Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: Design of Intelligent Design

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

Thanks for visiting my blog.  I hope you are well and happy. 

I am attempting to pose answers to many problems today that make it difficult for people to be persons of faith with integrity, that is, without being embarrassed when our other brothers and sisters make faith sound so lame and unbelievable.

If Christianity is not going to deteriorate into superstition and irrelevance, we must exercise our right as modern generations of believers to express our faith with the science we know to be true today, just as ancient people expressed their faith with their flat earth cosmology.

I know many people who believe silly things who are not the least bit embarrassed, although they would be if they could just hear how their arguments from the mouths of rival religions sound the same. 

For example, Muslims also make the argument that their religion is logically certain for everyone and all time just because their book says it is. 

How do we know their book is true?  Well, Gabriel the angel told Mohammed what God wanted him to dictate so that all humanity would have what would eventually called The Koran.  Hearsay so it seems is the stuff of book based religions.

We pay such believers the respect that the logic of fanaticism requires, but we are hardly persuaded by their certain logic.

It is the same with our fundamentalists, who are nice people, by and large, and quite sincere. 

I never met a Christian whom I didn't like, but when my brothers and sisters wish to ensconce silliness and superstition into law as if they were science, I must dissent.  

Our faith is going the way of Zeus and his gang if we do not dissent with kindness and respect.

I have been writing about intelligent design lately.  It is one of those unintelligent concepts designed to give faith its imprimatur, but ends up making our faith look silly. 

Intelligent design for worship is very appropriate.  I must admit however that intelligent design does not sound transcendent or venerable.  It is the design of those who thought it up to capture somehow the cold steel of an objective description in the phrase so that it might be taken seriously as science in a court of law.

For worship, however, who has not been in awe of a mountain range?  Who has not watched grackles, mockingbirds, and crows wrangle over bread crumbs, giggling as they dive and leap and fuss at each other until one of them wins the space?  Who has not marveled at the night sky, the half Oreo cookie light of the moon made thinly opaque by passing clouds?  The quickest meteorite can transform a grownup into an excited child.  Have you ever followed an ant?  Have you ever sat on your porch or sat beneath a tree, closed your eyes, and inhaled breath and sound? 

Intelligent design does not sound very poetic to me.  It’s the metaphor of the uninspired accountant or lawyer, not the vision of a prophet-poet.  I see the world and meditate on creative design or the intelligent explosion of panoramic Being-itself.

We are bombarded daily with a most splendid life, a world coruscating with magical being, and we cannot help but feel the profoundest wonder at it all. 

Intelligent design does point to a sense we have about the world.  It is the veneration expressed in language that inspires us as people of faith. 

Of course, science evokes veneration too, the wonder of discovery.  Science is often a wonderful source for contemplation, but it should never be sullied by doctrine.

Until next time:  blessings…