The Wonder of DNA

Posted on January 13, 2018 by dkoop

DNA is another reason, but not the last of many of Scientific Reasons to Believe in a Creator.  Hang with me as I draw an analogy here.

Since 1960, there have been concerted efforts by the U.S. government and private scientific groups to point satellite dishes toward the sky in a search for extraterrestrial life. One project scanned 8 million radio channels listening for signals from space.

What are they listening for? Normally, satellite dishes merely receive random static from space. But as the late astronomer Carl Sagan pointed out, all they need to receive, in his words, is just a single message from space, and if they were to get a single message from space, they would know for a fact that there is intelligent life out there.  There was a movie based on this called “Contact.”

Why would they know it for a fact? Because they would instantly know that random static could not accidentally form a single sentence by chance. The odds would be too astronomical. One sentence would conclusively prove that there’s intelligence out there because information requires an intelligence behind it.

If you got a message from space, wouldn’t it convince you that there’s intelligence out there?

This is a depiction of a DNA molecule. DNA is inside every living cell in every living creature, including you. What is DNA?    INFORMATION CODES!!!

DNA is literally a chemical language based on a genetic alphabet, a language every bit as real as the words you’re reading right now. DNA is like computer software that records the precise instructions for piecing together every part of you, from your 600 muscles to your 2 million optic nerve fibers to your 100 billion nerve cells.

The blueprints, programming, a thousand million lines of code for every cell, and every organism is different.  THINK OF THE VASTNESS OF GOD”S INTELLIGENCE!   the information about how to create that in you is contained inside the DNA in every single cell in your body. In fact, if the genetic information in the DNA of a microscopic single-cell organism were translated into English, it would BE MORE THAN  an entire 30-volume set of Encyclopaedia Britannica — all of that inside the DNA in one single-cell organism. 

*If all the DNA information from YOUR BODY was written down in books it would fill the grand canyon not once but 50 times over. (Eastman, The Creator Beyond Time and Space, 1996)

One teaspoon of pure DNA can hold the assembly instruction for every protein in all of the one thousand million species of animals that have ever existed on the planet and have room left over for all the information of every book ever published. Wow…one teaspoon of DNA. How does that kind of complexity get wired into something so compact? How do those assembly instructions exist? How can that get there by random mutation and chance?

To me, if one single sentence received from outer space would convince scientists beyond any doubt that there must be an intelligence behind it, then doesn’t the encyclopedia of information written inside every DNA molecule prove conclusively that there is intelligence behind life?

I think so.  How can you have such a sophisticated software without a programmer to create it?

 “When we see written language, we can infer that it has an intelligent cause.  We can legitimately use the analogical reasoning to conclude that the remarkable information subsequences in DNA also had an intelligent cause.  Therefore, this means life on earth came from a ‘who’ instead of a ‘what.’” Walter Bradley, professor and author of The Mystery of Life’s Origin

King David in Psalm 139 said,

“You, God, created my inmost being. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well.” Psalm 139:13-14

 But some scientists aren’t willing to even accept the possibility that there is an intelligent designer.

There’s a picture of two hand puppets talking to each other. One puppet says, “I don’t know. Sometimes I question whether there really is a hand.” How can people look at the handiwork of nature and not see God behind it? And yet I know there are smart people out there, intelligent well-meaning people, who don’t see God there.  Why?

One answer is that some people rule out the mere possibility of God at the outset.

Remember Dr. George Wald, the Nobel Prize-winning Harvard biochemist quoted in the last post? He’s the guy who said that he’s absolutely convinced that it is impossible for life to have been spontaneously created from non-life. Said it’s impossible.

But listen to rest of his quote. He said, “That leads us only to one other conclusion, that of supernatural creation. But,” he said, “we cannot accept that on philosophical grounds. Therefore, we choose to believe the impossible, that life arose spontaneously by chance.”

Here is a brilliant scientist saying he chooses to believe the impossible. Why? Not based on science, but because he says he has a philosophy that will not accept the possibility of a divine creator, no matter how much evidence is provided. So he takes a blind leap of faith by continuing to believe what he himself acknowledges to be unbelievable.

I hope that you won’t make that mistake.

Don’t close your mind to the clear implications of the evidence that you are fearfully and  wonderfully made, not by some combination of chance plus time over millions of years, but by a loving God who has made you in his very image and who stands there with his arms open wide and who beckons you to Him. Don’t shut your mind to that conclusion which is so well-supported by the evidence.

Rather be like Rex Sandage. Rex Sandage was one the leading observation cosmologists in the world and one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century.[5  He’s the one-time protégée of Edward Hubble. He spent his life quantifying the expanse of the universe and finding quasars and other solar systems, staring up into the most powerful telescopes on planet Earth. That’s what he did his entire life. He stood up in a conference in Dallas, Texas, on science and faith. Everyone pretty much knew he was an atheist. He had been an atheist and had been pretty public in his life. He stood up, and they all knew which side of the deal he would fall on as he spoke. Yet in a talk on the Big Bang, Rex Sandage said at the age of fifty he had come to believe in God, and he had become a Christian. A bang that was big went across the room. Here is what he said afterwards as he talked with a reporter: “It  was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science. It was only through the supernatural that I came to understand the mystery of existence.” The leading observation cosmologist in the world, through his exploration of the order of the universe, stars, galaxies, and all of that was eventually driven to the conclusion that an intelligent designer must have created it all.

I believe that “God created the heavens and the earth.”  Do you?

Darrell

Other Sources:  The Case for a Creator, Lee Strobel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Sandage

 

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Scientific Reasons to Believe in a Creator-Part 2

Posted on January 11, 2018 by dkoop

A little girl once asked her mom, “Where did people come from?” and the mom said, “an all-powerful and loving God made man in his own image. Then He made an upgraded version called woman and they had children.” Then the little girl went in the living room and asked her dad the same question, “Where did people come from?”  He said, “Well, many years ago there were monkeys and humans evolved from those monkeys.” She went back to her mom and said, “I’m confused you said God created …dad said we evolved from monkeys? Who’s right?”  The mom said, “It is very simple I explained my side of the family. He explained his!”

The theory of evolution by Charles Darwin (pictured) proposes that we came from monkeys.  Genesis explains that God is created us.  What should we believe?

Here are more scientific reasons to believe in a creator.

 The Complexity of Living Cells

 Even as intelligent as we are, as creative as we are, we can’t even create a machine as efficient as a one-celled organism.

Microbiologist, Von Noiimen says that every living machine (organism) is..

  • SELF-SUSTANINING – with gas prices so high wouldn’t you love for your vehicle to be able to find its own fuel!? That’s what single celled organisms can do.
  • SELF-REPARING – does your car repair itself? It would be nice.  If we can’t even with all our technology and intelligence build a machine like this.  Why do we think chance can?
  • SELF REPRODUCING, **Does your computer have baby computers? *If mine did instead of Dell I would open a company called Darrell!   

Our sound technician Gary Willingham often looks into getting new speakers and sound equipment.   Let’s say that Gary in here with some new speakers or sound equipment, (that would be nice right Gary?) and we said, where did you get that equipment?  If he said, well the wind blew around in my garage for the past few years and one day I walked in and these speakers were assembled!  We would say, yeah right!  No really where did you get them?  Hermes, Guitar Center? But if he insisted, “no its true!  Someone would call the funny farm and have him committed!  Not me, but someone would!

 Biochemistry professor Michael Behe has a book on this topic called Darwin’s Black Box that has been devastating to evolutionists.

In this book, Behe explains  a concept called irreducible complexity by using this analogy:

Now, notice that all five of the mousetrap’s parts — the platform, the spring, the hammer, the holding bar and the catch — must be present and working together in order to catch any mice.

You can’t start with part of the mousetrap — say, start with the platform and then catch a few mice and then add a spring and catch some more and so on as it grows in complexity and in efficiency. All the parts have to be present and they have to be working together or the whole contraption is totally useless.

Now, in a similar way, Behe has pointed out numerous examples of living biological systems, living biological machines that cannot function unless all of their parts are already present and working together in an interdependent way.

The implication is clear. They could never have evolved gradually, a little bit at a time like Darwin theorized, because an incomplete organism, just like an incomplete mousetrap, could do nothing. It would be totally useless, and so there would be no reason why it would continue to exist and evolve further.

Because of its complexity, it would be nothing short of a miracle if the whole organism suddenly sprung into existence all by chance.

Well, Darwin knew that the discovery of such organisms would destroy his theory. Listen to Darwin’s words: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organism existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, then my theory would absolutely break down.”

And,  it has broken down. Dr. Behe and other biochemists have demonstrated that these complex and interconnected organisms abound on the molecular level of the living cell.

 Here is another so called simple celled organism….

Description:  This is bacteria cell with a flagella.  This flagella can turn 10,000 revolutions per minute – My truck with a 350 redlines at 4000!  Not only that but it can stop on a dime and turn 10,000 revolutions in the OPPOSITE direction! This high tech engine in is about a micron, or 1/100,000th of an inch. A Harvard scientist said “it is the most efficient motor in the world.” We can’t create anything like this!!  It doesn’t run on gas, it runs on acid, and scientists are still trying to figure it out.

There is not an engine in the  universe that can do that, or that we’ve been able to create. Yet at the most basic cellular level, that’s the kind of complexity that we are seeing. He said when it comes to that kind of complexity, when it comes to looking at all of that and unpacking it, how did it evolve to get to that place?   By chance?

 So how do evolutionists explain the complexity of life just happening? How do they respond? Well, Dr. Behe searched the scientific literature dating back several decades, and listen to this — there was not one single scientists who has published any detailed explanation of how that or various other complex biochemical systems could possibly have evolved. Nobody’s even come up with an explanation of how this could happen.

So Dr. Behe’s conclusion is this:

“The result of these cumulative efforts by scientists to investigate the cell, to investigate life at the molecular level is a loud, clear, piercing cry of design. Therefore, there must be an intelligent designer.” Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry, Lehigh University, author of Darwin’s Black Box

Intelligent Design.  It sounds like what the Bible says…

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, …all things were created by him and for him.  Colossians 1:16

In the next post we’ll look at a few more reasons to believe in a creator.

Darrell

Sources:  Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe

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Scientific Evidence for a Creator

Posted on January 10, 2018 by dkoop

I loved science growing up and I still do.  Science and the Bible may seem at odds and cause controversy in our culture, but Science and the Bible are not enemies.

They are actually working in different realms in similar things in the quest for truth. Many people don’t realize that the early scientists who really launched out the scientific revolution were believers. People like Albert Magnus, who is the grandfather of geology, or Newton, who founded calculus, or Robert Bowl, who founded modern chemistry, or Copernicus, the astronomer, or Kepler, or Newton and Galileo, who launched a whole scientific revolution.

“If you really study science it will bring you closer to God”   James Tour, professor at Rice University Department of Chemistry and Nanoscale Science.  He holds seventeen US patents.

 Here are some scientific discoveries that help bring us closer to God as we see his power, intelligence creativity all around us.

  1. The Universe Had a Beginning

The ancient Greeks believed that the universe was eternal.  In science the “steady-state universe” theory proposed the universe has always existed.[i]

But this belief can no longer be supported by scientific evidence. Over the last fifty years, beginning with Albert Einstein, scientists have amassed an impressive amount of data that points to a startling conclusion: our universe had a beginning.

At a specific moment matter, space, energy, and time came into existence in a creative explosion known popularly as the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang there was simply nothing. A strange thought, isn’t it?

Though Mark Vuletic, along with a number of physicists, has argued for the presence of “virtual particles” that “come into existence in otherwise empty space for very brief periods of time,” the prevailing cosmological model maintains the theory that the Big Bang came out of nothing.[ii] At the same time, the predominant philosophical model holds that something cannot come from nothing.

If both theories are accepted as reliable, we are faced with almost unavoidable theistic implications. Who but an eternal, uncreated being who exists outside of time and space could have preceded and initiated the Big Bang?  For those of us who accept Genesis to be true, the Big Bang came as no surprise.

  1. The Origin of Life

An increasing number of scientists are concluding that it’s just plain impossible for non-living chemicals to somehow have linked together and become organized into the first living cells.

Darwin theorized that life began with reactions in what he called a “warm pond of chemicals,” and this was easier to believe in Darwin’s day because back then there didn’t appear to be much of a big leap between non-living chemicals and the most basic one-cell organisms.

After all, when Darwin looked through a primitive microscope that only magnified 200 or 300 times, what he saw when he looked at a single-cell organism looked pretty uncomplicated, a glob of protoplasm with a dot in the middle. That’s why he called them simple one-cell organisms.

But today, thanks to advanced technology, we know that even the most basic one-cell organism is incredibly complex. In fact, a cell is more complicated than anything the greatest scientists and the smartest supercomputers can duplicate.

*Harold Franklin in the Way of the Cells says, “Single-cell organisms are high tech factories on a microscopic level, complete with artificial languages and decoding systems, with central memory banks that store and retrieve impressive amounts of information, with precision control systems that regulate the automatic assembly of components, with proofreading and quality control mechanisms that safeguard against errors, with assembly systems that use principles of prefabrication and modular construction, and a complete replication system that allows the organism to duplicate itself at astonishing speeds.”

All this is in ONE cell, a high tech factory. When you think about the billions of cells or FACTORIES working together in a body all interconnected doing digestion, reproduction, circulation, nervous, our bodies are more complex than the world’s largest city!  In other words there is more going on in your body RIGHT NOW than in all the factories in the world!

And all this happens by blind chance?  After all, blind chance is an incredibly inefficient way to accomplish anything complex.

Lee Strobel illustrates it like this:  “I’ll take this Scrabble Game and start with 26 Scrabble tiles. Each tile has one letter of the alphabet on it. Just to demonstrate how random process, blind chance, is so terribly inefficient, if we were to mix up these tiles, how long do you think it would take us blindly to reach in and to spell the word “evolution?” Nine letters in that word.

First you go until you get an “e,” and then you put it back. The next one has to be a “v,” and you put it back. You mix it up, and the next one has to be an “o.” You have to spell it out that way. Picking one tile a minute, how long do you think it would take?

To spell just the nine-letter word “evolution” at one tile a minute by blind chance would take you 1,600,000 years.  And if you wanted to, by blind chance, pick out the word “construction,” a twelve-letter word, at one tile a minute, it would take you a thousand million years, on the average, to do that. That is how terribly inefficient random process and blind chance is in accomplishing anything complex.

In a similar way, how long do you think it would take to randomly link together the building blocks of life?

Let’s go back to some basics of biology and remember that living cells are built with protein molecules, and protein molecules are built with hundreds of amino acid links. In all, there are 20 different kinds of amino acids, some of which are lethal.

*PICTURE OF PROTEIN MOLECULE –

 So if we ignored the question of where the amino acids came from in the first place and we eliminated the deadly ones and we gave every possible opportunity for these amino acids to link up, how long do you think it would take for the hundreds of amino acids necessary to form one protein molecule to link together by random process?

Do you think it would take a long time? It would. In fact, the number is so astronomical that if I told you the number, we wouldn’t be able to grasp how big it is, so I have to use an analogy to let you know how long of a time it would take to form one protein molecule on the average by random process.

You start with an ant, and this ant is a very slow ant. It takes this ant 15 billion years to walk one inch. This is not a fast ant. It’s not a very strong ant, either, because this ant can only carry one atom at a time. You know how small an atom is. An atom is so small, it takes a million atoms lined up to equal the width of a human hair.

Now, here’s the question. Even going one inch in 15 billion years, carrying one atom at a time, how many atoms could that ant carry and how far could he carry them in the amount of time it would take, on the average, for one protein molecule to form by random process?

Well, even at that incredibly slow speed, that ant would be able to carry 600,000 trillion-trillion-trillion-trillion universes the size of our universe and carry them 30 billion light years in the amount of time, on the average, it would take for one protein molecule to form by random process.

That’s a really long time. And you know what? It doesn’t give us life. It just gives us one single, solitary, lonely non-living bachelor protein molecule, and it takes a 239 protein molecules of various kinds to come together again in the correct type, in the correct order to form a basic living cell.

That’s trillions of times longer than the longest estimate of the age of the Earth.”

It’s no wonder that Dr. George Wald, the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University, concluded that…

“It’s not just unlikely that life could emerge by chance and it’s not just implausible and it’s not just improbable. It is outright impossible.” Dr. George Wald, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University.

Or as the British expert on the origin of the universe, Sir Frederick Hoyle, put it, “Believing life could result from chance is like believing a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and the winds could accidentally assemble a fully-functioning Boeing 747 with stewardesses and all.”

Let’s be rational here, Evolution fails to explain the origin of life.  But the flip side of that is that the very evidence of life in all of its intricacy and all of its molecular complexity points powerfully in the direction of God as being creator.

In the next post, we will look at a few more reasons from science to believe that “God created the heaven’s and the earth.”

Darrell

  1. [i] The website ofPBS, “Steady-State Universe,”http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/universes/html/univ_steady.html.

[ii] The Secular Web, “Creation Ex Nihilo—Without God,” last modified 2011,http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mark_vuletic/vacuum.html

Other Sources:  The Case for a Creator,  Lee Strobel, Zondervan, 2004

www.ExploreGod.com

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In the Beginning…God

Posted on January 10, 2018 by dkoop

Did you see the latest Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi?  As I watched this movie with my family, it hit me later that if a viewer didn’t know the beginning of the Star Wars story the movie might be enjoyable but may not make much sense to them.  Someone who hadn’t seen the original trilogy might wonder things like:

“What is a Jedi?”

“What is the force?”  “Is that what happens when you eat too much 3 bean chili?”

“Who is Luke Skywalker? And why is he important?”

You may not even care about this movie series and that’s ok, the only reason I mention this is to explain that the beginning of a story is very important; perhaps the most important part of the story because it explains everything that happens in the rest of the story.

The bible is best described as a story—a true story—the greatest true story ever told—but like all stories we can’t fully understand this all-important story unless we start at the beginning. And, that’s what we’re doing as a church. For the next 5 year we are studying the bible by looking at its main stories and characters. This week we start at the beginning in Genesis…the most important part…and from now through next five years we’ll do a survey of the entire Bible.

So in your bible let’s look at page 1—I always wanted to say that!

Genesis 1:1 – In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

The simple statement that God created the heavens and the earth is one of the most challenging concepts confronting the modern mind.

The first two chapters of the Bible describe the creation of the universe—and introduce the creature—man…but the focus is on the creator. When the curtain first rises in the first verse of Genesis, only God is there.  “God” is mentioned here 32 times in Genesis chapter 1!

If you were to drive out into the country tonight away from the lights of the city and look up you would see countless stars! In 1996, astronomers basically did that with the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. They focused its lens on a small and utterly black patch of space right next to the Big Dipper. They left the shutter open for ten days. This one exposure revealed 3,000 galaxies out beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. Each of these 3,000 new galaxies contained hundreds of billions of starts, planets, moons, comets, and asteroids. In 2004 scientists did it again. This time they focused on a patch of darkness next to the constellation Orion. They left the lens open eleven days this time and discovered ten thousand more galaxies. I could go on because it turns out the Hubble Telescope has revealed that there are over one hundred billion galaxies out there in the universe! But Genesis 1:1 and now science affirms that it wasn’t always this way! “The universe and time itself had a beginning.”[i]  Science refers to the beginning as “The Big Bang”  Genesis refers to the beginning as “creation.”  Science is not sure of it’s cause, but Genesis is clear to name the cause of universe’s existence:  In the beginning there was God!

God did not need to create the universe; he chose to create it. Why? God is love, and love is best expressed toward something or someone else—so God created the world and people as an expression of his love. We should avoid reducing God’s creation to merely scientific terms. Remember that God created the universe because he loves us.

The creation story teaches us much about God and ourselves. First, we learn about God:

  1. He is creative.
  2. As the Creator, he is distinct from his creation.
  3. He is eternal, all powerful and in control of the world.

We also learn about ourselves:

  1. Since God chose to create us, we are valuable in his eyes.
  2. We are made in His image and his most important creation.

In our next series of posts we will look topics of science including cosmology, astronomy, physics, microbiology and evidence for an intelligent designer (God) but it is important to note that the biblical view of creation is not in conflict with science; rather, it is in conflict with any worldview that starts without a creator.

The most important aspect of the continuing discussion is not the process of creation, but the origin of creation. The world is not a product of blind chance and probability; God created it. 

Genesis not only tells us that the world was created by God; more important, it tells us who this God is. It reveals God’s personality, his character, and his plan for his creation. It also reveals God’s deepest desire: to relate to and fellowship with the people he created.

God took the ultimate step toward fellowship with us through his historic visit to this planet in the person of his Son Jesus Christ. We can know in a very personal way this God who created the universe.

The heavens and the earth are here. We are here. God created all that we see and experience. The book of Genesis begins, “God created the heavens and the earth.”

I hope you will continue to join us in our story of the beginning, God and creation.

Darrell

[i] Stephen Hawking, The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University Press, 1996
Stephen Hawking is the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. Now the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge, his other books for the general reader include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe and The Universe in a Nutshell.

 

 

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