“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” G. K. Chesterton’s quip sends a comical light on those non-believers who, seemingly, are trying to prove their own non-existence. John C. Lennox, who is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, underscores Chesterton’s point, though from a different angle, in the very title of his book, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Univ. of Oxford Press, 2007). If anything, he contends, science sheds light on God’s existence. If science is burying God, it is burying life along with it. Professor Lennox’s chapter, “The Origin of Life” is making it exceedingly difficult for an informed atheist to believe that life came about by chance, independent of any supreme architect.
Charles Darwin knew virtually nothing about the living cell, let alone its extraordinary complexity. The more science informs us about the structure of life, even in its most elementary form, the more Darwin and other atheistic scientists appear to be gross amateurs, spinning grand theories out of a web of vast ignorance.
Geneticist Michael Denton informs us that the gap between the non-living and the living “represents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological systems, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive.” The tiniest of bacterial cells weighs less than a trillionth of a gram. Nonetheless, it contains thousands of intricately designed pieces of molecular organizations, made up of some 100 thousand million (100,000,000,000) atoms. This is a structure far more complicated than any machine ever made by human hands and is without parallel in the world of the non-living.
How was this gap between the non-living and the living bridged? Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist who researches complex systems and ponders the origin of life on Earth. “Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on earth some 3.45 billion years ago,” he writes, is a fool or a knave.”
Dr. Denton, who has a Ph. D. in biochemistry, asserts that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems, from the humblest bacterium to the largest mammal. (Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 1985). As a consequence, according to Denton, there is no such thing as a primitive cell that is ancestral to any other cell system. He argues, then, that there is not the lightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence from one form of life to another. Nobel Prize laureate Jacques Monod agrees with Denton’s findings. “The simplest living system, the bacterial cell,” he writes, “in its overall chemical plan is the same as that of all other living beings. It employs the same genetic code and the same mechanism of translation as do, for example, human cells.”
A single living cell contains something in the order of 100 million proteins of 20,000 different types. Despite this phantasmagorical degree of complexity and diversity, a few hundred of the cells could fit on the dot of this letter “i”. And there is no scientific evidence that the living cell “evolved”. And yet, it is the prototype, the common factor of all the cells contained in the stupendously broad spectrum of the plant and animal kingdoms. How did self-replicating organisms come into being in the first place? On this question, science draws a blank, though scientists themselves are prodigal with theories. As another Nobel laureate, Sir Francis Crick, attests, “The origin of life seems to be a miracle, so many are the conditions whichwould have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
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As scientists push back the curtain of nature, revealing the living cell in its unfathomable complexity, its staggering intricacy, and its astonishing microminiaturization, the more it appears that an intelligent designer, and not chance, could have made this possible. To acknowledge the fundamental connection between the living cell and the Hand of God is to be pro-life on a most radical level. And this stance is simultaneously philosophical, theological, ecological, and humanistic. Furthermore, it does not contradict science, but builds on it.
God said, “Let there be Light,” and His creation began. Man said “Let there be light,” and his understanding began. But the gap between man’s understanding and the nature of God’s Light is immeasurable and unbridgeable. Yet this unconquerable gap should not be a source of discouragement. Rather, it should fill our minds and hearts with wonder and admiration.
Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, CT, and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad and Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart are available through Amazon.com.
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