You know I care deeply about understanding reality, and that includes science. I’ve spent years studying human development, DNA, embryology, and the astonishing complexity of the human body. The more I learn, the greater my appreciation becomes—not only for how life works, but for the mystery of why it works at all.
I simply want to share some questions that have become impossible to ignore.
Every day the human body quietly replaces about 330 billion cells. Each type of tissue follows its own schedule. Some cells live only days, others decades, yet every replacement occurs with extraordinary precision for daily replacement. Each of those cells is more complex than New York City.
Your brain contains about 86 billion neurons communicating through more than 100 trillion synapses. These networks regulate every thought, memory, decision, and movement. The systems that make this possible began forming long before you were born.
Your heart beats roughly 100,000 times every day and is engineered for billions of beats across a lifetime. The circulatory system—one of the first organ systems to form after fertilization—includes roughly 60,000 miles of blood vessels, reaching every cell for gas exchange.
We take around 20,000 breaths each day. Gas exchange occurs across hundreds of millions of alveoli (averaging around 480 million in adult lungs).
Bone marrow produces around two million red blood cells every second—more than 100 million per minute—to keep approximately 25 trillion red blood cells circulating and functional. Why and how?
Your liver performs more than 500 distinct metabolic and detoxification functions, all coded into its framework while still in the uterus. By eight weeks after fertilization, the developing human already possesses the full set of major organ systems and 4,000 identifiable body parts that will mature and grow for the rest of life.
An adult body contains on the order of 37+ trillion cells, roughly 650 skeletal muscles, and 206 bones, each perfectly positioned and designed. Experts continue to detail the extreme precision in all planes and dimensions. Within those bones, hundreds of billions of blood cells are generated daily.
Inside each of those trillions of cells—cells that all carry the same individual “me” marker—are millions of ribosomes continually reading the instructions stored in DNA. Every second, quadrillions of chemical reactions occur in exactly the right order to keep a person alive.
Truly amazing and mind-boggling.
Where did this information come from that is currently in action keeping us alive? What is the gift of life? Where did the information code originate that enables all of the above? What actually keeps us alive? And do we have a responsibility to make the best of it?
What continually tells every molecule where to go, what to build, when to begin, and when to stop?
What continually tells every molecule where to go, what to build, when to begin, and when to stop?
The chemicals themselves are not the instructions.
DNA is made from ordinary molecules, but those molecules carry information. The message is different from the medium. A book is more than ink on paper. Music is more than vibrations in the air. A computer program is more than electrical signals flowing through silicon.
In the same way, life must be guided by something more than chemistry. The evidence points to a Mind—a Mind capable of creating information before matter could ever use it.
And if such a Mind exists, perhaps the same One who designed the machinery of life also cares about the people who bear it.
This can be thought of as the immaterial genome. Scientists are now writing about this concept. Not because DNA and epigenetic events are not —they certainly are—but because the information encoded within it is something different from the atoms that carry it. Matter carries it, but matter doesn’t fully explain it. Each second, computational estimates approach an almost infinite number of possible choices, yet the correct one must be selected for each of the quadrillion decisions that occur every second of every day.
Why should the greatest information system ever discovered—the one that continually builds, repairs, and sustains every human life—be gifted to us?
Hard questions are worth asking, and the evidence is worth following wherever it leads. Scientists call this approach “inference to the most logical conclusion.”
It is also worth allowing room for questions that science alone may never fully answer:
The most logical conclusion, validated by modern discoveries astrophysics, in molecular biology and biochemistry, forms the foundation of a positive argument for Intelligent Design. Seen from the largest macro scale of the universe down to the smallest fundamental forces and elements, the evidence points to a beginning and to an Intelligent Designer outside of creation yet fully engaged in it.
Success is not measured by whether every person reaches the same conclusion. What matters far more is becoming someone who sincerely seeks truth wherever it may be found.
One day the voices that first raised these questions will no longer be heard. The words themselves can remain.
Years from now, when watching a child sleep or holding a first grandchild, it is possible to pause and ask the same question that still amazes:
What actually keeps us alive? More importantly, why?
Follow that question honestly, and it has the power to change the course of a life.
Keep searching—not just for answers, but for the One who may be the source of every answer worth finding.