Photosynthesis vs. Respiration

I slept at about 3:30 A.M. yesterday. And then my aunt and uncle dropped by at 4:30 A.M. and woke me up. I had spent the night and the wee hours of the morning reading, researching, and typing their youngest daughter’s homework. Such a tedious task for me as I could not recall my human anatomy and physiology learnings. 

So there I was, relearning the systems and organs and hormones, etc. of  the human body to answer several activity sheets for a second year high school student. Ordinarily I would not condone such an act. But then I took pity on my aunt who was tasked with that–and she had neither a computer nor Internet connection.

Let me clarify that my cousin is not just some lazy student making other people do her homework for her. She is actually quite studious. The thing is, at the moment, she is just too swamped to handle any more school work.

My cousin (I call her Pototong) is a second year high school student at the Philippine High School for the Arts. She is a scholar and her forte is dancing. They have been having several shows in the past few weeks, one in Puerto Galera and the other just last weekend, in Baguio City. 

Her homework was due today. 

It is not as if she does nothing at school but attend her classes. They individually had to prepare and adorn their own costumes on top of the regular school workload. Of course, they also had to practice for their shows.

Wow. Student life these days, even for high school and grade school students, seem rather stressful. My high school experience was nowhere near that hectic, thank God!

I did not really enjoy doing her homework for her. After all, homework is still homework–anyway you look at it. I did, however, appreciate the emphasis made on photosynthesis and respiration in one of my readings–their relationship to one another, that is. 

"Photosynthesis and respiration are reversible chemical reactions, meaning that the products of one process are the exact  reactants for the opposite process.

This is the cellular respiration equation.(Image from Gottfried, 1993).

This is the photosynthesis equation (Image from Gottfried, 1993).

Notice that the products from respiration, 6 carbon dioxide molecules and 6 water molecules are the exact reactants and the correct number of them to start the photosynthesis equation.  This clearly demonstrates the balance of life on earth and their interdependence of all life on other organisms."

Interesting. Reading that made me realize all the more that life as we know it is nowhere near being random nor accidental, as most scientists paint it out to be.

There can be nothing accidental about the reversibility of that equation.

So to me, that really is another reinforcing factor that there is a God and that He "created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is."

The God of the entire universe fashioned each cell (and I forgot what those things are called that are even smaller than cells) to serve a particular, definite, specific, absolute purpose. Imagine that!

There is order and purpose down to the last detail of our being. Absolutely fascinating! And this order and purpose is observable in everything in nature, too.

That, to me, is a whole lot easier to believe than some human-invented theory of evolution stating that chaos gave birth to purpose and order. That out of pure randomness, single-celled amoebas developed into human beings whose cells just happened to have specific job functions which all jive to support the individual human organism. (Something like that, anyway.)

To me, people who believe such theories actually have more faith than Creation-believing Christians. Why? Simply because between the two, that is the harder of the two to believe and therefore requires more faith to believe in.