Here are two Breakpoint articles about Johnson's new book "The Wedge of
Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism".
 

BreakPoint with Charles Colson
Commentary #000721 - 07/21/2000
DNA Junk or God's Design?: Unraveling the Human Genome

It wasn't the sort of talk that makes biologists comfortable. "We are
learning the language in which God created life," said President Clinton
two weeks ago as he announced completion of the map of the human
genome -- the 3.1 billion units of genetic information stored in our
chromosomes.

The President's words were right on, but to scientists they had a surprising
ring. As polls of scientists indicate, the majority of biologists these days
think natural selection -- not God -- created the information in the human
genome, over billions of years of evolution.

But as Phillip Johnson argues in his new book, THE WEDGE OF TRUTH,
biologists need to approach the origin of genetic information with new
eyes. Because, behind the news about completion of the genome map are
many other mysteries. For example, are the undirected forces of natural
selection (acting on random variation) really able to explain how strange
and irregular genetic information arises? And how could a blind
evolutionary process write the vast encyclopedia of biological data that
we carry around in our cells?

What gives Johnson's questions such urgency is the genome map itself.
Although biologists have finished sequencing the genes, determining the
order of the individual letters in the genetic text, they don't understand
most of it. "It's written in a foreign language," says geneticist Gerald Rubin,
adding, "It's a very complicated problem."

Why? Think of it this way. Suppose you found a stone slab covered with
strange marks. Some seem to be words in an unknown language, while
others are simply random scratchings or gibberish. Well, this is how
modern evolutionary biologists view the information in our genome.

In their view, the "gibberish" is simply "junk DNA" -- functionless,
meaningless scraps and left-overs, which we have inherited from our animal
ancestors.

And as they see it, only two forces could explain the origin of our genome:
natural laws and blind chance, which come together in the process of
natural selection. So if there's gibberish, you just dismiss it. After all, the
author was a blind natural process whose only goal was survival.

But this is a cop-out. What if natural law and chance are incapable of
creating such complex information? Even the most ardent Darwinian
biologists agree that our genome, despite its vast poorly understood
regions, contains tens of thousands of fantastically intricate meaningful
sequences. As Johnson argues, "meaningful information-bearing sequences
require some THIRD FORCE that works against both repetitive order on
the one hand and chaotic chance on the other." And that, he says, would be
a designing mind: The mind of God.

And if God, not a blind natural process, designed the human DNA, then
don't we have good reasons to think that the so-called "junk DNA," so
puzzling to biologists, may have important functions as well -like leading to
medical breakthroughs?

In fact, the view that our genome is not just junk, but an intricate language
we have yet to understand, holds vast promise -- something Darwinian
evolution can never offer.

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You can order your own copy of Phillip Johnson's
The Wedge of Truth from BreakPoint Onlineat <http://www.breakpoint.org>.
 

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