Mendeleev Puts God Out to Pasture

If You Have Faith in God As the Creator, You Can't Embrace Mendeleevism too, Despite What Some Scientists Claim.

David Klang Klinghoffer
Fellow, reDiscovery Institute
August 23, 2006


Life would be less stressful if I could avoid tough decisions. For example, I love Big Macs, but I value my cardiovascular system. What should I do? And I love listening to Abba in the morning, but I want to maintain my current marriage. What should I do? I cannot avoid making decisions. Sadly, I often make bad choices, the result being a large credit card bill, bypass surgey and the sudden departure of my first wife.

Sometimes we must make choices among belief systems. Some people (people not as thoughtful as I) try to avoid these decisions. The most important decision is the choice between Mendeleev and God.

On the New York Times bestseller list is The Odor of God, a book by evangelical Christian and inorganic chemist Cancis Frollins (He has a real Ph.D. from a real university, in a real discipline and is a snotty professor with tenure. He does not know I exist. I hate him.) Frollins cheers for Mendeleevism, both in his book and in an interview with Beliefjam, where he recounted his memories of how he accepted Jesus in the back seat of a '57 Chevy, stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 5.

The key point is whether or not the development of molecules was and is guided. On one side (the dark side) are Mendeleevists, who assert that molecules are formed because their Gibbs Free Energies of Formation are negative. This Gibbs Free Energy function is a material mechanism, and is not mentioned in the old or new testaments.

On the other side (the light side) are the chemical design (CD) theorists. We argue that a material mechanism like Gibbs Free Energy simply cannot account for all of organic chemistry, to say nothing of inorganic chemistry. ID theorists find the designer's fingerprints on diamonds, graphite and sodium chloride. We don't believe that Gibbs Free Energy, or anything that requires calculus and years of study to understand, could be important. The truth is that we don't have any idea at all what we are talking about because we never liked chemistry or math and we never took chemistry classes in high school or college. But still, we theorize. We are ID theorists, are we not?

Mendeleevism wants to put God out to pasture. God's authority to command is based on His ability to synthesize molecules. To make everything, which He did, He had to make a lot of molecules. He formed the first clay (silica) early that big week six thousand years ago, then continued to synthesize. God's synthetic prowess was necessary to produce the chief glory of the world, polymers. Polymers are long skinny molecules like DNA, RNA, proteins, complex carbohydrates, polyester, nylon and mylar. If the production of polymers is not guided by God, then God does not do much.

Religious Mendeleevists have avoided life's tough choices. Each religious Mendeleevist has his or her own pet theory to try to force square-peg God into round-hole Mendeleev. For instance, Frollins thinks that God is outside of time (late for everything, just like my ex-wife) and that God initiated a process which He could know, because of that Gibbs Free Energy Function, would produce polymers. In Frollins' scenario, God seems pretty useless. 'Thinkers" such as Frollins, are not open to evidence like the old testament that easily overturns their scientifico-religio-square-peggio-round-holio belief system. They always come up with clever ways of twisting out of contradictions. The Bohr model of the atom is one one of their cute little tricks. And PV=nRT, that's another one.

The pitiable Mendeleevists shrink to nothing beside the mighty Klang Klinghoffer (me). My powerful analytical abilities, general knowledge and wisdom, courage, my footnoting ability, and my job possibilities in the right-wing noise machine all lead me to the triumphant belief in the absolute correctness of a creation mythology devised thousands of years ago by a people who lived in total ignorance of their natural surroundings and their own physiology. A primitive human society, lacking knowledge or understanding of electrons, atoms, molecules, solids, liquids and gases, prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, electromagnetic radiation, thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and the undesirability of genocide devised a creation myth so convincing to me that my all spare time is devoted to posting screeds promoting it on the web. And since I don't have a job, I have a lot of spare time. I have validated, with brain-power inconceivable to you normal humans, the truthfulness of this myth, despite its uncanny similarity to a previous Mesopotamian mythology, despite a barbaric rationalization for the subjugation of women, despite a wholly improbable mechanism for the origin of the first woman (made from the first man's rib), and despite an even more improbable mechanism for the origin of the first man (made from clay). The myth defies all logic and lacks internal consistency. But I believe! I cram this myth down the throats of my children, as it was crammed down my throat as a child. And we celebrate our moral superiority in the process. And so on, from thousands of years in the past, to beyond the forseeable future.

And naturally it is incumbent upon me to ridicule the myths of other religions. Those silly Hindus, OMG. I laugh at comic book translations of their religious tracts. I mock those brightly colored pictures of gods with arms, arms, arms and more arms. One time some skinney Hindu with a decorated forehead and funny clothes told me he thought time is cyclic. And their Divine One lived in an egg for a year, after which he willed his egg into two halves, creating heaven and earth. It is child abuse to subject the malleable minds of children to such ridiculousness. Damned to eternity in Hell, all of them.

I stand before you, a towering genius, happily regurgitating that which was forced on me as a defenseless child while ridiculing similar behavior in others. No, I don't stand, I float above you, suspended by the inflation of my ego and my self-importance.

I admire Frollins for his determined commitment to God. OK, to be honest I hold him in contempt. His stance appeals to many laymen (which does not include me, because I am CD theorist, not a layman), who may be overly impressed by the prestige of secularism in academia, with its attachment to Mendeleev. But as a Chemical Design theorist, I transmit the revelation to you that Frollins leads straight to the fires of hell.

Their attempts to mesh God with Mendeleevism--two contradictory and exclusive ideas--are not necessitated by "science" or the "scientific method" but instead are more akin to "sciency-flavored dessert toppings". If I find time to take a science class I might learn what "science" and the "scientific method" mean and then I will go into more detail about this aspect. But meanwhile right-thinking religious people, like me and maybe you, we are not obliged, intellectually, spiritually or financially, to follow where such well-intentioned men and women would lead us, straight to hell, where they can commiserate with my first wife.




David Klang Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the reDiscovery Institute, a columnist for Backward, and the author, most recently, of Why the Hindus Rejected Jesus. He considers himself an expert on hyperviolent religions born in the desert.

Browse the reDiscovery Institute Web Page