Green is my daughter’s favorite. She loves everything green: grass, trees, even little green bugs. It occurred to me the other day that if a child was born colorblind and saw the whole world in black and white, she would not know what color is. If she were to ask you to describe the color green, you may say that green is the color of grass. If you look at grass and leaves and the new Wal-Mart eco-friendly sign that is “the” thing, what they all have in common is the color green. Still, this child would likely say, “I do not get it.” That person would not understand what these things have in common because she cannot relate at all to the experience of seeing green. You could say, “Well, it is light that comes in at 480 nanometers.” That still does not really describe the experience of seeing the color green.

I have been thinking a lot lately about principles and applications. I read a really interesting debate last week that was printed in Time Magazine. It was a debate featuring a couple of the leading thinkers in the field of genetics. One of the speakers took the atheistic position that life simply evolved and there was very little chance that a God of any sort was involved. The other author took a Christian stance, noting that without the six constants of the universe being exactly tuned correctly, there would be no chance of life at all. When you look at this argument very carefully, one of the things that I noticed was that the position the atheist took confused principles with application. Scientists do a wonderful job of understanding the application of basic elemental principles. In this quest, science has improved our lives in many ways—as we talk on our cellphones, drive our cars, enjoy air travel, see the miracles of in vitro fertilization, and even outer space exploration. There is no doubt that science can help us understand applications of principles that can improve our lives, but what science cannot do is alter or even very well explain the underlying principles of the universe—the gravitational constant, the strong and weak magnetic forces, time itself. These are principles that science can describe, and we can build applications as a result of these principles. But science is unable to explain the foundation of those principles. It can do a good job of observing the universe, but it runs into problems explaining exactly why the universe is ordered in the way it is. And if you look carefully, there does appear to be a remarkable order to the underlying structure of the universe.

I have been thinking a lot lately about principles and applications. I read a really interesting debate last week that was printed in Time Magazine. It was a debate featuring a couple of the leading thinkers in the field of genetics. One of the speakers took the atheistic position that life simply evolved and there was very little chance that a God of any sort was involved. The other author took a Christian stance, noting that without the six constants of the universe being exactly tuned correctly, there would be no chance of life at all. When you look at this argument very carefully, one of the things that I noticed was that the position the atheist took confused principles with application. Scientists do a wonderful job of understanding the application of basic elemental principles. In this quest, science has improved our lives in many ways—as we talk on our cellphones, drive our cars, enjoy air travel, see the miracles of in vitro fertilization, and even outer space exploration. There is no doubt that science can help us understand applications of principles that can improve our lives, but what science cannot do is alter or even very well explain the underlying principles of the universe—the gravitational constant, the strong and weak magnetic forces, time itself. These are principles that science can describe, and we can build applications as a result of these principles. But science is unable to explain the foundation of those principles. It can do a good job of observing the universe, but it runs into problems explaining exactly why the universe is ordered in the way it is. And if you look carefully, there does appear to be a remarkable order to the underlying structure of the universe.

I noticed something today while looking through the operating microscope that made me do a double take. We were working on a part of the dura (the covering of the brain) and looking at it under high magnification. We could see all of the magnificent detail magnified 10x. And there was a leaf. Not a real leaf, of course, but unmistakable nonetheless. As we focused in on it, and I moaned about not having a camera attachment, we could see it as newly formed blood vessels. There had been stress to the body at this site, and new blood vessels were forming to help with the repair. This happens as a natural part of the healing process, but I had never noticed the similarity to the most humble of creation, the leaf. Shown above is an example. One of the pictures shows the process of neovascularization in the brain; the other is a detail of a leaf. I think the part that amazes me most is that I’ve seen neovascularization tissue hundreds, maybe thousands of times. And the similarity is, well, striking. But I never made the connection before. It makes me wonder what else I’ve walked by!