Guests: Doug Sharp and Rich Geer
Description: We owe our existence to an abundance of features of chemical elements designed by God in perfect proportion to its role in sustaining life. One such feature is the hydrogen bond. Hydrogen bonds are forces where a hydrogen atom is weakly attracted to an unshared electron pair of another atom, commonly oxygen. It is this weak force that makes water a liquid, not a solid. Therefore, the hydrogen bond is the sticky note glue that holds the universe together. The chemistry of water is such a vast subject that you could write a 400 page book.
The hydrogen bond plays an important role in the activity of proteins. Proteins fold up into a three dimensional shape that allows it to serve as a catalyst for the thermodynamic reactions that occur in life. The amino acids have side chains that contain the hydroxide ion and are hydrophilic, or they are don’t and are hydrophobic. The hydrophobic side chains gather together to bend the protein to avoid the surrounding water, but the hydrophilic side chains like to waft in the water environment, bending it in the opposite direction. This is in conjunction with the disulfide bridges, ionic bonds, covalent bonds, and Van der Waals forces that shape a protein. This is evidence of incredible design, and if you really understand what goes on here, you have no excuse for denying the existence of God as designer.
Origin of life experiments are abject failures in their attempt to produce a scenario where the chemical components of proteins are all produced. There are 20 amino acids used in life, but only glycine and alanine were produced in Miller’s experiment. Larger molecular weight amino acids are not possible, and nucleotides used in DNA and RNA require reagents that conflict with Miller’s starting atmospheric scenario.
Claims such as “We’ve sequenced the human genome! What have you creationists done?” fall short in its arrogance and misunderstanding of the complexity of the problem.