This morning I read an AP story by Seth Borenstein, under the headline, “Scientists believe millions of species undiscovered.” The scholars estimate that we’ve found only 1.9 million of the 8.8 million out there. As one of the report’s authors put it, “We are really fairly ignorant of the complexity and colorfulness of this amazing planet.” Commenting on the peril in not finding and protecting these new species, Harvard’s E.O. Wilson said, “We won’t know the benefits to humanity, which potentially are enormous. If we’re going to advance medical science, we need to know what’s in the environment.”
I think there’s strong Christian resonance with this observation, for we believe that God has created an awesome world with all sorts of beneficial things waiting to be discovered by us humans, charged with “subduing” the earth in a stewardly fashion. It’s kind of like Christmas morning every day, in that there are many presents to be opened (as did George Washington Carver, who found scores of amazing uses for the humble peanut).
This is really the wellspring of science—the conviction that nature is the orderly and salubrious work of a benevolent Creator who tells us to get busy unpacking and responsibly appropriating the wonders of it all. (Contrast this perspective with that of the animist, who fears capricious spirits in forest and glen, and the atheist, looking for the next curiosity cranked out by blind chance.)
This news story brought to mind a passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a sort of Christian Walden Pond written in the Virginia countryside. Her focus is aesthetic, but it captures the spirit that a Christian scientist can have in his lab or on his expedition:
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find . . . For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe . . .
It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.
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