Written in a spirit of a Christian believer but pervaded with the tenets of intelligent design, the book “The Case for a Creator” written by Lee Strobel is a very good read for those interested in detailed problems of the evolution theory. The book, through interviews, reveals many facts that scientists don’t like to speak about because they weaken the evolution theory and indicate fine-tuned intelligent design.

Some conclusions are only partly agreeable with the Vedic, Hare Krishna views, for example that life in the universe is possible only in a certain habitable zones. This hypothesis does not consider that there might be other living entities that can live in more subtle regions of space that are inaccessible and unknown to us. Neither does the book consider that life is impossible without a subtle substance known as consciousness, which is the crucial life giving element. In other words, life is not only a mixture of fine-tuned, complexly interrelated amino acids forming RNA and DNA.

But all in all, Lee Strobel has done an outstanding job in presenting views in support of intelligent design from biologists, physicists and astronomers who carry significant credibility in their fields. Below is the table of contents, followed by an excerpt on the formation of life. At the end there is a mix of clips from the movie of the same name as the book: “The Case for a Creator”.

CONTENTS
Chapter 1
White-Coated Scientists
Versus Black-Robed Preachers

Chapter 2
The Images of Evolution

Chapter 3
Doubts about Darwinism
An interview with Jonathan Wells

Chapter 4
Where Science Meets Faith
An interview with Stephen C. Meyer

Chapter 5
The Evidence of Cosmology: Beginning with a Bang
An interview with William Lane Craig

Chapter 6
The Evidence of Physics:
The Cosmos on a Razor’s Edge
An interview with Robin Collins

Chapter 7
The Evidence of Astronomy: The Privileged Planet
An interview with Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards

Chapter 8
The Evidence of Biochemistry:
The Complexity of Molecular Machines
An interview with Michael J. Belie

Chapter 9
The Evidence of Biological Information:
The Challenge of DNA and the Origin of Life
An interview with Stephen C. Meyer

Chapter 10
The Evidence of Consciousness: The Enigma of the Mind
An interview with J. P. Moreland

Chapter 11
The Cumulative Case for a Creator

Appendix: A Summary of the Case for Christ
Deliberations: Questions for Reflection or Group Study
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author

The following text is an excerpt from the book.

Formation of Life

Undoubtedly,  obstacles  to  the  formation  of  life  on  the  primitive  Earth  would  have  been extremely formidable, even if the world were awash with an ocean of biological precursors. Still, is there any reasonable naturalistic route to life? Like a homicide detective rounding up the usual suspects, I decided to run down the three possible scenarios to see if any of them made sense.

SCENARIO #1: RANDOM CHANCE
I began with an observation. “I know that the idea of life forming by random chance is out of vogue right now among scientists,” I said Meyer agreed. “Virtually all origin-of-life experts have utterly rejected that approach,” he said with a wave of his hand.
“Even  so,  the  idea  is  still  very  much  alive  at  the  popular  level,”  I  pointed  out.  “For  many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge.”
“Well, yes, it’s true that this scenario is still alive among people who don’t know all the facts, but there’s no merit to it,” Meyer replied.
“Imagine trying to generate even a simple book by throwing Scrabble letters onto the floor. Or imagine closing your eyes and picking Scrabble letters out of a bag. Are you going to produce Hamlet in anything like the time of the known universe? Even a simple protein molecule, or the gene  to  build  that  molecule,  is  so  rich  in  information  that  the  entire  time  since  the  Big  Bang would not give you, as my colleague Bill Dembski likes to say, the `probabilistic resources’ you would need to generate that molecule by chance.”
“Even,” I asked, “if the first molecule had been much simpler than those today?”
“There’s a minimal complexity threshold,” he replied. “There’s a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don’t get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so.
That  may  be  conservative.  Now  consider  what  you’d  need  for  a  protein  molecule  to  form  by chance.
“First, you need the right bonds between the amino acids. Second, amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you’ve got to get only left-handed ones. Third, the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence, like letters in a sentence.
“Run  the  odds  of  these  things  falling  into  place  on  their  own  and  you  find  that  the probabilities  of  forming  a  rather  short  functional  protein  at  random  would  be  one  chance  in  a hundred  thousand  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion  trillion.
That’s a ten with 125 zeroes after it!
“And that would only be one protein molecule-a minimally complex cell would need between three  hundred  and  five  hundred  protein  molecules.  Plus,  all  of  this  would  have  to  be accomplished in a mere 100 million years, which is the approximate window of time between the Earth cooling and the first microfossils we’ve found.
“To  suggest  chance  against  those  odds  is  really  to  invoke  a  naturalistic  miracle.  It’s  a confession of ignorance. It’s another way of saying, `We don’t know.’ And since the 1960s, scientists, to their credit, have been very reluctant to say that chance played any significant role in the origin of DNA or proteins-even though, as you say, it’s still unfortunately a live option in popular thinking.”

SCENARIO #2: NATURAL SELECTION
Random chance might not account for the origin of life, but zoologist Richard Dawkins says that  when  natural  selection  acts  on  chance  variations,  then  evolution  is  capable  of  scaling otherwise impossibly high peaks. In fact, that was the premise of his 1996 book Climbing Mount Improbable.
He suggested that a complex biological structure is like a sheer cliff that cannot be scaled in one  big  bound  without  intermediate  stepping  stones,  as  chance  must  do.  People  look  at  this towering peak and think evolutionary processes could never get them to the top.
The  backside  of  that  same  mountain,  however,  has  a  gradual  slope  that  makes  for  much easier climbing. This represents the Darwinian idea that nature provides small chance variations and  then  natural  selection  chooses  the  ones  that  are  most  advantageous.  Over  long  periods  of time, little changes accumulate into major differences. So while the mountain looks impossible to  climb  from  the  cliff  side,  it’s  quite  easy  to  scale  via  the  smaller  Darwinian  steps  of  natural selection on the backside.’
In light of that insight, I asked Meyer: “Can natural selection explain how evolution managed to scale the mountain of building the first living cell?”
“Whether natural selection really works at the level of biological evolution is open to debate, but it most certainly does not work at the level of chemical evolution, which tries to explain the origin  of  the  first  life  from  simpler  chemicals,”  Meyer  replied.  “As  Theodosius  Dobzhansky said, ‘Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction in terms.”‘18
“How so?” I asked.
“Darwinists  admit  that  natural  selection  requires  a  self-replicating  organism  to  work,”  he explained.  “Organisms  reproduce,  their  offspring  have  variations,  the  ones  that  are  better adapted to their environment survive better, and so those adaptations are preserved and passed on to the next generation.
“However,  to  have  reproduction,  there  has  to  be  cell  division.  And  that  presupposes  the existence of information-rich DNA and proteins. But that’s the problem-those are the very things they’re trying to explain!
“In  other  words,  you’ve  got  to  have  a  self-replicating  organism  for  Darwinian  evolution  to take  place,  but  you  can’t  have  a  self-replicating  organism  until  you  have  the  information necessary in DNA, which is what you’re trying to explain in the first place. It’s like the guy who falls into a deep hole and realizes lie needs a ladder to get out. So climbs out, goes home, gets a ladder, jumps back into the hole, and climbs out. It begs the question.”
I raised another possibility. “Maybe replication first began in a much simpler way and then natural selection was able to take over,” I said. “For example, some small viruses use RNA as their  genetic  material.  RNA  molecules  are  simpler  than  DNA,  and  they  can  also  store information  and  even  replicate.  What  about  the  so-called  `RNA  first  hypothesis’  that  says reproductive life originated in a realm that’s much less complex than DNA?”
“There’s a mountain of problems with that,” he said. “Just to cite a couple of them, the RNA molecule would need information to function, just as DNA would, and so we’re right back to the same problem of where the information came from. Also, for a single strand of RNA to replicate, there must be an identical RNA molecule close by. To have a reasonable chance of having two
identical RNA molecules of the right length would require a library of ten billion billion billion billion  billion  billion  RNA  molecules-and  that  effectively  rules  out  any  chance  origin  of  a primitive replicating system.”‘
Although  popular  for  a  while,  the  RNA  theory  has  generated  its  share  of  skeptics. Evolutionist Robert Shapiro, a chemistry professor at New York University, said the idea at this point “must be considered either a speculation or a matter of faith.”20 Origin-of-life researcher Graham Cairns-Smith said the “many interesting and detailed experiments in this area” have only served to show that the theory is “highly implausible.”21 As Jonathan Wells noted in my earlier interview  with  him,  biochemist  Gerald  Joyce  of  the  Scripps  Research  Center  was  even  more blunt: “You have to build straw man upon straw man to get to the point where RNA is a viable first bio molecule.”22
Jay  Roth,  former  professor  of  cell  and  molecular  biology  at  the  University  of  Connecticut and an expert in nucleic acids, said whether the original template for the first living system was RNA or DNA, the same problem exists. “Even reduced to the barest essentials,” he said, “this template  must  have  been  very  complex  indeed.  For  this  template  and  this  template  alone,  it appears it is reasonable at present to suggest the possibility of a creator.”23

SCENARIO #3: CHEMICAL AFFINITIES AND SELF-ORDERING
Meyer  pointed  out  that  by  the  early  1970s,  most  origin-of-life  scientists  had  become disenchanted with the options of random chance and natural selection. As a result, some explored a  third  possibility:  various  self-organizational  theories  for  the  origin  of  information-bearing macromolecules.
For  example,  scientists  theorized  that  chemical  attractions  may  have  caused  DNA’s  four-letter alphabet to self-assemble or that the natural affinities between amino acids prompted them to  link  together  by  themselves  to  create  protein.  When  I  broached  these  possibilities,  Meyer’s response was to bring up a name I had already encountered during my investigation.
“One of the first advocates of this approach was Dean Kenyon, who coauthored the textbook Biochemical  Predestination,”  Meyer  said.  “The  title  tells  it  all.  The  idea  was  that  the development of life was inevitable because the amino acids in proteins and the bases, or letters, in the DNA alphabet had self-ordering capacities that accounted for the origin of the information in these molecules.”
I already knew that Kenyon had repudiated the conclusions of his own book, declaring that “we  have  not  the  slightest  chance  of  a  chemical  evolutionary  origin  for  even  the  simplest  of cells”  and  that  intelligent  design  “made  a  great  deal  of  sense,  as  it  very  closely  matched  the multiple discoveries in molecular biology.”24 Still, I wanted to consider the evidence for myself.
“How did this chemical attraction supposedly work?” I asked.
“We’ll  use  proteins  as  an  example,”  he  said.  “Remember,  proteins  are  composed  of  a  long line  of  amino  acids.  The  hope  was  that  there  would  be  some  forces  of  attraction  between  the amino acids that would cause them to line up the way they do and then fold so that the protein can perform the functions that keep a cell alive.”
I  interrupted.  “You  have  to  admit  that  there  are  examples  in  nature  where  chemical attractions do result in a kind of self-ordering.”
“That’s right,” Meyer said. “Salt crystals are a good illustration. Chemical forces of attraction cause sodium ions, Na+, to bond with chloride ions, Cl-, in order to form highly ordered patterns within a crystal of salt. You get a nice sequence of Na and Cl repeating over and over again. So, yes,  there  are  lots  of  cases  in  chemistry  where  bonding  affinities  of  different  elements  will explain the origin of their molecular structure. Kenyon and others hoped this would be the case for proteins and DNA.”
“What turned out to be the problem?” I asked.
“As scientists did experiments, they found that amino acids didn’t demonstrate these bonding affinities,” Meyer replied.
“None at all?”
“There were some very, very slight affinities, but they don’t correlate to any of the known patterns of sequencing that we find in functional proteins. Obviously, that’s a major problem-but there was an even bigger theoretical difficulty. Information theorist Hubert Yockey and chemist Michael Polanyi raised a deeper issue: `What would happen if we could explain the sequencing
in  DNA  and  proteins  as  a  result  of  self-organization  properties?  Wouldn’t  we  end  up  with something like a crystal of salt, where there’s merely a repetitive sequence?’”2
When I asked Meyer to elaborate, he said: “Consider the genetic information in DNA, which is spelled out by the chemical letters A, C, G, and T. Imagine every time you had an A, it would automatically attract a G. You’d just have a repetitive sequence: A-G-A-G-A-G-AG. Would that give you a gene that could produce a protein? Absolutely not. Self-organization wouldn’t yield a genetic message, only a repetitive mantra.
“To convey information, you need irregularity in sequencing. Open any book; you won’t see the  word  `the’  repeating  over  and  over  and  over.  Instead,  you  have  an  irregular  sequencing  of letters. They convey information because they conform to a certain known independent pattern that is, the rules of vocabulary and grammar. That’s what enables us to communicate-and that’s what  needs  to  be  explained  in  DNA.  The  four  letters  of  its  alphabet  are  also  highly  irregular while at the same time conforming to a functional requirement-that is, the correct arrangement of amino acids to create a working protein.
“Here’s an example. If you go north of here into Victoria Harbor in British Columbia, you’ll see a pattern on a hillside. As the ferry approaches, you’ll realize it’s a message: red and yellow flowers spell out WELCOME TO VICTORIA. That’s an example of an informational sequence.
“Notice you don’t have mere repetition-a W followed by an E, followed by another W and another  E,  and  so  on.  Instead,  there’s  an  irregular  combination  of  letters  that  conform  to  an independent pattern or specific set of functional requirements-English vocabulary and grammar.
So we immediately recognize this as informational. Whenever we encounter these two elements-irregularity that’s specified by a set of functional requirements, which is what we call ’specified complexity’-we  recognize  this  as  information.  And  this  kind  of  information  is  invariably  the result of mind-not chance, not natural selection, and not self-organizational processes.”
“And this is the kind of information we find in DNA?” I asked.
“That’s correct. If all you had were repeating characters in DNA, the assembly instructions would merely tell amino acids to assemble in the same way over and over again. You wouldn’t be able to build all the many different kinds of protein molecules you need for a living cell to function. It would be like handing a person an instruction book for how to build an automobile, but all the book said was ‘the-the-the-the-the-the.’ You couldn’t hope to convey all the necessary information with that one-word vocabulary.
“Whereas  information  requires  variability,  irregularity,  and  unpredictability-which  is  what information theorists call complexity self-organization gives you repetitive, redundant structure, which is known as simple order. And complexity and order are categorical opposites.
“Chemical  evolutionary  theorists  are  not  going  to  escape  this.  The  laws  of  nature,  by definition, describe regular, repetitive patterns. For that reason one cannot invoke self-organizing processes to explain the origin of information, because informational sequences are irregular and complex. They exhibit the `specified complexity’ I talked about. Future discoveries aren’t going to change this principle.”
To me, this absolutely doomed the idea of chemical affinities accounting for the information in DNA. But Meyer wasn’t through. There was yet another devastating problem with this theory.
“If you study DNA,” he continued, “you will find that its structure depends on certain bonds that  are  caused  by  chemical  attractions.  For  instance,  there  are  hydrogen  bonds  and  bonds between the sugar and phosphate molecules that form the two twisting backbones of the DNA molecule.
“However,”  he  stressed,  “there’s  one  place  where  there  are  no  chemical  bonds,  and  that’s between the nucleotide bases, which are the chemical letters in the DNA’s assembly instructions.
In other words, the letters that spell out the text in the DNA message do not interact chemically with each other in any significant way.  Also, they’re totally interchangeable.  Each base can attach with equal facility at any site along the DNA backbone.”
Sensing the need for an illustration, Meyer stood and reached over to the desk to grab another child’s toy-a metal chalkboard with several magnetic letters sticking to it. Sitting back down, he put  the  chalkboard  on  his  lap  and  maneuvered  the  letters  until  they  spelled  the  word INFORMATION.
“My  kids  were  young  when  I  was  first  studying  this,  so  I  came  up  with  this  example,”  he said. “We know that there are magnetic affinities here; that’s why the magnetic letters stick to the metal chalkboard.” To demonstrate, he picked up the letter R and let the magnetism pull it back to the board.
“Notice,  however,  that  the  magnetic  force  is  the  same  for  each  one  of  the  letters,  and  so they’re effectively interchangeable. You can use the letters to spell whatever you want. Now, in DNA, each individual base, or letter, is chemically bonded to the sugar-phosphate backbone of the molecule. That’s how they’re attached to the DNA’s structure. But-and here’s the key point there  is  no  attraction  or  bonding  between  the  individual  letters  themselves.  So  there’s  nothing chemically  that  forces  them  into  any  particular  sequence.  The sequencing has to come from somewhere else.
“When I show students the magnetic letters sticking to the metal chalkboard, I ask, `How did this word INFORMATION arise?’ The answer, of course, is intelligence that comes from outside the system. Neither chemistry nor physics arranged the letters this way. It was my choice. And in  DNA,  neither  chemistry  nor  physics  arranges  the  letters  into  the  assembly  instructions  for proteins. Clearly, the cause comes from outside the system.”
He paused while the implications sunk in. “And that cause,” he stressed, “is intelligence.”