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:

[Job] Do you know the laws that govern the heavens, and can you make them rule the earth?”

Job, Chapter 38, verse 33, Contemporary English Version

VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re very grateful that you are joining us on Anchored by Truth as we continue the series which we are calling “Eternal Information.” We wanted to do this series for one simple reason – to increase our listeners’ confidence in the Bible and in God. Today in the studio we have RD who is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. RD, why do you believe that it is so important to help our listeners develop increased confidence in God and in the Bible?

RD: Well, that’s a very good question. But before I answer it I’d also like to thank everyone joining us on Anchored by Truth today. 4 or 5 decades ago this kind of series might not have been necessary. In those days there was a far more widespread acceptance that God was real and that the Bible was God’s word. But those two ideas have been under constant attack during those decades. Today, it’s not uncommon to run into people who not only don’t believe in the Bible but who don’t even believe that God exists. Our culture has systematically removed God not just from educational settings and our public institutions but also from the public square. Part of what has permitted this to go on, largely unchecked, is the idea that belief in the God of the Bible is a sort-of remnant from a time when superstition reigned because people had not yet been enlightened by science. All that, of course, is nonsense but the trends have continued because individual Christians largely lost their ability to defend their faith from the standpoint of logic and reason.

VK: As you say during the last several decades the slogan “you have faith but I have science” has come to be pervasive in our culture. We constantly point out on Anchored by Truth that this idea, as popular and widespread as it is, has no basis in reason or science. The Christian faith is a faith of facts. It is based on both historical and scientific realities. And what the world calls science – such as the General Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang Theory - do not nearly possess as much support from empirical observation as is widely believed. We have an entire series called “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know” that addresses many of the ideas that are supposedly scientific but, in fact, are in conflict with real science.

RD: Exactly right. And the concept of information is one more area of genuine science that points squarely to the need for, and existence of, God. As we have been discussing in our first two episodes in this series the more we examine the concept of information we see that it is impossible to reasonably account for the existence of information if we do not acknowledge a source for intelligence that is outside matter, energy, time, and space.

VK: Yet matter, energy, time, and space are all that atheists and those radically secular scientists have to work with. Atheists and radical secularists not only won’t consider the possibility of God existing, they rule Him out by the very way in which they try to define science. They attempt to confine science to the naturalistic elements which they can see, touch, or measure. God is, of course, supernatural. So, they attempt to limit science to the natural world because by doing so they can dismiss God by saying that, even if He existed, His existence cannot be verified.

RD: Yes. By confining science to the so-called “natural world” they think they can erect a wall that keeps them safe on the inside while God must remain in an unseen and unknown realm. This is the height of silliness, of course. God most certainly is not and cannot be made prisoner of any human idea. But these radical secularists aren’t even consistent about applying their own rules. Atheists and secularists will say that because we can’t perceive God with our five senses we must doubt His existence. Yet those same people will proclaim that “dark matter” comprises 85% of the mass of the universe even though it cannot be seen and it does not interact with electromagnetic fields. It is supposedly “dark” because it cannot be detected. Yet they do not doubt its existence because its presence is needed for the math of the Big Bang and other astronomical phenomena to work.

VK: In other words they say “dark matter” must exist because we detect certain effects that would be impossible without its existence. But when Christians say that we can be sure that God exists because we can see His effects within the visible cosmos they reject that line of reasoning. In their way of thinking dark matter is unseen but can known by its effects. By contrast, God is unseen but cannot be known by the effects that His presence would explain. It does seem very much like they have substituted “dark matter” for God. The secularists accuse Christians of inserting “God into the gaps.” In other words, they tell us we resort to God when we can’t explain all the details. But that is exactly what they have done with dark matter. Rather than put God in the gravitational gap that is necessary to explain star formation they have inserted dark matter.

RD: Exactly right. The visible universe consists of matter, energy, time, and space and science has discovered much about how those four components relate to each other. The reason we have been able to do that is because God is a God of logic and order so when He created the universe He imparted His sense of order into His creation. This idea animated many of the founders of contemporary scientific disciplines such as astronomy and chemistry.

VK: For example, Johannes Kepler’s gave us the three laws of planetary motion, which describe the way planets move around the sun. They were named after Kepler who lived from 1571 through 1630 and who discovered them. Kepler was a devout Lutheran and biblical creationist. Kepler also gave us the famous phrase that science is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” Isaac Newton who lived from 1643 until 1727 and who is often regarded as the most influential scientist of all time. He explained the cause of Kepler’s laws in what are known as ‘Newton’s three laws of motion’ and his theory of universal gravitation—the law of gravity. In these he showed that the heavens obey the same laws of motion as the earth. Newton also has the fundamental unit of force named after him—the newton. Newton was a biblical creationist, who wrote far more on the Bible and theology than he ever did on science.

RD: And Robert Boyle (1627–1691) is known as the father of modern chemistry. In his famous book, The Skeptical Chymist, Boyle overturned the then popular notion that everything is made up of four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. He redefined the term ‘element’ to give us our modern notion of an element—a substance that cannot be separated into simpler components by chemical methods. He is also known for Boyle’s Law, which states that a gas’s volume increases as its pressure decreases at a constant temperature. Boyle was a generous patron of missionary work, and wrote a number of books defending the Christian faith. He too was a biblical creationist. There are a number of good articles on the Creation Ministries International website that talk about the undeniable links between the founders of many modern scientific disciplines and their Biblical faith.

VK: And that’s a good introduction for what you want to talk about today. We have coined the phrase “natural law” to speak about generalized maxims that tell us how the components of the universe operate and relate to one another. These natural laws include ones such as “Boyle’s Law” or the Law of Gravitation. Natural laws are statements of how parts of “nature” behave. We regard them as being universally applicable. As such, once identified and specified, they enable other work to be done without having to re-determine basic principles of how matter and energy behave. Well, it turns out that there are similar laws that govern the behavior of information. And that is probably a surprise for most people because as we have been talking about in this series information is a non-material component of the universe.

RD: Yes. Dr. Werner Gitt who wrote the book In the Beginning was Information has identified four laws that apply to information. There are two excellent articles on the Creation Ministries International website that describe them. I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to pursue this subject further but the articles provide a great summary also.

VK: So, let’s do a quick review of some of the essential elements that are inherent in “information” that we talked about in our first two episodes in this series. We just mentioned 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 although we can use matter and energy to transmit, receive, or store 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.

RD: And 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. We can be certain, then, that information is an expression of intelligence. It has to be. Information cannot be the product of mindless, random, or undirected activity of anything. Organization and randomness are the opposites of each other. Nothing random or chaotic is going to produce a sequence of codes or symbols that it intended to produce a specific effect.

VK: So, all this fits perfectly with what Dr. Gitt’s refers to as the “Scientific Laws of Information.” Dr. Gitt’s first law is “A material entity cannot generate a non-material entity.” This is simply a straightforward expression of the observation that we made above. Or, as Dr. Gitt put it in one of the articles on the CMI website, “In our common experience we observe that an apple tree bears apples, a pear tree yields pears, and a thistle brings forth thistle seeds. Similarly, horses give birth to foals, cows to calves and women to human babies. Likewise, we can observe that something which is itself solely material never creates anything non-material.”

RD: Right. And Dr. Gitt’s second law is that “Universal information is a non-material fundamental entity.” By “universal information” Dr. Gitt is referring to information that possesses five specific attributes or what he calls “levels of information.” The five levels are statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and apobetics. Statistics is simply raw data and counts of things. You can count the number of letters produced by a cat walking across a keyboard but that doesn’t give you any information. The next thing that is necessary for a sequence of letters to produce information is the syntax – the arrangement of the letters into words and the words into phrases, sentences, or something longer. In language there are structural rules that govern those arrangements and that is syntax. Semantics is “meaning.” I can write or say, “The dog waxed a pumpkin …”

VK: “The dog waxed a pumpkin?” Really? That makes even less sense than … well, some of the things you’ve written …”

RD: And that’s the point. The words are all real words and they are correctly arranged according to the rules of syntax for English. But there is no meaning. We can’t make any sense out of the sentence. That’s where semantics comes in. Strings of letters or words – even if they follow rules – don’t necessarily have meaning. Next is pragmatics. Pragmatics refers to action. Our non-sense sentence won’t produce any action but the phrase “put out the fire” hopefully will.

VK: Well, I’d sure rather have someone putting out a fire than have a dog waxing a pumpkin.

RD: And that brings us to the final level or attribute of information: apobetics. Dr. Gitt created this term from the Greek word that means result or consequence. So, apobetics means the goal, purpose, or result. Information serves a purpose. Asking someone to have their “dog wax a pumpkin” won’t do anybody any good, but telling them to put out a fire most certainly will. So, that’s how Dr. Gitt helps us sort between nonsense and information. The cat walking across the keyboard might produce letters on a screen and even the occasional real word but it will not produce what he has carefully labeled “universal information.” And what Dr. Gitt is telling us with his second law is that “universal information” is a fundamental component of the universe in which we live. You can no more have a universe without information than you can one without matter, energy, time, or space.

VK: Dr. Gitt’s third law of universal information is that “universal information cannot be created by statistical processes.” He provides this explanation about this third law.

The grand theory of evolution would gain some empirical support if it could be demonstrated, in a real experiment, that information could arise from matter left to itself without the addition of intelligence. Despite the most intensive worldwide efforts this has never been observed. To date, evolutionary theoreticians have only been able to offer computer simulations that depend upon principles of design and the operation of pre-determined information. These simulations do not correspond to reality because the theoreticians smuggle their own information into the simulations.

RD: The point Dr. Gitt is making in this third law is that there are only two competing possibilities for explaining why the universe appears as it does. The first possibility is that an all-knowing, all-powerful self-existent Being made the universe and everything in it. The second possibility is that the universe is self-existent despite the fact that, at a minimum, the laws of thermodynamics tell us that it isn’t. And further that the matter, energy, time, and space of this self-existent universe not only happened to produce rocks, planets and stars – as remarkable as that would be, it also produced living creatures. And those living creatures exhibit certain characteristics among them not just the ability to reproduce but also the ability to carry out purposeful activities. This second idea says that living creatures randomly arose from non-living bits of matter (atoms and molecules) that chaotically collided in such a way that one day several thousands of millions of them alighted in a collective that started reproducing itself. That collective of “self-replicating” molecules had random but fortuitous mutations that turned the 500,000 base pairs of DNA in the simplest self-reproducing biological entity into a creature that has 3 Billion base pairs in its DNA. And that DNA is present in over 35 trillion cells so exquisitely organized that this final collection of molecules is then able to determine, intelligently, that the whole process started randomly.

VK: Well, when you put it that way the whole idea of evolution does start to sound a bit preposterous. So, Dr. Gitt then moves from the third law of universal information to what is at this point a self-evident fourth law: “Universal information can only be produced by an intelligent sender.” It is here that the Merriam Webster online dictionary’s definition of information becomes so potent. The second definition that Merriam Webster provides for information says that “information is the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects.”

RD: Yes. The fourth law of universal information as Dr. Gitt has framed it simply notes the obvious. Information is not present unless there is a sequence of characters that have been arranged according to specified structural rules and that sequence then contains significance, the possibility for meaningful action, to accomplish a result. Universal information demands the presence of an intelligent sender. And even Merriam Webster recognizes that the nucleotides in DNA are one form of information.

VK: Therefore, there is a sound, scientific basis for noting that DNA, which contains information, must represent the activity of an intelligent Being who placed the information in the DNA. When you follow the line of reasoning the conclusion is obvious but that is certainly not anything that you hear in biology classes or science classes.

RD: And that’s one of the big issues we want to point out in this series. Science should be about the pursuit of truth regardless of where that pursuit leads. And as the line of reasoning we’ve used above the existence of information points to the existence of God. And it does so logically and reasonably. Furthermore, it’s important to note that these laws that apply to information have the same function as other natural laws with which we are more familiar.

VK: What are you thinking about?

RD: Dr. Gitt notes that laws of nature are statements that are “consistently and repeatedly confirmed to be universally true …” and therefore they enjoy the highest level of confidence in science. Laws of nature don’t have any exceptions and they don’t change with time. Laws of nature exist prior to, and are independent of, their discovery and formulation. They are thus universally valid laws. Therefore, they can be applied in unknown situations.

VK: What you’re saying is that no one questions if we drop a ball off a tall building whether that ball will fall to the ground. We know it will because the laws of gravity mean that the large mass of the earth is going to attract the small mass of the ball. We don’t wonder whether the earth will move up to the ball. We have a natural law that tells us what will happen. Same thing with laws of thermodynamics. Heat moves from a hot body to a cold body if they are left alone. That means the temperature will equalize in a closed environment if things are left alone. If we want to keep coffee hot while it sits on our desk we have to put it on a coffee warmer. The coffee warmer will inject heat into the cup because otherwise the coffee will simply cool off. These laws of nature are universally applicable and so they make our world predictable.

RD: And that’s a major takeaway from these laws of information that Dr. Gitt has identified. He didn’t invent these laws. Like other natural laws these laws are simply statements about information behaves within our universe.

VK: But, of course, the laws of information point to something quite important and in their own way staggering. As the fourth law of information says, “universal information can only be produced by an intelligent sender.” But DNA contains information. So, the only way we can account for the fact that DNA contains information is if DNA were created by an “intelligent sender.” It’s simple but profound.

RD: Yes. Despite the claims of the evolutionists life on this earth cannot account for its own existence. The universe cannot account for its own existence. Our examination of information leads us back to God. In fact, a careful and thoughtful examination of other natural laws does the same but that idea has been lost in our day and time. But the relevant point for today is that we cannot deny that information is present in our cosmos. To deny the existence of information would mean you are attempting to communicate using information. It’s a self-defeating exercise.

VK: So, information exists in the universe. No one seriously tries to deny that. Information is present in all living creatures because it is embedded in DNA. We’re going to talk more about that in a future episode in this series. The existence of information in DNA obliterates any attempt to assign DNA and its function to being the product of random and chaotic interaction of matter and energy. Matter and energy may store and transmit information but they do not and cannot create it. Thus, a study of information forms another powerful line of reasoning for the existence of God. In that sense information is part of an effective apologetic.

RD: Yes. The nature of the physical universe itself points us to a power that must lie beyond the universe. Information is another one of the many attributes of the universe that supports that basic line of reasoning. It forms another and very powerful argument for the existence of God. That’s the big reason we opened with that scripture from Job. Notice in the scripture God says to Job, “Do you know the laws that govern the heavens, and can you make them rule the earth?” In pointing out the error that Job had made God immediately points out that there are “laws” that govern the heavens and the earth. As we’ve been talking about today there are laws that govern matter and energy. Science has recognized that fact for millennia. But we are now discovering that there are laws that govern the non-material portion of the universe which includes information. You can’t have laws without a Law Giver. Laws cannot just spring like fairy sprites out of the ether. Laws reflect the intelligent action of a Being that has both the intelligence to design the law and power to make it. Job had no doubt of God’s existence. He had that much going for Him. Job error was that he thought he was qualified to review God’s management of the universe.

VK: Which he wasn’t – obviously. But today, many people aren’t even on the level where they recognize the necessity for God’s existence. So, in our next episode we’re going to spend some time discussing the strong link between information and other forms of apologetics. Again, the big idea that we are discussing throughout this “Eternal Information” series is that information is another line of evidence that proves that God exists. If God did not exist the universe could not possibly appear as we see it. Information requires intelligence. Even our DNA contains information. That information could only be present if it was created by an all-knowing, all-powerful God. This sounds like a great time to pray. Today let’s listen to a prayer that we would all receive illumination from the source of all intelligence and information – the Holy Spirit.

---- PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

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 Quotes from the Contemporary English Version)

Job, Chapter 38, verse 33, Contemporary English Version

Laws of information 1 (creation.com)

Laws of information 2 (creation.com)

We are less than dust (creation.com)

https://www.josh.org/what-is-the-design-argument-for-gods-existence/