Do you understand the role of “information” in your scenario?
I see information on two levels. One is the transfer of information within an organism, like a control system. When the transfer of information stops, the organism is dead. That could include the transfer of information by which its life systems control themselves, and communicate among themselves, and then information coming to the organism, by which means it finds its food, and adapts to a changing environment.
Another level of information is the plan or intelligence by which the organism was developed in the first place.
Neither of these two kinds of information can be separated from the organism, and neither can be purely mechanical or material even though information is transmitted by material means, its content is not material.
The holy grail for programmers is a program that can modify itself. I sometimes think that if an evolutionist saw such a program he would imagine that there was no programmer behind it, whereas I would look at it and marvel at the talent who wrote it.
At the heart of creation I imagine a beautifully elegant formula that over time brings what we see into existence. That God is the author of that principle or formula, and that creation continues and we play a role in it. I’m not a deist; I believe every thing we do and everything we experience is shot through with God’s presence and bears his thumbprint. When God spoke life into existence I envision an injection of intelligence into a material universe, or perhaps present from the first moment, maybe inseparable from it. On a small and narrow scale we do it all the time, injecting intelligence into the material. God does it on a grand scale. Our projects have to unfold rather quickly; God’s can go fast or very very slow, depending.
What evolutionists describe as evolution is an apparent transition from one level of complexity to the next. I look at the apparent transitions and I see intelligence driving it. I look at the cells that make up any living organism and I see a tiny organic machine with moving parts, on-board processor, and an electrochemical control system. Genius.
Hey, I know I’m an amateur in this kind of thread. Be easy on me.
I mean, imagine if a team of astronauts found a functioning digital calculator buried in a million-year-old stratum of the surface of Mars. Would they conclude the calculator was designed by some intelligent creature, or that the calculator was created accidentally by the effect of billions of years of weathering upon Martian stone? Would they try to find more finished artifacts, or would they start looking for fossil electronic devices demonstrating a gradual progression of calculator ancestors beginning with the first primitive transistors created by chance from the non-living minerals of Mars?
Of course not. The calculator in all its complexity and purposeful design would be seen rightly as incontestable evidence of the presence of intelligent life on Mars.
And yet a single biological cell is fantastically complex -- much more complex than any calculator...
I think B-Chan said in his post 10 what I was trying to say much better than I said it with my rather lame parable about diesel engines