While Waiting At The Airport For A Delayed Flight ...

While waiting at the airport for a delayed flight I got engaged in a conversation with a physicist who worked for the German electronics company that had played a leading role in developing the compact disc (CD). [Phillips and Sony, 1980] I told him I had a question that perhaps he could answer. “Imagine if one was to take a CD and copy it to another CD and then take that copy and copy it to yet another disc, and continue to copy the copies to other discs until one had made 1000 copies. Now if one was to compare the information on the original disc to that on the one thousandth disc, would the information be identical?”

“Why yes,” he said. “The developers of the copying process had built in some very robust copying routines and lots of error checking to ensure that the copying process was highly reliable.”

“OK,” I said. “Now imagine that you were God, and you had placed the human genome on earth. Your plan was that these strands of DNA would be copied and the copy would be copied and the copies copied and so on, and now here you and I are, thousands of generations later and we both seem to be pretty good copies of that original copy. Do you think that perhaps God placed some very robust guidelines around that copying process; like marriage and family and morality? Is that why the theme of sexual purity runs through the Bible; to protect this very wonderful copying process?”

“Hmm!” was his response. “I never thought about it that way before!”

PS: I found out about SermonCentral at the Outreach booth at NRB (National Religious Broadcasters)