In compliance with the new public health guidelines for businesses that are operating during the COVID19 pandemic, I instituted temperature checks of my employees and screening for cold or flu-like signs and symptoms when they entered my office. The non-contact digital thermometer facilitated these screenings. Of course, these devices have been around for a while but usually my medical assistants or nurses have taken my patient’s temperatures before I have seen them. This was the first time I was using this in my business setting.
As I held the thermometer up to each employee’s forehead, a quick read of the temperature appeared. It was interesting to see the range of normal temperatures but then an idea struck, what if I checked other areas of the body? I tried it on myself. My forehead registered 97.5F but my bare foot registered 92F. It was a five degree swing!
The first thing that flashed through my mind was gout!
Many of us are familiar with the debilitating signs of symptoms of gout, usually occurring as searing pain and throbbing in a distal extremity like the big toe. There is a reason. Gout is caused by a collection of uric acid crystals, a breakdown product of purines which are found in many meat proteins. If one has a high serum level of uric acid, cooler than normal areas in the body may facilitate this precipitation. The big toe and feet are prime locations.
It was decades ago when I first learned this fact in medical school and in spite of the dozens of patients I have seen and diagnosed with gout, I never saw actual confirmation of the temperature change until this past week. Yet, I believed it to be true.
There are many facts that I accept because I empirically see it’s effects. I may not understand all of the complicated physics to explain gravity, but I know it exists if I drop an object. What about God? Some atheists and agnostics aver that because God cannot be seen, He does not exist. Yet, even the most strident naturalists and empirical scientists acknowledge the astronomically staggering odds of everything in the universe occurring with such precision for life to occur. One group of theoretical physicists, none of them Christians, published an article that for the universe to begin as the Big Bang and lead to the formation of the stars, planets, and life would require a probability of 1 x 10*120. This is greater than the number of known particles in the universe! To explain how this could naturally occur, without acknowledging an intelligent Creator, they hypothesized that “an unknown agent” likely intervened to create such precision.
For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.
Romans 1:20 (NLT)
The complexity of Creation should lead one to search for an intelligent Creator, not some unknown agent. Yet man, in his pomp and arrogance, chooses to substitute other explanations that exclude God, even when the empirical evidence is overwhelming.
Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. As a result, their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they instead became utter fools. And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people and birds and animals and reptiles.
Romans 1:21-23 (NLT)
We accept many ideas on empirical evidence alone. God left His indelible imprint upon all of Creation so that wherever and whatever we observe, we will find Him.
Love and trust the Lord; seek His will in your life.
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