The Incredible Amount of Biological Information in the Cell Points to A Creator

When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for A Creator, chapter 9. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.

There are six feet (and I've heard as many as 9 feet) of DNA tightly coiled in each of our one hundred trillion cells, a four-letter chemical alphabet making each of us who we are. According to Bill Gates, the DNA in each cell “is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”

Each of the 30,000 genes embedded in our 23 pairs of chromosomes can yield as many as 20,500 different kinds of proteins. In fact, the information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived - an estimated one thousand million - could be held in a teaspoon with room left over for all the information in every book ever written.

Think of DNA like a library (rather than a blueprint as some have suggested). The organism accesses the information it needs from DNA so it can build some of its critical components. To build just one protein, you typically need 1,200 - 2,000 letters or bases - which is a lot of information.

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 information 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.”

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. Information is habitually associated with conscious activity.

Information, as opposed to mere data, logically implies intelli-gence. Data are raw facts. When put into a context that makes them useful, they become information. For example, an individ-ual 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.” 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.

Knowing how complex a living cell is and how much information is contained inside begs the question, “How did it get there? In the past, random chance was believed to be the best explanation, but scientists have abandoned this once-popular theory. However, it still lingers in popular culture. "For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero," says Stephen Meyer, "they think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge." But 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!

Others, like Richard Dawkins, believe natural selection offers the best explanation, but there are two problems with this. First, it's 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.

Second, 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."

Finally, scientists once theorized that chemical affinities and self-ordering tendencies answered the call. They believed the elements in DNA were in some way more attracted to one another than to other elements and that they had a tendency to order themselves in the proper sequence. But this has already been repudiated 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.”

And that's not all. DNA provides some but not all of the information necessary to build a new organism with a novel form and function. DNA builds proteins, but proteins have to be assembled into larger structures - cells > tissues > organs > overall body plans. If DNA is only part of the story, then you can mutate it indefinitely and never build a fundamentally new body architecture.

The Cambrian explosion demonstrates a need for a gargantuan amount of new biological information in a very short amount of time. To help put it in perspective, if all of time was compressed into a single 24-hour day, the Cambrian explosion would take just one minute. This is an insurmountable problem for Darwinists. It is better evidence of a top-down pattern of design vs Darwin’s requirement for a bottom-up pattern of incremental development.