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It’s hard to decide if we should pity or envy the man who boasts that he “knows God.” Surely, only someone with an ego the size of the Milky Way could believe he understands the power that created the universe with such meticulous detail and cohesive existence that reaches from the revolving movement of planets to the toil of the ant serving its community. It’s one thing for a man to say he believes in or loves God. It’s quite another to proclaim that his mind and comprehension are on the same plane with the omnipotent Creator. When I was a child on the farm and walking alone
in the woods, I felt His presence.
I didn’t pretend to understand Him.
It didn’t matter. Believing
he was there gave me a comfortable feeling.
To conjure up a mental picture, I associated God with a painting
of a white haired man with a beard I had seen in a book of Bible
stories. Maybe man’s mind
works that way that we have to associate our thoughts with something
physical as an embodiment in human form with which we are familiar. As I grew older, the mental picture became less
important and the spiritual essence was predominant.
But I never tried to put myself on an equal to say I understood
God. There are preachers, especially on television,
who would have you believe that they and they alone understand God and
can give you the word to reach the divine life.
One must wonder if they would be preaching if it didn’t pay so
well. Seems that Jesus
threw the moneygrubbers out of the temple. There is a lot of discussion now about school
textbooks to separate the idea of evolution from the concept of
creation. Religious
extremists try to dispute science and say it’s only a theory.
They want to take the teachings of religion and pronounce it as
fact. Here we go again.
What man can say he understands how the universe was created?
To say that evolution doesn’t exist and every species was
created in the flash of a light is to boost that old ego again, to say
someone knows for certain how Nature works. A friend who is a Catholic was fortunate to have
a teacher in biology who taught evolution.
They accepted evolution as the way God chose to put life
together. Charles Darwin has been made the scapegoat over
the years for anyone wanting a pulpit to attack science.
The “monkey trial” at Dayton was a show that proved nothing
except ignorance. Besides, Darwin never said man descended from
the ape. His studies showed
how species developed—evolved—to meet changes and conditions. You might find a type of rodent in the Amazon jungle that
couldn’t exist in the Polar Regions.
The adaptation of living creatures to adjust with varying
climates is obvious. The fierce Vikings of the middle ages were the
terror of the civilized world. By
today’s standards, they were nearly midgets.
The average Viking was just over five feet tall. Wonder how tall Adam and Eve were?
Some religious scholars might believe the first humans were just
as we see them today. It is
difficult to reconcile the sizes of the bones of early humans uncovered. Let someone else brag he knows God, how Nature
performs the miracles each day. Let
someone else worry about teaching evolution or religion in school. I’m satisfied to trust that God knows what He is doing.
He is doing a pretty good job, it seems to me.
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