God's Signature in Your Cells: The DNA Code Science Can't Explain Away

A Language Inside Every Cell

In every cell of your body there is a molecule that carries instructions, written in an alphabet of four chemical letters. Read in groups of three, those letters spell out the recipes for the proteins that build and run you. The system has a start signal, stop signals, and a dictionary that translates the letters into the twenty building blocks of proteins.

It is no accident that we describe all this in the vocabulary of language and code. Biologists use the words themselves: transcription, translation, codon, reading frame, proofreading, editing. When the Human Genome Project completed its work, many commentators reached for the language of books and libraries.

This article’s thesis is that the genetic code is one of the most remarkable discoveries in the history of science, that its resemblance to a language is real enough that biologists use the vocabulary of language to describe it, and that many people of faith naturally see in it a sign of a Creator who communicates. Whether that last step is warranted is a matter of belief and philosophy, and the sections below say plainly where science ends and interpretation begins.