How Christianity Best Explains Human Equality

Posted on November 24, 2020 by Will Myers

BY GUEST WRITER – NOVEMBER 12, 2020MORESHARE

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that many jobs we might have taken for granted, such as supermarket cashiers or online delivery drivers, are both essential and of great value to the well-functioning of society. This observation reminds us that a person’s inherent value is not based on their salary or job title. It also highlights a deep intuition that all humans are equal, regardless of differences in talents and abilities. As a society we believe the best versions of our political and social institutions should recognize this equality, and so we favor democracy and the protection of fundamental rights. We oppose racism and sexism because they demean and treat other humans as less than. All humans are equal and their gender or the color of their skin does not affect their value.

However, many philosophers have pointed out a seeming paradox: we deeply hold this intuition that all humans are equal yet humans vary in many ways. Some are virtuoso musicians while others are tone deaf. Some play in the NFL and many more watch football from their sofas. Some people create beautiful gardens or cook wonderful meals while others can’t make grass grow or cook anything without burning it.

Aristotle recognized that humans have differences when it comes to things such as height, speed, or musical talent.¹ Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated that differences in talents and economic demand for certain talents over others led to greater economic success for those with preferred skills.² Bernard Williams wrote: “It is not . . . in their skill, intelligence, strength or virtue that men are equal . . . it is their common humanity that constitutes their equality.”³ But Williams also says that “common humanity” doesn’t explain enough. The question these philosophers pose is, How can humans be equal if we have such different levels of talent? Our abilities and talents cannot be the grounds on which we base equality, so it must be something else.

Does Rationality Make Humans Equal?

A possible contender for explaining human equality is rationality. Immanuel Kant argued this point in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals.⁴ But being able to reason does not fully explain why all humans are equal because while most humans meet a threshold of rationality, some far exceed it and others fall below the threshold. Some people suffer from cognitive limitations and others lose their rationality due to dementia or injury. So, not every human enjoys the same level of rationality during all points of their lifetime. However, our society would think it monstrous to hold that a person lacking full rationality isn’t equal to other humans and doesn’t deserve to have their fundamental rights protected. We also don’t think it’s appropriate to give people with higher IQs more votes in an election. Therefore, rationality doesn’t work as the basis of human equality.

Does Pleasure/Pain Sensation Make Humans Equal?

Another possible reason for why humans are equal is that all humans suffer pain and experience pleasure. Utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill held this view.⁵ However, the ability to experience pain or pleasure seems inadequate as well. As Bentham pointed out, animals can experience pain and pleasure.⁶ And while we know that animals should be respected and treated humanely, we don’t place them as equals in society when it comes to being able to vote or exercise fundamental rights like freedom of expression. So, because the ability to experience pain and pleasure is not what makes humans equal there must be something else that grounds human equality.

Does the Image of God Make Humans Equal?

Christianity explains why people with different talents, abilities, and positions in life are equal. Scripture describes the Christian church as a body made up of different parts, but all parts are equally important (1 Corinthians 12:12–27). In this context, each person uses their talents, all talents are needed, and no talent––despite its prominence––is more valuable or important than any other. Christianity, like Judaism, holds that all humans are equal because we are created in the image of God.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26–27).

This image-bearing quality makes it wrong to mistreat other humans.

Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind (Genesis 9:6).

Moreover, in the incarnation, Jesus (being fully God) took on human flesh, vindicating the concept that each human being is created in the image of God. No matter what talents or skills we each possess or lack, whether we have reduced rationality because of advanced dementia or severe brain damage, as divine image-bearers we are still human and still equal. This explanation accords with our intuition that all humans are equal.

Someone might object that the capacity to make moral decisions, not the image of God, anchors human equality. However, some humans lack the ability to make moral decisions. In the criminal justice system we recognize that it is not appropriate to hold people fully responsible for their actions if they lack sufficient cognitive ability to understand those actions. Further, the concept of objective morality itself is difficult to explain if there is no God, and Christianity holds that moral capacity is something God has given humanity (Romans 2:14–16).

Grounding Human Equality in Christianity

Why is it important that Christianity explains the intuition that all humans are equal? Well, if we think it’s objectively true that humans are equal in spite of differences in talents, and Christianity best explains how all humans are equal even though we have different physical attributes and talents, then we have reason to believe that Christianity best explains reality. Anyone seriously interested in truth will want to understand reality and, hence, investigate the Christian faith.

In addition to truth considerations, the Christian faith teaches that being created in God’s image means all humans possess intrinsic value. Therefore, if we want a reason for why humans should be treated equally in spite of our differences in talents, abilities, or positions, then Christianity provides a robust grounding for human equality that other explanations cannot.

Endnotes

Aristotle, “Politics,” trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 1986–2129.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “A Discourse on a Subject Proposed by the Academy Of Dijon: What Is the Origin Of Inequality among Men, and Is It Authorised by Natural Law?” in The Social Contract and Discourses, translated with an introduction by G. D. H. Cole (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1923), 155–247, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/638.
Bernard Williams, “The Idea of Equality,” in Equality: Selected Readings, edited by Louis P. Pojman & Robert Westmoreland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91–102.
Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993).
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001).
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/278.

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LIFE IN A HYPERCOMMUNIST WORLD

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Will Myers

By Will Myers

The social machinery that exist is mind blogging and shocking in some instances. What ‘s being developed in the labs include mind readers from a distance. The special interest groups (SIG) who monitor private citizens and places adversities into the private citizens life has been growing rapidly for the past 20 years since 9-11 due to the fact that Bush signed authorization to surveillance domestic America. The government now listens to our telephone conversations and track our daily movement while special interest groups (SIG) goes farther with the placing of adversities into targeted private citizens for the purpose of controlling their thoughts and behavior.

The goal of hyper–communism is for the government to virtually own the minds of the citizens. The SIG snake organization is the operator who works to bring about and sustain hyper-communism. This is all under the umbrella of a coming One World Government. The subtle dynamics of these entities has taken giant steps during the past 20 years. Ed Snowden warned us that the collecting of data about each private citizen goes far beyond the posed purpose of catching and stopping terrorist; they are back-channeling all of the sensitive (sexuality) to SIG snake organizations.

Unfortunately, our health records with prognoses and credit records are back-channeled to SIG in order to have the person feel that the monster has moved into the mind of the targeted individual. Even, corporations who sell machines such as autos gives SIG their experiments that predict when the machine shall malfunction. Once again, SIG uses such information to move into the minds of the targeted individual. The government, corporations, and SIG all sleep together. They work together to undermine the minds of the private citizens with sophisticated intimidation.

Our Oligarch class finances SIG in order to have protection for their enormous wealth because a free democracy with enjoyable personal freedoms is a threat to their assets. As a matter of fact, SIG channels human permissiveness into the lives of others. The SIG snake organization pits us against each other in order to distract the working class from attacking the Oligarchy and taking their wealth. I am for the Oligarchs protecting their assets, but what is happening is SIG channeling rif-raf, deceit, and vandalism into the lives of targeted private citizens of the working class which is a burden placed on the back of an already heavily burdened people. The SIG snake organization causes suicides and mass killings due to them causing great mental oppression to the targeted individual.

The American citizen alone with all other people in the world must respect each other and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is a universal truth that would impede the operations of SIG because it needs for each of us to begin destroying our personal freedoms by becoming an opposition to other people as directed by SIG.

The SIG snake organization is collecting sensitive information about each citizen on the planet. The goal of those persons is to put your virtual-mind on computers as the SIG snake work to bring into fruition hyper-communism whereas each person on the planet thought processes can be controlled to a very accurate degree, liken unto herding cattle into corrals. The snake is now invading the sanctity of targeted private citizens. One’s sexuality (Life scientist are invading the inner sanctity of the mind) is mirrored from their active dossier. This has been causing suicides and mass killings by targeted persons. A passive dossier is one in whom data is being collected. An active dossier is one in whom data is being distributed in order to target a private citizen.

We are now in a struggle between Authoritarianism and Freedom loving people around the world who know how to keep it and those that appreciates the U.S. Constitution alone with religious freedoms. Our faith frames our worlds. Our Christian values are beacons of light for the respect for the individual. The SIG snake has been working to push religion out of America and all other countries because it wants to be our god. For the snake to be successful they must be able to have people disrespecting individuals. The group must be able to control the individual by immediately disenfranchising the individual.

The hyper-communist operates under the umbrella of a one world government. The individual rights and personal freedoms under the command of hyper-communism is very tentative and can be taken by the group at any time. The group is the same groups that picked on a kid on the elementary school yard; they just got bigger, and the hyper-communist allows them to continue picking on an individual, and negating the targeted person’s personal freedoms. The SIG organization encourages attacks upon the individual in order to instill fear and intimidation in order to control the private citizens thoughts. The hyper-communists shall extend all over the planet; establishing a One World Government. The freedom loving people must resist such government. Christianity and the U.S. Constitution must stand boldly and put us back on the path to more personal freedoms. A new world order at present is not on a path that is good for the common person, only good for the elitist.

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Do Hallucinations Explain Jesus’s Resurrection?

Posted on October 20, 2020 by Will Myers

BY JOSEPH BERGERON – OCTOBER 18 2020

Were the disciples hallucinating when they met Jesus after his crucifixion? Do psychiatric disorders explain the disciples’ belief in Jesus’s resurrection?

The resurrection of Jesus to bodily life after death by crucifixion is a foundational belief of orthodox Christianity. All of Jesus’s friends watched his ignominious and grisly death (Luke 23:49). Jesus’s disciples and many of his friends met him after his resurrection, too many to easily explain away (1 Cor. 15:3–8). The disciples unanimously believed Jesus had resurrected. Could their belief in Jesus’s resurrection be the after-effect of hallucinations?

As a naturalistic alternative for the biblical accounts of the resurrection, some skeptical scholars propose that the disciples’ post-crucifixion meetings with Jesus were actually various kinds of hallucinatory psychological phenomena. Collectively, such explanations have become known as the hallucination hypothesis for Jesus’s resurrection.

The hallucination hypothesis has significant medical implications yet its main proponents are critical New Testament scholars, not physicians. Consequently, books and articles advocating the hallucination hypothesis have not been subjected to the specialized readership of medical peer review. As the majority of proponents of the hallucination hypothesis are outside the disciplines of medical education and healthcare practice, an examination of the hallucination hypothesis from a medical perspective certainly seems warranted.

What Are Hallucinations?

A hallucination is an experience involving one or more of the five senses in the absence of external stimuli that the conscious mind perceives as real.[1] Most proponents of the hallucination hypothesis overlook the fact that hallucinations are symptoms of an underlying illness. Hallucinations generally arise from three disease categories: (1) psychophysiological causes related to an alteration of function or structure in the brain (a brain tumor, for example); (2) psychobiochemical causes due to alteration of chemical neurotransmitters within the brain (for example, delirium tremens in alcohol withdrawal); or (3) psychodynamic causes, namely the intrusion of psychiatric illness into the conscious mind.[2]

But could Jesus’s disciples have all simultaneously suffered severe medical or psychiatric illness? This contention defies reason and probability. In Jesus’s time people with psychiatric illness were ostracized and considered incompetent or demonized.[3] Could a group of people with uncontrolled psychiatric illness have deployed such a rapid and successful expansion of Christianity in the first century? This hardly seems plausible.

It must not be overlooked that hallucinations are private experiences occurring only in the milieu of the individual’s brain.[4] No two hallucinations are identical from person to person. As such, the hallucination hypothesis offers no explanation for group encounters with the resurrected Jesus.

Mass Hysteria

Does mass hysteria explain group meetings of the disciples with the resurrected Jesus? In modern medical parlance, mass hysteria is more precisely termed mass sociogenic illness. This condition describes individuals within a group who have similar simultaneous collective psychological experiences, even visionary experiences in rare cases. The group dynamic is characterized by a heightened sense of social excitement in the context of unique cultural or social expectation.[5] But Jesus’s disciples don’t fit that profile. They weren’t expecting his resurrection. They were frightened and in hiding (John 20:19).

It is noteworthy that no two persons in a group experiencing mass sociogenic illness have identical visual hallucinations.[6] This is not surprising since hallucinations are private experiences within the individual’s mind. Thus, mass sociogenic illness fails to offer a plausible explanation for group meetings of the disciples with the resurrected Jesus.

Conversion Disorder

In Freudian psychoanalysis, subconscious conflicts are sometimes “converted” into neurological symptoms, hence the term conversion disorder.[7] Conversion disorder symptoms can be profound and can include blindness or paralysis. Symptoms are psychiatric, however, and lack identifiable pathophysiological causation.[8]

Conversion disorder is twice as likely to affect women than men and is often associated with other psychological comorbidities. It results from a psychologically painful experience. For example, a mother who finds her child has drowned may become blind. People with conversion disorder show a peculiar lack of distress about their condition, a demeanor sometimes called la belle indifference. Nevertheless, conversion disorder has a generally positive prognosis. Neurological symptoms most often subside in days to a few weeks.[9]

According to psychologist Carl Jung, the apostle Paul had subconsciously been a Christian for some time but had repressed his true faith until it broke into his conscious mind, manifesting in a vision of Jesus followed by psychogenic (psychological-in-origin) blindness. Jung believed that Paul’s transient blindness after his Damascus road experience with Jesus (Acts 9:3–9) was a conversion disorder.[10]

Jung’s idea that Paul simultaneously experienced visual hallucinations and conversion disorder is antiquated. Visual hallucinations are not part of the current clinical pathognomy of conversion disorder.[11] To propose that Paul had hallucinations and conversion disorder would require dual diagnoses.

Also, Paul doesn’t fit the profile of someone suffering from conversion disorder. He had no misgivings or psychological turmoil about persecuting Christians (Gal. 1:13–14). And he was a rising star in the Hebrew religious world of his day (Phil. 3:4–6, Gal. 1:14). Had Paul merely experienced a conversion disorder, it would be expected that he would resume his usual life activities once the symptoms had subsided.

Even skeptical scholars concede that Paul believed Jesus appeared to him bodily.[12] This would be a peculiar lifelong belief had he merely experienced a conversion disorder. Paul made a lasting 180-degree change after he met Jesus. He became the most prolific proponent of Christianity to the Gentile world in his time, despite severe persecution and eventual martyrdom. He relentlessly preached of Jesus’s messiahship and resurrection from the dead.[13] Paul’s radical, enduring change, prolific doctrinal writing, and Christian advocacy are inconsistent with the proposition that he experienced conversion disorder.

Bereavement

Hallucinatory symptoms during bereavement are common, most often experienced by a widowed spouse. Unlike hallucinations, bereavement experiences are psychologically mediated but are not considered pathological (related to disease). The most common experience is a sense of closeness with the deceased.[14] Auditory and visual experiences can occur but are less common.

The rarest type of bereavement experience is visual apparitions. Visual experiences are reported to range from 4% or less but up to 10.8% in spouses suffering severe grief.[15] Visual apparitions are typically noninteractive. Attempting to interact with an apparition causes it to disappear.[16] Visual bereavement experiences would be doubly atypical among friends and disciples. Grieving the loss of a friend and mentor is dissimilar to the grief a widowed spouse may experience.

A widowed spouse is typically reluctant to disclose such experiences. It is noteworthy that bereavement experiences neither cause the grieving spouse to believe the deceased had resurrected nor inspire them to make any particular life change. Bereavement experiences often diminish in frequency over time but can persist in some cases for months or years. Unlike bereavement experiences, Jesus’s disciples saw him only within the forty days after his resurrection.[17]

Meetings with Jesus included person-to-person visits, group and large crowd meetings, physical contact, eating together, and detailed conversations.[18] Those who met him were convinced that he had resurrected. The disciples’ meetings with Jesus are simply unlike the psychological experiences reported in bereavement literature.

Hallucination Explanations Unconvincing

Jesus’s disciples experienced something that made them believe he had resurrected from the dead. The effect on each was profound and lifelong. Proponents of the hallucination hypothesis seem unaware of the psychiatric and neurophysiological pathologies that cause hallucinations. The disciples’ belief in Jesus’s resurrection cannot be reasonably explained away as the sequelae of psychiatric illness. Moreover, psychological phenomena offer no plausible explanation for the group meetings between the resurrected Jesus and his disciples. The hallucination hypothesis fails to offer any tenable explanation for the disciples’ belief in Jesus’s resurrection.

Resources

Joseph W. Bergeron and Gary R. Habermas, “The Resurrection of Jesus: A Clinical Review of Psychiatric Hypotheses for the Biblical Story of Easter,” Irish Theological Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2015), 157–72, doi:1177/0021140014564555.
Joseph W. Bergeron, The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Medical Doctor Examines the Death and Resurrection of Christ (Rapid City, SD: Crosslink Publishers, 2019).

Endnotes

Benjamin J. Sadock, Virginia A. Sadock, and Pedro Ruiz, Kaplan and Sadock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry, Behavioral Science/Clinical Psychiatry, 11th ed. (Philadelphia: Wolters Kluwer, 2015), 452–53.
Bryan Teeple, Jason Caplan, and Theodore Stern, “Visual Hallucinations: Differential Diagnosis and Treatment,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 11 (2009): 26–32.
As an example, some Jews referring to Jesus stated, “He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?” (John 10:20). See also MJL administrative staff writer, Judaism and Mental Illness, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/judaism-and-mental-illness/, accessed September 18, 2020.
Joseph W. Bergeron and Gary R. Habermas, “The Resurrection of Jesus: A Clinical Review of Psychiatric Hypotheses for the Biblical Story of Easter,” Irish Theological Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2015): 161, also fn 16.
Erica Weir, “Mass Sociogenic Illness,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 172, no. 1 (2005): 36; doi:10.1503/cmaj.045027.
Bergeron and Habermas, “The Resurrection of Jesus,” 161–62, also fn 16 and 19. See also Jake O’Connell, “Jesus’ Resurrection and Collective Hallucinations,” Tyndale Bulletin 60 (2009): 69–105.
Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 206. Also, it should be noted that conversion disorder is a form of mental illness and is unrelated to religious conversion.
Colm Owens and Simon Dein, “Conversion Disorder: The Modern Hysteria,” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, 12 (2006): 152–57. See also Matthew Allin, Anna Streeruwitz, and Vivienne Curtis, “Progress in Understanding Conversion Disorder,” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 1 (2005): 205–9. Benjamin J. Saddock and Virginia A. Saddock, Kaplan and Saddock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry: Behavioral Sciences/Clinical Psychiatry (Philadelphia, PA: Lipincott Williams and Wilkins, 2003), 649–50.
Allin, Streeruwitz, and Curtis, “Progress in Understanding Conversion Disorder,” 205–09. See also Saddock and Saddock, Kaplan and Saddock’s Synopsis of Psychiatry, 649–50.
Carl G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology, vol. 9 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928), 258–60.
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2013), 319.
Bergeron and Habermas, “The Resurrection of Jesus,” 163, also fn 25.
Paul personally described his many persecutions (2 Cor. 11:23–27). Paul’s widespread and persistent preaching was well known in the first century, see First Clement 5:5–7 http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/1clement-hoole.html, accessed September 21, 2020. The exact date of Paul’s death is not known but it is traditionally held that he was beheaded during Nero’s rulership, https://bibleresearchtoday.com/2019/02/27/the-death-of-the-apostle-paul/, accessed September 21, 2020.
W. Dewi Rees, “The Hallucinations of Widowhood,” British Medical Journal 4 (1971): 37–41.
Naomi M. Simon et al., “Informing the Symptom Profile of Complicated Grief,” Depression and Anxiety 28 (2011): 118–26.
Dewi Rees, Pointers to Eternity (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2010), 176.
Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 99.
Luke 24:13–31, John 20:19–23, John 20:26–29, Luke 24:34, John 21:1–16, Acts 1:3, 1 Cor. 15:3–8.

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THE AUTHORJoseph Bergeron

BIO Joseph W. Bergeron, MD, is a specialist in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation with decades of experience evaluating musculoskeletal injury, including medical legal analysis. Dr. Bergeron&rsquo… Read more about Joseph Bergeron.

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Biomedical Solutions to COVID-19 Highlight Human Immune System Design

Posted on October 14, 2020 by Will Myers

BY FRANCISCO DELGADO – SEPTEMBER 25, 2020

As the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) continues to wreak havoc throughout the world, scientists have been working diligently to come up with a solution to this daunting pandemic. Hopes remain high for a vaccine, but a safe and effective one may not come soon enough to prevent more people from being infected.

In the meantime, researchers are looking furiously for alternative forms of treatment that can help those who have already been infected. We know so far that steroids and a new antiviral medication called Remdesivir can provide some relief by acting directly on the virus and preventing replication, but better medications are needed, and soon.

We can also find solutions by learning how the immune system protects us against viral infections. Novel biomedical solutions involve B cells: Convalescent plasma therapy and monoclonal antibodies. By mimicking the immune system’s operation, biomedical researchers are making significant progress toward this end, highlighting the elegant and sophisticated design of the immune system.

B Cells

When a virus or another microorganism enters the body, it is initially captured by sentinel cells in our immune system. These cells break the microorganism into many fragments and “present” these fragments to special cells called B cells. The B cells that “recognize” the fragments will be recruited in the fight against the microorganism. The cells will replicate themselves in high numbers and become factories that produce proteins called antibodies whose goal is to neutralize the microorganism and protect the body from further harm. The population of B cells is a clone of the original one that recognized the fragments presented by the sentinel cells and the antibodies are highly specific in targeting the particular infecting microorganism.

Convalescent Plasma Therapy

When a person is in the recovery stage from a viral infection, these B cells produce a significant amount of specific antibodies against the virus circulating in their blood. This principle is the basis for convalescent plasma therapy, in which the blood from a person who has recovered from a viral infection is harvested and the plasma or liquid portion of the blood that contains these antibodies is separated. This plasma is then transfused to a sick person with the hope that it contains enough antibodies to fight the virus and let the person recover more rapidly.

Even though the principles for convalescent plasma therapy are straightforward, the plasma may not have enough neutralizing antibodies to help the sick person who is receiving it. If this is the case, the benefit may be minimal. One of the solutions for this problem is to “pool” many donors and prepare a mixture of plasma from different donors in the hope that one may have enough neutralizing antibodies to fight the infection. Another solution is to screen the plasma for those neutralizing antibodies and use the plasma units that have a high number of antibodies against a pathogen.

Monoclonal Antibodies

In a second research effort, scientists have sought to take the guesswork out of the process of harvesting convalescent plasma by employing a new technique in the medical field called monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies try to mimic the way in which the B cells protect us against viral infections. These antibodies are proteins designed to attach to specific three-dimensional molecules. That interaction can result in the modification of a cell function or, in the case of infectious diseases, block a pathogen from entering a cell.

The use of monoclonal antibodies is relatively new. The first monoclonal antibody was licensed in 1986.¹ Today there are over 75 FDA-licensed monoclonal antibodies that researchers use to treat cancer, chronic inflammatory diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and to aid in transplantation. However, only a handful of them are available for the treatment of infectious diseases. One of the most recent successful such applications involved treatment of Ebola virus.²

There are several ways to manufacture monoclonal antibodies, but all are complex and expensive. Some of them use human tissue and some use transgenic mice.³ Once biomedical researchers obtain the desired antibody (or mixture of antibodies), it proceeds through clinical trials to evaluate its efficacy as a treatment for a disease. The process to produce an effective monoclonal antibody is long and can take months to years. Nevertheless, this solution has materialized by studying the human immune system in exquisite detail.

The COVID-19 Challenge

Coronaviruses have a very distinct protein on their surface that resembles a crown. It is this protein (SPIKE protein) that gives the virus its name (corona = crown). The interaction of this protein with the ACE2 protein on the surface of a human cell allows the virus to invade the cell and start its replication cycle. During the first months of the pandemic, researchers studied the SPIKE protein in great depth and they have now developed monoclonal antibodies against this protein.⁴ As of today, a few companies have moved to the testing phase for some of these antibodies in clinical trials. However, results may not be available until late 2020. Nevertheless, some people believe that researchers will produce monoclonal antibodies before we have a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2.⁵

The Case for Design

The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a massive hunt for solutions that can help decrease the virus’s global impact. The amount of resources and the number of people involved in the development of novel therapies is astounding.

It is remarkable to think that with all the accumulated knowledge in the world and with a massive amount of resources behind this research, it will take us many months to accomplish what the immune system can do in just a few days. The complexity and efficiency with which our bodies run this process speak loudly about the exquisite design of our immune system. As the psalmist writes, we truly are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Endnotes

Justin K. H. Liu, “The History of Monoclonal Antibody Development—Progress, Remaining Challenges and Future Innovations,” Annals of Medicine and Surgery 3, no. 4 (December 2014): 113–16, .
Sabue Mulangu et al., “A Randomized, Controlled Trial of Ebola Virus Disease Therapeutics,” New England Journal of Medicine 381 (December 12, 2019): 2293–2303,
doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1910993.
Laura M. Walker and Dennis R. Burton, “Passive Immunotherapy of Viral Infections: ‘Super Antibodies’ Enter the Fray,” Nature Reviews Immunology 18 (January 30, 2018): 297–308,
doi:10.1038/nri.2017.148.
Xiaolong Tian et al., “Potent Binding of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Spike Protein by a SARS Coronavirus-Specific Human Monoclonal Antibody,” Emerging Microbes and Infections, vol. 9 no. 1 (February 17, 2020): 382–85,
doi:10.1080/22221751.2020.1729069.
Jon Cohen, “Antibodies May Curb Pandemic before Vaccines,” Science 369, no. 6505 (August 14, 2020): 752–53, doi:10.1126/science.369.6505.752.

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Out-of-This-World Riches

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Will Myers

BY HUGH ROSS – SEPTEMBER 7, 2020MORESHARE

Our planet is endowed with extravagantly rich mineral ore deposits. How did we get them and why is it significant? It turns out that the source of these deposits is not indigenous; rather, large asteroid/comet strikes over the past 2 billion years produced Earth’s richest metal ore deposits.

For example, an asteroid or comet 10–15 kilometers in diameter struck 1.849 billion years ago just north of what is now Lake Huron in Canada to form the Sudbury Basin.¹ The impactor itself was rich in nickel, cobalt, and platinum group metals. However, it struck with such force that nickel- and copper-rich magma from Earth’s mantle filled the crater. This 150–260 kilometer-diameter crater ranked as the world’s leading source of nickel until the 1970s. For many decades, it accounted for 95 percent of the world’s nickel market.² It still accounts for a third. At least as far back as 10,000 years ago, the Plano culture people mined copper to manufacture tools, weapons, and jewelry.³ This early use of metallurgy was a significant factor in the launch of human civilization. Also, due to the high mineral content of its soil, the Sudbury Basin is the best agricultural land in northern Ontario.

Earth’s crust does not contain any naturally occurring highly siderophile (iron-loving) elements (gold, platinum, iridium, osmium, rhenium, palladium, rhodium, and ruthenium) and very little of the moderately siderophilic elements (cobalt, nickel, silver, and tungsten). They exist in great abundance, however, in the planet core and lower mantle. It takes asteroids or comets larger in diameter than 10 kilometers striking Earth at high velocity to bring lower mantle material to the surface. Such asteroid and comet impacts were much more frequent previous to 3 billion years ago. Hence, it is no surprise that the only pristine continental crust dating older than 2.5 billion years—the Kaapvaal Craton in South Africa and the Pilbara Craton in Western Australia—are richly endowed with highly siderophile and moderately siderophile elements.

The Kaapvaal Craton is the site of the Vredefort Crater, the world’s largest remaining impact crater. Geologists calculate that the Vredefort Crater was more than 300 kilometers across when it was formed 2.023 billion years ago.⁴ Without the Vredefort impactor, either the gold and platinum group deposits beneath the Kaapvaal Craton’s surface never would have been discovered or the deposits would have eroded away.

The Vredefort Crater overlaps the Witswatersrand Basin, site of the largest gold and platinum group deposits on Earth. Even after the extraction of over 47,000 tons of gold, the Witswatersrand Basin still contains about half as much gold as the rest of Earth’s surface combined.⁵

An asteroid 5–8 kilometers in diameter created the 100-kilometer diameter Popigai Crater in northern Siberia. The asteroid struck with such force that it instantaneously transformed graphite in the ground into an abundance of diamonds. These diamonds range in size from 0.5–10.0 millimeters and the Popigai Crater region ranks as the world’s largest known diamond deposit.

In a review of mineral deposits in impact structures, a team of four geologists demonstrated that virtually every impact crater larger than 2 kilometers in diameter has produced economically valuable mineral deposits.⁶These mineral deposits include hydrocarbon fuel deposits as well.

As I explained in previous articles and my book, Improbable Planet,⁷ the asteroid and comet belts in the solar system are unlike those in other planetary systems. About 80 percent of known exoplanetary systems are devoid of asteroid and comet belts. The other 20 percent possess asteroid and comet belts populated by hundreds to thousands of times more comets and asteroids than is the case for the solar system.

The asteroid and comet belts in the solar system, plus the mass and orbital distance of the Moon, are such that Earth receives enough major impact events, especially early in its history before the appearance of animals, to salt the crust with rich mineral ores. These ores played crucial roles in the early launch of metallurgy and the eventual development of global, high-technology civilization. On the other hand, Earth, especially during the human era, received a sufficiently low number of major impact events to pose no risk to a high human population and global civilization.

Image: The Big Nickel Outside the Sudbury Nickel Mine
Credit: Motorbicycle, Creative Commons Attribution

Endnotes

Donald W. Davis, “Sub-Million-Year Age Resolution of Precambrian Igneous Events by Thermal Extraction-Thermal Ionization Mass Spectrometer Pb Dating of Zircon: Application to Crystallization of the Sudbury Impact Melt Sheet,” Geology 36, no. 5 (May 2008): 383–86, doi:10.1130/G234502A.1; Joseph A. Petrus, Doreen E. Ames, and Balz S. Kamber, “On the Track of the Elusive Sudbury Impact: Geochemical Evidence for a Chrondrite or Comet Bolide,” Terra Nova 27, no. 1 (February 2015): 9–20, doi:10.1111/ter.12125.
Tom Jewiss, “The Mining History of the Sudbury Area,” originally published in Rocks and Minerals in Canada (Spring 1983), University of Waterloo, Earth Science Museum, accessed August 16, 2020, https://uwaterloo.ca/earth-sciences-museum/resources/mining-canada/mining-history-sudbury-area.
Jewiss, “Mining History.”
Jason Kirk et al., “The Origin of Gold in South Africa,” American Scientist 91, no. 6 (January 1, 2003): 534–41, doi:10.1511/2003.38.907.
Kirk et al., “Gold in South Africa.”
Wolf Uwe Reimold et al., “Economic Mineral Deposits in Impact Structures: A Review,” in Impact Tectonics, ed. Christian Koeberl and Hebert Henkel (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, January 2005): 479–552, doi:10.1007/3-540-27548-7_20.
Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 44–48, 57–60, 63–76, https://shop.reasons.org/product/283/improbable-planet; Hugh Ross, “How the Flora Family of Asteroids Shaped the History of Life,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), May 1, 2017, https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/read/todays-new-reason-to-believe/2017/05/02/how-the-flora-family-of-asteroids-shaped-the-history-of-life; Hugh Ross, “Grand Tack Model Reveals More Solar System Designs,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), May 22, 2017, https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to-believe/read/todays-new-reason-to-believe/2017/05/22/grand-tack-model-reveals-more-solar-system-designs; Hugh Ross, “Is the Solar System Too Fine-Tuned for Modern Science?,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), January 7, 2016, https://reasons.org/explore/publications/tnrtb/read/tnrtb/2016/01/07/is-the-solar-system-too-fine-tuned-for-modern-science.

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Reasons to Believe emerged from my passion to research, develop, and proclaim the most powerful new reasons to believe in Christ as Creator, Lord, and Savior and to use those new reasons to reach p… Read more about Hugh Ross.

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Plant-Predator Symbiosis: Ubiquitous Evidence for Creation

A casual look at the world of plants and insects may suggest that nothing much is going on, but the constant struggle is anything but quiet. In this “eat, fight, or be eaten” world, scientists continue to learn how species’ various defense mechanisms, both direct and indirect, have emerged concurrently in life’s history to yield balanced, healthy ecosystems. These symbiotic relationships—sometimes involving multiple species—provide evidence for a Creator’s intelligent agency.

Are Religious Experiences Evidence for God?

Have you ever had a deep spiritual encounter? One that changed your life?

Mantle Bottom Pancakes Benefit Surface Life

The biggest island in the United States also is the fastest growing. Thanks to a steadily rising hot plume from the lower mantle, Hawaii Island’s land area grows by an average of a little more than 40 acres per year. Though geophysicists have known about hot mantle plumes for several decades, only in the past few weeks have they gained an understanding of the source and mechanisms that produce hot plumes.

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America’s Secret Super-Government

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Will Myers

Posted on September 29, 2020by Will Myers Rate This

Posted on April 14, 2016by Will Myers Rate This

By Will Myers

America is controlled by an oligarchy, a small collection of powerful special interests who own the oil corporations and the most powerful banks. I was surprised to learn that our federal reserve bank is actually own by a private small group of persons. This alone gives the oligarchy the power to create financial depressions. We don’t live in a liberal free democracy; we serve the oligarchy, controllers of Americans.The oligarchy effects us daily more than all of the governments in America due to Special Interest Groups ( SIG of Ephesian 6:12) that target private citizens. If Marshall law was imposed on all citizens because of protests against the oligarchy then all rights of the citizenship shall be reduced to that of living in a dictatorship. The oligarchy is more survivable than the USA Federal Government.

The super-government in America creates imagery thru the media, politicians, workplace, and word of mouth making people believe that they are governing instead of the oligarchy.

The oligarchy has surrogates:

(1) USA Brain Trust works for the oligarchy . When the Brain Trust works includes benefits for the common folks, it is secondary and the oligarchy is the prime benefactors.

(2) Republicans serve big business’s agenda. During the past 60 years the Republicans as the party of Lincoln, the helper of oppressed people, has morphed from a St. Bernard rescue dog to a snake in the grass.

(3) SIG of Eph 6:12 invades the privacy of private citizens; Special Interest Groups (SIG) who target private citizens, while stealing civil rights and undermining our free liberal democracy, is presented falsely as being in the name of the people.

The oligarchy dictates when there is to be a depression or a recession or a collapse of the stock market. Working people’s 401K losses as dictated by the oligarchy who owns the Federal Reserve Bank, J. P. Morgan, Chase…controls the energy sources…oil and electrical powers plus many others. Greed of big business will always cheat the small investors. Workers who lose their job caused by the financial crises which were caused by the oligarchy are forced to sell low. Stocks of the small investors are marginalized.

All financial crises are caused by the oligarchy. Just think, when there is a financial crisis no money has left earth nor any material resources. Virtually, the same amount of beef is in the fields when the stock market crashes; virtually, the same amount of oil is in the earth and warehouses, but the oligarchy calculatedly has hoarded everything causing a depression making hard money. The oligarchy who has control of the currency becomes even more powerful due to increased value of the dollar. What the Republicans does is move money up the ladder to the oligarchy who are in the top 1% owning 99% of America’s wealth. Ironically, the oligarchy knows that Wall Street and large banks are creating a financial bubble. So, this one tenth of 1% directs a depression to occur. These persons should be indicted, but they are protected and if any attempt to prosecute them, the oligarchy shall destroy them.

The resolve to the manipulation by the oligarchy is a strong faith in God and a very strong labor union; thereby, restricting the flexibility of the super-powers. There is an earthly reason that religion and labor unions have been under attack the past 30 years. The labor unions have almost been destroyed by the super-powers in the name of the people while ripping off the people. We live in a false truth system that marginalizes the people and severely restricts the people from reaching their dreams. The oligarchy wants to remain our little gods. In the real truth system, the people are supposed to rule the nation. Their needs should have top priority, not the oligarchy.

Caveat*** Bernie Sanders has the platform for the middle class and workers of the lower-income ( Free education, universal health care, and a livable wage). ***Hint: all things that benefit the people are usually opposed by the Republicans. Their response to such accusation is usually a smoke stream or an appeal to fears and emotions. The foundation of all Republican propaganda is “everyone act nice people so that we can keep our profits plus achieve our increased projected profits.” The concept is pacification of the people while maintaining the status quo to ensure entrenched profits.

About Will Myers

SIG, the snake organization, who collect, analyze, and distribute very sensitive info about targeted private citizens has slivered in their beds. SIG has and is pitting us against each other and has raised the probability for us to meet. SIG desires conflict; it thrives on conflict. It makes money from the Oligarch class and adds sadistic entertainment for them. In a sense of having the least evil, the restrictions caused by the pandemic has to some extent slowed the distribute of SIG’s poisonous info. Although, we must eventually cut the head off of the snake SIG so that we save our personal freedoms.SIG is making money from hurting individuals. Even celebrities has some expectation of privacy; also politicians. SIG should stop at the home place. But, SIG hides behind a façade that is considered natural or the simple case, the first thought to be the cause. For example, take my case, crime outside of my apartment such as shootings and killings on a weekly basic. I moved to Oklahoma City and the same thing began to occur on my block with half way houses set up. GO FIGURE. Any idiot would recognize the influence of SIG at any one of the places without considering the both, Los Angele and Oklahoma City. The authorities ignore quickly if challenged. I know that we have a den of snakes controlling a pack of idiots.

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America’s Secret Super-Government

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Will Myers

Posted on April 14, 2016by Will Myers Rate This

By Will Myers

The super-government in America creates imagery thru the media, politicians, workplace, and word of mouth making people believe that they are governing instead of the oligarchy.

The oligarchy has surrogates:

(1) USA Brain Trust works for the oligarchy . When the Brain Trust works includes benefits for the common folks, it is secondary and the oligarchy is the prime benefactors.

About Will Myers

I am an “Intelligent Design” writer who has the Christian faith. Part of my background is that I have a degree in physics, and have been inducted into the National Physics Honor Society. Sigma Pi Sigma, for life. My interest has lead me into metaphysics, farther into Christianity. Optimum metaphysics becomes religion.View all posts by Will Myers →This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.← Christian Thinkers 101: A Crash Course on C. S. Lewis American Super-Government →

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More Treasures in Earth’s Attic

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Will Myers

BY HUGH ROSS – SEPTEMBER 21, 2020MORESHARE

Did Earth hide some of its treasure on the Moon?

Last week I wrote about how the Moon—Earth’s attic—has uniquely preserved fossils of Earth’s first life in pristine form. I say uniquely because Earth’s geological activity has destroyed those fossils while other solar system sites, such as Mars and Venus, have received far too low a delivery of Earth soil (through meteoroid transfer) to reveal any fossils.

A paper has been published in Science Advances establishing that yet more scientific treasure from Earth has been preserved on the Moon’s surface for us to discover.¹ That treasure is hematite—a reddish-brown to black mineral that often comes in crystal form. Learning how hematite got to the Moon will help scientists know what Earth’s atmosphere has looked like over its history—a find that I believe will reveal a Creator’s guiding hand.

Hematite is an iron oxide mineral (with the formula Fe₂O₃) and a common oxidation product on Earth, where it is abundant on the surface. It is the main ore harvested from iron mines. Hematite’s abundance stems from the enormous quantity of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and the amount of iron in Earth’s crust.

Most of us were taught that the Moon has no atmosphere (gaseous envelope). It is true that the Moon’s gravity is too weak to retain light molecular weight gases and the Sun’s ultraviolet and X-ray radiation that falls on the lunar surface is too intense for the heavier molecular weight oxide gases to survive. However, the Moon does retain a very thin atmosphere of mostly argon gas and smaller amounts of xenon and radon gases. These gases are the end products of heavy radioisotopes’ decay. The gases are heavy enough for the Moon’s gravity to retain them and, being inert elements, they are immune to decomposition by solar radiation.

How Did Hematite Get to the Moon?
The lack of oxygen or oxides in the Moon’s atmosphere implies that any hematite on the lunar surface cannot be indigenous. It must have been deposited there from other solar system bodies.

In the Science Advances paper, a team of seven American planetary astronomers led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii analyzed the Moon Mineralogy Mapper data. They found that hematite is present at high latitudes on the Moon and mostly associated with east- and equator-facing sides of craters, mountains, and hills. Also, hematite is much more prevalent on the lunar hemisphere facing Earth than on the opposite hemisphere. The locations and quantity of hematite found on the Moon imply that oxygen delivered from Earth’s atmosphere is the major oxidant that forms hematite on the Moon.

Lunar hematite presents physicists and chemists interested in a detailed history of the composition of Earth’s atmosphere with an exciting opportunity. In my book Improbable Planet I presented the best available data on the composition history of Earth’s atmosphere.² However, with respect to oxygen there are long stretches of time, particularly during the boring billion, where there’s great uncertainty on the amount and variability of oxygen content in Earth’s atmosphere.

Treasure-Hunting Implications
Planetary scientists can send spacecraft to hematite-rich regions of the Moon to bring back samples for analysis. Oxygen isotope and age-dating measurements in those samples will, for the first time, provide atmospheric physicists and chemists with an accurate history of the oxygen content in Earth’s atmosphere throughout the entire 3.8-billion-year history of life on our planet.

As I described in Improbable Planet and in a previous article, what we already know about the oxygen history of Earth’s atmosphere has affirmed God’s miraculous hand in shaping the physical, chemical, and biological history of Earth in preparation for human beings and civilization. I am persuaded that an accurate, detailed oxygen history of Earth’s atmosphere will yield even more evidence for God’s miraculous handiwork. Let’s retrieve the hematite treasure from Earth’s attic!

Endnotes

Shuai Li et al., “Widespread Hematite at High Latitudes of the Moon,” Science Advances 6, no. 36 (September 2, 2020): id. eaba1940, doi:10.1126/sciadv.aba1940.
Hugh Ross, Improbable Planet (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2016), 94–197, https://shop.reasons.org/category/format/books/improbable-planet.

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Biomedical Solutions to COVID-19 Highlight Human Immune System Design

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My Early Baptism and Spiritual Development

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Will Myers

BY KENNETH R. SAMPLES – SEPTEMBER 1, 2020

When does God’s saving grace begin working in a person’s life? Is it at the moment the person decides to believe in Christ? Or can God’s saving grace be operative prior to a person believing? Could that saving grace even begin at a young child’s baptism?

Church traditions within Christendom differ over the practice of baptism. Those differences extend to its meaning, spiritual significance, rightful candidates, and how baptism is to be performed. I will not address those questions here but I highly recommend the source below for understanding where Christians agree and disagree over baptism.¹

The focus of this article is more autobiographical. I hope you’ll benefit as I share my reflections on how I have understood God to have worked in my life when it comes to baptism and my ongoing spiritual development and vocation.

God’s Early Hand on My Life

My life is inextricably linked to my parents. Both my dad and mom grew up with an evangelical Christian faith in the rural state of West Virginia. They moved to Los Angeles, California, in the mid-1950s and converted to Roman Catholicism in the early 1960s. At age four, I was baptized as a Roman Catholic at St. Athanasius Catholic Church in Long Beach, California. I distinctly remember as a young boy staring intently at the crucified Christ statue that hung above the church’s altar. Being very young, I knew little about who Jesus was, but the crucifix told me he had suffered greatly and that he was central to our church.

Catholicism honors its saints and our parish was dedicated to the early church father St. Athanasius (c. 296–373) who had defended Nicene orthodoxy. This meant that he affirmed the Trinity by defending the deity of both the Son and the Holy Spirit against arguably the church’s greatest heresy—Arianism (a categorical denial of Christ’s deity). I recalled later reading on the church door Athanasius’s famous words uttered during the height of the Arian controversy: Athanasius Contra Mundum (“Athanasius against the world”).

God’s Ongoing Guiding Hand

Many years later I would come to learn about Athanasius’s heroic life as a Christian theologian and apologist. I went on to read his classic work On the Incarnation, which inspired me to write and speak about the person of Christ and the triune God, especially to those contemporary religious groups that deny these doctrines (Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphians, Iglesia Ni Cristo). Many years after my baptism I came to view my own modest apologetics ministry as being carried out in the spirit of Athanasius. I would even write a chapter about Athanasius in my book Classic Christian Thinkers.²

God’s special grace in my life seemed to begin at my baptism all those years ago where I first heard of Jesus Christ and made the sign of the cross and uttered those sacred words: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” While theologians debate the concept of baptismal regeneration, I am convinced that God had his providential hand upon me even as a small boy. And while I would not remain a Roman Catholic my whole life, I am indeed grateful for and respectful of what I received and learned as a Catholic and for distinguished Catholic thinkers like St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Blaise Pascal, who would continue to teach and inspire me even as an evangelical Protestant Christian.

Reflecting on a Heritage

Several years ago I visited St. Athanasius parish and showed my children the place where my Christian spiritual pilgrimage in life began. I looked again at the statue of the crucified Christ as well as the front door of the church, which still contained Athanasius’s famous words. I reflected anew on how God’s saving grace had worked in my life both then and now.

Reflections: Your Turn

Have you reflected on how God’s saving grace has worked in your life? Visit Reflections on WordPress to comment with your response.

Endnotes

For different views of baptism within Protestantism, see the book Baptism: Three Views, edited by David Wright.
For an introduction to St. Athanasius and his key ideas as well his battle against Arianism, see chapter two of my book Classic Christian Thinkers: An Introduction.

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I believe deeply that “all truth is God’s truth.” That historic affirmation means that when we discover and grasp truth in the world and in life we move closer to its divine Author. This approach r… Read more about Kenneth R. Samples.

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More Treasures in Earth’s Attic

Did Earth hide some of its treasure on the Moon?

What Was Your Intellectual Epiphany?

Have you ever had a sudden realization that ended up changing your life? You may have had an epiphany, which can be defined as an intuitive flash of insight or discovery as to the deep meaning of something significant that comes through experience and leads to a sense of wonder.

Earth’s Attic: Houston, We Have an Opportunity

Those of us who are over 60 will never forget the chilling words spoken by the Apollo 13 command module pilot, Jack Swigert, and repeated by the mission commander, Jim Lovell, late evening on April 13 of 1970, “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

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Language and Biochemistry: Evidence for Intelligent Design

Posted on September 24, 2020 by Will Myers

BY – JUNE 19, 2020

By Zachary Leung

Have you ever composed a text message on your smartphone and had the app suggest the next word? It is amazing that, many times, the app is correct. How does it work? By sheer chance? Or by reading your mind?

The fact that technology can often predict the next word you are going to type is possible only because your text message comes from your mind. The sentence you type is informative and meaningful because it is intelligently designed and therefore predictable.

Scientists have recently found similar predictability in biochemical systems. Does this similarity mean that biochemistry is also intelligently designed? Before answering this question, let us look at one way that mathematicians characterize information in the sentences we type.

N-Gram Language Modeling

Language is a sophisticated human cognitive process, and N-gram modeling is just one of the language modeling techniques widely employed in a variety of artificial intelligence applications, such as autocorrect and speech recognition. We will consider three main types of N-gram modeling: unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams.

Unigrams: We know that some English words are used more frequently than others. By analyzing millions of sentences, Oxford University Press reports that among the top 10 most frequently used nouns are: “time,” “person,” “year,” “way,” “day”…¹ There are also lists of the top 100 and top 10,000 frequently used words. These lists agree with human intuition, contrasting with the most uncommon words, such as “futhorc” and “chaulmoogra.” Unigrams use these lists of word frequencies to predict the next word in a sentence, without relying on previously written words.

Bigrams and Trigrams: Let us look at this partial sentence: “The quick brown fox…” We can probably make some good guesses about what the next word might be: “is,” “eats,” and “jumps” are all possibilities. Similarly, bigrams and trigrams use the previous one or two words, respectively, to predict the probability of the next word, whereas unigrams use the frequency of the next word alone. Thus, in our partial sentence, bigrams and trigrams would use “fox” and “brown fox”, respectively. Generally, the larger N is, the better the predictive power becomes.

Word Perplexity

Perplexity is a mathematical measurement of how well a model predicts a result. Researchers use an information-theoretic metric known as word perplexity to quantify a language’s branching factor, which is the average number of possible words that can follow any word. It is a measure of uncertainty. For example, studies show that the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) uses a vocabulary of 19,979 unique English words.² If a writer who knew nothing about English were to “unintelligently” compose a sentence, they would pick random words from this vocabulary. In this case, the word perplexity would always be 19,979, as shown in Table 1, reflecting a mere chance scenario when the writer uses no intelligence to design the sentence.

	Vocabulary Size	Unigram Perplexity	Bigram Perplexity	Trigram Perplexity
Randomized WSJ	19,979	19,979	19,979	19,979
WSJ	19,979	962	170	109

Table 1: The use of N-grams shows that the perplexity in WSJ is two orders of magnitude lower than the perplexity in sentences of random WSJ words.³

In reality, writers use intelligence to design sentences. By analyzing a WSJ corpus of 38 million words, we can compute the N-gram perplexity, which is found to be 962, 170, and 109 for unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams, respectively. ⁴ The use of bigrams and trigrams indicates that the word-perplexity of actual sentences in WSJ texts is two orders of magnitude lower than the word-perplexity of sentences of random words (19,979). This significant reduction shows that writers intelligently design sentences to carry information and meaning, rather than relying on random chance. Is there a similar perplexity reduction in nature?

Consider the following example from biochemistry that demonstrates the similarity between intelligent human language and proteins.

Protein Domains

Proteins consist of sequences of polypeptides. These biomolecules form when the cellular machinery links amino acids together.⁵ Within the structure of proteins, biochemists have discovered compact and self-contained folded regions called protein domains, each possessing a unique biochemical function. Each protein, therefore, consists of a combination of domains.⁶

Resemblance to Human Languages

Researchers have discovered a remarkable resemblance between the information structure found in proteins and human languages, as summarized in Table 2.

English	Biochemistry
Letters	Amino Acid
Words	Protein Domains
Sentences	Proteins

Table 2: Analogy between biochemistry and human languages.

Recently, a team of scientists led by Yu used N-gram modeling to study protein architectures.⁷ They examined a dataset of 23 million protein domains across 4,794 species. Since most organisms, especially bacteria and archaea, have proteins comprised of two or fewer domains, they used unigrams and bigrams only. These scientists found that (1) over 95% of all possible bigrams were absent, indicating that the protein sequences were far from random; and (2) there was a “quasi-universal grammar” imposed on protein domains, showing the parallel between proteins and languages. For creationists, this result resonates powerfully with the idea that life was created by an intelligent God.⁸

Protein Domain Perplexity

By analyzing the dataset used by Yu’s team, this author examined perplexity in protein domains.Table 3 shows that the average numbers of protein domains for archaea, bacteria, and eukarya (the three domains of life) are 671, 917, and 2,434, respectively. If proteins were formed by naturalistic processes that link together protein domains at random, the perplexity for archaea, bacteria, and eukarya would always be 671, 917, and 2,434, respectively. This is analogous to the perplexity of 19,979 for WSJ texts if sentences were unintelligently written with random words.

If Protein Sequences Were Random	Average Domain Size	Unigram Perplexity	Bigram Perplexity
Archaea	671	671	671
Bacteria	917	917	917
Eukarya	2,434	2,434	2,434

Table 3: Perplexity if proteins were formed by randomly linking protein domains.

However, as shown in Table 4, the unigram and bigram perplexity in eukarya is 42 and 16 respectively, which is two orders of magnitude lower than the perplexity in random sequences of eukaryote protein domains (2,434). Similar reductions are found for archaea and bacteria. Analogous to the WSJ texts, N-gram modeling shows that protein domain sequences are far from random. Instead, just like newspaper articles or text messages, they carry information and meaning.

Protein Domains	Average Domain Size	Unigram Perplexity	Bigram Perplexity
Archaea	671	28	13
Bacteria	917	32	13
Eukarya	2,434	42	16

Table 4: Perplexity in actual proteins (as shown by unigrams and bigrams) is two orders of magnitude lower than the perplexity in “random” proteins. Perplexities are directly calculated from data sets.⁹

Intelligent Designers

Sentences are not sequences of random words; you and I write sentences with a perplexity significantly lower than the perplexity of gibberish. This is a hallmark characteristic of intelligent design. Similarly, the perplexity in proteins is much lower than the perplexity in random sequences of protein domains. I see at least as much intelligent design in proteins as in my writing. Perplexity reduction alone builds a positive case that proteins harbor information, and therefore have been intelligently designed. Proteins, like writing, are indeed information-rich. The analogy between proteins and writing—hallmark characteristics of intelligent design—point to a Creator.

Endnotes

Oxford Wordlists, Oxford University Press, https://languages.oup.com/products/oxford-wordlists/.
Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2008).
Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing.
Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing.
Fazale Rana, The Cell’s Design, How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008), 43.
Rana, The Cell’s Design, 43.
Lijia Yu et al., “Grammar of Protein Domain Architectures,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 116, no. 9 (February 26, 2019): 3636–45,doi:10.1073/pnas.1814684116.
Fazale Rana, “Biochemical Grammar Communicates the Case for Creation,” The Cell’s Design (blog), May 29, 2019, https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/the-cells-design/read/the-cells-design/2019/05/29/biochemical-grammar-communicates-the-case-for-creation.
Lijia Yu et al., “Grammar of Protein Domain Architecture,” Supporting Information, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 116, no. 9 (February 26, 2019): 3636–45, https://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2019/02/06/1814684116.DCSupplemental.

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