Ken Boa – Science, Faith, and Reason

We’re going to be exploring a huge topic this morning, so you’re going to have to put on your seat belt and get ready for a ride. We’re going to be looking at all kinds of aspects of science and so forth. But the thing I want to explore is when we’re talking about science, faith, and reason, the typical mindset is, how can you put science with faith?

And I’m going to be arguing, first of all, that the actual origin of science occurred in a context of Christian faith. In fact, science as we know it only appeared once in human history. Yes, there was technology in Greece and Babylonia and China, but there was no such thing as science as we know it until the appeared around the Renaissance in Christian Europe and it was this Christian synthesis that actually provided the foundation for the idea that the universe is rational and that it can be studied instead of like the eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism, where, would’ve never originated, because there, the philosophy was that the universe is an illusion, or in polytheism, it really wouldn’t be something one would explore because you’d worship it.

But here, in a Christian understanding, you had the idea of a logos, a mind who organized and ordered all things together, so, far from being inimical, the fact is that science and faith work together. In fact, I’m going to say that it’s a reasonable faith. When I consider the progenitors of science and look at people, for example, like Copernicus, and Galileo, and William Harvey, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, and all these greats who, these were all committed believers. These were people who had believed that God was there, and they saw that actually their science was a mode of worship. May I also mention that it’s an illusion to suppose that the atheist lives by science or by reason and the Christian, for example, by faith. Both embrace a worldview that requires faith to understand.

In fact, the atheist has to believe that universe is ordered and rational and reasonable, and that his mind can actually correspond to what he sees out there. But actually, atheism doesn’t provide a philosophical basis for doing that because your mind is just a byproduct of random processes in the first place. But that’s a faith proposition. I want to suggest that what’s happened in our time is science has been redefined, and it’s been redefined to become not just the scientific method, but the scientific method plus what I call naturalism or materialism, which is a philosophy that says that ultimate reality is nothing but matter and energy and time and space, and that there’s nothing transcendent, that there is nothing actually spiritual at all. Certainly no God. And I’m suggesting that we need to return to science to where it originally was, which was namely a method without naturalism that was always using inference to the best explanation, which means go where the evidence takes you, and if it implies design, so be it. But the quest to say that if there’s a possibility of design, you’re going to kill science is, I think, completely wrong. The error that’s being made, I fear, is that people suppose that as soon as you use design theory, now you’re going to get real theological on me. But actually, it turns out that there are numerous and growing numbers of design theorists who in fact aren’t not even theists.

When I think, for example, of some of these writers who explore this whole thesis, you see a number of people who aren’t even theists. I think I just wrote a thing by, read a little work by atheist Professor Thomas Nagel. And it was intriguing. He put it this way. He says, “it potentially can be scientific to argue that the data of DNA and life points to an intelligent designer, even a science cannot tell you the identity of the designer or what is going on in the designer’s mind.”

Hey, I’m with him. The bottom line is this, usually what’ll happen is people, as soon as you put an intelligent designer that they say, ah, he’s one of those he’s one of those creationists, he’s one of those fighting fundamentalists, which is the, you know, fundamental, that’s the new F word in our culture. But really all I’m looking at is a spectrum. And as spectrum goes, you can have total theistic evolution, theistic evolution, all the way down, and you can go to a six-day creationism. That’s not what we’re discussing this morning. The bottom line is where these all agree is in fact, that there is something more that the evidence points to that is evidence of design. As to the nature of that designer, that’s not what we need to discuss. We can agree on that. And this includes people even now who are atheists.

Einstein, for example, would be in that camp. He believed that there was in fact a super intelligence. Not that he was a theist, he was more of a deist. But the idea here that he still believed that, or a recent conversion by Antony Flew, who was the Richard Dawkins of the last couple of, a few decades ago, and Flew, only a few years ago, I believe it was at the age of 92, I mean, I’m pretty oppressed. It may have been 82, maybe he was a young guy. Yeah, that’s, that’s probably what it was. At that age, he concluded that “I was wrong. All these books I’ve written on atheism turned out I claim to be wrong.”

I’m impressed with a man who’s willing to go where the evidence takes him. When he finally began to understand the genetic code and realized that there is more information in the six feet of DNA that’s contained in each one of your 70 or so trillion cells, and that information consists of more than that of several Encyclopedia Britannica, he was impressed. How on earth could that be put there? Where does information come from? So now he’s concluded that there is in fact a super intelligence, a God. I think he’s more of a deist than a theist. But still, the point is that this man has moved more and more in that direction, and this is happening more and more frequently.

So, I don’t buy the guilt by association argument. Usually, what people try to do to denigrate this idea of design is they’ll just throw it all in and use guilt by association and ad hominem arguments. And I don’t think that that works. My view is let’s go where the science takes us and let’s, let’s not worry about your theological or metaphysical presuppositions. Let’s just go, and I call it inference to the best explanation. You explore the material. And frankly, we already know how to distinguish accident and design. And it’s a scientific method. It’s evident, for example, in forensic science or intellectual property law or insurance claims investigation, or whether it’s design in cryptology or artificial intelligence or archeology or SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or in random number generation. All these require an ability to determine whether in fact there is enough complexity specification to warrant that it is in fact something that is designed or whether the thing was accidental. We already can discern that, and we have very clear ways of understanding that.

So, my point here is it’s not creationism in disguise, but rather it’s simply taking the evidence and going where it takes us. And there are predictions that we can make when we embrace the concept of design theory, predictions that can be helpful. For example, when we look at the DNA, only 2% of the DNA in your body actually is related to the genetic dimension of working and forming proteins. The rest of it, a lot of people have called junk DNA. I think that’s rather arrogant. They call it junk because they don’t know what it does. Let me give you a very firm prediction. I can promise you with no doubt that in the years to come, we’re going to discover more and more that so-called junk actually has an elegant function. It constantly works this way.

I can predict that their universe will continually be found to have more rich complexity and information and elegance as time goes by. Not less. Darwin’s Black Box was the name of a book by Michael Behe, who is a molecular biologist, and he called it Darwin’s Black Box because he was saying, look, to Darwin, the cell was just a lump of protoplasm. It was just a big blob. And so, the supposition that the cell could evolve was not a problem for him. Now that we’ve come inside of that box, and through very, very complex methods, x-ray crystallography, nuclear magnetic resonance and other forms, we’ve actually been able to go inside and discern the nature and the structure and the complexity in the cell. And it turns out to be exquisitely elegant beyond our comprehension, more complex than the city of Birmingham.

That not, that may not be the best analogy, I know, but the point is, one of your cells is like a whole city, and it’s rich. We’ve never come up with anything even close to that in terms of our own computer systems. It’s rich and wonderful and elegant. So, we can certainly say that, and I can predict in a number of ways that certain things are going to be discovered, that we’re going to discover more and more evidence for it, and that’s what we’re living in. I think it’s an exciting time where we, in the last, oh, four, four decades or five decades, have seen all kinds of new things that we never even imagined before. And I want to explore four of those things with you this morning. So let me just walk you through, and I’m just going to give you the distilled essence of four of these critical evidences that in my mind points much more consistently to the idea of a designer than it would to something that is simply an atheistic, mechanistic materialistic universe.

The first of these four things that I see in a growing momentum of evidence, because I’m going to be claiming that scientific naturalism is in fact a failed paradigm. And more and more scientists are beginning to see this. But the problem is though, when you pull the rug out of that, where do they go? Because Some of them don’t want to go to the idea of creation or of a God or so forth, so they’re in a rough situation.

But let’s consider, for example, evidence for the universe beginning. That’s the first of these four evidences.

We live in a time where, for the first time, we can categorically say that the universe actually had a beginning. There’s an if proposition. I put it this way, if anything now exists, something must be eternal or else something not eternal must have emerged from nothing. Did that make sense?

Let me,  there are only four options. Either the universe is an illusion, so nothing exists, or the universe is the something that’s eternal. Or third, the universe emerged from nothing. Or fourth, the universe was created by an eternal being. And I’m not going to go into much detail here, but the universe as an illusion argument really never really impressed me very much because, you know, even, even the full-blown Hindu who believes that all of life is an illusion, he looks both ways before crossing the street. The fact is, if it’s an illusion, it’s a pretty consistent illusion. Nobody can live consistently with that notion. It lacks rational coherence. It’s like saying, I can’t speak a word in English, but I just said a sentence in English. You see my point? It defeats itself. It doesn’t, it’s not livable. It really doesn’t make sense.

Well, the main claim over a number of centuries by scientists who wanted to believe that the universe was eternal, because they didn’t want to believe that there was a beginning event because some of them had a disposition not to believe in the possibility of a divine agency. So, they wanted to believe in what was called a steady state theory, whereby essentially the universe could be seen to be eternal, that matter and energy always existed. And that was a popular view among astronomers, especially at the early part of the 20th century. It was the majority view.

Astronomer Fred Hoyle even postulated that somehow there had to be some continuous creation going on to keep the thing having enough energy so it wouldn’t wear out. These are faith propositions. But Edwin Hubble, when he discovered that the universe was actually expanding uniformly in all directions, it led to George Gamow and others to talk about Big Bang Theory and the idea that there’s actually as you go backwards in time, that there was in fact a major event that occurred, which by the way, has been increasingly authenticated.

For example, in 1965, two researchers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs actually accidentally discovered a cosmic background radiation that was uniform. And it gave evidence for the actual beginning of the cosmos, scientifically. And then the Kobe satellites that went out, that measured cosmic background radiation actually amplified our understanding of this. And then more recently, a W-map satellite has actually given us so much detail about that, and it’s so consistent with the understanding of this hot big bang, that we can actually now determine things we never dreamed of before. Because of the consistency of this, the science moves us clearly in this direction.

In fact, what they discovered with the W-map is something really bizarre. You’re going to like to know this, this is going to change your day. All right? First of all, it turns out that 73% of the cosmos is dark energy, and 23% of it is dark matter, leaving only 4% of what we would call ordinary matter. In other words, we don’t have a clue what 96% is. We call it dark energy and dark matter, as if that meant anything. Do you see my point? 96%, we don’t even know what it is. It’s becoming more and more mysterious, as Alice in Wonderland said, curious, curiouser, and curiouser. And the more we learn, the more bizarre it really becomes.

And so, what we find then is that the universe even they’re trying to avoid this claim by saying, well, maybe it existed because it pulsated, that’s what it is. Yeah, it keeps coming back and it another big bang, and then a big crunch and another Big bang which doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, which I won’t go into this morning, but the bottom line is, each big bang would have less energy than the one before, and ultimately it would be a big blob rather than a big bang. I mean, this thing in fact is going to expand forever. In fact, the evidence now that we’ve discovered is that the further out it goes, the faster the expansion rate. So that’s related to this mysterious force. And so the point here is that we can now discern very clearly through science that there is a beginning point, which is very consistent with the biblical understanding.

Do you know what that means? It means that matter, energy, space and time did not all exist forever. Now, I love a big objection that a lot of some especially the new atheists are using. You know what they think is the killer question. Well, then where did God come from? That is a sophomore objection that my 4-year-old grandson even understands how to answer that. He says, God didn’t come from anywhere, nobody made him. It’s like asking who made the unmakeable being. You see, in fact, what I’d asked them is where did matter and energy come from? But the point here is God, the point is, is if God created space and time and matter and energy, then to ask where he came from is to try to put him right back into space and time and it doesn’t work. He’s the unmakeable being. But that’s another story.

The point here is that we can see that the universe really is consistent with the idea of a beginning event, which is precisely what you would’ve predicted if you read the Book of Genesis. And you can easily see that. Another argument that I use, I have several arguments for this, which I’m not going to go into, but the you’ll love this, the second law of thermodynamics, which is a law that relates to increasing entropy. And the idea here is that things left to themselves tend to move toward chaos and disorder. Maybe you’ve noticed this. You know, you just leave your house alone for about 30 years and let’s see what we come back to. You see, it’s not going to get more organized. It’s not going to put a new wing out there. Your car’s not going to develop a new fuel, better fuel injection system if you just leave it sitting in the garage. It requires constant energy and infusion of energy to keep things together. By the way, that’s even true of relationships. Everything seems to erode, everything left to itself seems to fall apart.

And the idea of this law is that while the total amount of matter and energy is a constant, that’s the first law, nevertheless, the amount of useful energy, the ability to do work, actually is diminishing as time goes by. And if you plotted a curve, it turns out that that useful energy goes down as an exponential decay curve. And if you point backwards, it points backwards to a beginning event where it was like a clock that was wound up, and this clock was perfectly organized, rich in and perfect energy, so that it was all useful. And now it’s wound, it’s going down. But it couldn’t be going back forever because absolutely, because ultimately, we would have none at all. And in fact, if you look ahead on that curve, it means that there’d be the heat death of the universe if there was not a divine intervention, that the universe left to itself is not, doesn’t have a pretty picture in the future.

Now, I believe that the universe is not going to end that way because of the divine intervention of God. But my bottom line here is to say that we live in an exciting time where we can explore and understand how these things are moving us in directions we could have never known there. The universe had a beginning, and this has profound implications for the way we look at science and the way we look at faith and the way we look at reason. And again, I, for me, my heart cannot rejoice in what my mind rejects. It’s got to be a reasonable faith. Everybody lives by faith. The only question is what’s is it a worthy object of their faith? You see the concept there.

When I get into an airplane, that’s a faith proposition, is it not? When you think about this? You may understand even the laws of aerodynamics and lift and so forth, but still you’re taking a big chance when you go in that plane, at least so it might appear. You hope that particular airline has a good record. And the point is, but you get on the plane, you don’t normally even look to the left to see who’s in there. There could be a couple of gorillas in there for all you know, but then you, you go in there, you strap in your seat, and then you commit your life to someone you don’t even know as you go. And then there’s that final point of no return when you take off. But the point is, we all live by faith. And one person might have white knuckles the whole trip. This is their first airline trip and they’re terrified. The other guy’s a businessman who’s been doing it so many times, he doesn’t even bother looking out the window. But here’s the interesting thing. The one had great faith and one had very little faith, both get to the same destination.

You see, the issue is not how much faith you have, but the object in which you put your faith. And that is why I say it’s a reasonable faith. And that is why I would get on an airplane. If I was with Podunk Airlines that didn’t have a good record, then I might reconsider that. You see the point here about faith.

Let me move on from the first, which is the fine tuning of the cosmos to which is rather the beginning of the cosmos that it had a beginning to the fine tuning of the cosmos. And I just want to describe how the universe is like a clock, like a watch that’s perfectly organized, and it’s finely tuned. When Carl Sagan wrote about the cosmos and, and made the claim that we might have, for example, millions of habitable planets in our own galaxy, they only had a couple of parameters that would limit your possibility of life. Since that time in 1966, dozens and scores and then now hundreds of fine tuning parameters have been discovered. And though every year we’re discovering new parameters that are so delicate, so perfectly balanced, that as one writer put it, it looks like some super intellect monkeyed with the laws of physics and chemistry because It’s the only way you could get the thing to be so perfectly tuned. Again, I’m not going to go into detail here, but let me just explore some of the things.

How is it even possible for you to even have molecules, let alone life? The only way you’re going to have atoms and then molecules, is to have the perfect molecular bonding that requires just the right amount of electromagnetic force. Because if it was a little bit larger or if a little bit smaller, you wouldn’t be able to have atoms. The ratio of the electron mass to the proton mass is exquisitely fine-tuned. Just the tiniest bit more, tiniest bit less, you couldn’t have atomic material. The strong nuclear force has to be within an extremely precise quotient. If it were either one 10th of a three tenths of a percent stronger or just 2% weaker, you couldn’t have life because you couldn’t have molecules. And I’m not going into the reason why this is true, but we’ve discovered more and more that these are the case. The weak nuclear force, which has to do with the ratio and the rates of radioactive decay. We’re discovering that that too has to be finely tuned. Any, anymore, any less. You could not have the galaxies, you couldn’t have stars, you couldn’t have the molecules that you need. The force of gravity, the strength is extremely refined and very close indeed. The neutron, if we were just one 10th of 1% more massive or one 10th of 1% less massive, again, you would not actually be able to have the elements necessary for life.

Let me give you another example. Getting the right electrons. The number of electrons in the cosmos is so close to the number of protons that is actually within one part and 10 to the 37. That means that you have 10 a one with 37 zeros. And it’s the fraction is one in that chance. I wouldn’t want to bet on the lottery of that one. You see, let me give you an illustration of how fine-tuned that is.

Suppose we took our us government debt, which is an increasingly depressing topic. And what we could do is represent that as if we had a square mile of dimes, you could represent our debt with less than 10 feet high of a square mile of dimes. That’s a lot of dimes. But let me give you a better idea of what we’re dealing with one chance in 10 to the 37th, the distance to the moon is about 239,000 miles. And if you had dimes covering not a square mile, but all of North America to that, go to the height of the moon, 239,000 miles, but that’s, yet, that, wait, that’s not all. A billion North Americas with that many dimes. And your mission is to choose from one of those billion and then get the right dime in one of those piles. That’s getting us to where we’re, that’s the fine tuning we’re talking about. It’s a statistical monstrosity. Even worse, in fact, is the expansion rate of the universe. If the expansion rate of the universe were one part and 10 to the 55th faster or slower, we would not actually be able to have a cosmos.

It would’ve either been a big crunch immediately or would’ve gone off and you wouldn’t have had galactic formation and the possibility of stellar formation as well. We’re talking about a figure that’s so refined that it’s impossible to describe. The best I can come up with was Hugh Ross’s illustration.

Imagine you had, for example, a smooth glass surface and you have to take a pencil and your job is to balance a pencil without any external forces, okay? No external supports vertically with its point standing up. Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing to do? Now, multiply that by a million and you’re getting the idea here. The odds aren’t good. The probability is extremely amazing how refined and how fine-tuned it really is.

Or another example would be the idea of stellar masses that if the ratio of the electromagnetic force constant to the gravitational force were changed in one part and 10 to the 40th, then you’d either have only small stars or only large stars and you wouldn’t be able to have the kind of star we need to have life, which is a middle-sized star.

My bottom line is you keep adding these and adding these and adding these and a conservative estimate of the probability of having the universe with just all the right parameters where you could even have the possibility of life, I’m not even talking about the evolution, just the possibility of having a planet with life is about one part and 10 to the 215. And I’m being conservative now, by the way, suppose there are 10 to the 22nd planets. I’m being very generous with that estimate. That’s a big lump number of planets. Okay? So, you, you subtract 22 from 215, you still have a monstrosity. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly evident that it may have taken a universe this big in this old to create the context in which we could be here and have this discussion on one planet. But that’s another matter. I won’t push that on you. But the bottom line is the elegance. The fine tuning is extraordinary.

Furthermore, you’ve got to have just the right a galaxy on one of the recent ones, I think it was discovered two years ago, was that in your galaxy, your Milky Way galaxy, our sun has to be within a 4% band. If it’s a little bit closer in or closer, further out, 96% of the galaxy couldn’t sustain life. Only a little teeny 4% band. And you happen to be in right, that right band. And on and on it goes. It has to be the right kind of galaxy. It has to be a spiral. And there are only 5% spiral galaxies. It has to be the right supernova event rate. It has to be carbon-based life. Silicone won’t do, because it only can hold about a hundred amino acids together. It has to be carbon.

You have to have an abundance of carbon. You have to have the right kind of star. You have to have a star that’s precisely the mass of the sun, the precise rotation period. It has to have the exact mix of heavy elements and lighter elements. It has to be middle aged. It has to have the perfect luminosity. It has to be stable and on and on and on it goes. What we’re looking at now is fine tuning that is in growing evidence for design because the probability is such that it won’t work otherwise. And this is one of the reasons why a number of astronomers and physicists and cosmologists are moving more in this direction. Even though they may not want to embrace perhaps the spiritual or theological implications, they’re beginning to say that this is where you look.

For example, it’s not unreasonable to say when you compare the possibility of a Mount Rushmore, and you look at the Mount Rushmore and you have one explanation is to say that those formations got there by erosion and by wind and chemicals and so forth. That’s a possibility. I wouldn’t put my money on it. The fact is, there are clear evidences that there are some things that can show design because it has order. And I want to talk about that in just a minute.

A third evidence besides the fact that the universe had a beginning and that is extremely finely tuned, is the problem of life itself. As I mentioned earlier, it turns out that the cell is exquisitely complex. And the idea as Michael Denton observed is that undirected processes could somehow turn dead chemicals into all the extraordinary complexity of living things. He says that’s no more or less than the great Cosmogenic myth. It’s a myth he says. And more and more evolutionists, including the atheist Thomas Nagel, are saying that he says. He’s for a long time been skeptical of the claims of traditional evolutionary theory to be the whole story about the history of life. This is a growing problem because we do discover what, what would it take to get one living cell? And you cannot appeal, by the way, to mutations and natural selection because that only applies to living systems.

So, you have to go back to the chemistry and the molecular biology and so forth. And when you’re looking at that, the possibility of creating and synthesizing a simple protein becomes absurd. A protein consists of hundreds of amino acids and that these amino acids, which form in nature, whenever they appear in nature, turn out to be left-handed and right-handed about the equal amount. But in your body, every cell, every protein of your body is all left-handed. Now that imagine getting a protein of 400 amino acids out of nowhere, the probability of getting all left-handed is not a good one. And it would be like taking a fair coin and tossing it 400 times, and you get heads every time. Would you get a little suspicious that maybe the coin is rigged after a while? You begin to get the idea.

But we’re not talking about a 400, we’re talking about thousands of these things. Everything in life is formed out of the left-handed, even though in natural appearances they can be formed either way. Moreover, they have to connect together in these complex chains. And these chains have to be such that the more you have together, the more unlikely it is for them to stay together. And these chains in turn have to be in the right sequence.

There are 20 kinds of amino acids. You have an alphabet of 20. And if it’s not in their meaningful sequence, then it doesn’t correspond symbolically to in fact, what it’s meant to create. Namely a protein. It’s a language, and it has to be rich and right. And even there, that’s nothing compared to a DNA molecule or an RNA molecule. And getting those. And those, even if you could synthesize proteins, and even if you could synthesize DNA, you’re still not anywhere close to a cell because life’s minimum complexity, the minimum genome size requires the simultaneous occurrence of all the essential gene products. You’ve got to have RNA and DNA and complex carbohydrates to form the cell wall. You have to have the lipids to form the membrane. There can be no proteins without DNA and RNA, but there can be no DNA and RNA without proteins.

And it goes on and on and on. As one writer put it, it was Franklin Harold in The Way of the Cell. He describes a single cell organism as a “high-tech factory, complete with artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automatic assembly of parts and components, error fail safe and proof reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and molecular construction and also a capacity not equaled in any of our most sophisticated and advanced machines such that it could be capable of replicating its entire structure within a few hours.”

Did you follow that all? I’m not making you, I’m not wanting you to understand all this. I’m just trying to say, give you the impression, the impression I want you to have. It’s a lot more meaning, more amazing than we thought.

It was thought by Darwinists in years, in the past that yeah, the body’s elegant and so forth, but the cells are simple. They thought they’d be like Legos. The cells. Turns out each Lego is like the complexity of a body, and it goes on. And, and the more we learn about the cell, the more extraordinary it becomes. In fact, now there are some writers who are, are actually appealing to what they call directed panspermia. You know what that means? This is desperation. We’re talking about, talk about faith here. It means that they’re saying that, okay, it couldn’t have evolved on the earth. I admit that. It’s too complex. Maybe it came from outer space. What’s the problem with that? It’s not a hard thing to figure out. You know, sometimes some scientists don’t make the best philosophers.

The bottom line is, okay, where did it come from there? You just push it back one level and you still have the problem. It had to be synthesized. And if you’re appealing to something without a designer, you have a real problem.

Let me move on to my fourth and an illustration. There are numerous ones we could look at. It’s called information theory. I want you to understand that information, that your body is rich in information and that again, there’s no sudden infusion of complex information through undirected natural processes. And let me describe this in a couple of ways for you. Sure, we have a lot of naturally occurring patterns. Weather, hurricanes and tornadoes. Snowflakes and crystals are beautiful. They have patterns, stalagmites and stalactites, sand dunes, and fractals and chaos theory. You have beautiful patterns that you can see that go on forever. They’re mathematical descriptions of elegant patterns, no problem with that. But these patterns don’t have information because a pattern is different from a design.

For example, unlike a fractal, we’re dealing now with, if you’re dealing with music, or maps, or instructions, coding systems the basic operating system of a computer, now you have something very different. Human language is this way, computer language. And the DNA. DNA turns out to be a language and a linguistic system that’s rich in information. And the language always needs to have a symbolic representation of a physical thing. So, for example, music is a symbolic representation of these movements of sound waves. And we can say that a map of Birmingham, if you have a map, that map is a code. It’s a, it has information and it’s a map of the city, but it’s not just a map. It corresponds to, it relates to a reality.

If we talk about the idea of languages, it’s the same way. That DNA encodes all information necessary for life. The double helix structure has an alphabet. It has information, it creates characters. It has nucleotides, 3.2 billion of these things that are like words and then characters. And then these combine together to create little words. They’re called codons. And these words come together and they form genes. And the genes move to sentences and then paragraphs, and then chapters. And then the whole genome is your body, rich in information. As I say, the information in one of your 70 plus trillion cells is equivalent to more than several sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is, I think, pretty impressive because we have to ask ourselves where does information come from?

What makes a message? If it symbolically represents something other than itself, it requires a speaker, which is a transmitter, and a listener, which is a receiver, and it contains the elements of language. Information must have an alphabet, it must have syntax. It must have meaning, and it must have intent.

For example, I can say he didn’t steal that car, and that has an alphabet. The word it consists of that the smaller things build up to words, the words to syntax and grammar. And then symbols, symbol, symbolic context where for example, you could say, he didn’t steal that car is a very different meaning, isn’t it, than he didn’t steal that car. You with me? He didn’t steal that car. And so forth. So, the same sentence could mean something different according to the intention.

Which brings me to a fourth level. Suppose, hey, you’ve got a green light. That has to do with mine because what does that mean? It could mean that you have a green light. You’re get, get moving. The, the light’s no longer red or you gotta go for the project you see or in, or you’re holding a green light bulb, any number of things, but you’re dealing with intention. You have to have a mind to comprehend that. The lower cannot account for the larger, the larger always can account for the lower, but the little bits cannot actually account for the larger.

In fact, let me suggest that there are three fundamental entities and we’re beginning to discover this more and more clearly. Norbert Weiner, who was an MIT mathematician, he was the father of modern cybernetics. He put it this way. Information is information. Neither matter nor energy. Any materialism that fails to take account of this will not survive one day. So, the point is this idea that you’re dealing with intentionality, there’s a dimension of information and information is independent of matter and energy.

I’m having this talk with you. You’re recording it. It’ll be digitally recorded. What can we do with that? You can turn it into an MP3. You could send that as an electronic transmission as a document effectively. You can send that to another computer. The computer can open it up, you can hear it, or you could, someone could transcribe it. You could then read it, you could print it out. You could see it on the, but here’s the interesting point. Whether it’s energy or matter like a book or images of light from a computer screen. Here’s the point. It’s the same information. You with me?

Information transcends matter and energy. It’s a third ultimate. And it cannot be reduced to matter and energy, it has to do with intentionality because you cannot have information without intention. And this is where we move into the atheist riddle so simple that a child can understand it, but so complex, an atheist can’t solve it. Show me a message that doesn’t come from a mind. And this is, this would be my challenge. If you can show me a message, information that doesn’t come from a mind, I’ll be impressed because you can’t have it.

Oh, but what about random mutation? I refer you to the www.randommutation.com. Try it out. It’s fun. Start with, plug in any sentence. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy fence. Okay? Plug that in. And then watch the fun as you mutate it. And you’re going to discover that the sentence doesn’t become more complex. It always becomes more and more chaotic it leads to total lack of information. It becomes a googly gob. And the fact is that you don’t have information with mutations, it’s systematically noise. And noise isn’t something you want to have. It requires intentionality to build up the possibility of information. And that’s what I’m suggesting here, that you have systems that cannot be built in small degrees, that they’re non incremental, that they are, that they all fit together. Your body consists not only of your cells and your tissues and your organs and but also systems. And all of these things, synergistically fit together in ways whereby the larger cannot be accounted for based on the smaller.

I’ve talked about this business of information with some atheists. One of them said, yeah, but maybe eventually we’ll find some scientific explanation, some materialistic explanation for how we can get information. You know what I call that? Promissory materialism. Where people are supposing somehow that, and like Stephen Hawking supposing, well, maybe the universe did always exist. Maybe there’s quantum foam or maybe I’ll use negative time. But the point is that actually this is faith. You see, the facts, the two greatest laws of physics, the first and second laws of thermodynamics show that the universe cannot be eternal. And what they’re willing to do is to come up with exotic theories that are mathematical only with no empirical warrant and they’re actually claiming that we can hold onto that even though it violates the most fundamental laws of physics who’s living by faith now.

And I say we’re living in exciting times because the evidence is moving us more and more and I predict that the evidence will continue to move us more and more to the elegance and the sublime order and organization that we will finally conclude that there’s going to be have to be a paradigm shift. Your DNA is the most exquisitely engineered communication protocol in existence.

Let me just tie this, the threads together for you. If Darwinian materialism or scientific materialism is true, then there are five inescapable conclusions. The first would be, of course, that there is no God. That ultimate reality is merely matter and energy and space and time, although where did it come from cannot be answered. The second implication is that there’s no life after death. All of human life is one episode between two oblivions. Oh yeah. But he’ll be remembered by the people who love them. Don’t we ever hear that, that statement.

Woody Allen in a Rolling Stone Magazine interview was asked, do you want to live on in the hearts of your friends? He said, no, I want to live on in my apartment. I mean, what, what, what good would it do for me if a million people were singing my praises morning, noon and night? What good will that do me? You see, and that’s the point. What happens when your friends die? Now you are not going to live on anywhere. You see there’s got to be something more. Yet we have an aspiration that I believe is wired in us by the living God from whom and through whom, and to whom are all things, for more than that. But there would be no life after death. And basically, then you’re food for the worms. G. Gordon Liddy once said that on an interview and he said, and he said that, but when he went back home, he said, is that really true? Am I food for the worms? And it so bothered him when he said that on that interview and yet he knew that was the implication of his philosophy. He began to read the Bible and he eventually became a Christian as a result of that, it’s a very interesting inquiry.

Not only would there be no God and no life after death, but there’s no absolute foundation for right and wrong. It’s just anybody’s guess. And you can’t say that Hitler was wrong because the guy was just being consistent with his, basically the, the project that he had was Darwinian socialism or a project whereby you would eventually eliminate those weaker races just for the Aryans. And what would we say would be wrong about doing that if evolution’s the only thing, in other words, survival of the fittest? If you buy his premises, the guy was just living coldly realistically with the logical implications. And what would be wrong to say that?

A lot of people today claim to be in fact relativists, there’s no such true for you, but not for me. Is that statement true for you but not for me, though is the problem. You see, you can tell your bank this. You try this way. But hey, sir, your, your check was, your checks bounced. No, no, I have 20,000 in my account. No, sir, you actually only had 200. Well, that’s true for you, but not for me. Try living that way. You see, it doesn’t work that way.

Or a guy says ethics, morality is no real absolute. It’s just what’s good for you. Yeah, I tried this when I got my iPhone 3G, and I was on the line there. You know, I just imagined there are probably several relativists in the line. Wouldn’t it have been fun for me to go to the head of the line and just stand there and watch the fun as people get furious and suddenly become their, every one of them would become a moral absolutist. Immediately they say, what do you think you are? Well, basically we’re in a Darwinian world and might makes right and I’m here. You want to do anything about it?

You see, the bottom line and how could they say that was actually not a correct thing? We all can, we live in a way that’s consistent with the idea of truth and beauty and goodness, even though our culture and postmodernism is telling us to go otherwise. Furthermore, there’d be no absolute foundation for meaning and life at all. Life would be an absurdity. It’s a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing as Macbeth would put it. There’s no meaning to it, but it’s got to have more than that, we are in a quest for meaning. We’re in a quest for purpose. We’re in a quest for reality. And people cannot live consistently without some form of meaning.

And guess what we discover is the most meaningful thing of all? It’s relationships. And to recognize then the possibility of life going on because that is the ultimate foundation for meaning. That there is somebody, there’s someone and that this in fact is not a cosmic accident, but it is in fact intention. And it is the Word Who created us. And more than that, what we could not have learned from science, we learned from scripture that the Word Who holds the cosmos together, Who holds the strong nuclear force of every atom stays together and so forth. That Word is the One Who also loves us.

By the way, another implication if, if of materialism is that people don’t have free wills. They’re just products of their selfish genes. Hey, I’m not, don’t bother, don’t, don’t bother me about it was my ask my selfish genes. I just did that because I was determined, I was programmed again. Well, you were programmed to write that book about the selfish gene. You see the point here? People would not have free will, but we cannot live as if we do not have free will. And so, I’m suggesting here that when you back off a bit, I’ve claim, and I’m a follower of Jesus, and I claim that I have seen in the last 60 years science moving more and more consistently in each field, every field, toward a consistent vision of an ordered universe that points beyond itself to a design and a designer. And that is the ultimate foundation for life, for purpose, for meaning, for life after death, to give us proper relationships, first with God, then within ourselves, and then with others. And that is what life is meant to be. God wants us to overcome the alienation that we had with Him and within ourselves.

Kind of put it together as I conclude with these, these two little sentences from Thomas Merton. “We’re not at peace with one another because we’re not at peace with ourselves, and we’re not at peace with ourselves because we’re not at peace with God.” That summarizes it rather well. Once you actually embrace the One for Whom you were made and embrace His truth and His Word, then you discover that the self now has been, it will be transformed from the inside out. And you’ll have shalom, you’ll have peace with God, peace within. You know what that means? Then you can have shalom peace with relationships because you can approach relationships now out of a context of meaning and hope and purpose and other-centeredness.

Let me close with a quick prayer.

Father, we thank You for our time together and I pray that as we explore these extraordinary themes and topics and look at this rich and wonderful unimaginably elegant cosmos that You’ve made on every order of magnitude, I pray that our vision of You would expand because we know that a big God leads to small problems at the end, but a small God leads to big problems at the end. And I pray that we would put our hope first and foremost in Your unchanging character and Your promises that flow out of it so we would have stability and hope and purpose and meaning in this world. We thank You in Jesus’ name. Amen.