Despite this usage, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability, and that it often implies a lack of conscious intentionality. But what do mathematicians and scientists mean when they say something is random? Can a random process lead to an ordered, even predictable outcome? Is there evidence that God makes use of random processes to fulfill his creative purposes?

These are big questions, and we won’t address them all today. But I think randomness is an important topic to cover for two reasons: 1) it is integral to many processes in biology (and math, physics, chemistry, etc.), and 2) it is commonly misunderstood to be incompatible with Christianity.

As I said above, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability. If you pick a card “at random” from a shuffled deck, you have a small probability of drawing an ace (4 out of 52, or a 7.7% chance). If you flip a coin, you have an equal probability of getting heads or tails.

Randomness also seems to imply a lack of intentionality or purposefulness. After all, you might hope for an ace when you draw a card, but you can’t choose one on purpose. You might call heads when you flip a coin, but you can’t know beforehand what the outcome will be. Thus the outcome is indeterminate, but is it purposeless? Not necessarily. Indeterminacy simply means the result cannot be predicted from the outset.

It should be noted that indeterminacy does not imply that God does not have foreknowledge of future events. Christians ought not to be uncomfortable with the idea of God interacting with his creation through chance. We often describe a seemingly-random (i.e. unplanned by us) sequence of events as being “providential,” or planned by God.

In biology, it is very hard or impossible to calculate precise probabilities for most processes, so when we say a process is random, we typically mean it is extremely unpredictable. Eventually we will discuss randomness within biological evolution, but first we must consider some simpler processes, like the self-assembly of a virus.

Viruses are remarkably efficient entities. Coiled tightly within a protein-based shell is a small amount of DNA needed for self-replication. The shell, called a capsid, is made of many repeating protein subunits and is therefore highly symmetrical (see figure). Important biomedical insights have certainly been gleaned from structural studies of viruses, but viruses also teach us about the emergence of order from non-order.

The virus life cycle has four main steps: 1) enter a host cell, 2) hijack the cell’s replication and translation machinery to make many copies of itself, 3) assemble into many virus particles, and 4) exit the cell to invade another host.

When I first learned about this process, I found it very hard to believe it just “happens.” The idea that a bunch of molecules bumping into each other inside a crowded cell could spontaneously assembly into a fully-functional virus seemed a bit far-fetched. Many viral capsids have over 100 protein subunits that must interact with each other in just the right way, or it won’t work. Surely there must be something driving this process, right?

There is! Random motion. I had to see it to believe it. I distinctly remember sitting in class during my first year of graduate school when the professor demonstrated self-assembly of a virus using a 3D model as shown in the following video. In less than 30 seconds, you can watch a jumbled heap of proteins become a beautifully ordered structure.

As the narrator explains, sub-assemblies form and break apart en route to the most stable structure, the full capsid. As the sub-assemblies begin to form, further associations with free subunits become more favorable and as a result occur rapidly, while the final steps may take considerably longer. While the subunits in the model are rigid, in reality the proteins take on multiple conformations, allowing the capsid to “breathe.”

Amazing as it is, the system we just considered—one virus capsid in a jar—is pretty simple. One wonders how self-assembly can happen in a crowded cell, where there are countless other molecules diffusing around, potentially getting in the way. We can’t directly see how it happens in a cell, but we can reconstitute the process in a test tube using different combinations of constituent molecules.

Consider two viruses, where each protein subunit in one virus is the mirror image of the corresponding subunit in the other. Putting the two viruses together by hand would be pretty tricky, because the constituent parts look so similar. But random motion can do the job in short order:

From this model, we can see clearly, in real-time, how distinct complex structures can arise from their parts randomly interacting with one another. Many large viruses also use special scaffolding proteins to assist in the assembly process, and some even use their own genomes as a scaffold. In addition, two closely-related viruses that happen to infect the same cell can exchange parts to create a new virus. This is one way viruses can evolve quickly to evade the host’s immune system.

Here we have seen how viruses demonstrate a principle inherent in God’s world—that order can emerge out of chaos from random processes. In my next post, we will look at some other biological processes that make use of—rather, depend on—randomness. This will set the stage for us to see that such processes can not only assemble a structure within seconds or minutes, but also generate complex, information-bearing molecules over billions of years. Even though the freedom inherent in nature sometimes produces unintelligently-designed structures (like viruses, which can kill us), we see that God has made, and continues to oversee by his providence, a good creation that, at least in part, is capable of creating itself.

Next weekend, we’ll continue this series about randomness and God’s divine will. Up next: how God created the body to heal itself, and how can random mutations can be both harmful and benign.

There are several different kinds of arguments that people bring along these lines; I want to talk about just one. So first… the Heidelberg catechism, one of the forms of unity of the church I go to (the Christian Reformed Church), says

Providence is the almighty and ever-present power of God, by which he upholds as with his hand heaven and Earth and all creatures and so rules them, that leaf and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty. All things, in fact, come to us not by chance, but from his fatherly hand.

And part of the way it comes to us—not by chance, but from his fatherly hand—part of the way God has designed our world, is that there is a great deal of regularity and dependability in our world. Of course, if it were not for this regularity and dependability, we couldn’t do the things that we actually do. I mean, for example, if I just wanted to walk off the stage—if, for example, all the sudden those stairs over there suddenly turned into a ladder going up—well, that would make it really difficult.

If you are trying to build a house, for example, you have this hammer, but all the sudden the hammer turns in to a goose or a pigeon. Again, that would make things really difficult…or if the nail turned into a worm…or if you get in the car and turn the key and the car turns into a camel, things would be really hard, much harder than they are. This regularity and dependability in our world is an essential condition of our being able to live in the world in which we actually do.

If the world were irregular enough, we would not even be able to live in it, but there are also, according to classical Christianity here (the Heidelberg catechism, for example) there are also special divine actions; sometimes God does things specially. There are miracles in Scripture: the parting of the Red Sea, for example, Jesus walking on water, Jesus changing water into wine. There are miraculous healings: Jesus rising from the dead, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and so on. And according to classical Christians, many of them, perhaps most of them, are special divine actions. God, for example, responds to prayers. He works in the hearts and minds of his children to effect sanctification. There is, what Calvin called, the internal testimony or witness of the Holy Spirit, and there is what Thomas Aquinas called the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit. So, these things are all special actions on the part of God. God constantly causes events in the world. Ok, so far fair enough—what is the problem?

Many theologians seem to think there is a science-religion problem here. I don’t think any of the theologians of Biola think this, (I don’t know, but I doubt it) but many theologians do. For example, Rudolf Bultmann says, “The historical method,” which of course he thinks that is the method we should use, “includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect. This continuum, furthermore, cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers.”

That’s what he says. Alright, there is this continuum that cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural (that would be God) or transcendent powers. So, it is a little bit like the laws of the Medes and Persians. You probably remember Daniel. Daniel was a favorite of King Darius, and well, the other courtiers became jealous of Daniel (they didn’t like it that the king liked him so well). So, they came to the king and said, “Oh king, live forever, we think it would be a great idea if you passed an edict to the effect that you alone can be worshipped. Everybody has to worship you and nothing else.” Well the king thought that over for a minute, and that sounded pretty good to him so he said, “I guess that it is a pretty good idea.” So he made this edict; he made this declaration: “Only King Darius is to be worshipped—no one else, nothing else.”

These courtiers knew that Daniel worshipped God, and they thought probably Daniel would keep right on worshipping God despite this edict. So they were watching Daniel, and he was, in fact, worshipping God. So they came to the king. Now the penalty for worshipping something else was to be thrown into the lion’s den and they said, “Well, king live forever, looks like Daniel has been violating this edict. You have got to throw him in the lion’s den.”

Well, the king didn’t want to do this because he really liked Daniel. He thought this was a miserable way to proceed, and he didn’t want to do it, but then they said to him, “O king live forever, and remember a law of the Medes and Persians cannot be abrogated, even by the king himself.” So once it’s put in place, not even the king himself can change it or abrogate it or go against it.

That is sort of the suggestion that you get here from Bultmann. Bultmann thinks, “Maybe God created the world and set it up in a certain way, but once he did that, not even he can interfere in it”—he uses that word interference—“not even he can do anything in it. He just has to keep hands off.” It is like the law of the Medes and the Persians.

Another theologian who agrees is John Macquarrie, who says,

The way of understanding miracle (and that would be one kind of special divine action) that appeals to breaks in the natural order and to supernatural intervention belongs to the mythological outlook, and cannot commend itself in a post-mythological climate of thought. The traditional conception of miracle is irreconcilable with our modern understanding of both science and history. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever events occur in the world, can be accounted for in terms of other events that also belong within the world, and if on some occasion, we are unable to give a complete account of some happening, the scientific conviction is that further research will bring to light further factors in the situation that will turn out to be just as imminent and this worldly as the factors already known.

Ok again, no room there for special action. And the third thinker here, Langdon Gilkey (still another theologian), says something similar, but I will pass. I will not read that one in the interest of saving a little bit of time, but these three theologians, plus many others want to assert that there is something wrong with the idea of God acting in the world, acting in the world in a way that goes beyond creation and sustaining, or creation and holding things in existence. So they think, “Ok, God created the world; God sustains it in existence”…that is ok with them, but anything beyond that, God performing any miracles, raising Jesus from the dead, or for that matter working in somebody’s heart and mind in a special way, that, they say, is a real problem. The question is, what is the problem?

Well, the next little bit here…according to the Christian and theistic idea, God is a person; he has knowledge, loves, and hates. He has aims and ends. He acts on the basis of his knowledge to achieve his ends. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and wholly good. Thirdly (noted above by the Heidelberg catechism), God has created the world. Fourth is God conserves and sustains and maintains in being this world he created, but fifth, at least sometimes, God acts in a way going beyond creation and conservation in miracles, but also in his providential guiding of history, his working in the hearts of people, his internal instigation of the Holy Spirit, and so on, and it is with that fifth category that these people have a problem. It is God’s special action in the world—action beyond conservation and creation—and miracles would be an example.

So we might think of these theologians as endorsing what we could call hands off theology. God has got to keep his hands off. God could create the world. God conserves the world, sustains it in being, but he can’t do anything else—that is as far as he could go. It is hands off theology, and Bultmann, even in this context, even talks about interfering. I mean if God did something in the world that would be interfering, which, when you think about it, is a sort of strange thing to say—I mean if God created the world, he is the omnipotent, omniscient, holy, good creator of the world—when you accuse someone of interfering, you are saying they are doing something they should not be doing, right?

So Bultmann thinks if God did something in the world that would be interfering, and he should be ashamed of himself. Ok, now why is this a problem? Their suggestion is that somehow it is contrary to science. It is contrary to science the suggestion that God acts specially in the world. I didn’t read that bit, but Gilkey says, "The causal nexus in space and time which the enlightenment science and philosophy introduced into the western mind is also assumed by modern theologians and scholars. Since they participate in the modern world of science, both intellectually and existentially, they can scarcely do anything else.”

From a presentation sponsored by Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought, and delivered February 12, 2012 at EV Free Church, Fullerton, CA. Used by permission.

For more, be sure to read Randall Pruim's recent series Randomness and God’s Governance, Kathryn Applegate's post That's Random: A Look at Viral Self-Assembly, and our FAQ How Do Randomness and Chance Align with Belief in God's Sovereignty and Purpose?.

Author's Note

I am so thankful that I grew up in a Christian environment, which both kindled and nurtured my relationship with Jesus Christ. The Biblical instruction I received from my parents, pastors, and teachers has been invaluable as I walk out my love for the Lord from day to day. However, there was one specific topic growing up which was not fully addressed, namely evolutionary theory.

Coming from a conservative Christian background, evolution was given little or no thought because of its seeming contradiction to the creation story in Genesis. To me, evolution meant a monkey became a human, and as far as I knew, I had never seen that happen! So, of course, it appeared too improbable to hold any truth. When it was discussed, an inadequate picture of its ideas was often painted, which caused immediate suspicion and rejection of the theory. I don’t think this was intentional, but most Christians have never learned an unbiased, in-depth theory of evolution that is completely detached from societal agendas and philosophical conclusions. Therefore, their explanations of the theory are often misinformed.

My senior year of high school, I took AP Biology, and finally learned the scientific reasoning supporting this theory. I was surprised by how logical and obvious the mechanisms of change (such as mutations, natural selection, genetic drift, and so on) were that gave rise to new species. My subsequent response was, “No wonder people believe evolution occurred.” At that point, I was convinced that microevolution (evolution within a species) existed, but I was still questioning macroevolution.

Now, being at Point Loma Nazarene University as an undergrad in the Biology-Chemistry major and a year-round, student intern at BioLogos, my understanding of evolution has expanded enormously. I have enjoyed critically thinking through the evidence for evolution and reading articles that tackle difficult issues at the interface of science and Christian faith. Ultimately, I know that God has created all things, but the processes he used surpass my small understanding.

My personal wrestling with evolution and quest for truth has led to times of prayer and studying God’s Word, which has deepened my love for him in ways I cannot express. The first chapters of Genesis, in particular, have come alive. My whole life, the creation story was a straightforward list of facts about the creation of the world; I never searched further. I didn’t even perceive the truths Genesis declared over my very identity and God’s character. The more I study his Word and handiwork, I glimpse the awesomeness and majesty of the Creator, who loves me much more than I know. There is still so much to learn, but I am confident that he will lead me into all truth as I seek him out.

I desire to give others the opportunity to see evolution accurately and to distinguish it from the traditional, philosophical, and personal conclusions that too often cloud the scientific theory. I believe these conclusions alienate Christians from evolution more than the scientific theory itself. Ultimately, I do not mean to convince someone about evolution, but simply to give them the freedom to understand it.

Therefore, my goal for this podcast is two-fold:

• First, to offer a new perspective on randomness within natural processes that removes its negative connotations (especially as it relates to evolution).
• Second, to expose why evolution is powerless to support conclusions beyond the physical realm.

This will hopefully encourage others to study evolutionary theory and draw their own conclusions about its meaning in the framework of their faith.

Vox Balaenae, or “Voice of the Whale,” was composed by American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) and was first performed by the New York Camerata in 1971. It was only four years before that, in 1967, that biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay discovered that humpback whales “sing” and published recordings of the whales’ complex vocalizations, after which “whale song” quickly entered the popular consciousness and helped propel the “save the whales” environmental movement forward. (In 1970, Folk singer Judy Collins even put out a version of the traditional melody "Farewell To Tarwathie" over a background of recorded humpback whale songs.) For many, the fact that the massive creatures might share the human capacity and desire to engage in music as a social activity only made their wholesale destruction at our hands more egregious.

Though he was himself inspired by hearing those early whale song recordings, Crumb’s work does not utilize tapes of real whales or attempt merely to reproduce the effect in the context of an ordinary musical form. Instead, he asks three chamber musicians with modified and electrically amplified instruments (piano, flute and cello) to create sounds that evoke the entire natural history of the sea. The piano is played and strummed from inside the case and with a glass rod or plate on the strings, the cello part emphasizes a string’s abilities to produce high harmonic tones, and the flautist sings into her instrument as she plays. Many of these effects are intended to suggest natural sounds—as in the cello’s "seagull effect" (audible at 5:59 in the video linked blow), and the whale-like beginning cadenza by the flute—but not always in a direct way. In addition, all three players perform wearing half-masks, which, according to Crumb help “effac[e] the sense of human projection,” especially when they play under blue stage lighting as he envisioned. (Most of these features can be seen and heard in this April 2011 performance in Montreal by Philippe Prud'homme, piano; Stephane Tetreault, cello

; and Camille Lambert-Chan, flute, though it omits the blue stage lighting.)

In this multi-sensory impressionistic scene, the whales become representatives of a natural world that predates humanity, yet whose fate is inextricably bound up with the will of mankind. Indeed, the tension between the measured vastness of geologic time and the “Age of Man” is written into the score, as an opening prologue is followed by variations on the initial “Sea Theme” (beginning at 4:20), each named after geologic epochs: Archeozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and finally, the Cenozoic. It is in this last age—when mankind arrives on the scene—that the sometimes atonal and harsh combinations of sound reach a dissonant climax that the score indicates should be played as “dramatic, with a feeling of imminent destiny” (beginning at 11:26). Finally, the piece moves towards its conclusion with a haunting restatement and renewal of the Sea Theme (at just after 13:00), with the musicians gradually playing more and more quietly until ending with a pantomime, as if creating sounds beyond the limits of human hearing. Again, the sense of resolution in the music is named by Crumb in the score’s instructions to the players: “serene, pure, transfigured.”

So what do we make of this musical narrative and what Crumb seems to be saying about both whales (standing—or swimming—for the natural world) and humankind? Is it truly an anti-human statement, a “whales vs. people” image in response to environmental damage we were only really beginning to understand (via science) at the time the piece was written? There is certainly a skepticism here about human hubris, made explicit at the end of the prologue section by a “parody” of the opening phrase of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathustra (at 2:40). Contemporary listeners then and now will likely recognize that borrowed theme as the music from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but before that it was a musical homage to Nietzsche’s view of ascendant Man. In this ironic re-use of Strauss’ work, Crumb seems to say that against the span of geologic time and a vast (musical) world previously unknown to human ears, our claims of knowledge and technological mastery seem laughable.

Yet there are several clues that that sort of reading misses the mark, or that it is, at best, incomplete—beginning with the experience of playing and hearing it in person. I first heard Vox Balaenae in about 2002 with my then 6-year-old son. It was played in a small hall (under blue lights) at our local art museum by the Quadrivium Players, a group that included my friend Mary Boodell on the flute. While the masks were surprising at first, they did, indeed, de-emphasize the personality of the players as individuals, while emphasizing the atmospheric, world-creating power of art-forms, especially music.

Rather than a symbolic effacement of the human presence in the world (in keeping with the anti-Nietzschian not above), the effect was to move away from the ritualized performative aspect of modern chamber music and bridge the divide between players and observers, creating a more participatory community. Because of the piece’s distinctive, impressionistic kind of narrativity, one isn’t so much as “carried away by” the music as submerged and suspended in the world created by it, and Boodell describes the effect (especially at the end of the piece) of feeling like the audience is holding it’s breath to hear the silences Crumb has written into the score.

But Boodell also recounts the story of being drawn into the conceptual frame of the piece in a very physical, way when she found herself alone in a swimming pool in the weeks leading up to a performance. Though hesitantly at first, she couldn’t help but wonder how the sounds she made in Vox Balaenae would sound underwater, and so went under in the pool to find out. While the image makes one smile and probably reminds most of us of similar, less technically-proficient underwater experiments of our own, it also suggests how the piece helps hearers make a connection in addition to that between player and listener—that between humanity and the rest of the natural world. If the unexpected flow and soundscape created by Crumb helps audience and players achieve the kind of connection music scholar Jeff Warren has elsewhere on this site discussed as “entrainment,” it is also an invitation to a similarly compassionate state with the rest of creation, based on the new-found knowledge that other creatures have complex, even musical relationships with each other, and that we are privileged to discover and begin to understand them.

Clearly, then, Crumb’s Vox Balaenae touches on scientific knowledge of the world both in its genesis in recordings of whale songs and its structure keyed to geologic, evolutionary ages. But does it have more to say to us here than that we should avoid killing whales because they sing? While we can recognize that the biblical call to have dominion over the earth guides us towards cultivation and care for its creatures and remember that Jesus exemplified such a shepherding role, we should also remember his priestly one, and ours. For just as he remains the High Priest of heaven, holding our prayers in the presence of the Father, we have similar joy in being between heaven and earth, “a little lower than the angels.” Thus we can hold up the great whales (and their songs) as monuments to the depth of God’s creative activity in and through nature—and even revel in our musical, creaturely fellowship with them—without denying the special place of humanity. On the contrary, we affirm that special place when we humble ourselves to listen, seek to understand the native tongues of creation, and then, through Christ, present its songs before the throne of the Almighty Creator and King.

Opening Prayer: “Will you join me in prayer as we focus our hearts and our minds on the Lord this morning? Let us pray. Take a minute and just speak to God yourself, and speak to him about your love for him and your thankfulness for his love and grace and mercy in your life—Father you are good and your love endures forever, your faithfulness to all generations. Thank-you for your faithfulness in our lives, thank-you for your grace that is sent to us, especially sent in the form of your son Jesus. Lord help us to continually appropriate that grace, to continually seek after you. Lord we ask that you would take this time to grow us, to spiritual form us. Amen”

Ken Myers: “Morning. I am in east Texas. The original invitation was to give some lectures on the subject of beauty. I am lecturing in Tyler beginning tonight and tomorrow morning, and when an opportunity came up to speak to you all here at Le Tourneau, I suggested that I might want to talk about a related topic, and so my topic this morning is going to be about the arts and worship.”

“I started working at National Public Radio just before I turned twenty-two. I went to work in the arts and performance department, and I was editing interviews with and commentaries about some of the most creative people in the world. Now, during that time I was also attending an evangelical church I had been at since 5th grade, and that meant that I was spending Monday through Friday with people who were intensely involved in the arts, but pretty much indifferent to, if not hostile to, the practice of Christian worship, and on Sunday’s I worshipped with people who often regarded the arts rather nervously, if not with hostility. It was like when worlds collide, and it was my life.

“During this period in my life on Sundays, I spent time with people who believed in creation, while during the week I worked with people who believed in creativity, and often their lives didn’t seem to overlap. My church friends were deeply committed to the first clause of the Nicene Creed: ‘I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.’ These people believed in a creator. They described the world as a creation, but, in general, like most Christians for most of the Church’s history, they were often more eager to defend the fact of creation than they were to explore the consequences of creation’s nature and meaning in their everyday lives.

“My colleagues at NPR, on the other hand, and the people with whom I was pursuing my vocation, were all people who did not believe there was a maker of all things—they believed in nature, but not creation, and certainly not a creator. But they did believe, and sometimes in an almost religious way, in creativity. In fact, some of them were willing to ascribe almost redemptive power to creativity as made evident in the arts. The arts made life worth living. The arts fulfilled meaning in otherwise meaningless lives. In a world that was essentially chaotic, in which everyday life was dominated by bureaucratic, mechanistic institutions, the arts were great refreshment. They were a source of hope and joy and peace and even possibly moral guidance. The arts rendered us human, many of my friends believed, and delivered us from mere bestial or mechanistic existence. Some of them may have gone so far as to say that the arts imparted a spark of divinity into our lives.”

“Now I was used to living between these two worlds—I majored in film studies as an undergraduate, and I didn’t have a lot of colleagues in my department at the University of Maryland who took religion very seriously either. And I dealt with this conflict early on by starting to read as much as I could lay my hands on about Christianity and the arts. In 1975 (when I started at NPR), there wasn’t a lot written—you all are lucky that there is a lot more great stuff to read now on subjects like that—but I was beginning what turned out to be a life time of reading and study and writing and interviewing to try to understand how we had gotten to the point: how was it that the Church had generally allowed its concern with redemption to eclipse the theme in both Old and New Testaments of the goodness and givenness of creation? Why didn’t we attend to the structure and form of creation that much? …and how was it that modern western culture outside the Church had abandoned its belief in a creator, in a creation that was ordered and given meaning by its maker even while it tried to sustain a belief in human dignity and creativity?

“And over the years, as I have studied this and read about it and thought more about it, I came to realize that both the church and the world of the arts suffered from a diminished appreciation for the meaning of creation. Modern Christians often assume that they could relate to God apart from any deliberate relation to the stuff of creation, and modern secularists assume that they can relate to creation without recognizing or honoring the creator in any way. For both sides, creation is just a lot of raw material; creation isn’t inherently meaningful. It is meaningless and awaits our creativity to achieve significance. Modern Christians, moreover, have tended to pursue an understanding of God that was more and more abstract. It focused his attributes, on invisible realities rather than history, and as theology has aspired to be more like a science, it has assumed that we can think about God apart from his relationship with creation.

“ Of course, God’s identity is not determined by creation, but it is through God’s actions in and through creation that we know him. The Psalms make this very clear. He reveals himself through creation and his supreme revelation of himself involved his entering into creation in a sensory and perceivable way. Creation is an epiphany, it is a revealing…it is a revelation. The heavens declare the glory of God, and God’s eternal power and divine nature can be perceived in the things he has made…that is a remarkable statement. Throughout the Scriptures, especially in the wisdom literature and the Psalms, creation is depicted as an active and evident witness to God’s identity, and all of creation bears witness to God in a chorus of worship. In Psalms 89 we read the very heavens shall praise thy wondrous works and thy truth in the congregation of the saints. The heavens and the earth are depicted as testifying to God’s nature and to his coming triumph over evil. In Psalm 96 we read ‘let the heavens be glad, let the earth rejoice, let the sea roar and all that fills it. Let the fields exult and everything in them, then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness. Creation bears witness that those with ears to hear can hear, but to hear we have to approach creation with a well-ordered imagination.”

“There is a wonderful poem by Gerard Hopkins “God’s Grandeur,” and I mean it is wonderful in the strictness sense. It is full of wonder. He begins by insisting that the world is charged with the grandeur of God, and he goes on to suggest that modern men and women fail to perceive the grandeur of God. They fail to perceive what is revealed there because we are so preoccupied with practical things. All is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil, and all wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell. We are too preoccupied with getting things done to actually attend to the glory present in creation, and as I have suggested, where the Scriptures present creation as an epiphany, a revelation, modern culture and a lot of modern Christians see creation as a lot of raw material resources. It is inert, meaningless stuff awaiting our creativity to become meaningful.

“So, the world is commonly regarded as material to which we do something, and not a source from which we receive something. I think that this attitude toward creation is contrary to how we should pursue the Arts, but also to how we ought to proceed in worship. Our worship should recognize that God the Maker of all things reveals himself in what he has made and that he calls us toward a receptive and grateful posture toward creation, not just toward the redemption he has provided…and that is really the posture of faithful artists. Both worship and the arts serve the function of reorienting our minds, our imaginations, and our practices so that we can properly perceive what creation is and what our position in creation should be. Art is a way of admiring and marveling and wondering at, as well as engaging in, meaningful and wonderful creation. God presents us in creation with materials and forms that artists transform, but they are always tethered to some order that is implicit in creation itself.

“Theologian Peter Lighthart has observed that the artist is always transforming, but this transfiguration is an attempt to get at dimensions of what is really there. It is not an abandonment of what is really there. Even if the artist is aiming at fantasy, art attempts to highlight patterns, correspondences, and dimensions to reality that are usually missed in our everyday experience and to force us to look again at the sunflower or the pipe or the chair. As the Russian formalists say, one of the purposes of art is to de-familiarize the familiar. The reason we do that is so that we can see it for what it is. It has become too familiar for us to recognize what it is. The artist is always responding to the reality of creation in some way—even the most abstract artistic forms—and the best artists are open to receiving something from creation before they can transfigure it. An artist has to sense creation with an exceptional acuity.

“Catholic philosopher Joseph Piper has a little book of essays called “Only the Lover Sings”—art and contemplation—only if you love something do you sing about it. Only if you delight in it, do you rejoice in it, and he is talking about the kind of rejoicing that is evident in works of art. He says there that to contemplate means first of all to see, not to think, and he is advocating a contemplative approach to creation so that we can see what it is, and then express what we have seen…a kind of seeing that is receptive and open, and not just accurate. That is the kind of seeing that is practiced by artists, and it is not unlike the tradition of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition, and that gives us a link between worship and the arts.

“When I say the artist perceives creation, I don’t just mean trees and birds and colors and sunsets, but I mean all of the components of creation—shapes and sounds and textures—as well as various human activities within creation: the way our bodies inhabit space and time, the way words work with all their intriguing textures and resonances as well as the shape of our inner life—what sorrow feels like or sounds like or looks like. Memory, grief, affection—all of the aspects of nature and human nature have to be attended to lovingly and then reassembled or reconfigured or remixed in some way. Human creativity is not as God’s creativity ex nihilo—creation out of nothing—it is creation out of something, and it is a something that God, the God that we worship, has already blessed with meaning. Creation is meaningful revelation, and its revelation can be perceived as we are imaginatively involved with the stuff of creation. The God we worship, the maker of heaven and earth, has made as creatures whose lives are fulfilled when we engage creation well.”

“I have to confess that I get nervous when I hear Christian artists or other religious artists talk about the relationship between faith and art only as if art is an expression of spirituality or art is a gateway to the transcendent. It may be that, but I think they run the risk of presenting Christianity in disembodied terms. We should not be ashamed of the fact that our faith integrates spirit and body, but our faith calls us to regard the stuff of creation in all of its materiality as good, and thus offers the best starting point for the practice and pleasure of art.

“Christian worship has always been involved imaginatively with the stuff of creation. The poetry of the Psalms was recited by our Lord and his disciples so that he was engaged with the sound of words as well as the meaning of words. Music was a part of Christian worship—at least since choirs of angels greeted the nativity of the incarnate Christ and possibly earlier. Whether Mary sang her wonderful song which we call the Magnifica, a wonderful song inspired by her miraculous pregnancy or whether she simply spoke it we don’t know, but it is still sung week after week in churches around the world. Artful expressions and worship have been present in less obvious ways. It is notable that the communion table contains bread and wine, not wheat and grapes. It is not organic material in its most natural state that serves as a memorial meal that unites us with God, bread and wine are the products of human creativity. They are not simply of the natural blessing of God’s harvest, even grain and grapes require attention and care to bring them to fruition. Wine is an even more artful product and bread demands attentiveness to the details of creation. Bakers and vintners are not people we usually think of as artists, but what they do has a lot in common with what artists do: they take the stuff of creation and transform it into something newly delightful and beautiful. Bread, wine, and art all serve practical purposes, but they often go beyond necessity toward delight.

“Again, theologian Peter Lighthart has observed that art is a making that imitates the making of God, and it is most God-like when it is purely gratuitous, when it is not meeting a need—creation is gratuitous, it is not something that God needed to do, but we rejoice and give thanks both in worship and in the arts that he chose to do so. In worship, we honor the creator for the gift of creation and of salvation. In works of art we imitate God’s act of delighted and gratuitous making, and in the Lord’s Supper we receive a great feast, a table set for us not because we deserve it or even because we need it. God’s salvation could have been less extravagant, more perfunctory than a feast, just as the wine that Jesus made from water could have been merely passable rather than a really good wine. The wedding guests thought it was any way, and the inspired texts of the gospel seem to remind us of that. The gifts that God has given are given generously as well as gratuitously. Now, when we receive a great gift, we are delighted in the gift, and in the generosity of the giver, and so it is with a reception of a powerful work of art.

“When I hear the thoughtful and attentive performance of a carefully crafted piece of music or when I watch a masterfully constructed film, I often have a sense of gratitude not just to the performers and the composer or the director, but to God! I am grateful to live in a world where such joys are possible. The gratitude felt by the recipients of a gift resonates with the delight known by the giver of the gift. It is win-win, and that is a pattern built into creation since creation is the work of a dynamic three-personed God and the members of the Trinity enjoy an eternal giving and receiving of love among themselves. The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us of the personality and dynamism of God…qualities suggested in the ancient term applied to the Trinity by theologians [is] perichoresis. Perichoresis refers to the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity, and by extension it refers to God’s relationship to the world whereby everything is in him and has its being in him. The ‘chor’ in perichoresis, by the way (if you have studied any Greek), may recognize that it shows up in our word choreography. Perichoresis literally means dancing around. So, the relationship among the persons of the Trinity is a dance—Father, Son and Holy Spirit dancing around each other and the Christian life which involves God in us and we in God is our entry into that dance.”

“What I am trying to do with all this theology is to make a case that artistic and imaginative and creative activity is not simply a pleasant and rewarding ornament that we might use to decorate our worship services or to increase enthusiasm to make them less boring, artistic activity is evidence to us of the kind of creatures we are, the kind of creator that God is, and the kind of world that we live in, a world that he has placed us in to love and serve him and others as we exercise our stewardship over that world. Since worship is in the words of one writer “the school of the Church,” our hearts and our minds are shaped through the experience of worship to properly perceive things as they are, and not only spiritual things, but all aspects of creation. After all, when Jesus commissioned the Church with the task of making disciples, he begins by declaring his authority over heaven and earth, not just their spiritual lives…and when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask that God’s rule over all earthly things would become more and more evident on earth as it is in heaven. And so in worship we learn to perceive and name reality in a Christian way, and works of imagination can assist in those lessons.

“Since I have already mentioned the subject of music briefly, an observation from theologian and musician Jeremy Begby is appropriate here. In his book Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music, Begby notes that in the western musical tradition guided by the Church quote “we have been placed in a world vibrant with its own God-given integrities and with the opportunity of interacting fruitfully with those integrities and that music is one means we have been given to do just that. When churches order their ministry of music with those kinds of integrities in mind, then music becomes a tool to reshape our imagination and to renew our minds.

“Art provides us with ways of perceiving reality aright. Not all art does this, or very well, and not all of us have allowed our imagination to be encouraged that kind of perception—we are in too big a hurry or it doesn’t seem practical enough; we have other things on our plate. Just as our thinking can be taken captive to worldly conclusions, so our imaginations can become preoccupied with novelty or with the merely interesting or with something that is trivializing or flattering. Just as we can surrender our bodies and the various consequences and configurations of our life in the body to patterns of disobedience, so we have the opportunity to present out bodies and all that we do in our body life in worthy and thoughtful sacrifice to God. The orienting of all aspects of our embodied life to God is the worship that we owe him.

“We learn that from Romans 12. And so, the use of our hands and our eyes and our ears and our voices in creativity activities that resonate with God’s own music in creation is a most suitable offering to bring him. In Romans 12, Paul warns about being conformed to this world and in no matter are we more in danger of worldly conformity than in our posture toward creation. All sorts of intellectual and social pressures suddenly persuade us to ignore the Biblical testimony of God’s identity as creator as well as the nature of our engagement with creation. The rationalism of the Enlightenment, which guides modern science and technology, encourages us to assume a god-like stance over the material world and at the other extreme, modern materialism suggests that we are at the mercy of something utterly different and incomprehensible.

“The Gospel picture of creation is radically different. Theologian Colin Gunton has said that we can know the world, not infallibly, not with a name of a kind of omniscience because we are both a part of it and able to transcend it through our personal powers of perception, imagination, and reason…and perception, imagination, and reason come together most intensely in artistic modes of knowledge and expression. The world is a creation intended for us to inhabit. It is not simply a meaningless, cosmic accident, and thus art can be powerful, it can resonate deeply in our lives, and even people who believe that the world is the product of a cosmic accident often cannot help when they work creatively to behave that way. Imaginative expressions in the visual arts and poetry and music have existential power because at some level, they convey to us something about the various connections and likenesses that God has placed in creation.

“This is especially evident, I think, in poetry where metaphor is involved in the recognition of likenesses, and it is an idea that came up in a conversation that I enjoyed a number of years ago—someone less famous than Johnny Cash—Richard Wilbur, who is probably our greatest living poet. Wilbur and I talked about the centrality of metaphor and poetry, how poetry works by likening one thing to another. In Psalm 1, a righteous person is compared to a tree sustained by its life and fruitfulness in life-giving water. The power of metaphor, Wilbur observed, “puts almost every poet in danger of being religious. If anything can be compared to anything else, if the world can be seen as a linkage of similes and metaphors and figures, then poetry itself comes very close to declaring that all things are co-natural, that they are of one nature and that brings you to the threshold of saying all things have had a maker.” Wilbur went on “I remember ages ago reading the final book of poems by poet Joseph Warren Beach, who claimed to be an atheist, and I took it around to him and he was in Cambridge at that time, and I said Joseph look at these two lines. Don’t you think that they amount to a religious affirmation? He read them and said ‘well, I can see that they do. I must say that I seem simply to have submitted to the spirit of poetry at that moment. It is an awesome thing to submit to the spirit of poetry even if for a moment.’”

“Worship that avoids imaginative expressions runs the risk of reducing our religious experience to mere ideas or mere therapy, when in fact our religious experience is rightly understood as cosmic. The scale of the Christian story incorporates the intensely intimate and the vast incomprehensibles of the cosmos, and we need works of imagination to convey that whole story to us, to refresh our gratitude to God, to reorient our engagement with all that he has made, and to baptize our imaginations. Art that resonates with the order in creation conveys to us a deeper character of our creator and the character of the order he has placed there.

“In Isaiah 45, there is this wonderful passage where we read of God: “For thus says Yahweh, the creator of the heavens, he is God who shaped the earth and made it, who set it firm. He did not create it to be chaos; he formed it to be lived in. I am Yahweh and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, in some dark corner of the underworld; I did not say offspring of Jacob search for me in chaos. I am Yahweh. I proclaim saving justice; I say what is true.” In closing, I want to comment on that observation from Eugene Peterson in his recent book Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. He says at the beginning of that book…and that line by the way “Christ plays in ten thousand places” is from a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins—I think it is the poem the “King Fisher,” which is about the glory evident in a bird…Peterson writes, ‘it is the task of the Christian community to give witness and guidance in the living of life in a culture that is relentless in reducing, constricting, and enervating life’ [repeated once more].

“I think that with that task in mind the Church and its ministry in discipleship and mission should proceed in three steps. First, we need to identify the ways the culture around us has misshaped or misunderstood how to live life well in God’s creation, how it has sundered what should be united. Second, the church in its teaching and discipling should encourage the convictions and practices necessary to restore a proper wholeness to life, which includes recognition of all the glories and wonders of creation. Third, motivated by the need to love our neighbors, care for widows and orphans in their misery, and having demonstrated to the world the ways in which redeemed humanity is a fulfilled humanity, the church has to find the false gods under whose captivity people are suffering. I am afraid in our time there are a lot of false ideas that penetrate the world of the arts, and part the task of the church is to recognize those false ideas so that we can, in fact, be liberated. This is a problem that should concern the church, and not just those in Christian arts—thank-you very much.”

While these are indeed complex questions, some of the problems do stem from misunderstandings about what randomness means in a scientific sense and what role it plays in evolution. To help clarify some of these details, we offer these resources.

The “Randomness” installment of our Distinctions series (first posted earlier this year) looks at some of the basic misconceptions about the role of randomness in evolution. While it is understood by many simply to mean blind, undirected and purposeless, in truth, randomness is far more complex and awe-inspiring than this overly-simplified definition. Whether through genetic mutations or the combinations that occur between sperm and eggs, these processes can be seen as the continual unfolding of something that is decidedly not random--creation itself. Randomness, in essence, generates certainty. This is further illustrated in the second video.

In the clip “Randomness” from the upcoming film A Leap of Truth by Ryan Pettey, Richard Colling, Ard Louis, and John Polkinghorne offer several examples of random processes leading to order rather than disorder. As Dr. Louis points out, the scientific definition of “randomness” is quite different from our everyday understanding of the word. In fact, random generation is the most efficient way to generate complexity. Polkinghorne further notes that we live in a world where the balance of random mutations is almost perfectly tuned for fruitful life on Earth. This, we learn, is God's process: Randomness given time, can lead to that which is nearly certain.

This is beautifully illustrated in the following re-post from last year. Here, in a blog called "That's Random," Kathryn Applegate offers two examples of random motion leading to certainty in the process of assembling a virus. Because random processes can lead to that which is almost certain, it is not at all surprising that this has frequently been used by God over billions of years to create order out of chaos--God's creation, by God's way, in God's time.

That's Random

You hear it all the time: “That’s so random!” When used by people of my generation, the word “random” can simply mean “cool” or “surprising.” Or it can mean something like “disconnected,” as in the phrase, “I had a random thought” (which returns 189,000 hits on Google, by the way—random!).

Despite this usage, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability, and that it often implies a lack of conscious intentionality. But what do mathematicians and scientists mean when they say something is random? Can a random process lead to an ordered, even predictable outcome? Is there evidence that God makes use of random processes to fulfill his creative purposes?

These are big questions, and we won’t address them all today. But I think randomness is an important topic to cover for two reasons: 1) it is integral to many processes in biology (and math, physics, chemistry, etc.), and 2) it is commonly misunderstood to be incompatible with Christianity.

As I said above, most of us know that randomness has something to do with probability. If you pick a card “at random” from a shuffled deck, you have a small probability of drawing an ace (4 out of 52, or a 7.7% chance). If you flip a coin, you have an equal probability of getting heads or tails.

Randomness also seems to imply a lack of intentionality or purposefulness. After all, you might hope for an ace when you draw a card, but you can’t choose one on purpose. You might call heads when you flip a coin, but you can’t know beforehand what the outcome will be. Thus the outcome is indeterminate, but is it purposeless? Not necessarily. Indeterminacy simply means the result cannot be predicted from the outset.

It should be noted that indeterminacy does not imply that God does not have foreknowledge of future events. Christians ought not to be uncomfortable with the idea of God interacting with his creation through chance. We often describe a seemingly-random (i.e. unplanned by us) sequence of events as being “providential,” or planned by God. A good introduction to the way divine action could drive physical processes can be found in this Question.

In biology, it is very hard or impossible to calculate precise probabilities for most processes, so when we say a process is random, we typically mean it is extremely unpredictable. Eventually we will discuss randomness within biological evolution, but first we must consider some simpler processes, like the self-assembly of a virus.

Viruses are remarkably efficient entities. Coiled tightly within a protein-based shell is a small amount of DNA needed for self-replication. The shell, called a capsid, is made of many repeating protein subunits and is therefore highly symmetrical (see figure). Important biomedical insights have certainly been gleaned from structural studies of viruses, but viruses also teach us about the emergence of order from non-order.

The virus life cycle has four main steps: 1) enter a host cell, 2) hijack the cell’s replication and translation machinery to make many copies of itself, 3) assemble into many virus particles, and 4) exit the cell to invade another host.

When I first learned about this process, I found it very hard to believe it just “happens.” The idea that a bunch of molecules bumping into each other inside a crowded cell could spontaneously assembly into a fully-functional virus seemed a bit far-fetched. Many viral capsids have over 100 protein subunits that must interact with each other in just the right way, or it won’t work. Surely there must be something driving this process, right?

There is! Random motion. I had to see it to believe it. I distinctly remember sitting in class during my first year of graduate school when the professor demonstrated self-assembly of a virus using a 3D model as shown in the following video. In less than 30 seconds, you can watch a jumbled heap of proteins become a beautifully ordered structure.

As the narrator explains, sub-assemblies form and break apart en route to the most stable structure, the full capsid. As the sub-assemblies begin to form, further associations with free subunits become more favorable and as a result occur rapidly, while the final steps may take considerably longer. While the subunits in the model are rigid, in reality the proteins take on multiple conformations, allowing the capsid to “breathe.”

Amazing as it is, the system we just considered—one virus capsid in a jar—is pretty simple. One wonders how self-assembly can happen in a crowded cell, where there are countless other molecules diffusing around, potentially getting in the way. We can’t directly see how it happens in a cell, but we can reconstitute the process in a test tube using different combinations of constituent molecules.

Consider two viruses, where each protein subunit in one virus is the mirror image of the corresponding subunit in the other. Putting the two viruses together by hand would be pretty tricky, because the constituent parts look so similar. But random motion can do the job in short order:

From this model, we can see clearly, in real-time, how distinct complex structures can arise from their parts randomly interacting with one another. Many large viruses also use special scaffolding proteins to assist in the assembly process, and some even use their own genomes as a scaffold. In addition, two closely-related viruses that happen to infect the same cell can exchange parts to create a new virus. This is one way viruses can evolve quickly to evade the host’s immune system.

Here we have seen how viruses demonstrate a principle inherent in God’s world—that order can emerge out of chaos from random processes.

Just over six months ago we began a new emphasis in the Sunday posts on the creative arts (musical, visual, poetic) as means both of worship and of understanding how modern science can and should inform the life we live as the Church. Behind that new emphasis was a belief that both the arts and sciences are facets of the same distinctively human posture of “faith seeking understanding,” and a desire to work against the cultural trend of seeing each field of endeavor—science, the arts, theology, or even Christian ministry—as distinct, autonomous activities divorced from the others.

In the first segment of this video, I discussed how metaphors are inherent to scientific thinking and discourse. In this video blog, I suggest that coming to terms with such marvelously complicated things as the universe and our own cultures sometimes requires methods of inquiry that are less precise, rather than more precise, and I note that art has a way of helping us see the complexity of the world while simultaneously appreciating its beauty. Additionally, as they provide invitations to engage with the world and with each other rather than propositions to be proved or disproved, the creative arts call us towards community even in the midst of our most contentious debates.

By engaging scientists, but also biblical scholars, theologians, pastors, artists and laypeople, the BioLogos Foundation expresses our belief that all aspects of creation including human culture are under the Lordship of Christ, and that those who call upon Jesus as savior have the additional joy and burden of submitting to each other in love as part of our life of worship. We hope and pray that these creative works will aid in that process of seeking unity, and continue to help us engage deeply with what it means to be human—to be made in the image of God.

Today we are happy to introduce the first in a new series of videos from The BioLogos Foundation called “Distinctions”. These short videos look to clarify some of the important scientific questions at the heart of the science and faith dialogue. In our first video -- featuring biologists Sean Carroll and Kerry Fulcher, Smithsonian Human Origins Program director Rick Potts, and Old Testament scholar John Walton -- we look at the concept of randomness. While it is understood by many simply to mean blind, undirected and purposeless, in truth, randomness is far more complex and awe-inspiring than this overly-simplified definition. Unlike our previous posts for the Conversations series, we won't be including a full summary, as we feel the videos speak for themselves.

There are certainly more resources addressing the topic of randomness, however. For further reading, be sure to check out our FAQ on chance and God's sovereignty, Ard Louis’ scholarly essay “How Does the BioLogos Model Need to Address Concerns Christians Have About the Implications of its Science?”, and the series of blogs by BioLogos program director and cell biologist Kathryn Applegate, beginning with her posts “That’s Random!” and "Understanding Randomness".

Credits: This video was directed by Loretta Cooper, President of Clarity Media Strategies and was scripted by Loretta Cooper and BioLogos Program Director, Kathryn Applegate.

This video features a discussion with Mark Sprinkle -- painter, educator, writer, and BioLogos Senior Fellow -- about the relationship between art and science. Art and creative expression, Sprinkle explains, are simply ways to give form to metaphor. Metaphor, in turn, is at the heart of two seemingly opposing entities: our understanding of God and our understanding of science.

While science is a data-driven pursuit, when we talk about what it actually means we almost always use metaphor. As an example, Sprinkle mentions the way we talk about atoms as tiny particles orbiting around other tiny particles. This description is based on data. It refers, however, to the metaphorical Greek idea that everything can be broken down into smaller and smaller particles or “building blocks”.

In a similar manner, spirituality and our understanding of God intrinsically include images. When Jesus describes the Kingdom of God, for example, he uses a variety of metaphors, implementing many layers of imagery to give his followers a more complete picture.

It is impossible, Sprinkle concludes, to talk about complicated things without reference to our senses. “Art”, he states, “is a language of description that connects both science and faith”.

Today's video, courtesy of the Test of Faith project, presents a dramatic retelling of Job 38. Below is the original text from the New International Version.

Job 38

1 Then the LORD spoke to Job out of the storm. He said:

2 “Who is this that obscures my plans
with words without knowledge?
3 Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me

4 “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
5 Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
6 On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—
7 while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

8 “Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
9 when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,
10 when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
11 when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?

12 “Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place,
13 that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?
14 The earth takes shape like clay under a seal;
its features stand out like those of a garment.
15 The wicked are denied their light,
and their upraised arm is broken.

16 “Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea
or walked in the recesses of the deep?
17 Have the gates of death been shown to you?
Have you seen the gates of the deepest darkness?
18 Have you comprehended the vast expanses of the earth?
Tell me, if you know all this.

19 “What is the way to the abode of light?
And where does darkness reside?
20 Can you take them to their places?
Do you know the paths to their dwellings?
21 Surely you know, for you were already born!
You have lived so many years!

22 “Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
or seen the storehouses of the hail,
23 which I reserve for times of trouble,
for days of war and battle?
24 What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
25 Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
and a path for the thunderstorm,
26 to water a land where no one lives,
an uninhabited desert,
27 to satisfy a desolate wasteland
and make it sprout with grass?
28 Does the rain have a father?
Who fathers the drops of dew?
29 From whose womb comes the ice?
Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
30 when the waters become hard as stone,
when the surface of the deep is frozen?

31 “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
32 Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
33 Do you know the laws of the heavens?
Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?

34 “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
and cover yourself with a flood of water?
35 Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
36 Who gives the ibis wisdom
or gives the rooster understanding?
37 Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?
Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens
38 when the dust becomes hard
and the clods of earth stick together?

39 “Do you hunt the prey for the lioness
and satisfy the hunger of the lions
40 when they crouch in their dens
or lie in wait in a thicket?
41 Who provides food for the raven
when its young cry out to God
and wander about for lack of food?

In this video “Conversation,” BioLogos Program Director Kathryn Applegate points to evolutionary science as a way to gain a richer understanding of the glory of God.

Scientists become fairly comfortable with a certain level of uncertainty within scientific data, notes Applegate, but that is not the case for most people. Uncertainty—especially where faith is concerned—can be scary for people who want a black and white answer. Yet science has all of the subtlety of a beautiful painting that is hard to encapsulate in a sound byte.

God speaks through the Bible and all sorts of other things that comport with the Bible, says Applegate. “Science is another way of studying what God does. How he created and how he continues to create. God is active and involved. We see that through the means of a continuous creation through evolution,” she says.

That is really exciting and allows us to better understand the character of God. God is infinitely creative and infinitely good. Looking to Genesis for scientific data is like looking at the notes on the page of a symphonic score without ever hearing the music—you miss all the richness. “Not that the notes aren’t important,” says Applegate, but they do not offer the complete picture and it isn’t the primary purpose of those texts.

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When I consider your heavens,
       the work of your fingers,
       the moon and the stars,
       which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
       the son of man that you care for him?

Psalms 8:3-4

As modern science reminds us just how big this universe is, the same question arises: "What is man?" And as we turn our telescopes to the skies and learn more about them, even more questions seem to arise.

We now understand how stars and galaxies are born and how they die. The heavens are not fixed, as we once believed, but they are expanding, growing, and changing. Stars are still being created even today. What do these new observations say about the Bible or about a Creator?

Certainly, our scientific inquiries raise some deep, trying questions, without easy answers. However, the words of Galileo, whose passion for the heavens led to revolutions for both science and religion, can offer us some closing insight:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

For more worship videos like the one shown above, be sure to visit Highway Video's website.

Come Thou Fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,
Mount of God's unchanging love.

Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I'm come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here's my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins was noted for his focus on both religious and natural subjects, often intertwining the two. His sonnet “Pied Beauty” (published 29 years after his death) is just one example of Hopkins’ masterful ability to connect the beauty of nature with the wonder of God.

The poem begins with a clear call to worship (“Glory be to God”) before taking readers through vivid images of creation. As the title suggests, these images -- “skies of couple-colour” and “fresh-firecoal chesnut” -- stitch together to convey the diverse and changing beauty of God’s creation, much like the patches of a quilt.

As we weave through the images, caught up in the alliteration and sprung rhythm of Hopkins’ verse, we can feel the wonder and excitement of God’s creation building until the poem reaches its short yet powerful final line. Indeed, as we look back at the dappled beauty of the world Hopkins describes, what can we do but “praise him”?

Pied Beauty

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

–Romans 1:20

Psalm 93

The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty;
the LORD is robed in majesty
and is armed with strength.
The world is firmly established;
it cannot be moved.
Your throne was established long ago;
you are from all eternity.

The seas have lifted up, O LORD,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea--
the LORD on high is mighty.

Your statutes stand firm;
holiness adorns your house
for endless days, O LORD.

“There is no creature so small and abject, but it reflects the goodness of God.”
– Thomas A Kempis

Amidst the noise and bustle of the modern world, it can be difficult to find time to simply sit and listen. Yet it is often in the quiet times when the Lord speaks most clearly to us.

In 1 Kings 19:11, the Lord tells Elijah to “stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” As Elijah waits, he is witness to a powerful wind, an earthquake, and a fire, yet God is not in any of these loud and awesome forces. Instead, Elijah finds the Lord in “a gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:12).

Scientist George Washington Carver puts it wonderfully: “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.”

This Sunday, even as we are surrounded by the winds, earthquakes, and fires of our own lives, let us take time to “tune in” to the beauty of God’s creation around us and to thank the Lord for all He has done.

"Do you know how God controls the clouds and makes his lightning flash? Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge?" -Job 37:15-16

Science has shown us that clouds are visible masses of water vapor, which are condensed into either droplets or frozen crystals. Their formation and movement are aided through the circulation of air masses. Indeed, the clouds that seemed so mysterious in the book of Job are no longer a mystery to us.

The same can be said of many other aspects of the natural world. Science can tell us how flowers bloom and how the sun rises and sets each day. Science has even begun to give us insight into the processes that may have brought about life itself - processes that seem to go against the idea of a literalist six day interpretation of Genesis. Does such knowledge mean we cannot look upon these natural wonders and experience the same awe of our Creator, as described in the verses above? Is the beauty of nature diminished simply because we better understand it?

Not at all. Our scientific insight into the way the world works should lead us into a deeper sense of awe and admiration for the author of these processes, not a lessened one. And as we begin to understand the laws that underlie God's creation, even deeper mysteries emerge. Why is the universe so well ordered? Why is there something rather than nothing? Such questions lead us deeper still in our understanding of the Creator.

In addition to His Word, God has given us an innate desire to seek him through nature - the book of God's works. We must remember that both faith and science lead to truth about God the creator.

For more worship videos like the one shown above, be sure to visit Highway Video's website.

In this video conversation, Karl Giberson advocates for an understanding of the Creator that places more emphasis on his sustainment of creation and less on its origins. Giberson notes that one of the things that the New Atheists have succeeded in doing is setting the frame of the debate by suggesting that unless we can point to what God is “doing”, that is, what he is actively creating—then he can’t exist.

This is a very reductionist argument, says Giberson, which attempts to evaluate claims of God in the same way that one would evaluate something like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This kind of rubric does not work because the Christian understanding of God has always been a much more “robust and philosophically deep concept” than that which the New Atheists will account or allow for.

“What does it mean to say that God brings a universe into being?” It doesn’t mean that God is “[always in there] tinkering like gravity”—but he is more significant than that because he is the grounding force of gravity. God works through secondary causes—thus we need a more sophisticated view of causality. Way before the Big Bang or any theory of evolution, Aquinas points out that origination is not the key part to creating, it’s sustaining.

We have to be careful about projecting our idea about human creation onto God because the notion of a human creator is an entirely different concept. For example, when humans create something, they finish, and then walk away. We don’t say that Da Vinci continues to sustain the Mona Lisa and that if he were to remove his “sustaining powers” that it would cease to exist.

That would make no sense at all.

“Yet, that’s what it means to say God created the world—because everything is grounded in his being.”