Category Archives: Creation

Articles on creation, the deep biosphere, and the witness of the natural world

The Chain: From Cosmos to Cell

Last week we heard from Dr. James Tour and Dr. Denis Noble. Tour proved the molecules can’t self-assemble — the chemistry doesn’t work from the bottom up. Noble proved the genome can’t self-run — the cell has agency that isn’t in the DNA. Two insiders, two attacks on the materialist story, from opposite ends. This week, we go wider. Same evidence, bigger lens. Every layer you peel back, the same answer.

Start at the top.

Dr. Brian Miller, physicist: The physical constants that govern the universe are set with precision that defies comprehension. The electromagnetic force — if it were a few percent larger or smaller, stars couldn’t produce carbon and oxygen. No carbon, no life. The strong nuclear force that holds atomic nuclei together — a few percent either way, no life. Gravity must be set to 1 part in 1035. That’s like hitting a 1-inch target at the other end of our solar system. The cosmological constant — the dark energy that drives the expansion of the universe — must be set to 1 part in 1090. That’s like hitting a target the size of an atom at the other side of our galaxy.

Fine-tuned to 1 part in 10^35

Before we go further, let’s make these numbers real. Dr. James Tour uses this illustration: A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years — longer than recorded human history. Now keep going. 1035 seconds is a billion billion billion years — longer than the universe has existed. And we’re not even close to the biggest number yet.

The entropy — the initial order of the universe — must be set to 1 part in 10(10123). That number is so large you couldn’t write it even if you put a zero on every atom in the visible universe. 10(10123) seconds? There isn’t a word for it. There isn’t a comparison for it. It’s beyond comprehension — and yet the universe is set to that precision.

Fred Hoyle, the atheist astronomer who discovered how stars produce carbon, looked at this data and said: “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology.” His atheism was shaken by the numbers.

The multiverse escape? Even if a multiverse-generating machine exists, it must itself be fine-tuned as precisely as the universe it produces. Hammer down the bulge in the rug, it appears somewhere else. Every attempt to remove design evidence simply moves the need for design elsewhere.

The universe is tuned. Now go down one level.

Dr. James Tour, synthetic chemist at Rice University — we heard him last week: “Molecules don’t care about life. They never have. They never will.” He spent decades proving the building blocks of life can’t self-assemble. Nobody has made even a dipeptide — two amino acids hooked together — under prebiotic conditions. Time is the enemy. Molecules fall apart faster than they form. “If you gave me all the parts of a cell in individual bottles — make a cell. Nobody would ever suggest that they could.”

The molecules don’t care. Chemistry is indifferent. The physics is tuned, but the chemistry doesn’t cooperate on its own. Now go down another level.

Dr. Denis Noble, physiologist at Oxford — also from last week. He built the first computational model of a living heart cell in 1958 and spent 60 years discovering something the textbooks don’t allow: the cell has knowledge that isn’t in the DNA. The cell proofreads its own genome — fixing 300,000 errors per replication before it will allow itself to divide. How does it know when it’s done? “We don’t know,” Noble says. DNA can’t copy itself without the cell being alive first. The genome is an organ of the cell, not the other way around.

Life requires life — the cell has agency

“The body as a whole can tell the genome what to do.” Two-way causation. The “selfish gene” is a servant, not a master. “Agency is fundamental to any living system.” The central dogma — DNA → everything — has, in Noble’s words, “the wrong metaphysics.”

Tour proved the molecules can’t self-assemble. Noble proved the genome can’t self-run. Life requires life. The chemistry doesn’t work. The code can’t execute without the cell already being alive. Now look at what’s growing in a Petri dish.

Take a piece of bark from a tree. Put it in a dish with some water. Within days, slime molds appear — organisms with no brain, no nervous system, no organs. One cell. It crawls across the dish hunting bacteria. It navigates mazes. It remembers where it’s been and avoids dead ends. Cut it into pieces and each piece continues to function. Cut it into many parts and they can find each other again and fuse — sharing cytoplasm, sharing memory.

When food runs out, individual amoeba cells secrete a chemical signal. They aggregate. They form a slug. The slug moves toward light. The cells in the back undergo programmed cell death to become the stalk. The cells in the front become spores. No cell has the plan. No cell sees the whole picture. The code was there from the beginning.

The slime mold’s spores can survive 75 years dormant. Three-quarters of a century in suspended animation, waiting for the right moment. A single cell with no brain, executing a program written before it existed.

Tour says the molecules don’t care. Noble says the cell does. The slime mold proves both — simultaneously. The molecules underneath don’t care. But the cell they form does care. It hunts. It remembers. It sacrifices itself for the structure. It makes decisions based on data.

Where does the caring come from? Not from the molecules — Tour proved that. Not from the DNA — Noble proved that. The caring comes from the code. From the IF/THEN rules written into the system. Code requires a coder.

Code requires a coder

Now look at the archaeology.

Göbekli Tepe — the oldest known human archaeological site, in southeastern Turkey. Massive religious structures with intricate animal carvings. Predates pottery, predates agriculture, predates writing. According to the standard timeline, humans existed for 200,000 years and then suddenly built this. 195,000 years of stone tools, then everything at once — architecture, agriculture, metallurgy, distillation, writing. All within a few thousand years.

Tepe Gawra, in northern Mesopotamia: the earliest evidence of distillation — 5,000 years ago. Specialized pottery with condenser rings and steam distillation setups. No crude prototype stage. It appears fully formed. Maria Rosaria Belgiorno built replicas and proved it works. The technique is so elaborate it suggests it had already been developing for centuries before those vessels were made.

If humans had 200,000 years, why did everything happen in the last 5,000? What changed? Not the brain — same hardware. Not the hands — same anatomy. The capacity was there from the beginning. The code was there from the beginning.

Every layer. The same answer.

The universe is tuned to 1 part in 1090. The molecules can’t self-assemble. The genome can’t self-run. The cell has agency that isn’t in the DNA. The slime mold navigates mazes with no brain. Humans built temples and stills 5,000 years ago after 195,000 years of nothing — because the capacity was there from the start.

Top to bottom. Cosmos to cell. Physics to behavior. The numbers don’t lie. The molecules don’t care. The cell does. The universe is tuned. The code is written.

Code requires a coder.

All of these gentlemen — smart, very capable, many skilled in advanced math — do none of them wonder if maybe, just maybe, there is another answer?

Merriam-Webster defines faith as “complete trust, confidence, or belief in a person, plan, promise, or higher power, often held even without total physical proof.” Atheists claim only Christians have faith. But look at that definition — complete trust and confidence. Everybody has faith. The question isn’t whether you have it. The question is what you put it in. Secular schools pump out atheism as a worldview. They’re faith schools too — just a different faith.

Consider the apostles. Every one of them except John was executed. Peter was crucified upside down. Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross. Thomas was pierced with a spear in India. Matthew was killed by the sword in Ethiopia. Bartholomew was flayed alive — skin peeled off — and then beheaded. Philip was crucified upside down. Simon was sawn in half. Jude was killed with an axe. James was stoned and beaten with a club. John was boiled in oil, survived, and died of old age in exile.

These men were not dying for what they believed. They were dying for what they knew to be true because they saw it with their own eyes. Nobody dies for what they know to be a lie. They could have stopped at any point — just deny the resurrection and walk away. None did.

That’s the difference between a martyr and a fanatic. A fanatic dies for what he believes. A witness dies for what he saw.

I know that my Savior lives, and He has stated He will take me home with Him.

Luke 23:43 — When speaking to the repentant thief on the cross beside Him, Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

John 14:1–3 — Jesus tells His disciples not to be troubled: “I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.”

John 14:23 — Jesus says if anyone loves Him and keeps His word, “my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

All of these things — check on them. The browsers of today have AI built in. Ask them if what I have stated is true.

For me, it was geology that opened my eyes. Mount St. Helens dropped ash on my car hood in Minnesota. For you, I don’t know. But if you truly seek Him, God will grant you peace.

What We Replaced

I worked with hydroponics for a couple of years. Soilless gardening — mineral salts dissolved in water, no dirt, no microbes, just chemistry. The growth was fast and the yields were real. I was trying to feed a family that lived with us. The father had Long Covid and was bedridden much of the time. His wife and six young girls needed help keeping themselves fed.

Hydroponics seemed like the answer. Then the father got better. He believed his diet had done it, so he extended it to the rest of the family. A carnivore household has no use for hydroponic vegetables, and that was the end of it.

The Lord has saved my life through ALS. I do not mean He healed me — I mean He saved me in the way that matters. The changes have all pointed to glorifying the God who did it. At first I had trouble walking. His mercies are new every morning, and by October 2024 I could walk without support. By the fall of 2025 I was able to build the ladies a chicken house. Then in 2026 the Lord showed me the wonders of His creation, and I came to look at the soil as an extension of His will.

When I looked into it, things were not as they said they were.

Whose they? The works of man. In many cases they run contrary to the will of God.

The soil was cursed in Genesis 3:17 — “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” But a curse for our sake is not abandonment. The ground still works. The ground has been working since the Fall, doing what it was made to do, even under the curse.

We have lost our way. What was given to us to husband and manage, we have replaced with a shortcut. The trouble with hydroponics is that it uses mineral salts to grow food. It grows food. But consider this: would you rather be blessed by the Creator of all in the consumption of food, or go with the knowledge of man — which, when you look at things as a whole, is where the problem started in the first place.

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband, and he did eat. — Genesis 3:6

The rhizophagy cycle: root tip absorbing and secreting bacteria in the soil

The rhizophagy cycle — a digestive system shared between plant and soil.

A root tip secretes sugars into the dirt. Bacteria come. The root takes them in through its softest cells, strips their walls off with a burst of reactive oxygen, and pulls nutrients from what remains — magnesium, calcium, iron, the metals that stick to bacterial cell walls. The bacteria, now wall-less, replicate rapidly inside the plant’s own cells. Then the root secretes them back out through root hairs, with enough food to rebuild. The bacteria return to the soil, recover, and the cycle starts again.

Hours, not seasons. Every growing tip. Every plant.

This is called the rhizophagy cycle. It was discovered in our lifetime. It has been there since the beginning.

The plant does not feed itself. The plant and the soil feed each other. The root tip attracts bacteria with sugars it made from sunlight, the bacteria deliver minerals the root cannot reach, the plant extracts what it needs, and returns the living bacteria to the soil to do it again. It is a digestive system shared between a plant and the ground it grows in.

Root hairs do not form without these microbes. The plant does not develop properly without them. No antioxidants, no phenolics, no amino acids in the fruit — or at least not enough. The microbes enter the plant’s cell nuclei during division and cause the plant to demethylate its own DNA, turning genes on. The plant’s genome is more expressed, more diverse, more alive when the system runs as designed.

A seed carrying microbial inheritance packed around the embryo

A seed is not sterile. It carries its microbial inheritance.

Seeds carry these microbes inside their cells, packed around the embryo. They are inherited. A seed is not a sterile object dropped into sterile dirt. It is a living package carrying its microbial inheritance into the next generation.

This is not a theory. It is observable, repeatable, and has now been documented in every plant examined for it.

Here is what man built instead.

We learned to pull nitrogen from the air with the Haber-Bosch process — a genuine feat of chemistry. We mined phosphorus and potassium. We spread them on fields. The plants grew. We called it progress, and it was, in the sense that more people were fed.

But thirty to forty percent of that fertilizer makes it into the plant. The rest runs off or sits in the soil doing damage. The soil’s microbial community collapses. The plant, now fed from outside rather than from within, stops producing the compounds that protect it. Disease moves in. We answer with fungicides. The fungicides kill more microbes. The soil degrades further. We add more fertilizer. The cycle accelerates.

We sterilize seeds. We grind and treat them so they store and ship cleanly, and in doing so we destroy the microbial inheritance packed around the embryo. Some conventional cultivars have lost the genes for microbial association entirely. Not the genes for the trait — the genes for the relationship. The plant can no longer do what it was built to do, because we bred the capacity out of it.

We did not improve on the design. We did not understand the design. We didn’t even know it was there. We saw a plant growing in dirt and assumed the dirt was inert and the plant was doing the work. We were wrong. The soil is alive. The plant is not growing alone.

Consider the work of God.

Living soil on the left, dead chemical system on the right

The designed system and the replacement. One is alive. The other produces bulk.

He made a system where a seed carries its own microbial inheritance. Where a root tip and a bacterium feed each other in a cycle that runs in hours and repairs itself. Where the plant’s genome is more alive, not less, when the system runs as built. Where the soil is not dead matter but a living participant in the plant’s life.

And man looked at it and said, “I can do better.”

He made a dead system. One-directional. Extractive. The plant is force-fed. The soil is a container. The seed is a sterile object. The microbes are pests. The relationship is replaced with a pipeline.

The dead system works — for a while, and only in the narrow sense of producing bulk. It does not produce the same food. Biological produce has more phenolics, more antioxidants, more amino acids, more diversity of gene expression. The fruit of the designed system is richer than the fruit of the replacement. This has been measured.

This is not a conspiracy. It is not a scandal. It is a pattern as old as we are. We see the work of God, and we build something we can control, and the thing we build is worse. Then we keep doing it because the thing we built is ours.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death. — Proverbs 14:12

The rhizophagy cycle does not need us. It ran before we found it. It will run after we stop interfering with it. The mercy of God is that the system is resilient — it recovers when the chemicals stop. Dr. Walter Goldstein has rehabilitated conventional corn cultivars by putting the microbes back in. It takes three or four years. The plants recover their associations. The relationship can be restored.

That is the character of the God who built it. The system He designed does not just sustain itself — it restores itself when given the chance. The created order is not fragile. It is patient. It waits for us to stop long enough to let it work.

The next time you see a plant growing in a field, consider what is happening underground. The root tip is not pushing through dirt. It is running a digestive system it shares with the soil. It is feeding and being fed. It is doing what it was built to do.

We did not make it. We barely understand it. We replaced it with something worse.

The ground still works. The mercy of God still runs through it.

The Lithium Problem

The Big Bang story is the one everyone knows. Thirteen point eight billion years ago, everything that is began as something incomprehensibly small and hot, and expanded outward. In the first three minutes, the lightest elements formed — hydrogen, helium, trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. Everything heavier came later, cooked up in stars and scattered by supernovas. That’s the story. It’s told with confidence, and for good reason: two of those predictions work beautifully.

David wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1). He didn’t have a telescope. He didn’t need one. The declaration is there for anyone with eyes to see. But when you’re committed to a story about how the heavens got here without Him, even the declaration becomes something to manage.

NASA’s nine-year WMAP image of the cosmic microwave background — the “baby picture” of the universe at 380,000 years old. This data feeds the baryon density predictions used in Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Credit: NASA / WMAP Science Team.

WMAP cosmic microwave background map

Big Bang nucleosynthesis — the name for the physics that calculates what the first three minutes should have produced — predicts the primordial abundances of the lightest elements. Hydrogen? Spot on. Helium-4? Remarkably close. Deuterium? Spectacular agreement between prediction and observation, confirmed by looking at the most distant, oldest gas clouds we can find. When the prediction and the measurement line up like that, it’s a real success. Nobody’s taking that away.

But then there’s lithium.

The same model, using the same physics, fed the same cosmic baryon density measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe — the same input that nails hydrogen and helium — predicts that the early universe should have produced roughly three to four times more lithium-7 than we actually find. Not three percent more. Three to four times more. The discrepancy is now at 4-5 sigma, which in plain English means it’s not a fluke, not a measurement error, not something that’s going to go away with a better telescope. It’s real. It’s been called the “cosmological lithium problem” in the literature for over a decade, and it’s not getting smaller. A 2008 paper out of Michigan State was titled “A Bitter Pill: The Primordial Lithium Problem Worsens.” It has worsened.

The Schramm plot: primordial abundances of helium-4, deuterium, and lithium-7 as a function of cosmic baryon density. Helium and deuterium observations overlap with predictions. Lithium-7 does not — the observed values sit a factor of 3-4 below the predicted curve.

Schramm plot showing lithium-7 discrepancy in Big Bang nucleosynthesis

Now here’s where it gets interesting — not the problem itself, but the response to the problem.

When hydrogen and helium match the prediction, that’s celebrated as confirmation of the model. When lithium doesn’t match the prediction, the model isn’t questioned. The lithium is. The proposed fix is that stars somehow destroy their own lithium over time — that the lithium was there at the beginning, as predicted, but something in stellar interiors burned it away over billions of years, leaving us with less than the model says should be there. The mechanism isn’t settled. The details are murky. But the direction is consistent: the model stays, the data needs explaining away.

Proverbs 18:17 says, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.” The Big Bang had the floor first. It told its story, and the story sounded right — still does, in the parts that work. But lithium just walked into the courtroom. And the response of the first witness is to talk louder, not to listen.

Stop and look at that for a second.

If the model predicts X and you find X, you say “the model works.” If the model predicts X and you find one-third of X, you say “something must have destroyed two-thirds of X.” In both cases, the model is assumed right. The first case is science. The second case is something else. The second case is what you do when the model can’t be wrong — when the commitment to the model comes before the data.

If that pattern feels familiar, it should. You’ve seen it before.

Do you recall the beginning of covid? “Two weeks to flatten the curve” became “until the vaccine” became “until the boosters” became “the new normal.” The goalposts moved and moved and moved, and the confidence never wavered. States drew hard lines against “wrong think” — doctors who had studied hard, who had made sacrifices, who had built careers so that we would trust them, were silenced for asking questions the framework couldn’t answer. I am thankful to God that my ALS diagnosis came just before all of this. We were living in Minnesota, and if you haven’t had your head in the sand for three years, you know how that went down.

The current status of doctors is the current status of astrophysicists. They moved the story, kept the lab coat, and still want our trust. After everything that happened — after the contradictions, the silenced questions, the quiet reversals nobody acknowledged — they want us to trust them. And science.

The word science used to mean something. It comes from the Latin scientia — knowledge. That’s all it was. What do we know, and how do we know it. Newton called his work “natural philosophy” because the word still just meant knowledge back then. But over time the word narrowed, and then the authority claim hardened on top of it. “Science” went from meaning “what we know” to “the method by which we know” to “the institution that tells you what to believe.” Same word. Different thing wearing it. Somewhere along the way, “science” stopped meaning knowledge and started meaning trust me.

Jeremiah said this a long time ago: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD” (Jeremiah 17:5). He wasn’t talking about doctors or cosmologists — he didn’t have them — but he was talking about the human instinct underneath both. We want an authority we can see, a consensus we can lean on, a framework we can trust because the people in white coats told us to. And when the framework cracks, the instinct isn’t to question the framework. The instinct is to patch it and keep trusting.

That’s not a slam on scientists. Most of the people working on the lithium problem are doing honest, careful work, measuring stellar atmospheres, calculating nuclear reaction rates, looking for some pathway that might account for the missing lithium. Some of them might be right. There could be a stellar depletion mechanism that nobody’s found yet. That’s possible. But the shape of the search reveals the assumption: the answer must be something that preserves the model. Nobody in the mainstream literature is asking whether the model itself is the problem. That option isn’t on the table.

Richard Lewontin, the Harvard evolutionary biologist, told us why. Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1997, he said it more plainly than any scientist on his side of the line usually does:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community of unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”

Read that carefully. He didn’t say the evidence compels the materialist conclusion. He said the commitment comes first, and the apparatus of investigation is built to produce explanations that fit the commitment. The data is examined through a lens that was chosen before the data arrived.

The lithium problem is a small, clean example of exactly what Lewontin described. The model predicts an amount. The universe has a third of that amount. And the response is not “maybe the model is wrong” — the response is “find a way to make the universe match the model.” The model is the prior commitment. The lithium is the data that doesn’t fit. The apparatus of investigation produces explanations that preserve the model, because the model is what can’t be questioned.

There’s a pattern in Scripture that looks like this. Romans 1 says that what can be known about God is plain — He made it plain — but people “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” They don’t just miss it. They have it, and they push it down. The word Paul uses is katechontōn — holding down, suppressing, pressing the truth under something else. The truth is there. The commitment to something else comes first. The truth gets explained away.

The lithium problem isn’t proof of God. It’s not proof the Big Bang didn’t happen. It’s one crack. One place where the confident story has a seam that doesn’t line up, and the way the seam gets handled tells you something about the story — not about the universe, but about the people telling it. The universe is fine. The lithium is what it is. It’s the story that has the problem.

If the framework can’t account for the data, and the response is to keep the framework and manage the data, that’s worth noticing. It’s worth noticing not because it proves anything, but because it shows you what’s being protected. And once you see what’s being protected, you can start asking why.

Jesus said, “If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). The truth sets free. The framework — any framework that can’t be questioned — keeps you in.

One crack. That’s all. Just the thing itself.

References:

• Fields, B.D. (2012). “The Primordial Lithium Problem.” Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science, 62, 105-123.

• Cyburt, R.H. (2008). “A Bitter Pill: The Primordial Lithium Problem Worsens.” arXiv:0808.2818.

• Lewontin, R. (1997). “Billions and Billions of Demons.” New York Review of Books, Jan 9, 1997.