William P. Brown serves as a great example of someone who has integrated biblical studies with scientific and technological progress so as to promote a “theology of wonder.”
This portion from one of my favorite books on the Old Testament, The Seven Pillars of Creation, explains how Brown first caught that sense of wonder. I’ve included the video he describes — and it’s still fun to watch today. His last sentence is a keeper, capturing something I was trying hard to say yesterday. What we need today are people in the church who can capture the wonder both of ancient scripture and contemporary science and communicate them so that we can all share in that wonder.
The inspiration behind this study stems from a childhood epiphany that took place in a science museum in Seattle. Set off in a far corner was a small video screen whose button was waiting to be pushed by a curious child. I happily obliged. A serene scene unfolded of a young couple lounging on a picnic blanket in a Chicago park. But before my eyes could linger, the screen took me out above the park, the city, Lake Michigan, the continent, and the globe. Vast stretches of outer space quickly came into view. The solar system resembled something of an atom. Next came other stars, the swirling Milky Way, and finally empty space dotted with tiny galaxies. Then in a matter of seconds I found myself once again suspended over the lounging couple, pausing only briefly before closing in on a patch of skin and proceeding all the way to the cellular, molecular, atomic, and quark-scale levels. I was mesmerized by this dizzying ride through the cosmos and the microcosmos. I saw things I thought were privy only to God.
That presentation, I discovered years later, was Powers of Ten, the ingenious creation of Charles and Ray Eames. Both a visual thought experiment and a virtual rollercoaster ride, this now “ancient” video dramatically covered the extremities of scale, from the unimaginably vast (1025) to the inscrutably tiny (10-16), from the cosmic to the subatomic. The sum effect on me was nothing short of transcendent.
Gloriously “weird” is how physicist Brian Greene describes the quantum world. “Too wonderful” is how the biblical sage responds to creation’s marvels (Prov 30:18-19). The psalmist trembles before the vastness of the universe (Ps 8:3-4). Biologist Ursula Goodenough celebrates the “sacred depths of nature.” What do they all have in common? I wonder. Though separated by over two and a half millennia, the authors of ancient Scripture and numerous scientists of today find themselves caught up in a world of abiding astonishment. Like the ancients, many scientists admit to being struck by an overwhelming sense of wonder—even “sacredness”—about nature and the cosmos. What a far cry from Francis Bacon’s objectification of the natural realm as humanity’s slave!
The wonder of it all prompts one—anyone—to wonder about it all. Bioanthropologist Melvin Konner regards the capacity to wonder as “the hallmark of our species and the central feature of the human spirit.” Although Homo sapiens (“wise human”) may be too self-congratulatory, there is no doubt that we are Homo admirans, the “wondering human.” Wonder is what unites the empiricist and the “contemplator,” the scientist and the believer. “Everyone is naturally born a scientist,” admits astrobiologist Chris Impey. We can no more deny that of our distant ancestors than we can deny that of ourselves. Together, the ancient cosmogonist and the modern cosmologist, the biblical sage and the urbane biologist form a “cohort of wonder.” [emphasis mine]
• William P. Brown
The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder
(pp. 3-4)















