Creationism on an atomic level, page 1


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reply posted on 13-11-2005 @ 06:29 PM by mattison0922
Originally posted by godservant
How does it work? A tree, for example, has atoms specific to wood among others. Where do these wood atoms come from if you can't modify existing atoms nor create new ones? Simply, where do the atoms that make up wood come from? How could it pull it from the ground when the ground is without wood?

I don't know much about how atoms work, and I can very well be proven wrong here. I am merely inquiring.


Wood doesn't arise from nothing, and it's not a spontaneous creation of atoms. This is not rearrangement of atoms. Physics rearranges atom; biology rearranges electrons and other molecular, not atomic structures. There's no such thing as wood atoms. There's no such thing as wood molecules. Wood is a mixture of component molecules. You can't break wood down into a single simple unit. Wood and other products of primary production are the result of natural processes entirely. Perhaps you learned about the carbon cycle at some point in your life?

Either way... wood comes from a variety of things cellulose, lignins, etc. We'll discuss cellulose whose structure and synthesis I am most familiar with.

Cellulose is basically sugar molecules arranged in such away as to make them unavailable for digestion and subsequent metabolism by organisms like us. Sugar molecules are one of the primary products of a process called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis creates sugar molecules via the reduction (believe it or not in this case, reduction means adding something) of Carbon Dioxide. Photosynthesis provides the energy that creates sugar molecules from CO2 and Water. The sugar molecules are then arranged around the plant cell to create a rigid structure known as cell wall. These cell walls, and other specialized apparatus including the xylem and phloem are also ususally constructed of cellulose.

You can see the reverse reaction everytime you eat sugar and exhale carbon dioxide. In this case what you're doing is oxidizing sugar molecules back down to CO2 and H2O, in the process harnessing the energy released via the breaking of chemical bonds. Same thing when you burn wood. You're releasing the CO2 that the plant collected over the years back into the atmosphere... hence the description Carbon Cycle. This is why plants need water. Yes, it's true plants don't extract wood from the ground... but did you consider why plants die when you don't water them? Wood is a mixture assembled by woody plants via the synergistic coupling of multiple anabolic processes.

It's not magic... It's science that's been worked out and well known for decades.


reply posted on 13-11-2005 @ 10:23 PM by Nygdan
Originally posted by godservant
How could it pull it from the ground when the ground is without wood?

A tree is a living thing that has the ability to tap into the organic compounds (which merely means compounds with carbon), take them into themselves, and process them in to wood, bark, leaves, buds, etc.

I don't know much about how atoms work, and I can very well be proven wrong here. I am merely inquiring.


Here's a nice little bit about
Atoms in general
Atoms make up Molecules
Molecular Bonds
Digestion in Humans

Essentially, the world is made up of atoms, elements. These elements are neither created nor destroyed (essentially, for our purposes anyway). Atoms bind to other atoms, this forms molecules, even very complex ones. These molecules can have functions; one molecule might tend to, upon contacting another molecule, break it up into bits, or tend to cause individual elements to bind to one another to make other molecules. Organisms, made up of lots of molecules, have to constantly replace those molecules, they do this by going out into the world and eating other organisms, breaking those organisms molecules down to very simple components, and then rebuilding, from those components, their 'worn out' parts of themselves.

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