Summit Lecture Series: Intelligent Design with Sean McDowell, part 7

One of the leading explanations for the origin of information within the cells of the human body for those who do not believe in intelligent design is “Chance”. In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins uses the word “luck”. He says that we if we just get lucky, then Darwinian evolution could take over and solve all our problems.

Personally, I simply don’t have enough faith to believe that this could happen by chance.

But Dawkins explained his theory through what he called the “Monkeys Typing Shakespeare Theorem”. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins hypothesized that if you had enough monkeys, typewriters and time, eventually one of the monkeys would sit down and type out the works of Shakespeare. You see, he’s trying to get information from an unguided, essentially purposeless process.

Well, is this plausible within our universe?

Seth Lloyd, an MIT Computational Quantum Physicist, tried to quantify exactly how much information could come about by chance, assuming that the age of the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old and as vast as we think. He concluded that four lines from one work of Shakespeare could be produced:

“To be or not to be,

That is the question.

Whether it is nobler

In the mind to suffer.”

Given the entire vastness of the universe this is the entire sum of information that Lloyd says could arise by chance alone.

In 2003, Dawkins’ “Monkeys Typing Shakespeare Theorem” was put to the test. They put six monkeys in a habitat with computers and typewriters to see what would come out of the minds of these primates. The first monkey picked up a rock and started bashing a computer. Another monkey climbed on top of one and relieved himself on it. But, before the end of the experiment was over, they actually produced six pages of text. It was a string of a’s, l’s, m’s, along with the occasional j and a few s’s.

Not a single word.

You see, it’s very obvious that when we have information, we know the best explanation is that it comes from a mind – not by chance.

If we were to walk along the beach in California and see the words “John loves Mary” written in the sand, we wouldn’t assume that the writing was created by a chance parting of the sand during an earthquake or that a series of waves ebbed and flowed to the point of drawing those perfect letters into the sand and forming the words “John loves Mary”. The same goes for wind, erosion, or any natural occurrence. Instead, we would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only plausible explanation is an intelligent mind went to work and put those letters in the sand.

As Stephen Meyer wrote in Signature in the Cell:

“Whenever we find specified information and we know the causal story of how that information arose, we always find that it arose from an intelligent source.”

In other words, if we receive a text message and it’s legible (not a butt-dial or text created by an infant who got a hold of someone’s phone), you know that there’s an intelligent mind at the other end sending the text to you. Likewise, if you see a book, you know that there’s an author; if you see a newspaper, you know that there’s a journalist; if you see letters in the sky, you know that there’s a sky writing airplane pilot – not that the clouds came together by chance to spell out “Drink Coke”.

So, we see information within DNA – not the equivalent of “John loves Mary” or even a book, but the equivalent of 8,000 books of information – so the best explanation seems to be an intelligent mind.

It’s my opinion that those who reject Intelligent Design do not have a clue of how life could come from non-life – not a single good idea backed up with evidence of how information could come from a blind process.

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