Flower Power

The January issue of Awake! (a Jehovah’s Witness magazine) uses the orchid as an example of Divine creation: surely such a flower testifies to the fact that God created the world, since it is clearly intelligently designed!

Well…what does intelligent design mean, anyway? Does it mean that God sat up in heaven drawing blueprints of flowers and then scattered the perfect little seeds? I dunno. If He did, then He must not have created everything at once: if all creation were simultaneous, we’d run into a little problem I like to call ‘the dinosaurs.’

So, every once in awhile God makes something new and then plunks it down on the earth fully developed. This causes a few problems, too. Among other things, it begs the question of why no one’s ever caught God with His hand in the cookie jar (so to speak).

Another intelligent design theory is the ever-popular Deism: God created the ‘stuff’ of everything and then sat back and let it evolve all by itself. The Clockmaker God, Newton’s God. This is a bit problematic, too. For one thing, there’s the question of whether He actually knew what all this stuff was going to turn into or was shooting in the dark. For another, it’s a bit odd that a hands-off God would do things like Divine Revelation and Redemption: shouldn’t everything just evolve to a perfect end all by itself?

The idea that God upholds creation by – oh, I don’t know – thinking the laws of physics is not particularly comforting. As it turns out, things like the speed of light haven’t always been constant. And if God, like, sneezes and loses concentration, will we all wake up with wings? (that would explain the angels)

Creationism and intelligent design are so mind-boggling that I’m tempted to ignore them altogether. The only problem is that I believe both that evolution is true and that the world is not the product of complete chance. Oh, I can believe that specific subspecies of orchids are totally random, since that doesn’t really change their ‘orchid-ness,’ or that the entire type of flower was just one possible outcome. The fact that they’re so delicate and complicated and beautiful, however, I think could only be true in a universe where God carefully watched over things as they took their own course, making sure that they could become what they are.

It’s the same with humans: why can’t we be both descended from apes and the special creations of God? A soul can’t be evolved because it’s supernatural, and only the natural can evolve. Nor can it be separated from the natural body and remain what it is – that’s why the final resurrection is embodied, so that the human person exists in wholeness. God wants us to be able to smell the flowers and see their beauty, not just to be able to contemplate them as intellectual objects from within some disembodied existence.

God created each and every one of us as human persons, knitting us together in our mothers’ wombs. But we also belong to this world. Anyway, it’s like everything that makes us not-apes – and everything that makes us apes – was able to happen because God nurtured and helped and made it possible, knowing what it is that He had created the world and everything in it to become. After all, aren’t our lives a mixture of precisely these two things: the self-direction of free will coming from inner growth, and the help of God that makes our actualization – our becoming who we are – possible? Our lives a collaboration between us and God in a world where we do not stand alone.