Celebrate Mystery and Wonder

Praise the LORD, O my soul.
O LORD my God, you are very great;
you are clothed with splendor and majesty.
He wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
Psalm 104:1-6

I must admit I was never very good at science. On more than one occasion, when I couldn’t remember that Au was the symbol for gold or where the last Ice Age stopped its advance, a science grade kept me from getting straight As on my report card. So I’m certainly not going to object when philosophers suggest we are leaving the Age of Science or the Modern Age. It doesn’t bother me a bit.

It’s not that scientific discoveries aren’t still being made every day or that science and technology aren’t moving into new frontiers. They are. It’s that we have begun to see what science can and cannot do. As the writer Wendell Berry suggests, “We are learning to know precisely the location of our genes, but significant numbers of us don’t know the whereabouts of our children.”

The Age of Science has made us more informed humans, but it has not made us better parents, spouses, or friends. “I’ve got to check my e-mail before we sit down for dinner. It’ll only take acouple minutes.” By the time you’re done, the casserole is cold and headed back to the microwave. In the Age of Science, there’s no time to watch the stars or contemplate the mystery and wonder of the universe. In fact, in the Age of Science mysteries aren’t tolerated at all. They are problems to be solved in the objective environment of the laboratory. “Wonder” itself has been marked for extinction because there is always a scientific explanation for mystery and wonder. Anything that can’t be logically explained is to be stuffed into a forgotten closet in as a seldom-used guest room.

But a world with no mystery and wonder is a place I’d rather not be. It’s a world in which I’m invited to see myself as a complicated machine or chemical reaction but nothing more. But is that all I am—just some randomly firing neurons?

It was Thomas Edison who said, “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” Edison was a bright man who seemed to know the limitations of science. Pascal also said it well: “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” There are mysteries that will never be solved. If we have eyes to see, there is glorious wonder abounding. The one who hung the stars and makes light dance across the northern sky holds the patent on mystery and wonder, and he doesn’t want us to lose sight of them.

I was on a dock by the bay with hundreds of other vacationers, watching the sun set across the waters of the west. As the orange globe slipped beneath the surf, there was at first a faint, then unmistakably growing, wave of applause that grew to a grand crescendo and continued for a very long time. Mystery and wonder were celebrated, ushering all into God’s courts of praise.

—Paul S. Williams

For Further Thought

Have you been caught up in the Age of Science—trying to explain everything through reason? Why or why not?

How can you celebrate the mystery and wonder of God’s world today? Write down your reflections as you contemplate God’s creation.