Genesis 1:25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
Jesus warned us, "Take heed that no man deceive you." 1 And we do, indeed, live in the Age of Deceit. Our entire society is totally driven by many myths, none more basic or insidious than the convictions of Evolution, the religion of our age. (Dismissing for this discussion the observations of microevolution, the variations within species, but rather using the term in its connotative sense, referring, in fact, to biogenesis: the notion that we are all the result of a series of cosmic accidents.)
The ancient cultures worshiped gods of wood and stone. It is difficult to comprehend the insanity of paganism: who can tally the blood that has been spilled on the altars of the gods who are not and the demons who are! We, however, in our contemporary paganism, have invented the most insulting "god" of all. Instead of ascribing the awesome magnificence of the Creation to any of the false gods of the past, we have chosen to ascribe it all to randomness, or chance. That has to be the most insulting ascription of all: we have decided that no Designer was necessary - it all "just happened." "First there was nothing. Then it exploded!"2
The premise that we are all simply the accidental result of random chance underlies our entire culture, not just biology: the fields of psychology, our social and political sciences, our media, our entertainments, and, of course, the forced inculcation of our children in the government schools.
Darwinists love to postulate the "simple cell." With the advent of modern microbiology, we now know "there ain't any such thing." Even the simplest cell is complex beyond our imagining.
As Michael Denton has pointed out, "Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of 100,000,000,000 atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world."4
The "simple cell" turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as 3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations) manufacturing hundreds of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error correction techniques and proofreading devices for quality control.
All by chance? All without a Designer? (How do you define "absurd?")
At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!
If all the chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!
Cell Replication
The details of cell replication are too complex to be described in detail here. A simplified outline is given below to illustrate the incredible process involved: 5
1. Replication involves the synthesis of an exact copy of the cell's DNA.
2. An initiator protein must locate the correct place in the strand to begin copying.
3. The initiator protein guides an "unzipper" protein (helicase) to separate the strand, forming a fork area. This unwinding process involves speeds estimated at approximately 8000 rpm, all done without tangling the DNA strand!
4. The DNA duplex kinks back on itself as it unwinds. To relieve the twisting pressure, an "untwister" enzyme (topo-isomerase) systematically cuts and repairs the coil.
5. Working only on flat, untwisted sections of the DNA, enzymes go to work copying the strand. (Two complete DNA pairs are synthesized, each containing one old and one new strand.)
6. A stitcher repair protein (DNA ligases) connects nucleotides together into one continuous strand.
Read and Write
The process described above is only a small part of the story. While the unwinding and rewinding of the DNA takes place, an equally sophisticated process of reading the DNA code and "writing" new strands occurs. The process involves the production and use of messenger RNA. Again, a simplified process description: 6
1. Messenger RNA is made from DNA by an enzyme (RNA polymerase).
2. A small section of DNA unzips, revealing the actual message (called the sense strand) and the template (the anti-sense strand).
3. A copy is made of the gene of interest only, producing a relatively short RNA segment.
4. The knots and kinks in the DNA provide crucial topological stop-and-go signals for the enzymes.
5. After messenger RNA is made, the DNA duplex is zipped back up.
Adding to the complexity and sophistication of design, the genetic code is read in blocks of three bases (out of the four possible bases mentioned earlier) that are non-overlapping.
Moreover, the triplicate code used is "degenerate," meaning that multiple combinations can often code for the same amino acid-this provides a built-in error correction mechanism. (One can't help but contrast the sophistication involved with the far simpler read/write processes used in modern computers.)
A Common Software House
All living things use DNA and RNA to build life from four simple bases. The process described above is common to all creatures from simple bacteria all the way to humans.
Evolutionists point to this as evidence for their theory-but the new discoveries of the complexity of the process, and the fact that bacterial ribosomes are so similar to those in humans, is strong evidence against evolution. The complexities of cell replication must have been present at the beginning of life.
A simple explanation for the similarities of the basic building blocks can be found if one realizes that all life originates from a single "software house." He is awesome indeed!