Here’s a great proof for God from Chemistry that I recently learned about.
“When two molecules appear identical and their structures differ only by being mirror images of each other, those molecules are said to have chirality. Your left and right hands illustrate chirality. Your hands may appear to be identical, but in reality, they are only mirror images of each other, hence the term handedness.” [1]
You probably know that DNA is made up of four simple nucleotides and that DNA is in the shape of a spiral staircase. Well, actually, getting even more specific, DNA is always in the shape of a right-handed spiral staircase.
When amino acids are formed in the laboratory, they can result either way, “left-handed” or “right-handed” in a 50% to 50% ratio.
“In our body, every single amino acid of every protein is found with the same left-handed chirality. ... It is a universally accepted fact of chemistry that chirality cannot be created in chemical molecules by a random process. When a random chemical reaction is used to prepare molecules having chirality, there is an equal opportunity to prepare the left-handed isomer as well as the right-handed isomer. It is a scientifically verifiable fact that a random chance process, which forms a chiral product, can only be a 50/50 mixture of the two optical isomers. There are no exceptions.” [2]
“The DNA molecule is made up of billions of complicated chemical molecules called nucleotides, and these nucleotide molecules exist as the “R” or right-handed optical isomer. The “L” isomer of nucleotides can be prepared in the lab, but they do not exist in natural DNA. There is no way that a random chance process could have formed these proteins and DNA with their unique chirality.” [3]
“How can a random chance natural process create proteins with thousands of “L” molecules, and then also create DNA with billions of “R” molecules?” [4] A random process always results in a 50-50 mix.
To make a strand of DNA step by step as evolutionists claim and still make the correct spiral, all the steps in the strand must bend the same way, i.e. right. In another post I talked about how human DNA has over 3 billion “steps on the ladder” or characters in the chain. All those characters have to be in the correct order or you don’t get a human being.
Chirality adds an even more impossible level of difficulty for DNA to have formed by accidental mutation as the evolutionist faith believes. In building up the DNA staircase step by step, every step that is added must turn out to be ones that bend to the right. If you were going to build a spiral staircase with your eyes closed and you start out with an equal number of left and right handed steps, you could never build the spiral randomly. Impossible.
Here is one very famous case of chirality in life. Do you remember the drug Thalidomide. It ”is a sedative drug that was prescribed to pregnant women, from 1957 into the early 60's. It was present in at least 46 countries under different brand names. ‘When taken during the first trimester of pregnancy, Thalidomide prevented the proper growth of the fetus, resulting in horrific birth defects in thousands of children around the world’. Why? The Thalidomide molecule is chiral. There are left and right-handed Thalidomides, just as there are left and right hands. The drug that was marketed was a 50/50 mixture. One of the molecules, say the left one, was a sedative, whereas the right one was found later to cause fetal abnormalities. ‘The tragedy is claimed to have been entirely avoidable had the physiological properties of the individual thalidomide [molecules] been tested prior to commercialization." [5]
Another example is the artificial sweetener, Aspartame, which is more than a hundred times sweeter than sucrose. However, the mirror image molecule is bitter.
Not only is all DNA right-handed, but proteins are all left-handed. There are 20 different amino acids needed in your body to sustain your life. They are the building blocks for an estimated 2 million proteins in your body. Your DNA acts like the “designer” for the proteins. It links molecules together along its length by a type of hand-clasping or matching. This is why when the proteins are formed, they are all left-handed when they separate to go about their important functions in the body.
In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did an experiment with a mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water vapor by passing it through an electric discharge. A few amino acids resulted and the newspaper headline was “Life in a Test-tube.” Don’t be fooled. Sure amino acids make up proteins and proteins are important for life, but a few amino acids are not life any more than a few auto parts laid out on your driveway make a car, especially if the parts are all left-handed. By the way, it turns out their experiment was discredited anyway because their mixture of ingredients is no longer believed to be the original formula for the primitive atmosphere of the earth. [6]
Your body is a walking miracle every instant in time. The chirality of all the amino acids and nucleotides proves it.
There must be God.
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[1] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page ii, paragraph 2. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf
[2] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page ii, paragraph 3. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf
[3] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page iii, paragraph 1. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf
[4] Evolution Hopes You Don’t Know Chemistry: The Problem With Chirality. Charles McCombs, PhD Organic Chemistry. Page iii, paragraph 2. http://www.icr.org/i/pdf/imp/imp-371.pdf
[5] http://chirality.ouvaton.org/homepage.htm
[6] Icons of Evolution, Science of Myth? Why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong, Chapter 2, Jonathan Wells. Regnery Press, Washington, DC, 2000
I’m going to assume that almost every person loves trees. They are everywhere around us with about 100,000 different species, but we often take them for granted.
Without trees we wouldn’t exist. They take the carbon dioxide that we exhale out of the air and return to us oxygen that we need for survival. What a phenomenal coincidence if you don’t recognize a master designer. The whole amazingly complicated and delicately balanced ecosystem exists to perfectly support our existence.
Trees have a vascular system that passes water and nutrients throughout all the cells in the tree, somewhat similar to our own circulatory system of blood.
Trees produce for us an amazing variety of fruits that we love. They are almost all tasty in our mouths and at the same time very healthy for our bodies. Yet, there is a tremendous variety: apples, oranges, citrus, peaches, pears, cherries, coconuts, and so many others.
Trees produce in great abundance, far more than is needed for their survival…almost like they do it for us. Trees are the great “givers” in nature. I will always remember this big old cherry tree that my aunt and uncle had in their backyard. That thing produced so many cherries that they could never give enough away to the whole neighborhood. As hard as they tried, the ground would always be covered with a layer of rotting cherries.
Forests of trees support the life and existence of many other plants as well as myriads of insects and animals.
Trees give us shade from the hot sun and they shelter us from the rain like a big protective friend.
Trees give us their wood for building our houses and thousands of other creations. For thousands of years we burned the wood of trees to keep warm and to cook meals.
Many a romantic moment has happened in front of a burning fire. One of the greatest joys of going camping is sitting around the fire in the evening.
Trees give us paper. The vast majority of human knowledge that was ever shared in history was made possible by paper from trees.
Trees directly or indirectly provide jobs for a large segment of the population.
Another incredible aspect of trees is that they start from a small seed. A seed is truly a miracle in itself, containing nourishment to begin its life and all the DNA information needed to build the tree for its whole lifetime. The first thing to emerge from the seed is the "taproot" which goes straight down into the ground.
Some of the largest seeds come from trees, but the largest tree, Sequoiadendron giganteum, produces one of the smallest tree seeds. (see picture)
Ancient trees that are now under the earth have turned to coal which has also been another huge contributor to human development; heating buildings, driving steam engines for manufacturing and locomotives to move people and business; and making steam power to generate the majority of electricity in the world.
Every little boy who ever walked in the woods has picked up a stick and done wondrous things with it.
Trees can touch the sky like the Redwood in California named Hyperion that is 379.5 feet high.
Trees remind us of the past like the Great Basin bristlecone pine called Methuselah (above). It has been dated by drilling a core sample and counting the annual rings at 4,844 years old in 2012.
The largest living thing on earth is the Sequoia named General Sherman (below) at 52,508 cu ft.
Trees can also be miniaturized like the Japanese Bonzai to display elegant beauty.
I'm really moved by the awesomeness of the Kapok tree.
Every autumn I try to make a trip to upstate New York when the leaves are changing color. It is spectacular and I never get tired of it. The trees do it for us every year like a living painting.
Trees are not an accident or some plant that happened to have the best materialistic, heartless survival abilities. Trees were designed with us in mind and are a precious life-giving gift to us from someone who loved us before we were born.
We could not exist without them.
There must be God.
From the time that we were little children, we have heard the axiom that “Practice makes perfect.”
We all know the meaning of it, namely that just about anything in life that is worth doing or learning takes practice. You don’t get it right the first time. From potty training, to learning to walk, to brushing your teeth, to kindergarten, to playing a sport, playing an instrument, getting a job, to cooking your dinner, to about everything else, it takes practice to get it right.
Do you find anyone out there advocating “It takes an accident to make it perfect?” When you get right down to the bottom line, that’s what atheists believe. Life itself was an accident. For each higher level of species, there were more accidents (mutations).
The Big Bang was an accident of some kind. The appearance of life from non-living chemicals was an accident.
Most atheists will admit that random mutation cannot generate successful changes for producing evolution so they will add in “natural selection” as the cure all because it magically adds a “positive” directedness. But as I detailed in a previous Proof for God (#35), natural selection is never the source of new information. It only acts on what exists already which can be inherited. No new information comes from it.
If mutation does not work and natural selection does not work, then adding them together will not work. “Practice makes perfect” obviously means good practice, not bad practice. Bad practice added to bad practice makes a worse result.
You and I might be able to conceive of one or two accidents that happen to go “right” (i.e. toward the direction of evolution), but millions upon billions upon trillions of accidents that go right is NOT conceivable.
Michael Jordan made 49.69% of his shots in his career by practicing a lot, not by accident.
The number one hitter of all time in baseball, Ty Cobb hit successfully 36.6% of the time in his career by practicing a lot, not by accident.
Nobody is any good at anything complicated by accident.
People who decide to be atheists have concluded that all the incredible complexity from the biochemical level up to the intergalactic level including all the flowers, fish, birds, and animals exist by accident followed by reproductive selectivity, followed by another accident, followed by more selectivity on and on to the millionth degree.
Huh!
I believe that atheists start out with a decision that there is no God and then proceed to conjure up a way that this observable world “might” have come about. Then they believe in that. They don’t start with the observable data known to science today and propose a theory. They start with the assumption that there is no God and a theory from 154 years ago. Conclusions and theories should come after analysis of data, not the other way around.
Many examples of people falsifying the data (on both sides) exist in the scientific fields. Also many advances in science have proven previous theories were false. But the “old truths” were slow to die because those who believed in them could not give them up. We have to be careful who we bow down to as our authorities. Darwin thought a cell was mostly an uncomplicated mass of protoplasm. That’s far, far distant from what biochemists know today since the electron microscope was invented.
Even Albert Einstein admitted he fudged the data when it led him to the conclusion that the universe was expanding. That would have meant the universe must have had a beginning at a certain point in time which would clearly imply a creator. Later when the research of others like Hubble also concluded the universe was expanding, Einstein admitted his falsification. [1] [2] He called it his “biggest blunder.”
Science is clearly closing in on atheists and making it harder and harder to sustain their beliefs.
Dr. Paul Zulehner, dean of Vienna University’s divinity school and one of the world’s most distinguished sociologists of religion, has said that atheists in Europe have become “an infinitesimally small group. There are not enough of them to be used for sociological research.” [3] Also, “John Updike’s observation, “Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position,” appears to have become common currency throughout much of the West.” [4]
"And if you think it is challenging to be a Catholic parent, try being an Atheist parent! Some 70% of Americans raised to believe God does not exist end up being a member of a religion as an adult." [5] That is the worst retention rate of any "faith".
Real scientists go where the evidence leads. They don’t cling to unverifiable dogma. The truth about God and evolution will not be suppressed for much longer in science.
There must be a God.
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[1] http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-biggest-blunder-turns.html
"In 1917, Albert Einstein inserted a term called the cosmological constant into his theory of general relativity to force the equations to predict a stationary universe in keeping with physicists' thinking at the time. When it became clear that the universe wasn't actually static, but was expanding instead, Einstein abandoned the constant, calling it the '"biggest blunder" of his life."
[2] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071127142128.htm
Then, 12 years later, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is not static -- it is actually expanding. So Einstein scrapped his idea of a cosmological constant and dismissed it as his biggest blunder.
[3] Analysis: Atheism worldwide in decline. By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religious Affairs Editor, Published: March. 1, 2005
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2005/03/01/Analysis-Atheism-worldwide-in-decline/UPI-20691109700930/
[4] Atheism worldwide in decline. By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religious Affairs Editor, Published: March. 1, 2005
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2005/03/01/Analysis-Atheism-worldwide-in-decline/UPI-20691109700930/
[5] Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). See chart of retention rates among all faiths at this website: http://nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com/2012/06/reverts-catholics-who-left-and-came.html
“There is enough capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.” [1] This is a quote from Richard Dawkins.
I don’t know about you but if I came across an encyclopedia that was three or four times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica, you could never get me to believe that it came into existence without any intelligence behind it. But that’s what Richard Dawkins, famous atheist, believes and evangelizes, and probably also makes a lot of money espousing.
“To illustrate further, the amount of information that could be stored in a pinhead’s volume of DNA is staggering. It is the equivalent information content of a pile of paperback books 500 times as tall as the distance from the earth to the moon, each with a different but specific content.” [2]
Let me say that in a different way for you. The distance between the earth and the moon varies, but the average is 238,900 miles (384,400 km). Imagine a stack of paperback books, all different, that is 11,945,000 miles high. Now shrink down all that information until you can put it on a pinhead. That is the reality of the world around us. That’s how much information exists all around us in every square millimeter of the plants, animals, and people we see. Almost incomprehensible!
Atheists do not believe there was any superior intelligence behind all that information. It all comes from accidental mutations and natural selection (which I have already written about as processes that LOSE information). The more scientists discover about DNA and microbiology, the harder atheists have to work to keep believing in nothing as the source of life.
“…But in all the reading I’ve done in the life-sciences literature, I’ve never found a mutation that added information. …All point mutations that have been studied on the molecular level turn out to reduce the genetic information and not to increase it.” [3]
(NOTE: Let me say that in layman's terms. The very type of mutation that evolutionists depend on happening billions of times to produce all current life forms has NEVER EVER been observed even once in the history of science.)
Life cannot exist without order and information. Every living being starts out with a single cell which contains all the information needed to eventually build the complete organism. When scientists tried to determine the smallest amount of information necessary to still end up with a potentially living organism, they came up with 256 genes. But they profess this theoretical organism might not be able to survive on its own.
“More recently, Eugene Koonin and others tried to calculate the bare minimum requirement for a living cell, and came up with a result of 256 genes. But they were doubtful whether such a hypothetical bug could survive, because such an organism could barely repair DNA damage, could no longer fine-tune the ability of its remaining genes, would lack the ability to digest complex compounds, and would need a comprehensive supply of organic nutrients in its environment.” [4]
“Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality, the smallest element of which – a functional protein or gene – is complex beyond our own creative capacities, a reality which is the antithesis of chance, which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? Alongside the level of ingenuity and complexity exhibited by the molecular machinery of life, even our most advanced artifacts appear clumsy…” [5]
Encyclopedic amounts of information are required for the most basic form of life to exist. It could not be assembled step by step and then suddenly come to life. The information had to already be there at the beginning of life.
Imagine the most complex system you can think of, say a supercomputer, a skyscraper, a spaceship, whatever. The amount of information to build those systems is not enough to build the first living cell. Life is no accident.
There has to be God.
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[1] Famous atheist Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p. 115. (New York: W. W. Norton 1986)
[2] Jonathan Sarfati, Refuting Evolution. p. 121 (Green Forest, AR, Master Books, 1999). Original information from W. Gitt, “Dazzling Design in Miniature”, Creation Ex Nihilo, 20(1): 6, December 1997-February 1998.
[3] L. Spetner, Not by Chance (Brooklyn, NY: The Judaica Press, Inc.) p. 131-143.
[4] ] Jonathan Sarfati, Refuting Evolution. p. 123 (Green Forest, AR, Master Books, 1999). Original information from W. Wells, “Taking Life To Bits”, New Scientist, 155 (2095): 30-33, 1997.
[5] M. Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Chevy Chase, MD: Adler and Adler Publishers, Inc. 1986), p. 328.
