Reverence for creation through science

2006/05/25 at 08:56

This morning, I happened to catch Alex Chadwick’s Radio Expeditions report from the Ecuadorean rain forest with entomologist Rex Cocroft. Dr. Cocroft’s musings at the end of the piece struck me, so I transcribed them:

It can seem very strange to people, I think, and very ludicrous, to see some grown person who’s spending his time chasing around tiny, strange bugs in the woods, but I think of it like somebody who’s a musician. You’re not just a pure musician in the abstract. You play something, and once you pick up an instrument, all the principles of music are there. And if you’re studying biology, then any individual living thing that you can study has all the principles of biology wrapped up in it, and it has a long evolutionary history that has solved a very impressive set of problems and challenges and has a beautiful set of adaptations.
[The tree hoppers] are just very different from us, but they have just as many challenges in their lives, and fabulous, very finely tuned adaptations for dealing with them. So they’re not at all primitive or simple. They’re actually very complex and advanced, if you will.

I don’t know whether Dr. Cocroft bellieves in any dieties, but I am much more impressed with a God who can devise evolution and let it run its course than one who just spits out creation fully formed. The more I learn about the complexities of creation via science, the greater my reverence for it.