There are some things that come up often when I talk about faith and science. The rational order of science and beauty of the world perceived by human eyes makes perfect sense as divine creation. Just as in ages past, we can see quite clearly how the heavens proclaim the glory of God. What is so hard to believe is that our weak living bodies, destined to death from the moment of birth, should be made for life with God to eternally proclaim the glory of God.
Parents holding their child in their arms for the first time will see the glory of God proclaimed in it, but when this child looks into the mirror 60 years later, then it takes a good sense of humor to hold on to Christian faith in the incarnation of God in human nature and the resurrection of the body.
Biology teaches us about how this human nature and its failings bear the imprint of evolution’s past. We find the shortness of our human life embedded in the much longer life of the human species, which is also embedded in the much longer history of life on earth. This history remains present in our DNA and is in a sense part of our bodies. Our short existence is embedded in an unfolding of life in a diversity and richness that is far beyond our imagination. Surely, all of this has the purpose of proclaiming the glory of God. God loved the dinosaurs in their day as much as the birds in the sky today. They were all given the time measured out for them. And so have we. For the biologist, we are just one small speck in the richness of life on earth past, present, and future. For the person of faith, this richness of life proclaims the glory of God as much as the heaven.
Human life and the human body proclaim this glory in a personal and created way. While the heavens’ proclamation of the glory of God is understood in cosmology and the earth’s proclamation of the glory of God in evolution, the incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus being born to Mary proclaims the glory of God in the smallness and weakness of one individual human life. It is as small as it can be and as powerless as it can be, but it is also the whole world and all its power. Science captures the glory of God in its grandeur, but faith confirms an intuition that all hold: The each and every human life has a fundamental and irreducible value in itself. Each human life proclaims the glory of God as if it were the whole of creation, and the whole of creation proclaims the glory of God as if it had one voice.
Photo credits: Loume Visser and Jimmy Conover, Unsplash.
