15th January 2018

I never get it. I’m reading this terrific book called Touch by David Linden that explores the incredible microworld of the skin. And after detailing some exquisite biology, he says that ‘we have an array of many types of touch sensors in the skin, each a beautiful, specialized micromachine sculpted by evolution to extract different aspects of information about our tactile world’.

Sculpted by whom? Evolution. Really? I get that a lonely column of sandstone in the middle of the desert can be sculpted by the wind and the rain to produce after many years a structure of beautiful form. But never like the faces on Mount Rushmore. And never like the facades in that famous city of Petra. I get that a rough stone in the middle of a creek bed can be sculpted by the river currents to produce after many years a beautiful skimmer. But never a Michelangelo’s David. Or a Rodin’s The Thinker.

I mean ‘fair go’. Everything about the human body, and particularly the incredible form and function of the touch sensors, screams of design by intelligence. ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ said a different author named David, ‘day after day they pour forth speech.’ And so they do. On every page of Touch, I read the marvels of ‘beautiful, specialized micromachines’ embedded within the human skin, and am truly touched by a God who reveals his glory in every cell and cubic nanometer of the universe.

DM 15^th Jan 2018