From 1835, when Charles Darwin was travelling around the world on HMS Beagle, and then from 1842 when he put pen to paper to outline his theory, up until 1859 when he finally published his book, On the Origin of Species the two most important scientific developments that he really needed to know about, wouldn’t happen for over another 90 years. Materialist scientists, atheist, saw those developments as decisively ending all of this nonsense about God, but were they getting ahead of themselves?

Tag words: Charles Darwin; HMS Beagle; On the Origin of Species; atheist; God; Rosalind Franklin; Watson and Crick; Nobel Prize; DNA; Linus Pauling; Maurice Wilkins; Walter Isaacson; The Code Breaker; Jennifer Doudna; Peter Pauling; photograph 51; Claude Shannon; Alan Turing; President Bill Clinton; Galileo; Sir Isaac Newton; human genome; Theory of Evolution; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; RNA; sequence hypothesis; central dogma;

Stephen Meyer, in his book, The Return of the God Hypotheses wrote:

By the late 1960s, molecular biologists knew where the information for building proteins was stored and even how that information was used to build them. But they did not know where that information came from. I call this mystery "the DNA enigma," a mystery that is closely related to the question of how the first life on earth originated.

And later in his book he wrote:

I came across a book written by Henry Quastler, one of the early scientists who first began to apply informational concepts to molecular biology. In it, Quastler made an almost offhand and seemingly obvious observation. As he put it, "The creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity."

From this part, I’m going to explore the DNA enigma. Where did the information, the instructions, about how to build proteins, come from and did science find itself walking down a path that was leading it, especially with enormous reluctance on the part of the atheist scientists, to God?

I’m going to tell you the amazing story of how Watson and Crick, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962 for, in the words of the award: their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material. And how they shafted their colleague, Rosalind Russell, to do it.

After General Montgomery won his historic victory at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942 Winston Churchill made one of his memorable speeches:

'This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.'

The remarkable story of information had well and truly begun – but terrifyingly the quest for where it came from, seemed to leading to the door of the most high God who many scientists and philosophers said was a figment of people’s imaginations. How could a figment of the imagination of a deluded Christian be the source of information for living things?

Tag words: Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypotheses; Henry Quastler; DNA enigma; atheist; God; Watson and Crick; John Lennox; Gods’ Undertaker; matter before mind; Mind before matter;Socrates; Charles Darwin; Walter Isaacson; The Code Breaker; Theory of Evolution; , Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Gregor Mendel; On the Origin of Species; Marxists; William Bateson; genetics; Wilhelm Johannsen; gene; pangene; chromosomes; materialism; nucleotides; Linus Pauling; Rosalind Franklin; The Double Helix;

Richard Dawkins, in his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker wrote:

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a 'spark of life'. It is information, words, instructions. If you want a metaphor, don't think of fires and sparks and breath. Think, instead, of a billion discrete, digital characters carved in tablets of crystal. If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.

Here Richard dismisses the idea that the creation of life could be the work of God. But is the dismissal of that idea scientific or based on the unscientific worldview of Richard Dawkins? That is what we need to explore.

But there is one take away from this – both atheists and Judaeo Christians accept that information is the key to life – and the big question is where did the information come from.

Tag words: Richard Dawkins; The Blind Watchmaker; information; Word of God; Moses; Torah; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; Aristotle; Bill Bryson; The Body – A Guide for Occupants; Eva Bianconi; DNA; RNA; Professor DMS Watson; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; Francis Crick; Elliott Sober; Professor Ridd; CP Snow; Sir Isaac Newton; Albert Einstein;

Evolutionary biologists. Did you know that sometimes even Homer nods? That’s an expression my amazing high school teacher used to say. I don’t think it’s a common expression today. So let me explain it to you.

Tag words: Darwinism; Theory of Evolution; The Return of the God Hypothesis; Stephen Myer; DNA; RNA; proteins; Neo-Darwinists; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; Bill Gates; Stephen Jay Gould; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Icons of Evolution; Massimo Pigliucci; the Altenberg 16; Richard Lewontin; Jerry Fodor; Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini; Intelligent Design; Creationism; James Shapiro; Richard Dawkins; The Blind Watchmaker; God; Denis Noble; Raju Pookottil; The Third Way of Evolution; the Oxford 50; Clarence Williams; Gerd Müller; Stuart Newman; the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest; Galapagos finches; Darwin's finches; HMS Beagle; Peter Grant; Rosemary Grant; information;

In 1999, the editor of the prestigious scientific magazine Nature, Henry Gee wrote "it is effectively impossible to link fossils into chains of cause and effect in any valid way. To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story — amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific."

Tag words: Fossils; James Watson; Francis Crick; DNA; double helix; Charles Darwin; On the Origin of Species; Theory of Evolution; Stephen Myer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution; Wistar Institute in Philadelphia; novel protein structure; Murray Eden; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; Stanley Ulam; Sir Peter Medawar; Ernst Mayr; Marcel-Paul Schützenberger; Fred Hoyle; microevolution; palaeontologists; Mark Ridley; David Raup; Field Museum of Natural History; Stephen Jay Gould; Niles Eldredge; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Ronald Jenner; American Museum of Natural History; Gareth Nelson; Henry Gee;

Thanks to our discovery of DNA, RNA and all things associated with them, and what we know of how it operates, we now know that every living system, just like your computer, is powered by its own operating system to power what it is and what it does. Until that discovery we used to think that our universe was made up of just matter and energy. Now we know living things, besides energy and matter, also need information. A new species, for example, needs its own new operating system before it comes into existence. Understanding that has caused those evolutionary scientists, who deny the existence of God, to face a problem which they don’t have an answer for – how could such life come into existence if there is no God. As leading Harvard Paleontologist and Evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, a leading proponent of Neo-Darwinism, declared in 1980, because of this problem:

‘neo-Darwinism is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.

Neo-Darwinism is the name given to the progression of the theory of evolution after Darwin’s original idea of natural selection, was accepted as being impossible back in the late 1800s. I discussed Neo-Darwinism in Parts 4 & 6 of this series.

Tag words: DNA; RNA; operating system; new species; evolutionary scientists; Stephen Jay Gould; Neo-Darwinism; natural selection; mutation; Stephen Meyer; The Return of the God Hypothesis; James Watson; Francis Crick; Theory of Evolution; Charles Darwin; On the Origin of Species; microevolutionary changes; macroevolutionary development; Jonathon Wells; Zombie Science; Richard Lewontin; materialism; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; George Klein; Carl Sagan; Divine foot; methodological naturalism; methodological atheism; methodological theism; Geoffrey Miller; Hande; Lynn Margulis; peppered moth; Biston betularia; Jerry Coyne; Bernard Kettlewell; Scientific American; Signature in the Cell; Thomas Nagel; Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False; Stephen Fletcher; RNA-world hypothesis;

Darwin admitted that if an irreducibly complex form of life was found, then his Theory of Evolution would be proven to be a failure. Richard Dawkins agreed, although he lifted the bar that Darwin had set. Perhaps Dawkins was trying to keep his life’s work of promoting the still unproven theory of evolution alive. Today Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has remained unproven and increasingly dubious because over the 175 years since his Theory was announced it has not only remained unproven but because with every new scientific discovery the Theory becomes more and more implausible. Had Professor Behe found the Evolution killing irreducibly complex life form that would bring Darwin’s macro-evolution (the explanation for the creation of new species) down. Reluctantly leading atheist and agnostic scientists, James Shapiro, Cavalier-Smith and Stephen Jay Gould seem, reluctantly, to be on the brink of having to agree with him. They certainly don’t disagree with him. Here’s why.

Tag words: Charles Darwin; Theory of Evolution; Richard Dawkins; Professor Behe; Bill Bryson; A Short History of Nearly Everything; adenosine triphosphate; ATP; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; The Origin of Species; irreducible complexity; mousetrap; Tree of Life; bacterial fla; the cell; James Shapiro; Cavalier-Smith; Stephen Jay Gould; origin of life;

In my previous programmes I’ve looked at serious problems with Darwin’s still unproven Theory of Evolution. Problems that he knew about when his book On the Origin of Species was published. Here’s another one. The late Sir Charles Darwin wrote in his book:

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’

So the question for me to now consider is has such an irreducibly complex life form that did not evolve been found to exist?

Tag words: Darwin; Theory of Evolution; On the Origin of Species; irreducibly complex life; Richard Dawkins; The Blind Watchmaker; Professor Michael Behe; intelligent design; Bruce Alberts; John Lennox; God’s Undertaker; Bill Bryson;, A Short History of Nearly Everything; basic yeast cell; human cells; nitric oxide; toxin; Christian de Duve; skin cells; Robert Hooke; Microphagia; Microscopes; Antoni van Leeuwenhoek; Vermeer; Royal Society; nucleus of a cell; Robert Brown; nucula; Theodor Schwann; Louis Pasteur;