It used to be thought that babies grew from a very small version of themselves—termed a homunculus. From a Bible perspective, this neatly explained how it was that "in Adam, all had sinned." The whole of humanity resided within his loins (homunculi within homunculi within homunculi . . .) Therefore, when he sinned so did all of his contained homunculi, giving us all an "original sin" requiring a savior.
 
Our modern understanding of genetics retired the cute little baby in a sperm homunculus idea. However, although DNA in a fertilized ovum may not be a preformed homunculus human, its program is a blueprint for a human.

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To any thinking person, it is a consternating wonder that something as unimaginably complex and functional as a human could form from an egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The source of the complex information embedded in its DNA is an even greater wonder.
 
DNA is comprised of smaller molecules that in turn come from atoms which are in turn comprised of quanta. But none of these individual components have the inherent potential to create the information, the blueprint, to form a human.

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There is an obvious difference between the information in sperm and eggs and that which is within their component atoms. Search as they may, atomic physicists never find so much as even a hint of anything akin to the information characterizing life residing there. Any given atom only contains information about how to be that atom or how to randomly combine with other atoms.
 
If atoms had the ability to self-organize into prodigious information, such as in DNA, laboratories around the world would be churning out every imaginable sort of creature. (That would be incorrectly assuming life is nothing more than organized DNA letters.) But not even the simplest living thing has ever spontaneously formed from atoms in spite of the ability to create every imaginable experimental circumstance.

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Add every materialistic explanation for the origin of life up, such as incrementalism, draw a line, and the same impossible conclusion emerges: massive amounts of information must arise from no information.

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Complex functional things—like life—must come from a sufficient cause. The injection of intelligent information is always necessary to take fundamental things beyond their intrinsic nature. On their own, water molecules don't become ice sculptures, letters don't become books, dust doesn't create skyscrapers, and atoms don't create DNA.
 
Moreover, it's an immutable law that things naturally lose information, they don't gain it. Start at one end of a group of people and whisper to the person: "Earth science describes nature's machinations." Then ask that it be whispered one to another to the end of the group. When it gets to the end it will be something like: "Washing machines clean Earth."
 
At the end of any series of random events acting upon information, the loss of information always exceeds any random gains.
 
On July 22, 1962, the Mariner 1 space probe was exploded shortly after liftoff. The omission of a single hyphen in the guidance software information led to a series of false course correction signals. The rocket was then deliberately detonated to prevent it from crashing down in a populated area. The rocket was worth between $80 and $150 million, a loss due to a single typo error. The point is that even a small inadvertent error can fatally destroy functional information. Imagine what random changes can do.
 
Neither the formation of or inevitable degradation of information over time jibes with materialism. Science is about observation and facts. But there are no observations or facts demonstrating the spontaneous formation of information or its increase in the absence of outside intelligent agency.
 
Matter can naturally manifest in different forms that, at first glance, appear to be something other and more complex than what they were to begin with. A snowflake is an intricate pattern that does not look at all like a water molecule. But the snowflake is nothing more than a manifestation of the preexisting information in the molecule. Even though there are trillions of different snowflake configurations, they are all an expression of a preexistent capacity held within water molecules. But aside from the ability to form water, clouds, and snowflakes, as well as evaporate, sublimate, combine with or disassociate other chemicals, and expand upon freezing, that's about all the information that water molecules contain. The encyclopedia within water molecules never so much as adds even a meaningful word. It is what it is and that's it.

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Organisms are the effect of information. The DNA molecule is made of four nucleotides, represented by the letters A,C,G,T (adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine). This is a quaternary code, as opposed to the binary code of computers. These molecular letters are in turn organized into genetic codons, genes, operons, regulons, and chromosomes which are like words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books.

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The prodigious DNA information in even one human cell is staggering. The 100 trillion cells in the entire body would equal 1,000,000,000,000,000 (10¹⁵) copies of this book. That's enough books, stacked side-by-side, as in a library, to reach to the sun well over fifty times.
 
The information-carrying capacity of DNA outstrips the man-made inorganic data-storage devices such as flash memory, hard disks, or even storage based on quantum-computing methods. It's estimated that about a teaspoon of DNA in 2011 could have held all human-generated information up to that time. That would include everything from the ancient Greeks through every selfie, text, movie, and album.
 
With present silicon chip technology, by 2040 the amount of world data accumulated for instant access would require a facility costing billions and decades to build. This is not to mention consuming hundreds of megawatts of power and exhausting the world's supply of computer-grade silicon. On the other hand, only about two pounds of DNA would be required and would consume about 0.04 watts per gigabyte.
 
In addition to recognizing the extraordinary information-carrying capacity of DNA, the critical point to understand is that DNA is beyond the characteristics and information of the atoms composing its structure. Atoms simply do not have the know-how on their own to form DNA or any other information-carrying biochemical that could result in functional complexity.
 
Information is an entity in and of itself and apart from the letters and vocabulary it uses. It is neither energy dependent nor matter dependent. It is other. Something had to encode ("tell") quanta, neutrons, protons, cells, organs, physiological systems, bodies, planets, stars, and galaxies to be what they are and behave as they do. Nothing discovered within nature can account for this, other than preexisting information.
 
Information requires an information giver, an intelligence, a mind. We know this to be true because when things that contain functional information, such as blueprints, music, language, instructions, and computer HTML are constructed, they require mind. We also know that once in place, such information remains as it is or degrades with time. There is no exception to the rule and that is as good as science can get. It's simple, obvious, common sense, and requires no data to be excluded.
 
Everything is what it is because of information. Everything stays what it is because of information. Randomness and time are destroyers of information, not its creators.
 
Information requires mind. That is an inviolable law, a universal truth. No evidence or experiment proves otherwise.
 
This conclusion doesn't require any religious predisposition nor does it lead to one. We're simply letting facts and reason guide us.