The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [128]
“In this case, the effect in question is information. We’ve seen that neither chance, nor chance combined with natural selection, nor self-organizational processes have the causal power to produce information. But we do know of one entity that does have the required causal powers to produce information, and that’s intelligence. We’re not inferring to that entity on the basis of what we don’t know, but on the basis of what we do know. That’s not an argument from ignorance.”
“Isn’t there a fundamental weakness to your argument, though?” I asked. “You’re arguing by analogy, comparing the information in DNA to information we find in language. Arguments based on analogies are notoriously weak. Advocates might emphasize the similarities between two things, but opponents will stress the differences.”
“I’ll admit that there is a way of speaking about the information in DNA that goes too far and then becomes metaphorical,” he began. “When people talk about DNA as being a message, that could imply there was a receiver who could ‘understand’ the message. I’m not saying that DNA is this sort of semantic information.
“However, I’m not arguing by analogy. The coding regions of DNA have exactly the same relevant properties as a computer code or language. As I said earlier, whenever you find a sequential arrangement that’s complex and corresponds to an independent pattern or functional requirement, this kind of information is always the product of intelligence. Books, computer codes, and DNA all have these two properties. We know books and computer codes are designed by intelligence, and the presence of this type of information in DNA also implies an intelligent source.
“Scientists in many fields recognize this connection between information and intelligence. When archaeologists discovered the Rosetta stone, they didn’t think its inscriptions were the product of random chance or self-organizational processes. Obviously, the sequential arrangements of symbols was conveying information, and it was a reasonable assumption that intelligence created it. The same principle is true for DNA.”
THE BIOLOGICAL BIG BANG
Meyer had made a convincing case that intelligence—and intelligence alone—can explain the presence of precise information within genetic material. By itself, this was impressive evidence for the existence of a designer of life.
As I looked down at my hand and tried to comprehend the vast quantities of complex and specific information inscribed in each cell, a slight smile formed at the corners of my mouth. The answer to the monumental question of whether there’s a Creator, I mused, might very well be as close as my own fingertips.
Meyer wasn’t finished, however. As he mentioned in our previous interview, he is convinced that the so-called “Cambrian explosion”—in which a dazzling array of new life forms suddenly appears fully formed in the fossil record, without any of the ancestors required by Darwinism—also is powerful evidence of a designer. The reason: this phenomenon would have required the sudden infusion of massive amounts of new genetic and other biological information that only could have come from an intelligent source.
Among other places, Meyer makes that case in “The Cambrian Information Explosion: Evidence for Intelligent Design” in Debating Design, recently published by Cambridge University Press. Another extensive piece, “The Cambrian Explosion: Biology’s Big Bang,” appears in Darwinism, Design, and Public Education. Meyer coauthored this analysis with Paul Chien, chairman and professor in the biology department at the University of San Francisco, who worked with leading Chinese scientists on interpreting Cambrian fossils unique to China’s Chengjiang region; Paul A. Nelson, a philosopher of biology who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago; and paleontologist Marcus Ross.
“The fossils of the Cambrian Explosion absolutely cannot be explained by Darwinian theory or even by the concept called ‘punctuated equilibrium,’ which was specifically formulated in an effort to explain away