Oxidative Phosphorylation, chemiosmosis and God

Oxidative Phosphorylation is part of the final step in a process known as cellular respiration. When one eats something, depending upon what it is (protein, fat or carbohydrate) it is converted into glucose and then encounters this or that and eventually through the process mentioned above is converted into the most important stuff inside your body - ATP. ATP (which is short for Adenosine Triphosphate) is the fuel that all of your cells use to do things. Without ATP you would be dead because none of the 3+ trillion cells in your body would regenerate, or do anything else for that matter. In effect, one eats because one needs to make ATP.

Did you know that your body is electrical? When you run a comb quickly through your hair, the friction causes an electrical current, causing your hair to stand on end. This same affect is going on in all of your cells - all the time.

Outside each of your cells is a membrane, called a plasma membrane. Inside the cell are other objects called organelles which also have membranes. Across these membranes flow hydrogen ions, or more accurately protons. This flow of ions across the membrane creates a "friction" of sorts and generates an electrical current. This current is used by proteins embedded in the membrane to carry out work, such as the making of ATP by the protein complex - ATP Synthase, during a process called chemiosmosis.

Animals use this process and plants do also - in a slightly modified form.

The whole process looks something like this:

Glucose (sugar) + Oxygen = Carbon Dioxide + Water + Energy (ATP)

What on earth does this have to do with God?

Dr. Gerald Schroeder, an MIT Physicist has put together some terrific material about the probability of this type of complexity happening by chance. To quote from Dr. Schroeder,

"Humans and all mammals have some 50,000 genes. That implies we have, as an order of magnitude estimate, some 50,000 proteins. It is estimated that there are some 30 million species of animal life on Earth. If the genomes of all animals produced 50,000 proteins, and no proteins were common among any of the species (a fact we know to be false, but an assumption that makes our calculations favor the random evolutionary assumption), there would be (30 million x 50,000) 1.5 trillion (1.5 x10 to power of 12) proteins in all life. (The actual number is vastly lower). Now let's consider the likelihood of these viable combinations of proteins forming by chance, recalling that, as the events following the Cambrian explosion taught us, not all combinations of proteins are viable.

Proteins are coils of several hundred amino acids. Take a typical protein to be a chain of 300 amino acids. There are 20 commonly occurring amino acids in life. This means that the number of possible combinations of the amino acids in our model protein is 20 to the power of 300 (that is 20 multiplied by itself 300 times) or in the more usual ten-based system of numbers, 10 to the power of 390 ( Ten multipled by itself 390 times or more simply said a one with 390 zeroes after it!!!!!) . Nature has the option of choosing among the possible 10 to the power of 390 proteins, the the 1.5 x (10 to power of 12) proteins of which all viable life is composed. Can this have happened by random mutations of the genome? Not if our understanding of statistics is correct. It would be as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million times.

But this impossibility of randomness producing order is not different from the attempt to produce Shakespeare or any meaningful string of letters more than a few words in length by a random letter generator. Gibberish is always the result. This is simply because the number of meaningless letter combinations vastly exceeds the number of meaningful combinations. With life it was and is lethal gibberish."

Gibberish is indeed lethal in the human genome. Any non-specific cellular activity is in fact, lethal. Even viruses which attack and destroy are cells are specific in the way they go about doing this.

Can order and specificity emerge out of randomness? No. In fact, just the opposite - the universe is decaying or experiencing entropy - disorder, out of the grand order it began with.

Where does this leave us? Well, one can either accept that order cannot occur from disorder and understand that an intelligence must have designed the universe or one can, like Mr. Newdow in California, walk blindly in ignorance and pretend that this intelligence, which we know to be God, does not exist.

I have actually spoken to some persons who desire ignorance. They had hearts and minds which have become so calloused that despite any pleadings to the contrary, they refused to believe the truth. Yet, unbelief does not negate truth. Just because I do not believe in gravity does not mean I will not die if I jump off of the roof of a multi-story building.

Every deliberate action in the universe (and they are all deliberate) has a cause. This cause also creates an effect. There is no randomness in the universe.

The bible tells us that God is a God of order, not chaos. He desires order in our lives as well as the universe around us. He also tells us in the bible that He created us to enjoy this universe and Him as well. But we cannot enjoy either the universe or God if we are tainted with sin, which we all are.

So in order to "untaint" or remove the stain of sin from us, God designed another process - He sent His Son, Jesus Christ to take the punishment for all of us and thereby act as our scapegoat and remove our guilt - if only we will believe.

Have you believed in Jesus? Do you believe in the order He created? Isn't it time you did?