Once, There Was no Knowledge of Biological Information
One of the most popular films of all time is the "Matrix." Those who have seen the second in the series, The Matrix Reloaded, will remember the sequence where all the characters were shown to be units of software, in an environment where every object was a unit of software. One scene shows a woman being given some pill, and in order to make the audience better understand that both she and the pill are software, her body and the pill are shown in silhouette composed of green digital numbers and letters. This visual effect, repeated in several scenes of the film, was designed to get the audience to understand that the characters they were seeing were actually the products of software.
Most of those watching The Matrix Reloaded were unaware that all the bodies in the real world are actually, in a sense, very complex pieces of software.
If you wanted to transpose its information to paper, you would have to build a library large enough to cover whole walls of a big room. If you compared it to other computer operating systems like Windows or Mac OS, you would see that your "software" is incomparably more complex and superior. Besides, the operating system in your computer often shuts down or freezes and you have to restart it. It even crashes, so that you lose all your information. However, nothing happens to your body's software as long as you are alive. If there is an error in this software, another part of the program corrects it and eliminates the problem.
But the software in your body is not composed of green digital numbers and letters as inThe Matrix Reloaded, but is made up of molecules—parts of a gigantic chain of molecules called DNA in the nucleus of each cell of the trillions that comprise your body.
Your DNA data bank contains all of your body's characteristics. This gigantic molecule is composed of a series of four different chemical units called bases. Like a four-letter alphabet, these bases store the information about all the organic molecules that will construct your body. That is, these chemical building blocks are not arranged randomly, but according to particular information, divided into "sentences" and "paragraphs" that scientists call genes. Each gene describes various details of your body—for example, the structure of your eye's transparent cornea, or the formula of the insulin hormone that lets your cells make use of the sugar you eat.
The discovery of DNA is acknowledged to be one of the most important in the history of science. In 1953, two young scientists by the name of Francis Crick and James Watson determined this molecule's existence and structure. In the half century since then, a significant part of the scientific world has tried to understand, decode, and read DNA, and put it to use. One of the greatest strides in this effort, the Human Genome Project, was begun in the 1990s and completed in 2001. The scientists directing this project sequenced the human genome—that is, the totality of all human genes—and took its flawless "inventory."
Of course, the Human Genome Project was to benefit not only medical and genetic engineers, but various professionals in all fields. But an equally, if not more important result was the insight it provided about the origins of DNA. In a news item headlined "Human Genome Map Has Scientists Talking About the Divine" in the San Francisco Chronicle, this was explained by Gene Myers, who worked for Celera Genomics, the producer company of the project:
We're deliciously complex at the molecular level. We don't understand ourselves yet, which is cool. There's still a metaphysical . . . element. What really astounds me is the architecture of life. The system is extremely complex. It's like it was designed. There's a huge intelligence there.47
The information contained in DNA invalidates Darwinism's view of life as the product of random chance and destroys its materialist "reductionist" foundation.
The End of Reductionism
As we know, materialist philosophy claims that everything is just matter; that matter always has been and always will be; and apart from it, there is nothing. In order to solidify their claims, materialists use a kind of logic they call "reductionism," which states that things that seem to be immaterial can be explained in terms of material influences.
For example, take the example of the human mind, which is not something that can be seen or touched. Moreover, there is no "mind center" in the brain. Inevitably, this leads us to conceive of the mind as something beyond matter. That is, what we call "I"—the thinking, loving personality able to feel pleasure and pain, that gets upset or happy is not a material object like a table or a stone.
However, materialists claim that mind can be reduced to matter. They claim that our ability to think, love, feel regret and all other mental activities are actually products of chemical reactions among the atoms in our brain. When we love someone, it is the influence of neurochemicals in certain cells in our brain; if we fear anything, that is due to another chemical reaction. Of this logic, the materialist philosopher Karl Vogt said, "the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile."48 Bile is a material substance, but there is no proof that a thought is material.
Reductionism is a strictly logical operation. But any logical operation may rest on false foundations. One of the important methods in determining if this is so is by appealing to science. For this reason, we must pose the following question: Can reductionism—the basis of materialist logic—be substantiated in the light of scientific data?
In the 20th century, all scientific investigations, all observations, and the results of all experiments have given a resounding "No" to this question.
Dr. Werner Gitt, director at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, says this:
A coding system always entails a nonmaterial intellectual process. A physical matter cannot produce an information code. All experiences show that every piece of creative information represents some mental effort and can be traced to a personal idea-giver who exercised his own free will, and who is endowed with an intelligent mind. . . There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter. . . 49
Gitt's words state the same conclusions arrived at by the so-called Information Theory, developed within the last few decades to investigate the origin and structure of information in the universe, and accepted as part of thermodynamics. After long research, it arrived at the conclusion that information is different from matter, that it can never be reduced to matter, and that the sources of information and matter must be investigated separately.
As we saw earlier, scientists who have investigated DNA's structure have stated that it contains a "magnificent" information. Since this information cannot be reduced to matter, it must originate in a source beyond matter.
George C. Williams, one of the proponents of the theory of evolution, admits that most materialists and evolutionists do not want to accept this result. Williams had been a strong advocate of materialism for many years, but states in an article written in 1995 that the materialist (reductionist) outlook that supposes that everything is matter is wrong:
Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter. . . These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." . . . The gene is a package of information, not an object. . . In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality. . . This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.50
Reductionism is the product of the 18th and 19th centuries' unsophisticated science. This fundamental deception of Darwinism presupposed that life is so simple that its origins can be explained in terms of random occurrences. But 20th-century biology has shown that exactly the opposite is the case. Phillip Johnson, retired professor of the University of California at Berkeley and one of Darwinism's contemporary critics, explains that Darwinism has neglected information as the foundation of life and this has led it into error:
Post-Darwinian biology has been dominated by materialist dogma, the biologists have had to pretend that organisms are a lot simpler than they are. [According to them] Life itself must be merely chemistry. Assemble the right chemicals, and life emerges. DNA must likewise be a product of chemistry alone. As an exhibit in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History puts it, "volcanic gasses plus lightning equal DNA equals LIFE!" When queried about this fable, the museum spokesman acknowledged that it was simplified, but said it was basically true.51
However, these primitive and superficial suppositions all turned out to be without substance. As pointed out in this book's first chapter, even the cell, the most basic and the smallest form of life, is more complex than could ever have been imagined previously, and has been acknowledged to contain magnificent "information." It has been demonstrated how uninformed were the efforts to reduce information to matter (for example, the formula: volcanic gasses+lightening=DNA=life). Johnson explains the situation of those "reductionist" scientists who worked to reduce information to matter:
Reductionist biologists are not looking at reality, but only at life as it would have to be if the reductionist program is to succeed. It's the old story of the drunk who lost his car keys in the bushes, but was looking for them under the street lamp instead because "there's enough light to see them over here." 52
Today, more and more scientists have stopped looking for the key in the wrong place and chosen to go to the right address. Instead of vainly searching in random occurrences for the origins of life (and the magnificent information that constitutes it), they have accepted the evident truth that life is the result of a superior Creation. This knowledge has come to light especially in the 21st century, where computers and the Internet have become an important part of our lives. The outmoded 19th-century Darwinist idea that life is simple, with its lack of awareness of biological data, is an idea doomed to pass into the depths of history.
The truth is, God has created every creature on the face of the Earth and ordered everything perfectly in the flawless artistry of His Creation. He created the human body wonderfully and afterwards breathed His spirit into it. All the characteristics of human consciousness—the senses of sight and hearing, thought, feeling and emotion—did not result from the interaction of unconscious atoms, but are faculties of the spirit that God has given to human beings. In the Qur'an, He reminds people of the faculties He has given them:
Say: "It is He Who brought you into being and gave you hearing, sight and hearts. What little thanks you show!" (Surat al-Mulk: 23)
Everyone has the spirit given to him by God; and every individual is responsible to our Lord Who has created everything from nothing. In the Qur'an, God reveals the creation to those who think they have no purpose and tells them that after they die, they will rise again:
Does man reckon he will be left to go on unchecked? Was he not a drop of ejaculated sperm, then a blood-clot which He created and shaped, making from it both sexes, male and female? Is He Who does this not able to bring the dead to life? (Surat al-Qiyama: 36-40)
Notes
47- Tom Abate, San Francisco Chronicle, 19, Şubat 2001. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/19/BU141026.DTL
48- Encyclopædia Britannica. "Modern Materialism"
49- Werner Gitt. In the Beginning Was Information. CLV, Bielefeld, Germany, ss. 107, 141
50- George C. Williams. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. (ed. John Brockman). New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995. ss. 42-43
51- Phillip Johnson's Weekly Wedge Update, "DNA Demoted" April 30, 2001, http://www.arn.org/docs/pjweekly/pj_weekly_010430.htm
52- Phillip Johnson's Weekly Wedge Update, "DNA Demoted" April 30, 2001 , http://www.arn.org/docs/pjweekly/pj_weekly_010430.htm
