Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
In our experience, codes are produced only by intelligence, not by natural processes or chance. A code is a set of rules for converting information from one useful form (such as language) to another. Examples include Morse code and Braille. Code makers must simultaneously understand at least two ways of representing information and then establish the rules for converting from one to the other and back again. It is hard to imagine how natural processes and long periods of time could produce even one language. Having two languages form by natural processes and be able to automatically convert one to the other is unbelievable.
The genetic material that controls the physical processes of life is coded information. Also coded are very complexa and completely different functions: the transmission, translation, correction, and duplication systems, without which the genetic material would be useless, and life would cease.b It seems obvious that the genetic code and the accompanying transmission, translation, correction, and duplication systems were produced simultaneously in each living organism by an extremely high intelligence.c
Also, no natural process has ever been observed to produce a program. A program is a planned sequence of steps to accomplish some goal. Computer programs are common examples. Because programs require foresight, they are not produced by chance or natural processes. A complex program is stored in the genetic information in every form of life. Therefore, it appears that an unfathomable intelligence created these genetic programs.d
Life contains matter, energy, and information.e All isolated systems, including each living organism, has specific, but perishable, amounts of information. No isolated system has ever been shown to increase its information content significantly.f Nor do natural processes add information; they destroy it. Only outside intelligence can significantly increase the information content of an otherwise isolated system. Thousands of scientific observations are consistent with this generalization, which has three corollaries: