The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. (Psalm 19:1, NIV)
If you caught any of this week’s NCAA Men’s Division I golf tournament from Prairie Dunes, you may have noticed that the men from Stanford University, while eventually defeated in the match play portion of the event, cruised to a 9-shot victory in the medal portion. Stanford’s Cameron Wilson added the individual championship to the Cardinal’s success, too.
You may also have noticed something else about the Stanford team, something unusual. All Stanford’s players propelled their bags up and down those many rolling dunes by using push carts. For a high-caliber group of college athletes it looked so, well, unathletic.
But here’s the deal—and it makes sense when you’re talking about a storied academic institution like Stanford: there’s science behind what Stanford is doing. In fact, Dr. Neil Wolkodoff, medical director of the Colorado Center for Health and Sports Science, stepped up to defend the Cardinal squad when critics started chiming in.
A past study by Woldokoff had determined that walking with a push cart is not only equally exertive to carrying one’s bag and better on one’s back and knees (ask Tiger Woods about how critical those are), but that typical golfers who use push carts average five shots better per nine holes than those who shoulder their bags!
That, folks, is the science behind the Stanford push carts.
Many Christians aren’t sure what to make of science—at best. Others altogether fear it. Pharmaceutical inventions like the morning after pill challenge our ethics and macroevolution begs the questions of first cause and creation. We’re more comfortable singing “the heavens declare the glory of God” and leaving it at that.
But those Christians who have landed in scientific arenas—as a profession, a hobby, or a reading interest—often find that where science has made fixed discoveries, their appreciation of what God has done increases all the more. That is, when you know more comprehensively what the heavens (and earth) contain, the glory of God is revealed all the more and your worship of him is thereby heightened.
Science does not threaten God. In fact—though this may not be the intent of the majority of scientists at work today—science does a very nice job of revealing the designs of the Designer. Like theologians, scientists do not get everything right or understand the whole of what they are studying. But both are trying. And in the work of theologians and scientists alike, we touch this spot and that of the God we cannot get our arms around, the God who is behind it all.
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Jeff Hopper
May 29, 2014
Copyright 2014 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.