This time Dr. David Humphreys and Ron Hughes talk about design in the Universe and the origin of life.

Ron Hughes:  It seems that one of the great differences between the Christian view of Creation and other views is that of design; that there is a reason behind all this.  So many other views; especially the scientific view is that everything just sort of came about by chance.  It's all a grand accident. It's a wonderful accident, but an accident nonetheless.  Comment on that for me.

Dr. David Humphreys:  Yeah, it's a very interesting area, Ron. And as a matter of fact, scientists are really grappling right now with this whole idea of the significance of design in nature.  I mean, when I was an undergraduate we never used to talk about it, but now even the Royal Society of Canada has convened conferences - not necessarily from a Christian perspective - to try and grapple with this idea of chance versus design.

And there is no question that for me the evidence is absolutely clear in science that the molecules of life, the molecules which we're built of, could not have self-assembled.  There just isn't enough time, if you take the longest date you could ever imagine for the age of the Earth for this to happen.  There are all kinds of calculations that we could do to substantiate that.  But there is no question at all that the evidence is now clear that chance is not an option.  Some of the alternatives people suggest, and we could talk about sometime, are fantasy.

Ron Hughes:  Now David, I remember from my high school days having Christian leaders use examples like ‘the watchmaker'; that just like all the pieces of a watch shaken together in a bag will not assemble themselves into a functioning watch.  And then there's also the 'jet in the junkyard'; that all the bits and pieces of scrap in a junkyard could never assemble themselves into an airplane.  And they use that as an example of... a rationale for design; that things couldn't happen by chance.  Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

Dr. David Humphreys:  You know, Ron, some of the old, old arguments for design - like the divine watchmaker type arguments - are really now quite old fashioned.  I mean, a lot of Christians say, you know, ‘snowflakes are beautiful designs and then there must be a god.'  But in one sense there's nothing that mysterious now for us in chemistry and science about the beauty of the snowflake.  We can explain it by natural causes.

Let me just give you a little illustration.  If you saw some beautiful patterns in the sand, because the wind had eroded the sand, or some nice rock patterns.  You would simply say, ‘hey, that's beautiful. That's the result of natural forces; the wind and the rain.'  So you don't need to invoke a designer or a creator, necessarily.  But suppose you came across, like the four faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore carved in the rock face.  I mean, you wouldn't say, ‘hey, what wonderful rock erosion.'  You'd say, ‘who did it?'  I mean, those four faces - when you look at those you see that's an evidence for intelligence.

And now we're beginning to realize, you see, the order produced by intelligence, the order produced by a creative mind, is different from the order produced by natural forces.  So the old kinds of arguments that there must be a god because we have beautiful flowers and snowflakes is a little bit different from where we're coming at it in science.  Because life requires the kind of design that requires intelligence.  You see, when you get to the big molecules, like the DNA - that molecule which conveys genetic information - we say it's a genetic code, it's like letters of the alphabet - and we all know that a written message would come from an intelligent designer.  And we can do the calculations - the numbers are horrendous - we can show that there is really compelling scientific evidence that life could not have arisen by chance.