The Bible says God created Adam from the dust; David said to God “You knit me together in my mother’s womb”; as I see it now after three decades of research, we are all created from the dust with God’s super-intelligent two-step process: from atoms in the soil to our foods and from the same atoms in our foods to our cell-parts, cells, and us.
The three 2016 Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry received that award for “knitting together” over a 33 year period, a few very simplistic molecular machines. These tiny units are almost infinitely more simplistic than any of the molecular machines constructed for our new cells every day.
So it seems that Super-Intelligence (far beyond that of mankind) is essential for constructing cell-parts, cells, and us.
In discussing this with some other scientists, I often hear “Oh, there are mechanisms in our body that do this work”. This just opens a larger point regarding how these mechanisms are constructed because the Nobel Winners are ‘mechanisms building cell-parts’ and they don’t have anywhere near enough intelligence for the work.
This brings us back to our Creator as described in the Bible, the one who “knit us together” in our mother’s womb.
Our group is calling the study of assembly of living cells and entities, “the Godly life-science of atomic biology”.
Are we on the right track?
King David (and we) are knit together in the womb but nobody will say that David was born of anything other than the natural processes common to all placental animals. Indeed, if God doing the assembly directly there would be no birth defects.
Here I think John Walton’s layer cake image is very illustrative (It is in his Lost World Series , Genesis 2 I think) The lower layer is natural processes and the upper is God’s work. Both are at work at the same time, all the time except for infrequent miracles .
As to the improbability argument in your note, consider this: If you play the lottery with a 1 in a million probability of winning once a second for a year, how many times should you expect to win placing 1 bet per lottery? Since there are approximately 30 million seconds in a year, you should win approximately 30 times.
One of the first startling numbers that we put together about 15 years ago came by combining info from three other scientists regarding our replacement red blood cells: Pallister (and others) say our rbc’s are replaced about every 120 days and for a 70 kg male this works out to about 2.3 million new rbc’s per second 24/7; Tortora says there are about 280 million molecules of haemoglobin in every rbc; and Perutz says there are about 10,000 right elemental atoms from our digestive system via our blood system that are put into every molecule of haemoglobin. The math says this amounts to about 6400 quadrillion right atoms per second that have to be found, sorted, selected and precisely assembled into new rbc’s. (Adjust the number according to your weight).
This is an enormous amount of super-intelligent physical work with atoms as each is selected from our blood system that picked them up from our digestive system.
Every cell-part has to be properly constructed with the right numbers of the right atoms. This amounts to an enormous number of decisions, choices and physical works with atoms. It is not unguided chemical reactions, electromagnetism or any other natural process.
I used to give “Mother Nature” the credit for causing life but when I finally “saw the light” and learned a little about what has to happen at a cell construction site, it was easy and logical to replace Mother Nature with God our super-intelligent Creator. If you are interested there is a book with the details.
What are you proposing exactly? So take for example, the formation of cell membranes (note this is the first step):
Perhaps you are referring to something else but are you saying that no natural processes can ever account for how cells are formed and specified and that God is supernaturally making all cells?
Genesis 1 continually " God said let " …
By his word or command …
" God said let the waters bring forth "
" God said let the earth …"
It is sometimes difficult for us to understand the concept of commanding the physical universe to react …
If one thinks of it like the simulation hypothesis suggests …
(A programmer writing code) it can be easier to percieve .
The expanse the universe exists within
being the computer the game is designed on .
In other words , when God commands , the code is written into existence
To simplify this concept, let’s consider building a cell and building a bird house. For each, the builder has to know what the finished product he or she wants, will look like? First decisions and choices, for the cell; will it be an eye cell, a muscle cell, a kidney cell, a sperm cell, or what? For the bird house how big will it be, what kind of base, what kind of mounting, what kind of walls, how big a hole, what kind of perch, what kind of roof, what kind of fasteners, what paint, what tools, what skills? Next decisions and choices, where will the builder get the materials? For the bird house: from a lumber yard, or a hardware store, or both? For the cell there is just one source of building blocks (atoms) and that is the essential pre-built adjacent blood vessel that has picked the atoms up from the digestive system which got the atoms from what was eaten or breathed in, and the blood vessel source is also the delivery system for getting the building blocks to the construction site. For the bird house: does the builder phone for delivery, or drive his own vehicle, or go by taxi to get the materials? Now let’s watch the construction: for the bird house the builder will probably start by cutting the base to the size he wants, then cut the wall pieces, drill two holes in one side - one for entrance and one for perch, then fasten the walls to each other and to the base, then put on the roof, and then the mounting piece, and then the paint. (See all the essential decisions, choices and physical works?) For the cell, an almost infinitely more complex challenge… scientists often compare a cell to a large walled city. When the construction site is chosen and the type of cell is decided, the builder now has to make a small regulated opening in the right place in the wall of the blood vessel so that he right number of the right atoms for each cell-part can be accessed but the blood under pressure cannot spurt out. A membrane enclosure for the cell has to be built of the right numbers of the right atoms (More decisions, choices, and physical works). Now the builder has to import the right selected and counted atoms to build each cell-part. We know that the three 2016 Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry did not have anywhere enough intelligence to build even the simplest molecular machine for a cell, so this cell builder has to be far more intelligent, dexterous, and fast. Those that say the body’s mechanisms do this work…so how would those millions of super-intelligent mechanisms be built?
Does this all make logical sense?
I have no problem seeing God’s handiwork in everything that makes us ALIVE and HUMAN.
It’s quite reasonable. But as a Unitarian Universalist, the one thing I have to step aside for is the idea that Science can prove this. I don’t think it can, and I don’t think it matters if it can or cannot.
George
Thanks for your comment George. It seems that what we can prove is that even with mankind’s vast accumulation of scientific knowledge and sophisticated equipment, the best intelligence we have is nowhere near enough to build cell-parts, cells, and us. Super-intelligence (far beyond that of mankind) is essential to cause life. There is another requirement for super-intelligence to cause life and that is the necessity for the “breath-of-life” to be added to the otherwise inanimate atoms.
One of our “seven principles for life” is that “Dead dogs don’t bark” which means that in spite of the fact that all the right atoms, molecules, cell-parts and cells are precisely assembled for its eyes, ears, nose, heart, lungs, etc., without that special breath-of-life, the dog won’t move one millimeter.
Thomas, thank you for your input.
To answer your question I do not think that God micro-manages life at any level, but that certainly does not mean that God is not an active manager of God’s universe.
The universe is God’s universe and the only reason that we humans can understand it is because we are created in God’s Image.
Genesis 1:31 (NIV2011)
31 God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.
God does not have to micromanage that which God created to be “very good.” Indeed of God micromanaged the universe there would be nothing for us to do, but God made us on God’s Image to help manage the Creation and is even willing to put up with our failures.
God also created Natural Selection to edit and guide evolution so that God’s Cr4eation would show forth God Power, Love and Wisdom.
there is also a comparable degree of parallel processing going on. No one 'processor ’ does it all
Okay, but the pieces of a bird house are not subject to hydrophobic interactions, electrostatics, diffusion, etc. Also a cell is not always just starting from a ‘pile of atoms’ but rather many structures already exist in completed forms inside the body.
No. It seems your argument is that ‘building a cell is complex and the natural mechanisms behind are complicated and parts are not well understood, therefore God.’
You’ve inspired me to rewatch this video though:
Hi If you could use paragraphs I bet more people would read your posts. Thanks
Love the video!
Re: the video, there is a lot of intelligent work and intelligent technology involved there, would you agree? Just the coding for the computers and software to make a video like this is fairly awesome.
Do you believe that video could be made by natural selection? How long would that take using no intelligence as with evolution?
I come back to the building of all the circuitry etc. shown which in living entities has to be constructed an atom at a time. As mentioned earlier, the three 2016 Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry took 33 years to build a few tiny molecular machines which are each almost infinitely more simplistic than the simplest molecular machine built into each of our new cells every day.
This shows that as builders of molecular machines, mankind does not have anywhere near enough intelligence to build even the simplest one for our cells.
The coding for every DNA strand in the roughly 100 trillion cells built to make our body, takes intelligence. We call it super-intelligence because it has to be far superior to that of mankind.
Thanks Larry. Will do.
We need constructive criticism from allies.
Is a person the one making the lipid bilayer self assemble? Nope. The highlight of the video is in fact that natural processes like the hydrophobic interaction and electrostatics and considering the most likely states that a collection of particles will take (like including entropy considerations and statistical distributions). I highlight in my biophysical statistics class not only how a lipid bilayer forms but also why and how it produces a spherical cell structure spontaneously instead of many other structures (side note: some cells are more ellipsoidal or cylindrical but the same physics can describe how they form).
I’ve also actually made hundreds of artificial lipid bilayers. They self assemble in a matter of seconds (if that) as long as you simply have the right molecules of which living things have in abundance. Here is another video of the same thing of the self assembly of a cell membrane:
Again, the point is not that the video was made but what the video is demonstrating: that lipid bilayers spontaneously self assemble (and the second one shows the spontaneous formation of a spherical lipid bilayer membrane).
Considering how mankind didn’t even know cells existed until the 1600s or their structure/functions until the past century, one could easily predict that it’s only a matter of time until you are proven wrong. Here for example is one fairly recent paper on building cell prototypes:
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9352
Again it seems your main point is just “this is pretty complex, and we don’t quite understand it or can replicate it - therefore we never will.” I think that is a dangerous position to be in as we understand many many physical processes in the cell and regarding its construction. That by itself already falsifies your idea that no natural processes are at work because we can already describe many interactions at the level you claim cannot be explained.
Yeah, the argument basically boils down to personal incredulity if you ask me.
Can you give us a simple yes or no as to whether you believe these videos can be made with no intelligent help?
They are complex but not as complex as a cell.
Here is another basic example: for our various DNA strands in different cells, the bases that have to be individually constructed and assembled into an operating code for each cell are Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine, and Thymine, as you probably know.
They are very similar in construction; Adenine - C5H5N5, Guanine - C5H5N5O1, Cytosine - C4H5N3O1, Thymine - C5H6N2O2.
Would you say the builder has to be very accurate and careful with the assembly work?
Where does the assembler get the atoms? Does it not have to be from a pre-built adjacent blood vessel?
Do the right atoms have to be found and selected?
Do they have to be carefully counted and fastened?
Do you think this work can be done with no intelligence or care?
Then look into the arranging of the bases into a highly complex operating code. When Bill Gates discussed this, he stated, “Human DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”
Scientist I.L.Cohen said, “At that moment , when the RNA/DNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt.”
If I might interject here, of course a video requires an intelligent agent. But what’s your point? A video is not alive. It doesn’t die. It doesn’t reproduce.
Depends on how you define complex. When you consider all that goes into making and seeing a video it is probably much more complex than a cell.
Hi Bill:
The point about making the video is that there is a huge amount of intelligent work in making the equipment to help make the video as well as the intelligence to make the video, but building a cell takes far more intelligence than mankind has even including our sophisticated equipment.
That is what the three 2016 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry proved (probably unintentionally).