I read today of the death of Antony Flew at age 87. Mr. Flew was a well known and highly articulate atheist philosopher who in 2004, at the age of 81, suddenly announced that he had changed his mind about the existence of God. To me the most notable thing about this late life conversion to faith was Mr. Flew’s stated reason. Essentially, his argument was that something as complex as DNA could not have occurred without intelligent intervention. The NY Times has quoted Mr. Flew on the subject as follows:
“[DNA research] has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved.”
Oh my.
Of all the observed phenomena in the known Universe that Mr. Flew could have chosen as his example, I am astonished that he should have chosen this one. For I had exactly the opposite experience, back when I took it upon myself to learn a bit more about DNA than they had taught me back in high school.
In particular, one day back in 1994 I purchased a copy of Recombinant DNA by James Watson, to learn as much as I could about DNA, ribosomes and genetic replication.
I confess that my motives for this new-found curiosity were not strictly scientific. I had recently fallen madly in love with a beautiful molecular biologist, and I longed to know everything I could about her world. For a while, all things molecularly biological took on a strange romance in my mind. The fact that Watson’s book essentially described the chemistry of sexual reproduction was a further poetic twist that was quite lost on me at the time.
But I digress.
I discovered, as I read this wonderfully written book, a set of facts about DNA and the encoding of amino acids that might as well have been a bright red flashing neon that said “This must be the product of Darwinian evolution!”
In fact, DNA encoding provides such a strong argument for natural selection that if there were a God, the way DNA encodes amino acids would be a demonstration that he/she must be a rather perverse God, possessed either of a nasty and twisted sense of humor or else some sort of deep seated hostility toward humans. Otherwise, he/whe wouldn’t plant evidence (for us humans to find) of his/her own non-existence.
Why does DNA encodimg provide such a strong argument for natural selection? I’ll get to that in two days. Watch this space.