Intelligent Design
I don't usually get into some of these sorts of issues (although I have a lot of big thoughts and good arguments in these things), but I thought I would share this little thought with you.
Want to know what I believe is one of the greatest evidences of intelligent design in the world is?
These guys:
Saccharomyces cerevisiae aka yeast. Let's look at what these little guys can do and how it works.
Let's say you get some flour from ground wheat -- something that isn't found in nature, by the way, so the behavior here can't be the product of natural evolution -- and mix it with water. You get an environment with a lot of starches and sugars all in solution, which is a great environment for the growth of all sorts of little critters. Within hours you'll have dozens, if not hundreds, of different things living there. Many of which would make you sick or kill you.
But, every 12 hours, take half that mixture and mix in fresh flour and water (throwing out the other half, so you keep a blob of near constant size. Within a couple days or a week you will have only two types of critters left, everything else is dead. Those two things that are left are the yeast as shown above and these guys:
Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, which is a lactobacilli bacteria that lives in symbiosis with the yeast. Only these two survive because the environment created by the flour and water mixture is absolutely ideal for these two and their symbiotic lifestyle. They outgrow everything else. In addition, as they grow, the yeast helps the lactobacilli stay alive, and the lactobacilli produces lactic acid which kills other bacteria and molds and such.
So, you take this very man-made thing called flour and you get the ideal environment for these univeral natural organisms that are everywhere in the air.
Also not only are these the only two that survive, these two also won't harm you. In fact, they are pretty good for you. But, even more, the yeast that makes its home here is EXACTLY what you need if you want to make a dough and bake bread -- that which has been the primary staple food of most people throughout history.
What an amazing coincidence, huh? That's all sourdough is: just keep mixing flour and water -- and don't do much else at all, because this happens on its own -- and you will get a living, thriving colony of yeast and lactobacilli living in symbiosis all ready to make bread for you.
But, it gets better.
Grapes. Grapes have this amazing little waxy skin on it. A skin that is perfectly made to capture wild yeast. Why? It does nothing good for the grapes. And not really anything good for the yeast. But it does great thing for man. Because grape juice is the perfect material for fermentation, and that takes exactly the yeast that the grape skins catch. All you have to do to make wine is just squish the grapes. You get the grape juice, and the yeast from the skins goes directly into it and starts the fermentation. Within a matter of hours you will have a rather highly alcoholic wine.
OK, is this good for the yeast? Were they evolutionarily driven towards this? Not really, because the fermentation of straight grape juice -- if not controlled by man -- can quickly reach a high enough alcohol content that the yeast itself will die. Is it good for the grapes? Not really, because this only happens after the fruit has fallen and almost always only if all the grapes get squished together -- not good if the point of your reproduction is to spread your seeds around larger areas, something that is usually accomplished by birds picking the fruit and eating it on the fly, dropping the seeds as they go. And while birds can eat fermented grapes, they don't fly very well or very far when they are drunk. Believe me, I've seen it.
Is this just a weird happy coincidence? No. Not this. Not with the amazing set of chemical processes that go on here. Here's a quote from Stuart Fleming's Vinum: the Story of Roman Wine
"The ease with which the juices of the grape ferment naturally into wine belies the complexity of what is one of hte most elegant chemical processes in nature. Back in 1810, Joseph Gay-Lussac recognized a key element of the process -- the breakdown of the grape's sugar content into alcohol and carbon dioxide. But more than forty years were to pass before Louis Pasteur identified the catalyst for that breakdown -- microscopic organisms that we call yeast...
[There follows a description of the chemistry of a grape]
While these sugars and acids define a wine's main elements of flavor, many other constituents of the grape play a part in defining its subtler qualities, and thus the aroma and bouquet of the wine produced from it. Various amino acids, vitamins, enzymes, and minerals provide nutrients to the fermenting yeasts and thereafter become part of the process by which a wine develops its aromatics; tannins in the grape's skin provide the astringency that characterizes red wines which are fermented from a mash of the entire grape; and a dozen or so pigments give the wine its color. With good reason, Maynard Amerine has described wine as a chemical symphony, comprising not just ethyl alcohol but a host of other ingredients that, in their possible permutations or combination, result in so many different tasteful harmonies."
This isn't an accident, it's art. It's a symphony in the form of chemistry. Chemistry that happens naturally -- man doesn't DO anything in making wine, other than just squishing things and letting it sit -- but chemistry that produces something not only desirable to man, and enjoyable to him, but beneficial to him as well (pre-modern technology, water wasn't really a good option for beverage). Yet it is a chemical symphony that benefits no other player in the game. Not the yeast, not the grapes, not the birds that eat the grapes.
All in the exact same little micro-organism. Two of the earliest cultivated plants were grapes and wheat, mainly because of they are common in nature, easy to domesticate, and their extreme hardiness allowing them to be grown pretty much everywhere in the world. Both of these products, in interaction with the same little critter, produce something extraordinary for man. Things that the life of pre-modern man literally depended on for survival in any sort of civilized community. Civilization couldn't have happend without bread and wine, both of which are created by yeast doing something it naturally does.
Accident?
Exactly how blind are you?
Want to know what I believe is one of the greatest evidences of intelligent design in the world is?
These guys:
Saccharomyces cerevisiae aka yeast. Let's look at what these little guys can do and how it works.Let's say you get some flour from ground wheat -- something that isn't found in nature, by the way, so the behavior here can't be the product of natural evolution -- and mix it with water. You get an environment with a lot of starches and sugars all in solution, which is a great environment for the growth of all sorts of little critters. Within hours you'll have dozens, if not hundreds, of different things living there. Many of which would make you sick or kill you.
But, every 12 hours, take half that mixture and mix in fresh flour and water (throwing out the other half, so you keep a blob of near constant size. Within a couple days or a week you will have only two types of critters left, everything else is dead. Those two things that are left are the yeast as shown above and these guys:
Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, which is a lactobacilli bacteria that lives in symbiosis with the yeast. Only these two survive because the environment created by the flour and water mixture is absolutely ideal for these two and their symbiotic lifestyle. They outgrow everything else. In addition, as they grow, the yeast helps the lactobacilli stay alive, and the lactobacilli produces lactic acid which kills other bacteria and molds and such.
So, you take this very man-made thing called flour and you get the ideal environment for these univeral natural organisms that are everywhere in the air.
Also not only are these the only two that survive, these two also won't harm you. In fact, they are pretty good for you. But, even more, the yeast that makes its home here is EXACTLY what you need if you want to make a dough and bake bread -- that which has been the primary staple food of most people throughout history.
What an amazing coincidence, huh? That's all sourdough is: just keep mixing flour and water -- and don't do much else at all, because this happens on its own -- and you will get a living, thriving colony of yeast and lactobacilli living in symbiosis all ready to make bread for you.
But, it gets better.
Grapes. Grapes have this amazing little waxy skin on it. A skin that is perfectly made to capture wild yeast. Why? It does nothing good for the grapes. And not really anything good for the yeast. But it does great thing for man. Because grape juice is the perfect material for fermentation, and that takes exactly the yeast that the grape skins catch. All you have to do to make wine is just squish the grapes. You get the grape juice, and the yeast from the skins goes directly into it and starts the fermentation. Within a matter of hours you will have a rather highly alcoholic wine.
OK, is this good for the yeast? Were they evolutionarily driven towards this? Not really, because the fermentation of straight grape juice -- if not controlled by man -- can quickly reach a high enough alcohol content that the yeast itself will die. Is it good for the grapes? Not really, because this only happens after the fruit has fallen and almost always only if all the grapes get squished together -- not good if the point of your reproduction is to spread your seeds around larger areas, something that is usually accomplished by birds picking the fruit and eating it on the fly, dropping the seeds as they go. And while birds can eat fermented grapes, they don't fly very well or very far when they are drunk. Believe me, I've seen it.
Is this just a weird happy coincidence? No. Not this. Not with the amazing set of chemical processes that go on here. Here's a quote from Stuart Fleming's Vinum: the Story of Roman Wine
"The ease with which the juices of the grape ferment naturally into wine belies the complexity of what is one of hte most elegant chemical processes in nature. Back in 1810, Joseph Gay-Lussac recognized a key element of the process -- the breakdown of the grape's sugar content into alcohol and carbon dioxide. But more than forty years were to pass before Louis Pasteur identified the catalyst for that breakdown -- microscopic organisms that we call yeast...
[There follows a description of the chemistry of a grape]
While these sugars and acids define a wine's main elements of flavor, many other constituents of the grape play a part in defining its subtler qualities, and thus the aroma and bouquet of the wine produced from it. Various amino acids, vitamins, enzymes, and minerals provide nutrients to the fermenting yeasts and thereafter become part of the process by which a wine develops its aromatics; tannins in the grape's skin provide the astringency that characterizes red wines which are fermented from a mash of the entire grape; and a dozen or so pigments give the wine its color. With good reason, Maynard Amerine has described wine as a chemical symphony, comprising not just ethyl alcohol but a host of other ingredients that, in their possible permutations or combination, result in so many different tasteful harmonies."
This isn't an accident, it's art. It's a symphony in the form of chemistry. Chemistry that happens naturally -- man doesn't DO anything in making wine, other than just squishing things and letting it sit -- but chemistry that produces something not only desirable to man, and enjoyable to him, but beneficial to him as well (pre-modern technology, water wasn't really a good option for beverage). Yet it is a chemical symphony that benefits no other player in the game. Not the yeast, not the grapes, not the birds that eat the grapes.
All in the exact same little micro-organism. Two of the earliest cultivated plants were grapes and wheat, mainly because of they are common in nature, easy to domesticate, and their extreme hardiness allowing them to be grown pretty much everywhere in the world. Both of these products, in interaction with the same little critter, produce something extraordinary for man. Things that the life of pre-modern man literally depended on for survival in any sort of civilized community. Civilization couldn't have happend without bread and wine, both of which are created by yeast doing something it naturally does.
Accident?
Exactly how blind are you?
posted by Christian Husband at 9:03 PM
11 Comments:
I suppose any properly sacramentally-minded Christian would find extraordinary cosmic significance in all these 'coincidences' pertaining to bread and wine. . .
I remember being just floored, when I was in grad school, by the fact (from Lagrangian dynamics) that, essentially, all of physics is derivable from an energy-minimization principle. That just seemed too good to be coincidental. . .
Yeasts are organisms, largely aesexual in reproduction, and do not require sunlight. So these primitive organisms are involved in ethanol fermentation as a way to convert sugars into cellular energy in the absence of oxygen. They also are the culprits in food spoilage.
It's just as easy to say that this biological process is the result of early life form evolution and that millenia down the road, its our good luck that alchohol is the result. After all, having cataloged only 1% of yeast species, it seems that alchohol byproduction is the most least of intended ends of a million ends.
Wine is chance, not providence. We make it and We bless it. We could have chosen chocolate milk as symbol of the incarnation.
At the same time, yeast was a very important and symbolic thing to the ancient Jews. The Feast of Unleavened Bread, get rid of all of the yeast in the encampments, that whole thing - a representation of sin in our lives.
Not necessarily related at all, but it's always been interesting to me (as when we take the sacraments, the bread should be made sans yeast). We could probably tie it in somehow if we felt like making a connection. :-)
I don't recall yeast symbolizing sin for the Jews. In fact, just the opposite. Unleavend bread represents the haste in leaving Egypt: life before salvation.
Leavened bread symbolized salvation from slavery.
This was a very interesting and beautiful post. I really appreciate you sharing this with us.
It seems almost too obvious to need pointing out, but Christ blessed wine. Not only at the wedding, but also at the Last Supper, forever tying it in an important way to the incarnation, whether you believe it was meant as just a symbol or something more. We continue to use wine in a religious way because that's what Christ did, not because we randomly decided it was better than chocolate milk.
But, wine IS better than chocolate milk.
Just for the sake of sayin' so. . .
;)
-----
And a friend of mine, a Messianic Jewish 'rabbi', has written a 'Christian Seder', which Molly and I have participated in for years. And in it, he quite explicitly identifies 'leaven' with sin. . .
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So what do we make of those who pray over Welches?
My point is that theological meaning is a "derived" unseen thing that has meaning only because it is more than data.
We baptize with water and invest in it meaning. That water is H2O does not in itself signify the Holy Trinity unless we "make" something of that fact. Which, I hasten to say, is not an argument I've ever heard before.
To translate organic chemistry into spiritual meaning is, in fact, a translation, an interpretive analogy that may or may not have deep meaning.
If the science itself is presented as its own case for divine existence, that is sentimentalizing our current epoch of scientific understanding. And thus it jeopardizes our spiritual understanding.
I am reminded of Church of Christ arguments for why Jesus could not have been blessing fermented wine, but unfermented wine (grape juice). Very rational, somewhat scientific (since the CofC is based in the Scottish Enlightenment, this seemed natural).
Either way, neither Manischewitz nor Welches is what Jesus had in front of him. How do we know we have it right? Or does the interest in replicating the physics of biblical reality only go so far? And how do we determine how far that should be?
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Yes, I can see how a messianic rabbi could have an idiosyncratic view of unleavened bread. Jewish rabbis make stuff up, too, you know. The chore of preaching moves all of us to stretch the traditions. By the way, one of the greatest preachers of the last century was Rabbi Lionel Blue.
I apologize for going on and on, but I think the assumptions uncovered along the lines being discussed here are pretty important.
The reason Manischewitz and Welches carries such multi-valent freight is that both are largely made from the Concord grape, a variety of Vitis labrusca, the fox grape. This is a species of grape native to North America. So unless Jesus was a Mormon, he did not bless wine made from the Concord Grape (nor should he have drunk it, but that's just my taste).
So, Therese is interested in wine because it is biblical. But what exactly is the biblically important part?
Fermented grape juice? Again, what about those who use unfermented grape juice as a doctrine or simply those who normally have wine at mass but offer grape juice for those in Recovery? Has biblical importance been lost for these people?
If grape juice, unfermented or fermented, is the accepted point, then the "sacred" aspect of the whole post is crippled.
And if grape juice is not really the really "sacred" part, then chocolate milk may have sacramental meaning, especially for Aztec christians whose ancestors may have combined chocolate with blood sacrifice.
If Jesus had appeared as an Aztec, would chocolate milk be the blood of Christ or would we find that too gauche.
So what really is the really "sacred"?
"Sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace." As long as the "sign" signifies grace (God's favor toward us) keep it. When it disturbs, change it.
Wine (as fermentation of the grape) is a spiritually meaningful sign to me of God's favor. Poetic and biblical. But it can have limits.
Fermentation as a sign of intelligent design is, for me, sentimental poetry, and therefore bad poetry. And it has crippling limits in a dependence on only certain degrees and limited scope of scientific explanation. Like the Church of Christ argument for flat grape juice.
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