Wallace G. Smith

Many people remember math as a subject they hated in high school. Maybe they found it difficult or dull. Maybe they just thought it was not relevant to their lives. Mathematicians, however, often find math not only beautiful, but also profoundly meaningful. Why? And what does this mean for Christians?

What if we could travel through the microscopic world and enter the amazing environment of a single, solitary, minuscule human cell—just one of the trillions in your body? What an amazing world of wonder we would encounter! There, within this infinitesimally small and elegantly ordered domain, we would see complicated molecular machinery busily carrying out the functions that make our lives on earth possible! Traveling to the heart of the cell—its nucleus—we would find the “brains” of this invisible, unfathomably small world: an incredibly thin, unbelievably long strand of atoms that form a molecule, the existence of which is truly a miracle.

In our world, science and the Bible seem constantly pitted against each other, and it is true that there certainly are outstanding questions to be resolved. But many such “conflicts” are illusions, arising either from misunderstanding the scientific data or from failing to understand the truth of God’s word.

If you listen to the right people—or, perhaps more accurately, the wrong people—you may have heard that in December of this year mankind will either experience the end of the world or the dawn of a new age.

The late Carl Sagan, renowned astronomer and cosmologist, famously began his acclaimed book Cosmos with a sweeping statement: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” And the grandeur we see as we point our telescopes outward can cause us to feel humbled by such lofty declarations.