The Importance of Science For Believers (Even Indirectly)

Posted on by frankwmcarr

On the radio, I listened to a preacher discuss this verse to distinguish God’s truth found in Scripture and the things that we humans must discover ourselves.

It is the glory of God to conceal things,
but the glory of kings is to search things out. — Proverbs 25:2 ESV

As you may know, I am a science enthusiast (and someday, may get a degree so I can have a scientific career). Nevertheless, if I never get a degree, it is still a key intellectual element and could do the work of an amateur scientist, particularly in the field of biology (my favorite science field).

The job of science is to use the mind to discover things and that God has not revealed. God could have revealed all the details of scientific knowledge in His Word so we have no need for this kind of work. But He didn’t. He left it to us to do that. That is, in fact, part of the dominion mandate given to Adam and Eve since the very beginning (Gen 1:26, 28).

Of course, science has limits. The logic and reasoning that God gave us for such use has its place, but is not foolproof. It can only work with observable properties of systems. It cannot tell why things are the way they are. That is where faith enters. It goes beyond where reason ends.

And for those Christians not inclined towards science, at least the science and technology has still affected you. The kitchen, computer, car, phone system, animals (including, yes, pets), plants, and your very body are all explained by science, among many other things. Even if you don’t know the details behind the day-to-day technology you use, they are still there and make your use possible.

So God gave you the top-priority things necessary for salvation in Scripture; everything else is secondary and must be searched for ourselves. Always remember that.

Look Closely at Your Eggshells

Posted on by frankwmcarr

Eggshell
See the translucent shell lying under the opaque shell we normally see.

I was making an omelet around 6 this morning (and have been up since about 5).  I discovered however, that eggshells have an inner layer.

I will sometime try to research the anatomy of an egg.  Texts (or, better yet, college courses!) on ornithology and embryology, as well as Britannica, etc., will help. For now, I ought to see amazement in every area of his creation I observe, wherever it may be.  AMEN.

An Amazing (Yet Simple) Substance

Posted on by frankwmcarr

You think you know this planet has an amazing substance that we can’t live without.  But you might think you can’t imagine what it is.  Well, I’ll give you 10 clues.

10)  It needs a lot of incoming heat to substantially change its temperature.  (Especially in the oceans)

9) It easily holds its own surface, can hold to molecules of the same substance, and can even hold to certain walls.

8) It is neither an acid nor a base

7)  Your kidneys control the balance of this in your blood in relation to the cells of throughout the body.

6)  It falls, rises, makes clouds, and does this in a constant cycle.

5)  It is quick to dissolve substances, making it a (somewhat) universal solvent

4)  It can be a solid, liquid, or gas.

3)  In ice (solid) form, we put it in our drinks and store it in cubes or in a crushed form.

2)  When it is frozen and transitions from a liquid to solid, it will expand (not contract), protecting life under a thin layer of such.

1) We are supposed to drink 8 glasses of it per day.

So, what is it? You guessed it:  it’s water!  Good old H2O!  Sure was a no brainer!

 

Putting God In Charge of All Intellectual Pursuits

Posted on by frankwmcarr

Our individual lives are a tiny fragment of all time.  Yet God gave us a mind to learn, reason, analyze, and create.  We must therefore come to terms with certain areas of our transient lifetime, and let our intellect follow suit.

1.  Unlike God, knowledge always changes.

Consider great minds like Newton, Descartes, Franklin, Jefferson, Pasteur, Einstein, and sundry others.  Some were Christians, some were not, the important thing to remember is that we have moved far beyond the potential of their time.  Yet they never got to see this later activity and development.  Not to get too morbid, but all people should consider what they have achieved and leave the achievement of future generations to God.  In the case of Christians, we could care less what happens on earth once we enter and eternally enjoy the overwhelming and magnificent heavenly fellowship with God and his people.  That’s at least how I see it.

For practical consideration on this earth today, we must accept the fact that we will never know everything.  As a budding scientist, I understand that people in my bunch may make discoveries (or at least participate in such activity), but those discoveries always change.  A college textbook used when one is say, age 20, will be a dinosaur (no pun intended) when one is 50.  Yet people aren’t chasing after newer editions.  Instead, they keep up to date with scholarly periodicals focused on their field.  While some people love holding onto their textbooks, others would rather limit it to those books that are relevant as a reference, especially in the courses most pertinent to your current job.  The rest might as well be rubbish.

2.  Only God is omniscient and only He knows the “exact truth”

Earthly information is not only subject to change, it is also really only a shadow of the exact truth.  Whether antiquated or cutting-edge, all human knowledge is fallible.  Even the Bible, God’s Word, is subject to interpretation.  (This causes splits in churches, but that’s for another post.)  In any case, what is quite commonsense today was highly arcane at one time.  Newton was quite intrigued by the falling apple, which we now know as the law of gravity, which is now a mere staple (unless you wanted to study it in detail).  Same thing with living cells (the name came from the resemblance to a prison “cell”).  And let’s not forget Franklin’s kite, which could have put his life in jeopardy.  Copernicus and Galileo were the first heliocentric proponents, yet they got some pretty nasty treatment from the Inquisition, etc.

Whatever it is, science is an interpretation.  Hypotheses and theories change over time, and they are the backbone of science.  Another type of scientific statement, the law, is a more stable, observational principle, e.g., Newton’s three laws.  Even they could occasionally be modified.

Conclusion

All human endeavors (including science and many others) are imperfect.  Thanks to Jesus, we now enjoy the freedom of exploring our world, sometimes to a scientific extent.  And that includes people like me.  As Thomas Aquinas put it, if faith or reason need to be chosen, pick faith.  There is nothing wrong with reason, but it is always secondary to faith.  God created our minds, not vice versa.

Because knowledge is a creation of the Creator, it should never be worshiped.  It may very well be fruitful to detach from books that it would be time to move on from, as you have learned many of the main principles, though perhaps not all the details, and certainly not verbatim (hardly anyone can do that!)  I think God is in action when “pruning” the knowledge that is not needed.

Seeing God’s Wonders in Scientific Details

Posted on by frankwmcarr

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
    fools despise wisdom and instruction“ — Prov 1:7, ESV

Right now I am reading an article (obtained from the online Britannica subscription service accessed through Community College of Philadelphia, where I currently attend) about the invertebrate phylum known as annelids, or segmented worms.  I have learned tons of neat facts about these critters, but for the sake of space (and relevance to the real point of this post), I will only mention a few very striking ones.

-Leeches, a class of annelids, known for their “medicinal” species used in centuries past by sucking blood, actually can be a source of a “real” (i.e., chemical) medicine!  Known as hirudin, it is an anticoagulant (blood thinner) that might be a better natural alternative to popular prescription blood thinners like Xarelto and Pradaxa (claimed to cause serious risk, including that of death).  Maybe this natural remedy could be better, but since I’m not a medical doctor, who am I to compare?  But hey, it sure is practical and thought-provoking!

-Some “sedentary” members of a class of annelids known as polychaetes actually make tubes into the ocean floor.  Their skin secretes a substance, which may include components such as mucus and calcium carbonate (known in various common forms such as limestone, marble, and chalk), which binds to marine sediment.  Wow, this is a marriage of the inanimate with the animate!  (I now pronounce it tube and worm.)

-Wait!  You may think a “defecation dilemma” may result from this since the anus is trapped in the tube.  Guess what, no problem, a side groove is the way for the feces to be expelled into the waters.

-Finally, earthworms have minute, perhaps microscopic, eyes all over their body.  Yikes!

So much for the annelids.  Now, reflecting on the Scriptural heading, you really don’t know anything unless you know God.  If you fear God (i.e., worship and have awe for him, out of love, not terror), you will gradually increase in your intimacy with Him.  After all, God created nature, and science is simply its interpretation.  Science is to nature as theology is to Scripture.

Many readers think many substantial detail in scientific discussions can be overwhelming, trivial, technical, unnecessary, whatever.  Or as the old cliché goes, they could be “gory.”  (Quite a strong word, isn’t it?)  While I am by no means pushing memorization of the entire material (very few people have truly photographic memories, and I doubt, IMHO, I would even qualify).  But they shape a piece of writing (fact or fiction), and give substance to it.  And when detailed to a substantial (though often not excessive) degree, instead of dismissing the ins-and-outs, an interested reader should appreciate God’s creative power therein, to the best of his ability.  One’s awe and recognition for God will increase, regardless of the information’s practicality, or lack thereof.

Yes, atheist Stephen Hawking can go on and on about his knowledge and insights on astrophysics, but he (most likely) may just be hoarding knowledge to impress.  Or some other motive.  But as a fellow human, it’s not my prerogative to judge him.  Only God knows his motives.  Ditto for secular scientists dead and alive, like Darwin, Haeckel, Svante Arrhenius, Linus Pauling, Ernst Mayr, Richard Dawkins, the list goes on and on.

Incidentally, as for the second part of my verse, atheists, according to the Bible, are cited as “fools” (Ps 14:1).  Fools would rather act as “know-it-alls.”  Whether instructed directly by another person, or indirectly from written material (which can often be posthumous!), a believer will appreciate it more than an unbeliever.

So, no matter what your brain capacity or “tolerance” for details in a written work, make the most out of those that you can.  Always jump “in and out” of whatever you read!

Putting the “Science” in Political Science

Posted on by frankwmcarr

Diffusion (and its analog concerning water, osmosis).  Electric potential (aka “voltage”).  Heat.  Gravity.  Air pressure.  Without going into details, all physical and chemical phenomena these concern a high-to-low gradient of different entities to achieve equilibrium.  A concentrated fluid will make osmotic balance by the flow of water from the less “concentrated” (but richer in water) to the more dehydrated (and therefore more “concentrated” side).  Voltage dissipates from differences in positive and negative charges (thus giving us electric current).  Hot water poured into cold water will become lukewarm, since the temperature gradient has evened out.  Air pressure differences cause wind.  And of course, the higher something is above the ground, the sharper gravity’s effects will be.

This logic can be applied to politics in a similar way.  There’s the so-called “1%”  (the billionaires and multimillionaires) and the other “99%,” which includes everyone else.  Most likely you and me.

I am not technically endorsing any candidate, but Bernie Sanders definitely has a plan that should cause an “equilibrium” in politics.  By building a middle class, which could be whatever of proportions you could conceive, at the very least two quarters of rich and poor and half in the middle class.  More desirably, you can have lesser proportions of super-rich and super-poor and make a broader middle class (i.e., over half).  Now isn’t that wonderful?

If politics and religion are the titans of hush-hush thought, and religion already has plenty of its own tension with science, well, now I have an analogy that could be as provocative as it is pleasant.

Wee Hours of Bisquick, Biology, and the Bible

Posted on by frankwmcarr

Who says the overnight hours need be depressing?
Who says the overnight hours need be depressing?  This selfie (taken circa 5:30am tells the contrary)

He made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting.  You make darkness, and it is night, when all the beasts of the forest creep about.  The young lions roar for their prey, seeking their food from God. When the sun rises, they steal away and lie down in their dens.  Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening. (Psalm 104:19-23)

Okay, so I got up a little before two.  And I thought there was no point in returning to sleep.  So, I read my Bible, from which I quoted above, except the focus was Jeremiah.  (Of course, in modern society, you can’t strictly go by a sunset-to-sunrise sleep cycle, because we have, yes, clocks!  Though as we all know, mankind’s modern waking hours lean in the “PM” direction.)  Yet the scripture, as always, does give godly counsel.

So anyway, on a more temporal note (pun intended), I also read two Scientific American Library books, a long discontinued series I get used from Amazon.  One I started yesterday evening and completed about one-fifth through (again, it’s little over 200 pages.)  This was on the biochemical topic of enzymes, a form of protein.  The other, with only little that I haven’t read intently, concerns microbial organisms.

The Bible and these two popular-level books (from the Scientific American Library) kept me company overnight.
The Bible and these two popular-level books (from the Scientific American Library) kept me company overnight.

A little after 4 am I decided hey, why not make breakfast.  Little did I know I had the alternative of making something different than oatmeal or eggs/omelets.  The verdict?  Pancakes.  (The “Bisquick” in the title, mind you).

Mmm...Pancakes and Authentic Maple Syrup. (I actually made/ate this breakfast about an hour before, namely, a little before 4:30am)
Mmm…Pancakes and Authentic Maple Syrup. (I actually made/ate this breakfast about an hour before, namely, a little before 4:30am, and deliberately posed this as such.)

Yep, not Mrs. Butterworth’s, Aunt Jemimah, or Log Cabin, but something where quality trumps quantity:  real maple syrup.

So, to conclude, while it’s not good to be up half the night (ask a doctor for details), the super early wake-up was (and is usually) due to leaving my overhead light on, a habit I must stop.

As this post went to press, the sun is now up, and the night is now over.  (I’ll bet I’ll crash soon).