What a Wonderful World

There was an interesting article in the Straits Times last Saturday on 31 Jan 2009. In the Science Talk section, a question was posed: Where does life come from? Classical physics has no answer to this question: time to make quantum leap.

Let me read a part of what the article has to say.
“LIFE presents a great mystery to a scientist. Where does it come from? How did it appear in the first place? Does it exist elsewhere in the universe? The questions just keep on coming.

Living beings are extremely well adapted to their surroundings. Even the simplest of organisms, such as bacteria, know how to survive by finding appropriate food, digesting it and turning it into energy, which they then use to move into a more desirable environment and reproduce. Try designing a machine to do this.

Our most sophisticated computers look ridiculously simple when compared to even the lowliest of
bacteria, let alone the infinite complexity of a human being. There is no way that your laptop, not even a Pentium 100, can plug itself into an electrical outlet, let alone find a suitable mate and go into a safe drawer to make a baby laptop.

That is why scientists are baffled: How is any living thing so much better designed and robust than any humanly engineered machine?

It is therefore not surprising that the Austrian Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger speculated more than half a century ago that living beings may not be explained by the laws of physics.

Ordinary laws of physics, such as the belief that everything that exists has energy, occupies space and evolves in time, may describe non-living matter successfully. When it comes to life forms however, this might not suffice.”

The article went on to talk about other means of trying to understand the creation of life and how methods of physics and biology were unable to answer the question of where does life come from. The writer continued by saying that perhaps the answer to the question of life form will be through the study of quantum physics and quantum mechanics. I have never been an A student. So talk to me about physics and biology, and I will look at you with a blur look.
Towards the end of his article, the writer wrote, “One of the biggest mysteries we face is to explain how life arose in the first place. If it really happened by chance, then the odds for this are stupendously low, because even the simplest life form has billions and billions of atoms which all had to be combined in the right way for this to happen.”

If you ask me, do we have an answer to where does life come from? And how is any living thing so much better designed and robust than any humanly engineered machine? I believe the Bible shares some answers with us.

In the very first sentence in the first book of the Bible, it says:

Gen 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”

The chapter goes on to tell us that God created all the vegetation, trees, birds and fishes and all the animals. The God who created and designed all these also made you and me. And at the end of the chapter, it says, “Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!” God loved all that he made.

In attempts to discover how life came about, Science and technology might not be able to understand fully the intricate details of God’s amazing creation. What science and technology cannot explain, the Bible tells us that God with his wisdom and love created the world and everything in it. We may live day to day in a world so big that we are just but like a small atom but do take time to appreciate God’s creation each day and marvel at the infinite and loving God we have.

I shall leave you with one of my favourite songs to begin the day with. It’s an old song but I hope it brightens your day and makes you think about how wonderful God’s creation is.