For over twenty-five years, I've stood in front of classrooms full of curious, question-asking teenagers with a textbook in one hand and a Bible in the other. And I've watched my students' faces as they realize something remarkable: science and faith aren't enemies. They're dance partners in the same grand cosmic narrative.
I was fourteen when I first felt this tension myself. My biology teacher explained the intricate mechanics of photosynthesis—that plants convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into glucose and oxygen through a series of elegant chemical reactions. Meanwhile, my youth pastor spoke about how God made the plants for us, how creation itself testifies to God's design. In that moment, I felt a conflict. Which one was true?
It took me years to understand that they were asking different questions entirely. Biology answers the how. Scripture answers the why. And when you study both seriously, they don't contradict—they illuminate each other with stunning clarity.
The Apostle Paul wrote about this in Romans 1:20: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made." That's not metaphor. That's theology. The created world itself is God's signature, visible to anyone willing to look closely.
And what does close looking reveal? Incomprehensible design. The human eye captures light and converts it to electrical signals that travel through the optic nerve. Our brains then reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the world around us. That process happens in milliseconds, and we don't even think about it. We just see. How can you study that and not stand in awe?
Or consider the immune system—those white blood cells patrolling your body, learning to recognize invaders, remembering encounters with viruses and bacteria from years ago so they can protect you again. It's an army. It's a library. It's a conversation between your body's defense mechanisms and the challenges it faces. The more you understand the science, the more you marvel at the ingenuity of the design.
When my students experience those moments—what I call "God Stops"—their eyes light up in a way that textbooks alone don't produce. I can see it happen. A girl who was daydreaming about her plans after school suddenly sits forward because we've just looked at the migration patterns of monarch butterflies and she's realizing that these delicate insects navigate thousands of miles using the sun's position, magnetic fields, and landmarks, with no map, no GPS, no written instructions. Just knowing. Built in. Designed in.
That awakening is the beginning of worship.
I've met people who say science robbed them of their faith. They learned how the heart pumps blood and lost the ability to believe in God. They understood gravity and felt their faith weaken. And I've always wondered: what kind of God were they believing in before? A God so small that understanding His creation makes Him disappear? That seems backwards to me.
The God of Scripture is not threatened by knowledge. He invites investigation. He made a world layered with complexity, fractal patterns, and beauty at every scale—from the spiraling arms of galaxies to the double helix of DNA to the intricate symmetry of a snowflake. Why would He do that unless He wanted us to explore, to discover, to wonder?
When you study the natural world deeply—really study it, not just memorize facts but contemplate the mechanisms—you're practicing a spiritual discipline. You're learning to recognize the fingerprints of your Creator. You're training your heart to respond to revelation. Because that's what the created world is: revelation.
Every discovery in science is a discovery about God's mind. Every time we understand a process in nature—photosynthesis, osmosis, the carbon cycle, plate tectonics, stellar evolution—we're reading pages of His autobiography. We're seeing how He thinks, what He values (order, beauty, balance), how He solves problems (with elegance and efficiency).
This is why I wrote BEHOLD! with studies that weave science and Scripture together. Not as a cute educational trick, but because that's where the deepest transformation happens. When a young person understands entropy scientifically—how all systems tend toward disorder—and then grasps Romans 8:28, where God is working "all things...together for good," they experience something that lectures about faith can't produce. They see viscerally why we need a Creator. They feel the weight of grace.
Science hasn't weakened my faith. It has deepened it immeasurably. Every equation I've studied, every mechanism I've learned, every new discovery that refines my understanding of the world—it all points back to the same conclusion my teenage self was struggling toward: There is a God, and His creativity is boundless.
If you've felt conflict between faith and science, I want to invite you to explore that tension more deeply. Don't run from it. Walk toward it. Study the creation. Read what Scripture says about it. Watch how they don't compete—how the hows of science make the whys of faith more beautiful.
Join me in learning to behold the God who is revealed through both the book of nature and the book of Scripture. The answer is not to choose between them. The answer is to see them as two languages describing the same profound reality. That's when wonder begins. That's when true faith takes root.