I have to admit: I am a big Kurt Wise fan. If you are not familiar with his work you simply must check out, Is Genesis History. His contributions to the film are significant. Kurt studied under the prolific evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard and now teaches for and directs the Center for Creation Research at Truett McConnell University in Cleveland, Georgia.
Well, apparently I am a bit behind the curve as Dr. Wise and Compass Classroom published Devotional Biology in 2015. My copy arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago.
My first impression left me feeling a bit underwhelmed, but upon reflecting and revisiting the material I realized I was underwhelmed because my expectations were shaped by my experience with other biology texts, mostly secular in nature. I expected a load of sciency stuff, graphs, factoids, remarkable statements and features. My first impression was superficial and I am happy to say, deeply flawed! This book delves deeply into approaching science and in particular biology as a theological exercise, that is to say, how to make studying living things worshipful in nature. I am quite overwhelmed by the depth and then the clear elucidation of not only guiding principles but fundamental truths that relate the study of life to our spiritual walk. I am reminded that we live in a day and age of information glut. As Dr. Wise realizes this, the book is not a collection of facts. This book covers concepts thoroughly and provides wonderful guidance for continuing in biology.
Here are a couple of notable quotes:
“The order of creation is simple enough to be understood by humans and the human brain is complicated enough to understand creation’s order. Although a full understanding of God would certainly be outside the capability of any finite being, God still wants us to understand something about Him. This means He chose to illustrate understandable things, created the universe in such a way as to illustrate those concepts in understandable ways, and constructed our brains in such a way as to comprehend those concepts.”
“DNA provides evidence of the existence of a language at the foundation of life. Note, however, that just as the words of this page are not actually language, but evidence of a language, so also DNA is not actually language itself, but evidence of one . . . Language and DNA both exhibit hierarchical coding. Language codes for a seemingly infinite diversity of thoughts in a hierarchical fashion – a few different symbols coding for a larger number of other symbols, that code for an even larger number of other symbols. . . ”
I highly recommend this book!
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