I thank God that the FDA has just approved a vaccine for the coronavirus. If things go well, they may approve a second vaccine next week. These are the first vaccines for humans that are based on mRNA. We should be praying that these vaccines will live up to their promise of being safe and effective. We should also thank God for enabling the hardworking scientists, doctors, and other people involved in the process who have produced an approved vaccine in record time.
In addition to having the potential to save many thousands of lives and help end the difficult shut down, these mRNA vaccines can give glory to God in another way. They can remind us of evidence that life had to be created by a great, super-intelligent, ancient Designer.
What is mRNA? (a very simple review of life and some cell biology)
One of the characteristics of living things is that they are designed so that normally they can reproduce other living things of the same kind. Living things are incredibly complex. So far people, despite being able to make spaceships and nuclear submarines, have not been able to make a self-replicating machine or a self-replicating factory that uses material in the environment to make copies of itself. Thus, every blade of grass and butterfly that flutters by can do something that no man-made object can do. Blades of grass produce seeds that grow into new blades of grass and butterflies lay eggs that grow into new butterflies. Your iPhone may be an amazing piece of technology, but it can’t make baby iPhones!
All living things are made of cells. That includes everything from dolphins to oak trees and from hummingbirds to bacteria. Your body is made up of approximately 30 trillion cells! Although cells are very tiny, they are filled with functioning molecular machines and encoded information that work together to enable the cell to live and multiply.
One of the important components found inside of every cell is DNA. DNA works like the hard drive on your computer. It contains much of the information that the cell needs to function. This information is encoded in the sequence of base pairs in DNA. DNA is an excellent molecule for the long term storage of biological information (the “blueprints” for building new cells). DNA can also pass this information down to the next generation of cells. But the information does not do any good if it stays in the DNA just like the information on your computer’s hard drive will not do any good if it stays there. In the case of your computer, the information on the hard drive gets copied into RAM where it can operate your computer and make it do things (like check your email or display a blog post). Likewise, the information stored in DNA gets copied onto RNA so that the RNA can do things in the cell. One of the main things the RNA does is provide the correct sequences for amino acids to be built together into proteins. The type of RNA that does this is called mRNA. So, basically, mRNA is used to build proteins.
Here is a relatively simple, animated video I found on YouTube that shows the role of mRNA in building proteins. A couple of notes: (1) The video correctly states that ribosomes are made from rRNA, but they also have protein parts in them and are incredible molecular machines that are much more complex than what the video shows (the video warns that it is a simplification), and (2) the video shows how cells in your body normally make mRNA from DNA, but the mRNA in the vaccine is made in a lab and injected so it does not involve your DNA.
How mRNA is used to make a vaccine
Like many other viruses, COVID 19 has some protein parts. One of these protein parts is the “spike proteins” that are seen sticking out of the ball in artist renditions of the protein. These “spike proteins” help the virus to get into the cells of the people the virus infects. God has given our bodies amazing immune systems that can identify foreign proteins and destroy them. But this takes some time to work when a foreign protein enters your body. During that time, the virus can multiply and do all kinds of damage, making people sick and in some cases even killing people.
While the spike protein is part of the virus, by itself it cannot multiply and is not a big threat. But it can be identified as part of the virus and then the whole virus can be destroyed.
Like all proteins, the spike proteins are produced in
cells by using mRNA that codes for that particular protein. Usually, the mRNA
comes from the virus itself (yes, some viruses have mRNA in them). The way the
vaccine works is that it has mRNA that codes for the spike protein, but does
NOT have the mRNA for the whole virus. So, when the vaccine mRNA is injected,
it causes our cells to make the spike proteins, but not the whole virus. Then your
body’s immune system learns to recognize and destroy the spike proteins. Later,
if the actual virus enters your body, your body’s immune system very quickly
recognizes the spike protein and destroys it along with the whole virus it is attached
to before the virus can do a lot of harm. Pretty clever, isn’t it! (There are a
lot more details, and I thank God for the smart scientists whom He enabled to figure
this stuff out.)
What is Intelligent Design Theory?
Intelligent Design theory is a scientific theory based on seeing evidence in nature that indicates that the universe we live in, as well as specific parts of it (like living things), is best explained as being the product of a great, intelligent Creator as opposed to merely being the product of the laws of nature, matter, energy, and chance. Evidence for design can be seen at many levels, including:
1. The fact that our universe had a beginning
2. The fine tuning of physics to make a universe able to support life
3. Chemistry
4. Starlight
5. Our wonderful home, the planet earth
6. The origin of life
7. The diversity of life
mRNA provides evidence for design at levels 6 and 7 (also level 3, but I won’t be addressing that). I’ll include links to other blog posts on some of the other levels and on other evidence at levels 6 and 7 below, but in the rest of this blog post I will focus on evidence related to mRNA.
RNA and the Origin of Life
Cells are really, really complex and amazing. They have complex cell membranes that protect the cell and let the stuff out that needs to go out and let the stuff in that needs to come in. Cells are also full of functioning molecular machines (here’s a link to a cool video showing one of these machines). All cells contain a large amount of functional information. So it’s not realistic to think that a functioning, living cell could just pop into existence (unless you believe in God!). Scientists who are committed to materialism (explaining everything without God) don’t say that the first cell just popped into existence. They claim that prior to cells there must have been some type of chemical evolution (also referred to as abiogenesis) that involved increasingly cell-like replicating chemical systems.
It should be noted that no one has ever found or made a somewhat-on-the-way-to-being-a-cell replicating chemical system. There’s no physical evidence such a thing has ever existed. In fact, there’s good evidence that such a thing cannot work (see this blog post on how viruses strengthen the scientific case for a Creator). But that hasn’t stopped origin of life researchers and those who follow their work from spinning stories about what they think might have existed. One of the most popular such stories is sometimes referred to as the RNA world. The RNA world is a theory that says that before there were replicating cells with DNA there were replicating molecular systems with RNA. Because RNA contains information and because it can work as a catalyst for some reactions, this seems like about the best guest possible if you begin by ruling out God (which is a really terrible way to begin). But there are many reasons the RNA world could never work, and the recent news about mRNA viruses reminds us of some of those reasons. I will briefly explain three of them.
1. mRNA cannot replicate on its own
One of the challenges of using mRNA in a vaccine is that it is not enough to inject it into your body, the mRNA must make it through the cell membrane into your cells. Why is this? By itself, mRNA cannot do anything. It cannot make spike proteins or any other type of proteins by itself. It contains information, but it needs other RNA molecules (specifically tRNA), complex cellular machinery (specifically ribosomes), and the metabolism of a living cell (a complex system for harnessing and using energy needed to run the cell) to create a protein. And many proteins are needed for self-replication of cells. In other words, even if an RNA molecule somehow formed on the early earth (which is basically impossible without intelligent intervention, but just for argument sake let’s say it did) it would be able to do nothing at all. It would be there without a ribosome, without cell metabolism, and without very specific tRNAs it needs to work.
2. mRNA is relatively unstable
Some people speculate that because there were millions of years potentially available for chemical evolution, you could get some of the parts you need (like RNA) and then eventually add other parts. But there’s a problem. Time doesn’t help, it hurts. The mRNA vaccines have to be kept frozen prior to use. This may be due to the well known fact that RNA is a relatively unstable molecule (see articles here and here that explain this). RNA usually does not stay around for long. So even if an RNA molecule somehow appeared, it could not wait around for millions of years (or usually not even for one year!) for a lucky encounter with some other molecule that could help it do something.
3. RNA needs functional information to work
You can’t just pump any mRNA into a person and expect it to vaccinate them against the coronavirus. We already have LOTS of mRNA constantly being produced in the 30 trillion cells in our bodies. None of that mRNA vaccinates us against the coronavirus. Why? Because the function of any particular strand of mRNA depends on the order of the nucleotides it contains. It works like this sentence I am typing. I cannot just type random letters and get a sentence that makes sense, much less a sentence that conveys the specific meaning I desire. Likewise, none of the mRNA in your body currently codes for COVID spike proteins (unless you have been infected). The chances of randomly assembling nucleotides into even one RNA sequence that would perform any useful function relative to self-replication are so remote as to be practically impossible, even if you had oceans full of RNA and millions of years. This situation is made worse because there is no known sequence of RNA anywhere (in any cell in any creature or in any virus or in any lab) that has the ability to self-replicate without using the resources of an already existing cell.
What Works
The mRNA vaccine was not created by purely material forces and chance. It was designed and manufactured by intelligent scientists. It is far more difficult to design a living cell. In fact, we are not even close to being able to design a living cell from material that does not come from already living cells. Not even close. So, it is reasonable to believe that the Creator of the first living cell is more intelligent than all our scientists today. This Creator also lived long before any human lived. And since the universe we live in has physical constants fine-tuned for life and the chemistry needed for life, it appears that this great Creator existed before the universe and made the universe and all the life that we see. Remind you of Anyone?
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1 ESV)
To God be the glory!
Hebrews 13:16 And do not forget to do good and to share with others . . .Some of the Other Blog Posts I Have Written on Evidence for God Seen in Nature:
God Created the Earth to be Inhabited
How the Sun glorifies the Son
Seeing God in Creation Gives Me Courage to Keep Serving Him
Nuclear Submarines and Living Cells
Theistic Evolution Demagnifies God's Glory
Octopi from Outer Space
Behe’s Three Mighty Blows Against Darwinism
I also have blog posts on lots of other stuff. Here’s a small sample:
Create in Me a Clean Heart, O God
What does Paul Mean by a “Spiritual Body”?
The Three Ways Jesus Saves Us from our Sins
A Model for Intercessory Prayer
Practical Advice for Battles with Sin and Temptation
What’s so Great about the Great Commission?
Do we Kneel and Bow Down Enough?
The Book of Revelation is Practical and Applicable
No comments:
Post a Comment