The Christ Centred Cosmic Civilisation

Episode 70 - Happy Atoms and Sacred Numbers: A Cosmic Symphony

• Paul

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What if the secrets of chemistry could illuminate deep theological truths?  Discover how the quest of "happy atoms" for stability mirrors creation's longing for a better state, and see how the number eight resonates both in scientific and biblical contexts. We break down the basics of atomic bonding with elements like sodium, magnesium, oxygen, and fluorine, showing how they strive for an ideal state that parallels our spiritual journey towards new creation and resurrection.

Our journey doesn't stop at chemistry. We also delve into the rich symbolism of the Feast of Tabernacles and the spiritual significance of temporary dwellings, connecting Paul's teachings on our earthly bodies being mere tents to the hope of eternal life. Learn how the covenant of circumcision on the eighth day signifies a rejection of reliance on the flesh in favor of eternal promises. Finally, explore the profound theological implications of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the molecule of life, as we discuss its reflection of the Trinity and the concept of sacrifice. With special insights from Dr. Andy Hayden and a chemistry-inspired Psalm 148 by Professor David Vossburgh, this episode offers a unique and thought-provoking perspective on the divine intricacies woven into the fabric of our existence.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Speaker 1:

Well, welcome to the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization podcast. And we're still in chemistry, and a few people wanted me to give more about that Chem4Kids website that I'd mentioned, which explains the basic principles of chemistry, and I like it because it uses this metaphor of happy atoms. I like this idea that atoms are unhappy or happy, and I like that again because that so fits with that biblical idea that the creation itself is yearning, desiring for new creation, that it has emotions and that it's in pain, struggling, as in childbirth the whole cosmos, because it doesn't like its current situation and wants to arrive at a better state of operation. So, yeah, chem4kids uses the metaphor of happy atoms to describe the desire for atoms to reach a state of eight. So what I'm going to do, the website is wwwchem4kids remember C-H-E-M, the number four and then kids, chem4kidscom, and then you want to find it's got a subsection on atomic bonds. So but here's what it says. It says you must first learn why atoms bond together.

Speaker 1:

We use a concept called happy atoms. We figure that most atoms want to be happy, just like you. The idea behind happy atoms is that atomic shells like to be full. That's it. If you're an atom and you have a shell. You want your shell to be full. Some atoms have many electrons, one or two extra, and these atoms like to give up their electrons to get to, so that they reduce to a happy shell. Some atoms are really close to having a full shell and those atoms go looking for other atoms who want to give up an electron.

Speaker 1:

Let's look at some examples. And so Chem4Kids gives us a diagram with a sodium atom diagram. So it has its nucleus, two full shells, and then the third shell has just one spare electron. And then the example is magnesium nucleus in a shell full of two, second shell full of eight, and then the third shell has two extra electrons, has two extra electrons. So Kempferkid says we should start with the atoms that have atomic numbers between 1 and 18. There's a 2-8-8 rule for these elements.

Speaker 1:

The first shell is filled with two electrons, the second is filled with eight, the third is filled with eight, and so you see that sodium and magnesium have a couple of extra electrons. They, like all atoms, want to be happy. They have two possibilities. They can try to get to eight electrons to fill up their third shell, or they can give up a few electrons so that they have a filled second shell. It's always easier to give away one or two electrons than it is to go out and find six or seven to fill your white outer shell. And then that's a nice coincidence. This is Ken, for Kids says this. What a coincidence, because many other atoms are interested in gaining a few extra electrons.

Speaker 1:

And the examples here is oxygen and the diagram there has the nucleus, the first shell with two filled, but then in that second shell it's got six and it says two missing electrons. And fluorine is next to oxygen because it has its nucleus, then the filled first shell and then in that second shell it's got seven. So it's missing just one electron. So the idea is oxygen and fluorine are looking for atoms that could give up one or two, and sodium and magnesium they have just one or two in their outer shell. So they're looking for atoms that they can easily give up their spare ones to, and that's the idea. So oxygen is looking for spare ones, sodium and magnesium is looking for atoms that want one or two. So each of those elements are looking for a couple of electrons to make a filled shell. Oxygen and fluorine, they each have one filled shell with two electrons, but the second shells want to have eight.

Speaker 1:

There are a couple of ways they can get the electrons. They can share electrons, making a covalent bond, or they can just borrow them and make an ionic bond bond, or they can just borrow them and make an ionic bond. So let's say we've got a sodium atom that has an extra electron. We've also got a fluorine atom that is looking for one. When they work together they both wind up. Happy. Sodium gives up its extra electron. The sodium then has a full second shell and the fluorine also has a full second shell. Two happy atoms. Okay, that's it.

Speaker 1:

All of that that I just read out was from the Kenful Kids website and I like that metaphor of the happy atom. But you can see what it's saying and how just this fundamental rule of chemistry that works for over 99% of all the elements and the atoms in the universe. They are working and wanting to bond with other atoms in such a fashion that both atoms want to get to a state where they have an outer shell that has eight and they combine in ratios that enable that state to come about. And when they're in that state then they're stable out. And when they're in that state, then they're stable, and then elements that just have naturally ate in their outer shell. Those are the noble ones that are just naturally happy or noble. But don't worry, there is a lot more we could say about that, and look at some of the exceptions and things like that.

Speaker 1:

But for our purposes in this podcast, what we're wanting to see is that for over 99% of all the elements in the universe, they are governed by this desire to get to the number eight, and I know we've touched on this before when we looked at numbers. But eight is the number of new creation, resurrection and hope all the way throughout the Bible. Eight is such a deep theological number. I mean some of us know that in some cultures I think in China, the number eight is associated with good luck and that's a kind of almost like a secular form of this. Hope is reduced to just good luck and often understood in a financial way. But the Bible gives us a much bigger picture of the number eight. And let's just start from the big thing.

Speaker 1:

In John, chapter 20 and verse one, jesus himself rose from the dead on the eighth day, the first day of a new week. So he is killed on the Good Friday and then so he's on the sixth day, and that's the day of humanity, the sixth day. Then he is in the tomb on that seventh day, the Sabbath day, the Saturday, and then he rises early on the first day of a new week. So it's a day one. But it's also a day eight, isn't it? Because it's the day after the seventh day. It's a day eight. So it's a day one because it's the first day of this new creation and his body has already passed through and the very atoms of his body, like we, in a way, we'd want to be able to inspect. It'd be fascinating to inspect the very atoms of his resurrected body, because they have already that small portion of the material of the cosmos has already entered into this new state of being that the whole of the rest of the universe is yearning for. And it could be that because a portion of the universe has already passed through into this new state of chemical being, elemental being, maybe that's intensified the yearning that is in the elements of the universe. But there's Jesus, the fundamental truth of the universe, his death and resurrection, and he rises from the dead on this eighth day. So that gives us that's the ground zero for understanding the number eight.

Speaker 1:

But when we think about the Levitical feasts, the final festival of the Levitical feasts is the Feast of Tents or Tabernacles, and that's when it's there in Leviticus 23, from verses 33 to 44. And it's all about living in a tent for a week and the idea is you abandon your normal lifestyle and then you have to live under canvas and it's in the autumn, so it's not necessarily completely warm. It could be wet and windy and definitely colder than it would have been. Say it because it's the northern hemisphere, so it'd definitely be colder, cooler than it would have been in, say, june or something like that. And and it's deliberately supposed to be an uncomfortable situation, because you're in this temporary structure under canvas, and the way you're preparing your food, your bed, everything has an instability about it and it's tougher and everything has an impermanence about it and it's tougher and everything has an impermanence about it.

Speaker 1:

But you're to do that, according in Leviticus 23, 33 to 44, for seven full days, an entire week, like a complete unit of time, in that biblical mentality. And at the end of the seven days, and at the end of the seven days, on the eighth day, that's when you move back into your more solid dwellings, the permanent dwelling of a house with brick walls and like a proper bed with a mattress and a kitchen with facilities. And the idea is, you then experience moving from this kind of unstable temporary accommodation to stable, permanent, solid dwelling. Dwelling and that feeling of coming back into your permanent, solid structure with better facilities and all the rest of it, that feeling of moving from unstable to stable is about new creation, hope. That's what that final festival is about. It's saying have an experience of something that will make you feel like you will feel when, on the day of cosmic resurrection, when we all receive our resurrection bodies, and that there'll be that feeling that what we're now living in and Paul says this in 2 Corinthians our current bodies are like temporary tents. They are like tents and it's a temporary dwelling for us, and then we die and that tent's gone, and then we're literally not, we're sort of uh, have no kind of physical um dwelling at all. We're disembodied for a while, but paul says that's okay because we're in heaven, we're with christ and he's our light, true home, and we we can see his physical body and we'll see, we'll be yearning to inherit our own one of that. So in paradise, though, we will be disembodied, which is not what we want, says Paul. We don't want to be unclothed, we want to be clothed more thoroughly. That's like Paul's point we don't want to be unclothed, we don't want to be disembodied. So now we've got temporary clothing, then we die, physically die, and then we've got no clothing at all. We're unclothed. But that's not our hope. Our hope is to be clothed with a permanent dwelling, our permanent clothing, and that's the physical resurrection of the future. When Christ returns, and then all of those, everyone, will receive that resurrection body. But those of us who trust in him, we get to enjoy that resurrection in the cosmos that's been also resurrected and liberated from its bondage to decay. But if we are, if we have insisted on rejecting Christ, we are shut out in the outer darkness, with their, with their, with all that. That means, with all that that means. So that's the Leviticus 23, 33 to 44, an eight day festival. That was an experience of moving from instability to stability. And maybe, maybe atoms experience something of that whenever they combine and move from a state where, say, there's oxygen that's hoping to get a couple of electrons to fill its outer level, and then it joins with a couple of hydrogen atoms and the hydrogen atom gets to a point of stability and the oxygen atom does, and they move from instability to stability and are then happy atoms. Maybe they experience something. Those atoms then experience what humans did in the Levitical festival of the Feast of Tents.

Speaker 1:

Circumcision was also done on the eighth day. Genesis 17, 10 to 14. Circumcision to be done on the eighth day because that was also a sign of new birth, new creation, resurrection, the idea being the like flesh again. It's that idea that there's this temporary dwelling that is our flesh and we cannot put our hope in it. If we live for the temporary dwelling, we have no future, there is no life for us if we are saying I'm putting all my hope in what is temporary. No, the gospel, all the way through the Bible, from Genesis, chapter 1 to the end, is to say don't do that, don't invest in what is temporary. See the temporary for what it is and look forward to trust in Christ to deliver the permanent, the eternal, the immortal, the resurrection, future, trust in him to follow him into death and then into his resurrection and future.

Speaker 1:

And so circumcision was a symbolic way of cutting off a bit of the flesh and throwing it away as a statement to say I have no confidence in the flesh. I'm throwing it away because I'm looking for something else, and it's particularly at that part of the body, because that part of the body is where it's easy to believe that the flesh can provide new life, because, literally, new life comes about through that part of the body. New life comes about through that part of the body and you get a newborn baby. And you see a newborn baby and you can think, oh, he has really new life. And yet we can easily forget that baby has a life expectancy, the same as all, and although it looks totally new, it's got the same old humanity that we all have. That baby is not genuinely new, it's not immortal, it's dying, just like we are the baby.

Speaker 1:

And so the circumcision was a way of cutting off some flesh from that part of the body and throwing it away to say no, we do not trust in this temporary flesh, this tent that has to be cast off, and rather we look to not our seed, our human fleshly seed that can only give birth to flesh. We look to the seed, the seed of God, a totally different kind of seed, the seed of God, the Christ and the new creation, the new humanity that can be found in him through his death and resurrection of Jesus and baptism as a washing away of the old and a bursting and a coming into the new life of the new creation. Baptism is also that, but it's all about the number eight and we'll just think of one more. Of course, the eight people are saved in Noah's ark as the world passed through judgment into a renewed creation. Number eight is the number of Noah, isn't it?

Speaker 1:

And there's that way in which the old world, that was a temporary world, and there were people were warned in scripture that people had invested utterly in that world, that corrupt, fallen world, with the, with the fallen angels and the nephilim and the corruption of it all, and and they believed it was going to last forever perhaps. But they lived for that as if it was gonna, and yet it was. It was doomed, it was doomed and the only hope was to get into that symbol of the church, the ark, that place of safety. And then it was like baptism, says Peter, that there's this washing away that brings death to the old, and then that water also gives birth to a new beginning, a new life, and then, when they get off the ark, the Lord addresses Noah as if he's a new Adam, and they're given the same commission that Adam and Eve had been given to populate the earth and have a new beginning. Now, of course, it wasn't a totally new beginning because although it is like a new earth after Noah's ark, noah and his family there's deep corruption still in them.

Speaker 1:

But nevertheless, eight were saved. And so the Lord, god, gave the number eight to the incident of Noah. And we look at it and we think of eight and we go ah, it's about the hope of new creation, the hope that the old, temporary will go and the new will come, that the unstable, temporary will be replaced by the stable and permanent. So the whole creation longs for this renewal. It longs to become stable instead of constantly decaying away into death and vanity, instead of constantly decaying away into death and vanity. Yeah, and as we say, it's hard to imagine what the chemistry of the new creation might be like. But this longing for a state of eight is a loud and clear cry for redemption.

Speaker 1:

And I love studying this aspect of chemistry, and I know we've labored it, but I love it. Let me just point out one other thing Dr Andy Hayden in Swansea shared this with me another aspect of chemistry, and it's about one of the basic molecules of life. All the energy that living creatures use comes from the sun, the S-U-N, and the Bible tells us in Psalm 19 of the universal and profound importance of the sun S-U-N for life on earth. Everything depends on its light and heat, and that's literally true. Children often ask why plants are green and the answer they are given is that plants contain chlorophyll to enable them to transform the light of the sun into oxygen. The light of the sun into oxygen. But more than that, more than that happens in plants when they take the light of the sun. They don't only produce oxygen, but plants also form these basic molecules of life, molecules that are formed from the light of the sun. It's as if the light of the sun is turned into a physical form and then, when creatures like fireflies or algae want to glow in the dark, they take those molecules and turn them back into light.

Speaker 1:

Now the name given to these life molecules is adenosine triphosphate, which shortened to ATP, that second word, triphosphate. Tri means three, and phosphate refers to phosphorus, and the word phosphorus phos is the word is Greek for light and then the phorus is like carrying bura, like a bura, a carrier, light carrier. So the word phosphorus literally means a light carrier. Now we don't need to get into all the technical chemistry involved in ATP, but notice this that at the heart of the life molecule are three pieces of phosphorus, three light bearers, and ATP is the life molecule. Every living creature uses the chemical compound ATP to get life and energy.

Speaker 1:

Atp is made of three molecules of phosphorus that's at the heart of it. Three molecules of phosphorus that's at the heart of it, three molecules of phosphorus. And in order to give up this life, in order for the life that's like, that's contained in this molecule, atp, in order for it to release its life to the creature who has it, one of these three molecules of phosphorus must let's put it like this, it must sacrifice itself. So think of that, the heart of the life molecule, atp. There are three molecules of phosphorus, three light bearers, one of which must be sacrificed in order for ATP to give up its life and energy. And Dr Andy Hayden in Swansea explained this and he wrote it up in a fabulous document about it, and it's like an incredible testimony to the life of the Trinity through the cross, and it's right there at the heart of every living creature. You know, without ATP, nothing in your body works. Muscles won't move, brain doesn't function, heart doesn't pump, you don't breathe. No ATP equals no life. You're dead without it. And so the living God has designed this fundamental life molecule in such a way that it's teaching us wonderful things If we've got the eyes to see it. Well, there's loads to say about the ATP molecule. Well, there's loads to say about the ATP molecule, and Dr Andy Hayden explained so much of that to me, but I can't share it all now. But hopefully that's enough for you to go and explore that yourself.

Speaker 1:

Let me end this little series on chemistry with something wonderful that I came across from David Vosburgh, a professor of chemistry, and he kind of did a chemistry version of Psalm 148, calling on the whole of creation to praise the Lord. Calling on the whole of creation to praise the Lord. It's kind of like a chemist's deep dive, because Psalm 148 goes through the whole creation, calling on it to join in the praise of the Lord, and David Vosburgh, professor of chemistry, sort of adapt that to be super chemistry based. So I'll just read it and make of it, if you can understand all the elements that he mentions, great. If not, don't worry about it, but it's just, you'll get the feel of it.

Speaker 1:

Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord from the classroom. Praise him in the laboratory too. Praise him all his molecules. Praise him all his proteins and nucleic acids. Praise him all alkaloids and steroids. Praise him all you sweet carbohydrates. Praise him you manifold terpenoids and you polykeptides and peptides. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created. He formed them from the elements. He decreed how they should bond. Praise the Lord from the NMR. All you chemists in industry and academia, whether you be famous or not. Carbon and oxygen, sulfur and nitrogen, electrons that do all his bonding, euflorine and chlorine, light hydrogen and heavy iodine and heavy iodine, all alkanes and alkenes, every alkene and aromatic ring, all amines and aldehydes, ketones and carboxylic acids, esters, amides, anhydrides, alcohols and ethers. Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted. His splendor is revealed in our every molecule. He has raised up for his people the Christ. The praise of all his saints of the church.