It’s funny how sharing a silly cartoon can turn into a teachable moment.
My cohort-in-crime Wilfred recently posted this cartoon poking gentle fun at the theory of macroevolution to my Facebook page titled The God Conclusion, which is aptly named after my book.
The cartoon is silly because no one in their right mind would ever look at a snowman and think it could have come to exist due to random natural processes. Obviously, the snowman must be a human creation, the product of a primitive but nevertheless intelligent design.
How can we know this? In part, due to entropy.
Before a snowman could ever form by purely natural processes, the ambient temperature would rise and the snow would melt. No matter how much snow accumulates and how much time elapses, before the snowman could ever acquire two wooden arms, a knit cap, a carrot for a nose, and various buttons to represent eyes, mouth, and vest due to purely random processes. But first and foremost, a snowman isn’t a living organism.
Snowmen don’t have DNA to analyze. Comparative anatomy doesn’t really work, either, when one of the items being compared doesn’t have an anatomy. There is no fossil record of a snowman. Nothing about a snowman would ever suggest it could exist due to random selection taking place over a very long period of time, even though a snowman is comprised of only one basic ingredient, which is snow. You can’t use any of the tools an ordinary evolutionary biologist would use to determine any relationships allegedly due to common descent because a snowman isn’t alive.
By comparison, an average human contains 3.2 billion bits of information inside every individual cell in their body, complex and sophisticated information that describes one unique individual out of billions of similar specimens. How ironic — that the individual with incredibly complex information coded into every cell in their body is allegedly the product of a blind, undirected process but credited with producing a primitive intelligent design based on their own “undesigned” bodies.
I’m quite fond of Dr. Frank Turek’s analogy of intelligent design by comparison, found in his famous example of finding the words “John loves Mary” written in wet beach sand.
The most belligerent critic must acknowledge those specific words had to be the product of a mind because of the specific message being conveyed. Blind or undirected natural forces can’t explain the specific message being spelled out. Even so, “John loves Mary” only contains fifteen characters including the spaces, which are important to help convey accurate meaning. By comparison, human DNA contains 3.2 billion pieces of specific information.
However, each character in the message has a specific meaning such that changing any of the characters distorts the entire message. For example, changing the “o” to an “I” in the second word to now convey “John lives Mary” and the entire message is garbled. Or, to become a more relevant example, “John loves Mary” could be changed to “John loves Lisa” because my name is John and my wife’s name is Lisa. The whole point is, if you see even those few letters specifically arranged, you’re going to reasonably conclude that an intelligent mind formed the message being sent.
Some like to argue that huge chunks of human DNA are “ancient repetitive elements” or junk DNA that no longer serves any useful purpose in the development of the modern organism, but that is a mostly unproved speculation resulting more from ignorance than evidence. The more we learn about DNA, the more sophisticated and complex it appears to be. Certain genetic sequences appear to exist within the genome only to turn on and off various stages of the development process. I highly recommend reading a book titled Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome by Cornell University professor and geneticist John Sanford, who claims that most DNA sequences must not only be poly-functional, they must also be poly-constrained. In other words, DNA has a message that cannot be improved.
There is no debate whether DNA can be compared to a computer’s machine language…clearly, it can. DNA is more than twice as complex as ordinary digital information because DNA allows for four possibilities in constrained combinations while machine language permits only zeroes and ones in any order. Digitized information, even books, have been encoded into DNA then successfully retrieved and decoded, so the concept has unequivocally been validated.
So, the question becomes, can the product of blind and stupid unplanned processes design and build a crude model of itself that’s even dumber than it is? If you believe in Darwin’s theory of universal common descent, the answer is yes.
Time has become your god. With enough Time, anything becomes possible.
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