The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Rod Dreher wrote “to order the world rightly as Christians requires regarding all things as pointing to Christ”
Christ is the One in Whom in all things consist and humanity is not the measure of all things. If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder then the most fundamental act of resistance is to discover and life according to the deep, divine order of the heavens and the earth.
In this series we want to look at the big model of the universe that the Bible and Christian history provides.
It is a mind and heart expanding vision of reality.
It is not confined to the limits of our bodily senses - but tries to embrace levels fo reality that are not normally accessible or tangible to our exiled life on earth.
We live on this side of the cosmic curtain - and therefore the highest and greatest dimensions of reality are hidden to us… yet these dimensions exist and are the most fundamental framework for the whole of the heavens and the earth.
Throughout this series we want to pick away at all the threads of reality to see how they all join together - how they all find common meaning and reason in the great divine logic - the One who is the Logos, the LORD Jesus Christ - the greatest that both heaven and earth has to offer.
Colossians 1:15-23
The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation
Episode 69 - The Octet Rule: Chemistry, Spiritual Renewal, and Cosmic Patterns
What if the quest for atomic stability could illuminate our understanding of spiritual transformation? Join us as we unravel the mysteries of the octet rule, a cornerstone of chemistry, and explore its profound connections to biblical themes of renewal and cosmic redemption. Imagine atoms as tiny solar systems, with electrons seeking stability by reaching the sacred number eight in their outermost shell. Through this lens, we draw captivating parallels between scientific principles and spiritual truths, and spotlighting the divine lessons embedded in the natural world.
In this episode, we navigate the recurring significance of the number eight, both in the periodic table and scripture. Discover how elements like Potassium and Calcium manifest this cosmic pattern, and see how these scientific observations align with biblical symbolism of new creation. By referencing trusted educational resources like the BBC and Chem4Kids, we provide a rich tapestry of knowledge that bridges chemistry and faith. Tune in for a thought-provoking journey that sets the foundation for deeper explorations in our Christ-centered cosmic civilization series.
The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore
Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. And we are looking at chemistry and we thought last time about atoms and we ended by trying to visualize a simple diagram of an atom with a nucleus at the center and surrounding that, like shells. We'll call them shells. You can think of them visually like circles around the nucleus, but really we'll call them shells, like a shell. So you end up with like a sphere. A sphere and there's a nucleus at the center of it and then these shells around that.
Speaker 1:And what we're going to think about is something called the octet rule. Now, before I explain what it is, I want to flag up that it's a rule of thumb. It isn't an absolute rule. It's a rule of thumb. It isn't an absolute rule, but it is one of the most important and kind of fundamental rules in chemistry. There are exceptions to it and some molecules with odd number of electrons don't, but this is a really fundamental principle in chemistry understanding how atoms interact with one another, how one element interacts with another element. That's what we're really thinking about here. So this thing called the octet rule, and it states that I'll state it first, then let's go back and understand what it is. Understand what it is what's significant about it and what it means for the way atoms interact. So the octet rule states that atoms tend to prefer having eight electrons in the outer shell, the valence shell, in order to possess a configuration similar to a noble gas. Now, ok, what's that about? First of all, noble gases, and I love the word noble to describe these gases. They have eight electrons in their valence shell and they have this name noble, which again a moral category applied to them, and it means that they are very non-reactive, and the word that is often used to describe them is that they are at peace. They are peaceful or stable, but I've often seen the word they the peaceful in, and that they don't react with other elements. So much so that. So why is that OK?
Speaker 1:So what we're talking about again is then let's think again about how the, the atom, is formed. The atom is formed the very. There are three think about three subatomic particles. So we've got the atom. We've got that simple diagram in our minds, and that atom is made of neutrons, protons and electrons. Now think of them as having a kind of charge. The neutrons have no net charge and they're in the center of the atom with positively charged protons. So the nucleus is made of neutrons and protons and that's the nucleus of the atom. And then electrons are negatively charged and they circle the nucleus like planets around the sun, like planets around the sun. So yeah, electrons and protons are attracted to each other by electromagnetic force. Ok, leave that, we don't need that for the moment. Let's just focus on the electrons in those shells orbiting the orbiting electrons right in those shells, orbiting the orbiting electrons.
Speaker 1:Right Now, what we want to think about is that when there are, each atom has a certain number of those electrons in its outer shell, in the shells, like the innermost shell. So there's the nucleus at the very centre, then there's an innermost shell and that can hold two shell. So the nucleus, a little shell around that that can hold two electrons, then another shell around that and that can hold up to eight. And then, once there's more than eight, it goes to another shell and that can hold up to eight. Than eight, it goes to another shell and that can hold up to eight, and then, if that's filled with eight, it goes to another shell, it forms like another shell beyond that, and that can hold up to eight. Can you imagine then? So the nucleus orbited by two electrons and then an atom could have another shell holding up to eight, and then, if that's filled, after that there's like it would form There'll be another shell with up to eight, and so on. Can you write that's the idea, and then what? The?
Speaker 1:What seems to be the case then is that Eight electrons in the outermost shell, that's a stable shell. So if an atom is able to get eight electrons in its outermost shell, it becomes stable, peaceful. See if you can just take that in for a moment. See if you can just take that in for a moment. So that means that when one atom is going to join up with other atoms so think of water Water, we know, is the symbol for that is H2O, and that means there's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom H2O. That's the formula to describe water Two hydrogen, one oxygen. And the reason it forms like that is because there's this desire, so that when an atom interacts with other atoms, they join together in such a way that they use the minimum energy possible to get to a state of having eight electrons in an outer shell. So it becomes stable and settled. So that's what goes on in the interactions when the molecules are formed by multiple atoms and the. What governs that formulation of molecules is this octet rule, that they form together in such a way that they want to arrive at stability, and the stability is defined as having eight electrons in the outer shell.
Speaker 1:Now why that's important, why have we bothered to labor this point for the last episode and into this episode? Is because the bible tells us that the whole creation is longing to be transformed um into a state of renewal and Sabbath. New creation, the whole creation. What does it say? Proverbs, chapter 8. In fact, I look it up and we can read it Proverbs, chapter 8, from verse 18, isn't it? Proverbs 8 from verse 18 says 18 says the whole creation. And I'll go from verse 19,.
Speaker 1:The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole cosmos has been groaning, yearning, groaning as in the pains of childbirth, right up to this present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we await eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. So in that picture, in that language, we're being told that the creation has undergone some negative transformation to become subjected to a kind of instability, an intrinsic instability and decay. We call that, like the principle of entropy in the universe, this tendency for energy to become ever less available, less useful, kind of this downward trend of energy to decay. And the whole creation, the whole cosmos, is in this kind of an instability, a frustration, a decay, a downward trajectory of the usefulness of its energy and reactions. Overall, that's the creation overall as that. Overall, that's the creation overall as that. And the creation itself has a yearning to be free from this decay, instability and to ultimately be liberated from it entirely and come into the freedom and glory that God's family has.
Speaker 1:So that the creation has undergone a transformation, a negative transformation of decay and frustration, but that that was done by Christ. Christ placed this curse, this reduction of the creation from its original nobility to a baser form of existence. He did that with hope, because through death there can be resurrection, through decay and death there can be so decay, death and destruction can seem utterly negative, from a hopeless point of view. But when we understand things from the perspective of the cross and resurrection of the divine emperor, we then trust him that decay and destruction and even death can be through his power, through him can lead to resurrection. And so he says these extraordinary things, doesn't he?
Speaker 1:Just this lunchtime we were discussing something over at church that whoever loves their life in this world will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will gain eternal life. And it's that crazy thing that we were sort of together at the lunchtime just thinking how difficult that is to grasp from the perspective of this world. Because we yearn for, we kind of instinctively want the life of this world. Our flesh wants that. And yet it is a decaying life, a dying life. And Jesus says no, don't hold on to it, let it go. Let it go because it must die. You must come to my cross and die and let and do not face death without me. Like with christ, death can leads to life. Without him it's just a barren chaos, there's nothing comes of it, it's just frustration and bitterness. But with him he leads us as the divine shepherd through the valley of the shadow of death and beyond that there is this resurrection.
Speaker 1:Now then all of these other things we know, but that these are the things that are in creation itself. And the whole creation yearns for freedom from decay, freedom from instability, and longing to be liberated from bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. And the whole creation is in like a pain and a travail and a torment and an instability. Now it's hard for us, no, impossible for us, to fully imagine what the form of physics and chemistry and biology would be in the new creation, when there is this full transmutation of the entire cosmos into the physical life of the resurrected divine Messiah. The physical life of the resurrected divine Messiah, like? How could we grasp such a thing? Even the Apostle John says we don't know what it's going to be like, but we do know that when we see him we'll be like him and the whole creation. He is this small portion of the cosmos that has already been through this death and he has entered into the undiscovered country of physical immortality. He's already in it, that new form, that physical body of Jesus of Nazareth, that those atoms have already entered into this state of absolute stability.
Speaker 1:And to bring this back, I would say that the atoms in the body of Jesus, all the elements that form his body, his resurrected body, operate differently to all the atoms that are in our fallen universe. And the atoms in his body, in a sense, have attained pure eightness. They are utterly defined by the number eight, the atoms within his body. Why do I say such a thing? And that sounds weird, doesn't it? But what we mean by that? So the Bible has given us this vision of the cosmos longing to be transformed into the state of Sabbath peace. And at the most basic level, as we've already tried to see, at the most basic level of the way the elements and atoms interact with one another, they are striving and combining together to find this stability of a state of eight. They want to be in a state of the number eight and then, and they combine to to get to that.
Speaker 1:And, um, god teaches us about the meaning of the number eight in the bible. This is the god who created, created everything. So it's fast the god who? The god who created everything. So the God who created all things and formed all the elements. There's what? 90, is it 92 elements in our periodic table of elements that we find naturally occurring on earth. And then there's another is it 26 or something that are in nuclear reactions and things. I can't remember it. Just off the top of my head it's something like that. And the living God, who formed these elements in this way, to have this yearning for the stability of the number eight by large, that's true of these, these elements. He's teaching us things in these. So the things he teaches in the bible about the number eight, he teaches us actually in the atoms of the universe, this fundamental rules by which atoms interact and combine with one another. This lesson about the number eight is taught in the written scriptures and it's taught in the formation of the very elements around us. So the basic elements, the atoms, are continually trying to find a state of eight. Let's call it a state of eight. They want to achieve eight electrons in their outermost shell, and so when they react with one another or bond with one another, they will either give up the spare electrons or take on the spare electrons of other elements in order that they can together form a stable situation with eight in the outer shell. So some and the idea is those that, because it requires a lot of energy to move electrons and so what they will do is whoever's got the least will give them up to those who's got the most in order to most efficiently arrive at the state of eight. And this basic idea that or I'm going to call it a desire I think it's a desire the bible says that the cosmos itself, at the most fundamental level of its basic elements, has a yearning. It's a yearning, it's a desire to reach a state of eight. It's so basic to chemistry that this isn't just like me with theological imagination or fancy.
Speaker 1:You can go to the BBC kind of British broadcasting company website, the BBC website on its bite-sized section, which is brilliant. It's probably the best thing the BBC does, apart from some of its sports coverage. But the BBC probably the best thing is its bite-sized educational materials. Some of them are just absolutely exceptional quality materials and some of them are just absolutely exceptional quality. And in its bite-sized explanation of chemistry it explains this the rule of octet, the rule of eight that governs chemistry. Or there's another website I came across called Chem4 kids, c-h-e-m, then the number four and then the word kids, but all of that is one word chem for kids and they. They set it out too, and excellent. And when you listen to the way that even these non uhChristian, not theological well, not explicitly theologically websites, it sounds theological when you read what they say.
Speaker 1:Because it's this simple truth of basic chemistry, this rule of eight, the octet rule, that governs basic chemistry. Now, yeah, it doesn't, it's true. I know sometimes when I explain this, someone reminds me that, yeah, there are rare chemical elements that this does not work for, that this does not work for, and yeah, I know that. But for more than 99% of the universe let's just keep it in perspective For more than 99% of the universe, the elements are governed by a desire to get eight electrons in the outer shell. That's it. So I think I might actually read from the BBC's explanation of this arrangement in the GCSE bite-size piece about the periodic table, and it's trying to explain this process, how, beginning with the simplest element well, it begins with the simplest element, hydrogen, and how electrons fill the shells going out. So I'm just going to read now from the BBC's explanation. It says this Electrons are arranged in shells at different distances around the nucleus.
Speaker 1:Distances around the nucleus. As we move across each row of the periodic table, the proton number increases by one for each element. This means the number of electrons increases by one for each element. Starting from the simplest element, hydrogen, and moving through the elements in order, we can see how the electrons fill the shells. The innermost shell of electrons is filled first, and this shell can contain a maximum of two electrons. Next the second shell fills with electrons and this can hold a maximum of eight electrons. When this is filled, electrons go into the third shell, which also holds a maximum of eight electrons. Then the fourth shell begins to fill the table. Then they provide the bbc provides a table showing the number of electrons in each shell for the first 20 elements in the periodic table. And so there we have it.
Speaker 1:There's hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen has one electron in shell one. Helium has two electrons in shell one. Then the next one is lithium, in shell one. Then the next one is lithium. Lithium has two electrons in shell one. But then it starts to fill that second shell and it has one electron in shell two. Then it goes. Beryllium has two electrons, in that they all have two in the first shell, so I'll take that as red. So beryllium, two in the first, two in the second. Then boron has three in its second shell, carbon four, nitrogen five, oxygen six, and that's why that helps us with oxygen has six electrons in its shell in that shell, two right electrons in its shell in that shell, two right.
Speaker 1:And then let's think if it's going to join with hydrogen to form water, and hydrogen has one electron in shell one. So how many hydrogen is it going to need to get to a state of eight? Well, two, it would need two, because hydrogen has one electron in shell one. Oxygen has six in its shell two. So in order to get to a state of eight, oxygen would want two hydrogens to join with it to get to a state of eight. And that is the chemical formula for water H2O two hydrogen one. Oxygen Fluorine has seven, in shell two. And then neon has eight. And so neon just is in that state of stability, and so it's a noble gas, it's a stable gas, it's non-reactive, see. So that's what's fascinating. When we get to neon, it's one of these noble gases that is stable.
Speaker 1:And then after that we go to sodium, and that has two in the first. They all have two in the first, except hydrogen, which is the simplest, so it only has one. But um, sodium, two, eight. And then it's now got, goes into the third shell and it has one in the third shell. So can you see that Sodium goes 2, 8, 1. And then magnesium is 2, 8, 2. So it's as if once the atom has got to a state of 8 in its second shell, it doesn't disrupt that anymore. It's like, no, we've got to stability there and now so any further electrons are in the third shell. So, and then it goes. Sodium is has one in in the third shell, magnesium to aluminium three, silicon four, and then you all go down to the. You went to argon. Argon has two in the first, eight in the second and eight in the third. And again, that's a noble gas, non-reactive, because it's got eight in its outer shell and then off it goes and starts another cycle.
Speaker 1:Potassium 2881. Calcium 2882. So again, notice how there's this big. So that's all from the BBC website. Chem for Kids has a similar thing. There's this constant tendency towards the number eight in the basic chemistry of the universe. That's what we wanted to say. That's what we wanted to say. Eight is the number of new creation throughout the Bible. Actually, we'll look at that more. Let's begin the next episode with that, just exploring a little bit about the number eight in the Bible.