Enough to Make God Laugh

This is a short book, bursting with laughter and enthusiasm, with clever combinations and references to the last four decades of popular idioms from science and religion that have framed so much public discussion, for example: Stuff and Nonsense, The Empire of Chance, Words and Works, The Still-Great Planet Earth. It is designed to bridge the gap between science and religion; more appropriately perhaps, it is written to describe these two old friends — so long forced apart by scientists and religionists, but not by persons of humble faith. These two old friends, in Al Wells’s configuration, are walking together on a road not often taken. They meander through a spellbinding, wondrous universe; they celebrate, explore, and push the limits to understand everything in which God delights.

Wells loves science and was trained as a scientist. He later became a Minister of Word and Sacrament, served churches in small towns, in large cities, in a developing country, and taught in an African American college. Enough to Make God Laugh woos the reader into a world of enjoyable insights and learning for all of us who are not experts in the fields of science or religion. So this book assists us as we are asked each day by what we hear and read to make judgments about faith, science, and reality. The media of our time like nothing better than to pit fundamentalist against secular humanist. They rarely give space to the sorts of learned Christians (of whom Al Wells is one) who love God with the mind, and who love the universe God has created, and who see science as means, not only for profit or for exploitation of the natural order, but rather as something that reveals the wonder, the mystery, and the majesty of the created world.   

But the author is also a pastor, and this book is something like a fireside chat with your favorite uncle, a man who loves puns and puzzles, who tells stories and puts concepts together that delight the ear and give pleasure to the soul, in whose presence you are simply glad to be alive. In a world where swords are too often drawn over faith and fact, this book invites you to learn from and listen to, and carefully observe, God’s world, your place in that world, and most especially, our vocation as responsible stewards for that which we do not possess, but without which we would not exist at all.

Finally, the book makes you grateful that God does laugh, and invites you to long for the day when all creatures will hear that laughter ringing through the rolling spheres to the very ends of the universe itself.

 

O. Benjamin Sparks is interim pastor of Westminster Church in Nashville, Tenn.