First published in Sight Magazine, 17 December 2025
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know. – Job 42:3 (NIV)
I am vicariously travelling with my sister on a historic scientific expedition to Antarctica. Her videos of waddling penguins and colossal icebergs juxtaposed against a dramatic blue-white wonderland fill me with thrills and chills.
She is part of the ‘Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future’ expedition. These scientists will map changes to this undisturbed ecosystem since the last scan over 20 years ago.
The treacherous 4000 kilometre voyage on the Southern Ocean from Tasmania to Heard Island (land of fire and ice) is often described as an encounter with ‘Mother Nature’. The personified and popular concept of Mother Nature stems from the Greek primordial goddess Gaia, around 1200 BC.
So why does it remain so unpopular to personify Father God (Yahweh) the Creator? Moreover, if science can decipher how the Laws of Nature operate, who wrote them and why?
These burning questions have recently re-ignited my curiosity about that intersection between science and creation.
Who stands at that vexed crossroads between these two ‘altars’, like a majestic Emperor penguin proudly perched on an Antarctic ice shelf? The soon-to-be centenarian – Sir David Attenborough, of course!
My respect for this living legend grew when he declared “I don’t think an understanding and an acceptance of the four billion-year-long history of life is in any way inconsistent with a belief in a supreme being.”
I love his honesty about what science cannot explain: “There are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand.” In his litany of documentaries, he often concedes “for reasons unknown”, such as why beluga whales congregate annually in the Canadian Arctic. Scientists know how a whale can launch itself out of the water with a spectacular splashdown, but “don’t really know” why whales breach.
On the opposite end of the planet, my sister’s Antarctic videos evoke paradoxical questions underlying the science – about the ‘unseen’ underwater realm of each iceberg: why is there so much heart-melting beauty in this ice-melting wilderness? Why is it teaming with marine life yet so life-threatening? Why would God create this alien land that is not human-friendly?
As I re-watched some Attenborough documentaries on Antarctica and the laws of Mother Nature, one childlike question remained unrelenting and unanswered: “But why?”
Why do animal skins and tree barks appear to be painted by the same brush, using the same colour palette and texture? The beech tree is nicknamed ‘elephant tree’ because their wrinkled trunks resemble elephants’ trunks and their stumps resemble elephants’ feet. Similarly, the sycamore tree is nicknamed ‘alligator wood’ because its furrowed bark resembles the scaly texture of alligator skin.
If flora and fauna merely mimic each other’s appearance through natural selection and convergent evolution, who designed these enduring patterns, and why are they so enduring?
Ironically, I missed another ‘resemblance’: my tirade of why questions evoked Job 38 when God unleashed a whirlwind of rhetorical questions about His creation. Many are so apt for Antarctica.
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow … From whose womb comes the ice? … Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens, when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? Do you know the laws of the heavens?”
Perhaps only the ‘laws of the heavens’ can explain why, but the laws of Mother Nature can only explain how.
If I were physically on the science expedition to Antarctica, I would be armed with the Book of Life to ignite my icy bones. I would read God’s whirlwind questions as a reminder that answers to my why questions are “things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3).