Breaking: Origin of Life Still a Mystery

From a brief review in Scientific American of A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life (Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II, Norton, 2015):

No scientific quandary is as confounding, controversial or important as the question of how life began, argue journalist Mesler and geochemist Cleaves. “It touches upon not only how we came to be, but why we came to be,” they write. “It is, in a sense, the ultimate question.” Here the authors chronicle the historical quest to understand how life arose from nonlife, from Aristotle's theory of the “spontaneous generation” of life, to Charles Darwin's 19th-century musing on the origin occurring “in some warm little pond,” to the latest modern-day research on the “LUCA,” or last universal common ancestor. They find that the scientific understanding of life itself has advanced considerably over the years but that the fundamental event that began it some four billion years ago is just as much a mystery as it ever has been.

Russian Scientific Studies on the Property Change of Water on Epiphany Day

Russian Study: Physical Property of Water Changed on Epiphany Day

February 5, 2007

Interfax

All water, including that in the water supply system, changed its physical properties on the Epiphany Day and the day before it, the Sysin’s Research Institute of Human Ecology and Environmental Hygiene of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences physicists found some days ago.

The institute’s scientists daily researched properties and quality of regular water from the pipe measuring quantity of ion radicals in it. From 17 January(1) the ion radical level started rising, and the water started smoothening. The water’s pH level was rising too making it less acidic, the Moskovsky Komsomolets daily said on Monday.

Why the Seemingly Educated Abandon Christianity

By St. Nikolai Velimirovich

Why do some people, well educated and baptized as Christians, fall away from Christianity and give themselves over to philosophy and to learned theories, pretending these to be something more truthful than Christianity?

The Magic and Value of Photons

By Metropolitan Nicholas of Mesogaia and Lavreotiki

We live in a superbly beautiful world, whose underlying secret of life is borne by microscopic entities called 'Genes'. They are inconspicuous; they are not visible. And yet, they determine life and its characteristics. They are what determines each person, each identity, with precision and with details.

We are swimming inside an ocean of infinite particles, which relate to assorted and strange names: Quarks, Gluons, Bosons, Leptons, Baryons, Neutrinos, Photons and a host of others - which are also not visible. However these tiny particles are what supports the grandeur of this world. They are the ones that shield its mystery.

That God is the Cause of All Creation (St. Gregory Palamas)

By St. Gregory Palamas

That the world has an origin nature teaches and history confirms, while the discoveries of the arts, the institution of laws and the constitution of states also clearly affirm it. We know who are the founders of nearly all the arts, the lawgivers and those who established states, and indeed we know what has been written about the origin of everything. Yet we see that none of this surpasses the account of the genesis of the world and of time as narrated by Moses. And Moses, who wrote about the genesis of the world, has so irrefutably substantiated the truth of what he writes through such extraordinary actions and words that he has convinced virtually the whole human race and has persuaded them to deride those who sophistically teach the contrary. Since the nature of this world is such that everything in it requires a specific cause in each instance, and since without such a cause nothing can exist at all, the very nature of things demonstrates that there must be a first principle which is self-existent and does not derive from any other principle.