Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
In recent months, my colleagues and I have accepted an invitation to debate a number of propositions with an evangelical who became a traditional Catholic and then embraced atheism. The Kolbe Center is dedicated to helping to restore faith in the traditional doctrine of creation among Catholics, so it is not our primary mission to evangelize unbelievers. However, we try not to refuse any challenge or miss any opportunity to speak the truth in charity even to atheists, especially when they have broken their baptismal promises and tried to undermine the faith of other Catholics.
Now and in the near future, I would like to share some of the insights that the Good Lord has given us through this heartbreaking dialogue. In this newsletter, I would like to focus on the origin of coded information and the origin of life as two insuperable obstacles to a coherent defense of atheism. I hope that our readers will be able to use these points to rescue relatives, friends and neighbors from the sophistry of atheistic (and, sadly, even theistic) evolutionists who claim that material processes can account for the origin of these marvelous realities.
The Origin of Coded Information
A great place to begin a discussion with an atheist is with the origin of coded information—since atheists will generally acknowledge the reality that all living things are full of coded information. It is not difficult to prove that even the simplest code requires a mind and a free will. Consider the example of a group of cousins on vacation in their grandparents’ house. They want to create a code to warn each other when Grandma or Grandpa is coming to check up on them. They agree that one knock will stand for Grandma and two knocks for Grandpa.
Now even this simple code could not come into existence without intellect and free will. The children must have minds to decide that X = Y and they must have a free will to decide that X = Y and not Z. Moreover, there are no examples of any kind of meaningful code arising from inorganic chemicals, either in nature or in the laboratory. All such examples involve the assignment of meaning to the chemicals by human beings—which requires the use of the intellect and free will of those human beings, be they atheists or theistic evolutionists.
But that is not the end of the story.
As Dr. John Sanford explains, DNA sequences in all living things possess an information density that far surpasses the capabilities of the most gifted human intellects:
DNA sequences have meaning on several different levels (poly-functional) and each level of meaning limits possible future change (poly-constrained). For example, imagine a sentence which has a very specific message in its normal form, but has an equally coherent message when read backwards. Now let’s suppose that it also has a third message when reading every other letter, and a fourth message when a simple encryption program is used to translate it. Such a message would be poly-functional and poly-constrained. We know that misspellings in a normal message will not normally improve the message . . . However, a poly-constrained message . . . cannot be improved. It can only degenerate
With this in mind, when confronted by an atheist or theistic evolutionist who believes that the coded information in living things could have arisen through material processes without any direct involvement by God, you could give them this simple challenge:
Create an English sentence of 12 to 20 words which:
- A) gives a meaningful set of directions when read from left to right;
- B) gives a different meaningful set of directions when read from right to left;
- C) gives a different meaningful set of directions when every third letter is read from left to right;
- D) gives a different meaningful set of directions when translated into another language.
If your interlocutor is an honest man, he will admit that he would hail any human being as a genius who could meet that challenge. And yet even the “simplest” living things are filled with books of information, written into their genomes at this level of designed complexity and information density. Thus, it is absurd to hold that the complexity of the coded information in living things could have arisen through unguided material processes, without the agency of an exalted intellect and will.
Life From Non-Life?
The impossibility of explaining the origin of coded information through material processes goes hand in hand with the impossibility of explaining the origin of life from non-life. Atheists and evolutionary biologists like to point to an experiment that was conducted in the fifties as proof that organic matter can come from non-organic matter. As Catholic theologian and theistic evolutionist Dr. Brett Salkeld has stated:
the "famous Miller-Urey experiment, for example, found that adding electricity to a collection of inorganic molecules, led to their organization into amino acids. The proteins did not preexist and await some “spark.” Rather, we have concrete, repeatable, testable scientific data showing that a “spark” can generate the proteins necessary for life.
In reality, as our leadership team explained in our reply to Dr. Salkeld, the Miller-Urey experiment did not "generate the proteins necessary for life.” It produced 11 out of 20 naturally-occurring amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins are complex biochemical molecules composed of hundreds of amino acids (one estimate is that the average protein contains roughly 325-350 amino acids) that have an organized sequence and a definite three-dimensional shape. To give an idea of the complexity of these proteins, keep in mind that one misplaced amino acid in a protein can have disastrous results, such as sickle-cell disease in humans.
Not surprisingly, the problems with the Miller-Urey experiment are legion:
- Amino acids are chiral, which means that they occur in “left-handed” and “right-handed” forms. The chirality of the amino acids produced in the experiment was classically inorganic, with a rough mixture of both forms, and not organic. Life requires only left-handed amino acids, and there is no known inorganic method for sorting out these chiral forms that could have operated under proposed early-earth conditions.
- Ammonia, which was present in the flask, would not have been stable in significant concentrations under the proposed conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere. Without ammonia, there would not have been a sufficient nitrogen source to form the amino acids.
- The flask did not contain oxygen, which geology has demonstrated was present even in the early atmosphere of the earth. In the presence of oxygen gas, no amino acids are produced.
- Two key amino acids necessary for the structure of all biologically-functional sequences were missing from the Miller-Urey experiment, because the flask did not contain sulfur (a key component of both of these amino acids). Thus the experiment did not produce methionine, which is the beginning amino acid of all protein-coding sequences, or cysteine, which is necessary to produce the disulfide bridges that stabilize a protein’s three-dimensional structure.
Jonathan Sarfati, a physical chemist from the Victoria University of Wellington, points out another general flaw that plagues origin of life experiments like Miller & Urey’s:
Origin of life simulations purport to show that life could arise by time and chance. In reality, even the meagre results obtained are only possible because of the design of the experiment. A common procedure is to find a trace of compound A in a spark discharge experiment, and compound B in another simulation (sometimes with mutually incompatible conditions), then claim, “See A and B can be produced under realistic primitive-earth conditions.” They then obtain pure, homochiral, concentrated A and B from an industrial synthetic chemicals company, react them to form traces of the more complex compound C. Then the news is trumpeted that C will form under primitive-earth conditions. But this doesn’t show that dilute A and B can react that way, that they can be produced together, or that they won’t react with contaminants D, E or F that were also formed in the first experiments. In short, the evolutionists’ simulations have an unacceptable level of intelligent interference.
Additionally, even if the Miller-Urey experiment, or one like it, were able to produce a functional protein, the protein would be unable to reproduce itself (a condition necessary for life) without being assembled as a unit with functionally encoded DNA in a functional cell. Moreover, according to a Science Daily article, "The minimum number of protein-producing genes a single-celled organism needs to survive and reproduce in the laboratory is somewhere between 265 and 350, according to new research.” This makes the probability of building even a “simple” cell astronomically less likely than identifying a particular atom out of the 1080 atoms in the entire universe. It is worth noting that in a court of law the probability of finding two people with identical fingerprints—estimated at 1 in 1050 is considered to have a real probability of zero. Yet Dr. Ken Miller has stated that he believes that discovering how life came from non-life will be one of the great scientific discoveries of the twenty-first century!
All of this evidence indicates that Dr. Salkeld’s statement, “we have concrete, repeatable, testable scientific data showing that a ‘spark’ can generate the proteins necessary for life," is woefully inaccurate, and it would cause any reader not well versed in chemistry to think that life is simple and that scientists can do things relating to life that they are not even close to being able to do.
I hope that these simple arguments will be helpful to you, when you encounter relatives, friends or neighbors who have been led astray by atheistic sophistry that obscures the gulf that separates evolutionary speculations from biological reality.
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata in union with St. Joseph,
Hugh Owen
P.S. In the midst of the current worldwide diabolical disorientation, the Holy Face of Our Lord Jesus Christ on the Holy Shroud of Turin reconnects us with Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, with our first father, St. Adam, and with Our Heavenly Father, because, as Our Lord said to St. Philip, "If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father." Our Lord revealed to the French Carmelite Sister Mary of St. Peter that the Devotion to the Holy Face would be an antidote to the blasphemies of revolutionary men. Please consider purchasing a Holy Face banner at this link and displaying it on your front door or in another prominent place outside your home.
"Arise, O Lord, and let Thine enemies be scattered! Let those that hate Thee flee before Thy Face!"
