Science excels at identifying the natural forces responsible for physical, mechanical and chemical reactions. For example, a scientist might explain a battery’s functioning as an oxidation reaction on the anode terminal releasing electrons.
To explain how things work is one thing. However, accounting for their origins will fall into two different activities. Some origins we can explain because we witnessed them or were involved in their creation. On the other hand regarding those things whose origins predate humanity, we are left with proposing stories fueled by imagination and constrained by what seems plausible. Let’s consider how the idea of a battery can fall into both camps.
Where Batteries Come From
When we see AA batteries displayed in a store, we know their origin. A factory produced them. We also can contribute the ingenuity of various types of engineers in designing both the manufacturing equipment as well as the production process. Then employees operated that equipment and followed procedural tasks to produce neatly packaged batteries for sale.
Presumably everyone would acknowledge that eons of time combined with natural forces would be impotent in creating a AA battery. Human engineering produces Energizer and Duracell batteries. Nature does not.
Although it is silly, imagine someone being convinced that time combined with purely naturalistic forces could create AA batteries. Curiosity would demand a story how this could have occurred. Would such a story suggest a volcanic molten metal composition might have been driven into thin rock fissures to form battery components? Whatever might be told … thus begins a story.
A Battery In Nature
What may be new to us is that both plants and animals utilize bio-batteries. We call these tiny packets of stored energy ATP or adenosine triphosphate. Living cells depend upon this energy stored within ATP to power a whole host of tiny machines making life’s functions possible. Cells break down carbohydrates to build ATP. Life runs on energy!
While biochemistry and physics can tell us how kinetic mechanical energy is converted into potential chemical energy during ATP synthase to manufacture ATP, can these disciplines tell us how these marvelous nano energy-manufacturing factories, often operating at 9000 RPM with near 100% efficiency, came into existence?
Just as many components are required to construct machines making AA batteries, so too the enzyme responsible for ATP synthase is itself constructed of multiple smaller protein units each of which involves amino acids in a very specific order. Furthermore, just as there are blueprints for how to make the parts of human designed machines, so too DNA instructions determine each protein’s amino acid sequence which will enable this string of amino acids to fold into a functional three dimensional protein. Amazing!
We know the origin of commercial batteries. What about the origin of ATP synthase with all of its parts plus the origin of the DNA blueprint making all of this possible?
How It Works Doesn’t Explain Where It Came From
Today we know that a genetic blueprint provides the design for each of the components of this bio-battery making machine. We also can describe in detail how ATP synthase works.
Yet, knowing how something functions is vastly different from knowing its origin. Are there good reasons to assume, dare I write imagine, that all of this came about by purely naturalistic forces and time? That would be one story. There is, however, another story which is reasonable.
A More Ancient Story
"In the beginning God created."
When we use our intelligence to design and manufacture commercial batteries, our efforts are a poor imitation of the efficiency of what Someone did long ago at the nanoscale to store usable energy to make life flourish.
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