The “morning stars” sang as God set Earth’s foundations

In the Christian faith, often there is a view of a fight between science and what the Bible says, but it’s important to recognize that as we learn more about our perplexing world, we can still appreciate the poetry we have loved for so long. Science works to discover empirical truths, while poetry can open those truths to a human understanding. The analogies used in the Bible can help us put ourselves in the shoes of another character to feel the suffering another person in our life could be feeling and then translate that understanding into our everyday interactions. There is no need for a game of tug-of-war between poetry and science when they complement each other so harmoniously. 

An easy-to-understand story is the story of creation. In Genesis, there is a clear narrative to the origin of the universe–God made the world, saw it, and knew that it was good. A less black-and-white story is the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This tells a story of a son abandoning his father, facing suffering on his own, and returning home. His father saw him, ran to him with open arms, and threw him a party without alerting his other son working in the field. The first story is a pretty easy to understand. God knew what was made because he was the one who created it, so he knew it was good. The second story can have many different understandings. Some think an ungrateful son was given an undeserved second chance that he was bound to mess up by a father who was undermining the hard work of his other, better children. In my opinion, the father who raised his son knew his son very well and knew that he needed to learn lessons on his own, so when he had returned home, the father was elated because he knew his son the way God knew the sun. So, when the son had returned home, the father knew he was good. However, depending on how the reader grew up, very different stories could be interpreted. Maybe you were a kid who had to learn lessons the hard way and were excited to see a father full of grace, or maybe you were a hard worker that never got the credit you deserved. There is no clear answer to whether the son deserved a second chance or not–there is no experiment that could answer this question, just different explanations of the poetry. 

The summer before my junior year of high school, my mom took my best friend and me to a star-gazing cabin out in the countryside. I remember looking up at the starlit sky those couple nights in complete awe of how something so magical could be real. To me, the stars I saw those nights were other worldly, completely bewildering. Later I learned about how stars were formed from the accumulation of thousands of tiny dust and gas particles, drawn together by gravity to create a marvelous sight. Learning about the formation of stars, how much goes into making just one and how they’re made up of such ordinary materials, adds a whole new layer of admiration towards not only the solar system, but also the God who created it all. 

In stories like the story of creation we can depict the scientific understanding of the person writing to decode their process of thinking, while in stories like the Parable of the Prodigal Son, much is left up to interpretation. God created the sun as the father in the Prodigal Son raised his son. Understanding the interconnection of the two enriches both the natural and spiritual truths. By opening our minds to the idea that both science and poetry have so much value to Scripture and the world around us, we enrich our understanding of each one that much more.