Religion Meets Science

I’m sorry, but I thought this was just too funny not to share.  Apparently, the ad is so popular over in the UK and Ireland, that folks call in to find out when they are airing it.

Or, your could look it up on YouTube.  The tag line reads:

Science, flies people to the moon. Religion, flies people into buildings.  Volkswagen=Solution for terrorism.

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A Star Is Born

And it came to pass in those days—as everything comes to pass, for if it doesn’t pass then it must run the ball—that a decree went out for Caesar Salad from Augusta, Maine.  All the world was to be taxed—the Democrats had won the election.  Everyone came to Bethlehem to be recounted.  In Florida, they came to be counted and recounted, until every male Chad, well hung or with dimples, had been counted again.

Joseph, wearing his amazing Technicolor raincoat that he got at a Christmas sale at Wal-Mart, brought his wife.  She was with child—Joseph should start acting his age.  They tried to get a room at the Holiday Inn (because kids eat for free) but apparently the Patriots were in town for a play-off game, and no rooms were to be had.  They passed up the parking garage for a stable in back.

Meanwhile, there were shepherds standing out in their fields.  Well, where else would they be?  They were watching over their sheep.  Some were counting their sheep.  Others were doing things with their sheep we should not mention.  They were lonely.  They were sore.  They were afraid.

An angel came to them and said, “Fear not, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.  I bring you tidings of great joy!”

The shepherds asked, “What’s a tiding?”

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior which is Christ the Lord.”

And suddenly, with the angel food cake, there was a hostess of cupcakes.  Praise be to God.

It came upon a midnight clear, although the weatherman had called for snow.  Many of the shepherds had bought merchandise that would be free if six inches of snow fell that night.  It had not snowed in Bethlehem in centuries.  They were clueless.

Hark!  The Harold angel sings.  His name was Harold.  You got a better name for an angel?  But the story is not over until the fat angel sings.

And it came to pass (for if it didn’t pass it wouldn’t be history and we couldn’t write about it now) that the shepherds talked amongst themselves.

“For unto you a child is born,” repeated one shepherd.

“Not me,” replied another.  “I never touched her.”

So they set out to see what this was all about.  Besides, the sheep were tired and there was nothing else to do.

Meanwhile, back in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph found the stable and decked the stalls with boughs of holly.  Don wore now his gay apparel (we always wondered about Don.)  Mary, who was quite pregnant, gave birth to a child.  She had the baby in the stable since her HMO insurance wouldn’t kick in until after the New Year.  Joseph was happy since he could take his tax deduction right away.  She wrapped the babe in sequined clothes, and named him Elvis.  She laid Him with his manager.  He was to be the King.

And it came to pass—apparently a lot of things came to pass back then—that Three Wise Guys, who were apparently lost, saw a star appear in the heavens.  They followed that star from the East, but they really couldn’t be sure what direction it was since they were lost anyway.  Those three kings, disoriented are.  Wearing gifts, they traveled afar.

They brought the new King gifts of goldfish, Franks-n-beans, and mirth.  In addition to being wise guys, they were pretty funny as well.  They also had a lot of intestinal gas.  They laid their gifts down before the King.

And He said, “Thank you.  Thank you very much.”

The moral of this story: book your reservations ahead of time.

Laugh if you will, for I have given you the gift of mirth.  It is a humble gift.  I hope this gift reminds you of another story, long ago, which came to pass.  And as you come to pass (fourth and long, late in the game) and decorate your stable, wrap your myrrh, drink your eggnog, and tend to your sheep, that you stop for a moment—perhaps more—and consider the reason for the season, and remember that babe—our Savior—so long ago when a Star was born.

Thank you.  And have a Merry Christmas!

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Artificial Life Support

In my last post, I discussed faith and in the process of meandering through that

Just typing my blog . . .

issue, I addressed the origin of life, and how science has not proven the mechanism by which the first cell(s) was/were born.

The general theory is that if you start with the right ingredients, under the right conditions, and throw in an immense amount of time (beyond human comprehension) then life will form by random chance.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem.  A million monkeys typing away randomly will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.

Or in this case, the inifinite evolutionists theorem.  Replace letters on the keyboard with base pairs in DNA and amino acids in proteins and the similarities are striking.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

In this context, “almost surely” is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the “monkey” is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters ad infinitum. The probability of a monkey exactly typing a complete work such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time of the order of the age of the universe is extremely low, but not zero.

 In order for the evolution theory of cell creation to occur, one must have a lot of pre-existing conditions (a typewriter and a million monkeys for instance) and a lot of time (more than we can imagine.)

But it could happen.

One monkey typing for a few days could probably reproduce this blog.  But I digress.

On another blog, I asked the evolutionist to prove the origin of the first cell.  His response was thus, and I will cut to the chase:

Explaining early life is difficult if you are not from a biological and chemical standing point, or have an interest in how chemicals and biology work, but ill keep it relatively simple for the length of the reply. Life began in the sea several million years ago. Complex chemical molecules began to clump together, it is these that begin to sow the first seed for the tree of life. We know that when certain atoms are arranged, you get adrenaline, sugar and caffeine. It is because of this way, that atoms can do many things, that they formed these organic chemical molecules, most importantly protein. When given enough time in the right environment, ie warm oceans, then these chemicals begin to combine. After these chemicals find the right state to be, they are able to split, and replicate themselves, as has been found in pre-Cambrian fossils. This can be achieved in labs, but they would have to wait some time for the chemistry set to do much, thats the wonder of evolution, it takes a long time.(And they’d have to get the right parameters.) And it is at this point, id like to mention that life, every cell, is just a chemical box. The Nucleus of the cell, is just a big packet of DNA, or long strings of chemicals. What scientists have done is artificially, by using chemicals, create a cell nucleus, and create synthetic life from that.

But is synthetic life really creating life?

You can read about synthetic cells here in the Wall Street Journal.  But note the following conditions:

To make the synthetic cell, a team of 25 researchers at labs in Rockville, Md., and San Diego, led by bioengineer Daniel Gibson and Mr. Venter, essentially turned computer code into a new life form. They started with a species of bacteria called Mycoplasma capricolum and, by replacing its genome with one they wrote themselves, turned it into a customized variant of a second existing species, called Mycoplasma mycoides, they reported.

To assemble the strips of DNA, the researchers said they took advantage of the natural capacities of yeast and other bacteria to meld genes and chromosomes in order to stitch those short sequences into ever-longer fragments until they had assembled the complete genome, as the entire set of an organism’s genetic instructions is called.

They transplanted that master set of genes into an emptied cell, where it converted the cell into a different species.

So in essence, to “create” this life, they used an existing mycobacterium, they employed other bacteria and yeasts to manufacture the DNA, and then used a pre-existing cell shell to house the new life.  None of these things would have been present in the primordial soup before life began.

Even the researcher notes:

“I don’t think it represents the creation of an artificial life form,” said biomedical engineer James Collins at Boston University. “I view this as an organism with a synthetic genome, not as a synthetic organism. It is tough to draw where the line is.”

I still maintain that science has not shown how LIFE originally began, only how it has changed and adapted from that point on.  It may seem like a minor point but I don’t think there is anything minor about.

So did infinite monkeys create the first cell?

God?

Maybe it was space aliens.

But who created them?

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