Evolution's Extinction Engine

Welcome back to another session in our series, Literal Genesis, where here we go by the motto that we should hold firmly to Scripture and hold loosely to theories. With the idea that these theories are mostly related to evolution.

How can we go from a rock to a rock star, for example, over billions of years? What are the mechanisms, how does that work, and exactly how does that happen? Because we see that this conflicts with Scriptures, especially the early Genesis, the history that we read in early parts of Genesis, where that's not the idea that God gives us on how things came about.

And today, we're going to continue in our conversation from last week where we talked about the energy of the cell, which is ATP. There's no free lunches. If anything's going to move and have motion, you need energy, and ATP is what we have found to be the energy to fire those motions.

Today we'll take a step back a little bit and we'll look at the cell as a whole, and how it might resemble a city, and then look at some stats. What are the odds that some of these things could happen purely by chance?

So to get started, I will look at Hebrews 11:10, where it says,

"For he was looking for a city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God."
- Hebrews 11:10

Now the Hebrew writer here is talking about Abraham. He left everything. He left his home, he left his countrymen, and took off on a journey not really knowing where God was leading him. And in fact, he lived in tents along the way. And the scripture here is telling us that Abraham wasn't really concerned about finding a permanent city, a permanent home to hang his hat in, to call home. He was looking for something better. And in this case, it was a city whose architect and builder was God.

Now, you think about the Creator of the universe. If He's going to architect and build a city, that's got to be something to see, right? And this is the context that I want to keep in today's session when we look at the cell, in ways that it resembles a city. In fact, some researchers have said that the cell more resembles a universe, but we're going to keep it to the city level to make it more manageable today. And to do this thought exercise, we need to compare it to a human-made city, that we may build underwater.

Building a City

So what are the kind of things we need just to start off with? And I'll give you some examples. First thing, we might need blueprints. Now, of course, to build any city, you're not just going to go start off without any kind of plans whatsoever. These things need to be planned out. There are a lot of complexities going on in a city. Now, how does that relate to a cell? We have blueprints for an actual physical city. Well, in the cell, we've got DNA. That's the blueprints. And they're compacted down a million times smaller than they need to be to fit into this tiny, tiny nucleus. Which is amazing. We talked about that in a previous session. So we have actual blueprints for an actual city. We have blueprints for biological systems, for this biological city that we're going to build.

What about roads? No city would be complete without roads. You must have roads. Does a cell have roads? Well, obviously, I'm not going to put roads up there if the cell doesn't have roads. Of course, it does. It's got different types of roads, and one of those types of roads is called microtubules. Now we're going to look at some videos in a moment on some of these, on how they might look inside the cell. But just picture these roads stemming out from a central location going to all different parts of the cell, because you need to transport things along these roads. It's no different inside the cell than it would be a physical city.

We need factories. We need things manufactured so that we can consume goods. In the cell, these are called ribosomes. And these ribosomes are responsible for actually taking blueprints from the DNA, and making the product from those blueprints. And it makes all kinds of parts. Now, if you'll remember back to our airplane analogy, when we said we needed manuals to be able to create all these parts- the raw parts, right, from the very beginning. This is exactly what the ribosome does, it creates multiple different parts from those blueprints of the DNA.

Waste management. No city would last very long at all without a way to deal with the waste products that come from the inhabitants, from product use and consumption. It's the same thing in the cell. In the cell, those are called lysosomes. Lysosomes are a very, very important part of cellular maintenance, as they take down parts that are no longer needed, they tear these structures down. We'll see a video of this in a moment, but it's really more of a recycling-type of waste management. We think recycling's somewhat of a new idea, it's not. The cell has been doing it since day one, and it does it very efficiently with lysosomes.

A post office. You're going to need a way to communicate and to send packages, and a central place to do that. In the cell, that's called the Golgi Apparatus, where all these packages that are created from the ribosomes, from the factories, are sent to post offices to be boxed up and to be shipped out to other parts of the cell.

Hopefully you're getting the idea that this is absolutely amazing, that this miniature, microbiological form of a city exists in all of our cells. It actually is pretty amazing.

Energy, we talked about this last week. Any city that's going to be livable, we're going to need some energy, whether that's solar, or wind, or coal powered. And the cell actually can take different forms, just like a city, and turn those into energy. For us, that would be things like carbohydrates, or fats, or proteins. And ultimately, as we've seen in our last session, that gets down to the ATP-synthase, which is a very intricate way of creating these ATP molecules. That's done in the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell. In fact, in each one of our cells, we have about 12.5 million of those little ATP-synthase motors that we looked at last week. Absolutely incredible!

Delivery vehicles. So we have these packages that are made by the factories and are in the post office. How do we get them to different places in the cell? Well, that's through vesicles and kinesin proteins, which we'll actually look at a video here in a moment. This is probably one of my favorite examples here, just because of the way it looks in the animation. But of course, we have delivery vehicles. Why wouldn't we in our city?

Messaging. We have to have a way to communicate with one another, especially for long distances away from one another. That could be email, that could be snail mail, there's lots of different ways to communicate. And the cell also has various ways to communicate. One way is through the nerve cells themselves, sending those electrical signals, those impulses. But that's just one of many different ways.

Steel girders. If our city is going to be under water, we have to have someway to hold up the structure that protects the outside from the inside. And on a cell, that's the cytoskeleton. That's what the cytoskeleton does. But there's something unique about the cell cytoskeleton versus the steel girder. With steel, you think of it as rigid and not very pliable, not very movable. That's not the way with the cytoskeleton of a cell. Now, these structures not only keep the cell shaped the way it is, but it's flexible and they're pliable, and they can move. So think about these cells that actually move in the body. The shape needs to change at times. These are very flexible, not like our steel girders. They're actually better.

You need city hall. You need somewhere where you've got people controlling the big picture. As growth happens in the city, you need to plan for expansion and more roads and those sorts of things. Well, in the cell, that would be the cell nucleus. The cell nucleus is like the city hall that holds all the plans, holds all the blueprints.

We will need medicine and clinics. Hey, people get sick from time to time. What are you going to do? How are you going to take care of those residents? Well, in the cell we have lymphocytes. And lymphocytes can branch off into different types of cells like T-cells and B-cells. But particularly the B-cells, which is how we form antibodies. So it's like a medicine chest, all right there within the cell. Whenever there are things- foreign invaders that shouldn't be there. The job of the lymphocytes is to take care of that.

And then, like any good city, there might be multiple cities that we have in our underwater analogy. Well, how do these cities communicate with one another? In a cell, that's going to be through hormones, where you have cell-to-cell interactions. Lots of different places in the body produce these hormones: kidney, heart. And this is one way that they communicate with one another.

So this is really just the tip of the iceberg. We can spend the rest of the session going through more ways that a cell is like a city, but what I want to do next is walk through some visual illustrations of some of these analogies. And we'll start with the blueprint.

What you're looking at above is an image of DNA, if you don't recognize that. And it's actually showing you the DNA in several different packaging states. So here, in this tightly compact state, is a chromosome. Now the only time it's packed this small is when the cell is dividing, otherwise, it's not packed this small all the time. And then you've got a less-packed area, that's the heterogeneous chromotin, or heterochromotin. Then you've got even more loosely packed DNA that's called the euchromotin. And in fact, the DNA inside the nucleus is mostly going to be in this state here, so it can be easily read. And then finally in the more broader state, there's even a bigger state than this when it's unzipped and actually copied. And this is what we're going to see: the process of copying the blueprint. Because the blueprint can't leave the nucleus, it can't leave city hall. So we need something to make copies of the right section for the right part we need, and then take that copy of the blueprint out of city hall to a factory, so it can be manufactured.

So if we start the animation (see video 10:52), what you see is one of these cell workers, who understand the DNA, who know exactly where to go and the right spot to start transcribing, or making a copy of the blueprint. Whenever something needs to be made in a cell, again, the blueprint can't leave the nucleus, so a copy is made. And this is a chemical copy. And what you'll have at the end of this process here is a section of the DNA that we call messenger RNA or mRNA.

If you remember back to an earlier session, we talked about the idea of splicing. So this is the section of the blueprint that we're going to splice away the parts that aren't needed and keep the parts that are needed to make the ultimate part that we do need. And then it's the messenger RNA that's transported outside of city hall or the nucleus to a factory. And that's what we'll look at next.

And to set this video up, we've got these purple globular-looking structures here, those are the factories, those are the ribosomes. You see this long string of messenger RNA here? Now, in this particular video, we're going to see three factories making the same part at the same time. So this is mass production. And these factories are actually going to land on what's called the rough endoplasmic reticulum. We'll talk more about that in a moment. But for now, just watch the process.

As you see, this long strand of messenger RNA that we copied from DNA, it's going through the factories. And these factories are actually making a part as it goes through them. When it's finished making the part, you can see these factories, unlike manmade factories, they disassemble and they float somewhere else to wherever else they need, so they're mobile.

Now, you may be wondering, well where's the part that it made? We can't see that, because if you look at these bumps on the rough endoplasmic reticulum, these are actually transport modules. So the part that's made actually gets pushed down into the ER, the endoplasmic reticulum. What does it do in there? Well, from there it goes to shipping. There's a series of tunnels and pathways underneath the structure that we're seeing here where these parts, these finished parts, are getting ready to be shipped off.

Once the parts are ready to ship, they actually go to another area of the cell, which we're not going to show a video of, called the Golgi Apparatus, and it's like the post office, where once these parts arrive, things are sorted and boxed up and put on different vehicles so they can be transported to different parts of the cell.

What do those vehicles ride on? Well, they ride on roads, they walk on roads. And what you'll see in this video, or this animation, is these microtubules, these are the roads dynamically assembling. They make themselves whenever they need to. And if you look down further here, when we start playing the animation, you'll see a road being torn apart. So these roads are built and they're torn apart, they're built and they're torn apart as they're needed dynamically, all coming from this central part of the cell, this Golgi Apparatus or the post office, if you will.

This is absolutely stunning to watch the animation. Imagine poor Darwin, looking at the cell in the 1850s, not having a clue of the complexities that are going on inside of these miniature cities? It's not his fault. He did the best he could with the knowledge that he had at the time, but our knowledge has grown so much more. We know better. We know that these aren't just globs inside of tissue. There are a lot of things going on here.

Well, after we get the roads built, we've got to have some kind of a worker or a vehicle to take these parts from the post office and deliver them to the parts of the cell. And that's what we're looking at here. You'll see this big round sac, and it's full of parts, it's full of these proteins and enzymes that we built in those ribosome factories. And they're being shuttled across the microtubules by this kinesin protein. And watch this kinesin protein as it looks like it's literally walking along this road that has been built. It kind of looks like a stick figure, these feet that are moving. I call them feet. By the way, what's powering those feet? ATP. With each step that that kinesin protein takes, there's an ATP amount of fuel molecule that's being expended to cause this walking motion. And these little kinesin proteins can walk as much as 120,000 steps along these roads to deliver their packages. Now, if you were to equate that to a postal carrier on foot, that would mean that postal carrier would walk 45 miles with his bag of mail. It is absolutely stunning the things that are going on in our cells at the micro level!

Well, what about the waste management? Again, to set this one up, you'll see these floating particles. Now, everything floats in the cell, because it's a cytoplasm, it's mostly water and then a gel-like substance. But you see all these things floating around in here? Well, what are those? Some of those are amino acids, they're building blocks. Some of them are going to be nucleic acids. There's lots of parts floating. Some of them are going to be ATP, the energy molecule, so as things need energy, they grab one of these molecules and they use it. So these things are just floating all around in the cell, but what happens when we have a part that's no longer needed? Do we just let it take up space in the cytoplasm? Or how about a part that's old and fulfilled its purpose? Well, no. We don't just leave it flying around like space junk. We actually have these lysosomes that float around and they attach to these things that need to be broken down. And it doesn't just compact them or destroy them or burn them up in some kind of a way, but it actually disassembles them and then puts them back out into the cellular environment, so that that the parts can be reused. It's the prime example here of recycling.

And if you'll watch this lysosome, you'll see it looks like it's leaving behind a trail of debris. Well, that's not debris. That is the building blocks of the thing that it's tearing down. You might think of it like, I've got a stack of lumber, and maybe I build a picnic table out of it. Well, I use the picnic table for a few years and now I don't need it anymore, it's taking up space in my backyard. Well, rather than destroy it, I can just take the nails out, disassemble it, and I can reuse the boards. It's kind of the same principle here with the lysosomes. And inside of these lysosomes are enzymes that are very good at breaking down things.

And then the last animation we'll look at here is energy production. We've already seen one animation of ATP-synthase, so this is a different type of animation. But to set this one up, we have the inner membrane of the mitochondria, which is like the powerhouse, the power generation house of the cell. And then here's the motors on ATP-synthase. We have the rotor up here that's going to rotate. And as this is going, you'll notice these little components flying into the side, those are the protons that powers the motor, we talked about this. And it drives this shaft. And as the shaft turns, you notice this bump. And as it hits these three appendages on the bump, you'll notice these chemicals coming in, ADP, and there's an extra phosphate chemical there.

And as this thing rotates, it energizes it, and it makes ATP. So, if you remember back on our talk about ATP, there were three phosphate molecules. So it takes ADP with two phosphates, and it crunches on that third one, kind of like a spring, compresses it down. And this video is greatly reduced in speed. If we were to speed this up in real time, these motors would be spinning at a rate of about 9,000 rpm, so very fast. And again, these things are creating ATP constantly in mitochondria.

So these are just some of the ways that the cell is like a city. When we look at some of the animation, we can see it really does look like a city with roads and pathways and waste management and energy production.

And it reminds me of a verse in Matthew 5:14, where Jesus says,

"You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden."
- Matthew 5:14

And it's true. When you think about a city or even a house that's up in the upper elevation on a hill, you see that, especially at night with the lights on.

And when I think about the city of the cell, we can go back to the invention of the scanning electron microscope, which is 1937. With the invention of that microscope we've been able to see more and more details; and we make these microscopes better and better each decade, so that now we can actually see inside the nucleus, and actually take a 3D journey down the DNA molecule, such incredible detail.

And these kinds of things can't be hidden. Just go and type a search on the internet about the inner workings of a cell. There is so much information. And this is what I think about when I think about the city of a cell. It can't be hidden. It was hidden back in Darwin's day, they had no idea. In our day, we have no excuse. We know the details of the cell, and it's mind-boggling.

Well, how big are these cities that I'm talking about inside the cell? Here we have a picture of Tokyo with the famous Tokyo Tower. It's a radio transmission tower. And if I've got my stats correct, there's about 38 million people that live in Tokyo, it's the largest inhabited city on the planet, 38 million people! Now we compare that to the cell, the cell has about 42 million residents, if we think about residents being proteins.

Aside from proteins, there's other objects, obviously, trillions of them in every one of the trillions of cells that we have in our bodies. So these really are like cities, when we talk about the numbers, we talk about how it behaves like a city even.

Well, what are the odds that Tokyo could build itself over time? What if I took a big pit and I threw in a bunch of cement and electrical cables and elevators and maybe some wireless access points for wireless communication? What if I threw all this stuff in a big pit, and then maybe give it a billion years and come back. Do you think I would have Tokyo? No. Nobody ever would think that way, because we know the odds of that happening, they're impossible.

But when it comes to the cell, we think that it could've happened by chance, or at least that's what we're taught. So let's take a look at some of these odds. What do the actual numbers show? Is it really possible?

Now, if I were to take a rock, and I were to wait for a night of a full moon, and I were to go outside, and I threw this rock as hard as I could at the moon, do you think I could hit it? No, you don't think I could hit it? What if I worked out for 10 years and built up a lot of arm strength? Do you think I could ever hit the moon with a rock thrown from the surface of the earth? I don't think so either, it's an impossibility.

Well, someone has put the odds to this. So remember when it comes to odds, you can put an odd to just about anything. It doesn't mean it's possible, it just means there are mathematical odds. And the odds of this happening is one in 10 to the 50th power. In case you're a little rusty on your exponential math, that's a one followed by 50 zeroes.

So if I tried this many times, one of those times, mathematically speaking, I'm going to be successful in hitting the moon.

Well, am I really going to be successful, even if I do it twice that many times? No, it doesn't matter how many times I try, that's never going to happen, and there's a lot of reasons for that. That's why when we see this number 10 to the 50th power, it's considered a statistic impossibility. So it's going to be impossible. Even though there's an odds for it, one in this many times, it doesn't mean it could ever happen. It's really considered a statistical impossibility. So we keep this number in mind, this 10 to the 50th power. And let's look, and relate that to the cell.

So, if we're going to have a single cell, like this one shown here, eventually become a male and a female, because that's what we need for reproduction in humans, there's a lot of changes that have to take place. Hundreds of thousands, millions, billions. There's a lot of changes, if this cell is going to become humans over time. So what are the odds of that happening? Somebody worked that out. Dr. Francisco Ayala has calculated the odds of being one in 10 to the one millionth power. How close are we to 10 to the 50th? This number is so huge, it's really unimaginable. It's really unthinkable. We can write it in scientific notation, but this number is meaningless. It is so far beyond 10 to the 50th power, it's beyond possible. However, Dr. Ayala left out a few things. Well, three other scientists came back behind him and said, "No, it's more like 10 to the 24 millionth power. He forgot a few factors. Someone else from Yale actually came back, Harold Morowitz, and said, "No, they're both wrong, it's more like one in 10 to the 340 millionth power."

Now, we're not going in the right direction for evolution, are we? We're going in the wrong direction here in terms of odds and statistics. This number again is so big, it's unusable. We can't do anything with that number, it's incredibly large. Maybe we're starting out too grand. So we're starting out with a single cell that's already got all the parts working, which, I mean- and now we're trying to get that down to the humans.

Well, let's just see, what are the odds that this cell could even come into existence by itself, by chance, random processes? Well, that's also been worked out. And that is worked out to be one in 10 to the 57,800th power.

So no longer are we going from a cell to a human, now we're just saying, what are the odds a cell, even a "simple", and I put that in quotes there, a simple cell could evolve by itself by natural chances? Again, this number is astronomically huge.

And to give you an idea of why I say that's still too huge. If you think about how small an atom is. You know, everything is made up of atoms. Well, you know what they say about atoms, right? Don't trust an atom, because they make up everything, right? I'll continue on. But it's true, they make up everything. And it's very, very tiny. So how many atoms do you think are in your fingertips right now? Billions and billions. How many atoms do you think are in your entire body? Well, that's been estimated to be 10 to the 27th power. That's how many atoms are in your body.

How many atoms do you think are in the entire universe? That's also been calculated as 10 to the 82nd power. Think about the vastness of the universe. Now, there's a lot of empty space in the universe, there's a lot of objects, a lot of galaxies, a lot of stars- hundreds of billions. And when we look at this number, 57,800, that's so far beyond the total number of atoms in the universe. Do you see the scale of the numbers we're talking about here? Well, maybe we're still being too grandiose in our desires here.

Let's, instead of saying, how does a simple cell form by chance? We know that each of these cells, like amoebas, have proteins. They have tiny, little proteins in them. No cell operates without proteins. So what are the odds that we can even get one protein to form by itself, and fold in the proper shape out of nature? Well, it's 10 to the 164th power. And as an example, I've got the HSP protein, it's better known as the heat shock protein.

Whenever your body is under duress, or your cells are in duress, this protein is produced in rapid amounts to compensate for that stress. It's a very important protein. What are the odds we can get a protein like that? You can see this one is folded in a unique shape there, a hexagonal shape. Well, 10 to the 164th power. The numbers are getting lower, so that's better, right? This number is still so huge.

So we need to do another thought experiment to kind of get an idea of how big this number is. I heard this awhile back and it's kind of stuck with me. I like the example, so I'm going to use it here. Let's say you go to the beach, and you pick up a single grain of sand, just one grain of sand, and you color it, because we need to find this sand later on, this grain of sand. We're going to actually need to find it out of more sand, so we don't need to color it to a color that can be confused with other types of sand. We know we have green sand, there's actually black sand, I've seen green sand beaches, black sand beaches, so maybe color it purple. You color the sand purple, the one grain of sand, purple. And now you fill the earth from the core to the surface with sand and your one grain of sand that you colored is in there somewhere. I don't know where. And you've got one chance to reach down, pick up a grain of sand and for that to be your purple-colored sand. What do you think the odds are of that? Well, the odds are one in 10 to the 30th power.

Again, we're thinking about this 10 to the 164th power. The odds of you finding that one grain of sand out of an earth-sized package of sand is one in 10 to the 30th power. You see how these numbers are so huge?

But we need to get this number higher. So let's just go big. Let's just go really big. Take the known universe. Somewhere along 90 billion light years across. Incredibly huge! It makes us feel so small when we look out at God's creation, doesn't it sometimes? Let's take the whole universe and fill it all with sand, all the empty spaces, all the objects, they all become sand, everything is sand. We put your one grain of colored sand somewhere in the entire universe. We fly you in a rocket ship anywhere you want to go. You reach out and you pick up one grain of sand. What are the odds that it's going to be your colored piece of sand? That would be only 1 in 10 to the 96th power.

You see how far we are from 164? So far. And again, we're well above 10 to the 50th, which is a statistical impossibility, right? Now, you can believe in evolution if you want to. I've said that before, I'll say it again. But you need to understand what you're putting your faith in. I don't have enough faith to believe in that process. There's not only the odds that are stacked up against it, but our own observation in life shows us that it doesn't work the way that Darwin thought it worked.

Here's a quote from Fred Hoyle. You may be familiar with that name. He's actually the one who coined the phrase Big Bang. He did it out of sarcastic jest. He never liked that it stuck, but that's the way it is. He says,

"The notion that not only biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."
- Fred Hoyle

Now Fred Hoyle was very respected. He passed away, I believe in 2001. He contributed a lot to science, a lot to astronomy and to physics. And here he's saying that- he used the word biopolymers, that's another way to say a protein. Remember, we're talking about the odds of just a single protein arising and folding in a proper shape by chance, 10 to the 164th power. He says the notion that that could happen or that the operating program, and he uses the English way of spelling program there, it's not a spelling error. What is he talking about with operating program? That's the DNA, that's the blueprint. He says either one of these arising by chance is nonsense of a high order. Now, Fred Hoyle, Dr. Hoyle was an atheist. But he believed in intelligent design.

And if you research what he did believe, he never believed that chance created life. He said, it's too complex, it's too impossible. And he actually worked out his own odds, which I don't have in the deck here. It's astronomically too high to have happened. So he believes that life was intelligently designed. Well, how can that be if he's an atheist? Well, he didn't believe God did it, he believed that extraterrestrials, somewhere out in space did it.

So he was another pioneer of panspermia, which we talked about in a previous session. So intelligent design, yes. A Creator God, no. He couldn't allow for that. But again, saying that aliens did it really only kicks the can down the road a little ways. Now you have to explain the aliens and how they could've arisen biologically by chance. And once you do that, if they were made by even more intelligent aliens, where did they come from? You see the problem? You just keep going back and back and back.

At some point you need a Creator who's transcendent, who's outside of time, outside of space, who could've brought it all together. That's the most logical conclusion you could come to, in my opinion.

So how do we know if something is intelligently designed or not? And I'll use SETI as an example here. You see some of these large radio array telescopes pointing up. And their sole purpose in life is to listen. They do some transmission, too, but they mostly listen. What are they listening for? They're looking for signs of intelligence somewhere out there in the cosmos. And what they see is, or what they hear, what they are listening to is what you would call background radiation, just a low level noise that's just constant all the time. Now, if they were to see something different, if they were to hear something different, you think that would be an implication of intelligence? Especially if it was an ordered signal? Absolutely. They would shout it from the rooftops. "There's intelligence out there. We received this." Even if it was a coded message. We have the ability to know if something is a code or not, even if we don't understand the code. DNA is a good example of that.

And in fact, this actually happened in August, I think, of 1977. Big Ear Radio in Ohio, one of these SETI locations that was listening, they received a small signal that was different than the background noise. They circled it on a piece of paper and wrote, "Wow" next to it. It's become known as the wow signal. And for 40 years it has been thought that this came from an intelligent source. And it only amounted to be about like six characters. Yet for 40 years they believed that this must have come from, some still believe it. Others think now maybe it might have come from a passing by comet. But the point is, in the normal radiation that they were listening to, they received what looked like an ordered signal of just six characters, and they proclaimed it from the rooftops for 40 years.

Well, what are the implications of a code that's three billion characters long that we still haven't fully cracked, because it's level, after level, after level? It's like having a book with a table of contents, with a table of contents, with a table of contents. It's metadata, upon metadata, upon metadata, if you're a programmer. Would that be a sign of intelligence? If we shout it from the rooftops that we received six abnormal characters from our listening to space, and here we have three billion ordered characters and a code that we still don't fully understand, but yet somehow that's not from an intelligent source?

I'm telling you, as a Christian, you do not have to hang your head low when you say you believe that God created everything. That is the most logical explanation we have. We talked about this in the last several sessions, that codes don't come from nature, they don't come from molecules. The medium by which you have a code, by which you write code on is secondary. I could write a code on a blackboard, I could write on a piece of paper, I could put it in electronic signal with ones and zeroes, that's arbitrary. The primary thing we need to think about is, what is the code? Where does the concept of the code come from to begin with? It always, always comes from a mind.

While we're on this topic of alien life, I wanted to put this in here, I get asked this a lot. What do you think about aliens? Isn't it possible God could've created aliens? Well, is it possible? Well, of course, He could have created life on other planets. But what does Scripture say? Isaiah 45:18,

"For this is what the Lord says, 'He who created the heavens, He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it as a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited. I am the Lord and there is no one else.'"
- Isaiah 45:18

Well, what's God telling Isaiah here? He's saying, "Yeah, I made all the other places that you see in the universe, but I only made one to be inhabited." And when we point our telescopes out to space and we see all these magnificent structures and planets, some of them have an eerie beauty about them. They're beautiful because of all the different landscapes and designs, but they're eerie, because they're barren, there's no life there. And God said, "I did this on purpose."

When we look out at the universe, we shouldn't get the sense that, oh, it's a shame, we're the only ones. We should get the sense that God did this for us. And He gave us all the evidence that we need if we just take the time to look around and see it.

Now again, going back to Darwin, Darwin had a bottom-up approach. He believed that you could take something simple and over time, they kind of get together and make something bigger, a little more complex that gets together with other molecules and gets bigger and more complex, and eventually you get humans, right? From rocks to rock stars, like I said at the beginning.

That bottom-up approach, that's not observational, that's not what we see. That's not what we see in science, that's not what we see every day. The industry that I'm in, information technology, cybersecurity, if you're going to create something complex, it's a top-down approach, meaning the concept always starts in a mind and then you go out and you develop that concept.

If you're going to build a city, it's the same way. You have a concept and a mind. You start creating blueprints, you get plans, years and years of planning by city councils, even just for things like annexing a small piece of land. What are we going to do with that land? We're going to put substations there: power, water, all these things. It's a top down approach. And the most beautiful example I can think of, in Scripture, of a top-down approach to creation is the very first verse in the very first chapter of the very first book, "In the beginning God." There's our top-down approach. That not only makes sense, that's observational, that's what we experience. God, in His infinite mind conceptualized all of creation: us, you and me, everything. And that's how it all began. It wasn't a bottom-up. Bottom-up doesn't work in nature.

And then what we'll end on, our anchor verse we've been using throughout these series, Psalms 139:14,

"I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works, and my soul knows it very well."
- Psalms 139:14

Again, I thank you for your attention in this session. If we look ahead to the next session, we'll take one more look at the partner or companion way that mutations supposedly work, and that's natural selection.

I look forward to talking to you then.