Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Information and Intelligent Design

Here we go again. ID vs Darwinism. Oh joy! What fun eh?

Well hopefully, I'm going to present some simple but adequate evidence that you should see as proof to the fact of an intelligent designer behind all life.

Here I'll try to put as simply as possible so that anyone can grasp the meaning.
I'm goin to use some of Peter Marshalls' stuff to do so. He's an electrical engineer who wrote a book called Industrial Ethernet. He works, as do I, with information theory, computers, coding and languages etc. And, like myself, he has recognized the implications of those particular domains with regards DNA - also a code. Not a binary code! (Shannons' information theory is good but being mostly binary based it does not apply well to DNA which is not binary based.)

Ok, take Marshalls simplistic statements first :
quote:

1. All languages, codes, protocols and encoding / decoding mechanisms come from a mind - there are no known exceptions
2. DNA is a language, a code, a protocol, and an encoding / decoding mechanism
3. Therefore DNA came from a mind.

This is so simple child can understand it. But more than anything else it's true!

This statement could also be formed even more simply, as follows:
All languages, codes, protocols and encoding/decoding mechanisms - including DNA - come from a mind

Nothing like language or code arises naturally or by natural processes. It MUST be designed.
There is simply no other source! Material molecules, by themselves, contain no information. For example, a hydrogen molecule contains no information in itself. They just are what they are. But DNA does contain information - volumes upon volumes of information!

quote:

Three Fundamental Entities: Matter, Energy & Information
Information can be transmitted & stored via matter and energy, but is neither matter nor energy.


ID (intelligent design research) uses well known principles in it's efforts to provide evidence for design in nature: design pattern recognition, code recognition, abductive reasoning (experienced-logic-based knowledge), common sense evaluations, etc....

These are all used by us every waking hour of everyday of our lives - intuitively and unconsciously if not purposely.

DNA is a language, some would call it an encyclopedia, others an instruction book - this is so well known now that it needs no proof.
quote:

"In the Beginning was the WORD. And the WORD was with God and the WORD was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything that was made." - john 1.1
The Word -- logos -- the divine form and source of all language itself, "coded" the whole univserse.

Marshall says,
quote:

No naturally occuring molcule possesses the properties of information. Nature does not produce any kind of code, encoding/decoding mechanism or symbolic relationships at all; everything in nature represents only itself.

DNA, on the other hand, represents a complete plan for a living organism. DNA is an encoding / decoding mechanism that contains code, or language, representing the organism.
...
In Christian theology, God himself is the essence of words, language and expression. The Biblical theology of God squarely matches everything that information science tells us about reality.
Now if ID is not science, then information theory and and every other science, like forensics, informatics, etc., that depends on it is not science either!

So why do so many well respected intelligent scientists so adamantly reject ID as science? Because they do not understand information theory or they ignore it and pretend it has no relationship to life origins! But DNA is CODE, a complex coded information system. And that alone refutes the whole slew of anti-ID arguments from base one. When understood, it becomes clear that random mutations+selection could not produce anything like what we see in DNA.

Symbolic code does not and indeed cannot arise randomly.