Catholic science teacher blog

Axel: [1, 2, 3]

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” – Jules Verne

As I was preparing to help with an evolution lab (laying out fossils for Caminalcules), it occurred to me that our culture has become so obsessed with “never making a mistake”. Yet “mistakes” or “mutations” can actually be the beginning of a whole new species…they can actually become the trait that nature selects to move a species forward. Again, I am not an evolutionary biologist so I don’t want to risk speaking about things that I know very little about. But sometimes the realities of science can also point us towards theological truths.

Like what happens in our life when our plans get altered (when things don’t go as planned)…when we have to take a different path…and what is often surprising is that the new path (perhaps caused by a mistake or by sin or by a failure)…can end up bringing us to a preferred outcome. Like for example, a student desperately wants to go to one particular university and because there is so much competition, he/she doesn’t get in, even though students with lesser qualifications get in….but then they are at that university and the person they marry or end up working with a professor on a project which become’s their life work.

If the ultimate goal is to be in harmony with God’s truth, there is a need to surrender to the mutations of life…when life doesn’t quite go our way…can we hold onto the truth that mistakes can be useful (thank you Jules Verne)…and that we serve a God who can always write straight with crooked lines and even/possibly the Author of Life…had written the path of our lives with these crooked lines as THE pathway He intended for our life from the very beginning.

As a good friend of mine says to me during hard times “Trust in the miracle….the miracle is unfolding”