Design in Nature: Observing and Voicing God’s Glory within an Engineering Vocation

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” [Gen. 1:1] The Bible starts with the most colossal, grandiose and formidable engineering feat ever. Without debating the literacy of the account, the Genesis creation story presents a prudent engineering critical path flowchart for filling the earth – making sure all the biological needs of each species are in place before it is called into being, and placement in a setting where arbitrary and unrelated constants of physics are amazingly and inscrutably fine-tuned to the narrow, precise values needed to sustain life. [1] The complexities of the process of creation and its life-sustaining environment is a dramatic engineering feat, much less the intricacy of design embedded in each individual plant, animal, insect, bird or fish. Our universe has all the fingerprints of a designer, whether you look with the naked eye, with a high-powered telescope or a high-powered microscope - from the far-flung galaxies to the microscopic details. By observing how specific and exact the interworking’s of creation are, its intricacies and precision, one can concede that there must be a Designer. This is acknowledged even by the secular world. Albert Einstein, though not a believer, expressed “I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. … We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.” [2] An agnostic Cambridge University astrophysicist, Fred Hoyle, upon realizing a how narrowly precise a physical parameter had to be to support life, concluded “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” [3] As Christians, the forethought and design found in the created world points us directly to God. John Glenn, observing the heavens and the earth from his spacecraft window exclaimed "To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible. It just strengthens my faith.” [4] The Bible tells us that God is revealed in the created world. “For [God’s] invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” [Romans 1:20 ESV] C.S. Lewis, the legendary scholar and Christian apologist, devoted several pages of his book The Four Loves to the Christian’s relationship with nature. [5] He points out that nature also gives language and meaning to our faith. “Many people – I am one myself – would never, but for what nature does to us, have any content to put into the words we must use in confessing our faith. … If nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the “love” of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.” The mystery and awe of nature can be a deeply spiritual, emotional experience that evokes divine worship, similar to profoundly moving music, and causes us to recognize and extol the goodness and glory of God. The natural world is a reflection of God’s glory and gives “content to put into the words we must use in confessing our faith.”