The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [132]
“Today we buy information, we sell it, we regard it as a commodity, we value it, we send it down wires and bounce it off satellites—and we know it invariably comes from intelligent agents. So what do we make of the fact that there’s information in life? What do we make of the fact that DNA stores far more information in a smaller space than the most advanced supercomputer on the planet?
“Information is the hallmark of mind. And purely from the evidence of genetics and biology, we can infer the existence of a mind that’s far greater than our own—a conscious, purposeful, rational, intelligent designer who’s amazingly creative. There’s no getting around it.”
The cacophony of street noise coming through the half-opened window was getting louder now that rush hour was approaching. Meyer’s wife was graciously cooking a salmon dinner for us at their house, and it was time to get on the highway before it got clogged with traffic. As we ended our discussion, Meyer excused himself for a quick meeting in another office, giving me some time to reflect.
Meyer’s two rhetorical questions near the conclusion of our discussion effectively summed up the issue. The data at the core of life is not disorganized, it’s not simply orderly like salt crystals, but it’s complex and specific information that can accomplish a bewildering task—the building of biological machines that far outstrip human technological capabilities.
What else can generate information but intelligence? What else can account for the rapid appearance of a staggering variety of fully formed, complex creatures that have absolutely no transitional intermediates in the fossil record? The conclusion was compelling: an intelligent entity has quite literally spelled out evidence of his existence through the four chemical letters in the genetic code. It’s almost as if the Creator autographed every cell.
I sighed and slumped back in my chair, a bit exhausted from my whirlwind of travel and interviews. The case for a Creator was accumulating at a remarkable pace, and I could sense I was approaching the conclusion of my quest. But I also knew there was at least one more expert I needed to consult.
In the closing minutes of our conversation, Meyer had mentioned the word “mind” and referred to conscious activity. As beguiled as I was by DNA, I was equally intrigued by the human brain. Weighing just three pounds, it has ten thousand million nerve cells, each sending out enough fibers to create a thousand million million connections. That’s equal to the number of leaves in a dense forest covering a million square miles. 34
Yet how does all of that circuitry create the unique phenomenon of human consciousness? How does raw biological processing power enable me to reflect, or form beliefs, or make free choices? Is my consciousness only attributable to the physics and chemistry of my brain, or have I also been endowed with an immaterial mind and soul? And if there is persuasive evidence of a soul, what could this tell me about the existence of a Creator—and an afterlife?
I pulled out a small notebook and scribbled myself a note to contact an expert on consciousness as soon as I returned to Los Angeles. I started to slip the pad into my shirt pocket, but instead I stopped and looked at the reminder I had just written.
It was also a reminder of something else. Those few words—a fragment of a sentence—represented information that has its source in my intelligence. How intuitively obvious that a dense array of far more complicated biological assembly instructions must, too, have their origin in a mind.
For Further Evidence
More Resources on This Topic
Meyer, Stephen C. “The Cambrian Information Explosion: Evidence for Intelligent