The Science of Life Points to GodÀpẹrẹ

Black Gunk

As an atheist I was convinced that everything in existence came about through natural processes, simply by following the laws of physics and chemistry. I started out as a chemistry major in college, because I liked chemistry with its straightforward rules and equations. Chemical reactions in chemistry could produce all the substances we see on earth.

Or so I thought. My education into the reality of chemistry began with my first advanced organic laboratory class. We were to perform a simple organic synthesis experiment: mix two starting reactant chemicals in a flask, along with some reagents, add heat, then purify the product of the reaction. I was careful to follow all the steps, measured everything precisely, and made no mistakes.

We were supposed to determine the “yield” of the reaction, the amount of the product we get compared to the amount we are supposed to get according to the equations.

When the reaction was finished, I noticed that the stuff in the flask was no longer that nice, clear yellowish brown it had once been. It had gotten darker, opaque, and viscous, and after I was done, it took me an hour to clean all the black gooey gunk from the flask.

When I did the measurements and calculations, I found I had achieved a yield of 20 percent. I was mortified. I had produced only one fifth of the product that I was supposed to. But the instructor said, “Great job! A 20-percent yield is terrific!” I was shocked. Then I asked him what was in that black, tarry, gunky stuff—which, as it turns out, is the main product of practically every synthetic chemical reaction. He told me it was a mixture of hundreds of chemical compounds produced by hundreds of other reactions between the reactant chemicals, their breakdown products, the other reagents, and so on, and the result is always a mess. I realized the only reason I got any amount of the desired synthesized chemical was because of the complex purification steps—which would not happen in the natural world, without a chemist doing it.

My beloved chemistry, it turned out, was not the pure, pristine science of logical, predictable reactions between chemicals, and it seemed there was something missing in my ideas about how everything came to be. I thought about the very complex chemicals needed for life and wondered how they could have gotten purified from the black gunk they were originally made in. This education into the reality of our immeasurably complex world was one of the first indicators to me from science that the natural world was (although I would not have used that word at the time) miraculous.