Fantastic Voyage

A Scientific Odyssey

Did mind make matter, or matter mind? Are the things of nature the product of mindless forces alone, or did creative reason play a role? Theologians have grappled with the question but so have philosophers and scientists stretching from ancient Athens to modern Nobel Prize winners.

In 1859, Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution to argue that blind nature had produced all the species of plants and animals around us. The new theory convinced a lot of people that evidence of a Creator could not be found in nature, and indeed, should not be sought. If there are things in nature that remain mysterious, the thinking went, scientists will figure them out in time. To attribute their origin to God was simply to give up on science.

Today, Darwinists level the same charge against the contemporary theory of intelligent design (ID). They insist that ID is just an argument from ignorance—plugging God into the gaps of our current scientific understanding. Darwinists have made many thoughtful arguments over the years, but this isn’t one of them. The theory of intelligent design holds that many things in nature carry a clear signature of design. The theory isn’t based on what scientists don’t know about nature, but on what they do know. It’s built on a host of scientific discoveries. To demonstrate, let’s take a journey.

Miracle of Rare Device

You’re a computer geek living thirty years in the future, and you just won a lottery for a space flight to a distant planet, as yet unnamed. The rendezvous is SpaceX in south Texas. After a thorough physical, you enter the raindrop-shaped vessel along with the captain, pilot, and two other lottery winners. You’re strapped into a cockpit with a panoramic window and hooked to various wires, patches, and tubes. The lottery winner to your left is a burly submarine engineer with short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. The lottery winner to your right is a gangly blonde in her early thirties, a Caltech physicist.

The hatch is shut. The countdown begins. At seven you hear a low groaning. At three it drops an octave, the lights flicker, and your teeth vibrate inside your gums. At zero the cabin falls silent, a stab of pain runs the length of your body, and you fall into darkness.

When you wake, eyes blurry, head aching, you rub your eyes and see that the ship is already approaching a moon marked by a pattern of blobs haphazardly swinging this way and that over the surface. How long were you asleep?

As your ship draws closer, you realize the moon isn’t like any moon you’ve ever heard about. Your hands are clenched on the armrests. You try to relax. Farther and farther the ship descends. It’s clear now that this strange moon is closer and smaller than you supposed, maybe only a dozen miles away and as many across.

If it’s just a big asteroid, it’s a strange one—almost perfectly round.

Suddenly you realize, it’s not a moon. It’s a giant machine, one far bigger than any manmade object you’ve ever encountered.

You’re close enough now to make out millions of portholes on its surface, portholes opening and shutting as millions of ships enter and exit.

You expect your ship to move into orbit around the space station, but now you realize that one hole—barely larger than the ship—lies directly ahead and the pilot is making straight for it.

You find yourself holding your breath and counting down from ten, wondering if these are the final seconds of your life.

The engineer beside you crosses himself and murmurs, “What … is it?”

“Byzantium,” the captain whispers mysteriously.

In the next moment you’re through the portal and onto the other side.

In modern parlance, the ancient capital city of Byzantium, with its intricate and devious political environment, has come to serve as a metaphor for all things labyrinthine and, well, Byzantine. Immediately you understand why the captain would refer to your destination by the name of that ancient city. Within is a realm of unparalleled sophistication, a labyrinth of intricate corridors and conduits networking off in every direction, some stretching off to processing units and assembly stations, others to what the captain explains is an enormous computer, as yet far out of sight, at the center of the space station.

On and on you fly. When the central processing unit at last rounds into view, it looks like a space station itself, about a half a mile across and shaped like a geodesic dome. The pilot threads the ship through a tiny portal. Inside, in every direction you look, are mile on mile of twisting ladders.

“They’re for storing data,” the captain explains. “They’re part of the hard drive, more or less.”

“I had no idea we were this advanced!” the lottery winner to your left says. “How did we manage it? Is this all SpaceX’s doing?”

“Us?” the pilot says. “Don’t be silly. This factory does something no human factory is anywhere close to doing—it builds copies of itself.”

What was the pilot suggesting—that the space station was built by aliens?

He continues. “Don’t get me wrong. As extra­ordinary as this factory is, it isn’t perfect. Occasionally when it builds a copy of itself, there’s a minor difference, a copying error. But as the French say, viva la différence. Those tiny differences made all of this possible. You see, occasionally, one of those copying errors was actually an improvement. The improvement was preserved, and over time a series of these tiny improvements led to the extraordinary factory before us. Initially the factory was quite crude, but over time—”

The physicist interrupts. “Wait, how crude could it have been if it could build copies of itself? We’ve never managed to build a factory that could build a factory that could build a factory that could build a—”

“What are you suggesting?” the pilot snaps. “Are you some sort of religious freak?”

The physicist blinks, disoriented by the seemingly random charge. “No, I—.” She tries again. “I just mean that the engineers who built this must have been brilliant. It’s phenomenal!”

The pilot shakes his head paternalistically. “I think it’s time we cleared up the confusion. Time to let you in on the secret.”

Here the captain nods. “Everything was on a need-to-know basis. You three were chosen, each for a particular expertise—an engineer, a physicist, a software architect. The entire project is hush-hush.”

As you listen, you realize that the long twisting ladders outside the big viewing window seem to have grown larger. The ship has drawn up beside one, and the twisting ladder strikes you as oddly familiar. Suddenly it hits you, but the engineer beside you blurts it out first. “A DNA model—the size of a building!”

He tries to leap from his seat to point, but he’s caught by the intricate restraint system. “Look! The ladder rails are the double helical structure, and rungs across the middle are the nitrogenous bases. It’s all coming back to me.”

The pilot nods. “Adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.”

The captain chimes in. “The genetic code’s four-character alphabet—A, T, G, and C for short.”

“This is where genetic defects come from,” the pilot adds. “Cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia. If there’s a genetic defect, eventually you’ll find a glitch in a strand of DNA for the guilty party.”

The architecture is breathtakingly elegant, but you notice that the sequence of letters on any given rail follow one another in a seemingly random sequence.

The engineer interrupts your train of thought. “If this models DNA, what’s all this other … the space station, I mean?”

“The larger sphere is the cell as a whole,” the pilot says. “The smaller inner sphere is the nucleus.”

“Where,” the captain adds, “the biological information is processed and shipped out as code for helping build the various protein machines.”

You wonder, does this really model a one-celled organism? Could a tiny cell really be this sophisticated? And could even Elon Musk, with all the money in the world, build something this advanced?

The engineer beside you breaks in with another question. “Why was I brought in? My engineering work looks like Tinkertoys beside this stuff.”

The captain drops the other shoe. “Humans didn’t build this. And no, an extra­terrestrial race didn’t build it either.”

“Nobody built it,” the pilot interjects.

The captain seems to bite his tongue here, and then he continues. “You know how physicists have been trying to unite Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum physics? A few years back, a pair of government physicists succeeded.”

“The theory of everything,” the pilot intones.

“So-called,” the captain continues. “This discovery has allowed us to make a series of major technological breakthroughs. The whole endeavor is classified, but as we push forward, we have to bring more and more talent in. The three of you have been recruited into the project.”

At last the captain cuts to the chase. “The so-called ‘theory of everything’ has taught us how to miniaturize things,” he says. “When you woke from the initial shock, the miniaturization process was underway. That vague blob you saw when you first awoke? That’s a cell, looking about as big as cells looked in the best microscopes of the 19th century. You were 700 times smaller than normal, meaning the cell looked 700 times bigger. Then, as we drew closer to the cell, we continued to shrink down and down until we were a billion times smaller. This allowed us to enter the cell and now the cell nucleus. In the 19th century, the cell was a black box, a mystery. Most scientists pictured it as simple, like a little sack of goo. As you can see, they missed the mark by just a bit.”

As the ship weaves its way through the nucleus over the next few hours, you witness a stunning array of raw materials and finished products shuttling along microtubule tracks to and from the many assembly plants in the outer regions of the larger and encompassing cell factory. The machines all around the ship are incalculably numerous and fantastically various. There are molecular machines to haul cargo along molecular tracks. There are molecular cables, molecular ropes, molecular pulleys. Light-powered machines that harness light particles and store them in molecular batteries. Machines to flip cellular switches, machines to send electrical current through nerves, machines to build other machines (and themselves), machines to swim, machines to copy, machines to untangle and splice, machines to ingest and digest. In every direction you look you discover some new miracle of rare device, nanotechnology far beyond anything humans have yet achieved.

The engineer finds his voice. “How does the cell know how to build all these machines, fuel them, orchestrate them?”

“Part of the answer: It uses the same thing a robot uses,” the captain says. “Digital information. Some of that information is stored on these winding ladders all around us, on the DNA. The DNA is like a software program. Its four-character alphabet combines in various ways to form a twenty-character alphabet of amino acids. Each amino-acid ‘character’ is three DNA letters long. That twenty-character alphabet is then used to write the long protein sentences, the molecular machines, you see working all around us.”

The physicist leans forward excitedly. “I get it now!” she exclaims. “I couldn’t figure out why the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs were strung along the double helices in a random order. But it isn’t random. They’re coding information, genetic information. Novels and computer programs and instruction manuals—things like that don’t use recurring patterns of letters. They couldn’t convey their information that way. It would be like trying to write a friend where B always had to follow A, and the Cs had to come in threes. If every letter you set down was governed by a rule like ‘repeat the letter and then skip ahead two letters in the alphabet,’ you’d never get anything meaningful written.”

The captain nods. “If you’re going to code information, you can’t be shackled at every step by predetermined laws. That doesn’t mean you can set down the letters at random. Imagine randomly shuffling the code in a software program. You’d crash it. Same thing happens when you start randomly shuffling around the letters down here. The letters appear in a very specific sequence for a reason. That’s the sequence that works for that particular biological machine.”

“But random changes do occur in the order of the letters,” the pilot protests, “and they’re not always lethal. Sometimes they’re helpful. That’s evolution.”

The physicist gives the pilot a look. “You’re saying random errors sifted by natural selection wrote all this software code, all this hardware? Built a system light years more sophisticated than our best robots and our best computer programs?”

The pilot nods.

The submarine engineer shakes his head and looks to you. “Are we sure this guy should be steering?”

A Miniature World

Of course, the captain, pilot, and voyage are make-believe, but the debate is real. The intricate world of the cell described in this story is also real. It is the discovery of this miniature world of rare device, not ignorance, that drives the contemporary theory of intelligent design.

—This article is adapted from Intelligent Design Uncensored by William A. Dembski and Jonathan Witt. Copyright (c) 2010 by William A. Dembski and Jonathan Witt. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com.