Enigma: Unlocking the Greatest Puzzle of All Time

No, the greatest weapon that could be wielded was that of intelligence, of information as to the enemy’s strategies and resources so that effective countermeasures could be deployed and implemented at the right times. The “best laid plans,” so to speak, could be overturned by the leaking of information into the enemy’s hands through carelessness, spy networks, and code-breaking devices. As the saying went: “Loose lips sink ships.”

Likely the most well-known of all of these was the German Enigma machine. At a time when computer technology was practically non-existent in comparison to what is commonplace today, Enigma was an extremely complex cipher device that enabled the Germans to secretly communicate over vast distances, providing a huge advantage against the Allies. Considered to be virtually impenetrable, the German High Command was confident in sending even the most top-secret messages through its electrical circuits.

Eventually, however, Enigma was cracked, and arguably its decryption (along with several other ciphers utilized by the Axis powers) not only shortened the war substantially and saved countless lives, but it also likely altered the war’s outcome completely.

Of course, people had been natural “code-breakers” before that. For example, in WWI the extraordinary Elizebeth Smith performed amazing decryption feats for the military. Elizebeth had no formal training in cryptanalysis; rather, she was a well-educated polyglot and loved reading classic literature like Tennyson and Shakespeare. And it’s likely that this combination allowed her to sort out the jumbled letters of cryptograms in her head.

Statistical analysis in regard to the frequency of letters and words used in a message helps cryptanalysts discover which letters might be used to substitute secret ones, and recognizing patterns may come more freely to someone adept at literary analysis and linguistics. She was so astute and skilled at code-breaking, her contemporaries commented,

Elizebeth was repeatedly called in to fix messes that nobody else could fix – she was a secret weapon for hire . . . Her skills were so unusual that she became indispensable.1

She was a master code-breaker indeed! She just seemed to have the right knack for problem-solving and seemed to genuinely enjoy doing it. Many others do today, and this feeds an entire industry that employs what are termed enigmatologists: people who study and write mathematical, word, or logic puzzles

Elementary?

Games like crosswords, word jumbles, sudoku, word find, and anagrams are a popular pastime for those hardcore puzzlers who find satisfaction pitting their mind against the game designer’s skill. So what’s the big take-away from all of this, and how does it relate to the topic of ultimate origins, of where everything came from?

Well obviously, if it takes intelligence to crack a code or puzzle, then how much more intelligence did it take to create it in the first place? For scientists studying the world today, one of the greatest challenges in understanding the creatures in it involves unlocking the remaining mysteries of the greatest word puzzle that has ever been made: the incredibly complex coded language system known as DNA. Many of them ponder its origin and want to know whether there are clues within it that can answer that.

Broadly speaking, there are only two options to choose from as to where it could have come from. It either evolved naturalistically through material processes (involving no mind in its creation), or it was created by God. Many scientists today adhere to the story of evolution as to the origin of living things, while some say this is a riddle that can never be solved. Some say there’s no way to know if God exists or not. Some feel intimidated and want to leave it to “experts” to decide. But perhaps like the aforementioned Elizebeth Smith, we don’t need any formal training to figure this mystery out. Let’s take a look at just a few things and see if we can solve this puzzle.

DNA for Dummies

Simply put, deoxyribonucleic acid contains the hereditary information for all living organisms, including us! DNA is like a very long string of letters utilizing a unique language. The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical “letters” called nucleotides: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T).

These bases are read three at a time, effectively providing for up to 64 different “words” (called codons). These words are similar to the way in which letters of the alphabet can be arranged into words that form meaningful sentences and provide the information available for the construction, function, and maintenance of an organism. And like the biggest jigsaw puzzle you can imagine, they’re ordered by the millions!

Think of DNA like a library of books or instruction manuals that contain everything about a creature and how to assemble and maintain its functionality. Analogously, each “library” (genome) has books of information we call chromosomes, and each book of information has chapters in them made up of sentences we call genes. The chapters are groups of genes that are read in a coordinated way (operons, for example).

Now the genes in each of us determine specific traits we’ll have, such as blue or brown eyes, blond or dark hair, short or tall height etc., with the coding for each of those genes being spelled out in sections along the length of our DNA.

Is It That Easy?

Now some might suggest scientists have already decoded this puzzle, but that would be as trite as saying that because you can navigate the keypad on your phone, you therefore know everything about all of the functionality (computer coding, hardware, satellite systems, etc.) of what sends a text message from your brain to your fingertips to your buddy in New Brunswick.

Honest scientists admit the DNA code itself is by far the most sophisticated code known to man because its ability to store information is astonishing. However, most people have no idea of the true level of complexity scientists are discovering inside this molecular marvel. Let’s show a few examples in simplistic terms to illustrate.

Data Compression

One of the amazing things about DNA coding is that there are “overlapping genes” where more than one lot of information is stored in the same broad area of letters. For example (just so you get the point, although this isn’t an actual textbook case), the information to build proteins for brown hair might overlap information to build your toes, depending on where you start reading. Computer programmers refer to this kind of concept as data compression, and to understand it, let’s use a sequence of letters in a sentence to see how we could get two different sets of information from within the exact same order of letters. Now again, this is just a crude example to illustrate the point and understand the big picture. Let’s look at this sentence:

My therapist has brown hair.

Now if you state it this way, the sequence of letters has a certain meaning. But what if you were to start just a little further down at the second word, and then (and we’re fudging here a bit because DNA doesn’t have “spaces”), what if we put a space after the first three letters? It would now say-

The rapist has brown hair.

You can see this has a completely different meaning.

Now even coming up with that sentence to illustrate the idea of overlapping coding was a challenge for me, and I suppose an expert enigmatologist could probably have come up with a much better example. But just try it yourself sometime; it’s not that easy!

However, as tricky as this 23-letter sentence above might be to overlap (at least for me), DNA coding is far more sophisticated than this. When you consider that the average human gene contains thousands of words (nucleotide triplets or codons), you start to realize the magnitude of what we’re talking about here. When comparing overlapping genes to written paragraphs, this is like having two completely different five-hundred-word articles overlaying each other. By starting at a different point in the text, a completely different story would be read!

Back and Forth

Even more incredible is the fact that at least some overlapping genes can be read backwards as well as forwards. This would be like writing a story, and then by starting at a certain point near the end and reading it backwards, a completely different story would be told, with perfect spelling and punctuation!

Let the most brilliant enigmatologists beware: no one has ever accomplished anything close to this. It’s considered virtually impossible. Any person who could design such a code would be considered a super-human!

So the big idea we’re belaboring here is, the more clever the puzzle, the more clever the designer! And because codes and languages require a creator, we recognize the intelligence behind this greatest code (which we are likely scratching the surface of in terms of complexity) we’ve ever seen is that of the most intelligent mind we can imagine: the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator God of the Bible.

God Is Not an Enigma

So the puzzle as to where DNA originated can be answered quite confidently- God created it. How can we state that so surely?

Information itself as an entity is an incredible problem for naturalists to explain, let alone the incredible multi-layered coding we observe within DNA, much more of which likely hasn’t even been discovered yet. So concluding God created DNA certainly isn’t a god-of-the-gaps-type argument (“we don’t know so God must have done it”). We do know where information comes from (an intelligent mind), and again, we intuitively understand that the more sophisticated the information is, the more sophisticated the mind that created it must be.

However, as fun as a little sleuthing and puzzling might be, the fact is the truth of God’s existence is all around us and has been revealed to everyone. As it says in Romans 1:20:

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

So God need not be an enigma to those who do not know him personally yet. The ‘mystery’ of whether there is a Creator God needn’t be puzzling at all. The complete story of who God is and what he has done for us isn’t difficult at all and can be found by reading his word, the Holy Bible. There you will find the truth, the life, and the way through Jesus Christ.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28–30)