Telenomy: Design or Chance?

Posted by Worldview Warriors On Friday, March 14, 2014 3 comments

How did life get here? There are two major competing theories and ideas about it: Evolution and Creation, namely Biblical Creation. There really are not any alternative options. Life was created intelligently or it came about without it on its own. I’ve been reading a very interesting book called “The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution” by A.E. Wilder-Smith, a brilliant scientist with 3 PhDs in Chemistry. In his book, Wilder-Smith talks about a very critical aspect to life that Evolution cannot account for: telenomy, also known “know-how” or intelligence.

This is something Wilder-Smith really emphasizes in his book and it is something no one should just pass off easily. Telenomy is described by Wilder-Smith as the imputing of intelligence onto a machine to perform a useful function. Every piece of technology or tool or device we use today was designed with telenomy. Last week, I talked about how energy is always destructive unless there is a mechanism that can control and direct that energy. Every such mechanism requires telenomy for it to work. We can take the energy from the sun or from the wind or from fire and direct it into a mechanical use to create electric power or run a motor, or weld etc. We can create a myriad of metal or plastic parts and put them together to create a working car. There is no question that a welding torch, a light bulb, or a car was designed. It carries telenomic properties.

However, when it comes to life, where the functions are significantly more complex, and require far more precision, many people have no problem saying these came out completely by itself. You see, what Evolution stipulates is that everything we see today, all matter, all life, all everything came about without the aid of any outside intelligence source, or without any telenomy. A frequent analogy Wilder-Smith uses fits perfectly. Even if it were possible for nature to come up with the conditions to generate the chemistry of life, it would be no different than chemistry completely randomly coming up with the pages of a book, with the text included. This alone requires natural processes that are simply never observed to ever happen. But for sake of argument, let us suggest that it were possible. We are then forced to ask the question: Can the book (literally) write itself? This is to the average person simply preposterous. Everyone knows that no book can write itself. It had to be written by someone. Yet, chemically, DNA behaves just like a book, only far more complex.

You see, the English alphabet consists of 26 letters and using those 26 letters, we can create endless combinations of words and letters. I am an author on top of a blogger here with Worldview Warriors and I have the first book of a trilogy I am writing being released pretty soon. That 425-page book uses the same 26 letters that your textbooks and your English Bible use. In order for any language to work, it must have a grammar, a structure, and it must be understood by two parties who agree to use said grammar and structure. I will never forget doing ministry in Juarez, Mexico and we had a young man from Holland who spoke 5 different languages with us. He was translating from English to Spanish, or supposed to be and suddenly found himself going off in Dutch. No one understood him. Dutch was a totally useless language in this situation, even though one person understood it. We needed the same language that both sides understood in order for anyone to get anywhere.

DNA behaves like a language. It is in a different structure (a double-helix) and it uses only four letters: A, C, G, and T, named after the four bases. And the organelles and the proteins which read the DNA perform their functions based on these four letters and their order. DNA behaves exactly like computer code. The computer code itself means nothing. There is not a single person today who can take a series of 0s and 1s in computer code and tell you what it means without a given context. Yet, we can do so much with just a bunch of 0s and 1s. Every computer program did not write itself. It was written for a specific purpose to perform a specific function. And we can use the exact same sequence of 0s and 1s to determine a color of a pixel for your monitor, for performing a mathematical operation, for storing data in memory, or for communicating with another computer. DNA behaves the same way.

Evolution must postulate that the computer program not only wrote itself, but also the ability to read the computer program wrote itself as well. Evolution cannot consider intelligent intervention into the origin of life. Though some try, via Theistic Evolution. That is for another post. Evolution must assume that only natural causes are involved and yet there is not a single example of raw material being able to auto-organize itself. Information Theory is very clear that every piece of information had to originate from an intelligent mind, regardless of the medium through which that information is transmitted. The absolute best that Evolution can provide is the medium of information itself: a book, computer code, radio waves, or bumps, or knots on a string. The medium of information is not information. Information must be imputed onto the medium. This is what telenomy is.

Life is full of telenomy and even if man is able to create its own living forms down the road, it will only be due to telenomy or “know-how”. Even if man could create possible conditions for the origins of life, all said conditions and experiments are a result of telenomic processes, or knowing how to do it. It could never prove that it happened without intelligence. If life did originate on its own, we should be able to see this process taking form today in various stages. We don’t.

The Creation account explains all this. We believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing God who possessed the telenomy, the ‘know-how’ on how to design and create life .And the more we learn about biology and bio-chemistry, the more we learn this could not happen by any random chance but only by the mind of a very intelligent being. There is a book out there that explains precisely how this came about. And its first line says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Trust this Book. It knows what it is talking about. Because it was imputed with supernatural knowledge by its supernatural Author and it reflects the mind of its Author, as does every work of creation or art reflects the mind of its creator.


Anne said...

You have introduced me to Wilder-Smith. I had never heard of him - now I want to read his writings. Thank you

Anonymous said...

That make Sense to me..

Charlie said...

Anne, sorry I didn't see this until today. Wilder-Smith does such an amazing job at explaining this very in depth scientific issues in terms that many lay people can understand. I had never heard of him either until January this year and he is one I cannot recommend enough. It is unfortunate that he has passed on but from what I understand, Wilder-Smith is the reason why men like Richard Dawkins refuses to debate Creationists.