Modern aircraft can carry passengers and cargo to altitudes as high as six miles and are assembled from many thousands of precisely machined parts. The airplane as a whole can fly, even though it is made of non-flying parts. Take, for example, a wheel or a single wing flap or the fuselage. By themselves these parts cannot fly (throwing doesn’t count), but when integrated with all the other parts, they take on a new characteristic that is not inherent in any of the individual parts—flight.
It is not miraculous or mysterious that intelligent people discovered the mathematical and physical principles of flight and used them to build objects that fly. But it is miraculous and mysterious that life itself even exists, and that it exists in multiple levels of complexity. Life is really a compounded miracle. Take one cell from your mouth. This living cell is made of non-living chemicals like water, proteins, fats, acids, carbohydrates, and salts. These chemicals obey the laws of physics and chemistry based on their composition and can be separated or combined at will in a test tube. Yet they are not alive. So the property of life is not inherent within inorganic and organic chemicals. That is, life is not the result of spontaneous mixtures of dead chemicals as some of the evolutionary faith believe. Rather, the miracle of life is that dead chemicals were skillfully and intentionally arranged by someone into a form that they do not naturally take and which is far greater than the sum of the parts—a living cell.
Compounding the miracle of life from dead chemicals are the levels of cooperation and specialization of cells that form organs, organ systems, whole organisms, and even populations of organisms like a flock of geese, a herd of sheep, or a forest ecosystem. These complex and interrelated systems are the compounded miracles of life. Within their boundaries they obey, but they do not create, the biological laws of genetic variation, natural selection, population dynamics, and biochemistry. Instead, these physical and biological laws must have been set in place by someone outside of the entire system. Someone we will call the Creator.
So who is this mysterious Creator with the power and skill to form dead chemicals into living things? Many believe this question is unanswerable and is similar to the historical question of who built the ring of huge stone blocks in England called Stonehenge: people built Stonehenge but they did not leave their names inscribed on the stone nor are there written records identifying the builders. Likewise, the Creator did not inscribe His name on each strand of DNA or write it in the clouds for all to see. But, unlike the builders of Stonehenge, the Creator of the Universe wants to be known, and even worshiped. Since the living world around us is a compounded miracle, isn’t it reasonable to start the search for the Creator by looking for Someone who performs miracles?