Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script:

Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.

Psalm 139, verse 14, New Living Translation

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VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re excited to be with you today as we continue the new series we started last time on Anchored by Truth. So, In the studio today we have RD Fierro. RD is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books and he is the one picking the facts we are covering in this series. RD, you’ve entitled this series “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know.” I’m sure many listeners would wonder how in the world you settled on the 10 facts that we are including in this series. There are surely thousands of facts that are relevant to the Christian faith. Picking 10 means you have to have done some hard thinking.

RD: Well, I’d first like to start by thanking everyone for joining us here today. And you are absolutely right that there are thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of facts that are relevant to the Christian faith. I have wanted to do this series for a while to highlight a couple of key points. First, as we discussed last time the Christian faith is a faith of facts. In other words the Christian faith is a faith that reflects the real world, and not just the world as it is today but the entire history of the world – both natural and human history. One of the ways we can be confident about the truth of the Christian faith is that Christianity permits us to test it by examining its principle source – the Bible – through the lens of logic, reason, and evidence.

VK: Now in saying that I want to be sure that people understand that we are not elevating man’s logic over the revelation made in the Bible. What you are saying is that the Bible may be tested in the same way a farmer tests his fruit trees. Jesus gave us this test in Matthew, chapter 12, verse 33 which says, “A tree is identified by its fruit. If a tree is good, its fruit will be good. If a tree is bad, its fruit will be bad.” That’s the New Living Translation version of that verse. We can be sure of the Bible’s trustworthiness because we can evaluate its content for accuracy, reliability, consistency, and relevance. When we do so we see that it possesses the attributes we would expect of a book that claims to be the word of God. The Bible is consistent with what we know about world and human history and it gives evidence of supernatural origin.

RD: Yes. We do not judge the Bible. The Bible judges us. But the Bible commands us, to use our minds in worship. In John 10:38, Jesus said to a group of people who were about to stone him, “even though you do not believe me, you should at least believe my deeds, in order that you may know once and for all that the Father is in me and that I am in the Father.” Even Jesus didn’t just demand unquestioning obedience. He gave evidence, and a lot of it, that He was who He said He was. In the same way the Bible provides evidence that it is what it says it is. So, part of what we’re doing in this series is to look at a set of facts that serve the same purpose that Jesus’ deeds did. These facts confirm the Bible and its message. But you are right that deciding on just 10 facts was not easy.

VK: So, how did you do it?

RD: Whenever I think about the Bible I always try to ensure that I start out with the big story. The Bible is one grand saga – the saga of creation, fall, and redemption. The saga features a chosen people, the Jews, a chosen family, the family of David, and, of course, one central person – the Messiah who was Christ Jesus. Those are the primary actors in this unfolding, grand drama but make no mistake – we are all players on the stage. So, when I started thinking about which facts that pertain to Christianity I went back to the places where the grand saga is so misunderstood in our day and age. And, of course, no surprise the misunderstanding of the story begins at the beginning.

VK: It’s obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the book of Genesis is the most attacked book in the Bible. For more than a century and a half the attacks have been relentless. In our culture the belief that all life arose from the random collision of inanimate particles has largely supplanted a belief in the creative activity of God. Even many Christians now fall for the idea that God may have started everything but somehow He used evolution to move life along. Long-age uniformitarianism has replaced the idea that the surface of the earth we see resulted from a catastrophic world-wide flood. Few people now believe that the world wide dispersal of human beings and the proliferation of languages resulted from God correcting the behavior of His people at Babel when they tried to build a tower that would reach the heavens.

RD: Yes. As you said Genesis is the most attacked book in the Bible and for good reason. If Satan and his human minions can dispense with the necessity of God as creator they can fill the gap with any nonsense that is convenient at the moment. God as creator means God as regulator and the one idea that fallen people hate is that they are accountable to a holy sovereign. So, the first fact that I chose to feature in this series, and that we addressed on our last episode, is the whole notion of what is sometimes termed “deep time.” The simple fact is that there is abundant scientific evidence that is consistent with the age of the earth and universe being thousands of years old rather than millions or billions of years old.

VK: Deep time is essentially the idea that the universe and the earth are billions of years old. The secular world must have deep time in order to maintain the illusion that the General Theory of Evolution is plausible. Evolution needs billions of years of time to change bacteria into biologists. The only supposed creative force evolution has is beneficial mutation - in other words the random interaction of unthinking matter. To make the whole evolutionary hypothesis plausible the scheme needs lots of time. Lots of time is necessary so that lots of those random, chaotic, interactive events can take place. They need untold trillions of those interactions in the hope that a few of them will produce a living being so complex that the code that describe its construction can contain 3 billion data elements.

RD: Deep time is the root of the evolutionary weed. Destroy the root and the weed dies.

VK: I like that phrase. “Deep time is the root of the evolutionary weed.” It’s graphic but appropriate. So, we addressed the issue of deep time in our last episode of Anchored by Truth. What fact do you want to tackle today?

RD: Today I want to address the fact that the complexity of life makes it impossible that life could have arisen as a result of the random collision of atoms and molecules – even if you could explain the existence of the atoms and molecules to begin with.

VK: Ok. I think we’re going to need to probe some of the specifics that lead to a statement as definitive as that.

RD: I agree. So, let’s start out with the fact that unlike Charles Darwin thought a living cell is not a simple blob of protoplasm. Living cells are enormously complex structures. In fact the simplest living cell is more complex than the most sophisticated machine ever built by man.

VK: I think we better get into some specific examples of what you’re thinking about.

RD: I agree. So, let’s start with some basic facts about cells. All life on earth is cellular based. We know that there are different types of cells – some have nuclei and some don’t – but all life on earth is based on cells. Some living forms are only a single cell but. Higher forms of life have a great many cells. Recent estimates are that the human body contains 200 different types of cells and about 30 Trillion individual cells. But regardless of whether we’re talking about a single cell bacterium or a human being all life on earth is based on the existence of cells.

VK: And we know that all cells are composed of a cell wall, or membrane, that encloses the cells machinery which consists of various proteins. The number of proteins that a particular cell contains varies widely but even the simplest cell contains thousands of individual proteins. Estimates say that the simplest bacterial cell is comprised of at least 100 Billion atoms. That’s Billions with a “B.” In other words, every single cell on earth is a phenomenally complicated system and the complexity of life only increases as we move up the chain.

RD: Right. And the sheer numbers only begin to hint at the complexity. All of those protein machines must not only be present but they must be able to properly perform their individual function. Why don’t you go ahead and read that section about cellular composition from Michael Denton’s classic book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis?

VK: This is from page 263 from a chapter entitled “The Enigma of Life’s Origin.”

The American biochemist Harold Markowitz has speculated as to what might be the absolute minimum requirement for a completely self-replicating cell … Such a cell would necessarily be bound by a cell membrane and the simplest one feasible is probably the typical bilayered lipid membrane utilized by all existing cells. The synthesis of the fats of the cell membrane would require perhaps a minimum of five proteins. A minimum of ten proteins would be required for the nucleotide building blocks of the DNA, and for the DNA synthesis. Such a cell would also require a protein synthetic apparatus for the synthesis of its proteins. If this was along the lines of usual ribosomal system, it would require about eighty proteins. … This is the smallest hypothetical cell we can envisage ... since we have allowed no control functions, no vitamin metabolism and extremely limited intermediary metabolism.

RD: So, what Denton was describing was the simplest theoretical cell. Some bacterial cells approach that level of “simplicity” but the cells of higher organisms multiply the level of complexity present within each cell. We can get some idea of how much more complicated higher organisms are by considering DNA. The DNA of the simplest self-reproducing organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, has the smallest known genome of any free-living organism. Its DNA contains 482 genes with 580,000 base pairs. But Mycoplasma can’t actually survive by itself. It only survives by parasitizing more complex organisms, which provide many of the nutrients it cannot manufacture for itself. Mycoplasma has DNA which consists of approximately 500,000 base pairs. Human DNA by comparison consists of 3 Billion base pairs.

VK: So, the point of all this is really very simple. Living creatures are enormously complicated systems. Yet the General Theory of Evolution contends that all of this complexity arose as the result of the random collision of bits of matter floating in what is sometimes called a “pre-biotic soup.” Wow. That would have to have been an extremely fortunate accident for 100 Billion of the right atoms to all collide with one another in such a way that a permeable cell wall was instantly formed that contained hundreds of individual proteins that immediately began acting together to sustain and replicate themselves. How do evolutionists address this obvious problem?

RD: Well, typically they don’t actually attempt to address the issue of original cellular formation. They try to come at the problem indirectly by talking about how organic pre-cursors may have formed. All of the proteins that comprise cellular machinery are made up of amino acids. So, the evolutionists try to show how these amino acids may have formed without intelligent intervention. That’s one of the reasons the Miller- Urey experiments were so sensationalized during the latter half of the 20th century.

VK: In 1953 Harold Urey of the University of Chicago and his 23-year-old graduate student, Stanley Miller. The Miller–Urey experiments involved filling a sealed glass apparatus with gases that had been speculated were necessary to form life—namely methane, ammonia and hydrogen (to mimic the conditions that they thought were in the early atmosphere) and water vapor (to simulate the ocean). Next a heating coil kept the water boiling, and they struck the gases in the flask with a high-voltage to simulate lightning. Below this was a water-cooled condenser that cooled and condensed the mixture, allowing it to fall into a water trap below. The result was a sort of gooey tar mixture that contained some amino acids. And some scientists of the day proclaimed that scientists had created life in a test tube. Some still do and the Miller-Urey experiments is still prominently featured in many textbooks as proof that life arose from non-life.

RD: That’s the contention but the truth is that the Miller-Urey experiments not only didn’t create life they proved how difficult it is for life to have arisen randomly. In his well-known book called Algeny Jeremy Rifkin wrote this: “It turns out that the particular amino acids Miller formed in his experiment are totally unsuitable for the formation of life. Chemists divide amino acids into levorotary and dextrorotary. The latter are incapable of supporting life. … For biogenesis to take place all … amino acids of living protoplasm must be levorotary … if even small amounts of the dextrorotary type are present, proteins of a different three dimensional structure are formed, which are unsuitable for life’s metabolism. … Miller’s experiment produced only [combinations of the two types].”

VK: One survey of adult Americans believe that as many as 75% of adult Americans believe that scientists have produced life from non-living chemicals but that’s not true is it?

RD: No. All similar experiments since Miller-Urey have resulted only in the production of a combination of levorotary and dextrorotary amino acids which as Rifkin said are completely unsuitable to sustain life. So, all of this biochemistry leads us back to where we began in stating our fact for this episode: the complexity of life makes it impossible that life could have arisen as a result of the random collision of inanimate atoms and molecules.

VK: Well, as you put it some people believe that chemistry plus physics equals biology. But that’s not true is it?

RD: No. And even if a scientist did create “life in a test tube” that would not prove life arose or could arise without intelligent intervention – unless the scientist wanted to claim they themselves were not intelligent! And it is not just that life displays incredible complexity. There are least 3 specific forms of complexity that are present in life: irreducible complexity, specific complexity, and informational complexity. When we speak of “irreducible complexity” we are simply saying that living systems are not only complicated but they must operate as a system. Take one part away or if a single part malfunctions and you don’t just affect that part. The entire system ceases to function. This is very similar to mechanical systems with which we are more familiar. Someone may drive a car worth $100,000 but you can take away a $3 spark plug wire or valve stem out of a tire and the whole car stops. The failure of a single, seemingly insignificant part stops the entire system from functioning.

VK: The most graphic example of the failure of a single part stopping an enormously complicated system was the 1986 Challenger disaster. According to Wikipedia “The disaster was caused by the failure of the two redundant O-ring seals in a joint in the Space Shuttle's right solid rocket booster (SRB). The record-low temperatures of the launch reduced the elasticity of the rubber O-rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints. The broken seals caused a breach into the joint shortly after liftoff, which allowed pressurized gas … to leak and burn through the wall to the adjacent external fuel tank. This led to the separation of the right-hand [solid rocket booster’s] aft attachment, which caused it to crash into the external tank, which caused a structural failure of the external tank and an explosion.”

RD: Yes. Most people don’t realize that there are dozens of biochemical reactions that must be present for vision to occur. Remove a single one and even though the eye itself might be fine the entire system fails. But the complexity of life is not just irreducible it is also specified. The example most often given of specified complexity is language. We can have a very long sequence of random letters – hundreds, thousands, or millions yet without specificity most of that series will be meaningless.

VK: An analog might be if we filled a swimming pool with a child’s letter blocks. There would be enormous complexity in the jumble of blocks but how much meaning would be present. If we started pulling out blocks one at a time, occasionally we will pull out a sequence of 2 or 3 letters that has meaning. The letter “t” and “o” might come out and that means something. Then we pull a “p” and that means something because now we have “top.” But after that, then what? If we pulled out another “p” we could be on our way to “topple” but how likely would we pull out the “l” and “e” in that order? So, a physical situation can be enormously complex but meaningless. But that is not at all how life exists.

RD: And with your letter blocks in the pool analogy we start to see the impossibility of aligning the 100 Billion atoms in the simplest cell by random interaction. Specified complexity means that the complexity has been so arranged that it produces use, meaning, or in the ultimate expression – life. Life, all life, exhibits specified complexity. Cells not only have billions of atoms but all of those atoms are organized into micro-machines that perform specific purposes and all those micro-machines must work together properly or the system fails.

VK: So, specified complexity leads us to the conclusion that life contains informational complexity. Back to your formula – chemistry plus physics does not equal biology. Nor does the addition of time complete the package for life. Chemical plus physical systems that have been around for a while are just old systems. What transforms chemistry plus physics into biology is information. You might say that information is necessary for animation. Right?

RD: Right. There’s a great book that discusses this need thoroughly and compellingly called In the Beginning was Information. Informational complexity is exhibited in all living systems but it is most potently exhibited in DNA. DNA is far more than just a series of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements clinging together in long molecular strings. DNA is an information storage system that is far more complicated, at its simplest, than the most sophisticated human information system. Originally it was thought that the genes that DNA contains controlled the attributes of the creature. It was thought that one gene controls one attribute.

VK: But that’s not true at all is it?

RD: No. The genes of all higher order animals are pleiotropic which means that most genes control or contribute to the control of multiple aspects of the creature. Moreover, we now know that DNA differs greatly from human information systems in that it is not two dimensional in its storage capacity. It is three dimensional. It can be read not just right to left but left to right and even up and down. In some cases some parts of the code are skipped in providing instructions to the cell while in other cases that part of the code is used. And there is a relatively new discipline called “epigenetics” which tells us that contrary to long standing ideas certain characteristics acquired by an individual during their lifetime can be passed immediately to their descendants.

VK: It used to be thought that there was an absolute barrier between what are referred to as “somatic” cells and “germ” cells. Somatic cells are used to build the “body” of the creature. “Germ” cells are reproductive cells. It was thought that there was an absolute barrier between the two and it was called the Weismann barrier. But the latest science indicates that isn’t always true. Yet all of this amazing complexity must be specified somewhere with the DNA. The big point is that living beings do not and cannot exist without enormous information systems being present in every component of the living creature – the cell.

RD: Right. The simplest cell will not work if its component parts don’t function properly individually and collectively. The same is true for body systems that those cells build. That’s irreducible complexity. The cells and body systems must be organized in very specific ways. They must exist as systems that have utility, function, and purpose so they must have been developed and must be maintained in very specific configurations. In other words, they are specified in their design and function. That’s specified complexity. And present throughout all living creatures are incomprehensible amounts of information. And the information is not a direct consequence of the underlying chemistry any more than the information on the page of a book is dependent on the chemistry of the ink and paper. The information present in living creatures transcends the physical storage apparatus in the same way that the information contained in a computer has nothing to do with chips, plastic, wires, or metal. And information is the exact opposite of randomness and chaos. Chaotically derived information is not only ridiculous it is impossible.

VK: Well, as you said the complexity of life makes it impossible that life could have arisen as a result of the random collision of atoms and molecules – even if you could explain the existence of the atoms and molecules to begin with. And even King David knew that 3,000 years ago as our opening verse from Psalm 139 demonstrated. Life is complex – irreducibly, specifically, and informationally. But let’s hasten to add that as complex as it is to us, it presents no challenge to an omniscient God. Today let’s listen to a prayer for children who are getting ready to go back to school. And let’s remember that as important as education is to our children parents must always be alert to what their kids are being taught in school, especially public schools. That’s one of the reasons it is so important for us to ground ourselves firmly in facts so we can correct the impressions that circulate so widely today – such as the idea that evolution can explain the marvelous complexity of life. Evolution can’t but the Bible does.

---- PRAYER FOR CHILDREN STARTING SCHOOL

VK: Before we close we’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes in this series or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!”

(Opening Bible Quotes from the New Living Translation)

Psalm 139,verse 14, New Living Translation

How simple can life be? - creation.com

Why the Miller Urey research argues against abiogenesis - creation.com

C14 dinos - creation.com