Episode 5 of Evidence for Belief explores the amazing world of DNA.
DNA is the complete set operating instructions at the heart of almost every cell. It is a genetic code that is more complex and sophisticated than any computer code mankind has ever written, and it could not have developed incrementally and gradually. DNA can only have come from a pre-existing supreme intelligence. Below are the links for the video presentation and audio podcast, as well as the full transcript of the Episode.
VIDEO AND PODCAST LINKS:
VIDEO PRESENTATION: EPISODE 5, AMAZING DNA
AUDIO PODCAST: EPISODE 5, AMAZING DNA
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to EPISODE 5 of Evidence For Belief, a series which examines evidence for the existence of God.
In this episode, we are going to examine the second of three amazing aspects of the living cell – the complex DNA molecule that lies at the very heart of every cell.
DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid – or DNA – is an extremely large and complex molecule with two long sides that spiral around each other in the form of a double helix and it is found in the nucleus of just about every cell in our bodies. But it’s not just a dead molecule. In fact, it operates exactly like a computer code. It’s a complete set of operating instructions for the formation and functioning of every single cell in the human body.
DNA tells every heart cell how each individual cell is to function in its place in the heart, it tells every liver cell how it is to function, and every brain cell, and every eye cell. DNA is the complete set of genetic operating instructions for the entire human body, and it sits in the nucleus of every cell in our body – a hugely long molecule of instructions that is folded over and over on itself like spaghetti in the nucleus of the cell. And not only is it very long, it is also very complex. The strand of human DNA contains 3.2 billion base pairs (or nucleotides) – which are specific individual instructions – a bit like letters or words.
MASSIVE COMPLEXITY
Just to help you appreciate how huge an amount of information 3.2 billion bits of information is, the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains about 50 million words. Our DNA molecule has 3.2 billion words – that’s more than 60 times the Encyclopedia Britannica. And even if you prefer to equate nucleotide base pairs of DNA to letters rather than words, that is still TEN TIMES the number of letters in the Encyclopaedia Britannica!
It’s so complex it took scientists 13 years to map the entire sequence of individual bits of information in our human DNA molecule, using the fastest computers available. Granted, computers weren’t very fast back then, at least not initially. Scientists who were part of the Human Genome Project started sequencing or reading the DNA code in 1990 and ran their computers 24/7, finally finishing in 2003. It took 13 years, with computers running constantly, to finally map the entire sequence of human DNA – to work out what specific piece of information was at every point in the DNA chain!
MOST SOPHISTICATED SOFTWARE EVER!
The late Bill Gates, computer wiz and founder of Microsoft, once tweeted on his Twitter page, “DNA is more sophisticated than any software ever created and we are exploring its huge data storage capacity.” He’s right. Our DNA is unimaginably longer and more complex than the most sophisticated computer program we’ve ever designed.
We have this amazingly complex software built into every cell of our body. Interestingly, even the smartest scientists in the world can still only understand a minute fraction of it. Although we’ve now mapped the entire length of DNA, meaning that we have now identified the exact sequence of paired nucleotides that comprise the entire length of DNA – but we still don’t know what most of that information codes for – what most of it is instructing our cells to actually do. We can still only understand a very small percentage of the DNA instructions.
CELLS CAN READ AND UNDERSTAND DNA
What is also extraordinary about DNA is how each cell of the body knows how to read and implement the code. And here is where it gets truly mind boggling, because each cell only reads and accesses that part of the DNA that relates to itself and ignores all the rest of the information. For instance, the cells of the eye know exactly which part of the incredibly long DNA molecule contains the instructions relating to itself. The parts of the eye cell responsible for reading and interpreting the DNA instructions then unfold the DNA molecule from the nucleus, copy that part of the instructions that relates to the eye, they read those instructions and implement them, and they completely ignore all the rest of the information in the DNA that relates to other parts of the body.
So there is a dual miracle going on here. Because not only did this hugely complex operating code somehow come into existence, but each cell somehow knows how to read and interpret the code and to locate only that part of the code that relates to itself. In regard to the formation of DNA in the very beginning, many atheists try to argue that it could have happened by chance. That this vast amount of complex information in the DNA strand could have developed gradually over millions or billions of years by random chemical processes, accumulating one letter at a time, gradually and incrementally growing in complexity.
DNA EVOLVED BY CHANCE?
On one atheistic website I’ve read the argument …
“A monkey tapping away at random on a computer keyboard would eventually write correctly not only words but also phrases, sentences, and even whole books. So, given enough time, chance can produce all the information in DNA.”
STATISTICAL NONSENSE
But there are two huge problems with this theory. Firstly, it’s a statistical impossibility. Consider just the chance of a monkey randomly typing the phrase, “peanuts and computers” – 21 letters and spaces all in the correct order. The statistical probability of that happening by pure chance can actually be calculated, because a typical computer keyboard has 101 possible keys that can be pressed. So the statistical probability of this 21-letter phrase being produced randomly is 1/101 x 1/101 x 1/101 … a total of 21 times. The number produced is so huge it doesn’t have a name. It would take: 1 billion monkeys typing randomly for one thousand million million million million million years! But that’s longer than the universe has existed!
But there aren’t just 21 letters in our DNA. There are 3.2 billionnucleotide base pairs or letters! And they all have to be in exactly the right order in order for every cell in the human body to function and be alive.
CATCH 22
The second problem with the idea of DNA developing by random natural processes, and even more problematic for the atheist argument, is that in order for a living cell to pass on these supposed incremental additions, the cell has to be alive in order to replicate and pass the gradually accumulating DNA on to each successive generation of cells. But for a cell to be alive and be able to repIicate, it needs a complete set of DNA in the first place! It can’t BE alive without a full set of DNA. It’s impossible! It’s a Catch 22 situation.
The first living cell had to come into existence with a complete DNA molecule, otherwise it would not be viable! DNA CAN’T have evolved gradually and incrementally over time!
WHERE DID THIS INFORMATION COME FROM?
So here’s the ultimate question we are left with. Where did that massive amount of information come from? Who wrote the genetic program in our cells? And, secondly, who taught the cells of our bodies to READ the program? Science just doesn’t have an adequate answer. Random chemical processes can’t produce intelligent information, just as monkeys tapping randomly on a computer keyboard could never produce the plays of Shakespeare. Random natural processes simply could not have produced such a vast genetic library of information nor the ability of living cells to read and decode it.
Professor Maciej Giertyche, professor emeritus of Genetics at Toran University, Poland, writes, “The science of genetics makes it clear that at no time in the past can there have been such a thing as a simple organism. All organisms, however primitive they may appear, are complex and bursting with information. And we know that this information must have been there from the very beginning. The only logical explanation is that this vast quantity of information came from intelligence. Every bacterium, every microscopic cell, is so precisely programmed that we have to assume that the information contained in them comes from an intelligence far beyond our own…. Evolutionists have no idea how this information system was produced.”
SIMPLER FIRST DNA MOLECULE?
Having said that, there are some evolutionists who, in a desperate attempt to explain how DNA could have developed by natural processes, propose that the very first living cells might have been much simpler than today and would have required a much shorter, simpler chain of DNA. An article by a group of biologists published in the scientific journal, “The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 93”, proposed that the first DNA-based cells might have had only 250 genes rather than the 25,000 genes that our DNA has today.
Genes are segments of the DNA molecule, often comprising thousands of base pairs, and each gene codes for a specific function or structure of the cell. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand all that, the important thing to understand is that this theory proposes a much smaller original DNA molecule of only about 300,000 base pairs, instead of the 3.2 billion that we have today. That’s about ten thousand times smaller than today’s DNA.
And so the theory proposes that this much smaller, shorter DNA molecule might possibly, somehow, by some means that we still don’t understand, have developed by chance natural processes. But let me explain how ridiculous even that is. There remain two problems that evolution can’t explain.
Firstly, this supposed first DNA molecule not only had to contain 300,000 base pairs, but each of those needed to be in precisely the right order to make sense – to convey intelligent instructions to the cell. And the second problem is that all 300,000 of these base pairs needed to come into existence at the same time in order to have a complete and fully functioning operating system so that the first cell could be alive and able to reproduce. Even this much smaller theoretical strand of DNA couldn’t have slowly developed over thousands or millions of years.
WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?
So, what are the chances of 300,000 pieces of genetic information being formed from chemicals via a random process and all of those base pairs instantly being arranged into precisely the right order simultaneously?
Recently, The Biology Department at the University of North Carolina published a paper on their website estimating this very probability – And they calculated that the chance of 300,000 base pairs being somehow arranged in exactly the right order by random natural processes is 1 in 10 to the power of 90,000. That is one chance out of 1 with 90,000 zeros after it. (University of North Carolina, Biology Department, https://www.cs.unc.edu/~plaisted/ce/abiogenesis.html).
Now you might think, OK that’s a long shot, but given enough time, perhaps it could happen. But that’s precisely the problem! Because there HASN’T been enough time!
NOT ENOUGH TIME!
According to evolutionists, the universe is 14.5 billion years old. In terms of seconds, that’s about 4 to the power of 17 seconds. Even if the random mixing of chemicals was somehow able to produce a new complete DNA molecule of 300,000 randomly ordered base pairs every second – a new DNA molecule every second since the beginning of the universe, only 4 to the power of 17 molecules would have been produced by now, which is nowhere near the 10 to the power of 90,000 molecules that would be needed to be randomly produced before we had ANY chance of producing a fully functioning DNA molecule with all 300,000 base pairs in exactly the right order.
NO NATURAL MECHANISM
And, of course all of that assumes that there is a DNA producing mechanism somewhere out there in nature that is capable of producing a new randomly ordered DNA molecule every second! But there is no such natural process that we have either observed or even successfully theorised to date – and that includes the highly theoretical and deeply flawed RNA model. This model proposes that instead of a DNA molecule, the earliest cells might have contained an RNA molecule – a slightly simpler molecule – which contained the genetic instructions for the cell.
THE FLAWED RNA MODEL
But this model has met with serious opposition, not just from creationists but also from scientists who are trying to support an evolutionary worldview. They point out a whole range of problems including that RNA is inherently unstable, that it is too complex a molecule to have developed prebiotically and that there is no possible catalytic process that could explain its evolution into DNA.
NO OBSERVATION TODAY
But I think the ultimate killer for all these theories is the simple fact that we don’t observe DNA molecules forming by natural processes today. It just doesn’t happen currently in nature, and we have no viable explanation as to how it COULD have happened in the past. This is just nonsense – it’s complete nonsense – that the incredibly complex information system in DNA could somehow have formed itself by random chemical processes.
I’m an author, and I’ve written over 25 books now. The average word count is about 60 to 70,000 words. That’s equates to about 500,000 letters and spaces per book. Nothing like 3.2 the billion letters or base pairs in our DNA. Now I would love to set my computer to start randomly typing letters and spaces onto the screen and walk away and be able to come back some time later and find a fully written book. I would love that. But I can tell you that it would never happen! I could leave my computer running for a year, for 10 years, for a lifetime, for a million lifetimes, and it would never write a coherent, logical book using random letters and spaces assigned purely by chance. Even after a trillion years it would still be gibberish.
INTELLIGENT INFORMATION ONLY COMES FROM INTELLIGENCE
Now you might argue, “But we can do this now with AI. Artificial Intelligence software is now writing whole books by itself!” Yes, but here’s the thing. I want to point out to you the key word in the name Artificial Intelligence. It’s the word, “Intelligence”. To produce something intelligent, you need intelligence in the first place! AI programs can only produce intelligent information that is logical and coherent because we’ve programmed those AIs using our own intelligence!
Intelligent information can only come from pre-existing intelligence! It CAN’T be produced from non-intelligent random chemical processes. The only thing that random processes will produce is GIBBERISH. What I’m saying is that the human genome, our incredibly complex and sophisticated DNA software, can only have come from a pre-existing intelligence. It could NEVER have been spat out of a random chemical soup. That is just utter nonsense.
I recently read a statement by the Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina in an article he posted on their website, which said, “The problem of abiogenesis …” (that’s the concept of the first cells coming into existence with a complete set of DNA in the beginning from non-living matter by chance processes) “The problem of abiogenesis is very severe indeed for the theory of evolution”.
That’s an understatement! It’s not just a very severe problem – it’s impossible!
DNA POINTS TO AN INTELLIGENT DESIGNER
The human genome, our DNA, SCREAMS out that there is an intelligent designer: A pre-existing intelligence that has created this incredibly complex, intelligent coding. The Bible has a name for this pre-existing intelligence: GOD. And I think it takes MUCH more faith to believe that our incredibly complex biological coding came from random chemical processes than from an all-powerful, intelligent designer.
Well, so far we have examined two of the three aspects of living cells that indicate intelligent design: the cell’s irreducibly complex physical structures, and DNA, the incredibly complex biological software that lies at the heart of every cell. In our next episode, EPISODE 6, we are going to explore the third aspect of cells that provides evidence of an intelligent designer: the incredible world of molecular machines that operate within our cells. And I will pre-empt that episode by simply saying, prepare to have your mind blown! If you think the things we have discussed so far about the cell are impressive, wait until you see this! Don’t miss EPISODE 6. It is truly stunning!
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For more information, you can check out my books, which are on my website, smartfaith.net, where you can also subscribe to my weekly blog.
LINKS:
VIDEO PRESENTATION: EPISODE 5, AMAZING DNA
AUDIO PODCAST: EPISODE 5, AMAZING DNA