Science has revealed that information transcends above the material medium.
The actual writing of a new murder mystery novel changes character as Agatha Christie puts her ideas down on paper, making the fundamental transition from the abstract and intangible nature of informational ideas to the physical materials of paper and ink.
The interesting observation here is that the letters, words, punctuation marks, spaces, paragraphs, and book chapters could be on any subject. It could be a murder mystery, foreign-agent suspense thriller, romantic comedy, historical biography, or a cookbook filled with recipes.
The mediums of the ink and paper, the ones and zeros of the laptop computer word-processing code, and the English language are entirely indifferent and neutral as to the genre category of the information being presented.
The material medium does not dictate or guide the outcome, but is merely the means for expression.
But then another interesting transition takes place.
After the murder mystery novel is completed and enters the published book phase, physical print copies now sit on shelves in bookstores waiting for someone like me to see it in its material form, buy it, and take it home to read.
Then another amazing thing happens.
I open up the physical book and begin to read the text in the form of letters arranged as words and sentences in the English language, and the information that Agatha Christie created has passed through the material medium of ink on paper to become once again information that is the engrossing murder mystery that keeps me up reading late into the night, the who-done-it story And Then There Were None.
Without hitting this nail on the head too many times, this recognition of the fundamental essence of creative information in literary fiction writing has huge implications for a more accurate and up-to-date scientific understanding of the causal mechanisms behind the phenomena in the natural world.
The non-material nature of information should tell both professional scientists and laymen like me that a purely materialistic worldview of the universe, absent the input of creative agency, is unnecessarily and illogically limited.
The organized complexity of the system of information that comprises a murder mystery story is not the same thing as that same story in physical print form in a book I can hold in my hands.
The abstract and intangible creative thought behind the murder mystery story is not the same as the hands and fingers of Agatha Christie physically typing-out the story day-by-day using the materials of ink and paper.
This seems to me to be a workable analogy to the material universe we study through science, and the abstract, non-material information this research reveals.
Agatha Christie could just as easily tell her murder mystery story verbally to a small group sitting around a camp-fire, maybe over the course of two or three nights, in a shorter abbreviated and abridged version.
Scientifically studying how our throats and mouths form the individual sounds of the words of human speech, how these sounds are carried as sound-waves across the distance of seemingly empty space to another person, and how our ears instantly translate these words/sounds into intelligible information within our minds is simply another material medium for passing along information.
This scientific, fact-based information understood today in terms of the hard physics and chemistry of speech, sound, and hearing will still not explain the creative mental ingenuity that can invent a new suspense-filled murder mystery story from scratch out-of-nothing.
Telling the story verbally merely uses the mediums of speech, sound-waves, and hearing instead of paper and ink.
But the distinctive thought-process is still the same mystery.
Its origin still has no material explanation in terms of the basic question of where does information come from in the first-place.
Information by definition is abstract and non-material. Mass/energy by contrast is physical and material.
Information and intelligent agency go together.
Mass/energy is incapable of creating information, because mass/energy does not possess the ability to think.
The worldview of scientific materialism is illogically limited because it attempts to tell modern audiences that And Then There Was None typed itself. Scientific materialism illogically postulates that it did not need the intelligent agent Agatha Christie as the dynamic explanation of its origin.
The independent yes/no feature of targeted brilliance has to come from somewhere other than material causations.
This is ingeniously and concisely summarized in the question posed by some modern physicists in this Age ofInformation: Is the universe it before bit, or bit before it?[1]
In this question, it is material in the form of mass/energy. Bit is non-material in the form of the “bits” of ones and zeroes comprising the information in computer software language code.
Did mass/energy come first before information, or did information come first followed by mass-energy?
Did Agatha Christie conceive of her murder mystery book in her mind before it became typed words and sentences?
That some combination of material objects like a typewriter, laptop computer, paper, and ink could create a murder mystery book on their own…without a mind…is inconceivable.
The narrative can be spun to seemingly support the notion that the functionality of the mind/brain can be reduced to its material parts.
But the transcendent feature of the independence that can navigate through the innumerable “yes” choices and “no” rejections to reach the end-point outcomes of specified function, argues compellingly that the sophisticated complexity of the thought-processes of the human mind/brain exists above the material mediums of quarks, atoms, and neural network connections alone.
[1] John Lennox: Socrates in the City in Labastide, France Part 1, published Jan. 12, 2018 on You Tube.
The Cross in the Christian Life 