In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick proposed the double helix structure of DNA for which they won the Nobel Prize in 1962. The discovery was based on work by chemist Rosalind Franklin for which she received little credit.
But on November 6, Watson met DNA’s Designer. It must have been quite a shock since he’d been denying God’s existence for most of his 97 years.
He understood that a Godless universe left him without any transcendent meaning. When asked about that, he responded, “I don’t think we’re FOR anything; we’re just products of evolution. You can say ‘Your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose,’ but I’m anticipating a good lunch.”
At that moment he felt his purpose was the same as cows watching Farmer Jim arrive with a load of hay.
It’s a great disappointment to Western intellectuals that the common man, even though force-fed the materialistic worldview for almost 200 years, still doesn’t believe it.
As George Orwell expressed it, “Some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them.”
We may not understand all the intricacies of DNA (who does?), but one thing was clear from that discovery in 1953. The universe wasn’t just chemistry and physics. It was information, and information isn’t material. Besides, no one ever discovered information that didn’t originate from a mind. Imagine convincing a policeman that the 4-letter stop sign you just blew past was no evidence for intelligence, just a surprising freak of nature.
Yet the double helix strand containing about 3.2 BILLION base pairs which act as “letters” in the genetic code that makes you YOU—that just happened?
No wonder we read, “The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:18-20)
The atheist calls faith “belief without proof.” But that’s the atheist’s brand of blind faith which calls us to believe that everything came from nothing, that order came from chaos, that life came from non-life, and that personality, rationality, and morality simply arose from matter.
Ordinary folk don’t believe this because they regularly try an experiment. The best “primordial soup” would be Campbell’s vegetable soup, wouldn’t it? The building blocks for life are all there. Yet millions open up such cans to feed their children, never fearing that some deadly bacteria has arisen in the can. Life can’t spontaneously generate in a closed system. If it could, the canning industry would die tomorrow.
Of course, mutations occur. Darwin’s Galapagos finches show that. But if you start with a finch and end with a finch, that hardly explains how everything came from a single cell.
We’re grateful scientists discovered what David told the Lord 3,000 years ago. “Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written.” (Psalm 139:16) It would be nice if they, with a little humility, joined the rest of us in singing a few stanzas of “How Great Thou Art.”
Article published November 15, 2025 in the Commercial Dispatch.