06.27.08
Information and neo-Darwinism
Using their own weapons against them
In recent years, populist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Peter Atkins and Daniel Dennett have propelled the post-Christian bandwagon to new heights, reading the Last Rites over the theist corpse and prompting John Lennox, a mathematician and philosopher at Oxford University, to ask: “Has science buried God?”
Lennox’s approach is to deconstruct the atheists’ claims by turning their own weapon – science – against them.
Stating the case for neo-Darwinism, Dawkins has said that information lies at the heart of every living thing.
Lennox counters by pointing out the DNA in the human genome contains 7 billion “bits” of information and it has to be in an exact order to work.
He does the maths to show that the possibility of this happening by random chance is absurdly low.