A growing number of scientists are beginning to argue that not only is life complex, but also that it is ordered in such a way as to exhibit evidence of intelligent design. Since life is at its core a chemical code (the DNA code), the origin of life is the origin of a code. A code is a very special kind of order – it represents “specified complexity” (high information content). The complex, meaningful arrangement of bases (or ‘letters’) in the DNA code are characterized by high specified complexity, i.e., high information content. Leading origin-of-life researcher, Leslie Orgel, explains: “Living things are distinguished by their specified complexity… Roughly speaking, the information content of a structure is the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure.” The more complex a structure is, the more instructions needed to specify it (‘The origins of Life’, L. Orgel, p.189-190, 1973).
Everyday experience reveals that information is only produced with intelligence; it always takes an intelligent agent to generate information. In nature, there is no example anywhere in which meaningful information has been observed to arise by itself, without an intelligent source.
“There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this” (‘In the Beginning was Information’, Werner Gitt, CLV, 2nd English Edition, 2000, p. 79).
In everyday experience, people detect intelligent design all the time. For example, if a school teacher finds a sequence of lettered building blocks on the floor of a kindergarten classroom which spells out “THESE BLOCKS WERE NOT PUT HERE ON PURPOSE,” the teacher can safely assume that someone did arrange the letters in that order on purpose – no one would suppose they accidentally fell down that way. This arrangement of building blocks shows specified complexity (i.e., it contains meaningful information).
The meaningful arrangement of bases (or “letters”) in the DNA code of living things is far higher in information content than that of the arrangement of kindergarten building blocks. Indeed, the Encyclopedia Britannica concedes that the information content of a single simple cell is encyclopedic – comparable to about one hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Thus, if it is unreasonable to believe that the arrangement of kindergarten building blocks could have originated without intelligence, then it is at least as unreasonable to believe that the encyclopedic amounts of information contained in the DNA code could have originated without intelligence.