October 19

October 19, 2008

Fearfully & Wonderfully Made
a sermon on Psalm 139.13-18
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

Every new baby is an amazing creation. Think of all that it took to get you here. Your parents had to meet and fall in love and come together at exactly the right time. Each of them had “the capacity to generate 103000 eggs or sperm with unique sets of genes.” The right two had to come together. The result is your DNA, the genetic code that makes you you. Your DNA contains 3.2 billion letters of coding. That’s sufficient to allow for 103,480,000,000 possible combinations. That’s a number so large, it would take more than 5,000 average sized books just to print it! In other words, you are wonderfully unique. There never has been and never will be anyone else just like you, unless you happen to be an identical twin, but even then you know there are differences.

I marvel at the whole process from conception to birth, for example the marvelous system God put in place to allow the baby to receive nutrients from the mother and send out waste while having a separate blood system. I marvel at a newborn baby. The tiny hands, the eyes. They come into the world as proficient criers, you know. It’s true. They also know how to suck. You don’t have to teach them that. And as they grow, many amazing features develop, such as the grasping reflex.

When the psalmist reflected on his life, he considered with awe how God carefully crafted him in his mother’s womb. And of course, once we are grown, our bodies are no less amazing. Thousands of miles of blood vessels and nerves, hundreds of muscles and bones—all working together with graceful precision. Or think of our senses! We can see. We can hear. We can touch, taste, and smell. What wonderful mechanisms God designed to allow all this!

Or think of your thinking! Your mind is a creation glorious beyond your comprehension. You think, you feel, you choose, you act. Your brain coordinates the work of your body. It is the font of creativity: all great art and music originated in the human mind, possibly in some cases with divine inspiration, but nevertheless executed through the humble (by comparison with God) yet glorious (by any other comparison) agency of human intelligence.

The psalmist was right: “We are fearfully and wonderfully made!” And do you know what? The psalmist didn’t know the half of it! Our understanding of ourselves is frightfully incomplete, yet despite this, we know a lot more about human beings than they did when Psalm 139 was written. Advances in science have not decreased the awe and wonder of who we are. Instead, just the opposite has happened. The more we learn the more we have to marvel at the wisdom and creativity of God. This morning I want to share with you some breathtaking facts that will make you sit up and praise God. I invite you to reflect, as the psalmist does, on the beauty of God’s human creation. If you are the kind of person who does that best by thinking about babies, then do so. If you are one of those who get excited about the complexity of our bodies on the molecular level, then do so. This is one of those rare sermons where I throw science at you, but it’s not all math and chemistry. After all, the little parts come together to form something greater than their sum. You have a mind, and there is a correlation between how the world is and how your mind works so that you can understand, up to a point, what God has created. You can certainly understand enough to want to give praise to your Creator. You are also a person. That is, you are more than an amazing biological machine. You are a person, because you were created by a personal God. I’ll explain that toward the end.

This sermon is about God, who made us. It is not about creation versus evolution. I suppose I have to say something about all that in a sermon like this, so let me clear that up now before we move forward. As I have said before, I regard evolution as an open question. I have doubts about it, on scientific grounds. The fossil record, for example, and the irreducible complexity of many biological systems seem to count against evolution. How does a system with several parts working together in complex symmetry happen by chance? Do some parts show up and do nothing or a long time until a perfect match just appears, over and over? I doubt it. Plus I am a skeptical person, and I suspect evolution persists as a popular hypothesis because it is the best (possibly the only) naturalistic explanation of how we got here. A lot of people have a vested interest in atheism. They would prefer that there be no god. So they have good reasons to prop up any theory that offers an alternative. On the other hand, many intelligent Christians buy into evolution. So for me it is an open question. I have my doubts, but if tomorrow I someone sold me on evolution, I would simply conclude that’s how God did it. If you want to go that route, however, you still have to posit a special creation of human beings. There was a time when there no human beings existed, and then later we did exist, and whatever happened in between, God did it. If you give up that, then we are nothing more than animals. In one sense human beings are animals, but we are also much more. We are persons, made by a personal God in God’s own image.

Now that we have that all cleared up, let me handle one more bit of housekeeping before we get to the good stuff. Most of my information for this sermon comes from either Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything or Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator. There are other sources. I’m not going to verbally footnote throughout the sermon, but you can get the footnotes in the printed copy.

Now to more exciting things. Did you know that you are quite young? It’s true. Your body is made of trillions of microscopic cells. Most of these cells last only about a month. They die, and new ones take their places. Some last much longer. Your brain cells last a lifetime. You are born with about 100 billion of them, and you never get any more. However, “the individual components of your brain cells are constantly renewed, so that … no part of them is actually likely to be more than a month old.” In all probability, not a single bit of you, not so much as a single molecule, was part of you nine years ago. How’s that for young?

I am fascinated by how we function at the cellular level. So much so that the more I learn, the more I praise God. We begin life as a single cell. That cells divides. Those two divide. Those four divide. After just 47 divisions, you have 10 thousand trillion cells. That’s a one followed by 16 zeros. Every cell contains a complete blueprint for you. And these tiny cells are incredibly complex.

You don’t have to design jet airplanes to realize how complex they are. And yet, did you know, the simplest yeast cell has more parts than a Boeing 777 jet? It’s true. And, the yeast cell is able to reproduce itself. And, the cells in your body are far more complex than a simple yeast cell. Bill Bryson remarks, “Your cells are a country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some specific way to your overall well-being.” One scientist called the cell a high-tech factory with “artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction … [and] a capacity not equaled in any of our machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours.”

Cells are lively places where things happen fast. Molecules fly around like bullets. “Each strand of DNA is on average attacked or damaged … ten thousand times a day, and each of these wounds must be [repaired] … Proteins are especially lively, spinning, pulsating, and flying into each other a billion times a second. Enzymes … dash everywhere, performing up to a thousand tasks a second.”

And yet, despite all this, cells are remarkably orderly. All cells except bacteria have different compartments, like rooms in a house. Most of your cells have twenty different sections. I’ll describe just one of them, the ribosome. The ribosome [is] a collection of some fifty large molecules containing more than one million atoms, … [It is] an automated factory that can synthesize any protein that it is instructed to make by DNA. Given the correct genetic information, in fact, it can construct any protein-based biological machine … regardless of complexity. In other words, your ribosomes are capable of constructing “every living thing that has every existed on earth” and they are “several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man.”

An average cell in your body is only 2/100 of a millimeter in size. Yet each holds thousands of complicated structures and millions of molecules.

A typical cell has 20,000 types of protein, with at least 100 million total protein molecules in each cell. Altogether there may be more than a million different kinds of protein in the human body. And each one is a brilliant creation of God. Talking about how unlikely any protein molecule is, Bill Bryson writes, “Each one is a little miracle. By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn’t exist. To make a protein you need to assemble amino acids … in a particular order, in much the same way that you assemble letters in a particular order to spell a word. The problem is that words in the amino acid alphabet are often exceedingly long.” He uses the example of collagen: “To make collagen, you need to arrange 1,055 amino acids in precisely the right sequence. But—and here’s an obvious but crucial point—you don’t make it. It makes itself, spontaneously, without direction, and this is where the unlikelihood comes in. The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.” And keep in mind there are probably a million other kinds of protein in your body.

Personally, I find this exciting, and I hope you do too. It speaks to us of our origin in God. Life is based on DNA, and DNA is information, and information comes from a mind. It does not happen randomly. The unlikelihood and complexity of every tiny part of us, each one essential, speaks not only of the existence of our Creator, but also of his wisdom and glory. God made the atoms that make the molecules that make the cells that make the tissues that make the organs that make the systems that make you! You are fearfully and wonderfully made. God designed each part, each function. How brilliant God is! His wisdom is unsearchable! How carefully and lovingly God fashioned every living thing. Even the simplest bacteria is a marvel of engineering beyond our understanding. Truly God is worthy of our praise!

But wait! There’s more! As if that were not enough, the best is yet to come. Your body is an amazing, unbelievably complex, marvelous machine … but … but … you are more than a machine. You are a person. You think. You feel. You choose. You act. You make real and significant moral choices. You love. You can understand not just your world but also your place in it. You search not just for knowledge but for significance. Your life means something, and you know that … deep down you do. You are known by your Creator, and you can know him as he reveals himself to you. You can love and praise him. You can worship.

If you were a machine, no matter how complex, you could not do those things. If you were a machine, you would not be free. But you are, and you know it. Some would deny our freedom and tell us we are basically determined by our genes and our environment. And they are halfway right. Genetics and environment do shape us, probably more than we realize and in ways that would surprise us if we realized it. I think a person’s sense of humor is based more on genetics than anything else. I think that because I never met my biological mother until I was grown, yet we have the exact same sense of humor. It’s spooky. Nevertheless, I remain a free moral agent. My genes and my upbringing may have made me who I am, but so did my own choices and the choices I make today. I am a person, because I am the creation of a personal God.

Francis Schaeffer helped me understand the significance of this. If we are here by chance, as many would have us believe, then we are biological machines and nothing more. “Water never rises above its source,” Schaeffer used to say. He asked people to imagine three mountains with two valleys between them. One valley has water, the other is dry. Then one day, the dry valley has water too. If the water in both valleys rise to the same level, then they have a common source. We would be right to conclude the water from the first valley ran into the dry valley. But if the water in the formerly dry valley rises higher than the other; it must have a different source. Then he explains the point of comparison. For a material universe to give rise to real personhood would be like water rising above its source. Because we are persons, we must have a personal origin, namely God. If we arrived here by chance, we could never be more than biological machines. All the qualities we take as evidence of our being persons are then illusions. But can they be? I say no.

Dr. J. P. Moreland, professor of philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, explains it this way: “ ‘You can’t get something from nothing.’ If the universe began with dead matter having no conscious[ness], ‘how, then, do you get something totally different—consciousness, living, thinking, feeling, believing creatures—from materials that don’t have that?’ But if everything stated with the mind of God … ‘we don’t have a problem explaining the origin of our mind.’ ”

Once on a trip Schaeffer and his wife met a young couple. The husband was an atheist and wanted to have a little fun at Schaeffer’s expense so he began a debate. Schaeffer explained to him what I have been trying to explain to you (and surely did a better job!). The young man realized he was stuck, and Schaeffer realized the young man was at a significant juncture, so he pressed the point. He asked the young man, who obviously loved his wife very much, “When you lie next to your wife at night, do you know she’s there?” Meaning, here is a person who loves me and I love her; we are not machines, not animals; we are people; she is there. Schaeffer was reaching into the man experience for some indisputable clue to his being a person and not a mere machine as he claimed. The young man saw his dilemma, got upset, and yelled back, “No, I don’t!”

That encounter may not have ended the way Schaeffer hoped it would, but for the rest of his life, that young man knew he had evidence of God’s existence and power and love right next to him in the form of a person who loved him. What about you? Think of someone you love. As amazing as the biology may be, it pales in comparison to the fact that here is a person, made in the image of God—someone you love, who loves you. That bond too is evidence that you are fearfully and wonderfully made by your loving heavenly Father.

Think again of a newborn baby. That’s easy to do around Westminster these days. We’ve had six births this year with one more to come. We had a baptism last Sunday and three more on the calendar. You marvel at the miracle of a new life. Your mind boggles at the biology. And yet best of all, here is a new little person—a unique creation of God. This child is a person, and a person has rights and dignity—given not by any human law but endowed by the Creator. A person has inherent worth. A person is worthy of respect and love. Fearfully and wonderfully made, every one of us. This is of course true of children born with severe disabilities. Suppose a child will never walk, will never see, or his or her mind will never fully develop. Each remains a beautiful and unique creation of God, a marvelous wonder worthy of love.

Fearfully and wonderfully made? The psalmist didn’t know the half of it … and we don’t either. We are only beginning to understand the wonders of our biology, and we haven’t even started to understand the wonders of our mind. But we know enough. We know enough to stand in awe before our Creator and praise him. And that is what I want you to do as a result of this sermon. Praise God. Praise him, and know that the God who created you loved you and wants a relationship with you, Person-to-person, and he sent Jesus to make that possible. Amen.

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