The Atheist's Riddle

8/6/2019 The Atheist's Riddle

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The Atheist's Riddle: 30+ Skeptics Attempt

To Solve It

For Three Years and counting, I have successfullyadvanced the Information Theory argument for Intelligent

Design on Infidels, the worlds largest Atheist discussion

forum.

Information Theory and DNA deal a crushing blow to Atheism, because the laws of physics

and chemistry do not account for the existence of information.

You are invited to study, in detail, one of the longest-running debates in the history of theInfidels discussion board.

Verify for yourself: To the extent that science can demonstrate anything, the information in

DNA is evidence ofdesign in living things.

On August 30, 2005, a member of the infidels online forum (screen name wdog) posted the

following on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board athttp://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=135497&page=1

"I have been emailing back and forth with Perry Marshall, the author of this site

http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/ifyoucanreadthis.htmand since it quickly expanded in scope I invited him to come here and present his 'evidence'

and proof. You might find the site amusing anyway. Feel free to critique his statements as i

am sure he may at least read this since i will make him aware of this thread.please be polite. Thanks"

My first post:

Gentlemen:

The starting point of this discussion is my central thesis, which is:

1) DNA is not merely a molecule with a pattern; it is a code, a

language, and an information storage mechanism.

2) All codes are created by a conscious mind; there is no naturalprocess known to science that creates coded information.

3) Therefore DNA was designed by a mind.

If you can provide an empirical example of a code or language that occurs

naturally, you've toppled my proof. All you need is one.

Perry Marshall


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The discussion continued for more than 4 months and 300 posts. At the end, nearly allparticipants dropped out, having failed to topple my proof or produce any new objections that

had not already been addressed. In the course of a very detailed and vigorous discussion myargument did not suffer the slightest injury.

There were six major counter-arguments to information as proof of intelligent design. You

can follow these links for a thorough summary of the discussion threads:

1. The objection that DNA is not a code (it is, by universal definition)

2. The objection that information is not real (it is, because it produces real effects)

3. The objection that information has no objective meaning (it does, because a message

produces results that are just as objective and specific as the message itself)

4. The objection that random processes can create information (they can't)

5. The objection that codes do occur naturally (they don't)

6. The objection that the nature of the Designer cannot be determined (in very broad

terms, it can)

(Note: for brevity and because of copyright concerns I have edited and / or paraphrased most

of the questions, being careful not to change the intent of the message. If you wish to read

the full discussion you can do so here. Lest anyone accuse me of re-writing history here onmy website, I strongly encourage you to go see the forum for yourself! I was challenged by

dozens of people and responded in detail to all major objections.)

On December 4, 2005 I made my last of 16 posts. Notice that my language re-stating my

syllogism is somewhat tightened as a result of four months of discussion:

Let's review where we've been in this thread. I have said:

(1) The sequence of base pairs in DNA is a code.

Much effort has been made to discredit this statement, unsuccessfully.

This statement is fully and explicitly supported in virtually all of the

scientific literature since the 1960's.

(2) All codes that we know the origin of come from a mind.

Much effort has been expended to discredit this statement as well.Assertions have been attempted that gravity, snowflakes, magma flows

and the like are codes. But none accurately conforms to Shannon's

communication model. Most of the examples cited do not contain an

encoding system, and none contain a decoding system.

(3) Therefore DNA came from a mind.


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The objection to this statement has been that the conclusion is reached

inductively. Complaints have been lodged that inductive reasoning is

inherently unreliable. But we do observe that the laws of thermodynamics

and in fact the majority of known scientific laws are determined

inductively and not deductively. If you wish to throw out inductive

reasoning, then we can discard almost all scientific knowledge and start

all over again and use rocks and sticks to make fire.

Thus we have, right here on the Infidels discussion forum, after more

than 300 posts, robust evidence that life was intelligently designed.

It is not possible for me to persuade people to believe in God if they donot want to; that is not my job. But one can hope that some will follow

the evidence, wherever it leads.

Perry Marshall

At this point the moderator, RBH, said:

I've pretty much abandoned this thread as hopeless, but recently ran onto the Evolving Code

Wiki run by Stephen Freeland's bioinformatics lab. A good resource for those who wish to

'follow the evidence'.

Mr. Freeland's site doesn't answer the questions I raise either, but skeptics are free to pursuethat line of inquiry if they wish. Let's not forget that the entire enterprise of scientific

inquiry during the last 500 years has been the ongoing discovery of underlying order,notthe assumption of accident. For that reason I think it's more productive to hypothesize

design in DNA and devote our energies to discovering all its wonders.

Open Challenge: The discussion thread is still open on IIDB, as discussion resumed in lateFebruary 2005. I welcome anyone who understands information theory, and has a

rigorous argument, to come forward and present it. No doubt people will editorializeabout this elsewhere, attempting to dismiss it as 'arguing by failed analogy' or whatever.

But to whoever says I'm wrong, I say: Log on to the Infidels forum,step into the ring with

me andprove I'm wrong .Note: Before you do this, do your homework. (I've done mine.)Carefully read every single post and make absolutely sure you're not just repeating what

somebody else has already said.

After more than 500 messages on the board, the atheist position is forced to insist, against

decades of well-established scientific literature and every convention in the field of biology,that DNA "isn't really a code." And yet things like pebbles and snowflakes somehow are.

A number of people on the atheist side have called them on this, but even the moderator

continues to insist that I'm foolish for taking all those biology books literally. How very

interesting that the atheist position cannot accept one of the most fundamental

definitions in modern science, once the implications become clear:If DNA is a code, then

we have every reason to believe that it is designed.


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Personal Comments After Debating Information Theory in Public for Well Over A

Year and Successfully Advancing Intelligent Design to 30+ Atheists:

Having successfully run through the gauntlet with this argument, some brief

observations.

First of all, the vast majority of evolution vs. creation debates are fundamentallyincapable of reaching a conclusion because 99% of the evidence is subjective and anecdotal.

If you argue about fossils, for example, the evidence is extremely fragmentary and people see

the evidence through their presuppositions. An endless debate that never reaches a

conclusion is a great way to sell books, because skeptics buy evolution books and creationists

buy creationist books and nobody really listens to each other anyway.

But Information Theory is different. The arguments I make here, and the argumentsHubert Yockey makes in his bookInformation Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life are

not subjective at all. (Yockey is nota creationist or even an advocate of Intelligent Design, bythe way, and nowhere do I reference anything other than widely accepted, non-controversial

scientific literature.)

The information theory argument is based on rigorous logical and mathematical

definitions, and long-standing conventions in Electrical Engineering. The pattern in DNA is

not like a code, it is a code, by definition. So information theory applied to DNA is not an

analogy and actually has a possibility of making real progress in this debate.

As you will see here , the only resource the skeptic can use to fight this is confusion and

obfuscation. Observe the skeptical attempt to take my simple argument and make it

impossibly complicated and confuse people, including the skeptics themselves.

Information Theory really isn't all that complicated. But it is sufficiently abstract that

you can throw up smoke screens, and the smoke screens will work for quite awhile. Noticehow tirelessly these guys argued that DNA doesn't actually contain a code. (Also notice thatat the very same time they also try to argue that gravity is a code!) And although most

members of the board don't explicitly admit it, their argument does ultimately fail. The

pattern in DNA is a code.

You will notice that there is a handful of atheists here who do acknowledge that

DNA is a code - and that yes, my first two points are correct, all known codes are

designed. They are lambasted by their brethren and accused of secretly being on my

side.

My argument is inductive. It does not explicitly identify God as designer, it just leaves

God as the only available possibility. So a person is still free to reject the God conclusionand suppose that there must be some other explanation.

But what is interesting is that almost nobody on this forum is willing to even acknowledge

they don't have an alternative explanation. This strikes me as self-deception. Hey, if you

don't know something, why not just admit it? How else can rational inquiry move forward?

As you see here, not many infidels were willing to make that admission. Fact is ,

"skeptics" take a whole bunch of things on faith, too faith that science will fill the ever


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widening gaps of the origin of life question for example. Skepticism fails to satisfy its owncriteria because every worldview invokes a miracle, somewhere along the line.

Another thing you'll quickly see on the infidels forum is extreme hostility. The

gentleman who invited me to the forum asked his colleagues to be polite, but as you see many

were not. (At some points, he wasn't all that polite either.) One guy said, "If you quote

Yockey one more time I'll claw your eyes out." One participant had his posts heavily editedby the moderator and was eventually kicked off. These guys hate intelligent design and

everything it stands for. The contempt for religious ideas and religious people, especially

Christians, is palpable.

But again, the infidels failed to put so much as a dent or scratch in my argument. Because

the greatest failure of materialism is that it simply cannot explain the existence of

information! Decades ago this would have seemed like an odd and abstract argument, but

living in the digital information age as we do now, with computers and credit cards and cell

phones, even a child can easily grasp it.

It is not my intent to embarrass, humiliate or show up anyone here. Nobody likes to be

publicly made a fool. Nonetheless truth does matter. And if naturalism is false, then thefaster we put a fork in it, the faster we can get to the truth. After all, if there is a pre-designed

order in living things, then the most unproductive assumption science could possibly make

would be that it is random, accidential or purposeless.

Ultimately the outcome of this discussion reinforces what the great mathematician

Norbert Weiner said almost 50 years ago:

Information is Information, neither matter nor energy. No materialism that fails to

take account of this can survive the present day. -Norbert Weiner, MIT Mathematician

and Father of Cybernetics

On this discussion board I rigorously demonstrated that an Intelligent Designer is the only

availalable explanation for the genetic code in DNA. I did so in the same manner that we

assert the truth of other scientific theorems, like the laws of thermodynamics. But I couldn't

get a congregation of hard-core atheists to accept it - which goes to show that Dale Carnegie

was right: "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

Here, atheists show themselves to be just as devout in their beliefs, and just as steadfast in

the face of reason, as the adherents of any world religion.

-Perry Marshall

"Let us break the chains of the prejudice called Logic. Are we going to be stopped bya syllogism?"-Dr. Floyd Ferris, a villain who opposes reason and logic in Ayn Rand's

landmark novel Atlas Shrugged

"The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settledorder and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to


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admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle." -G.K.Chesterton

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The Atheist's Riddle