Questions asked of a molecular biologist

In the fall of 2019 I received an invitation to address the board of directors for a well-known national religious organization. Knowing that the group was largely made up of non-scientists, I accepted the invitation and presented a talk titled “Questions asked of a molecular biologist.”  The talk was followed by a time for questions and discussion. The presentation was not recorded, but I provide a synopsis here.

It is a special pleasure to be able to speak to you today. I am aware of the impressive speakers that have addressed this group, and it is an honor to be counted among them.

My goal as a professor of molecular biology and as a Christian believer, is not to make you comfortable, but to make you think.

Thank you for the work that you do. I pray that my words today will be clear and will magnify our view of God. Indeed, I am convinced that our view of God always needs magnification.

I’ve chosen this topic for my remarks today – Questions asked of a molecular biologist. I chose this topic because of what I found to be an unexpected and remarkable experience this past year. It was the opportunity to speak openly and honestly with a group of biomedical science graduate students who are spiritual seekers from many different backgrounds. Two of the students originally approached me as a faculty member and dean, knowing of my Christian faith even as I lead an NIH-funded molecular biology research lab and am married with two adult children. One of the seeking students had faced a difficult year, confronted by the deaths of loved ones. She and her colleague met me on the sidewalk one afternoon.

“Would you ever be willing to sit down and talk about whether there is more to life beyond the experiments we do and the data we collect?”

My answer was simple.

“Yes” I said.

“The only rule of discussion would be that I participate as another voice in the circle – not as teacher or professor or dean. I’ll present my path as a seeker, and explain my Christian faith, but then listen as you speak and share and ask questions. Maybe we can discover some common questions that lead you to wonder about whether there is more.”

The two students immediately agreed, and quickly identified three more students to participate. These were extremely intelligent students from across the globe, all at my institution for PhD training in biomedical sciences. These were students from very different backgrounds. Most had been raised in faith traditions but had become seekers because of doubt or the disconnection between the teachings of their faiths and the realities and questions of their professional and personal lives. The students represented Hindu, Muslim, Roman Catholic, Evangelical Christian, and agnostic backgrounds. All agreed to meet monthly for an hour over almost a year. The discussion topics emerged spontaneously after each meeting and different students led different discussions. Often the leader of the month would post one or more readings to spur reflection or discussion before each session.

I found that many of the topics reflected ideas and questions related to material I had already posted at my blog, so I commonly cross-referenced one of my essays as I provided resources for reflection. If these kinds of topics intrigue you, I refer you to my blog as well. In my blog I treat thoughts at the intersection of science, family, and faith. For example, if you are curious why this professional baseball player is holding a praying mantis on a baseball, and what that has to do with the relationship between science and faith, you can find my discussion of the topic here.

Although our seeking exploration covered more than a dozen topics, I have chosen to share today four of the questions that struck me as particularly interesting. These are topics where young scientists are rightfully curious, and problems that skeptical trainees must confront to make sense of a world where their personal lives and experiences are balanced with professional lives involving measurements and the reproducibility of experiments, and ideas touching on the invisibly small molecular machines of life.

As background, this is my church home, Autumn Ridge Church in Rochester, Minnesota. I have been privileged to have volunteer leadership opportunities in this large and diverse Christian congregation. I continue to enjoy serving as a musician and I produce an Arts Series that for 13 seasons has brought two concerts with world-class performers to Southeast Minnesota each year.

I was raised in a church-going family that was part of a mainline denomination, but even after baptism and first communion and confirmation, I had never come to terms personally with the central claims of Christianity – that I constantly fail to live up to ethical standards of my own, let alone those of a holy and loving God, and that this God has paid a dear price to rescue me forever from my hopeless struggle, not because I am good, but because he is good. When I was 17 I finally understood personally the central proposition of Christianity and made my decision to dedicate my life to God in thanks for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for me. This faith decision has changed everything about how I understand the world and my place in it.

I am also a PhD molecular biologist. My BS and PhD degrees are from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and I did postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology before beginning my career as a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. I have had my current research and teaching position for 25 years.

This photo shows what I particularly love about my job – the chance to work with brilliant young scientists from all over the world. Perhaps it is not appreciated, but the majority of cutting-edge molecular biology that is done to address the unknowns of how life works is done by young apprentice scientists in their 20s. When I began my career, I was just a few years older than my student apprentices. Now they are slightly younger than my own adult children.

Working with extremely intelligent, skeptical, and productive students is a prescription for staying young. Their lives are turbulent and exciting – first partners, first jobs, first pets, first major failures and self-doubts, first major successes, first divorces, the first illnesses and deaths of family members, first true loneliness, first long distances from home, first doubts about career goals.

It is exciting to be a mentor to such students.

And they find themselves asking ‘why’ questions that are beyond the reach of the experimental science they do all day and many nights. ‘Why’ questions are every bit as important as ‘how’ questions, but science is not designed or equipped to answer ‘why’ questions. It is the ‘why’ questions that bring tearful students to my office to share their vulnerabilities and doubts and fears and shame with me, not infrequently. At these ‘why’ question times I have come to find it a privilege to listen and counsel and advise, even as the tears can be disarming. I ask myself ‘how would I want a professional colleague to treat one of my adult daughters at a stressful time such as this?’

It was in this context that I agreed to participate in a discussion of hard questions asked by very smart, seeking students. In many ways the student-requested discussion was something I had always hoped to do, and perhaps something I will do again.

I think what made me especially comfortable with it was that I wasn’t my idea.

So here are four of our group questions that I’ve chosen to share today.

Let’s begin with the first. “Are living things machines?”

In a sense, the answer is simple, and we know that it is “yes,” especially because of the work of Vesalius and van Calcar, as shown in this beautiful rendering from 1543. All living things are flesh and bone, bark and root at the macroscopic level, built from levers and pumps, sinews, meat and blood, tissue. Recognition of our own mechanistic character by dissection was one of the pillars of the enlightenment. Vesalius, da Vinci, Harvey all made seminal contributions.

But I’m here to answer the question with a more fundamental ‘yes’ than Vesalius or da Vinci or Harvey could have given. I’m here to affirm that living things, all of us, are digital machines all the way down to the nano level.

In fact, this is the realm of nanomachinery where I work. These nanomachines are millionths of inches small, invisible, but still absolutely mechanistic. The DNA code molecule shown in this picture is a mechanical ladder where the segment of rungs shown here is a millionth of an inch long, but the three billion rungs of ladder code in each human cell add up to 6 feet of invisibly thin double helix, packed with digital instructions encoded as a linear hard drive – two copies of every inherited instruction, one from mom, one from dad, needed to make another entire human identical to us.

Indeed, we are machinery all the way down to the nanodevices that form our cells.

The idea that DNA carries all the coded recipes for all of the nanomachines of life has always delighted and fascinated me. That’s why I still have this 6-foot-tall poster on the wall outside my office at work. It shows the map of the coded blueprint information, the recipe locations, for the 20,000+ recipes for all the nanomachines needed to make a human cell. The recipes have all been sequenced now – we know the code, so we can read this book of life and labs like mine study how the code is organized, how only some recipes are used at any given time, and what goes wrong when recipes have errors or are read at the wrong time and place in cells.

If we zoom in on this map, we start to see the locations of individual recipes, written into stretches of thousands of rungs of DNA ladder code, all coiled and folded and packed into volumes like a huge, complicated cookbook of recipes, organized in unexpected and perplexing ways.

We, and all living things, are machines all the way down to the nano scale. Here is an example of our digital code, written with the letters G,A,T,C to substitute for the chemical rung structures of DNA.

The code is read out by a copying machine and then a translation machine so the string of DNA is first rendered as an RNA copy, but then interpreted by translation so each group of three original DNA letters corresponds to one ‘bead’ on an eventual string of amino acid beads, that will fold into the functional protein nanomachines of life. These invisibly small proteins become the meat and bone and goo of living things.

How cool that scientists before us figured out this genetic code! How absolutely cool that all living things share the same code – there is just one universal digital language shared by everything that is alive – and we can read it! We scientists can copy and paste digital recipes and rewire cells to do new and different things – all because we are machines all the way down to the nano scale, and machines built from coded instructions, and coded instructions of just a single language for all living things.  In this example, the recipe code starts at the letters “ATG” and ends at the letters “TAA” with each triplet between indicating a different one of the 20 possible amino acid ‘beads’ forming this string that folds automatically to form this machine that we study in our lab.

This particular machine shown in red is part of a larger machine. We study it because when it is broken or missing, cells can grow out of control and become cancerous tumors.

Now here is something incredibly cool. Because we can read the genetic recipes written in the DNA of different living things, we can compare these recipes! In fact, it soon became clear that all living things are built from similar recipes, and the same kinds of nanomachines are doing their things in all of us, from humans to other animals, plants, bacteria…everything.

Here I have lined up the genetic recipes for one of the machines my lab studies in humans. The recipes for this machine are shown for bacteria, yeast, humans, and pigs. The recipes are shown with 20 different letters to represent the 20 different amino acids coded by the sequential triplets of G,A,T,C DNA letters I showed earlier. If we look at the code sequences for this nanomachine we quickly realized that the codes look similar! We can recognize the patterns and in some places the codes for this machine are identical in bacteria and humans! Where the codes aren’t identical, they are often similar. This machine is quite similar, even interchangeable, across many living things.

Not only are living things machines, but the digital codes in living things can be compared.

This was a HUGE discovery, because it means that we don’t have to just compare how living things look on the outside, we can actually read the instruction blueprint for each kind of living thing and compare the blueprints.

Scientists quickly came to terms with the similarities between living things:

This is where I want to share a very important point. Without any ax to grind, scientists began comparing the digital codes in living things. Scientists did something kind of obvious – they used the kinds of comparison tools used to compare the familiar codes that we humans call languages.

Few people doubt that languages are related, and that languages have descended from common ancestors. We see this in the similarities of certain languages, and we can recognize the sounds of words in other languages descended from common ancestors.

In fact, languages evolve. They change over time. As groups of people become separated, their languages drift and become different enough that different language groups can no longer communicate.

Here is a common tree diagram depicting the relationship between languages. The common ancestor languages can be deduced. I’ve never heard anyone claim that all languages were created at once in their present forms. It is self-evident from the codes that languages descended from common ancestors over long times.

Charles Darwin studied the macroscopic external appearance of plants and animals and deduced common ancestry, proposing an evolutionary theory for the relationship between all living things. Darwin did this based only on what he saw, kind of like trying to propose relationships between languages based only on how they sound.

How amazing was it then when, more than a century later, scientists realized they could compare the DNA codes inside of living things. This is like comparing languages as written codes rather than just by listening to the sounds of the words.

What became instantly clear is shown here. The same tools that show relationships between languages through common ancestors forming a language ‘tree’ revealed an absolutely analogous ‘tree of life.’ The best and most obvious explanation for this tree is exactly the same explanation as for the language tree – living things have evolved over time from common ancestors.

This wasn’t an evil scheme to destroy religious faith – it was simply the realization that Darwin’s insight based on appearances had been shown to be correct by reading the digital codes built into every living thing.

Amazing.

So are living things machines?  Yes. From what we can see right down to the nanoscale, they are all machinery – we are all machinery. And the digital coding of life makes it absolutely obvious that all living things are related to each other – and since the relationship looks just like the relationship between languages that have evolved from each other over long periods of time with change and separation, evolution over a long period of time is the obvious logical conclusion of this discovery that living things are machines based on digital code.

This "yes" conclusion prompted an obvious question in our discussion group. If living things are material, and the enlightenment moved us away from animism to a mechanistic view of life, is there any room left for the concept of a soul – an aspect of life that is beyond the mechanical – an aspect that might commune with a higher power, a creator if there is one – an aspect of life that lies on the ‘why’ dimension – an aspect of life that might transcend the mechanical and outlive the machinery?

What is a soul?

What a great question. I have blogged about this question in the past, so we discussed a possible direction for thinking about the soul. My argument has been based on the concept of emergent properties – properties of large and complex systems that are not readily explained by the properties of the component parts.

My analogy relates to the concept of ant colony behavior that isn’t predictable by studying individual ants. Ants are cool, but…

Ant colonies do lots of things that individual ants do not. These colonial behaviors are kinds of emergent properties observed only when hundreds or thousands of ants work together and we start to realize that there is a kind of ant colony “organism” that we only understand when we grasp that we can't understand the purpose of an individual ant, its ‘why,’ until we see it in context.

There is a possible analogy that gets us to the soul. It is the analogy between ant/colony and neuron/brain. It is entirely plausible that the 100 billion neuron cells of the human brain are the ants and the brain is the colony, replete with emergent properties unpredicted by the characteristics of neurons. These are properties like self-awareness, consciousness, selflessness, love, and the longing for connection to a purpose and the sensed yearning for the love of a creator.

I think this is such an interesting idea.

And it has fascinating implications that our group discussed.

First, if the soul is an emergent property of a complex brain, we must confront the fact that humans are not the only animals with complex brains. Are all creatures machines, but only humans have brains large enough to spawn emergent souls that are loved by a creator God and can commune with that God beyond this life? What if the different brains of all kinds of creatures generate different kinds of souls that are loved and find transcendence with such a God?

Wow.

Second, if the soul is an emergent property of a complex brain, what happens when that brain dies? An ant colony has no emergent properties when all individual ants are dead. There is no immortal emergent property of an ant colony except perhaps our memory that such a colony once existed. What of a soul that is an emergent property of a living brain? When the neurons cease to function, what of that soul? Here we discussed the notion of reincarnation, or in Christian terms, resurrection. If the soul is an emergent property of a complex brain, the soul is immortal if that physical brain can somehow be made immortal by resurrection – re-integration – recreation. If that brain is physically rebuilt in a manner that is timeless, a timeless soul re-emerges.

So, though by no means a trivial idea, the fact that living things are machines does not kill the idea that a transcendent soul could emerge from a complex mechanical brain. Such a soul is a way to understand the aspects of human life whose aesthetics provide ‘why’ answers in a mechanical universe that otherwise lacks them. As I have discussed in a previous post the idea that answers to ‘why’ questions are totally fair and desirable even though such answers are off limits for experimental science.

Our discussion group was made up of students trained in molecular biology, though each was studying different fields and questions. The group did find itself discussing the ethics of application of technology to the mechanism of living things. Since living things are machines, and since we increasingly understand that machinery, we are learning to engineer it. In some ways this is the story of medicine, and in some ways it is also the ancient story of selective breeding. The latter is just genetic engineering done in slow motion and without mechanistic insight.

But what of newer and faster techniques that allow us to engineer the digital blueprints present in the DNA of all living cells? As we change this blueprint information, we change the character of the cell. As that cell divides, we have the potential to change the character of the resulting organism – or even to make new kinds of organisms. Is this something to worry about?

The reason this is on our minds is the discovery and optimization of a wonderful and unexpected technology found buried within the deep inner workings of bacteria. This is an ideal example of a principle that I try to communicate to the lay public every chance I can – the revolutionary discoveries that change medicine for humans almost exclusively come from studies driven by curious scientists simply interested in how living things work, very often without any obvious connection to human health. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to promote and support the work of curious scientists – we simply don’t know what is going to turn out to be important for human medicine.

This is also exactly the case for the discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 machinery hidden in bacteria. 

We simply had no idea that bacteria carry their own immune systems, helping them fight off their own parasites!

Who knew?? We think of bacteria being the parasites, but they themselves have been in an ancient battle with their own parasitic viruses (called bacteriophages) and dangerous parasitic mobile DNA molecules.

The name of the CRISPR system (an acronym standing for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) illustrates the accidental way in which the system was discovered. The molecular nanomachinery that performs the immune functions was not discovered first. Rather, it was peculiar features of the genetic blueprint instructions for CRISPR in the bacterial DNA that caught the attention of DNA sequencing bacteriologists before they had the slightest ideas what was encoded by these DNA patterns. Remarkably, bacteria with CRISPR systems preserve a digital record of samples of the DNA codes of invading parasites so this library of code specimens is ready in the DNA blueprint of the bacterium itself, allowing every piece of DNA to be checked against this library, for safety.

Amazing? It is like a facial recognition system to destroy anyone depicted on a ’10 most wanted’ poster.

To appreciate this natural and unexpected bacterial technology and how it has been re-engineered by clever scientists, consider another analogy that I used in our group’s discussion of the ethics of CRISPR/Cas9. This analogy is a simple zipper.

The double-stranded DNA in cells is a molecular ladder twisted into a spiral, and it is in some ways like a zipper. The analogy is not perfect, but it is surprisingly good. We just have to remember that unlike the identical teeth in the zippers in our clothes, DNA zipper teeth come in 4 shapes, and the DNA zipper can’t zip unless the teeth match in a complementary way – DNA is a smart zipper.

Amazingly, the CRISPR system is like the single red zipper strand shown here without a partner. Let’s imagine that in this room full of people wearing clothes with zippers, each person’s zipper is slightly different as far as the sequence of the zipper teeth. If one of us is a dangerous criminal, how might we be detected? How about a zipper ID test? Let’s say we have a record of the order of teeth on one section of the criminal’s zipper, and it is available as this single red probe zipper. One way to find the criminal is to allow this single red probe zipper to test for matches with all the zippers on the clothes of the people in this room.

Seems crazy, but that is exactly how the CRISPR system works.

The CRISPR system has a zipper tab that can start probing almost anywhere along any zipper. Prying into the target zipper, it inserts its red single zipper and tests for a match to the potential criminal sequence by zipping. 

Most zipper teeth won’t match and the CRISPR system then disengages harmlessly. However, if a perfect match is found all the way along the teeth of the red single probe zipper, the fully-zipped product triggers a clever machine that physically cuts the target zipper so it can no longer close.

[Reflect for a moment on the implication in the analogy for the criminal in this room if the recognized and destroyed zipper is the one that keeps the criminal’s pants closed.]

Here is a molecular view of the actual CRISPR/Cas9 machinery, also less than a millionth of an inch in size. I colored it so the red single zipper is red, and the grey target zipper whose tooth order is being checked is grey. In this picture, the green stuff is the protein that acts as both the zipper tab that is inserted in the target zipper to do the checking, and the scissors that are activated if a perfect match is found.

Our discussion group, being made up of molecular biologists, was somewhat familiar with this molecular machine, so we reviewed it as well as its unlikely discovery within bacteria, and its subsequent engineering. This engineering means that the little machines can now be engineered with whatever red single zipper tooth sequence we want, so the machines will scan and cut target DNA zippers only where we wish.

Cutting a target zipper DNA in a living cell has the interesting effect of triggering the cell to undertake a haphazard repair attempt that results in a repaired zipper with a kind of scar that has a slightly different sequence of teeth than the original, often destroying the meaning of the code. These errors can destroy the genetic recipe encoded by the target zipper sequence, allowing scientists to edit (crudely for now) the recipe list.

One of the big challenges is getting the red single zipper inside of cells where it can do its job. That’s one of the things we work on in our lab, but that is also a different story…

So, the question our group asked was whether we should be alarmed by the availability of this CRISPR technology, stolen from bacteria, and engineered to alter gene recipes in any organism, including humans.

The group reflected on the fact that this kind of gene editing might be applied in two general ways.

If the gene edit is made in a normal body cell (a “somatic” cell) of an organism such as a human patient, the change stays in that patient and is not passed along to offspring.

If, however, doctors or scientists figure out how to make the gene change in one of the eggs or sperm ( the ‘germ cells’) of a human patient, their DNA is then included in the new fertilized embryo to create the genetic recipes for the baby. In fact, every single one of the trillions of cells in the resulting baby would inherit the same gene change made by CRISPR in the egg or sperm. Such technology has powerful implications that have already triggered ill-considered attempts to alter eggs so the resulting babies have a designed gene change in every cell. These changes would then be inherited by their offspring, and the human race altered a little bit by the effort.

Such “germline” gene editing is currently illegal, and our group agreed that it is premature to consider the idea of “medicine” that alters families now and in perpetuity. We’re just not smart enough to understand the implications of this kind of medicine.

On the other hand, editing DNA within the somatic cells of an individual patient is not nearly as ominous, as the effects are limited to that individual.

We concluded that we should not be alarmed by the availability of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. It is a tool, neither good nor bad. We should explain the tool to the public, and help guide ethical use of the tool. For now, that means limiting its use to the editing of somatic cells where it may be of use as a new kind of precision medicine in some patients.

This then brings us to a fourth discussion topic that I found particularly interesting. 

The students asked why so many Christians are so frightened by the ideas of an ancient earth and evolutionary origins. As scientists, we wanted to appreciate the source of these fears and concerns in order to improve our dialog with Christian people who feel threatened by these very important scientific concepts. We also wanted to explore whether there is something about Christianity that is inconsistent with the findings of science.

Are Christianity and science complementary ways of discovering and understanding the same truth, or are they inconsistent?

Those familiar with my blog know that I’ve posted several things about this issue before – here, here, here, and this video.

As we discussed with our discussion group, I believe the central issue comes down to this illustration and how we choose to understand the written documents of Judaism and Christianity, what we call the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Christians derive their understanding of God from these documents, and Evangelical Christians believe that the documents are worth studying. The question is ‘in what sense are these documents true?’ Some Christians see the biblical documents as if they were a textbook, all written in one coherent format, as if by one author, all for one purpose. I show here one of my favorite textbooks, Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, as an example. Textbooks are one kind of literature, and we understand them by studying them in a certain way.

I have argued that the Bible is not a textbook. It is much more interesting than that. The Bible is a scrapbook. Scrapbooks (at least those like my own scrapbook, shown here) are full of mysteries and surprises and puzzles, contradictions, delights.

The Bible is a scrapbook and it does not reveal many ‘how’s (as it would if it were a textbook), but it does reveal many ‘why’s. This makes it a particularly unique and important collection of documents reflecting the contributions of dozens of authors over centuries of time.

So, part of the fear of some Christians about scientific evidence for an ancient earth and evolutionary origins can be traced to the desire to read and understand the Bible as a textbook.

We discussed another likely contributor to discomfort about an ancient earth and evolutionary origins – the truth of these concepts tends to reduce the special importance of humans.

This is a problem because we like to be especially important.

I like this quote from pastor Rick Warren. Rick makes the point that we like to think of the universe from the reference frame of…us. The Bible meets us in this reference frame, but that doesn’t mean that it is the ultimate reference frame – it is simply the only reference frame our tiny minds can comprehend.

It hasn’t taken long for modern instruments descended from Galileo’s original telescope to remind us that our place in the universe is insignificant, as is the amount of time we have been living here.

Sobering but true.

Our discussion group thus decided that another reason some chafe against an ancient earth and evolutionary origins is that we find ourselves no longer the main event, the stars of the show. We are told in the Bible that we humans are specially loved and that have been purchased by God through an expensive and mysterious sacrifice.

But this doesn’t mean that we are unique. It doesn’t mean that God has no other love stories in other places, times, or universes. 

This image of earth from beyond Saturn might please Galileo, who was the first to see moons circling Jupiter, reminding us that the earth is not the center of everything.

In fact, the earth is the center of very little.

As I have posted, our place in the universe is unimaginably small. That a powerful and creative God is at all mindful of us is the miracle. The size of our planet relative to the size of known universe is on the same order as the size of a grain of sand relative to the size of the entire planet earth. On that massive scale the single sand grain is too small to matter – isn’t it?

Our group discussed my post that we humans may dislike the idea of evolutionary origins because it destroys the sense that human history is a significant part of the history of the universe.

It isn’t. The 10,000 years of recorded human civilization are to the age of the universe as the last two seconds of time are to the previous month. Inconsequential. Insignificant.

In the world we are discovering through science, the space and time of humanity lose their prime status. Rather than being obvious that a loving God must attend to us, it becomes unfathomably remarkable that we merit the least notice in the blink of time that we have occupied this dark corner of what may be just one universe of a multiverse.

No wonder some are discomforted by the ideas of an ancient earth and evolutionary origins. These ideas force us to rethink the Bible as textbook, requiring more homework to unpack the purpose of the biblical scrapbook. These ideas also force us to confront our insignificance.

Apparently the only reason our human story is important is because God says it is.

Our group discussed how these are not particularly new ideas, but they have been rediscovered over and over in history. This is one of the great reasons to study history and literature – to realize that we may be re-fighting intellectual battles that were already won by thinkers like Augustine and Galileo centuries ago. In his The Language of God, molecular biologist Francis Collins calls these the Lessons of Galileo.

I smile audaciously to then contribute my own quotation along the same line, and it sums up what our discussion group concluded in considering an ancient earth and evolutionary origins.

So, we come to the conclusion of this story of a remarkable group of seeking students and their willingness to ask important questions of a molecular biologist.

They knew that I have lived my live as a professional scientist and as a person of faith. They wanted some insight into how that combination can coexist. By the end of our sessions together, I had shared my own path to Christian faith, and I had tried to be honest and vulnerable about the feelings of guilt and loneliness that led me to investigate, and eventually accept, the claims of Jesus Christ.

We then talked about more than a dozen topics, including the four summarized here.

Thank you so much for your attention. Let’s have some discussion!

1.14.20

A reader comments:

I enjoyed reading your presentation - rigorous discussion around very complex topics. I am not a young earth proponent, but I do have one question: What is the difference between the DNA building blocks evolving over millions of years, like languages, into different species versus God using those building blocks to design life in more real time? Does the DNA profile look the same either way? Is the only difference the amount of time God used to complete the task (allowing / guiding macro evolution vs. a more "fast path" or micro evolution approach)?

Response:

Great question.

I use the language analogy to get us thinking. The biblical story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) might suggest that God created all the different languages at once by confusing the speakers of one original language with a single act. That’s what we would deduce if the Bible is a textbook. If the Bible is a scrapbook that includes stories and mythology meant to help explain things that are hard to explain (like different languages), then we are open to the possibility that the real origin of languages is different from the Babel story, or perhaps better stated, that the Babel story doesn’t likely explain the different languages we experience today. By studying the languages of today, we see that they are related in a way that points to common ancestry, and we can make diagrams that illustrate the likely family tree. As we watch language evolution we see that it is slow. It therefore seems more reasonable to explain the family tree of languages as being the result of a slow process of evolution, based on the principle that it is simplest to assume that processes currently observed are generally similar to processes that took place in the past. That means language evolution has been taking place over many thousands of years. Could God have created all languages in their current form very quickly, and then just created the appearance of a family tree of relationships because that is beautiful?  Sure. God can do almost anything except be untrue to himself. It is just easier to understand languages as having arisen by gradual processes. The only reason not to believe that is if we insist that the Babel story is taken as a textbook account and applied universally to all languages.

So, the same goes for the genetic relationships between organisms. Could God have quickly created all the kinds of organisms using a process that created the appearance of the genetic family tree that we see by gene sequencing, including genetic parasites and broken genes? Of course he could have. He can do almost anything. However, based on what we see going on now, and processes and the measured pace of genetic changes, and based on the assumption that current processes are generally a reasonable model for past processes (the simplest assumption of science where miracles aren’t invoked), the time to build the current genetic tree of life would be thousands of millions of years. This doesn’t mean that remarkable things like asteroid impacts haven’t occurred in earth history, so unusual events are allowed. My argument is that the simplest explanation for the tree of life, as for the tree of languages, is a long, slow process that appears random even if it is, in fact guided by God. Simplest explanations win in science. The only reason to invoke the hand of God in a sudden process that just imitates the slow process is insistence on understanding the Bible as if it were a textbook.

I’m quite convinced that the writers of the Bible never claim that it is a textbook (!), or that it should be understood as a homogeneous and uniform document containing a single style of literature. That’s why it doesn’t bother me at all to choose the simpler explanation that is more consistent with what we observe with our eyes and experiments, rather than reverting to seeing the world through the lens of a textbook reading of the Bible.

After all, it was insistence on a textbook reading of the Bible that suggested a geocentric universe, and that got Galileo in trouble when he found moons orbiting Jupiter rather than earth. My argument is that we long-ago learned that the textbook view of the Bible is not particularly valuable in astronomy and cosmology. We all pretty much understand that now.

It is taking longer to realize that the same is true for languages…and biology ☺.

The reader comments again:

That is a very helpful explanation, and I don't necessarily disagree with it.  I am not convinced, however, that just because one thinks there was miraculous intervention (i.e God sped up the process from what we observe today) it means that one reads the Bible as a textbook. I don't make that connection. I think the overwhelming scrapbook story of Scripture is that God intervened.   He certainly intervened in the incarnation. He could have also intervened in creation - and in fact did at some point in the process. "In the beginning God (vs. chance) created the heavens and the earth."  It seems to me we can have differing views of how he created and over what period of time without thinking of Scripture as a textbook.   Thoughts?

Response:

Yup. Good thoughts.

I would just make some comments about the concept of God “intervening.”  Though it is debated by theologians, my personal conviction is that God exists outside of time, and created time for his purposes without needing to exist within it. This is analogous to a playwright or composer creating an artistic product in the dimensions of her own existence. While the actual performance of the piece and its characters are trapped in time and space, the creator is not. Because we are creatures of the time dimension (akin to characters in the play), we have no real ability to fathom what the existence of the playwright (outside of time) is like. We are trapped in time and can only think about timelessness by analogy. My sense that God is timeless is based on hints from the Bible, and my instinct that God is master of everything, so of time as well. I could be wrong.

The reason that prior paragraph matters is that, if it is true, it means that God has never ‘intervened’ in the sense of inserting himself into a place or plot where he wasn’t previously involved. It’s like saying that the playwright became involved in her play only here and there. That doesn’t make any sense because the playwright is responsible for the entire play from conception to crafting of plot to conclusion. The playwright might choose to write herself into the play as a character here and there, so both audience and other characters would get to know her character, and she might even create plot lines where her actions in time have dramatic and real consequences for the other characters in the play. I would not say that this would be intervention. She wrote the whole play and just chose to enter the plot as a character here or there. The whole play was written knowing of those plot twists.

So I see God as having written into the fabric of time and space and what we perceive as random chance the plot and the story, right from what we see as the start, right through to what we will see as the end. We can’t conceive it because we are creatures of time. He has accomplished this to allow for what we perceive to be free will and he knew the outcome before setting the story in motion. Indeed, that is the most encouraging thing about this universe – that God told/is telling/will tell a beautiful story well worth telling, though we see it incompletely from the perspective of time.

Now as to God being able to manipulate time for his purposes, obviously from my comments above, he can do this if it suits him. I am more concerned in my advocacy for science and Christianity with the issue of credibility. This was the point of the slide with the quote from Augustine in my talk. If we stubbornly cling to certain textbook interpretations of biblical treatments of science and cosmology and astronomy and biology and other areas that the ancient authors could not address with any authority or insight, we risk discrediting ourselves as not having a message worth hearing on matters of faith and salvation. The world is suspicious that they will need to deny the implications of objective observation if they want to accept the Gospel. They do not. I think the “foolishness” of the message of the cross for those who are perishing (Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, 1:18) has nothing to do with Christians needing to ignore scientific evidence staring them in the face, it has to do with the paradox of losing one’s life to gain it.

By wrapping Christianity in an anti-intellectual package, we create an unnecessary obstacle, particularly in a city like ours. I think this is one of the central discussions for Christian leaders here over the coming years.

I am about removing obstacles.

decision

 [Earlier this week I was privileged to speak to several hundred middle school and high school students. This is what I said.]

Three years ago I had the chance to give a TED talk from this stage. That night I asked the question: “What is the most important machine in the world?”  You can find my TED talk on the internet if you’re curious about it.

Tonight I'm going to ask a different question: “What is the biggest decision you'll ever make?”

Let me ask that again – “What is the biggest decision you’ll will ever make?”

For a group of middle school and high school students, some of the easy answers that immediately come to mind are things like these:

What high school classes should I take? If I'm in middle school I'm looking ahead to that question. Even if I’m in high school I'm probably thinking about that too.

Should I go to college or tech school?

What college should I attend?

What should I study in college?

How am I going to find a partner in my life?

Should I buy a car? If I already have a car, should I buy a different car?

Should I live at home or move?

iOS or Android?

(Actually, that's a decision probably all of you have made already!)

Those are some of the obvious decisions that come to mind.

But, if I ask this question to students one-on-one, and when I read about the pressures that you are really facing, and when I sit down with students like you and get to know you, there are bigger and more difficult and more private and more personal decisions you're facing.

How far do I go with my partner sexually?

What do I do with my guilt feelings about viewing pornography?

What do I do about my friend who’s hooked on oxycodone or some other opioid or some other drug?

Who do I tell about my eating disorder?

I killed someone with my car when I was texting. How do I even go on with my life? (I heard that one last year)

What do I do with my worries about my own drinking problem?

How do I deal with my friend’s suicide?

Who do I tell that I've been cutting since my parents' divorce? (I heard that one last week)

Do I keep going to church? Why?

Who do I tell that I'm questioning my gender identity?

If we are honest, these are the harder questions and bigger decisions that are being faced by students right now in this room.

Tonight we’re going to think bit about the decisions that you are facing and how some of them are pretty big. Then I'm going to look back over my life, because I'm quite a bit older than you, and I am going to reflect on many of the decisions I have faced. Then I'm going to tell you about the biggest decision I ever made.

I'm going to challenge you that you probably face that same big decision.

 These are pictures of me from when I was your age.

When I was in middle school and high school there was no Internet and there were no cell phones so we had to create fun in old-school ways – things like finding out how many rice krispie bars I could fit in my mouth at once.

I also faced some big decisions when I was in high school. I had to decide if I wanted to be a professional musician in my life – I was both a classical musician and a rock musician and I love music.

I also had to think about whether I wanted to be an actor because I love drama and I love performing. Should I be an actor or musician or a scientist or doctor?

I also faced a big decision when I was a freshman in high school and had a large cancer operation. I had to decide how to manage the challenges of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and all the questions of my friends. How to go on as a cancer patient?

I also had a big decision because when I was a senior I met a girl who was a sophomore, and fell in love with her. Just three years later we were engaged and that was a big decision for both of us.

After a few years we faced decisions about starting a family and raising two daughters.

When they were little the decisions were challenging, but when I look back decades later I realize that the biggest decisions were about how to raise our girls so that we could eventually let them go. Those are big decisions that your parents are thinking about right now.

 Then our family faced many big decisions as we moved for my education. I was born in the Twin Cities and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where I got my college degree and my Ph.D. Then we had to decide about moving for more education. We moved to Los Angeles where I studied science at Caltech. Then we moved to my first job as a professor in Nebraska. Then more than 20 years ago we moved here to Mayo Clinic for me to be a scientist. Think of all the big decisions along the way as we made those moves with our family.

Now imagine all the decisions that I face every day as a research scientist. My research group has students and professional scientists and each day we have to decide how to study the problems that interest us in my lab. I have to decide how to raise the money we need for our science projects. I have to decide how to approach our science questions.

 And I now have other big decisions all the time as a leader in science. I am the Principal (they call it the Dean) of the graduate school at Mayo Clinic. That means I am always facing decisions about who should be our new graduate students, and how to serve them.

 There have been other big decisions in my life. I think of decisions that I have faced when serving in the community. I was fortunate to lead the committee that discussed the idea of the name for this church when it moved to this location 15 years ago. We wanted a name that would be welcoming to everyone. Not far from here is a street sign and that sign gave me the idea that maybe our new church should be named for its neighborhood rather than for a denomination. That's why the church is now called Autumn Ridge Church. That was a big decision.

Then I was the leader of the committee that designed and built this church. $25 million were raised and we had to decide how to invest in this facility – every detail, every room, every function. Our committee had more than 90 meetings to make all those big decisions.

Then I had the chance to lead the committee that designed the gymnasium addition you were just enjoying. We had to decide how to make it into a space that could serve as a gym for recreation,

 but also a flexible space to be transformed, like it was tonight, into a beautiful event center. Those were big decisions.

 And I had the idea that in our new building we might be able to host new activities and functions for the community. I decided on an arts series so that every year there are two big concerts where we invite national performing artists and welcome people from all over the region to come and enjoy music. Imagine all of the decisions that are needed to hire artists for concerts and organize volunteers and publicity for two big arts events every year! Those are a lot of big decisions.

So that is a look back at the many many big decisions I have faced in my life.

But what is the biggest decision I ever made…what is the biggest decision you’ll ever make?

That's what I want to talk about now.

To understand the biggest decision I ever made, we need to think about my family when I was in high school. I was a very successful student. I had straight A's and was co-valedictorian of my high school class. I was a National Merit Scholar and was constantly involved in many exciting activities in high school.

But my life was not perfect.

I remember that I was lonely. I had friends, but I really wanted a girlfriend. I wanted a girlfriend more than just about anything else. So I was lonely, but I also had other problems and concerns. For one thing, I felt guilty about the way that I had treated my little sister through much of her life. She was vulnerable but I would make fun of my sister in many ways, and I acted like a bully toward her. This made me feel guilty.

I had been raised in a church and had been going to church every week of my life.

 I had come to my own theology about God. In thinking about my desire for a girlfriend, but also my feelings of guilt about my behavior, I had the idea that God was a judge of my life. If I wanted something good, like a girlfriend, I thought that meant I needed to act better and please God so he would reward me. If I was bad and felt guilty about what I was doing wrong, I assumed that was why God was not rewarding me with a girlfriend in my life. 

It was a simple idea that God was the judge, and my job was to be as good as I could be to be rewarded.

The story of the biggest decision I ever made is because of a friend of mine named Tom.

Tom and I played high school basketball together when we were juniors. We were on the basketball team together and would often talk after practice. We lived near each other and would ride our bicycles home together after basketball.

One night in the fall of my junior year our practice was done and as we walked out to our bikes we began to talk about life. My friend Tom had been thinking more about God, and his relationship to God. He asked me that night – “Tell me about your relationship with God, and tell me who Jesus Christ is in your life?”

I was a little annoyed by this question because I had a simple relationship with God and didn’t want to talk about it. I told my friend Tom – “I don't need to think about Jesus Christ. I have a simple relationship with God. I try to do the best I can so God will reward me if I’m good. If I'm bad I expect that God will punish me or withhold good things from me. Jesus was a good teacher, but he died tragically. I don't need any special relationship with Jesus. I just have a relationship with God. Fanatics and Jesus freaks and fundamentalists talk about relationships with Jesus. Maybe you should just have a relationship with God like I do.”

My friend Tom was curious and persistent and he offered to give me two little booklets that explained Christianity more clearly. I didn't really want to read the booklets because I was annoyed about Tom’s question. I was afraid he was some kind of born-again Christian who was pushing some weird fanatical kind of Christianity on me. I was suspicious.

I did finally take the little booklets and started to read them. One was by a famous teacher named Billy Graham. The other was called Born Again. I wasn't very interested in the booklets at first and I didn't really want to read them, but I was a bit curious and they were short and easy to study. I was wondering if there could be more to my relationship with God than what I was experiencing.

As I read the booklets I was very surprised. The booklets explained teachings from the New Testament of the Bible. Even though I had gone to church all my life, I had never heard about how to experience a personal relationship with God.

Here are some of the examples of Bible verses that changed my thinking and led to the biggest decision of my life.

Some of these are statements from St. Paul. Paul had never met Jesus personally, but he was a Jew who understood how important the new principles of Christianity were. In his letter to the church at Rome, St. Paul taught these important principles. In the third chapter of Paul's letter he wrote “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

All have sinned.

This was a surprise to me because I was hoping that I could be good enough so that God would reward me with a girlfriend.

Here I learned that everyone falls short of God’s glory.

In the sixth chapter of Paul's letter he wrote “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This passage really surprised me.

Paul says that what I deserve in my life is separation from God. I don't deserve good things, like a girlfriend. Because of who I am, and how I behave, I deserve nothing from God. “But” is the next word. “But the gift of God… the gift of God… is eternal life, and it's through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This passage taught me that God has a gift for me. It's not something that I can earn or deserve.

It's not because I am good.

It's because he is good.

I didn't want to think about a relationship with Jesus Christ, but this passage says that the gift is through Jesus Christ.

In Chapter 5 of Paul’s letter to the Roman church Paul goes on to write that “God showed his love for us in this – while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

I was amazed. Even though I am intrinsically bad and don't deserve anything from God, Christ died for me even while I was bad.

God gave me a gift. Jesus paid for my sins.

One of the booklets shared a verse from the New Testament Gospel of John – a verse that most of us have heard about, even at football games. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not die but have everlasting life.”

What an amazing promise and gift.

Jesus has already paid for me and for all of my sins. My job isn't to try to be perfect and live well. It is to accept the gift of Jesus, and live my life thankfully.

What amazes me as I think back is that all of my life I had been going to a church where there was a breathtaking symbol of Jesus dying for me. I had not recognized the symbol or thought about it.

At my church in the front, above the alter, was a large wooden cross. On the cross was a beautiful and terrible larger-than-life wooden sculpture of my savior, Jesus Christ, dying for me. How could I have missed the huge implication of the sculpture?

I was trying to earn God's blessings.

Right in front of me was a sculpture showing my savior dying for me. He died in my place to pay for me.

When Jesus died on the cross, he paid for every sin and every act of failure and evil that I had ever committed.

He paid for every mistake and sin I will ever commit.

He paid for my whole life once and for all when he died.

What's more amazing – in that act he also paid for every sin you have ever committed. He paid for every sin you will ever commit.

More than that, Jesus paid for every sin that has ever been committed by anyone in the world.

And he paid for every sin that will ever be committed by anyone who ever lives.

Jesus's death was so amazing that it paid for everything and for everyone to start fresh.

Jesus' death redeemed the entire world forever.

That is the most amazing idea I have ever heard.

So what is the biggest decision you will ever make?

For me it was deciding that I would stop trying to earn God’s favor and accept that Jesus had already paid the price for me.

My biggest decision was to surrender my life to Jesus Christ.

My biggest decision was to ask Jesus Christ to be my savior and pay for me.

My biggest decision was to live the rest of my life being thankful for what God has done for me in Jesus.

I made that decision when I was a junior in high school. That night I got down on my knees in my room and I prayed a prayer of surrender to God. I'm going to pray a prayer like that again right now, and I ask you to close your eyes and listen as I pray. As I pray, if my words are touching you and you feel that they’re words that you want to make true in your own life, then pray them along with me and let your heart be changed. After I am finished praying, please keep your eyes closed as I’ll say a few more words.

Here is what I prayed that night.

Dear God, I have lived my whole life thinking that I can be good enough to earn things from you. I now know that that is not true. I have learned that you love me so much that you have paid for me through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. Thank you Jesus for dying for me. Thank you Jesus for paying with your life for all the sins of my life. Thank you for offering me your life to pay for me forever. I now accept you as my savior and I accept your life as payment for me. I want to surrender to you and let you live in me for the rest of my life. I want to live with you in heaven forever and I ask you to be my savior. Thank you for coming into my life now.

I prayed that simple prayer that night and gave up trying to be good enough for God. He changed my life that night.

It was the biggest decision of my life.

If you prayed along with me just now and feel that tonight you've come to understand that Jesus offered his life as payment for you, and if you would like to accept the gift of Jesus tonight, then with all eyes closed in this room, raise your hand for a moment to symbolize before God your acceptance of his love and gift for you tonight.

If this was your choice tonight then please let someone know this evening. Talk to a leader or tell a friend or mention it to a parent.

I will also be here in front so come and chat or ask questions about life with Jesus as your savior.

3.15.19

again

I have been blessed to enjoy Florida Christmas vacations with my wife’s family for almost 40 years.

For a Wisconsin native, these sunny weeks have been surreal. When the girls were young, I joked that even sharing half of the child-care load during the vacation week made me feel like I needed a subsequent real vacation.

Since the girls grew up, I often use the peaceful vacation time to plan logistics for the major arts series concert events I produce at our church, or to write creatively.

That was the case at Christmas of 2014. I began to envision a dramatic musical project about heaven.

It seems that everyone thinks about heaven, but few people talk about heaven. We all instinctively long for heaven, but we don’t know much about it. For Christians, we look to the Bible for guidance on how to know God and how to be rescued and how to become part of what Jesus called “the kingdom of heaven,” but we still find heaven to be a mystery. We are taught that every one of us needs to be forgiven when confronted by a perfect deity, and we learn that we can never earn this forgiveness. We learn that God offers forgiveness as a free gift – his rescue comes through his own goodness and sacrifice, not ours.

But what is heaven really about?

How will heaven address the great griefs of this life? Why do we long for a redemption and restoration that will undo the pain we now know only too well?

What about a child lost in an accident?

What about an innocent animal that enriches a life and teaches about death too soon?

What about the parent whose loss leaves a young woman empty before she has grown up?

I thought about the people in my life that have raised these pressing questions, and I thought about three stories I have written to honor them. If Christianity is true, if the rescue offered by Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead are real, if God will one day redeem and restore all of creation in this little particle of his universe, shouldn’t I address this unspoken longing?

Longing for heaven.

I guess I needed to be in my fifties before I could collect three of my stories about longing for heaven.

So I gathered them. Three stories about grief and longing for heaven. They all speak about the longing to experience the loved one again. Someday. Somehow. By God’s grace.

Again is a universal longing, so I named the collection Again.

One of the great joys in my life is being surrounded by creative friends who are willing to share my dreams and introduce me to more creative friends.

Four of those friends, Jeffry Swertfeger, Brian Dunbar, Tommy Rinkoski, and Evan Bonde, joined me for this creative project.

I envisioned a collection of original dramatic readings, music, and songs. These friends helped realize it. Jeffry wrote original songs for my friends to sing. Brian wrote and performed original musical scores to enhance the readings and he recorded the audio performances. Tommy edited my stories and created screenplays, and then recruited some of Rochester Minnesota’s finest actors. Evan patiently captured everything on camera.

We created a video of Again, saved for now as a template that could someday form the basis for a live performance. Live events carry amazing power, but they are so transient. So few people can attend. Since we are not certain of the prospects for the logistics needed for live performances of Again, I have chosen to preserve a simple video version here for now.

Besides the team that created these elements, superbly talented old and new friends read and sang their way through all of this original material for the recording.  Their creativity honors me beyond words. I am so thankful to Mollie Baker, Bria Carr, Jerry Casper, Tanner Fiek, Mariya Maragos, Nick Mezzacapa, Mick Nichols, Audrey Rinkoski, Cory Wentland, and Sue Zehasky for sharing their gifts for this project.

Who knows whether this work will ever be realized as a live performance? If you have 38 minutes and are curious, watch it here, and wonder with me why we each are wired to long for our own personal Again.

4.12.18

psalm 22

From our vantage point as western readers in 2018, it is difficult to remember that the biblical book of Psalms is a set of lyrics from a collection of worship songs whose music is long lost.

Removed from their original Hebrew context, we don’t sense them as poetry, let alone lyrics.

These were the ancient worship songs of Israel. Studying them teaches us something about worship songs. They are brutally honest expressions of every kind of human emotion.

Our modern worship songs are narrow in scope, telling God that he is good, telling God that we love him, reciting canonical truths about what he has accomplished for us. Those are not bad things, but the Psalms tell us that worship lyrics can be deeper.

Much deeper.

We can cry out in anger, fear, misery, frustration. We can express doubt and horror. We can blame and exaggerate and use sarcasm. The lyrics of the Psalms are often brutally honest and even confused. Reading these lyrics speaks permission for a deeper and more honest kind of singing in our worship of God.

I was reflecting on this as I read two contrasting psalms, both of them lyrics to songs whose melodies are long forgotten.

Psalm 23 is beloved. In The Message the translation is rendered:

God, my shepherd! I don't need a thing.
You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word,
you let me catch my breath
and send me in the right direction.

Even when the way goes through Death Valley,
I'm not afraid
when you walk at my side.
Your trusty shepherd's crook
makes me feel secure.

You serve me a six-course dinner
right in front of my enemies.
You revive my drooping head;
my cup brims with blessing.

Your beauty and love chase after me
every day of my life.
I'm back home in the house of God
for the rest of my life.

Many of us remember these lyrics in various other translations. The words are safe and comforting. These lyrics are what we expect in a reassuring worship song. We want to sing it over and over.

Yes, Psalm 23 is beautiful and it’s model for our own modern worship songs. That’s fine.

But what struck me, on reflection, were the lyrics to the song just before this one.

Psalm 22 starts like this:

God, God...my God! Why did you dump me
miles from nowhere?
Doubled up with pain, I call to God
all the day long. No answer. Nothing.
I keep at it all night, tossing and turning.

And you! Are you indifferent, above it all,
leaning back on the cushions of Israel's praise?
We know you were there for our parents:
they cried for your help and you gave it;
they trusted and lived a good life.

And here I am, a nothing-an earthworm,
something to step on, to squash.
Everyone pokes fun at me;
they make faces at me, they shake their heads:
"Let's see how God handles this one;
since God likes him so much, let him help him!”…

Not a conventional worship song? Too personal? Too depressing? Lyrics that accuse God of indifference in the midst of my suffering? Who would dare put that to music?

Who would remember lyrics like that in a time of despair?

I asked myself those questions.

Then I reflected on one of the most poignant truths in all of the Bible. 

Jesus Christ, my savior, hung suffering and dying on a Roman cross, the ultimate innocent lamb paying once and for all for your imperfections and shortcomings…paying once and for all for my imperfections and shortcomings. As he suffered there what came to his lips were lyrics from an ancient song he had known since childhood. Songs have a way of transcending logic and speaking when isolated words can’t. Jesus used lyrics to speak beyond time. We’re not told that he sung these words, but he might well have.

Jesus didn’t sing lyrics from the encouraging Psalm 23.

He chose the lyrics of Psalm 22.

Matthew 27 records the moment:

From noon to three, the whole earth was dark. Around mid-afternoon Jesus groaned out of the depths, crying loudly, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

At that moment he sang an ancient worship song to us.

We don’t need to be afraid of honest worship songs like that.

He wasn’t.


4.10.18

election 2016

  
Dearest Liz and Chris

It is easy to become frustrated or even furious when we sense what we interpret as ignorance in our society, and especially when we perceive it in our friends. 

I want to remind you of something that we have tried to elevate in your lives above even knowledge and insight.  It is why we eagerly sent you to public schools, and why your grandparents invested in your college education at large public universities. 

It was to learn the concept of tolerance and the ability to make friends and communicate with all kinds of people, including people you may feel are uneducated, biased, or misled. 

In our civil society, our hope is in the ability to love and serve even (and especially) those with whom we disagree. We have no hope of dialog or change unless we have communication and mutual respect. Using insulting and dismissive language will not change our society. Unconditional love, and an ear to understand the concerns of others are necessary. 

While it may appear misguided to us, there are some who are much more influenced by what they believe to be the impact of a presidential candidate on the future supreme court, or national security, or the growing size of government, or the right to bear arms, or many other issues that might seem subordinate to us. 

Some act simply on an instinct for change because they feel unempowered. 

As an example, our faith community attracted us because we agree to love and serve each other and together build ministries to serve others and introduce them to Jesus Christ, even though we may disagree on politics. Our imperative to love and serve others and explain the love of Jesus to them does not depend on our politics or their politics or who ends up as president. 

For what it is worth, my approach is to build relationships that allow me to understand why another person might think differently about the world than me. Only then does it make sense to try to explore those feelings and discover if more information could lead to a different opinion. I also enjoy working with people who may have different politics by choosing projects where we can agree to serve together. This then earns a sense of trust and appreciation that might lead to dialog, eventually. 

Don’t be discouraged. I’m not. I love my friends not because of their politics or in spite of their politics, but because they are my friends.

Feynman

I received an amazing gift in the mail today.

I had wanted to be an architect…or maybe an archeologist…or a musician. As I started college in 1979 I told people I was pre-med and then began to imagine an MD-PhD trajectory. Truth be told, I think I gravitated toward that dual degree target mostly to impress other people during those early college years. I probably had the grades and the standardized test skills. I had a medical history so there was the needed curiosity. On the other hand, I had never asked myself whether I had the needed commitment to service and empathy, or to teamwork, or to joining the healthcare machine. By 1982 I knew my undergraduate BS honors degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison would be in molecular biology. It was time to decide if medicine or science or both were really in the cards for me.

The answer came through several scientists who served as role models. None was more important than Bill Dove. Bill was a remarkable scientist at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at Madison. With his wife, Alexandra, he led a genetics research lab with interests spanning bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold that shape-shifts), and the developmental genetics and cancer genetics of mice. Bill's example taught me that it was possible for scientific curiosity to take a research laboratory in multiple directions simultaneously. Bill's career taught me that physical chemical thinking could connect to genetics and to developmental biology and to cancer biology, and that a single scientist could make those connections. Bill's career also taught me that the history of molecular biology was amazingly brief, and that in the 1980's individual scientists could be connected with all of the founders of the discipline.

And Bill taught me about Caltech.

Actually, it wasn't Bill that taught me directly, it was the books on Bill's office shelves. Early in my internship with Bill at McArdle, I had a mix of labwork and office tasks. In those pre-computer days, the clerical work included filing of reprints and organizing books and papers. Bill's narrow office included a rudimentary bookshelf assembled from bricks and wood. On it was a treasure trove of textbooks and notebooks. Some were dusty, some were in frequent use. As my organizational assignments often took me to these shelves, I began to be familiar with the titles there. One red 3-volume hard-cover set of books often caught my eye. It was a collection called Lectures on Physics. The books embodied an unprecedented freshman physics curriculum developed at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena at about the time I was born. The curriculum was the entirely unconventional product of the mind of the incomparable Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, shortly after the textbook collection had been written.

Feynman was a character.

Besides being willing to teach freshman physics and develop his own original 3-volume curriculum, he was an avid traveler, a frank speaker, a dabbler in hallucinogenic drugs, a man fascinated by languages, and a bongo player. I had heard of Feynman, but paging through these textbooks piqued my curiosity in new ways. What was Caltech like? Why were these books on Bill's shelf?

Bill Dove had done his PhD in the physical chemistry of DNA with Norman Davidson, a Caltech physicist who had been part of the Manhattan Project. Dove's PhD was granted in 1962, when Feynman was finishing his Lectures on Physics for Caltech undergraduates studying a few buildings away. Bill Dove had been part of the interdisciplinary academic and intellectual life at Caltech. I found myself daydreaming of that mystique. It occupied a place in the background of my thoughts.

It was in the Dove lab that I realized that the entrepreneurial independence of the career of a PhD scientist fit my personality. Though not a lover of risk, those that know me will affirm that I thrive when I'm in charge. I didn't want to be at the beck and call of a pager, or told what my patient schedule was going to be. I didn't want a boss. My experience in the Dove lab sealed my fate–I wanted to be a scientist like Bill Dove, or at least a weak impression of him.

After my transformation in the Dove laboratory, these aspirations led me to a PhD in molecular biology and a thesis project in the human oncology lab of Bruce Dolnick at the interface of chemistry and biology. In 1988, after considering postdoctoral opportunities in Cambridge England, Amsterdam, Montpellier France, and Boulder Colorado, I was drawn irresistibly to creative molecular biology and chemistry work being done independently by Peter Dervan and Barbara Wold at…Caltech.

In a sense, my professional dream came true when I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship there in 1988. It changed my life. The mystique was still present. Richard Feynman died just after Laura and I chose our apartment in Pasadena. His name was still spoken quietly and with reverence when I began my work in those hallowed halls that summer.

Now, 28 years later, I'm 55 and a professional molecular biologist. I will never attain the impact of Bill Dove, but I keep trying. At a retirement celebration for him a year ago we spoke about legacies and threads that link people and careers. As Bill planned the contraction of his office in retirement, he kindly asked me if there were any particular items that held special meaning for me. It was a profoundly generous question. I thought for just a moment and then replied.

A year later, Bill's office transformation in Madison is complete. How do I know? It is because of what I received in a heavy, lovingly packed cardboard box today.

There are only a few possessions in my life that I would truly describe as "cherished." That list just got a little longer.

9.1.2016

Rome

A friend of mine will be spending the fall in Rome. I wrote to wish him well:

Dear Peter-

Congratulations on your opportunity to spend this semester abroad, in particular, in Rome!  How exciting. I have no doubt that you will have a remarkable time with plenty of experiences that will change your life.

Enjoy every one of them!

I wanted to send you off with some thoughts that you may find a bit different from what others are saying. Because you have given your life to Jesus Christ, and depend on him for your identity and purpose, I wanted to reflect a minute on perhaps the most important letter recorded in the Bible. It is the letter of Saint Paul to the church in Rome. It was written by Paul from the city of Corinth, in Greece. The date of writing was approximately 56 AD, when Paul was about 60 years old. Since you will be living in Rome, I thought this was a good time to review why Paul's letter to the Romans is so amazing and important. Bear with me. If you are bored on your flight to Italy, maybe it would be a good time to read the whole letter. For now, just a few comments on some of the most amazing parts.

Paul was born in about 4 BC in Tarsus, a city in southern Turkey. We don't know too much about him, but it touches me to realize that he was about the same age as Jesus Christ, though they never met before Jesus was crucified in the early 30's AD. Paul's original name was Saul, and he was an orthodox Jew, a man of extreme integrity and determination to keep Judaism pure. As you will recall from the Book of Acts, Saul was miraculously converted from a persecutor of early Christians to the greatest missionary of the early church. His passion was to explain about Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, that is, to non-Jews. Without the life and ministry of Paul, the spread of Christianity might have largely been limited to Jewish communities. Paul changed the world. His ministry is why you and I heard a clear explanation of how God has pursued us, paying our own debts of evil through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us.

So what is so important about Paul's letter to the early church at Rome? It is a letter that clarified the central truths of Christianity in ways that have been helping change lives ever since. The letter is rich with Paul's theological teaching (after all, he was an expert in the Jewish scriptures so he could explain in detail how the life and death of Jesus fulfilled the Jewish story, while changing everything). Though the entire letter is worth detailed study, there is a selection of very famous verses (statements) from this letter that have been used for centuries to help explain Christianity to those seeking to understand it. These verses helped convince me to give my life to Jesus Christ in 1978. As you reflect on them, keep in mind that as you live and study in Rome, you carry the legacy of Saint Paul, whose love for the people of the early church in Rome led him to write this letter. Recall that he was writing to early Gentile believers who were confused and still trying to understand his message.  This was hundreds of years before Emperor Constantine made Christianity into an imperial religion. Recall that Paul was writing about 20 years after his conversion experience in 36 AD. Reflect also on the fact that Paul probably was killed about 10 years after writing this letter. We don't know, but he may also have died in Rome under Emperor Nero.

Here are some of the amazing verses in this letter, and what they mean to me. Remember that it is always risky to select individual Bible verses and read them out of context. That is why I encourage you to read the entire letter.


Rom 3:10 There is no one righteous, not even one.
Rom 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

These two verses remind me that all humans are in the same boat – we fall short of God's standard. We stumble when it comes to the ten commandments, and even if we manage to avoid doing bad things, we leave good things undone. Worse, Jesus taught that our thought lives count against us as much as our actions. We all stand before God in need of restoration and redemption, and we don't have the tools to restore or redeem ourselves.


Rom 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

This amazing statement suggests that our rescue isn't about our goodness, but about his goodness. It also tells us that there is nothing we can do to merit God's love. There is nothing we can do to make God love us more than he already does. We don't have to improve ourselves or get clean in order to be forgiven. Jesus died to pay for us just as we are. Sure, there are plenty of things that we can do to love God more, and to imitate his great unconditional love for us. Those things show our appreciation and thanks, but they won't make God love us more. He can't love us more.


Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This verse reminds me how wonderful is God's free gift. I had separated myself from him through my selfishness and pride. He has not given me what I deserved, but offers a gift of forgiveness, and a chance to be redefined forever. If I accept this gift, I am forever new, not seen by God in terms of my sin, but seen by him as his own son, Jesus Christ. I need not constantly worry about this new status – I have been adopted forever. Even as I continue to struggle to imitate him, he has defined me as saved permanently.


Rom 10:9 If you declare with your mouth "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Here I learn that accepting God's gift of new life doesn't involve achieving anything or maintaining anything on my part. It is a single decision and statement of faith and surrender to a new Lord. God pays my penalty once and for all, not because I am good, but because he is good.



As you have a wonderful fall in Rome, I pray that you remember and are always prepared to share Paul's ancient message to the Romans.

8.29.16

Inhibition

I am truly so fascinated when I attend wedding dances. I'm especially fascinated by wedding dances after Christian weddings involving churchgoers who I know and love.

I went to one last night.

What fascinates me is comparing the behavior at a wedding dance to the behavior at a worship service.

The behavior is so different and I'm trying to nail down why!

Last night we all had so much fun dancing and singing! People showed practically no inhibitions, even relatively quiet and demure people who are respectable and conservative in church services.  Everyone was on the dance floor leaving nothing behind! 

Such passion! Such joy!

Why are wedding dances fun but the same people glower and look like deer in the headlights in a worship service?

The same people.

I have some theories.

1. Joy. The wedding celebration is fun and it brings people joy. Worship is not and does not. Gulp. OK – if this is true, where are we failing in our worship theology? Does a couple need to get married before every worship service to inspire a celebration?

2. Ethanol. Let's be honest – ethanol helps reduce inhibitions. Maybe that is part of it.  If so, I can only say that either we should have ethanol in worship or we should consider that the Holy Spirit is at least as powerful as ethanol. Inhibitions and self-consciousness are huge obstacles to passionate worship. We haven't figured out how to overcome them in worship, at least not in my church. I didn't detect many self-conscious inhibitions last night at the wedding dance!

3.  Ambience.  We try to make our worship ambience encouraging of passion and transcendence. At a wedding dance this is so easy. The room is dark and there are flashing lights everywhere. Nobody is watching the DJ. People are dancing with joy, clapping, singing, and stomping. They are doing it for hours on end. During worship in church…not so much. At the dance most people knew most of the songs. They were pop/rock classics from the past 40 years, shared deep in our culture. People belted out the lyrics in full voice, unable to hear themselves, sharing happy memories of the songs. Not in church.

4. Examples. At a wedding dance the kids hit the floor hard and immediately with joy and passion. They basically create role models for the wallflowers who soon follow. Who is setting this passionate example in worship, granting permission to shed inhibitions?

5. Volume.  This is the observation that most inspires me. I listened carefully to the music at the dance last night. It was well above 95 dB the whole night. More importantly, it was dance music with simple messages inspiring simple joy. The subwoofer blasted punchy bass lines and powerful backbeats all night long. The sound carried the power to hit us right in the gut where the rock experience belongs!  Even more importantly: nobody complained! No critical comment cards were submitted – there was just joy and smiles and passionate abandon. People came expecting powerful music in that style and they embraced it.

What is going on??

These joyful dancers are the same people trapped motionless in their seats at a church worship service the same weekend.

Why? 

Is it unfair to compare worship to a wedding dance? If so, why? Why is our culture confused about this?

Why should so many Christians settle for passive, inhibited worship when they really do know how to party?

I'm beginning to understand why Jesus launched his ministry by supplying supplemental wine for a wedding dance.


5.15.16

the most important machine in the world

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A version of this story was presented as a TED talk. 
Watch the video at TEDx Zumbro River

What is the most important machine in the world?

The printing press?

The car?

The airplane?

The personal computer?

How about the smartphone?

I am going to argue that the most important machine in the world is the machine with the greatest number of copies on planet earth – the most abundant machine.

So what machine is that?

Is it the smartphone?

Manufacturers started marketing smartphones around 2005 with about 3 billion phones produced since then!

That's about 10 smartphones produced per second every day, every week, every month, every year!

The machine I'm talking about is stunningly more abundant than the smartphone.

Let's think about it.

About ten septillion (that is one followed by 24 zeros) copies of the most important machine in the world are created every second, every day, every week, every month, every year.

Wow. How is that even possible?

It turns out the honor of most abundant machine in the world doesn't go to any of the things we discussed, but to a very tiny machine - in fact a NANOMACHINE.

Nanomachines are machines whose size can be measured in nanometers (billionths of a meter). We don't think about them very often, but the most amazing machines on the planet are nanomachines like this one.

The most important machine in the world is really small. In fact, 2 million of these machines lined up end-to-end would reach just one inch.

Here's another illustration.

If you came with a friend, or don't mind bothering a stranger, pluck a single hair from their head for this demonstration. Go ahead, do it!

If you're not that daring, take a look at an arm hair.

You would need 4,000 copies of the most important machine in the world sitting end-to-end to reach across the thickness of a human hair.

The most important machine in the world is a nanomachine not designed or made by humans and not even found in the human body.  It is a nanomachine that is crucial for the existence of humans, and with respect to life on earth, you could argue that this nanomachine is more important than humans! From the perspective of the ecology of the earth and our biosphere, the most important machine in the world is absolutely necessary, and humans are not.

Isn't that a humbling thought?

I'm not saying that humans don't have important purposes. After all, I'm a man of faith and I'm convinced about a beautiful and joyful human purpose. I'm just saying that life on earth isn't all about us.

Let me take a few minutes to describe the most important machine in the world to help you understand why it is so amazing, and why the world absolutely depends on it...and why WE absolutely depend on it.

Let's take a tour of this amazing machine.

You can think of this machine as being made from 4,000 tiny beads arranged in 16 strings: 8 long and 8 short.  There are 20 different kinds of beads used in the strings, so the machine is very fancy. Even more amazing, the 16 strings each automatically fold up into complicated shapes that automatically assemble together to form the machine itself.

If you are a biochemist like me, you would say that the most important machine in the world is a nanomachine called a protein enzyme made up of strings of amino acids. But we don't need those fancy words for this story.

We see the 8 short strings folded into 8 beautiful, identical shapes.

Next we see the 8 long strings folded into pairs and packed together.

Finally we see all 16 chains assembled, each shown in a different color. 

I think the ways the tiny chains automatically fold into spirals and zig-zags is breathtaking.

Even more amazing, this is a self-assembling nanomachine!

OK – I know you are now curious, what is this machine and why is it the most important machine in the world?

The machine is named ribulose-1,5-bis-phosphate carboxylase.  Say that with me once...

Luckily, the machine has a nickname: RuBisCO. If there is one thing I want you to remember from this story (besides that I let you pull your neighbor's hair) it is this funny name.

Let's say it together one more time: RuBisCO.

What does RubisCO do that is so awesome?

It does something no human can do: RuBisCO makes sugar from sunlight and air.

RuBisCO is an enzyme that dramatically increases the speed of the most important chemistry of life: taking rare carbon dioxide molecules from the air, and gluing them into a cluster of carbon atoms to make a sugar called glucose. This is really the only way that glucose is made from scratch, and glucose sugar is really important.

Why is RuBisCO's job so hard? Because it turns out there is almost no carbon dioxide in the air!  Remember that CO₂ even in trace amounts is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat.

Here is a demonstration to show what I mean. It is sometimes helpful to imagine the different components of the air we breathe as if they were liquids.

80% of air is nitrogen. About 19% of air is the oxygen we breathe. About 1% of air is argon. How much of the air is carbon dioxide that RuBisCO needs to capture? Less than 0.04% (4 hundredths of one percent)! Even if I use purple dye to represent the CO₂, you can hardly see it. Imagine poor RuBisCO needing to fish carbon dioxide, CO₂, out of the air. It turns out that this is a really hard job, and RuBisCO can barely get the job done. Many protein enzymes perform thousands of cycles of their job every second. RuBisCO struggles to even capture a few molecules of carbon dioxide every second. Worse, it gets easily confused and sometimes accidentally captures a more abundant oxygen molecule. It ruins the chance to make sugar whenever that happens. These facts explain why RuBisCO needs to be so abundant on earth. It is struggling to get the job done.

So that explains what RuBisCO is, and what it does. 

Why is RuBisCO so important for humans?

Well, RuBisCO makes everything we eat, both plants and the animals that eat plants, and it makes all our fuels...anything we can burn, including fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gasoline, and modern fuels like wood and cellulose and everything made of sugar.

In case you missed it, that about sums up everything needed for human life!

And RuBisCO does all this just by grabbing carbon dioxide from the air. It's just about the only machine that we know that can do this.

If RuBisCO is the most important machine in the world, how do we get more RuBisCO?

Simple. 

More plants.

I'll let you think about that.

So what is the take-home message from this story?

RuBisCO is the most important machine in the world, but it is not designed or made by humans, it is not part of humans, it is crucial for human life, and from the perspective of life on earth it is more important that humans.  

RuBisCO reminds us that humans are beautiful and important, but the story of life on this planet isn't really about us. RuBisCO uses light energy and air to make all our fuels, and it is the only machine that can undo what we humans are doing every time we convert fuel into CO₂.

What is the most important machine in the world?

RuBisCO !

5.5.16