Divine Chemistry
Amazingly, the science that consolidated my belief in God was chemistry. Yeah, the bane of my junior year actually helped me believe in the Divine? No, it was not just because of the intervention I am sure He had in my being able to pass the class. It was perhaps in one of the simpler lessons of chemistry: chemical reactions.
I had excelled in the biochemistry portion of my Biology class, and perhaps it was this appreciation of the formations of sugars, proteins, lipids, and DNA that spurred my intellectual quest to understand chemical reactions. I was all too aware of the painful consequences of awry genetic sequences and broken molecular bonds, at least on the cellular level. However, being introduced to a table of ions and reactions ushered in my awareness of a whole new dangerous world I was exploring. I could see myriad possibilities for reactions both good and bad. I could see how things could just go wrong with the single shoving of an electron in the wrong reaction.
This question occurred to me one day: “What ensures that Element X combines with Element Y to produce something beneficial, instead of combining with Element Z to produce a harmful compound?” Like for instance, the element hydrogen could combine with a myriad of other elements in different proportions. There had to be something that dictated that in nature, two atoms of hydrogen when combined with one of oxygen would yield water. There had to be something that ensured that hydrogen in the environment did not usually combine with other elements like barium, chlorine (God forbid) or even radioactive elements. I seriously could not imagine living in a hydrochloric world. There had to be something governing the entire process of chemical reactions and the proportions of such in our environment.
That same year, I took a fall down the stairs and twisted my knee. While limping through the school building for the next six months, I began wondering “What ensures that these atoms in compounds, or even the electrons in individual atoms stay put and do not decide to fly off to combine or act in other ways?” I had some idea of the effects of being bombarded with neutrons, or perhaps with nuclear energy. I had pretty crazy visions of DNA turning into nonsense when a particle knocked into the guanine or thymine bridges. What was it in nature that stopped these things from happening?!
Then there was the beauty of studying carbon. Seriously, Someone must have thought that a tetravalent atom would be the best thing to include in a diverse array of bio-molecules that support life. Imagine how organisms might look if say, silicon had been the foundation of organic qualities? Or what would happen if life was based on a noble gas like neon?
The more I studied the various things that could happen in a test tube, the more I became convinced that such things happened (or did not happen) in nature for a reason. There had to be something orchestrating the timing, location, and magnitude of the different chemical reactions in the organic and inorganic environment. If chemical reactions were purely random or merely “by chance”, or left up to the laws of science, it is possible that many undesirable phenomena could occur in our environment and make life more difficult to sustain on the planet. It is possible a chemical reaction gone awry could destroy a planet. After all, though the rules of chemistry allow for all kinds of compounds and mixtures to be created, there is the question of why some are more commonplace than others, why some chemical reactions are only strictly in the laboratory, why nuclei aren’t as easy to play with as electrons are, and why water has an amazing specific heat that allows life to generally persist despite temperature extremes.
This leaves me little choice but to conclude that there is some higher Power than either Man or Science that governs the universe. Coincidence cannot fully account for such precision in the smallest yet most crucial aspects of the physical world. There is Something or Someone that has intelligently put the world together, and is continuing to do so. After all, if the Big Bang is proven—what is there to ensure that the Big Bang is not the end of it all, and is only the beginning?
Therefore I have no choice but to acknowledge that my scientific study has not in any way proven that the physical world is the “end” of all life and inquiry, and that it has only spurred me to look at the exquisite way that all is ordered as if by some large-scale semantic diagram, and that such arrangement cannot be chalked up to chance alone—especially if it has been going on almost consistently for billions of years. There has to be Someone that is driving it all—and no matter what name this Being may go by for the scientist or layman, this Person is definitely worthy of our respect, if not our reverence for the very act of running a universe as it continues to change and evolve.
