Thinking Out Loud with Alan Shlemon - DNA’s Intelligent Design

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

Alan offers a piece of evidence that suggests that the DNA in your body is intelligently designed. Download the mp3...

Technology is advancing at a very rapid rate. Today, scientists now can store information in a DNA molecule just like we do with computers or DVDs and thumb drives. DNA's capacity to store information is vastly greater, though, than any DVD or any thumb drive that your company's IT guy would carry. In fact, recently, Harvard researchers were able to cram 700 terabytes of data onto one gram of DNA. That's 148,936 DVDs of data, right? I mean, you could binge watch your favorite TV shows for the rest of your life and you'll never see a rerun. In fact, that's only the tip of the iceberg because microbiologist Michael Denton explains DNA's true storage potential. Listen to what he says. He writes, the capacity of DNA

to store information vastly exceeds that of any other known system. It is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand Or to put it another way, the information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on the planet, a number of approximately 1,000 million, could be held in a teaspoon, and there would still be left room for all the information in every book ever written, end quote. Okay. So did you catch that? A teaspoon of DNA, which is of course smaller than the size of a typical thumb drive, can hold all the design blueprints for every species on earth and every book ever written. That is amazing.

every species on earth and every book ever written. That is amazing. Now, the implications of this new technology are fascinating because based on this discovery, I was wondering if the researchers have been able to draw any kind of conclusions about DNA. And I think personally, there are at least two truths that become incredibly evident. First, the reason why scientists are able to cram DNA full of information is that it's already working as a storage medium for information. Now, information, by the way, is not merely random bits of data. For something to qualify as information, it must be complex and specified. Now, by complex, I mean that the arrangement of its contents isn't simple enough to be explained by chance. Now merely being complex, though, isn't sufficient to qualify the data's information.

The contents must also be specified. This means that the content's pattern communicates a meaningful message. For example, it has a set of instructions, or it contains data that depicts something, or it provides blueprints for the construction of something. These are all examples. Now, DNA is both complex and specified. The arrangement of information is incredibly complex, making it impossible to account for its arrangement merely by chance. I'm sorry, making it impossible, I should say, to account for its arrangement merely by chance. I'm sorry, making it impossible, I should say, to account for its arrangement merely by chance.

Now, furthermore, DNA is highly specified, containing the design blueprints to manufacture the proteins that make up your body. Therefore, the content of DNA qualifies as information. Now, second of all, the source, the source of that information in DNA must be external to the medium in which it's stored. All right, let me give you an example here. Consider someone writing a letter to a friend with an ink pen. Notice that neither the ink in the pen nor the letters in the page are the source of the message, right? There's nothing

intrinsic to the ink, the paper, or the characters that creates what's being communicated. The ink doesn't naturally arrange itself into letters and the letters don't naturally arrange themselves into sentences that are meaningful to the reader. The message is in the mind of the author, and he or she communicates that message using the medium of the ink, the letters, and the paper. Now, the same is true of the bits of zeros and ones that make up binary computer code, right? Those two characters, zeros and ones, they don't naturally arrange themselves into a sequence on your computer. Instead, there are programmers who write code to make computer programs. And again, the source of that code is in the minds of the computer engineers, and they use the characters of computer language to write their program.

Notice the information goes from their minds and then into the computer code. And the same is true of DNA. Instead of the two-character code of zeros and ones that is used by computers, DNA uses a four-character code that we represent with the letters T, G, C, and A. Now, with these four characters, DNA can store the design blueprints for every part of your body. Now again, the four letters are not in and of themselves the source of the blueprints, okay? They don't automatically arrange themselves into the proper sequence that results in the creation of proteins. The source of the plan for these body parts must be external to the DNA letters. And that means there is something or someone who takes the ideas from their mind and puts it into DNA. Even if you don't know who that someone is, we can be confident there is a

mind behind what's coded in DNA. And that's because you can't get computer programs arising by chance without a programmer. It follows then that you can't get the design blueprints for your body, something magnitudes more complex than a program, arising by chance without a designer either. So this is why I say we are not left without evidence of God's hand in creation. That's why, in fact, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 1.20 that, and he says, quote, Since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse. End quote. Indeed, we are without excuse.