This Week’s Devotion Theme – God Created!
Today’s Daily Bible Reading – Genesis 13-14 and Matthew 7
This conversation can be a great jumping off place for reaching non-believers. I hope you have an opportunity to use it for that purpose.
According to Genesis, God created the first life on Earth, in the form of plant life, on the third day of creation. Then He created sea creatures and birds on the fifth day of creation, and finally, He created land animals and then man on the sixth day of creation.
Christians certainly believe that God created life. But not everyone believes in a creator, so how do those folks, especially scientists, propose that life got started here on Earth? The image below, from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History gives a clue:
The first part, about living things being made up of organic compounds, is not disputed. But how those organic compounds, known as the building blocks of life first appeared, is really not clear to scientists. That is clear from the language used in this sign – “may have formed” and “may have been carried to Earth”.
But then, students are presented with a misleading experiment in their textbooks, known as the Miller-Urey experiment. In 1953, Stanley Miller reported that he had conducted an experiment which replicated the primeval conditions on Earth and had produced the chemicals that were essential for life to begin. The point being made to students to this day is that if the building blocks of life could start on their own, as this experiment demonstrates, then certainly life could eventually follow.
Even if the building blocks of life were there, to say that life could begin from non-life is actually a non-starter. It has never been observed and is not even remotely possible. There is something called the Law of Biogenesis which is the principle stating that life only arises from pre-existing life, not from nonliving material.
But the Miller experiment was actually a failure, and did not create the correct kinds of amino acids, which was the experiment’s goal. Also, the fake environment created for the experiment lacked oxygen, because Miller knew it would prevent the molecular bonds from forming, though scientists believe the early Earth had higher oxygen levels than today’s atmosphere.
But let’s pretend for a moment that amino acids were actually able to come about completely by chance. What then? They would have to form into proteins, which are the building blocks of living cells. This is no small feat however. The law of probability states that an event with a chance higher than 10 to the 50th power (that’s 10 with 50 zeroes behind it or 10⁵⁰ in scientific notation shorthand) will never happen. It has been estimated that the chance of a single protein arising by chance is 10 to the 191st power! And cells are made up of millions of proteins. The possibility of an entire cell arising by chance is estimated to be 10 to the 40,000th power!
The idea that a single cell is somehow simple in composition is a fallacy that has lived on well after the truth of its complexity has been discovered. One scientist described a single cell as, “a high-tech factory, complete with artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction… and a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.” That does not sound like something that could have arisen completely by chance.
Even biochemist and spiritual skeptic Francis Crick, who shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular structure of DNA, said, “an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
He’s right of course. Secular science is missing the most important parts of how life begins. A Creator, and the breath of life.
Genesis 2:7 – Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Secular science will never be able to explain or demonstrate how life began on its own, because it is an impossibility. But the fact that you exist is proof that we have an amazing Creator God. And the fact that you are able to read this is also pretty incredible. Why? Because of the design that enables you to see. There are 100 million light sensitive cells in the human eye, which send signals to the brain through the 1 million nerve fibers of the optic nerve! The visual process culminates in our brain which contains 100 billion nerve cells connected by 150,000 kilometers of nerve fibers. It is estimated that there are 100 trillion connections between nerve cells in the human brain! All of that, just so you can see. And that is only one small but miraculous part of the equally miraculous rest of your body.
Indeed, we have a great God! And indeed, you are fearfully and wonderfully made!
-Greg Landry
If anyone has any questions or comments they would like me to address on any of the devotions dealing with creation this week, please reach out to me at gregrlandry@gmail.com
Keep Seeking God – in his Scriptures and with the brain He has created for you. Your faith will Grow. Then Love someone else enough to share what God is teaching you.
SeekGrowLove.com 
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