The BBC has a short video out that shows how the cell defends itself against viruses. It's a two step process in which one protein identifies the virus and attaches to it and then a second protein complex anchors to the first protein and eviscerates the virus. It's astonishing.
To think that such a system arose by random processes purely by chance rather than having been intelligently engineered requires a prodigious quantity of blind faith, but such is the faith of our naturalist friends that no feat of biological complexity is so astronomically improbable as to challenge their credulity.
As you watch the video note not only the wonderful defense mechanism the cell employs against the invaders but also note the amazing means of locomotion that the virus employs to traverse the cell.
The ability of the protein "feet" on the virus to attach to the proteins in the microtubules that serve as the highways in the cell is reminiscent of one of the first animations of cellular processes ever made. It was produced by Harvard University scientists in 2006 and is titled the Inner Life of the Cell.
At the 1:14 mark, the motor protein Dynein, which carries vacuoles across the cell, is shown "walking" along a microtubule. Anyone who can witness this and not see intelligent engineering can look at the clear blue noonday sky and not see the sun.
If you'd like to know more about what's being depicted in this video you can watch the following version of it. It's fascinating.
If you do watch it notice how the woman narrating it, in describing what's going on, uses language which implies intention and thus intelligence. She may not herself think that intelligence has anything to do with the incredible cellular choreography, but even so, the phenomena she's showing us are so much easier to describe in terms of intentional design:
Darwin and the scientists of his day knew nothing about the biology of the cell. They assumed it was a simple blob of jelly, but investigations of the last 70 years or so have shown that each of the trillions of cells in our bodies is in fact more like an enormously complex city. Each new discovery puts increasing strain on the belief that purely natural processes can account for how such a marvel came about.
Those who cling to this idea often do so because it's a pillar of their naturalistic worldview. If they give it up their worldview would undergo a psychologically devastating collapse.
So, like lonely Japanese soldiers holding out on Pacific Islands long after the war was over, some simply refuse to acknowledge what is plainly evident to anyone who looks at the evidence without an apriori commitment to naturalism.
Their adamantine refusal to grant that intelligent agency is the best explanation for the cellular machinery depicted in these videos brings to mind the story of the man who told his psychiatrist that, despite appearances, he was really dead. Nothing the psychiatrist could say or do persuaded the man that he wasn't dead. “Oh, yes doctor!" he insisted, "I’m completely dead!”
Finally, the psychiatrist showed him in several medical books that dead men don't bleed. The man accepted the authority of the books and agreed that it must be true that dead men don't bleed. The psychiatrist then said to the man, “Now look, I want you to go home and several times a day, tell yourself: Dead men don’t bleed! Dead men don’t bleed! Say this over and over again, come back to me in a month, and I’ll show you something very interesting indeed!”
The man did as the doctor instructed. He went home, repeated the phrase several times a day and returned a month later. “Well,” said the doctor, “what have you been saying to yourself?” “Oh,” replied the man, “Dead men don’t bleed, doctor; dead men don’t bleed.”
“Good,” said the doctor, “now watch this!” He deftly pricked the man’s finger with a needle, and a drop of blood oozed out. The man watched his finger bleed. “Oh, dear!” he gasped, “My Goodness! Dead men DO bleed after all!”
