THE existence of design invariably calls for
a designer with skill and ability. Who would think for a minute that a finely
tooled watch would form by accident? Its precision of movement is evidence of a
skilled designer.
So, too, let us take a good look at the human
body to see indications of a great Designer. A glistening newborn baby, teeming
with life, is in itself a breathtaking miracle. Moreover, within this little “bundle”
are evidences of sophisticated design that impress even highly educated
engineers and scientists. So, as the child develops, notice some examples of
superb designing.
Our Bones: “Triumphs
of Structure and Design”
Why did the book The Body, which
strongly advocates evolution, describe the bones in the way that it does?
Because bone “supports the body the way a steel framework supports a
skyscraper, and it protects its vital organs the way a cast-concrete roof
protects a building’s occupants. In filling these structural assignments, the
human body solves problems of design and construction familiar to the architect
and engineer.”
How would you feel if you were a building
contractor and were asked to enlarge a home, making it three times higher and
wider and yet not disturb the occupant’s daily labors or night’s rest even for
one hour? Impossible, you say. Yet that very thing is required of our bones.
Our frame must increase threefold from our infancy till we reach maturity.
How do our bones accomplish this task?
Imagine someone scraping a little material off the interior of the walls and
ceiling of a room and then depositing this material on the outside of the walls
and ceiling. Each week the room “grows” several millimeters until, finally,
after 20 years, our house is three times as large as before. Well, special
cells in our bones do this same “masonry” work—osteoclasts (bone breakers) and
osteoblasts (bone builders).
And what strength and flexibility is built
into our bones! Their construction is similar to reinforced concrete (a
material of astounding strength used extensively in modern construction with
poured concrete formed around flexible rods of steel). Crisscrossed through the
concrete-like calcium in bones, run fibers of collagen, providing the
reinforcement. Yet bone is eight times stronger than reinforced concrete. Its
tensile strength is greater than cast iron. Your shin bone can regularly
support a weight of nearly two tons and can be subjected to pressures up to
20,000 pounds per square inch (1,400 kilograms per square centimeter). Yet bone
is flexible and amazingly light. If steel were used instead, a 160-pound
(73-kilogram) man would weigh nearly 800 pounds (360 kilograms)! Think about
that the next time you are floating in water. So a perfect mixture is used in
our bones, combining strength with flexibility and lightness.
As if this alone were not enough, the
interior of the bones is like a “mint” where new blood cells, the life of the
body, are “coined and issued.” As the book Man in Structure and Function
comments:
“Just
as banks build their vaults in the foundations of their buildings so as to
deposit their gold reserves in the safety and security of their depths,
similarly the body has used the most protected places in the human body, the
interior of the bones, to deposit there the coin and gold of the cell state:
the blood.”
No wonder the magazine Today’s Health
says: “The human skeleton represents a masterpiece of engineering design, . . . ”
“The Ear: Masterpiece
of Engineering”
So the book Sound and Hearing
describes our organ of hearing. The book adds: “Yet behind [the outer ear] lie
structures of such delicacy that they shame the most skillful craftsman, of
such reliable automatic operation that they inspire awe in the most ingenious
engineer.”
Just think: miniaturized into a space about
one square inch (6 square centimeters) is an entire high-fidelity receiving and
transmitting system. From the outer ear (which gathers the sound waves) through
the middle ear (which converts the sound waves into mechanical movements) to
the inner ear (which transforms the mechanical movements into electrical
impulses), we see evidence of really sophisticated design.
In the cochlea (a part of the inner ear
resembling a snail’s shell [note the picture above]), the real miracle occurs.
It is here that mechanical movements are converted into electrical impulses and
fed to the brain, which decodes these as sounds. To accomplish this function
24,000 tiny hairs within this organ act as the strings of a piano. The sound
waves cause movements within the cochlea from which these “strings” then
reproduce the various tones. Through nerves attached to these hairs electrical
impulses are sent to the brain. One reference work says: “Since the cochlea in
a pianist’s ear is approximately a million times smaller than the piano upon
which he plays, one must imagine the keyboard and strings of a concert piano
reduced about 100 million times in order to arrive at the dimensions of the
auditory ‘piano’ in the ear.” Our “piano” reproduces perfectly every sound—from
a faint whisper to the crescendo of a great orchestra—and all of this within a
part the size of a pea! Design or accident? Have you ever heard even of a grand
piano that came into existence by pure accident?
The Human Hand: “Instrument
of Instruments”
So said an ancient physician about that which
has made possible so many of man’s achievements. Biochemist Isaac Asimov echoed
such feelings by calling the hand:
“ . . .
a superlative manipulative organ, incomparably the best thing of the sort in
all the realm of life—with four limber fingers and an opposing thumb so that
the whole can be used as a delicate pincer or firm grasper, a twister, bender,
puller, pusher, and manipulator of piano and typewriter keys.”
Indeed the hand is not only powerful, but
strikingly agile. With it we can pound with a hammer yet also pick up a small
pin.
Where are the powerful muscles located that
control our fingers? Now if you were designing a hand, where would you put the
muscles? Perhaps in the fingers themselves? How dreadful that would be! For
even though they would have strength, they would look like thick sausages. Have
you ever tried to pick up a pin with a thick sausage? But the bending muscles
of the fingers for the most part are located in the forearm. Flex your fingers
and feel your forearm. Feel the muscles moving? These are connected by “strings”
or tendons to the tips of your fingers, resulting in great strength, but
genuine flexibility. What a remarkable design! By mere accident?
The Brain: “Most
Miraculous Creation in the World”
That is what a leading anthropologist, Loren
C. Eiseley, an evolutionist, called our brain back in 1955. Man today, with all
his increased technology is still dumbfounded at what our brain is capable of
doing. It has “10 billion nerve cells, any one of which may connect with as
many as 25,000 other nerve cells. The number of interconnections which this
adds up to would stagger even an astronomer—and astronomers are used to dealing
with astronomical numbers,” reports one reference work, and it adds: “A
computer sophisticated enough to handle this number of interconnections would
have to be big enough to cover the earth.”
Yet all of this is miniaturized into a mass
weighing about three pounds (1,360 grams), small enough to fit in your two
hands. Fittingly it is called “the most highly organized bit of matter in the
universe.”
Our brain is capable of something for which
no man-made computer has ever had a capacity: creative imagination. This
was especially evident from the experience of composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
When one of his greatest works, his Ninth Symphony, was introduced, the
audience broke into “frantic applause,” they loved it so. Beethoven was not
audibly aware of it; he was totally deaf! Just think, he “heard” the full
richness of the composition first in his own imagination and then set it down
in notes, and he never actually heard one tone. What power of creative
imagination our brain possesses!
Is it not obvious that there are examples of
superb designing in our body? Should we not be drawn to the same logical
conclusion as that reached by an outstanding consultant engineer who struggled
for two years designing an “electronic brain”? He said: “After facing and
solving the many design problems which [the computer] presented, it is
completely irrational to me to think that such a device could come into being
in any other way than through . . . an intelligent designer. . . .
If my computer required a designer, how much more so did that complex . . .
machine which is my human body.”
Could all these examples of design merely
have “just happened”? George Gallup, a renowned statistician, one who carefully
compiles figures and facts on certain subjects, once said: “I could prove God
statistically. Take the human body alone—the chance that all the functions of
the individual would just happen is a statistical monstrosity.” In other words,
the chance that all of this could “just happen” without some directive power
is, in reality, impossible, “a statistical monstrosity.”
The great physicist Lord Kelvin who at the
time of his death, “was without dispute the greatest scientific genius in the
world,” reached the same conclusion: “We are absolutely forced by science to
believe with perfect confidence in a Directive Power—in an influence
other than physical or dynamical or electrical forces . . . You will
be forced by science into a belief in God.” (Italics added)
We can see convincing evidence of God’s
existence through (1) sound scientific logic and (2) existence of
design in the world around us.
For more informative articles please see AWAKE magazine at www.jw.org
