The Sacred Day

Losing faith: evolution vs. creationism

Chris — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:13:42 +0000

One of my concerns with teaching creationism in Sunday School is the impact this has when the children grow up to become college students and then realize how full the data set is supporting evolution. If a child is repeatedly told that evolution and Christianity are mutually exclusive, then Christianity itself is often discarded when intellectual assent is given to evolution. Ironically, both creationists and materialist evolutionists insist on mutual exclusivity. It’s an odd cat and mouse game they play.

What worries me is an acceptance of the World with an acceptance of evolution. Over and over in the Old and New Testaments we are told to reject the World. However, when college students reject creationism, sometimes it seems to be a propitious time to reject other things that make them seem out of step with the World. Just looking at the electronic media and the people around us, there are several high moral stances that are advanced in the Scriptures that could be dropped in order to make life a whole lot easier. A whole lot more “acceptable.” The most important thing seems to be the need to fit in. But it has always been that way. It was only 170 years ago in the southern USA that the “need to fit in” would mean that one would need to accept slavery and find ways to twist Scripture so that it matched the current behavior. If you didn’t make this social/intellectual move, you were tarred and feathered. Literally.

On this site I argue that when one accepts the cruelty implicit in the nature of Nature and evolutionary mechanisms, one must turn elsewhere for what the soul longs for. The acceptance of evolution and Nature red in tooth and claw is a powerful inducement for the acceptance of Christianity. Where else can we go? How untenable is life under the secular worldview, even with the artificial bubble of advanced society that covers over the brevity and brutality that underlies Life. We are all on a path to destruction. We will all end up in a hospital, nursing home or hospice bed, struggling for breath as our internal organs fail. Unless we have a terrible accident. Why worry about what others think as we live out our days? Life is too short. I want to read the Scripture and follow it implicitly. I want to create as much Heaven now on this Earth in anticipation of the real Heaven and Earth that I will enter into. There is nothing in this present World to hold on to.

God loves the lonely

Chris — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 04:35:27 +0000

Dust floats in the light

a beam through the curtains

Another sleepless night

now just slowness and pain

God loves the lonely

like a fragment of shell

the best colors and shimmers

his eyes have beheld

are broken fragments

that glisten where they fell

He takes care of his mother

after teaching at school

seems it’s always another

only his illness is his own

Dust goes to dust

but God only knows

those who do what they must

as they call others their own

God loves the lonely

like a fragment of shell

the best colors and shimmers

his eyes have beheld

are broken fragments

that glisten where they fell

Should I hate myself?

Chris — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 03:37:55 +0000

I am my own worst enemy. The worst things in my life can be traced back to my own words, actions and decisions. Other people have messed me up, but they really played a minor role if I think about it coldly and objectively. This can really paralyze a person. If you can’t even trust yourself, how do you proceed in life? I find Paul’s idea of the “old self” (“natural man”) really helpful here. I have two faces as a Christian. I am allowed to hate the old self. He is intensely destructive and reckless. He is, after all, my natural self, bent on self preservation. He wants what others have. He wants others to fail and him to win. He lusts, he is cynical and he judges other people so as to raise himself in his own mind. He doesn’t listen, he just talks. He is as all-natural as whole wheat bread. He just wants to advance his genes to the next generation. There is some kinship selection in there too, but it’s fairly muted as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t want to be this animal. The things that I desire may indeed be counter-adaptive, but I believe in a life beyond this life and I value it above this life. I want to listen, to give, to restrain myself, to not hurt others. I want to explore this heavenly life now. Of course, with good works, you often get a social/personal benefit, like with the career of obvious dedication as an HIV scientist or a high standing in the community as a person of substance/integrity. But my wants are more basic than this. I want to get away from this Natural Man within me. Doing good that no one sees makes me happy, and following the natural path makes me sad. So the one person I really hate is my old self, who drags me away from these good things. And I think it’s OK to hate him. And to take him down….

Verses dealing with old self and natural man: Romans 6:6, 1 Corinthians 2:14, Ephesians 4:22, Colossians 3:9

The Fear of Death

Chris — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:04:04 +0000

A disconnect in the life of a human is the contrast between existence and death. How can I cease to exist? Why this is disturbing to us could be explained evolutionarily. All vertebrates, at least, have a tremendous fear of death. It is, of course, an adaptively-favorable trait. Vertebrates moved forward evolutionarily by becoming better problem solvers. The best problem solvers were the best hunters or the best at avoiding being eaten. Humans are the ultimate problem solvers and have such an excess of this capacity that they can figure out that they will die and now have to deal with this conundrum. How do I avoid this destiny? It is built into my genetics to want to avoid extinction, so the inevitability of death is a terror just in thinking about it. So that seems to solve the problem nicely as to why this disconnect, this disturbance, exists in us.

But it also opens up another door. If this is what separates humans from animals, and if God exists, it is rather obvious why this trait exists. Humans can make decisions and be held responsible for them because they can think ahead. Humans can consider the size of the world (and in our century, the universe) and consider their place in it. Humans can consider the big questions because they can see their own mortality. I’m not one to claim that God micromanipulates evolution. If so, He is responsible for an awful lot of awful things. But it is a fairly obvious next step to see that God could have set the track of the evolution of vertebrates towards the development of problem solving with the ultimate goal of developing the ultimate problem solver, Man (Adam in Hebrew). This ability to ask the big questions is the breath of God.

So that’s the problem with trying to prove the existence or nonexistence of God. In the end, you just explain a mechanism. The why of that mechanism can usually be interpreted either way, to follow God or to walk away. Perhaps it was set up that way. When there are two solutions, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is found in the garden.

Sacred Day remade

Chris — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 20:26:03 +0000

I’ve added new features to my website, Sacred Day, so please drop by for a visit. The Dominion Story is now posted, as well as some nice butterfly pictures and other features.

Sunday’s discipline: “pur’t near nothin’”

Chris — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:43:41 +0000

size of earth

In previous posts, I wrote about how small I felt looking out at the universe as I stood on this insignificant planet in an insignificant solar system in an insignificant galaxy, looking outwards into the vastness of space. In fact, this was the reason my mother cited for not embracing Christianity. She couldn’t imagine why God would care about us. And of course, she’s right – it doesn’t make sense. But then, here we are with “the most complex machine in the universe” inside our skulls, thanks to evolution, which seems, at the least, rather surprising at first thought. Lots of things are unexpected at first thought.

Well, here we are. Pretty near nothing in the universe with any measure you wish to use. How do we interact with the Creator? If He doesn’t care, then we can do what we wish ……. and we are profoundly alone. But what if He has expectations of us? What then?

So this is my discipline for this week. I want to reconnect myself to my proper place in the universe at least once per hour. I want to understand my smallness and God’s complexity and grandeur. So I’ll look at the window to see the largeness of sky. I’ll look at the freshness of Spring and think about the anatomy and physiology of the plants around me. At night, I’ll look at the stars. In this way, I’ll try to take my proper assigned role as a servant in the service of God. I’ll place my desires beneath those I’m serving – children, students, co-workers. I’ll focus on getting the job done in research and teaching rather then on distracting things, because a good servant gets the important things done first. I’ll make sure I keep myself pure down to the thoughts, because my life is laid out as plain before God. And I’ll try not to overpromise, even as I set these goals…..

image from :

http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/detail/nasaNAS~20~20~120408~227109:Earth-and-the-Sun

Getting injured to get things done

Chris — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:49:16 +0000

I usually hate getting injured. My back went out on Tuesday and I’ve been restricted to my couch for the past two days. I miss out on exercise, I can’t do lab work, and I can’t play with the kids outside. But, somehow, it’s been a good experience. I’ve had a ton of computer work hanging over me and it is all getting done. I’ve finished off the NIH proposal, targeted the grant programs I want to apply to the rest of the year, answered all my email requests, and should have a paper submitted soon. I’ll be ready to get back into the lab when by back is healed next week.

So things that hurt me, or I don’t like, wind up helping me. I wish I would remember this for the rest of my life. I spend so much time “optimizing” things and so little time getting the important things done regardless of the situation. “If I bought this, then I could….”, “if I had time, then I could….”, “if my job changed in this way, then I could….”. I think the challenge for me is to be creative where I’m at and to expect wildly wonderful things. When I come home, I always play with the kids, but I want to be more spontaneous, more creative in this. It could be a real adventure every night. I want to look at my work and see all the opportunities rather than the snags. When I speak to someone, I want to see the good in them, rather than the annoyance or problems.

By being creative and good, we are saying that Christ’s Kingdom is coming and that we reject evil. That sort of creativity, working with what I have in front of me, is what changes everything radically. My situation doesn’t have to change. It can even get worse. But please don’t pray that my back continues to ache!

Cassava, the poverty fighter

Chris — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:51:53 +0000

cassava

Cassava is a staple crop in many tropical countries. It is a member of the Euphorbiaceae, which includes those red flowered poinsettias we get at Christmas and those little spurge weeds found in southern USA gardens. Its tubers are toxic and must be processed to eat, but they provide a lot of calories in the form of carbohydrates. That’s not of much interest to us in the North, who avoid calories, but it is the lifeline against famine in the South. I’ve collected some interesting stories to give a flavor of agriculture “on the edge” in the South and how agricultural improvements via technology and marketing can make a big difference in less developed countries.

In Nigeria, cassava is moving from a starvation-prevention crop to a cash crop for local urban consumption. The next stage is to develop novel uses for the crop, such as livestock feed and industrial uses and to identify new markets. The top cassava producers are, in order, Nigeria, Brazil, Thailand and Indonesia (the next six countries are all in Africa). The leaves can be cooked as a vegetable or dried and fed to livestock as a protein feed supplement. The root tubers, of course, are high in starch and provide the most calories for human and industrial use. However, only 5% was processed into syrup for soft drinks and less than 1% was used for refined flour or adhesives, so much of the value added production potential is neglected. But cassava is the “food of choice” even with an abundance of other options in urban settings. However, there is a lot of work needed in processing the tuber. To be edible, it must be peeled, washed, soaked, wet sieved, grated and bagged: no less than 14 steps. This work is done by hand by women of a village. Improvements in processing would greatly aid production.

A study in Vietnam on involving the poor shows a different picture of a less organized system. The study did conclude that cassava is a perfect crop for the poor. First, cassava can be grown on poor soil with no investment in irrigation, fertilizers or pesticides. Its processing also takes tiny amounts of investment. For many reasons, though, even these minimal inputs leave cassava farmers in poverty. For example, the final product is typically unrefined and has little value, there is little incentive for upgrading equipment, and, in the North, there are problems with transportation costs and bad weather.

A big problem for cassava is cassava mosaic virus, which is so devastating that Nigeria has a US$ 16.5 million grant program for just this virus. There have been very successful programs which have produced transgenic cassava plants resistant to this virus.

Another problem is that cassava produces a large amount of cyanogenic glycosides, which our digestive enzymes break down to toxic cyanide. The plants produce this to defend against herbivores. This is why the cassava tubers must be so heavily processed, otherwise, ingestion leads to konzo (paralysis of the legs). Genetically engineered cassava has been created with greatly lowered cyanogenic glycosides.

Finally, great improvements have been made in starch yield. Cassava can form sugars from CO2 via photosynthesis at an exceptionally fast rate for C3 plant. However, the sugars pile up because it doesn’t form starch fast enough. This downregulates the photosynthetic final yield. The authors reasoned that adding a better ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase (the rate limiting enzyme) from E. coli would increase starch yield in the tubers. They also had to engineer the enzyme to avoid a feedback mechanism. Sure enough, the transgenic cassavas had a 2.6-fold increase in tuber mass! [Ihereme et al. (2006) Plant Biotechnology Journal 4(4):453]

Nicole Marguerite Plissier Kearney Pt. II

Chris — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:53:13 +0000

My mother, Nicole, was only too happy to escape her troubled French family. She boarded a boat for America with just two steamer trunks. They allowed only a very small amount of cash to leave France at that time, so she bought expensive French clothes. When she arrived in America, she discovered that these were not in fashion so she sold them pennies to the dollar. So she came to America with almost nothing. My father’s family was poor, but they owned their own house in Cleveland. My mother was impressed at the wall-to-wall carpeting, which she had never seen before. I’ve been to my mother’s chateau – they had hand-made parquet and marble throughout, perhaps hundreds of years old.

My mother and father settled into project housing and my Dad went to Western Reserve College (before it was Case Western Reserve) on the GI bill, majoring in English. One day, my Dad left his peanut butter sandwich lunch at home. My mother had to eat this sandwich (which she had made) since they were so poor. Holding her nose, she ate it – and loved it! In her later years, she would eat peanut butter washed down with Asti Spumante champagne in the middle of the night when she couldn’t get to sleep. She had to learn how to cook, clean, launder – everything the hired help had done. She learned, and it was skewed toward the French way. I sometimes had peanut butter in my lunch at school but more often had sardine sandwiches or sandwiches made with a pork riette (a meat spread) that my Mom would make from scratch. We had crepes when company came and there were always snail shells in the cupboard that Mom would fill for very fancy occasions. Uncle Michel would regularly send us CARE packages of pate de frois gras (embedded with truffles) and sauce Perigueux. Every time a French person would come to our town (Claremont, CA), they would wind up in our house. Relatives would also visit fairly often because S. Calif. was quite a popular vacation destination. I would come home to strange people speaking French and not know if I was related to these people or not.

Life was hard in my Dad’s early career because he moved around constantly. My mother never settled into a career or had many long term friends. My brother, Marc Michael, was born within a year of their marriage. My mother never was allowed to blossom in her youth and, in many ways, was denied again once in America. My Dad was very difficult to live with, and she focused on keeping him reigned in and supported. Even though there was a lot of animosity, they kept together for 61 years. I don’t think things would have improved for either of them if they had divorced and remarried. Each had their own deficits. In a strange way, they became completely dependent on each other. When my Dad died, my Mom began the descent herself.

Nicole Marguerite Plissier Kearney (2/18/23 – 2/28/09)

Chris — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:54:30 +0000

My mother passed away in the early morning hours yesterday of old age, probably aided by Alzheimer’s Disease. Her father, Germain Plissier, grew up in a small village but was recognized for his native intelligence. The villagers invested in his education, allowing him to become a pharmacist. In those days in France, the pharmacist could prescribe and could even invent his own medicines. Plissier’s special medicine for “women’s problems” was apparently a draw for women throughout the region, probably because of certain ingredients that would make anyone feel pretty darn good, male or female.

Germain married Marguerite Madeleine Mazeaud, the daughter of Hippolyte Mazeaud, an engineer who built bridges, including the two at the confluence of the Dordogne and Vezere Rivers where my mother’s country house was in Limeuil. Hippolyte experienced a rise from obscurity similar to Germain’s. Two of my daughters, Marguerite and Madeleine, keep these names in the family. Germain and Marguerite were wealthy and owned two chateaux, one in Dijon and one in Limeuil. Limeuil has been occupied for 10,000 years and is in the region of the Cro-Magnon cave paintings. Germain lost his investments in Russia in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, the Dijon chateau was sold, and Germain went back to work as a pharmacist.

My mother and her older brother, Michel, seemed to have a wonderful life. They took multiday canoe trips in the Dordogne River, they had a cook for very nice meals, a gardener to tend the terraced gardens of the chateau, maids to clean the chateau and a tutor to help them with homework. Marguerite threw lavish parties. However, there was a lot of tension between Germain and Marguerite, involving quite a bit of infidelity. The children were used as pawns by Marguerite to hurt Germain. Ultimately, it was not a happy situation.

It got worse when the Nazis invaded France. Germain bought out the business of his close friend, Mr. Menon, who was Jewish and would have had his business confiscated once the Nazis arrived. The Menons hid out at the chateau in Limeuil while the Plissiers stayed in their town home above the pharmacy in Perigueux. Michel was on the run, but we’re not completely sure if the Nazis wanted to take him off to a factory or if the French resistance wanted to recruit him as a soldier. In either case, he would hide within a rock wall to avoid capture. Marguerite was taken by the SS for interrogation for two weeks and my mother was also on the list to be brought in. Both were to be killed. The day Marguerite was to be killed, the Americans approached Perigueux and the Nazis retreated.

In the meantime, my Irish-American father, Michael Joseph Kearney, Jr., was fighting as a GI. His father had also fought in France, in WWI, only a few years after emigrating from Ireland. My father and mother met in Biarritz, a seaside resort for the wealthy French and also the site of a temporary American university for GIs waiting to go home. They didn’t have enough transport ships to take all the GIs home all at once, and they didn’t want them to get into trouble. My mother at first was not accepted by my Dad’s Irish mother (she wasn’t keen on these “foreigners”, but my Dad’s father spoke up for my mother, and that was that. Later, my mother and her mother-in-law became very close friends.

There is, of course, more, but that is enough for this post.