It Passes All My Understanding

I had a series of small coincidences this week. I don't think they were really significant, but they were some coincidences nonetheless.

One of these coincidences came as I was doing my homework about Saturn and its largest moon, Titan. I was looking at a lovely picture of Saturn and its rings, and I thought about a song lyric about Saturn's rings.

And then I realized that the song that was currently playing on my shuffle playlist was that very song. It was almost over, and the Saturn lyric had already passed, but I did find it interesting that the lyric became relevant while the song was playing, even though I wasn't really paying attention to the song.

You may recall that I really like the singer Cherie Call, and this song, “It Passes All My Understanding,” is what introduced me to her.

“He talked about the universe,

He talked about Saturn's rings,

And he said, 'I might be an atheist,

Except for just one thing.

“'It passes all my understanding how it all worked out just right:

The distance that we live from the sun, the stars that shine at night.

We may prove that it was just an accident, but how did it begin?

It passes all my understanding.'”

My testimony has been strengthened this semester, but paradoxically it hasn't been because of my religion class but because of my science classes. As I ponder the mysteries of deep time and space, I am filled with a sense of awe. I remember standing outside one day, looking at the mountains towering in the east, and looking at all the buildings we humans have built, and watching someone drive their van down the road. We as a species have built all these buildings and we have the ability to create vehicles and airplanes and come up with scientific theories for our existence.

Yet 65 million years ago (that's (999,999+1)*65), our ancestors were small mammals that probably burrowed in the ground to survive the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. In the late Triassic, we mammals evolved from reptiles. In the late Mississippian, reptiles evolved from amphibians. In the Devonian, amphibians evolved from fish. Fish date all the way back to the Cambrian. And around three and a half billion years ago (that's (999,999,999+1)*3.5), the only living cells were simple prokaryotes.

As I think about how amazing our world is, and how amazing our bodies are (with the ability to reproduce and heal so easily), and how amazing our minds and species are, I can't fathom it all being by chance. It seems incredible to me that our planet just happened to accrete with the proper materials and the right distance from the sun for water to exist as solid, liquid, and gas. It's incredible that the amino acids just happened to form living cells that were able to reproduce themselves, and then eventually become the complex organisms we are today. It's incredible that we can create models about our very existence. I believe that God must have been responsible for all of it.

Now, I need to establish a few things. First, I do believe in science. I believe that our universe originated with the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. I believe that Earth formed from accretion 4.5 billion years ago, and that we evolved from simpler life forms over hundreds of millions of years. I believe that that was the way God designed it.

Furthermore, I am not trying to vilify those who don't believe in God. I can understand why they don't believe in God, since there is not hard scientific evidence for God. Furthermore, many Christians have stated that certain scientific principles are false, creating the erroneous impression that you must choose between God and science. Because there is so much evidence for science—such as background radiation indicating the Big Bang, and the fossil record indicating evolution—many people choose science. Thus Christians' attempts at promoting their religion end up backfiring.

But I do believe what Alma told Korihor—that all things denote there is a God. The fact that we humans find beauty in mountains and flowers, in enormous trees and sunsets, all made out of the same elements as we are, strengthens my testimony of the existence of God.

In addition to the world's beauty and amazingness, I also believe in God because of how much we do not know. We humans have learned about the various objects in our solar system, and we have sent spacecraft to many of them; in two years, a spacecraft will fly by Pluto. Our spacecraft have even landed on several bodies. Yet for all of our studies, the only body besides Earth on which humans have stepped is our own Moon—and only twelve people have done that (I think), and that hasn't happened since the 1970s. And yet Earth and the Moon are just specks in the solar system; the Sun makes up most of the mass in the solar system, with Jupiter making up most of the little mass that remains. And yet our solar system is a tiny speck in our galaxy, and our galaxy is a tiny speck in the universe.

Given all that we do not know, I don't understand how some can say so confidently there is no God. I can understand if they don't believe, but I don't understand how they can so condescendingly belittle those who do, especially if they say they like to promote love and tolerance. There is so much we don't know, and what we do “know” may be revised as we learn even more.

I believe that there will come a day when we will learn the answers that science has yet to, and perhaps cannot, answer. We will know what caused the mass extinction at the end of the Permian, we will know how the plates of Stegosaurus were arranged, we will know what was there before the Big Bang. I believe that the natural and the supernatural will merge together into one great whole of truth.

But for now, it's my duty to learn what I can, both spiritually and scientifically.