My belief as an atheist was that God did not exist, the Bible was not a credible compilation of writings, and that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. However, a guest on my radio talk show in 1971 challenged my thinking about that. He was a Christian and a well-known scientist. His challenge got me started in the area of science.
I’ve already detailed my investigation in a lengthy series of articles that ran for more than a decade (2012-2026). I’m now sharing the next part of the series where I look at what I’ve learned since 1971. I shared about the Cosmological Argument, and began looking at the Teleological Argument in my last post. The Teleological Argument includes the Fine-Tuning of the Universe, Irreducible Complexity, and Regularity. You can read about ‘Fine-Tuning’ here. Let’s move next to ‘Irreducible Complexity.’
Irreducible Complexity
AI Generated
I was fortunate during my investigation in 1971 to know some scientific evidence about DNA. Watson and Crick discovered the DNA double-helix structure in 1953. Swiss biochemist Friedrich Miescher discovered the molecule we now refer to as DNA in 1869. He called it ‘nuclein’ because of the nuclei of white blood cells. Other scientists during World War II discovered that DNA is the substance responsible for transferring genetic information. Watson and Crick used information from those and other scientists ten years later to publish the structure of the DNA double helix. (History)
DNA research continues to play an important role in our understanding of the basics of life. Scientists in the 1970s explained how genetic information is encoded through nucleotide-based sequences. The National Human Genome Research Institute explains the process in this way:
“Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a molecule that contains the biological instructions that make each species unique. DNA, along with the instructions it contains, is passed from adult organisms to their offspring during reproduction.”
DNA functions similarly to a biochemical code – how we might view how the alphabet forms words and words form sentences. DNA is a type of ‘genomic language’ –
“DNA’s instructions are used to make proteins in a two-step process. First, enzymes read the information in a DNA molecule and transcribe it into an intermediary molecule called messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA.
Next, the information contained in the mRNA molecule is translated into the “language” of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. This language tells the cell’s protein-making machinery the precise order in which to link the amino acids to produce a specific protein. This is a major task because there are 20 types of amino acids, which can be placed in many different orders to form a wide variety of proteins.” How are DNA sequences used to make proteins?
Michael Behe wrote a book in 1996 titled, Darwin’s Black Box. Here’s how the publisher explained the importance of DNA –
“In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe argues that evidence of evolution’s limits has been right under our noses — but it is so small that we have only recently been able to see it. The field of biochemistry, begun when Watson and Crick discovered the double-helical shape of DNA, has unlocked the secrets of the cell. There, biochemists have unexpectedly discovered a world of Lilliputian complexity. As Behe engagingly demonstrates, using the examples of vision, bloodclotting, cellular transport, and more, the biochemical world comprises an arsenal of chemical machines, made up of finely calibrated, interdependent parts. For Darwinian evolution to be true, there must have been a series of mutations, each of which produced its own working machine, that led to the complexity we can now see. The more complex and interdependent each machine’s parts are shown to be, the harder it is to envision Darwin’s gradualistic paths, Behe surveys the professional science literature and shows that it is completely silent on the subject, stymied by the elegance of the foundation of life. Could it be that there is some greater force at work?” Darwin’s Black Box
Behe wrote Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution ten years later –
“In 1996, Darwin’s Black Box helped to launch the intelligent design movement: the argument that nature exhibits evidence of design, beyond Darwinian randomness. It sparked a national debate on evolution, which continues to intensify across the country. From one end of the spectrum to the other, Darwin’s Black Box has established itself as the key intelligent design text—the one argument that must be addressed in order to determine whether Darwinian evolution is sufficient to explain life as we know it.
In a major new Afterword for this edition, Behe explains that the complexity discovered by microbiologists has dramatically increased since the book was first published. That complexity is a continuing challenge to Darwinism, and evolutionists have had no success at explaining it. Darwin’s Black Box is more important today than ever.” Darwin’s Black Box, 2006
Research into Intelligent Design and issues of Irreducible Complexity have continued since Behe wrote those books decades ago. Here’s an example:
“One of the original icons of intelligent design, the bacterial flagellum continues to astonish viewers shown a complex molecular motor in the “simplest” life-forms. As researchers peer deeper into its operations with super-resolution microscopy, they have revealed many more details since Michael Behe introduced his readers to its outboard-motor function in Darwin’s Black Box (1996), elaborating on it in more detail in his subsequent books. The bacterial flagellum played a starring role in Illustra Media’s film Unlocking the Mystery of Life in 2002. As recently as 2024, Destin Sandlin made a whole episode about it for his channel Smarter Every Day. To watch a modern animation of this elegant device is often enough to convince people of intelligent design. Here is an artifact clearly beyond the reach of unguided natural processes.
One mystery remained, though: how did it generate torque? Rotating a propeller in fluid that feels more viscous at the nanometer scale requires significant turning force. A recent paper in PNAS by Basarab Hosu and two colleagues at Harvard — the same university where pioneering research was done on it by Howard Berg in the 1990s — helps answer that question: “Torque-generating units of the bacterial flagellar motor are rotary motors.” The flagellum is a rotary motor rotated by smaller rotary motors! Even more amazing, those small motors act like gears. ID advocates leaped on the discovery of planthopper nymphs that use gears to hop, but these are orders of magnitude smaller.
Another mystery was how the flagellum could switch rotation from one direction to the other almost instantly. The new model by Hosu et al. pictures the inner motors rapidly flipping from inside to outside or back. To visualize this, think of a ring toothed on the inside and outside. Now think of four small motorized gears inside the larger ring, rotating the ring as they turn. If they could flip to the outside and engage the ring’s outer teeth, the ring would reverse direction. Something like that is what Hosu et al. confirmed: “The bacterial flagellar motor is driven by the first set of enmeshed gearwheels that has been described in any living cell.” That’s worth a big “Wow!” Science and Culture Today
Life’s Irreducible Structure
Chemist Michael Polanyi was writing in the late 1960’s about the ‘mechanistic structures of living beings’ appearing to be irreducible even as machines were ‘irreducible to physics and chemistry.’ Polanyi’s work impacted other scientists to consider the idea of ‘irreducible complexity.’ Some scientists refer to it as ‘specificed complexity’ or ‘digital information’ in DNA.
Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen wrote The Mystery of Life’s Origin in 1984. The book was updated many years later under the title of The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy.
“The origin of life from non-life remains one of the most enduring mysteries of modern science. The Mystery of Life’s Origin: The Continuing Controversy investigates how close scientists are to solving that mystery and explores what we are learning about the origin of life from current research in chemistry, physics, astrobiology, biochemistry, and more. The book includes an updated version of the classic text The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen, and new chapters on the current state of the debate by chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer.”
This demonstrates that the scientific community was not sitting still about investigating the ‘origin of life.’ I discovered that much of the information available to me in 1971 had been challenged years later. One example is the Miller-Urey experiment from 1953. Russian biologist Alexander Oparin and British biologist and geneticist John Haldane came up with a concept in the 1920s called ‘primordial soup.’ However, chemists began laboratory studies to understand the synthesis of organic materials from simple materials from an ‘early Earth.’ That’s when Stanley Miller worked with Harold Urey to evaluate what may have happened on a primitive Earth. That led to what was a synthesis of biochemicals they believed simulated early Earth conditions and production of amino acids.
Biochemist Dean Kenyon had been a proponent of chemical evolution and wrote Biochemical Predestination with Gary Steinman in 1969. However, Kenyon began questioning whether the ‘undirected’ processes of evolution could account for the formation of complex biomolecules. That led him to eventually co-author a book titled The Mystery of Life’s Origin in 1984. I’ve continued to follow Kenyon and other scientists about where their ‘doubts’ took them. Here’s a brief summary he wrote about his doubts:
“Finally, in this brief summary of the reasons for my growing doubts that life on Earth could have begun spontaneously by purely chemical and physical means, there is the problem of the origin of genetic, i.e., biologically relevant, information in biopolymers. No experimental system yet devised has provided the slightest clue as to how biologically meaningful sequences of subunits might have originated in prebiotic polynucleotides or polypeptides. Evidence for some degree of spontaneous sequence ordering has been published, but there is no indication whatsoever that the non-randomness is biologically significant. Until such evidence is forthcoming one certainly cannot claim that the possibility of a naturalistic origin of life has been demonstrated. ” Dean Kenyon, What Scientists Fear: Foreword to The Mystery of Life’s Origin, 2020
Specified Complexity
I begn reading the works of mathematician and philosopher William Dembski in the 1990s. Dembski used his knowledge of ‘information theory’ to argue that a system or object that is ‘specified and complex’ is best explained by an intelligence rather than something ‘random.’ Dembski looked at the DNA genetic code as having an ‘intelligent’ cause because of ‘specified complexity.’
Specified complexity is –well — complex. So, I’m grateful to Dembski for explaining it in detail a couple of years ago in an article titled, Specified Complexity Made Simple. Here’s a short quote. The entire article is lengthy, but well worth the read:
“Even though this article is titled “Specified Complexity Made Simple,” there’s a limit to how much the concept of specified complexity may be simplified before it can no longer be adequately defined or explained. Accordingly, specified complexity, even when made simple, will still require the introduction of some basic mathematics, such as exponents and logarithms, as well as an informal discussion of information theory, especially Shannon and Kolmogorov information. I’ll get to that in the subsequent sections.
At this early stage in the discussion, however, it seems wise to lay out specified complexity in a convenient non-technical way. That way readers lacking mathematical and technical facility will still be able to grasp the gist of specified complexity. In this section, I’ll present an intuitively accessible account of specified complexity. Just as all English speakers are familiar with the concept of prose even if they’ve never thought about how it differs from poetry, so too we are all familiar with specified complexity even if we haven’t carefully defined it or provided a precise formal mathematical account of it.” William Dembski, Specified Complexity Made Simple, 2024
Other scientists and researchers you may find interesting to read about ‘specified complexity’ during the last 25 years include Michael Denton, Maxim Makukov, Douglas Axe, Ann Gauger, Winston Ewert, Jeffrey Tomkins, Ola Hössjer, Steinar Thorvaldsen, Randy Guliuzza, Vernon Cupps, John D. Morris, Brian Thomas, Frank Sherwin, among many others.
Don’t Fear
My point is simple. Don’t be afraid to question and search for truth. It was evidence that brought me as an atheist and investigative journalist to believe in the God of the Bible. It has been my continual search for evidence since then that has quelled any doubts that may have arisen since I became a follower of Jesus Christ in 1971. Every year and decade that goes by finds more and more scientists from every field of study closer to accepting that an ‘intelligent being,’ who I know as God, is responsible for everything we see around us – both the simple and the complex.
Next Time
Evolution vs. Creation .. and the winner is! Join me next time as my series continues, Still Convinced After All These Years.
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