On Saturday, my wife, my son and I went to a nearby city to do a little shopping. On our way home, we swung by the town where we used to go to church before I accepted my current call. There had been a lengthy road construction project there for quite some time where they were creating an interchange between a major highway and one of the main thoroughfares through the town. They finally completed it and we happened to experience it. It was so unbelievably complex that my inner curmudgeon came out. This thing makes a traffic circle look idiot proof and if you think traffic circles are idiot proof, you have clearly never approached one that was occupied by an idiot, but I digress. My inner curmudgeon got home and took to social media asking “Who designed that debacle?”
Everyone has one of those friends, the one who would contradict you if you said the sky was blue and the earth was round. He attributed the above debacle to “intelligent design.” My response was “As an artist, I know design. As a minister, I know intelligent design. This was neither.” Now in fairness I hear the unkindness in my words now, but I will drive miles out of my way just to avoid this thing. It is genuinely frightening. My friend wanted to push more buttons, so he commented, “Evolution?” You see, on principle, I don’t believe in evolution. When pressed for more detail I would tell you I believe in micro-evolution, where small developments occur over long periods of time that allow creatures to adapt to their surroundings. Macro-evolution is much more troublesome to me. The idea that new species derive from older species does not seen workable. Somewhere along the way the theory became “undisputed fact” in the minds of many, with no further evidence and I remain unconvinced. The basis for our modern explanations of evolution seem to be to discount the existence of a Creator, and I find that untenable. For me it’s far easier to believe in a Creator and intelligent design. Here’s why.
I could randomly throw paint at a canvas for a thousand lifetimes and never create the Mona Lisa. There is nothing haphazard about the Mona Lisa. Neither is it random. It is the work of an artist who put considerable skill, thought and creativity into its creation and every thinking person in the UNIVERSE would agree. All this to explain the creation of a PICTURE of a woman, yet people ask me to believe that the woman herself and everything else in creation somehow happened by accident, that it is all random with no design or designer, because if there is a design there has to be a designer. I simply can’t get past that.
AMOKArts 