In an earlier devotion, What’s More Complex Than New York City, I shared the following: “It takes a lot of faith to believe that something as complicated as a cell phone, which took years of ingenuity and literally thousands of engineers and scientists to create, needed a designer, and yet a human being, consisting of 30 trillion cells, didn’t need a designer, but just came into existence by chance and accident. More complex things like you and me should take a more skillful designer than less complex things such as a cell phone, yet for the evolutionary scientist, just the opposite is true – the more complex a thing, like a human being, the less need for a designer under their worldview.”
Sadly, I believe, that many people accept evolution today, not because of the science and the evidence, but because of two main reasons. First, because of peer pressure and second, because to many people, they are told it’s the only game in town. Let me explain.
When I went to college (Princeton University) in the 1970’s I believed in evolution mainly because most of my peers believed in it. I wanted to fit in and rather than examine the evidence I chose to follow the crowd. The sad part was that if pressed to defend my position – I had no defense – I just accepted it as a fact, since most of my classmates believed in it. I have since learned how dangerous this can be. You see evolution is more than a theory – it’s a worldview! I don’t know about you but if I am going to put my faith in something as important as a worldview I would want to know that it is true. Unfortunately, this was my worldview back in the 1970’s and I had no idea whether it was true or not – I just followed the crowd.
In addition, many scientists don’t really follow the evidence on how human beings came into existence since they automatically exclude the possibility of the supernatural, and therefore are left with evolution being the only game in town.
Enter the cell. It goes without saying that as complex as a cell phone is, it is dwarfed by the complexity of a single living cell. Just listen to these famous scientists describe the single cell:1
“Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. . .” – Michael Denton, developmental biologist and genetics researcher.
“We have always underestimated cells. . . . The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines. . . . Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world, these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts.” – Bruce Alberts, biochemist and former president of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The complexity of the simplest imaginable living organism is mind-boggling. You need to have the cell wall, the energy system, a system of self-repair, a reproduction system, and means for taking in “food” and expelling “waste,” a means for interpreting the complex genetic code and replicating it, etc., etc. The combined telecommunication systems of the world are far less complex, and yet no one believes they arose by chance.” – Stephen Grocott, chemist.
“Every living cell, even the simplest bacterium, teems with molecular contraptions that would be the envy of any nanotechnologist. As they incessantly shake or spin or crawl around the cell, these machines cut, paste and copy genetic molecules, shuttle nutrients around or turn them into energy, build and repair cellular membranes, relay mechanical, chemical or electrical messages—the list goes on and on, and new discoveries add to it all the time.” – Alonso Ricardo, biochemist, and Jack W. Szostak, geneticist.
If some of our greatest scientists of all time, men like Newton, Boyle, Faraday, and Kepler believed that an all-powerful God created life, before they knew anything about a human cell, just imagine how blown away they would have been if they knew about the complexity we now know exists in a single living cell. These great scientists understood, before they even knew about cellular biology, that we are indeed, as the psalmist says: “fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139:14).
My friends if a cell phone requires a designer, simple logic would tell us that if something is a billion times more complex that a cell phone, like the simple single living cell, then it would require a designer too. In the final analysis belief in a God, who created the universe, I will admit requires faith, but belief that our universe came into existence by chance and accident, I believe, requires much more faith than I can muster. And if a single living cell is a billion times more complex than a cell phone, just imagine how infinitely more complex our universe is than that same cell phone. Chance, accident or divine design? I ask you to ponder your choices!
1 All of these quotes are from the following website: Quotes on Cell Complexity and the Origin of Life (theoutlet.us)
This is so interesting also, Curt. I print these posts so I can read them over and over…hoping to retain some of the knowledge that’s in them.
Thanks!….Elaine