Creation cannot be separated from its creator. You may see the creation, and even revel in it, basking in its beauty at face value, but if you look closely, you'll always see the creator. The same thing goes with studying Creation ("with a capital C")- all of Creation, everything that exists or has ever existed. By observing that which has been created, we necessarily learn about the Creator. Anything less than that, and we've allowed ourselves to be blinded. Yes, I'm talking to you, my fellow scientists.
And by not studying the creation, we miss out on critical parts of the Creator. Yes, I'm also talking to you, my fellow believers. No one is exempt here.
What?
I was in AP Art in my senior year of high school. I wasn't very good, but I was in it. Mrs. Weiss, my AP Art teacher, was and still is my favorite teacher ever. (The reason why is best explained with a quick but unrelated conversation...) In order to submit your portfolio for grading at the end of the year, you must send in pictures of twenty-four pieces of your art- twelve showing the breadth of your work, with a variety of media and topics, as well as twelve showing the depth of your work, with one medium and a single topic. You spend all year pouring your heart and life into creating twenty-four pieces. Twenty-four papers or 3D structures that people walk by and observe without realizing that it is your heart they are seeing. It's a weird feeling, art... in any media or focused on any topic, putting your art out to the public is nerve-wracking, because your creations somehow feel... a part of you. And putting yourself out there so plainly is risky. There's a lot to learn from it, though, so let's do it. Let's push through the sheer embarrassment and even terror of displaying my lack of artistic talent and dive right in. Let's take a look at the second part of my AP Art portfolio, the portion highlighting depth of my watercolor painting work.
If you look at my artwork glancingly, it looks like an 'okay' high school artist put together some interesting juxtapositions that you wouldn't normally see. You could perhaps tell that there was a story there. Many could stop there, as I'm sure many did when these were displayed in the school's art show. You could stop there and live your entire life happily, but you'd never realize that there was so much more to the paintings. If you look at them closely, especially with someone to guide you (in this case, me), you'll notice that it isn't just any story, it's my story.
Since birth, I have been taught the ways of God. In the first picture, the altar (looking similar to the one present in my childhood Catholic church) replaces my changing table. Yet in this picture and every picture that follows, an aspect of science sits in the background. In this instance, it is eyedroppers on the shelf and the graduations on the bottles. The next few images depict my early years- elementary and middle school. I completed my first few sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church- confession and First Communion. I played on the playground, religious incense burners in the foreground but newton's cradle playfully joining, unaware of the tension soon to unfold. Then, the night in second grade when my mother taught me about the Holy Spirit, in my childhood room one night.
It was the calm before the storm, basically, because in the next one you see my middle school locker and various religious scripts, along with a broken window where you can see only a tiny portion of the playground where I spent days blissfully unaware that science and God were not supposed to play well together. I surrounded myself in religion until science came after me hard and fast. Science exploded into my world with recklessness and, in high school, a battle began to stir within me. I was told (quite explicitly) that science and God could not coexist, and thinking otherwise proved my foolishness. My academic interests and my faith began fighting for space, because I was told there was not space for both. Eventually, when I felt pushed into a corner, I knew I couldn't turn my back on God, and science retreated for a short period.
As I know all you very intelligent people can guess, it didn't stay there long. Eventually, it was God himself that shed light on the importance of my efforts in science, and eventually my life came to a beautiful mess of seeming contradictions that cemented itself as one of the most important and rewarding aspects of my life.
Make no mistake: my creation, my art, tells many things about me. It tells of my middling art talent, my desire to be good at it (through my completion of the portfolio in the first place), the fact that I can do items decently well while landscapes and skin eludes me nearly entirely. You can tell that the juxtaposition of science and God has always been in my life, and you can tell exactly how it plays out. You can learn that at no point have I ever been willing to accept blindly what I was told for very long. That when one started to push out the other, I determinedly brought them back into equilibrium. You learn from that I am persistent, that I care passionately about God and about science, and that there is beauty in my life from the harmonious and complementary existence of both. Though you could choose to ignore the connection, there is absolutely no way to separate my creation from me. My creation IS me. If you learn about my creation, you learn about me.
So what?
We have been told for our entire lives that science and God are incompatible. Speakers have preached from the altar that science is unreliable and should be ignored because it is not compatible with the holy words of God. Scientists have preached from the stage that God is dead because scientific discoveries have disproven possibility of His existence. The scientific community has declared Him obsolete or unnecessary. But by doing that, we are attempting (and failing) to do the impossible- we are separating creation from its creator.
This is our call to action. This is our command. We are to go do what we're born to do- to study Creation. To do science! (whether it is formally or casually.) To not stop at surface level and, instead, look deeply until we see Creation but learn about the Creator. Join me as we get ready to take a deep dive into some topics where God and science collide- often seemingly at odds, but we know better. We work to understand both further until the truth we see and the truth we can't fully see make sense
That scientific mind still not convinced? Let's chat about the six days of Genesis and that whole 'age of the Earth thing'. (Link coming!)
Are you already a believer in God, but think that science just isn't your thing? I get that too. But you aren't excused from Romans 1:20. Thankfully, God made you perfectly and knew that you could easily see Him in His creation through other means. Let's chat about what it looks like to see Him in His creation if science doesn't appeal to you.
No matter your current status or next step, you and I are called to the same thing- to look at what has been made around us and learn more about the one who created it all. Let's do it together.
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