False Arguments About the Origin of Existence: Matter and Chance.Part1

Our argument against natural laws and causes being somehow selfexistent, selfsustaining, and even in some sense eternal, holds true for those views attributing creativity to chance and matter.

Whether defined according to the principles of classical physics or new physics, matter is obviously changeable and susceptible to external interventions. Thus it cannot be eternal or capable of origination. Also, as matter is deaf and blind, lifeless and ignorant, powerless and unconscious, how can it be the origin of life and knowledge, power and consciousness? Something cannot impart to others what it does not possess itself.

There is such abundant evidence of purposive arrangement, organization, and harmony in the universe that it is irrational to speak of chance or coincidence as its cause. For example, a human body contains 60 million million cells, and a single cell contains about 1 million proteins. The possibility of a protein occurring by chance is infinitesimally small. Without One to prefer its existence and to create it; who has an absolute and allcomprehensive knowledge to prearrange its relations with other proteins, the cell, and all bodily parts; and then to place it just where it must be, a single protein could not exist. Science will find its true path only when its practitioners admit that this One-God-is the Creator of all things.

The following simple scientific experiment helps us understand this significant argument:

Overbeck and his coworkers at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston were trying to practice some gene therapy techniques by seeing if they could convert albino mice into colored ones. The researcher injected a gene essential to the production of the pigment melanin into the singlecell embryo of an albino mouse. Later they bread that mouse’s offspring, half of which carried the gene on one chromosome of a chromosome pair. Classic Mendelian genetics told them that roughly a quarter of the grandchildren should carry the gene on both chromosomes-should be “homozygous,” in the language of genetics-and should therefore be colored.

But the mice never got a chance to acquire color. “The first thing we noticed,” says Overbeck, “was that we were losing about 25% of the grandchildren within a week after they were born.” The explanation:

The melaninrelated gene that his group injected into the albino mouse embryo had inserted itself into a completely unrelated gene. An unfamiliar stretch of DNA in the middle of a gene wrecks that gene’s ability to get its message read. So in the mice, it seems whatever protein the gene coded for went unproduced, whatever function the protein had went undone, and the stomach, heart, liver, and spleen all wound up in the wrong place. Somehow, too, the kidneys and pancreas were damaged, and that damage is apparently what killed the mice.