The Book of Works

No, this is not about the origins of Christianity. The Paul in the title is not the Apostle, but Sir Paul McCartney, former Beatle. Back 1969, rumors on some American college campuses that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash began to spread. Radio DJs and talk-show hosts expanded and elaborated the hoax. The details can be found here. For years, very serious, thoughtful people compiled and presented “evidence” that Paul was dead. Such evidence included clues one could hear by playing some of the Beatles records backwards and the fact that Paul is not wearing shoes in one of the album cover photos. At the time I was a science student, and several friends wondered why I was skeptical about the story. “You are a scientist,” they said. “You must believe in evidence.”.

This story is a good way to illustrate what science is not. Science is not about amassing evidence to prove a point. That’s what lawyers do. That’s what advocates do, and scientists are not supposed to be advocates. One can always find evidence for or against anything. As a counter to this rumor, I began to accumulate a great deal of evidence that the Beatle John was really a woman. I even convinced a couple of poor souls.

I once watched a crazy lady on the news holding up evidence for yet another “Paul is dead” story. This was the one about President Obama being a fraud and a liar (her words) and that he was born outside of the US. Oh yes, she (and other people) presented a lot of evidence. Did that make it true? No. I have seen tons of evidence that US intelligence and/or the Israeli military blew up the Twin Towers on 9/11. There is evidence that vaccines cause autism, that GMOs make you sick, that the Holocaust never happened, that Elvis lives, that we never landed on the moon, that fluoride kills, that AIDS is caused by drug abuse, and so on.

And of course, when I say that I don’t believe it, the believers always counter, “look at the evidence”.

So let me say this. Evidence is cheap. You can find evidence to support or refute any statement. Evidence is not the way to establish the truth. Evidence is important, but by itself is useless. Now I can hear the computer keys clicking away. “SCIENCE IS BASED ON EVIDENCE. YOU ARE ANTI-SCIENCE!!”

Actually, that is a common misconception. Science is not based on what you might call evidence. Scientists are not juries. They do not reach a conclusion about truth by hearing arguments from many sides, and weighing the evidence. The scientific process is quite different from what people generally think. For most tough scientific questions, where there is evidence pointing to different answers, scientists will usually say “We don’t know yet. I favor this answer, but it could be the other one.” Eventually, as more data comes in, one answer becomes obviously correct to everyone (sometimes with exceptions).  That can take years or decades.

Experimental science is not set up to answer big questions, but very small ones. No scientist goes into a lab ready to prove that evolution is true or false or to cure cancer, or to learn how life began. No experiment or observation could do that. What they do is set up an experiment to measure the enzymatic activity of an extract of one species of yeast cells by determining the rate of disappearance of a particular metabolite labelled with radioactive phosphate. And 9 times out of 10, the experiment doesn’t work: the controls show the wrong values, the replicates give wildly different answers, nothing makes sense. After several months, usable data finally comes out. It’s usually not very impressive or interesting. The measured enzymatic activity is pretty much zero, which means either that this yeast species doesn’t degrade the metabolite, or the extract didn’t have the enzyme in it, or there is no such enzyme, or who the hell knows. That is what really happens in science labs, folks.

Sometimes we get lucky and we make a real finding. Something that can be published. Something that might mean something interesting. But proof? Truth? Sorry, no. At best we have an experimental result or an observation that is factually true (because we did the experiment according to the rules). But that fact by itself could mean any number of things. Scientifically defined evidence for a hypothesis, especially for a major important hypothesis, comes very slowly and from many different approaches.

This is why I am not interested in evidence for or against the reality of God or Jesus Christ. LaPlace famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis” when asked about God – well, I have no need of that evidence, because I know that “that hypothesis” cannot be tested by any manner of experiment, and that evidence can be presented by both sides ad infinitum.

Some people still think that the original Paul McCartney is dead. During the height of the hysteria, one addled reporter challenged Paul to prove he was the real deal. Of course, he couldn’t. How would you go about proving you are really you, and not a very clever impersonator who has learned all of the life story of the real actual you? How do we prove that Shakespeare wrote his own plays? Obama showed his birth certificate and Trump declared it a forgery. Christians point to historical documents, and skeptics say they were forged or not early enough. None of this is science, people. It’s politics, and its fake.

A popular approach to explaining consciousness and other attributes of the human mind and soul is to attribute all of it to evolutionary mechanisms. The purpose of the new field of evolutionary psychology (EP, or Evo Pyscho, my own invention) is to find “scientific” explanations for human characteristics within the context of evolutionary adaptation. The field is based on the premise that all human behaviors and characteristics are the result of evolutionary adaptations to survival conditions during the evolution of humanity. Sociobiology is a related area of study that also incorporates this premise and strives to find evidence for it.

There is of course, plenty of evidence to be found. Sexual jealousy, hunger for sweets, even altruism toward kin can all be “explained” as adaptations to primitive conditions. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t always scientific, since the evidence used is sometimes a “just so” story that sounds logical and meaningful. In these cases the premise is a more of a faith statement with no basis of proof. And it may not be falsifiable. There is no possible human trait, real or imagined, that cannot be postulated to result from some evolutionary selective advantage.

Take, for example the well-known human tendency to bite one’s fingernails when nervous. We could say that long finger nails present an impediment to manual dexterity, which is needed to properly wield a weapon, and therefore when nervous the human tends to be sure that his/her fingernails are as short as possible. This is complete nonsense which I just made up without more than a moment’s thought. But it sounds like it makes sense..

Or take a fictional trait, like the urge to urinate when undergoing high-speed movement. That arose because humans never moved at high speeds unless they were being dragged away by a large carnivore, and urination was a useful way to signal distress to any other human passing by and also disgusted the animal enough to let go. Before you laugh, read some actual examples and explanations given for real human behavior by the “science” of evolutionary psychology.

Here are few quotes:

Physically more attractive parents are more likely to have daughters than physically less attractive parents…

It is therefore reasonable to infer that our ancestors must also have limited their daily activities to daylight, and sustained nocturnal activities are largely evolutionarily novel.  The hypothesis would therefore predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be nocturnal than less intelligent individuals.

Black women have lower average level of physical attractiveness net of BMI. Nor can the race difference in intelligence (and the positive association between intelligence and physical attractiveness) account for the race difference in physical attractiveness among women.

Satoshi Kanazawa

To be sure, the entire field of evolutionary psychology should not be judged by the writings of one controversial individual. Some EP ideas are more logical, some have some degree of reliable data, and some are undoubtedly correct. But often there is no actual evidence for any of the claims made, other than that they sound logical.

Modern humans have been around between 50 and 100,000 years (according to the cultural evidence of anthropology) and emerged as a biological species about 100,000-200,000 years before that. These are extremely short time spans for any kind of Darwinian evolution, and the idea that somehow there was enough time for humans to evolve all the traits we see in thought processes, sexual activities, child rearing, thinking, language, art and so on, is not compelling. If, however, these traits evolved in earlier hominin species, we need to be sure that the environment and behavioral selection pressures for those earlier ancestors were equivalent to those of early H. Sapiens. This may or may not be true, depending on the particular situation.

Lets take a closer look at a couple of mainstream EP claims brought to my attention by Ben Goldacre writing in his blog Bad Science. “Women walk more sexily when they are at their least fertile,”  according to a study in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The finding might be true, based on survey research, but the explanation for something that seems counter intuitive is one of those things that only an EP mind set could produce. In reporting on this “Science” the Daily Mail reports “The apparently contradictory finding – which belies earlier evidence that women’s behaviour becomes more alluring around the time of ovulation – amounts to an evolutionary con-trick on men, scientists said yesterday. Genuine signals of sexual availability, such as subtle changes in smell and facial expressions, can be detected only close up. If she flaunts herself too openly at fertile times, she could be made pregnant by an unsuitable man,”

Well, that makes sense, right? And if it isn’t true, we can always think of something else.

In another EP study, published in the respected journal Current Biology, scientists found that girls prefer pink or reddish hues, compared to boys who prefer blue. Again this was the result of a survey. But the conclusion, based on nothing, was this was probably due to female humans gathering berries, while the men hunted. Sounds logical until we find out that the female preference for pink is a modern Western cultural concept, and that a bit less than 100 years ago pink was considered a masculine color compared to the softer, more feminine blue. Oh well.

Lurking behind evolutionary psychology is a theological statement which is as follows: “There is no God, and therefore ALL human characteristics must be explainable by scientific (evolutionary)  principles”.  The converse of that statement is “Humans are NOT totally explained by evolutionary principles” which leads to the question of what other explanations for human behavior and human nature could there be? There are many answers to this question, some of them theological, others not.

The purpose of my argument here is not to suggest that the failure of Evo Psycho leads to a conclusion that humans were created by God (although I do believe that humans were created by God). What I am trying to suggest is that it is a bad mistake to allow a religious view (there is no such thing as a god) to lead to the acceptance of pseudoscience. It isn’t Christian theology, but the reputation of science that suffers from this error.

Andreas Wagner and his research  group found, both in laboratory experiments and using computer models, that there is not just one way to build a protein with a particular function. There are millions (at least) of ways to do it. The same is true of gene regulatory control circuits and metabolic pathways. Wagner uses an analogy to explain the concept: a universal library containing every possible book, some of which, while containing different words, have the same meaning.  We can explore the idea using a simple English sentence as a model.

Everyone knows that life is complex.

Human language is robust: making small changes in a sentence often does not change its meaning. If we substitute just one word for another, creating a one-step neighbor (a good analogy for a mutation), some of these neighbors will retain the meaning of the original. For example: Everyone understands that life is complex or Everyone believes that life is complex.

Of course, because there are so many words, we can imagine that there are a vast number of neighbors that will not make sense, or will simply make the meaning unclear: Everyone corrosive that life is complex.   

Unlike human language, computer code is not robust at all. Leave out a semicolon or change a letter, and either nothing works, or it all works wrong. So how robust is life?

Wagner found that life is surprisingly robust. In life there are a lot of one-step neighbors. Most proteins, for example, are at least 100-400  amino acids long. An average protein would have almost 5000 neighbors (i.e. proteins with one amino acid changed). While a large fraction of a protein’s neighbors did not work well or at all, Wagner discovered that many of the neighbors produced the same phenotype as the original sequence. The same was true for regulatory networks and metabolic pathways.

Wagner’s research group then did an experiment that gave them an unexpected result. They continued to make single amino acid changes in the functional neighbor sequences, in a stepwise manner, and looked at all the neighbors (over 22 million) of the original neighbors.  They found that even after many steps, there were still plenty of sequences that retained the original function.  In fact, to their surprise, they could replace up to 80% of the amino acids in a protein structure and still get a few that worked as well as the original. Talk about robustness.

But, most importantly, they found that this process is also the source of innovation.  After many steps, when the protein has a number of amino acids that differ from the original but still has the same function, just one more change can produce a protein with a brand new useful function.

Let’s get back to our sentence analogy. Here is a pathway of sentences in which each sentence is the one-step neighbor of the one before. Sentences 1, 2, and 3 have essentially the same meaning. But in sentence 4, a single word change creates an entirely new meaning:

1. Everyone knows that life is complex.
2. Everyone thinks that life is complex.
3. Everybody thinks that life is complex.
4. Everybody thinks their life is complex.

We call a one-step change in the amino acids of a protein a mutation, and we know that such mutations happen all the time. How likely is it that a mutation in a protein would produce a novel function?  If there were just one protein that could perform the original function and keep the organism alive, it would be very unlikely – a miracle. But with many different candidates around, it could happen frequently. The more robust a protein is, the greater the possibility for innovation. A high degree of robustness allows for many different structures doing the same thing, and also allows for innovation through a small change in one of those robust alternative structures. Complexity leads to robustness, which leads to innovation.

So that is how the fittest arrive. Some evolution-deniers make the argument that the probability of getting a particular protein by chance is so small that it could not happen naturally. But one does not need that particular protein structure to carry out a function: there are many possible protein structures that can do the same thing. And the argument that mutations are always destructive and cannot lead to new information is also wrong, because many of these changes have no negative effect (the definition of robustness); and eventually, one change in one of the possible alternative structures can lead to an innovative function.

Andreas Wagner’s robustness/innovation hypothesis could be the basis for a new way of thinking about evolution. It provides a mechanism for innovation to occur quickly and doesn’t require the gradual accumulation of small changes, each with an adaptive advantage, of traditional Darwinism. It has the ring of truth, since it is both elegant and simple yet requires innate complexity as a prerequisite for the evolution of life.

While some traditional Darwinians insist that chance events are the dominant source of variation among individuals, there are new findings from evolutionary biologists suggesting that this might not be entirely true. Wagner’s theory adds evidence to the possibility that there is a degree of inevitability, or at least a direction, to how new life forms arise, and thus reduces the role of blind chance in evolutionary outcomes. Simon Conway Morris’ book Life’s Solution: Inevitable humans in a lonely universe describes the myriad examples of evolutionary convergence – how the same very complex features, from wings and eyes to eusociality, have evolved many times in different biological lineages. Wagner’s work could supply a mechanism to explain these observations on convergence.

I don’t know if Wagner is a Christian, although the last sentence of the book is intriguing:

And we learn that life’s creativity draws from a source that is older than life, and perhaps older than time.

Wagner’s explanation for the arrival of all of life, including us, seems to fit in quite well with the Christian belief in a Creator God who knits all creatures together, and who created all living creatures to be fruitful, robust, and innovative.

Everyone knows that life is complex, but what does that really mean? Take the following fact: we can throw away a large fraction of the genes of most organisms (up to 80% in some cases), and they will live and function just fine. In science, when a fact doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense, it’s a good clue that we are dealing with deep complexity.

Andreas Wagner, one of the leaders of the new generation of evolutionary biologists, quotes Lewis Carrol’s Through the Looking Glass in a recent paper about his “White Knight hypothesis”:

“You see,” he went on after a pause, “it’s as well to be provided for everything. That’s the reason the horse has all those anklets round his feet.” “But what are they for?” Alice asked in a tone of great curiosity. “To guard against the bites of sharks,” the Knight replied…

Wagner’s hypothesis is that while we might laugh at the folly of the White Knight, his approach to life is actually used by life itself. In his book, The Arrival of the Fittest, Wagner describes the importance of robustness in our understanding of how life survives, evolves, and creates new functions and features. While a shark bite seems an unlikely problem for a land animal, if by some strange scenario the White Knight’s horse found itself surrounded by sharks, it would probably have a better chance of surviving than any other horse. He is one robust horse!

That is the explanation, Wagner proposes, for the fact that so many organisms harbor genes that are not necessary and are not generally used. A typical bacterium, living happily in your gut, munching on an unlimited supply of the sugars in your diet, has no need of genes that allow it to live on acetone, butane, or glycerol, but it has them. Just in case. Being robust means being able to survive tough challenges, no matter how unlikely – like a sudden loss of sucrose to live on, or being plunged into shark-infested waters. It means being adaptable to unexpected changes in the environment, being able to adjust and survive.

Wagner is working  on one of the long-standing mysteries of evolutionary biology: how do biological innovations arise? The early 20^th century biologist Hugo de Vries pointed out that while natural selection can choose which of many variant forms of life (or enzymes, genes, or metabolic pathways) works best, natural selection cannot innovate. It was De Vries who coined the term “arrival of the fittest”, to distinguish innovation from the better understood survival of the fittest.

In several publications over the past decade or so, Wagner and his team have proposed a very exciting answer to this question – one related to the White Knight’s horse. Their hypothesis also resolves the apparent paradox of how robustness and innovation can happen at the same time.

Robustness is conservative; it maintains a homeostasis in the face of external change. This is accomplished by lots of duplication and overlap of critical functions, so that biological processes are immune from damage to any one part. That is one reason that most organisms can do just fine after losing so many of their genes. Innovation, on the other hand, is revolutionary; it implies large-scale change. How can these two opposite impulses be connected? The genius behind Wagner’s answer is the discovery that biological innovation requires robustness, and robustness leads to innovation.

In the next post we will take a closer look at how that works.

Atheism is simply the lack of belief in a god, or in a supernatural being. We hear that all the time, and it’s generally true, from a dictionary point of view. So are there no other beliefs or attitudes or philosophical world views that accompany the statement “I am an atheist”?

Let’s take a closer look. Atheists are a very diverse group, so nothing I say refers at all to all atheists. But there are some beliefs and philosophical world views that are commonly held by many (sometimes most) atheists, especially those who identify with the newer, more militant brand of atheism promoted by Krauss, Harris, Stenger, Dawkins et al.

Here is a partial list:

Free will and consciousness are delusions. Science (methodological naturalism) is the only legitimate epistemology. We are insignificant creatures living on a mediocre planet. There must be many far more advanced civilizations in the galaxy. All unsettled questions about the natural world (such as the origin of the universe and of life) will eventually be answered scientifically. All human emotional, moral and spiritual attributes are explained by evolutionary theory.

I know that many atheists will deny holding some or all of these beliefs. But others are continuously stating them in books, blogs, and articles by atheists. And the same themes are also repeated constantly on social media by less famous followers of the new atheist “creed”.

None of this should actually matter. There is no problem with a group of people all believing in some philosophical world view, even if some of them steadfastly refuse to admit it. But there is a problem when unspoken, unacknowledged presuppositions leak into the scientific enterprise. That is very dangerous. Religious (or anti-religious) agendas are as toxic for science as are political agendas. Most scientists have learned to reject these and stay away from the very risky business of allowing political or religious concerns to determine their research programs.

But sometimes  it seems that for a few scientists, the temptation to gain fame and public attention by supporting the atheist agenda has not been as easily resisted. It’s true that most of the time that we read some blockbuster story in an online or print rag about scientists unlocking the secret of life or proving the absence of God, the story turns out to be a terrible distortion of an honest scientist’s work. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the scientists are actually doing research whose goal is not just better understanding of nature, but a stronger argument for atheism and against the existence of God.

Examples include research designs to gather evidence for a multiverse or any other explanation to counter the theistic argument of fine tuning of the cosmological constants; evidence against a true beginning of the universe, to counter the evidence that everything that exists came from nothing, which makes little sense in the absence of a Creator; evidence for life on other planets, to counter the false notion that Christians think the Earth was chosen by God as the only place for life and intelligence; evidence that our planet is an insignificant and minor dot in a vast universe which is teeming with much more interesting and valuable creatures and features, again to counter a false notion that Christians think the Earth is unique and the center of everything; evidence that human beings are nothing more that naked apes who acquired a few abilities (none of which unique to humans) that allowed them to conquer the planet. The purpose of the last example is to dismantle the Christian notion of Imago Dei. There have even been neuroscience experiments done to try to disprove the existence of free will.

These new anti-theistic research goals are a waste of time and resources. There is no need for science to fill these gaps in understanding in order to disprove religion. Faith in God cannot be disproven any more than the existence of God can be scientifically proven. I know that some atheists cannot grasp this, but scientists should be able to. Christians should not, and many do not use God of the gaps arguments as the basis of their faith. As a Christian scientist, I base my rational belief in God, not on what is unknown, but on what is known about our world. Like so many others, I know that new knowledge will never destroy my faith (whether it is the discovery of a multiverse or the natural mechanism for the origin of life, or the finding of alien life forms, or the final understanding of how humans came to be), but only enhance it. There is nothing that we can discover about the truth of how the world is and how it works that does not point to the glory of God.

Why doesn’t anyone speak Esperanto? For the same reason that communism failed, that there are always shortcuts, and that mutations are random.

The answer is that planned, designed systems never work as well as unplanned, natural systems that arise by some form of trial and error, often called natural selection.

Esperanto was a great idea: create a new language that has features of many of the existing language. All people would learn their own language and Esperanto, and everyone could then communicate with everyone else. But it never happened. People preferred to learn English, just as in the past they learned French or Spanish or Latin, or whatever was the dominant language of the times. But, we could argue, isn’t it more sensible for everyone to learn a common language that isn’t chosen because its spoken by some group that has temporal power and dominance? Yes, that makes sense. But so does the idea that its possible to have an economy where the production of cars or rolls of toilet tissue is planned in advance. Or that we should design the best routes so that shortcuts would be unnecessary.

It turns out that solutions that make sense are not always the best solutions. Sometimes this is because “making sense” is often a very complex thing. For example, in today’s world, it makes sense for a Dutchman to learn English, but much less sense for a typical American to learn Dutch (or anything else, except maybe Spanish). Americans, Britons, Canadians,  and other native English speakers don’t really need to learn other languages including Esperanto, so they don’t. Why therefore should a Dutchman or Norwegian who already speaks English bother to learn Esperanto? If a Norwegian wants to speak to an Italian, it’s much more likely that they both know English than that either of them has even heard of Esperanto.

The reasons for failure of planned economies (communism) or designed social structures (like teenage dance parties) is too complex for this discussion, but like language choice, they all stem from the same issue: Planned designs don’t work in complex systems.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in biology. A lot of things make sense when you first learn the details of biology and biochemistry, but just as many things don’t. SJ Gould loved to write about this, and the title essay in his collection The Panda’s Thumb is devoted to a discussion of biological features that really shouldn’t exist.

Most organisms have far more DNA than they need. And it seems very inefficient to keep replicating all of this useless chemical that serves no purpose. Except now we know that some of the “junk” DNA does actually serve some purpose, such as coding for regulatory processes, or as material for new genes. Another example can be found at the post “Occam was wrong”

Does this mean that biological creatures are somehow poorly designed? Yes, it does, and therein lies the strength of life on this planet. If life had been designed according to how we humans think it should have been, it’s very likely that life on Earth would have gone the way of Esperanto, communism, and all the other carefully designed systems of human beings.

Software engineers have learned this lesson and now use genetic algorithms that depend on random changes and a form of natural selection of the most optimum solution to solve very complex problems in software development.

Those who argue against the process of Darwinian evolution because it seems to negate the appearance of the intelligent design of life are therefore missing the point. The most intelligent way to design a well-functioning life form is through evolution by natural selection. It is far more intelligent than attempting to design a well-functioning bird that must also survive in an environment with well-designed insects, worms, trees, hawks, cats and people, If biology (and a lot of human culture) could be summed up in two words, they would be “Whatever works”.

I do believe there is an Intelligent Designer. But His intelligence is as far above the intelligence of the smartest human engineer. God, in His Divine intelligence, designed life not to look efficient to us, but to last. And natural selection was His tool to do it. Every living cell proclaims the Glory of God.

Today, August 31, 2017 is the last day of the John Templeton grant that made this blog possible. BUT, it is NOT the last day of the blog. I will be continuing this blog into the future, and have no plans to stop or even slow down.

In fact, I have recently added three new pages to the blog, shown in the top banner.

Publications is an updated list of all of my publications divided into two categories: 1. Recent publications mostly related to science and faith issues, including links to the full papers.  2. A list of my scientific publications, from 1976 through 2010 (over 200). PDF reprints for any of them are available on request.

The second new page is Presentations, which includes the title, venue and a link to the actual video or audio (sometimes both) presentations. This list is not yet completely up to date. Stay tuned.

Finally, I have added a page called FAQs, which is intended as a summary of my views on many subjects related to my Christian faith and science. I link this page whenever I am asked one of the many common questions by someone on social media, to avoid having to answer the same question dozens of times. (This mostly applies to Twitter)

All of these pages will be updated periodically.

I also thought this milestone date would be a good time to summarize some of the facts and data about this blog over the two years of its existence. Since its inception there have been 118 blog posts, including 8 guest posts that have generated 13,964 views, 521 comments and 321 Likes. The blog has attracted 3,773 visitors from 64 countries including at least 20 views each from South Africa, Nigeria, China, Germany, UK, Australia, Canada, Austria, New Zealand, Colombia, and Denmark (and of course, the US). As if today the blog has 65 followers, and attracts about 30 views/day.

Thanks to all my followers, and all others who comment and/or visit this blog. I hope to continue to provide you with interesting material for the foreseeable future. .

I would like to close this post by especially thanking the John Templeton Foundation for funding this project (see the page “John Templeton Foundation” for details)  and in particular Paul Wason, Vice President, Life Sciences and Genetics, and Kevin Arnold, Program Officer, Life Sciences and Genetics, for their unwavering support, encouragement and friendship over the years.

Today’s guest post is by my friend and colleague, Jennifer Secki Shields. Jen was trained as a biologist, and was the long-term Director of Christian Education at Christ Crossman United Methodist Church in Virginia. More recently, she founded a new organization called Discovery and Faith http://www.discoveryandfaith.org/ which helps children and youth grow in their experience of God as they explore the world around them. Jen is also a member of the WesleyNexus Board of Directors, which is how we met.

I organized a viewing event for my Cub Scout Pack that was attended by ~75 friends and neighbors on the field behind our local elementary school. All of the school’s teachers came out, too. As the eclipse reached its maximum at 2:42 PM we could hear other groups cheering from their locations in our community. We added our chorus to theirs. For me, there is no question—that collective moment of awe and wonder was an act of worship, a joyous celebration of God’s creation!

It also is one more piece of evidence that tells us just how profoundly our culture is impacted by science. The AP is reporting that this eclipse was the most viewed and photographed of all time. Consider that many millions of Americans interrupted their busy lives to pause for this event. Millions even made roadtrips so that they could be in the path of totality. All of this, not just to witness an event described by science, but in complete trust that the scientists had accurately predicted the whole thing! And they had. You literally could have set your watch by this event. In my area, the eclipse began at 1:17 PM, and reached its maximum at 2:42 PM, exactly as predicted.

While all of this points to the power of science, this was clearly a spiritual experience for most viewers. This morning I heard a woman on the radio describe it this way, “It was like Christmas, but for only one time.” Another said, almost breathlessly, “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

I left my viewing event singing to myself:

This is my Father’s world,
And to my list’ning ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.

Which leaves me wondering, did your church in any way acknowledge this historic moment in it’s Sunday worship services? In its children’s message or programming? In the pastor’s sermon? Did it seek to make a connection between scientific knowledge and biblical wisdom? Did we, the church, connect with our science-shaped culture? Or did we miss an opportunity to point to the living God?

The 2017 eclipse reaffirmed two things for me. First, that science is good at doing what science does, making accurate predictions and descriptions about the natural world—and the vast majority of Americans trust this. Second, that wonder—expressed by Christians and non-Christians alike—is alive and well. A church that seeks to be culturally relevant today will look for ways to engage positively with science so that it can bear more fruit for the kingdom of God.