Amazing Design of Life
Biological systems are far more sophisticated than anything else on the planet, natural or artificial. Structures, such as the muscular-skeletal structure in vertebrates, the system to clot blood or protect the body from bacterial infection, and the complex human eye appear to have been designed because they consist of complex systems that are interrelated to one another. Anyone who has seen a Body Worlds (Body-Worlds) exhibit has seen something of the astounding complexity and interconnectedness of the human body, which is perhaps the most amazingly complex of all biological structures in our world.
The impression of design is not unreasonable. I drive a Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid electric and gasoline car. I’m frequently astonished at the wonderful engineering that must have gone into the car to allow it, for example, to switch back and forth between electric (“when I want it,” says the tagline) and gasoline (“when I need it”). When the car is on “Mountain Mode,” it “decides” to use a combination of gas and battery when needed. Yet Volt engineering is rudimentary compared with the engineering and design in the simplest of life.
When she was only one year old my daughter Marie had open-heart surgery to correct a Tetralogy of Fallot. Part of the septum in the ventricle of her little heart had not closed up as it normally would in children her age, creating a heart murmur. An alert pediatrician caught the sound on her stethoscope and, on further investigation, helped to discover the defect. It is called a tetralogy because the heart does its best to compensate for the hole in this way:
1. The ventricular septal defect allows blood to flow improperly in the ventricle, prompting
2. The valve in the pulmonary artery to constrict to reduce damage to the lungs, prompting
3. The aortic valve to enlarge, prompting
4. The heart to work harder to pump more blood, enlarging the muscular wall of the right ventricle (Tetralogy-of-Fallot, 2020).
This frightening and potentially fatal imperfection in our little Marie was corrected through surgery conducted by an outstanding team of doctors and nurses at Denver Children’s Hospital. During surgery, the pulmonary valve and passage were widened and the ventricular septal defect was patched. Marie fully recovered, thank God, and her heart is now perfectly normal. Once the hole was patched, her heart knew just what to do.
My point is that Marie’s heart, as complex as it is with its variety of systems and structures, was so interrelated that it responded holistically to the defect. The Tetralogy of Fallot was itself a response to the ventricular septal defect as her heart attempted to compensate. Once that hole was patched her heart responded and healed itself. The entire process is amazing, bordering on the miraculous. These days, Marie says, “I do credit God for healing my heart and giving me a physical reminder that everyone has a hole in his heart that only the great physician can fix.” Her thoughts recall the words of Augustine of Hippo (354-430), “There is a God-shaped vacuum in every man that only Christ can fill” (Augustine). Similarly, as the great French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) said, “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus” (Pascal).
Marie’s physical reality points to the spiritual analogy of the hole in the human soul.
The human heart is just one of the many complex structures in living organisms. The human body is filled with complex, interrelated systems that work together to make our lives possible, as designed by our loving Creator.
This blog post is an excerpt from my recently published book, Is Jesus Real? available on Amazon in print and Kindle.
