For me, 2023 has been a year of wonder, textbooks both new and soon to be new, and anticipation of semi-retirement. I thought it would be appropriate here to post some thoughts on these things as we head toward the celebration of our Savior’s birth and the end of the year.
In the wonder department, it seems that almost everything I read keeps pushing me in the same direction, that is, toward a greater appreciation of God’s presence in every particle of creation—every breath of wind, every ugly bug, every piece of firewood, every itsy-bitsy spider crawling on the edge of my reading table. A big chunk of this reading was the biochemistry text I inhabited this year, which was finished literally one hour ago. Cellular respiration, meiosis, and DNA transcription are simply stupendous beyond anything Hollywood or AI bots can produce or ever will. I don’t need new movies or the internet to be amazed—just thinking about the 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 different proteins the human body routinely produces is enough. Just a small sample of books I can recommend from my 2023 reading includes Let Them Eat Dirt, by B. Finlay and M. Arrieta, Children of Light, by Michael Denton, Songs from the Blue River, a collection of poetry by Paul Kingsnorth, and The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben.
This is something we American Christians don’t talk about near enough. I have long since stopped killing bugs I find in my house, for they too are part of creation (and useful as food for our birds and green anole lizards). Instead, I try to catch them and toss them out the door. Mosquitoes and fruit flies, when they get in, are so troublesome that it is hard to give them the same grace, but at least I try to kill them with an apology on my lips and a prayer in my heart.
My grandkids got into the spirit of this way of thinking a while back, and now they are a constant source of joy and rejoicing as they too observe the world around them and revel in the fascination of living in it. What better lesson can we pass on to our children than this? To know that Messiah Jesus is not only Savior but Creator of the wonder that surrounds us is life-changing and life-giving.
Moving on to the texts, it was indeed a thrill last spring to publish Life Science, by Tracy Creek. This book has been in the works for something like five years, and it was the first text for Novare Science to publish that was designed by someone other than yours truly. Indeed, one of the great things about becoming part of Classical Academic Press in 2020 was having real design talent for Novare Science’s new books. Our designer, Bill Wiist, is a talented artist and I love working with him. (You can find some of his other work on Amazon under the name William S. Wiist!)
Another great thing about releasing Life Science is that now I am working on only two textbook projects instead of three! And as of today, having finished Advanced Biology only this morning, it will soon be only one! I still have to finish up the lab book and the digital resources for Advanced Biology, but those are almost finished as well. So, in 2024, Advanced Biology will be taking its place in our growing catalog. The last remaining text is, of course, Environmental Science, which is now about 60% complete. Our plan is to have that one ready in 2025, at which time our catalog and program will be completed. Also in 2025, we are planning on a second edition of our popular text General Biology. This should not be too surprising, since we just finished going through the process of creating Advanced Biology. The writing, reviewing, and editing process is so intense that it was bound to illuminate a host of ways in which General Biology could be improved, and it did.
Finally, at the beginning of this ramble I mentioned something about anticipating semi-retirement. Yes, my friends, tempus fugit, as they say, and in addition, we just keep on getting older. It has now been almost 15 years since I started Novare Science, and frankly, I am starting to feel the need for slowing down. So starting in January, I will be taking advantage of the fact that we only have one major text project left. I will decrease the amount of time I spend working on text projects and increase the amount of time I spend with my four grandchildren and learning Latin. I will still be around for a couple years to answer questions and so on, but I may be a bit harder to catch. I am infinitely grateful to all our friends, fans, and customers for making this step possible. Fifteen years ago, I did not expect that I would enjoy any kind of retirement.
God is good. I wish you all an Advent and Christmas season filled with the love and peace of Christ. While enjoying the Holy Days with your family, take time to step outside and reflect on what God has made. Whether you see snow or sand, mountains or marsh, it is a beautiful expression of God’s love and he wants you to see it that way.
]]>Readers of this page probably know that Novare Science is presently working on a new Environmental Science text to be published in 2025. Our authors, Mark and Karen McReynolds, have completed the first eight chapters and the design work is done for the first four!
Each chapter in this text will contain a special feature highlighting the work of a Christian Creation Caregiver—someone who loves Jesus and is actively putting that love into action by caring for His creation in some way. Karen McReynolds tells me that she is still looking for individuals to highlight in the following areas:
If you know of someone whose work deserves to be highlighted in our text, please let us know at info@classicalsubjects.com!
]]>Recently, I was asked for advice on how to manage experiments for online chemistry classes. This is a very tough problem! The ideas I came up with should be of interest to both online schools and homeschool families. I present several alternatives here, beginning with the most demanding ones. Folks looking for more manageable plans should keep reading to Alternatives 4 and 5. All five options include having students perform at least a few experiments at home and I discuss this after presenting the five basic options.
The ideas in this essay could be applied to any online or at-home chemistry course, but for obvious reasons, I will assume that readers are using one of the two Novare Science chemistry texts, General Chemistry (GC) or Chemistry for Accelerated Students (CAS), along with the lab book Chemistry Experiments for High School at Home (CEHSH).
Alternative 1: Maximizes student experience.
If you want to maximize student experience with chemistry lab work, then students should perform all the experiments for themselves at home. (There are 17 for GC, 19 for CAS.) This option is the most labor intensive and the most expensive for the students and families, and would require the most time to procure materials, prepare solutions, and so on. The cost for going this route would be somewhere around $1000. Going with this option relieves the online instructor of the problem of how to conduct experiments via zoom, and provides the student with the full lab experience. If the time and expense are manageable, this is the best option. But in many online-instruction scenarios, teachers cannot expect families to spend this kind of money. Thus, alternatives are necessary. In Alternatives 2–5, the student lab work is limited to performing six experiments at home.
Alternative 2: Nearest possible approach to a traditional classroom.
Another academically rigorous plan would be for students to conduct a few experiments at home (the most manageable ones, requiring minimal apparatus and few chemicals), while the online teacher conducts other experiments live on camera, during class. However, this means a lot of work for online teachers, most of whom presumably teach from home. This is because for teachers to conduct any chemistry experiments at all requires apparatus, chemicals, one or two chemical storage cabinets, safety gear, and a lab work area equipped with sink and burner or stove, not to mention a camera setup that includes a front-view camera and an overhead-view camera, lighting, and probably an assistant or two to manage the production. This would be a lot easier to pull off if the teacher had access to an actual chemistry lab. Even so, the video production would still require significant effort.
Alternative 3: Separating the classroom instruction from the laboratory instruction.
This approach keeps the same student component but handles the teacher component differently. The school would separate the chemistry course credit into two pieces: one for the regular classroom instruction and a separate one for the laboratory work. These could be held at different times and taught by different instructors. The school would have to establish credit allocations in a way that motivated students to sign up for the lab component. For high school credit, colleges typically require science credits to be laboratory based, so we don't want to enable students to take the classroom piece without also taking the lab piece.
This alternative would be attractive if, for example, an online school had two different candidates for chemistry instruction, and the two people came with different strengths, resources, and time commitments. The advantage here is that both teachers could focus on one main task: one on implementing best practices for online instruction, and one on setting up for lab work in a video studio.
Alternative 4: Replacing the teacher experiments with videos.
A practical alternative to conducting experiments in front of a camera is to replace the teacher experiments with videos from YouTube. There are many to pick from, and the production quality varies a lot—from good to unwatchable. Still, spending time hunting down good videos may be more manageable than setting up a video lab.
Alternative 5: Replacing the teacher experiments with videos from Novare Science.
Actually, this alternative is not available yet (sorry)! But I am thinking I might be able to make videos of a dozen or so of the chemistry experiments within the next 2–3 years. This is not a promise, but I will see what I can do!
Student Experiments
Alternatives 2–5 above entail having the students conduct a few experiments themselves, at home. Below is a plan for doing that. All the information pertaining to instruction about safety, etc., applies equally to Alternative 1, which is for students to perform all the experiments at home.
Purchased items for six student experiments:
Apparatus |
Price |
Chemicals |
Price |
ring stand |
14.95 |
benzoic acid |
4.25 |
buret, 25 mL |
18.85 |
CuCl2×2H2O |
5.40 |
buret clamp |
8.50 |
HCl, 12M |
7.95 |
mass balance, 0.01 g |
39.95 |
acetic acid, 1M |
5.85 |
grad cylinder, 100 mL |
8.95 |
bromothymol blue |
4.95 |
grad cylinder, 500 mL, polypropylene |
7.80 |
NaOH |
6.00 |
volumetric flask, 100 mL |
9.95 |
KHP |
3.95 |
beaker, 600 mL, borosilicate glass |
5.95 |
litmus solution, 0.5% |
5.95 |
Erlenmeyer flask, 125 mL |
10.70 |
oxalic acid |
5.40 |
rubber stopper, #5 ½, with hole |
1.05 |
|
|
glass tubing |
— |
|
|
latex tubing |
— |
|
|
Total cost: $176.35. HST does not have the two tubing items listed, but these can be procured from Amazon for about $25, bringing the total cost to right at $200.
To conclude, many thanks to Dr. Joylynn Blake and Amber Morris, both at CAP's Scholé Academy, for the discussion in which these ideas were first fleshed out.
]]>To state the obvious, we live in challenging times. Here is why I mention this: Spiritual growth, that is, growth in our relationship to Christ and in our understanding of how to follow him, means constantly being willing to reassess our attitudes, behaviors, and practices in light of what the Spirit is teaching us. Growth means change—change of mind, change of heart, change of practice. But in our country at present, political dialog is ever more polarized, and people hear their leaders saying Don’t give an inch! Dig in! Hold the line! Thus, our current climate of polarization is a barrier to any growth in Christ if such growth involves anything political. But all environmental issues are simultaneously political issues—that’s just the nature of the situation. The result? Any article, like this one, that seeks to lead people to reconsider whether their priorities align with God’s priorities, and to be willing to change if they don’t, is dead on arrival unless readers are willing to put down polarization and read with a mind open to the voice of the Holy Spirit.
Now, I think a lot about the environmental mess we are in, how we got here, and what we are doing and are going to do to try to get out of it.
Yes, we are in a mess. Everyone knows this and everyone knows many of the specifics about this mess. The mess includes contamination of the entire earth with microplastics, environmental destruction (habitat loss, high rates of species loss, and so on); profound levels of pollution from pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers; and numerous global environmental crises due to the ongoing effects of incipient climate change.
And yes, if we want our grandchildren to have something like a beautiful world to live in, and food to eat, and some kind of political stability, we must try to get out of the mess. And yes, that means making changes to how we do things.
Should we care? In other words, does following Christ necessitate that we care? In a word, yes. As Jesus taught us, the second greatest commandment is that we love our neighbors as ourselves, and it is now obvious that if we cling to the practices that got us into the mess, things will get dire for a great number of people as food and water supplies become unstable or fail entirely in coming decades. Continuing our present practices is not loving our neighbors.
I am sometimes reminded that there are Christians who believe that Genesis 1:26 and Psalm 115:16 describe a blanket license for humans to exploit the creation at will for their own purposes. It is difficult to imagine how any Christ follower could adopt such a doctrine based on two brief texts divorced from everything else the Scriptures have to say about the relationship between God, the creation, and humans in particular. However, a few hundred years ago many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, thought they were serving God by burning people at the stake. A few centuries later, the heinous nature of such crimes is evident to all, and Christians do not think that way anymore. Only two hundred years ago, most of the Christians in the American South thought that forced enslavement based on race was morally legitimate. Today, slavery is our national shame, and we are quick to admit that it is hard to see how we could have been so wrong about something so obvious.
A century from now, Christians will look back on this present time and wonder how we could have misunderstood so completely the way we should act in relation to God’s creation.
Many have written entire books on this subject, demonstrating at length just how robustly the Scriptures affirm the doctrine of creation care. Here, I offer just two points for consideration—one from science and one from the Scriptures.
Over the past few decades, environmental science has shown the enormous extent to which all the organisms on this planet are interdependent. There is no doubt about the fact that if we continue wiping out species at the present rate the results for life on earth will be disastrous. One example: Numerous studies have revealed and confirmed the fact that over the past 30 years insect populations worldwide have declined by 60–70%. I first became aware of this only a few years ago, but it was not hard to perform a simple experiment to confirm this research finding. You see, I have lived in central Texas for a half century, and I know what used to happen when one drove down the highway at night for even 60 miles—the car windshield would be virtually opaque from splattered insects. But today, I drive the 80 miles from Austin to San Antonio late at night every month, and most of the time I complete the trip without hitting a single insect.
The decline of insect populations is very distressing news for the simple fact that the global food web depends heavily on insects: birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and even many mammals eat insects. Moreover, insects, along with wind and some birds, are the pollinators of the world. Without insects, our food supply in trouble. We do not need a creation care lesson from the Scriptures to know that we need to be supporting policies that will quickly and significantly change the way we are affecting the non-human life on this planet. This is a utilitarian argument, to be sure. My next argument is of a higher order. But when it comes to dealing effectively with our environmental challenges, I will take every good argument. The interdependence of all life, and of all life on the inanimate materials and processes in the air, in the water, and both in and on the land, necessitates that if we are to act even only in our own self-interest, we must care for and carefully steward every part of creation.
When we turn to the Scriptures, we find a consistent testimony. Psalm 148, for example, describes the “mountains and hills, fruit trees and all cedars, beasts and all livestock, creeping things and flying birds” as praising the name of the Lord. It is not credible to profess a love for God while abusing the creatures that are praising God. Does creation’s praise for the name of the Lord having any meaning? If so, then the creation—all parts of it, since Psalm 148 is clearly describing all of it—are intrinsically valuable as things that praise the Lord, day and night. As such, creation is something that God loves and thus something we should cherish. The logic here is not hard to follow. We do not have license to clear-cut forests, blow up mountains, poison rivers, contaminate fish populations, and eradicate species, all in the name of production, profit, development, and more profit. To be clear, we do have license to make use of creation, in a loving, managed, and sustainable way, to supply our own needs for food, water, shelter, and clothing. However, this is not what we are presently doing.
All creation praises the Lord and declares his glory. God not only accepts this praise; God also delights in what he has made. This too is a consistent testimony throughout the Scriptures. Genesis 1 depicts God as judging it all good and very good. In Luke 2:14, the angels announce God’s benediction on the earth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace.” God cares for the creation intimately, as Psalm 65 and Psalm 104 describe at length. Jesus calmly tells his listeners that God knows when every bird falls, which means, among other things, that God cares when one falls. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom speaks in the first person, describing her presence with the Lord throughout the process of creation.
The creation praises the Lord. The creation declares God’s glory. God delights in what he has made. God blesses the earth. God cares for the creation intimately. God cares about the death of a single bird. God made the entire creation with wisdom. The consistent message here is that we need to be about cherishing and protecting creation, not exploiting it. We need to repent. We need to change our priorities, habits, and practices. And we need to support and sponsor policies at every level and in every sphere that will protect and restore our damaged environment.
As the folks at A Rocha International like to say (check them out at arocha.org if you don’t know who they are), we need to make it part of our worship to care for the creation that God made and loves.
Are you interested in deeper study on this? Below I have listed some resources. There are many, many others.
My remarks in this post owe a lot to two books. The first is David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), perhaps the most difficult and demanding book I have ever read. (Studying it through took approximately 150 hours.) This book is superb on the theology of the Trinity, and on the notion that our theology of creation flows from our theology of the Trinity, ideas I repeat below as part of Thesis A. The language and quotes I use to describe the Trinity are from Hart. The second is Robert J. Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God (2010), the source for the idea I describe below as Thesis B.
——
As a science teacher and writer, I read a lot about science. But since science is the study of creation, I also study the theology of creation, the mystery of creation, and what I have come to call the Symphony of Creation.
Scripture describes the creation as one great symphony of praise to God, declaring his glory and delighting in its very existence. According to Psalm 19, creation declares the glory of God. Psalm 148 describes the Lord being praised by all creation, all things animate and inanimate—all the creatures of the deep, and the sun, moon, stars, mountains, hills, trees, fire, and hail; Psalm 65 describes the hills and valleys as girded with joy and singing and shouting together with joy; and Psalm 150 ends with, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.”
Scripture reveals much else about God’s relationship to creation: in Genesis 1, where he makes it and calls it good; in Psalm 104, a detailed account of God’s intimate, sustaining care for creation—he makes everything, the creation is essentially woven together with God’s majesty and joy, he provides all the creatures their food and shelter, everything is made with wisdom; and in Job 38–41, four continuous chapters of God taking delight in describing all the things he has made.
These aspects of creation are well known. But the Symphony of Creation is telling us something else about God, something enormous, but something that we almost always miss and that one rarely hears talked about or preached on. In fact, I have never heard anyone preach on it. This missing testimony is huge for science classes, but I have never heard about in any of the many science classes I have taken.
Let’s approach this missing theme by way of two questions. What is the reason for the creation? And what is the reason for us being part of it?
According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “the chief end of man” is “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” According to the Children’s Catechism, the reason God made us and all things was “for his own glory.” Not to criticize, but with only the briefest defense I am going to propose a different way of addressing both these questions, a way that I believe connects directly to how we should live every moment of our lives. As we have seen, Scripture describes many things about creation, what it reveals, and God’s relationship to it. But to really get at the heart of these questions of purpose, we need to go to the heart of what we know about God. And that is the thunderclap of revelation, found throughout the Scriptures, of God’s love.
There is a great deal in Scripture about love. A brief sample: In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul tells us that love is the greatest thing. The Lord Jesus said that the two greatest commandments are to love—first, to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength; second, to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30, 31). He even tells us we must love our enemies (Matthew 5:44). In his parable of the prodigal son, the unconditional love of the Father for both sons is the main point (Luke 15:11–32), and of course this is made explicit in John 3:16—God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son for us, and Romans 5:8—God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
This aspect of God’s love—the love behind the redemption—is what we do hear about. But I want to focus on 1 John 4 for the two points I am developing. The passage says twice that God is love—in verse 8 and again in verse 16. It also says that those who do not love do not know God (v. 8). The implications of this passage are what I have been leading up to.
The first point is this: The love that motivates the redemption is also the motivation for the creation in the beginning. The creation is here because of God’s overflowing, infinite love. This understanding of creation follows from our doctrine of the Trinity.
The theology of the Trinity, as articulated by early church Fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and many others, includes this: Within the Trinity is an eternal communion of infinite love, infinite joy, infinite peace, infinite light, infinite truth, infinite giving and receiving of the Father’s infinite beauty, infinite goodness, and infinite fullness of being. The doctrine of creation flows from the doctrine of the Trinity: the creation, from the infinite fullness of God’s being, is an outpouring of God’s infinite love in which he “utters himself” (think of Jesus Christ, the Word or Logos of God, through whom all things were made, John 1:1–3) in the infinitude of creation’s permutations—like a musical fugue with trillions of voices, one for every creature, star, and planet, or even one for every atom and all its movements.
In fact, the creation is a love song—a cosmically beautiful love song, because the Beauty of the Father and the Love of the Father and the Goodness of the Father are all eternally given and received within the Trinity; they are all infinite and flow forth unceasingly from him, through the Son and echoed and returned and shown to us by the Spirit. This is what the creation is. Every quasar, photon, resonance, atom, molecule, harmony, mountain, organism, movement, river, spiderweb—all are God’s expressions of himself as he utters himself in a constant display of infinite beauty and goodness flowing out of his overflowing infinite love. The point of the creation is love. The reason for the creation is love. And this love flows forth in overflowing fullness and infinite beauty as it never ceases in its permutations—one unique snowflake, leaf, crystal, orchid, and coral reef after another.
The creation is here because of love. This means creation is a gift, a precious gift, suffused with beauty, from our loving God to us, the ones he brought forth to share in his loving fellowship, which is infinite delight and infinite peace. You may have read C.S. Lewis’s brilliant line in The Weight of Glory, “You have never met a mere mortal.” Every person, made in the image and likeness of God, is divinely appointed to reflect God’s love and beauty to the rest of creation, declaring and witnessing to his glory. You are one of these! So am I. So is everyone.
In the economy of the Trinity, Beauty and Love dissolve into each other because both are ubiquitous—infinitely and eternally present. When contemplating God’s love, we are always simultaneously flooded with God’s beauty. Every expression of beauty in the universe is simultaneously an expression of God’s love, and also God’s goodness, joy, delight, and peace.
If we are not basking in the beauty of this love every minute, we are missing the very substance and content of the Symphony of Creation. We live and walk daily in the gushing forth of God’s love, announced—declared—shouted by every redbud, salamander, ladybug, and pelican. If during our day we hear only the sounds of our jobs, our phones, our politics, and our problems with the kids, we are missing the biggest thing—God’s outpouring of infinite love in the infinite beauty of the Symphony of Creation. God’s love is the reason for the creation, and creation constantly speaks this love to us. This is Part A of my thesis.
Thesis Part B is this: Love is not only the purpose for creation, it is also the meaning and purpose of our lives. Simply put, the reason we are here is to learn how to love, and to be perfected in love. Those who do not love do not know God, for God is love (1 John 4:8). So learning how to love is the reason we are here.
This should be the first thing we think in the morning and the last thing we think at night, and the living theme of our engagement with everything in between. This is what Jesus was talking about in his recitation of the two greatest commandments. And in understanding this purpose for our lives, we also understand what is meant by Kingdom life, life in the Kingdom of God, Christ’s Kingdom: Kingdom life is characterized by the overcoming of all conflict through love. Despite the victory already won by Jesus Christ through his resurrection, at the present time, we await the consummation of this victory—the world is still broken and conflict with opponents is inevitable. Do we seek to vanquish our opponents by being smarter or stronger than they are? Or more aggressive? Or even underhanded? Or deceitful? Or do we overcome conflict through love? This is what we are here to learn how to do. “Enjoy him forever”, as the Shorter Catechism says, given that God is love, necessarily means sharing, participating in, and being filled with the love of God. We must not miss this.
Knowing and internalizing the truth that the creation exists because of God’s love changes everything about how we see the world. A fish in a pond is not just a fish, fascinating though fish can be. The fish takes on an entirely new character as an expression of God’s love as God utters himself. A bird singing on a limb becomes the very voice of God. A green anole on a rock, so quiet and vulnerable, is an expression of the very character of the Creator. Even insects that we would normally find annoying, like a fruit fly in your house that keeps passing between you and the book you are reading, are suddenly seen as living expressions of God’s love, instances of the endless fugue of the Symphony of Creation.
Looking at creation this way is mind altering. As Christian science educators, it is simply essential that this theme should run through our classes as it if were an actual stream running right through our classrooms! Contemporary life has poisoned the way we look at creation—it has become unexceptional, uninteresting, and even boring, reduced to mere mindless matter and energy. To participate in the Symphony of Creation, we need to begin meditating on the expression of God’s love that is on display in every single object in creation. Extending C.S. Lewis’s beautiful statement, there are not only no mere mortals, there is no mere anything in creation.
Everything that exists is an instance of God’s grace, the grace of God’s gift of being. Even the materials we use exist because of God’s grace and are expressions of God’s love. The wood in a carpenter’s shop is beautiful and was made with love; the delightful smell of the wood shavings is an utterance of God’s love. The wool being sewn into a garment, the spices measured into a curry, the metals wound into guitar strings or rolled into organ pipes, the stone laid into the wall of a building—all are God’s self-utterances that exist because of God’s love expressing itself through the grace of being. As we go about doing various tasks throughout the day, we should do them in the conscious recognition that we are participating in the love of God through his gift at that moment, and that this is the source of its delight and beauty. It should occur to us that the delightful smell of the wood shavings is a beautiful gift of the love of God.
I invite us all to reflect on the bizarre contradiction between what most of us spend all our waking hours attending to and how little time we spend meditating on the centrality—in it all—of God’s love. We do think about God’s love in the redemption. What we generally don’t think about is that the entire creation is here because of God’s love, and that the reason for humans being in it is for us to learn how to love.
The last line in Dante’s Divine Comedy is “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” Dante is saying what I have been talking about—love is the reason for the creation. Every ant crawling on a branch outside your window is doing so because of God’s love. Every inchworm in the garden, every mockingbird on a wire, every barnacle on the side of a rock in the sea—they exist because of God’s love. This is my Thesis A.
My Thesis B is that the reason you and I are here is to learn how to love. Traditionally, the seven virtues, of which one is love, are divided into the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues. The cardinal virtues are justice, wisdom, fortitude, and temperance. We understand that one can develop these virtues through study, practice, and habit. The other three are the theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. These are understood to be gifts of God’s grace, through the Holy Spirit. They are not virtues one can develop by sheer force of habit; they are gifts of the Spirit. So, if anything I have written here makes sense to you, and you want to know where to start, the place to start is in prayer. Pray every day, maybe several times each day, that God would give you a heart of love, and by his grace help you learn the things you need to know most—how to love, and how to see his love in the creation. That is a prayer God will not fail to answer.
]]>Those following this blog will wish to note the recent changes on CAP's website. There is no longer a blog tab at the top of the home page. Instead, CAP's blogs—including the Novare Science blog—are now accessed from the Resources drop-down menu.
And for those not following the Novare Science blog: What are you waiting for? The Novare Science blog is where I continue to post reflections oriented around taking our work as science educators to new levels. Sign up!
And speaking of taking science education to new levels: I hope you saw the announcement about my new series at ClassicalU entitled Science and the Symphony of Creation. I think it is my best work yet. In the announcement I noted that the series is about all the stuff that should be going on in our science instruction other than the technical content of the science text, and there is a lot that should be going on. The more I think about it, the more I am persuaded that this "metacontent" is even more important than the science content. After all, the science content changes as scientific discovery proceeds. What does not change is the fact that creation does not invent or create itself—its being is contingent on the Ultimate Source of Being. Creation's meaning does not derive from itself, but from the One who loves so much that for sheer Love He exploded creation into existence and his own Incarnation in it as part of the bargain. It is this Cosmic Act of Participation with us and love for us that must define for us everything about the nature of our relationship with Him.
If science teachers stick merely to the laws of physics and chemistry in the texts, we create a false impression in our students minds of what science is, what its limits are, what the nature of the world is, what our place in the world is, and what the nature is of our relationship to God, the world, and our thinking about both.
One more thing: Also new at ClassicalU is the wonderful series of interview questions with David Bentley Hart, whom I have been reading and following intensively for several years. I commend these to you.
The year 2022 has been a violent one: The exhausting war in Ukraine, the ongoing terror of Covid-19, the calamity of financial upheaval in various markets, and the infinitely sad continuation of poverty and disease all over the world. In the midst of all this violence, there is only one source and place of Peace. May the Peace of Christ be with you in this Advent season.
]]>In fact—get ready—there is no such thing as an American buffalo, and there never has been. The animal pictured above, famed for being reduced by hunting and slaughter from its prime population of 60 million during the early 19th century to an incredible low of 541 animals in 1889, is one of two variations in the species of American bison, Bison bison. The one pictured is the plains bison, Bison bison bison. The other is the wood bison, Bison bison athabascae. (There is also a European bison found in—yes—Europe.) The only actual buffalos in the world are the various species of African buffalo, found in Africa, and the two species of water buffalo, Bubalus arnee (wild) and B. bubalis (domestic) found all over Asia.
How in the world did we start calling the American animal a buffalo—a term used ubiquitously? Because of the French, my friend. Apparently, in the early 17th century, when some French trappers saw a drawing of a bison they assumed it was an animal like the buffalo they knew of (somehow) found on other continents. The name stuck. In 1774, the correct term bison became official, but the old term is still in constant use. Even in songs you learned as a child.
Personally, I intend henceforth to say bison for the American critters. You may want to do the same in your science class. (And by the way, although the buffalo burger you see on a menu is actually a bison burger, buffalo mozzarella is named correctly—it is made with the milk of the water buffalo, Bubalus bubalis.) Now you know.
]]>Occasionally, I have an opportunity to talk with a teacher who is beginning to implement the Novare Science curriculum and finds that some parents raise questions about our mastery-learning approach. Even though mastery learning is supported by a huge body of research literature and has a pedigree going back to the great Benjamin Bloom, sometimes questions even come from people with credentials in the field of education.
In a recent interaction with a teacher, the teacher wrote, “There seems to be a significant portion of people that think science is all about “hands-on” learning. My guess is that their idea of science is a series of “experiments” (a better word might be teacher-led demonstrations) that end in some conclusion stating a scientific principle. Is there educational research or literature on whether (or not) that actually leads to understanding?”
I think the underlying issue here is the current popularity of so-called “discovery learning,” which is, in turn, related to the essentialism-constructivism debate. In brief, the educational philosophy of essentialism, which emerged in the literature in the first half of the 20th century, holds that there is a core of knowledge (math, literature, history, science, etc.) that should be passed on to students, including knowledge of one’s cultural heritage. Essentialist classrooms are often described as teacher-centered, where the teacher delivers content, and the role of the students is to learn what the teacher requires them to learn.
The newer educational philosophy of constructivism holds that all true learning occurs when students “construct” the knowledge for themselves by means of their own experiences. This is why the constructivist philosophy is often associated with “discovery learning.” Constructivist philosophy also holds that since each student’s experience is unique, each student’s learning will be unique as well. Constructivist classrooms are said to be student-centered, where the role of the teacher is to be more of a facilitator and less of a person who delivers content.
The essentialism-constructivism debate is a false dichotomy, and the claims people make in this context are often misinformed. The fact is that even in a traditional classroom structure there can and should be a lot of student “construction” going on. Moreover, some of the criticisms thrown at essentialism are simply criticisms of bad teaching, not the basic idea that there is an important core body of knowledge students should interact with.
Misconceptions and mischaracterizations have led to a great deal of confusion. For example, one website describing essentialism starts off with a video clip of a film produced in the 1950s. In the clip, the teacher mercilessly berates his high school students for their laziness and poor performance on a math exam, calling them “the worst class I have ever had.” Now, this sort of thing is not a characteristic of essentialism; it is simply a terrible and tyrannical way for a teacher to act. But the inclusion of the clip has the immediate effect of making essentialism look bad and making constructivism look good by comparison.
The language people use in this debate also makes constructivism appear superior to the traditional essentialism. Isn’t school all about the kids? Why would anyone want a teacher-centered classroom? Isn’t it obvious that classrooms should be student-centered?
But saying that essentialism necessarily implies a teacher-centered classroom is also a mischaracterization. The truth is that education, done well, should be a loving, communal enterprise. Neither the teacher nor the students are more important than the other and neither should dominate the other. Teachers and students are all humans made in the image of God; all should respect, serve, love, and speak the truth to each other. In the well-ordered classroom, there is a healthy balance of teacher-led and student-led activities and there is no dominant party. Of course, the teacher is the leader, but godly leadership is not domination; it is servant leadership in a context of mutual respect, submission, and cooperation.
I’ll discuss the well-ordered classroom more below as we consider some of the claims people make that emerge from the confusion of this conflict. Claims I have heard over the years include:
Let’s work our way through this list. First, to say that memorization is bad (because outdated or essentialist or whatever) is simplistic. Memorizing some things is necessary; memorizing some things is not. Almost no one opposes having elementary school students memorize the math facts. Knowing them is so useful both for learning more advanced math and for life in the modern world that school kids still memorize them in nearly every school. Memorization is also necessary for most foreign language study. Unless one is fortunate enough to learn by total emersion, most students must commit vocabulary and grammatical paradigms to memory by intentional practice. But is it necessary for chemistry students to memorize the periodic table of the elements? No, it isn’t. Thus, there is a right balance of things that should be intentionally memorized and things that can be looked up when necessary.
And, by the way, memorization is not just for kids. Who would trust a doctor who had not memorized the names of biological functions, diseases, and medications? Who would hire a CPA who didn’t know the bulk of the tax code by heart?
When talking with parents, teachers can point out that, contrary to what some people might assume, a reasonable measure of memorization is not equivalent to an outmoded methodology dominated by rote learning. In Novare Science courses, students are required to know a handful of unit conversion factors, physical constants, and equations. They must also memorize definitions of technical terms, just as students must do in nearly every discipline. In science courses, there are thousands of conversion factors and physical constants that students could be required to memorize. Novare courses focus on a few that are very handy, and the memorization requirements are limited to these. For example, in Introductory Physics (9th grade), students are required to know three physical constants, eight unit conversions (only four or five of which are not common knowledge), nine metric prefixes, and 14 equations. This is not a burdensome memorization load; it just takes some time to get the items down initially. Moreover, students don’t learn them all at once; they are spread throughout the year. And the practice problems students are constantly working help ensure that once memorized, they stay memorized.
In general, classical education does not shrink from the essentialist idea that there are some things in our heritage that students should know, and memorizing is often involved. Most classical educators would agree that memorizing poetry, key speeches from history or Shakespeare, major historical dates, and facts about major historical figures is important. Most classical Christian schools have elementary students memorizing a lot of Scripture, a great many songs, and a lot of scientific terminology.
Let’s move on to the next item. These days, lecturing seems out of fashion because of the buzz about “discovery learning.” Lecturing sounds like a boring, teacher-centered activity, and “discovery learning” sounds student-friendly and exciting. The fact is, a boring, teacher-centered lecture is just a bad lecture, at least in high school. (College courses are a different matter; I am not writing about those.) In a good lecture, the students are very involved, and with a lively, creative teacher a good lecture is far from boring.
Even more important, perhaps, is the misconception about what is and isn’t happening in a lecture. It is common to think that the purpose of a lecture on, say, working kinetic energy problems is to deliver content, with the goal of teaching students how to work kinetic energy problems. But that is not an accurate description of what is going on. What is occurring is simply an introduction, not the development of intimacy. If a friend introduces you to someone, you have only superficial knowledge of this new acquaintance. Intimate knowledge only comes when you spend a lot of time together. The same is true when the teacher works example problems on the board. All such problems look easy when students watch the teacher solving them. But they aren’t easy, and the students discover this when they begin trying to work the problems on their own. The students don’t gain intimate knowledge by watching the teacher; that only comes by spending time working a bunch of the problems. This activity is essentially a constructivist, hands-on activity—the students are constructing their own understanding of the ins and outs of working this kind of problem by doing the problem solving themselves, over and over. The mental construction involves first-hand experience with interpreting the problem statement, recognizing subtle details that supply key information, knowing what to do next at each step, correctly executing the mathematics, being aware of the kinds of errors one is likely to make, and, eventually, learning to recognize structural similarities to computations in other subjects. Thus, a creative lecture in physics followed by an assignment to work through a problem set is essentially a constructivist pair of learning activities, but they don’t appear to be, and they usually don’t get credit for being so. Instead, parents hearing about such a class may get the impression that the teacher is running an old-fashioned, teacher-centered classroom that emphasizes rote learning, none of which may be true.
The notion of the intrinsic value of “discovery learning” is the next myth to deal with. As smart as Aristotle was, and as much as he wrote about physics, he never did discover what chemical elements are and how chemical compounds are formed. It took an additional 2,200 years for an army of scientists to figure these things out. For students to go discover these for themselves would be beyond impossible. But a chemistry teacher can easily explain what elements are and how compounds are formed in about 10 minutes. What a time saver! Twenty-two hundred years of scientific discovery in 10 minutes! Discovering physics or mathematics or chemistry for oneself is not the point. But neither is the point for the teacher to fill students’ heads full of facts. The point of the classroom is for the teacher to lead the students in a learning adventure—revealing the wonder of the subject matter, engaging students in creative and rigorous activities that result in learning and mastery (with the attendant satisfaction that always attends mastery). Part of this adventure will involve engaging students in discourse—Socratic discourse—in which students respond, question, explain, debate, counter, challenge, answer, and struggle. The struggle of the Socratic dialog is the most ancient and the most reliable learning method there is. It is entirely constructivist and student-centered, but it doesn’t look like it, and again, doesn’t get the credit.
When I am trying on a new idea, I frequently use a Socratic process on myself. I just bring up the idea with a group of smart friends and see what happens as they attack it and I attempt to defend it. By defending the idea with all my might, I find out both whether the idea has merit and whether I understand it well enough.
Here is another thing about “discovery learning”: it is pretty much impossible to learn anything if you don’t already know something. It is possible, of course—babies do it all the time. But it is a slow, slow process. If you took an intelligent person from a primitive tribe and sat her down and said, “go learn chemistry; discover it for yourself,” the effort would be painfully slow. To speed it up, the teacher could prime the pump, so to speak: explain that everything is made of atoms, that there are 118 different kinds of atoms, with such and such chemical behavior, and so on. But now we are back to the supreme usefulness of the introductory lecture.
Yet another thing about discovery learning is the inherent cart-and-horse problem of knowing what needs to be discovered. If you tell students to go find an interesting project to work on and then hope they discover a bunch of science, you will be disappointed. Leadership by the teacher is crucial: the teacher knows (or should) what is important for the students to learn and what is of less significance; what knowledge is relatively easy to acquire and what is more laborious. The teacher should specify learning objectives pertaining to the significant topics. And the learning objectives should be coordinated as part of an overall disciplinary program spanning several grades. I hope it is clear that I am not arguing against “discovery learning.” I am merely saying that the process of students constructing knowledge by discovery is a process that takes place in any well-ordered classroom. It is not necessary to go and manufacture a lot of specific “discovery learning” activities. (It is necessary to avoid acting like the history teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That’s the point.)
I have already addressed the issue of the teacher-centered classroom. To summarize: just because a teacher is lecturing doesn’t mean the classroom is teacher centered; the way the teacher interacts with the students determines whether the learning environment is healthy, rich, and compelling. Moving on then to the last of those comments in the list above, we encounter the claim that homework and tests are obsolete. Dealing with this requires me to separate the two. To quote myself, homework is a necessary learning activity; it is not a legitimate indication of whether learning has occurred. Most people think homework is for grades; it isn’t, and I don’t give grades for it. Students must work through their assignments to learn; doing the homework is an essential part of the lesson. One cannot learn how to solve kinetic energy problems except by working a bunch of them. But this is not for an assessment or a grade; it is for learning. This situation is not unique to science and math. In a literature class, one of the best ways to learn how to talk and write about literature is to write papers. The initial outlines and drafts might be compared to the problem sets in physics—this is the practice phase of the lesson in which the student is constructing his or her own understanding. The final draft could be the equivalent of the test, where the assessment and grading occur. A similar process is going on in both cases.
Now let’s talk about tests. If humans were not fallen, I would agree that tests would be unnecessary. If every student were diligent, committed, responsible, timely, forthright, honest, and transparent, all the time, then we wouldn’t need tests at all. Learning would happen all by itself. We would just tell our students that everyone in the chemistry class needs to mastery stoichiometry, and bingo—the students would go after it like ants on an apple pie at a picnic.
We also would not need tests if each student simply worked one-on-one with a private tutor. The tutor would say “work this problem,” the student would do so, the tutor would be satisfied that the student knows his stuff, and they would move on to the next thing.
Sadly, we live in a fallen world and people must be held accountable. We also live in a complex and expensive world where individual instruction by an expert private tutor is available only to a privileged few. Administering tests addresses both challenges. Students are fallen, so they must be held accountable. Education is expensive, so teachers must assess the proficiency of many students simultaneously. (In a homeschool, this limitation is usually manifest differently—as lack of expertise; the effect is the same.) Given these realities, tests are properly regarded as a necessary instrument by which students demonstrate their proficiency.
Almost. I’ll conclude by acknowledging that there may be other school and classroom paradigms that are effective. I know of schools that seek to place the bulk of the learning process in a series of student-led projects. This is very difficult to do, and I don’t think it can be done at all unless the entire school is set up this way. Even then, teachers must still find ways of enabling students to acquire the basic knowledge they need in order to accomplish the project. And it is colossally difficult to ensure that every student project is associated with an academically rigorous set of learning objectives, and that these objectives encompass all of what students need to learn. I have seen many projects in which students put in a lot of time and effort to accomplish something relatively trivial. This is why these schools are rare. I applaud their efforts, but I think it likely that traditional classrooms will continue to be the norm, and teachers will be challenged to design creative lessons that engage the students at all levels, while leading them to mastery and long-term retention.
© 2022 John D. Mays]]>
O science teachers, consider the joys of your vocation! In this post, I want us to think about some of the amazing aspects of God’s creation and to reflect on some of the astonishing things God has said about his creation. I also want to reflect a bit on what we know and don’t know, and how these things relate to what we communicate when we teach science. Our reflections will lead eventually to a meditation on a short passage from Job 38.
My previous post touched on one of the non-textual components that should be part of science instruction. Today we consider another one—leading our students in being in creation and listening to what God reveals to us through his creation. But as I have said before, you can’t give what you don’t have. We cannot effectively lead students in being in creation and listening to creation unless we ourselves are practicing being in nature—first, just to be there (because being there is good in innumerable ways), second, to listen to what creation has to say, and third, to meditate on creation together with what the Scriptures have to say about creation. These practices are essential for us if we are to be effective science teachers.
Unique Joys of Teaching Science
It seems to me that there are unique aspects to our knowledge of nature, and these lead to some unique joys in teaching science. To explain, consider the teaching of history. Historians often know how things happened (the sequence of events leading up to an incident), but they rarely know why—at least not in teleological or ultimate terms. It is risky for historians (or anyone else) to speculate on the ultimate reasons surrounding why something happens because historical events can happen for any number of reasons—an act of human kindness, human error or sinfulness, natural processes, an attack by the Evil One, or an act of grace or judgment from God (and of course these categories are not mutually exclusive). We know why Pharaoh and his army were destroyed—we are told in the Scriptures; but for most events, historical and contemporary, it is not at all clear why they happen.
I think science teachers are sort of in the opposite position. Our scientific knowledge about how things happen is limited (though it may not seem so). But we do know a lot about the whys of the natural world. Consider the first question of all—Why does creation exist? Christianity has some robust answers to this question. In your theological tradition, the answer might come straight from the Westminster Children’s Catechism: For God’s glory. Recall the first three questions:
Q: Who made you?
A: God.
Q: What else did God make?
A: God made all things.
Q: Why did God make you and all things?
A: For his own glory.
I can still hear the lilt in my little daughters’ voices as they chanted these responses over 25 years ago!
Now, with all due respect to the Westminster divines, and to those who embrace the Westminster catechisms, as I have reflected on this answer over the decades, my answer to the why of creation has developed quite a bit. I have come to see the “God’s glory” answer as a shorthand for a more complex web of relationships. The creation exists because of God’s love—within the Trinity, for us, and for all creation. (This has a lot to do with the fact that the Logos—Christ—is in all things, and all things hold together in Him, as Colossians 1:17 and 3:11 declare.) The creation also exists because God wants to dwell with us—we as his people and he as our God (stated repeatedly in the Old Testament). God’s participation with us is a central element in creation, which itself entails the central element of the Incarnation. Further, we can say that the creation also exists because our destiny is union with God in Christ. These ideas are obviously cosmic, as cosmic as God’s plan for his creation, which he loves and called good.
Now let’s back up. What exactly do I mean when I say that our scientific knowledge is limited? Don’t we know a lot? Haven’t we put men on the moon and created carbon nanotubes? Yes, we certainly have discovered many amazing things, and have put them to use in fantastic technologies. But even so, the content of what we know is dwarfed by the volume of what we do not know. Scientifically speaking, how did we get here? We don’t know. How did the energy at the beginning of the universe form from nothing? We don’t know. How did life arise? We don’t know. What is it that happens when an organism dies—passes through that boundary between living (though perhaps injured or diseased) and not living? We don’t know. Why do radioactive atoms strictly follow statistical patterns in their decay rates, and what determines when a single atom of uranium will decay? We don’t know and perhaps cannot know. How does the brain in a developing unborn child generate 25,000 neurons per minute for nine months to produce a brain with a billion neurons, each connected to thousands of other neurons—especially when the human genome only has about 26,000 genes with which to generate the instructions that control all the myriad bodily processes? We don’t know.
“Now hold on there just a minute, buster!”—I can hear some of my friends saying. “We do know how man got here—God made him from the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life. That explanation is as plain as a periwinkle!” Well, I too relish the beauty and profundity of the Genesis narrative, but I do not understand periwinkles or any other flowering plants (a subject for later, perhaps). And it is certainly not adequate to say that after reading the Genesis narrative we know how man got here. That’s like saying that because we know what spiderwebs look like we understand how spiders know how to build those things. Just take a look at this picture and tell me if there is anything here that you don’t understand.
We don’t really know how we got here. However, I do suspect that there is a lot more to it than just saying poof! and there Adam was, blinking awake for the first time, dazed and marveling at the warmth of the sun on his bare shoulders, and wiggling his toes in the dirt.
“But hold on there, you reckless naysayer!” my other friends will say, “we do know how man got here—he evolved.” With all due respect, this explanation is no more illuminating than Genesis 2. It might even be less illuminating, but we don’t know that either. Even if there were some element of evolutionary process involved—and I’m not saying there was or there wasn’t—that is a far, far cry from explaining Man. There is still a lot more—way more—to it than that.
Let’s go back to what we do know—some profound things about the why of creation (none of which came from science). Why are hundreds if not thousands of physical parameters in nature fine-tuned for the benefit of human life? So that human life can be! Why must human life be? Because God loves us and wants to dwell with us. Why do things die? Scientifically, it is impossible to say. But in Psalm 104:29 God reveals to us a different way to answer this question about life in the world he made: “When you take away their breath they die and return to their dust.” This is the real answer to the question of why things die—they die because God takes their breath away.
Materialism—In Our Classrooms?
This kind of biblically informed thinking is really necessary to counteract the materialism that constantly tries to sneak in the back door of our science classes. And I’m not talking about public schools; I’m talking about materialism in Christian schools, because if all we do is cite scientific findings when explaining the creation to our students, then we are being materialistic. There is much more to say about the natural world than we can say or will ever be able to say merely from scientific research.
Some Christian educators try to combat materialism by wielding the Bible like a bludgeon to smash it: Bible verses and prayers in every chapter, in every class, on every page of a text. But such methods are heavy-handed, and students can find them off-putting. An example of this I once encountered in a chemistry text was the statement that atomic bonds are supposed to make us think of God’s power. Now, I would agree that some things do directly remind us of God’s power—storms at sea, for instance. The Bible even connects these together in the narrative of Jesus calming the storm. But it seems contrived to make the connection in the context of atomic bonding. The atomic bond is still very much a mystery to us, even though we may have cataloged the bonds with bonding theory, mathematically modeled the bonds with quantum mechanics, and described the bonds in terms of the mediation of bosons.
The persistence of mystery here provides us with a rich context for making much deeper connections with our students between creation and its Creator. For example: 1) the apparent limitlessness of the complexity in atoms—a complexity that seems to many (though not to all) to go far beyond what the human mind is capable of understanding; 2) the orderliness, regularity, and continuity in atomic bonds, which points like a flashing neon sign at the intelligence behind the natural order, God’s intelligence; and 3) the unbreachable wall of mystery surrounding the question of how energy and matter can be brought into existence, along with time itself, from nothing. That is, the mystery of reality—that this world is. We deny that it is a dream of God. We claim that it has objective existence apart from God. But when we say this, we don’t even know what we mean or what we are talking about. Probably there is no such thing as “objective existence apart from God.” We must teach these things to our students.
A Meditation
If we science teachers in Christian schools are to bring a biblical perspective on nature to our students, it is essential that we spend time in nature meditating on nature. We should, of course, encourage our students to do the same. (Such encouragement must be delivered while looking the student straight in the eye, communicating through the gravitas of your aspect that you do not consider it an exercise in futility to suggest that students take time to meditate.)
As an illustration of where our minds and spirits can go as we meditate on creation in light of God’s word, the following is an example meditation (a very short one), an attempt to think God’s thoughts after him—faith seeking understanding. The subject of this meditation is: The Sea.
Job 38:8–11
Or who shut in the sea with doors,
when it burst out from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed limits for it
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?
What can we know about the sea that goes beyond what science can tell us? Let the thoughts ramble . . .
If I may say so with reverence, throughout Job 38–41 God is essentially boasting about the works of his creation. His comments are all about the splendor and mystery in creation. In the passage from Job 38, we see God’s own love for the sea, his joy over it, and his pride in its magnificence. I learn more about the ultimate reality of creation from this simple passage than from all the books of philosophy I have read. Creation is not an illusion—God made it. Creation is not evil—God positively delights in it. God called the seas good when he made the earth, and indeed they are for without them life on this planet would not exist. God’s Spirit hovered over the face of the waters.
There is something of tremendous importance here when we consider the nature of creation and its status in terms of God’s ultimate purposes. The present creation is not the end of the creation journey; there is more to come. Romans 8 describes creation as subjected to futility and groaning as in the pains of childbirth. These are colossally complex theological statements, and I don’t think we can say we have a very clear idea of what they mean. But we at least know that creation is still in process—there is an unfolding, as some writers have put it. We are face to face with mystery and must accept it.
But the fact that creation is in process does not mean that creation as it now stands is totally corrupt or broken. There is a strong tendency in sermonizing about Genesis 3 to infer from the curse on the ground that much in nature is now hostile or ugly. It seems to be clear that humans must endure lives of exhausting toil as a consequence of the Fall, but the attitudes ascribed to God in Job should place firm limits around how far we go in describing creation as a hostile place. God delights in the sea, even though the sea sometimes wreaks havoc. Mysteriously, God claims sovereign authority over such events in passages such as Isaiah 45:7: “I form light and create darkness, I make well being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does these things,” and Exodus 4:11: “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” And the statements elsewhere in Job about the predator animals God made are strong demonstrations that many creatures (most, in fact), as God made them, are predators—a profound and dizzying idea. I often think that our judgments about the present order—an order that includes predation and calamity—are generally simplistic and fail to see the present order of creation as part of the unfolding of God’s supreme plan for all that he has made (and will make). Yes, human sin led to disobedience and corruption for all mankind and has made our lot in life profoundly more painful than it otherwise would have been. But we are too quick to leap from this to describing as evil everything in creation that causes us pain. Somehow, in the infinite wisdom of God’s creative economy, even the pains we endure now are part of our growth as humans, a necessary component of what God intends for us to become. C.S. Lewis dwells on this extensively in The Problem of Pain.
After much reflection I still feel that my understanding is minuscule. With Job I must confess that I have uttered what I do not understand, things too wonderful for me.
Here shall your proud waves be stayed... Because we understand the history of the earth as entailing total and repeated changes to the shapes of the continents, we don’t often consider the deliberateness of the coastlines, which have been more or less as they are throughout human history. God prescribed limits for the sea, as he has for everything. All things have their rightful places and these places are not random, they are intentional, part of the harmonious order God recognizes by saying, “It is good.” The human race lives at a particular time in the history of the universe, a time when hundreds of necessary factors have coalesced or aligned to enable us to live. The boundaries of the sea, in place by God’s specific decree, are part of that harmony.
They are also a gift, as is the entirety of creation. Isn't the Mediterranean Sea gorgeous? Aren't the towns along the Mediterranean coast lovely? Even if we don't live there, how impoverished we would be without the Mediterranean and its history—all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians? (And there is Israel, right at the end of the cul-de-sac, as it were.)
We are all aware of the abundance and strangeness of life in the sea. God created this abundance: “Let the waters swarm with living creatures...” John Steinbeck was fascinated by the abundance of life in the sea, and by its apparent recklessness. In his book The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck observes of the creatures in the sea that “everything ate everything else with a furious exuberance.” Like Annie Dillard, Steinbeck was astonished by the fecundity of nature. Steinbeck continues, considering a sea snail called the “sea-hare,” by writing: “a California biologist estimated the number of eggs produced by a single animal in a single breeding season to be more than 478 million...!” Comments such as these compel continued reflection. Four hundred seventy-eight million.
And for what a long time and to what a great extent has the sea been a source of food for humans! And what tasty food at that! Thousands of years of fishermen collecting the bounty of the sea's fecundity to bring sustenance to families, villages, and cities. Eventually, humans created sushi. One of the most glorious foods ever imagined. God gave us the gift of sushi. Think how much He must love us!
Here shall your proud waves be stayed... I am enraptured that the writer calls the waves proud. What does it mean that through the inspired author of Job the Creator speaks of his creation in such terms? Obviously, this passage is poetry, conceived and written in the most elevated style possible. Still, why does God call the waves proud? Why this particular choice of adjective? What ineffable mystery lies behind this divine communication?
The context for the meaning of the term proud is not in the sense of the human sin of pride, but in the sense meant in the titles All the Proud Ships (a novel by Charles E. Friend) and “The Proud Peaks of Scotland” (a Scottish folk song). Proud as in majestic. But with respect to the sea, we must regard even the term majestic as an understatement. Sublime is better, but not because sublime means beautiful beyond words—that’s not actually what it means. Sublime means simultaneously beautiful and terrifying beyond words, and the terror is part of the fascination in the beauty. South of South America, the ocean completely encircles the globe, giving rise to huge waves called Cape Horn rollers, waves 60 to 90 feet high that race around the globe at 30 miles per hour. (We read about them in Alfred Lansing’s tremendous book Endurance, the mind-numbing story of Ernest Shackleton’s heroic escape from Antarctica in 1914 after his ship was destroyed in the ice.) I cannot conceive of a 90-foot wall of water coming at me at 30 miles per hour. Where are the boundaries now? Where the staying of the proud waves?
Referring to the waves as proud suggests that God imbued the waves with their own dignity; they inspire and mystify. The personification is so compelling that we are virtually forced to ascribe volition to them, just as we personify the mountains that seem like great giants to us. We give them human names, like the Three Friars of Cabo San Lucas that Steinbeck wrote about. Jesus himself joined us in personifying the rocks by saying that if his followers did not offer forth praise the stones would cry out. I take his statement to be more—much more—than mere metaphor. As in, not a metaphor.
And speaking of the doors of the sea and the staying of the waves, where were they on Boxing Day in 2004 when the Indian Ocean tsunami wiped out 200,000 people and the homes of 1.7 million others?
What do we see when we sit on the beach or a rocky coast and gaze at the sea? What is the effect on the mind of the haze, the ceaseless waves, the clouds, the vast emptiness, the repeated and endless sound of the waves? (That sound is so difficult to describe that I'll not even try.) Why is it that for both my wife and I these things are so calming that we have taken trips to the beach every year for over half a century? Why do I feel that I could so easily become a meditative beach bum, a sort of desert father of the beach?
There is so much more, so much more. The vastness of the sea, described and pondered countless times since the very dawn of writing. The dangers of the sea. (Moby Dick comes to mind.) Water, water every where, Nor any drop to drink. Getting lost at sea. Storms at sea. (St. Paul comes to mind.) The ecosystems of the sea—the unbelievable complexity and beauty of the coral reefs, the tidal pools, ghost shrimp living in the sand, dolphins that frolic for pleasure, the Mariana Trench (far deeper than Mt. Everest is high), and pelicans.
Conclusion
Our meditations could obviously continue for hours. May they do so beyond the present medium. If we have a vocation for teaching children about God’s creation, we must meditate on creation in light of God’s word if we are to know at all what we are talking about. May we each faithfully do so, again and again.
(An earlier version of this article was published in our old Novare Newsletter back in October, 2014.)
]]>When it comes to science teaching, we have to do better than simply tell our students the content from the science texts. As fascinating as it is, the story told by scientists today is not the whole story. This is because contemporary science seeks only material explanations, and since there is a Creator involved in creation at every level, telling the story about creation without ever alluding to the Creator is like telling a family history without ever mentioning the father—something crucially important has been left out, and the rest cannot be understood without it.
I have a few times been called a theistic evolutionist. I don’t know why this happens, since I have never said in public that I accept evolutionary theory. (I've also never said I don't.) But be that as it may, the thoughts I have in mind today are not opposed to the idea of evolution of species per se, they are simply opposed to the crazy idea that evolution could have happened all by itself through random, unguided processes.
The more I have contemplated the theory of natural selection, the more I am convinced that it is one of the dumbest ideas ever. Not because it can’t happen or never happens—it clearly happens all the time. What is silly is the incredible idea that natural selection can explain everything.
And the assumption that natural selection does explain everything is ubiquitous—one reads almost every day about how natural selection caused this or that trait to be present in some organism or another. Now, given that most genetic mutations are harmful, and many others are silent, we start with the fact that mutations contributing beneficial features to organisms are relatively rare. Next, remember that only mutations in germ-line cells (sperm and eggs) matter so far as evolution is concerned because only these are passed on to offspring. Finally, we are expected to believe that natural selection alone, using these relatively rare beneficial mutations, occurring only in germ-line cells, has produced every single trait of every single organism in every single species in the world. This is what is called a just-so story. I wouldn’t believe it even if life on earth were 1020 years old instead of only 109 or so years old. Neither would I ever accept the claim that out of a trillion trillion tornadoes in wrecking yards one of them would be likely to produce an apparently brand-new BMW 750i.
Natural selection is regularly brought up in discussions of sex-selected traits. Female birds, we are supposed to believe, select mates exhibiting wild courtship displays because such displays indicate fitness to reproduce. Female elk, we are supposed to believe, select mates with huge antlers because such displays indicate strength, and thus fitness to reproduce. But such displays indicate nothing of the kind.
Imagine a young woman whose highest concern is to reproduce, raise a family, and thus pass on her genes. (By the way, this is a totally teleological thing. Why do all creatures want to do this? Whence cometh the intentionality, yea the purpose that produces this desire? And it clearly is a desire. What else could it be?) Anyway, let’s say two eligible bachelors come along. The first dresses in the most outlandish fashion and at irresponsibly great expense. He prances around in an extravagant manner, like some primitive tribal chief performing the goat dance, all of which consumes a great amount of time and energy. The second bachelor is a sensible, practical fellow. He dresses simply, neatly, and in good taste, and he exhibits perfect manners. If both bachelors ask our young lady out to dinner, which invitation do you think she will accept? Naturally, there are women who will be attracted to the craziness of the lunatic fop and will want to go out with him just out of sheer curiosity. But our question is about a woman whose chief interest is the very practical one of reproducing and successfully raising offspring until they themselves can reproduce, and the man most likely to help her do that is not necessarily a nut job. Successful rearing of offspring entails navigating the practical affairs of life—obtaining and succeeding at a good job, being alert to all kinds of threats, spending money on the most important things first, and being willing to sacrifice for one’s children. Given the lady’s priorities, and given the practicalities involved in the matter of successfully raising offspring, I think it most likely that the lady would select the practical man rather than the show-off.
Why should a female elk believe that a male with large antlers would be a better bet for successful reproduction? Why would she not conclude, on the contrary, that those big antlers might get in the way or exhaust the male during mating? Why would she not assume that any male with big antlers like that is going to have a tougher time hiding from predators, and would thus be more likely to get them all eaten before they could reproduce? And as for avian courtship displays, how could such displays suggest anything at all about fitness for reproduction? These have nothing to do with each other. You might as well say that sticking a Chiquita Banana sticker on your chest shows that you will be better at playing chess. It simply indicates no such thing, and may, in fact, show just the opposite.
So why do virtually all scientists promote the just-so story that natural selection gave us all the variety, exquisite functionality, and beauty of life? Because they have no other option. One who believes that a wise and loving Creator is responsible for all the variety, exquisite functionality, and beauty of life can assume that not nature, but the Creator is doing much, if not all, of the selecting. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has suggested (I think in Where the Conflict Really Lies, but I couldn’t find the reference in my notes) that God could cause specific mutations to occur that give the species no benefit whatsoever initially, and cause these to be collected in the genes over the generations until they add up to totally new functionality, at which time they would be expressed, giving the creature a completely new phenotype. (And, by the way, leaving no transitional forms in the fossil record.) Perhaps this is a better explanation for the rapid increase in mammal size and diversity after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event than the explanation typically—… Wait, what is the typical explanation? Oh yes—all the new niches opened up by the destruction of the dinosaurs. As if sheer space is all that was needed for the evolution of squirrels who glide between trees, kangaroos who carry their joeys in pouches, and beavers who engineer dams. I don’t believe it—it simply takes too much faith. Weak people like me need a simpler, more straightforward causal framework, so I am sticking to the idea that it makes more sense that new BMWs are made intentionally in factories by skilled workers who know what they are doing and that highly specific and successful functionality in creatures is the result of the Creator’s wise hand. As for birds who prefer mates with crazy feathers and dances, either the Creator thinks these things are fun and causes the genetic mutations that will bring them to be, or perhaps the female birds just mate with males like that because they want to (that is, they think it’s fun)—regardless of the outcome for the offspring.
I have often said that if evolution did happen, it didn't happen by itself.
If you are interested in thinking more about teaching science with these kinds of things in mind, I have a new video series on ClassicalU that will be available probably sometime in November. I think it will be called Science and the Symphony of Creation. Just click on Teacher Training up at the top of the page.
Copyright 2022 John D. Mays
]]>This week I am performing the final proofread for our forthcoming text, Life Science. This is exciting work because it is the last task before sending the book to the printer. Reading in Chapter 2 this morning, I came across this interesting passage introducing plant cells:
"When it is time to break down and recycle wastes, an organelle called a lysosome releases digestive chemicals into the vacuole. While the cell is healthy, digestive chemicals are placed into vacuoles only when needed. When the cell dies, the lysosome’s membrane disintegrates, and digestive chemicals are released to break down the cell’s contents."
This colorful figure accompanies the passage:
I suppose I have read this passage a hundred times while working on this book over the past few years, but today the wonderful broke through the mundane—just as we want it to do every single day in our science classes.
Like just about everyone else in human history, I have spent a lot of time thinking about death over the years. We know that death is our enemy, in fact, the last enemy to be destroyed (I Cor. 15:26). We also know that the Lord Jesus Christ has already conquered death, taking away both its victory and its sting (1 Cor. 15:55). These are fundamental and glorious truths of the gospel for which we rightly give thanks and praise to our great Savior!
But the science teacher in me pauses here at a great mystery. While death is our enemy, it is also a fundamental and mysterious part of creation. Everything we know about the life sciences and the way recycling processes function on the earth and in all living things indicates that death is a fundamental part of the way living things function. Read again the passage above from Life Science and notice that the process of disposal of the waste cellular products upon the death of the cell is built right into the very design of cells! This is no accident! The whole functioning of the cell is thoroughly designed from top to bottom so that everything is taken into consideration, including disposal of the cell's materials when the cell's life is up. (And by the way, most of the cells in your body are replaced on average about every 7–10 years.)
I pause here to address a question I know is on the mind of many readers at this point. I know many Christians believe that 100% of death is a result of the Fall. I was raised in that tradition too, but encountering the fossil record and facing up to what this part of the Book of God's Works is revealing to us, I realized long ago that death has been part of creation for a very, very long time—all the way back to the beginning of life itself. My intention in this article is not to get into controversial theological issues. But for those who doubt that death has been part of creation since life first began, I commend to you Ronald E. Osborn's excellent and sensitive treatment, Death Before the Fall (2014).
Back to thinking about death's functioning in nature: Just as the cleanup operation for dead cells is designed into fundamental cell processes (which means it is coded into the DNA and expressed in the proteins that carry out these functions), we see the creation making use of death, cleaning up after death, and recycling the matter from dead organisms everywhere we look, from the tiniest microorganisms to the largest whales and trees. Dead organisms in the soil contribute to soil fertility. Trees recycle their leaves every year, providing organic matter that decays and becomes mulch in the soil. The incredible fecundity of life in the sea provides food for all the millions of different sea creatures, all of them "eating each other with furious exuberance," as Steinbeck wrote. Even maggots, which we are foolishly taught to think of as gross, are part of a stunning system of planetary custodial care. A dead animal is typically completely gone in no more than a few days. This is amazing. Most creatures live no more than a few decades, but when they die, they are efficiently cleared away.
I still remember years ago when I realized that vultures are not the grotesque monsters people tend to think; they are part of a global cleaning system that works highly efficiently to recycle the matter from dead creatures so that a) the nutrients continue serving living creatures in the biosphere and b) dead animals don't accumulate without end. My attitude about vultures changed forever when I realized this. Oh, and I can't help mentioning that vultures are one of those birds, like pelicans, that ride on the rising thermal air currents in the sky for the sheer joy of it. Just go watch them circling round and round, so high in the sky—they are rejoicing in the joy of flight and giving glory to the creator by dancing in flight, hour after hour! I love vultures! They are so beautiful! Vultures need love too!
Some day, when we see our Lord face to face, death will no longer be a mystery to us; "we will know even as we are fully known." Until then, we grieve at the loss of our loved ones, but we also marvel at the splendor of a creation that functions year after year, perfectly balanced and designed, so that even death, our enemy, is part of the ongoing circle of life.
]]>People who know me know that I spend a lot of time talking about wonder. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that "wonder is the beginning of philosophy." Wonder should be the beginning of all our science teaching as well.
Recently, I was asked about "the practical art of bringing wonder into moments during live online high school science classes." This is no small issue and no small challenge. And the question is especially relevant in our post-COVID times.
When I address questions about the fierce challenges of teaching, my advice always begins with doses of reality, as well as encouraging teachers to break out of their own mental prisons. So, here are some ideas about our reality.
In addition to writing science texts, I sometimes dabble in mathematical recreations. Here’s one.
For a long time, I have been fascinated by the nearly mystical (or maybe actually mystical) mathematical structure of the pentagram:
You may already know that phi, or the golden ratio, is all over the place in this figure. (Phi, like pi, is one of the magic numbers of the universe.) Every ratio of the length of a line segment to the length of the next shorter line segment is equal to phi. There are three such pairs:
Also, with pentagon side lengths equal to 1, all the diagonals in the pentagon are of length phi. And also, drawing any two diagonals in the pentagon creates two intersecting segments that section each other into smaller segments that also have the ratio phi.
This just goes on and on. What happens if you draw all the diagonals? It's not hard to guess.
Sometime back, I was playing around with this figure and wondering if I could prove that these ratios were equal to phi. I spent a few hours on it but was not successful. A while later, I was reading Out of the Labyrinth, by Robert and Ellen Kaplan, and learned that the high school students in one of their Math Circle groups had figured it out. Knowing that, and with my pride at stake, yesterday I went back to the problem. This time, I discovered a solution for pair #1 above in only a couple hours. I was wildly, even dizzily excited. And that's why I'm writing about this today! I didn't run naked through the streets as Archimedes did when he had his eureka moment; I'm writing a blog post instead!
I’ll show you the solution, but if you’re interested, you should take a crack at solving it for yourself before reading the solution (or sneak-peaking at the diagrams)! Assume the length of the sides of the central pentagon is equal to 1 and go from there.
The Solution:
Begin with pentagon edges = 1. We will assign to the long edges of the triangles forming the points of the star the label phi (the Greek letter is shown in the figure and in the solution below). In the proof below, after deriving the value of that length we will also demonstrate that this value actually is the “golden ratio,” phi.
The insight that leads directly to the solution is to draw another pentagram, upside down, and place it on the one above so that the horizontal lines coincide. Then notice that we now have two right triangles, with side lengths that can be expressed with only two unknowns:
With this diagram, the solution is easy. Write two Pythagorean relations and eliminate h and we're done.
If you thought that was fun, I'd love to hear from you. Send an email anytime to Classical Academic Press and our email caretaker will see that it gets to me.
]]>This is an exciting day: The first images from NASA's new James Webb Space Telescope were released this morning. Read about the image shown above and look at other ones here.
After over 25 years of development, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched last Christmas. Space exploration enters a new era today!
]]>A customer recently asked about the priorities for students in grammar school science. I wrote a fair bit about that in my book From Wonder to Mastery—so for a fuller response, check that out. But here are a few highlights:
1. Begin with wonder. Show your own constant amazement at God’s creation. When you see a bird, pause and marvel at it for as long as possible, and then ask your wee one, “Who made that bird?”
2. Get your children or students out into nature as much as possible. There is much to say here too, but as Richard Louv shows in Last Child in the Woods, many of the problems experienced by children today are due to what he calls “nature deficit disorder,” and getting out into nature is the best way to bring things back into balance.
Make nature encounters as deep as possible—your backyard is better than nothing; your garden is a great next step and can be as intense as you want to make it; a good city park down the street may be even better and can be visited regularly. A state park is far better yet, and a deep nature encounter (completely away from civilization, in the mountains or forest or desert) is the best. When traveling with kids, seek always to stop at nature areas along the way and let the kids get out and get dirty. (As our friends at True North Leatherworks say, Mud Washes Off). And if you teach at a school, encourage school families to do the same. For resources to help, check these out:
3. Focus on what is going on and why. Physicist Richard Feynman liked to tell the story of going on walks with his father as a boy. His father never cared what the name of a bird was; his question was always, What is that bird doing? This question illustrates a deep approach to reflecting on creation. After, of course, prayerfully wondering at a phenomenon or creature, and thanking God for it, and praising Him for it, we should then nudge children past the simple phenomenon itself to wondering what is happening and why. Likewise, as kids get older and engage with scientific demonstrations, we must lead them to respond not by saying “Wow! Do it again,” but “Wow! Why does it do that?”
Now, Richard Feynman was quirky and a genius. His disregard for names is amusing, but of course it is better to include the names of the birds along with our conversations about what they are doing. (We know how young children are like vacuum cleaners for learning new names!) And when they are old enough, they should start using Birds of North America (You have a copy, right? No home is complete without it.) to learn about types of birds (warblers, woodpeckers, swallows, etc.) and identifying species within types.
4. Make everything as hands-on and physical as possible. In the elementary grades, virtually every creation encounter should be with the actual and physical first. Texts and printed images should come later, if they are needed at all. Of course, there are lots of images and videos of things that are hard to see in person (Antarctic penguins, nebulae, glaciers, tiger sharks, etc.), and these are fascinating to study. The point is, don’t turn to books to study things when you can arrange for an in-person encounter.
5. Do lots of observation, journaling, and sketching. These are the traditional and indispensable activities of Natural Philosophy. It's easy to combine disciplines in activities like these. In an activity to observe a plant and write the most creative possible description, children are immersed in creative writing as well as scientific observation. And if a sketch is involved too, you have an art lesson to boot. Check out this lovely website for great ideas on nature journaling.
6. Bring nature inside. Aquariums and terrariums take time and care, but they are worth it. You can check with pet stores for people available to provide care for your plants, animals, or fish while you are out of town. Microterrariums are now very popular, and there are lots of online resources to get you started. Obviously, let the children do all the work, which isn't really work at all, but simply fascinating exploration of how things grow and depend on each other in God's creation.
]]>It is amazing to me that is has taken many evangelical Christians so long to get on board with the need for a new emphasis on creation care—one that addresses the unique need present in our times. But now it seems things are changing. This post highlights several items that have come my way recently.
To begin, just a couple days ago I received a link to a new album by The Porter’s Gate called “Climate Vigil Songs,” just released last week. The music produced in The Porter’s Gate projects is very fine and I was thrilled to learn about the new collection. (One of the songs features Jon Guerra, a Christian musician I have listened to quite a lot.) I commend this recording to you.
Many of those who have been following Novare Science know that we have been planning for some time on getting an Environmental Science textbook project going. This project is now well underway. Our lead author, Mark McReynolds, came to us by way of mutual connections at A Rocha International, a global Christian environmental nonprofit engaged in scores of projects oriented around creation care, healing, justice, and community support. If you are not aware of the good work A Rocha is doing, do check them out at https://arocha.org/en/ (British headquarters) and https://arocha.us/ (US branch). Our Environmental Science text, now scheduled for 2025 release, will make its own contribution to creation care, with a robust and creative treatment of the topic in the first chapter.
Finally, my late afternoons these days are spent luxuriating out in the 104° afternoons reading Creation Care: A Biblical Theology of the Natural World, by Douglas J. Moo and Jonathan Moo (2018), an indispensable resource. This book is quite well done, carefully assessing the Bible’s position on the characteristics, status, and future of creation, and making a thorough biblical case not only for caring for creation, but also for how our role as stewards of creation relates to caring for humans and sharing the Gospel. I am now recommending this book to everyone as a must read for evangelical Christians.
Some final housekeeping: I plan to continue making posts here approximately each week, just so you'll know what to expect. Also, we don't have a comments field for this blog, but I would love to hear from you all the same. If you want to send me a comment, write to science@classicalsubjects.com and indicate that your comment is for John. The good folks at Classical Academic Press will see that it gets to me.
Pax Christi to everyone.
]]>Greetings everyone. Welcome to the new Novare Science Blog hosted on the Classical Academic Press website! Prior to 2020, I shared ideas about science and education in the Novare Newsletter. Some of those old issues have now been converted to blog posts on the CAP site.
But beginning today, we have this new blog site just for Novare Science. I hope you will find some things you can use in your classroom or homeschool, as well as some thrilling insights and comments about Creation—this fascinating place we have called “God’s World, Our Home.”
This first week of June 2022 may turn out to be a moth extravaganza here in San Antonio, Texas. It’s very hot (over 100°F every day this week), but I guess the moths are like me and don’t mind it.
I’m fascinated at how well the coloration on moth wings can help them blend into their environment, a trait scientists call camouflage.
The stunning banded sphinx moth shown in the photo above isn’t very camouflaged on my front door, but when he decides to fly into a bush somewhere he will be all but invisible.
The sad underwing moth in the next photo is even more invisible! (By the way, he isn’t unhappy; sad is his name!) This moth is on the trunk of a large live oak tree in the garden behind my house. See if you can find him!
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