The Problem of the Protein Molecule

Every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.
—Hebrews 3:4

A major flaw in the theory of evolution is the problem of the protein molecule. Evolutionists say all life came from a one-celled microscopic blob, a protozoan. The logical question is, how did this microscopic blob come into being? Interestingly, evolutionists skip over that, because they have no answer to how living matter suddenly emerged out of primordial chemical soup. The best evolutionists can do is to say for millions of years chemicals covered the Earth. Then lightning strikes energized those chemicals, so out of those chemicals came amino acids, which randomly assembled to become protein molecules, which randomly assembled to become the first living cell, from which all life-forms can be traced.

What are the chances that 20 amino acids could form just one protein molecule? It’s 1 in 10 to the 161st power. That’s 1 followed by 161 zeroes. And how long would it take for those amino acids to come together randomly to produce just one protein molecule?

Dr. James Coppedge uses this illustration. Imagine that a single amoeba decides to move every planet, every solar system, every galaxy, from one end of the universe to the other. But the amoeba is so small it can only move one atom at a time. So this tiny amoeba decides to start with you. It takes one atom of your body, moves it 30 billion light years across the universe, and plunks it down. Then it travels back 30 billion light years to get your second atom, and third atom, and so on until it has completely moved one human being. Now it has to do that for all six billion human beings on planet Earth. And then it has to do that with all the animals on planet Earth, and everything else on planet Earth, one atom at a time. Then it has to move every other planet in our solar system—and then it has to move every solar system in our galaxy. Then it has to move the millions of galaxies in the universe. That’s how long it would take for 20 amino acids to form one protein molecule.

But when you get all 20 amino acids together to produce one molecule, you don’t have a cell yet—you just have one protein molecule. It takes thousands of protein molecules to form one cell. What are the chances of that happening randomly? The chances are zero. Yet the evolutionist says, “I would rather believe in that happening than to believe in the divine Creator.” Why? Because evolution is a religious philosophy, not just a scientific theory. So the first flaw of evolution is the protein molecule.

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Today’s devotion is excerpted from “Four Fatal Flaws of Evolution” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2008.

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright © 1960,1962,1963,1968,1971,1972,1973,1975,1977,1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Illustration from from Dr. James Coppedge, “Evolution: Possible or Impossible?” (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1973), 110, 114.