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.

History of the Future: Part 3

15 Sep 2012 Leave a comment

by C.O. Bonham in Random Musing, Well founded paranoia Tags: , , , , , ,

I bet you thought that I forgot about the third part of my promised three-part blog post about random future events. Well I didn’t forget I just hadn’t gotten to it yet because here it is. Would you believe that this whole post is actually a Sociology paper that I turned in for a college assignment and that I got an A on it? Well I it is and I did.

Now for you enjoyment, The conclusion to a History of the Future:

In the year 2043 people will begin to get rid of their cell phones because they can control so much that losing it is pretty much the end of the world.  Identity theft increases one hundred percent because it is so easy, just steal a cell phone and boom you have access to their car, their house and their bank account.  Why aren’t people protecting this information you ask well the answer is because people are lazy, careless and stupid.  They tried voice recognition but too many people figured out how to over ride that while at the same time the system was so faulty that the phone wouldn’t always listen to its owner.

More emerging technologies that have a darker side to them all have to do with things that go in your body.  First, super contacts that let you look at movies and surf the web while pretending to pay attention in class, were found to cause blindness and had to be scraped.

The micro chips that are supposed to be so great, so no one will ever be given the wrong medication or go missing, will be found to have a weird reaction with some people and will end up giving them a very strange blood disorder (their blood turned green) and the program was suspended until doctors could investigate the implications of this phenomenon.  The program will remain suspended until the antichrist decides to use it as his “mark of the beast.”

As the oceans begin receding in the year 2049, everyone will begin worrying about global cooling and foretelling a new global ice age.  Even though we all know that the first ice age wasn’t really a global ice age, but only a localized one.  One scientist though, will discover that this melting and freezing of the ice caps is all actually part of a cycle that runs through about every ten hundred years or so.

Unfortunately for everyone, a radical terrorist group has acquired a very powerful EMP bomb and has launched it into space, when it reaches the Stratosphere they plan to detonate it thus wiping out every electronic device on the planet.  This will set everyone back for at a period no shorter than ten years.  Living history re-enactors such as pioneer groups and revolutionary war enthusiasts will lead the way in survival during the period of rebuilding that will follow.  At the end of that ten-year period they are still only up to about 1985 standards which is pretty good for only having ten years to rebuild the world.  Of course they weren’t exactly starting from scratch.

The future is not set in stone and this is only one of the many possible futures; the flow of events could be diverted at any point along the path to create a new series of events and then those events may be diverted to create a new series and so on.

Perhaps instead of America and Canada uniting, they stay separate or maybe Mexico will try to be declared officially part of South America rather than North.  And the last part about the EMP bomb will probably not happen because someone like James bond would come along to stop it.  But it’s still all speculation.

There is no way to really know what the future holds, no crystal balls, no horoscope, no fortune tellers, the only way to know what will happen is to just wait for it.

History of the Future: Part One

29 Aug 2012 Leave a comment

by C.O. Bonham in Well founded paranoia Tags: , , ,

As promised a three-part post. These are my random predictions for the future. You can write these off as humorous and misguided musings but only time will tell.

And now I present for your enjoyment a history of the future:

In the year 2024 all newspapers had to stop producing paper copies due to pressure from environmental groups as well as a dwindling number of subscribers, so now they can save the planet and their money.  The e-newspaper, now humorously dubbed the News, Sans Paper, still requires a subscription and is then delivered straight to your inbox every day or for just $1.80 an issue you may buy a single copy to download off of the website as a PDF file, sales papers are not included.  No reporter has yet tackled the question of why the price jumped after they got rid of the paper.

Other changes to the media include the new restrictions on how much can be reported during elections.  Thanks to the news outlets using exit polls to announce the winner of the 2016 presidential election a full three hours before polls on the west coast closed, (the first thing that Hawaiians saw when they turned on their TV’s was news casters telling them who the new president was; no one in Hawaii even bothered voting that year) they are now forbidden to report any results in a nationwide election until the day after.

In education news, the public school system has been dumbed down so much that by the year 2028 the only children who can get in to colleges are homeschoolers.  But because of the low attendance the tuition prices became too high for anyone to afford.  Universities were forced to dumb themselves down in order to stay in business.  The government actually tried to outlaw homeschooling for a while but there was no way to stop the movement without taking away all civil rights.  Besides everyone knew that the only reason they were against it was because homeschoolers have consistently done better than public schoolers in all subjects and grades.

On the religion beat, scientists discover heaven?  Year 2030: Scientists working on a project to tel-port matter from New York to L.A. were suddenly overwhelmed by what they called, “a feeling of the most intense joy that a human being could ever hope experience on earth.”  The feeling of joy left as suddenly as it had appeared.  One of the researchers also reported hearing a voice that told him, “It is not yet time; this is not the door that you are meant to enter by.”  The lead researcher is hypothesizing that they may have momentarily breached another dimension of some sort.  As a result of this story conversions to Christianity will skyrocket.

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