When Orville and Wilbur Wright sought to discover how to keep an airplane in the air, they looked to what God had already placed in the sky. As historian David McCullough records, “‘Learning the secret of flight from a bird,’ Orville would say, ‘was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician.’”
Going to an air show is a unique kind of thrill.
There are the sights—watching a sleek machine blaze through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, or seeing a pilot perform acrobatic feats in his plane hundreds of feet from the ground. There are the sounds—the unmistakable roar of a fighter jet announcing its power, or the nostalgic rumble of a World War II-era Mustang or Corsair telling the story of battles won, by God’s grace, long ago. There are the smells—fuel and exhaust mixed in with the cool, spring air.
Growing up, my dad would take our family to an air show every year, and I developed a lifelong love of all things with engines that fly. Taking my wife and children to share such an experience recently, I discovered that the thrill has not been diminished with time.
To get those amazing machines in the air requires an incredible mastery of physics, chemistry, aerodynamics, engineering, and design—and that is just to build the things. To actually lift them off the ground and maneuver them through the air, a pilot must have an almost superhuman degree of focus, vision, reflexes, strength, and physical stamina.
All of that is a testimony to God’s handiwork. A pilot navigating an F22 through the clouds points to the glory of Almighty God as much as anything in nature. As we discover more about how the universe works, the imagination and skill of man may be able to craft some profoundly complex inventions. But only an infinitely creative and knowledgeable God could make human minds that could dream up and build an airplane or a spaceship or a car or a computer.
Not only that, but all of the materials used to create all of those technological wonders come from elements that were already in the earth.
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