(Extracted from our series, The New Scientific Evidence That Points to the Existence of God, Part 3. Edited for publication.)
Dr. John Ankerberg: Let’s go to the third one that’s been proposed. What about the laws of nature? Could life, when you look at that DNA cell, could life have arisen through a law-like process of self-organization?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Excellent question. This has been where a lot of the action has taken place in what’s called chemical evolutionary theory, or origin of life research. And there was a very specific proposal suggesting that the information in the DNA molecule might have arisen because of the forces of attraction between the individual subunits of the DNA. And similarly, the proteins might have originated as the result of forces of attraction between the amino acids that form the long chains that fold up into the proteins.
This idea was first proposed by a scientist named Dean Kenyon and his colleague Gary Steinman, in a book called Biochemical Predestination. They weren’t religious Calvinists; they were talking about the idea that chemical interactions predestined the origin of biological information. And Kenyon himself came to repudiate this idea. And I heard one of the first public talks he gave where he publicly announced that he had rejected his own theory. And he did so because of a question that came to him from a student one summer right before the end of term. And then he got to thinking about it over the summer.
Biochemical Predestination was the bestselling, advanced graduate level text on the origin of life throughout the 1970s and early 80s. So I was blown away, because, you know, he was a leading figure in the field. And he announced that, not just that he had questions about the general approach of the field, but his own theory. And here’s what he came to realize, is that the DNA molecule does not lend itself to this kind of explanation. There are molecules that self-organize by mutual attraction. If we think of a crystal of salt: sodium has a plus charge, chlorine has a minus charge—NaCl—and you get this nice regular crystalline structure that arises because of self-organizational properties.
But DNA, as we said earlier, doesn’t have a nice repetitive structure. It’s not A-G, A-G, A-G, A-G, A-G, it’s a highly complex arrangement of these characters. And if you look at the molecule, what you see is that you’ve got the pentagons and the circles. That’s what’s called the sugar phosphate backbone along the outside of the molecule. And then you have the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s along the interior, and that’s the message-bearing axis of the molecule.
But notice that what connects all of these subunits are little sticks, and those represent chemical bonds. And notice in the DNA there are no sticks connecting the A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s. That means there’s no chemical interaction between them that could be invoked to explain the sequential arrangement of those information-bearing subunits.
So I have a visual analogy that might get this across in case the chemistry is a little heavy. I’m pandering to my host here, “JOHN ANKERBERG ROCKS,” right?
Now, this is a magnetic chalkboard. And in the analogy, visual analogy, the magnetic chalkboard is like the sugar phosphate backbone in the molecule. It’s the medium upon which the message is inscribed. But then there is also a message inscribed on the medium, and that is “JOHN ANKERBERG ROCKS.” But what’s responsible for the letters sticking is a bond, a physical bond, in this case a magnetic attraction. In the case of the DNA, a bond called an N-glycosidic bond. So there’s a force of chemical attraction that explains why the letters stick to the medium.
But notice we wouldn’t want to say that the magnetic letters are responsible for the information in this message. That comes from outside the system. It has an exogenous source, as one scientist puts it. In other words, I arranged the letters to spell this message. It came from a mind. And I can show that the magnetism isn’t responsible for the message, because I can rearrange these letters. We’ve still got all those magnetic forces at work, but now they don’t spell a message. Magnetism isn’t the explanation for the information; that comes from someplace else.
And what we have in DNA is a true message-bearing system where the chemistry is not responsible for the sequential arrangement of the characters that convey the message. And Kenyon realize this, and realized that therefore there wasn’t a self-organizational chemical law that was responsible for the information. It must be coming from someplace else.
Dr. John Ankerberg: I remember when, the first time we met, you were working on your graduate work. And you were coming to the conclusion, with all of these things being knocked down, that you were saying, “I think we can make intelligent design into a scientific discovery.” Why did you believe that intelligent design was needed to explain what you were seeing?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, I encountered Professor Kenyon at a conference when I was early in my scientific career, and a colleague of his named Charles Thaxton, who had just written a book titled The Mystery of Life’s Origin. And Thaxton in that book detailed many of the kinds of problems that we’ve been talking about with the attempt to explain the origin of information necessary to build the first living cell. And he, in an epilogue to that book, floated the idea that with the information-bearing properties of DNA, we were seeing evidence of what he called an intelligent cause, because we know intuitively that information is a mind product.
And so, a year later I set off to Cambridge to begin work in my graduate work, and I eventually did a PhD on origin of life biology. And while I was doing that work, I was always thinking about whether or not this idea of intelligent design could be developed into a rigorous scientific argument. And oddly, it was another Charles that really helped me crack this nut. Because Charles Darwin, in The Origin of Species, used a very special method of scientific reasoning known as inference to the best explanation.
And it was crucial for scientists trying to reconstruct events in the remote past, because we don’t get to replicate events in the laboratory if we’re talking about the origin of life, or the origin of the Cambrian animals, or something like that. So we’ve got to use detective-style reasoning to figure out what happened and what caused those events to happen.
The idea of inference to the best explanation is that you infer that cause which, if true, would best explain the phenomena in question. But that raised the question, what does it mean to be a best explanation? And Darwin had a mentor as well, and his name also was Charles, and that was Charles Lyell. And one day I was reading the title page of his famous book on the Principles of Geology, and the subtitle, long, boring, Victorian subtitle, “Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.”
And when I came across that phrase, which was crucial to Lyell and Darwin’s whole method, a light went on for me. Because I asked myself a question, what is the cause now in operation that explains the origin of digital code? Their idea was that if you want to decide what explanation best explains something in the remote past, you want to invoke a cause which is known in our present experience to be able to produce the effect in question. Makes perfect sense.
So, what’s the cause that we see in our present experience that produces digital code? And I realized that there was only one. Chance didn’t do it; necessity didn’t do it; chance plus necessity didn’t do it. But we do know of a cause that produces information, and that cause is intelligence, or mind. And so, when you think on the quote we’ve cited a few times from Bill Gates, “DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than any we have ever created,” that’s highly suggestive. Because we know from our uniform and repeated experience, from our knowledge of causes in operation, that there’s one cause that produces digital information, and that is intelligence.
In fact, whenever we see information, again, whenever we see it, it always comes from a mind, not a material process. Whether we’re talking about computer code, or an alphabetic text, or a hieroglyphic inscription, or the information we embed in radio signals, it always comes from a mind.
So, using Darwin’s method of reasoning, his inference to the best explanation method, I concluded that the best explanation for the origin of information necessary to produce the first cell is not chance, or necessity—physical chemical necessity—or the combination of the two, but instead it’s intelligent design. And that’s a conclusion that’s based on our uniform and repeated experience, the basis of all scientific reasoning. And, in fact, the twist here is that I actually used Darwin’s method of reasoning to make the argument for intelligent design.