Finished Reading “Heretics”

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  "G. K. Chesterton, the "Prince of Paradox," is at his witty best in this collection of twenty essays and articles from the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on  "heretics" - those who pride themselves on their superiority to Christian views - Chesterton appraises prominent figures who fall into that category from the literary and art worlds... those who hold incomplete and inadequate views about "life, the universe, and everything." He is, in short, criticizing all that host of non-Christian views of reality, as he demonstrated in his follow-up book Orthodoxy. The book is both an easy read and a difficult read. But he manages to demonstrate, among other things, that our new 21st century heresies are really not new because he himself deals with most of them." (Goodreads)

Constructed, and Functioning

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Carl Sagan (author, astronomer, astrophysicist, humanist, and skeptic) observed in his book, The Dragons of Eden:


"A single human chromosome contains twenty billion bits of information. How much information is twenty billion bits? What would be its equivalent, if it were written down in an ordinary printed hook in modern human language? Twenty billion bits are the equivalent of about three billion letters.


If there are approximately six letters in an average word, the information content of a human chromosome corresponds to about five hundred million words.


If there about three hundred words on an ordinary page of printed type, this corresponds to about two million pages.


If a typical book contains five hundred such pages, the information content of a single human chromosome corresponds to some four thousand volumes.


It is clear, then, that the chromosome contains an enormous library of information. It is equally clear that so rich a library is required to specify as exquisitely constructed and intricately functioning an object as a human being."

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