Creation Moment 1/27/2025 - How do we detect design?

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: Psalm 139:14

Q: How do we detect design?
"There is an obvious difference between writing by an intelligent person, e.g. Shakespeare’s plays, and a random letter sequence like WDLMNLTDTJBKWIRZREZLMQCOP.

We can also tell the difference between messages written in sand and

the results of wave and wind action. 

The carved heads of the U.S. presidents on Mt Rushmore are clearly different from erosional features. 

Again, this is specified complexity. Erosion produces either irregular shapes or highly ordered shapes like sand dunes, but not presidents’ heads or writing.

To elaborate, a crystal is a repetitive arrangement of atoms, so is

ordered. Such ordered structures usually have the lowest energy, so will form spontaneously at low enough temperatures. And the information of the crystals is already present in their building blocks; for example, directional forces between atoms. 

--But proteins and DNA, the most important large molecules of life, are not ordered (in the sense of repetitive), but have high specified complexity. 

Without specification external to the system, i.e., the programmed machinery of living things or the intelligent direction of an organic chemist, there is no natural tendency to form such complex specified arrangements at all. 

--When their building blocks are combined (and even this requires special conditions), a random sequence is the result. The difference between a crystal and DNA is like the difference between a book containing nothing but ABCD repeated and a book of Shakespeare.

The design criterion may also be described in terms of information.

Specified complexity means high information content. 

In formal terms, the information content of any arrangement is the size, in bits, of the shortest algorithm (program) required to generate that arrangement. A random sequence could be formed by a short program:

Print any letter at random.
Return to step 1.
A repetitive sequence could be made by the program:Print ABCD.
Return to step 1.
*But to print the plays of Shakespeare, a program would need to be large enough to print every letter in the right place.
The information content of living things is far greater than that of Shakespeare’s writings. 

The atheist Richard Dawkins says:
"There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopaedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over."

If it’s unreasonable to believe that an encyclopedia could have originated without intelligence, then it’s just as unreasonable to believe that life could have originated without intelligence." 

CMI