One evening last week, when my wife worked late and I had no time to make dinner for my girls, my older daughter was charged with the task of preparing a large Chicken Caesar Salad for herself and her younger sister. I had already cooked and cut up the chicken; her job was simply to combine and toss the romaine lettuce, Caesar dressing, Parmesan cheese, croutons, and, of course, the chicken. She did a wonderful job and the girls enjoyed lots of yummy salad.
When I returned home later in the evening, I noticed something quite curious and perplexing. In the sink was this large glass bowl with a thin layer of Caesar dressing, tidbits of shredded Parmesan cheese, and crumbs resembling crouton dust. Inside of the bowl were a couple of forks and a pair of large tongs with the same culinary residue. How in the world did these items ever get into our sink? I pondered and I conducted extensive research, but I just could not come up with an answer. Now, of course, this question is ridiculous and the answer is obvious, but this situation illustrates how people often understand themselves and the world in which we live. Essentially, there’s this notion that the universe and the earth and everything on it, including we humans, just somehow came to be, accidentally, over the course of billions of years.
It would never even occur to me that the items in my kitchen sink just happened to be there, that the non-crystalline amorphous solid (glass) shaped itself into a bowl over billions of years, and then somehow the forks and tongs (which also created themselves) just happened to fall into the self-made bowl as well. As crazy as this sounds, it is much, much more likely for this to happen than for our entire universe to have started from nothing and to eventually have evolved into all that we observe today.
Think about just your eyeballs for a moment. Right now, as you read this blog, your eyes are using intricate machinery to refract and focus light from your computer screen onto light-sensitive rods and cones. Then, the light is transduced into nerve signals, which are then carried via your optic nerve into your visual cortex, where the raw information is filtered and patched together into something of which you can make sense. I’m no expert, obviously, but this is what I’ve read about our eyes and how they work. The point is this: if the dishes from a Caesar salad meal could never have created themselves and ended up in my kitchen sink, how much less likely is it for our eyes to be what they are and to function as they do? And this question speaks only of our eyes, two small parts of our incredibly complex and amazing bodies.
These types of thoughts always bring me back to God’s Word, specifically to what’s recorded in Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” I cannot bring myself to believe that effects have no causes, whether those effects are dinner dishes or human eyeballs or this whole world in which we live. I know that a creation points to a Creator and I suspect you do, too. So, what shall we do? I will give God the last Word and let you decide:
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
– Acts 17:24-28
Troy Burns