Hesses vs Holding

1) When Looking at Elena Maria Vidal's Book on Daughter of Cesars ... · 2) Answering J. P. Holding / tektontv on Quiverfull, Lifespans, Onan, up-dated : and Romans · 3) Trying to Get Through to Holding · 4) Hesses vs Holding

Here the Hesses, by Holding are told
How (not) to think of Heavenly art

tektonticker : The Quiverfull Movement, Part 2
http://tektonticker.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-quiverfull-movement-part-2.html

Holding attacks the Hesses for this paragraph:

Even more outlandishly, the Hesses put God directly in charge of genetics, asking, "does God decide eye color or does Mendel's Law?" [183] and, quoting a source as saying: "God individually chose and gave each child his or her blue eyes. We have to keep in mind that God can modify or abolish genetic or reproductive trends as He wills." [184]

From this little rhetoric question, one might presume Holding considers, unlike the Hesses, that God left genetics to Mendel's laws.

Left it to them to determine.

OK, there is one point in so far that Mendel's laws give the normal framework. But is that a framework which allows either chance (on atheistic views, or reduced to secindary causes) or God (an a Christian view) little or much freedom?

Let's get it straight about chromosomes. These were not directly described in Mendel's laws, but predicted by oberving, through them, the phenomenon of tied (as opposed to independent) characteristics. Also, they differ between kinds and even species in number. There are mice with 22 chromosomes and there are mice with 40 (I presume we mean 2n=22, 2n=40, so it would mean 11 or 20 pairs), one can refer to them as different species or as different chromosomal races. I have very little doubt those with fewer chromosome pairs have "evolved" if you like from the larger number by telomere fusion.

The opposite process is harder to get around.

Man, however, has 23 pairs, ALL "races". 22 pairs which are what they are independently of one's sex, and a 23:rd pair which is either XX for ladies or XY for gentlemen. The non-sex paris are numbered according to size of chromosome. 1 is biggest, 22 smallest. Trisomy 21, you hav Downs' syndrome. Trisomy 1, you usually die before birth.

Now, we were talking about how much this leaves of regular natural results and how much it leaves to either chance or God.

You begin when a sperm (Latin for seed - also used of unground whole cereal seeds in original language) from your father meets an ovulum (Latin for "little egg", and some languages say "egg cell" instead, like Swedish "äggcell") from your mother.

The sperm contained 23 of your 2n=46 chromosomes, the ovulum the other 23 of yourself.

For each sperm, it was a hazard which of your father's chromosome 1 you should get, and independent hazard which of his chromosome 2 you should get and so on in that particular sperm. And exact same for the ovulum selecting 23 from your mother's 2n=46 chromosomes.

What does this mean mathematically?

Chromos.	possibilities by nth chromosome
1	2	7	128	13	8192	19	524,288
2	2*2=4	8	256	14	16,384	20	1,048,576
3	4*2=8	9	512	15	32,768	21	2,097,152
4	8*2=16	10	1024	16	65,536	22	4,194,304
5	16*2=32	11	2048	17	131,072	sex	8,388,608
6	32*2=64	12	4096	18	262,144

The sperm that became the sperm which meeting an ovulum became you is genetically one out of 8,388,608 millions different sperms your father could have produced (OK, in any case where he had two identical versions of a pair, this figure needs to be halved). From your mother, the ovulum which received the sperm to become you was one in 8,388,608 genetically different ovula which she could have produced.

8 million 388 thousand 608 times same number of possibilities from other source is 70 trillion 368 billion 744 million 177 thousand 664.

So, if your parents had had 70 trillion plus babies, one of them would statistically have been you.

Usually it is very rare to have even as many as 20.

Say your parents had 20 babies, the chances of one of them being you was:

2.8421709430404007434844970703125 e-13

e=1

2.842,170,943,040,400,743,484,497,070,312,5

e-3

0.002,842,170,943,040,400,743,484,497,070,312,5

e-6

0.000,002,842,170,943,040,400,743,484,497,070,312,5

e-12

0.000,000,000,002,842,170,943,040,400,743,484,497,070,312,5

e-13

0.000,000,000,000,284,217,094,304,040,074,348,449,707,031,25

So, within the framwork of your parents' genetics, the main factor determining your exact genetic makeup is God's providence.

"Mendel's laws" are a framework more often than not veried in God's result.

But God could make a sheer miracle, like when cloning Eve from Adam without his Y and with an extra or doubled X, and when He cloned Christ from Mary, except one X (let's assume Hers were identical) exchanged for a Y.

God could also make you the first carrier of a mutation. Its presence in you is not determined by Mendel's laws, since it does not follow from previous.

God could make you trisomic. Trisomy 1 is lethal, so is trisomy 3, trisomy 21 is Down's. Some trisomies affect neither life nor intelligence, like a trisomy in sex chromosomes, might make you the last of your line. XXY is a man less likely to be fertile than normal XY. XXX is a woman less likely to be fertile than a normal XX.

God is also in charge of the exact number of both identical and non-identical ancestors you get in each generation before your own, within or sometimes between generations.

If you have blue eyes, God made sure the first person with blue eye gene would be one of your ancestors, would be it on both your father's and your mother's side and would have passed on that gene to both of them.

So, yes. God is in fact in charge of your genetics.

When the Hesses advise readers that, "we would do well to give God control over how many children we have," [57] they do not simply mean we should allow God to be sovereign; rather, they envision God as having direct, micro-managerial command of conception ("lock, stock, and baby" as they put it [94], and elsewhere, "pregnancy is not going to occur except through God's active agency" [106], and yet again, "...the Scriptures prove that God Himself is our birth Controller" [141], and finally, "God Himself is all the birth control we need" [158]…and let us add, as a related point, this quote: "Menopause occurs at exactly the time in a woman's life when God decrees that she is to bear no more children." [189] I have not seen even a Calvinist assign God that much micro-managerial control!).

Well, I am not a Calvinist, and I very much do believe God does micromanage it.

I believe in free will, and yet that our lives are micromanaged.

God being outside time, for Him there is no problem to take into account each and every free willed decision through all history to micromanage all history. Some things, like sins, God simply allows. He allots that decision to sin, taken by that creature, to that specific moment in his life, but He did not chose for the creature to sin. Some things He directly produces.

And the lives of human persons is one of these.

Even if a person is conceived in a rape, God chose for that particular rape to result in pregnancy, whereas for another rape He chose there would not be that result.

So, yes, God is in direct charge of what happens for pregnancy or not once sex is freely (usually, fortunately, freely on both sides!) engaged in.

If Adam and Eve had not sinned, they would have been able to know perfectly at what moments their union would be fertile, and if wanting to use occasion, would not have used it in vain, Eve would have become pregnant every time.

But after their sin, it often happens that a coitus is a little too late for an ovulation or a little too early for the sperms to survive up to ovulation, or too few sperms to reach ovulum, after previous coitus. Every unsuccessful coitus is, so to speak, "beside nature", "praeter naturam". But making it unsuccessful by choice is to go against nature, "contra naturam".

If a Catholic couple abstains from coitus on the nights when the Church traditionally demands so, they are allowing God the freedom to chose how many occasions of abstinence shall mean failure to conceive, and how many coitus right after abstinence shall be on the right moment for increased chances. Overall, this would usually tend to child spacing. To having children less often than if using marriage each night. Which is good for the female body (also due to the curse after the first sin, being fertile whenever possible is a chore for the female body).

But, if one does not abstain certain nights for piety, at least one should allow God to do what He wants with the coitus where He offered the couple the pleasure. The couple should offer back to God the occasion for making a child.

Also, the human soul of each conceived (at least each conceived and fully human) fetus is directly a creature of God. And to each soul God allotted the genetics it should have.

Hesses are right, Holding is wrong.
Match is over, hear that ding-dong?

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Margaret of Scotland
10.VI.2016