"And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good."  At that time "the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy."  Later, others wrote, "He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind ... .  [T]hose who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles ... .  He who forms the mountains, creates the wind, and reveals his thoughts to man, he who turns the dawn to darkness, and treads the high places of the earth--the Lord God Almighty is his name ... .  See ... the lilies ... I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these."

The great descriptive language of the Song of Songs draws repeatedly on the beauty of nature to reveal glimpses into the enigma of romantic love.  Visualize these: "... a cluster of henna blossoms ... doves ... a rose of Sharon ... a lily of the valley ... an apple tree ... the little foxes ... vineyards that are in bloom ... a young stag on the rugged hills ... a flock of goats descending from Mount Gilead ... a flock of sheep just shorn ... twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies.the mountain haunts of the leopards ... like the dawn, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, majestic as the stars ... pomegranates in bloom ... a mound of wheat encircled by lilies."  As these words emanate from the Song they move us to respect and cherish romantic love.  But as we reflect on what has here been drawn from nature, we can perceive the touch of God on the creation and sense how its splendor infuses the heart.

I like to study head stuff:  The complexity of the information code of life, the mathematical genius seen in the universe, the mystery of the mind/consciousness, the irreducible complexity of life, and fine tuning of the cosmos.  But the spiritual value of all of that pales when compared to the impact of the heart stuff.  The beauty of creation speaks to my heart about its maker.

Before any physicist discovered that all objects of the universe are in fact connected, the English poet, Francis Thompson, wrote, "One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star."  John Muir wrote of flowers, "Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos."  Peer into a flower, looking for those glorious traces, and see if you, too, can experience that cosmic voyage.

Rainbows and sunrise, flowers and butterflies, October woodlands and April showers, warblers and wood ducks, DNA and supernova all reveal some of those traces.  A chamber in my heart is filled with pictures of moonlight dancing off ripples of a river, hoar frost on a spruce tree, a lone wood lily in a wilderness, a brood of new born ruffed grouse, caribou in a tundra sunrise, a hummingbird feeding on columbine, and a western tanager pecking on our window.

And so I want to sing the words of poets and song writers:  A.W. Dicus, "There is, beyond the azure blue, A God, concealed from human sight, He tinted skies with heavenly hue ..."; Stuart K. Hine, "O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made, I see the stars ..."; Gary L. Mabry, "Tall mountains, green valleys the beauty that surrounds me all make me aware of the One who fashioned it all."

God made white light that is composed of the spectrum of colored light that produces rainbows.  We would have a harder time comprehending that white light contains that range of colored light if it were not for one more amazing little detail.  When light traveling at over 186,000 miles per second strikes water or glass it slows respectively to about 3/4 or 2/3 of that speed, but now the colors all travel at different speeds in this denser medium.  As a consequence, light can be spread into the spectrum of color visible from window sun-catchers and in rainbows.

God assured Noah, "Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it ... ."  The color we see in other objects of the universe stems from light they emit or reflect by their pigmentation or structure.  Perhaps the genius expressed in creating color had a significant role in God seeing the creation and knowing it was very good.  The memory of a few fabulous rainbows drives the message of the splendor of God's creation deep into my heart.

Gerald Schroeder wrote, "The mystery that remains in the sunset is the riddle of why and how a mixture of seemingly inert, unthinking atoms of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and several other varieties can produce humans capable of having the subjective experience we refer to as beauty ... ."

While science has the answers to the physics of rainbows and sunsets, it will never answer that riddle, but each one of us has the potential to trouble a star and to observe a minute expression of the wisdom of God.

Back to Contents Does God Exist?, JulAug07.