Just reacting to your headline and common practice at ICR, the fact that science hasn’t got an explaination for something doesn’t “prove” the existence of God or intelligent design. To argue otherwise is a classic non sequitur. It just means we haven’t figured something out yet.
DNA indicates that there IS an intelligence behind the creation of life. Evolution and random accidents contribute nothing to the complexity of life.
Below is an excerpt from Dr. Walt Brown’s free online book:
Duplicate copies of this long tape of coded information are coiled up in almost all of the 100,000,000,000,000 (one hundred trillion) cells in your body. The DNA in a human cell has 46 segments; you received 23 segments from your mother and 23 from your father. DNA contains the unique information that determines what you look like, much of your personality, and how every cell in your body is to function throughout your life.
If all the DNA in one of your cells were uncoiled, connected, and stretched out, it would be about 6 feet long. It would be so thin its details could not be seen, even under an electron microscope. If all this very densely coded information from one cell of one person were written in books, it would fill a library of about 4,000 books. If all the DNA in your body were placed end-to-end, it would stretch from here to the Moon more than 500,000 times! In book form, that information would fill the Grand Canyon almost 100 times. If one set of DNA (one cell’s worth) from every person who ever lived were placed in a pile, the final pile would weigh less than an aspirin! Understanding DNA is just one small reason for believing that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”
Center for Scientific Creation - In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/IntheBeginningTOC.html
JimSEA, I gather from the context above that by “we,” you mean scientists who, deploying scientific presuppositions and methods exclusively, will eventually be able to figure out everything going on in the universe, given sufficient time, by means of such methods. I have reason to suspect that this expectation will prove unlikely to be the case.
At the same time, I am not a person who believes that when science fails to explain something this is somehow “proof” of the existence of God. That is total nonsense: God is not subject to “proof.”
What worries me about the practice of biological science in particular nowadays is that it seems so constrained by Cartesian and Newtonian principles that it is hampering its ability to understand living systems in nature at the very outset. This practice entails a whole bunch of unexamined presuppositions, such as:
• The expectation that everything in the natural world is reducible to “matter in its motions” governed by causal relations obtaining between material states and the forces impinging on them — or as it has been stated, “everything supervenes on the physical.” [Newton’s legacy.] Also involved is the presupposition that biological systems are physical “mechanisms.” [Descartes’ legacy.]
Yet as the great mathematician and theoretical biophysicist Robert Rosen has pointed out,
The universe described by these laws is an extremely impoverished, nongeneric one, and one in which life cannot exist. In short, far from being a special case of [the physical] laws, and reducible to them, biology provides the most spectacular examples of their inadequacy…. To this day, today, the formidable powers of theoretical physics find nothing to say about the biosphere, nor does any physicist contemplating the mysteries of life speak of them qua physicist. This, I would argue, is because biology remains today, as it has always been, a repository of conceptual enigmas for contemporary physics, and not technical problems to be dealt with through mere ingenuity or the application of familiar algorithms. Somehow, the life gets irretrievably lost whenever this is attempted.A mechanism is something that can be productively studied by disassembling it down to its parts. Then the expectation is, if you understand the parts, just sum them all up, and you can completely recapture the whole of which they are the parts. This happens to be impossible in biological systems. When one disassembles a biological system, one instantly loses information about that system — preeminently its organizational information. One also happens to lose its life….
This parts-to-whole expectation reflects what is known as “context independence,” which is one central feature of scientific objectivity. Yet it appears that the “parts” of living systems are not context independent. For they are both “parts” and “participants” in the Whole — the Whole being the very context that is being rigorously ignored, for the sake of “scientific objectivity”….
I have an analogy that suggests somewhat the loss of information that is involved in the sort of paradigmatic reductionism that I am trying to describe here: the “reduction” of an analog to a digital signal. Ask: “What is lost in this transformation?”
I am not a “water carrier” for either Jeffrey Tomkins Ph.D. or ICR. I’m pretty skeptical in general these days. But I did like the article. If anybody has a specific objection to Tomkins’ methods and/or conclusions, I would very much like to hear the details.
Thanks so much for writing, JimSEA!