The Body Temple: Planned Resistance
by Jack Hoehn | 26 June 2024 |
Unseen powers are in the body. They are placed there in anticipation of problems by God’s foresight.
Vaccination
Until 1973 every child in Canada and the USA and much of the rest of the world was offered smallpox vaccination by scratching the skin with a needle and inoculating a virus-like smallpox called vaccinia or cowpox into the skin. Other countries continued the practice a bit longer, after smallpox disappeared, except in one closely guarded laboratory in Russia and one in an equally guarded laboratory in Atlanta in the USA (unless a rogue nation has discovered their own strain they are nurturing for bioterrorism purposes elsewhere in the world). I had my first smallpox vaccine at one year of age, and my last booster dose was May 30, 1979.
Although smallpox is no longer a human risk (unless it were weaponized sometime), we need to look carefully at terrible photographs like this to remind us of why the body’s immune system is so important.
One child’s immune system had been trained with a vaccinia vaccine, and one had not been vaccinated. 30% of infected people died. Survivors were marked by scars where the hundreds of pox healed. There were side effects of this vaccination, like all vaccines, but the benefits were so obvious that parents did not hesitate to provide those they loved this protection.
Covid-19, measles, RSV, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, rabies, meningitis, chickenpox, and polio are all infectious diseases that as a missionary physician I have seen cause preventable severe disability or deaths in unvaccinated children and adults. In the USA I have had otherwise fit and healthy young men die from influenza because they were “too tough” to need flu shots! Sometimes people complain if they get Covid or influenza in spite of the vaccine. But the truth is they survived to complain because they had the benefit of the vaccines.
Three layers of defense
Intelligently designed body defense systems are of three types–
1.) barriers
2.) innate immune systems
3.) acquired immune systems
Defense systems of the first two types do not evolve, and were not acquired as time went on. They have been designed into life like the DNA RNA code systems from the most ancient animals and plants. They are just parts of the design. In evolution talk they are said to be “conserved,” meaning they appear in all similar life forms essentially unchanged without significant evolution. This means they were there from the beginning, vital and essential for life, important for every living organism—designed from the first. No organic life and its chemicals could exist without barriers of some kind—membranes, cell walls, skins.
Examples of the innate immune system are microRNA, little watchmen, protecting organisms from the foreign DNA of viruses. This general machinery to protect DNA has not evolved in function from primitive bacteria to the most recent mammal. Again, what texts call “a fundamental and evolutionarily conserved mechanism…present in all eukaryotes” (plants and animal) from carrots to us.
The plasma is not just water from some tropical sea.
The blood’s disease-fighting powers in the body temple are indeed great. The science behind the blood’s multitude of miracle functions is full of specified complexity. The fluid part, the plasma, is not just water from some tropical sea. Blood plasma has albumin, gamma globulin, and anti-hemophilic factor, plus sugars, fats, hormones, vitamins, and minerals.
Then beside the plasma the blood is full of always busy red blood cells that are very focused constantly doing their jobs. They have given up their nuclei and seem to only care about using their hemoglobin that loves oxygen to grab and carry the oxygen to feed every cell of the body.
WBC do nothing most of the time except float around looking beautiful.
The white blood cells (WBC), on the other hand, seem to do nothing most of the time except float around looking beautiful. They have nuclei and granules that when stained look quite beautiful. But like firemen just polishing their engines when there is no fire, white blood cells seem just to float around looking shiny. In reality, though, WBC are sort of like tanks fully loaded with ammunition, roaming around always “locked and loaded,” ready for any battle that might possibly start. They have little function until an emergency appears. Then. within seconds of an injury or invasion past the body’s barriers, neutrophils are the first to respond to any breakthrough attack. Highly mobile, they attempt to grab and ingest any offending intruders. Beautiful eosinophils with their red granules join the battles against bacteria and some parasites. Basophils, dark purplish blue, are also ready to help attack invaders.
The third line of defense (acquired immunity) starts in the next kind of cell, the lymphocytes. But, again, there is not just “a lymphocyte” that evolved, but specific kinds of lymphocytes that don’t just work alone but team up to work in designed cooperation together.
The lymphocytes known as T-lymphs (T for “thymus”) make proteins known as the various interleukins, cytokines, TNF that message other cells and organs in the body what to do to fight an invader. B-lymphs (B for “bone marrow”) work with the T-lymphs to see if they both agree that a given protein is foreign and a danger. This is a safety mechanism. A suspected foreign protein is identified by one cell. It brings that protein to a second cell to see if that cell agrees this is a danger. If both agree, then the B-lymphs begin to make antibodies specific to kill that invading protein. A B-lymph cell turned into an antibody-producing factory is then called a plasma cell, and makes the IgG, IgM, and IgA antibodies to attack the disease.
Deployed in anticipation
These defender cells have camps or stations to grow, mature, or group in large numbers. We call them lymph nodes, spleen, thymus gland, and bone marrow. Some of the lymph cells have come to be called helper cells. CD4+ helper T-cells help make antibodies, and CD8+ T cytotoxic cells destroy invading cells.
Every detail is only mentioned here and not explained, diagrammed, or biochemically outlined. But every point shows that life has been designed for a great controversy between life and death, and mechanisms to protect life from its challengers have been present from ancient times. The systems are interlocked and interdependent, suggesting that single step-by-step mutations would never create the amazing defensive mechanisms living forms possess without intention, foresight, or (the forbidden word) “design.”
We can worship God in the temples of science.
It certainly appears to us worshipers in the temples of science that life was worth fighting for, and mechanisms to defend and protect life have been designed from the most ancient forms of life we find. The cell’s immune system should make their origins immune from simple or simplistic answers. Whatever your conclusion, make it big enough to face that fact, that cell and multicellular life appears designed with complex specified information from the very beginning.
Vaccines are not some attack on nature, but are a way of helping nature.
Finally, please remember that vaccines designed by human scientists are not some attack on nature, but are a way of helping nature do the job it was intelligently designed to do—protect life from death. Our loved ones, especially our children, deserve all the protection we can offer them. There are side effects of vaccines, but in every case they are much less than the terrible diseases we can be protected from. “Herd immunity” works when most of the “herd” has been vaccinated. Vaccinating yourself and your children is an act of love to protect the weaker and most vulnerable among us. When the stronger take a vaccination they don’t think they personally need, they are behaving as heroes for those who do need the protection. And that person might be you or someone you love.
The picture of two boys (one vaccinated against smallpox) is from a 1901 textbook by Dr. Allan Warner and is public domain.
The illustration of the cells is from a lecture Dr. Hoehn used in a class taught at Walla Walla University and is public domain.
[This is part of a series on worship guided by science. #1 is here. Jack is also known as Dr. John Byron Hoehn, MD, CCFP (Canada), DTM&H (London).
Adventist Tomorrow—Fresh Ideas While Waiting for Jesus
in its second edition continues to be the most popular book
Adventist Today has published.
Jack’s wife, Deanne, has a delightful new book called
Loving You—I Went to Africa, about their 13 years as medical missionaries.
These books and others are available at SHOP in the menu at the top of the page. All sales go to support Adventist Today.]
