A response to the Oct. 17 letter to the editor, “Pledge allegiance to the flag, not to a god.”

In light of discoveries daily unfolding in genome and synthetic biology technologies, it’s got to be getting harder to reject an ‘Intelligent Designer’ and embrace atheism.

Consider the lowly one-cell bacteria. In it are molecular machines that make parts for other machines, machines that assemble machines, then check for errors and scrap incorrectly assembled units, a shipping and receiving department that checks material going in and out, little trucks hauling stuff for internal and outside use, gate keepers, garbage handlers, fuel manufacturing machines, highway builders for the trucks, a network that monitors and communicates conditions inside and outside of the cell. Instructions on how to do all this are written on a master blueprint –^— DNA molecule.

Then there is the most complex machine in the universe — the human brain, with its 100 trillion connections producing a mass of communications that exceeds the Internet. Scientists involved in the “Human Brain Project” (to simulate the human brain) say they need a computer that runs at 10 to the 18th flops per second, and will consume 20 megawatts of power; available by year 2020.

Was it intelligence that put instructions into the DNA blueprint on how to build a brain that doesn’t consume 20 megawatts of power, rivals the Internet and can be built in nine months? Or, did it come about by random mixing of molecules in some big cosmic “bingo tumbler” without intellectual input?

Phil Drietz

Delhi, Minn.