Riding into the sunset
Last October, we took a family trip to Maine. After stopping at the outlets in Kittery, we were getting onto I-95 while watching the most breathtaking sunset I’ve ever seen. I drove as fast as I could down the on ramp, pulled the car over, grabbed my camera, and took this photo. . .
It was truly an “f/8 and be there” moment. (If you don’t know what that means. . . Well, that’s another entry for another day. Maybe tomorrow.)
As best I understand it, there are two explanations for what I saw:
The scientific explanation (for the colors at least) is that light—which normally travels in a straight line—was bumping into gas and dust molecules, which interfered with the wavelengths and redirected the light in different directions. The longer wavelengths (reds, oranges, yellows) lingered in the air and caused me to miss the blue and see the red and orange. A gentleman named John William Strutt (a.k.a., Lord Rayleigh) figured a lot of this out around 1900 (Rayleigh Scattering).
The theological explanation is that God decided to get out His special set of Crayolas and have some fun that night. It was a gift to anyone who was there. He took the dust of this broken world and bent some light to remind me that He is colorful and desires to remind us of His existence—sometimes right before the darkness comes over this fragile planet on which seven billion creatures made in His image reside.
Sometimes, I need the image of this breathtaking sunset in my mind and heart during what John Chysostom called the “dark night of the soul” to remind me that the sun will come up in the morning.
Here’s the thing. I see these explanations as not only compatible, but necessarily so. I’m not saying that we have to understand everything, because we never will—either in the scientific or theological arenas. But if God is the creator of the universe, then science is part of the way God reveals Himself to humanity. I firmly believe that every single scientific discovery ultimately points, like a neon sign, straight at God—even if there are turns in the road between what we know and what is to be known. If science doesn’t point to a God who created, then He either doesn’t exist or is a cosmic clown playing a very bad joke on us. (Someone reading this may be asking, “Which God do you mean?” ’Tis a fair question for another day.)
A final thought:
I find it fascinating that from space, air appears black and the sun is white. Black and white. Yet, while we are bound to this broken world, God gives us colors—like blue skies and orange sunsets—to help us see meaning and beauty when dust is flying all around us and out of our control.
