Information Theory, Radio-Telescopes,

and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

From Lesson 28 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charles Clough

First category where you can show evidences of the Biblical world view: design and information theory. The universe isn’t chaotic and life certainly isn’t chaotic, you’ve all seen the helix type molecules, etc. of DNA and today of all ages of the church we live in a time of history when we know more of the design than anyone has ever seen in all the history of the church together. Precisely in the very day when Genesis is being denied we live with more powerful evidences than any of the church fathers ever even dreamed of having.

One of the fascinating things, that quote by A. E. Wilder-Smith on page 110, follow me, “A.E. Wilder-Smith has noted that such design cannot come from matter spontaneously. While random processes can produce limited structures by chance, they cannot produce genuine information….” Let me show you the example, we did this once before. Let’s pretend you have paper, all cut the same size, somebody cut 3 x 5 cards and on each card you got a dot or a dash. And I hand you the box and tell you to shake up the box, and then pour it out on the floor, so you have these dots and dashes randomly scattered all over the floor. And your eye looks down and you see these dots and dashes scattered all over the floor until, at one place in the floor, you see dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot you’d observe a pattern. That’s not what A.E. Wilder-Smith is saying. The evolutionists are arguing that all we creationists are saying is that chance can’t produce patterns and they say yes you can, there’s an example, chance has produced a pattern.

● ● ●	▬▬ ▬▬ ▬▬	● ● ●
S	O	S
Save	Our	Souls

But that’s not A. E. Wilder-Smith’s argument; his argument is that particular pattern has linguistic meaning. It has meaning if you share, if that pattern has been given meaning by two minds, person A has sent a message on the radio to person B, they both share a language, and in language SOS… I was just told the other day comes from Save Our Souls, the international recognition of distress. That would have to be known by the sender and the receiver. Both share a linguistic convention. What A.E. Wilder-Smith is saying is you have to look at not just the pattern, but you have to look upon the fact that language has given that pattern meaning. And the analogy to biology is that you have genetic codes that are coded into the chemistry for reproduction. Those codes are physical patterns. But the codes result in a conveying of information from parent to child of a blueprint of how to build a body. There has been a meaning that has been transferred, not just the physical pattern. Just as, for example, if you want to build a house and I hand you a blueprint. On the blueprint, we don’t use blueprints now, but a computerized design gives me this wonderful looking drawing. It’s just lines and ink on paper, interesting patterns. If I’m not an architect that doesn’t communicate to me, but if you intended to create a message across the paper in ink, you had a message in your mind and I received the message because we share knowledge of blueprints. The meaning is different from the pattern.

That’s what Smith is arguing for here, is that it’s not a case, and if you look at page 111, “Biological genetic structure functions similarly to a printed page.” Now watch the care here. “There is a plan or a design communicated from one cell to another that is distinct from the DNA molecular structure.” In other words, the information, like SOS is a content, it says come and get me I’m in trouble, that is to be distinguished from three dots, three dashes, and three dots. That’s a pattern, but the pattern is conveying a concept, conceptual information, and that’s Smith’s point. By the way, Dr. Smith has 3 PhDs and one of them is pharmacology, he deals with drugs and chemicals. He says, “Such a plan no more arose from the DNA than a book’s story arose from paper and ink.

Wilder-Smith notes that this distinction between an intelligent message or design and its physical carrier is precisely what evolutionary scientists today use in trying to discern signs of extra-terrestrial life in radio noise coming to the earth,” SETI. Here’s a very good observation. Have any of you noticed on any of the science programs on television, have you seen where they’ve built radio telescopes and they have these vast antennas pointed deep into outer space at certain places. What they’re doing is they’re listening. If you were to listen to what those antennas are listening to, you’d hear a lot of static, and the computers are busy assimilating that static signal, looking for something. Here’s the problem: when in all the static can they tell whether there’s a message coming from outer space, what instructions do you give the computer to turn on the light and say hey, found something. How do you program a computer to do that?

Wilder-Smith says this is interesting, these are the very same people that are saying there’s no design, or whatever design in nature doesn’t indicate a message or content. These are the very same people spending millions of dollars to build radio telescopes looking for a pattern in the radio amplitude and frequencies, and saying that when they’re there that means there’s a message.

Isn’t this ironic, the very same people, in one area looking at a microscope are arguing that the helix and the design, the DNA conveying all this conceptual information on how to build a human being, think of it, a sperm and an ovum has a blueprint in it equal to over 100,000 pages of instructions on how to build a human being, and it’s all conveyed in this little sperm and ovum, complete details, what color your eyes are, hair follicles, skin structure, bone structure, all your organs, how to build a central nervous system, how to carry traits from you to your children, all that carried in one little tiny sperm cell, a message. And the shape of the information chemically in those molecules is to be distinguished from the message they’re carrying.

Just as if you were to diagram the radio frequency coming in off a radio telescope, it’s going like this, changing amplitude, changing frequency, it’s a mess. But what they’re looking for is something that would be regular, that they can separate out of all that junk, and when they’ve done that, aha, we’ve got a message, maybe. And the whole theory of extra-terrestrial intelligence depends on signal processing, using a theory of information that is being denied in the area of biology.

This is the background for the quote on page 111. “It would be interesting to suggest to practitioners of ETI [Extra-terrestrial Intelligence] research the following experiment: instead of listening to their radio telescopes searching for non-random sequences issuing from the far galaxies as an index of ETI, they might take a look into a suitable mount on an electron microscope focused on suitably prepared genetic code sequences. … When the ETI expert has thus convinced himself that the genetic code shows non-random sequencing governed by a language convention determining a synthetic organic chemical message, what must he conclude?” What must he conclude? That’s an amazing observation.