Wonderfully and Fearfully Made

I believe in God because I opened my heart and my mind to the possibility and He answered. The gift of faith has given me a new way to perceive the world and a clearer prism through which to understand meaning. Being called to serve God through medicine as I have been, my eyes are opened to the wonder of His creation, life, on every scale I study it on. It is easy to appreciate the miracle of man simply by meeting one of your fellows on the street. We, each of us, are inner worlds of experience, thought and emotion and external marvels of engineering. But what inspired me to write this essay are the wonders of life on the submicroscopic level.

The story of characterizing life and how it works is the story of peering into the progressively smaller and smaller. Leuwenhook discovered a world hitherto unknown with his microscope. This lead to understanding of the fundamental building block of life, the cell. Further scientific inquiry revealed the inner workings of the cell on the level of organelles. And another area of science altogether revealed the very smallest building blocks of life, the molecule and the atoms. The activity of life on this level of magnification is a wonder to apprehend. That the myriad reactions that collectively comprise our metabolism can work together to support life is a miracle of inscrutable coordination.

If you are reading this at a wooden table with a glass of water placed on it, you are looking at the very same stuff of which you are made. The difference between the table and the water and you is the relationship of the parts contained within with each of them. The table and the water are inert. The wood is dead, its metabolism has stopped. Now it is carbohydrate, and residual enzymes frozen. They are chains of carbon and hydrogen along with other elements such as oxygen collectively serving as a table, and an oxygen and two hydrogens serving as water. But we are animated assemblages of the same stuff.

The difference is that we are processing energy contained in the chemical bonds of the food we eat. Carbohydrates and other molecules of food such as proteins and fats are broken down by enzymes into glucose. The glucose can be split apart in the aqueous interior of our cells to produce a little energy that is transiently stored in a molecule called ATP, the currency of energy in all living systems, molecularly very similar to one of the constituents of DNA. But this would not be enough energy to keep life going, the products of that initial reaction are shuttled into a series of reactions within one of the organelles of the cell, the mitochondron, which leads to many more ATP being generated through a series of reactions called the Krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation. These pathways, as they are called, couple reactions called oxidation and reduction to generating ATP and the waste product carbon dioxide. We need to breath oxygen because we need to oxidize substances to release their energy into the bonds of ATP. All of these reactions are driven by little wonders of nanotechnology called enzymes.

The ATP goes on to drive any process in our bodies that requires energy, be it, moving your arm, breathing, or generating substances that are used by other parts of your body.

But what is making all of these reactions occur? Enzymes. Enzymes are submicroscopic machines that allow chemical reactions that would take a long time to occur on their own to happen much faster. This is the biochemical key to life. The enzymes essentially bring two or more molecules into the right physical relationship with one another for a vital chemical reaction to occur, one that might take eons to occur if such assistance weren't rendered. The enzymes are encoded by life's great information technology, the DNA. Our genes hold the information to create enzymes and proteins that control how the miraculous machinery of life works for each individual.

Many say that this machinery is the product of a geologic accident that spontaneously created the first cell and a series of random accidents that over time gave rise to increasing complexity. That in a nutshell, is the atheists' creation story. Their theory has not been convincingly demonstrated experimentally in the way that say the Theory of Relativity has been, and yet it is accorded the rights and privileges of a theory nonetheless.

I read the Psalmist who explains it to me in a way that rings truer.

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. Psalm 139:14 (New International Version)

Indeed.