Perhaps you were a science junkie when you were in high school, at ease with chemistry and physics and biology. If so, you were lucky, and I hope your love of science has stayed with you through the years. It matters deeply in the quest for understanding not only your faith, but whatever revelation comes to you by God’s grace.
Baby ginger monkey superimposed on newborn star cluster ~ Wikimedia Commons/ NASA
For a number of reasons I dreaded science classes, with the result that I retained very little of the knowledge my teachers tried to instil in me. What first overcame my resistance to all things scientific was the genre of science fiction. For about a decade, beginning in my late teens, I devoured the works of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and others.
Many of those classics had elements of the quest about them. In some indefinable way, they sowed the seeds of my own explorations. Then a day came when I knew a call to begin reading about the science beneath the fiction. I found the stories about the discoveries made by scientists and their precursors to be every bit as exciting and satisfying as the imagined plots of the sci-fi greats.
Decades later I began a long-desired degree program at university. There I moved from reading books by authors who write about science to primary works by scientific discoverers, ancient and mediaeval as well as modern. Despite initial skepticism, I learned to respect the work of people like Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton, and many others whose observations and ideas changed their world. In the works of modern scientists I learned how the God I knew from experience could be described in a different, though incomplete, way.
It is sometimes said that theology looks for the why of things and science explores everything else, but that draws too hard a line between them. In seeking to understand the what and the how of mystical experience, as well as the why, I have found both areas of thought and study to be complementary and symbiotic. In tandem they are extremely fruitful when powered by revelation and inspiration.
If you breathed a sigh of relief at the end of high school, and gave thanks that you would never have to pick up another science textbook again, I urge you to take another look at all things scientific. This Christmastide I have extended my own questions deep into the prehistoric past, through Ian Tattersall’s delightful collection The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human. His first piece, “What’s So Special about Science?” is a fine argument for making the study of science part of your quest.
In Tattersall’s book I am looking for clues to how humans developed awareness of God’s presence in the hope of expanding what I have already learned through revelation. Our Creator’s world of wonders has been magnified a thousandfold by the discoveries of the past one hundred years alone. Study it with your senses, illuminate it with learning, and you will discover an infinity of entry points into your own quest.
For further reading:
Tattersall, Ian. The Monkey in the Mirror: Essays on the Science of What Makes Us Human. New York: Oxford University Press; 2002.
Notes:
The photograph of the baby ginger monkey is by Rob of Cambridge MA, and can be found at Wikimedia Commons.
The full credit for the star image above belongs to:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/P.S. Teixeira (Center for Astrophysics)
The image shows newborn stars in what astronomers have nicknamed the “Snowflake Cluster,” in a section of the larger “Christmas Tree Cluster” from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
You can find a link to the Newton Project Canada here on the website of my favourite university.