However amazing, this evolutionary explanation for the iris flower in our garden isn’t completely satisfying. In talking with our garden committee chair, she recounted how the irises came to be there. She described the renovation of the garden, and discovering a diversity of bulbs scattered around the garden. Having collected them in one area, not knowing if they’d survive or if so, what colors they’d be, they planted them and cared for them. The perfect bouquet of blues that emerged seemed to defy explanation–an unexplained convergence of chance events where beauty emerges against all odds filling my hear with wonder and amazement.
I feel the same way when sitting in the pews, and I hear the call of the morning dove. And, when I step out the back of the church and see the thick blue-green lichens hanging from the conifers, or I catch a glimpse of whales migrating from the bluffs. All these phenomena have a scientific (and an evolutionary) explanation. The more I learn about the biology of these phenomena, the more I realize that science is an amazing powerful tool for explaining nature, yet fails to explain the curiosity and fascination that we have with nature.
For me, Christianity and specifically the stories of the Bible are compelling lessons for unexplained emotion. Why are we so curious about the world? Why am I compelled to help others? Why stop and help a stranger when it has no effect on your chances of surviving and reproducing (fitness, the currency of evolution)? Neither of these questions have satisfactory answers from evolutionary biology (but I am a plant guy, not an animal behaviorist after all). Here, I rely heavily on my faith that the stories in the Bible are meaningful lessons in how to treat others and build community and approach the world.
In reflecting on my personal beliefs, I discovered a cycle of believing, knowing and believing again:
- as a child I just believed in things (I was pretty naïve – sleeping under a coffee table with a camera at Christmas to document the existence of Santa).
- having responsible parents, they fostered my curiosity and critical thinking to try to justify those beliefs with some explanation
- as a student, I filled my mind with explanations for the way the world works (my world of belief became a world of knowing)
- at some point, reflecting on all this knowledge, I found that the tools of science did not have all the answers. How to treat others? What is our responsibility to the community? Why do we wonder?
- Eventually, there was an acceptance that knowing and belief can coexist. For example, at the birth of my children, I was the annoying biologist father-to-be asking all the questions, watching the monitors, predicting the next contraction, attempting to use all my scientific knowledge to help my wife. Yet, with all the scientific background I had, that experience clearly went beyond knowing.
- Now, in raising kids, I’m finding a new found sense of awe seeing things through their eyes for the first time, again. I’m rediscovering a world of believing amidst my knowledge.
Last week for Earth Day, I was at the beach having breakfast with the Sunday School when the Sunday School leader asked, “Where do you see signs of God?” I watched my son’s eyes rise from the small sand tunnel he was quietly/secretively digging at the edge of the blanket and fix upon the bluff where a large yellow flowered bush-lupine was in full bloom. “In the flowers on the hill”, he said.
