A naturalistic world view is one in which there is no Creator, and everything we see occurred and developed by chance and evolution. The very existence of the universe is by chance, and the existence of life on earth is the result of random mutations that eventually led to organized life.
There are two qualities of the matter and life that surround us that utterly destroy this naturalistic worldview.
The first is information.
Information. It’s everywhere. From the DNA pattern coded into a blade of grass, to the cell phone signals wafting from tower to tower, to the agreement that church will start at 10:00 a.m. Our lives run on information. It’s inside our bodies and brains, it surrounds us every nanosecond of every day in a million different ways.
Much of this information is man-made. Every single street sign, television show, GPS instruction, phone call, stop light, library book, indeed every conversation and every thought that passes through your gray matter includes and relies upon information for its very existence.
This is why the presence of information is a death knell for naturalistic, evolutionary thought. Because information requires an intelligent organizer.
Information is nothing more than the organization of quanta of information into a meaningful form. And this organization process requires an organizer, it requires some kind of intelligence in order to recognize it as information (based on some previously-established criteria that necessarily must exist above and beyond the interpreter), and it requires a context in which to interpret the information to determine whether it is, indeed, information or whether it is simply noise.
Minds that have been recognized as brilliant (they most emphatically are NOT) cling to the hope that the universe and everything in it is merely accidental, an inevitable development over time (which contradicts the second law of thermodynamics) of mindless matter into information and consciousnesses that can not only understand such information but can also use it for the benefit of humankind.
Even this thought—of “benefit” for humankind—is impossible in a completely materialistic world. If your thought processes and my thought processes are simply the result of random chemical reactions in my brain created over millions of years of Darwinian natural selection, then how can your thoughts chemical reactions have any more or less validity than my thoughts chemical reactions?
According to naturalistic evolution, if I deem it morally acceptable, according to my chemical reactions, to kill you in the grocery store because you’re about to take the bag of oranges that I had my eye on (survival of the fittest per Darwin), then you have no right to judge my intentions as either right or wrong. A naturalist would have to admit that I, having a legitimate fear that I may not be able to feed myself or my family, have the Darwinian right to any action that would help me to survive, especially since my chemical reactions are telling me so.
The most cogent argument for the presence of information requiring intelligent design is found in the DNA code. The basic structure of human DNA includes about 3.5 billion characters, which all must be aligned properly in order to properly accomplish its task. The statistical probability of this happening by chance is so staggeringly huge that the numbers become meaningless. Let’s take a ten-word sentence for example (this illustration is provided in John Lennox’s book God’s Undertaker):
Professor Derek Bickerton gives us an interesting insight into linguistics by explaining how even a single sentence presents a prodigious problem: ‘Try to rearrange any ordinary sentence consisting of ten words. There are, in principle, exactly 3,628,800 ways in which you could do this, but for the first sentence of this [quote] only one of them gives a correct and meaningful result. That means 3,628,799 of them are ungrammatical.’ Bickerton then asks the obvious question: ‘How did we learn this? Certainly, no parent or teacher ever told us. The only way in which we can know it is by possessing, as it were, some recipe for how to construct sentences, a recipe so complex and exhaustive that it automatically rules out all 3,628,799 wrong ways of putting together a ten word sentence and allows only the right one. But since such a recipe must apply to all sentences, not just the example given, that recipe will, for every language, rule out more ungrammatical sentences than there are atoms in the cosmos.’
If combining ten words into a sentence can create more than three and a half million possible combinations, and only one of them would be considered grammatically correct, how much less likely would be a scenario in which the 3.5 billion words in the DNA code line themselves up randomly to properly create the building block of life?
Lennox continues:
To give some idea of the numbers involved in the biological situation we note that the smallest proteins possessing biological function that we know of involve at least 100 amino acids and so the DNA molecules corresponding to them have as many as 10130 sequence alternatives, only a minute proportion of which will have biological significance.
This 10130 number is unfathomably huge, so much so as to be totally meaningless. The entire number of atoms of matter in the entire universe is estimated at 1080. There is absolutely no statistical probability that such a feat as the self-organization of DNA into an informationally significant pattern could possibly happen, even if the universe were trillions of years old. Mathematics itself prohibits it.
Yet atheists must cling to their non-scientific ideology. Everything in science prohibits the possibility of naturalistic evolution, yet because of their spiritual ideology, atheistic science must reject special creation and a Creator.
Consider this illustration: you are walking through the woods, and you come across a rectangular shape completely covered in moss and weeds. It’s a rectangle about twenty feet square, with lines about a foot wide and a foot high. You naturally conclude that a building once stood on that property and you are viewing the remnants of a foundation. And you would be correct. Why? Because there is information present. It’s different from the moss-covered rocks lying nearby. It has a shape that cannot occur naturally.
Further, you scrape off the moss and see that the foundation is made of bricks. These bricks were somehow formed into their rectangular shape, and stacked so as to create a foundation for a wall. This, too, could not have happened by chance. No one would deny that, because there is information present.
Think about the ancient cliff dwellings in the southwestern United States. Same story…bricks were first created as a source of building material, then those bricks were purposefully and intelligently laid in place to form walls. No one in the entire world thinks that these walls were created from random natural processes. Yet such walls are stupidly simple compared to the incredible engineering of the DNA molecule.
However, the walls of the cliff dwelling contain one other quality that we must discuss. I said at the beginning that there are two qualities in the universe that require intelligent design, the first being information, the second being purpose.
These walls have information—the design and size of the individual bricks, the height of the walls, the number of doors and windows—but they also contain purpose—the walls are there to protect the inhabitants from weather and animals, the doors are to allow the inhabitants to get in and out. The height of the ceilings matches the needs of the inhabitants. The hole in the floor and the ladder that allows inhabitants to crawl up into the house and pull up the ladder behind them, is to protect them from intruders.
Design (information) and purpose. These two qualities exist in every created object and system. A cell phone possesses intelligent design and also possesses many various purposes. Human DNA serves a multitude of purposes. Even a simple glass pane in your sunroom window serves the purpose of letting in light while keeping out the weather.
Of any object known to humankind, the human body is by far the most complex. Unfathomably so. We continue to learn more and more every day about the intricacies of how all the biological systems within our bodies function and interact with one another. Yet there are those who demand that it all came about through chance and randomness.
This is not physically or logically possible, and we are now at the point in our scientific evolution where even naturalistic scientists are admitting that naturalistic evolution cannot possible be an accurate theory of the origin of life. The more science we do, the more we realize that Darwinian natural selection and evolution could not possibly explain the origin of life.
In his book Lennox also describes the science proving that natural selection via mutations (the foundation upon which naturalistic Darwinian evolution is built) functionally limits the amount of change a family of organisms can experience. Rather than leading to never-ending mutations into another species, natural selection actually prevents mutations beyond a certain point. The mechanism that makes mutations work actually militates against extensive change in an organism and instead works to keep species distinct from one another.
Read the book, because there is no way I can go into all that here. The point is, naturalistic unguided evolution has been shown to be mathematically (and philosophically) impossible.
Lennox further quotes atheistic curators of natural history museums who openly admit that there is absolutely no fossil record that would support macro evolution. It’s a house of cards, a system rigged up to write God out of the equation so atheistic scientists can remain unaccountable to any Supreme Power.
Evolution is only one small example I am using to demonstrate the fact that a naturalistic worldview cannot be supported either by science or by experience. There are myriads of other ways to address this issue.
Maybe those will the topics of other posts?