRARY OF LIFE
I was fascinated by the process that Meyer had described. “What you’re saying is that DNA would be like a blueprint for how to build proteins,” I said, using an analogy I had heard many times before.
Meyer hesitated. “Actually, I don’t like the blueprint metaphor,” he said. “You see, there are probably other sources of information in the cell and in organisms. As important as DNA is, it doesn’t build everything. All it builds are the protein molecules, but they are only sub-units of larger structures that themselves are informatively arranged.”
“Then what’s a better analogy?” I asked.
“DNA is more like a library,” he said. “The organism accesses the information that it needs from DNA so it can build some of its critical components. And the library analogy is better because of its alphabetic nature. In DNA, there are long lines of A, C, G, and T’s that are precisely arranged in order to create protein structure and folding. To build one protein, you typically need 1,200 to 2,000 letters or bases—which is a lot of information.”
“And this raises the question again of the origin of that information,” I said.
“It’s not just that a question has been raised,” he insisted. “This issue has caused all naturalistic accounts of the origin of life to break down, because it’s the critical and foundational question. If you can’t explain where the information comes from, you haven’t explained life, because it’s the information that makes the molecules into something that actually functions.”
I asked, “What does the presence of information tell you?”
“I believe the presence of information in the cell is best explained by the activity of an intelligent agent,” he replied. “Bill Gates said, ‘DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve ever devised.’ That’s highly suggestive, because we know that at Microsoft, Gates uses intelligent programmers to produce software. Information theorist Henry Quastler said as far back as the 1960s that the ‘creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity.’ ” 12
“But we’re talking about something—the origin of information and life—that happened a long time ago,” I said. “How can scientists reconstruct what happened in the distant past?”
“By using a scientific principle of reasoning that’s called uniformitarianism,” Meyer replied. “This is the idea that our present knowledge of cause-and-effect relationships should guide our reconstruction of what caused something to arise in the past.”
“For example . . . ,” I said and paused, hoping to prompt an illustration that would help me follow him.
“For instance, let’s say you find a certain kind of ripple marks preserved from the ancient past in sedimentary strata. And let’s say that in the present day you see the same sort of ripple marks being formed in lake beds as the water evaporates. You can reasonably infer, then, using uniformitarian logic, that the ripple marks in the sedimentary strata were produced by a similar process.
“So let’s go back to DNA. Even the very simplest cell we study today, or find evidence of in the fossil record, requires information that is stored in DNA or some other information-carrier. And we know from our experience that information is habitually associated with conscious activity. Using uniformitarian logic, we can reconstruct the cause of that ancient information in the first cell as being the product of intelligence.”
As my mind tracked his line of reasoning, everything seemed to click into place—except one thing. “However,” I said, “there’s a caveat.”
Meyer cocked an eyebrow. “Like what?” he asked.
“All of that is true—unless you can find some better explanation.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “You have to rule out other causes of the same effect. Origin-of-life scientists have looked at other possibilities for decades and, frankly, they’ve come up dry.”
Before we went any further, though, I needed to satisfy myself that the other major possible scenarios fall short of the intelligent design theory.
THE MISSING SOUP