Illogic Primer Quotes Clippings Books and Bibliography Paper Trails Links Film

Jay W. Richards on Biological Information

"The Contemporary Argument for Design: An Overview" in Passionate Conviction, eds. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig (B&H Publishing: Oct 1, 2007), 71.

Then there is the niggling problem of the origin of biological information, which stubbornly transcends its chemical medium in the same way the letters and sentences of a book transcend the chemistry of ink an paper. We see this starkly in molecular biology where the presence of information encoded along the NA molecule look suspiciously like an an extraordinarily sophisticated computer code for producing proteins, the three-dimensional building blocks of all life. Move up a level, and we find complex and functionally integrated machines that look inaccessible to the Darwinian mechanism. Moreover, such structures look much like the systems produced by intelligent agents, who can foresee a future function and bring it into being. ¶ Then there is the three-dimensional complexity of animal body plans, which so outstrips our understanding of the informational systems present at the lower levels. Finally, there are human agents themselves, which are so unexpected in materialistic terms, that many actually try to deny their existence — another deliverance of materialist reasoning that has obvious logical problems.