Science . . . just is

03 Sep 2015 Leave a comment

by C.O. Bonham in Scientific Musing Tags: , , , , ,

I’m going to talk a little about my novel in progress. It’s about a teenage genius who is super into science. I am not a teenage genius. So I actually needed to look stuff up, which I am good at.

But now I stand on the edge of a divisive canyon. Should my science based book be religious?  I do not agree with evolution, this theory has no place in my philosophy or my novel. But does that mean that I have to have an overly creationist message? Am I going to write to my beliefs and sentence my YA novel to the uncertain audience of Christian publishing. If I just have my main character say he doesn’t agree with evolution, will that turn off secular publishers?

It finally dawned on me that it didn’t matter. I can talk about science without mentioning either Creation or Evolution. Because true science is about the way the world is.

The sun rises every morning due to the rotation of the Earth in it’s orbit around the sun. Plants use the rays of the sun to make food, through a process called photosynthesis. The water evaporates into gas and causes precipitation.

Atoms make up everything, regardless of where they came from. Water always has two Hydrogen atoms for every Oxygen atom. Humans breath in the oxygen atoms and the hemoglobin in our blood takes in the oxygen, it distributes the Oxygen and takes in waste atoms called Carbon dioxide. We release this waste when we exhale.

All of that science and not once did I mention Creation or Evolution.

Something has been lost in the eternal battle between Creation and Evolution.

The Science.

I watched the much publicized debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. I was disappointed in how little science they used. It was a battle of religions not of facts. That is why there was no winner.

Science is facts. Not opinions.

Evolution is not a fact. It can not be proven through experiments or observation.

Creation, I hesitate to say, can also not be proven through experiments or observation.

Anyone who tells me that I have to add either one or the other is no longer talking science they are advocating religion.

To the Creationists, just because scientific facts back up Biblical accounts does not prove the existence of God to an unbeliever. Science can make people think. But people who want to believe God is a myth will always find an argument around it.

To the Evolutionists, nothing I say will make you change your mind because you are a very faith based religion.

But I will say this. If Creation is true then that means that God created this thing we call science. This wonderful, predictable, observable thing. It’s patterns and cycles and numbers. It’s real, it’s now, it’s provable. We haven’t even managed to understand it all yet. New discoveries are still being made. And my God thought it all up. He numbered the electrons on the atoms, he set the orbits in motion. He twisted the DNA into a helix and established the rate of decay. God is the ultimate world builder. The original genius. Yet he didn’t feel the need to spell it out for us. He left it for us to discover, through experimentation and observation. Why?

Because if we can accept the unbelievable wonder of the universe without bringing religion into it, then maybe we can accept that a deity made himself mortal, lived a human life, died, absorbed all of our wrongs, rose back to life, ascended beyond our dimension of existence and is coming again, without bringing science into it.

In the Beginning, there was human cloning

13 May 2015 Leave a comment

by C.O. Bonham in Random Musing, Scientific Musing, Theological Musings Tags: , , , ,

Eve was Adam’s clone. Think about it, it really does make sense.

So here’s Adam. He’s perfect. He has all perfect chromosomes, perfect genes, no mutations, no disease, no defects at all. Everything needed to father the entire human race. He just needs one thing. A woman.

The Bible has two accounts of the Creation. In chapter one we get a very fast summery of what was created on each day. This is what it says about humans:

    So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.             Genesis 1:27 (NIV)

 Nothing about cloning you say? Well lucky for me chapter two is more detailed:

    So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and       then closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he       brought her to the man. Genesis 2:21-22 (NIV)

 Eve was created from Adam’s flesh. A new biological entity was formed from a single set of genetic information. A clone.

“But Eve is female” you say, “if she was a clone there would have been two Adams.”

Not so. The only difference between men and women is a small piece of information called the Y chromosome. Men have it Women don’t.

Everyone has X Chromosomes. Men have XY, Women have XX. Some people have Turner’s Syndrome in which they only have one X chromosome. These people are noticeably female. Sadly this syndrome is marked by heart problems and infertility. Interestingly there is no syndrome in which someone has only a Y chromosome. It’s X or nothing.

The Mother of all humanity can’t have a Y chromosome, and she can’t populate a planet with Turner’s syndrome either. What’s a creator to do?

Remember those perfect chromosomes that Adam has. His X Chromosome is as perfect as an X Chromosome will ever be. Perfect enough that Eve can have two of them. God just made the Universe; cloning an extra chromosome is nothing.

It mind blowing to realize that every person on the planet is descended, not just from two people, but from one set of Genetic information. The great Geneticist knew what he was doing, because Adam had a truly diverse set of Genes.

I am in no way condoning human cloning. Our genes are not perfect anymore. Plus once God made Eve, reproduction became a viable option. God is the ultimate scientist, science was his creation after all, the best we can do is study his work and try to learn from it. Repeating his work is too far beyond us

Blood is Blood, DNA not Required

19 Mar 2015 2 Comments

by C.O. Bonham in Random Musing, Scientific Musing, Theological Musings Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Sorry for the long wait, but random thoughts come rather sporadically. So to motivate myself I started with a prompt:

 Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord had commanded. He raised his staff in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials and struck the water of the Nile, and all the water was changed into blood. (Exodus 7:20) NIV

I remember as a young Sunday school student listening to the story of the ten plagues and wondering, “When the Nile turned to blood whose DNA did it have?” When I asked this foolish question aloud, I got a foolish answer. “It must have been God’s DNA.”

This answer may have sufficed, save for a funny fact that I learned while reading Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. I have since confirmed it and now know that human red blood cells have no nucleus. They do not contain DNA. Blood is just blood. It’s the white blood cells and platelets in our blood that allows scientists to collect DNA from a blood sample. This is also why oral swabs are used when a comparison test is preformed. More nuclei to pull DNA from.

It is entirely possible that God turned the Nile river into a river of pure hemoglobin. Thus making it a true river of blood.

But there is the possibility that it wasn’t human blood, it could have been reptile blood or fish blood. There are those who theorize that it wasn’t even blood but rather red algae. To that I say, no. Ancient men might not have had microscopes and computers, but everyone who has ever scraped a knee or bit their tongue knows blood. The smell of the iron, the texture, the color, the way it flows. The thing is all humans have blood. Human blood would have been recognized and understood. They would have known it as human blood. Human blood would have had the most impact for the purpose God intended.

Naturally I can’t expect everyone to be a cellular biologist, but it seems to me that a better understanding of science could go a long way to helping keep the faith strong in this scientific world we live in.

Instead of, “It was God’s DNA.” How about this answer, “It didn’t need to have DNA, because it wasn’t in a body, so there wouldn’t have been any white blood cells for defense or any platelets to induce clotting. So you see it was just red blood cells.” Or the even more simple answer, “Lets look it up,” naturally smart phones were not in production back then but my outdated encyclopedia from that era still has the correct answer.

The point of all this? Well if you were or know of someone who started off strong in the faith and found yourself tempted away by scientific logic, think for a minute. Maybe it wasn’t your faith that was wrong, maybe it’s your science. God is the creator of all. That means he’s the creator of Science too.

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