Specified Complexity: A Message Without a Mind Would be a Miracle
A few months ago I was visiting a friend and her young daughter. After a day of fun in the sun and a good night's sleep, I woke up and found a couple of notes on the dining table. One was a drawing of two stick figures, a sun, a house, and the words, "I love Ms. Laura." The letters were large and crooked, and the 'r' in Laura was backwards. The other note was written in neat, smaller writing, and read, "We went to the store. Be back soon."
Of course I knew immediately that the note with the large, crooked letters was written by the seven-year-old, and the slightly more complex note was from my adult friend. I didn't doubt this for a second, and I'm certain anyone else would have concluded the same. But why did I assume these notes came from human minds? Why didn't I assume that they formed naturally and without intelligent design? Is it because I had only been asleep for eight hours and it takes longer than one night for information to create and organize itself in a specific and meaningful order? If I had slept for a week, or a year, or a million years, would it have been more reasonable to assume these messages came about through natural processes? Of course not! It is the specified complexity of messages - that is, the presence of information with a specific meaning - which causes us to conclude they came from intelligent minds.
In the movie "Contact", ironically based on the book by atheist Carl Sagan, the main character played by Jodie Foster concludes without any doubt whatsoever that there is intelligent life beyond Earth when she picks up the transmission of an ordered series of prime numbers from outer space. Why would she (and writer Carl Sagan, and audience members across the globe) accept that such messages are indicative of intelligent life when we all learned in biology that the far more complex information in our DNA is the result of natural processes?
The answer, of course, is that no matter how long the wind blows, gravity pulls, earthquakes erupt, and rain falls, natural processes never form meaningful information such as a list of prime numbers or messages like, "We went to the store. Be back soon."
And yet, the information in each person's DNA provides far more meaningful complexity than any of the messages above. In fact, the information in the DNA of a single-celled amoeba is equal to the information contained in 1,000 sets (each set containing 30 volumes) of the Encyclopedia Britannica.1 Would it ever be reasonable to assume that the information in 1,000 unique sets of educational encyclopedias came about by natural processes through dumb luck over lots of time without any intelligence? Of course not! That's entirely irrational, and yet that is what scientists would have us believe about our DNA, which is far more complex than that of the single-celled amoeba.
It is no wonder outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins defines biology as "the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."2 Or that Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, felt the need to issue a warning that "biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.3 For, as Phillip Johnson points out, if biologists did not often remind themselves of their prior faith commitment to naturalism, they would surely run the risk of allowing their observations to interfere with their conclusions.4
The specified complexity in even the simplest life led atheist microbiologist Michael Denton to write, "The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle."5
Of course, when Charles Darwin proposed his theory on the origin of species he had no idea how complex a cell was, and the past 150 years of scientific discoveries have not proven friendly to his theory. Yet, as Darwinist Richard Lewontin of Harvard University admits, such a story is readily accepted, not because of its evidence or consistency with reality, but rather because it allows atheists to maintain their a priori commitment to naturalism, thus preserving their dignity while keeping God out of their lives. He writes in gushing transparency,
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."6
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[1] Norman Geisler and Frank Turek. I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 116.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1987), 1.
[3] Quoted in Phillip E. Johnson, The Wedge of Truth (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 153.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Bethesda, Md: Adler & Adler, 1985), 264.
[6] Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons," The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, 31.
