GOD
REVEALED IN A MICROSCOPE
John C. Studenroth
INTRODUCTION
"It is the glory of God to conceal a
matter, but the glory of kings is
to search out a matter." Prov 25:2 (NASB)
Consider the glory of God as revealed in: (1) the green plant; (2) the
single cell; (3) the ribosome; and (4) the virus.
THE GLORY OF THE GREEN PLANT
Imagine designing a robot to prepare an
exactly earth-like planet
(without life) for human habitation; must meet following specifications:
Metabolic synthesis:
Growth, differentiation, and reproduction:
Adaptation to environmental change:
These are only a few of the more basic requirements:
No committee of
scientists & engineers on earth could begin to duplicate what God
has done with the simple seed that grows into a green plant!
This
analogy borrowed from secular authors: Frank Salisbury and Cleon Ross,
Plant Physiology.
THE GLORY OF THE SINGLE CELL
The closer we examine man's handiwork,
the cruder it looks.
The closer we examine God's handiwork,
the more sophisticated it looks!
All living things from bacteria up to humans are composed of cells
Cell: a jelly-like cytoplasm around a
nucleus, surrounded by a cell
membrane
Greatly oversimplified: more like a large highly-organized city
transportation system, power plants,
factories, packaging plants, city
hail
Duplicate sets of blueprints stored in nucleus
perhaps 100 trillion cells in human
being
simple cell (bacterial) has
information content = 100 million pages of Encyc Brit
Sagan, "Life,"
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1974), 10:894
DNA from one human cell unwound
would be about 6 ft long
Chromosomes like chemical cookbooks each containing thousands of recipes
Each gene like a single recipe, written
in chemical words with
four-letter alphabet
Each human cell has 46 cookbooks, a duplicate set
of 23 each
Number of possible variations of human chromosomes is 102.4 billion
contrast number of elementary
particles in universe 1080!
"The human being is an extraordinarily improbable object."
Sagan,
ibid., 895d.
THE GLORY OF THE RIBOSOME
Single ribosome is very small:
millionth of an inch in largest
dimension
cell may contain half a million
ribosomes
yet very complex
To cook a recipe from one of its cookbooks, cell first xeroxes the
recipe
uses a sophisticated protein, an enzyme
called transcriptase
Xeroxed copies of recipes are called messenger RNA
The cooks are the ribosomes
They grab the recipes, mRNA, march along
them
grabbing the right ingredients (from
among 20 amino acids)
stick
these together with peptide bonds to form proteins
This is done with
amazing accuracy, since one wrong ingredient is a spoiled dish
Without ribosomes, there would be no proteins
But ribosomes themselves are made up of 50 to 80 very complex and
different proteins,
plus nucleic acids called ribosomal RNA
Need
ribosomes to make proteins, but need proteins to make ribosomes!
There is a recipe in the cookbook for making a cook, but need cooks to
make cooks
Who will cook the first cook?
Likewise the RNA in the ribosomes must be xeroxed out of the cookbooks
Who will do the xeroxing?
Yet typical high school textbook says "Somewhere in the warm sunlit
waters of the sea the first cell was formed" (i.e., quite by accident).
THE GLORY OF THE VIRUS
A virus is a germ's germ, about same size as ribosome
Virus very simple, basically two components:
Small strand of DNA or RNA
(just enough for a few recipes)
Protective coat of proteins
NO
ribosomes, cytoplasm, nucleus, organelles, etc.
Is this the missing link between life and non-life?
Viruses by themselves can't do anything
need a functional cell to
operate
Like runaway cookbooks which get into the kitchen and confuse
the cooks
who then make the evil recipes provided
by the virus
eventually making copies of the evil cookbooks to take over other cells
Overlapping genes
God's wisdom revealed in a way that
totally baffles
man:
two recipes from one!
Discovered in 1977:
Sanger, F., et al. 1977.
'Nucleotide sequence of b. ph. 0X174 DNA Nature 265:687.