Stacy Trasancos on God's Creation Reflecting His Glory

"The other night, I was frustrated with my critics, frustrated with my children, and frustrated with my disobedient German shepherds who take my donning of a coat to mean the dawning of a walk, even near midnight.  I was grateful to be pulled outside though. The sky was clear beyond bits of late snow, one of those spirity nights when the winds of impending Spring wipe away the clouds, and the starlight casts shadows. 'My God,' I prayed, 'the stars are so bright!'

"When you understand something about matter at the atomic level, both starlight and snowflakes can induce that embarrassing human act called sudden-unabashed-weeping. Those dots of light are actually massive spheres of plasma, some of them billions of years old, radiating energy when hydrogen nuclei fuse to become helium and helium becomes heavier elements. The light I saw traveled for years to reach my eyes. And the snowflakes? Each one's beauty is scripted by the union of chaos and determinism, unique in its trajectory through other matter and changes in temperature and pressure, but patterned at consistent angles by the polarity and bond of every water molecule. They melted on my face, never to be seen. Under such an interactive firmament, it's hard to feel unappreciated. Goodness, I felt downright glorious.

"Science has given us this radical view of the universe. For most of recorded history, religions provided the concepts and expressions for understanding nature, human life, and the cosmos. Since the emergence of a physical theory in the Christian Middle Ages some 700 years ago, what we now call 'modern science' has allowed us to quantify and describe motions of ever-smaller subatomic particles and ever-remote astronomical objects. . . ."

In a recent commentary, writer Stacy Trasancos reflected on ways in which God's creation reflects His glory and what this may mean for us.

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