A friend pointed me to Luke Jerram’s “Glass Microbiology” project, from which is the above photo of an e. coli bacterium. His work, plus the Vanity Fair article on the LHC which referred to the super-collider as a “cathedral to science” and listed its sublime statistics, got me thinking about a common refrain among Christian apologists.
The old adage is that one of religion’s big advantages over science is that it inspires Art, like the Sistine Chapel and The Last Supper and the Hallelujah Chorus. What is funny about this assertion is that it is often ignored that Da Vinci’s technical diagrams and anatomical sketches are also Art and that Raphael painted The School of Athens. But those aren’t winning arguments, they’re just exceptions that prove the rule.
The first decade of the 21st century, however, is perhaps finally living up to the possibility of a Sistine Chapel of science. I don’t know if this will ultimately be seen as the historical function of postmodernism, but it seems that our ability to “read anything as a text” has finally let us start seeing the beauty in our scientific engineering and the most basic forms of life.
