Aspects of Divine Intelligence

Robert Anderson BSc(Hons) PhD

4 February 1942 to 5 December 2008

Robert Anderson intended this draft script to become a talk. Sadly, he died before completing the Power Point presentation. Despite this, we at CONNECTED decided it was worth posting on our website.

Who has not heard someone say, I wish I could witness a miracle. The Indian mystic, Paramahansa Yogananda¹, replied to a student who voiced this complaint, "Nature sprinkles miracles beneath your feet every day, but you simply don't notice them.”

Yogananda was absolutely right. Have you ever really stopped and listened to a grey warbler? A grey warbler is generally about 4 cm high; without his feathers about 2 cm high. How does a tiny creature like that produce such a rapturous melody? The miracle of our birth is an amazingly inspiring process. In fact, if we take the time to look around us, there are untold examples of miraculous events taking place in our world every day.

For me, this is evidence of an extraordinary degree of intelligence operating throughout our world. We do not need to look at complex events to find illustrations. We need only look at the simplest processes to find this miraculous intelligence operating in nature. 

Consider the billions upon billions of snow flakes that fall in a snow storm. No two are ever the same. Like human beings, each snowflake is unique. Yet each snowflake conforms to the same basic shape.

The great astronomer, Sir James Jeans, once said, "The more we study our world and the universe in which we live, the more it looks like some great thought, rather than a great machine."

 I remind you of the simplest substance known. Without it, life as we know it would come to a sudden and very immediate end. We wash in it. We drink it. And we often needlessly waste it. Water. As every school boy knows, H₂0.

I used to tell my students that water was a magic substance and they would laugh. I could almost hear their thought: Bob’s being metaphysical again! Nevertheless, there are many properties of water, which science today still does not fully understand. When I have finished sharing with you some of the more common facts about water, I hope that you will be able to appreciate just a little of its very real magic quality.

When the water molecule is formed in nature, we would expect it to follow the usual rules of nature by obeying the laws of symmetry and pattern. Remember what we said about the snowflake? Each snowflake is unique, yet it conforms to the same basic shape. This is not the case with water. The water molecule forms with a distinct kink, a bond angle of 104⁰. This simple, small deviation in the water molecule is just one of the qualities which enables life to continue on Earth.

The shape of the water molecule can be simplified. It becomes a small bar magnet with a very tiny charge on both ends. In chemistry, we have a very special name for these little magnet type molecules. We call them dipoles.

(N.B Check out dipoles on http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole#Molecular_dipoles.)

Have you ever wondered what drives water up trees? Giant Redwoods grow to be 100 metres / 300 feet or more in height, yet water still makes it to the top. Any competent engineer will tell you that for us to pump water to a height of 100 metres requires a very substantial pump indeed. Yet nature has a miraculous way of solving this problem. It involves electrostatic attraction..

(N.B. Check out electrostatic attraction on https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/archives/2002/04_2002/msg00325.html)

Together with Osmotic pressure, electrostatic attraction drives 95 litres / 25gallons of water per hour up the trunk of a fully grown tree.

(N.B. Check out Osmotic pressure on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmotic_pressure.)W

What happens to all this water? It is released into the atmosphere. And how many gallons of water will a full grown tree pump into the atmosphere in its life time of about 100 years? Around 2.5 million gallons. The water is pumped into the atmosphere through tiny pores called stomata on the lower surface of the leaves. These equate to the lips of the leaves: millions upon millions of them per square metre of leaf surface.

I have said nothing here of the millions of cubic metres of waste carbon dioxide trees take in. Or of the millions of cubic meters of oxygen they give out that enables us to breath every day.

We should pause here to consider the ultimate effects of removing the Brazilian and Amazon rain forests. At present rates, most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of the next century. And with them vast numbers of plant and animal species. What state will our atmosphere then be in? The CO₂accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere at present has become a huge blanket. Our world is heating up rapidly. Some folk feel that this blanket may become our shroud. That is a topic for another day.

Another very simple but essential property of water is its huge specific and latent heats. Is this relevant?

Yes, very relevant, because our planet is kept cool by the oceans and lakes only because water has this high specific heat. It goes like this.

 Water has one of the highest heat capacities of common substances, requiring 4.1 kiloJoules to raise 1 litre of water by 1 degree C. In comparison, air requires 1 kJ / kilogram; the ground even less. Air and ground heat up faster on a sunny day because it requires less energy to do so than that required by the oceans. An air mass over a body of water is cooled by the water. It remains cooler than a similar air mass over land. Convection currents over land are created by warm air rising. These upward currents draw cooler air from over the oceans onto the land and this behaviour moderates the temperature over land.

Slower temperature changes can be the reflection of light off the surface of the oceans. Some bodies of water are very deep, so there is more to heat. Couple these facts with wave action and mixing, and any heat in the very top layer of water would be rapidly diluted, leaving colder water below it

There is another, even stranger property to water. It takes place near its freezing point. Unlike any other liquid, its density decreases, then swiftly increases once more. No other substance we know of has this strange property. Science books refer to it as an anomalous behaviour of water.

Under specified conditions, the density of a fluid can change. Water as a gas it is one of lightest known. In its liquid form, it is much denser that it is in its solid form. The behaviour of liquid water is different from the behaviour of other liquids.

These characteristics have given rise to the term the anomalous properties of water. And only because of this strange behaviour, can life survive on Earth. Water is truly unique

Many animals have an extraordinary sensitivity to water. The Elephant, for example, can detect water many metres under ground. In times of drought, the elephant has managed to save whole villages by finding water sources. The elephants body, like ours, is mostly water. It is thought that a resonance effect is set up and thus the animal is able to trace water even underground.

Water has a memory. If water did not have a memory, homoeopathy would not exist. A homoeopathic remedy is diluted hundreds of times to the point where a chemist would say there is not even an atom of the original substance left in the solution. But somehow the water remembers. For want of a expression, water remembers the vibration of the original substance used to make up the homoeopathic remedy.

Another small but not insignificant fact is that metabolic reactions take place fastest in water in the range 20C to 40C. This is precisely the range of our life processes; almost made to measure for us you might say.

Something that has come to light recently, came from the work of scientist, Professor Giogio Piccardi, Director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Florence. Piccardi found that chemical reactions in water are greatly influenced by electromagnetic fields. We might ask again. Is this relevant to us? The answer is very relevant because we human beings consist of 65% water. These leads to the question, what are the effects on our bodies of our technological world, with its computers, power lines and the multitudes of electrical appliances? We are only just beginning to find out.

The sensitivity of animals who live in this and other media also provide us with a miraculous collection of biological wonders. Eels are able to recognise a thimbleful of rose water diluted in a lake covering fourteen thousand square miles.¹ Think about that: 14 000 sq. miles of water. A male moth can detect the presence of a female of its species as far away as 30 miles by the presence of just one molecule of her scent in the air.²

This kind of awareness is completely foreign to us humans. We cannot even conceive of such sensitivity.

Even our laboratory instruments would be hard pressed to match this kind of analysis. We cannot even imagine the operation of such miraculous senses.

Returning to the unique properties of water mentioned previously, we find that all living things are subject to cosmic influences. Because water is sensitive to electromagnetic effects, it is reasonably safe to conclude that there must be ways that the sun and other cosmic forces will influence life on our world. The sun has an eleven year cycle of intense sunspot activity. Incredible as it may sound, we now know that this activity has effects, both on human beings and other life forms. Work by Soviet scientists has shown that our blood is directly effected by the sun. Over 12,000 tests were made on people in the Black Sea area to measure the number of lymphocytes in their blood. These small cells normally make up about 25% of our white blood cells. The number of these cells drops alarmingly with solar activity. The number of people suffering from diseases caused by lymphocyte deficiency actually doubled during the tremendous solar explosions of February 1956. Many of the body’s functions seem to be influenced by solar activity.

A study of 5 580 coal-mine accidents in Germany found they occurred on the day following solar activity.³

Traffic accidents in Germany and Russia were found to increase by as much as four times after solar activity.

A survey of 28 642 admissions to psychiatric hospitals in New York shows there is a marked increase on days of Solar disturbance.⁴ These results make it clear that the human being is, among other things, a remarkably sensitive living sun dial. The water within our cells makes us susceptible to deep-seated mechanisms that respond to the changes in the cosmos.

One morning in February 1966, a discovery was made that had far reaching effects on our views of plant sensitivity. Cleve Backster was a specialist in using the polygraph. This instrument measures changes in the resistance of the skin. (Known as and frequently used as a lie detector.) On this particular morning, however, Cleve Backster decide to see if he could measure the uptake of water in plants.

Having just watered a plant on his desk, he attached the instrument to the leaves of but received no reading. So Backster decided to try the “threat to well-being principle” which is a well known method of triggering emotion in humans. First, he dipped a leaf in hot coffee, but again there was no response. After lighting a

cigarette he decided to burn a leaf. At the instant the thought arose within his mind the plant reacted violently and there was an dramatic change in the PGR tracing. An abrupt and prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen took place. Backster had not moved or touched the plant.

Backster went on to explore the possibility of such perception in the plant by killing shrimps in boiling water.

Every time he killed a shrimp, the polygraph needle jumped violently. To eliminate the possibility that his own emotions may have an effect, he automated the experiment. The plant continued to respond to the death of the creatures. It did not do so to an already dead shrimp.

This phenomena, which Backster labelled primary perception,has been demonstrated in other laboratories.

It raises biological and moral questions. If dying cells send out signals to which other life responds, why do they do so? The answer to the moral problem lies in treating all life with respect and killing with real reluctance. Life survives in the chaos of the cosmos by picking order. Death is certain, but life becomes possible by following patterns that lead to firmer ground through time. Cycles of light and dark, of heat and cold, of magnetism and gravity, all provide vital guides to the subtle changes to which life seems to respond.

Science has to look, with reverence and great humility, on Mother Nature and take greater pains to understand how she works. She scatters miracles in profusion around us every day.

There is an old Persian legend called The Conference of the Birds would like to read it to you: All manner of birds gathered one day for a conference and were persuaded to disperse to the four corners of the world in search of the meaning of life. After many long and arduous years, they eventually returned home only to discover that what they were seeking had been right there all along. They were blind to it, but the journey away was very necessary to open their eyes.

In many ways this is the parable of our western science. After centuries of intellectual wanderings, that increasingly led away from nature, we are irresistibly drawn back to her in the realisation that there is no authentic knowledge, and hence no meaning in life, apart from nature. If we continue to forge arrogantly ahead without this humility, we will not only destroy ourselves, but also this, God's miraculous world of miracles of which we are only a small part.

As Edmund Burke said: Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another.

 

Robert Anderson BSc(Hons) PhD

4 February 1942 to 5 December 2008

 

Robert was a Quaker, teacher and writer. He was a Trustee of Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility (www.psgr.org.nz) and a campaigner for peace and disarmament. He believed everyone has the right to equality and respect, freedom of speech and religion He lectured on many subjects to meet the public’s right to be independently informed on issues of science, the environment and social justice. He was passionate about making this world a better place for the generations to come.

 Enquiries about books written by Robert Anderson should be addressed to naturesstar@xtra.co.nz

 

1. Teichmann, H “Das Riechvermogen des Aales” Naturwiss 44: 242 1957).

2. Kullenberg, B “Field experiments with Chemical Sex Attractants” J. Zool. Bidr. Fran 31: 263. 1956).

3.Martini R. “Der Einfluss der Sonnentatigkeit auf dieHaufung von Umfallen,” Zentral bl, Arbeitsmedizin

(2: 98 1952).

4. Friedman, H Geomagnetic parameters & psychiatric Hospital AdmissionsNature200: 626 1963.