The Biblical Concepts of \u3cem\u3ePotentia Dei Ordinata\u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3ePotentia Dei Absoluta\u3c/em\u3e in the Development of Chemistry

Medieval theologians spoke of the potentia Dei ordinata (the power of God expressed in the orderly working of nature) and the potentia Dei absoluta (the absolute power of God to intervene miraculously) (Kaiser 1997). Scientific creationists accept this understanding – we believe that God has ordained natural laws that result in a comprehensible natural world. But we recognize God is not bound by natural laws but can act miraculously, as when He spoke the world into existence. This understanding was also foundational not just for the development of science itself. It first appeared outside of the Bible in the Hexameron, a series of lectures on the six days of creation by Basil of Caesarea. Unlike most church fathers, Basil focused on what God communicated through creation itself (Bouteneff 2008). He read Genesis literally and argued for the study of nature to see God’s glory. Basil taught that the Lord had created natural laws to govern the normal operation of nature so we could see his greatness in it (Kaiser 1997). This is possibly the first extra-biblical articulation of the potentia Dei ordinata. This concept was fundamental in the establishment of the sciences, including chemistry. Chemistry has its roots in alchemy, which rested on the assumption matter was composed of Aristotle’s four elements (fire, earth, air, and water) and supernatural intervention was necessary to alter those elements for transmutation. A key figure in beginning to emphasize the potentia Dei ordinata instead was the Christian physician and alchemist Paracelsus. Paracelsus rejected the four elements of Aristotle because he did not find any mention in Genesis of God creating fire. He suggested three principles instead: sulfur, mercury, and salt (Salzeberg 1991). Furthermore, because Jesus had said the sick needed a physician, he concluded that it was unacceptable that physicians of his day were so ineffective. The Lord surely provided the information needed to treat the sick. This set him on a series of experiments that revolutionized medicine and chemistry (Kaiser 1997). Paracelsus did not make a full break from alchemy, he still believed that every organ of the body was empowered by a different spiritual force (Salzeberg 1991) but he was clearly moving the emphasis from the potentia Dei absoluta to the potentia Dei ordinata. Probably the best known of Paracelsus’ followers was Johan Van Helmont, famous in chemistry for discovering gases. While still believing that there was a separate spirit to every chemical compound, he further developed Paracelsus’s emphasis on invoking the potentia Dei ordinata to understand chemistry through experiments. Van Helmont rejected Aristotle’s 4 elements based on scripture (Genesis simply didn’t describe God creating the world from fire, earth, air, and water) but also rejected Paracelsus’s 3 principles based on experimental results (Salzeberg 1991). He wrote “I believe nature is the command of God, whereby a thing is that which it is, and doth that which it is commanded to do or act.” (Kaiser 1997). The transition from alchemy to chemistry culminated in Robert Boyle. He greatly respected Van Helmont and so expected to find spiritual forces in the movement of gases. But experiments led him to conclude it was not necessary to invoke potentia Dei absoluta to explain chemical behavior. Gas molecules behaved as they did due to natural laws God had ordained to govern them. He did not see this as detracting from God’s glory but rather emphasized His role as Creator and sustainer of an orderly world (Kaiser 1997). God was capable of intervening miraculously but generally He is glorified in creation through the potentia Dei ordinata. This was the understanding of Basil and is that of creationists today. Rather than being a modern aberration, the creationist view was foundational for the development of science, as illustrated by the history of chemistry

THE DESIGN AND SYNTHESIS OF NOVEL CHELATES FOR THE PRECIPITATION OF MERCURY

Mercury has been an element of great industrial importance since early times.This wide utilization of the element has led to pervasive mercury contamination in theglobal environment. Due to mercury\u27s high toxicity, this is a matter of great concern. Anumber of methods, includ ing phytoremediation, filtration, and precipitation/chelation,have been investigated to remove mercury from the environment. Unfortunately, thesemethods are not entirely satisfactory for the in-situ remediation of mercury from aqueousenvironments.The hypothesis of this dissertation is that this can best be accomplished by theaddition of a large and flexible sulfur-based chelate, that will bind mercury in atetracoordinate and presumably tetrahedral environment, to mercury-contaminatedwaters. Although this proved difficult due to the tendency of these ligands to decomposeinto smaller, sulfur-containing rings, the synthesis and characterization of such a chelatewas achieved. Several potential mercury-binding ligands were eventually synthesizedsignificant amounts of mercury (91-100%) from the contaminated solutions, in one caselowering the mercury levels in the water to below the CVAF detection limits. Theresulting solids lost little (andlt;15 ppb) of their mercury during leaching studies.This work demonstrates the use of tetradentate chelates in precipating Hg2+ fromwater to produce stable mercury- ligand precipitates. A calculation for the quantification ofthe geometry of a four-coordinate compound was also developed and applied to aluminum,gallium, and mercury compounds. This calculation could also be applied to the mercurycompounds described in this thesis once X-ray structures become availabl

Potential Mechanisms for the Deposition of Halite and Anhydrite in a Near-critical or Supercritical Submarine Environment

The formation of geologic salt deposits has long been an area of concern for creation geology. Uniformitarian geology has pictured these deposits as forming due to the evaporation of seawater, hence their designation “evaporites”. Both creationist (Nutting, 1984; Williams, 2003) and uniformitarian (Hardie and Lowenstein, 2004) literature have noted problems with evaporation models and creationist literature has suggested a hydrothermal model as a more likely mechanism for evaporite formation (Nutting, 1984; Williams, 2003). This contribution will review some hydrothermal mechanisms for rapid deposition of these salts and discuss possible evidence that could be used to identify these mechanisms in the geologic record. Submarine hydrothermal fluids possess significant salinity. At near-critical temperatures (~400°C and 250-290 bars), hydrothermal fluids undergo a phase separation into a vapor and NaCl-rich brine, containing higher concentration of NaCl than the original fluid (Von Damn et al., 2003). Salt will be concentrated in this brine and as it is pushed upward, it will both cool and be placed under lower pressure, leading to halite (NaCl) precipitation (Berndt and Seyfried Jr., 1997). Creationist models assume extensive hydrothermal activity at the time of the Flood, so this mechanism would have the potential to deposit a significant amount of salt. Deposits formed in this way would be expected to be primarily composed of halite; anhydrite (CaSO4) is significantly insoluble in high-temperature water (Hovland et al., 2006). Any anhydrite present would have precipitated before the halite and therefore would be found stratigraphically lower than it in the geologic record. Furthermore, near-critical hydrothermal fluids have been noted to contain unusually high Fe/Mn ratios (Von Damn et al., 2003); the presence of similar ratios in fluid inclusions in the halite might indicate it formed under these conditions. Another mechanism for “evaporite” formation is suggested by Hovland and coworkers and involves both sub-critical and supercritical processes (Hovland et al., 2006). Hovland’s mechanism requires a source of extremely high heat , such as a magma chamber, below a porous seabed. In Hovland’s model, the sediment primarily serves to protect the halite from redissolution; during the rapid sedimentation of the Flood, capping by newly deposited sediments could achieve the same protection. In either view, the saline water is heated by the magma chamber, leading to the precipitation of anhydrite in areas of less intense heat and supercritical conditions leading to halite precipitation in the most intense heat (405°C and 300 bars), directly above the heat source (Hovland et al., 2006). In a supercritical environment, water behaves like a non-polar liquid; therefore it will be a far better solvent for organic compounds than salts and will precipitate any halite it contains. This entire process would be expected to generate halite deposits directly above the heat source, with anhydrite deposits flanking the halite. Geologic salt deposits have likely formed by a variety of mechanisms. There is not one simple answer for their origin. However, if a thorough understanding of the mechanisms for rapidly precipitating salts and criteria for determining which mechanism was responsible for a given deposit are developed, it should be possible to understand these features on a case-bycase basis. This contribution is a step towards developing those mechanisms and criteria

The Fate of Arsenic in Noah’s Flood

One potential consequence of Noah’s Flood would be the mobilization of toxic elements such as arsenic (As), a group 15 metalloid with a significant solubility and redox chemistry in water and a high toxicity to human beings. This paper discusses the likely chemistry of arsenic during the Flood. The Flood would have released arsenic through hydrothermal activity, volcanic eruptions, and weathering of crustal rock. Arsenic in hydrothermal fluid would likely be rapidly precipitated by sulfides. Likewise, much of the arsenic in volcanoes would actually be deposited sub-surface as sulfides. In the presence of oxygen-rich waters, these sulfide minerals can undergo oxidative dissolution, releasing the arsenic back into the water to join that liberated by the weathering of the surface. Iron oxyhydroxides would form in such an environment, however, and these will sorb and remove arsenic from the water once again. In waters rich in organic-carbon, reducing conditions can return periodically. This would lead to reductive dissolution to liberate the arsenic from the iron oxyhydroxides. However, these conditions can also reduce sulfates to sulfides and thus reprecipitate the arsenic sulfide minerals. Furthermore, the extremely rapid formation of sedimentary rock during the Flood would likely bury both the original sulfide minerals and the arsenic-sorbed iron oxyhydroxides before they could be significantly dissolved. The modern distribution of arsenic gives evidence of this; the element is often concentrated in large sedimentary basins adjacent to orogenic belts. It appears that arsenic sulfides (formed during the Flood) were in some cases subject to uplift during orogenesis associated with the Flood and underwent oxidation, resulting in the arsenic being sorbed to iron minerals and clays. These eroded into the foreland basins and were buried before the arsenic could leach into local waters to a major degree. In modern times, however, reductive dissolutions of these deposits has resulted in arsenic poisoning. While arsenic does not threaten the Flood model (rather the Flood explains the modern distribution of arsenic), modern arsenic contamination is an ongoing result of the judgement of the Flood

UR-379 Combatting Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning

The growing concern in data privacy has led to new paradigms in Machine Learning primarily focused around keep data safe and secure. In our research project, we studied Federated Learning, specifically utilizing knowledge distillation and an autoencoder in an attempt to create a sustainable model that could be used in a field such as Heathcare. We propose a Federated Model using the Flower framework, trained on the MedMNIST2D dataset (Organ(A/C/S)MNIST), using Knowledge Distillation as a method of sharing the global model, and a Variational Autoencoder to deal with the problem of Data Heterogeneity that can arise on a distributed network. Our results on a cumulative model are tentative but hope to prove that the idea can be utilized in networks with varying sizes of edge device, usage, and types.