Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Intelligent Design

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Intelligent Design: Paredolia

God people cannot help but see intelligent design in experience. From a scientific point of view, it is an illusion, but where’s the fun in seeing everything scientifically?

The reason intelligent design is an illusion is because nature just does what it does. It follows natural law. Nature needs not a guiding hand or mind to do its thing.

I remember the time I attended a Christian fiction writing group at First Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Many of the members of that church, at least the ones I have met, are fundamentalists and Calvinists so imagine my surprise when none of them knew I would be there since I was predestined to show up.

Okay, so I resorted to church humor. For those of you who do not know, John Calvin, Protestant Reformer and scientist burner, believed that every moment and molecule motion in life is preordained by an all controlling God. Predestination takes all the fun out of free will in a Baskin Robbins.

Incidentally, there's an old story about John Wesley, the father of the Methodist Church, who rode his horse out into a field where he met a Calvinist.  The Calvinist said, "Brother John, God preordained you to meet me here today."  

John Wesley turned his horse around and rode away.

At the Christian fiction writing group we read our stories to one another, and then we sat around and chatted. One of the church members mentioned that we needed rain, and we should pray for rain.

In other words, God controlled the weather.

I reminded her of the water cycle. She looked genuinely stunned, as if she had never heard of such before.

Of course she had, but maybe as a God person, she was so absorbed in the theological way she related her experience to the world, she had forgotten or failed to make the connection.

Two plus two equals four whether there be gods or not.

Those Darn Atheists

Indeed, an atheist would argue that our perception of intelligent design happens because our brains receive sensory detail and from that data, our brains create patterns that oftentimes look a whole lot like us.

For example, a person looks at a Martian landscape from a telescope and sees a face or a city.

There’s a word for that you know. It’s called pareidolia. Atheists are dead-on right about that.

By the way, the etmology of pareidolia is “para” which means “beside” and “eidolon” which means image or idol. Walt Whitman wrote a little about eidolons in Leaves of Grass.

Ever the dim beginning

Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,

Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)

Eidolons! Eidolons!

Who hasn’t sat on a commode and seen faces among the floral designs of bathroom wall paper? Surely, I’m not the only person who does that.

Thanks for visiting me. Please feel free to respond. Blessings…