Letters From Grandpa #198

LETTERS FROM GRANDPA # 198

Dearest grandchild,

Today’s letter will deal with the reality of God. There are basically two world views (1) Mind produced matter (2) Matter produced mind. I am convinced, as you know, of position # 1. The Bible teaches that in the beginning was the Word (Mind), and the Word (Mind) produced matter (Jn. 1:1 — 4). To me, it is irrational to believe that words came by accident from matter. Even atheist, Thomas Nagel admits this problem in his book Mind and Cosmos. The subtitle his books is: “Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False).

In a previous letter we pointed out that the late Anthony Flew, at one time the most famous atheist in the world, came to believe in God as a result of the human genome. This is the longest word in the world with over 3 billion letters. If you read these letters at the rate of one per second without stopping day or night, it would take over ten years to read them all. If you saw rocks arranged to spell Don, Bob, Sam, Sue, etc. you could logically assume that even the 3 letters arranged in a rational order came from a mind. To assume that 3 billions letters arranged themselves by accident is totally irrational. Yet, evolutionist Edwin Conklin of Princeton University believes it happened. He even uses the illustration of a print shop blowing up billions of times and ultimately producing the unabridged dictionary. He does not tell us, however, where either the print shop or the explosions came from.

Here are a few other realities which those who do not believe in God relegate to accidents.

m The firefly produces a “cold light” which has neither ultraviolet or infrared rays. This chemically produced light has a wave length from 510 to 670 nanometers, and is apparently used in identifying a mate.

m The electric eel, by comparison, has much more powerful electrical energy. It has 6,000 specialized cells that store power like tiny batteries, and when threatened or when attacking prey, these cells discharge simultaneously and emit a burst of at least 600 volts. This, as you know, is five times the power of a standard U.S. wall socket.

m The tiny bombardier beetle has the amazing ability to emit odious gases that are 212 degrees F. It seems that the beetle has been blessed with two dangerous chemicals, hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide. To avoid self destruction, it also has an inhibitor to keep them from exploding. When approached by a predator, however, the beetle squirts the stored chemicals into two combustion tubes, and at precisely the right moment adds an anti inhibitor which causes a violent explosion to take place in the face of an attacker. It is hard to imagine bombardier beetles reproducing and exploding for millions of years until one “accidentally” got the right timing. And even more “miraculous” that it would be able to reproduce and then pass that information on to the next generation.

m The pistol shrimp is even more amazing. It can snap it’s claws so quickly that it creates a cavitation bubble with extremely high temperatures and a resultant water jet. The National Geographic News states that the temperature created in this bubble reaches 10,000 Kelvin, or 18,000 degrees F. Further, the shrimp is able to aim the resultant water jet and thus stun or kill small creatures in the ocean.

™ Geneticist Michael Denton PhD., points out that the simplest bacterium known to man has

millions of protein molecules divided into, at bare minimum, several hundred distinct interlocking protein types that further interlock with several hundred genes in the DNA that are all interconnected with RNA and protein machines in an irreducibly complex manner that defies

all attempts to reduce its complexity further. Indeed the complexity of the simplest cell on earth is so complex that no man can fully elaborate the function of all the "parts" of the "simplest cell".

m In the year 2000 IBM announced the development of a new super-computer, called Blue Gene, that is 500 times faster than any supercomputer built up until that time. It took 4-5 years to build. Blue Gene stands about six feet high, and occupies a floor space of 40 feet by 40 feet. It cost $100 million. It was built specifically to better enable computer simulations of molecular biology. The computer performs one quadrillion (one million billion) computations per second. Despite its speed, it is estimated it will take one entire year for it to analyze the mechanism of JUST ONE “simple” protein . . ." (Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM research, September 21, 2000).

I know that all of you are busy and may not even have time to read these letters. I love you so much, however, that I feel I have to write them whether you read them or not. The thought that you might some day die without believing in God is more than I can stand. When you follow the evidence, I am convinced that you will agree with the Psalmist: “The fool says in his heart there is no God” (Ps. 14:1).

I love you,

Grandpa Boyce