Balance exists to fulfill this need for occasional stability. The four seasons allow the earth to change, to expel its waste and excess nutrients, to let its sweat drip from the sky. With such an elaborate system of balances and counter-balances can we honestly attribute the idea of balance to chance? It seems impossible to me for a mere explosion of mass and energy to produce such an elaborate hierarchical structure as the one found beneath the soils of the Earth. Or even for billions of years of mutation and periodic adaptation to make the earth rotate around the sun at the perfect distance and speed (18.6 miles per second at a distance of 92.9 million miles) to make it the only planet of nine suitable to sustain life is to say we have no intellect and cannot clearly see that we are incapable of understanding the universe in which we exist (Frazier, p37).

    Chemistry best deals with the next portion of this discussion. As one chemistry student puts it, "balance is a notion that is at the heart of a great number of chemical concepts" (Ridley, p.1 par.2). In Chemistry models entertain our desire for something tangible to observe in science. We cannot easily pick up a rock and examine one particle in a possible billion that are contained in the rock’s shape. For this purpose, we have simplified models and equations that represent the rock’s atoms we are trying to understand. Neither can we look into the sky and say we see God, ignoring the possibility that we may only be catching a glimpse of his passing train. This is where our tool comes in. Balance, like the model of an atom, serves as a model to help us better understand the larger concept of a supreme being. Claude Bernard was on the right track. He was the first to propose the idea of homeostasis, that systems in a living creature maintain a balance. Without this balance, there would be no conceptual building block to define an atom or the structure of a molecule of water. Balance allows—equilibrium—allows symbioses.

Next Page