A common complaint made against creationists is the most of creationist writing consists of a critique of evolution. Though there's some truth to this claim, it can be explained in a couple of ways. [1.] The area of what we might call creation science is relatively young, and has few participants; second, evolutionists appear to be largely ignorant of what we might call positive study, investigation and discovery in the field. One example of a positive creation can be seen in the work of Werner Gitt on information theory.
Quotes and comments;
- the quotes below are from an article by Gitt. He makes the claim that information cannot come from matter, and that it therefore disproves materialism and macro-evolution.
97. 'The American mathematician Norbert Wiener made the oftcited statement: “Information is information, neither matter nor energy.” With this he acknowledged a very significant thing: information is not a material entity. [2.]
97. 'Let me clarify this important property of information with an example. Imagine a sandy stretch of beach. With my finger I write a number of sentences in the sand. The content of the information can be understood. Now I erase the information by smoothing out the sand. Then I write other sentence in the sand. In doing so I am using the same matter as before to display this information. Despite this erasing and rewriting, displaying and destroying varying amounts of information, the mass of the sand did not alter at any time. The information itself is thus massless.
98. 'Information itself is never the actual object or act, neither is it a relationship (event or idea), but encoded symbols merely represent that which is discussed. Symbols of extremely different nature play a
substitutionary role with regard to the reality or a system of thought. Information is always an abstract representation of something quite different.
98. 'Using the last four of the five levels, we developed an unambiguous definition of information: namely an encoded, symbolically represented message conveying expected action and intended purpose. We term any entity meeting the requirements of this definition as “universal information” (UI).
99. 'In the following we will describe the four most important laws of nature about information.
#1. A material entity cannot generate a nonmaterial entity
#2. Universal information is a non-material fundamental entity
#3. Universal information cannot be created by statistical processes
#4. Every code is based upon a mutual agreement between sender and receiver
99. 'The materialistic worldview has widely infiltrated the natural sciences such that it has become the ruling paradigm. However, this is an unjustified dogma. The reality in which we live is divisible into two fundamentally distinguishable realms: namely, the material and the non-material.
99. 'Matter involves mass, which is weighable in a gravitational field. In contrast, all non-material entities (e.g. information, consciousness, intelligence and will) are massless and thus have zero weight. Information is always based on an idea; it is thus also massless and does not arise from physical or chemical processes. Information is also not correlated with matter in the same way as energy, momentum or electricity is. However, information is stored, transmitted and expressed through matter and energy.
99. 'Sufficient Condition (SC): An observed entity can be judged to be “non-material” if it has no physical or
chemical correlation with matter. This is always the case if the following four conditions are met:
• SC1: The entity has no physical or chemical interaction with matter.
• SC2: The entity is not a property of matter.
• SC3: The entity does originate in pure matter.
• SC4: The entity is not correlated with matter.
100. '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.
101. 'The programs in living systems obviously exhibit an extremely high degree of sophistication. No scientist can explain the program that produces an insect that looks like a withered leaf. No biologist understands the secret of an orchid blossom that is formed and coloured like a female wasp … and smells like one, too. We are able to think, feel, desire, believe and hope. We can handle a complex thing such as language, but we are aeons away from understanding the information control process that develop the brain in the embryo. Biological information displays a sophistication that is unparalleled in human information.
- It's my guess that the more we discover about the complexity of biological information, the more the concept of intelligent design will begin to make sense to people. With each new discovery the assumption of materialism becomes harder to hold.
102. 'Even though information requires a material substrate for storage/transmission, information is not a property of matter. In the same way, the information in living things resides on the DNA molecule. But it is no more an inherent property of the physics and chemistry of DNA than the blackboard’s message was an intrinsic property of chalk.
102. 'The grand theory of atheistic evolution must attribute the origin of all information ultimately to the interaction of matter and energy, without reference to an intelligent or conscious source. A central claim of atheistic evolution must therefore be that the macro-evolutionary processes that generate biological information are fundamentally different from all other known information-generating processes.
However, the natural laws described here apply equally in animate and inanimate systems and demonstrate this claim to be both false and absurd.
Notes;
1. It's in the nature of new fields of study that they often begin largely as critiques of existing theories. (e.g. Marx and Engels and their critique of capitalism)
2. Scientific laws of information and their implications—part 1 - Werner Gitt [JOURNAL OF CREATION 23(2) 2009]
- part 2. of the article is also available free online.
- Werner Gitt has also written a book on Information theory that I recommend.
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