Steve Maltz considers
the complexity of how blood works and what that reveals of a Creator God.
How does blood do its stuff? It's interesting just to look at the
mechanism for blood clotting. Any holes that appear in any blood vessels need to
be patched up pronto, otherwise we're going to experience the equivalent of a
slow puncture or, even worse, a flat! So the breach must be plugged through the
thickening of some blood into a clot, but there's a balance needed. Too much
clotting can disrupt adjacent healthy blood vessels and could even lead to
strokes in the brain or heart attacks, or embolisms elsewhere. Too little
clotting can cause re-bleeds and dangerous blood loss.
What happens is this. As soon as damage occurs, the vessel itself
automatically constricts so that blood flows out more slowly and a message goes
out to tiny particles in the blood called platelets, which are summoned and then
activated and do their job, in a highly complex dance involving 193 proteins
interacting with each other 301 times and this process occurs in real-time
seconds after they arrive.
It's amazing to think that not only do these complex interactions occur
to clot the blood, but they are regulated in the most amazing ways by chemical
reactions occurring in the correct sequence, otherwise nothing happens. We are
talking of hundreds upon hundreds of steps along the way and it only takes one
wrong step to bring the whole thing down and the body bleeds to death. It is so
hard to imagine that these mechanisms could have evolved by trial and error, as
every mistake results in death and the knowledge of this mistake is lost, so how
can the next generation get it right? Surely this ought to make us question the
theory of evolution?
But the story doesn't end there. It has been discovered that Vitamin K is
a vital element in the whole process, so much so that its absence can halt the
whole process. This has been seen to be a problem with newborns because of the
deficiency of Vitamin K in the first seven days of life. In fact in the UK a
Vitamin K supplement is recommended for all newborns on the first day of life.
On the eighth day the Vitamin K kicks in and blood clotting is not an issue any
more.
So what's the relevance of this? Here's a snippet (or "snip it?") for you
to mull over and it's regarding the circumcision of a Jewish boy, when the
foreskin is lopped off in order to comply with a key religious rite of Judaism.
If this ceremony is conducted during the first week of life the boy would
literally bleed to death. Interesting! Even more interesting is that the
ceremony is conducted on the eighth day, when Vitamin K is at a high level and
the wound would clot quickly.
What is even more interesting is that this is not a ruling from a
knowledge of science, it was written down in the Bible over 3000 years ago, when
no-one knew anything about vitamins or blood clotting.
Whoever wrote the Bible knew all about blood clotting and Vitamin K way
before any scientists were around to discover these things. The only one who
could have known about this science was the God who designed our bodies in the
first place. All he had to do was to make sure that the Bible writer (Moses in
this case) was in full possession of the facts before he put chisel to stone.
Cross Rhythms.
