My definition is scientific. To be specific, I am quoting Dr Werner Gitt, Director and Professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology. He has written numerous scientific papers in the field of information science, numerical mathematics, and control engineering.
"All the scientific research, experiments and observations carried out in the twentieth century show that the answer to this question is a definite "No." The director of the German Federal Physics and Technology Institute, Prof. Werner Gitt, has this to say on the issue:
A coding system always entails a nonmaterial intellectual process. A physical matter cannot produce an information code. All experiences show that every piece of creative information represents some mental effort and can be traced to a personal idea-giver who exercised his own free will, and who is endowed with an intelligent mind.... There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter...385
It is impossible for the information inside DNA to have emerged by chance and natural processes.
Werner Gitt's words summarize the conclusions of "information theory," which has been developed in the last 50 years, and which is accepted as a part of thermodynamics. Information theory investigates the origin and nature of the information in the universe. The conclusion reached by information theoreticians as a result of long studies is that "Information is something different from matter. It can never be reduced to matter. The origin of information and physical matter must be investigated separately."
Werner Gitt, In the Beginning Was Information, CLV, Bielefeld, Germany, pp. 107, 141
When we apply this scientific definition of information to nature, a very important result ensues. This is because nature overflows with an immense body of information (as, for example, in the case of DNA), and since this information cannot be reduced to matter, it therefore comes from a source beyond matter.
One of the foremost advocates of the theory of evolution, George C. Williams, admits this reality, which most materialists and evolutionists are reluctant to see. Williams has strongly defended materialism for years, but in an article he wrote in 1995, he states the incorrectness of the materialist (reductionist) approach which holds that everything is matter:
Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter… These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." …The gene is a package of information, not an object... In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality... This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.
Therefore, contrary to the supposition of materialists, the source of the information in nature cannot be matter itself. The source of information is not matter but a superior Wisdom beyond matter. This Wisdom existed prior to matter. The possessor of this Wisdom is God, the Lord of all the Worlds. Matter was brought into existence, given form, and organized by Him.
With all due respect, I am one of the people who made the field what it is today and your definition is wrong. I will directly address the assertions of anybody who wants to discuss the mathematics, but that isn't what goes on here. We get third-hand assertions that originated from people who do not understand the field, presented first-hand by people who don't even pretend to understand the field. Not much of an argument, that.
A coding system always entails a nonmaterial intellectual process. A physical matter cannot produce an information code. All experiences show that every piece of creative information represents some mental effort and can be traced to a personal idea-giver who exercised his own free will, and who is endowed with an intelligent mind.... There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter...
This guy uses the same invalid definition of information as you. That's what you get for using a reference with questionable credentials. The "Sell By" date on his understanding of information theory was passed sometime around the Korean War.
More to the point: His above claim runs directly contrary to some of the basic theorems of information theory. There was a seminal set of mathematical papers published in IEEE's information theory journal (THE journal in the field) in the 1970s that prove that his assertions are false, and which are foundational to the field today. This guy is clueless and his understanding pre-dates when most of the field was developed.
Your source is thereby discredited. Anybody who can't even keep up with important works in the field that are more than 25 years old is not an expert. That would be like using the Wright brothers as expert references on supersonic aircraft.
No it doesn't. Information theory is a field of mathematics that deals with "patterns" in the abstract (the best colloquial definition I can think of for "information"). Applied to the real world (e.g. thermodynamics, economics, etc), there is a single additional rule that makes the system behave like it does: information can never be moved, only copied (not coincidentally, exactly like our plain old silicon computers). Everything that exists IS information, and therefore you can't have a universe that isn't packed to the gills with information.
Information theory is NOT a science, it is mathematics. The application to the real universe requires assuming a single additional rule which I mentioned above. And there is even a sub-field of information theory that assumes that rule as well and therefore thoroughly characterizes our universe.
As his bio at Answers in Genesis makes clear, he is also "a renowned evangelist," preaching on topics such as, "‘After death — what then?’ ‘The wonder of the Bible’, and ‘What creation teaches us’". There are also links for various creationist books and articles he's written.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/bios/w_gitt.asp
The following page (excerpted) describes, and then elucidates some problems with, Gitt's "information theory" evangelism. In short Gitt's claim that information must have an intelligent source is nothing but a bald assertion, made "true" by definition, but not by demonstration, or by derivation from accepted theory:
http://home.mira.net/~reynella/debate/gitt.htm
Where Gitt Goes Wrong [Top]
A striking contradiction is readily apparent in Gitt's thinking- he holds that his view of information is an extension of Shannon, even while he rejects the underpinnings of Shannon's work. Contrast Gitt's words
(4) No information can exist in purely statistical processes.
and
Theorem 3: Since Shannon's definition of information relates exclusively to the statistical relationship of chains of symbols and completely ignores their semantic aspect, this concept of information is wholly unsuitable for the evaluation of chains of symbols conveying a meaning.
with Shannon's statement in his key 1948 paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.
It becomes very difficult to see how he has provided an extension to Shannon, who purposely modeled information sources as producing random sequences of symbols (see the article Classical Information Theory for further information). It would be more proper to state that Gitt offers at best a restriction of Shannon, and at worst, an outright contradiction.
In SC2 Gitt notes that Chaitin showed randomness cannot be proven (see Chaitin's article "Randomness and Mathematical Proof"), and that the cause of a string of symbols must be therefore be known to determine information is present; yet in SC1 he relies on discerning the "ulterior intention at the semantic, pragmatic and apobetic levels." In other words, Gitt allows himself to make guesses about the intelligence and purpose behind a source of a series of symbols, even though he doesn't know whether the source of the symbols is random. Gitt is trying to have it both ways here. He wants to assert that the genome fits his strictly non-random definition of information, even after acknowledging that randomness cannot be proven.
Gitt describes his principles as "empirical", yet the data is not provided to back this up. Similarly, he proposes fourteen "theorems", yet fails to demonstrate them. Shannon, in contrast, offers the math to back up his theorems. It is difficult to see how Gitt's "empirical principles" and "theorems" are anything but arbitrary assertions.
Neither do we see a working measure for meaning (a yet-unsolved problem Shannon wisely avoided). Since Gitt can't define what meaning is sufficiently to measure it, his ideas don't amount to much more than arm-waving.
By asserting that data must have an intelligent source to be considered information, and by assuming genomic sequences are information fitting that definition, Gitt defines into existence an intelligent source for the genome without going to the trouble of checking whether one was actually there. This is circular reasoning.