Let me get this straight -- musing about lines in nature

Natural objects very seldom contain perfectly straight lines. Man-made objects often do.

True, there are some nearly straight lines in natural objects. Some tree trunks are almost perfectly straight. Still water has a flat surface, a straight line expanded to two dimensions, as it were. Salt crystals are sometimes nearly perfect cubes, or, at least, they often have one or more flat surfaces. Some leaf veins are almost perfectly straight. But these examples are rare.

Spider webs do have what appear to be straight lines, but they usually don't go very far before joining with another line, which goes in a different direction, and, like power lines, the threads usually sag in the middle. I am not sure that there are any really straight lines in the photo above. (The photo is from my Flickr photostream. If you want to see a larger version, go here.)

Covalent bonds, such as the 4 bonds that Carbon atoms can form


are depicted as straight, as in the image of cyclohexane, above, where the dark gray balls represent carbon atoms, and the rods between the balls represent covalent bonds. But the angles of the bonds are such that, even in this model, the straight lines can not continue in the same direction. Besides, the bonds aren't really little rods, any more than the atoms are little spheres. And, even if they were little straight rods, they are very short -- just the distance between two adjacent atoms in a tiny molecule.

The two examples above, and some tree trunks, are about as close to really straight lines as you are going to find, in natural objects. Look, for example, at the trees and leaves in the first photo, or at almost any natural scene. You will see all sorts of shapes, many of them difficult to describe, but you will almost never see straight lines.

Why is that? I don't know. But this fact suggests that it is very difficult to grasp nature clearly. In a way, our use of straight lines, angles, flat surfaces, and curves, in the things we build for ourselves, is a reflection of our power over such artifacts. But we have much less power over nature -- we can't create it. Its shapes are too complicated for us to easily duplicate, and comprehend.

The word, "straight," is used several times in the Bible. Of the twelve versions that the Blueletter Bible offers, the New International Version has the most occurrences, 40. Here they are.

I am not sure that any of these 40 refer to a straight line, as such. Most of them are used in the sense of going straight toward some destination.

Here's one instance of the use of "straight" in the Bible:
Matthew 3:3 For this is he who was spoken of by Isaiah the prophet, saying,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
make ready the way of the Lord.
Make his paths straight.” (This is referring to Isaiah 40:3, which uses much the same wording.)

Did the people of Bible times understand the concept of straight lines, or straightness? Surely they did. In Acts 9:11, a street in Damascus is called Straight Street. 2 Kings 21:13 uses the concept of a plumb line as a measure of straightness.

To sum it up, God, and God's nature, are more complex than we often like to make things. But that is not to say that God doesn't understand our simple patterns and constructions, often with straight lines all over the place. He does. He made straightness possible. We should see beauty in the seemingly complex, and  difficult to describe, shapes that we find in nature, such as the lichen below:

(Larger sizes here.)

 

Thanks for reading! Keep yourself straight, but appreciate complexity.

God's complexity

Isaiah 55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (All scripture quotations are from the ESV, which allows such use, if properly credited.)

I have recently posted on simplicity, and also on childlikeness, and children, in the Bible.

Let me now muse about the opposite idea -- complexity. We don't have to understand a lot to have our sins forgiven, and become a believer. It's simple. But, for those who are capable of such things, there are more complex matters to consider. God is complex, complicated, and detailed.

There are things that only mature Christians can know.
Hebrews indicates this:
Hebrews 5:12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. 14 But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. This implies that there are stages in Christian knowledge, and presumably thinking on a more complex level is possible.

We must be careful here. In the first place, mature Christians should not look down on new Christians, or be proud. The admonition here is to Christians who should have been more mature than they were, apparently not new Christians.
Second, we must not succumb to the temptation of thinking that we need some sort of special knowledge for our salvation. We don't. We just need to accept Christ's sacrifice for our sins, and live with Him as Lord of our lives. A child, or a person who is intellectually challenged, can be a Christian just as I can be, and for the same reasons.

There are deep things for a mature Christian to learn, about herself, about the Bible, about God. That's part of God's complexity.

Another part of God's complexity is His amazing creation.
Zophar challenged Job, in Job 11:7 “Can you find out the deep things of God?

Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?

There's more about this subject in Job. Beginning with Job 38, God asks Job to explain the phenomena of nature. This goes on, until, Job confesses his profound ignorance
Job 42:2 “I know that you can do all things,
and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.

Job didn't know very much about how nature works. He didn't understand the weather, astronomy, or animal diversity and behavior. We don't, either.

Let me deal only with astronomy here.

The ancients could see stars. They didn't understand the nature of what they were seeing, or comprehend the vastness of space. We now believe that some of the "stars" we see are actually galaxies -- vast collections of stars, so far away that they look like stars to us. We now understand that some other stars, probably a lot of them, have their own planets. (For a graphic portrayal of the vastness of space, see this video, a little over four minutes in length.)

We now believe that our sun, and other stars, are visible, not because they are burning, but because they are giant thermonuclear reactors, giving off tremendous amounts of energy -- so much so that, even though we are over 90,000,000 miles from the sun, we receive enough energy to keep us warm and lighted, and to fuel photosynthesis. Our own sun loses over 4 billion kilograms of mass each second, converted to energy by its fusion reactions.

There are galaxies very far away, and, as far as we can tell, the size of the universe is vast beyond all comprehension, and it may be infinite in size.

We believe that there are black holes, objects so dense that their gravity bends space so that light from these objects cannot escape.

I have previously mused about the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds, and its theological implications.

With all of this size, the possibility of other planets, some with their own life forms, surely there are many phenomena, perhaps even types of astronomical objects, that we have never yet encountered, and can't even imagine. The universe is exceedingly complex.

Weather, and the states of matter, or the diversity of the animals on the earth, and their behavior, are equally complex, and, in their own way, incomprehensible.

Job 5:8 “As for me, I would seek God,

and to God would I commit my cause,

9 who does great things and unsearchable,

marvelous things without number:

Thank God for His marvelous creation!