Thanks to Eric Metaxas at BreakPoint for his excellent commentary today (“Unlocking the Darwin Debate“) on our new brief video, The Information Enigma. Eric congratulates us on our “snappy” intro to intelligent design, which is a compliment from a guy who can distill it down even further, to a still snappier four minutes.

He begins:

You know Darwinism has problems, but how do you explain them to your friends and family? Well, look no further than a bicycle lock.

More:

Information is at the heart of life, and our uniform and repeated experience tells us that matter, by itself, never produces information. The only known source capable of producing information is a mind.

Okay, fine, you say, but how do I explain this over the dinner table? One great place to start is a new video from the Discovery Institute that condenses the main argument for intelligent design to a snappy 20 minutes. It’s called “The Information Enigma,” and features noted ID authors Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. Douglas Axe.

Here are the basics: Using an analogy from Dr. Meyers’ book, “Darwin’s Doubt,” the video compares DNA with a bicycle lock.

“The reason a bike lock works,” explains Meyer, “is that there are vastly more ways of arranging those numeric characters that will keep the lock closed than there are that will open the lock.”

Most bicycle locks have four dials with ten digits. So for a thief to steal the bike, he would have to guess correctly from among 10,000 possible combinations. No easy task.

But what about DNA? Well, in experiments Axe conducted at Cambridge, he found that for a DNA sequence generating a short protein just 150 amino acids in length, for every 1 workable arrangement of amino acids, there are 10 to the 77th possible unworkable amino acid arrangements. Using the bicycle lock analogy, that’s a lock with 77 dials containing 10 digits.

Thus, as the film states, it is overwhelmingly unlikely that a random mutational search would produce even one new functional protein in the entire history of life on earth. In other words, random mutation is not driving the biological bicycle.

If you haven’t watched The Design Enigma yet, does so here and now:

As Eric Metaxas recognizes, the science of ID can be intimidating if you’re new to it. That why we produced The Information Enigma, so that an accurate but accessible — snappy! — primer can make the rounds as easily as possible, via YouTube. Please help others by sharing it, won’t you?