Although this DNA code was eventually deciphered many of its elements are still not well understood. But what has been found has profound implications for the Darwinian theory of evolution which maintains all living beings have evolved by natural processes through mutation and natural selection.
As scientists began to decode the human DNA molecule, they found an exquisite “language” composed of some 3 billion genetic letters. This amount of information in human DNA is roughly equivalent to 12 sets of The Encyclopaedia Britannica— 384 volumes’ worth of detailed information that would fill 48 feet of library shelves. Yet the actual size of the DNA molecule containing all this information is only two millionths of a millimeter thick. According to molecular biologist Michael Denton, a teaspoon of DNA could contain all the information needed to build the proteins for all the species of organisms that have ever lived on the earth, with “enough room left for all the information in every book ever written” (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1996, p. 334).
Dr. Stephen Meyer explains: “The coding regions of DNA have exactly the same relevant properties as a computer code or language” (quoted by Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 2004, p. 237). As Lee Strobel goes on to explain: “The data at the core of life is not disorganized…it’s complex and specific information that can accomplish a bewildering task—the building of biological machines that far outstrip human technological capabilities” (p. 244).
We have in the genetic code an immensely complex instruction manual that has been designed by a source far more intelligent than human beings. Even one of the discoverers of the genetic code, the agnostic and now deceased Francis Crick, after decades of work on deciphering it, admitted that “an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going” (Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature, 1981, p. 88).
In spite of all the efforts of all the scientific laboratories around the world working over many decades, they have not been able to produce so much as a single human hair. How much more difficult is it to produce an entire body consisting of some 100 trillion cells. Dr. Meyer considers the recent discoveries about DNA to be the Achilles’ heel of evolutionary theory. He observes: “Evolutionists are still trying to apply Darwin’s nineteenth-century thinking to a twenty-first century reality, and it’s not working….I think the information revolution taking place in biology is sounding the death knell for Darwinism and chemical evolutionary theories” (quoted by Strobel, p. 243).
One of the world’s most famous atheists, Professor Antony Flew, admitted he couldn’t explain how DNA was created and developed through evolution. He now accepts the need for an intelligent source to have been involved in the creation of the DNA code. “What I think the DNA material has done is show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinary diverse elements together,” he said (quoted by Richard Ostling, “Leading Atheist Now Believes in God,” Associated Press report, Dec. 9, 2004).
