As regularly happens, this morning my son Ryan said, “Hey Dad, did you see what the iPhone weather app does?” – and proceeded to show me something cool that I hadn’t known about the interface.
He’s always showing me something more that I did not dig into, something better.
And that’s why I love my iPhone, and the Apple design philosophy – you keep discovering, the more you dig, something even better, even cooler. Unlike many products, where more and more flaws show up over time.
Yesterday, splitting a pile of wood, I found myself marveling at the creativity of God. The different grains and textures in various types of trees, the smells, the fact that this lovely stuff hiding behind its marvelous tree-bark cloak can be used to make furniture, construct houses, build fires…and that it makes a growlingly manly splitting sound when you apply force to turn it from log to cord wood.
Just a moment ago I glanced over at my Facebook stream, and there one of my crafty friends had uploaded a picture of a beautiful desk that he had just made for his daughter. That was a tree not long ago. Now it’s an heirloom. Something glorious was hidden in that tree, waiting to be released.
From another friend’s Facebook post:
“All the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is…the reflection of the diffused beams of that being [God] who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory” (Jonathan Edwards, True Virtue).
It is a slander to think that knowing God – seeing His handiwork – leads to narrowness and misery and dullness and hate. A truly opened pair of eyes is always discovering something better, something more. We go from treasure room to treasure room, even in the simple act at gazing at the grain of wood or studying a fallen autumn leaf.
And, in God’s inexhaustible wisdom and creativity, there will always be something even better!
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Consider the snowflake. Of the uncountable trillions that fall on one’s front yard during any winter storm, no two are the same. Yet all that hard-to-comprehend variability is due to nothing more than the behavior of the water molecule when it approaches 0 Celsius in the presence of microscopic bits of dust. It requires no supernatural influence, no divine intervention, no imaginary friends, only the most basic forces of nature to explain. Wood grain is nothing more; the random effects of different annual rings that themselves are the varying natural effects of annual weather and climate.
It adds nothing, in fact it seems to me to cheapen the wonder of nature to ascribe its products to a man-made supernatural being. Nature is wondrous and fascinating and infinitely deep without any appeal to the imaginary. The real fascination and depth come when one expends the mental energy to dig deeply and scientifically into the whys. I’m sorry to have to say it this way, but the religious explanation is the lazy way out. It requires no discipline, no work, no reason to explain anything by simply saying, “It’s a miracle.”
(for those who don’t know us, Joe and I have long discussions, public and private, about our differing views of God and reality. And we remain good friends!)
If God was a man-made supernatural being, I would agree with you, Joe. It requires amazing faith, and quite an imagination, to hold to the perspective, “It just showed up.”