“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail? . . . From whose womb comes the ice?  Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 39:22, 29-30)

The end of 2009 has been beautiful—with snow either falling or fallen since well before Christmas.  I say, “If we have to have winter, let’s have it with snow!”  Some of the snowfalls have been of the mesmerizing sort: the air filled with giant flakes ambling downward tipping and twirling slow enough that you can follow one flake from sky to touchdown.

It was during just one of those snowfalls several years ago that a thought suddenly overwhelmed me: materiality is the miracle. What I came to understand is that we are living in the miracle.  If God the Father is spirit and did create and continues to create and sustain all things through Christ the Son, then the ultimate reality that makes our visible material existence possible is found in the invisible spiritual realm.  The material world that we see, feel, hear, smell, and taste is God’s persistent miracle (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15 ff). 

So for a material being to ask if miracles are possible is really a ludicrous question.  Our senses are the material gift of our Creator that allows us to know in only a limited way just one small part of a reality so far beyond human comprehension that our reactions to it must chiefly be humility, wonder, and wordship.

It’s this truth that is the motivation for this website and the chief reason we don’t get into the debate on how or how long ago God created the material world.  For more that forty years I argued and debated and debated and argued—mostly with other Christians—about what the Genesis account of creation was telling us about the scientific manner of God’s creation work.  I was convinced that the proud humanist who denies the existence of a Creator but is nonetheless awestruck by the cosmos will eventuallybe led, as Paul tells us in Romans 1, into idolatry—to worshiping the creation instead of the Creator (Romans 1:19-23). 

What I didn’t see for decades, however, is that when Christians claim that we know how and how long ago our Creator did it, we too are a long way from humility and can easily fall into a sort of “righteous idolatry” of the material world.  I feel that too quickly we call the Darwian scientist off base when he makes proud pronouncements about how the material world came to be and are too slow to confess that even so-called creation scientists make pronouncements that may be a far cry from the truth—truth that no created being may ever be able to grasp. 

Frankly, I believe if anyone, Christian or non-Christian, ever claims he knows anything more than an inkling about God’s creation miracle, he ends by adding speculation to ignorance and calling it knowledge. For that reason I’m not much interested anymore in the “Great Creation Debate.”  Always fresh in my mind are the often logical pronouncements of Job’s counselors (and Job himself) that were blown away in a whirlwind followed by the appearance of God who shushed them all not with theology, mathematics, physics, geology, botany, or zoology (responding to their “words without knowledge”) but by showing the patriarch “things too wonderful for [him] to know” (Job 38-42).

I find it to be a lot safer—and more fulfilling—to be content to merely celebrate the miracle and wonder of His Creation and follow William Blake’s advice:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19)

For the follower of Christ, this psalm of David is a virtual manifesto for our belief in a personal Creator.  But for a large number of people, this passage is a mere affirmation of blind faith.  These are the philosophical naturalists.  As I understand it, the naturalistic theory of origins says that for billions of years after the unknown and unknowable beginning there was nobody. There was something, but it wasn’t somebody. As the universe was developing and organizing without order or purpose, nobody knew or observed it. There was no person, no intelligence, no will, no consciousness, no sensory awareness, no knowledge, no thought, no reason, no word—nowhere!

For millions of eons something was here, but no conscious mind was aware that something was here. There was no purpose or principle, yet without anybody or anything here to supervise it, something followed an orderly progression from a simplicity that’s never been observed to a complexity we still cannot grasp.

So what was in the beginning? Naturalists assert that an unimaginably huge and awesomely productive “explosion” caused immateriality to take on materiality.

Purposelessness then created a cosmos.
Chaos organized itself.
Unconsciousness awoke.
Deadness begot life.
Asexuality engendered sexuality.
No one became someone.
Impersonality gained personhood.
Non-self became a self.
Irrationality became rational.

And this material self functioned for millions of years according to the principle of self-preservation to evolve into a being who, oddly, could even purposely will to give up his life for the belief that everybody has a spiritual (supercosmic) cause, purpose, and destiny. So godlessness created God. And because of that belief, amorality produced morality, which in turn developed into complex moral and ethical systems based on irrational beliefs about diety, spirituality, goodness, love, and immortality.

Summary: For all but the last tiny eon of existence, nothing had knowledge of anything else; yet something lifeless and unconscious cooperated with something else lifeless and unconscious to bring into existence the living, knowing, conscious, intelligent, rational creature called man who survives by deliberate cooperative relationships. This accidental—and oddly naked—ape communicating in symbols invented language and made poetry. The uncreated thing created music* and art, and its evolved and embarrassingly illogical emotions still cause it to weep over the stunning beauty and grandeur of its apparent purposeless and meaningless environment. This reasoning, decision-making, sensory somebody who came into existence by the will of nobody can yet will to love or hate, kill or allow itself to be killed, and even develop the capacity to senselessly alter the natural processes that created it—threatening to send everything back into unconsciousness.

So according to naturalism, man is nothing but a cosmic orphan overwhelmed by the knowledge that he has no ultimate purpose. Shakespeare’s Macbeth articulated it well:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

To me the wonder of the creation is so great and the naturalistic worldview is so unthinkable, I can only declare with David: “The heavens declare the glory of God!”

*Read Krista Tippet’s column on Einstein’s God in which she includes this quote:
Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) is considered one of the premiere classical musicians of the 20th century. Born in New York, Menuhin first performed at the age of seven in San Francisco and four years later performed with the New York Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. After Menuhin performed a violin recital of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1929, Einstein was reported to be so taken that he rushed into Menuhin’s dressing room and exclaimed, “Jetzt weiss ich, dass es einen Gott im Himmel gibt” (“Now I know that there is a God in heaven.”)

[Photos: NASA/ESA Hubble images]

You crown the year with your goodness, and your paths drip with abundance. Psalm 65:11

Extravagant fruitfulness. It is hard to find a more exuberant expression of praise for God’s abundance than the one penned by the Hebrew psalmist David:

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its ridges abundantly, you settle its furrows; you make it soft with showers, you bless its growth. You crown the year with your goodness, and your paths drip with abundance. They drop on the pastures of the wilderness, and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered with grain; they shout for joy, they also sing (Ps 65:9-13 NKJV).

The fruitfulness of the earth and all its creatures is a major theme both of the biblical creation story and the re-population of the earth after the Flood. In both instances the Creator’s mandate is that the non-human creatures should “be fruitful and multiply,” and then that people should “be fruitful and multiply.” We all have the capacity to multiply because the earth produces enough food for us all to live and thrive.

But there’s a major difference between these two major forms of “living creatures”: people have dominion over the animals. This means that animals are ultimately at our mercy. Yet if we had to feed the animals, that would be our full-time job! For this reason, of course, we are blessed in that the animals are taken care of by God. The Psalms in particular speak of the wilderness as God’s great larder where “the young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God” and where God gives the great sea creatures “their food in due season” (Psa. 104). Psalm 145 affirms the same: “The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.” And God does that because He “is gracious and full of compassion,” and His “tender mercies are over all His works” (vv 8-16 NIV).

The amazing fruitfulness of the earth that provides both for us and for the creatures of the wilderness is a gift from a righteous, gracious, merciful, and loving Creator. As its stewards then, mankind has a divine mandate to preserve its capacity to be fruitful.

Sacrificial nurture. When I was about ten I came across a baby killdeer, and my instinct was to “save it” by capturing it. Being naturally endowed with long legs, the little bird made a successful run for shelter. As I was trying to lay my hands on it, my eye was distracted by another bird—a larger one flapping helplessly on the ground only a few feet away. What luck, I thought; and I quickly went off in pursuit of this new prey. After about a fifty-yard scamper, however, I called off the chase—because the “injured” bird suddenly took flight. I watched it fly without handicap over to the spot where I first saw the baby bird, which was now far from my reach. I’d been fooled by the mother killdeer, which had merely feigned injury to draw me away from her fledgling. She had risked capture and death to save her young, just as other birds commonly do—and countless other creatures. Many other examples of this sort of natural devotion continue to be a humbling inspiration to human parents and other caregivers who are often put to shame by animal devotion and self-sacrifice—such as mother birds caught in prairie fires who cover their chicks with their wings, dying so the new generation will live.

Human pre-eminence. One biblical truth that is clear throughout the Scriptures is that people are more valuable than animals to God (Matt. 10:29-31).  And we have the pre-eminent position among living creatures on earth.  This is clear from the dominion mandate in Genesis 1:26-29, the stewardship mandate in Genesis 2:15, and the David’s pronouncement about mankind’s superior position in Psalm 8

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings [God]and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (vss. 3-9)

Over the past twenty years secular scientists who do not themselves acknowledge the existence of God have nonetheless confessed that unless people of faith in a Creator who does have the qualities identified by Paul in Romans 1:20 (“eternal power” and “divine nature”), their desperate calls for better care of the earth will likely fail.  A notable gathering of evangelicals and scientists occurred in January 2007: An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation.  At this gathering there was a unified acknowledgment that mankind has the power both to protect or imperil God’s creation.  Certainly those of us who claim to worship the Creator must spend less time asserting the human rights of this God-granted position and begin tending better to its responsibilities.  A good place to begin is to acknowledge the amazing joint affirmation reached by this historic gathering:

"Angelus" by Millet

We believe that the protection of life on Earth is a profound moral imperative. It addresses without discrimination the interests of all humanity as well as the value of the non-human world. It requires a new moral awakening to a compelling demand, clearly articulated in Scripture and supported by science, that we must steward the natural world in order to preserve for ourselves and future generations a beautiful, rich, and healthful environment. For many of us, this is a religious obligation, rooted in our sense of gratitude for Creation and reverence for its Creator.

[Check out the "Creation Care For Pastors" site where this statement and other valuable resources can be found.]

The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. Genesis 2:9

What aspects of the natural world might demonstrate to us the existence of a creator God and His attributes identified by the apostle Paul in Romans 1:20—His “eternal power and divine nature”?  Here are a few more to add to our growing list:

Amazing adaptability. Charles Darwin used his observation of finches on the Galapagos Islands to formulate the theory that the capacity of the birds in that isolated region to adapt to a great variety of food sources is the function that “created” all life forms. Such adaptation (“natural selection”) is the origin of all species, he concluded. His observations were truly significant as are the thousands of similar observations made by other biologists since that time. It is obvious that God gave His creatures the capacity to change in this manner. This capacity is often called “microevolution” a highfalutin term that simply means “small changes.” We can see small changes like this in many similar animal and plant groups. Such changes, however, are noted only in creatures that retain their primary basic life functions and form.

To a non-scientist like myself, natural adaptation is amazing evidence of God’s purpose and design and moves me in the direction of worshiping the divine Creator. Darwin’s conjecture that all living things had their source in one simple life form that without direction or purpose through the course of minute changes created all the diversity and complexity we see in life around us will ultimately drive the God-denier in the direction of worshiping the creation—the exact result Paul describes later in his message to the Roman church: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised” (Romans 1:25ff).

Remarkable harmony Perhaps even more amazing than the creation’s adaptability is its harmony. Even though we know from our observations in the wild that only the most fit creatures survive the longest, this melody of competition is underscored by a broader and deeper natural harmony without which nothing could survive. Scientists are often astounded by instances of inter-species cooperation that are being discovered regularly: Tree roots that do a slow dance around each other and benefit each other for the health of the forest, pollinators by the hundreds sailing without conflict through the vast sea of blossoms in a mesquite grove, and cactus plants giving each other the space they need to obtain enough water to make it in what to us seems to be a “hostile” environment. Capitalism is an economic theory based on the importance of competition, but if our present economic woes are to teach us anything, they should prove to us that competition without a foundation of moral and ethical harmony is merely chaos. Our Creator’s natural systems cannot function without basic harmonious relationships. You would think that since mankind is made in the image of its Creator, we’d know our human systems, though at times beneficially competitive, truly work only because of harmonious relationships.

Overwhelming beauty. I believe it’s significant that in the Genesis creation account the first fact mentioned about the trees of the garden was that they were “pleasing to the eye” (Gen. 2:9). For this reason I’m convinced that the beauty we see and sense in the natural world is one of the most important evidences of God’s divine nature. Nineteenth century American statesman George Bancroft expressed it like this: “Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.” In commenting on William Cullen Bryant’s beliefs about beauty in nature, theologian Augustus Strong observed: “The external world is beautiful, because unfallen. It shares with man the effects of sin; but whenever we retreat from the regions which man’s folly has despoiled, we may find something that reminds us of our lost Paradise.” John Muir believed that “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”

The value of natural beauty to the human soul was what inspired the masterful landscape painter Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting. With his paintings he wanted to put people back in touch with the Creator. He hoped his paintings would give city-dwelling admirers a yearning for the outdoors where they too could discover what he had—that “in gazing on the pure creations of the Almighty, he feels a calm religious tone steal through his mind, and when he has turned to mingle [again] with his fellow men, the chords which have been struck in that sweet communion cease not to vibrate.” Maybe that’s why I admire Cole’s paintings and not Picasso’s. If we saw something like a Picasso in nature, we’d know at once it did not come from God’s hands! Beauty may be nature’s most profound apologist for God.