More Than One Christian View

Many parents and pastors are wondering what to tell their children about creation and evolution. While Sunday school classes often cover Genesis 1 around kindergarten (with kids coloring pictures of what God created on each day), most curricula do not address science again before kids leave for college. Yet issues of creation and evolution can be addressed in age-appropriate ways throughout Sunday school. Elementary school children already learn about idol worship from other Old Testament stories, so teachers have an opportunity to contrast Genesis 1 with the idol-rich creation stories of other cultures. Middle school students can be given basic tools for considering creation and evolution such as the contrast between the “how” questions answered by their science lessons in school and the “who” and “why” questions answered in Scripture. Middle and high school students can find role models by reading the testimonies of scientist Christians.

Youth need to be encouraged to discuss their questions and doubts, while affirming core beliefs. When asked why they left the faith, scientists often mention that the church was not open to their questions and told them to “just believe.” Churches can demonstrate openness to questions by teaching youth about multiple Christian views on an issue. Students need to hear that some Christians accept the science of evolution and others do not, and have a conversation about the reasons why. Too many young people have struggled when they felt they had to choose between clear scientific evidence and the beliefs they grew up with. Even when parents and leaders are unsure about evolution, they can help students by saying, “While I have concerns about evolution, I’ve heard that some Christians accept the science of evolution while still believing in the God of the Bible.”

Difficult issues like origins cannot be addressed in a single event. People need time to ponder the issues, and spaces to talk it through. One church did a six-week sermon series, with parallel curricula for all ages in Sunday school, so that families could work through it together. Another church did a sermon series and discussion group for adults for four weeks, to prepare parents before a four-week series for the youth group. Other churches encourage small groups to read a book on science and faith and discuss a chapter a week. (Since all authors have their favorite view, I recommend discussing at least two books from different authors to learn about multiple Christian positions.)

More Than Evolution

In our science-saturated culture, evolution is not the only science topic the church should be considering, and not even the most important. With church members encountering the latest medical advances as patients and family members, a discussion on bioethics would be very relevant. Since young people are usually the first to use hot new gadgets, they should be considering the appropriate Christian use of technology . As the issue of climate change becomes more pressing every year, churches need to talk about it, and not avoid it because it is so political. The Evangelical Environmental Network offers many resources for churches, emphasizing ways that creation care benefits the poor and the unborn. One group of churches, with the help of Calvin College, joined together to clean up the local creek that drains the watershed in which the parishioners live, work, and worship. Many of the congregants were not even aware of the size of the watershed or the pollution level in their own creek. This was a hands-on opportunity for all ages, directly caring for their own corner of God’s green Earth.

More Than Controversy

With so many issues to discuss, Christians can easily get the feeling that science is always attacking the faith. It is essential to balance such conversations with positive responses to God’s creation. After all, the primary response to the natural world in the Bible is to praise the God who made it. The first time I led an adult Sunday school class on creation and evolution, I was amazed how much the participants appreciated simply ending each session with a Psalm reading or creation hymn. Thoughtful frowns turned into relaxed smiles as the group remembered our unity in Christ and the centrality of God as the Creator.

Creation themes can be incorporated throughout worship. One church asked the congregation to submit their favorite creation photos at the end of the summer (from backyard flowers to National Parks), then wove the images into a worship service with creation songs and readings from the Psalms. In addition to flowers and mountains, modern science has revealed incredible glories that can inspire our praise and reflection. Several contemporary Christian musicians have begun to artfully incorporate the wonders of the natural world into their music; Chris Rice sings of “cratered moon and Saturn’s rings,” and Third Day praises the “God of wonders beyond our galaxy.” In one church, an elder brought in modern science when leading the congregation in prayer with these words: “Creator God, out of nothing you created all that is. You hurled the galaxies through time and space. . . . The universe is your hourglass, the continental drift your minute hand, the Grand Canyon your second hand. You are infinite.”

Preachers can incorporate science in the same way they make references to movies, current events, or best-selling books in sermons. To notice these connections, take some time to encounter science: read the science section of the New York Times, visit a local science museum, or ask scientists in the congregation about their work. A visit to a planetarium might give a new appreciation for the vastness of the universe, which could illuminate a sermon on the vastness of God’s forgiveness in Psalm 103:11–12. Pastor John Van Sloten learned about the neural networks in the brain and incorporated it into a sermon on the vine and the branches of John 15.

Preachers are understandably concerned about avoiding scientific errors when preaching, but this should not prevent engagement with science. Some pastors do their own research to get the details right because they enjoy digging into a science topic. Other pastors bring in a scientist (live or by video) so that they do not have to explain the technical material themselves. Others play to their strengths by choosing topics with fewer technical details, such as the Christian motivation for doing science or exposition of Bible passages relevant for scientific questions. Many of the questions Christians have are really about biblical interpretation and Christian theology, areas where the pastor is an expert. Minor technical errors made in good faith are forgivable, but a sermon that argues that mainstream science is wrong on some point can be devastating for the faith life of teenagers who are learning the correct science in school.

Beyond Sunday morning worship and preaching, science can show up in many areas of church life. During a youth camping trip or church picnic, include a nature walk concluded with praise. After a winter evening worship service, invite a local amateur astronomer to set up a telescope in the parking lot to show people the moon and planets. Convert a vacant lot near church into a community garden, so kids can experience firsthand how God provides food from the Earth.

More Than Programs

In all these activities, remember that views on science are “caught” more than “taught.” Congregants will naturally pick up on the attitude of the pastor or ministry leader, whether skeptical of science or celebrating science as the study of God’s creation. Visitors will pick up on this too, so these attitudes are part of being a church that welcomes and ministers to scientist Christians . Recently I was invited to speak at a church on the expansion of the universe and the possibility of a multiverse. Several enthusiastic young people in attendance had clearly caught the love of science from the church leaders who planned the event. One girl came up afterward with her dad, both of them marveling at God’s creation. They were amazed not just with the particular things I had discussed, but with the way in which God has embedded wonders at every level of understanding. Everyone can marvel at the starry skies, school kids can learn about the planets and asteroids, and scientists with PhDs can study dark matter and string theory. No matter how deep we look, we keep discovering more and more ways that creation declares the glory of God.

For Further Reading

For more resources on a full range of science topics, visit the The Ministry Theorem collection at http://ministrytheorem.calvinseminary.edu/. You will find sample sermons, curricula for children and adults, worship resources, essays by a dozen scientist Christians, and much more.

Evidence from the Size of the Universe

We’ve already discussed the vastness of the universe earlier in this chapter. We noted that the most distant galaxies are over 10 billion light years away, indicating that the light left these galaxies over 10 billion years ago in order to reach us today. The straightforward interpretation of these data is that the universe must be at least 10 billion years old.

While some people have argued that perhaps these galaxies aren’t really that far away, all of the methods used to measure distance agree that galaxies are billions, not thousands, of light years away. Others have argued that perhaps the light moved much faster when it first left these galaxies, so that it could reach us in much less time than 10 billion years. But this idea conflicts with other data that we have. As described in Chapter 3, ample evidence supports the idea that physical processes such as quantum mechanics and electromagnetism function the same way in distant galaxies as they do on earth. Those physical processes depend on the speed of light and would look very different if the speed of light had changed. Instead, they look the same in distant galaxies as they do on earth, indicating that the speed of light has been constant over the history of the universe.

Evidence from the Moon and Planets

Studies of the Moon and planets also give evidence for great age. Geologists can use some of the same methods to measure the age of rocks on the Moon, Venus, and Mars as they use on Earth. That’s because the asteroid collisions, volcanoes, and erosion they observe on Earth also occur on the Moon and planets. Photos taken by spacecraft while orbiting Mars show channels and gullies on the planet’s surface. Similar channels on Earth are usually made by flowing water. Yet there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars right now.

What does this have to do with age? It is evidence that Mars was much different in the past than it is today. The atmosphere used to be much thicker and warmer, similar to Earth’s, but now it is much colder and thinner. This dramatic change in planet-wide climate took millions or billions of years. Thus the rocks testify that the planet Mars must be at least this old.

Evidence from the Orbits of Asteroids

The orbits of asteroids also show evidence of a long history. When an asteroid is discovered, its path through the sky shows its orbit around the Sun. Once astronomers know the orbit of an asteroid they can calculate its orbit in the past and into the future to see whether it will hit the earth. By calculating the orbits backward, astronomers have found several asteroids that converged at the same location several million years ago. Apparently two larger asteroids collided at this spot and shattered into the smaller asteroids we see today. If God had created asteroids just a few thousand years ago, why would he have put them in orbits that suggest a collision several million years ago? The evidence clearly points to a long history for asteroids.

Evidence from Meteorites

Radiometric dating is used to study rocks on Earth as well as rocks from elsewhere in the solar system. Studies have been done on the rocks that astronauts brought back from the Moon and on asteroids that have fallen to Earth. As with Earth rocks, scientists use multiple radioactive isotopes to cross-check age measurements. At least three different isotopes have been used to measure the age of Moon rocks, and at least five different radioactive isotopes have been used to measure the age of meteorites. The results all agree: the oldest Moon rocks and asteroids are 4.6 billion years old. This is our best measure of the age of the solar system as a whole. The universe itself must be at least this old.

Evidence from Star Clusters

Another important measure of age in the universe comes from star clusters. Because all stars in a star cluster form in the same nebula at about the same time, they all have about the same “birthday.” But they don’t all have the same lifespan. High-mass stars burn bright and fast like a “flash in the pan,” while low-mass stars burn slowly and steadily. Consider how this will look in a star cluster. A cluster starts with many stars with the same birthday but of all different masses. Over time the high-mass stars die off first, leaving behind the low-mass stars. This means that if many high-mass stars are present, the cluster must be young because they haven’t burned out yet. If most of the stars are low-mass, the cluster must be old. Careful studies of star clusters show that some clusters are younger and some are older, with the oldest ones having an age of about 12 billion years.

Multiple Lines of Evidence

The most distant galaxies, the planets and asteroids of our own solar system, and the oldest star clusters all are several billion years old. Astronomers have many different methods for measuring the age of various objects, and they all support ages of billions of years, not thousands. Even if the assumptions of one or two methods were faulty, it is highly unlikely that all of the methods would be affected. Like the geologists in the 1700s, astronomers today have found multiple lines of evidence against a young earth and young universe.

It may seem as though we are once again describing a conflict between science and theology. Scientific results that indicate great age do conflict with the Young-Earth Interpretation of Genesis 1 discussed in chapter 5. But remember that in chapters 5 and 6 we presented many other interpretations of Genesis 1; several of these are not in conflict with the great age found in the book of nature. In chapter 6 we also explained why we believe that the best biblical scholarship, quite independent of modern science, indicates that Genesis 1 was never meant to convey scientific information to the original audience. Its intent for the first listeners, and for us, is to teach the who and why of creation, not the how and when. Taken in this context, there is no conflict between Genesis 1 and the astronomical evidence for great age.

For background on related topics (like the reliability of historical science and interpretations of Genesis), see previous excerpts from this series.

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of Origins: Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive Christian Resources), 2011. Reprinted with permission. To purchase a copy of the book or e-book, call 1-800-333-8300 or visit www.faithaliveresources.org.

Want a free copy of Origins?  For a limited time, donations of $50 or more will receive a  copy of the book! Plus, from now through April, your gift will be doubled thanks to a matching grant from a generous donor. You can learn more here.

As is the case in many fields, astronomers are trying to settle questions that the general public thinks little about, often because laypeople are still coming to grips with much more basic questions such as Did the universe appear—poof—all at once or did it evolve into its present state?

These are questions where science crosses into—and sometimes crosses swords with—religion. For many who take an anti-evolutionary stand as a matter of spiritual principle, the word evolution should not be applied to anything having to do with creation, cosmic or otherwise. Yet, if an evolving universe implies a beginning (and it does, for relativistic reasons), science has taken a tremendous leap toward rapprochement with Christian faith on the matter of creation. Traveling backward in time with their shrinking subject, cosmologists can only watch the cosmos disappear at the beginning, pointing to a universe that came out of nothing—a universe that wasn’t there.

No one need ask: “Were you there?” Chuck Steidel has tapped into nature’s own motion picture of past events, now showing in the present. Anyone who cares to view it can now see for himself what was and wasn’t there, at various stages of the deep past.

While other astronomers at first assumed that larger telescopes would be necessary before finding truly primeval galaxies, Steidel began finding dozens of them—and today, thousands of them. His method, called ultraviolet dropout, is based on the fact that intergalactic hydrogen gas absorbs the ultraviolet light of the most distant galaxies, causing them to disappear when seen through an ultraviolet filter. Steidel identified early galaxies that are present in pictures of the cosmos when viewed through red and green filters, but that aren’t there when viewed through an ultraviolet filter.

Visual evidence for a universe that isn’t there starts with the observation of galaxies that aren’t there.

“The way that people have looked for these in the past tended to be looking for particular, spectacular fireworks of stars going off all at once,” Steidel told me. He was only 32—a young-looking 32—and could have passed more easily as a student than as a professor as he talked with me in his Caltech office, surrounded by Hubble Deep Sky images. “So they were looking for relatively rare events, using narrow-band filters tuned to find an emission line that comes from hydrogen atoms. And you have to have the filter exactly tuned to that wavelength to see it.”

“And I’ve heard it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” I offered.

“It’s much more difficult.”

“So rather than try to find something that stands out you’re trying to find something that drops out?”

“That’s correct. It’s a very simple technique, where we take pictures through different filters, very deep images of the sky with CCD detectors, and we take three filters, and we look for objects that are present through two of those filters, and they completely disappear in the third. And the reason they disappear is because they’re at a high redshift.”

The high redshift denotes greater distances—and earlier periods, because of the time required for light to reach us from those greater distances. These young galaxies contain young, hot stars, emitting strongly in the ultraviolet. However, ultraviolet radiation from the most distant galaxies is absorbed by a greater amount of intervening hydrogen gas along the way. Today, Steidel uses the 200-inch Hale Telescope at California’s Palomar Observatory to find these primeval galaxies with his ultraviolet dropout technique, then flies to the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii to measure their redshift, which corresponds to their distance and time period.

And what do these galaxies look like?

“We actually think we’re seeing the central bulge regions of galaxies forming,” said Steidel, “that is, the round part in the middle of a spiral or an elliptical galaxy, where you expect all of the star formation to be happening in a relatively small region. And those parts of galaxies we see today are also the parts that we think are the oldest stars in those galaxies.”

“And you’re saying that modern galaxies have the oldest stars in the bulges, is that right?”

“That’s right …. It’s still somewhat controversial. But there isn’t any doubt that we’re finding a number of things that match fairly closely to the number that you would expect to find if you were looking at the progenitors of the present-day, bright galaxies.”

Steidel’s galaxy surveys have shown that galaxies were already arranged in clusters at that early time. But the individual, primeval galaxies lacked the characteristics of today’s spirals and ellipticals. More recently, Steidel has focused on a slightly later period, from about 10 to 12 billion years ago, when star formation appears to peak. If seeing is believing, then, as Steidel says, the universe “has absolutely changed with time.” His methods have helped astronomers identify populations of galaxies at various stages, where their differences from one to another are unmistakable.

In the years ahead, telescopes beyond our obfuscating atmosphere, like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (collecting six times as much light as the Hubble), may begin to give us glimpses of the “Dark Ages,” when the first galaxies began to form. As our improving technologies bring us closer to the beginning, they will lead people to ponder, once again, what happened before that. 

In my interviews with researchers, I usually bring up such crossover questions when the scientists or their studies naturally suggest them. But I worried that I’d crossed over too clumsily into this territory with Steidel when I asked him what he thought about a universe that appeared to come into being out of nothing.

He hesitated and said, “What happened before, you know, it’s …” and his voice trailed off. 

Finally I suggested: “Something must have happened before.”

“I think about that extremely rarely.”

Shoot, I’d gone too far, I thought.

But then he added: “On the other hand, I do have a very wide appreciation for whatever put things there—because it’s just the greatest thing to go out on the catwalk around the dome, in the middle of the night, and just look up there, or look at a picture of the Hubble Deep Field, and see all the things that are out there, and—you know— it’s a beautiful universe out there.”

Indeed, come to think of it, the way it all came together may be an even more impressive fact to ponder than the fact that at one time, that is, before time, the universe wasn’t there.

By Luci Shaw

Blessed be God for thaw, for the clear drops
that fall, one by one, like clocks ticking, from
the icicles along the eaves. For shift and shrinkage,
including the soggy gray mess on the deck
like an abandoned mattress that has
lost its inner spring. For the gurgle
of gutters, for snow melting underfoot when I
step off the porch. For slush. For the glisten
on the sidewalk that only wets the foot sole
and doesn’t send me slithering. Everything
is alert to this melting, the slow flow of it,
the declaration of intent, the liquidation.

Glory be to God for changes. For bulbs
breaking the darkness with their green beaks.
For moles and moths and velvet green moss
waiting to fill the driveway cracks. For the way
the sun pierces the window minutes earlier each day.
For earthquakes and tectonic plates—earth’s bump
and grind—and new mountains pushing up
like teeth in a one-year-old. For melodrama—
lightning on the sky stage, and the burst of applause
that follows. Praise him for day and night, and light
switches by the door. For seasons, for cycles
and bicycles, for whales and waterspouts,
for watersheds and waterfalls and waking
and the letter W, for the waxing and waning
of weather so that we never get complacent. For all
the world, and for the way it twirls on its axis
like an exotic dancer. For the north pole and the
south pole and the equator and everything between.

Editor's Note: If you'd like to see other great posts like this, go to the BioLogos Navigator topic Worship & Arts.

The script was written by biology student Joy Walters, with help from BioLogos president Darrel Falk.

We tend to think of creativity in terms of flashes of insight and brilliance, of novelty, and especially of unexpected things bursting upon the scene. But creativity is no less creative and no less remarkable when it proceeds step by step, according to discipline, according to rule. We notice significant ruptures in the flow of things and upheavals of the regularity and predictability of life, faith, or science, precisely because such revolutions happen against a background of the ordinary. Even when the rules are interrupted and disturbed, they are usually not obliterated but modified. We and the rest of creation begin again by applying them anew and continuing on in light of what has changed.

Artist Linnéa Spransy makes this paradoxical ‘rules and rupture’ quality of life the method, not just the subject of her art, bringing a fascination with the mathematical underpinnings of the natural world together with her commitment to the kind of renewal-through-brokenness that comes with following Christ. As she says, “the boundaries between art, worship and natural sciences are fluid. I go [to that place of intersection] to be more amazed by the strangeness of existence, to experience awe and wonder.”

Confronted with the scriptural assertion that “eternity is written in [our] hearts,” Spransy wondered how we even begin to understand what that means. What might visual corollaries for such a statement be? How do we represent the tension between freedom and constraint, that dynamic dance of continuity and change, of predictability and surprise, that exists at every level of our experience and study of the world—from quantum physics to genetics to geology—and that seems fundamental to the ways of the Lord with us, as well? Her answer began to form around the study of fractals, mathematical rules whose reiteration in nature leads to endlessly new things. In her own work, a similar fractal sensibility leads to visual representations of something eternal.

Spransy says that every painting she completes “is the manifestation of a predetermined scheme – a system of small limits, with a clear beginning and end. These scripted pieces of visual choreography are allowed to accrue to show me their beauties and surprises, allowing discovery in the midst of certainty.” In other words, images like Frenetic Sequence, 2011, above, are not pictures of natural systems or objects, but representations and results of the processes and relationships by which natural systems and objects come to be. They are built from the inside out, as it were.

To begin a piece, Spransy assembles a library of “research drawings” that play out the various rules and rule sets she intends to use—essentially a kind of preliminary modeling of the visual system she wants to explore. Sometimes these are based on fairly simple mathematical or geometric rules that tell her when a line or shape will turn or divide or end. Other times she uses several different sets of rules at the same time—whether mathematical or derived from biological relationships such as those between base pairs on the DNA strand, or the way bacteria will move towards available sources of food in a Petri dish. But though these rules are established at the outset of a new piece, when she begins a new large-scale work, the outcome is anything but mechanistically predetermined, for several reasons.

First, the physical context in which she’ll be exploring each basic “module” or set of rules is different from that of her research drawings, having moved from a sheet of paper onto large prepared canvases that are five or six feet on a side. She does not transfer the small drawing from the paper to canvas, but regards that earlier work as preparation and practice of the process out of which the final work will emerge. Second, because the works are hand-drawn, there is always the element of her own agency and engagement with both the materials and the rules. There is an inescapably subjective quality to the way she responds to both materials and means. There is also subjectivity to the way she engages with the lines and shapes she has already laid down. Put another way, the abstraction of the rules is always mediated by and expressed through specific, very concrete and physical circumstances.

Finally, Spransy’s process includes what she thinks of as cataclysmic events or moments of chaos: intentional ruptures of the emergent system by gestures that overwhelm and obliterate sections of what she’s already done. Often she will shield sections of the existing system from the coming trauma either by masking them off or by subtly manipulating the flood of color—tilting the canvas to preserve sections of what was there. Afterwards, she will continue scribing and painting lines from the original system on top of or adjacent to the new areas of color, but in ways that respond and adapt to the new visual ecosystem. In this way, layers of work are built up, obliterated, and built up again.

Again, there is an inescapable agency at work in what—from the imagined standpoint of the system itself—must seem a randomly destructive occurrence, but Spransy’s point in breaking into the system is to test the limits of its creative, integrative capacity. By creating “environmental pressure” in this way, then coaxing the fragments and remnant information to multiply and reassert their orderly identities again, she asks, “How flexible are the rules?” The finished paintings are not rote recitations of fractal or statistical formulae, then, but objects with both a physical and a relational history. They are records of a thoughtful, physically engaged, but also humble exploration of how the confluence of order and chaos creates meaning.

Though Spransy denies that there can be such a thing as a “perfect analogy,” her artistic practice has spiritual underpinnings and spiritual implications, as well as visual results. Like many working scientists, she is seeking a way of understanding how the creator engages with His creation, and a better grasp on how we creatures should make our way in response. On one hand, her attentiveness to the basic orderliness of the material creation has a corollary in the familiar disciplines of faith, including reading the scriptures, prayer, and responding with mercy to ruptures in human lives and communities. But on the other hand, her embrace of surprise and chaos is, as she says, an “invitation to the otherness of God,” and a recognition that radically “dissimilar things sometimes occupy the same space.” In combination, those divergent elements help Spransy’s works hover at the boundary between knowing and un-knowing, between control and accident, between freedom and determinism.

Spransy notes that “even in the aftermath of great destruction, life is given great opportunity. In science we’re actually happy and excited when there’s a break in the rules.” This insight, clarified and lived out in her life as well as her artistic practice, directs us to consider not only the necessity and goodness of diligent pursuit of the rules, but also to reconsider the goodness of what we are otherwise inclined to see as calamity and chaos. Indeed, Spransy’s work points us back to the central paradox of the Christian faith: that the most radical disruption of the natural systems of the world occurred two thousand years ago in Palestine with the coming of Christ—singular proof that rupture does not necessarily end in destruction, but may be our means to redemption.

Linnéa Gabriela Spransy grew up in rural Oregon in a community attentive to Christ’s call to live in community with one’s neighbors, but was herself equally aware of God’s presence in the natural world around her. She received her BFA in Drawing from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art. In the midst of exhibiting in solo and group shows in university and commercial galleries, she moved to Milwaukee to study the Bible and consider how it might re-frame her sense of self and her career as an artist. In 2005 she relocated to Kansas City to help found the Boiler Room, a prayer-focused intentional community where she lives and in which she is the artist in residence. She continues to show her work widely, has pieces in pubic and private collections, and was the subject of a recent film-making project: Linnéa: Freedom Through Limits. More of her art can be seen on her website.

Originally posted February 4, 2012

It’s true that physics sounds scary to many people, and it can indeed be a difficult topic to learn. Yet I’ve always loved physics (my degrees are in physics rather than astronomy), because of the way that mathematical equations can describe and predict so much of what we see in the world around us. One reason I got into astrophysics is because the universe contains so many bizarre situations that we can’t reproduce on earth, like ultracold, or extremely high density, or extremely high magnetic fields. It’s a fun challenge to figure out which physical process will be the most important when the situation is so dissimilar to everyday experience. But if the word “physics” makes you shrink in distaste or fear, don’t worry. For the rest of this article, we’ll focus on a more friendly topic: astronomy.

In the last decade or two, our knowledge of the universe has grown dramatically as many new telescopes and spacecraft have come online. In this essay, I’ve selected some of my favorite recent astronomy photographs to share with you. As a professional astronomer and a Christian, I feel God has called me to share these wonders with the Church. Many times, these new discoveries are presented without any mention of God, and sometimes in a context of overt atheism. I want to share these things with you in a Christian context, with God as their creator.

The Milky Way

Have you ever seen the Milky Way? If you live in a rural area, you may have seen it many times. If not, it may have been a dramatic surprise when you first saw it while camping or traveling. On a clear night out in the country, the sky is strewn with brilliant stars—many more stars than you can see under city lights.The faintest stars form a creamy, smoky band from horizon to horizon. Our galaxy contains billions of stars, and thousands of those stars are visible to the naked eye. The stars appear in a band across the sky because we are viewing our galaxy edge-on, like looking at the edge of a dinner plate.

When David looked up at the night sky over Israel thousands of years ago, he may have seen the Milky Way, or a comet, or simply the brilliance of the full moon. Whatever the sky looked like that night, it inspired him to sing:

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Ps. 19:1-4a)

The heavens are displaying the glory of God for all people to hear, proclaiming their message to people of every language, tribe, and nation. Just about anyone who looks up at the night sky feels a sense of wonder. Yet as Christians, we feel more than a vague sense of awe; we know the Creator of the heavens personally, as our own loving Father.

The heavens declare more than God’s glory. The universe is God’s revelation of himself to us, and teaches us about his character. As the Belgic Confession says about “The Means by Which We Know God,”

We know him by two means: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20. Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine Word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own. (Article 2)

The natural world teaches us about God’s glory, power, divinity, faithfulness, extravagance, immensity, love, and other attributes. God’s special revelation in scripture is our primary place to learn of God’s character (Ps. 19 goes on to talk about special revelation in vs. 7), but the natural world can bring the message to our senses in a powerful way beyond mere words on a page. The Holy Spirit can use the natural world to get the message past our hardened or weary hearts. Nature illustrates these attributes in ways that enlarge our imaginations to appreciate afresh the glory of God.

The Sun

The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched into space in 2010, the latest of several spacecraft to photograph the sun in detail. In Figure 2, the upper photo shows the face of the sun with a sprinkling of sunspots. The sun is powered by nuclear fusion reactions deep in its core which heat the hydrogen and helium gas till it glows. A sunspot is a place on the sun’s surface where the gasses are a bit cooler than the surrounding area, so that it glows less brightly and appears dark.

The lower photo in Figure 2 was taken the same day, but in X-ray light. X-rays are invisible to our eyes, but you have experienced them at the dentist’s office. There, the X-rays are produced by a machine, travel through the mouth, and are detected by film to reveal an image of your teeth. In this image, X-rays are produced by the sun, travel to the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and are detected by a camera to show an image of the sun. In X-rays, the sunspots are the brightest part of the image, not the faintest. If you look at the sunspot on the left edge, you can see bands of particles rising out of the sunspot in a looping path above the sun’s surface and falling back down on it. As the particles follow lines of magnetic field, they emit X-rays. The loops you see are not small—they are about the size of planet Earth! Because of modern spacecraft, telescopes, and cameras, we can see so much more in the heavens than what is visible to the naked eye. Thus, we are seeing more of what the heavens have to declare about God. In Psalm 19, David goes on to describe the sun:

In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth. (vs. 4b-6)

If David had lived today, maybe he would have written about other properties of the sun, like the power of God as seen in nuclear reactions and looping magnetic fields. As it is, he makes two important points. One is the universal warmth of the sun, by which God provides for all life on earth. The other is the faithful path of the sun, day after day, unchanging year after year. In the book of Jeremiah, God promises his people that he will not break his covenant with them, any more than he would break his covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth (33:19-26). The sun is a persistent reminder, woven into our lives, of God’s faithfulness to his promises.

As Christians and geologists, we frequently encounter people with stories of storm tossed and shipwrecked faith that started when they began to wrestle with apparent conflicts between science and the Bible. The stories have a common thread. The Bible, they were told, clearly teaches the earth was created a few thousand years ago with life forms fashioned more or less as we find them today. Because the earth is very young, the incredibly complex sequence of rock, sediment, and fossils found on our planet must have been deposited in a very short period of time. Noah’s Flood, as the only plausible causal agent, was obviously a global and violent event. Theories of an ancient earth and adaptation of life forms, they were further informed, have been constructed on flimsy evidence created by atheistic scientists searching for ways to expunge God from modern culture. But as these sojourners began to explore and understand the actual evidence for an ancient earth, they found themselves increasingly convinced of its legitimacy, and thereby increasingly questioning the veracity of their faith – many to the point of relegating Christ to just another wishful myth.

It is our conviction that these stories of strained or lost faith derive not from an inherent unwillingness to trust the Bible, but rather from misguided teaching on the message of Scripture. Those insisting the earth is young are not simply putting their faith in God’s Word, they are putting their faith in their own particular interpretation of that Word. As such, an entirely unnecessary stumbling block to faith is created, where faith in Christ first requires rejection of sound science.

As we have prayed and studied this subject, we have felt God’s call to speak out against this misplaced stumbling block. We are sensitive, however, to the fact that when scientists speak on issues of faith, there is a natural suspicion that science will be regarded as the ultimate arbiter of truth, and Scripture will have to yield whenever conflict arises. It is thus important for us to state here that both of us ascribe to the authority and inspiration of Scripture, the reality and necessity of Christ’s death and resurrection, the existence of genuine miraculous events, and the truthfulness of the Biblical historical narratives. In our understanding, science will never trump Scripture, but by virtue of science being a study of God’s natural creation, it may occasionally assist in our understanding of God’s written Word. Where this has occurred historically and has been accepted by the Church, the invariable result has been the abandonment of an interpretation of some secondary importance, without any change in our understanding of the intended central message.

This phenomenon is illustrated well by the 17th century clash between Galileo’s claims that the earth revolves around the sun, and the multiple passages in Scripture that appear to clearly present a static earth as the physical center of God’s natural creation. The Bible tells us repeatedly that the earth is fixed upon its foundations (Ps 93:1, 104:5) and the sun rises and sets (Eccl 1:5, Ps 19:6). Within the context of the historical narratives (which we are not accustomed to interpreting in any figurative manner) we read statements about “the sun rising over the land” (Gen 19:23), and a miraculous event during a famous battle where “the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down a full day” (Josh 10:13). Likewise in the Levitical law, we find commands to complete the Passover sacrifice “when the sun goes down” (Deut 16:6).

God’s people had interpreted these verses for thousands of years to be authoritative statements about both spiritual and physical realms, and 17th century believers understandably struggled with allowing science to alter traditional interpretations. If God says the sun rises and the sun sets, how could it be otherwise?

Fast forward a few centuries, and we are now somehow quite content to have allowed science to alter our thinking on these verses, without abandoning notions of inerrancy or inspiration. The reason is simply because it was eventually recognized that the primary message of these verses was never on the nature of nature, but on the nature of man and his experience with his environment and his God. Solomon and Joshua accurately recorded their experience from an earthly perspective (sun rising and setting), and David praised God for holding the earth fixedly in His hand (Ps 93:1, 104:5), without requiring a meaning of fixity in space. The central message of these verses was apparent to readers before and after Galileo. Only a secondary interpretation, likely never intended by the writers, was cast off after scientific advances.

So what is the issue regarding Noah’s Flood? The modern debate centers around two questions. Was it truly global in extent, and can the Flood account for the earth’s complex geologic record? To address the first, it is worth being reminded of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome where he makes a statement that “your faith is being proclaimed throughout the whole world” (Rom 1:8). Entire people groups existed at this time in China, Australia, and North and South America who knew nothing of the church in Rome. Though using wording that literally means the entire world population, Paul is clearly referring to the world known to him and his readers at the time.¹ Paul speaks truthfully from his experience. Allowing for the possibility that Noah’s Flood encompassed all of known humanity without necessarily covering the entire planet is thus consistent with how other passages in Scripture are interpreted by Christians who believe the Bible is authoritative and trustworthy.

Our primary interest in this blog series is the second question, the widely promulgated notion that the Flood can account for the earth’s complex geology, and that all genuine Christians should accept this viewpoint.

Notes

1. Many Biblical scholars define a literal interpretation as one that takes into account the literary genre, figures of speech, context, and author/audience perspective in deriving the intended meaning. By this definition, poetry and allegory are literally interpreted as figurative. In this blog and in our article, our use of literal conforms to its more common definition where a literal interpretation is one that adheres to the precise definition of words without figurative meaning and without requiring additional context to understand.

Photo credit: Jan Bacon

Singer/songwriter Andy Zipf’s “Stumble on the Line” is built around the image of a river flowing through a canyon it has sculpted—an image that can easily be played out as a picture of the way that the Lord has been at work preparing a path for us in the material world, complete with signposts to his former and present activity. Zipf’s imagery of flowing water as a powerful (even dangerous) but also refreshing force echoes the similarly-complicated place of springs and rivers and seas in the scriptures; his description of his own path through the canyon calls to mind the Psalmist’s affirmation that his help comes not from the idols erected on the heights, but from the maker who has crafted both heaven and earth. Here, the river has literally made the canyon, carving it through the “years and layers,” and leaving the evidence of that long work as a sign to all who journey through.

But though Zipf’s canyon provides shelter, a good measure of necessary constraint, and even encouragement to keep moving along the river-course, the thrust of the song is that seeking God is a complicated, sometimes difficult endeavor, whether we are looking for Him through what He has made or through what He has said. The lyrics suggest that walking with the Lord is a path of halting discovery and intrigue, of our learning to notice the way God’s actions in the past are written subtly into the world around us. But Zipf also implies that this is a path that requires obedience, since we are also confronted with the fact that He sometimes speaks to us directly and unequivocally, saying, “follow me.” The song does not take its name and refrain from the river itself, then, but from how we tend to navigate and respond to the terrain it has carved: we “stumble on the line.”

Though pursuing the text’s geologic conceit a bit further is possible, what is more poignant for all of us engaged in the science and faith dialogue is that “Stumble On the Line” is at its heart a love song addressed to the “you” that is the river—the one who has carved the path and along whose banks the singer and we pick our way. Our attentiveness to this terrain of faith does not come first from our desire to analyze and categorize the “evidence” of how it came to look as it does, or even to demystify the mechanism by which a message might be written “in a line of stones.” Rather, what leads us on is the desire to know how to relate to the water itself. The song describes not just a physical path, then, but one of the heart and will.

Indeed, the personal address of the song focuses our attention on the fact that the subtlety or obviousness of the signs along our way have much less to do with whether or not we heed them than does the basic dividedness of our hearts. As Zipf says, we alternate between “trying to reach” and “trying to leave” the One we love. Put another way, we do not reject how God has written his past activity into the layers and years of the earth, or spelled out his intentions for us in the future because they are not obvious, but for the same reason we reject any and all of His claims on us at one time or another: because we wish to be the ones who forge the path, write the story, and sing the song. Our pride—whether in our science or our righteousness—is what keeps us blind and deaf to His leading in our daily path. And yet, even—perhaps especially—in response to our pride, God makes a way for us to gain a better perspective, and leads us on towards Him through whatever means we need.

To return to the language of the song, there is a beautiful ambivalence to the word “stumble,” that contains reminders that following the Lord involves being ever surprised by His ways (we “stumble on” his truth as an unexpected discovery), and ever broken by our own ways (we “stumble on” our pride as an impediment to seeing and following). Yet in both cases, our stumbling leaves us in the same position: on our knees before the one who is both maker and guide. In the last few repeated lines of the piece Zipf affirms that we must and will continue to stumble on in this path of love, whether we come to each stumbling place through surprise and joy, or pride and brokenness. From that position of humility and worship we have the proper perspective to see and affirm that the God who creates is the God who speaks is the God who redeems—the Lord who meets us on our knees, lifts us up, and guides us into the steps of His righteousness.

“Stumble On the Line”

© 2009 by Andy Zipf

I walk a weathered canyon
you're the rapids, running through it
years and layers start to show
in the soil, there is a swelling, beating rhythm to it
earnest prayer I used to know

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you

came upon a message,
hidden in some shallow water,
written in a line of stones
telling me to go on down the canyon, follow after. . .
so I keep on. . .

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you

I walk a weathered canyon
you're the rapids, running through it
years and layers start to show
in the soil, there is a swelling, beating rhythm to it
earnest prayer I come to know

on the one side, I reach you
on the other, try to leave you
in between the faults of my youth
I stumble on the line to love you.

Though now based in Washington, DC, Andy Zipf began life in the Midwest (Indiana, Illinois, Iowa), but moved to Pennsylania and then New Jersey before his family settled in northern Virginia. He began his career as a professional singer and songwriter shortly after high school, and has performed over 400 times in the last four years—in living rooms, coffee houses, churches, concert halls, and bars. Though “Stumble on the Line” comes from Andy’s 2009 ep “Our Voice Is a Weapon,” his third full-length album and seventh studio release, “Jealous Hands,” became available in July, 2011. More details on Andy and downloads of his music may be found on his website.

One thing I ask from the LORD,
this only do I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
to gaze on the beauty of the LORD
and to seek him in his temple.

Psalm 27: 4

I belong in the ranks of those who have cultivated the beauty that is the distinctive feature of scientific research.

Marie Curie¹

All of the biologists I know are undeniable lovers of their objects of study...

Konrad Lorenz²

Beauty in Science

As a biologist, I am fascinated by the fluorescent-on-black images of cells, 3D rotations of protein structures, and cross-sections of colourful tissue samples that grace the covers of scientific journals. I have spent whole weeks staring down a microscope at the beautifully transparent bodies of developing fish embryos, and whenever possible I illustrate my written work with photographs of the natural world. I’m not alone. In the institute where I did my PhD we had a basement full of microscopes and imaging technology, and it was considered important to have beautiful images in your presentations—movies were even better. The journal Nature: Cell Biology always features striking images on its covers, and in an editorial these photographs were described as works of art in their own right. In fact, ‘scientific art’ has become a recognised genre, and displays of science-related images are increasingly popular in research institutes, museums, science festivals and other public spaces.

Indeed, a number of practicing scientists have devoted their time outside the lab to communicating the beauty and wonder of science to the general public. (See sidebar.) One of these is Dr. Lynne Quarmby, a cell biologist who’s passionate about explaining her work to people outside of the scientific community. She writes a regular column, a ‘nexus of mystery, art, literature, beauty and science,’ for the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq.

If we can recognize and acknowledge that our direct biological senses, as wonderful as they are, give us only a tightly pinched and cloudy view of the world, then we open ourselves to unimagined beauty.

Lynne Quarmby, Numero Cinq, 2011³

Biologists often label themselves according to the ‘model organism’ that they work on. I was a zebrafish person, and Quarmby is a Chlamydomonas person. Chlamydomonas is not an STD (you’re thinking of Chlamydia), but a gentle single-celled algae that is in all likelihood swimming around the standing water in your garden as you read. This microscopic creature is easy to grow in the lab (a jam jar on a sunny windowsill will do), its genome has been sequenced, and it is a surprisingly powerful tool for studying human disease.

Chlamydomonas was not an obvious choice for medical research, but the secret is in the cilia. Cilia are hair-thin appendages that wave around in a coordinated fashion to move their owner from A to B. But these algae don’t spend their whole lives swimming around. When they reproduce, their cilia are absorbed back into the cell body (scroll to the 4th video here). When conditions are stressful, the cilia simply drop off. Quarmby and her students studied Chlamydomonas mutants that hold on to their cilia, and discovered a family of proteins involved in the regulation of both cilia and cell division.

At the same time as Quarmby was studying the behaviour of cilia in Chlamydomonas, medical researchers were identifying genes that are mutated in humans. The same proteins involved in cilia and cell cycle control in Chlamydomonas were affected in some patients with polycystic kidney disease. What’s the connection? Cell biologists knew that most of our cells have cilia on them, but assumed that they were not important. Our cells generally do not swim around, unless they’re sperm. It turns out that these tiny appendages are involved in a whole range of vital cell functions. The cilia on kidney cells are important for sensing the flow of urine, and without these the kidney cannot function properly.

Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to unicellular flagellates, but what I appreciate is the detail. To see the minutiae of cell structure is stunning, particularly when you know how difficult it is to achieve images like the ones in this article in the journal Cytoskeleton, or even the image of an adult rat head, below. And little Chlamydomonas, a microscopic pond dweller, has advanced our understanding of a devastating human disease. This combination of aesthetic experience and elegant scientific explanation is what I find beautiful. ⁴

Adult rat head MRI © Gavin Merrifield, University of Edinburgh.

It appears to be a universal experience for scientists to find beauty in their experimental systems. Perhaps this is because the daily discipline of examining anything in detail brings an appreciation of its finer points. Or maybe the process of choosing something to study and then spending the greater part of one’s waking hours staring at it provokes something akin to the loyalty of the mother who thinks her child is beautiful, despite the large pimple on its nose. But even bearing in mind the fascination and devotion of the true professional, there seems to be something more in the scientist’s experience of beauty.⁵ Most, I think, simply delight in the beauty of creation. For some, this gives a sense of the transcendent: a sort of natural spirituality. For a Christian, this encounter with beauty draws them nearer to God.

Christian Appreciation of Beauty in Science

One of the driving forces behind the work of many of the early scientists was their Christian faith. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) initially hoped to pursue theology, but was eventually satisfied that science was also a way to glorify God.⁶ Many others, including the famous naturalist John Ray (1627-1705), were ordained clergy in addition to their academic studies, so their science and theology were naturally interwoven. Others, like James Clark Maxwell (1831-1879), examined Christianity as rigorously as their scientific experiments.

These pioneering scientists (or ‘natural philosophers’, as they called themselves back then) were encouraged by a rich tradition of theology that wholeheartedly encouraged their exploration of creation. The Hebrew Scriptures tell how creation reveals the glory, generosity and faithfulness of God who created and sustains everything.⁷ The beauty of the land and everything in it is celebrated: mountains and trees, plants and animals, men and women.⁸ A number of the earliest Christian theologians, the Church Fathers, often expressed their delight in the details of animal and plant life, and what we now understand as ecosystems.

Diversity of beauty in sky and earth and sea…the dark shades of woods, the colour and fragrance of flowers; the countless different species of living creatures of all shapes and sizes…the mighty spectacle of the sea itself, putting on its changing colours like different garments, now green, with all the many varied shades, now purple, now blue.

Augustine, The City of God

Theologian Jame Schaefer has surveyed the writings of many of the Church Fathers and Medieval theologians, and found five broad themes in their contemplation of creation.⁹

• Affective appreciation: Simply delighting in what is seen.
• Affective-cognitive appreciation: A deeper, scientific study of creation leads to even greater joy for the beholder.
• Cognitive appreciation: Thinking in more abstract ways about the beauty of the interconnected universe. Each part plays its unique role for the greater good of the whole.
• Incomprehensibility: Being overwhelmed by the magnitude and complexity of the universe and everything in it.
• The sacramental quality of the physical world: The world God has created mediates something of God’s presence and character to us.

One of my favourites among the theologians covered in Schaefer’s work was an unnamed Cistercian who in the twelfth century wrote extensively about the grounds of the abbey in which he lived, and the surrounding countryside. He was obviously very happy with his vocation, and had a good understanding of the interconnectedness of the different factors: water, weather and crops - an early ecology. Basil of Caesarea (ca. 329-379) spent time observing animals and plants, noting similarities and differences, and encouraged others to do the same, giving glory to God for everything he saw. Hugh of Saint Victor (1096-1144) delighted in what his senses could tell him about creation, so enabling him to praise the Creator all the more, and lamented that others might pass such an opportunity by.

An important Medieval figure in the early development of science is Albert the Great (ca. 1200-1280), teacher of Aquinas, who wrote on “the importance of observation and experimentation in field and laboratory studies of animals, plants, metals, and inorganic elements”. He carried out field studies, and “legitimised the study of the natural world as a science within the Christian tradition.” For him, appreciation of creation had both cognitive and emotional aspects.

For all of these early scholars, to study creation and enjoy its beauty was an activity that everyone should engage in using their God-given intellect. Their detailed exploration of the wonders of the universe was fuelled by faith in a benevolent creator God, and this deep intellectual study led to heartfelt praise for the one who made it. Is this something we can share?

Protein structure model © Dr Neville Cobbe

The series continues tomorrow with Part 2: Understanding Beauty in Science.

Notes

1. Bersanelli, M. & Gargantini, M. Galileo to Gell-Mann: The Wonder that Inspired the Greatest Scientists of all Time. Templeton Press, Philadelphia, 2009. Page 9.
2.Ibid., Page 10.
3. I should highlight that as far as I know Lynn Quarmby is not religious and has not in any way endorsed this blog.
4. Further reading: http://quarmby.ca/, http://blog.quarmby.ca/, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=Lynne%20Quarmby, http://www.ciliopathyalliance.org/
5. I try to avoid using the words ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’ as much as possible because of the ambiguity of the word nature, which is often wrongly used to create a divide between natural and supernatural worlds. This is ancient Greek philosophy and has nothing to do with the God of the Bible. When addressing Christians I usually use the word ‘creation’ in its traditional theological sense, meaning ‘everything that exists apart from God’, without connection to any one particular interpretation of Genesis 1-3.
6. Frankenberry, N.K. The Faith of Scientists, Princeton University Press, 2008.
7. For example, Psalm 29, 104, 148; Job 38-41; Joel 2: 18-32, Isaiah 41:17-20, Hosea 14:5-8.
8. Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible.
9. Schaefer, J. Appreciating the Beauty of the Earth, Theological Studies 62 (2001), p23-52 & Schaefer, J. Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic & Medieval Concepts, Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, 2009.

(Click image for full resolution)

In a Nutshell

In Detail

Introduction

Astronomers and geologists have determined that the universe and Earth are billions of years old. This conclusion is not based on just one measurement or one calculation, but on many types of evidence. Here we will describe just two types of evidence for an old Earth and two types of evidence for an old universe; more types can be found under Further Reading. These methods are largely independent of each other, based on separate observations and arguments, yet all point to a history much longer than 10,000 years. As Christians, we believe that God created the world and that the world declares his glory, so we can’t ignore what nature is telling us about its history.

Age of the Earth from seasonal rings and layers

If you’ve ever seen a horizontal slice of a tree trunk, you’ve seen how a tree forms a new growth ring each year. In years of drought, the tree grows less quickly so the ring is narrower; in good growing seasons the ring is thicker. A tree’s age can be found by simply counting its rings. By comparing the pattern of thick and thin rings to weather records, scientists can verify that the method is accurate. This method can even be used on dead trees that fell in a forest long ago. For example, the last 200 rings in the dead tree might match up with 200 rings early in the life of the living tree, so the two trees together can count back many years. In this way, multiple trees can be used to build a master chronology for a forested region. European oak trees have been used to build a 12,000-year chronology.¹

The annual ice layers in glaciers provide a similar method that goes back much further in history. Each year, snowfall varies throughout the seasons and an annual layer is formed. Like the tree rings, this method can be verified by comparison to historical records for weather, as well as to records of volcanic eruptions around the globe that left thin dust layers on the glaciers. Scientists have drilled ice cores deep into glaciers and found ice that is 123,000 years old in Greenland² and 740,000 years old in Antarctica.³ These annual layers go back much farther than the 10,000 years advocated by the young earth creationists. The Earth must be at least 740,000 years old.

How can an old Earth be reconciled with Genesis? See Scripture Interpretation

Age of the Earth and solar system from radiometric dating

In your high school science classroom, you may have seen a large poster of the periodic table hanging on the wall. The periodic table shows the types of atoms that make up the world around us. An element in the periodic table can come in different flavors called isotopes. Some isotopes are unstable, and over time these isotopes “decay” into isotopes of other elements. For example, Potassium-40 is unstable and decays into Argon-40. As time passes, a rock will have more and more Argon-40 and less and less Potassium-40. Radiometric dating is possible because this decay occurs at a known rate, called the “half-life” of the radioactive element. The half-life is the time that it takes for half the radioactive sample to change from one element into the other.

Some isotopes have short half-lives of minutes or years, but Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.3 billion years. Radiometric dating requires that one understand the initial ratio of the two elements in a given sample by some means. In this case, Argon-40 is a gas that easily bubbles out and escapes when it is produced in molten rock. Once the rock hardens, however, all the Argon-40 is trapped in the sample, giving us an accurate record of how much Potassium-40 has decayed since that time. So, if we find a rock with equal parts Potassium-40 and Argon-40, we know that half the Potassium-40 has decayed into Argon-40, and that the rock hardened 1.3 billion years ago.⁴

It’s hard to find rocks on the surface of the Earth that have not been altered over time. Most old rocks have been eroded by wind and water or submerged by continental plates. The oldest reliably dated rock formation is in Greenland, where several different isotopes were used to find an age of 3.6 billion years.⁵ Scientists also recently dated zircon grains (which resist erosion) in Western Australia to 4.4 billion years old.⁶ To find older rocks that haven’t been eroded, we need to look beyond Earth. Meteorites are rocks from the solar system that have fallen to Earth recently and haven’t suffered much erosion. Their pristine interiors give an age that dates back to their formation at the beginning of the solar system. Nearly all meteorites have the same radiometric age, 4.56 billion years old.⁷ Thus, the solar system, including the Earth, is about 4,560,000,000 years old.

PLEASE READ THE REST OF THE ANSWER HERE.

Notes

1. Davis A. Young, ”How Old Is It? How Do We Know? A Review of Dating Methods – Part One: Relative Dating, Absolute Dating, and Non-radiometric Dating” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 58 No 4 (2006), p. 264. (PDF)
2. Roger C. Weins, "Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective", The American Scientific Affiliation (2002). See also North Greenland Ice Core Project Members, “High-resolution Record of Northern Hemisphere Climate Extending into the Last Interglacial Period,” Nature 431 (2004): 147–151, which reports ages back to 123,000 years. (web article)
3. EPICA Community Members, “Eight Glacial Cycles from an Antarctic Ice Core,” Nature 429 (2004): 623–628.
4. Young earth creationists reject radiometric dating methods, including claims that decay rates are not constant. For a critical review, see Randall Isaac “Assessing the RATE Project”, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, vol 59, no 2, June 2007, p.143-146. (PDF)
5. See Wiens and references therein. (web article)
6. Wilde et al. “Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the earth 4.4 Gyr ago,” Nature (2001) 409, 175-178.
7. See Davis A Young, ”How Old Is It? How Do We Know? A Review of Dating Methods—Part Two: Radiometric Dating: Mineral, Isochron and Concordia Methods” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol 59, No 1 (2007) and references therein (PDF)
]]> Sat, 14 Jul 12 05:02:55 -0700 http://biologos.org/blog/what-is-the-higgs-boson?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/what-is-the-higgs-boson?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication At a press conference on July 4, 2012, and with 99.99994% confidence (5 sigma), CERN announced the discovery of a particle consistent with that of a Higgs boson (a.k.a. “the God particle”). This is very exciting for elementary particle physicists. But what is the Higgs particle, and what is its meaning? At a press conference on July 4, 2012, and with 99.99994% confidence (5 sigma), CERN announced the discovery of a particle consistent with that of a Higgs boson (a.k.a. “the God particle”). This is very exciting for elementary particle physicists. It is also getting the attention of press and general public. But what is the Higgs particle, and what is its meaning?

It has been widely reported that the moniker “God particle” was not its originator’s first choice. Still, Leon Lederman, director emeritus of Fermilab and Nobel laureate for neutrino research, did accept the nickname “God particle” because the particle is “so central to the state of physics today, so crucial to our final understanding of the structure of matter, yet so elusive.” “God particle” was quickly accepted by the press and general public because it seemed an appropriate title for a particle theorized to give mass to all elementary matter particles and the force carrying W and Z bosons. Serving this mass-giving function since near the beginning of the universe, a Higgs field (more fundamental than the actual Higgs boson ) must necessarily exist everywhere in the universe and be unchanging. With an omnipresent and immutable field, analogies between the Higgs boson and God naturally developed within the press and the public—“God particle” became deeply rooted. Relatedly, the Higgs boson become an excellent source for theological analogies. (See for example this article.)

Nevertheless, as physicists seek to emphasize, neither the Higgs boson particle nor its field have religious properties. Thus, elementary particle physicists are not fond of the “God particle” appellation. In the opinion of Oliver Buchmueller, of CERN’s CMS group, calling the Higgs boson the “God particle is completely inappropriate. It’s not doing justice to the Higgs and what we think its role in the universe is. It has nothing to do with God“. As Pippa Wells, another CERN scientist expressed, “Calling [it] the God particle … confuses people about what we are trying to do at CERN”. (Source: Reuters)

One alternate name for the Higgs particle that is used within the physics community is the “BEH” particle. “BEH” stands for Brout–Englert–Higgs, three of the six authors of 1964 papers that first proposed a mechanism for giving mass to elementary particles. In addition to Peter Higgs, the five other authors are Robert Brout and Francois Englert, and Tom Kibble, C.R. Hagen, and Gerald Guralnik. The process for giving mass to particles is thus sometimes referred to not just as the Higgs mechanism, but as the Brout–Englert–Higgs–Hagen–Guralnik–Kibble (BEHHGK) mechanism. (Saying all six names a couple of times makes it obvious why we most often only call it the Higgs.)



But issues of naming aside, what is the Higgs and why is it so elusive? According to the Standard Model, the particles that compose matter (the quarks and leptons) are in a category called spin-1/2 particles. The force carrying particles (the photon, the W's, the Z, and the gluons) are spin-1 particles. What the physicists above proposed was the existence of a type of spinless, or spin-0 particle. Not only does the Higgs boson form its own class of particles, it also gives mass to itself and to all the other particles that have mass: to all of the leptons and quarks, and to the W's and Z bosons, but not photons or gluons. This set of relationships is shown in the image below, indicated by the lines connecting the Higgs to these other particles. There are no lines directly connecting the Higgs boson to photons and gluons because the Higgs boson does not interact with these force carrying particles and, thus, photons and gluons remain massless.



But the story of the Higgs particle actually begins with the associated Higgs field, an invisible field (something like a generalization of an electric field) that has a non-zero, constant value everywhere throughout the universe. This Higgs field continuously interacts with all matter particles and the W and Z force carrying particles. Matter and massive force particles are slowed down as they move through the Higgs field, just as are balls rolling through thick mud. The Higgs field is sometimes described as a “cosmic molasses”. Different particles interact with the Higgs field to varying degrees—those interacting more, are slowed down more, those interacting less are slowed down less. Slowing down more equates to acquiring more mass. If not for the Higgs field, all particles would be massless, zipping through the universe at the speed of light. The universe would be without structure—no galaxies, no plants, no life. Without the Higgs field, not even atoms could have formed.

It should be noted, however, that the majority of the mass of protons and neutrons (and thus of atomic mass) does not come from interaction with the Higgs field. Each proton and neutron is composed of three quarks, which do receive their mass from their interaction with the Higgs field. However, the masses of protons and neutrons are much greater than the sum of their constituent quarks and are a result of the additional mass contribution from the binding energies of the “trapped” quarks.

It was theoretically possible for elementary particles to have mass without needing to acquire it through interaction with a Higgs-like field. However, as the standard model of elementary particles developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, elementary particle theorists realized that if particles had their own innate mass, rather than acquiring it, many beautiful symmetries of particle interaction equations would be broken. To keep the beauty and symmetry in the theory was the essential reason the BEHHGK mechanism was developed, which immediately led to the prediction of Higgs bosons.

When there is enough external energy in a given volume, the Higgs field also produces Higgs bosons. But the Higgs bosons are very unstable and quickly decay. This is the process that enabled the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN. At CERN, protons are accelerated to high energies via electric fields and directed in circular paths via magnetic fields. The protons then collide and release large amounts of energy. When sufficient energy is released in a collision, the Higgs field can use this energy to produce Higgs bosons. The Higgs bosons quickly decay leaving evidence of their existence through particular combinations of leftover particles that they have decayed into. Among those predicted by the mathematics of the Standard model are the muons and electrons identified by the CERN experimenters. The image at the top shows the identities and paths of particles produced in one of the CERN proton-proton collisions whose results fit with what would be expected from the decay of a Higgs boson.



For a proton-proton collision at the CERN LHC, the above diagrams show both the dominant modes for creation of a Higgs with a mass around 125 GeV, and the two dominant decay channels (modes). The creation mechanism (shown schematically in the left half of each diagram above) involves virtual gluons, the carriers of the strong nuclear force (represented by squiggly purple lines) from the protons. The gluons fuse into a virtual top quark loop (medium blue triangle), which then emits a Higgs boson (squiggly yellow line). The top quark couples more strongly to the Higgs than any of the five other quarks, so the top quark contributes the dominant loop.

The Higgs boson then dominantly decays into either (i) 2 gamma ray photons (the squiggly green lines) via another intermediate virtual top quark loop or a virtual W gauge particle loop (dark blue triangle), or (ii) two Z0 gauge particles (squiggly dark blue lines), which each then decay into a lepton (specifically an electron or a muon)/anti-lepton pair (light blue lines).

The likely discovery of the Higgs boson, and its implied existence of the associated Higgs field, is an amazing success for CERN. Past research and experience at Fermilab and by elementary particle physicists throughout the world also contributed to the discovery. The Higgs boson was the remaining particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be found. With it, the Standard Model is in some sense complete. (Nevertheless, many questions about the Standard Model still remain—many inspired once again by beauty and symmetry. In particular, several numeric values associated with particle masses and interactions could only be experimentally measured, as with the Higgs, and not predicted from the Standard Model.)

With the apparent success of these experiments and seeming confirmation that the physical universe is, indeed, reflected by the complex and beautiful mathematics of the Standard Model, the international physics community is eager to keep delving deeper into the structure of creation. In addition to trying to verify that the 125 GeV particle is, indeed, the Higgs spinless particle and not some more exotic, new particle, CERN physicists are simultaneously seeking to discover an entire new class of particles, resulting from a theorized symmetry called supersymmetry. Discovery of the associated particles, if they exist, will likely take a few more years. For these discoveries we can only wait in anticipation.





Updated July 12, 2012.

]]> Wed, 11 Jul 12 11:58:56 -0700 Gerald Cleaver http://biologos.org/blog/naming-the-god-particle?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/naming-the-god-particle?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all? The image above describes an "event" (proton-proton collision) recorded in 2012 with the CMS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. According to CERN, "the event shows characteristics expected from the decay of the SM Higgs boson to a pair of Z bosons, one of which subsequently decays to a pair of electrons (green lines and green towers) and the other Z decays to a pair of muons (red lines). The event could also be due to known standard model background processes. ATLAS Experiment © 2012 CERN

Judging from the flurry of headlines over the past week, one might be tempted to think that proof positive of God’s existence (or lack thereof) had just appeared out of a 27-km-tunnel buried beneath the Swiss-French border. This frenzy of news headlines and blog titles hailed the recent news that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has discovered a brand new particle of a mass of 125-126 GeV, which is assumed to be the Higgs boson, or the so-called “God particle.” The discovery of the Higgs boson would certainly be a breakthrough for particle physics and cosmology, but would such a finding also radically redefine theology’s understanding of God or challenge the existence of such a deity? Is there actually any theological or religious significance in Higgs physics at all?

The short answer is “no,” which becomes apparent when one considers the widely-reported story of how it got named. In 1993, Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman, along with science writer Dick Teresi, wrote a book detailing the history of particle physics starting with Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy Democritus and culminating with the hunt for the Higgs boson. Until this latest discovery, the Higgs boson was the elusive final missing piece of the puzzle known as the Standard Model—a collection of the fundamental particles that constitute our universe and the complex and mathematically-sophisticated relationships between them. Considering how incredibly difficult finding the Higgs boson was proving to be, Lederman wanted to name the book after that “goddamn particle,” according to some of his collaborators. His editor, however, would not allow it and so the name was shortened to “The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?” And thus ‘the God particle’ was born, carrying with it more than enough social baggage for such a miniscule particle.



Particle physicist Dr. Zosia Krusberg (at right) is visiting assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vassar College and thinks “the term ‘god particle’ is unfortunate. The Higgs boson is no more (or less) divine or spiritually significant than any other elementary particle within the standard model of particle physics.” It may be fundamental to explaining one of the most basic characteristics of the universe—namely the existence of matter and mass in addition to energy—but “it is no more (or less) important than any other physics principle underlying the Standard Model.”

Last week’s discovery was monumental in that it may have finally provided experimental evidence for the Higgs Mechanism and defined the specific energy of the resulting Higgs boson, but even this “breakthrough” for particle physics leaves many scientific questions unresolved. Finding the Higgs boson completes the Standard Model, but it does not do away with many other questions and shortcomings of the current state of particle physics, such as the constituent particles of dark matter, a quantum theory of gravity, and other “mathematically subtle problems.” Not to mention that there is still significant work to be done to determine the exact nature of this newly-found particle. According to Dr. Krusberg, this particle might behave just as the Standard Model predicts or it could instead be “a Higgs-like particle that will serve as a gateway into explorations of physics beyond the Standard Model." Krusberg continued, “And I guarantee that it is this latter scenario that most of us are hoping for: physicists love nothing more than discovering the shortcomings of their theories, since this is the first step toward more fundamental theories with even more predictive power!”

No, finding the Higgs boson does not answer all the questions of particle physics, much less lend insight into the existence (or not) of God. For that reason, Dr. Krusberg (like most physicists) bemoans the term ‘God particle’ and insists, “There really is nothing either literally or metaphorically god-like about the Higgs boson.” Indeed, one writer for the British journal The Guardian reached such a point of frustration about the name that he ran a competition for alternatives. The winner was “the champagne flute boson,” ostensibly because the bottom of a champagne bottle is an excellent and oft-used demonstration of the energy potential of the Higgs Mechanism. Or then again, perhaps it is simply because physicists thought that finally finding this shy particle would call for some of the bubbly.

On the other hand, some science writers and scientists can appreciate the ‘educational benefits’ of such a mysterious and controversial name because it attracts the attention of the general public and puts a relatable face on an extremely esoteric physics concept. Krusberg herself admits that “People are naturally drawn to the mysterious and the controversial, providing educators with great teaching opportunities.” But she worries about the larger social implications involved in “mixing the vernacular of physics and spirituality,” not least because such uncritical mixing can lead the non-scientific community to draw conclusions about the authority and reach of science that are not justified.

Understanding that the Higgs boson is not the literal stuff of God and that it does not prove or disprove God’s existence (as the name seems to suggest) extinguishes the fire under any sort of religious outcry. But this does not mean that its discovery is irrelevant to the discussion of science and faith, nor to the Christian community as a whole. As Dr. Krusberg remarks, “The recent discovery of [this] new boson at the LHC perfectly embodies the scientific process at its best (and thereby illustrates to the public why and how science works).” Scientific exploration of nature is not a fool-proof endeavor; healthy skepticism and accountability to a wide community of other researchers are absolutely critical to its success. But such evidence of the power and finesse of well-executed science as we saw last week is a testament to our ability to explore and understand the ‘how’ of the universe. God has equipped humanity with the desire, the intellectual abilities, and the collective will to recognize and explore the cosmic order and beauty of his creation. God has made our home knowable, and has given us the tools and capacities by which to know it.



At left, Cern researchers present their findings to a few hundred of their colleagues in Melbourne, Australia. Image © 2012 CERN

It is valuable, then, for the Christian community to understand and appreciate how science works, in part to recognize that there are many instances in which science and the church work in tandem in order to better understand and better serve the world. But I think there is something else we can draw from the story of the Higgs boson, too. The nickname ‘the God particle’ has touched nerves in religious communities because it implies that science has the ability to prove or disprove divine existence by physical means. Even though the physics community is by no means claiming insight into the divine, it is sometimes assumed by the religious community that scientists view their work as chipping away at God’s existence when they begin to understand something that was previously unknown, or known only “by faith” in esoteric theories and models.

And yet, regardless of motives or metaphysical interpretations, perhaps physicists' search for the Higgs boson is in fact an apt picture of our own search for God. How many times have we stared up at the starry ceiling in times of crisis and prayed fervently for some kind of sign from God to assure us of his presence? And how many times has that much-desired evidence appeared only in retrospect, when we look back to see God’s hand faithfully and elegantly working in ways inscrutable at the time? It took a community of physicists to discern the presence of the Higgs boson. But even so, they could only do so after the fact from the cascade of particle decays it sparked; they could not observe the particle itself directly. In a similar way, though we often do not see the working of God directly, “in the moment,” we still trust in his presence and providence, often depending on friends, family and the community of the church to help us see his hand in hindsight.

So while the discovery of the Higgs boson does not itself explain God, we rejoice at the subtle yet striking new insight we have into God’s creative genius via the Higgs boson and at the way God gives evidence of his faithfulness in the ordered creation itself. Perhaps, however, the greatest insight we can glean from this breakthrough is an analogy for the way God calls us to seek him and find him together, in the community of those who follow his son.

Tomorrow, Baylor University physicist Gerald Cleaver answers the question, "What is the Higgs boson?"



]]> Tue, 10 Jul 12 09:02:29 -0700 Faith Tucker http://biologos.org/blog/the-transit-of-venus?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/the-transit-of-venus?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Today we have a chance to witness a special moment in history as Venus transits across the disk of the Sun for people across the world to see. Not only is this process of discovery exciting for natural science, but it has profound theological ramifications as well. Today we have a chance to witness a special moment in history as Venus transits across the disk of the Sun for people across the world to see. This rare astronomical occurrence may have been witnessed by Montezuma in 1520, was first predicted by Johannes Kepler in 1631, launched Captain James Cook’s expedition around the world in 1768, helped us determine the Earth's distance from the Sun in the 1882, and will not occur again until 2117.

The astronomy community is particularly interested in this event because exoplanets throughout the Milky Way galaxy regularly transit their parent stars in just the same way. This local example will allow astronomers to test and refine techniques used to determine the composition of these exoplanets' atmospheres, providing insight into whether these distant planets could possibly harbor life.

As Venus begins to cross in front of the disk of the Sun, Venus's atmosphere will refract the Sun's light, illuminating the backlit portion of the planet's atmosphere. Telescopes on the ground and in orbit will be trained on this thin arc of atmosphere lit up by the Sun. Astronomers will use spectrometers to break the light up into its constituent colors, from which they can determine the chemical composition of our over-heated sister planet's atmosphere. Once perfected, this same technique can be used to examine the atmospheres of planets far beyond our own solar system, offering us one of our best clues as to the habitability of these distant worlds.

Not only is this process of discovery exciting for natural science, but it has profound theological ramifications as well. Surely a God capable of orchestrating both the majestic swirls of a spiral galaxy and the intricate language of DNA could bring forth life where and when He chooses, but only now are we on the verge of being able to answer the age-old question: “Did God confine His creative life-giving actions to our own planet, or does His abundant fertility extent far beyond our limited experience?”

In 1882, William Harkness, the Director of the U.S. Naval Observatory, was one of two astronomers to determine from the transit of Venus the distance from Earth to the Sun. Just as previous viewers could never have imagined calibrating the scale of the solar system from such an event, Harkness could not predict its importance in 2004 and 2012 (the most recent Venus transits). As we look to the future, we can hardly imagine what new frontiers the next Venus transit of 2117 will find us exploring.

"We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. . . . What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children's children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day. As for ourselves, we have to do with the present ..." ~William Harkness, the Director of the U.S. Naval Observatory, quoted in 1882 (source: NASA.gov)




The image above shows Venus on the eastern limb of the Sun during the 2004 transit. As described in Tucker's essay, the faint ring around the planet comes from the scattering of light through its atmosphere, which allows some sunlight to show around the edge of the otherwise dark planetary disk. The faint glow on the disk is an effect of the TRACE telescope through which the image was captured. For more on the historical significance of the transits of Venus (including the voyage of Captain James Cook), see this article from NASA, which also includes links to several live webcasts of today's transit.


]]> Tue, 05 Jun 12 11:47:56 -0700 Faith Tucker http://biologos.org/blog/the-wonder-of-the-universe-the-heavenly-declaration?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/the-wonder-of-the-universe-the-heavenly-declaration?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication The universe that inspired the psalmist three thousand years ago grows grander as each new generation of astronomers adds yet another layer of understanding. The Heavenly Declaration

“The heavens,” wrote the psalmist “declare the glory of God.” (Ps 19:1 NIV)

The universe that inspired the psalmist three thousand years ago grows grander as each new generation of astronomers adds yet another layer of understanding. Each new discovery pushes back the boundary that separates the known universe from the vast terra incognita that beckons and teases us to keep going, to sail ever further from familiar shores.

A few centuries ago the great philosopher Immanuel Kant repeated the psalmist’s declaration: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steady reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence."

The night sky still beckons us, as it once did the psalmist. I spend time each summer at a rustic family cottage in the wilderness of my native New Brunswick, Canada. There, miles from electricity, the night sky does not compete with artificial light. Smog does not obscure it. Planes do not draw white trails on it. It does not compete with cable television or even cell phones, silenced by the absence of signals. The night sky is simply there, quietly declaring the glory of God. Its many lights reflect off the ripples of the lake, and are accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the voices of the many creatures that call this wilderness home. Only a jaded soul could sit by that lake and not wonder if there wasn’t some larger meaning to the experience.

I can see what the psalmist saw and rejoice as he did. But I watch the night sky through the eyes of a twenty-first century scientist. I have the benefit of centuries of scientific advancement and can see, in my mind’s eye, so much more. Those visible stars are just the advance guard of an almost infinite army of stars going back almost forever. The stars are not attached to a dome that one might reach with an ambitiously tall tower or puncture with a long-range missile. They are so far away that their light has been traveling at unimaginable speed for years, centuries, milennia and longer. The light from the stars in the Hyades Cluster began its journey to the earth at about the time that my ancestors—Loyalists from Pennsylvania—began their journey to this part of North America in the eighteenth century. The light from the closest stars, the trio that make up Alpha Centauri, takes over four years to reach earth. The most distant star ever detected from the earth is a “gamma ray burster” that launched its signal almost 13 billion years ago, when the universe was young. The powerful gamma ray signal from this star began its journey before our planet was even formed, reaching the earth in April 2009.

The psalmist did not know that the stars were made of hydrogen and helium. He did not know they generated their energy through nuclear fusion or that many of them explode at the end of their lives. He knew nothing of galaxies and the layers of structure in the cosmos. He did not understand how fast light travels or that the light from our sun powers photosynthesis and many other processes here on the earth.

The universe brought into view by science is like a collection of Russian matryoshka dolls nestled one inside the other. With the psalmist we can see the outer layer—and it is grand. But inside are additional layers, each one with a new type of grandeur. And at the very end of the unpacking lie the remarkable laws of physics that keep the earth orbiting about the sun, the sun shining reliably, and the sunlight providing energy to sustain life on our planet.

The universe as we understand it today inspires awe. And for those open to its message—from the psalmists of yesteryear to the believers and even the thoughtful skeptics of today—it speaks of a Creator. Our universe does not look like a cosmic accident, where lots of stuff just happened. It looks like the expression of a grand plan—a cosmic architecture capable of both supporting life such as ours and of inspiring observers like us to seek out the Creator.

This is why Antony Flew—“world’s most notorious atheist”—changed his mind and started believing in God.

]]> Sat, 05 May 12 05:30:09 -0700 Karl Giberson http://biologos.org/blog/series/universe-and-multiverse?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/universe-and-multiverse?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Baylor University Physicist Gerald Cleaver describes the changing state of our understanding of the cosmos and suggests ways that Christians can make theological sense of a theoretical Multiverse. Called to Christ and to Science

By the time I was ten years old, I was already determined to follow a career in physics and cosmology, both because of the wonder I felt for the natural world and as a means to better resolve serious questions that were developing within me regarding the relationship between biblical interpretation and scientific discovery. The prior year I had read and studied scripture in its entirety for the first time, rather than just the piece-meal sections covered in my Sunday school classes. Whenever I look back at that year in my life, I am always glad I chose to study the New Testament before the Old Testament, rather than vice versa. From the New Testament study, I found salvation and accepted Christ into my life. But my examination of the Old Testament that followed raised serious questions for me, particularly regarding Genesis. Even as a ten-year-old, I could see the apparent conflict between Genesis and what I had already learned about the history of the universe, of earth, and of life on earth as reported by science. From science I felt amazement and wonder toward God as Creator and strongly desired to learn more about the physical laws set up by God that sustained the universe. In contrast, both of the Genesis stories of creation seemed simplistic and hollow.

As I continued to study, I came to believe that divine inspiration of scripture does not exempt scripture from portraying human authors’ limited (in particular, finite) understandings of the physical world.

Since Genesis 1 and 2 were written in a pre-scientific age, we should expect a non-scientific description of the creation process. Divine inspiration allowed the language of the time to express eternal truths regarding some aspects of God’s nature as Creator. Using stock images from the culture, the opening chapters of Genesis describe God as the ultimate Creator of all things and in charge of all things. These chapters should not be misinterpreted as scientific treatises describing the actual physics processes by which God creates all things.

From further study I came to understand that for almost two thousand years, many others far more knowledgeable than I had wrestled with the same issues. I was thrilled to learn that the early church fathers had developed a procedure for dealing with disagreement between scripture and scientific understanding. In 1657, the famous scientist, mathematician, and devoted Christian, Blaise Pascal, summarized the procedure of St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in his Provincial Letters:

When we meet with a passage even in the Scripture, the literal meaning of which, at first sight, appears contrary to what the senses or reason are certainly persuaded of, we must not attempt to reject their testimony in this case, and yield them up to the authority of that apparent sense of the Scripture, but we must interpret the Scripture, and seek out therein another sense agreeable to that sensible truth.... And as Scripture may be interpreted in different ways, whereas the testimony of the senses is uniform, we must in these matters adopt as the true interpretation of Scripture that view which corresponds with the faithful report of the senses.

An opposite mode of treatment, so far from procuring respect to the Scripture, would only expose it to the contempt of infidels; because, as St. Augustine says, “when they found that we believed, on the authority of Scripture, in things which they assuredly knew to be false, they would laugh at our credulity with regard to its more recondite truths, such as the resurrection of the dead and eternal life.” “And by this means,” adds St. Thomas, “we would render our religion contemptible in their eyes, and shut up its entrance into their minds.

During my teenage years, my conviction that science could be used to inform scripture and clarify our understanding and interpretation of it continued to solidify. I agreed with Galileo that, “the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Further, since God is the creator of all things, the physical and the spiritual, I came to understand that science as the study of the physical and theology as the study of the spiritual must be mutually consistent when both are properly understood. Inconsistency could only be the result of human misunderstanding of one or both arenas of knowledge.

(Some might correctly point out that science is not always as clear-cut as reason plus the report of the senses. That is, at times science also involves debates between competing interpretations, especially on the cutting edge of research. Nevertheless, ongoing scientific investigations gradually winnow away many or most proposed scientific descriptions of a given physical process, leaving only one or a few as the viable candidates. Scientific theories are formed by the general consensus of the scientific community based on overwhelming supporting physical evidence.)

In high school, I faced a serious medical problem, eventually identified as a brain tumor. Surgery was successful, in part due to a positive change in the tumor. In thankful response to God, I decided to pursue a career in church ministry. I determined a primary goal of my ministry would be to help the members of my future congregations develop mutually consistent and mutually supportive understandings of scripture and of science. I chose to attend Valparaiso University in Indiana, where I could, in addition to being a pre-seminary student, also double major in physics and mathematics to increase my scientific knowledge. Over the course of my four years at Valparaiso, I realized that my calling wasn’t for a church ministry, but one aspect of it would be to minister to Christians as a professional scientist, demonstrating by example that faith and science need not be at odds.

Thus, by way of a curved path, I did indeed follow the vocation I had initially chosen twelve years earlier. I decided once again to pursue the path that made my heart sing: studying the underlying laws and forces of the physical universe. As I was deciding which Ph.D. programs in elementary particle physics and cosmology to apply to, I became aware of a new, quickly developing subfield of particle physics called string theory that offered the possibility of unifying all of the known forces and matter in the universe into a single theory. I am now a successful scientist in this area, publishing discoveries that add to our understanding of particle physics and the universe.

In the next installment, Gerald Cleaver offers his advice to fellow Christians on how to seek after a consistent Christian worldview in which scientific and theological understandings of the universe are viewed as mutually supportive and complementary.

]]> Mon, 23 Apr 12 05:00:13 -0700 Gerald Cleaver http://biologos.org/blog/wheat-that-springeth-green?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/wheat-that-springeth-green?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication As we remember the narrative that takes us from Good Friday through Easter morning, the image of a buried grain of wheat invites us into the story rather than just describing what happens in it.

Despite a common desire among Christians to find evidence for the activity of the creator God in the natural world, the Scriptures themselves more often give us images and analogies of God’s providence rather than “proof” that would be admissible in peer reviewed journals, much less in court. In his final climactic week in Jerusalem, Jesus used image after image, parable after parable to convey the urgency of his message that the Kingdom of God was coming to pass through his own coming Passion.

Though His disciples did not understand them at first, it was by new pictures (the lost coin, lost sheep and lost sons) and reinterpreted old ones (like the vineyard), that they came to understand the “facts” of His healing miracles and, ultimately, His death and resurrection. By reframing concrete happenings and material relationships, stories and images opened up possibilities rather than limiting them—and they still invite us to enter into them, rather than leaving us dispassionate and disconnected.

As we remember the narrative that takes us from Good Friday through Easter morning, the image of a buried grain of wheat invites us into the story rather than just describing what happens in it. Certainly this is an image for Christ Himself, but as I’ve written elsewhere, the seed isn’t just a symbol of His death and rebirth from the grave, but a promise of future abundance, lavish reproduction, and a pointer to the coming harvest: Jesus Himself is the “first fruits” of the new creation. We are called not only to be workers for that harvest, but to be, like Him, the harvested grains. As Christ entered into His glory through self-sacrifice, so we, too, give ourselves in order to share in and contribute to the shalom—the comprehensive flourishing—promised as the marker of God’s Kingdom now and in the future.

This combined image of death and renewal, single seed to field, is the heart of John Crumb’s hymn “Now the Green Blade Rises,” first published in 1928 in the Oxford Book of Carols and originally set to an old French Christmas carol (“Noel Nouvelet”). By clicking the image above you can hear a new version as revised and re-arranged by contemporary hymnist Alex Mejias. We offer it as a meditation on the sacrifice and victory of Jesus, the glorious promise of resurrection, and the call upon us all to join in God’s story of redemption and renewal.

“Now the Green Blade Riseth”

John MacLeod Campbell Crum (1872-1958),
© Oxford University Press
adapted and arranged by Alex Mejias

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain.
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

In the grave they laid him, love whom we had slain,
Thinking that he’d never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Alleluia, allelu!
When we die, we will rise with you!

Up he spring at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain.
Up from the dead my risen Lord is seen;
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Alleluia, allelu!
When we die, we will rise with you! (x2)

When our hearts are weary, grieving, Lord, in pain,
By your touch you call us back to life again,
fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Alleluia, allelu!
When we die, we will rise with you! (x3)



Alex Mejias is the founder and director of High Street Hymns, a non-profit music ministry that exists to spread the Gospel and worship the Triune God in spirit and truth through hymns, psalms and spiritual songs. Alex grew up in New Jersey and outside Washington, DC, receiving a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. For the past 15 years he has been leading worship for churches and ministries, writing and recording both new and old hymns, and touring the east coast as a singer-songwriter. Alex is also committed to the power of the creative arts to advance the Gospel and promote justice and healing in the name of Christ, serving, supporting, and collaborating with several other non-profit ministries. More details on these projects and music may be found at High Street Hymns.

]]> Fri, 06 Apr 12 08:50:51 -0700 Mark Sprinkle http://biologos.org/blog/jeffersons-bible-and-the-tears-of-christ?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/jeffersons-bible-and-the-tears-of-christ?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication Predictably, "Jesus Wept" did not make into the Jefferson Bible. John 11 was cut out entirely, falling onto the floor of his Monticello home and discarded, along with Martha's confession. At a New York University bookstore recently, I came across a facsimile of "Thomas Jefferson's Bible." Jefferson famously cut out parts of the Bible he could not embrace (mostly the miraculous accounts) and collaged them back together. In the introduction I read the fascinating account of how this "Bible" came to be, including the account of Jefferson's conversation with Dr. Joseph Priestley who challenged Jefferson to write out his own convictions about the "Christian System."

My curiosity immediately led me to see what he had cut out. All of the miracles and the Resurrection passages were gone, and the Gospels were rearranged in a linear fashion, edited and pasted together as a single narrative. Then I looked particularly to see what Jefferson did with John 11.

Why John 11? For the past several seasons of Lent, I have been meditating upon this account of three siblings: Martha, Mary and Lazarus of Bethany. In particular, John 11:35 has become a central passage for me to consider in self-reflection, because an artist learns very early that creativity demands boundaries and limits to thrive. When I began on my recent journey to illuminate the Four Holy Gospels for Crossway publishing's celebration of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, I needed to find a thematic boundary. I was so overwhelmed with the grand scale of the project that I chose this shortest passage in the Bible—“Jesus Wept”—and that decision has led to many discoveries along the way.

"Jesus Wept" is, to me, the most profound passage in the Bible. After I gave a recent lecture on this verse at Duke University, Richard Hays commented on my reflections: "The Incarnate Word of God stood wordless at Bethany." Indeed, Jesus' tears make no logical sense, as he came to Bethany with the specific mission to raise Lazarus from the grave. He told the disciples his mission (and why he intentionally delayed his arrival, knowing that Lazarus lay dying) and revealed to Martha that he was and is the "Resurrection and the Life." So why did he, upon seeing the tears of Mary, waste his time weeping, when he could have shown his power as the Son of God by wiping away every tear, telling people like her, "Ye of little faith, believe in me!"?

In my reflections, this "irrational," emotional response from Jesus became a central means to understand the role and even the necessity of art in the midst of suffering—what I have began to call our "Ground Zero" conditions. Art, like the tears of Christ, may seem useless, ephemeral and ultimately wasteful. But even though they evaporate into our atmosphere, the extravagant tears of God dropped on the hardened, dry soils of Bethany, or onto the ashes of our Ground Zero conditions, are still present with us. Because tears are ephemeral, they can be enduring and even permanent, as with “Jesus wept.” In the same way, perhaps our art can be so as well. What seems, at first, to be an irrational response to suffering may turn out, upon deep reflection, to be the most rational response of all.

Predictably, "Jesus Wept" did not make into the Jefferson Bible. John 11 was cut out entirely, falling onto the floor of his Monticello home and discarded, along with Martha's confession. Jefferson's rationalism allowed only a distant deity that made sense in reference to objective ‘scientific’ calibrations, not ephemeral marks of compassion. Yet, when this attitude is actually applied to the sciences, they also become, like Jefferson's Bible, a “cut and paste” product, based on a limited viewpoint.

Even with my rudimentary understanding of the early phonetic and acoustic research my father was part of at Bell Labs in the 1970s, I know that the optimism of many scientists there was based on reductionistic assumptions. I described my father’s wrestling with the basic theses of linguistic research in a previous essay:

In the 1980s, [while in his] early 50’s, my father began to send a series of notes to his colleagues questioning the basic tenets of acoustics research, as he found them flawed and inadequate for the goals pursued. . . .[W]hat the early research assumed was that by segmenting speech patterns, you could have enough data to rebuild speech. It would be a bit like dissecting a frog, and stitching it back together, only to expect it to jump again -- A typical reductionist/modernist assumption. (Refractions 24: "The Resonance of Being")

My father began to challenge these underlying but over-simplified assumptions and as a result, came under criticism for abandoning many of the positions held by his peers. I continue:

My father’s Converter/Distributor theory (C/ D theory) assumes that computer technology is now capable of anticipating contextual patterns of speech, and is able to simulate an architectural structure to account for the morphing of speech production. Rather than the segmental approach, he calls his new thinking prosodic, as it accounts for the complexity of speech and language. But it would take years of research to get to a point of presenting his new ideas to the linguistics/phonetics community.

My father, who had rarely had problems finding support for his research before, was in for a battle. . . . He could not find funding, and found himself fighting the establishment of the research world—the very establishment he had helped to build. After my father’s many futile attempts to secure funding for his new research, my brother, a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, stepped in to fund a post for a graduate student at Ohio State, to help my father compile enough data to be able to begin his research.

To my father, the integrity of the scientific process demanded such a course. He never considered that his challenge to reductionism would be seen as a threat by many of his colleagues. He simply was seeking after Truth.

Even in the objective rigor of the research process, then, human factors intervene—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Our presuppositions surface eventually, and it becomes clear where we place our "faith. " My father's C/D theory is an intuitive leap, arising from his love for synthesis and beauty, but pulled up by hard data and a stubborn commitment to the truth of matter. It is an example of the way intuitive, subjective insight can connect the ephemeral with the rational, objective and concrete. Should we seek, then, to make the sciences a Jeffersonian cut-and-paste re-narration of our reality? Are we so inflexible in how we will understand the great mystery of our being? If so, the gap between that reduced ‘reality’ and what is truly human is the very gap into which Jesus' tears still fall.

Jesus wept for Lazarus, but also, perhaps, for Jefferson as he snipped out John 11 with his own hands; for to dismiss Jesus’ tears as irrational and unnecessary is to miss Jesus entirely. Jefferson sought to cut out the Deity, but also lost the Man. Without Jesus' full humanity, coupled with his Divinity, we do not have a Savior. Without this fullness of humanity—concrete and ephemeral, intuitive and objective—we lose perspective on why we are doing our research to begin with. If we assent to the fragmenting, segmental assumptions of modernity, we will have stitched the frog back together only to bury him anyway. If the dead are to live, we will require a Miracle Worker to show us that the world that is cohesive, and rational, but only when seen through a veil of tears.

]]> Sat, 31 Mar 12 11:59:39 -0700 Makoto Fujimura http://biologos.org/blog/series/science-as-an-instrument-of-worship?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication http://biologos.org/blog/series/science-as-an-instrument-of-worship?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication In this brief series (taken from a 2009 paper), Jennifer Wiseman uses an excerpt from the famous hymn “How Great Thou Art,” to explain why the study of God’s creation can lead Christ’s followers into meaningful worship and overcome the obstacles which impede true praise. Creation as encountered through our senses is pondered by our minds, which flows into wonder-filled songs from the soul. She further explains how knowledge of creation will help Christians to address the moral dilemmas of science, and she encourages all to see the process of scientific inquiry as a means to discover God’s truth. Today's entry was taken from an article written by Jennifer Wiseman for the 2009 Theology of Celebration conference and published originally on our website in 2010; we are reposting it here. Here she shared her personal Christian perspectives on how churches can better incorporate science as a positive element of worship, service, and celebration.

When astrophysicist Dr. Jennifer Wiseman first published the following posts as a paper in the BioLogos Scholarly Essay series, the essay’s subtitle asked the question, “Can Recent Scientific Discovery Inform and Inspire Our Worship and Service?” Over the next few weeks, we will look at Dr. Wiseman's answer to that query—an emphatic “Yes!”. But in this first installment we begin by describing some of the reasons such a posture of worship through science is not more common in the contemporary church than it already is.

Oh Lord My God, when I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee; How great Thou art, how great Thou art

(Carl Boberg, 1885; Trans. Stuart Hine 1949)

The words of this great hymn convey the proper overwhelming sense in which the wondrous Creation of God should translate directly into a response of awe and praise from mind, body, and spirit. The writer sees and hears the wonders of nature with his body, considers with his mind what all this implies, and responds with songs from his soul.

But is this worshipful response happening in our Christian congregations today? I believe this kind of response to the Creation can and should happen within the hearts of God’s people and wherever congregations of believers are gathered. Such power can even unify believers who differ on lesser matters as we all look up outside of ourselves at the same wonders and respond with the same praise. As an astronomer, I have felt the sense of being “blown away” by seeing images of countless distant galaxies, or even by just looking up at the array of stars overhead on a dark moonless night and sensing something of the “big-ness” of God.

There are impediments to realizing the fullness of this kind of worship experience for many Christian congregations today. I believe four of the main culprits are ignorance, distraction, controversy, and uncertainty.

Let me start with the first, and clarify up front that by ignorance I am simply referring to being uninformed, rather than the sometimes more negative connotations of the word. How up-to-date is the scientific knowledge of average, educated, committed evangelical church members and pastors?Americans, both adults and schoolchildren, are not ranking favorably compared to the rest of the world’s developed nations in science knowledge these days. We enjoy our technological achievements and resulting gadgets, but true comprehension of scientific principles and recent discoveries is not a strong part of our culture and national conversation these days.

This is reflected directly in what kinds of things are (and are not) discussed in church. In my own generally very good church experience growing up in mainstream America, I can only remember science and nature being discussed in a general way (e.g., we should look at the beauty of flowers and mountains and animals and thank God), except for once in a specific way in a children’s sermon (where we were told we should not believe we came from monkeys!). That was a while ago, but how are science issues handled today? Do pastors speak about the evidence from cosmic background light for a spectacular beginning to the universe? Are the genetic codes being mapped out for animals and humans resulting in praise for God’s amazing “blueprint”? Are the advancements in nanotechnology and biotechnology and medicine subjects for discussion of good and poor uses of technology in church? The answer to these is, of course, “no”, for the most part, yet even issues seemingly more relevant to the daily lives of parishioners are often driven by current technology and scientific advancement, and an informed congregation can better understand how to praise, pray, discern, dialogue, and serve.

Related to being uninformed is the condition of distraction for many evangelical Christians today. The distractions of overloaded schedules, pressured jobs, divided families, and even church environments of entertainment-based worship and activities can impede a lifetime of quiet listening, learning, and contemplation. If there is no encouragement from church leaders to learn and incorporate nature and current scientific discovery into contemplation and praise and service, then there will be no space available in the lives and activities of congregants for what should be the resulting awe and praise.



But what does it mean to be informed about science in today’s evangelical congregations? Too often this has implied a direct relation to controversy, the third reason science is not often inspiring worship these days. There are many voices trying to “inform” Christians about science, and for the average evangelical congregant, discernment about which authority figure to believe can be difficult. Many times Christians are presented with a clear and strong implication that scientific conclusions, especially on issues related to origins of the universe and of life, are part of the secular “World” camp rather than the camp of “God’s Truth”. And Christians “know” that they must be on one side or the other of this stark line of worldliness. Often in more conservative churches a teaching will come from the pulpit that goes something like this: “Scientists tell us that *...+, but they cannot give a reason how *...+ happened; but WE know how: God is responsible!” Therefore any serious consideration of a scientific understanding of the development of the universe and life implies that one is “compromising” the teaching of the Word of God, rather than studying the details of how God works. In Scripture, however, never is the study and experience of nature seen as somehow antithetical to knowing and following the Lord; just the opposite in fact!

This often boils down to the correct interpretation of Scripture. Through sermons, radio spots, television shows, and literature, evangelical Christians are hearing adamant messages conflating the acceptance of modern scientific discovery with worldly compromise, or else providing alternative ideas that are not entirely satisfying. From Young-Earth Creationists, they hear that a literal reading of the Biblical creation account is the only correct one, so all scientific discovery must be reinterpreted to fit a recent Creation. But this robs them of the sense of awe we glean from the magnitude of space and time revealed by astronomy, geology, and fossils. From the Intelligent Design community, they hear the message that life (and perhaps the entire universe) is too complicated to develop through natural processes alone, and therefore that God’s work requires miraculous inputs of information into the natural world. This implies that somehow natural processes must not be fully God’s processes, or that God’s work through them is somehow inadequate. They also hear the message to “teach the controversy,” so that somehow by proclaiming that there is a controversy about natural processes as an adequate explanatory tool for natural history, the controversy will in fact become real. They are then surprised to find out from either advanced scientific study or from the Evolutionary Creation voices that in fact there is no great controversy in the scientific community about the basic structure and timeline of the natural history of the universe and life; that in fact there need be no theological debate about how God brought (and is bringing) the universe and life into being, rather, the issue is whether God is in fact real and responsible for all we know and are. And yet even this unifying message can sometimes seem to gloss over the central theological issues of suffering and death and fallen-ness in Creation. So every approach to origins and evolution evokes some difficulties and challenges with which the Christian congregant must grapple.

Next week, Part 2 concludes Dr. Wiseman's discussion of the stumbling blocks that can stand between the church and its appreciation of science as a means of worship, and turns to the ways that the pursuit of God through study of the created world can help overcome those difficulties by pointing us directly to the Lord.

]]> Mon, 19 Mar 12 08:00:14 -0700 Jennifer Wiseman