We’ve shown that DNA is actually the software of life. It’s totally interchangeable between the digital world and the biological world. The DNA code itself is so digital, is so almost exactly like a confusion tape. Scientists have come to the amazing conclusion that our bodies contain digital code. In fact Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, tweeted “DNA is more advanced than any software ever created.” Think about it. A program or code is written by someone who is very smart. The more complex the code, the more intelligent the author has to be. If our DNA code is more complex than any man-made software, where did it come from? Is it possible it was authored without an author, programmed without a programmer? Materialists think so, through Neo-Darwinism, the modern version of Darwinian evolution.
Stephen Meyer, author of The New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt, explains: According to Neo-darwinism, new genetic information arises as a result of random mutations in the arrangement of the nucleotide bases along the spine of the DNA molecule. If those random changes are beneficial, they’re passed on to preserve and if many such changes are preserved and passed on, they would accumulate over time and eventually result in a very significant change in the morphology, thet form of the organism. That’s like saying if this game had glitches every time it was copied online, and gamers share their favorite mutated version and trash the rest, it will eventually turn into a more advanced video game. Come on. Really? If we know the computer glitches won’t produce a new video game, how much sense does it make to believe that glitches copied over can produce new organisms. Could random changes in our DNA produce cells, corals, jelly fish, small fish, sea turtle, whale, hummingbird, peacock, leopard, rhinoceros, girl?
Everything we know about the software shows that random changes in a section of functional code or functional information is going to degrade that information long before you ever get to something fundamentally new. That’s the problem with the mutation selection mechanism as an explanation for new genetic information. Information in DNA is also essentially typographic or digital and are far more ways to go wrong in arranging those characters than are ways to go right. If you begin to randomly change them, you inevitably fall into a non-functional abyss, long before you get anything fundamentally new.
Just how unlikely is it for random genetic changes to produce something new, even something as modest as a protein structure with a new function? One scientist performed experiments that enabled him to actually calculate the odds and they aren’t good. In fact, they’re next to Impossible. We caught up with a molecular biologist Douglas Axe in Seattle. In our lab, we’ve asked “How rare are or how common functional proteins are within the space of possibilities?” Doing experiments and calculations, we found that they’re exceedingly rare, like one in 1074. To get a few for these odds, imagine someone hid one atom within the Milky Way galaxy and you blindfolded, by chance, are supposed to pick one out and hope that is the right one. Those odds would be better than the odds for the protein. Axe calculated the probability for all the chance mutations in all of the life forms on Earth for billions of years and in all that time, he found they couldn’t chance upon even one new functional protein structure, not one. Keep in mind it takes thousands of distinct proteins to build any kind of complex life including humans. Many of these proteins are unique to each individual life form. So we go from improbable to basically impossible. The bottom line is that the mutation selection mechanism simply lacks the creative power to generate the new information necessary to build new organisms in the history of life.
If the material processes of mutation and natural selection aren’t capable of producing the biological information needed for life, then where did it come from? Our uniform and repeated experiences, as Darwin himself pointed out, is the basis of all scientific reasoning about the past. When we see information in digital form and software or we see the paragraph in the book and we trace that information back to its source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. That’s part of what we know from our observation of the world around us, that information always arises from an intelligent source. We can apply that knowledge to the question of historical biology and when we see that information is the foundation of life, we can infer that the best explanation for the origin of that information is in fact also a mind, a conscious agent, not an undirected material process.
When presented with evidence that conflicts with Neo-Darwinism, most scientists claim through belief in the blind process of evolution, denying what science has discovered, that at the foundation of life, there exists a code so complex and advanced that it defies chance. They make no room for the possibility that we were created by an intelligence far more sophisticated than the most genius of programs. Instead they choose to limit their investigation to a strictly materialist worldview. When faced with this evidence, how would you respond? We are not materialists. We see the human soul. We experience love. We live with purpose. We fight for justice.