SETI and DNA
I’m currently reading Jason Lisle’s The Ultimate Proof of Creation. It’s a unique effort to apply Reformed presuppositional apologetics to the origins debate. I hope to post my review of it either next week or the week after. For now, I want to share something from chapter 6. This chapter deals with the proper use of evidence. To get the evolutionist to a discussion of worldviews, Lisle suggests using evidence in a number of ways, one of which is demonstrating inconsistency and arbitrariness in the evolutionist perspective. Here’s one example:
Consider SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. People in this research program hope to detect radio signals from alien civilizations. But many things in space produce radio waves — stars, quasars, pulsars, etc. How would we distinguish an intelligent signal from a ‘natural’ one? One criterion that would certainly do the job is to find information in the radio signal. Clearly, if we received a radio signal that contained instructions on how to build a complex machine, no one would doubt that the transmission came from an intelligent source. Of course, DNA has just such encoded information: instructions on how to build a complex machine. Yet those same researchers will deny that DNA has an intelligent source. It is inconsistent for unbelievers to accept coded information as an indication of intelligence in space, while denying that very same principle in the DNA of living organisms. (101)
