The Complexity of DNA

Consider for a moment whether you could ever believe this publication happened by accident. Here’s the argument: There was nothing. Then paper appeared, and ink fell from nowhere onto the sheets and shaped itself into perfectly formed letters. Initially, the letters said something like this: “fgsn&k cn1clxc dumh cckvkduh vstupidm ncnx.” As you can see, random letters rarely produce words that make sense. But in time, mindless chance formed them into the order of meaningful words separated by spaces. The sentences then grouped themselves to relate to each other, giving them coherence. Punctuation marks, paragraphs, margins, etc., also came into being in the correct placements. Page numbers fell in sequence at the right places, and headers, footers, and footnotes appeared from nowhere on the pages, matching the portions of text to which they related. The paper trimmed itself and bound itself into a book. The ink for the cover fell from different directions, being careful not to incorrectly mingle with the other colors, forming itself into the graphics and title. There are multiple copies of this publication, so it then developed the ability to replicate itself thousands of times over.

With this thought in mind, notice that in the following description, DNA is likened to a book:

If you think of your genome (all of your chromosomes) as the book that makes you, then the genes are the words that make up the story…The letters that make up the words are called DNA bases, and there are only four of them: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). It’s hard to believe that an alphabet with only four letters can make something as wonderful and complex as a person!

To liken DNA to a book is a gross understatement. The amount of information in the 3 billion base pairs in the DNA in every human cell is equivalent to that in 1,000 books of encyclopedia size. It would take a person typing 60 words per minute, eight hours a day, around 50 years to type the human genome. And if all the DNA in your body’s 100 trillion cells was put end to end, it would reach to the sun (90 million miles away) and back over 600 times.

“Could DNA’s amazing structure have come together by accident? Or does it point to an intelligent Designer?”

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Aside from the immense volume of information that your DNA contains, consider whether all the intricate, interrelated parts of this “book” could have come together by sheer chance. Physical chemist Charles Thaxton writes:

The DNA code is quite simple in its basic structure (although enormously complex in its functioning). By now most people are familiar with the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. It is like a long ladder, twisted into a spiral. Sugar and phosphate molecules form the sides of the ladder. Four bases make up its “rungs.” These are adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. These bases act as the “letters” of a genetic alphabet. They combine in various sequences to form words, sentences, and paragraphs. These base sequences are all the instructions needed to guide the functioning of the cell.

The DNA code is a genetic “language” that communicates information to the cell . . . The DNA molecule is exquisitely complex, and extremely precise: the “letters” must be in a very exact sequence. If they are out of order, it is like a typing error in a message. The instructions that it gives the cell are garbled. This is what a mutation is. The discovery of the DNA code gives the argument from design a new twist. Since life is at its core a chemical code, the origin of life is the origin of a code. A code is a very special kind of order. It represents “specified complexity.”

Could DNA’s amazing structure have come together by accident? Or does it point to an intelligent Designer? Even the director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute concluded there is a God based on his study of DNA. Francis Collins, the scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome, believes there is a rational basis for a Creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”:

When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1-billion-letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.

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