Systems and God.

Walt Brown, in IN THE BEGINNING, Center for Scientific Creation, page 15-16, says:

This is a microphoto of a flagellum of a salmonella bacterium.





The bacterium propels itself with a type of miniature motor.

It permits the salmonella bacterium to move about.

Although there is no complete understanding of how these tiny motors work, the many studies of them have deduced the presence of the components shown in the diagram.

These extremely efficient, reversible motors rotate up to 100,000 revolutions per minute.

Each shaft rotates a bundle of whiplike flagella that acts as a propeller.

The motors have rotors and stators, and are similar in many respects to electrical motors.

The electrical charges come from a flow of protons.

Walt Brown, in IN THE BEGINNING, Center for Scientific Creation, page 40-41, says:

While today’s digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that the human retina’s real-time performance goes unchallenged.

Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds (ms) of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer.

Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second. (from John K. Stevens, Reverse Engineering the Brain, Byte, April 1985, p. 287.)

And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe. (from Isaac Asimov, In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even, Smithsonian, August 1970, p. 10)

The human brain is frequently likened to a supercomputer.

In most respects the brain greatly exceeds any computer’s capabilities.

Epigenesis, the idea that an embryo develops from the successive differentiations of an originally undifferentiated structure, a cell blob, constructs living beings according to a blue print in THE TRIUMPH OF THE EMBRYO, by Lewis Wolpert, published by Oxford University Press:

Form emerges due to changes in cell shape.

Development begins with the fertilized egg, which is a single cell, giving rise to a number of smaller cells.

Cell divisions cleave the egg, like cutting a cake, and result in a multi-cellular structure.

This simple structure, the blastula, the early embryo, a sphere made up of lots of smaller cells, must now be molded by cellular activities into all the shapes that emerge during development.

The blastula gives no visible indication of the complex animal into which it will develop.

It is only after the next stage, gastrulation, the process of cells formulating into shape of the animal itself, that the form of the animal begins to emerge.

Gastrulation occurs in the development of all animals.

It is the process that occurs when the cells of the blastula rearrange and move so that the hitherto rather simple, and often spherical or flat embryo is transformed into something approaching the form from which the animal will develop.

During gastrulation the front and back, top and bottom become evident, and the basic body plan is laid down.

Also, the cells move so as to take up new positions.

The development of the gut illustrates the point.

Surprisingly, cells that will form the gut are on the outside surface of many early embryos.

However, the gut in all animals is an internal structure.

It is during gastrulation that the cells leave the outer surface and move inside the region where they will form the gut.

Similarly, in early vertebrate embryos, the cells that will form the vertebral column and the muscles are also on the outside and must move inwards to an appropriate location.

It is also after gastrulation that the organs, like limbs, liver, and eyes, being to develop.

In most vertebrates in which they have been intensively studied, amphibians and birds, gastrulation movements are rather complicated.

Movements occur simultaneously over many parts of the embryo with sheets of cells streaming past each other, contracting and expanding.

It taxes the minds of determined embryologists to try and visualize what is going on.

If the cells in the embryo 'know' where and when to change shape, contract, or move, then it begins to be possible to envisage a programme for the development form.

It is a programme that does not describe the final form, but a generative programme that contains the instructions for making the shapes, of the animal under construction.

How then do the cells 'know' to make the right pattern?

There are a number of solutions, but the most interesting solution is for the cells to 'know' their position in the line.

If they know their position with respect to the ends, they can 'work out', their function.

Cell death is a normal feature of limb development and helps sculpt the form of the limb.

For example, in mice and humans the digits are initially joined together and only cell death between the digits separates them.

It is not that the cells die because they are sick or somehow abnormal, dying is part of their programmed development.

Walt Brown, in IN THE BEGINNING, Center for Scientific Creation, page 14, says:

A white blood cell, called neutrophils, is stalking a bacterium, shown in green.

Your health, and that of many animals, depends on the effectiveness of these search and destroy missions.

Consider the capabilities and associated equipment the white blood cell must have to do its job.

It must identify friend and foe. Once a foe is identified, the white blood cell must rapidly seek and overtake the invader.

Then the white blood cell must engulf the bacterium, destroy it, and have the endurance to repeat this many times.

Miniaturization, fuel efficiency, and compatibility with other members of the body are also key requirements.

The equipment for each function requires careful design.

Unless all this worked well from the beginning of life, a requirement that rules out evolution, bacteria and other agents of disease would have won, and we would not be here to marvel at these hidden abilities in our bodies.

A few stem cells in your bone marrow produce more than 100 billion of these white blood cells a day, plus other types of blood cells.

Each white blood cell moves at up to 30 microns (almost half the diameter of a human hair) each minute.

So many white blood cells are in your body that their total distance traveled every day would circle the earth twice.

Walt Brown, in IN THE BEGINNING, Center for Scientific Creation, page 13, says:

Techniques now exist for measuring the degree of similarity between forms of life.

These genetic distances are calculated by taking a specific protein and examining the sequence of its components.

The fewer changes required to convert a protein of one organism into the corresponding protein of another organism, supposedly the closer their relationship.

Similar comparisons can now be made between the genetic material (DNA and RNA) of different organisms.

The results of these studies seriously contradict the theory of evolution.

There is not a trace of evidence at the molecular level for the traditional evolutionary series: simple sea life —> fish —> amphibians —> reptiles —> mammals.

Each category of organism appears to be almost equally isolated. One computer-based study, using cytochrome, a protein used in energy production, compared 47 different forms of life.

If evolution happened, this study should have found that, for example, the rattlesnake was most closely related to other reptiles.

Instead, based on this one protein, the rattlesnake was most similar to man.

Since this study, hundreds of similar contradictions have been discovered.

Genetic material, DNA and RNA, is composed of nucleotides.

In living things, nucleotides are always right-handed.

(They were initially named right-handed because a beam of polarized light passing through them rotated like a right-handed screw.)

Nucleotides rarely form outside of life, but when they do, half are left-handed, and half are right-handed.

In other words, nucleotides that might have formed before life appeared on earth would be unsuitable for the evolution of life's genetic material.

Each type of amino acid, when found in nonliving material or when synthesized in the laboratory, comes in two chemically equivalent forms.

Half are right-handed and half are left-handed: mirror images of each other.

However, the amino acids in life, including plants, animals, bacteria, molds, and even viruses, are essentially all left- handed.

No known natural process can isolate either the left-handed or the right-handed variety.

The mathematical probability that chance processes could produce merely one tiny protein molecule with only left-handed amino acids is virtually zero.

The genetic information contained in each cell of the human body is roughly equivalent to a library of 4,000 books.

The probability that mutations and natural selection produced this vast amount of information, even if matter and life somehow arose, is essentially zero.

It would be analogous to continuing the following procedure until 4,000 books have been produced:

a. Start with a meaningful phrase.

b. Retype the phrase, but make some errors and insert some additional letters.

c. Examine the new phrase to see if it is meaningful.

d. If it is, replace the original phrase with it.

e. Return to step b.

To accumulate 4,000 books of meaningful information, this procedure would have to produce the equivalent of far more than 10 raised to 40,000 power animal offspring.

(Just to begin to understand how large 10 raised to 40,000 power is, realize that the visible universe has less than 10 raised to 80 power atoms in it.)

Walt Brown, in IN THE BEGINNING, Center for Scientific Creation, pages 12-13, says:

Living matter is composed largely of proteins: long chains of amino acids.

Since 1930, it has been known that amino acids cannot join together if oxygen is present.

In other words, proteins could not have evolved from chance chemical reactions if the atmosphere contained oxygen.

However, the chemistry of the earth's rocks, both on land and below ancient seas, shows that the earth had oxygen before the earliest fossils formed.

Even earlier, oxygen would have been produced by solar radiation breaking water vapor apart into oxygen and hydrogen.

Then some hydrogen, the lightest of all chemical elements, would have escaped into outer space, leaving behind oxygen.

To form proteins, amino acids must also be highly concentrated.

However, the early oceans or atmosphere would have diluted amino acids to the point where the required collisions between them would rarely have occurred.

Besides, amino acids do not naturally link up to form proteins. Instead, proteins tend to break down into amino acids.

Furthermore, the proposed energy sources for forming proteins (the earth's heat, electrical discharges, or the sun's radiation) destroy the protein products thousands of times faster than they could have formed.

The many attempts to show how life might have arrived on earth have only demonstrated the futility of the effort, the immense complexity of even the simplest life, and the need for a vast intelligence to precede life.

If, despite the virtually impossible odds, proteins arose by chance processes, there is not the remotest reason to believe that they could ever form a membrane-encased, self-reproducing, metabolizing, living cell.

There is no evidence that there are any stable states between the assumed naturalistic formation of proteins and the formation of the first living cells.

No scientist has ever advanced a testable procedure by which this fantastic jump in complexity could have occurred; even if the entire universe had been filled with proteins.

A typical living cell contains thousands of different chemicals, some acidic, others basic. Many chemicals would react with others were it not for an intricate system of chemical barriers and buffers.

If living things evolved, these barriers and buffers must have also evolved, but at just the right time to prevent harmful chemical reactions.

How could such precise, almost miraculous, events have happened for each of the many millions of species?

All living organisms are maintained by thousands of chemical pathways, each involving a long series of complex chemical reactions.

For example, the clotting of blood, which involves twenty to thirty steps, is absolutely vital to help heal a wound.

However, clotting could be fatal, if it happened inside the body. Omitting one of the many steps, inserting an unwanted step, or altering the timing of a step would probably cause death.

If one thing goes wrong, all the other marvelous steps that were performed flawlessly were in vain.

Apparently, these complex pathways were created as an intricate, highly integrated unit.

To produce DNA, a cell requires more than 75 different types of proteins.

But these proteins, in turn, are produced only at the direction of DNA.

Since each requires the other, a satisfactory explanation for the origin of one must also explain the origin of the other.

Apparently, this entire manufacturing system came into existence simultaneously.

His wisdom is profound, His power vast.

Who has resisted Him and come out unscathed?

Job 9:4