Spiritual Lessons from Biology

“The kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away.” —Matthew 13v24-25 I recently read a paper about weed control in New Zealand. This tells you a lot about how exciting my social life is…but it also tells you about my appreciation for journal access and my love of keeping up with current biological literature. In the paper, the authors seek to once and for all determine the sure-fire way to control New Zealand’s most invasive weed—the dreaded Scotch Broom. Biologists set up five different plots in the broomiest tangle of the Canterbury Plains. This was their method: Plot #1: Shave the woody weeds down into mulch, so that the native species can savor their victory by gaining nutrition from their would-be foes. Plot #2: Tear the weeds up by the roots, leaving not a shred to remind us of their hateful existence. Plot #3: Hulk Smash! Crush them flatter than a pancak

Bosons ~ The Triune Omnipresence of God C.S. Lewis once, said, “If [Christianity] were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern physics.”(1) Christianity makes many claims about God’s essence that are difficult.  For instance, there is the claim that God is everywhere.  His omnipresence pervades all of time.  We also read of the homousius , in which the Christ who stepped into time can be considered both fully man and fully God.  Then there is the notion of God’s ontology as three persons in one being.  How can we conceptualize a triune God whose being encapsulates the space-time continuum? These ideas are challenging.  Yet, as Lewis argues, their difficulty is no reason to reject them.  We observe many things in modern physics that boggle the mind, and in much the same way. One example is a particle called a boson.  Most elementary particles in the quantumsphere move around nicely on the playground.  They take turns, leave plenty of room fo

       I was returning home after a long walk.  The river smelled fresh because of the rain, and a pungent sweet aroma of autumn wafted down from the forest canopy.  As I turned a corner, the path led me back to the roadside.  The gentle sounds of the river fell away, overcome by the swoosh swoosh of traffic.  A chill descended through the ether as the sun sank low upon the horizon.  I crested a hill.  Something colorful on the sidewalk caught my eye.  A beautiful butterfly!  It was a female Red-spotted Purple.  I picked it up.  She fluttered her wings a bit.  She was very weak, barely moving, and one of her wings was torn.  She’d clearly been trampled.  I carried her home, in the palm of my hand.  When I arrived back, I mixed up some sugar water and filled a cotton ball with it.  I set the butterfly’s feet on the ball so she could taste the sugar.  She moved her head a bit, but she was too weak to extend her proboscis to drink.  I fetched a toothpick and gingerly unfurled her tongue. 

I love watching a flock of birds in motion.  It’s as if the mass is one giant organism, blobbing around above the buildings.  Sometimes I try to pick out just two as they move through the sky in perfect time with each other.  As one turns left, the other is already turning.  It’s hard to tell which of the birds is following the other one.  They are so in-tune with the air currents, it looks like they are moving at the same time.  But if we were to record a video of them and slow the frames enough, we’d be able to see a time gap in the movements of each individual.  Fascinatingly, some bodies in nature move at the exact same time and in the exact same way due to a behavior called quantum entanglement.  Quantum entanglement sounds a bit like sci fi at first pass.  It’s a behavior that even Einstein was skeptical of, calling it “spooky action at a distance”(1).  Basically, two particles can be inextricably linked in such a way that the properties of one perfectly correlate to the properti

When I was a child, my father invited the neighborhood children over to our house.  We gathered around the computer in the basement and watched with wide-eyed anticipation as my father picked up a black plastic bucket.  He moved along the mass of kids, his eyes twinkled with mirth, and we each reached in and pulled out our treasure.  I inspected mine curiously—a pair of paper glasses, blue on one side and red on the other.  I tried them on. “Nothing’s happening!” I squeaked. “Just wait.” My dad said. When at last we all had our glasses as firmly in place as possible, a picture appeared on the screen and the slide show began. All at once we were transported to a faraway world… a world of swirling dust and jagged rocks, of icy canyons and towering spires.  I reached out with my hands; the Martian landscape seemed to be coming straight at me!  Yet, when I took my glasses off, a tangled mass of grey blobs moved across the screen amorphously. I was utterly enchanted, and I asked my father

The Alcon Blue butterfly has a fascinating life cycle.   A mother butterfly carefully lays her eggs along the blue petals of the marsh gentian flower, high up where predators cannot eat them.   Down below, all manner of creepy crawly things would just love to gobble up those eggs.   Usually, if a caterpillar hatches and accidentally falls to the ground, it is quickly consumed by a wasp or an ant.   Yet, biologists were surprised to discover that a couple of weeks after the Alcon Blue caterpillars hatched, they deliberately launched themselves off of their protective flowers and into the dangerous world below.   The larvae were quickly overrun with ants and carried away.   How were the butterflies coming back each spring, if in their larval state they seemed self-destructive?   Eventually it was discovered that these butterflies are myrmecophylous, meaning they have a positive association with ants.  When the ants took them back to the nest, it was not to eat them, but to raise them as

            I recently flew home from a business trip.  The day I’d embarked, a mere four days previously, everything had seemed normal.  Yet on this, the day of my return, a sense of nervous urgency electrified the air.  Passengers feverishly wiped down their seats, armrests, and tray tables.  Some wore face masks.  All wore knitted brows and anxious glances.  I knew full well the reason for this behavior change.  The day I left there were 4 people infected in my home state.  The day I returned there were 40.  COVID-19 is steadily marching on.             I remarked how some of these individuals went to great lengths to make their environment clean, while at the same time spouting foul language and unkind gestures.  Surely our surfaces have never been cleaner…yet, within, there is fear, greed, and anger.  What if we cleaned our hearts with the same fervor that we cleaned our hands?  What if, while we scrubbed our hands and sang ‘happy birthday’ twice, we also prayed and asked God

It was an early autumn morning.  A vicious chill bit my knuckles through my gloves as I drove my trusty Toyota to our hiking troupe’s meeting place.  We gathered together in the parking lot, jostling poles and back-packs as we huddled together for warmth.  We all took turns peering up at the ominous black bellies of the low-hanging clouds. “Should we still go?” my friend asked.   “Looks like nasty weather.” Our troupe leader has been hiking these mountains for five decades.  She knows their faces, their moods.   She surveyed the sky with a knowing eye and said, “We’ll head up.   Ten bucks says these clouds melt away at 7,000 feet." So we piled into the four-wheelers and drove up into the misty mountains.   The gray shroud left teary streaks on our windows.   I watched them crawl along in trembling, horizontal lines down the glass.   All at once, about 6,800 feet above sea level, the welcoming arms of golden sunbeams reached down from the heavens. By the time we r

In the deep, sleepy greenery of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, live two of my very favorite human specimens.  I visit them when I need a break from the hustle and bustle of life.  No matter what time of year it is, Mary and Lonnie are always free for a visit!  The house is nestled deep in the forest where a green glow settles in the underbrush and the air is wet and heavy.  On their property, down by the base of the house, a reflecting pool offers sanctuary to the wildlife.  During my last visit, I kept watching the pool with the hopes of seeing any of the various wild animals come for a drink.  No such luck.  But on the last day of my stay, my friends turned on the fountain attached to the pool.  Immediately all manner of creature came out of the forest to drink the water!  Black capped chickadees, chipmunks, dragonflies; it was a veritable menagerie! I watched the scene, totally enchanted.  Then I began to wonder, why had all these animals burst from the forest only when the foun

Last month the snows came in full force.  The Colorado sun, usually so obliging, was blocked for days behind a frosty shroud.  I am one of those people who goes batty pretty quickly unless she can get outside into the fresh air, even in poor weather.  So I geared up in my winter attire; a soldier heading into a battle against the elements, and set out for the mountains of Sedalia.  I spent a lovely afternoon snowshoeing through the sparse forests and open plains.  It was quiet out there in the wilderness.  Only the deliberate whispers of my snowshoes moving across the terrain and my heavy breathing broke the silence.  In the bitter cold, even the birds stop singing.  Sometimes you can see them, little sleeping puffballs, tucked deep in the trees.  The snow stopped falling, and at last the sun crept her way through the ether.  All at once the pillowy drifts of snow became heaps of minute diamonds.  I blinked against the dazzling whiteness.  And as I turned my gaze to the western horizo