continued from… God – an Eternal, uncreated being? Part III

A Greater Problem Still!

mosquito-one Some scientists and educators have tried to get around the above problems by speculating that as long as all the chemicals that make up the molecule of heredity (and the information it contains) came together at some time in the past, then life could have begun.

Life is built upon information. In fact, in just one of the trillions of cells that make up the human body, the amount of information in its genes would fill at least 1,000 books of 500 pages of typewritten information. Scientists now think this is hugely underestimated.

Where did all this information come from? Some try to explain it this way: imagine a professor taking all the letters of the alphabet, A–Z, and placing them in a hat. He then passes the hat around to students of his class and asks each to randomly select a letter.

mosquito-two It is easy for us to see the possibility (no matter how remote it seems) of three students in a row selecting B then A and finally T. Put these three letters together and they spell a word—BAT. Thus, the professor concludes, given enough time, no matter how improbable it seems, there is always the possibility one could form a series of words that make a sentence, and eventually compile an encyclopedia. The students are then led to believe that no intelligence is necessary in the evolution of life from chemicals. As long as the molecules came together in the right order for such compounds as DNA, then life could have begun.

On the surface, this sounds like a logical argument. However, there is a basic, fatal flaw in this analogy. The sequence of letters, B-A-T, is a word to whom? Someone mosquito-threewho speaks English, Dutch, French, German, or Chinese? It is a word only to someone who knows the language. In other words, the order of letters is meaningless unless there is a language system and a translation system already in place to make the order meaningful.

In the DNA of a cell, the order of its molecules is also meaningless, except that in the biochemistry of a cell, there is a language system (other molecules) that makes the order meaningful. DNA without the language system is meaningless, and the language system without the DNA wouldn’t work either. The other complication is that the language system that reads the order of the molecules in the DNA is itself specified by the DNA. This is another one of those “machines” that must already be in existence and fully formed, or life won’t work!

Can Information Arise from Non-information?

We have already shown that information cannot come from mutations, a so-called mechanism of evolution, but is there any other possible way information could arise from matter?

Dr. Werner Gitt makes it clear that one of the things we know for sure from science is that information cannot arise from disorder by chance. It always takes (greater) information to produce information, and ultimately information is the result of intelligence:

A code system is always the result of a mental process (it requires an intelligent origin or inventor) … . It should be emphasized that matter as such is unable to generate any code. All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required.24

There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this.25

“There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.26

What Then Is the Source of the Information?

We can therefore conclude that the huge amount of information in living things must originally have come from an intelligence, which had to have been far superior to ours. But then, some will say that such a source would have to be caused by something with even greater information/intelligence.

However, if they reason this way, one could ask where even this greater information/intelligence came from. And then where did that one come from? One could extrapolate to infinity, unless there was a source of infinite intelligence, beyond our finite understanding. But isn’t this what the Bible indicates when we read, “In the beginning God …”? The God of the Bible is not bound by limitations of time, space, or anything else.

Even Richard Dawkins recognizes this:

Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. That, indeed, is what most of this book is about. But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him additionally capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and forgiving sins. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like, “God was always there,” and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say “DNA was always there,” or “Life was always there,” and be done with it.27

So what is the logically defensible position? Is it that matter has eternally existed (or came into existence by itself for no reason) and then that, by itself, matter was arranged into information systems against everything observed in real science? Or did an eternal Being, the God of the Bible, the source of infinite intelligence,28 create information systems for life to exist, which agrees with real science?

If real science supports the Bible’s claims about an eternal Creator God, then why isn’t this readily accepted? Michael Behe answers with this:

The fourth and most powerful reason for science’s reluctance to embrace a theory of intelligent design is also based on philosophical considerations. Many people, including many important and well-respected scientists, just don’t want there to be anything beyond nature. They don’t want a supernatural being to affect nature, no matter how brief or constructive the interaction may have been. In other words … they bring an a priori philosophical commitment to their science that restricts what kinds of explanations they will accept about the physical world. Sometimes this leads to rather odd behavior.29

The crux of the matter is this: if one accepts there is a God who created us, then that God also owns us. If this God is the God of the Bible, He owns us and thus has a right to set the rules by which we must live. More important, He also tells us in the Bible that we are in rebellion against Him, our Creator. Because of this rebellion (called sin), our physical bodies are sentenced to death; but we will live on forever, either with God or without Him in a place of judgment. But the good news is that our Creator provided a means of deliverance for our sin of rebellion, so that those who come to Him in faith and repentance for their sin can receive the forgiveness of a holy God and spend eternity with Him.

continued…

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