What could be a better example of Purposeful Design than this sub-microscopic motor called a Bacterial Flagellum?
There are endless examples of Purposeful Design in all of life, but I focus on this because it is a motor, and therefore, something we can all relate to.
Motors – whether in your car or on your boat – are items that we know intuitively and with uniform reason and experience always are planned, designed, and implemented on purpose and for a purpose. Motors never come about through the brute forces of nature either in one felled swoop or as series of chance events over a long period of time. Why should the bacterial flagellar motor be viewed any differently?
This motor is a marvel of nano-technology and screams out Design not only in its appearance, but also in its functionality. The attributes and capabilities of this motor (which is complete with a U-Joint, stators, bushings, and a drive shaft) are prolific. It looks like a motor, acts like a motor, and, guess what? It is a motor!
Beyond that, each of its parts is a protein. Protein molecules cannot come about chance. In fact, for one short functional protein of 100 amino acids to emerge by chance would, as Dr. Bill Demski put it, “exhaust the probabilistic resources of the entire universe.” The odds against this chance formation of a protein is one chance in 10 to the 130th Power. Even if you allow a 15-billion-year old universe (which many of us don’t) that adds up to only 10 to the 17th seconds. Statistically speaking, it is never going to happen. Not to mention the fact that the early earth wouldn’t even allow for the formation of these amino acid chains.
One short functional protein will never happen by chance or chance and necessity. Well, the Bacterial Flagellum has 40 Protein Parts! And these proteins are not short…they are very long with hundreds and hundreds of amino acids in their chains. Apply the same math for one protein and now do it for 40 but with even longer chains. The magnitude of order against this ever occurring without Purposeful Design is incomprehensible.
So in review: we have a protein machine that looks and acts like a motor. Then we contemplate that each of its parts is off the charts in terms of its complexity and specification. Even more, each of these individual parts just happens to be arrayed in such a way to as to produce a functioning motor! There is not a shred of explanation to show how any of these parts or the whole motor itself could come about by natural causes. There is a lot of conjecture, blind-faith, and bluster, but absolutely zero scientific explanation for how this Flagellum or any protein machine in the cell could come about by the brute forces of nature.
How, then, is this motor built? There is a step by step instruction manual (amazingly complex in and of itself) called DNA that provides the information to put everything where it is supposed to go to build real, three-dimensional protein machines and all things concerning the cell. The simple question is: what is more preposterous? That flagellar motors can come into existence without being designed on purpose or that the instruction manual that builds them came into existence without a purposeful, designing intelligence?
The Flagellum is just one example of many things we could discuss to illustrate that God is the Purposeful Designer. If someone can offer an alternative to that proclamation, they’ve yet to voice it with any empirical adequacy. We make reference to God as the Designer based on what we know and not on what we don’t know. Only God possesses the Bio-Chemical expertise, timelessness, intelligence and power to create the universe and all of life. The Lord has blessed us with not only a great salvation, but also the intellectual certainty of the very things we profess about that salvation.
