The Watch on the Beach

I was having a rather interesting conversation with several friends on Facebook the other day about how some people see God in the world around them. It's a subject that's probably worth a post in itself, but there was a specific aspect of the conversation that got me thinking about the subject of the evolution/creation debate, which I haven't written on in a long time, but I wanted to revisit. I should say upfront that I've come to a point in my life where, while I still believe in God, I'm pretty firmly on the evolution side of the debate, but there are still interesting aspects to the conversation nonetheless.

The thing that came up in the conversation was an argument that I myself have used in the past, and it's a classic creationist parable. Imagine you're walking on the beach. As you walk along, you see something shiny in the sand at your feet. You reach down and pull it out of the sand to find it's a gold watch. Do you say to yourself, "Amazing! The random action of the tides and the sand has fashioned this timekeeping device!"? Of course you don't; you recognize that you're holding an object that has been designed.

So now, the argument turns to the human body and asks, do you realize that even on the cellular level the human body is a far more intricate and amazing piece of machinery than that watch? Cells processing minerals, nutrients, and strands of RNA, joined togather to make organs that serve larger, specialized purposes, all fitted together within your skin to make a large, incredibly complex machine that has the ability to do everything that a human body does. How can we look at this amazingly complex piece of machinery and say this was the result of random chance?

That's the Intelligent Design argument, but we know it's evolution; we have mountains of evidence, including fossils of so many of the intermediate species that evolved from simple single-celled organisms to something fish-like to something reptile-like to something rodent-like to something ape-like to what we are now. We know, minus a few minor details, how we got from simple life forms to homo sapiens, and a designer is actually not necessary for the process. Yet it bothers me still.

Why do we look at the watch and say it must have a designer? It really is so much simpler and easier to construct than a human body. You could take apart a watch, and if you were particularly clever, you could figure out how to put it back together, or even build one from parts you made yourself. Nobody could do that with a human body. Even the collective knowledge of all the scientists in the world today couldn't figure out how to build something like a human being from scratch.

The watch itself is also the product of evolution in a sense. Watches are probably never designed completely different from any watch that came before, but were built as improvements on prior designs. It occurred to me that if clocks had been invented in the southern hemisphere, they would run counterclockwise (although we wouldn't call it that) because the earliest clocks were based design-wise on sundials, a kind of proto-clock. However, that evolution was certainly guided by intelligence, although obviously not by a single supernatural one.

So, this is the thing: a watch is complicated enough that we say it must have had a designer, but does there come a point of complexity where we say something is beyond the scope of a designer? What is the basis--separate from knowing an object's history--for judging whether it had a designer?

COVID-19 and mRNA vaccines

Okay, I wanted to take some time to explain how the mRNA vaccines work. I'm not a biologist, but perhaps that's a good thing, as I have studied enough of the science to understand how they work, and I believe I can explain it in very plain English.

First of all, it's worth dispelling some rumors that were common in the early days of the vaccines, and I still hear occasionally today. The vaccines do not have any affect on a person's DNA; your DNA is stored in the center of your body's cells, and there is nothing in the vaccines that actually enters into the cells.

The vaccines are essentially made of mRNA, which is something that naturally occurs in the human body. When your cells need to build a protein for some reason, your body produces mRNA to tell your cells to do so. The mRNA is essentially a chemical blueprint explaining how to build that particular protein.

What scientists have done in the case of COVID-19 is they have used the body's method of using mRNA to get the body to build a special protein that is called the "spike protein". While the technology of pretty much every previous vaccine was to inject the body with some weakened form of the virus you were supposed to be getting protection from, these new vaccines have mRNA blueprints of the "spike protein", which mimics the form of the actual virus. In both cases, your immune system reacts as though it is infected, and fights off the infection, but has the advantage of not actually fighting a live, dangerous virus.

Unlike what many people have either outright said or merely implied, this process *is* creating a form of natural immunity. Your immune system is learning what it's like to have an infection so that if it gets another infection (this time a "real" one) it has the tools to fight it in the form of antibodies. Contrary to what most people think, vaccines were never about stopping you from getting infected; they were about teaching your immune system to deal with an infection effectively.

Now yes, there is a downside in the case of COVID-19, and it's similar to the problem with the flu vaccine. No vaccine is 100% effective, but in the case of some diseases, the effectiveness is actually quite a ways off from 100%. The flu is a disease that frequently mutates, and will tend to come back different every flu season. So if you get a flu vaccine, it actually is a vaccine against two or three variants of the flu virus that scientists are expecting to be going around. Like the flu, the COVID virus has done a lot of mutating, and there are a lot of variants. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are only designed to help your immune system fight off the variants that existed at the time the vaccine was developed, so, yes, a vaccinated person can get COVID.

The good part of this, and a big part of the reason doctors are suggesting getting the vaccine even if you've been infected, is that while the vaccine won't stop you from getting infected, it still has been shown to help you fight the virus so that your infection is less severe than it likely would have been without the vaccine.

As for what happens in your body when you actually get the vaccine, the mRNA in the vaccine goes to your cells and without entering them, it delivers the message to build the spike protein. Having delivered the message, it naturally breaks up and dissolves like every mRNA in your body. When the spike protein is built, your immune system reacts, knowing immediately that this protein is not one that belongs. It figures out how to break it down and eat it, which is exactly what it will do to the virus if it encounters it later. So within about 48 hours or so, there is nothing left from the vaccine but the knowledge of how to fight the virus.