Codes and Creation

Romans 1:20 explicitly states that no one has an excuse for not believing in God’s existence because of the things that he made. What God created is proof of the Creator. Period. However, Romans 1:18 reveals that people also try to suppress this truth in their unrighteousness.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

So what does this have to do with DNA?

What’s “HI” Got to do with It?

A few years ago, just when the AiG–CA ministry was launching, my wife and I were walking on a beach at Niagara on the Lake (near Niagara Falls, ON), and we came across a one-word message written with driftwood that simply said, “HI.”

As it captured a concept that was quite similar to an example I’ve used for years in creation apologetics presentations I’ve done at church conferences, I snapped a quick picture of it and posted it on our AiG–CA Facebook page, along with the following text:

Walking on the beach in Niagara on the Lake and saw this on the sand. No thinking person would say something as foolish as, “Hey, look at what the wind and the tide brought in!” That is because natural forces cannot create coded language systems. Language has ALWAYS been observed to be because of the result of an intelligent mind. And yet state-run schools all over the western world teach students that DNA (the most sophisticated coded language system ever discovered) is the result of naturalistic evolution.

Atheists Ignite

To no one’s surprise, this quickly ignited a barrage of comments from some atheist types railing against the idea, arguing that DNA is not a “true” coded language system. So I answered back and quoted one of their own (likely the most well-known atheists on the planet now that Christopher Hitchens has passed away), Professor Richard Dawkins. And whether you like him or not, Dawkins’ credentials are impressive.

He is a former Holder of the Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. And as the old saying went, “You don’t get that piece of paper out of a Cracker-Jack Box.” But according to the Facebook feedback group, I guess even the highly educated, widely read arch-materialist Richard Dawkins didn’t get the same memo as the local village atheists, because in one of his best-selling books, he wrote the following:

After Watson and Crick, we know that genes themselves, within their minute internal structure, are long strings of pure digital information. What is more, they are truly digital, in the full and strong sense of computers and compact disks, not in the weak sense of the nervous system. The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code, with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular-biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer-engineering journal . . . 

Our genetic system, which is the universal system of all life on the planet, is digital to the core. With word-for-word accuracy, you could encode the whole of the New Testament in those parts of the human genome that are at present filled with “junk” DNA – that is, DNA not used, at least in the ordinary way, by the body. Every cell in your body contains the equivalent of forty-six immense data tapes, reeling off digital characters via numerous reading heads working simultaneously. In every cell, these tapes – the chromosomes – contain the same information, but the reading heads in different kinds of cells seek out different parts of the database for their own specialist purposes . . . 

Genes are pure information – information that can be encoded, recoded and decoded, without any degradation or change of meaning. Pure information can be copied and, since it is digital information, the fidelity of the copying can be immense. DNA characters are copied with an accuracy that rivals anything modern engineers can do.1

So despite skeptics often winging about how DNA isn’t a “real” code, Dawkins describes it as “truly digital, in the full and strong sense of computers and compact disks.” Is he the only one?

Evolution 2.0: $10 Million Prize!

Apparently he’s not, as there seem to be several Oxford-educated scientists that are recognizing this as well. And they and many others have come together under the Voices Of Oxford (VOX) banner, along with several outside investors, to set up a contest where the winner can claim a 10 million dollar prize by solving what they claim is the #1 question in all of science, namely, Where did the information come from?2

Now, just to quiet the “It’s not really coded information” crowd before they get started, I want to emphasize what this Oxford-led group means when it asks for the origin of “information” in their own words.

Every cell reproduces itself from digital instructions, stored in DNA. DNA has the same features as modern digital devices: Layers of digital encoding, decoding, and data storage; error detection, error correction, and repair—plus an ability to adapt that beggars the imagination.3

Who’s to Judge?

And in case skeptics might somehow think this must be just some motley group of outliers that are saying this, let’s emphasize that none of them are professing creationists, all of them adhere to the general theory of evolution, and they contain distinguished scientists well known and respected by the evolutionary establishment. Among them is Oxford Professor Dennis Noble, praised as a “scientist extraordinaire” by his peers. He’s the first person to build a computer model of an organ—the heart—and his discoveries have made pacemakers possible.

As a matter of fact, Noble is one of the three people that will judge the outcome, along with George Church and Michael Ruse. Church is a geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. He is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of health sciences and technology at Harvard and MIT, and he was a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

Ruse specializes in the philosophy of biology. He is director of the Program in the Philosophy of the History of Science at Florida State University, is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Bergen, McMaster University, the University of New Brunswick and University College London. He’s also the author of numerous books, including Darwinism and Design, Atheism: What Everyone Needs to Know, and Science, Evolution and Religion.

So to say this group includes has earned its accolades is an understatement, as it includes one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People (2017) and one of the top 100 scientists in the UK.

What Are They Looking For?

Under a section titled “What You Must Do to Win The Prize,” the following criteria are laid out.

You must arrange for a digital communication system to emerge or self-evolve without "cheating." The diagram below describes the system. [Not shown here: available on their website] Without explicitly designing the system, your experiment must generate an encoder that sends digital code to a decoder. Your system needs to transmit at least five bits of information. (In other words it has to be able to represent 32 states. The genetic code supports 64.)4

Pretty simple isn’t it? Just “arrange” an experiment that will naturalistically produce a digital communication system that generates an encoder that sends at least five bits of digital code to a decoder. Oh, and you can’t cheat (i.e., no intelligence allowed!).

By the way, you’d better hope that the decoder (that just happens to randomly generate) is capable of decoding the exact code that randomly generates from the encoding device that randomly generates. It would be a shame if the decoding device that randomly generated was set to decode a different randomly generated code. (Kind of like if you were trying to read this but only read Hebrew and didn’t have the decoding apparatus to decode these English language symbols).

For those looking at this, re-read the instructions above and try to imagine how such a thing is even possible, let alone remotely likely to have occurred some time in the past. How can such intelligent people imagine such a thing when it has never been seen to occur in all of human history? And one wonders, if the contestants are to “arrange” such an experiment but not add any intelligent input (computing/designing/etc.), then what activities should they initiate?

What exactly should contestants do, throw some mud on the ground and take out their microscopes to wait for the magic to happen? Perhaps we could zap some more chemical compounds like the failed Stanley-Miller experiment did years ago (and several times since) to see if life will emerge this time?

I mean, if we need to “arrange” this to happen, but it must emerge or self-evolve without intelligent input, doesn’t that mean we should just try to be as observant as possible to the natural world around us to try and spot this miracle happening in the moment? It’s not exactly like humans haven’t been observing their surroundings for hundreds of years now, and with some incredibly sophisticated technology to boot.

The Mystery

It is fascinating to read excerpts from the website advertising the contest, as the answers to what they are calling “The Mystery” seems rather obvious to the average Christ-follower (God did it). It is however worth the read to watch these brilliant minds struggle to understand life’s biggest questions—without God.

How do living things repair and heal themselves, adapt to any situation you can imagine, and make choices? The genetic engineering capabilities of cells, which are discussed in the book Evolution 2.0, are not known to most people. But an answer suggests staggering implications for medicine, technology and the environment.

How do cells “know” how to evolve? No human software does that. Give software millions of chances and billions of years and all it will do is crash. But life adapts relentlessly. How does it do this? What do cells know that we don’t?

And what about consciousness? In the human realm, only conscious beings create and modify code. Where does consciousness come from? Are cells self-aware?

The Evolution 2.0 Prize focuses these issues down to one central question: How do you get from chemicals to code? How do you get a code without designing one?5

Avoiding the Obvious

If you sum up their conclusions, it could be stated simply: DNA exhibits every quality that known coded language systems have, except it is far beyond anything we’ve come close to creating. So for those objecting and saying DNA isn’t like other codes, we know. It’s actually way better than other codes, because the Creator of DNA is far greater than any creator of any other code. But it is a code, as is summed up by their website’s final, central question: How do you get a code without designing one?

Well, the obvious answer is—you don’t! Have we ever observed a coded language system come into being without an intelligent designer? No! So do we know how codes are made? Yes! Observational science confirms codes are the result of intelligence, we do not have a single example that contradicts that fact, so why would you believe the most sophisticated language system ever observed came about without a mind?

It’s as simple as this: dishes don’t clean themselves; clothes don’t fold themselves; and documents don’t make copies of themselves via random processes. Even if those processes are automated, an intelligent mind is behind all such acts. So why would intelligent scientists propose that these types of tasks with the voluminous amounts of coded genetic information needed to initiate and govern their function inside living things came from lifeless chemicals?

Well we already read the answer to that in Romans 1:18: to avoid the obvious and most logical conclusion: God, the only sufficient Cause we know, did it. Just look at this caveat posted in their rules.

**IMPORTANT NOTE** General essays presenting a “Theory Of Everything” and metaphysical constructions about the history of life, unfortunately, cannot be considered. Please do not submit materials of this kind. We are looking for entries that offer quantifiable technological progress.6

It is actually mind boggling when you parse this out. Here we see incredibly intelligent, gifted people, who, under any other circumstance, if asked the question as to where any other code/language/message/information come from would have a ready answer, because everyone knows codes are created by intelligent minds. But in the case of where the language of life came from, they replace logic and knowledge with a theophobic ideology that automatically eliminates an intelligent Creator because, ultimately, that would mean someone else owns them, and that they are therefore responsible to the Creator.

But if God is automatically excluded from the conclusion, no one will ever arrive at the proper understanding. It is as 1 Timothy 3:7 says, they will be “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”

Nothing New . . . 

Remember, a 1-million-dollar prize looking for almost the exact same result has been tried before, and I actually wrote about it back in 2007, when a group called The Origin-of-Life Foundation7 was offering the prize through the Gene Emergence Project (MD, USA).8 At the time, this group declared its dedication to finding the answer to what one of their members (a biology professor, Jack Trevors) called the most pressing question in science: “The origin of the genetic instructions in the DNA” (sound familiar?), and he even made the point that “Genetic instructions don’t write themselves any more than a software program writes itself.”9 By the way, guess how many people won the million dollars they offered? You guessed it, zilch!

But as many people see scientists as the “high priests” of society today, with governments using them to define truth and implement policies based on their anti-God, ideological motivations, is it any wonder we are witnessing the collapse of our culture into more and more depraved and wicked ways. God forewarned what would happen should people not see fit to include God in their thinking.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. (Romans 1:28)