Night Vision

Seeing the World Correctly Requires the Right Light

Looking up one night recently while away from city lights, I saw something I often forget about: stars. Living in the city, with its overabundance of artificial light, I do not see very many stars, even on a clear night. This loss of the sight of stars is largely the result of the municipality's attempt to deal with man's fallen nature—the street and alley lights are as bright as they are to reduce crime.

My recent recovery of a few stars reminded me of vacations taken in my youth in northern Michigan, where it got so dark on moonless nights that you had to be careful lest you walk into a tree. The shimmering Milky Way and stars impossible to begin counting canopied the lake and the cottages at night. The sky whispered glory, while the eyes widened in wonder.

Secular man considers this sense of wonder at creation to be a vestige of man's childhood. Science has supposedly so demystified creation that the word "creation" itself has become an anachronism. Nothing was created; it just is—or happened by itself.

Contemplative Vision

But when I experienced wonder in childhood, it was not childish. Wonder at creation is, in fact, the primary frame of mind of anyone who has been spiritually and intellectually informed by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The religious believer who remains in the mainstream tradition of scriptural understanding accepts the Scriptures as divinely inspired and reads them on their own terms.

Thus, the believer's first question upon reading a biblical passage is not whether to take it literally. When he reads that God "has stretched the heavens out like a tent" (Psalm 104:2), he doesn't look for canvas in the sky or tent pegs on the earth. Nor does he need to tell himself, "Oh, this is poetry, not science." Contemplation takes precedence over analysis.

The believer is instructed throughout the Bible, especially in the Psalms, in the proper posture toward creation and its Creator: wonder and worship. When he considers the creatures of the deep, the sea that "teems with things innumerable, living things both small and great" (verse 25), and the earth "full of thy creatures" (24), his primary response is, "In wisdom Thou hast made them all." This response is not deficient in any respect. It needs no light from Darwin.

Recovering Wonder & Worship

If such a response to the created world around us is not, so to speak, our default position, then we are biblically illiterate, lacking in spiritual vision. Unfortunately, the city lights of materialistic science have obscured, not enhanced, this vision and, with it, the comprehension of the divine beauty reflected in creation. If anything is needed today to help us better understand creation, it is the effort to recover lost wonder and worship in our contemplation of life and the full cosmos in which we live.

Recent efforts to persuade believers (many of whom are, like most moderns, deficient in wonder) to accept a materialistic theory that explains their own bodies and minds as the products of millions of years of random mutations and evolution do not serve this recovery effort well. While embracing Darwinism might—in the eyes of their secular-minded peers—remove from believers the stigma of being unscientific or behind the times, it might also remove the Creator so far from his creation in their minds that that they no longer can say, "The heavens are the work of Thy hands" (102:25) without -reservations.

The little boy looking up at the stars in wonder sees and knows more than the man with the marvelous telescope who has forgotten what it all means. The boy might use the telescope, but he doesn't need it to truly see.