All right, thank you. We hired Dr. Kim as a part-time employee a few years ago. And I didn’t have any idea that he would be so smart. Because he just applied to our part-time position and then when we found out how devoted he was to Christ and teaching, and we found out about his mind, the Lord blessed us with the full-time position.
Let me just make sure I’m… I’m old enough that I have to see my notes. Okay. So, I going to do that. So how many of you were here for the welcome week or the student time this weekend? Were you, some left? Okay, looking good. Glad to have you here. I had to serve over four departments, with four chairman, and this school is called the science… School of Science, Math, Technology, and Health. So we have a kinesiology department. We have a biology and physical sciences department. We have a math department and what I missing out there? Engineering. Engineering And computer science department. And how could I forget? And we had some programs approved in engineering. Do you want to share those later? You told me. Okay. I was late. I was still halfway here, getting halfway here, getting halfway here. I made it.
So, we are so excited about the engineering and computer science department. And Dr. Eickemeyer raise your hand. He was our computer science department for years, basically almost alone. And we prayed and prayed for engineering to come and more computer scientists to come. And then professor Crater came. So prayer works, but we got to be patient.
So we’ve been blessed here. If you’re interested in science at all, please contact me or the university anytime. We are blessed to have many students going into the health professions and all the sciences. One of my favorite stories to tell is one of our students who is with his wife, a husband and wife, Dr and nurse team at the Hospital of Hope in Liberia, or I should say Togo, West Africa. And they graduated in 2006 and ’07. It took them 10 years or so to get to France, to get their language skills done. And they went to Togo now, a couple years. Their children just went through some bouts of malaria and they’re doing fine. But what a privilege it is to serve here. Our department was started… We’ve been doing science for 50 years. Started by Dr. George How and Dr. Dennis England, both who migrated from Westmont.
And I’m looking for, I don’t see Dr. England. He went to Utah when he retired, with everyone else in California that went to Utah. And, but I see Professor Lawson right here. Wave your hand. Okay. She served here many years. She came along as their student and then taught here for many decades, environmental science, plant science, ecology, actually everything. Because in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, we didn’t have enough teachers to teach specifically, specific subjects. So thank you, Professor Lawson for being here. It’s good to see you. So I was tasked with biocreation and biotechnology. Am I my too loud? Or am I good? Okay. I teach here without a microphone… And this is forward and backwards. Okay, good.
And funny thing is my talk will end on the same topic as Dr. Kim’s and we didn’t plan this. So I’m trying to figure out how that happened. We put our slides all in one place, so we could… And I started to look at his slides, but there’s 300 of them. I never got to the light part. So biotechnology, what is biotechnology? Biotechnology is the exploitation of biological processes for industrial and other purposes. Especially the genetic manipulation of microorganisms for the production of antibiotics, hormones, et cetera. So interestingly enough, biotechnology is very narrow. It’s very narrow. It involves modifying microbes. And there’s some fantastic things going on today with that, but it’s not new. It’s not new.
Who likes chocolate? That’s a bio technological process to make chocolate. You use microbes to ferment. Did you know that? Chocolate is a, is fermentation. Now there’s no alcohol. Okay. But it’s a fermentation product. Yeah, this is my cheese. Okay. Microbes have been doing things for centuries on their own. Okay. With a little help from us. That biotechnology has always been there, but there’s more going on. There’s more happening too. Recently, I read… Who has heard of the microbiome? Microbiome? What is it? I teach class. So I’m going to ask questions. What is the microbiome? The creature, what creatures that live inside us. Yes.
[inaudible 00:06:17] inside any form of mammal that can just reproduce, and it’s the bacterial microbiome.
Yes, James. James, one of our students. Yes. Yes, that’s creatures that live inside us, the bacteria and stuff. Recently, they’ve, looking at the good bacteria that live on us, and you have a good bacterium for every cell in your body. So, you have 35 trillion cells. You have 35 trillion bacterial microbes. They’re training some microbes now, of the good ones to look for cancer. All sorts of things can happen in this area of biotechnology. Let me show you some other examples. Anybody recognize that person?
Dr. Kent Brantly. Do you remember what happened to him? You watched him on TV. The whole world was entranced when he came back from Africa with Ebola. Don’t you remember that? You do. You do, I know you do. So Ebola was, there was Ebola outbreak about four or five, six years ago. He was serving with Samaritan’s Purse in a hospital, in west Africa also. And he got Ebola and he was on his death bed. He was going through a kind of chattering that the, and then, and shaking, that is normal just before death. He was on his deathbed. And Dr. Franklin Graham, who heads up Americans’ Purse, tried to get a dose of an antibody cocktail. You’ve heard about these cocktail infusions that we’re using now for COVID. President. Trump had one of the monopole antibody cocktails. Well, the one that he received was one of the first ones ever made.
It was frozen somewhere in the United States. Dr. Graham found it. This frozen antibody cocktail went across rivers, through mountains, on planes and made it to his bedside, but his assistant was dying. So he sent it to her. And when she said, “I can’t take it all,” they divided it and they both survived. So where’s the biotechnology here? Well we made those antibodies in humanized mice. And you say, what in the world is going on there? We took human genes and we put them in a mouse, human genes to make antibodies, put them in a mouse. The mouse made antibodies. But how in the world did you get antibodies out of a mouse? You basically had to take a big blender and blend up a lot of mice and that’s not fun.
So they took the technology from the mouse and they put it into, what are these plants right here? This is good you don’t know, because you’re not smokers. That’s tobacco, that’s tobacco. Okay. That’s tobacco. And it’s a lot easier to squeeze antibodies out of a leaf than a mouse. Okay? And so we… This is biotechnology and it’s saving lives. It is saving lives. So let’s look at another example. Anybody? You can buy one of these now. Anybody have one?
This is an algae chandelier. Okay. Algae, who do not produce light. But all photosynthetic creatures, photosynthesizing creatures can produce what? Oxygen. This is an oxygen producing lab. If you live in Manhattan and car exhaust is coming through your windows, you can turn this on. Okay, so it’s for sale, I think. It’s coming. But on a more serious note, we’re using algae to make batteries. And these batteries are much cheaper than the solar batteries and other batteries we’re trying to make. Much, much cheaper. So Tesla is looking into algae batteries. So I guess all the cars will be green. But it will be a lot of fun. Let’s see what else we have here. We might have went too far here. This is Dr. Craig Venter, and he’s a billionaire and he’s a biotechnologist and a scientist.
In year 2000, what DNA sequence were we trying to determine? The human genome, in 2000. It took, I think a year. And you’ve heard, you might have seen Francis Collins, Dr. Francis Collins. I was at the University of Michigan when he was there. We were both doing research. He was, he’s the head of the NIH. He just retired. I don’t blame him. He’s in his seventies and all the COVID stuff. He stepped down, but he was tasked by the government to sequence the three billion letters of the human DNA. You saw the picture that Dr. Kim had up there, of four or five of those letters.
He was going slow. So Dr. Venter stepped into… We’re doing it faster than you in the private sector. And they had a competition. The result was a good thing happened. That competition led to getting it all done. Okay. But, as some of our speakers have talked about, it’s easy for us in using God’s gift of technology to think of ourselves outside of God and getting puffed up. And Dr. Venter decided he wanted to create life. Okay. It’s not a joke. I’m not saying it disrespectfully. He wanted to create life. So he said he did. In a paper in Nature in 201. He created a minimal cell. And here’s what he did. He took one bacterium and he took the DNA out. And then he put a sequence of DNA together. I like, DNA origami, but he could do it too. And he put it back in the bacteria that the DNA was scooped out of. And he said he created life.
Well, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Because you know what? Even a little bacteria has a plasma memory that is immensely complex with phospholipids and proteins and channel proteins. And then the cytoplasm inside is this protein fluid with hundreds of biochemical reactions. He touched another bed. He went so far to put his name in the DNA. Okay. And some famous quotes. So if you see a bacteria quoting something, then you know what’s going on. But interesting, how… Well doesn’t scripture say that some want to be like that, right? To be like, God. A first sin, right? Interesting. So with everything I’ve seen in teaching cell biology for years, I don’t know if this could ever happen. Because we could modify life and creating these technology. But we cannot create life. And I think you would have to really get it right.
The other thing is, everything that supports life destroys it. Oxygen, water, and light are three things that life on earth needs. There’s all three of them are incredibly destructive, incredibly disruptive. So biotechnology has… We’ve been talking about micros, but there’s more. It’s really expanded today. And so now we’re talking about modifying the human body in a whole field of science called transhumanism. The idea here, in some ways is to be helpful. You’ve heard of cochlear transplants for hearing. They’re amazing, an amazing technology. As believers we would support that because Jesus supported medicine. But many of the transhumanists want to go farther. They want to modify their, the body. They want to modify eyes to see ultraviolet, or hearing to hear different frequencies that we don’t hear. And so where do we go? How do we… To a whole field of technology is bioethics, right? Bioethics in this realm.
And we need students to go into of these areas of making cochlear transplants and making eyesight better. But there’s basically one biblical principle that you can use to draw a line. Does a biblical principle… When Jesus healed, how did he heal? To Superman? Or back to typical function? He always healed back to typical function. You don’t hear about the person with the leg or the arm becoming Superman, right? So there’s biblical guidance here. An awesome field, we need believers to go into it so we can assist in medical ways, but not create the superhuman. We don’t have a biblical basis for that.
Juan Enriquez. Dr. Juan Enriquez at Harvard University has a dual appointment in biology and in the business department. Brilliant man, brilliant man. He believes that transhumanism will solve all our problems. It will be the next stage of evolution. And he’s calling the next human that’s modified by transhumanism all the way. Homo Evolutis. This is not a joke. This is not a joke. He gave a talk, to a Ted talk. You ever heard of Ted Talk? He was pretty good. He gave a Ted Talk in 2009.
What happened in 2009? We had a huge economy collapse, right? The market fell through. He gave a great Ted Talk saying, “We can solve this through transhumanism. We can modify the human body in three ways, robotics, genetic engineering, the tissue engineering. And we will overcome our problems.” Fascinating. That’s that’s not fantasy, that’s being worked on. So, definitely we believe in biotechnology. That’s from the Lord. Where do we draw the lines? So here are some notes. These are just my scratch notes I wanted to share with you. What is the biblical basis for biotechnology? Over here we have a robotic dog. I think these are from Israel? But the shepherds are using robotic dogs now and drones to gather up their sheep.
What’s the biblical basis for this? Well, I think we can look at Psalm eight, right? Psalm eight puts us where? It puts man a little bit below what? Angels, but above the realm below our feet, we do have dominion. We do have this earth that is ours to work on. So I believe there’s a biblical basis for biotechnology starting here and in other places, biblically.
And I think if there’s something to enhance man’s life, medically, it’s permissible. But what we’re seeing from Dr. Enriquez and others scientist is, “Well, we want to go farther. Let’s look at this idea of eternal life.” But that’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s interesting. Why does a man want eternal life? Where does the idea come from? Also Dr. Enriquez and Dr. Steven Hawking, who is Steven Hawking? What kind of scientist? Physicist, right? Probably the greatest business sense. Who was the greatest physicist at the time? You tell me.
Einstein.
Einstein or?
Newton?
Isaac Newton. I think they still would refer to Isaac Newton in some ways for what he did with what he had. Do you know what? So this is interesting. Why do we want to look at eternal life or saving mans predicament? These are some of the basic questions of Nicodemus, aren’t they? Yeah. How does the saving thing work? I’m sure he’s in interested in it. And I think we see this in science today. Steven Hawking was interviewed at the end of his life and he was asked a big question. What should science do next? You have discovered all this stuff about space and time. What should science do next? what do you think he said? His teachers were trained to wait. What did… Wait on the questions. What did… Say it again?
Extend life?
Yeah. He actually said this. “We should develop, on colonies on other planets.” Related to what you’re saying. “Extend human colonies on other planets.” Why? Because when alien life gets here, we’re going to be killed. Okay. But look what he’s saying. Let’s save man. Isn’t it interesting? Doesn’t the Bible talk about God and planting things in our hearts. Right? And planting things in our hearts. So you should be, can be saved.
It’s interesting to me that these great scientists have this altruistic idea of saving man. And we have an answer to that, right? We have an answer to that. So another way that Christians can be involved in science is making that answer real to them, right? How do we get that answer? Through the radio waves and well, that’s my generation, radio waves. Reading other kind of waves right, today. So interesting that there’s a saving complex. And just, these are just my notes, that when I think of biotechnology, how far I can go. It’s interesting that science have this savior complex. But, here’s my main point for the rest of the talk. I want to look at Romans one, because Romans one says “People, everyone does not have an excuse.” For what reason? By not seeing who in creation? God, you don’t have an excuse. My point here is, as we look at biotechnology and using what God has created and modifying it. My hypothesis is that anything that God has made is better than what we can make, because he wants to display who he is.
That means that as we look at biotechnology, technology, we can look at the Word and we can find a basis for doing science. And we can look at his creating world and try to mimic that. So there’s a whole field, not necessarily led by Christians, called biomimicry. So I want to take a look at some of those examples. So robotics, let’s look at robotics. Dr. Enriquez says this will be an area that will help us build a better human. But do you notice, this, these are robots that they want the military to be able to use outside. So, who’s their test case? Who are they copying here? Dog legs, right? Let’s see if we can… Guys, can you pull up that video? Want to come up? It’s at the bottom of the slide should be clickable. We didn’t test it earlier. Is it going anywhere? That you want to copy and paste it to a…
Oh, we don’t have audio. Oh, there’s still visual. If you can get it. Because they start kicking the four robot, try to knock it over. I don’t feel sorry for robots I guess. You guys work on it and I’ll keep talking. But you can see how the leg joints are bent, like the dog. These are some incredible robots that are being used in the military to get across terrain. And you definitely see how biomimicry is being used there. I’ll go to the next slide on mine. I’ll tell you what’s coming. See if they can pull that up.
Velcro. What is Velcro based on? What kind of creature out there? Plants. Yeah, burs. You’ve been out there hiking and you’ve got those in your socks, right? Those burs, it’s like they want to be on your socks forever. Right? And they start going into your skin. Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. So Velcro is a good example. Now, here’s what’s interesting. There’s actually I think a patent on Velcro. So I noticed when I went to Dollar General and I looked up Velcro, I couldn’t find it, I just found hooks and batters or something. And I took it home and it didn’t work as good as Velcro. At least in my mind it didn’t work well, okay. So you want to get the real stuff when it says Velcro. Next one. We can move on guys. You can go ahead and put it back up here and I can share that individually later. Thanks for trying. I want to show you a packaging material based on… There’s Velcro. Next one. Okay. What do you notice about the shape of this packing material? It’s honeycomb. Why?
It’s strong?
Pretty strong. It’s pretty strong, but we also found that that shape is very good for packaging. Why?
Light?
It’s light. It’s very good for the efficiency of packaging things. Why?
Save space?
Save space, but how? How? Someone might comment on this later. So we’ll talk about that. But it’s something about the design of this that makes it a very efficient way to store things. Let’s look at the creature. What is the creature that makes honeycomb? Let’s look at it. Yeah, next slide. So bees. What is that shape? It’s not a pentagonal? Hexagonal shape, yes. Hexagonal shape. Do you know that we have no idea how they do it? We have no idea. We have no idea. They put cameras inside the hives and the worker bees come in and they’re chewing the wax. They’re converting the sugars and the polylid collected to wax and they spit it out on the spot and they leave. If we mess with the temperature, it doesn’t form. So they find, somehow… How do bees control temperature in their hive? Wings. But how do they know the right temperature for hexagonal shape? They just go in and leave a dab. Apparently they looked at it and said, “Well, they seem to leave a dab at a certain place. And it actually seems to follow like a computer science, if then statement.”
Okay, I’ll let the computer sciences tell you what that is. But the following, if then statement. But here’s a summary of a recent book on this very topic. Next slide. The precise regularity of the honeycomb has been a source of wonderment, if not astonishment. There has been debate about how the bees create the shape of the cells. And after 350 scientific papers about research and honeybee comb. And after a publication of a book on honeybee wax, we still do not have an answer for how honeybees make the column.
We have no answer. 350 papers. Okay. If you write 350 papers, you’ll be running the college. That’s pretty good in science. We have no idea. We have no idea. But what, it’s useful. So useful. Next slide. That it, they use it for several uses. Waste collection, and for the babies. Look at the shape of the baby’s head. It’s not hexagonal, but it fits nicely doesn’t it? Fits really nicely in that too. And, next slide. And there’s some buildings using these shapes for their windows. They say… So these windows are being controlled for opening and closing. And they say it’s very efficient. Okay. I don’t know how to test that because the people who are making those windows are probably interested in just making something cool. Right? So I don’t know how scientific that is, but it’s kind of cool.
Next slide. So biomimicry is real. We use it a lot. Yeah. Solar… The Navy is developing a solar powered plane that can fly for 90 days. Why would we want an airplane to do that? Reconnaissance, right? Even possibly standing in for satellite beaming for your cell phone, all sorts of possible uses. Why did they make this solar power? And why did they make it manless? We found out that that humans can only last about five days in an airplane. They go nuts. Okay.
Apparently the space station has more room, right? You can roam around. And they have… Look how wide and flat those wings are. Why do they have to be so long? To get this solar panel… A lot of technology went into this because you have weight issues. You have to have a way that you can keep fueling it. But apparently with all those things they have, they’re not thinking they can go much beyond 90 days yet. Do you know some creatures who can fly for a long time? Let’s look at the next one. The Frigatebird can spend months. Some studies, maybe three or four months flying. How do they eat? How do they eat? They… Let me give you a clue. Their wing, their feathers are not waterproof. They can’t land. But look at that beak. Look at the design of that beak. They scoop from the water. They scoop from the water. How do they save energy on flights that could be thousands of miles? Formation? They try not to flap their wings and that could be bad. But how do you not flap your wings and still fly?
You glide. Glide, yeah. So they use something called dynamic soaring, which they share with their friends, the Albatross. Both the Albatross and the Frigatebird are really designed perfectly for a long flight. The Albatross, in its first year of flight can fly 110,000 miles. 110,000 miles. They both can fly for days at a time. The Frigatebird, we think months for a time. And they do something called dynamic story where they fly into the wind with their wings like this, right? That’s going to push them up, sometimes to two or three miles. And then they turn and soar for miles. It’s called dynamic soaring.
With all our technology and all our military. We can’t get there yet. We cannot do what they can do. And I think, again, God is showing us his creative wisdom. Next slide. This is a Shearwater. This is an amazing topic. Migration. This is a Sooty Shearwater that actually flies… Now I have to get to my notes, here to give you some data. They never cross land and they can fly 38,000 miles in 200 days without crossing land. Next slide. Here they’re off Santa Cruz. And you’ll see why they’re off our coast. If you look at the next slide.
Here is the flight pattern of where they put cameras and transmitters on 19 Sooty Shearwaters. And here’s their travel pattern, both north and south. South to the breeding grounds. They do land for a while to attend their children for a few days. But apparently they still don’t cross land? They’re always over in the ocean. So in the early 1900s, a Dr. Matthews in England took some shearwaters from Wales. And he blindfolded them and he flew them to Boston, blindfolded. He took them to the Boston Harbor. He un-blindfolded them. The Sooty Shearwater went out, turned to the east and made it back to Wales after 3000 miles, in a couple weeks. No one knows how.
So the navigation abilities are amazing in these creatures. We don’t know what they use, but because they appear to use several things. They use… They understand a 24 hour cycle. So in biology we call that a diurnal cycle. They appear to have a connection to the magnetic field of the earth. But then they’ve taken Albatross’ and put magnets on their head and they still fly the exact same pattern. With huge magnets on their heads. And, so they think it’s the position of the sun? And they’ve tried to mess up the position on the sun in cages and it does kind of mess them up, but you’d be messed up too if you’re in a cage, right? So, genetics play a possibly polarized fight and they’re still working on it. We’re still working on how they navigate. And it’s amazing. It’s amazing.
Here are, is the… Here’s the next one. The sea turtle. This one’s more intriguing because a sea turtle can swim thousands of miles to get to a jellyfish that it loves to eat and then thousands of miles back, a month or so later, a few months to its breeding ground. Never get off course. And it’s fighting against what? Storms and currents. Storms and currents. They really think that they, the best research shows some level understanding of the magnetic field, of the magnetic field. Again, they put magnets on them and they don’t go totally off. Here’s a weird thing though. They covered one eye with a patch and they went in circles. And then I said, not that good. Either they’re just really uncomfortable, or some scientists are saying they can see direction. How do you see direction? I don’t know, but I’m sure the Navy’s interested. Next slide.
This one’s really cool. This is, what is this? That’s a dragonfly. Some of you know your dragon flies up close. Good. I won’t ask you why you know that? But yeah, this is a dragonfly. In Dr. Francis Chance at Sandia laboratories has been studying these because they are so accurate at doing what? Kinda look at the zigs nagging here. They’re so accurate at catching mosquitoes. Next slide. If a dragonfly wants to catch a mosquito, that’s crossing its path, it can’t just aim at the mosquito. The dragonfly has to aim for where the mosquito is going to be. They put transmitters on them. They’re trying to figure it out. Here’s the amazing thing, next slide. Here are some charts and graphs she made for how this dragon fly over here on the left senses its prey and somehow, can develop a flight pattern for interception? This happens… Okay. Let me give you some data here. Since we’re scientist and we have to deal with some data.
They can make this decision in 15 milliseconds. How long does it take you to blink your eye? What’s five times six? 300. 5,50 times six is 300. All right. Yeah, so six… Your eye blink is six times slower than their decision. That’s how fast… We don’t even think about blinking, right? I think it’s fast, right? 15 milliseconds. Here’s the catch.
How many billion neurons do we have in our brain? We have 86 billion neurons. How many billion neurons do dragonflies have? Well, it’s only in the millions, maybe a million. So Francis Chance is going, how does this creature know how to intercept this Mosquito? It makes a decision within 15 milliseconds, can’t move its eyes. Its eyes are fixed, okay. So she created software using, mimicking… So we have, we’re actually looking at putting neurons in simulators now, simulators. And she was able to create a simulated device, with a lot with a lot less connections than modern tracking software, for say, self-driving cars. She’s going, “We might have missed something here by not studying this creature. We can make these things simpler.” The catch rate for that dragon fly, its success rate is 95 to 96%. Who do you think might be interested in an interception pattern?
The military.
The military, yeah. You remember some of your older… We actually saw this on TV. Next slide. Right. The Star Wars program or the anti-ballistic missile program. Some of us saw this, was it during the Iraq war we saw this on TV? One of the interceptions going on in real time on TV. What’s the success rate of our military doing this? 80 some percent. Dragon flies got it. And they use a lot less information and neuron. She’s going, she’s developing now a model that could be used by the military and make it more slick. And apparently with self-driving cars, there’s a whole trunk load full of stuff you have to carry around just to, for it to drive. She’s thinking we can get that information down into a small package because of this dragon fly technology.
Do you see the Lord’s hand here? In showing us that we think we’re smart. Here’s where we’re going to end, next slide. Does anybody know what this is? A molecule. The carbon based molecule, so it’s organic. I might have some of my first year freshman in here. We just went over. No, they’re sophomores and juniors over there. Okay. This is one of the most abundant organic molecules on her earth. This is chlorophyll. Where do you find chlorophyll?
Plants.
Plants, yeah. It’s probably one of the most abundant molecules on earth because I’m looking at plants out there and there’s probably several trillion billion right in that window there. And what is the goal of chlorophyll? Photosynthesis. What part does it play in photosynthesis? I think some of you got it. Absorption. What does it absorb? Light. What did Dr. King say about what do you call a light particle? Photon, photon yeah. An energized packet that comes from an electron, as an electron changes its energy. Yeah.
Here’s, what’s amazing. The tail of that chlorophyll is hydrophobic. So students out there, hydrophobic means… Your water fearing. And so what… Next slide. So we’re going to go inside plants. Okay. And this is a chloroplast, right? And the chlorophyll is inside the chloroplasts and those disc or stacks of membrane. And if I just look at one section of those membranes, what I find is a bunch of chlorophyll’s, hundreds of chlorophyll’s making what? What does that look like that’s not top of our houses? Solar sale or, or a, what do you call those things that receive signals from satellites? Satellite dish, yeah. This thing is a satellite dish with hundreds of chlorophyll’s on it. And that hydrophobic part is grounded in that membrane, which is hydrophobic. Here’s what some textbooks say. If there is one error in that tale, you begin to destroy life on earth.
Because when we have lunch in a few minutes, everything we eat is related to photosynthesis. Okay. Everything we eat, because if it’s beef, that cow was eating a plant, right? All that energy, in God’s design, comes through sunlight. And so it’s, I think of it as a catcher’s mitt. Okay, we’re watching baseball, World Series right now, that has to catch that thing. And if it rips out, we begin to break down life on earth. It probably would look strange with plants, probably falling apart or burning or something. I don’t know. It would be really wild.
What’s interesting is the efficiency is not much better but… Next slide. Is not much better than solar cell’s photosynthesis. But when they compare them online, what they don’t tell you, is it’s a lot easier to package these in billions and billions and billions and billions of leaves on the earth. Than have these square silicone things on the earth, right? And when you really look at it, that process of photosynthesis, which goes through this one molecule .is very efficient. It makes life work. If that thing breaks down, it can, it doesn’t just kill it, it probably rips apart life. And I found those quotes in a book.
So I was thinking about this, probably what is the most amazing source of power in the universe? Sun, yeah, light right? Dr. Kim was alluding to that. It is. There’s no other furnace like a star. And so Roman’s one says we can see his power. We don’t think about it sometimes when we go out on a starry night and we see those stars, because we love the beauty of it. But the immense power in those stars is beyond our comprehension. And it’s anti-life. It’s totally destructive. So God, in his wisdom in design, takes the most destructive force in the skies, the most destructive force, and he tunes it and he tunes it and he tunes it. And instead of death, he makes it support life.
That’s a powerful God. And so, and how does that, some of that work? Well, it’s interesting. Our sun is of like a mediocre sun. Well that helps us because it kind of gives the most… It has lots of light on the inside, all these wavelengths on the inside, but the stuff that comes off the outside is mostly visible light and UV light and a lot of infrared. And our atmosphere does what? Filters out a lot of the UV. So it’s just a fraction of a few wavelengths of the sun. There are so many wavelengths of a light in the sun… I forgot to bring my playing cards in. If a playing card represented each wavelength of light in the sun, we would have a card stack going to the Andromeda Galaxy. So many wavelengths, and God tunes it. He wants us to see this.
He wants to see us to see how powerful and destructive light is and how he tunes it and he tunes it and he tunes it. And life becomes dependent on it. And he supports life that way. It’s interesting, in that passage in Romans, there’s two more uses of power. Does anybody remember the first part of Romans talks about Jesus having power because of what? He’s the sun of God and has power because of the resurrection. The next verse in Romans 1:16 talks about the power of salvation. And I don’t want to get in trouble with the Bible teachers here and I need some help. But in both those cases, that’s the power of life over death. And that’s what I see with God’s most amazing creation of life. And I didn’t know Dr. Kim was going to end this way. He’s demonstrating power over life.
But there’s something else I want to share with you. This, is where we’ll conclude. I want talk about the old told story. Next slide. One of the famous authors of all time, of what country? [inaudible 00:46:22]. Yeah. He goes to the… Somehow he’s invited to the Caucasus Mountains, near Georgia. Not, probably not too far from where he lived. And this group of people, actually specific people groups said, “Come tell us what you know.” So gathering his families and neighbors, chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great and Napoleon. When he was whining to a close, the chief student said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder.”
Now we’re not in Sunday school. So Jesus is not the answer here, but what human person is this? What do they want to know about in the Caucasus Mountain? Because he was a traveler, right? And a writer. Any guesses?
Moses?
Moses, that would be a good one. Not Moses, more modern.
Abraham.
Oh, she’s in my class. Okay. Abraham Lincoln. And here’s how this plays out. Next slide. He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington. He was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Fredrick the Great. But his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar, moral what? Power. Just made me think about God and how he designed it. He has that power. He has the power to create and destroy. And he takes the most deadly thing in the universe, and he makes life. That’s control, right?
Don’t we think of some of the greatest presidents of having a lot of power, but not necessarily causing war. But having control over that power. And I think that’s another message I see in Romans one. Last slide, conclusion. Biomimicry and biotechnology show in many cases that living creatures and their abilities are superior to anything man can devise or create. Man can support life, but cannot create life. God’s power is on display all around us as biological life is complex and can be maintained on an earth designed to support life via chemical processes, which harness electromagnetic radiation, or light energy. The most powerful force in the universe.
We don’t have an excuse, right? We don’t have to look that deep into chemistry of physics. So understand that there’s something powerful. That’s what the Bible says. That there’s something powerful all around us, but what’s our job? If those don’t see it, the Bible also says they can be blinded, right? Or maybe there’s some blinders on. There’s still not an excuse. But I think one of the greatest things you can think about with the gospel, especially in the sciences, helping our scientific friends, is helping them uncover that blindness and seeing the power of God that’s right in front of them. And that catching that connection to Christ, the ultimate… The person who’s with God when he did all this creation of light and the earth and the universe. Thank you.
Dr. Joe Francis is Dean of the TMU School of Science, Mathematics, Technology, and Health and Chair of the Department of Biological and Physical Sciences. PhD from Wayne State University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. A national thought leader in creation science and the recent author of Bioluminescent Sea Creatures and COVID-19, Coronavirus, and Creation Virology for Answers in Genesis, and has contributed chapters to AIG’s The Answers Book as well as the books Evidence for God (Baker, 2010) and What Happened in the Garden: The Reality and Ramifications of the Creation and the Fall of Man (Kregel, 2016). His research is centered around a search for beneficial viruses, new antibiotics, and the development of microscopy techniques for studying immune cells.
