Recently many prominent—and self-appointed—spokesmen for science have argued that modern science has demonstrated that belief in God is no longer credible. A spate of bestselling books, led by Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, have popularized this idea. Dawkins and other New Atheists argue that science shows the existence of God to be a delusion, “a failed hypothesis” as one book suggests. Why? Because, according to them, there is no evidence for intelligent design. Instead, in their view, Charles Darwin explained away all evidences of design. Indeed, the modern version of Darwin’s theory, Neo-Darwinism, asserts that the wholly undirected processes of natural selection and random mutations are fully capable of producing the intricate structures in living systems. As Dawkins asserts, natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without itself being guided or directed by an intelligent agent of any kind. Thus, living organisms may look designed, but in his view, that appearance is illusory. Since, he says, the design argument was always, prior to Darwin, the strongest argument for God’s existence, the idea of a Creator is now extremely improbable—and placing faith in him is tantamount to choosing a delusion.
But is the premise of Dawkins’ argument accurate? Has Darwinism refuted the design hypothesis and, with it, any scientific evidence for the existence of God?
In fact, Darwinism has not disproved the case for intelligent design, and the foundational premise of Dawkins’ argument is fatally flawed. Today there is compelling evidence of intelligent design within the inner recesses of the simplest living cells. Darwin didn’t know about this evidence, and neither Darwin’s theory nor modern Neo-Darwinism even addresses it.
Darwin attempted to explain the origin of new living forms as starting from simpler preexisting forms of life. But he did not explain, or even attempt to explain, the origin of life’s basic building blocks—the simplest living cells.
Biologists committed to the Darwinian perspective with its denial of design were not initially troubled by this gap in materialistic explanation. During the late nineteenth century they thought the cell was an extremely simple glob of plasma. Such an entity, they thought, could have formed readily from a few simple, undirected chemical reactions without any designing hand’s involvement.
But as biologists gradually learned more about the complexity of the cell, evolutionary theorists devised increasingly more sophisticated theories of chemical evolution—theories that attempt to explain the origin of the first life arising gradually from simpler preexisting chemicals. Nevertheless, all such theories began to encounter severe problems after the 1950s as scientists began to learn more about the complexity of cells and the information-rich molecules contained within them.
In 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they announced a startling discovery. The structure of DNA allows it to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions—the information—for building the crucial protein molecules and machines each cell needs to survive.
Crick later developed this idea with his famous sequence hypothesis, according to which the chemical constituents in DNA function like letters in a written language or symbols in a computer code. Just as English letters may convey a particular message depending on their arrangement, so too do certain sequences of chemical bases along the spine of a DNA molecule convey precise instructions for building proteins. The arrangement of the chemical characters determines the function of the sequence as a whole. Thus, the DNA molecule has the same property of sequence specificity that characterizes codes and language. As Dawkins himself has acknowledged, “The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or, as Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
After the early 1960s, further discoveries made clear that the digital information in DNA and RNA is only part of a complex information processing system innate within the cell. It’s an advanced form of nanotechnology that both mirrors and exceeds our own in its complexity, design logic, and information storage density.
So where did the digital information in the cell originate? And how did the cell’s complex information processing system arise? Clearly, the informational features of the cell at least appear designed. To date, no theory of undirected chemical evolution has explained the origin of the digital information needed to build the first living cell. There is, it turns out, simply too much information housed within the cell to be explained away by chance alone. Moreover, the information in DNA has also been shown to defy explanation by reference to the laws of chemistry. Saying otherwise would be like claiming that a clever newspaper headline could arise as the result of the chemical attraction between ink and paper. Clearly something else is at work.
Importantly, scientists arguing for intelligent design do not do so merely because natural processes—chance, laws, or the combination of the two—have failed to explain the origin of the information-rich systems in cells. Rather, they argue for design because experience teaches that systems possessing such features invariably arise from intelligent causes. The information on a computer screen can be traced back to a user or programmer. The information in a book ultimately came from a writer. As the pioneering information theorist Henry Quastler observed, “Information habitually arises from conscious activity.”
To summarize, DNA functions like a software program. We know from experience that software comes from programmers. We know generally that information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics or encoded in a radio signal—always arises from an intelligent source. The discovery of information in the DNA molecule, therefore, provides strong grounds for inferring that a designing intelligence played a role in the origin of DNA as well as life itself.
Thus, contrary to the New Atheists, who claim there is no evidence of actual design in life—which, in their view, renders belief in God untenable—the DNA molecule reveals powerful evidence of a designing mind’s work. Neither Darwinism nor Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists have disproved the design hypothesis or the existence of God.
by Stephen C. Meyer
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