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These are the opening words of John’s Gospel, most probably written around 100 CE. Whoever John was, he tried to convey a late 1st century understanding of the person and significance of Jesus. In doing so, he borrowed the term logos from Greek philosophy. This can indeed mean ‘word’, but also includes a variety of meanings – not only human speech, but also rationality and logic, and extending to some universal, creative principle underlying the orderly structure and functioning of all that exists.

Let’s stick, however, with Logos meaning ‘word’. John suggests that “In the beginning was the Word”; that “the Word was God”; and that “all things came into being through him”. He goes on to claim that “the Word became flesh” in the person of Jesus, through whom God ‘spoke’. This is a powerful piece of writing, whether or not taken at face value. I’ve been reminded of it, when reflecting on a major finding of science dating from the early 1950’s – the molecular double-helix structure of DNA.  

DNA contains information that provides the fully and precisely detailed instructions necessary for accurate construction, function and replication, in each of the variety of mind-blowingly complex cells from which every living thing is made. It’s built (see the diagram above) using a sequence of 4 bases, with the letters A, C, G and T, each of which must be in the exactly right place. Analogies might be the columns of necessarily flawless digital code in a computer’s faultlessly functioning operating system, or the sequences of properly placed letters giving rise to a flawless edition of all the plays of William Shakespeare.

If we focus on the ‘letters’ and ‘words’ analogy, the thought might come that in human DNA, with its 3.2 billion ‘letters’, we have the ‘words’ of the longest ‘sentence’ in the known universe, incorporating a vast cornucopia of detailed Information. Materialists, especially those with a worldview which instantly resists anything that might even hint at a ‘god’, will claim that this ‘word’ has been formed in a process involving fortuitous physical and chemical interactions and random mutations. That might indeed be so, but need not necessarily be the case.

Bearing in mind that when random changes occur in computer codes or written pages, the results are most often deleterious, and only very occasionally beneficial, there are mathematicians who have come up with calculations which suggest that not even 3.7 billion years is long enough to account for what we’ve found to be the case. Would 3.7 billion monkeys, typing on 3.7 billion keyboards, for 3.7 billion years eventually produce the Plays of Shakespeare? Possibly yes, probably no.

It may be that Mind, Intelligence, Information and (whisper it) Design, lie at the heart of the universe. This doesn’t necessarily open the door for any of the ‘gods’ of any of the world’s religions, but it might legitimately be thought to give a fresh and thought-provoking slant to, “In the Beginning was the Word” …..