Earlier this month, former FBI Director, James Comey, posted a photo on social media of seashells arranged in the numbers 8647 with the words, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” This ignited quite the controversy resulting in an interview with the Secret Service. The exact meaning and intent are still being debated with possibilities ranging all the way from refusal of service to the 47th president, Donald Trump, to an appeal for his assassination. In interviews since then, Comey has stated he was not calling for the president to be murdered but simply found the formation interesting with some probable political meaning.
Comey claims he and his wife happened to discover these seashells while others accuse them of arranging them. We’ll let the Secret Service and the court of public opinion deliberate their origin as well as Comey’s intent, but no one believes this formation came about by chance. Not a single person, including Comey himself, asserts that this message occurred by the random shifting of water and sand. The odds of that happening are so miniscule as to never happen even over many billions of years.
And yet highly educated and very intelligent scientists believe and teach that life arose by random chance. Even the simplest lifeform is infinitely more complex than the arrangement of even a 500-character seashell string. In order for an amoeba to live, thousands of chemicals and processes have to be in their exact locations and work flawlessly together. Higher lifeforms are tremendously more complex with billions of molecular motors and specialized enzymes performing perfectly-timed microscopic tasks that keep us alive.
Even if Comey had nothing to do with their arranging, he knew those shells had some current political meaning. Someone was transmitting information regarding their feelings for the sitting president. Information requires intelligence and the DNA written into every living cell is the most complex arrangement of information in the universe. The amount of information in one strand of DNA contains roughly 215 million gigabytes which is more than will fit on millions of CDs.
DNA is five million times more efficient than our best storage systems and geneticists estimate that a single gram can store all the digital information that exists in the entire world. Bill Gates recognized DNA as a computer program, only one much more complicated than any designed by a human being. Our DNA is a spiral staircase of 3 billion steps that can duplicate itself and construct an entire functional human being. Our brain’s structure and methods have even inspired computer chips that out-perform all others, yet our brains don’t require permanent cooling like data centers.
One has to purposefully turn off their efficient brain to believe such a storage mechanism and the information it holds came about by accidental processes even over trillions of years. The only reason you might want to believe the seashells formed randomly would be to eliminate all human interaction, and even then you would have to override all your logic. And the only reason someone would want to believe in evolution would be to totally eliminate God so that we would be free to do whatever we wished without direction or consequence from a creator.
The Bible tells us in Romans 1:18-20 about those who, “…suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” One has to willfully ignore all reason and common sense to believe those shells were randomly arranged. How much more so this universe.
As we consider the complexity of information written into our DNA and all of Creation, may we recognize the much higher Intelligence behind it and worship Him as our Creator and Lord. Blessings, George