God in the Details: How Science and Nature Reveal Intelligent Design

Creation cannot exist without a Creator, and without divine providence, the universe would return to chaos.

The phrase “God is in the details” has become popular, and its deeper meaning is that if you pay attention to the little things in life, you can perceive God’s constant presence no less than in the big things. This is the power of reflection.

The Mystery of Fire

Consider something from everyday life — fire. We cook with it daily, but how often do we stop to ask: what is fire, and why does it exist?

All matter is made of atoms which are tiny particles that attract or repel each other in different degrees. Oxygen atoms in the air are attracted to carbon atoms. If they get close enough, they “stick” like magnets, forming carbon dioxide. When they are farther apart, they repel each other.

Wood is mostly carbon atoms, surrounded by air filled with oxygen. Generally, the oxygen doesn’t collide with the carbon strongly enough to bond. Heat is the rapid motion of atoms. When we add heat, oxygen atoms move faster and collide with carbon atoms in the wood, binding together and releasing more energy. This triggers a chain reaction, producing more collisions, more heat, and the visible phenomenon we call “fire.”

How does a seed create wood in the first place — carbon separated from oxygen? The seed is “programmed” to take in carbon dioxide, keep the carbon, and release the oxygen back into the air. How does it break the strong bond between carbon and oxygen? It uses sunlight. Sunlight provides the energy to split them apart, leaving behind oxygen for us to breathe and carbon to build the tree. The seed also draws water and minerals from the soil, combining them into wood.

Even after this separation, carbon still “wants” to rejoin oxygen. That’s why when heat is applied, the bond reforms, releasing energy as fire.

This elegant explanation was provided by scientists such as Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, himself of Jewish heritage. On the surface, fire is just a familiar phenomenon, but a deeper look shows remarkable precision in how nature works. In these “small details,” we can glimpse divine design.

Science Explains “How,” But Not “Why”

Science describes how things happen, but it does not answer the question why they exist, why laws work the way they do, or who established those laws. That is where meaning, and divinity emerges.

Consider just a few questions from fire:

1. Why do certain atoms attract or repel each other? The very fact that matter behaves like fitting puzzle pieces implies a Designer.

2. Why does carbon dioxide exist at all? There could have been a reality where oxygen and carbon never bonded, or never separated.

3. What force keeps atoms obeying these same behaviors every second? Naming it with a Latin scientific term is not a true explanation.

4. Why does sunlight have the power to split carbon and oxygen bonds? Why this structure?

5. Why does the vibration of atoms create chain reactions, allowing fire to exist?

6. How does a seed “know” to collect carbon, expel oxygen, absorb water, and extract minerals? The answer lies in DNA, a breathtakingly complex code of millions of instructions. Who wrote the code?

As David Hamelech says: “How manifold are Your works, O Lord; You made them all with wisdom” (Tehillim 104:24).

Seeing the Divine Through Natural Law

Looking deeply at the details of nature reveals how God not only created, but continuously sustains the universe with precision. Scientific knowledge, far from disproving God, points to His presence in the smallest elements of existence.

Some people dismiss it all with “that’s just nature”, but nature is not obligated to function as it does, nor to remain stable. The only reasonable conclusion is that there is a higher Intelligence sustaining it at every moment.

An ancient Midrash tells of Pharaoh’s magicians during the plague of frogs in Egypt. They tried to prove the frogs were a natural phenomenon by making one split into two, then four, then more. They thought that since it followed a “law,” it wasn’t a miracle. They failed to grasp that nature is itself a miracle, and laws of nature are the clearest proof of the Lawgiver.