Fibonacci: Science and Poetry, Part 1

There is order in the created world, both seen and unseen.  As a person of both faith and reason, I know that some aspects of this order can be discerned – while some will always remain Mysterious to the limited human brain.  When science documentaries show the collapsing and exploding of stars, the forming of galaxies, the wondrous growth of life on our blue and green planet, some people see this as proof that God, Our Divine Creator, doesn’t exist.  I, too, once drew this conclusion – but how to do so now is beyond me, for all of my eyes are open.

If there is order in the universe to be discovered by scientific methods, then the universe must have been ordered.  And if it has been ordered, then there must be an Orderer.  Hello, God!  

Numbers are not divine, no matter what some brilliant scientists may suggest as they stumble beyond their purviews.  But, math and science can combine to show us the wondrous patterns all around us.  The Fibonacci sequence is a spectacular example of this.  What is the Fibonacci sequence, you ask?  Well, to put it simply, each new number in the sequence is derived by adding together the previous two.  So, if we start with zero and one (nothing and something) the sequence goes like this:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

…ad infinitum.  And what’s so wonderful about these numbers is that they are found throughout nature – numbers of petals on flowers, spirals of seeds, spirals of conch shells, patterns on leaves of trees and bushes, curves of galaxies, and on and on.

My nephew did his first science project at Holy Family Academy on the Fibonacci sequence, with a sunflower and a love of math in hand.  I come before you in this post with a great respect for math, if not love, and a poem in hand – a Fibonacci poem, sometimes called a Fib for short.

And what, pray tell, is a Fibonacci poem?  A lot of fun is my answer.  I’ll be giving an example each week for three weeks, poems written by me to chronicle my journey from the error of atheism to true belief.  Their odd line structure is determined by the Fibonacci sequence, with the number of syllables in each line corresponding to the first consecutive numbers of the sequence.  So, a one syllable line is followed by another one syllable line, then a two syllable line, then three, then five….  The last poem, in particular, is a tribute to the wondrous secrets of the Created Order.  Stay tuned!

Here is the first:

There Was No God

(A Fib)

The

void

was all

that I could

see with idle eyes

that would not pierce the universe.

© 2017 Christina Chase

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Sunflower photo © 2017 Dan Chase