WHERE DID IT COME FROM?
Such complexity is so improbable that Meyer believes the DNA code cannot be the product of undirected natural processes. Furthermore, he reasons that DNA coding exhibits creative intelligence beyond random chemical bonds.
Perhaps this is why every attempt to create life has failed. Cambridge Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology, Simon Conway Morris remarks on biologists’ efforts to replicate life in a test tube: “And yet, something is clearly missing: life cannot be created in the laboratory, nor is there any clear prospect of it happening.”11
How did a molecule with such complex coded instructions originate? What natural process triggered a smattering of organic chemicals to come together and form the incredibly sophisticated double helix? Schroeder remarks, “And here’s that enigma. … It shows its head in a dozen different ways, the problem of how the entire process originally got started.”12
Dembski, Meyer, and Schroeder are part of a growing number of scientists and mathematicians who have concluded that the DNA molecule is so complex that it couldn’t have spontaneously assembled itself.
In Probability 1, mathematician and evolutionist Amir Aczel summarizes the DNA dilemma: “Having surveyed the discovery of the structure of DNA … and having seen how DNA stores and manipulates tremendous amounts of information (3 billion separate bits for a human being) and uses the information to control life, we are left with one big question: What created DNA?”13
An increasing number of scientists in other fields are also admitting that DNA’s complexity is not explainable by mere chance. Theoretical physicist Paul Davies affirms in The 5th Miracle,
The peculiarity of biological complexity makes genes seem almost like impossible objects. …
I have come to the conclusion that no familiar law of nature could produce such a structure from incoherent chemicals with the inevitability that some scientists assert.14
Biologist Michael Behe comments on the dilemma facing scientists who are wedded to a purely materialistic account of the origin of life, “In the face of the enormous complexity that modern biochemistry has uncovered in the cell, the scientific community is paralyzed.”15
Agnostic Sir Fred Hoyle, when considering the enormous information requirement of life writes, “Were a refined theory available for estimating the information content of DNA it would, in our opinion, be immediately apparent from its overwhelming content that life could never have arisen on a miniscule planet like on Earth. It would be seen that, to match the information content of even the simplest cell, nothing less than the resources of the entire Universe are needed.”16
Continue reading page 9 of 9 of “Does DNA Point to a Designer?”
