Life: Accident or Act? The Teleological and Design Arguments for God’s Existence Part 3

In an 1871 letter to famed British botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin explained his best guess of the origin of life on earth: 

It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.i 

Now, over 150 years since Darwin penned this letter, scientists have made very little progress in producing life by duplicating the conditions of Darwin’s “primordial soup.” As we noted in last month’s column, for the past 70-plus years, biologists have tried and failed to produce living cells, or anything even resembling them, by reproducing the famous “Miller-Urey experiment.”ii 

Why is this so? Phillip Johnson explains, “Even if one assumes that something much simpler than a bacterial cell might suffice to start Darwinist evolution on its way—a DNA or RNA macro-molecule, for example—the possibility that such a complex entity could assemble itself by chance is still fantastically unlikely, even if billions of years had been available.”iii 

Johnson and other proponents of intelligent design offer two related lines of argument to support this claim: the existence of complex specified information in all living cells and the existence of irreducibly complex systems in all living things.iv 

By “complex specified information,” we mean information which has a very low probability of occurring by chance and which fits an independently defined pattern. For example, if I receive a text message consisting of gibberish (“dobl30*%#”) from an unknown source, I could reasonably conclude the text was somehow randomly generated and accidentally sent to me. On the other hand, if my wife sends me a text message which reads, “Go to the store and get milk, butter, and eggs,” I would have little reason to worry the message was sent in error because it came from a source well known to me, it contained clear instructions in standard English, and it repeats or approximates other messages I have received from her in the past. 

By “irreducible complexity,” we refer to any biological system, such as the human eye, composed of interacting parts, where the absence of any part would cause the system to fail. 

Regarding complex specified information, Johnson says, “First, life consists not just of matter (chemicals) but of matter and information.”v And the amount of information found in even the simplest of living cells is mind boggling, a fact not unknown to evolutionists. Richard Dawkins, for example, acknowledges, “Each nucleus (in a cell) contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content, than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together. And this figure is for each cell, not all the cells of the body put together.”vi  

Let’s do the math. An average adult human body is composed of approximately 30 trillion cells. Each cell contains (a conservative estimate of) 750 megabytes of genetic information. That is a total of 22.5 quadrillion megabytes of information in a single human body! For comparison, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., has an estimated 21 billion megabytes of information. One human body contains over one million times as much information in its cells as the entire Library of Congress! 

“Second,” says Johnson, “information is not reducible to matter, but is a different kind of ‘stuff’ altogether. Any theory of life thus has to explain not just the origin of the matter but also the independent origin of the information.”vii While DNA carries a huge amount of information, it is merely the medium of the message, like a hard drive storing data, not the message itself. If there were only inert matter in the beginning, where did the information come from? 

“Third,” writes Johnson, “complex specified information of the kind found in a book or a biological cell cannot be produced either by chance or at the direction of physical and chemical laws.”viii Therefore, “The DNA of all living creatures … is front-loaded with an enormous amount of coded information, and no mechanism exists that can evolve information.”ix 

As we pointed out in last month’s column, in the 1960s respected biochemist Dean Kenyon developed his theory of “chemical affinity,” which claimed that amino acids have a natural chemical attraction to each other which causes them to bond into long chains. These chains supposedly formed proteins, which then self-assembled into living cells. 

If Kenyon’s theory were true, the first DNA could have been produced by chemical laws, contradicting Johnson’s third assertion. However, Kenyon renounced his theory when he could not explain how the first proteins could have been assembled without the aid of DNA instructions. He concluded that life must come from an intelligence able to produce an enormous quantity of complex information. 

The second line of argument supporting intelligent design has to do with irreducibly complex systems in all living things. As we pointed out in Part 1 of this series, what was lacking in evolutionary theory in the 1850s was a natural cause which would account for apparent design in nature. Charles Darwin supplied that with his theory of “natural selection” (“survival of the fittest”). Life forms best equipped to survive in harsh or changing environments do survive, passing their abilities on, genetically, to their descendants. Eventually, enough of these abilities (mutations) will produce entirely new creatures, without the need for an intelligent Designer. 

Because evolution is “blind” (undirected), Darwin understood it to be a painfully slow process, requiring eons of time and myriads of small steps as each mutation is tested by the environment for its ability to enhance the survivability of the mutated life form. Mutations which did not possess survival value would eventually perish with their life forms. 

However, Darwin recognized his natural selection theory was potentially susceptible to serious criticism. He writes, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case.”x 

This is where the argument from irreducible complexity enters the discussion. Proponents of intelligent design maintain that some organs are so complex that they could not have developed as Darwin claimed, by undirected mutation over eons of time, for then the organ would have lacked functionality for much of its existence and could not contribute to the survivability of its host. 

A classic example of this problem is the human eye, which consists of over two million functioning parts. That makes it second only to the brain in complexity. Most people are familiar with the basic, five-step process by which the eye transmits visual images to the brain: 

Step 1: Light reflects off an object and enters the eye via the cornea, a clear dome that covers the front of the eye and bends light as it enters the eye. 

Step 2: The light then travels through the pupil, the dark opening in the center of the eye that opens and closes in response to light brightness. 

Step 3: The light moves on to the lens, a transparent structure which bends the light again, causing the image to turn upside down. 

Step 4: The light is focused on the retina, the light-sensitive membrane that lines the back of the eye. It transforms light rays into electrical impulses. 

Step 5: The electrical impulses are then sent through the optic nerve, a bundle of nerve fibers that contain more than one million nerve cells, to the brain. 

However, within the process outlined above, there is an even more complex biochemical process which is necessary for vision. Biochemist Michael Behe explains: 

When light first strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11 cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in the shape of retinal forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior, making it stick to another protein called transducin. Before bumping into activated rhodopsin, transducing had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with activated rhodopsin, the GDP falls off and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin.xi 

Behe continues, describing several more complicated biochemical reactions which must be completed before an electrical signal is transmitted via the optic nerve to the brain. The point he makes by this example is, “Each of the anatomical steps and structures that Darwin thought were so simple actually involves staggeringly complicated biochemical processes that cannot be papered over with rhetoric.”xii 

Put another way, if all these moving parts and complex chemical processes must be working in unison for the eye to see, how could the eye develop, piece by piece, over thousands of years as Darwin theorized? What survival benefit comes from an eye that cannot yet see? 

Some Darwinians have responded to this challenge of irreducible complexity by proposing scenarios whereby primitive vertebrates could have developed “camera-type” eyes from a spot of light-sensitive skin by accumulating small changes over eons of time.xiii 

Perhaps the most famous of these scenarios was proposed by Dr. Dan-Eric Nilsson and Dr. Susanne Pelger of Lund University in Sweden.xiv Starting with the assumed light-sensitive spot, they theorized that random mutations made the spot more and more eye-like, improving its vision and, therefore, the survivability of its host. Altogether, they calculated that a camera-type eye could have evolved in 1,829 steps over a period of just 364,000 years! Evolutionist Richard Dawkins was elated by the paper because their time estimate was merely “a geological blink.”xv 

However, proponents of intelligent design are quick to point out that the Nilsson-Pelger paper was not an example of natural selection. The mutations they simulated happened in an order devised by the authors, not by some truly random process. Mathematician David Berlinski explains, “[Darwinian} principles demand that biological change be driven first by random variation and then by natural selection. There are no random variations in Nilsson and Pelger’s theory.”xvi Consequently, the authors did not have worry about their evolving eye hitting an evolutionary dead end. 

Moreover, Nilsson and Pelger admit that their estimate of 364,000 years to evolve the eye ignores the requirement of an evolved brain to make use of that eye: “Although reasonably well-developed eyes are found even in jellyfish (Piatigorsky et al., 1989), one would expect most lens eyes to be useless to their bearers without advanced neural processing.”xvii Consequently, the entire process would become much more complicated and time-consuming as both the eye and the brain (and who knows how many other organs to support them and the circuitry to connect them?) had to develop in concert with each other to confer a functional advantage to the host. On top of that, the host would also have to evolve a behavioral response to its newfound visual ability in order to gain an advantage which would enhance its survivability. Darwin’s “numerous, successive, slight modifications” seem to have grown much more complicated than he envisioned. 

A third problem for the Nilsson-Pelger theory is their assumption that numerous helpful mutations enhanced the development of the eye. In fact, most mutations are either neutral or harmful. Rarely does a mutation produce the beneficial changes assumed in this model. 

At most, Nilsson-Pelger shows how the eye might have developed gradually. However, it does not show that Darwinian evolution adequately explains the development. 

Thus, we concur with Michael Behe when he says: 

To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity. Rather, they were planned. The designer knew what the systems would look like when they were completed; the designer took steps to bring the systems about. Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity.xviii 

To Be Continued