Life’s Book

The amazing design and complexity of living things provides strong evidence for a Creator. We know from the Bible that God rested from (i.e. finished) His creative work after Day 6 (Genesis 2:2,3) and now sustains His creation (Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:3).

One aspect of this sustenance is that God has programmed the “recipe” for all these structures on the famous double-helix molecule DNA. This recipe has an enormous information content, which is transmitted one generation to the next, so that living things reproduce “after their kinds” (Genesis 1, 10 times). Leading atheistic evolutionist Richard Dawkins admits: “there is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.”

Just as the Britannica had intelligent writers to produce its information, so it is reasonable and even scientific to believe that the information in the living world likewise had an original compositor/sender. There is no known non-intelligent cause that has ever been observed to generate even a small portion of the literally encyclopedic information required for life.

The genetic code is not an outcome of raw chemistry, but of elaborate decoding machinery in the ribosome. Remarkably, this decoding machinery is itself encoded in the DNA, and the noted philosopher of science Sir Karl Popper pointed out: “Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation. This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code.”

So, such a system must be fully in place before it could work at all, a property known as irreducible complexity. This means that it is impossible to be built by natural selection working on small changes.

DNA is by far the most compact information storage system in the universe. Even the simplest known living organism has 482 protein-coding genes. This is a total of 580,000 “letters”—humans have three billion in every nucleus. A pinhead of DNA could hold 100 million times more information than a 40 gigabyte hard drive.

—Adapted from “DNA: Marvellous Messages or Mostly Mess?” by Jonathan Safarti, in Creation 25(2)27 March–May 2003, published by Answers in Genesis, www.AnswersInGenesis.org