What’s More Complex Than New York City?

Even though he declared himself an atheist near the end of his life, Linus Pauling, who won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, once remarked: “Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.”1 Just what would cause one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century to acknowledge the amazing complexity of a human cell yet reject the God who made it, is unknown, but Pauling, nonetheless, stood in awe at the dazzling complexity of the human cell.  

Charles Darwin, the modern day father of the theory of evolution, back in the 1800’s, knew nothing about the human cell, except that it was a blob of jelly, perhaps could get a pass on not acknowledging that God created everything since he knew so little about the complexity of man. Fast forward to today, and sadly, many world renowned scientists, who like Pauling realize how infinitely complex human beings are, still maintain that we are here by accidental chance and not divine design.

It’s as if the more science realizes how complex we are the less they want to attribute our existence to God. For you see man is constantly searching for the truth, but as I shared in an earlier devotion (Atheistic Scientists and the Schizophrenic Nature of Truth), at the same time he is suppressing the truth when he finds it. (Romans 1:18-20) shares why this is so: “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 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 people are without excuse.”

Take a cell phone for example. 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.

So where does all this leave us? While modern science has over and over confirmed the scientific accuracy of the Bible, and while advances in science have clearly shown the incredible complexity of human beings we see that man’s pride has caused a massive suppression of the truth. Rather than giving God the praise for His magnificent creation many scientists today are giving themselves the praise for their very limited understanding of the universe. Albert Einstein said it well when he commented: “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”2

Darwin knew nothing about the human cell and he suppressed the truth about God. Today many scientists know much about the intricate workings of the human cell and they still suppress the truth about our divine Creator. To me to deny that our universe is the product of an all-powerful and all-knowing super intellect, and instead ascribe its creation and function to blind random chance, is the height of arrogance.

In closing I ask those atheistic scientists to explain how a single human cell, with no brain at all, can perform hundreds of sophisticated bio-chemical processes in mere nanoseconds yet these same world class scientists with some of the smartest brains on the planet can’t even duplicate what our brainless cells can routinely accomplish. How can this be? The only logical answer is that we, as humans, are fearfully and wonderfully made by a divine Creator we call God. The more we discover about our universe we can either stand in awe at our Creator or suppress, what we all know in our hearts is true about Him – there really is no middle ground.    

---

1  Charlie H. Campbell, Apologetics Quotes (Carlsbad, California: The Always Be Ready Apologetics Ministry, 2020), p. 53.

2 Albert Einstein Quotes About Universe | A-Z Quotes (azquotes.com)