The World Around Us

by Don Welty

Living here in the Wrangell’s—with its awe inspiring beauty—one cannot help but ponder over what, when, and how all of it came about. Did the mountains, forest, rivers and “all creatures great and small” somehow spring into existence, or was there an intelligent designer at work?

Although science is responsible for many great advances in technology and medicine, it is of little help here. Since all these events occurred in the unobservable past we must go beyond repeatable, observable science, and venture into the realm of theory and faith.

Fortunately for us, the Creator makes a bold proclamation about the creation and what our response to it should be. “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise they became fools.” (Romans 1:20-23)

If this is indeed true, then God has provided enough evidence in the world around us to know both who he is, and what he is like. I hope you will join me in this and future issues as we explore this subject, and look at some of that evidence that points unequivocally to the creator.

When Darwin came out with his theory of evolution people thought that life—especially single cell bacterium—were much less complex than we now know them to be. This led to the idea that life could spontaneously arise in the right environment, at the right time and place, given enough time.

Also, since we can observe and verify natural selection, the idea was extrapolated to macroevolution, leading to the theory we have all been exposed to, much of the time represented as fact. However, as scientists explore chemical and molecular biology, they are gaining new insight into the complexity of life.

Now science has learned much more about what is happening in the DNA sequence as natural selection occurs. Instead of increasing information and complexity we find that natural selection and mutations only lose information. Instead of becoming more complex, as would be necessary for a reptile to become a bird, for example, they become less complex.

In this first article we will look at a description of one of these “early simple life forms” as Darwin believed, the cell. The following is from molecular biologist Michael Denton’s excellent book, Evolution: Theory in Crisis. In future articles I hope to look at more complex structures.

“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify the cell a thousand million times. What we would see then would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled DNA molecules. A huge array of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer region of the cell.

“We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D special conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine—that is one single functional protein molecule—would be completely beyond our capacity at present. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activity of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.

What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an automated factory, carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.” 1

How can a sensible person look at this staggering complexity and consider any other origin than intelligent design? No such person would look at even something as simple as a mousetrap and not be sure that someone made it. How much more the amazing complexity of living things. I hope you will contemplate such things the next time you get out enjoying the great outdoors.

A wealth of additional information is available on the web by various experts at both answersingenesis.org and ICR.org. Excellent books by non-Christian scientists are Evolution: Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton and Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe.

1 Dr. Michael Denton “Evolution: Theory in Crisis”(Adler & Adler, 1985) p. 328�.