Apples and apple pie are inscrutably mysterious \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons pubic domain photo)\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
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I published this column in Salt Lake City\u2019s Deseret News<\/em> on Thanksgiving Day 2017:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,\u201d the late American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan once quipped, \u201cyou must first invent the universe.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Americans enjoy their Thanksgiving dinners today, many of those dinners will include apple pie.\u00a0 But any other food would serve to make Sagan\u2019s important point.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Unless we ourselves grew the apples and grains and other ingredients vital to our apple pie, we can\u2019t really claim to have made it from scratch.\u00a0 After all, those components came to us via complex and varied trade networks, from widely scattered farms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Moreover, the hardworking farmers who grew our apples and the grains for our piecrusts didn\u2019t create them out of nothing.\u00a0 They came from pre-existing seeds.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lest this column rapidly grow far too complicated, though, we\u2019ll concentrate only on the apples:<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rev. William Blaxton planted the first apple orchard in North America in Boston, in 1625.\u00a0 But apples had already been grown in Asia and Europe for millennia.\u00a0 In fact, the apple tree, which originated in Central Asia, may have been the earliest tree ever cultivated.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Where do apple trees come from, ultimately?\u00a0 The origin of life on Earth as a whole remains a mystery; science doesn\u2019t know how or whence it arose.\u00a0 But apples are very far from simple or primitive organisms.\u00a0 The apple genome, its genetic material, may contain more genes than any other plant genome yet analyzed, and perhaps even more than the human genome does.\u00a0 But even a single gene is a remarkable thing.\u00a0 Unlike the machines that humans create, DNA\u2014the hereditary material in cells\u2014has the capacity to reproduce itself.\u00a0 Planting a Porsche or a hammer doesn\u2019t yield new craftsman\u2019s tools or sports cars.\u00a0 Apple trees, though, produce seeds that, in their turn, yield new apple trees.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
This would all be irrelevant, of course, had chemical and biological processes not created soil in which to plant apple seeds.\u00a0 Moreover, according to some current science, that soil wouldn\u2019t have contained key ingredients for the chemistry of life\u2014elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur\u2014if\u00a0 they weren\u2019t regularly replenished by the constant movements of the tectonic plates that cover Earth\u2019s surface.\u00a0 (In other words, you may owe your apple pie to the same forces that cause earthquakes.)<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
There would be no soil, though, no tectonic plates and neither apples nor apple pie if there were no Earth. Where did it come from?\u00a0 Our solar system formed roughly 4.6 billion years ago and, shortly thereafter, the Earth began to coalesce.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimately, of course, the genesis of apples is to be found in the Big Bang, which occurred (for reasons that may lie forever beyond the reach of science) about 13.7 billion years ago.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the path from the Big Bang to the appearance of life (and apple pies) on Earth is paved with remarkable facts.\u00a0 Somehow, only a fraction of a second after that unimaginable explosion, nature\u2019s fundamental forces were established\u2014in ways that make life possible.\u00a0 If, for example, gravity differed even slightly\u2014making you weigh a billionth of a gram more or less than you do\u2014or if the universe\u2019s expansion rate were even slightly slower or faster, or if the overall density of the cosmos varied by as little as 0.0000000000001%\u2014roughly the same precision required for a blindfolded man to choose a single predesignated coin from a pile of pennies sufficient to pay off the national debt of the United States\u2014either a \u201cBig Crunch\u201d would shortly have followed the Big Bang or, alternatively, atoms would have scattered so widely that neither galaxies, stars, planets nor apples could have formed.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sir Fred Hoyle (d. 2001), an illustrious astronomer and a vocal atheist, conducted path-breaking research into the indispensable role that stars played in the synthesis of all the chemical elements heavier than helium\u2014including carbon\u2014without which life (and apple pie) would be impossible.\u00a0 What he found shocked him deeply:<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA commonsense interpretation of the facts,\u201d he commented, \u201csuggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Making apple pie absolutely from scratch is plainly more difficult than most of us have imagined.\u00a0 Downright mysterious, in fact.\u00a0 Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Newport Beach, California<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 I published this column in Salt Lake City\u2019s Deseret News on Thanksgiving Day 2017: \u00a0 \u201cIf you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,\u201d the late American astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan once quipped, \u201cyou must first invent the universe.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0 As Americans enjoy their Thanksgiving dinners today, many of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6879,3790,6876,545,2007,4619,123,6882,6711],"class_list":["post-80436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apple-pie","tag-big-bang","tag-carl-sagan","tag-fine-tuning","tag-fred-hoyle","tag-id","tag-intelligent-design","tag-scratch","tag-thanksgiving"],"yoast_head":"\n
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