YOU WANT A MIRACLE? I’LL SHOW YOU A MIRACLE
by Phillip Day

Dear All,
We all realise that healthy cells lie at the root of good health, but how many of us realise what an enigma the cell actually is, or how much trouble it’s causing in the hallowed halls of academia these days? To the uninitiated, the cell is the smallest unit of living matter, and you have anywhere from 40-60 trillion of them, and I’ve never actually counted them so don’t ask.

Back when Darwin was formulating his theory of evolution in the mid 1850s, it was believed the cell was quite simple. There were no scientific tools sophisticated enough to look inside the cell, so what showed up under the microscope on the outside was what scientists accepted. The cell was goo. Ernst Haeckel was famous for saying that the cell was nothing more than an undifferentiated piece of protoplasm, or in today’s parlance, a piece of Jello. So that’s how you evolved. To quote one Dr Mark Eastman, “From the goo to the zoo to you.”

After World War 2, the cell began to be unlocked with new advancements in technology unavailable in Darwin’s day. You see, wars aren’t good for much but they are good for new toys. What confronted scientists down the new electron microscope, however, was not Haeckel’s homogenous glob of protoplasm, but a micro-miniaturised city of untold complexity containing molecular machines performing – well, let’s just say better than the Moscow State Circus. Professor of Biochemistry, Michael Behe, writes:

“At the very basis of life where molecules and cells run the show, we’ve discovered machines, literally molecular machines… There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one end of the cell to the other. There are machines which capture the energy from sunlight and turn it into usable energy…. When we look at these machines, we ask ourselves, where do they come from? And the standard answer – Darwinian evolution – is very inadequate in my view.”1

The flagellum, for example, which drives the E. Coli bacterium, is essentially an outboard motor. The design comprises a hook with filament or propeller rotating up to 100,000 rpm, a rotor, stator, drive shaft, U-joint, bushings and engine casing (inner and outer membranes). Its assembly defies any notion of a functional precursor in the evolutionary process. If just one of 40 structural components of the engine is missing, it does not work and the bacterium dies. How could the flagellum have evolved? It would had to have worked from the very first bacterium for natural selection to become possible thereafter. The system is said by Michael Behe to be irreducibly complex. Evolutionary biology has to explain how the bacterial flagellum came into being gradually when no advantage or function could be enjoyed until the last of some forty components was installed.

How was this machine built in the first place? Studies of the bacterial flagellum reveal that the parts have to be assembled in a certain order, as with a car engine. Chemicals cannot do this, there has to be information orchestrating the construction - and there is, on the DNA strand. Molecular machines construct the bacterial flagellum in the correct order for it to work. If one piece is mislaid or put in the wrong place, the engine won’t work, so the system is said to be irreducibly complex. And the machines which make the flagella are in turn made by other machines, which are themselves constructed by further systems which are also irreducibly complex. Such mind-boggling complexity ‘goes all the way down’ and has led to an organised re-think into how life is possible. Darwin seemed to anticipate the problem when he wrote,

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”2

Well, guess what, Charlie….

They’ve found information!
How does life get going in the first place? Even supposing some spark of lightning accidentally triggered chemicals to evolve into an upward cycle of growth billions of years ago (standard chemical evolutionary theory), how could they organise in so precise a fashion? An evolutionist would say, “Because of natural laws”, then decline to relate what those laws are, where they came from or what organised them and why. Take a look at the elements listed in rows on the Periodic Table in any chemistry lab with their sequential atomic numbers – now that’s what I call order.

Then consider the thorny problem of organisational intelligence. If you wish to build a house and Homebase delivers the bricks, that’s all you get – a pile of bricks. Gravity will cause the bricks to fall from the back of the truck but it won’t build you your house. Natural laws work predictably, which is why they’re called laws. Intelligence and design, on the other hand, are by nature anomalous and required to build the dwelling, one brick upon another, into the finished home. Where does the intelligence and design input come from to fashion the ‘simple cell’, which, now we can stare into its wonders with technology unavailable in Darwin’s day, turns out, alas, not to be so simple after all? Behe writes:

“The discovery of the Lilliputian world had begun, overturning settled notions of what living things are. Charles Singer, the historian of science, noted that ‘the infinite complexity of living things thus revealed was as philosophically disturbing as the ordered majesty of the astronomical world which Galileo had unveiled to the previous generation….’ In other words, sometimes the new [ideas] demand that we revise all our theories. In such cases, great unwillingness can arise.”3

The ‘simple’ cell - DNA
Even the simplest cells are now known to be unbelievably complex. Biochemists have tabulated their components – mitochondria, nucleus, rough endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, cytoskeleton, smooth endoplasmic reticulum, proteins, fats, enzymes, minerals, and so on – but not the biophysical aspects the cell, which include the information required to assemble and replicate the cell, not to mention the bizarre property of one cell being able to communicate with others over distance.4 Information sciences author Chuck Missler writes:

“The ‘simple cell’ turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as 3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations), manufacturing hundreds of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error correction techniques and proof-reading devices for quality control.”5

And guess what, the whole thing reproduces itself in a matter of hours. Behe is the author of the groundbreaking book, Darwin’s Black Box. He explains the reason behind his choice of title:

“Black box is a whimsical term for a device that does something, but whose inner workings are mysterious – sometimes because the workings can’t be seen, and sometimes because they just aren’t comprehensible. Computers are a good example of a black box. Most of us use these marvellous machines without the vaguest idea of how they work, processing words or plotting graphs or playing games in contented ignorance of what is going on underneath the outer case. Even if we were to remove the cover, though, few of us could make heads or tails of the jumble of pieces inside. There is no simple, observable connection between the parts of the computer and the things that it does….

Imagine that a computer with a long-lasting battery was transported back in time… to King Arthur’s court. How would people of that era react to a computer in action? Most would be in awe, but with luck someone might want to understand the thing. Someone might notice that letters appeared on the screen as he or she touched the keys. Some combinations of letters – corresponding to computer commands – might make the screen change; after a while, many commands would be figured out. Our medieval Englishman might believe they had unlocked the secrets of the computer. But eventually someone would remove the cover and gaze on the computer’s inner workings. Suddenly the theory of ‘how a computer works’ would be revealed as profoundly naïve. The black box that had been slowly decoded would have exposed another black box.”6

This is what confronted scientists after World War 2 following the invention of the electron microscope. Different levels of multi-layered reality were peeled back to reveal a far deeper, astonishing order. That the cell could have come about by Darwinian evolution has been described as ‘the wild, abandoned guess of the simpleton’, yet the notion is daily maintained. And while this cell is supposedly evolving, all other specific design attributes in the universe must be coming together in like random fashion, all within 5 x 10 to the 17th seconds (the evolutionist’s age of the universe), and, as it so happens, just work. Pull the other one.

The astonishing protein
Haemoglobin, for instance, (the oxygen carrying truck in your blood), is formed from a protein chain 574 amino acids long. Working from an available proteinaceous alphabet of 20 amino acids, what is the chance that haemoglobin occurred by natural selection acting on random variations according to Darwinian evolution? Zero, because natural selection only selects from beneficial precursors, and anything leading up to haemoglobin won’t be haemoglobin until all the bits are in place and the protein folds, locks and launches.

So what are the chances haemoglobin got it right by accident? 1 chance in 10 to the 650th. That’s right. Out of that staggering number of possible permutations of amino acids, only one is haemoglobin with an error-rate of zero, or you’re dead. To give you a model of how big this number is, take the number of atoms scientists say make up the observable universe (10 to the 80th), multiply them by the maximum rate per second at which scientists say physical particles can react (10 to the 45th), then multiply this by the number of seconds estimated for the generally accepted age of the universe (10 to the 17th), which we’ll increase a billion times (American billion) to be on the safe side (10 to the 25th). The product of this calculation is 10 to the 150th. This number is known as Dembski’s Universal Probability Bound and represents the maximum number of particulate reactions that could have occurred since the start of the universe. Compare that with 10 to the 650th for haemoglobin and the only logical conclusion I can come to is that I am 4.33 times more certain that haemoglobin was purposefully designed by an intelligence than I am about the fact of my own existence.

And by the way, that’s just haemoglobin! Now you’ve got to account for 33,000 other proteins forming in like fashion, and 2,000-odd enzymes, and then all the fats, vitamins, minerals, hormones and substrates happening by accident for starters. Hands up who can see what’s going on here?

DNA – digitally defined
“What are the forces that control the twisting and folding of molecules into complex shapes?” biophysicist F Weinhold wants to know. “Don’t look for the answers in your organic chemistry textbook.”7

At the base of the cell’s intelligence is Crick and Watson’s deoxyribonucleic acid template, DNA, a design marvel insurmountable for the evolutionist. Dr Jerry Bergman, professor of science at Northwest College, Archibold, Ohio, describes some informational aspects of DNA which have so boggled scientists:

“At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion ‘chemical letters’. This is enough information to fill 1,000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it! If all the chemical ‘letters’ in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!

This vast amount of information is stored in our bodies' cells in DNA molecules and is coded by four bases – adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (A, T, G and C). The key to the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic codes form the physical foundation of all life.

We've all been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that cells divide through the ‘unzipping’ and subsequent replication of the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of design in this process was not discussed.”8

Dr Missler argues that “an elegant design is more than the parts themselves; it involves information. It requires information input external to the design itself – and the deliberate involvement of a designer. The Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life because they cannot explain the origin of information. The technology that provides language – semantics and syntax, for example – is quite distinct from the technology of the ink and paper it may be written on. The physical features of the circuits in a computer provide no clue about the design of the software that resides within it.”9

Dr Bruce Lipton writes: “Multicellular organisms can survive with far fewer genes than scientists once thought because the same gene products (protein) are used for a variety of functions. This is similar to using the twenty-six letters of the alphabet to construct every word in our language.”10

Mark Ludwig writes: “E. Coli is one of the simplest living organisms. As of today the only thing simpler is a virus and they need the inside of a cell to live. E. Coli has a DNA molecule which is about 4,000,000 nucleotides long. Each of these four million sites is occupied by one of four different nucleotides. So, the probability of creating it at random from the right bases is 1 in 44,000,000 = 1 in 103,000,000. Putting every atom in the universe to work synthesizing molecules wouldn’t even put a dent in this number. Evolutionists suggest with the redundancy of the genetic code we could shrink this number down to 102,300,000. After this, the number may be able to be shrunk more but most scientists believe that the number would also get much bigger as we begin to factor in different types of chemical bonds and isomers of the nucleic acids, all of which must be in just the right order for the molecules to work as they are supposed to.”11

Dr Missler points out that DNA is a three-out-of-four, error-correcting digital machine code, which features start and stop bits (punctuation) to parse the assembly instructions. Where on earth did that lot come from? By way of an expanded model, imagine two pieces of mono-filament fishing line 125 miles long with digital information strung between them on around 3 billion rungs. This complex ladder is then twisted into the classic double-helix configuration and rolled up into a chamber (cell nucleus) the size of a basketball. And then imagine being able to pull out and unwind sections of this master blueprint countless times a day to access the information on it, transcribe a copy of the protein code you want (messenger RNA), and then rewind and stuff this lanky library back in without any tangles or damage. Good luck.

There’s more. DNA could not have evolved from simple to complex for a trailer-load of reasons, not least of which is that natural selection reduces genetic information, it doesn’t build it. There’s also the small matter of the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropy laws, which hold that as time passes, things go from complex to simple as they fall apart, not the other way around. Explaining 1 gigabyte of highly organised code stuffed into a cell nucleus is proving quite a challenge to those who believe we’re nothing more than a cosmic burp. The obvious explanation based on the evidence is completely disturbing to them.

And what is this obvious explanation? It’s that all life on Earth appears to have come from the same software house, since all species’ DNA is coded the same way, using an alphabet of four nucleotides, A, T, G and C. Put another way, the digital instructions to build the amoeba, horse, fly, elephant, kangaroo and duck-billed platypus all came from the same factory and it wasn’t Microsoft. And that goes for 1,000,000 species of insects in all their multiplicity, 20,000 species of fish in all their size and assortment, over 350,000 plant species of incredible variety, 9,000 species of bird from the minute to the magnificent, and 5,400 species of mammal, from rabbits to meerkats to rhinos and everything in between. Oh, and us. What to know what else science has found but is frightened to tell you? Get a copy of my latest book and pour yourself a stiff one.

ORIGINS – THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

Phillip