Spiritual Lessons from Biology

            My car died on the highway and had to be towed. My best friend, who is an absolute saint, picked me up and brought me to the dealership while we waited for my car to show up. While we were sitting in her car, we rolled the windows down and let in the delicious scents of spring. The air was warm and balmy, and full of birdsong. It tasted like life itself, crisp as an apple, and soothing as a mother’s song. We watched some robins hopping across the sun-dappled lawn. They were returning to the area on their route along the 37-degree isotherm. I can’t imagine how hungry they must have felt, having migrated 1000 miles from their wintering grounds in Mexico where they’d had only small fruits to eat all season. The birds seemed happy to find the lawn packed with earthworms and were merrily gulping down all that they could find. My friend was fascinated by the robins’ behavior—how they stood perfectly still with their heads sideways only to suddenly throw their heads full-force int

     Imagine you attend a lecture by a prominent Christian Apologist. As you listen to his presentation, you find his argument for human purpose to be elegant, compelling, and inspirational. At the end of the lecture, as the crowd begins filing out of the auditorium, your friend turns to you and remarks that she’s hesitant to believe anything the speaker said because he’d quoted the atheist philosopher Frederick Nietzsche’s famous line, “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”[4] You discuss other aspects of the talk but your friend is adamant: anyone who quotes an atheist is probably not a real Christian.                How would you respond to this friend? Would you agree with her? Should we avoid ideas that come from other camps? The above conversation is hypothetical, but likely semblant of a real conversation you’ve had at some point in your life. It raises many valid questions about how we approach our thought lives and how we sift through the vast sea of infor