Page 748 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

INFORMATION THEORY AND THE END OF MATERIALISM

aterialist philosophy lies at the basis of the theory of evolution. Materialism rests on the supposi-
tion that everything that exists is matter. According to this philosophy, matter has existed since
M eternity, will continue to exist forever, and there is nothing but matter. In order to provide support
for their claim, materialists use a logic called "reductionism." This is the idea that things which are not observ-
able can also be explained by material causes.
To make matters clearer, let us take the example of the human mind. It is evident that the mind cannot be

touched or seen. Moreover, it has no center in the human brain. This situation unavoidably leads us to the con-
clusion that mind is a concept beyond matter. Therefore, the being which we refer to as "I," who thinks, loves,
fears, worries, and feels pleasure or pain, is not a material being in the same way as a sofa, a table or a stone.
Materialists, however, claim that mind is "reducible to matter." According to the materialist claim, thinking,
loving, worrying and all our mental activities are nothing but chemical reactions taking place between the

atoms in the brain. Loving someone is a chemical reaction in some cells in our brain, and fear is another. The fa-
mous materialist philosopher Karl Vogt is notorious for his assertion that "the brain secretes thought just as
the liver secretes bile." 328 Bile, however, is matter, whereas there is no evidence that thought is.
Reductionism is a logical deduction. However, a logical deduction can be based on solid grounds or on
shaky ones. For this reason, the question we need to ask is: What happens when reductionism is compared to
scientific data?

Nineteenth-century materialist scientists and thinkers thought that the answer would be that science veri-
fies reductionism. Twentieth-century science, however, has revealed a very different picture.
One of the most salient feature of this picture is "information," which is present in nature and can never be
reduced to matter.

The Difference between Matter and Information

We earlier mentioned that there is incredibly comprehensive information contained in the DNA of living
things. Something as small as a hundred thousandth of a millimeter across contains a sort of "data bank" that

specifies all the physical details of the body of a living thing. Moreover, the body also contains a system that
reads this information, interprets it and carries out "production" in line with it. In all living cells, the informa-
tion in the DNA is "read" by various enzymes, and proteins are produced. This system makes possible the pro-
duction of millions of proteins every second, of just the required type for just the places where they are needed
in our bodies. In this way, dead eye cells are replaced by living ones, and old blood cells by new ones.
At this point, let us consider the claim of materialism: Is it possible that the information in DNA could be

reduced to matter, as materialists suggest? Or, in other words, can it be accepted that DNA is merely a collec-

746 Atlas of Creation Vol. 2