'Seeking' God

[Mister Agenda]

The intelligent design argument is very persausive when it comes to DNA. There just isn't any naturalistic explanation to account for it. The information contained in DNA is better explained by a mind than by an undirected process. Why? Because it is not just like a language, it *is* a language.

It has an alphabet, grammar, meaning and intent. It has error correction and redundancy. It is a digital information storage and retrieval system. It also transcends its medium. You can take the information in DNA and transfer it to computer disk with no loss of information. Information simply only comes from minds.

Unlike language, you cannot substitute the 'letters' of DNA with other molecules and get the same result. In language, the symbols are arbitrary, not so in chemistry. You can analogize DNA to a language, but it isn't actually a language. There is no alternate way to specify the same organism by 'translating' DNA onto a disk: the information will never give you a living organism unless you 'translate' the disk back into DNA. And 'Information simply only comes from minds' is affirming the consequent, and therefore fallacious. It's like saying 'design simply only comes from humans'. It assumes what you're trying to prove. Someone saying that 'information only comes from minds', observing information that can't be traced back to a mind, and concluding that it must be produced by a mind anyway, is doing neither science nor logic.

Your hope that science can account for this by naturalistic processes is misplaced. There is nothing like the world of the cell in nature. It's not just the same old same old on a smaller scale. This is something entirely new, and far more complex than darwin even imagined.

Darwin didn't even know cells, or genes, existed. He knew there must be a mechanism of heredity with the properties of high (but not perfect) fidelity for his theory to be correct, and it turned out to be so. As for the complexity of cells, that explains why it took longer for cells to appear after the earth cooled than it took for all life since to evolve. In regards to your explanation, why did God wait so long to 'poof' the first cell into existence?

Here are a couple of quotes:

Instead of revealing a multitude of transitional forms through which the evolution of the cell might have occurred, molecular biology has served only to emphasize the enormity of the gap. We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive....

If only there were a theory that explained how that gap could be bridged....

Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells.

Excellent evidence of common descent.

In terms of the basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth. For those who hoped that molecular biology might bridge the gulf between chemistry and biochemistry, the revelation was profoundly disappointing."

Dr. Denton, Ph.D (Molecular Biology),
An evolutionist currently doing biological research in Sydney, Australia

Now we know that the cell itself is far more complex than we had imagined. It includes thousands of functioning enzymes, each one of them a complex machine in itself. Furthermore, each enzyme comes into being in response to a gene, a strand of DNA. The information content of the gene (it's complexity) must be as great as that of the enzyme it controls.

A medium protein might include about 300 amino acids. The DNA gene controlling this would have about 1,000 nucleotides in its chain, one consisting of a 1,000 links could exist in 41000 different forms. Using a little algebra (logarithms) we can see that 41000 = 10600. Ten multiplied by itself 600 times gives us the figure '1' followed by 600 zeros! This number is completely beyond our comprehension."

Frank Salisbury,
Evolutionary biologist

Intelligent design is the only coherent explanation for DNA which is available. So your utter dismissal of it, when you in fact have nothing to replace it with, is ridiculous. Another informative video:

It is true that single-celled organisms never stopped evolving (why should they?), so current single-celled organisms are not 'primitive' in any sense. After sixty or seventy years of studying abiogenesis with purpose we are able to synthesize an entire bacterial genome, insert it into a denucleated cell, and have it live and reproduce. Nature ran the same experiment without purpose in 'labs' around the planet over half-a-billion years. Early cells would have a tough time in today's environment, but, to be fair, most modern life would perish in the world they arose in.