From Chaos to Order
Stephen C. Meyer
Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe
Harper One, 2021
576 pages
Chance and necessity have failed. In his book, “Return of the God Hypothesis,” author and philosopher of science, Stephen Meyer, leads us deftly through the long and fascinating history of scientific inquiry into the Big Bang, the fine tuning of the universe and the DNA ordering. He shows us how, over the last century, knowledge of the Big Bang proves that the universe is not eternal, that the existence of the fine-tuning of our universe depends on the values of necessary, specific fundamental constants, and that the discovery of the DNA ordering for proteins cannot result from chance.
Meyer brings us to the startling revelation that the common requirement for each of these discoveries is information. Information to start the Big Bang, information to set the fundamental constants for the fine tuning, and information to order the bases along the DNA.
In 1946, Professor Norbert Wiener of MIT founded the new field of cybernetics. He argued that information is information; it is neither matter nor energy.
In 1966, a symposium held at the Wistar Institute addressed the mathematical challenges to the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution. Professor Murray Eden of MIT and Professor Marcel-Paul Schutzenberger of the University of Paris were adamant then: “Biologists need to relegate the notion of randomness to a…non-crucial role in their theories of origins.”
Professor John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton added to this conversation-over-time with the phrase, “It from Bit.” (i.e., every particle, every field of force, even the space time continuum itself, derives its function, its very existence from answers to yes or no questions, from information: It from Bit.)
Now, Meyer has gathered volumes of historical data dealing with these discoveries and has written up a very important summary of how chance and necessity acting on matter and energy have failed to explain how the universe and life arose over billions of years. Just as Wiener, Eden, Schutzenberger, and Wheeler have all concluded, the missing entity is information.
The need for information is very clearly shown from the task of building a protein of say 150 amino acids out of the 20 amino acids used in life to build a useful protein. Using those 20 amino acids there are 20 x 20 x … x 20 x 20 = 20150 = 2150 x 10150 ≈ 10195 possible chains of 150 amino acids—a huge number of chains. Note there are only 1065 atoms in the Milky Way. Essentially, if you were trying to find a particular protein of 150 amino acids in the space of all amino acid chains, it would be equivalent to searching for one particular atom out of all the atoms in the Milky Way. No hope of finding that atom. The ordering of amino acids is absolutely critical to building the proteins of life and this requires information: the ordering is the missing information.
Meyer begins with a quote from atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” In contrast, Meyer concludes, “The properties of the universe and of life … are just what we should expect if a transcendent and purposive intelligence has acted in the history of life and the cosmos. Such an intelligence coincides with what human beings have called God, and so, I call this story of reversal, “The Return of the God Hypothesis.”
After more than 400 pages presenting and clearly explaining the evidence, Meyer concludes that the “…empirical evidence from the natural world points powerfully to the reality of a great mind behind the universe and the exquisite, integrated, and informational complexity of living organisms bear witness to the reality of a transcendent intelligence—a personal God.”
Meyer’s book demonstrates that the evidence of the need for information is changing the foundations of science. Chance and necessity acting on matter and energy are not enough; we must add information.
Meyer does not make any references to the biblical story of creation but he quotes the Nobel Prize winning physicist Arno Penzias who claims: “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the first books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”
Is it possible that the biblical creation story incorporates any reference to information?
For each of the six biblical days of creation Moses concludes the description of each day with the statement: “And there was evening and there was morning.”
The Hebrew word translated into evening is erev and the Hebrew word translated into morning is boker. The root of the word erev includes the meaning “mixture,” that is chaos, and the root of the word boker includes the meaning “to divide” or “to investigate,” that is making order. Hence, going back to the biblical Hebrew, Moses was describing each day as going from chaos to order. And that is exactly what science now demands.
Moses was declaring for each day of creation: “And there was chaos and there was order.”
Yes, information is fundamental to science. The God Hypothesis has returned.