A few weeks ago I was at a local Mexican restaurant with my family. Present were my two granddaughters. One is sixteen and just got her driver license (that’s scary). The other is twelve and is extremely bright. As we were waiting I casually asked the two of them, “What’s on the menu?”
One of them quickly answered, “Food!”
“No,” I replied. “That’s not what I asked. Look at it again. What’s on the menu?”
They both looked at me like I was crazy and repeated what they just said, “Food!”
So I said again, “Look at it carefully, What is actually on the menu?”
They both focused their eyes on the menu and looked back at me in bewilderment. “All we see are the different kinds of foods we can order.”
“Okay,” I said with a smile. “But, what is on the menu really is nothing more than colored ink printed on paper, right?”
“Uh…yes,” they replied, wondering where I was going with this.
“The ink is shaped in very specific ways, is it not? Why is that so?” They were listening curiously now. “They form letters, right? And what do the letters form?”
“Words.” They said.
“That’s right.” I agreed. “Words that have meaning. In the case of the menu, the words symbolize various kinds of foods that we can choose from to order to eat.”
“We get that,” they nodded. “What’s the point?”
“Now think about this. This may not seem very significant, but it is very important,” I told them. “Listen carefully. To take the letters of the English alphabet and arrange them in precisely the right order to form words, and then order the words in exactly the right way to form sentences and menu items requires what?”
“A mind,” the oldest said.
“That’s exactly right!” I said. “We know that a mind was behind it. The words did not just happen by pure chance. The manager of the restaurant did not just take a bunch of Scrabble letters, jumble them up, and throw them on a table and they just magically formed the menu.”
“Now, you may be saying, ‘So what?.’ Well let’s think about something. Let me see your hand.” I took the younger one’s hand and laid on the table . “Do you know your hand is made up of millions of tiny microscopic cells. A fully grown human body has over 50 trillion cells. Each cell has a nucleus that contains chains of molecules called Deoxyribonucleic acid (abbreviated DNA). That DNA is aligned in 23 pairs of 46 chromosomes arranged in a double helix inside the nucleus of each cell.”
“Now here is an amazing fact; each cell’s DNA chain contains all the coded information that makes a human being a human being. It is like an alphabet written in each cell that contains the blueprints of the human body. More than 6 billion coded combinations of DNA is needed to form a human being. Every person has a unique DNA profile which police can now use to identify perpetrators of crimes. It’s sort of like six billion different words needed to write a single book. In comparison, the 32 volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica contains only 44 million words. That is an incredible amount of information stored in one place.”
“What’s more incredible is that a single cell contains all the information necessary to form a human being with 50 trillion different cells each with a unique complex function. Just the human brain has more than 170 billion cells organized in a such complex system that scientists are still baffled by how it is all wired together to operate as it does in an organ about the size of a grapefruit.”
“Now here is the big question. If it takes a rational mind to write and form the letters and words on a menu, what does that say about how the formation of the human DNA code is formed? It is millions of times more complex than any menu, or any book for that matter. Is it by chance, or is there a mind behind it as well?”
I was surprised to hear one of them to say, tentatively, “God?”
“Yes!” I said. “It is the mind of God that designed it and put it in to action! We are infinitely more complex than anything mankind has ever designed or written. So don’t let anyone ever tell you that it all came about by chance. How likely is it that the restaurant’s menu or The Encyclopedia Britannica was the result of chance? The answer is not at all!”
This is a major problem of Naturalism. It simply cannot explain how there is so much precise design in the complexity of life. This is especially true regarding humanity. Most Naturalists still hold onto the 19th century theory of Darwinian natural selection (or Neo-Darwinism) to explain how life has evolved. Nonetheless, a growing number of scientists are coming to recognize the weakness of that theory to explain the incredible design and complexity of life. Increasingly they are acknowledging the need for a Designer.
13 For You created my innermost parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
14 I will give thanks to You, because I am awesomely and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from You
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully formed in the depths of the earth;
16 Your eyes have seen my formless substance;
And in Your book were written
All the days that were ordained for me,
When as yet there was not one of them. Psalm 139:13-16 NASB
© 2025 Tal Davis