rsewell:
It seems to me that you insist that God’s creation can only be seen in the things of nature, and not the processes of nature. Why do whale created de nova speak of the attributes of God, but whales descended in accordance with natural laws do not? Do you only see God’s power manifest where nature is insufficient?
In connection with this I think my opening post in another thread is appropriate:
I’ve mentioned multiple times the informal intelligent design club we had when I was a university student, back before the young-Earth crowd hijacked the term to try to smuggle horrid science and bad theology into public schools. I’ve also mentioned that the field of study with the largest contingent in that group was biology as former atheists and agnostics encountered the elegance of the theory of evolution and concluded there must be a Designer.
Reading other posts this morning I got to wondering if people really grasp what that epiphany was like for those students, and decided to try to get it into words. This doesn’t cover all of them because not all became Christians, but it covers the majority, and in fact includes some who were not biology majors but who had taken enough biology electives to have encountered the profundity of the biological world. It’s a take-off from something one of them actually said; hopefully this will get the idea across of how they felt:
A Psalm of the Designer
Evolution declares the glory of God, and the chromosomes in cells proclaim His handiwork! Day to day pours out research, and night to night reveals studies. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them, yet their message has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world. He has set a tent for DNA, which sends its messengers out from its chamber like strong men they run their course with joy. Its reach is from the birth of the Earth, its circuit all around it, and there is no life apart from that reach. selah
O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory within the cell. When I look at all life, the work of your fingers, the nucleus and the mitochondria§, which you have set in place – What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, all that swim the paths of the seas. Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
§ or, “the plants and all animals”
Those students, and the others who concluded there must be a Designer due to study of astronomy and cosmology, were looking at processes of nature, not at the things, finding those processes elegant and sublime. Indeed as more than one agreed, looking at the “things” of nature doesn’t give all that much in the way of being impressive – especially in biology, where the arrangement of DNA and physiology doesn’t indicate a very good designer – but looking at the processes leads to awe.
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