Dr. David Humphreys:  Life requires the kind of design that requires intelligence.  You see, when you get to the big molecules, like the haemoglobin that makes your blood red and carries oxygen in your blood or the DNA, the order is precise.  And we can show, we can do the calculations - the numbers are horrendous - we can show that there is really compelling scientific evidence from these kinds of probability calculations that life could not have arisen by chance.

Ron Hughes:  David, you mentioned haemoglobin and I would suppose that most of our listeners are familiar with that term.  And in fact we would see it as a rather humble servant of our bodies just doing a job.  And yet haemoglobin is an amazing, amazing thing.

Dr. David Humphreys:  Right.  Matter of fact, I mean, you could just take haemoglobin and let me tell you a bit more about it, Ron.  Just to tell you how compelling is the evidence for design rather than chance really is.

Haemoglobin is one of the proteins in your blood and that's what we said carries the oxygen in your body.  Now to make haemoglobin you have to assemble amino acids and there are twenty amino acids that we find in nature.  (These are special substances, we won't bother with the details, but-) You know, you can actually calculate the possible number of ways in which these twenty amino acids can be arranged in a protein like haemoglobin.

It turns out when you do the calculations the number is unimaginable.  It's10 to the power 650.  Now for the nonmathematicians listening that is 1 with 650 zeros after it.  I mean, it goes on page after page.  What it means is, it's a number too big to imagine.  So the chances of finding the particular arrangement of amino acids to make haemoglobin is just one chance in this horrendous number:  10 with 650 zeros after it.  In other words, what I'm really saying, Ron, is that the simultaneous formation of two of the these molecules with this complexity is inconceivable.

Now bear in mind that as we talk red blood is flowing through your body and there is only one combination that carries oxygen most efficiently.  As a matter of fact, if you just change one of the position you could have sickle cell anaemia - I mean, you've got a molecular disease.  The order is crucial.  And what people don't realize is that there are 270 million of these haemoglobin molecules - not just in your body, but 270 million each with just the right arrangement in every one of the 30 trillion red blood cells in your body.  I mean, these are fantastic numbers.  30 trillion blood cells; each of the 270 million haemoglobins in each one of those [is] absolutely right.

Now I have people who say, ‘Oh well, that could happen by chance .'  And they have enough faith to believe that.  And I say, there is absolutely no evidence, Ron, at all that molecules like that came into being by chance.  That's why I believe in a designer.  That's why I'm thankful I know a designer.

You would have a better chance, Ron, of flipping a coin and getting ‘heads' 6 million times in a row, than you would of getting molecules ordered enough just to form the simplest virus if you waited a billion years.  I mean, these are the numbers and you can't argue about the numbers, they are the results of our calculations.

And that's why I get impatient when people say, ‘you know, if you give things enough time, the most improbable things will happen.'  There just isn't enough time.  I mean, it's not on that you could get these molecules by chance.