I decided to do a little experiment on my computer. I'm a hobby programmer. I like to program for fun. I created a program that would generate and store lots of different numbers at random, mixing, combining, removing and adding numbers over and over again, all with the hope of something akin to life eventually making an appearance somewhere in the mix. This might surprise you, but nowhere in the trillions upon trillions of numbers did anything remotely resembling the ordered complexity of life emerge. Not in the slightest, not even once, despite trillions and trillions of "generations". Why is that, do you think?
The Problem For Materialist Scientists
People that believe in a purely naturalistic material universe have to try and account for the origin of life somehow. They cannot simply say, "It's always existed," because we know without doubt that this is not the case. Everything that exists in the universe as we know it had a cause, a beginning. And so just like everything else, life had to have also had a beginning. But life is so incredibly complex and stuffed full of highly detailed instructional information and functionality that it just could not have happened by random chance. Simply throwing a bunch of molecules into a big box and shaking it up will not come anywhere close to making a living organism, even a "simple" life form, because there is no such thing as a "simple life form". It would be like throwing trillions of english letters and punctuation symbols into a box, shaking it a lot for a long time, and expecting them to come up with one of Shakespear's famous manuscripts with only the slightest bit of spelling errors throughout. It's not going to happen. Mere randomness is NOT going to ever be able to "come up" with something like life. Never!
And thus, my program, my computer simulation based entirely on randomized numbers over and over again, will NEVER come up with anything resembling life. Random = Random, chaos, no order, no structure, no functional information, just meaningless useless garbled data with absolutely no point, pattern or structure.
My Simulation vs Nature
My program fails for one very important reason. There's no influences working upon the meaningless numbers. There's no potential of any kind there. Random numbers are random numbers and nothing more. What is it that would transform my simulation into something more similar to the universe that exists all around us? What would make my simulation more like "real life"?
Controllers, influences, connections, natural laws of physics and chemistry and all things that underlie the entire fabric (invisible and otherwise) of the universe itself! The systems and structures described in science are the heroes, the reason why random becomes non-random, in the origins of life debate. But does it really solve anything?
Here's the problem... All these complex and simple mathematical and scientific laws that govern everything in our universe from all matter to all energy are in and of themselves, information. *GASP*! That's right folks! A single basic molecule is itself information, a set of particles that have come together in a specific way to form a specific unique molecule with its own unique properties. The laws of physics and chemistry that underlie this entire structure are ALSO information because without them existing in the first place, the molecule itself could not exist, ever! The molecule requires the laws of the universe and those laws enable the particles in matter and energy to take form and have meaning.
2 + 2 = 4
Now remove the "equation" part, the operators.
224
What does that mean? Does it mean the same thing as it did before? No, obviously not. Now it can be read as "two hundred and twenty four", a whole number with 3 digits. But what makes 224 mean anything at all? The information that we use to interpret and understand that number.
That's the whole point. Nothing has any meaning except by way of interpretation and result. Think of it all like a giant equation. Meaningless random garbage + natural laws of the universe to shape it all = the actual universe. If nothing has meaning, than nothing = nothing and everything could not exist in the first place. Everything that gives our universe structure and any sort of order comes out of the fundamental underlying mathematical and scientific systems (the "laws") that dominate all matter, energy and whatever else exists out there. Without that "meaning", there is empty nothing.
The entire universe is a gigantic system of mathematical and scientific structure. Atheists and their like will argue that "there is no meaning to any of it, it just exists", but it could not "just exist", ANY of it, unless the rules and laws we discover and analyze through science and math were running and in operational order in the first place.
Conclusion
My simple computer simulation could never randomly come up with anything remotely similar to life. All it does is randomly generate numbers and mix those numbers in all sorts of strange and purely random ways. But there are no real controllers or systems involved in any of it. It's just random numbers, always and forever. Something must effect those numbers, operate on those numbers, for anything to take shape or change.
Our universe is not random nothingness. Instead, there are mathematical and scientific laws that govern absolutely everything in our universe and allow it to exist and be understood in the first place. Without these laws and systems, there would literally be nothing at all. The systems, the structure, the laws, all give everything meaning and substance. In fact, all of these laws are so incredibly well fine-tuned, that if they were different by even a tiny fraction, our entire universe would completely fall apart. This is what's known as the "fine-tuned universe" conundrum.
So where did those consistent laws come from? Where did the math and science that holds our universe together come from? Not our understanding of it, because it doesn't require us to understand it for it to function. Where did it all originate? It cannot have been the result of anything other than guided purpose. Our universe is intelligently, intentionally, programmed, because absolutely nothing can create such ordered structure and purpose except for a rational intelligent mind.
Take my computer again as an example. Unless I implement some sort of informational system of structure, meaning, and methods to my simulation of randomly generated numbers, the numbers simply are, with no rhyme or reason. It's when I start making the numbers mean something, have some sort of structure and connection to each other, that they become more. Matter, energy, and the universe itself, is information with meaning, understandable, examinable, calculable, all because of the mathematical and scientific "laws" that underlie the whole thing.
THAT does NOT and CANNOT spring from nothing. No giant explosion can cause that. No millions upon millions of universe iterations can produce that. SOMETHING intelligent has to cause it. The very fabric of space time, energy and matter, are all based upon informational structure. So even if you want to imagine that these "laws of physics and chemistry" can actually somehow have generated life itself (which by the way, is 100% impossible), as the material naturalist you STILL have to account for the existence of the informational systems that underlie and run the entire universe.
And here we are, mankind, capable of actually measuring and trying to understand all of this. God's living handiwork, trying to understand God's handiwork all around us. Absolutely incredible!
Follow Up: The Fine-Tuned Universe
There are a few naturalistic theories out there that try to explain this very serious dilemma of the "fine-tuned universe", however none of them are all that good. Mostly, they revolve around the idea of infinite possibilities, that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes and our universe just happened to "get it right". Another common idea is that somehow at the "Big Bang" event, the very laws of the universe did not apply as they do now, but somehow "fell into place". Why? How? Any proof? No answers to those questions exist, and neither does any sort of proof to support the few "best" materialistic theories that exist.
It would be like trying to explain the origins of a book by denying that the book was ever written in the first place, and that the information system or language that the book was written in, does not exist. Good luck with that!
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