Life...Happens

I've always been fascinated with the human body (any living thing for that matter) from the study of biology to the study of physiology. It was the only subject I liked in school and I even took Anatomy and Physiology in high school as an elective credit instead of the "fun" courses. I remember my first Life Science course in 7th grade and reading ahead in my textbook on chapters that really interested me, though I didn't even read most of the assigned material in my other classes.

In fact, it was a dead cat that convinced me there was a God, and in turn I completely gave my life to God while hovering over this dead feline. How strange that the cat didn't even know its purpose in life (and death) was to act as a tool to save mine, in a sense? No one would have thought. Anyone in their right mind would say, "That cat's purpose was to teach students about anatomy."

I had grown up in church for the most part and felt God calling me at a very young age, about 2nd grade if I remember correctly. It was very clear to me, though I think many doubted it at my age - it was, and still is, very real to me. I remember it well. But over the course of time, I decided to live my own life under a "cheap grace" concept and eventually came to very much doubt a God I once knew to be calling me... Plagued by doubt through Jr. High and High School, I spent a lot of time researching - and stumbled across a lot of interesting things. I know, what Jr High/HS kid spends their time researching religion? Well, me. I've always been a seeker of truth and research minded. (I walked to the city library after school to wait for city league soccer practice to start across the street at 6pm) It was a passion within me - which I hid from most. Why? Because I didn't want to be swayed by bias evangelists who felt something, but had no proof they had the "right" answers - and got paid for it. I also really struggled with the fact that I didn't agree with a lot of teachings, compared to what I was studying in the Bible they claimed to be "infallible."

The summer after my freshman year of HS, I again felt God calling me...strongly, and by 16 was rededicating my life, but was still plagued by doubt regularly, and was tortured mentally over it. "Had I fallen for my own psychological games? Maybe I psyched myself into this?" "It's still too early to decide - There is still so much I have not read/visited!" "But what if it is real and I deny it?..." But it was this dead cat, my senior year of high school, just before graduation, that convinced me more than any (live) human could about God.

The cat didn't say or do anything (obviously). It just laid there like any dead cat would, but as I continued to study the inner workings of this cat, I found myself in tears, completely marveled. "This is not an accident...The probability is too small...There must be a creator...This is too intelligent for happenstance..." And after pouring through all my thoughts in this hour and half class, I was convinced beyond anyone's reasoning, there was intelligent design; there was a God.

Even through college, taking numerous Biology and A&P courses, nothing has reminded me of this moment so much as the "Our Body" exhibit I saw a couple of months ago (If you haven't been - it's a must see. I know, I'm a big nerd for going to stuff like this "for fun.") But I was in awe of our Creator... there are no words to express except that it brought tears to my eyes, again. A reminder of how much God loved me; that he knew it would take a dead cat to convince my ever-doubting mind, and he made it happen just for me.

Today I was reading up on the discovery and furthering of DNA - regardless of who you believe truly discovered DNA (there is a big controversy over who should be credited), I think the words of Prof. F. Crick (1950's) are thought-provoking and that perhaps he was a "Doubting Thomas" like me, who required a dead animal (microscopic slides) to convince him of a "creator."


Professor Francis Crick, awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, wrote:

"An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part in (1020)2,000=1040,000, an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.

In terms of complexity, an individual cell is nothing when compared with a system like the mammalian brain. The human brain consists of about ten thousand million nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out between ten thousand and one hundred thousand connecting fibers by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1015 or a thousand million million. Numbers in the order of 1015 are of course completely beyond comprehension. Imagine an area about half the size of the USA (one million square miles) covered in a forest of trees containing ten thousand trees per square mile. If each tree contained one hundred thousand leaves the total number of leaves in the forest would be 1015, equivalent to the number of connections in the human brain! Despite the enormity of the number of connections, the ramifying forest of fibers is not a chaotic random tangle but a highly organized network in which a high proportion of the fibers are unique adaptive communication channels following their own specially ordained pathway through the brain. Even if only one hundredth of the connections in the brain were specifically organized, this would still represent a system containing a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth."


Unfortunately, Crick came to another conclusion (1970's) about "the Creator," summarized as follows:
Some extraterrestrial civilization of another solar system, because of the fear of extinction, decided to "seed" other planets with the essence of their live matter. So they sent frozen bacteria out into space, and eventually it reached earth. While on earth, it was these live bacteria from outer space that evolved into life as we see it now...

The sad thing is, Crick had confided to a fellow professor that he didn't really believe his own theory, and his purpose in espousing this theory was to get people to drop all previous theories that they held as true (such as the chemical soup theory, and the mutation theory, etc., all of them built on the idea that live matter can evolve from dead matter, which he held can't be true) and give them an idea which they can relate to, such as unmanned rockets with live bacteria in them, to hold on to. Not that he really believed his own crazy story (though many did/still do), but it was to help people understand that this world could only have developed from live matter. He just didn't want to admit to a "Creator" with no scientific theory/proof - so he went to this extreme instead.

And to me, that's very sad. I think we were standing at the very same crossroad, decades apart. Today, I'm again amazed God spoke to me through a dead cat...with "faith like a child."