A Letter to My Son About the Soul

Monday, May 7, 2019

Dear Aidan,

It was a blessing and a curse watching you compete Saturday. Yes, it was Bible Quiz (of all things), but it’s the same emotions any parent feels watching their kid play a weekend sport. I hoped you would take to this, and you have beyond any expectations.

So it was a blessing watching you remember words precisely and play the little parts of the game expertly, especially when you guess right and gain a lot of points.

But your high-risk strategy has a necessary downside, when you guess wrong and lose a lot of points. You take a lot of three-point shots, and the percentage is worse, but they’re worth more.

After that one prelim round, when your losses clustered all together, I saw my own reaction mirrored in yours. You couldn’t talk. You collapsed into yourself and walked away. I tried to put a hand on your shoulder but I don’t know if you even felt it. I could only let you be, and wait for the next round, if there was a next round.

There was, and you brought it all. You sailed through it with a tight precision. Then you went on, climbing step by step to take the top prize, winning a trophy so big it can only be classified as baggage. The trophy shows in its own ludicrous size that it is not the point. Who wants this chunk of wood and “gold” paint?

I wasn’t happy to have to make space for that thing in the trunk, but I was happy because it culminated months of your hard work. You wanted this, you considered the cost, planned a path, executed a strategy, ran into an obstacle, and overcame it.

I thought about why you were doing this, and I recalled the musical version of Percy Jackson that we had seen two nights before. The first song was all about the young demigods trying to catch their distant god-parents’ attention by accomplishing something big, something that the distracted gods just HAVE to notice. Did you notice how even their camp schedule was based around competition, and how the daughter of Athena honed her own battle strategy so that her god-mother would notice her? That’s the natural consequence of a world of competition: winning forces people to take notice. It was true for the Greeks, it was true for the Egyptians, and the Norse, and the soccer moms today.

Percy Jackson is missing his god-father, and that aspect to his character fits with the Greco-Roman world. All the powerful people believed this 2000 years ago: a god was a powerful man who gave you life but is off on business now and has left you to make a mark. Make some noise and maybe he’ll notice.

Jesus contradicted all this. He said God is near, God is love, God scatters life through a world like a sower scattering seed through a world of obstacles -- but God doesn’t just leave it there. God makes every seed grow, even the tiniest mustard seed, without us knowing exactly how. God gives Godself, overflowing as the Spirit, a bubbling stream to anyone who asks.

This is very different from a world where the person who captures the flag or wins the quest might get his father’s attention. Jesus was building on a foundation of Hebrew prophecies, laws, and songs showing that God is the good creator and sustainer of all things. Jesus took it farther by saying God is so good at giving gifts that God knows not just what you want but what you need. What we need is, ultimately, the Spirit of the Good Giver, who made us to need that Spirit.

Since it’s the week after Easter, I’m reminded of John’s picture of Jesus, risen from the grave, giving the disciples the Spirit by breathing on them. Kind of weird -- not the kind of image that has been repeated in Western Art that often -- but deep and resonant in its weirdness. That action means a lot:

First, don’t miss the obvious. Jesus had breath, a physical body that does the one thing physical, living bodies do all the time, in that it exhaled air.

Second, he gave that breath away, emptying himself to lift them up.

And he did so in a deliberate repetition of what happened thousands of years before in the Garden of Eden, when God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul.

This last image is from Genesis 2. It takes place in the same Bible as John 20, but many pages before, written at a different time in a different language. The Genesis verse doesn’t have much detail beyond a few solid, earthy words: “blow”; “nostrils” (they were face to face); and the mysterious term “soul.”

At this point in the story, God had formed Adam’s body from the dust, but that wasn’t enough. God was the good father to the first man and gave the gift of breath, and Adam started to move. I like the Latin term for soul best: “anima.” (Knowing the many sides of this word is why you’re learning Latin!) God blew on Adam and Adam became ANIMA-ted. “Soul” is an earthy term like “dust” and “nostrils,” and can be applied to all things that move. But in Adam’s case it was a special gift of God, reflected in the special phrase “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” God only knows precisely how that worked, but somehow something thin, active, and without parts flooded the physical, soulish body of Adam.

I can take apart an animated thing in the lab and learn something about how it works. The amazing thing is how much I can see. Living things are built from an untold number of chemical cycles, in which food comes in, is broken down, is used to build new cells, is breathed out as carbon dioxide, which a plant can “breathe in” and build up. The atoms are constantly cycling. As you breathe in and out, some atoms get lodged in your body but others fly away. I read once that 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced every year.

But you’re clearly the same Aidan who competed in Bible Quiz last year, right? So whatever it is that makes you “you,” it’s not the atoms. And whatever made Adam Adam, it wasn’t the atoms. The point of Genesis 2 is not to trace the atoms, it’s to show God giving the soul, face to face with the first man. (The point of chemistry is to trace the atoms, and that’s so relatively unimportant that we could wait a couple more millenia before learning it.)

Adam’s body of chemical cycles, reproducing and repairing, breathing air in and out, it all came from the earth. Each cycle moves because it is missing something: the atoms bind and the chemicals react to make something new. Also, each cycle has a hole in the middle. There’s a lot of empty space in the cycles. Even the atoms themselves, which seem so solid to us, are mostly empty space, with each dense nucleus relative to the atomic radius being only the size of a pea in a cathedral. Even the most solid things and the most dynamic things are open and empty, matter moving in the void. If this seems inadequate, that’s because it is inadequate. I think this is a sign that behind the void is a Creator without parts who has non-material, non-dissectable ways of filling all that emptiness.

Can I reiterate how much I don’t know here? It doesn’t really matter how long it took for these cycles to build from the dust, because there wasn’t anyone around to be impatient about it. Adam only became a soul when his eyes faced God’s (we know that that means on his side but not on God’s) and God’s breath became his. Whatever atoms were involved would soon leave him.

What would always remain in him was thin, strong, and without parts: Adam’s memory of the fact that there was once a relationship, face to face, Creator to creature. God had the same memory. God remembered Adam and his descendants.

The word-picture in Genesis 2 is like the verse in Genesis 1 where humans are all made in God’s “image,” to bring in another mysterious word. The simplest way to make an image of something is to hold a mirror to it. When Adam saw God, imagine God’s own image reflecting off Adam’s eyes, being pieced together in Adam’s brain, and therefore flooding and shaping Adam’s being. Carefully put Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:7 side by side, and imagine Adam face to face with God, reflecting his Creator, shining for all others to see.

There’s a lot of questions you probably have about the rest of Genesis 2, but this letter’s already long enough. In the rest of Genesis 2 relationships are made, and in Genesis 3, they are broken.

The image language shows up in a few other places scatted through the Hebrew scriptures. In Psalm 73, the same Hebrew word for image is used for God looking on the proud and mighty, the demigods of this world, but here something is broken: “Like one waking from a dream, Lord, when arising, you will despise their image.” We’ve all warped the mirror and defaced the image in some ways, all of us except Jesus, the perfect and accurate image of God. Paul uses the word “image” to say this exact thing in Colossians 1.

Adam’s body was a bottle of flesh, made with dynamic cycles of atoms with empty space scatted throughout, from the dust of this world, according to the patterns of this world. God gave Adam a puff of “breath” that made him a living soul, able to move deliberately, think, and speak, able to relate. God gave you this same “breath,” through Adam and Eve, through Cain and Cain’s wife or Seth and his wife, through … … … , through Grandpa and Nana, through me, to you. You can also move, think, speak, relate, and choose. For example, you can choose to work hard to win Bible Quiz, and I respect and admire that choice. I want it to pay off, even as I know it won’t always.

The gift of God comes from above and is not subject to scientific study or dissection. It has no parts we can pry open, but a secret center only you (and God) can detect. The rules of science, worked out over hundreds of years, apply to atoms, but the soul was forged by a relationship with a God not made of atoms, or any parts at all.

Science can only dissect what’s below it, so that God’s gifts of spirit and soul were excluded from it at this beginning. We can hear the sound of God’s breath with our own God-given minds, but we can’t tell where it came from or where it is going.

But we have something better than science for studying the soul. I have my own soul and you have yours. This is the secret place at the center, the closet where Jesus says only the Father can see. Only God knows what was going on inside you when you had that terrible round of quizzing, I could only guess. I couldn’t reach you, but God heard every word you prayed, however frantically or half-heartedly or even unknowingly in groans too deep for words.

Others have talked about this mystery: the soul as a gift of God, embedded in but independent from the atoms of the flesh. Philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza might have something to offer, some good, some not. However, my current favorite word-picture for the soul comes not from a philosopher but from a poet.

That poet is John Davies, who lived around the time of Shakespeare, when people were struggling with this same question and we started to learn how to take the world apart. From this struggle, Davies wrote a poem in which he approached the problem systematically, like a scientist, but with poetry in the place of the scientific method. Davies tries on eight metaphors and discards each as not fitting:

The soul doesn’t dwell in the body like a tent;

it’s not like a pilot sitting in a ship;

or a spider in its web;

or an imprint in wax;

or water in a bottle;

or as a liquid mixed in another;

or as heat emitted from a fire;

or as a voice spreading through the air.

Each of these has its points (I’m intrigued by the idea of a soul as an imprint in wax), but each also has a flaw (if the soul’s an empty imprint, then what is the part that thinks and feels and stays with God, that part of the dying thief that Jesus promised would be with him this day “in Paradise”?).

Davies finds a metaphor that exceeds the rest when he finally compares the soul to sunlight through air. Specifically, the soul is in the body the same way that morning light fills a room, which “in an instant doth herself unite / To the transparent air, in all and part.”

This works really well as a metaphor, especially given all the empty space inside atoms and in the biochemical cycles of life. Imagine how the light is independent of the air, how it can be blocked by the air, but it’s still there. The sun still shines outside, and the sunlight is still given to even the most clouded room.

In the same way, if the body corrupted by disease or decay, or weighed down by stress or depression, the soul is still there, given by its Giver, diffusing every part of the body as the sunlight fills the room. You can’t dissect or control the sunlight, you can only reflect it. And I read somewhere that God made the light and Jesus is the light of the world: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,  begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father” as Christians have recited for more than a millennium in the Nicene Creed.

Another Christian picked up on the same sort of image in a different way, this one a father of four called J.R.R. Tolkien. You probably figured I’d bring him into this sooner or later. Tolkien’s metaphor of soul and body is the Phial of Galadriel. Galadriel, one of the characters closest to the Creator, gives Frodo a tiny bottle. I remember being disappointed the first time I read this. Bilbo got a glowing sword, but Frodo gets a fragile bottle?

Of course, this isn’t just any bottle. The water holds the light of Earendil’s star, from a jewel called a Silmaril that itself holds the brilliant light of the Two Trees that once lit the world, in a chain reaching back to the beginning of creation. Imagine it glimmering like the light of Venus or Jupiter, unwavering in the western sky on our evening walks. It doesn’t seem like much, but it drives the darkness of monstrous, entangling evil away.

Your soul is a light filling the bottle of your flesh. You choose how you hold it up and pour out its light. This is the gift God gave to you, through Adam and through me.

Jesus reflected and embodied this light, with a hidden, humble glory that only some saw. Take care of your soul like Frodo took care of the Phial of Galadriel, and at a moment when “even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought” you may find yourself holding it high as you recite ancient words in the moment of need. Frodo found that “another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.” This voice can speak through you too.

As you trudge along the path, you might wonder if that light is even there, but in the darkness it will shine. When you struggled on Saturday at the Quiz Meet, things got dark and you had to trust that the habits you formed in secret would return by God’s grace. That’s just a foretaste to the bigger challenges that you cannot meet alone. Saturday, you met a big spider, but Shelob herself is out there.

Fear not. Jesus defeated the darkness by standing firm and taking the worst sin can do – which is that it killed him and stopped all his motion, all his “anima,” down to the atoms. Jesus stood firm as others mocked because he knew that all they could do was destroy his body. Jesus trusted that God would give him a new “bottle” after the old one was destroyed.

Jesus was right. God’s light shines on even when the body is destroyed by death, and that part of you that perceives and feels and dreams will be with Jesus always. God will hold you safe, as the good Father who is better than we can ask or imagine.

Jesus studied his Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, as you studied. Those scriptures told him that God has always worked this way: God’s Messiah would suffer shame and would die, then would rise after three days. Even study itself is filled with empty spaces and pauses, with times of blankness that God fills with the light of God’s Spirit. As you work to push these words into your memory, they shape faith and literally reshape the atoms in your neurons into windows that light can shine through.

I believe that shaping your brain to follow his words will open the space to let God’s light fill your body and soul. It’s not about the words themselves, but the space they open for God to move.

Even if this space closes, and you lose sight of God’s grace in the heat of competition, and if a fleshly and idolatrous brain drains the meaning from words by rote repetition, even if the quiz round crashes and burns and you don’t move on, God is in the failure too, because God himself failed according to the world’s standards, yet we call that day of failure “Good Friday.” Trust that God sees in secret and God gives life in secret, even in the face of failure, whatever befall.

Even in a stuffy Bible Quiz room when you’re hungry and tired and you have hours to go, and you’ve disappointed yourself after months of work, you have never disappointed me and you have never disappointed your heavenly Father, who always runs with open arms toward his prodigal son.

Remember that God’s light shines like the sun behind the clouds, and that Jesus himself is the reality that made everything and sits enthroned above and behind everything. Let God’s light be your vision, filling you and lifting you to see the hidden, generous glory of Christ that has sustained creation since God first said, “Let there be light.”

On March 25 fifteen years ago God said “Let there be Aidan.” I held your tiny form and saw that light when I first looked into your eyes, face to face. The light between us revealed to me that God gave us to each other. At that moment God created a truth that will never change: that I am filled with light when I remember you, because I love you. And I love you because God loved you first, and made you for this.

Love, Dad

All Life Starts with Light

All Life Starts with Light

It’s always a little startling when the pastor turns to you in the middle of the sermon and asks a question. When 500 people are attending the service, it gains even more of an edge.

That’s what I get for coming late and sitting in the front row today.

So, when Richard turned to me from the pulpit, in the middle of his discourse on the book of Ephesians, and said, “Ben, isn’t that right?,” at least I was paying attention. I tried to respond with a gesture that conveyed the nuance of the situation, nodding mostly yes, shaking a little no, but overall confirming that it’s the right idea, with a stately and contained mien. My wife says I quivered and grimaced, but I know what I meant.

Everyone else moved on at that point, but since I have a blog, I have unlimited verbal bandwidth to expand my expression with too many words. Here it is.

Before fixing me with his gaze, Richard had said that “All life starts with light.” He’s completely right, then he’s a little wrong, then where it matters most he’s right again. I’ll explain in three parts:

1.)    Yes, every thing started with light: When the universe was created, everything was packed into the space smaller than the size of a city block. And here, “everything” means each and every thing, atoms and energy, from neutrinos to neutron stars. Packed into such a small space, it was so hot that nothing held together and matter itself was melted. Instead, everything was photons and neutrino radiation. Only after space itself expanded could these waves of light cool down and condense into particles. Every bit of matter in you and around you right now was originally light.

That was the first event in the universe, when light was allowed to be light.*

2.)    But at first life got by without light: All this matter took an unimaginably long time to form anything that we could call “life.” Once it was created, life spread through the ancient waters and skies as tiny microbes that Moses never named. The oldest forms of life we can find didn’t live off sunlight, but squeezed energy out of various chemicals lying around the planet. They ate the earth, not the sun. These chemicals only gave energy for a meager existence, but it was all the microbes needed. But without an external source of energy, the earth would slowly run out of juice. Photosynthesis changed all this. Once life started to pull down energy from sunlight, it flourished in new ways and began to change the world (or at least its chemistry).

Even today, whole ecosystems can survive without light. Deep-sea vents give food and energy to weird red and white worms, crabs, and fish far from the reach of the sun. Near these vents, the creatures that are big enough for us to see must have drifted down from above and taken up residence by the dark, bubbling waters, eventually transforming from ordinary creatures into sub-oceanic bottom-dwellers, like Gollum wasting away under the mountains until even the memory of the sun is forgotten. Still, they have their own hidden glory and can eat and make chemicals beyond any human skill. They are so wonderfully weird that they would fit in well to a modern retelling of Job 38-42.

3.)    Complex life starts with light: It took a billion years for the gift of photosynthesis to be fully realized, and another two and a half billion years for it to have its full effect. The net effect of photosynthesis is a trick verging on alchemy: it turns sunlight, water, and exhaust (CO₂) into fresh air (oxygen) and sugar. From our human perspective, oxygen and sugar are definitely part of the good life. Our bodies and brains require huge amounts of each in order to think these thoughts and speak these words. Nothing else on the periodic table can do what oxygen does for us each day. Every breath you take and each bite you eat, something good in it comes from the sunlight pouring over our planet. This torrent of free light energy has persisted day in and day out for an unimaginable length of years. All of this is grace.

So, yes, Richard, the energy of life starts with the energy of light. Now we can even build small devices that, at the far extent of our effort and knowledge, might mimic the light-catching and energy-giving life of the everyday leaf. When we do this we’re still depending on the live-giving gift of light.

 When Paul says to live in the light, and when John says that light was the life of men, those connections are the same as before. Jesus is the light of the world. He made the sunlight and plants to give sugar and life to our bodies. He gave words of life that give sweetness and growth to our souls. There is not a firm line of distinction between the two modes of grace, and each reinforces the other.

Therefore, when the pastor asks you to confirm in front of everyone that all life starts with light, you can nod your head with confidence. Each muscle movement, however awkward, is fueled by the light.

(*By the way, don’t take this too far. This doesn’t mean that if you read the Bible carefully enough that you would come up with the Big Bang model for the creation of the universe. Rather, this means that we can work out each account on its own terms and then juxtapose them. When I set the Big Bang next to the Biblical account, the accounts make sense together and clash in interesting ways. It’s like playing two chords together on a piano to make an unresolved harmony pushing forward through time.)

Dr. Lucy Van Pelt, Scientist (Part 3/3)

[Link backward to Part 1/3]

[Link backward to Part 2/3]

Dear Brendan,

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing Lucy count so many things and ask the question why they happen. She won the science fair by counting and writing down what she saw, after all. She’s good at it.

But sometimes Lucy goes too far and says things that sound pretty ridiculous! Here’s one example:

(It might help to know that today we call a “man-made moon” a “satellite”, so Lucy is talking about satellites. I was confused myself on this at first!)

Q: What’s wrong with what Lucy is thinking here?

A: Here’s my list:

1.) The satellite isn’t falling toward the Earth (it actually is falling, but the Earth is falling too – it’s a long story for another time!).

2.) It’s so small that it would burn up if it did start to fall toward the Earth.

3.) It’s so big that it would cause a problem for more than just one poor little dog if it did make it to the Earth!

You can tell Charlie Brown is thinking at least one of these things.

Here’s another one where Lucy makes a different kind of mistake. 

Q: What is Lucy’s mistake?

A: Lucy knows what a lava formation is and what one looks like, but again, she chooses a complex explanation when a simple one will do. If Lucy wanted to test her driveway, she’s find out soon that it’s only a little bit like an ancient lava flow.

At this point I wonder what tests Linus could do to show Lucy that their driveway is not an ancient lava flow. If you start thinking about these things, that’s thinking like a scientist. It’s all about arguing based on evidence of the things you can take apart.

(Or you could just decide to laugh at the comic strip and move on. That’s good too!)

Here’s a third kind of mistake that’s different from the last two. 

Q: What is Lucy doing wrong here?

A: The Earth does not revolve around Lucy! It’s not a good idea to put yourself at the center of anything. But sometimes it’s simpler to talk as if the sun rises rather than the earth spins. Or you can talk like Sally in this strip:

This next strip may be my favorite. Lucy is wrong, wrong, wrong, in every single panel. You’ll recognize these from the song “Little Known Facts” in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

But here’s my main point: Even when Lucy is wrong, she’s always thinking like a scientist. That means she can be proved wrong and learn the right thing!

Since Lucy is a fussbudget, she’s making it up and enjoying the “authority” of science for a second. Once Linus is older, he starts to take things apart and put them together for himself, and he thinks more like a scientist too. Then he joins Charlie Brown in realizing when Lucy’s explanations don’t add up.

This works even when the cartoonist, Charles Schulz, thought the wrong thing. What do you think of these comic strips?

Schulz heard in school that no two snowflakes are alike. For many decades, that’s what scientists said and what students learned.

But recently a scientist at Cal Tech named Kenneth G. Libbrecht found a way to grow identical snowflakes in the lab. So much for that idea. Also, as that last strip shows, even if two snowflakes were alike, how would you know?

The story that “no two snowflakes are alike” is probably not true, but when Charles Schulz wrote his comic strips, it was something “everyone knew.” Charlie Brown says “it’s the truth” but, actually, Lucy’s right. It’s more of a legend.

So, you see that thinking like a scientist isn’t so simple, and you have to do it differently at different times. It’s not a simple game like checkers, it’s more of a complex game like chess.

Scientists say a lot of things. Once in a while, like Lucy, they go too far. But in those cases, you can be a scientist yourself by asking three right questions.

1.) Ask “What did they measure or count?”.

Sometimes, like Lucy counting twelve suns, a scientist can measure carefully, and then get the explanation wrong. But their measurements are usually right.

I trust a geologist who looks at rocks, counts the chemicals in them, and says they are billions of years old. (That’s chemistry and I can check some of it myself.) I trust a paleontologist who measures dinosaur bones and puts them in order. They can also pull DNA out of living animals and read information off of that.

2.) Ask “How many scientists are saying this?”.

If, like Linus and Lucy counting snowflakes, two scientists have found the same thing, you can trust it more. There are times when a lot of scientists are wrong, but the way they find out they’re wrong is by measuring or counting something new, not by arguing over the old measurements.

Thousands of geologists and biologists think that our planet is very old. I agree with them and with the thousands of scientists who think that every living thing is related through evolution. We can talk about all the reasons why when you’re older, but for now, this is what I think after decades of thinking about it. Evolution adds up and makes sense of how animals, plants, and even minerals work.

Through it all, I’ve kept an open mind to God’s sudden action in making life. That’s because I’ve seen His action in my own life – even on the day you were born.

I know God can work any way He wants. It looks like God made us in a way that we can understand, looking back. We can follow along through billions of years of evolution from the evidence, learn how He did it, and even control some parts of it. He gave all of that history and possibility to us.

3.) Ask “Is this a question science can ask?”.

This boils down to asking the question at the beginning of the first letter: “Is it something I can take apart and put together again?”. We can take apart a lot of things: computers, chemicals, bacteria, rocks, even things that were put together long ago, like old fossils or very old DNA. In this way we can take the past apart and put it together again.

But I cannot take you apart and put you together again. Only God can do that. When you were born, after five years of waiting for you, I couldn’t claim that I did very much at all in putting you together. God did that, and then He gave you to us. I thank Him every day for that.

The love God gave me for you on that day is like the love Linus showed to Lucy when she couldn’t count her blessings. Science cannot measure that love.

On your first day, God gave you breath and opened your eyes. He did that on this day, too. He gave you the gift of waking up this morning, of the food you ate today, of the videogames you played, and of the minutes you’re taking to read these words.

I know as a scientist that some of those gifts came through the oxygen in the air and the sugar in the food and the electrons in the electronics, because I can take apart the chemicals in them. Those gifts came through the atoms, but the gifts came from God.

There’s so much more to say, but this is enough for today. We can only think so many thoughts in one day, after all. (Which might be one of the reasons why the story of God creating the whole earth in Genesis 1 is so short!)

I wanted to take some of God’s gifts to me and use them to tell you about His gifts to you. It can get pretty mind-blowing, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty simple.

Every bit of life is a gift from the Maker of Life.

That means air, food, dinosaurs, DNA, the moon, the sun, others moons and suns around other planets … You can’t put your arms around God’s love. You can’t measure its size, because it’s too big. You can’t measure its speed, because it includes every second of every day.

You can trust in the world to act the same way when you take it apart. That too is a gift from God.

You don’t have to be afraid of what you’ll find when you ask questions about dinosaurs or DNA. Even when we refuse God’s gifts, He forgives us because He is love. So be bold and explore the park by the creek. (Just be safe when crossing the creek!) Take the things apart that you can take apart. Breathe in every bit of air God gives you. When His time for you is done, He will hold you in His arms even then.

Today He’s given me the chance to hold you in my arms. That is the best gift in the world and it is all that I need.

Love, Dad

Dr. Lucy Van Pelt, Scientist (Part 2/3)

[Link backward to Part 1/3]

Dear Brendan,

Let’s talk more about why I think Lucy is the scientist in the Peanuts gang. In the last letter I showed you how Lucy won the science fair. Can you think of other comic strips where Lucy acts like a scientist?

Of course, since Lucy’s a bit of a fussbudget she can be kind of an annoying big-sister scientist. But I still think she’s a scientist at heart.

Here’s one that shows how much Lucy cares about watching the world around her very closely:

Q: What word did Linus use that probably made Lucy mad?

A: Linus calling the bugs “stupid” didn’t help that conversation start well. I think when Lucy looked at the bugs she was probably counting them.

I say this because there’s many other comic strips where Lucy carefully counts things in the world around her.

Or, at least she tries to. She counts the stars:

Then she counts the raindrops, although she may be a bit over her head with this project:

Then she counts the snowflakes:

Linus can count the snowflakes, too:

Q: Do you think that 13,000,004,003 is the right number of snowflakes?

A: If Lucy said it by herself, I wouldn’t believe her, but Linus got the same number. I wonder if it is the right number?

When two different scientists do the same experiment and get the same result, I’m much more confident that it’s the right result. If they’re both counting snowflakes and they get the same number, then they’re more certain that it is probably the right number. So it’s always important for scientists to talk to each other and see where they agree and disagree. And everyone knows Lucy’s not shy with her opinions.

Lucy’s always counting something. Like a scientist, Lucy counts how many times she’s “fallen in love” with Schroeder:

Lucy counts the electrical outlets in her house:

Here Lucy counts how many times she beats Charlie Brown at checkers:

But sometimes Lucy makes mistakes in her counting. Here she tries to improve her position to count the stars better:

Q: Can you think of a reason why the chair won’t help Lucy count more stars?

A: I’d say the distance to the stars is so big that the chair doesn’t make any difference.

Here’s another set of strips where Lucy gets an explanation wrong, but I think she’s still thinking like a scientist thinks.

Q: Can you tell what’s wrong with Lucy’s counting in this next series of strips?

A: I think Lucy’s problem is that she’s trusting too much in what her own eyes see! She won’t listen to Charlie Brown, who has a simpler explanation. It’s simpler to have one sun than to have twelve, with a new sun being made every day. After you count and make careful observations, you still have to listen to other people. Lucy still needs to learn to listen, in this area and in many other areas as well. So do I!

There’s one more way that Lucy thinks like a scientist and it gets her into trouble. It’s hard to count the things you can’t see. Think about what Lucy is trying to count in this comic strip:

Q: How does Linus help Lucy count her blessings in this? Does he help her count something she can see?

A: Lucy’s problem isn’t that she needs to count better. She needs to know that her little brother loves her (despite all the fights they have). Linus is right. That is the right thing to say.

When you say this to your brothers, it gives life to my heart too. Lucy needs to see and count her brother, and that’s what really counts here.

So Lucy is a scientist at heart because she likes to look closely at the world and count the things around her. This helped her win a science fair. Lucy is good at counting. She gets the right answer (or least an answer that agrees with Linus’s answer) when counting the snowflakes.

Sometimes she can have the right answer for one question and still get something wrong, like with the sun and Charlie Brown. But she’s wrong because of what happens after she counts. Her counting is still right.

In the last letter, I’ll tell you about some of the strips where Lucy plays the scientist. She usually gets one thing right and other things wrong. Those are some of my favorites, and I think you’ll laugh at them, too.

Love, Dad

[Link forward to Part 3/3]

Dr. Lucy Van Pelt, Scientist (Part 1/3)

Note: This letter is for a first-grade student. Click here to read a similar letter that I wrote for my high-school son last October. (Since I have four sons I have two more chances to get this right!)


Dear Brendan,

I heard your favorite class in first grade is science. I’m so proud that you’re interested in the same type of class I teach. As you learn about scientists, I thought I’d let you learn something from me about what science means to me. If you want to really understand science, you have to know how to listen to scientists. It’s like if you really want to understand how God works, you have to listen to Him (in the many different ways that He speaks!).

So to understand science, first you have to understand the words scientists use. You’re learning the words scientists use in science class. Sometimes the words are long but that can be part of the fun. Then the real fun begins, when you use those words to look at the world around you.

A scientist can take the world apart and put it back together again, like a LEGO set. It’s great fun, but there are some things that you can’t take apart like that. (For example, you can’t take God apart, right?) It’s hard to tell “what you can take apart” from “what you can’t take apart.” I’m not always sure which things are which myself. But this is also part of the fun of science -- you’re never quite sure.

To really understand science, you have to understand scientists. I’ve watched you read through our Fantagraphics Peanuts comic books. I think one of those Peanuts characters is surprisingly close to being a scientist, or at least thinking like a scientist: crabby big sister Lucy, of all people, thinks like a scientist!

It’s OK if you don’t think of Lucy as a scientist. I only just realized it myself. Let me show you why I think this:

For one thing, Lucy plays at being a psychiatrist with her “Psychiatric Help” stand. But she actually does science at one point. Did you know that Lucy is the only Peanuts character to win a science fair?

It’s true! First, she looked at the world around her and decided which part of it to study (click on it to read the whole thing):

Of course, I think you should ask him (and us) before you run any experiments on your little brother. Linus isn’t exactly happy to be Lucy’s science project, but Lucy takes charge:

Then, Lucy starts her experiment and takes careful notes, like a good scientist:

Then Lucy reverses what she did and sees something change. She writes this down, too:

Did you notice how much Lucy is enjoying what she’s doing? Yes, she enjoys annoying her little brother, but, other than that, it seems like she really likes science. Once Lucy finishes her experiment, she makes a poster and presents her project:

Q: What do you see on her project that the other ones don’t have? (Other than a sighing little brother.)

 A: I see more words and squiggly-lined graphs than on the other projects. It looks like good science to me. Notice the ribbon. Lucy won first place!

 On the other hand, Peppermint Patty is not quite the scientist that Lucy is:

Q: Which do you think is the better project? Why?

A: I think Lucy ran a good science project. Peppermint Patty’s wasn’t as good.

But you can make it better!

Q: Maybe you can come up with a better project to run with toast? How could you do that?

I think you could come up with a pretty good project if you did it like Lucy:

-- changing things one by one,

-- watching closely,

-- writing down what you do, and

-- measuring it.

It doesn’t matter so much what part of the world you’re looking at. You could experiment on a piece of toast, or on your little brother, or anything inbetween. (Just be sure to be nice to him, and pay him with candy or something, please?)

What matters in science is that you do your experiment back and forth, many times, and measure what happens carefully. In this story, that’s exactly what Lucy did.

Even without this story, you could tell that Lucy’s a scientist at heart from other comics. Did you know that there are many other comic strips where Lucy acts like a scientist? I’ll tell you about those in the next letter.

Love, Dad

[Link forward to Part 2/3]

A Letter to My Son About Creation

Dear Sam,

Today you are fourteen. I am so proud of how you’ve grown up from a little drooling turkey-sized thing to the young man you are today. I keep thinking about how we really only have four more years with you until you move out to college. I’m left with too many things to say in such a short time.

You inherited half of yourself from me. I see myself in your constant reading, in the way you are interested in so many things that it’s hard to pick a single thing, even in the way you file away the comics in your head. And it makes me remember what it felt like to be fourteen.

I had a lot of questions about how to put all that reading together, especially trying to reconcile the first few pages of my Bible with the first few pages of my science textbooks. After three decades of these thoughts, I’ve tried out just about every possibility to see how it works. When I was your age I read many people who insisted that the stories of the Bible and the stories of evolution don’t fit at all. These people said you have to trust one set of stories and throw away the others. Creationists said throw away the science, and Isaac Asimov (my favorite science writer) said throw away the Bible.

I remember a Saturday afternoon I spent sitting in church learning about how the six days that I read from the first chapter of Genesis were 24 hours long and each creation event was an abrupt creation from nothing. I started out believing them when they said that it gave God the glory to trust His Word over that of the scientists. But the more I learned and did experiments myself, the more I felt like there must be other ways to read all these books. So, I went through an “Intelligent Design” phase, and then a “God created everything else with evolution but Adam and Eve were separate” phase, and now?

I’d like to tell you where I am now in a story. I could tell you my biographical story, of how I changed my mind and why, but instead I’m reminded of the recent movie version of Noah. This movie took a lot of risks, and all of them didn’t work, but one of them worked very well. In the darkened ark, during the 40-day deluge, Noah sits down with his family and tells them the story of creation. In the movie, this is animated beautifully with images of nature, and I’m sure you remember how I’ve shown it to you on YouTube. (I even have a few issues with how the movie did this, but it’s better to tell your own story than correct someone else’s!)

Noah’s children walked out into a new world after 40 days. For you, it’ll be four short years. You need to know where you came from, and that God was here before you, me, anyone, or anything.

Here are a few words trying to capture a fraction of that story. Some of my words will be proved wrong, but the story remains true if it shows you who God is.

 

The story starts in the darkness. In the beginning, there was God. The Spirit of God fluttered over the empty chaos like a bird over the ocean. He spoke a word, and a pinpoint of something emerged, bright with light. Time and space flashed open, inflating like a balloon, obeying his command. Matter separated into pieces with positive charge and negative charge. These attracted each other like a swarm of magnets and joined into a multitude of indivisible bits that could snap together like so many LEGOs. God called these bits atoms. God set a limit for these atoms: they could not travel faster than light. God saw the atoms obey his limit, and he saw that it was good.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the first part of the story.

God said, let many lights form. God made gravity, and the atoms gathered together. In some places, billions upon billions of atoms pressed down with enormous pressure. God called these places stars, and saw that they were good. Inside the stars, some atoms were squeezed into newer, bigger atoms, and the extra energy leaked out as light. One by one, the stars caught fire, blooming like flowers. They grew, and aged, and burst like seeds, spreading the new atoms across the universe.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the second part of the story.

And God said, let a disc fly out from a new star and let it gather into new planets. After an intricate dance, eight planets obeyed his call. God saw that it was good, and he called that star the sun. Some say that the biggest planet moved in and out around the sun, clearing the space for the four planets inside. God set a limit: the planets settled into cycles, like dancers repeating the same steps again and again around the central star.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the third part of the story.

One of the planets was not like the others. It was wet and open to the sun, warm but not too hot. God called this planet earth. God gave it a single moon that lit up its night sky and pulled the oceans over the dry land. God said, let the water form a cycle of weather, and, look, the water went up into clouds and came down as the rain. The water mixed with the dry land and, like an artist, drew shapes on its surface. And God said, let a cycle of life spring up from these atoms. And the earth brought forth tiny creatures, and they ate food that God gave them from the hot insides of the planet in chemical cycles. God blessed them, and the creatures built shelters and grew and changed. They filled the earth, and God saw that it was good.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the fourth part of the story.

And God said, let the earth bring forth green things. And plants grew from the waters and the earth. These caught the light from the sun that God made, and turned it into sweet sugar and fresh oxygen. Oxygen’s power rusted and reacted with the planet and took away most of the food. There was a famine and life fell back. But, faithfully, the sun kept giving its light, and that light became more oxygen, and the oxygen became new life. Creatures learned to breathe the new air, and to use cycles of oxygen for energy and for building new things. These cells grew abundantly and joined together into animals big enough to see, but there was no one to see them yet.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the fifth part of the story.

And God said, let the earth bring forth different kinds of animals, and the earth brought forth amphibians that crawled from the water, reptiles that basked in the sun, great sea creatures that lurked in the oceans, and birds that flew through the air. Some kinds ate plants and evolved strength and defense. Other kinds ate animals and evolved quickness and intelligence. Together the animals grew into cycles of biology that turned together to make ecosystems, like dancers repeating the same steps. Great extinctions pulled back on life, yet great expansions of new life followed.

Then God said to the earth, let us make humans in our image, after our likeness, male and female. God spoke, and his breath went out, and new cycles formed in the brains of humble primates. Out of those brains emerged minds that could see, understand, and even control the plants, the cattle, and the birds. And these humans became living souls reflecting the Creator into the creation. And God blessed them, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. I have given you all this – take care of it.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, yes, it was very good.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass. This ends the sixth part of the story.

In the seventh part, God ended his work. The heavens and earth were complete. God set a limit: God blessed the seventh day of the week, and set it aside, so that we too can enter God’s rest.

We watch as evenings and mornings pass.

Then, something happened that was not good. The father and mother of us all were deceived because they did not believe that God was good. They followed evil whispers and stepped outside of God’s limits. We all followed in their footsteps, and death ruled in us. Brother killed brother in broken, decaying cycles of greed and fear, and we were lost.

Into this darkness, God again brought light. God called a man named Abraham to leave the limits of his father’s country. From this man God called the nation Israel. The name Israel means “struggle,” and they indeed struggled with God. They received stories and limits from God, but they forgot them and failed to trust God. So God gave them judges and kings, but they fell back. One day the light of God’s glory left them. They did not notice.

Then, as a humble carpenter, God’s glory returned. We did not notice. Life ruled through Jesus, a different kind of king. He was full of grace and truth -- yet he was cut off and killed by the people of Rome and Jerusalem together. It was another broken cycle of violence and fear.

But the broken cycle was fixed! On the third day, on the first Easter Sunday, God vindicated Jesus by giving him new life, through the same Spirit that formed the earth, recreating and raising him from the dead, with a new body that goes beyond our limits.

The Gospel of John hints that Easter Sunday was the eighth day of creation, recorded not in rocks or trees but in transformed minds, bodies, and words. Like the first seven days, it was a unique act of God that built on and emerged from the previous events in surprising and creative ways.

This Eighth Day is repeated when Jesus is born again in someone’s heart and mind. Together we look forward to that day when God will raise the bodies of all who believe as he did Jesus’ body, and will restore all of God’s creation, and will reveal God’s Kingdom here on earth.

If you look in the right places, with eyes of faith, you can already see God coming, as God is creating new life and filling the earth with good things through the community of believers. The best part is that you don’t have to just watch -- you can join in as God uses your life to bring more life to this beautiful, broken world. God made you with love, as he made this planet, to be part of the continuing, evolving act of new creation.

 

I hope this shows you how I have found peace in reading first the Bible and then the science books. God told us some of this story in each book, and part of life is putting it all together. Now, what questions do you have? This story isn’t complete without them.

Love, Dad

A World from Dust (Plus): The Rapid Emergence of Life

For a scientist, opening up a new scientific journal is a bit like opening up a present on Christmas Day. I always get a slight thrill when I look through new journal articles and find one that further confirms something I'd suspected previously. I had that sensation a few weeks ago when I read "Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures" in Nature.

I admit that most people don't have their heart leap when reading those words, but compare that title to this quote that I wrote a year or two ago, now printed on p. 87 of A World from Dust:

"Before the clues, there is the question of timeline: When did life begin? This is a bit of a surprise in its own right. I would have thought that, given all the different molecules that have come together in any living thing, this assembly should have taken a long time. Instead, most evidence implies that life formed on this planet as quickly as possible, if not sooner."

"Living processes are even harder to pin down in rocks, but various lines of evidence (including unnatural imbalances of neutrons) can only be explained by life 3.5, 3.6, or even 3.8 billion years ago. A study of phosphorus in rocks 3.5 to 3.2 billion years old finds that life was mature enough to use phosphorus in a widespread, well- defined phosphorus cycle. Evidence for life immediately follows the evidence for oceans. An energy- diverting, growing, replicating chemistry followed the presence of liquid water in a geological blink of an eye."

This is why Chapter 5 (Clues to the Origins of Life) immediately follows Chapter 4 (the formation of the oceans). Many pieces of evidence point to the quick succession of these two chapters, including the "deep genealogy" studies that project what the oldest DNA sequences were like, resulting in an age of 3.8 billion years for the first proteins, as described on pages 87 and 88. Life springs up as soon as -- or even before -- the planet cools down enough to host it. This new Nature article is one more piece of evidence that fits into the quote above with an almost-audible snap.

Some have read the Nature article as a strike against "Darwinism" in some way, because this rapid emergence of complexity is inconsistent with slow, gradual change. But one of the main points of A World from Dust is that Darwinism isn't all about slow, gradual change. It's more like a symphony, a long, moving piece of music with different parts at different tempos, all reflecting the same theme of emerging life.

If the Nature article is a strike against Darwinism, then why was I, a scientist who admires Darwin and his ideas, so excited to read that sentence? Why did I write those two paragraphs as part of a whole book about evolution before this new finding was revealed? Yes, life emerged quickly, I've been saying that for a long time. I wrote those two paragraphs a year or two ago, and they are reinforced now. (Another point of my book is that it's possible to have disagreements about the nature and meaning of evolution without throwing out the idea of evolution, as shown by how often I contest Gould's "Tape of Life" metaphor yet remain convinced that evolution was the mechanism for generating life's diversity. For one thing, I think Gould's picture of evolution is at times too slow, and that it moved faster than he gave it credit.)

In the rest of my Chapter 5 I present seven chemical ideas, each one rooted in replicable laboratory experiments, for how the origin of life could have happened so quickly. I think that we might be able to understand how it happened by investigating chemistry -- in particular, the chemistry of oceans reacting with earth in oxygen-free water.

We live in a universe where we can see back 13 billion years with physics, all the way to the Big Bang, and we can understand how that worked. It stands to reason that we may be able to see back 4 billion years with biochemistry, all the way to this "Big Bang" of life, and to also understand how that worked.

I celebrate the fact that we have been given a universe we can understand, in which, periodically, life explodes with seeming joy. Understanding the chemical reasons that explain why the explosions happened doesn't take away that joy, but rather magnifies it. As I understand just how quickly life emerged, my heart leaps a little and I participate in that same old joy, as I receive that gift.