Spiritual Lessons from Biology

It has been 2 months since I underwent a partial meniscectomy to fix my knee. I’m now able to run, rock climb, and even dance in my kitchen while I cook dinner! The surgeon told me to expect a full recovery at 8 weeks. Yet, after having completed a regimen of physical therapy sessions, I still experienced pain and swelling. I was eager to bring this up with my surgeon at our final post-op appointment. At that meeting I told him I was confused about why my recovery was taking so long. I explained that I’m very dedicated, in fact I was asked to do less exercise because I was overdoing it in an attempt to rehabilitate the knee. My doctor explained that my problem wasn’t a lack of dedication, but the fact that I’d lived with my injury for so long. I was injured four years ago in New Zealand. At that time, I was a foreign student in grad school. As I was without a lot of extra cash or insurance, surgery had to wait. My doctor explained that the tear was one of the most complicated he had ev...

I recently received a message from a friend of mine who lives in Oregon. There was no text, only a ten second video panorama of what looked like a war zone. Trees were strewn all over the ground. Splintered wood carpeted the scene. It took me a moment to realize that the recording was taken just outside of their house. I was shocked. After visiting them each year, I’ve come to know their land well. The forest surrounding their home has become like a friend to me. Now it’s an unrecognizable wasteland. I called my friend to make sure she was alright, and she told me the story of what happened. Over the summer, new tenants purchased the adjacent property. They were first-time landowners and did not consult anyone about managing their forest. The couple decided that they wanted more sun, so they hired loggers to come and cut down the trees on their property. Residents in the area (some of whom had been in land management for 40+ years) reached out to the new neighbors and explained that th...

“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....

       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 t...

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 prop...

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 enc...