The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [127]
“When I show students the magnetic letters sticking to the metal chalkboard, I ask, ‘How did this word information arise?’ The answer, of course, is intelligence that comes from outside the system. Neither chemistry nor physics arranged the letters this way. It was my choice. And in DNA, neither chemistry nor physics arranges the letters into the assembly instructions for proteins. Clearly, the cause comes from outside the system.”
He paused while the implications sunk in. “And that cause,” he stressed, “is intelligence.”
“ALMOST A MIRACLE”
Like a skillful boxer picking apart the defenses of his opponent, Meyer had adroitly dismantled the three categories of naturalistic explanations for the origin of life and information in DNA. We even discussed another option—the possibility that some external force might be responsible for creating organization, much in the same way gravity creates a vortex as water drains from a bathtub. Meyer quickly dismissed that notion, pointing out that such forces may produce order but they can’t manufacture information. 26
These dead-ends for naturalistic origin-of-life theories would not be a surprise to scientists in the field. When prominent origin-of-life researcher Leslie Orgel ran into another evolutionist at a Detroit conference several years ago, Orgel admitted the overwhelming difficulties he had encountered in trying to figure out how nucleic acids might have been naturally synthesized on the primitive Earth. Then Orgel candidly conceded, “There are equally overwhelming difficulties in the way of all theories.” 27
In short, no hypothesis has come close to explaining how information necessary to life’s origin arose by naturalistic means. As Crick, a philosophical materialist, has conceded: “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.” 28
For many researchers, the only recourse has been to continue to have faith that, as one scientist put it, some previously unknown “magic mineral” will be discovered to have had “exactly the right properties to cause the necessary reactions to occur to create a nucleic acid.” 29
“Maybe,” I said to Meyer, “someday scientists will come up with another hypothesis.”
“Maybe they will,” he replied. “You can’t prove something like this with one-hundred-percent certainty, because you don’t know what new evidence will show. That’s why all scientists reason in a way that’s provisional. Having said that, though, we do know that some possibilities can be excluded categorically. They’re dead ends. For example, I think you can categorically exclude the idea that self-organizational processes can provide new information. More evidence will simply not change that.”
“Some skeptics would claim you’re arguing from ignorance,” I pointed out. “Scientists admit they don’t know how life started, so you conclude there must have been an intelligent designer.”
“No, not at all. I’m not saying intelligent design makes sense simply because other theories fail,” he insisted. “Instead, I’m making an inference to the best explanation, which is how scientists reason in historical matters. Based on the evidence, the scientist assesses each hypothesis on the basis of its ability to explain the evidence at hand. Typically, the key criterion is whether the explanation has ‘causal power,’ which is the ability to produce the