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

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

Biological Implications of Hydroxyapatite Coatings on 3D Printed Titanium Implants

This study sought to determine the growth of and viability of osteoblast cells on hydroxyapatite coatings of 3D-printed titanium implants. The experiment used twenty 3D-printed titanium disks each of which had a determined surface roughness. These disks were printed by Tangible Solutions, LLC (Fairborn, OH) and then sonicated. Ten of the disks were coated with hydroxyapatite through the process of electrodeposition using an open cell and a three lead potentiostat. Using the hydroxyapatite coated titanium disks and uncoated disks, two four-day growth trials were performed. Two trials used five control disks (uncoated titanium disks) and five coated disks each, making an n of 10 for the total experiment. The disks were each placed into the wells of a culture plate and each disk was seeded with 15,000 human osteoblast cells. After four days in the incubator, the cells were removed using trypsin and the counted using the CytoSmart Automated Hemocytometer. The cell count from each disk as well as the viability of the cells from each disk were recorded. Means comparison was performed using Tukey-Kramer method of analysis. Results from the cell count portion of the experiment showed that the mean of the hydroxyapatite group was not significantly greater than the control group (p=0.83). In addition, cell viability of the hydroxyapatite group was also not significantly different than the control group (p=0.31). This data was unexpected but may be due to a change in the surface roughness between the two groups caused by the hydroxyapatite coating decreasing the surface roughness. The surface roughness selected for the experiment was chosen due to it being the most ideal for osteoblast growth, but any less rough surfaces were shown to be less ideal for osteoblast cell growth. Future Experiments will remove the variable of surface roughness

Disturbance regimes predictably alter diversity in an ecologically complex bacterial system

© The Author(s), 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in mBio 7 (2016): e01372-16, doi:10.1128/mBio.01372-16.Diversity is often associated with the functional stability of ecological communities from microbes to macroorganisms. Understanding how diversity responds to environmental perturbations and the consequences of this relationship for ecosystem function are thus central challenges in microbial ecology. Unimodal diversity-disturbance relationships, in which maximum diversity occurs at intermediate levels of disturbance, have been predicted for ecosystems where life history tradeoffs separate organisms along a disturbance gradient. However, empirical support for such peaked relationships in macrosystems is mixed, and few studies have explored these relationships in microbial systems. Here we use complex microbial microcosm communities to systematically determine diversity-disturbance relationships over a range of disturbance regimes. We observed a reproducible switch between community states, which gave rise to transient diversity maxima when community states were forced to mix. Communities showed reduced compositional stability when diversity was highest. To further explore these dynamics, we formulated a simple model that reveals specific regimes under which diversity maxima are stable. Together, our results show how both unimodal and non-unimodal diversity-disturbance relationships can be observed as a system switches between two distinct microbial community states; this process likely occurs across a wide range of spatially and temporally heterogeneous microbial ecosystems

A Conserved Bicycle Model for Circadian Clock Control of Membrane Excitability

SummaryCircadian clocks regulate membrane excitability in master pacemaker neurons to control daily rhythms of sleep and wake. Here, we find that two distinctly timed electrical drives collaborate to impose rhythmicity on Drosophila clock neurons. In the morning, a voltage-independent sodium conductance via the NA/NALCN ion channel depolarizes these neurons. This current is driven by the rhythmic expression of NCA localization factor-1, linking the molecular clock to ion channel function. In the evening, basal potassium currents peak to silence clock neurons. Remarkably, daily antiphase cycles of sodium and potassium currents also drive mouse clock neuron rhythms. Thus, we reveal an evolutionarily ancient strategy for the neural mechanisms that govern daily sleep and wake

Using [Ne V]/[Ne III] to Understand the Nature of Extreme-Ionization Galaxies

Spectroscopic studies of extreme-ionization galaxies (EIGs) are critical to our understanding of exotic systems throughout cosmic time. These EIGs exhibit spectral features requiring >54.42 eV photons: the energy needed to fully ionize helium into He2+ and emit He II recombination lines. They are likely key contributors to reionization, and they can also probe exotic stellar populations or accretion onto massive black holes. To facilitate the use of EIGs as probes of high ionization, we focus on ratios constructed from strong rest-frame UV/optical emission lines, specifically [O III] 5008, H-beta, [Ne III] 3870, [O II] 3727,3729, and [Ne V] 3427. These lines probe the relative intensity at energies of 35.12, 13.62, 40.96, 13.62 eV, and 97.12, respectively, covering a wider range of ionization than traced by other common rest-frame UV/optical techniques. We use ratios of these lines ([Ne V]/[Ne III] = Ne53 and [Ne III]/[O II]), which are closely separated in wavelength, and mitigates effects of dust attenuation and uncertainties in flux calibration. We make predictions from photoionization models constructed from Cloudy that use a broad range of stellar populations and black hole accretion models to explore the sensitivity of these line ratios to changes in the ionizing spectrum. We compare our models to observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope of galaxies with strong high-ionization emission lines at z ~ 0, z ~ 2, and z ~ 7. We show that the Ne53 ratio can separate galaxies with ionization from 'normal' stellar populations from those with AGN and even 'exotic' Population III models. We introduce new selection methods to identify galaxies with photoionization driven by Population III stars or intermediate-mass black hole accretion disks that could be identified in upcoming high-redshift spectroscopic surveys.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted in Ap