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.

My family and I recently returned from a trip to London, England. We had a great time, found the British people to be wonderful hosts and managed to get our ten bags to and from the United States without any serious mishaps. One of our site trips was a day spent in Oxford, one of my favorite towns.

However, as it is written:

It’s that season again. We just had to stop and buy some Girl Scout cookies. We’re supporting a good cause, right? But darn it, those thin mints are so addictive. I’d believe you if you told me they had drugs in them!

Ever stop to look at slime? You know, the stuff that gooks up a run-down lake and makes a sticky film on stagnant water? It’s also found in streams and in the ocean. It’s really not all that pretty on the surface, but if you look closer…you can find God’s stained glass window. I was astonished when I found that simple diatom cells sometimes arrange themselves in beautiful colonies, such as the one shown in the center image above. These simple cells can form the most wondrous complex designs, all invisible without a microscope.

Second Corinthians 4:18 says, “Since we consider and look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen, for the things that are visible are temporal, brief, and fleeting, but the things that are invisible are deathless and everlasting.” (Amplified Bible)

Spiny, vibrant, purple - one thrives on craggy mountaintops and back gardens, the other beneath the waves. Similarly designed to spike those who come too close, these sea urchins from California look almost as though they could be the Canadian thistle's distant cousin, when in fact, they aren't really related at all.

An oddly shaped mushroom - more celestial than last week's jellyfish - arrives in the spring and summer alongside the equally celestial, purple coneflower.

I have been thinking a lot lately about faith and creation. You might ask what in the heck these two things have in common. Well, much brighter minds than I have recognized there are at least some principles—not theories, not applications, but bedrock basic, fundamental observations about the way things work—that had to be tuned just right in order to experience life as we know it. One basic, underlying principle is the force of magnetism. Magnetism is one of those mysteries that we don’t completely understand, but we see it in everything from the atom to the solar system. If magnetism had been a little weaker or a little stronger, it is very doubtful that you would be reading or listening to this right now because, frankly, you probably would not exist. As you look at a magnetic field, you see that it has arches and looks like the spindles of actin in a mitotic figure. Why are these two events so similar? I have no idea, but it does makes you stop and go hmmm. If you have any clues, let me know at observations@designedonpurpose.com.

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.