The science teacher from Philadelphia's Franklin Institute was young and pixie-like, her enthusiasm contagious as she used flashlights, mirrors, and prisms to convey the wondrous properties of light to the children gathered in the public library. Mine were among them, while I sat in the back, mostly reading, until she happened to call upon my younger son, Graeme, among others, as a volunteer. She handed each child a small round light, instructing them to hold them just so; together, they resembled the constellation Orion. My son beamed appropriately. She then directed one child to step forward a certain number of feet, the other to step back a little way, and so on, until the children were scattered from the front of the room to the back, as she explained that the stars in Orion were incredibly far away from one another and, in fact, that they had no relationship to each other at all. "The only meaning a constellation has is the meaning we assign to it," she announced with almost missionary zeal. Graeme's face fell a little; I saw a flicker of sadness pass over his eyes.

As chance or providence would have it, the book I was reading that afternoon was Rob Moll's What Your Body Knows About God, and I may not have taken notice of the science teacher's remarks at all had I not just been reading about how children are born ready to "attribute purpose and intention to things that they see in the world." The science teacher probably felt that she was doing her part to imbue the children with correct scientific thinking—Orion is a design superimposed by human imagination upon stars that have no particular relationship with one another. But the subtext of her pronouncement—the stories human beings tell themselves and one another about the universe are far less meaningful than "scientific" measurements of what's actually "out there"—was hard to miss. Graeme, who was six then, didn't miss it: she'd taken a thing that delighted him, and declared that the meaning it had for him—as for humans across the millennia and around the world—had no scientific basis and hence was negligible.

"Our culture," Moll writes, "tends to reduce all things to matter, and more and more aspects of our lives are being 'demystified' of the spiritual qualities they were once assumed to have." Stephen Pinker and others triumphantly announce that what we call "minds" don't really exist at all; anything that might persuade us otherwise can be explained purely by biological factors. It is for good reason that religious people are occasionally wary of what passes for science—"many of the articles [in Scientific American] reflect the assumption … that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism," Marilynne Robinson writes, having just insisted that to read the magazine rightly is to have one's sense of God's grandeur expanded; "if the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation."

In What Your Body Knows About God, Moll leads the reader on a tour through cutting-edge science about brains and bodies, bodies that are not a bit less fearfully and wonderfully made even if little about them remains, as the psalmist said, a "secret place." Moll never suggests that the findings of science he rightly celebrates lead inexorably to orthodox Christian faith. If the book advances a particular argument, it is simply this: "bodies matter, and they matter spiritually," a fact Moll came to notice in his years as a hospice chaplain, through which he came to write his fine book The Art of Dying. The funerals "that would later seem to be most meaningful and helpful … treated a body with reverence."

Other points that Moll allows to rise out of the fascinating science are similar in their tendency to confirm what we might intuit via other means—things that poets and philosophers have known for millennia. We do not need to know much about the highly addictive properties of oxytocin, the hormone released by the pituitary gland when we fall in love, and when women give birth and nurse babies, to know that people newly in love act a bit like addicts, obsessed with their beloved—and that new parents can't seem to stop gazing at their babies. But it is revelatory to learn that science emphatically does not suggest that selfishness, social isolation, and godlessness define the "natural" human condition. Mirror neurons and mimicry that happens below the level of consciousness—as when you slip into imitating the speech and mannerisms of your conversation partner without realizing it—suggest that there's something in us that wants to connect deeply with others.

That deep prayer and contemplation of God make us healthier and more compassionate in scientifically measurable ways may come as little surprise to those who believe, but it is something of an answer to those who would claim that religion has wrought more evil than good in the world. In one of the book's most interesting sections, Moll quotes Jonathan Haidt, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, whose work suggests that religion has tended to aid human progress, and that the more rigorous and costly the demands of a particular religion, the longer the community that pursues it has tended to last. I was reminded again of a lecture Marilynne Robinson gave in which she described the Freudian account of humanity, according to which civilization itself is merely an ill-fitting carapace metamorphosed from primordial guilt. In this view, religion can only fitfully rein in what the natural human craves. The evidence Moll assembles, on the contrary, would seem to suggest that what human bodies and minds are actually designed for is deep connection with others and with the divine.

Moll does not shrink from the problem of evil; as he was in the midst of writing, his wife, Clarissa, descended into serious postpartum depression. "How could our celebration of a birth become so marred by mental illness?" he asks. "How could I stand in awe of God's glorious design for our bodies when things could go so badly wrong?" There are no human answers to these kinds of questions, of course, but Moll finds in the Christian story, as well as in the science he surveys, the hope that it is possible to "embrace our suffering as a path to intimacy and reach beyond it to comfort others … enacting what God will do in the consummation of all things."

Several months ago, Graeme and I went to watch his cousins perform in a gymnastics show. As the young gymnasts bounded and back-flipped and seemed to fly through the air, my little son broke into copious applause and in six-year-old earnestness cried out, jubilantly, "I never knew a human could do that!" I suppose one might counter that when we look at the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the moon and stars and planets that God has established, a few back-flips on the face of this lonely planet don't seem to amount to much—what are human beings that God is mindful of us? How silly, perhaps, to make stories out of the patterns we see in the skies. Yet we are, the psalmist says, but a little lower than the angels, and we have been given dominion over the work of God's hands: to map and study stars and neurons and neurotransmitters scientifically, yes, but also to tell stories, to love, to appreciate beauty, to show compassion. To see pictures in the stars, to do back-flips, and to worship.

Rachel Marie Stone is the author of Eat with Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food, published last year by InterVarsity Press.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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