This article is part of an ongoing series of contemplations about God’s creation and man’s role in it by Rev. Lou Veiga, Pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Houston, TX.

In the spring of 1977, the Office Products Division of International Business Machines (IBM), located in Lexington, Kentucky, began modernizing its typewriters from mechanical typing elements to electronic componentry. The objective was to retire its fabulously successful mechanical “type ball” componentry and replace it with in-house, custom engineered silicon chips for control and print purposes.

The Lexington Research and Development Lab recruited 300 engineers to accomplish this goal, many of them recent college graduates. I was one of those grads who signed up for this work.

Both the processes and the technologies to be deployed in pursuit of modernization were complex and state-of-the art. The IBM laboratory, as it was called, resembled the NASA complex on Cape Canaveral. In fact, I learned practically all that I needed to do in my assignment from my companion engineers, and not from any school.

Two gifted men in our department came up with a new design for a memory device called a Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) using complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. This had not been done before. The circuitry could store an electronic bit in either a “one” or a “zero” state without battery backup. This offered both design efficiency and a cost advantage over existing Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips, which lost all their memory upon power reset. The new SRAM had a working memory! This was engineering progress, obtained by the diligent efforts of capable, trained engineers and scientists at IBM.

Meanwhile, at home my hobby interest was fish keeping—I maintained and bred ornamental fishes. One day, as I was feeding a batch of newly hatched killifish fry, I realized something I had not considered earlier. The baby F. gardneri I was observing were less than 12 hours old. Yet, as they had consumed most of their egg yolk upon emerging from their eggshell, they now required a different kind of food: tiny food that was alive and moving.

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When a tiny Artemia nauplii swam in front of a ¼-inch killifish fry, the baby fish coiled its tiny body into any “S” shape, for the first time, then powerfully lunged forward, for the first time, while simultaneously opening its tiny mouth, for the first time, successfully ingesting its non-yolk-sack meal, for the first time! This fish had never done any of these things before. How did it know both the process and the mechanism? This fish seemed to possess memory. But how?

Then it dawned on me that gifted men were able to design and implement logic circuitry at the microchip level, resulting in a functional electronic memory. Yet the biological complexity of my little pets at home far exceeded that of the chips at the IBM Engineering Departments (and, for that matter, the complexity of any of the millions-of-times-more advanced computer chips of our day). The gardneri fry had brains no larger than the period mark at the end of a sentence, one hundred times smaller than the microchips we were building. But somehow this nascent creature could easily perform complex functions such as object recognition, sensing the need for food, and positioning itself in such a manner as to successfully smack its object with force and without failure. This impressed me more than many mechanical IBM typewriter font balls.

Man, made in the image of God, is capable of many marvelous inventions. The contributions of engineers at IBM Office Products Division enabled our customers to communicate, facilitated the writing of letters, the printing of newspapers and books, and other such things. Curiously, my history professor at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Dr. James E. McGoldrick, used one of our Lexington manufactured IBM Selectric typewriters in his office—the newer electronic model!

All this is good and useful work, and to be regarded as such by all reasonable souls. Yet in pursuing scientific advances we must never lose the greater framework of who Man the Worker truly is, as the Lord God knows him. Man ranks “a little lower than the angels” in the cosmos, the Lord placing “all things under his feet: birds of the air, fish of the sea, and whatever passes in the depths of the sea.” (Psalm 8:4–8). Who knows what the natural limits of man are, if once he sets his mind to organize, work, and invent (Genesis 11:6)?

Man is indeed a wonder. But the superlative glory of worship goes to man’s Designer, the Senior Scientist and Chief Engineer of all things, whose wisdom, power, and works are marvelous beyond all understanding. This is sufficiently demonstrated in the marvelous working “memory” of a tiny, newborn fish’s first bite of food. Truly, God’s handiwork is admired by all who can see it, and this truth all men may know with certainty (Psalm 139:14). Let man, therefore, enjoy his own creaturely memory and never forget God.

Featured photo of fish by the author, Lou Veiga. IBM Selectric type ball photo public domain.