Episode 197 – Eternal Information – Part 5 – Living Information
Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.
Script:
I will praise you because I have been remarkably and wondrously made. Your works are wondrous, and I know this very well.
Psalm 139, verse 14, Christian Standard Bible

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. Thank you for joining us here today on Anchored by Truth as we continue the series which we are calling “Eternal Information.” Like several of the other series that we have done on Anchored by Truth this “Eternal Information” points out a fundamental truth about the universe we see around us. Everywhere we look the universe exhibits order and design. That is true for the inanimate features of the universe and even more true for living creatures. Today we are going to focus on the undeniable elements of design present in living creatures. In the studio we have RD who is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. When we look at the composition of living creatures it’s hard to avoid noticing an amazing level of complexity isn’t it?
RD: Yes, it is. Anyone who has ever contemplated the properties of a living cell for even a moment has to recognize that human beings still do not have the ability to create structures or systems with that level of design finesse. Our most elegant examples of technology and advanced design pale in comparison to the complexity present to every cell on the planet. Yet, the most amazing thing is that some people continue to insist that all of that sophisticated complexity could have arisen by chance. So, today we’re going to do more of an in-depth look at the most amazing information storage medium on the planet – DNA. We’re doing this because we want people to have facts that run directly counter to the assertion that random chance could have produced living creatures.
VK: Well, just as a brief review to set the stage – we have already learned several critical things about information as a fundament component of the created order. Information stands alongside matter, energy, time, and space as a fundamental component that is evident when we make empirical observations about the universe. The difference between information and these other components is that information is non-material. Speaking technically, information is massless. Information is not created by and does not interact with matter, energy, time, or space. We can use matter and energy to transmit, receive, or store information but neither matter nor energy create information. A chemical formula for apple pie or rocket fuel can be written on the same piece of paper using the same ink. The paper and ink do not create the formula, tell us what is in the formula, or affect the formula in the slightest. Thus, information, differs from other massless parts of the universe like photons which are also massless. But photons can be created by matter and energy and do interact with them.
RD: And we have seen during this series that information contains specified sequences, elements, codes, and symbols that are arranged or encoded for a specific purpose to produce specific effects. So, in addition to information being non-material another overarching concept that leaps out at us about information is that information is ordered, organized, and specified. All definitions of information reflect these fundamental attributes.
VK: So, in studying these attributes of information one information scientist, Dr. Werner Gitt’s has formulated four laws that describe how information behaves within the universe. The first law is “A material entity cannot generate a non-material entity.” The second law is that “Universal information is a non-material fundamental entity.” The third law of information is that “universal information cannot be created by statistical processes.” Universal information is simply a way of saying that real information possesses the attributes of order, structure, meaning, and potential action that can produce results. This helps us distinguish information from the kind of nonsense that would be produced by a cat walking on a keyboard. The cat might produce some characters on a computer screen that resemble information, but the letters on the screen won’t have order, purpose, or enable meaningful action to take place.
RD: Exactly right. These first three laws then lead to a fourth law that will be particularly relevant to our discussion today. The fourth law is that “universal information can only be produced by an intelligent sender.” Anything that has order, specificity, and purpose must reflect intelligence. There are many predicable patterns in nature that are regular and repeating like crystal lattices or ripples spreading across a pond – but those patterns don’t convey meaning or purpose. They may be beautiful but they don’t tell anyone who much sugar to put in the pie or where the treasure is buried. This distinction immediately leads us to our subject today. Many people believe that chemistry can explain everything we need to know about how living creatures function, but it can’t.
VK: As Dr. Jonathan Sarfati reminded us when he was a guest on Anchored by Truth, the information stored in DNA cannot be explained by the chemical components of DNA anymore than the chemical components of paper and ink can explain what appears on a printed page. Paper and ink have chemical elements that form them, but it requires intelligence to use that paper and ink to store or transmit information.
RD: Yes. I sometimes ask people a sort-of trick question: “Is biology the product of chemistry and physics?” The answer is clearly no. If chemistry and physics could produce biology we could load some carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen into a vat, provide an energy source like electricity or heat, and “poof” out would come some cells –or at least some organic compounds. But we can’t.
VK: But some people would say we have already done that. Some people are under the impression that scientists have created life from non-living chemicals in laboratories.
RD: Many people are under the misimpression that the famous experiments conducted by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago starting in 1953 produced life. They didn’t. Some of the more accurate reporting noted that the Miller-Urey experiments while not producing life did produce organic material. Even this was a considerable overstatement of what Miller-Urey produced. The Miller–Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with the gases that some scientists had speculated were necessary to form life—methane, ammonia and hydrogen. They thought these gases might be similar to the conditions that they thought were in the early atmosphere. They also included water vapor to simulate the ocean). Next, while a heating coil kept the water boiling, they struck the gases in the flask with a high-voltage (60,000 volts) tungsten spark-discharge device to simulate lightning. Below this was a water-cooled condenser that cooled and condensed the mixture, allowing it to fall into a water trap below.
VK: Well, what did they get out of their experiment and why was it so widely regarded as an evolutionary breakthrough?
RD: Within a few days, the water and gas mix produced a pink stain on the sides of the flask trap. As the experiment progressed and the chemical products accumulated, the stain turned deep red, then muddy. After a week, the researchers analyzed the substances in the water trap used to collect the reaction products. The dominant solid material was an insoluble toxic carcinogenic mixture called best referred to as tar or resin. Tar or resin a common product that results from organic reactions, including burning tobacco. This tar was analyzed. What Miller and Urey were looking for was amino acids.
VK: Why were they looking for amino acids?
RD: The basic structure of all life on earth, whether plant or animal, is a cell. Some creatures like bacteria are only a single cell. Human beings contain over 35 trillion cells. Regardless of the number all life on earth is cellular based. Cells are composed of permeable membranes that encase the components of the cell that actually carry on the business of life. Those components include protein “machines” and other things like nucleic acids. The most famous nucleic acid is, of course, deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. The proteins that make life possible are built from amino acids. Amino acids are small organic compounds consisting of 10 to 20 atoms. There are hundreds of known amino acids but only 20 of those are used by living creatures.
VK: So, did they find any amino acids?
RD: They didn’t find any amino acids on their first attempt, so Miller modified the experiment and tried again. In time, trace amounts of several of the simplest biologically useful amino acids were formed—mostly glycine and alanine – but the yields were extremely small. Even Miller admitted at the time “The total yield was small for the energy expended.” After hundreds of replications and modifications using techniques similar to those employed in the original Miller–Urey experiments, scientists have only been able to produce tiny amounts of less than half of the 20 amino acids required for life. The other amino acids require much more complex synthesis conditions. And without all 20 amino acids available as a set most known protein types cannot be produced.
VK: That would seem to be a big problem. But there were other very significant problems weren’t there?
RD: Yes. There was a huge problem with the material that was produced. Chemists divide amino acids into levorotary and dextrorotary. Levorotary or dextrorotary refer to the “chirality” of the molecule - in simple terms whether the molecule is “left handed” or “right handed.” The amino acids of all living forms are levorotary or left-handed. As organic chemist A.E. Wilder-Smith has noted “If even very small amounts of … the dextrorotary type are present, proteins of a different three dimensional structure are formed, which are unsuitable for life’s metabolism.”
VK: In other words, the presence of right-handed amino acids can be lethal. So, did the Urey-Miller experiments ever produce pure left-handed amino acids?
RD: No. Nor have any similar experiments since produced pure left-handed amino acids. They always produce a combination of the two kinds of amino acids which chemists call a “racemate.” Usually, the proportion produced in these kinds of experiments is what you’d expect – about 50-50. So, this points out one of big failures of the Urey-Miller experiments to be helpful to the idea that living cells could have been produced randomly. Not only didn’t the experiments produce anything that was “alive” – despite all the media hype, they didn’t even produce the kind of building blocks with which real cells are made.
VK: And Urey himself acknowledged this problem. He was once asked how life could have formed spontaneously when living creatures require left-handed amino acids but the lab experiments like his only produce mixtures. His reply was, “Well, I have worried about that a great deal and it is a very important question … and I don’t know the answer to it.” Moreover, that’s just the beginning of the problems pointed out by their experiments. The Urey-Miller experiments used an “atmosphere” that was devoid of oxygen – what is commonly referred to as a “reducing atmosphere.” But the earliest known rocks, even according to the long age conventional theories, all show signs of oxidation. Rust is one common form of oxidation with which we’re all familiar. The presence of oxygen in the early earth atmosphere would be a real problem because oxidation would break down any early organic compounds faster than they could be created.
RD: So, many scientists today are trying to explain the origin of life by positing that it occurred near deep sea ocean vents. But for life to form water vapor, ammonia, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and methane must be present to produce the amino acids. Those amino acids must then combine spontaneously into long chains called polypeptides. But polypeptide synthesis won’t take place in the presence of excess water. Excess water would break down the polypeptides into the component amino acids. So, the appeal to life originating near deep ocean vents comes with a problem that is really unsolvable.
VK: The point about all of this is that contrary to widespread public opinion scientists have never “created life in a test tube.” Some surveys have found that as much as 75% of the general public believes they have. Further, scientists have never even produced the kind of amino acids living creatures need simply by shooting an energy source through a mixture of chemical elements, even when they preselect for elements that form the proteins required by life. Scientists can produce levorotary amino acids but only through very carefully designed synthesis protocols that aren’t anything close to the processes found in nature. So, far from demonstrating that random forces could have generated the components of life the Urey-Miller experiments actually demonstrated the extreme improbability of that happening.
RD: Right. The Urey-Miller experiments were a success – just not a success at showing how easily the components of living creatures can be produced by undirected “natural” processes. The Urey-Miller experiments were a success at demonstrating the extreme improbability of random processes producing the compounds needed by living creatures and the impossibility of those compounds then becoming organized into proteins, nucleic acids, or cells. But even if the Urey-Miller experiments had produced some or most of the necessary amino acids that still wouldn’t have been very helpful to their original aim.
VK: Why not?
RD: Because presumably in designing their experiments Urey-Miller injected a considerable amount of “intelligence,” into their experiments. Said slightly differently Urey-Miller applied a considerable amount of information when they designed and conducted their experiments. Remember on their first trial they didn’t get anything “useful” for life. So, they redesigned the experiment. This is a clear example of them acquiring and using information in an attempt to show that life could have arisen without intelligence or information.
VK: What you’re saying that even if a group of scientists went into a lab, put some chemicals into beakers, provided an energy source, captured any products formed, and then discovered the right kind of amino acids none of that is random. The scientists are the ones picking the chemicals they put in the beaker and they are using information to do that because they already “know the answer.” They already know what chemical elements are present in living creatures and they know the proportions the various elements represent. The scientists already know that all living creatures need a source of energy to sustain their activity, their life. And they have a pretty good idea of what kind of energy must be present. Too much energy living things get fried. Too little energy living creatures die of starvation or freeze to death. Living creatures live within very narrow limits of the type and amounts of energy they need to sustain themselves. But none of that information would be available to an “organic soup” drifting about in a primeval earth being struck by lightning or boiled by volcanic rifts. The absence of information would be fatal – if there was anything living that could die – which there wouldn’t be. Information is the essential component for transforming inanimate chemical elements into living entities.
RD: Yes. Scientists studying living things, then determining the constituent parts of those living things, and then attempting to induce similar things to organize into living things doesn’t demonstrate that life could have arisen randomly. It does the exact opposite. Information and its application were present throughout the process that Urey-Miller attempted to construct. As you just said, Information is an essential component for transforming inanimate chemical elements into living entities. An all-mighty, all-wise God could create the elements He wanted. He did on day one. Then on day three He took some of those elements are organized them in such a way that living things emerged.
VK: You’re referring to Genesis, chapter 1, verses 11 through 13 which read, “Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.” That’s from the New International Version.
RD: Yes. God can create atoms and molecules out of nothing (and he did) because God is infinite in power, wisdom, and sovereignty. God created the atoms and molecules on the first day and then began organizing them into a creation that suited His purposes, including the creation of man on day six. Day three is when he turned those atoms and molecules into the first cells with which He built vegetation. Now, we’re not told expressly when God created the plants that live beneath the seas but it might have been on day three or even day two when the Bible tells us He organized the waters into the seas and the sky. Christians are not left with a dilemma about how hundreds of billions of atoms could all come together at the right place at the right time to make the first living cell. But people who want to leave God out of the arrival of life are.
VK: Well, this is a series about information so let’s do a quick check at some of the places information is present in what we know about the process for creating life. Atheists and radical secularists have to figure out how enough hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arrived at one place and began forming just the right set of chemical bonds to turn those elements into amino acids. So, the first application of information is what elements are going to comprise living creatures. And those aren’t all of the elements that are contained in living creatures. The human body has 21 separate elements some of them in very tiny amounts. Yet despite their relatively small presence they are necessary for us to live.
RD: Yes. And it’s not sufficient just to have the elements available. Those elements must combine in just the right way to create twenty different forms of amino acids because those amino acids are going to be necessary to form proteins. The next place information is present is in the chemical structure of the amino acids. And just having the 20 different amino acids doesn’t make a cell or even a protein. Proteins are typically comprised of between 100 to 500 acid “blocks” in a chain. But the proteins don’t just exist as long strings dangling around. The protein string is called its primary structure but then all proteins fold into complicated shapes called their tertiary structure. It’s in their tertiary structure that proteins will interact with one another to perform the functions that sustain life.
VK: So, there’s information displayed in how the amino acids are lined up into a particular protein and then, of course, a bunch of free floating proteins doesn’t mean anything is living. Without a permeable cell membrane holding everything together you’d just have a bunch of junk protein. And the cell wall has to be permeable because even though it encloses the cell’s contents energy sustaining materials must come in and waste products must go out. So, there’s more information that describes the membrane’s construction and information that prescribes what energy source is safe for use and what is toxic. And all that is just talking about a single celled organism. We haven’t even begun to think about multi-celled creatures much less mammals and man. There are a great many layers of information necessary to make life, even simple life, possible.
RD: Yep. And even if you can get past all those informational barriers all you’ve done is get life going. Cells need instructions for how to operate and, of course, that’s all contained in DNA – which as we are going to see next time actually operates as a four-dimensional information system all by itself. We might have excused Charles Darwin for thinking that living cells are relatively simple constructs but ever since the biomolecular revolution in the 1950’s that excuse has gone away. James Watson and Francis Crick first discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, almost seven decades ago. Since then we’ve mapped the incredible complexity of life in increasingly fine detail including the human genome. Each new discovery adds to our knowledge of how life works but also adds barriers to the idea that random, chaotic forces could have solved the informational puzzle. To this day, no scientist has ever created “life in a test tube” nor have they even produced even the most basic compounds, the right amino acids, from which living creatures are formed.
VK: So, as you say physics plus chemistry do not equal biology. Physics plus chemistry plus information equals life. You know it’s just a little bit silly to believe that unintelligent and undirected matter and energy could produce life when even the most intelligent scientists that have lived among us have not been able to do it. That’s one of the reasons King David proclaimed we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” This sounds like a great time to go to prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer of corporate confession because we have all fallen short of the standards that God has prescribed for the creatures made in His image. But we can praise Him that there was One who met those standards and then allow us to rest on His perfect merit so we don’t need to rest on our imperfections.
---- PRAYER OF CORPORATE CONFESSION
VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”
If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”
(Bible Quote from the Good News Translation)
Acts, Chapter 17, verses 23 and 24, Good News Translation

Why the Miller Urey research argues against abiogenesis (creation.com)
The human genome is amazingly complex (creation.com)
Four Dimensional Genome (creation.com)
We are less than dust (creation.com)