Part 6 of a Series: Evolution or Intelligent Design
Presented by Vin Sparks
In the first 5 parts of this series we discussed the types of evidence that can be considered in a court of law (A Preponderance of Evidence), some of the key arguments against evolution (The Trouble with Darwin), one aspect of the massive fraud that accompanies Darwin’s theory (The Icons of Evolution) and I began introducing the evidence for intelligent design that exists in the sciences themselves – The Evidence of Cosmology and The Evidence of Biochemistry.
I want to turn your attention now to more evidence for intelligent design that exists in the human cell. Once again, I think Lee Strobel, in his book The Case for a Creator, offers incredible and insurmountable evidence. Please don’t be intimidated by the technical nature of the writing. I think you’ll find it quite fascinating. I know I found it to be so in presenting it here and I am no expert on biological information.
Remember, you’re the fact finders, the jury if you will. Consider the evidence and decide for yourself – does the evidence presented in this series point to the spontaneous evolution of life from inanimate matter or does it point to an intelligent design? Here is some of that evidence:
The Evidence of Biological Information (internally coded, inheritable information carried by all living organisms used as a “blueprint” or set of instructions for building and maintaining a living creature).
Yes, we’re talking about DNA – six feet of it to be exact. That’s how long the strand of DNA is that is tightly coiled in each one of our body’s 100 trillion cells. They provide the genetic information necessary to create all the proteins out of which our bodies are built. Each one of the thirty thousand genes that are embedded in our 23 pairs of chromosomes can yield as many as 20,500 different kinds of proteins.
Geneticist Michael Denton has said that the astounding capacity of microscopic DNA to harbor this mountain of information, carefully spelled out in a four-letter chemical alphabet, “vastly exceeds that of any other known system”. In fact, the information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived, a number estimated at approximately 1,000 million – could be held in a teaspoon and still have room for all the information in every book ever written.
That just bends my mind!
DNA serves as an information storehouse for a finely choreographed manufacturing process in which the right amino acids are linked together with the right bonds in the right sequence to produce the right kind of proteins that fold in the right way to build biological systems.
Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, there would be no doubt that there is proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. But, when it occurs in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces. This alone should give anyone pause to ponder what it means to the argument about the origins of life.
Professor Stephen C. Meyer would routinely ask his students what they would need to get their computers to perform a new function. They answered that they would need new lines of code – instructions to the processor on what to do. “The same principle is true in living organisms”, says Dr. Meyer. “We know that DNA is a repository for a digital code containing the instructions for telling the cell machinery how to build proteins.”
Dean H. Kenyon, Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University and author of Biochemical Predestination, a book on the chemical origins of life was lead to repudiate his own conclusions in that book to conclude instead that nothing short of an intelligence could have created this intricate cellular apparatus.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) is the world’s largest collaborative biological project. It was proposed by the US government and planning began in 1984, it was started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. An international science research project, mostly conducted at twenty universities in the US, Great Britain, Japan, France, Germany and China, it was charged with the goal of determining the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up human DNA and of identifying and mapping all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint.
When scientists announced, from the East Room of the White House, that they had finally mapped the 3 billion codes of the human genome – a project that took more than a decade to complete and filled the equivalent of 75,490 pages of the New York Times – there were references to God from the two most important people in that room:
“Today we are learning the language in which God created life. We are gaining ever more awe for the complexity, the beauty, and the wonder of God’s most divine and sacred gift” — President William Jefferson Clinton
“It’s a happy day for the world. It is humbling for me, and awe-inspiring, to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.” — Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project.
William Paley, an English clergyman, philosopher and Christian apologist, had no idea 
when he first championed the Teleological Argument for the existence of God (the argument from design) in the 19th century using the watchmaker analogy that science would come to discover such complexities in the building blocks of life – giving the argument from design such dynamic new meaning. Still, there are those that will say that the old arguments for the existence of God are tired and ineffective. I wonder what Professor Meyer has to say about that. Professor Meyer?
“We’ve learned a lot about biology since the Civil War. Evolutionists are still trying to apply Darwin’s 19th century thinking to a 21st century reality, and it’s not working. Explanations from the era of the steamboat are no longer adequate to explain the biological world of the information age.”
“The attempt to explain the origin of life solely from chemical constituents is effectively dead now. Naturalism cannot answer the fundamental problem of how to get from matter and energy to biological function without the infusion of information from an intelligence.”
It is obvious to me that it is not those that come down on the side of intelligent design that are using tired old arguments.
Again, the voice of the 100 scientists that originally published A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism echo loud and clear, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life.”
In this presentation I relied heavily on Lee Strobel. The Case for a Creator, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan – c. 2004
Sketches on the way 