Move Over Bacterial Flagellum

by Barry Newton

The cycle continues. As empirical science exposes our prior human ignorance, the latest naturalistic stories on origins join the trash heap of discarded speculation. Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount indicating the necessity of an Intelligent Designer’s work.

The bacterial flagellum provided one of the first serious objections against purely naturalistic origins. Research continues to reveal new challenges to naturalistic stories. Move over bacterial flagellum, you have company.

For years, the evolutionary community dismissed non-protein coding DNA (introns) as simply junk DNA. Accordingly, evolutionary theory impeded the advancement of scientific understanding of approximately 97% of our DNA. The interpretation of introns as failed evolutionary experiments could not have been further from the truth.

Today, a continual stream of discoveries are revealing that introns provide a multitude of very complex functions. For example, they even dictate a three-dimensional structure for genes enabling a whole battery of genes to be “turned on” with a single efficient flip of a switch. This stands as a testament to engineering brilliance, not haphazard accumulated junk.

How are yesterday’s confident naturalistic stories being revealed as uninformed speculation?
At first it was easy to imagine how life might have arisen. After all, were not single-celled organisms relatively simple blobs of protoplasm? Evolutionists’ creative naiveté combined with naturalistic Darwinistic stories have been in retreat since the 1960’s.

Today’s understanding of life being built upon DNA and the twenty essential bio-amino acids has repeatedly challenged naturalistic stories.

According to a symposium I attended recently, one of the many problems is how did the two essential amino acids, methionine and cysteine, come into existence? The formation of these two amino acids requires a biologically usable form of sulfur. We might ask, so what?

As it turns out, this needed form of sulfur is manufactured by an enzyme which transforms sulfur as it is found in nature into a usable form. However, the enzyme which performs this function, itself contains this usable form of sulfur.

Here is the chicken and egg problem at the smallest level. The solution can not be found on a smaller level. How could this enzyme have appeared naturalistically, since to build it requires what it will produce?

Unless someone is blindly committed to assuming that naturalistic mechanisms alone are sufficient for our universe, the mounting evidence challenges the naturalistic mindset. Where is the intellectual tipping point? Where does the evidence point?

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