Some species of birds have four color receptors in their retinas instead of three like most mammals and humans. These receptors process light in the ultraviolet spectrum that is invisible to humans. Since fructose and sucrose sugars have big peaks in their UV spectra, this gives me a clue why birds can watch our grape crop and know exactly the morning of peak ripeness (sugar concentration) of the grapes. The birds have additional information that humans don’t (at least visually), and they use it to their advantage.

Most people think of the world in terms of human observational capabilities. What we can see, hear, touch or smell forms our conclusions about the world. Even our sense of time is dictated by how fast we can walk and how long we live. Our very modern notion of the primacy of the individual is formed by this crazy idea that we have no debt to those who came before us and no obligation to those who come after. The self-made man (or woman) is only concerned about self.

But an individual Monarch butterfly is unable to fly the entire north-south migration route. The migration may take three or four generations of Monarchs. The survival of that species is dependent upon inter-generational transfer of knowledge. What if the next generation migrated the wrong direction?

Our human senses represent an evolutionary engineering design compromise that optimizes the information we gain purely for the survival of the species. It is fun to speculate about the ability to see things that happen really fast like a hummingbird’s wings or things that happen slowly like a sloth moving from tree to ground (which can take all day). What if we could hear higher or lower frequencies? What if we could “see” radio waves?

Surely, God has knowledge from information in areas that humans cannot process. Science does too. That is one reason why science is always important to theology. It keeps the conversation honest.