Do you ever find yourself feeling like your mind is going to unravel over some of the most obvious and mysterious questions of life like:
Why does anything exist? Me? You? Us? Now? Here? In a conscious state that cannot be explained? Above all why, would there be an eternal self-existent God? Why can’t science figure out a formula that enables us to replicate the simplest spark of life?
As helpful as modern science as been is improving our lives, resisting disease, and lessening our work, it is also deepening the mysteries that surround us.
I’ve been thinking again about the announcement last year of findings by a group of 440 researchers in 32 laboratories around the world who, while studying the inexpressibly complex human genome, found themselves looking at a mystery far beyond what they expected.
A science article in the New York Times reports that these researchers discovered a huge ocean of DNA that is giving them clues as to why “Complex diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure and psychiatric disorders are so difficult to predict and, often, to treat.”
What they found was that “The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave.”
The article went on to explain that the project’s predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which determined the entire sequence of human DNA, “was like getting a picture of Earth from space”… It doesn’t tell you where the roads are, it doesn’t tell you what traffic is like at what time of the day, it doesn’t tell you where the good restaurants are, or the hospitals or the cities or the rivers.”
“The new result “is a stunning resource,” said a researcher from the earlier Human Genome Project. Then he added, “My head explodes at the amount of data.”
The article is definitely worth reading. Seems to me that it helps us understand why it is not just simplistic faith to say that “God only knows” when it comes to the kind of questions that require the mystery of a Creator to explain, and an all-knowing God to Judge between us—within the complexities of what we do— and don’t understand.
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