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Without Excuse
With his co-authors, information scientist Dr Werner Gitt provides the most rigorous and useful definition of information thus far. He distinguishes this Universal Information (real information) from things often mistakenly called information, and shows how ultimately all biological information comes from God. Gitt's evangelist heart also shines through this academically rigorous work. The author is Werner Gitt, in cooperation with Bob Compton & Jorge Fernandez.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
3 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Werner Gitt
39 books21 followersEngineering degree from the Technical University in Hanover, Germany. Ph.D.
Previously Head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig).
Previously Director and Professor at PTB.
Previously Head of the Department of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt [PTB], in Braunschweig).
Previously Director and Professor at PTB.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 13, 2016
How important is information? What is information? Can you define it? Really define it? Is that definition clear enough to be the basis of a scientific law?
That is the arduous task Werner Gitt has undertaken, and he accomplishes it admirably. Now I'm not a biologist or a scientist of any kind. I struggle with rather basic biological concepts and terms. That said, as detailed and rigorous as this book is, I was able to understand even grasp the majority of it. He uses numerous understandable illustrations. Those helped. It really wasn’t that hard to grasp what his main points were. It was just the minutia that bogged me down some times.
Don’t let that stop you from reading it though! It was worth every minute of struggle. Every rereading of a section just brought out more amazing details.
Just like any other scientific law, in and of itself, it’s not that interesting. However when it comes to the application, Wow! It suddenly springs out as vitally important. That doesn’t happen till chapter 9 though so hang in there.
Chapter 9 was so interesting. Have you ever read the statistical probability of the fulfillment of the prophecies in the Bible? How can that strengthen our reliance on the infallibility of God’s Word? Really even if you don’t read the rest of the book, PLEASE READ THAT CHAPTER!
In really all comes down to if we are willing to accept God’s revelation. Even without the mountains of scientific evidence, there are enough internal proofs to its accuracy. This book just points out few of them more clearly. Do we really want to know truth? Do you? As good and accurate as this book is, it will never surpass the written Word of God. That’s the only truly eternally important book ever written. Will you believe it?
That is the arduous task Werner Gitt has undertaken, and he accomplishes it admirably. Now I'm not a biologist or a scientist of any kind. I struggle with rather basic biological concepts and terms. That said, as detailed and rigorous as this book is, I was able to understand even grasp the majority of it. He uses numerous understandable illustrations. Those helped. It really wasn’t that hard to grasp what his main points were. It was just the minutia that bogged me down some times.
Don’t let that stop you from reading it though! It was worth every minute of struggle. Every rereading of a section just brought out more amazing details.
Just like any other scientific law, in and of itself, it’s not that interesting. However when it comes to the application, Wow! It suddenly springs out as vitally important. That doesn’t happen till chapter 9 though so hang in there.
Chapter 9 was so interesting. Have you ever read the statistical probability of the fulfillment of the prophecies in the Bible? How can that strengthen our reliance on the infallibility of God’s Word? Really even if you don’t read the rest of the book, PLEASE READ THAT CHAPTER!
In really all comes down to if we are willing to accept God’s revelation. Even without the mountains of scientific evidence, there are enough internal proofs to its accuracy. This book just points out few of them more clearly. Do we really want to know truth? Do you? As good and accurate as this book is, it will never surpass the written Word of God. That’s the only truly eternally important book ever written. Will you believe it?
April 15, 2020
The circumstantial evidence for God and the biblical account of creation is staggering. Most importantly, information never creates itself. And yet, all the stories of evolutionism would require information continually creating itself. Such an explanation is unscientific and irrational. Of course, absolute proof also exists, and I wich Werner Gitt had mentioned that. We know that God exists because we know God through Christ. Christ is real and knowable. He leads, teaches, and corrects everyone who follows Him. And He teaches us that the Bible is His utterance without error. What God reveals is absolute truth, so we know that the Bible is without error. Not only that, but God speaks to us through the Bible. No one can hear the Bible being read without hearing God's voice. Many can and do fail to acknowledge God when He speaks, however. Everyone who seeks God finds God, so this revelation is checkable unlike the fabrications about billions of years and molecules coming to life and evolving into everything we now see around us.
November 29, 2014
J Warner Wallace first brought up some key points from this book in one of his podcasts a while back, and it intrigued me, but I couldn't remember his source. This year I went to a class where he did a presentation on the teleological argument for the existence of God and he referenced this again, so I immediately ordered the book. It's interesting in that information is something we tend to recognize when we see it (or hear it), but is still difficult to categorize and quantify. We see a movie on one TV channel and static on another, and we immediately recognize the first is giving us information while the second isn't. But how do you build a structured framework of testable premises for concluding that something is indeed information? Dr. Gitt looks at what exactly constitutes "information" and tries to develop a robust theory of what he calls "Universal Information" (UI). He starts with Shannon's definition of statistical information as a base level and adds 4 more characteristics that he argues are common to all messages conveying meaningful information.
His 5 levels (as he describes them) are:
Statistics - Any sequence of symbols without regard to its origin or whether or not it is meaningful.
Cosyntics (Code + Syntax) - All structural units and properties used in the process of creating information. Codes are the specified set of abstract symbols such as Morse Code, sign language, Braille, binary, or French. I found his section on what goes into selecting a code to communicate information and recognizing unknown codes quite interesting. Syntax is the set of all rules in a language such as grammar in spoken languages.
Semantics - The meaning that has been assigned to words, phrases, sentences, etc. A child saying a new toy is "cool" has very different meaning from a weatherman saying it will be "cool" today. Same words - very different definitions.
Pragmatics (Action) - The action that the sender desires or expects the receiver to perform. The cop yelling at someone to "Stop!" expects the person to quit running from the scene of the crime.
Apobetics (Purpose) - The intended goal that the sender wishes to achieve and all of the thought processes and actions that are required to implement the achievement of that goal. Richard Dawkins writes his "Weasel" program with the express purpose of making evolution through "mutation" of successive generations of text appear plausible and applicable to biological life.
Gitt writes from an academic perspective that may catch some people off-guard with his formulations of Definitions, leading to Empirical Statements, coupled with Necessary Conditions, leading to Scientific Laws. however, once you get used to the notation, it's a good stepwise building block system of getting from premises to conclusions systematically. His definition of Universal Information does lead to the surprising exclusion of some things we would commonly think of as "information", but he addresses those as different "types" of information. A good way of thinking of his "universal" information might be more as a framework for messages specifically.
After developing his Laws of Universal Information, he goes on to apply them to various man-made and natural systems to determine the presence of UI. Chapter 7 dealing with the presence of information in living things, particularly with regard to DNA/RNA protein synthesis, was especially interesting. He builds a strong case over the course of the book that this is an information-rich system that could not arise from a strictly materialistic origin. He goes on to make 8 Deductions from these Laws in Chapter 8, and a series of Direct Conclusions and Indirect Conclusions in Chapter 9 applying his theory to the Bible to determine whether it could be the message from God that it claims to be. Gitt approaches a defense of the Bible from a different perspective than most I've heard, and I think contributes significantly in the field of (secular) information science with his desire to formulate a framework for determining not just the presence of information but the measure of its worth. Chapter 10 (Q&A) addresses a beginning structure for assigning values to what is typically a very subjective area of judging the worth of a particular message (i.e. we value wise sayings precisely because they sum up various problematic concepts in so few words, whereas Shannon's statistical measure of information only looks at the quantity and not the quality of information. Appendix 1 provides a good overview of this and goes further into the idea of information packing density, comparing typical man-made systems to DNA. Appendices 2-4 deal with energy and information in biological systems, a background on scientific laws, and post-Darwin discoveries that negate the feasibility of natural selection working on random mutations in an unguided process.
Although I wouldn't be able to read Dr. Gitt's original German version of the book, the translation to English seemed well done, although a translation of some of the German titles in the bibliography would've been helpful, but that's a minor point. Interestingly, the fact that this was translated and yet still clearly understandable exemplifies one of Dr. Gitt's concepts - that the message meaning is independent of the material medium used to convey it, or the code (language) in which it's expressed. Overall, I enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it.
His 5 levels (as he describes them) are:
Statistics - Any sequence of symbols without regard to its origin or whether or not it is meaningful.
Cosyntics (Code + Syntax) - All structural units and properties used in the process of creating information. Codes are the specified set of abstract symbols such as Morse Code, sign language, Braille, binary, or French. I found his section on what goes into selecting a code to communicate information and recognizing unknown codes quite interesting. Syntax is the set of all rules in a language such as grammar in spoken languages.
Semantics - The meaning that has been assigned to words, phrases, sentences, etc. A child saying a new toy is "cool" has very different meaning from a weatherman saying it will be "cool" today. Same words - very different definitions.
Pragmatics (Action) - The action that the sender desires or expects the receiver to perform. The cop yelling at someone to "Stop!" expects the person to quit running from the scene of the crime.
Apobetics (Purpose) - The intended goal that the sender wishes to achieve and all of the thought processes and actions that are required to implement the achievement of that goal. Richard Dawkins writes his "Weasel" program with the express purpose of making evolution through "mutation" of successive generations of text appear plausible and applicable to biological life.
Gitt writes from an academic perspective that may catch some people off-guard with his formulations of Definitions, leading to Empirical Statements, coupled with Necessary Conditions, leading to Scientific Laws. however, once you get used to the notation, it's a good stepwise building block system of getting from premises to conclusions systematically. His definition of Universal Information does lead to the surprising exclusion of some things we would commonly think of as "information", but he addresses those as different "types" of information. A good way of thinking of his "universal" information might be more as a framework for messages specifically.
After developing his Laws of Universal Information, he goes on to apply them to various man-made and natural systems to determine the presence of UI. Chapter 7 dealing with the presence of information in living things, particularly with regard to DNA/RNA protein synthesis, was especially interesting. He builds a strong case over the course of the book that this is an information-rich system that could not arise from a strictly materialistic origin. He goes on to make 8 Deductions from these Laws in Chapter 8, and a series of Direct Conclusions and Indirect Conclusions in Chapter 9 applying his theory to the Bible to determine whether it could be the message from God that it claims to be. Gitt approaches a defense of the Bible from a different perspective than most I've heard, and I think contributes significantly in the field of (secular) information science with his desire to formulate a framework for determining not just the presence of information but the measure of its worth. Chapter 10 (Q&A) addresses a beginning structure for assigning values to what is typically a very subjective area of judging the worth of a particular message (i.e. we value wise sayings precisely because they sum up various problematic concepts in so few words, whereas Shannon's statistical measure of information only looks at the quantity and not the quality of information. Appendix 1 provides a good overview of this and goes further into the idea of information packing density, comparing typical man-made systems to DNA. Appendices 2-4 deal with energy and information in biological systems, a background on scientific laws, and post-Darwin discoveries that negate the feasibility of natural selection working on random mutations in an unguided process.
Although I wouldn't be able to read Dr. Gitt's original German version of the book, the translation to English seemed well done, although a translation of some of the German titles in the bibliography would've been helpful, but that's a minor point. Interestingly, the fact that this was translated and yet still clearly understandable exemplifies one of Dr. Gitt's concepts - that the message meaning is independent of the material medium used to convey it, or the code (language) in which it's expressed. Overall, I enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it.
June 1, 2024
AN ARGUMENT FROM “INFORMATION” TO THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
The authors wrote in the Preface of this 2011 book, “what is information? … As an information scientist I [Werner Gitt] took up the challenge and have spent more than 30 years researching the concept of information. The realization that information was… rather a distinct nonmaterial entity was a breakthrough for me… After working our a definition of information, I succeeded in formulating Scientific Laws for this nonmaterial entity, information, from which it is possible to draw sound arguments. Some of these scientific results were last published in [a] German book… and in two English articles. In cooperation with the American scientists Dr. Bob Compton… and Dr. Jorge Fernandez… the English translation … was significantly altered and extended.”
They state, “The key feature of chance/random events is that they are non-directional… The antithesis of ‘random’ is ‘directed, guided, designed or purposeful.’ … Events determined according to natural laws are also incapable of producing an intelligent outcome… By definition, intelligence demands that choice, FREE choice, be both available and exercised.” (Pg. 62-63)
They explain, “It has been the explicit goal of this book to not add yet another incomplete definition of information but to carefully determine those attributes of information that clearly describe it and distinguish it from all other entities. Exact observation of Universal Information once it was defined unambiguously, has led to the discovery and formulation of scientific laws that govern its domain. In other words, once the distinguishing attributes were discovered and incorporated into the definition of information, it was then possible to frame scientific laws about this entity.” (Pg. 113)
They point out, “So we ask: can a solely material entity ever create anything material? Certainly a person can create a thought, which is not material. However this leads us to the argument about whether or not a person is a purely physical entity. If a person is purely physical, then he must become less a person should a limb be amputated. That is not what we see, though. The entire person remains, even if all four limbs are gone. The personality, the will, the consciousness remains completely intact. A person is more than the sum of his physical parts. However, when we take something that we know is purely material… we do not find anything nonmaterial emanating from it, be it consciousness, will, desire, or anything else. We find the same to be true with any purely material substance.” (Pg. 125)
They note, “Anyone who wants to make authoritative statements about the origin of this ‘information.’ All evolutionary approaches to answering this fundamental question have, to date, failed. In spite of this, a kind of natural philosophy that sees life only as a material effect stemming from purely material causes has become widespread in the biological sciences.” (Pg. 169)
They explain, “A reasonable challenge here may be as follows: why does it HAVE to be a supernatural being that is eternal and with great (possibly infinite) knowledge, intelligence and power? Logically, we have arrived at the point where we can state that matter is not eternal, but was created… there are two, and only two, alternatives: either there is a ‘god’ or there is God… Whatever ‘god’ created matter from nonmatter would have also been responsible for establishing the laws and forces that govern matter… if we keep going back… we must, at some point, come to an original ‘god’… If a lesser ‘god’ created this universe, his intelligence and power is at least sufficient to have created the entire universe de novo. Therefore, by any standard this ‘god’s’ intelligence and power is at levels that we humans are neither able to imagine nor quantify. To this point we have logically demonstrated that there must be a God that is eternal and has great (immeasurable!) knowledge, intelligence and power.” (Pg. 193)
They acknowledge, “It is clear that when we speak of God as infinitely intelligent and omniscient we must leave the realm of the finite. We are in the region of infinity where we can no longer apply the customary comparison, estimation and evaluation that we know form the finite world. We can say with certainty that no one is above God and for Him there is no question that He must answer with ‘I don’t know.’ … God must know precisely every individual atom… He knows every thought we have ever had and every deed we have ever done or will ever do.” (Pg. 220-221)
This book will be of keen interest to those interested in the “information/Intelligent Design” aspect of the arguments for a Creator.
The authors wrote in the Preface of this 2011 book, “what is information? … As an information scientist I [Werner Gitt] took up the challenge and have spent more than 30 years researching the concept of information. The realization that information was… rather a distinct nonmaterial entity was a breakthrough for me… After working our a definition of information, I succeeded in formulating Scientific Laws for this nonmaterial entity, information, from which it is possible to draw sound arguments. Some of these scientific results were last published in [a] German book… and in two English articles. In cooperation with the American scientists Dr. Bob Compton… and Dr. Jorge Fernandez… the English translation … was significantly altered and extended.”
They state, “The key feature of chance/random events is that they are non-directional… The antithesis of ‘random’ is ‘directed, guided, designed or purposeful.’ … Events determined according to natural laws are also incapable of producing an intelligent outcome… By definition, intelligence demands that choice, FREE choice, be both available and exercised.” (Pg. 62-63)
They explain, “It has been the explicit goal of this book to not add yet another incomplete definition of information but to carefully determine those attributes of information that clearly describe it and distinguish it from all other entities. Exact observation of Universal Information once it was defined unambiguously, has led to the discovery and formulation of scientific laws that govern its domain. In other words, once the distinguishing attributes were discovered and incorporated into the definition of information, it was then possible to frame scientific laws about this entity.” (Pg. 113)
They point out, “So we ask: can a solely material entity ever create anything material? Certainly a person can create a thought, which is not material. However this leads us to the argument about whether or not a person is a purely physical entity. If a person is purely physical, then he must become less a person should a limb be amputated. That is not what we see, though. The entire person remains, even if all four limbs are gone. The personality, the will, the consciousness remains completely intact. A person is more than the sum of his physical parts. However, when we take something that we know is purely material… we do not find anything nonmaterial emanating from it, be it consciousness, will, desire, or anything else. We find the same to be true with any purely material substance.” (Pg. 125)
They note, “Anyone who wants to make authoritative statements about the origin of this ‘information.’ All evolutionary approaches to answering this fundamental question have, to date, failed. In spite of this, a kind of natural philosophy that sees life only as a material effect stemming from purely material causes has become widespread in the biological sciences.” (Pg. 169)
They explain, “A reasonable challenge here may be as follows: why does it HAVE to be a supernatural being that is eternal and with great (possibly infinite) knowledge, intelligence and power? Logically, we have arrived at the point where we can state that matter is not eternal, but was created… there are two, and only two, alternatives: either there is a ‘god’ or there is God… Whatever ‘god’ created matter from nonmatter would have also been responsible for establishing the laws and forces that govern matter… if we keep going back… we must, at some point, come to an original ‘god’… If a lesser ‘god’ created this universe, his intelligence and power is at least sufficient to have created the entire universe de novo. Therefore, by any standard this ‘god’s’ intelligence and power is at levels that we humans are neither able to imagine nor quantify. To this point we have logically demonstrated that there must be a God that is eternal and has great (immeasurable!) knowledge, intelligence and power.” (Pg. 193)
They acknowledge, “It is clear that when we speak of God as infinitely intelligent and omniscient we must leave the realm of the finite. We are in the region of infinity where we can no longer apply the customary comparison, estimation and evaluation that we know form the finite world. We can say with certainty that no one is above God and for Him there is no question that He must answer with ‘I don’t know.’ … God must know precisely every individual atom… He knows every thought we have ever had and every deed we have ever done or will ever do.” (Pg. 220-221)
This book will be of keen interest to those interested in the “information/Intelligent Design” aspect of the arguments for a Creator.
November 4, 2020
Wonderful book!
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