Letters From Grandpa #228
LETTERS FROM GRANDPA # 228
Dearest grandchild,
Today’s letter will deal again with the subject of where life came from. I bore you with details about this because I want you to believe in God. The spontaneous generation of life is only a theory. There is no scientific evidence that life ever came from non life. In Darwin’s day it was easier to “believe” in the spontaneous generation of life because we didn’t know how complex life really is. Ernst Haeckel popularized Darwin’s theory of evolution in Germany and insisted that a cell was a “simple lump of albuminous combination of carbon”. Thus the mystery of where life came from was summarily dismissed with a dogmatic wave of the hand.
Today, however, science has concluded that the “simple cell” is far more complex than Darwin ever dreamed.
Please consider this paragraph from an article in “Genesis Alive”. It involves a closer look inside the first "simple" life form:
“Prokaryote bacteria - the first known cell, or one of many created together? A Prokaryote (1) bacteria is considered the first single-cell animal, claimed to have been found among the oldest known rocks on Earth. However, when closely studied with electron computer imaging we find this tiny creature amazingly complex, made with many millions of molecules operating in perfect order, like the 747! "The genetic material (DNA) in most bacteria contains some 4.7 million base pairs. Stretched out, this molecule would be about 1,000 times longer than the bacterium itself".(2) The DNA is just the software, what about all the other systems that work, read, duplicate (The DNA of bacteria alone replicate error-free at an amazing rate 30,000 "letters" per minute) and assemble in the cell! In other words these tiny animals are far from ‘simple’. They maybe said to be less complicated as their companions the Eukaryotes(mentioned later), which are far more complex in comparison. As we can see, dead chemicals becoming life are a big deal, and explaining this gap away with a few drawings and words is entirely over-simplistic. (2,3) We also must consider cell only have DNA reading capacity, not information writing capacity like your computer has. In Charles Darwins day, the general understanding of biologic change was that characteristics could be inherited--that is, if an animal acquired a physical characteristic during its lifetime, it could pass those characteristic on to its progeny. This of course was proved false years later.”
This following quote is from Wikipedia: “The haploid human genome (23 chromosomes) is about 3.1 billion base pairs long and contains more than 20,000 distinct genes. Since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits, this is about 800 megabytes of data. An individual somatic (diploid) cell contains twice this amount, that is, about 6.2 billion base pairs.”
As I have said before, if you found 3 letters spelling “Joe, Jim, Pat, or Pam”, you would logically conclude that they did not happen by accident but were produced by intelligence. The longest word known to man is in the human genome. It contains some 3.1 billion letters. To assume that these letters came together by accident is ludicrous. To illustrate how long this word is, let us assume that you are going to read these letters at the rate of 1 per second without stopping until you read them all.
m There are 8,760 hours in a year. This computes to 525,600 minutes, and 31,536,600 seconds. m Thus after reading day and night for an entire year you still have a long way to go! m In fact, you would have to read day and night without stopping for 100 years to read them all.
Antony Flew (Feb. 11, 1923 — Apr. 8, 2010) was an English philosopher who taught at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keeleand Reading, and York. For most of his career he was an atheist. In 1976 he even wrote a much heralded book titled “The Presumption of Atheism”. He was at that time an icon and role model for atheists around the world. He debated believers and was eagerly quoted as an authority by other atheists. In 2007, however, he wrote another book: “There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind”. Flew said: “'My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads”. He continues: “It now seems that the findings of more than 50 years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design”.
There is an old joke about the man who jumped off the Empire State Building. He was quoted as he passed the 35" floor: “Everything is all right so far”.
“So far” isn’t good enough. Rational people prepare for the inevitable. It is not rational to prepare for college, marriage, work, and retirement, but make no preparation at all for eternity. The prophet Amos said it like this: “Prepare to meet your God ...” (Amos 4:12). There is a God, please prepare to meet Him!
I love you,
Grandpa Boyce