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Thursday, 19 May 2022
The truth has fallen. III
With us in mind?
Earth’s Atmosphere Demonstrates Stunning Biocentric Fine-Tuning
Summary: Our planet’s atmosphere provides a beautiful example of the parsimony and elegance of nature’s fine-tuning for aerobic life. This extraordinarily improbable degree of environmental fitness was woven in the order of things.
Editor’s note: Biologist Michael Denton’s new book, The Miracle of Man: The Fine-Tuning of Nature for Human Existence, is out now. This essay is adapted from Chapter 3, “Fitness for Aerobic Life.”
In my book The Miracle of Man, I review a stunning range of coincidences in nature that should inspire both awe and wonder. One striking illustration may be found in our planet’s atmosphere, which provides compelling evidence of a very special fitness for the generation of oxygen for oxygen-hungry beings such as ourselves.
For photosynthesis to proceed on a planet like Earth, sunlight (visual light) must penetrate the atmosphere all the way to the ground, and part of the sun’s infrared radiation needs to be absorbed by the atmosphere so as to warm the planet into the ambient temperature range, where the chemistry of life, including the chemistry of photosynthesis, can work its magic.
Happily, our atmosphere obliges. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a significant fraction of the infrared radiation — warming the atmosphere into the ambient range — and lets through nearly all of the radiation in the visual region to empower the process of photosynthesis.
Some infrared radiation does reach the Earth’s surface, felt as warmth on the skin, and some penetrates a little way into water, as is commonly experienced in a swimming pool. But there are several major atmospheric absorption bands in the near infrared region that capture and retain the sun’s heat, raising our planet’s surface temperature by 33°C over what it would be without them, a chilly −18°C.
If our atmosphere didn’t absorb at least a significant fraction of the infrared radiation when the sun was shining, the atmosphere would be intolerably hot during the day, and when night fell the temperature would plunge below zero. We would experience wild temperature swings like those on the moon. There temperatures spike in the daytime to more than 100°C (the boiling point of water at sea level) and plunge to −178°C at night, a temperature far, far colder than any experienced on Earth today. This wide variation is because the moon has no atmosphere to retain heat at night or prevent the surface from getting so hot during the day. No type of carbon-based plant life based in a water matrix could survive such massive temperature fluctuations.
On the other hand, if our atmosphere absorbed too much in the infrared region, that too would be disastrous. And this highlights another intriguing element of fitness in the absorption pattern of electromagnetic radiation in the infrared region. The windows between the absorption peaks are as crucial as the peaks. Why? Because without some spectral windows, all the infrared radiation would be absorbed by the atmosphere, none could be radiated back out into space, and Earth would suffer a runaway greenhouse effect, ending up a hellish hothouse like Venus.
A Sizable Absorption Window
In this context an intriguing feature of our atmosphere’s absorption spectrum is a sizable absorption window between eight and fourteen microns. It’s intriguing because the sun is not the only body that emits infrared radiation. The Earth also does, since all bodies at a given temperature emit radiation with a characteristic range of wavelengths. In Earth’s case, the emission peak is in the infrared region near 10 microns. And our atmosphere’s absorption gap allows a significant fraction of Earth’s infrared emission to escape into space through the eight-to-fourteen micron window. Around a fourth of the outgoing infrared emission from Earth escapes through this window, which consequently plays a major role in preventing our planet from going the way of Venus. If all radiation in the infrared between 0.80 and 100 microns had been absorbed by the atmospheric gases, if there were no windows, a runaway greenhouse would have been inevitable. The Earth would be a hot, Venus-like planet. Upon these windows, including the eight-to-fourteen-micron window, all advanced life on the surface of the Earth, including of course Homo sapiens, depends.
It is no exaggeration to say even with all the other elements of fitness that make possible our existence, without this eight-to-fourteen micron window — but one small detail in the atmosphere’s overall absorption spectrum — we wouldn’t exist. This represents yet another stunning instance of the biocentric fine tuning of nature.
Some Additional Fortuities
Before turning to the role of specific atmospheric gases in the fine-tuning of our atmosphere for advanced terrestrial life, a few quick notes on some additional fortuities regarding Earth’s relationship to light.
The light that passes through our atmosphere must penetrate water, not just to gift the sun’s energy to aquatic plants but because water is the matrix of life, and to reach the chloroplasts in any green plant, aquatic or terrestrial light must traverse the water in the cell. Again nature obliges as water is transparent to radiation in the visual band as a liquid, as a vapor in the atmosphere, and as ice. If liquid water or water vapor in the atmosphere absorbed visual light — the right light for photosynthesis — then photosynthesis would not be possible, and Earth would be devoid of aerobic life forms.
Also fortuitous is the transparency of our atmosphere to visible light, which made important scientific advances possible, as Carl Sagan underscored in his 1980 book Cosmos. There he asked us to imagine intelligent life evolving on a cloud-covered planet such as Venus. “Would it then invent science?” he asked. “The development of science on Earth was spurred fundamentally by observations of the regularities of the stars and planets. But Venus is completely cloud-covered… nothing of the astronomical universe would be visible if you looked up into the night sky of Venus. Even the sun would be invisible in the daytime; its light would be scattered and diffused over the whole sky — just as scuba divers see only a uniform enveloping radiance beneath the sea.”
Finally, it is not just that our atmosphere lets through the right light. It also strongly absorbs radiation from the dangerous or potentially dangerous regions of the electromagnetic spectrum on either side of the visual and near infrared regions.
The Atmospheric Gases
Another remarkable aspect of the absorption characteristics of Earth’s atmosphere is that it arises from the combined absorption spectra of the atmospheric gases, five of which — nitrogen (N2), oxygen (O2), ozone (O3), carbon dioxide (CO2), and water vapor (H2O) — are bound to be present in the atmosphere of any planet hosting complex carbon-based biological life. It is their combined absorption characteristics which lets through just the right light for photosynthesis while at the same time absorbing just the right amount of heat, as well as most of the harmful radiation outside of the visual and infrared regions.
Oxygen
Oxygen (O2) is indispensable to complex organisms such as ourselves. We need a lot of it (250 ml every minute, even at rest). Indeed, the metabolic rates needed to sustain the most advanced biological life depend on taking oxygen directly from an atmosphere. Atmospheres sustaining complex aerobic life will inevitably contain substantial quantities of oxygen.
Ozone
Where there is O2 in an atmosphere there is bound also to be ozone (O3), since it’s formed in the stratosphere by the reaction of individual oxygen atoms with molecules of dioxygen, catalyzed by the action of UV light.
O2 + O = O3
Ozone is important to life because it absorbs harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Carbon Dioxide
Breathing involves taking in oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a major product of aerobic metabolism (the process which provides us with 90 percent of our energy needs). Consequently CO2 will be found in the atmosphere of any planet where organisms use the oxidation of reduced carbon to generate energy. Carbon dioxide is also essential to plants, which require it for photosynthesis. Moreover, CO2 is the only feasible carrier of the carbon atom to all parts of any carbon-based biosphere.
CO2 is also delivered to the atmosphere on Earth by volcanic activity and is recycled via silicate weathering.
Water Vapor
Atmospheric water vapor will be found in the atmosphere of any planet harboring abundant carbon-based life because water is the essential physical matrix of all carbon-based cells and it is the necessary medium of the circulatory system in all complex multicellular organisms. Only worlds that possess water can harbor carbon-based life, hence the NASA adage “follow the water” in searching for extraterrestrial life. And since water evaporates at temperatures fit for biochemistry, some water vapor is bound to be present in the atmosphere of any world bearing carbon-based life.
Nitrogen
Atmospheric nitrogen provides most of the nitrogen atoms incorporated into organic compounds by life on Earth. It’s one of the four core atoms of organic chemistry alongside carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. It provides necessary density to the atmosphere, keeps our oceans from evaporating, and serves as a fire retardant, slowing the speed that fire spreads, rendering it controllable. Nitrogen is the only viable candidate for these roles and thus appears to be an essential ingredient in the atmosphere of any planet hosting carbon-based life.
All this suggests that oxygen, nitrogen, water vapor, carbon dioxide, as well as ozone are bound to be present in the atmosphere of any world inhabited by oxygen-utilizing, advanced carbon-based life, for reasons over and above their life-friendly atmospheric transparency for the right kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
The Right Proportions
Our atmosphere not only has the right components for complex aerobic life, it also has them in the right proportions. Only an oxygen concentration of about 20 percent, at a partial pressure of more than 80 mm Hg, provides the requisite oxygen for the active metabolism of organisms like ourselves. If the concentration were substantially higher, fires would be a far greater danger. In the case of nitrogen, only a considerable quantity of nitrogen provides the density and pressure needed to keep fires from raging uncontrollably in oxygen-rich atmospheres such as Earth’s, and to prevent the oceans from evaporating.
CO2 levels have varied throughout geological time, although over the past 400 million years — since advanced life colonized the land — they have almost certainly never reached levels ten times those of today and probably never more than about four to five times present levels. A recent study provided evidence of this. It found that raising CO2 levels in controlled atmospheres up to four times present levels diminished cognitive function in human subjects. This gives some indication of a CO2 ceiling, beyond which advanced life may no longer viable.
The Greenhouse Gases
Diatomic molecules with the same two atoms, such as O2 or N2, do not absorb infrared radiation. This is quite fortunate for life on Earth, since if either of these two gases, which make up most of our atmosphere, were strong absorbers of infrared radiation, Earth likely would have become a boiling cauldron like Venus, with temperatures hot enough to melt lead.
Also fortuitous: the major greenhouse gases CO2 and H2O are both stable in the presence of O2. This is enormously important. If they were unstable in the presence of oxygen, the whole atmospheric system and global heat balance would collapse. Aerobic life, our sort of life, would be impossible. However, in keeping with nature’s profound fitness for advanced life as it exists on Earth, H2O and CO2 are fully oxidized and stable in the presence of oxygen. Nitrogen, the major component of the atmosphere, is also stable in the presence of oxygen, because the nitrogen atoms in N2 bond strongly with each other and resist combining with oxygen. The stability of water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in the presence of oxygen is a point worth underscoring, since most other substances (apart from the noble gases) react strongly with oxygen — in some cases, explosively.
A fascinating further teleological aspect to all this concerns the quantity of ozone in the atmosphere. Because of the vast amounts of O2 in the atmosphere, inevitably there will also be some ozone (O3). Although ozone is indispensable for blocking harmful ultraviolet radiation, it is also a powerful greenhouse gas that absorbs strongly in the infrared region — one thousand times more strongly than CO2. Because of this, anything beyond trace amounts of ozone would contribute dangerously to the greenhouse effect. This means that its life-giving fitness in absorbing the dangerous ultraviolet radiation between 0.20 and 0.30 microns would be negated entirely if more than trace amounts were necessary for that vital task, or if it were produced in excess amounts by the action of ultraviolet radiation on O2 in the stratosphere. Happily, only trace amounts are needed to effectively block harmful ultraviolet radiation, and the rate of breakdown of ozone in the stratosphere almost equals its rate of synthesis, guaranteeing that it is indeed only present in trace amounts.
Finally, an intriguing aspect of ozone’s synthesis in the atmosphere is that ozone (O3) and diatomic oxygen (O2) indirectly promote their own formation by absorbing dangerous ultraviolet radiation and thereby protecting plant life, both aquatic and terrestrial, which synthesize the oxygen from which ozone is formed. This is yet another beautiful example of the parsimony and elegance of nature’s stunning fitness for aerobic life.
Vital Coincidences
The absorption properties of our atmosphere are not vital for all carbon-based life on Earth, but particularly for plants and energy-hungry aerobes like ourselves. Our atmosphere’s fortuitous mix of gases enables photosynthesis and the manufacture of oxygen, warms Earth into the ambient temperature range, and shields life from harmful radiation. Even slight differences in our atmospheric gases’ absorption properties, or in their relative concentration, and Earth would be uninhabitable, particularly for aerobic life. And note, these gases exist in our atmosphere, and in the proportions they do, because of factors quite distinct from the life-essential absorption properties described above.
There is a final twist to this teleology: Three of the key atmospheric gases whose physical absorption properties are indispensable to the process of photosynthesis are also central players in the process of photosynthesis itself.
6CO2 + 6H2O +light +heat —> C6H12O6 + 6O2
Indeed, they are the major reactants in the process. It is as if CO2, H2O, and O2 were deliberately colluding to incorporate themselves into the stuff of living matter.
Light and Air
Let’s review. The laws of nature, which determine the absorption properties of the atmospheric gases, have no logically necessary connection with their chemical properties or the chemical properties of their constituent atoms, which are of such utility to life. This is a striking fortuity in the nature of things.
Similarly, there is no connection between the laws of nature which determine the tiny size of the biologically useful region in the electromagnetic spectrum, and those laws which determine the radiant output of the sun. And there is no connection between the radiant output of the sun and the laws determining the absorption properties of the atmospheric gases and liquid water.
So here we have several coincidences on which the existence of oxygen-hungry aerobic organisms like ourselves depends. In the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in the article entitled “Electromagnetic Radiation,” the authors comment, “Considering the importance of visible sunlight for all aspects of terrestrial life, one cannot help being awed by the dramatically narrow window in the atmospheric absorption… and in the absorption spectrum of water.”
And it isn’t just the “dramatically narrow window.” We should be in awe of the entire ensemble of prior environmental fitness, an ensemble that enables photosynthesis and, by extension, our own existence as oxygen-hungry “light-eaters.”
Simply put, our existence, inhabiting the surface of a planet like Earth, deriving energy generated by the oxidation of the reduced carbon compounds manufactured during the process of photosynthesis, depends on what can only be described as an extraordinarily improbable degree of environmental fitness in the order of things. Note, too, that the improbable coincidences reviewed above, and much more fully treated in The Miracle of Man, are largely irrelevant to the other major domain of carbon-based life on our planet — the great biomass of “rock-eating” anaerobic denizens of the dark. Nature’s awe-inspiring fitness for photosynthesis is a fitness for our type of life, for life in the light, for life on a planetary surface, for creatures such as ourselves.
Yes, the technology is real. III
Brian Miller: From Non-Life to Life via Natural Forces Alone? Nope
A new episode of ID the Future continues physicist Brian Miller’s exploration of a recent report from the University of Tokyo claiming a big breakthrough in origin-of-life research. As Miller and host Eric Anderson make clear, the university’s laboratory work on RNA, detailed in a recent Nature Communications article, involved the intelligent interference of the lab scientists and, despite this intelligent interference, the devolution of RNA rather than the evolution of increasing RNA sophistication.
Miller says that it’s ironic that Steven Novella, a scientist committed to puncturing science hype, seems to have fallen for the hype surrounding this laboratory work. Miller and Anderson go on to discuss critiques of origin-of-life tall-tale claims, critiques coming from Robert Shapiro, James Tour, and others. Life, Miller says, requires organizational blueprints and design logics already in place to battle against nature’s relentless tendency toward entropy. Without those sophisticated organizational blueprints already instantiated in living cells and sophisticated molecular machinery, natural forces appear utterly powerless to pull off the kind of creative design work required to move from non-life to life. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Yes, the technology is real. II
Brian Miller: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Engineering in the Biological Sciences”
At the recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith, Discovery Institute physicist Brian Miller gave a great talk on the convergence of biology and engineering. It’s up now on YouTube and eminently worthy of being shared. Miller’s theme is that “you see the same engineering principles in human engineering as you see in life.” Funny that that should be the case when you consider engineering is obviously all intelligent design.
The point about engineering is not merely Dr. Miller’s personal view — it’s the insight behind an emerging scientific field, systems biology, that analyzes how living systems work with their “very clear design logic,” including “pre-programmed or pre-engineered responses” to the environment. Systems biology is quickly displacing impatient dismissals of supposed “poor design” in life — “how cr*ppy our shoulders are,” for example, in the phrase of one journalist who took instruction from biologist Nathan Lents. (See Jonathan Wells’s post on that here.) Miller examines a number of interesting specific illustrations including the celebrated eyeless cavefish, which he “used to think was an absolute win for microevolution.” He refers at the end to a famous paper by physicist Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” Brian would like to write a follow-up, he quips, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Engineering in the Biological Sciences.” Watch the whole lecture now:
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Darwin's replacement theory?
Darwin, Galton, and “Replacement Theory”
After the horrific Buffalo, NY, shooting of last weekend, “replacement theory” is suddenly on everyone’s lips. Unlike agitators in the media and politics, John West actually took the time to read the shooter’s manifesto to see what drove him. West found that the latter’s racism derived from online study of mainstream evolutionary theory. What the cynical manipulators don’t tell you is that “the Buffalo shooter’s evolutionary racism is not an outlier among recent mass killers. Arguments drawn from evolution have been prominent in the ideologies of many mass shooters in recent years.” But recognizing this reality would do nothing to advance political agendas, so the partisans ignore it.
Now a new podcast by Hank Hanegraaff with historian Richard Weikart provides some very relevant historical background, drawing on Weikart’s recent book Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. The interview was conducted before the event in Buffalo unfolded, though Weikart and Hanegraaff discuss a similar crime, a 2019 shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, also fueled by the killer’s reading about evolution.
What I found particularly interesting is that Darwinism and eugenics, going back to the 19th century, were haunted by ideas of “replacement.” Darwin in The Descent of Man predicted, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races” (emphasis added). But replacement could work in the reverse direction: Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin who first advanced the idea of eugenic theory, worried that people of what he regarded as inferior stock would “swamp” (Weikart’s word) their betters by out-reproducing them. The question of who would replace or swamp whom has been a preoccupation of pseudo-scientific racists ever since. Listen to the excellent conversation here.
Saturday, 14 May 2022
The selfish gene dethroned?
Biologist Michael Denton: Paradigm Shifts
On a classic episode of ID the Future, biologist Michael Denton reflects on paradigm shifts in science he’s witnessed in his lifetime and how his own thinking has changed. He also looks at how these shifts challenge Darwinian evolution in new ways. Denton is the author of the new book The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
Beware the ides of march?
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Why OOL science remains the key issue in the design debate.
How does one select the key issue in the design debate. I would say that it is the one most likely to force the opposition to play defense. From that standpoint OOL science, in my humble opinion, is hard to beat. Darwinism is the opposition's opening salvo against the notion of actual design being a necessary explanation for the technology evident in nature. The claim is that some combination of chance and necessity is a better explanation for this technology and thus any perception of intelligent design was illusory,a kind of pareidolia. Well if you say so mr. materialist, but in as much as science is about objectively testing truth claims how are we to test this particular claim. Well,if Darwinian evolution is the source of the (apparent) design in biology we should surely be able to observe some co-relation between the amount of Darwinian evolution and the amount of Design in the history of life. Hence the need for a simple beginning to life.
It simply will not do for there to exist any of the design that Darwinism is supposed to have successfully explained away prior to any Darwinian processes. So how's that search for a simple lifeform going?
Yes,the technology is real.
Natural Machinery Operates Without Intervention; But How?
In Francis Bacon’s day, it was easy to oversimplify nature. Elizabethan scientists began to conceive of a world that ran like a machine. Robert Boyle was a strong proponent of the mechanical philosophy. Soon, Isaac Newton’s clockwork heavens reinforced the notion that all the Creator had to do was wind it up, and let it run all by itself. From Boyle to Babbage, the Newtonian revolution showed the way for scientific progress: just uncover the natural laws that make the universe run.
By the late 18th century and into Victorian times, mechanical philosophy was sufficient unto itself. An original Designer could be conceived of, perhaps, but as science progressed, the Prime Mover had less and less to do. Some argued that it was an insult to the Watchmaker to suggest he needed to intervene and fix the watch.
Then molecular biology arrived, and we found out the clocks are real. Literal machines made of molecules make life run. Simultaneously, the computer age dawned and we learned a bit about programming. Now, robotics is here. We’re going to need a new philosophy: one that can handle realities the Elizabethans and Victorians could never have imagined.
It’s important to note that we’re not speaking of mechanistic or reductionist philosophy. See Jay Richards’s clarification. We seek an explanation for how natural machinery can operate without continuous intervention.
Real Clocks
Paley’s “watch on a heath” was only an analogy in 1805. Now, we can see real biological clocks of amazing design and precision in the cells of life. Current Biology talks about “unexpected biochemical cogs” in a cyanobacterium, freely using the word “clock” as well as “oscillator,” “regulator,” and “switch.” The circadian clock runs on a much slower schedule than most cellular reactions. It’s calibrated to the 24-hour day-night cycle, and keeps constant time even when the temperature changes. It would have been astonishing to Paley or Bacon to learn that a three-protein oscillating machine is found in such a tiny organism. In higher vertebrates, biological clocks are even more elaborate.
Real Engines
Is this the little engine that could? Penn State News finds that “little engines” of kinesin (see our animation) can do more than thought on their microtubule tracks. These little walking robots, one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair, not only walk the tracks but help them grow. When kinesin-5 pauses at the end of a microtubule, it “generates pushing forces, which slide the microtubules apart and essentially allow the motor to grow the microtubules.” [Emphasis added.]
Real Solar Panels, Quality Control, and Recycling
The Salk Institute calls chloroplasts “solar panels” and reveals how the cell monitors them with a “quality control check” that can “recycle” the parts of damaged chloroplasts. Notice the mechanical word: they uncovered “how plants thrive using a natural mechanism to recycle chloroplasts.”
Real Stress Management
Another “fundamental biological mechanism” is described by bioscientists at the University of Heidelberg. In a common lab plant, they found that proteins are “further adapted” after they are manufactured “for their specific jobs.” In one case they studied, chemical tags regulate the stress response to drought by closing the stomata and lengthening the primary root.
Real Coordinated Timing and Assembly
Scientists at Virginia Tech found that, during development, “timing is indeed everything.” They use music as an analogy:
Everyone who has played in a band or orchestra knows that playing in time creates music, while playing out of time creates cacophony. In an orchestra, each player may be out of tune when warming up, but eventually, all players must reach the same pitch, rhythm, and timing to produce a viable piece of music.
They found something similar in dividing cells. Just as live musicians can compensate for other players’ changes in tempo, “cells modulate the exact timing of when crucial cellular eventshappen, slowing down or speeding everything up to make sure everything is playing its proper part at the right time.” They were “astonished to see how greatly the starting conditions for each cell could differ and still lead to the same outcome,” the article says.
Is it just an analogy to call a ribosome a “protein-making factory“? Ask the researchers at Rockefeller University, who think “factory” is an appropriate description:
Ribosomes, the molecular factories that produce all the proteins a cell needs to grow and function, are themselves made up of many different proteins and four RNAs. And just as an assembly line must be built before it can manufacture cars, these tiny factoriesmust be constructed before they can put proteins together.
Real Mobile Factories
Rockefeller is not alone in using the word factory — only the one they found escaped detection till now. “Salk Scientists Discover Protein Factories Hidden in Human Jumping Genes,” a news item from Salk Institute says. Researchers found a third Open Reading Frame (ORF0) in certain jumping genes known as LINE-1 elements.
“Jumping genes with ORF0 are basically protein factories with wheels,” they said. The fact that they consider “evolution” to be the driver of the bus does not negate the fact that they are real machines that must function properly, otherwise it could cause disease. And there are 3,500 of these “factories with wheels” in the human genome.
Real Repair Stations
The nuclear membrane gained new respect from scientists at the University of Southern California when they found that it’s a lot more than “just a protective bubble” around the nuclear material. A team at USC has documented “how broken strands of a portion of DNA known as heterochromatin are dragged to the nuclear membrane for repair.” At the inner wall of the nuclear membrane, “a trio of proteins mends the break in a safe environment, where it cannot accidentally get tangled up with incorrect chromosomes.” (The discovery was made in fruit flies.)
As for heterochromatin, this “mysterious part of the genome” composed of repetitive elements has been promoted from “junk DNA” to superhero (watch the word “mechanism”):
The reason why we don’t experience thousands of cancers every day in our body is because we have incredibly efficient molecular mechanisms that repair the frequent damages occurring in our DNA. But those that work in heterochromatin are quite extraordinary.
Real Repair Machines
We see “mechanism” also used to describe a “new class of DNA repair enzyme” found by researchers at Vanderbilt University. This adds to the same work that earned a Nobel Prize earlier this year. This enzyme has some “remarkable properties,” they said, such as the ability to find damage indirectly without actually contacting the lesion, and the ability to fix bulkier lesions than other repair mechanisms can.
“Our discovery shows that we still have a lot to learn about DNA repair, and that there may be alternative repair pathways yet to be discovered. It certainly shows us that a much broader range of DNA damage can be removed in ways that we didn’t think were possible,” said Eichman. “Bacteria are using this to their advantage to protect themselves against the antibacterial agents they produce. Humans may even have DNA-repair enzymes that operate in a similar fashion to remove complex types of DNA damage.
Real Shaping Machinery
Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is described in Nature Reviews: Molecular Cell Biology as “an intricate machinery that shapes transcriptomes.” The abstract mentions “intricate steps” in this process, “cellular quality control,” and the ability of NMD to “dynamically adjust their transcriptomes and their proteomes to varying physiological conditions.”
Real Packaging
A grad student at MIT is studying how cells pack two meters’ worth of DNA into a cell nucleus. It’s like “trying to fit 24 miles of string into a tennis ball,” Abe Weintraub says. He’s intrigued by the fact that “DNA gets packed tightly in organized loops, rather than being haphazardly crammed into cell nuclei.” The specific 3-D organization appears to affect its functionality, because mistakes cause cancer and other diseases.
Philosophical Implications
Those are a few recent examples of the “machine talk” pouring out of labs around the world. This is not just metaphorical language for “nature” like the Victorians used. It’s observation and description of realities the early mechanical philosophers could not have imagined. And it’s everywhere. Machine talk is driving an explosion of discovery in science.
The old mechanical philosophy is hopelessly inadequate for these realities. The reason? We know from our experience that unguided natural law does not produce machinery, factories, and quality control. Something else is required: information.
The Santa Fe Institute identifies this critical part of the new 21st-century philosophy. A working group met to discuss the question, “What physical principles predict life?” They put the question into stark perspective:
We are immersed in life here on Earth, but life isn’t found on the Moon. Nor has it arisen, so far as we know, anywhere else in the solar system. Why do some physical environments precipitate life, and why don’t others?
It’s not enough to say that the moon has no water:
If the Earth really does use sunlight to convert a disorderly lump of mass and energy into organized living things, why can’t the Moon, Earth’s nearest neighbor, do something similar using different mechanisms?
This implies that “natural laws” alone are insufficient to account for the difference. David Wolpert was on hand to share an important suggestion:
One part of the answer, Wolpert says, might lie in information theory. In addition to being central to modern biologists’ understanding of evolution, information theory overlaps heavily with thermodynamics, the area of physics concerned with how the different kinds of internal energy of a system (such as heat and stored chemical energy) might be affected by the outside world.
In a video clip Wolpert elaborates on this theme. Apparently many others in the working group felt it was a promising avenue of thought.
“In many talks and discussions, the nature of information flow between different scales of organization emerged as an important theme and open question,” says O’Dwyer. “We look forward to future collaboration on each of these ideas.”
Willaim Dembski’s book Being as Communion would serve as a fine discussion starter. Wolpert comes so close, but is still so far from explaining what he set out to explain: why the moon differs from the earth. He talks about information flow through the system, but the moon gets exactly the same sunlight the earth does. And he never defines what information is, or where it comes from. Here is where intelligent design can offer real, substantive insight.
Information is the key to a “mechanical” philosophy for the 21st century. We know, because we have a great deal of experience producing information and imposing it on matter. We build computers. We make robots. We make clocks and trucks and factories. Indeed, we can even make machines that make other machines, and robots that increasingly look and act like us.
Our machines can run like clockwork, not because we shined sunlight on a “disorderly lump” and waited for natural laws to take their unguided course, but because we infused the lumps with information. And since we know that intelligence was the true cause that resulted in those lumps of raw material becoming Steinway pianos, Toyota robotic assembly lines, and New Horizons spacecraft, it’s a fair inference that intelligence is the true cause behind atoms that become kinesins, ribosomes, and circadian clock proteins.
This article was originally published in 2015.
Trying to school JEHOVAH again?
Is the Human Shoulder Badly Designed?
A few months ago, I fell and dislocated my left shoulder. My upper arm bone was put back in its socket the same day, but then I spent months in physical therapy to regain full function. In the process, I have learned a lot about an amazing joint that I previously took for granted.
The drawing below shows only part of the human shoulder’s anatomy. Not shown is the large deltoid muscle, which overlies the shoulder joint and connects the upper arm bone (humerus) to the collarbone (clavicle) and the shoulder blade (scapula). Also not shown is the trapezius muscle across the back, which connects the left and right scapulas. Both the deltoid and the trapezius play important roles in stabilizing the joint.
Anatomy of the Shoulder Joint
In the drawing, yellow indicates bone, red indicates muscle, blue indicates tendon, and purple indicates bursa (a fluid-filled cushion). The dashed black lines indicate the hidden ball-and-socket joint between the humerus and the scapula. Unlike the hip joint, in which the ball is deeper in the socket, the shoulder joint is more open. This means the shoulder joint is less stable than the hip joint, but it is also much more flexible. In fact, it is the most flexible joint in the human body.
The biceps muscle at the lower left gets its name from the fact that it has two heads. One attaches, through a tendon and a small bursa, near the top of the humerus. The other head attaches to the coracoid process, an extension of the scapula. The lower end of the biceps muscle is attached to the forearm. Although it is primarily involved in moving the forearm, its divided head helps to stabilize the shoulder joint.
Both the flexibility and stability of the shoulder joint are due primarily to the muscles of the “rotator cuff,” listed on the left side of the drawing. All four of the listed muscles stretch across the scapula and attach to the top of the humerus. For a 10-minute tutorial on the rotator cuff, see here. For a longer (20-minute) tutorial on the movements, bones, and muscles of the shoulder, see here.
The more I have learned about the shoulder joint, the more I have been impressed by its specified complexity, which points to intelligent design. Imagine my surprise when I came across a six-and-a-half-minute video claiming that the human shoulder is a “design disaster.” The video was made by Cheddar News, which describes itself as “the only news network focused on the next generation of innovators and decision-makers[.] Cheddar News is where forward thinkers go to learn about the people, ideas and innovations that are driving change and creating what’s next.”
I am confident that a rigorous argument can be made for the intelligent design of the human shoulder. But that is not what I present here. In what follows, I examine the claims against design that are made in the Cheddar News video.
Proof that the Human Shoulder Is a Design Disaster?
The video’s producer is Natalia Ryzak, who has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. At the beginning, Ryzak explains that “human shoulder blades tilt down and outwards, whereas chimps tilt up. Small variations like this are the reason humans have awful shoulders. And chimps, with whom we share nearly 99% of our DNA, don’t.” For that, Ryzak continues, “we can thank evolution — or more specifically, how we are outpacing it.”
But the tilt difference does not explain why the human shoulder is “awful.” If we spent most of our time swinging from tree branches, it might; but we don’t. And the claimed 99% similarity between human and chimp DNA has no bearing on the issue.
Ryzak goes on (from 0:47 to 0:59) to say:
Side effects of a human shoulder may include dislocation, separation, rotator cuff tears, bursitis, tendonitis, tendonosis, impingement syndrome, instability, arthritis, adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder), and fracture.
But these are not “side effects,” any more than getting a flat tire is a “side effect” of making an automobile. Or having a roof torn off by a tornado is a “side effect” of building a house. And these problems are not unique to humans: Chimps can also suffer from arthritis and fractures, among other things.
Enter Nathan Lents, professor of biology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. In 2015, Lents argued on his blog that the human eye is badly designed, primarily because “the vertebrate retina is wired in backwards.” Like Richard Dawkins and others before him, Lents based his claim on the fact that the light-sensing cells face away from the incoming light. But evidence published from the 1960s onward — and reported in standard textbooks — shows that this arrangement is far better than the one Lents favors.
Back to the video on “Why the Human Shoulder is a Design Disaster.” Lents says (at 1:30) that the shoulder is “more of a floating joint than any other joint in the body.” Ryzak explains that the outer layer of muscles (consisting of the deltoid and trapezius) is stronger than the inner layer (the rotator cuff). Then Lents continues (from 1:59), “Having such an overlapping meshwork of muscles, what you’re inviting is pinching, and tearing, as the orientation can shift.” Lents compares the shoulder joint to the hip joint, in which “the relationship of the hip to the leg is fairly fixed in place.”
So far, the video has summarized the structure of the shoulder and its difference from the hip. The shoulder is more flexible than the hip. Good thing, too, or we wouldn’t be able to perform many of the actions we do. Just watch an acrobat performing on the parallel bars. Or a baseball player pitching a fastball. Or an athlete swimming the butterfly.
But journalist Ryzak confidently concludes ex cathedra (starting at 2:19) that “we’ve proven to you just how cr*ppy our shoulders are.” How so? Ryzak doesn’t say. Instead she simply suggests going “back into the evolution part.”
Does Evolution Explain It All?
According to Lents (starting at 2:28), “In our quadrupedal ancestors, in our deep past, really we had four legs, they weren’t really arms, to speak of. When you think of a dog and a cat, they don’t have arms, they have legs. But they still have a shoulder joint, as we can think of it.”
Then Ryzak says, “Our shoulders evolved for a life in the trees, swinging and hanging out. Then we left the trees behind and began to stand upright. This freed our arms up for other purposes, like hunting and gathering.” So from four-legged animals that walked and ran on the ground, we get animals that spend some of their time on the ground but mostly swing from branches to branches in the trees. Then those animals “evolved” into animals that stood upright and used their arms for other purposes. This is the standard Darwinian narrative. But how, exactly, did four-legged animals on the ground evolve into two-armed animals that swung on tree branches, which then evolved into two-armed animals that stood upright on the ground? The video offers no explanation; only an imaginative story.
Lents continues (starting at 2:54), “We are partially adapted for throwing, which is… no other animal in our group of animals throws anything.” This is not true: Chimps can throw, though not as far or as accurately as humans. Indeed, they are infamous for flinging feces at visitors to zoos.
But that’s a minor detail. Lents goes on to say, “So we believe that throwing was a very strong evolutionary pressure as we began to hunt — throwing spears, thrusting as well, so thrusting and throwing are very specific kinds of motion. And that required that floating nature to our shoulder.” But “evolutionary pressure” just means that throwing favored the survival of early humans. It does not account for the origin of the human shoulder. As Darwinian biologists wrote in 1996, adaptations “concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.”
So the claim that “we left the trees behind and began to stand upright” does not explain the remarkable anatomy of the human shoulder. After all, chimps leave the trees on a regular basis (though they don’t stand upright). Yet their shoulder anatomy has not changed.
The Problem and Its Solution
According to Lents (at 3:57), “Part of the problem in present-day humans is not so much a bad shoulder design but a mismatch between what our shoulder is designed to do and how we use it on a daily basis.” Of course, Lents doesn’t think the shoulder was intelligently designed. As a Darwinist, he believes that the shoulder evolved through accidental variations and survival of the fittest. And in our immediate ancestors, the shoulder was adapted (“designed”) to swing through trees.
Most of our modern activities are very different. Ryzak adds (starting at 4:16),
It might surprise you, but simply sitting at your desk is a major contributor to shoulder problems. When we hunch forward for days, hours, months, years on end, we end up causing unnecessary pulls and strains on our rotator cuff muscles. That can lead to injuries.
Lents explains (starting at 5:20) that you can minimize shoulder problems by “changing the way you eat, changing the ways you use your body.” And, Ryzak adds (from 5:34 to 5:52), “pay attention to basic posture.” So after all the talk about bad design and evolutionary mismatch, the solution to our “design disaster” is for us to pay attention to diet, exercise, and posture.
I think I could have figured that out without all the anti-design rhetoric and Darwinian storytelling. Oh, and I would add: Be careful not to fall in such a way as to dislocate your shoulder.
The sanctity of life: The Bible's view.
The question of the sanctity of human life(specifically at what point should human life be regarded as "sacred") has returned to the public square in big way recently. Much of the discussion has been about what the sciences of medicine and biology have to say as to when any human offspring should be considered a person.
Some maintain that as long as the infant is biologically attached to its mother it ought not to be considered a person and its life ought not to be accorded the same value as a person. This post is addressed primarily to those who are interested in what the bible has to say about the matter,there are individuals on both sides of the issue who are citing scriptures as an authority. I would like to lay out what scriptures and reasonings thereon inform the position of my brothers and me.
Genesis1:27KJV"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. "
All life is the property of God Almighty, human life has a peculiarly sacred quality because Man is a living representation of the supreme divinity. Therefore the destruction of any human life apart from due process is sure to incur divine wrath.
Genesis9:5,6ASV"And surely your blood, the blood of your lives, will I require; At the hand of every beast will I require it. And at the hand of man, even at the hand of every man's brother, will I require the life of man.
6Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: For in the image of God made he man."
Does this include life in the womb? Consider.
Psalms139:15KJV"My frame was not hidden from thee, When I was made in secret, And curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
16Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance; And in thy book they were all written, Even the days that were ordained for me , When as yet there was none of them."
The Psalmist was certain that the Lord JEHOVAH loved him from the very beginning,because He knew that there was latent potential to reflect His glory in a unique way in this nascent being. Thus even before this potential was known to any other it was being keenly and sympathetically observed by its source.
Liluke1:42KJV"And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. 43And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? " No dedicated servant of JEHOVAH worthy of that designation could ever say "my body my choice". when we made our dedication we handed over all that we are and possess to their rightful owner i.e the God and Father of Jesus Christ. For all of JEHOVAH'S servants the fruit of the womb is JEHOVAH'S we are merely custodians of what is our Lord's the above quoted text further confirms his interest in the potential in the impregnated womb.
1Corinthians6:20NIV"you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies."
Thursday, 12 May 2022
Jesus' offering; human or superhuman?
"One strength of Arius’s position was that it appeared to safeguard a strict monotheism while offering an interpretation of the language of the New Testament—notably, the word Son—that conformed to general usage and meaning. The weakness of his view was that, precisely because Jesus was capable of suffering as a human, it was difficult to understand how he could be fully divine and thus effect the redemption of humankind."
The above quote is taken from the encylopedia brittanica's article on the arian controversy you can read article here ,it is a perfect example of the sort question begging stupidity we have come to expect from trinitarians. JEHOVAH'S priest needed to be divine in order to make an acceptable offering? Says who?
1Corinthians15:21KJV"For since by man(not God-man) came death, by man(not God-man) came also the resurrection of the dead. "
Our brother Paul under inspiration begs to differ.
Science for sale?
Did Fauci and Collins Receive Royalty Payments from Drug Companies?
Open the Books is a nonprofit government watchdog organization dedicated to investigating and disclosing the many ways in which government spends — and wastes — our money.
It has a new report out that should raise eyebrows. According to information garnered from Freedom of Information Act Requests, between 2009-2014, both Anthony Fauci and former NIH director Francis Collins received royalty payments from pharmaceutical companies. This may present a conflict of interest since they had a great deal of influence in deciding what research the government funds. From the report:
Last year, the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s employer – doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients. That largess of taxpayer money buys a lot of favor and clout within the scientific, research, and healthcare industries.
However, in our breaking investigation, we found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way. These are royalty payments from third-party payers (think pharmaceutical companies) back to the NIH and individual NIH scientists.
We estimate that between fiscal years 2010 and 2020, more than $350 million in royalties were paid by third-parties to the agency and NIH scientists – who are credited as co-inventors.
Because those payments enrich the agency and its scientists, each and every royalty payment could be a potential conflict of interest and needs disclosure.
When bench scientists’ research leads to monetized benefit in the private sector, I suppose royalties are in order. And certainly, government funding should reap benefits for the government when that investments leads to the development of profitable products.
Administrators, Not Researchers
But Collins and Fauci, as far as I know, were administrators, not researchers. Yet OTB found that they received royalties from drug companies:
Since the NIH documents are heavily redacted, we can only see how many payments each scientist received, and, separately, the aggregate dollars per NIH agency. This is a gatekeeping at odds with the spirit and perhaps the letter of open-records laws.
We found agency leadership and top scientists at NIH receiving royalty payments. Well-known scientists receiving payments during the period included:
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the highest-paid federal bureaucrat, received 23 royalty payments. (Fauci’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $456,028).
Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009-2021, received 14 payments. (Collins’ 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $203,500)
Clifford Lane, Fauci’s deputy at NIAID, received 8 payments. (Lane’s 2021 taxpayer-funded salary: $325,287)
In the above examples, although we know the number of payments to each scientist, we still don’t know how much money was paid – because the dollar figure was deleted (redacted) from the disclosures.
It’s been a struggle to get any useful information out of the agency on its royalty payments. NIH is acting like royalty payments are a state secret. (They’re not, or shouldn’t be!)
Did Collins and Fauci earn these royalties from work performed before their government service or as bench researchers? Are they partial patent owners? If so, what did they contribute to the product’s development? If they were rewarded for acting as administrators and not researchers, is it akin to a kickback?
As Opaque as Possible
Unfortunately, the NIH is keeping the matter as opaque as they can:
Consider how NIH is using taxpayer money to try and keep taxpayers ignorant and in the dark:
1. NIH defied the federal Freedom of Information Act law and refused to even acknowledge our open records request for the royalty payments. We filed our FOIA last September.
2. NIH used expensive taxpayer-funded litigation to slow-walk royalty disclosures (releasing the oldest royalties first). Although the agency admits to holding 3,000 pages, it will take ten months to produce them (300 pages per month). With Judicial Watch as our lawyers, we sued NIH in federal court last October.
3. NIH is heavily redacting key information on the royalty payments. For example, the agency erased 1. the payment amount, and, 2. who paid it! This makes the court-mandated production virtually worthless, despite our use of the latest forensic auditing tools.
NIH is essentially telling you, the taxpayer, to pay up and shut up. They’ll run things.
To say the least, congressional oversight is warranted over these questions. It’s time for Fauci and Collins to answer some pointed questions in open hearings.
Cross-posted at The Corner.
Man reprivileged again? III
Miracle of Man: Denton’s Prior Fitness Argument
A new episode of ID the Future spotlights the groundbreaking new book The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence, with author and biologist Michael Denton reading excerpts from the work. Here Denton, who is also an MD, marvels at the engineering sophistication of the human heart and hands. Then he dives into the heart of his new book, with just a small sampling of the many ways nature appears fine tuned for bipedal, intelligent, technology-developing creatures such as ourselves. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
One or two such examples are interesting. But where the argument gains dramatic force is in the accumulation of many examples, stretching from physics and the characteristics of our sun to chemistry and the ensemble of unique characteristics of planet Earth, water, carbon, and the transition metals. To appreciate the full force of Denton’s prior fitness argument, pick up his newly released book here, where you can also check out the ringing endorsements from other scientists such as Lehigh University biologist Michael Behe and Henry Schaefer III, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia.
The truth has fallen. II
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The Athanasian creed.
Athanasian Creed, also called Quicumque Vult (from the opening words in Latin), a Christian profession of faith in about 40 verses. It is regarded as authoritative in the Roman Catholic and some Protestant churches. It has two sections, one dealing with the Trinity and the other with the Incarnation; and it begins and ends with stern warnings that unswerving adherence to such truths is indispensable to salvation. The virulence of these damnatory clauses has led some critics, especially in the Anglican churches, to secure restriction or abandonment of the use of the creed.
A Latin document composed in the Western Church, the creed was unknown to the Eastern Church until the 12th century. Since the 17th century, scholars have generally agreed that the Athanasian Creed was not written by Athanasius (died 373) but was probably composed in southern France during the 5th century. Many authors have been suggested, but no definite conclusions have been reached. In 1940 the lost Excerpta of Vincent of Lérins (flourished 440) was discovered, and this work contains much of the language of the creed. Thus, either Vincent or an admirer of his has been considered the possible author.The earliest known copy of the creed was included as a prefix to a collection of homilies by Caesarius of Arles (died 542). The creed’s influence seems to have been primarily in southern France and Spain in the 6th and 7th centuries. It was used in the liturgy of the church in Germany in the 9th century and somewhat later in Rome.
The apostles creed.
Apostles’ Creed, also called Apostolicum, a statement of faith used in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and many Protestant churches. It is not officially recognized in the Eastern Orthodox churches. According to tradition, it was composed by the 12 Apostles, but it actually developed from early interrogations of catechumens (persons receiving instructions in order to be baptized) by the bishop. An example of such interrogations used in Rome about 200 has been preserved in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus. The bishop would ask, “Dost thou believe in God the Father almighty?” and so forth through the major Christian beliefs. Stated affirmatively, these statements became a creed; such creeds were known as baptismal creeds.
The present text of the Apostles’ Creed is similar to the baptismal creed used in the church in Rome in the 3rd and 4th centuries. It reached its final form in southwestern France in the late 6th or early 7th century. Gradually it replaced other baptismal creeds and was acknowledged as the official statement of faith of the entire Catholic church in the West by the time that Innocent III was pope (1198–1216). All creedal Protestant churches accept the Apostles’ Creed and use it in worship, but some (e.g., the United Methodist Church) delete the line “He descended to the dead.”
The accepted Latin version reads as follows:
Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem; Creatorem caeli et terrae. Et in Jesum Christum, Filium ejus unicum, Dominum nostrum; qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria virgine; passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus; descendit ad inferna; tertia die resurrexit a mortuis; ascendit ad caelos; sedet ad dexteram Dei Patris omnipotentis; inde venturus (est) judicare vivos et mortuos. Credo in Spiritum Sanctum; sanctam ecclesiam catholicam; sanctorum communionem; remissionem peccatorum; carnis resurrectionem; vitam aeternam. Amen.
A modern English version (as used in the Roman Catholic church) is the following:
I [We] believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I [We] believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son,
our Lord.
He was conceived by the power
of the Holy Spirit
and born of the Virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the
Father.
He will come again to judge the living and
the dead.
I [We] believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy Catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
The Nicene creed.
Nicene Creed, also called Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, a Christian statement of faith that is the only ecumenical creed because it is accepted as authoritative by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and major Protestant churches. The Apostles’ and Athanasian creeds are accepted by some but not all of these churches.
Until the early 20th century, it was universally assumed that the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (the more accurate term) was an enlarged version of the Creed of Nicaea, which was promulgated at the Council of Nicaea (325). It was further assumed that this enlargement had been carried out at the Council of Constantinople (381) with the object of bringing the Creed of Nicaea up to date in regard to heresies about the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit that had arisen since the Council of Nicaea.
Additional discoveries of documents in the 20th century, however, indicated that the situation was more complex, and the actual development of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed has been the subject of scholarly dispute. Most likely it was issued by the Council of Constantinople, even though this fact was first explicitly stated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. It was probably based on a baptismal creed already in existence, but it was an independent document and not an enlargement of the Creed of Nicaea.
The so-called Filioque clause (Latin filioque, “and the son”), inserted after the words “the Holy Spirit,…who proceeds from the Father,” was gradually introduced as part of the creed in the Western church, beginning in the 6th century. It was probably finally accepted by the papacy in the 11th century. It has been retained by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant churches. The Eastern churches have always rejected it because they consider it a theological error and an unauthorized addition to a venerable document.
The Nicene Creed was originally written in Greek. Its principal liturgical use is in the context of the Eucharist in the West and in the context of both baptism and the Eucharist in the East. A modern English version of the text is as follows, with the Filioque clause in brackets:
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father [and the Son],
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
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