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 You are in / Foolish Faith / Read Book Online / Chapter 3 / Chance Design?
"Nobel Prize winner Dr. Francis Crick (co-discoverer of one of the most important discoveries of 20th century biology) arrived at the theory that life could never have evolved by chance on planet earth."
»  Chapter Introduction
»  The Experts Say What?
»  Life from Non-Life
»  Mutations - Evolution's Raw Material
»  Fossils
»  Ape-Man
»  Radio Dating
»  Starlight
»  The Creation Model
»  Dinosaurs
»  Odds & Complexity
»  Chance Design?

Chapter 3:
Two Worldviews in Conflict
What do thousands of scientists believe about creation and evolution?

Chance Design?

A growing number of scientists, both creationists and noncreationists alike, are beginning to argue that not only is life complex, but also that it is ordered in such a way as to exhibit evidence of intelligent design. Since life is at its core a chemical code (the DNA code), the origin of life is thus the origin of a code. A code is a very special kind of order — it represents “specified complexity” (high information content).[117]

In everyday experience, people detect intelligent design all the time. For example, if a school teacher finds a sequence of lettered building blocks on the floor of a kindergarten classroom which spells out THESE BLOCKS WERE NOT PUT HERE ON PURPOSE, the teacher can safely assume that someone did arrange the letters in that order on purpose — no one would suppose they accidentally fell down that way. This arrangement of building blocks shows specified complexity (i.e., it contains meaningful information).

The meaningful arrangement of bases (or “letters”) in the DNA code of living things is far higher in information content than that of the arrangement of kindergarten building blocks. Indeed, the Encyclopedia Britannica concedes that the information content of a single simple cell is encyclopedic — comparable to about one hundred million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Thus, if it is unreasonable to believe that the arrangement of kindergarten building blocks could have originated without intelligence, then it is at least as unreasonable to believe that the encyclopedic amounts of information contained in the DNA code could have originated without intelligence.

Everyday experience reveals that information is only produced with intelligence; it always takes an intelligent agent to generate information. In nature, there is no example anywhere in which meaningful information has been observed to arise by itself, without an intelligent source.[118]

The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) would be pointless if there was no criterion for determining what constitutes an intelligent source. The criterion for SETI is a radio signal from outer space with a high level of specified complexity — a signal like this would prove that there was some kind of an intelligent sender.[119]

If specified complexity indicates an intelligent source for SETI, then why shouldn’t the high specified complexity found in the DNA of living things, equivalent to millions of pages of Encyclopedia Britannica, also indicate an intelligent source?

Today it is becoming clearer that the biblical creation model is not unreasonable to believe as a fact of history. The creation model stands up to an objective analysis; it is consistent with what is observed around the earth today.[120]

The more that is discovered about the detailed and complex architecture of living things, the stronger the evidence seems to become for the involvement of a Master Designer. It is for precisely this reason that many famed scientists, such as the co-discoverer of DNA, who made one of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, have begun to abandon their faith in chance alone.

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