Ours is an age of vaunted skepticism. In the face of massive scientific breakthroughs, many individuals in educated circles simply default to the idea that God is an “unnecessary hypothesis.” While it’s true that our increasingly sophisticated scientific technologies and procedures are shedding more light on the operations of our universe, the notion that these explanations are explaining away the mystery underlying existence in the primary place is entirely misplaced.
One of the delicious ironies of history is that the enlightenment—the breeding ground of radical skepticism—can also be the positioning of God’s clearest expression of the wisdom of His created order. It’s almost as if our Lord granted, “Okay, skepticism’s ramping up. Let me show you something you didn’t know.” The world we’re glimpsing through the vantage point of our enlightenment tools is beyond our capability to assume. What are these tools? In broad strokes, we are able to consider these scientific tools as granting us views into two broad realms—namely, the microcosm and the macrocosm. The microcosm falls under the purview of the microscope and all of those instruments that allow us to look into the formerly inaccessible regions of the microscopic realm. Conversely, the telescope grants us access to the vastness of our universe, bringing to light whole regions that were impossibly distant to us in former times. In these two realms, we’re confronted with the infinitesimally small and the inconceivably large.
A crude reading of all these breakthroughs is that they provide us a comprehensive material explanation of all that’s. Setting aside the undeniable fact that such a claim neatly skirts the query of why there may be anything in any respect (why is there something, moderately than nothing?), such a claim also fails to reckon with the undeniable fact that all of this exploration, removed from exhausting our understanding, only deepens our sense of mystery. In the traditional and indeed biblical sense, the mystery is something that exceeds our full understanding—not something that continues to be permanently inscrutable. We can gain insights right into a mystery, but we are able to’t exhaust it. As we’ll see, our universe falls into this category.
What if we saw our scientific instruments as force multipliers of wonder moderately than tools of reduction? What if we saw these many insights into the minuscule and the vast as types of divine disclosure moderately than discoveries that rule out the need of a creator? For the rest of the article, I’d like to focus on some pertinent examples from the microcosm and the macrocosm.
How the Microscopic World Reflects the Mystery of God
The smaller we get, the more bizarre and abstract things begin to look. Indeed, even probably the most daring of non-representational artists can be hard-pressed to compete with among the minuscule scenery we glimpse within the microcosm. Take, for instance, the diatom. Microscopic algae with glass-like shells that make up pond scum, also they are marvels of elaborate design. If you leaf through among the images, you’ll likely notice striking resemblances to among the more famous architectural designs. One example I take into account strongly resembles the world-famous Sydney Opera House. Another is a dead ringer for the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Why all of this extravagance—this gratuitous beauty, most of which can never be seen by human eyes? I’m put in mind of Proverbs 25:2: “It is the glory of God to hide things, however the glory of kings is to go looking things out.”
Another example can be the common-or-garden snowflake. It’s a widely known undeniable fact that no two snowflakes are alike, but even an informal glance at their intricate designs inspires wonder. And if we attempt to spell this radical diversity out by way of numbers, we now have to make use of words like sextillion. Yes, we are able to speak in such terms and even represent them mathematically, but there’s simply no option to wrap our minds around such abundance. We cannot avoid the word mystery.
Psalm 8 and the Majesty of the Macrocosm Revealed
Conversely, the telescope has allowed us to travel to fantastically distant regions. One example of the immensity that confronts us in space can be the great red spot on Jupiter, our solar system’s largest planet. In fact, this spot is a colossal hurricane that’s been raging for over 300 years, spinning in a counterclockwise fashion. Nearly three planet earths could fit inside this storm.
While examples could easily be multiplied, one in every of the clearest examples of the inconceivable scale that confronts us in our universe is the variety of stars. Thanks to modern scientific advances, we now know that there are billions of stars in our galaxy. (The current estimate is 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy.) As mind-boggling as these figures are, astronomers and astrophysicists are actually starting to suppose that there are as many as two trillion galaxies—a figure that yields ten times more stars than all of the grains of sand within the beaches and deserts of this world. Now recall Psalm 8, which describes the heavens because the work of God’s “fingers.” Once again, due to our scientific breakthroughs, we’re in a position to appreciate the profundity of this Psalm on an entire other level today. The discoveries of sciences are a precious gift to the church!
To behold the sheer immensity of our universe—its cosmic vastness—is to come across a level of power, majesty, and artistic exuberance that’s unfathomable. Scientific exploration doesn’t hole out the world by giving us a reductionistic vision. Rather, it deepens the mystery, revealing riches upon riches that were formerly hidden.
Embracing the Wonder of Creation through Worship
Everything within the natural world, from a leaf to a speck of cosmic dust, is a “pointer,” gesturing toward the one who’s Himself the wellspring of all creation. Indeed, all the things within the created order “accommodates multitudes,” hidden realms, some impossibly small, others impossibly distant, that clarify that our world is deeply mysterious. To say that we cannot wrap our minds across the created order just isn’t a recipe for mental sloth, but moderately a humble admission that we’re stewards of creation—not its masters. All that’s to say, the correct response to all of this wonder is a posture of worship.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/gorodenkoff
Kenneth Boa equips people to like well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a author, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life within the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
