Bill Gates created Microsoft. The Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid in Egypt. George Washington founded the United States of America. But did any of them actually get their hands dirty doing so?
God may have created everything. But did he carefully design it — put molecule to molecule … assemble the bits and pieces … shape formless materials … put each animal in its place in the ecology — all from the bottom up based on a blue-print or architectural drawing?
The authors of Genesis clearly thought that: they describe God planting a garden, sending rain to water it, shaping some of the wet clay, and breathing life into it.
The Psalmist thousands of years ago certainly seemed to think so: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made … you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”
But taking those passages too literally creates problems: there are many aspects of our body’s design that call into question the credentials of a designer.
Some of these are small things that don’t raise any serious questions other than “what was he thinking?”
- small hairs all over our body that stand up on end when we get cold or frightened — aka “goosebumps” — which do nothing to keep us warm or make us look more threatening.
- muscles attached to our ears so we can wiggle them?
- toenails? Really?
But some aspects of our design create HUGE problems, and reflect horribly on the designer:
- linking up the airway to the food-pipe in a way that causes many people to choke to death on the water they swim in, the steak they bite into, the saliva that builds up at the back of their throat, or acid from their stomach.
- forcing the unborn baby through the mother’s pelvis … leading to all kinds of life-threatening problems in childbirth.
Really!?
All of these aspects of our design — and many others — are better explained as leftover bits and pieces still hanging around after our slow and gradual evolution from some ancient ancestral species.
This doesn’t mean God wasn’t involved. Any more than saying Cheops didn’t build the Great Pyramid, when all he did was stand up and say “Let there be a massive monument to hold our national treasures …”, and then sit down while everyone else around him scurried until he could once again stand up and announce “Look at this great thing which I have made.”
Look more closely at what the authors of Genesis actually quote God as saying: “Let the land produce vegetation … ” “Let the land produce living creatures … ” Check it out for yourself.
But when you do check it out, try hard to not read it through the lens that Fundamentalist Christian dogma gives us, but through the worldview-lens that the ancient Hebrew authors or Cheops himself might have worn. In doing so, you might see less of a micromanaging God who directs every little detail, and instead get glimpses of a bigger sovereign God who instills creative forces (gravity; quantum mechanics; entropy; thermodynamics; biological evolution) into the ancient primal cosmic egg that exploded at the first moment of time, and took delight in what evolved out of that.
So:
Creator God? Absolutely.
Intelligent Design? Maybe we should let go of that idea.
Tell us what you think in the comment box below …
If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic.
If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook.