DNA Is Literally Code

Every single cell in your body runs on code. Not metaphorically. Literally.

DNA uses a four-letter alphabet (A, T, G, C) arranged in specific sequences that encode instructions for building proteins — the molecular machines that do everything in your body. These instructions are read, copied, error-checked, and executed by molecular machinery of extraordinary sophistication.

Your genome contains about 3.2 billion base pairs. If you printed it out, it would fill roughly 175 volumes the size of a phone book. All of that is packed into a nucleus 6 micrometers wide — about one-tenth the width of a human hair.

Here is what makes DNA different from, say, a crystal or a snowflake (which have patterns but no information):

• DNA stores specified complexity — meaningful sequences that encode functional instructions
• It has error correction — your cells catch and fix about 99.99% of copying errors
• It uses a coding system — codons (three-letter sequences) map to specific amino acids, just like binary maps to instructions in a computer
• The same DNA is read differently by different cell types — your liver cells and brain cells have identical DNA but read different parts. That is like having one codebase that deploys different applications depending on the environment.

Bill Gates said: "DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created."

Here is where it becomes particularly interesting for the science-and-faith conversation. In our entire experience, information — real, functional, specified information — always comes from a mind.

• Every book has an author
• Every program has a programmer
• Every blueprint has an architect
• Every language has speakers who created it

We have never, not even once, observed random natural processes generating functional information. Crystals form patterns, certainly. Tornadoes create chaos. But a tornado has never assembled a Boeing 747 — and random chemistry has never written a genome.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer spent years on this question and concluded that "the discovery of information at the foundation of life provides strong grounds for inferring that intelligence played a role in the origin of life."

Evolution by natural selection is effective at explaining how existing genetic information gets modified and optimized over time. Mutation plus selection can refine what is already there.

But evolution cannot explain where the first information came from. Natural selection requires self-replicating organisms to already exist. You need DNA to make proteins, but you need proteins to read DNA. It is a chicken-and-egg problem that origin-of-life researchers openly acknowledge they have not solved.

As geneticist Francis Collins (who led the Human Genome Project and is a Christian) put it: "The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshipped in the cathedral or in the laboratory."

Nobody debates that DNA contains information. The question is whether information can arise without intelligence.

Every example we have from human experience says no. Every code has a coder. Every message has a sender. Every instruction manual has an author.

The Bible says God spoke everything into existence — that creation happened through his Word. It turns out that at the molecular level, life literally runs on language. Make of that what you will.