We need to start by defining what is meant by “information”. One way to think about information is as a set of instructions, or a blueprint. For example, the instruction manual that comes with a set of children’s building blocks will typically show step by step pictures of how to build a simple car with the blocks. The instruction manual contains information.
The more complex something is, the more information it contains. That is, a longer set of instructions are needed to build it, or more words are needed to describe it. For example, the blueprints for the Empire State building in New York would consist of more pages than the blueprints for your average house.
Just as blueprints are needed to build a building, blueprints are needed to build a living organism. And just as a building is not put together haphazardly, the unfolding of life from a single fertilized egg cell to an adult is a precisely controlled process. The instructions (information) for how to build life is coded in the DNA. And not only the instructions for how to build life, but how to run it (controlling the active body processes, like blood circulation) and repair it.
At this point a very important idea needs to be introduced – the DNA physically houses or contains the information of life, but it is not the information itself! An analogy here is in order. For example, this presentation contains information – words and ideas that convey meaning to the reader for a purpose. However, the information (this presentation) can be physically housed or represented in many different ways: on a CD, on a diskette, on a computer hard drive, printed on pages of paper, or viewed on a projection screen. In all of these cases the information is the same, so we can see that the information itself and its physical representation are two different things. However, this is not commonly understood, and most people think of the DNA and the information of life as one and the same. They therefore incorrectly think that altering the physical representation (mutating the DNA) can produce new information. The truth is that the information of life came from the mind of God, but is physically housed as codes in the DNA.