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Claim ID: BIO-IS02
Claim: Blueprint for Life Originated in the Mind of an Intelligent Designer
Summary: Scientists in many fields recognize the connection between complex information and intelligence. The mere presence of complex biological information such as DNA and epigenetics strongly suggests the involvement of an Intelligent Designer.
Description: Circular arguments are very subtle and convincing. We fall for them all the time.
To be caught unwittingly in a circular argument is to be duped into thinking that a conclusion is valid while in fact the opening clause of the argument is nothing more than a restatement of the conclusion. Circular arguments are a restatement rather than a proof. They are a form of tautology.
Here are a couple of circular arguments pertaining to the Christian faith.
Circular Argument 1:
The Bible is true, so you should not doubt the Word of God.
... or, You should trust God's Word because the Bible is true.
This first circular argument rests on a prior acceptance that the Bible is true. To establish that God's Word is trustworthy, we must first prove the Bible is true.
Circular Argument 2:
God does not act to end human suffering, so he must not be a caring, benevolent god.
... or, God is uncaring and unbenevolent because he does not end human suffering.
This second circular argument assumes that God's inaction toward alleviating human suffering proves God is not disposed to doing good. To prove this conclusion false, we must establish that God is most assuredly capable of alleviating human suffering but chooses not to at this point in human history.
This leads us to consider the question, is the biological intelligence for life (DNA and epigenetic information) the result of the process of natural selection or is it the product of a Divine Designer? Where does it find its origin?
At its core, Darwin's theory of evolution is a circular argument as it relates to the underlying intelligence required for cell reproduction. Based on the universal principle of natural selection, we are duped into thinking that everything just evolved somehow.
The basic argument is that since evolution depends on natural selection which depends on cell reproduction which depends on some underlying intelligence or mechanism to support reproduction, then this intelligence or mechanism must have come about by some form of evolution in order for Darwin's theory to work.
For most people, this sounds reasonable.
At the time Darwin established his theory in the mid-1800's, cells were merely regarded as "black boxes". Until the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, biologists had no idea what was involved in cell reproduction and the importance of genetics. With the discovery of DNA and epigenetic information, the assumption that everything just evolved is no longer valid despite what Francis Crick said.
"Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved." Francis Crick cited by William Dembski, Science and Design.
To prove this argument is a fallacy, we establish the following two facts. First, only living organisms can naturally select because they are capable of affecting change and reproducing. Second, DNA is not a living organism and cannot reproduce. It is simply a sequence of nucleotide pairs. From these facts we conclude that DNA is incapable of evolving as Darwin's theory would imply.
So how did the original biological information come about? How did this chain of nucleotide pairs organize itself into an ordered set of codes to precisely define the blueprint of each species?
Aside from the process of natural selection, we are left with three possibilities for the creation of the initial biological information.
It is implausible to assume that biological intelligence originated by spontaneous generation or chemical evolution [BIO-EV09] [BIO-EV10]. Biological intelligence is both unfathomable and innumerable.
This sentiment is best expressed by Francis Crick in his book Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature.
"An honest man, armed with all he knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the comment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth’s surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imagination too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, especially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against." [REF-CRK01]
To assume we can theorize with any degree of certainty about something we have only begun to understand is naive. Before we can answer the question why something exists, we must fully understand what exists. Failure to understand the true nature of life will ultimately undermine the credibility of any theory about the origin of life.
The concept of biological intelligence coming from an alien planet is preposterous [BIO-EV09]. This theory assumes a number of conditions that cannot be tested empirically and have not been observed in the fossil and geological records. It is contrived.
Moreover, panspermia does not answer the question of the origin of life. It evaded the question all together by suggesting that adding a couple of billion years to the age of another carbon-based planet justifies the plausibility of either spontaneous generation, chemical evolution, or some other cause for the origin of life.
Because of the implausibility of the previous two explanations, we are left with the explanation that relies on the intellectual intervention of a transcendent god. This conclusion is based on the following assertions:
Therefore, biological intelligence must have pre-existed the genesis of life itself. It existed in the mind of a transcendent god before the foundation of creation.
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