us who God is.
The Unknown Masterpiece
In his book The Cells Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creators Artistry, biochemist Fazale Rana probes the cells’ biochemical systems looking for attributes of God. He compares this to the process by which the identity of painters is determined by the characteristics of their paintings:
Sometime in the early 1970s, a junk dealer came across five ink drawings while clearing out a deceased woman’s apartment in London. He hung onto them for several years, after which time one of them wound up in the hands of a Brighton art dealer. Eventually, that dealer showed the mysterious drawing to Mark Harris, an art aficionado, who concluded that the piece might well be an unknown work by Picasso.21
When Picasso’s estate refused to confirm the authenticity of the drawing, which became known as “The Unknown Masterpiece,” Mark Harris was charged with a difficult task: authenticating the artwork based solely on its attributes.
Harris began by pointing out hallmark features of Picasso’s work, such as the fingerprint rolled into the wet ink at the bottom of the drawing, and by comparing the drawing to authenticated works by the artist. By identifying stylistic attributes that had been associated with Picasso, and discovering similarities between “The Unknown Masterpiece” and other paintings by Picasso (such as “The Three Dancers” and “Guernica”), Harris was able to amass a large body of evidence to support the claim that Picasso, indeed, painted the picture. In other words, Harris was able to identify the designer by looking at the design.
If it is true that God’s divine nature is “understood by the things that are made,” then examination of the body God created reveals not only the beauty and elegance of his design, but also unveils countless truths about his nature and his goodness.
The Body as a Teacher
The body is a miracle. The mere act of waking up in the morning involves more complexity than all the technologies NASA has ever designed. The outer ear captures fluctuations in air pressure that are created by the noise of an alarm clock, translating these fluctuations into an electrical signal that the brain can understand. The eyelids are extended upwards to reveal a fusion of light and color, which the brain weaves into visual information that can be recognized by the mind. Then thought activates the brain’s cortex, creating an electromagnetic storm that sends a nerve impulse down through the spinal cord into the muscles, which animate the bones and joints of the body. All of this happens so that the arm can reach, and the finger can extend, to nudge the highly coveted snooze button.
For these three simple movements to occur, trillions of cells must fire over a quadrillion signals to each other simultaneously, and each cell must understand what the other is doing. Even when the body is in a state of rest, each cell is completing a few million processes per second just to keep us alive: creating proteins, absorbing nutrients, transporting oxygen, and fighting infections.
In his book The Greatest Miracle in the World, Og Mandino wrote a “memorandum from God,” in which he unravels the marvel of our biology:
Your brain is the most complex structure in the universe. I know. Within its three pounds are thirteen billion nerve cells, more than three times as many cells as there are people on your earth. To help you file away every perception, every sound, every taste, every smell, every action you have experienced since the day of your birth . . . And, to assist your brain in the control of your body I have dispersed, throughout your form, four million pain-sensitive structures, five hundred thousand touch detectors, and more than two hundred thousand temperature detectors. No nation’s gold is better protected than you. None of your ancient wonders are greater than you . . . Within you is enough atomic energy to destroy any of the world’s great cities . . . and rebuild it.22
Zoom in on any one system in the body and you’ll be fascinated at all that has to take place to make the plan work. Geoffrey Simmons, in his book What Darwin Didn’t Know, describes the inner workings of the digestive system:
Look at how we transfer sugar, minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and vitamins from our dinner plates to our mouths, down to the gastrointestinal tract, through the walls of the small bowel, into the bloodstream, through the liver, and ultimately to every cell in the body. Millions of macroscopic and microscopic processes are utilized. How does the body even know which sugar (and there are many types) to absorb, or which protein (and there are hundreds) goes where, when, and in what quantity? How does it know which substances are safe to absorb, and which should be ignored, quickly eliminated, or destroyed? How does the small bowel know how to cooperate with the 500 different kinds of bacteria that live in it? These are incredibly complex functions that work together—and only together—to maintain the health of an individual.23
Words that could be used to describe the inventor of this process might include artistic, imaginative, original, inventive, beautiful, clever, magnificent—even stunning. C. S. Lewis wrote “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art . . .”24
If such a cursory look at the body’s design warrants such adjectives, what might an even closer look reveal?
Cell Theology
Advances in biochemical technique have made it possible for researchers to get a closer look at the cell than ever before, revealing biochemical processes that mirror God’s character attributes at the molecular level.
The bacterial flagellum, for example, is a biomolecular machine that reveals his intelligence. It reflects careful planning, purposeful design, and complex engineering. This mechanism is made up of over forty different kinds of proteins that function in concert exactly like a rotary motor would. According to Rana, its “components stand as direct analogs to the parts of a man-made motor, including a rotor, stator, drive shaft, bushing, universal joint, and propeller.”25
When harmful breaks occur on strands of DNA, they don’t die; they are instead repaired and given new life. Damaged DNA is removed and then resynthesized. The technical name for this repair mechanism is Homologous recombination, but in spiritual terms it’s called grace.
Homologous recombination is just one of many cellular mechanisms that demonstrate that forgiveness isn’t just an ethereal concept that occurs in our spiritual “hearts,” forgiveness is hardwired into our cells. The process of death and resurrection plays itself out millions of times each hour within the biomolecular systems of the body.
The resilience of the body demonstrates God’s grace; the complexity of the body demonstrates his creativity; and the quality control systems that govern cell reproduction demonstrate his reliability.
Indeed, the designer can be known by the design.
The Body as a Symbol
Just as the physiological processes that govern bodily function have much to teach us about God, so also does the symbolic nature of the body. In his book Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality, Father Thomas Ryan wrote about the spiritual significance of male circumcision:
In Jewish mystical practice the covering of the phallus with foreskin symbolized humanity’s tendency to cover over or to forget that our origins are in the loins of God. Thus the foreskin of the male child is cut away from the phallus, “and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you” (Gen 17:11).26
The penis as a symbol of being in covenant with the living God? What a far cry this is from the way most Christian men view their penises! Through circumcision, the penis actually becomes a prayer. J. Phillip Newell wrote:
At different points in Christian history, if there had been a religious ritual in relation to the male
