Are Science and Faith Incompatible? Part 3
The Evidence of Biology
Equally deserving explanation is the information in the cell. The information found in DNA has been recognized as one of biology’s big problems; explaining it naturalistically is no easy task. Just how much information is contained inside a human cell? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says, “Each nucleus… contains a digitally coded database larger, in infor-mation content, than all thirty volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of the body put together.”[13] And according to Bill Gates, the six feet of tightly coiled DNA in each cell “is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”[14] But Charles Darwin had no way of knowing this when he developed his theory of evolution.
It was not until after his publication of On the Origin of Species that microscopes advanced enough to peer inside the cell were developed. Darwin would have considered a single-cell organism to be rather simple. And at the time, life arising from non-life seemed plausible. Maggots appeared on raw meat left exposed seemingly from out of thin air. Thus, there seemed to exist empirical evidence that life just popped into existence, and we had no reason to believe that simple organisms were in fact very complex. But this is not the case at all. Professor of materials science and engineering Dr. Walter Bradley observed:
One person very creatively - but quite accurately -
described a single-cell organism as a high-tech factory,
complete with artificial languages and decoding systems;
central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive
amounts of information; precision control systems that
regulate the automatic assembly of components; proof-
reading and quality control mechanisms that safeguard
against errors; assembly systems that use principles of
pre-fabrication and modular construction; and a com-
plete replication system that allows the organism to
duplicate itself at bewildering speeds.[15]
Knowing how complex a living cell is and how much information is contained inside begs the question, “How did it get there?” Information, as opposed to mere data, logically implies intelligence. Data are raw facts. When put into a context that makes them useful, they become information. For example, an individual student’s test score is data. The average of the class’ test scores is information. “Although physical processes that are not also intelligent agents can generate information,” says Dembski, “there is a sense in which information, whatever its source, is irreducibly conceptual and thus presupposes intelligent agency.” [16] Quite simply, if you see the words JOHN LOVES MARY written in the sand on the beach, you are likely to believe an intelligent being wrote those words. You are not likely to believe the effects of the waves on the sand left them there.
Scientists have tried several ways to explain the mind-boggling information contained in human DNA. Like the improbability of our universe being so fine-tuned for life, scientists here too once hypothesized that random chance is the answer to biology’s information problem. But according to physicist Stephen Meyer, scientists have abandoned this once-popular theory; however, Meyer points out that it still lingers in popular culture.[17] “For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly inter-act over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge.”[18] To further illustrate his point, Meyer says, “The probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That’s a ten with 125 zeroes after it!”[19]
Random chance having thus been abandoned by virtually all experts, many, such as Dawkins, hypothesize that natural selection answers the call. According to Dawkins, many minute changes over millions of years would allow for the assembly of the first living cell. Natural selection would “choose” the most advantageous of the slight variations and then reproduce them. There are two glaring problems with this. One is that he is putting the cart before the horse. Nothing can be “chosen” for its advantages and reproduced without DNA to direct the cell division in the first place. One must first explain where DNA came from. Secondly, there is an even more fundamental assumption people make to help explain evolution and natural selection. A popular theory is that a kind of “prebiotic soup” existed in Earth’s past that was rich with the chemical “nutrients” necessary for life. “Considering the way the prebiotic soup is referred to in so many discussions of the origin of life as an already established reality,” says biochemist Michael Denton, “it comes as something of a shock to realize that there is absolutely no positive evidence for its existence.”[20]
Yet another hypothesis, that amino acids, the building-blocks of protein and thus of life, may have chemical affinities that attract them to one another and self-ordering tendencies that enable them to line up in the right sequence, has already been repudi-ated by one of its early proponents, biologist Dean Kenyon. Instead, he says, “We have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells.”[21]
Next, our conclusion.
[13] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Longman, 1986), 1, 2-3.
[14] Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996) in Stephen Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 12.
[15] Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 137.
[16] Dembski, The Design Revolution, 137.
[17] Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 229.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Michael Denton, Evolutoin: A Theory in Crisis (Chevy Chase: Adler & Adler, 1986), 261.
[21] Dean Kenyon, Unlocking the Mystery of Life. Available at: <http://www.unlockingthemysteryoflife.com> [Accessed 12/11/15]