Codes, Evolution, and Intelligent Design

You are misunderstanding how science works.You seem to be taking a scientific law to something created by God as part of the design of the natural universe. While some scientists look at it that way, that leads to a misunderstanding of science.It is better to think of a scientific law as a human construct, made as part of a program of successive approximation. It is not that laws are found to be in error. Rather, we develop better approximations, and thus we abandon the earlier approximation in preference for the newer, better one. It is a mistake to say that an earlier approximation was an error. It might have been the best approximation possible at the time. Using the best approximation available is not an error, even though at a later time an even better approximation might become available. It is a little misleading to say that DNA is a code.Portions of DNA are often described using the letters 'A', 'C', 'G', 'T'. This representation in letters is a code. The DNA is itself sometimes referred to as a genetic code. That's because humans have designated it as a code.If you want to say that DNA is a code, then it is indeed a human constructed code. The decision to designate it as a code (as a realization of the genetic code) is the construction that makes DNA a code. The DNA is a code by virtue of that designation, and by virtue of the way humans use it, not by virtue of the way it works in biochemistry. In terms of the biochemistry, the DNA is simply part of a causal mechanism.Your argument really amounts to this: Because humans designated the DNA as a code, and used it as a code, therefore the DNA itself must have been designed by a higher intelligence. But that is an absurd argument.

Quite right. And therefore the DNA, as it acts in nature, is part of a causal mechanism, and not a code. If it were a code, then it would require an interpretation of that code in order for anything to work.

The ribosomes are not sitting their, interpreting the "code", and then deciding what how to act on that interpretation. Rather, there are just causal processes at work. It is only "decoding", because our explanation of DNA considers it a code. And it is only "transcription" because that is how our explanation describes the processes. But take away the human observer and his explanations, and what you really have are causal processes. No coding, decoding, transcription is involved except in the sense that our scientific explanation has chosen to describe this as decoding and transcription.