God Is In The Information

9 August 2026  1 Kings 19:9,11-13

“…and after the fire, a still, small voice.”  (1 Kings 19:12)   

Elijah found that God was not in the massive displays of power – the earthquake, wind, and fire. God was in the “still, small voice.”

A voice means communication. Communication means information.

God was in the information.

Science is not aware of any information that does not come from a mind. If new information emerges in evolutionary time, it seems unavoidably likely that a mind must be behind it. Whose? God is in the information.

In 1953 Watson and Crick famously discovered the three-dimensional double helix structure of DNA. Five years later Francis Crick made another equally ground-breaking discovery when he determined that the nucleotide bases that are the building blocks of DNA have to be arranged in what amounts to an alphabetic code that arranges the amino acids that make proteins.

Proteins are the building blocks of life – they make up muscles, skin, and organs, they fight off germs that cause illness, and carry oxygen in the blood. The amino acids that make up proteins have to be arranged in a very specific sequence, like beads on a chain, in order to function. There are about 20 different amino acids used to make proteins. The number of possible amino acid sequences is therefore very large to make even a small protein. To accomplish this by random changes would require an absurdly large number of attempts – something like 20100. When you consider that there are only 1080 particles in the entire universe, it becomes clear that the existence of an alphabetic code and the very precise sequencing necessary to make proteins is not a random event. There is information (in fact, encoded information) in very small places necessary to make life happen. Where does that information come from?

God is in the information.

Over evolutionary time, new DNA began to appear, particularly during a period called the Cambrian Explosion, when very large numbers of new life forms and body plans emerged with no predecessors in the fossil record. New life forms and body plans means new DNA. New DNA means new information. Where did the new information come from?

Science is not aware of any information that does not come from a mind. If new information emerges in evolutionary time, it seems unavoidably likely that a mind must be behind it. Whose?

God is in the information.

In 2016 the Royal Society of London, the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world (est. 1660), held a conference entitled New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical and Social Science Perspectives to address the problems arising over the origins of information, and possibly beginning a path to a new theory to explain it all. It involved not just biologists but philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, psychologists and historians. It reached no conclusions, but it certainly made respectable the view that it might be God in the information.

Elijah was exhausted by his conflicts with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, and needed help. God, in His “still, small voice”, provided Elijah with a helper, and a successor, Elisha.

Perhaps scientists are some of the helpers God is providing now.