In front of you is a single cell, 0.02 mm across. Tap a workshop and it lights up.
The factory comparison was not invented by believers. This is how biology textbooks and biologists themselves describe the cell.
This is kinesin, a protein motor. It walks along a protein rail and drags a vesicle with cargo hundreds of times bigger than itself. It moves its legs one after the other, like a person.
The vesicle carries an address tag, and the loader takes it where it needs to go. In a nerve cell this road can be up to a meter long: from the spine to the toes. On its own, the cargo would take years to get there.
Green flash: one ATP molecule has burned. Slowed down about 60 times on screen.
People get energy from fire, dams and nuclear decay. But in the end it is almost always the same thing: something has to turn a turbine. Your cells have turbines too. Only they are turned not by steam or water, but by a flow of protons.
This is the mitochondrial membrane. On the left are three pumps: they burn fuel from food and pump protons (red dots) upward. More and more of them pile up at the top, like water behind a dam. They can only get back through the turbine on the right.
Peter Mitchell received the Nobel Prize in 1978 for discovering this principle. He called it the “proton motive force”.
ATP synthase. Protons settle on the golden ring of the rotor and turn it. The rotor spins a bent shaft, the shaft squeezes three chambers below one after another, and out of each comes a charged battery: an ATP molecule (green).
The turbine is about 10 nm across: several thousand of them would fit side by side across the width of a hair. The rotor, stator, shaft and three chambers are assembled from about thirty protein parts. The design was worked out by Boyer and Walker, Nobel Prize 1997. Slowed down 200 times on screen.
Humanity has mastered electric current and the nuclear reactor. But a ten-nanometer proton turbine that assembles, repairs and copies itself is something we cannot reproduce. We are only learning to understand it.
No link works without the rest. The factory must appear all at once and complete: with blueprints, machines, energy and a wall around it.
In 2016 a laboratory built the simplest cell it could: 473 genes. Remove one more, and it cannot live. At that time nobody knew what a third of those genes were for.
Hutchison et al., Science, 2016 (the JCVI-syn3.0 cell).
“The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines.”
“We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
Selection works only where something already reproduces. And only a whole factory reproduces: blueprints, machines, energy, a wall. Selection does not explain the appearance of what it needs in order to start at all.
The parts of a washing machine look like parts of other machines. But an engineer assembles a machine from them. The ring, shaft and chambers must fit each other to a fraction of a nanometer, or the rotor will not turn.
A nuclear plant is also just physics. The question is not what it is made of, but who arranged the parts so that it works.
Nobody who sees a nuclear plant would say it grew by itself. And a cell is more complex than a plant, smaller than a speck of dust, and can build a copy of itself. It was designed by a brilliant Engineer. The Bible calls Him by name: God.
“For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.”
Hebrews 3:4
“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.”
Psalm 139:14
While you were reading this page, your turbines made billions of billions of turns. The One who built them keeps you alive every second. He knows you and wants you to know Him.
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