A significant moment in my faith journey took place while channel-surfing a few years ago. I happened to watch a few minutes of a documentary about open-heart surgery.
I was awestruck by the footage of surgeons working on a beating heart. What a marvelous mechanism the body is! And by implication, what a marvelous mechanism the universe is, to say nothing of the physical laws that got it where it is. Of course, one has to wonder: Whence came those laws, to say nothing of the energy and matter that obey them?
But back to biology: Here’s a typically droll passage from Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Its cover claims it was described by the NY Times Book Review as "destined to become a modern classic of science writing":
… Each one [of your cells] caries a copy of the complete genetic code — the instruction manual for your body — so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body. Never in your life will you have to remind a cell to keep an eye on its adenosine triphosphate levels or to find a place for the extra squirt of folic acid that’s just unexpectedly turned up. It will do that for you, and millions more things besides.
Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit the into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.
But yeast cells are as nothing compared with human cells, which are not just more varied and complicated, but vastly more fascinating because of their complex interactions. * * * And not once in all your years have you thanked even one of them. So let us take a moment now to regard them with the wonder and appreciation they deserve.
(Ch. 24, paperback edition pp.371-72.)
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