See this blog post I just wrote, that you’re reading right now? This blog article is proof of the existence of God.
| Before you read/watch/listen to “If You Can Read This I Can Prove God Exists,” read THIS first. (700 words – 2 minutes) – then come back and continue reading. Thanks. |
Yeah, I know, that sounds crazy. But I’m not asking you to believe anything just yet, until you see the evidence for yourself. All I ask is that you refrain from disbelieving while I show you my proof. It only takes a minute to convey, but it speaks to one of the most important questions of all time.
So how is this message proof of the existence of God?
This web page you’re reading contains letters, words and sentences. It contains a message that means something. As long as you can read English, you can understand what I’m saying.
You can do all kinds of things with this message. You can read it on your computer screen. You can print it out on your printer. You can read it out loud to a friend who’s in the same room as you are. You can call your friend and read it to her over the telephone. You can save it as a Microsoft WORD document. You can forward it to someone via email, or you can post it on some other website.
Regardless of how you copy it or where you send it, the information remains the same. My email contains a message. It contains information in the form of language. The message is independent of the medium it is sent in.
Messages are not matter, even though they can be carried by matter (like printing this email on a piece of paper).
Messages are not energy even though they can be carried by energy (like the sound of my voice.)
Messages are immaterial. Information is itself a unique kind of entity. It can be stored and transmitted and copied in many forms, but the meaning still stays the same.
Messages can be in English, French or Chinese. Or Morse Code. Or mating calls of birds. Or the Internet. Or radio or television. Or computer programs or architect blueprints or stone carvings. Every cell in your body contains a message encoded in DNA, representing a complete plan for you.
OK, so what does this have to do with God?
It’s very simple. Messages, languages, and coded information ONLY come from a mind. A mind that agrees on an alphabet and a meaning of words and sentences. A mind that expresses both desire and intent.
Whether I use the simplest possible explanation, such as the one I’m giving you here, or if we analyze language with advanced mathematics and engineering communication theory, we can say this with total confidence:
“Messages, languages and coded information never, ever come from anything else besides a mind. No one has ever produced a single example of a message that did not come from a mind.”
Nature can create fascinating patterns – snowflakes, sand dunes, crystals, stalagmites and stalactites. Tornadoes and turbulence and cloud formations.
But non-living things cannot create language. They *cannot* create codes. Rocks cannot think and they cannot talk. And they cannot create information.
It is believed by some that life on planet earth arose accidentally from the “primordial soup,” the early ocean which produced enzymes and eventually RNA, DNA, and primitive cells.
But there is still a problem with this theory: It fails to answer the question, ‘Where did the information come from?’
DNA is not merely a molecule. Nor is it simply a “pattern.” Yes, it contains chemicals and proteins, but those chemicals are arranged to form an intricate language, in the exact same way that English and Chinese and HTML are languages.
DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and structures very similar to words, sentences and paragraphs. With very precise instructions and systems that check for errors and correct them. It is formally and scientifically a code. All codes we know the origin of are designed.
To the person who says that life arose naturally, you need only ask: “Where did the information come from? Show me just ONE example of a language that didn’t come from a mind.”
As simple as this question is, I’ve personally presented it in public presentations and Internet discussion forums for more than four years. I’ve addressed more than 100,000 people, including hostile, skeptical audiences who insist that life arose without the assistance of God.
But to a person, none of them have ever been able to explain where the information came from. This riddle is “So simple any child can understand; so complex, no atheist can solve.”
You can hear or read my full presentation on this topic at
http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
Watch it on video:
http://evo2.org/perry-speaks/perryspeaks.html
Matter and energy have to come from somewhere. Everyone can agree on that. But information has to come from somewhere, too!
Information is separate entity, fully on par with matter and energy. And information can only come from a mind. If books and poems and TV shows come from human intelligence, then all living things inevitably came from a superintelligence.
Every word you hear, every sentence you speak, every dog that barks, every song you sing, every email you read, every packet of information that zings across the Internet, is proof of the existence of God. Because information and language always originate in a mind.
In the beginning were words and language.
In the Beginning was Information.
When we consider the mystery of life – where it came from and how this miracle is possible – do we not at the same time ask the question where it is going, and what its purpose is?
Respectfully Submitted,
Perry Marshall
Full Presentation and Technical Details (please review before posting questions or debates on the blog, almost every question and objection is addressed by these articles):
–“If you can read this, I can prove God exists” – listen to
my full presentation or read the Executive Summary here:
http://evo2.org/ifyoucanreadthis.htm
–“OK, so then who made God?” and other questions about information and origins:
–Why DNA is formally and scientifically a code, and things like sunlight and starlight are not (Please read this before you attempt to debate this on the blog!!!):
http://evo2.org/blog/information-theory-made-simple and http://evo2.org/faq/#code
-The Atheist’s Riddle: Members of Infidels, the world’s largest atheist discussion board attempt to solve it
(for over 4 years now!), without success:
Where Did Life And The Genetic Code Come From? Can The Answer Build Superior AI? The #1 Mystery In Science Now Has A $10 Million Prize. Learn More About It, Here – https://www.herox.com/evolution2.0
While I agree with your conclusions as they are laid out and find this discussion stimulating and helpful for resolving the conflicts which you outlined as preventing a sane discussion in other forums, I do have a question about your use of entropy as an argument. I’m not sure that entropy indicates that the universe will eventually reach an equilibrium state and end. An equilibrium state is reached when there is no more active energy in a CLOSED system, which is an abstract construct with clearly practical applications. But, in the real universe, there are no known closed systems (except, possibly, at the singularity of a black hole), since space continues to expand at every point in the universe. Hence, the complexity and volume of information in the universe continues to grow even while local systems tend towards an equilibrium state. I’m not exactly sure how this would relate to your arguments, but it occured to me while reading that your use of entropy as an argument didn’t take this into account. The expansion of space is the engine of creation, and continues to this day. Although it does also occur to me that while the universe expands, the DENSITY of complexity/information in the universe as a whole may be declining and such might be related to some fundamental physical ‘constant’, such as G or entropy.?
Can you point to a known source of negative entropy in the universe, that is counteracting the laws of thermodynamics?
Perry:
Lets say that it is agreed that some sort of “Source” created DNA. Now, lets say that this source is several dimensions, timestreams, timelines and quantum universes removed from our own, and DNA made its way to this one, and began to form into living, self-aware beings.
And eventually some of those beings found their way to Earth, genetically manipulated the DNA of existing lifeforms, and created homo sapiens sapiens. And then through a series of events, they were the basis for the establishment of ‘religious belief’ on this planet for those lifeforms.
http://www.crystalinks.com/ufohistory.html
Now, to a primitive society, a more technologically advanced one would seem like ‘god’ to them, or some sort of supernatural, all powerful entity. Because that’s all they could compare it to, what they knew and were aware of up until then. Now, some of the smarter humans knew to keep the highly advanced knowledge and technology that they got from the aliens to themselves. Imagine the kind of power you would have today if you could teleport. So they hid the actual source of the happenings around them, and attributed them to a ‘supernatural’ cause, rather than what it was, in order to keep the illusion that they were the only ones that could connect the rabble to this ‘supernatural superpower’.
So: God makes DNA -> DNA arrives in this Universe -> Lifeforms based on this DNA grow at whatever rate wherever -> Aliens arrive on earth and create humans -> Humans create the concept of ‘supernatural entity’ based on the obvervations of a primitive society looking upon one with much more advanced technology -> Humans start to reach towards a level of technology where they themselves are now capable of manipulating DNA.
Now, tell me how does ‘the creator of DNA’ automatically equal ‘christian god with known set of confusing laws, scriptures, story of murdered son, etc’ ?
Even if ‘god’ created DNA:
-it did not directly create humanity.
-it did not create religion/religious belief/guidelines/rules of conduct/etc
-it did not create morality. (unless I am mistaken and you can show me a code sequence in all DNA that governs the ‘morality’ of the lifeform, whatever that means)
Bottom Line:
I’ll agree with you that that DNA is created by God. Ok, so how does this affect your life? or mine? Does it make an iota of difference? Will God pay your bills from that day forward? I just agreed with you and accepted your theory. And absolutely nothing changed in my life, so could you tell me how it changes yours?
Or will it just make you feel better about yourself that the stuff you were told about when you were a kid about the burning bushes and talking snakes is in some way ‘validated’ so YOU feel validated and feel like you matter?
If you’re a deist or you believe that ‘god’ is really an alien, then none of this really changes your life.
However when you observe that with very simple assumptions, Genesis 1 matches modern cosmology tit for tat (see http://www.evo2.org/genesis1) then the implications of that are rather different.
You DO matter. I DO matter. What kind of life you live matters.
And God loves YOU very much. In a deep and personal way.
Dear Mr Marshall,
Do you agree that “all coded information for which we know the origin has a designer” in no way equates “all coded information has a designer”? The origin of DNA being what you are investigating, you cannot infer that DNA requires a designer from “all coded information for which we know the origin has a designer” since we do not know the origin (since the origin is what we’re looking for) . For you to be able to use the premise “all coded information has a designer” you’d have to show this is true for all coded information (because it’s not necessarily a given), including DNA, thus DNA being designed would need to be a proven premise to your premise, rendering your argument circular. In effect, manmade binary systems and languages do not exclude the possibility of a thought independent information systems. And naturally, if information sources such as DNA can be sustained by nature, it is only natural that human beings, being the fruit of natural processes, could tap into that potential.
I would suggest that nature is slightly anthropomorphized to make it accessible to our minds. Seeing DNA as a information system is one way amongst others to see it. One could be so reductionist as to say that the interaction of DNA and the rest of the cell is simply a combination of chemical interactions.
Please tell me if I’ve missed something.
My syllogism says:
1. The pattern in DNA is a code.
2. All codes we know the origin of are designed.
3. Therefore we have 100% inference that DNA is designed and 0% inference that it is not.
I am not saying that we KNOW DNA is designed. I’m just pointing out that we don’t have any experimental reason to make any other assumption.
This is not anthropomorphism, this is isomorphism. (Look these terms up on Wikipedia). An isomorphism is an exact mathematical parallel where two systems have identical characteristics, expressed in different domains. Code in DNA is isomorphic with human language and digital computer codes.
There is nothing else in nature that shares this isomorphism.
And I submit to you that seeing DNA as a code containing instructions and not merely a chemical reaction is the most effective way to understand what is happening. That’s why Watson & Crick’s discovery of DNA was so important in the 1950’s. To reject the code paradigm is to take science backwards, to pre-1953. Surprisingly, a very large number of people who embrace the materialistic paradigm would prefer that than to accept inference to design in biology. This strikes me as anti-scientific.
I have been challenging people now for 6 years to show me a set of chemical reactions that produces this isomorphism and no one has come forward with an example.
I just started doubting you now……..it’s like you copy a work done by scientists and paste them here but change the unexistance to existence, brother you are not making sense at all coz all your facts proves that god does not exist according to the bible but if you believe that the universe is coming from somewhere….then what, all should say is something made something and that god of yours was made by something but he is not intelligence and can’t see at all if yiou question the story logically.
Ruenet
I’m really surprised seeing all of you busy trying to figure out the source of DNA and the physical body we have.. ok there is laws and science.. which are all come from perceiving and analyzing the Body..
But don’t you all think that we are ignoring the fact that we all have Soul too.. yes we do.. did anyone pay attention to it.. why it exists? where did it come from?
Do we need more proof now that God do exists…
It seems that this discussion always ends up with an attempt to define information in a way that really makes no sense at all and none of the responses are concerned with science but in denying the creator God I.M.H.O.
It is pointless to do experiments to determine if random events can result in recognizable words because they are only recognizable to an intelligent being that happens to understand that language. DNA has a very distinct purpose and purpose requires intelligence.
There is also a very hostile attitude from both sides of the argument to anyone who believes the Bible records the true events of creation. Statements like children are losing their faith because of people who believe the Bible are false. The opposite is true. When Mr. Brown who wrote the Da Vinci Code went to his priest with questions about the interpretations of great age so popular in science he was told nice boys do not ask such questions. he concluded Christianity is false and I am sure his priest considered himself just as Christian as those here who pick and choose which parts of secular science to accept and which to reject. If God lied about creation why bother with the rest ?
The majority of scientist believe the world is very ancient because the majority of scientist believe the world is very ancient. The majority of geologist bought Lyell’s Uniformitarian views hook line and sinker and 150 years later the same majority agrees he was a con man who brainwashed them.
Yet those who never bought Lyell’s lies , which includes the world’s foremost expert on supercomputing software for plate tectonics are called idiots by both the atheists and the Old Earth Christians. If all secular geologist were brainwashed for 150 years is it so insane to question them now? for a Christian God’s word should be the final one.
Mr Marshall
I have written a similar comment before and never got any real answers from you or comments from other bloggers. Maybe it got lost somewhere.
Anyway, here it is again.
I believe that your whole analogy around this genetic code is flawed. Let’s go back to where you started it all with the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. Here you showed that by doing a couple of random changes this sentence quickly becomes unreadable jargon. I believe that genetics does not quite work like the English language or any other human language for that matter. But this is not the core of my argument. If you should answer, don’t concentrate on this. Rather concentrate on what follows.
Let assume for the moment that “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is a piece of genetic information that deals with hair on an organism. If we now change it to, “The quick brown fox j#@ps over the l2%y dog”, it does not necessarily become unreadable in genetics. No, this might mean that this organism now has white hair instead of brown, and the hair is now hollow (as in a polar bear) and not solid anymore. Similarly other changes (mutations), will determine the length of hair, whether it curls or not, does the organism have spots or stripes, the colouring and shape (see different shapes of spots on cheetah, leopard and jaguar) of the spots or stripes, does the stripes run all the way down the belly or not (see different sub-species of zebra), the varying lengths of hair over the body of the organism (the hair on a cats tail is much longer than the hair on the tip of it’s nose) etc. etc. etc.
Other spellings (mutations), in other sentences (genes), will determine variations (in for instance human beings) in the shape of the face, the general build (fat or thin, tall or short), shape of the ears, colour of the eyes, propensity for certain diseases (heart cancer Parkinsons), shape of fingers, finger prints etc. etc. etc.
We know that all these things are caused by different genes/mutations/”spellings”. We know that forensic scientists can pick up these differences and identify suspects in criminal cases and determine the parents of a person based on the different “spellings” etc. We know that the effect of some of these “spelling” differences can be predicted. Parents with double brown eye genes will only have brown eyed children. Parents with (pure) blue eyes will only have blue eyed children. If one parent is double brown and one parent is pure blue, all the children will be brown eyed with latent blue etc. Of course this becomes much more complex with all the different hues of eye colour in humans.
Granted, many different “spellings”/mutations will cause great damage to an organism. It may cause birth defects, still borns or natural abortions etc. Many of these different “spellings”/mutations will have no effect on the organism and be latent or it may or may not come forward in subsequent generations (as in the case of a single gene for blue eyes).
This is not conjecture, this is fact. We see it around us every day. Scientists work with it every day and understand it better every day. One day science will unravel the mystery of genetics and fully understand it, the same way science unravelled the mystery of how it is possible to have a round planet earth without all the water in the seas running off (like some clever religious fanatic way back when “proved” by poring water onto an orange and showing everybody how the water ran off. This was then taken as proof that the earth could not be round).
I therefore conclude that your “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” analogy is flawed. Does this prove or disprove the existence of GOD? Of course not. I don’t think it will ever be possible to do either. It is simply a matter of what you want to believe.
Chris de Kock
Johannesburg
South Africa
Chris,
You cannot apologize for your lack of knowledge of the genetic code at the end of your post and expect me to take anything you say before it seriously.
You are missing the point on a number of levels.
First of all, the laws of genetics and dominant/recessive genes are entirely non-random as you appear to already know. “The quick brown fox j#@ps over the l2%y dog” in a genetics analogy does not give a person with brown eyes blue eyes, it gives them birth defects or kills them.
The point of the quick brown fox sentence is that it’s demonstrably impossible for random mutation + natural selection to convert it to say anything significantly different and meaningful *in its existing context*, which is English readers. If you want “The quick brown fox j#@ps over the l2%y dog” to mean something then you have to change the context again and again to suit your own purposes. And mangle the rules of the language on an ongoing basis so as to force it to mean something.
If as you say our goal is as follows:
does the organism have spots or stripes, the colouring and shape (see different shapes of spots on cheetah, leopard and jaguar) of the spots or stripes, does the stripes run all the way down the belly or not (see different sub-species of zebra), the varying lengths of hair over the body of the organism (the hair on a cats tail is much longer than the hair on the tip of it’s nose) etc. etc. etc.
Then random mutations will never give us any of those new characteristics. All those things require highly systematic revisions to gene expression and regulation which is highly analogous to re-writing a sentence like this –
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
the quick brown fox is jumping over the lazy dog
the quick brown fox had jumped over the lazy dog
the quick brown fox did jump over the lazy dog
You cannot get those kinds of changes by randomness. You have to obey the rules of English. In this case you have to properly conjugate the verb.
DNA does this, switching genes on and off and re-arranging genes, all the while obeying its own rules, through:
1. Transposition
2. Horizontal Gene Transfer
3. Epigenetics
4. Genome Doubling
5. Symbiogenesis
Look all these things up on Google. They are all well known, well documented phenomena. And they are emphatically non-random. This is how organisms evolve. Not random copying errors.
You can skip the English sentence analogy entirely by showing me *one* scientific paper that demonstrates that random mutations generate new features or organelles in a plant or animal. In six years of debating this no one has ever shown me one yet. The systems that drive evolution are the 5 things I just listed, not random mutation.
“Many ways to induce mutations are known but none lead to new organisms. Mutation accumulation does not lead to new species or even to new organs or new tissues… Even professional evolutionary biologists are hard put to find mutations, experimentally induced or spontaneous, that lead in a positive way to evolutionary change.”
-Lynn Margulis, UMass biologist, former wife of Carl Sagan and author of “Acquiring Genomes”
A quote from the top of Lynne McTaggarts blog:
“More than 50 years before Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck wrote Les Recherches sur L’Organisation des Corps Vivants, the first book to set out a coherent and well-developed theory of evolution.
Where Lamarck differed from Darwin was in his belief that the environment, rather than genetic coding, was responsible for changes in animals, and that these changes could be inherited.
Lamarck—who has been ridiculed for generations—has now been vindicated by recent studies showing that environmental influences cause changes in organisms that may even persist through generations.”
Found here:
http://community.wddty.com/blogs/lynnemctaggart/archive/2009/05/05/Beyond-the-blueprint.aspx
What this article talks about is how a stimulating environment can developed a compensatory new protein pathway that can effectively turn a knocked out gene back on.
To me, this says that the communication between an organic system (be it mice or men) and their environment is a central activity point that keeps the checks and balances in place. I see this as Information being processed through the constant contact with the environment as a redundancy that can create new pathways for ones that have been lost.
It may not be a case of redundancy stimulating a reconnection, but something through the constant contact with our environment builds a new pathway for functions that were lost when older pathways (genes) are knocked out.
Furthermore, the new pathways can be inherited in succeding generations.
I am just going to point out that the term “random” is actually a nomenclature of too many variables. Scientists say random in place of “we don’t know.” For instance in computer science if you really want true random, what you do is use an image of noise generated from space because the variables that went into making the noise is so astronomical that at the current time we can’t explain it, however, that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained.
The whole model for evolution by random mutation doesn’t make any sense. Even if you have a random mutation since it is “random” it doesn’t necessarily mean it makes an organism it better, and it also doesn’t mean you will survive longer, or the mutation will be passed on, or that you won’t die to something completely unrelated to your traits. Even if ‘random’ mutation was the cause it doesn’t fit into the time frame that things apparently evolved in, billions of years is not long enough to allow something like minor random mutations to have any success – even if it was possible.
I personally believe the ‘missing link’ is actually our brains which is part of the process of evolution, kind of hard to believe we have such powerful computers in our head and it doesn’t interact with our DNA. That’s just my theory however.
I also agree that given enough time we will come to understand evolution better, and hopefully, be able to execute it efficiently in a lab. However, that potential understanding does not validate random mutation as the probable process.
Firstly, I would like to suggest you to define god first before proving its existence. That’s the scientific way of explaining things.
“Information is separate entity, fully on par with matter and energy”
No, information can be a lie or wrong, but there cannot be wrong matter or wrong energy. Information is not in par with matter and energy.
God is nothing more than an information that was created by some early Homo sapien’s s mind and passed on to the generation. Since this information doesn’t have a scientific explanation, its a wrong information
Dear Shirhara,
First of all, It seems to me that there has existed a knowledge of God from ancient times. This knowledge has not been expected to exist as scientist and missionaries alike some times have not been open minded and willing to see what they saw. Therefore it for some time was not taken serious. What I fhowever find in old books like J.G. Frazer the Dying God, is a pre-existing knowledge about a God who has created all, who is invisible, who is omnipresent, an almighty God. I know that Frazer is not the only one who has written about this. While studying Weber I found Confucianism, and it appear to me that Confucius also had a pre-existing knowledge of God. It has been found in many countries, in many people. The spread is to large to claim this is a coincidence. What appears strange to me is that the more I am reading in regard to the concept of God and development of faith, is that people has gone from the worship of the one God to worshipping created beings as gods, and then in later time the worship of the one God has once more been restored more or less. Technically it should have gone the opposite way, if the claim was right. Which bring me to the second of your points. You claim that God is nothing more than information, created in the minds of Homo sapiens. I know this claim, but I tell you it has no scientific root. It evolved by assumptions made by Edward B Tylor and has been proved not correct by later scholars like Dr.Andrew Lang once a pupil of Mr. Tyler. If you are honest the Making of Religion, by Dr. Andrew Lang is on Project Guthenberg for you to read. Then there is a 12 volumes work written by Wilhelm Schmidt called the origin of the Concept of God. I have not looked into this later work. But I know there are more, and it is all over the place.. it is like it is written in the Bible.. look and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened…friendly greetings..
“Show me just ONE example of a language that didn’t come from a mind.”
This is as good as an atheist asking god to make a rock talk
Yes you misunderstood. The Seventh Day Adventist take an Orthodox view on the creation account in Genesis. If I typed that Orthodox Judaism and Christianity believe that matter pre-existed God that was a mistake on my part as I meant to say the exact opposite.
They are the only ones who do. There are Orthodox in many Christian denominations when it comes to creation . 200 years ago it was universal despite what liberals try to claim.
[i]
It seems very logical to me that if one believe in a allmighty God, why then limit Him and make Him handicapped because of our crippled minds fail to grasp His allmighty power and greatness? I have seen some very sensible remarks from you and perhaps I misunderstood this one”[/i]
We are told to believe and nothing in operational science contradicts a word of scripture. The interpretations of sinful men can contradict all they want, I don’t care.
Sadly those that put God’s word as authoritative like you and I are the subject of ridicule by Atheists as well as liberal Christians. We do not agree on doctrine but we do agree on authority which is all important.
I do not see the point in attacking Darwinism if at the same time you attack Genesis. Very few people are true materialist that believe that life spontaneously came into existence but so many so called Christian apologists embrace so called Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design has brilliant design arguments but refuses to even consider the chronology in God;’s Word is true. If the history in Genesis 0ne is a lie why read Genesis 2?
If the Bible is false where it touches on science, paleontology,astronomy , history ,biology etc. it is illogical to believe in it’s morality or salvation.
That is why we are losing the culture, young people are told to believe this in the Bible and ignore that and they intelligently decide its all a lie.
If a person decides which part of scripture is true he/she discredits it all as well as the divinity of Christ and usurps the power that belongs to God alone.
Mr Marshall
I enjoy reading your followers comments most of the time and your comments, all the time. Your power point presentations are professionally presented.
One of your commentators caused me to investigate mtDNA and myRNA., it has been decades since I studied mitochondria…it was a nice update to see the advancements made in the last 20 years. Use it lose it …how very true.
One of your commentators was talking about the dating of mit and the clock used to date scripture.
Natural laws of physics tell us that time is relevant to position.
The newest dating period for mit is 150,000- 200,000 …not the creationist 6500 years. Creationist latch onto out of context, Parson papers. Parson’s concludes mit is approximately 200,000 years old.
The article I read, said in another 20 years of discovery, creationist will be a wrong as they are today.
I’m not trying to start a confrontation, just relating recent findings.
I believe I’ll just stay with empirical science…the scientific proof is overwhelming for an older earth and not a young earth. We know light photons travel 300,000 kilometers a second. A new galaxy has recently been discovered , light just now reaching our Hubble telescope observation, if the earth like planet with its own sun and satellite is 1,200 light years away, light travels 300,000 kilometers a second. That planetary system has existed for a time relative to the distance light traveled for our observation. I find that completely logical in support of an old universe.
Unfortunately for creationist and I have studied their theories, I have always come away empty and void of empirical evidence for their theoretical claims.
I am certainly aware of Josephus, a historian of the early centuries.
I will check out Mr. Craig and his philosophical theories of Christian Apologetic..hopefully there are some new thought patterns. I have studied many Biblical text and every theory conceived and exegetic by man. I’m not an atheist but read the other day atheist know more about the Bible than Bible believers’.
I have always known there is a supreme spirit and cultures take different routes to the same eternal spirit.
I have no interest in people believing what I have found to be supported truth.
I’m just reporting new science.
We learned the physical properties of silicon molds in writing algorithms, the laws governing electron flow in bits of a combination of 0’s and 1’s.
Natural laws control our universe and we are privileged to be able to design mathematical models that prove scientific theories are true.
I apparently have come across a group not interested in empirical science but religious philosophy.
Dear Perry,
I came across an article on the ‘Evolution vs. Intelligent Design/Creationism Debate’ – not a particularly good one I must say – where the journalist unequivocally came out as a supporter of evolution, so I couldn’t resist the temptation to venture a comment on it in the comments section stating that I believed a good case against Evolution Theory could be made and that in fact it was on the way out. As evidence I cited the bearing Information Theory has on it (based on what I had read on your website) as well as Aw Swee Eng’s paper…
creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/tjv10n3_origin_life.pdf
…which I thought also put forward an excellent case in this regard.
I chose these two sets of evidence as I thought they were the best arguments I knew of from an Intelligent Design point of view.
I then received a reply from another reader, an evolutionist and a skeptic, who stated that Aw Swee Eng’s paper, dating from 1996 is ‘unfortunately old science’ and that ‘many of his protestations have subsequently been decisively refuted.’ He did not explicitly indicate whether he thought the same applied to Information Theory, but I got the impression he thought it did.
With respect to Aw Swee Eng he for instance stated that, subsequent to Aw Swee Eng’s paper, recent scientific research findings has reinstated the Miller-Urey experiment as valid evidence supporting Evolution Theory, and that the homochirality of the DNA molecule now had a perfectly natural explanation.
I must confess I was a bit stumped, purely because as a ‘laymen’, albeit a better-than-average informed one, I simply am not well enough informed about the latest evidence for- and against both sides of the argument to be able to put together a good rebuttal, so up until now I have refrained from answering him back.
My questions therefore are:
1. How up to date is the Information Theory argument in terms of the very latest research findings. I see on certain blogs the matter is now being driven down to, philosophically speaking, what constitutes ‘consciouness’ with reference your use of the term ‘Conscious Mind’? The argument that was being put forward is that it does not constitute a metaphysical entity or that it is nothing more than an illusion and that materialistic explanations for it could exists.
2. The second question, in all fairness should perhaps better be put to Prof. Aw Swee Eng instead rather than to you, but i though perhaps you could answer it for me: Are there recent updated research findings that ‘rebuts the rebuttals’ to the professor’s paper, in a manner of speaking?
Your help in formulating my rebuttal will be greatly appreciated.
My arguments really have nothing to do with chirality or chemistry. They have to do with the nature and origin of information. This takes the whole discussion onto a different plane because as Dr. Norbert Wiener said, “Information is information, neither matter nor energy.”
Information theory as I present it is entirely up to date. Short of some new discovery of the same import as quantum mechanics and relativity, there’s nothing about it that can potentially become obsolete.
Consciousness = self-aware being with ability to willfully act and communicate. Normal human imagination in regards to this is just fine – Could be humans, aliens or spirits.
As to the professor’s paper, I’m not familiar.
Dear Perry,
Can u give an explanation of how there is change in the facial attributes of the off springs, to be specific, if genes works as an book of information for developing the protien structure , how does the information is to be really possible for genes to develop a new facial traits. each one of us different from others on the line of the facial attribute.
if you suggest it has a special intelligent code for designing the way one look,how intelligent is that ?so that it can produce, suppose all 100 offsprings the are born are different,in their look
Lets consider the cases of indentical twins. born with same facial charateristics.
if having different facial characteristics is not a reason of random mutation. we can keep birth of identical twins with same facial features to be reason of random mutation, since the process of producing different facial attributes is not achieved here
in the same way if we consider (two identical face) as a normal process of information transfer in DNA strands
,we can keep the facial changes occurs due to random mutation then it becomes easy to prove that random mutation causes good effect and doesnt goes wrong always
The difference between two peoples’ faces is because of mendelian combinations of genes, not random mutations.
Mr Marshall,
Your interpretation of Language or information is basically flawed here.Information on its own has no meaning,no relevance.Suppose a room is filed with water vapor,the true inter atomic distance between water molecules in this state are completely random and they on their own can mean nothing.However the same water in solid form is a regular crystal and can convey a lot of information.A catalyst changes the course of a reaction.It a limited sense it can be called language too.However it is completely natural.The probability of a much more complex language forming on its own is I agree very low.But given such a big universe that it happened may not be surprising.May be it is the reason that all the life on earth is genetically related,perhaps the probability of it occurring again is too low.Anyway the point is that language can form on its own.
How do you know this?
See that i said ‘may’
.Any way i can point out other coding just like DNA.’Spectrum.’.its completely natural,no mind required to form one.And the spectrum of an element can convey as much if not more information about the element that DNA can about an organism.So in your analogy it should be counted as a language.But its completely natural.
see http://evo2.org/faq/#naturalcodes
I’m not talking about a photon or an electron here.I am talking about a spectrum .A spectrum is very different from a photon.A spectrum has an encoder a message and a decoder.A line in the spectrum corresponds to a transition of a particular frequency only.It is encoded and in a spectrum the transition appears as a line.If we know how to interpret it we can know the frequency of the transition.So,here it goes.’.a spectrum is ur solution’.
Draw the communication system per the directions at http://www.evo2.org/solve, label the encoding and decoding tables and fill them out. If you can successfully show that a light spectrum is a complete communication system, I’ll write you a check for $10,000.00.
Mr Marshall,
Here is your communication system diagram of a spectrum.Sorry for the delay
code transmitted through
Encoder —————————————————->>> Decoder
communication channel
Note:here i am talking about an emission spectrum only.the absorption spectrum is the same ,except the substance absorbs photons instead of emitting
Information: The information is the about of energy change in the de-excitation of a molecule electron or an atom .
Encoder:The energy value is encoded into the frequency of the emitted photon by the equation E=hv ,where
E = energy of (de)excitation
h=planks constant
v=frequency of emitted EM wave
so,here the information is encoded by dividing the enrgy by h
communication channel: the communication channel are the EM waves
Decoder: finally with the wavelength corresponding line observed in the spectrum,the energy of tranmission is found our with the formula
E = hc/lambda
where,
E = energy of (de)excitation
h=planks constant
c = speed of light
lambda = wavelength corresponding to the spectral line
So,here the information is decoded by multiplying hc to 1/lambda
Go to naturalcode.org and apply this information to the tables you find there and submit it.
Hi,
I would like to present an argument that may have yet been mentioned.
Assume, for one moment, that no living, thinking, logical creatures existed. They all simply disappeared. This is hypothetical, of course.
I have two questions. First, would information and ideas still exist? Judging by your arguments, I would be inclined to think you would say no. Coding is how information exists. If intelligence would be gone, so would information.
And a second question. What would become of DNA? Now things get interesting. Would the structure change? The physical properties? I would say no. No, because while meaning would be gone, the matter itself would still exist. Matter is not intelligent. Thus it is still there. But from the first question, information would not exist. And DNA is information So what happened? What changed, when intelligence was removed?
I can only think of one logical answer. That we, as humans, do NOT create information. We have only created code, as you stated. However, information can exist without code. Code is our interpretation of information. The height of a mountain does not change, whether measured in feet or meters. As such, DNA does not change, no matter what our code is to describe it.
Newton didn’t create gravity. He discovered it, and described it. Likewise, humans don’t create information. They discover it, and describe it. The information exists without intelligence.
To answer your question all you need to do is imagine winding the clock back a billion years. Even when there’s nothing but single-cell organisms, information still exists because the code in their DNA is decoded into Messenger RNA and decoded into proteins by the ribosomes.
Code is not our interpretation of information. Code is defined as a system of symbols for communication. That objectively exists regardless of our ability to observe it.
Hello again Perry, good to see you are still fleshing all this out for all of us, thank you.
In some of my own discussion Ive come across a few questions/objections that I would like to see your response to. I believe I adressed them adequately but how would you.
1) **They are not symbols, they are molecules. Is a hand the symbol for a glove? The hand in glove analogy is much more appropriate for mRNA/tRNA matching. It’s not a code. It’s just a physical pairing.**
2) **There’s no transmitter encoding a symbol representing a message to be conveyed then decoded by some symbol decoder to translate into some original message.**
3) **You already stated that symbols in, say a post here, do not interact with one another physically or chemically to represent information; the information is something else. But in biology, that is exactly what happens; nucleotides interact solely because of their particular physical and chemical properties.**
4)**theres no coded information being read etc., its just chemical reactions that produce a certain result based on that reaction, like when we drop a rock into water, the reaction is consistantly ripples in a circular fashion, same thing in DNA, when a certain configuration of base pairs are present the reaction produces the same effect time after time**
Thanks
1. In transcribing codons to amino acids, the codon (ie GGG) never physically becomes part of the amino acid (i.e. Glycine). It’s just instructions to the cellular machinery to make Glycine. Just like the pits in a CD never physically get transferred into your speakers. The pits are read by the laser.
2. That is completely wrong. See the diagram at http://www.evo2.org/solve/ Actually, between this and the FAQ page, you have pretty much everything you need to counter any argument.
3. See 1.
4. See 1. Also, multiple codons map to a single amino acid. GGG is Glycine but GGA is also Glycine. It’s a redundant code, not merely a chemical reaction.
Sorry, but this is another example of ‘credo ut intelligam”. The strongest universal force is Gravity. It molded the universe and controls it. We’ll all need to die before we resolve the truth of a creator. Needing a creator such as you outline gets no one any closer to getting into meaningful communication with that creator. Accepting Gravity as God works now, in this life. Any other God requires your death first. I’ll stay with Gravity for now…
.
You can’t group every theist argument into credo ut intelligam. Well I concede that many people believe in god simply to understand the universe (such as the gap god), that is not always the case. For instance, myself, regardless of God’s existence I believe God represents an epitomized and idealistic end point of human evolution, I believe in God to discover.
In Perry’s case he is discovering and understanding things in order to facilitate an argument for God. Accepting something as a “God” would mean you fundamentally change yourself to what you believe to be the God. In the case of gravity nothing would change because gravity doesn’t have any active -force- on your -conscious- psychology and in particular your morality, only your physical body. God however is an active moral psychological force, and everyone who believes in God would acknowledge that characteristics.
For instance, a Christian/Muslim/etc.. who accepts God and changes their life away from drugs or violence; gravity would never facilitate that kind of change. Comparing God to gravity really is comparing apples to oranges.
Hello Perry,
How do you respond to the objections that –
1) 100% of our observations of coded information has always come from a physical brain or mind etc. We have never seen information come from an immaterial source.
2) Since that is the case, we have 100% inference that the information in DNA came from a physical finite source since 100% of our observations information always comes from a physical source.
Information is immaterial. Case in point: It can be in the form of pits on a CD, North/South domains on a hard drive, pulses of light, pulses of electricity. But it’s still the same information.
On the other hand we have never seen information come from an unconscious source.
Thus we have 100% inference that the source of information and consciousness is immaterial.
Perry said: “On the other hand we have never seen information come from an unconscious source.”
But this is exactly how it seems to me. I am not conscious of exactly what I will think of next. It seems as if my thoughts simply arise in me, without any conscious intent or direction at all.
It is a good experiment to try. See if you can figure out what you will be thinking five minutes hence — not generally, but specifically.
I got an email, I read it and thought I might respond. Here I am doing that. Now, surely, some of that was random or chance driven? I would say that what is in my head now, what I think you would call ‘information’ has arisen largely by many, many chance events over my lifetime.
Did I miss something critical or is there some purpose-driven clockwork that somehow has instilled in me this information without my noticing it?
We could take a specific bit of information and see. Yesterday, I learned the difference between the words ‘further’ and ‘farther’. Somehow I had missed the distinction until passing 50. I might have actually died before I knew it. Now, what, if not chance, put that distinction in my conscious mind?
And while we are at it, how is it that this sort of information is being created all the time if not by chance and coincidence? Whenever I make a discovery about the world, am I extracting some information that already existed or creating new information? If I learn Spanish and express my thoughts in that language, (thoughts that have never been thought of in Spanish) has information been created? What was it created from?
hi.
I’m Titus, a final year masters student in zoology, with a specialization in molecular biology.
I’d like to make a few points clear.
I watched your presentation, and frankly I think you have a highly oversimplified view of mutations. firstly, ‘words’ in DNA are 3 letters long. since there are 4 bases in DNA ,i.e. ATGC (and one has a functional replacement in RNA; T->U), there are 64 possible combinations possible, while there are only 20 Amino acids, and 3 stop sequences. Therefore there is a ‘degeneracy’ in the code, i.e. generally only the 1st 2 bases in a codon matter..
Also, a ‘mutation’ can be 3 types, i.e. a mis-sense, a non-sense, and a silent.
MIs sense means that the Aminoacid(AA) coded changes. this can result in a ‘similar’ (property-vise) AA coming in, or a different one. both have different effects.
nonsesne means that the code becomes one of the 3 stop codons; UAA,UGA or UAG, i.e. terminating translation (protein synthesis)
silent means that the mutation codes for the same Amino acid, resulting in no change.
Also a gene has other discrete parts, i.e. the promoter, enhancer, as well as internal splice sites. modifications here have varying effects on a protein expression, sequence and structure..
for example, pythons and lizards differ in body plan, due to different expression of a set of genes called hox (homeobox) genes.
On top of this, the location of a gene is also important, since it affects its expression. If it is close to a repressed gene, or the centromere & telomere, it would be silenced (its called PEV- positional effect variegation)
Your random mutation generator therefore, is a joke, since any and ALL mutations within a functional gene will code for a ‘word’ or a ‘punctuation’ or a ‘paragraph’.
And while most mutations may be negative (vast majority), some have either no effect, or a benefit.
Evolution is based on small, discrete mutations, accumulating over time (although drastic changes are seen).
While I personally hold a belief ‘theistic evolution’, there isn’t enough evidence for it one way or another. But imagine.. evolution would be so perfect! A system that works towards not a static, but a dynamic perfection and equilibrium! A self improving system…
I don’t understand why people who are ready to read the new testament metaphorically aren’t ready to do the same with genesis.
Regards,
-Titus
I talk about the structure of codons and their relationship to the rest of DNA at http://www.evo2.org/solve/
The word “degenerate code” is derogatory, the proper term is “redundant.” Ingeniously so, optimized to 1 in a million.
My random mutation generator is not a joke, because
4 letters of DNA binary 1/0 in digital codes
64 codons 128 ascii characters
In the RM generator, you can mutate at the level of individual bits or ASCII letters, your choice.
The characteristics of genes can be reasonably compared with words and sentences in the English language. The folding of proteins is reasonably analogous to things like tables and fonts on a web page.
I’m with you on the comment about reading the NT and Genesis metaphorically. I read Genesis only 25% metaphorically, I would say. See http://www.evo2.org/genesis1
Hello Perry,
In a discussion Im having, evolutionary algorythm programs were brought up as evidence codes can arise without intelligence. I aksed him the same question you asked in the debate you had over at infidels “Are these random mutations applied truly randomly, i.e. anywhere in the source code of the entire program, or… are they deliberately restricted to specific parts of the code? Is it mutating the source code itself, or certain specified variables within the source code?”
I also stated sure, an EXISTING code certainly can evolve ONCE it exists in the first place! Show me an algorythm program that isnt designed. He goes on to say…**Yes, the entirety of the aerofoil code can mutate. The experiment has no bloody point if you restrict it. The evolutionary algorithms came from our mind, but they themselves are designed to be mindless. They mindlessly generate wing cross sections, then mindlessly twiddle with the cross section, keeping improvements, and dropping bad changes, just as we see in natural selection.**
My response would be that in such a program how do we define what an improvement is? There must be some prior predetermined outcome that is being sought, and that be the programmers. Im interested in what your response might be to this.
Thanks, JohnM
John,
First of all, the computer that runs the program isn’t mutating. The genetic algorithm program (ie Avida) isn’t mutating. Only the testbed environment is mutating.
Second, codes never evolve unless designed to. All genetic algorithms have some level of design and pre-set goals.
Yes, computers do their work mindlessly. Of course they do. But they do their work according to fixed rules that are preset by purposeful beings. They never function without rules.
Improvement has to be defined in terms of some measurable output of a system. Like with Google ads you can measure the % of people who click on the ads and in advertising that’s a universal definition of fitness.