The question of Random Chance or Intelligent Design

Signature in the Cell (2009)
DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
Stephen C. Meyer

Take the instance when you receive a fax. You marvel at how a message at one end of the line is transmitted to the other many miles away. You think you know it all when you discover the nitty-gritty of how a facsimile machine works. You forget all about the composer of the document.

Learning about the essence of life, DNA is something like that. When Watson and Crick suggested the double helix model as the prototype for DNA in 1953, the world thought material science could explain everything. Delving further, later scientists came with theories after theories of how internal milieu of the cell worked.

The author posits that the possibility of creation of life from the Universe's 'pre-biotic soup' just by chance - by random 'trial-and-error' is merely impossible. The probability, in statistically sense, of Nature coming up with the correct combination that can sustain life, from zero, is simply very remote.

Meyer, a self-professed staunch Christian, a Professor of philosophy and a scientist, came to the fore when in 2005, a school board decided that students should be exposed to intelligent design as a possible origin of life. American Civil Liberty Union chose to sue the school board for teaching something counter to the accepted theory of the origin of life.

Meyer, being a scientist, does not bring in the story of Genesis as the beginning of time. He instead, postulates that perhaps there must be an intelligent designer who orchestrated this potpourri of life forms. There are simply too many hostile or destructive forces in Nature that against life formation. He does not create argue in the fashion of a theologian who goes on bringing in the word divine in his answers but instead tries to give scientific explanations to his reasoning. Whether the scientific fraternity accepts his argument, that is another question. They mostly consider his accounts as pseudosciences. Meyer insists that science makes many conjectures before concluding something. Hence, intelligent design can be presumed.

The exciting thing about science is that it accepts new ideas. All the scientists have to do is to prove their finding. With time, their theories are open to debate and maybe disproved altogether. Perhaps, they would be a template for further developments. This must surely be better than shutting our minds to new ideas and accepting that the human race has nothing new to learn but to depend on age-old scriptures. Nobody knows the whole truth about our origin and the purpose of our existence. Only our intellect remains the last bastion to bring us there, at least a little remotely close there.

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