Douglas Axe on the protein folding problem

When we look at something like this, we realize that someone had to know how to arrange the amino acids in order to get this to work. We attribute it naturally to genius, somebody knows how to do this. I don’t know how to do this. In fact after decades and decades of very smart scientists studying all kinds of proteins, we still cannot author amino acid sequences that fold into functional proteins. We still don’t know how to solve this problem – it’s called the protein-folding problem, it remains unsolved. Somebody brilliant knows how to do this. When we look at things like this, we naturally intuit that genius is behind this. Anyone who wants to claim otherwise is claiming that accidental causes just happen to do the work of genius. Because those two causes are so very different polar opposites, that could only be true by a remarkable coincidence. Probability is the math of coincidence and when you do the math on this, it turns out that that’s just not possible. The only way to avoid this problem of coincidence is to reject accidental causes and to affirm that these things look like they were designed because they were designed.