Michael's Personal Devotionals

As I explore the Bible (God's infallible word spoken to man) I will share my thoughts on scripture and their applications to every day life. I will try to update at least once weekly.

Friday, April 07, 2006

Would you take a chance of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000?

Me neither.

In one of the best books I have ever read The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel this staggering figure is quoted as the probability of forming a short protein strand at random given the perfect environmental conditions.

I'll let the book speak for itself:
In summing up how random chance could not have been responsible for forming of DNA (the building blocks of all cells). Lee Strobel speaking with Stephen C. Meyer, Director and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, Graduate of Cambridge ,and Origin-of-life expert:
"I began with an observation. "I know that the idea of life forming by random chance is out of vogue right now among scientists," I said.
Meyer agreed. "Virtually all origin-of-life experts have utterly rejected that approach," he said with a wave of his hand.
"Even so, the idea is still very much alive at the popular level," I pointed out. "For many college students who speculate about these things, chance is still the hero. They think if you let amino acids randomly interact over millions of years, life is somehow going to emerge."
"Well, yes, it's true that this scenario is still alive among people who don't know all the facts, but there's no merit to it." Meyer replied.
“Imagine trying to generate even a simple book by throwing Scrabble letters onto the floor. Or imagine closing your eyes and picking Scrabble letters out of a bag. Are you going to produce Hamlet in anything like the time of the known universe? Even a simple protein molecule, or the gene to build that molecule, is so rich in information that the entire time since the Big Bang would not give you, as my colleague Bill Dembski likes to say, the “probabilistic resources” you would need to generate that molecule by chance.”
“Even,” I asked, “if the first molecule had been much simpler than those today?”
“There’s a minimal complexity threshold,” he replied. “There’s a certain level of folding that a protein has to have, called the tertiary structure, that is necessary for it to perform a function. You don’t get tertiary structure in a protein unless you have at least seventy-five amino acids or so. That may be conservative. Now consider what you’d need for a protein molecule to form by chance.
“First, you need the right bonds between amino acids. Second, amino acids come in right-handed and left-handed versions, and you’ve got to get only left-handed ones. Third, the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence, like letters in a sentence.
“Run the odds of these things falling into place on their own and you find that the probabilities of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one chance in a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That’s a ten with 125 zeroes after it!
“And that would only be one protein molecule- a minimally complex cell would need between three hundred and five hundred protein molecules. Plus, all of this would have to be accomplished in a mere 100 million years, which is the approximate window of time between the Earth cooling and the first microfossils we’ve found.
“To suggest chance against those odds is really to invoke a naturalistic miracle. It’s a confession of ignorance. It’s another way of saying, ‘We don’t know.’ And since the 1960’s, scientists, to their credit, have been very reluctant to say chance played any significant role in the origin of DNA or proteins- even though, as you say, it’s still unfortunately a live option in popular thinking.””
From “The Case for a Creator”, ©2004 by Lee Strobel

This book goes on to refute any standing argument against intelligent design in a one-two punch to the face of evolution. After reading this book there is no doubt in my mind that this universe was created by an intelligent designer. Everyone who has any feelings about the issues of creation should read this book, it will amaze you as it did me.

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