Let’s begin with something remarkable.

Machine One is alive.

It’s a slime mold. Not a mushroom, not a plant, and not an animal. It is a living organism that, at one stage of its life, can exist as one enormous cell containing thousands or even millions of nuclei.

It has no brain. No nerves. No eyes. No ears.

Yet it can find its way through a maze.

It can remember where it has been by leaving a trail that helps it avoid retracing its steps. It can learn to tolerate something it previously avoided. Experiments even suggest that it can anticipate regularly repeated unpleasant conditions.

And here is something especially interesting.

Scientists placed slime molds in situations where they had to cross a salty surface to reach food. At first, they hesitated. But after repeated encounters, they crossed more readily.

They had become accustomed to the salt.

Then researchers allowed an experienced slime mold to join with one that had never encountered the salt. The two became one living mass, sharing their internal contents.

The inexperienced slime mold acquired the changed response.

Think about that.

No brain. No nervous system. Yet something learned by one living cell could be passed to another.

Scientists call this habituation, a simple form of learning.

We know the behavior occurs. We don’t yet know exactly how the slime mold stores that experience.

Perhaps the answer lies in the chemicals moving through its body, or in the changing arrangement of its living tubes. Perhaps several processes work together.

Where does a cell without a brain keep a memory?

That is a question worth investigating.

Machine Two is a motor inside a living cell.

This one is almost unimaginably small.

It is called ATP synthase, and it helps produce the fuel that powers much of the activity inside living cells.

Imagine a tiny waterwheel. Water flows through it, turning a shaft that operates machinery.

Now replace the water with hydrogen ions, particles smaller than atoms, moving across a membrane.

The flow turns a molecular rotor. That motion drives a chemical reaction that produces ATP, a molecule cells use to transfer energy.

The motor is only about ten millionths of a millimeter across.

And it works.

It can even run backward under the right conditions.

But the motor itself is not a living cell. It is one working part of a much larger living system.

That distinction matters.

A living cell contains many extraordinary molecular machines. But assembling a collection of working parts is not automatically the same as producing a living organism.

What makes the difference between machinery that works and a cell that lives?

That brings us to the first great question.

1. Where Did Life Come From?

Charles Darwin proposed an explanation for how living things change over generations.

But that is not the same question as how life began.

Before anything could reproduce and pass its characteristics to offspring, something had to be alive.

How did that happen?

Scientists have spent decades investigating whether the chemicals found in living things could have formed naturally before life existed.

They have produced some of life’s building blocks in laboratories. They have studied molecules that can copy portions of themselves and simple structures that resemble some features of cells.

These are genuine accomplishments.

But making some of the ingredients is not the same as making the finished product.

Dr. James Tour, a chemist at Rice University who has spent his career building complex molecules, has been particularly outspoken about this problem.

He points out that producing the ingredients of life is only part of the challenge.

Those ingredients must somehow become organized into a system that can obtain energy, maintain itself, preserve information, and reproduce.

No one has yet demonstrated a complete process showing how nonliving chemicals became the first living organism.

That doesn’t prove such a process is impossible.

It does mean we have not solved the mystery.

And the more we learn about living cells, the more questions we discover.

2. The Problem of Making Copies

Imagine copying a book by hand.

Every time you finish a copy, someone uses it to make another.

Now suppose every copy contains mistakes.

Some mistakes won’t matter. Others might change the meaning of a sentence. Enough mistakes could eventually make the book unreadable.

Living cells face a similar problem.

They must copy their genetic instructions when they reproduce.

Fortunately, modern cells have remarkable machinery that checks for mistakes and repairs many of them.

But what about the first living systems?

Where did their copying machinery come from?

Researchers have experimented with molecules that can make copies without the sophisticated machinery found in modern cells.

Some of those experiments have shown serious problems with accuracy.

Dr. Tour has emphasized the difficulty of building a reliable copying system without the help of an already functioning cell.

There is an important distinction, however.

An unsuccessful experiment does not prove that every possible method must fail. Scientists continue to investigate simpler copying systems and ways that useful information might survive despite mistakes.

Still, the question remains.

How did the earliest living systems preserve the information they needed to stay alive?

3. Is DNA Really in Charge?

We often hear that DNA is the blueprint for life.

That’s a useful comparison, but it can also be misleading.

A blueprint sitting on a table doesn’t build a house.

Workers, tools, materials, and energy are needed to turn the drawing into a building.

Something similar happens inside a cell.

DNA contains instructions for making proteins and other essential molecules. But DNA doesn’t read itself, build its own machinery, or decide independently when every instruction should be used.

The cell does that work through a remarkable collection of interacting parts.

Dr. Denis Noble, a physiologist at Oxford, has spent decades studying how living systems function.

He argues that we have placed too much emphasis on genes acting as though they alone control the organism.

His work reminds us that the entire cell matters.

The membranes surrounding its compartments, the chemicals moving through it, the proteins doing their work, and the signals passing between its parts all contribute to what happens.

Consider our slime mold again.

Its body contains a network of living tubes. Material flows back and forth through them, carrying nutrients and other substances.

When food appears, the network changes.

When conditions become unfavorable, the organism responds.

There is no tiny commander sitting inside the cell giving orders.

The different parts work together.

We understand some of these processes, but not every detail of how they produce the organism’s behavior.

Perhaps understanding life requires more than reading its genetic instructions. Perhaps we must understand the whole living system.

4. Four Things Worth Thinking About

There are several familiar ideas about biology that deserve a closer look.

First, DNA cannot do everything by itself.

Take DNA out of a cell and place it on a table. It won’t suddenly reproduce.

It needs the machinery of a living cell to make copies.

That doesn’t make DNA unimportant. It means DNA is part of a larger system.

Second, a new cell inherits more than DNA.

When a cell divides, its descendants receive cellular material and organization as well as genetic information.

They inherit a working environment in which the instructions can be used.

Third, cells are constantly communicating internally.

Chemicals, electrical signals, and other processes help regulate what happens inside them.

DNA plays an essential role, but it isn’t the only participant.

Fourth, the whole can do things that an isolated part cannot.

An ATP synthase motor produces ATP under the right conditions.

But it cannot feed itself, repair an entire cell, or reproduce as an organism.

A slime mold can do those things because it is a complete living system.

The parts matter.

Their arrangement matters.

And the way they work together matters.

That is what makes the study of living cells so fascinating.

5. The More We Discover, the More We Wonder

Scientists have discovered molecular machinery that would have seemed almost unbelievable a century ago.

There are tiny motors that rotate.

There are proteins that carry materials from one place to another.

There are systems that detect damage to DNA and help repair it.

There are bacteria that swim using rotating structures called flagella.

And there is our slime mold, reorganizing its entire body as it explores the world.

Dr. Tour has compared the challenge of building molecular machines in his laboratory with the extraordinary complexity of those already operating in living cells.

Researchers have also investigated how such biological machinery could develop through changes to simpler systems over many generations.

Some of those explanations are supported by substantial evidence. Other details remain uncertain.

But consider what we can actually observe.

We can see the machinery.

We can measure some of its movements.

We can identify many of its parts.

And still, questions remain about how these systems originated and how their activities become coordinated.

I don’t find those unanswered questions discouraging.

I find them invitations to investigate.

6. Does All This Point to Design?

Not everyone looking at the same evidence reaches the same conclusion.

Dr. Stephen Meyer argues that the information and organization found in living things point toward an intelligent cause.

David Berlinski, a mathematician and writer, has questioned aspects of evolutionary explanations while remaining cautious about whether intelligent design offers a complete scientific theory.

David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, has also questioned whether Darwinian explanations adequately account for all the complexity found in living organisms.

Other scientists disagree with these criticisms and point to evidence for evolutionary processes and the development of biological complexity.

The disagreement is real.

But I don’t believe we should be afraid to examine it.

We should ask what has actually been observed.

What has been demonstrated experimentally?

What is a reasonable explanation?

And what remains an assumption or an unanswered question?

My own belief is that the living world was created by God.

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

John 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. And the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overtake it.

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That belief does not mean I have no reason to study it.

Quite the opposite.

I want to know how these things work.

I want to see what can be discovered with a microscope, careful observation, and experiments.

If an idea is wrong, I want to know that.

If something remarkable is discovered, I want to understand it.

There is no benefit in exaggerating the evidence. The truth is interesting enough.

7. The Verse That Names the Question

The apostle Paul wrote:

"The invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." — Romans 1:20

And the psalmist wrote:

"The heavens declare the glory of God." — Psalm 19:1

Those words have special meaning to me.

When I look at a living cell, I don’t see something ordinary.

I see an astonishingly organized system, carrying out thousands of activities that allow it to live.

When I examine a slime mold, I see an organism without a brain that can respond to its surroundings, change its behavior, and retain information from experience.

I want to understand how it does those things.

And I thank the Lord that I have the opportunity to investigate His creation.

I have ALS, a disease that often takes away a person’s ability to move, speak, and eventually breathe.

For a time, I believed much of what I had once been able to do was gone.

Then, in 2024, my strength began to return.

I can walk. I can drive. I can cook. I can work with wood.

And I can care for my wife, who has cared for me through so much.

I give thanks to God for these blessings and for the peace He has given me.

I don’t expect everyone reading this to believe as I do.

But I do encourage you to look at the world around you.

Ask questions.

Investigate what interests you.

Don’t be satisfied merely because someone tells you that a question has already been answered.

Look at the evidence and think about what it means.

And I implore you to seek the Lord and ask Him for mercy.

He has created an awesome world for us to witness.

Go forth and do so.