We’re living in God’s world, whether we admit it or not.
Imagine your best friend calling to say that he had two tickets. Before he could continue, your imagination runs wild: front row seats for an NBA game, backstage at a rock concert, the latest movie, or plane tickets? As you brace yourself for a great surprise, he blurts out that he has two tickets to a Russian Nobel laureate in Physics who will be speaking at the local university. You can feel the air go out of all four tires, but you decide to tag along, as your friend will not take no for an answer.
For an hour, you listen to the great Russian professor. He talks endlessly and shows numerous slides. At the end of his talk, there is thoughtful applause and then you plan your escape. As you and your friend head home, you realize that you understood nothing the man said. Neither of you can pronounce his name and certainly there was nothing in his intense discussion of subatomic particles that you understood. Yet, you would never suggest that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You would admit that your knowledge is lacking and that the man is a certified genius.
One of the many reasons people don’t believe in God is because things don’t make sense. There was some Harvard professor who used to show slides of badly disfigured babies after birth, and then ask how there could be a God in a world where such things come into existence. People look at the righteous suffering or the evil becoming fabulously wealthy and conclude that there can be no God in the world. This approach to life is much like children with their parents: if you give me everything I want, I love you. But if you deny me a new toy or an extra hour watching TV, then I don’t know who you are.
While a chaotic world can lead to a lack of religious belief, nothing has contributed to the downward spiral of religion in the West more than science. Whether it be Darwinian evolution or modern theories of the creation of living material out of mere chemicals, what is presented is supposed to simply make any belief in God superfluous or outright ridiculous. Why believe in myths, when we can explain everything? Well, almost everything.
Below are some scientific facts that are not subject to debate. Every detail listed below is from at least one recognized scientific source. So, let’s see how a God-free world improved from a sack of chemicals to what we have today:
- Estimated average number of cells in the human body: 37.2 trillion
- Length of DNA in a person. Not all cells have DNA; for example, red blood cells do not so as to carry as much oxygen as possible. Let's assume 10 trillion cells have DNA, and the accepted length of DNA is 2 meters per cell. That would come to, if all DNA was placed end-to-end, well over 20,000 round-trips to the moon and back for the DNA in your body
- Total length of blood vessels (veins and arteries) in your body: 60,000 miles
- Alveoli, the 700 million little air sacs in the lungs that allow for oxygen to get into the blood, if spread out, would cover a surface area of 750 square feet
- Number of genes in the DNA: 20,000 spread over 46 chromosomes
- Fastest enzyme (an enzyme is a protein that can perform one or more chemical reactions): carbonic anhydrase at 1 million reactions per second
- Estimated number of enzymatic reactions per second in the body: 1027—more than the number of stars in the universe
- Number of heart beats from birth to 80 years old: over 3 billion
If you want the references for the data above, you can find them in my introductory book on science at Amazon. The length of blood vessels in our bodies, for example, I first heard from a Yale professor giving a TedTalk. He didn’t know what to do with the information. “Is it God? Is it magic?” For comparison, a modern Boeing 787 Dreamliner has 62 miles of wiring, and nobody would suggest that a plane just happened.
When looking at the information above, a person has to decide if these scientifically-corroborated data are the product of random events beginning with the appearance of chemicals or are the outcome of the will of God. For this article, we’ll skip bacteria from Mars and any other side-theories. Is there a God and what we witness in the performance of our bodies is a reflection of Him or did everything happen in an undirected manner from some starting point (“Big Bang”) to the present? Scientists would say that stories from ancient religious texts are myths and fables, while they hold the keys to the truth. I would respectfully argue that the reality is precisely the opposite.
The hallmark of scientific research is careful experimentation. A friend quoted a colleague who said that he would not trust his mother to run a control experiment, as the only way to know if a certain reaction occurs as proposed is to run a proper control that would validate the suggested hypothesis. If science wants to start with atoms of all of the elements, fine, give them the atoms. But then science must show how those atoms became larger, more complex compounds. The next trick would be to go from nonlinving chemicals to a fully functional living entity, or cell. I saw a book written by a couple of Harvard professors that made claims that were borderline absurd. They postulated that chemicals self-associated (why?) and then a membrane formed around them (why?) and that became the first living cell. They never explained what chemicals associated and why fatty acids would suddenly form a spherical entity around them to create a single cell, living creature. Maybe they passed their word limit.
There are many contradictions in science, all conveniently swept under the rug so as not to rock the boat. DNA requires proteins for its translation—the first step in making new proteins; but you cannot have those proteins unless their genes had already been translated from DNA. Transfer RNA—tRNA—has an amino acid at one end and a three base code at the other. Its code is the match for a piece of mRNA so as to put the right amino acid in the right place in a growing protein strand. How did tRNA know which amino acids go with with which codes? And while yes, many proteins look very similar from species to species, there are differences. And we know from cancer and other diseases that even small changes in DNA at the wrong positions can have catastrophic effects, the changes required in going from nominally evolutionarily related species would require wholesale changes in the genome of hundreds or thousands of DNA bases. If one base change can cause cancer of sickle cell anemia, how can one believe that 400 or 4,000 bases changed between species A and B, and everything came out just fine? And that’s just one gene. What about the thousands of other genes that would require perfect chages between species?
If the issues raised above were just academic, then this article would belong in a scientific journal, not that any would accept it (Nature rejected a form of it 30 years ago). But the West is losing its religion and many, if not most, of societal problems today are related to countries built on religious values that are no longer religious. Our parents had no thoughts of destroying children with chemicals and surgeries. The loss of religion is a disaster for the West, and it’s all based on false assumptions.