can i see some ID please?

it's my birthday. i'm forty-one.

they're still arguing about evolution over at the gc.com forums.

and nobody want to argue with me on these points, so i'm disappointed. and i'm quoting myself here.


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ok, let's assume that you can't prove God exists. you just can't. why should you? once you take the supposition that there exists an ever-present living God you have abandoned the arena where proof is needed. the concept in and of itself is preposterous unless you believe it to be true, in which case proof is useless.

so. i'd like to assume that there is an ever-present living God.

why would such a being bother to create us and the intricate universe that houses us? if we're the star creations, it's a mighty big stage for us to be playing on.

or why bother to create such amazing and balanced systems that we can study for thousands of years and with all our accumulated knowledge we can't quite fathom?

i'm an artist. i create things for the enjoyment of it. i set my hand to a thing and it has some meaning, or beauty. i write a string quartet and it gets interpreted by every new set of players. sometimes you create art and it is meant to interact with its environment; the whole point of it is to watch it unfold.

scientists, i'm told, like to create models. they set up environments with given sets of rules and they observe what hapens when things interact within the set of rules the scientist has created. it is possible for the scientist to change the parameters of the model and things within it will behave differently.

why would anybody go to the trouble of creating art, or models?

because we like to. because it pleases us. we like to find out what happens. we like to see the manifestation of our ideas take shape.

if we are in God's image, perhaps God too is like this. there is much talk about God having peopled this world with creatures posessed of free will.

it is possible that God created this incredible, highly ordered set of complex and beautiful systems simply because it pleased him. it is also possible that such a God could set up this model with rules that even he obeys. you know, to see what happens. to watch his creation grow and manifest.

a God like this could easily adjust a parameter and step back to see what effect it has on all his creation. things might evolve. they might evolve because the parameters change, or because they can.

we were given free will. somtimes we change in unexpected or sudden ways. sometimes you can trace a continuum, sometimes you can't.

as much as you can't SEE the ever-present Hand Of God working each string, you can't see it NOT there, either.

our perception of all of creation is so limited by the way we understand time and space and the more we know, the more there is for us to try to learn. we can unravel some of the mystery of our physical world but no amount of science will detect the absence or presence of God's hand in it.

so we may as well use our science to observe and describe what happened. a lot of the "how" will probably always be a mystery. you may as well not get started on the original "why".

i am amazed by the vast scope of all of creation and the intricacy of the systems that govern it. i look to science and its current best guesses to tell me what we can understand of how it all works.

i feel the living Hand of God as certainly as i feel anything in my soul and yet it is not up to science to ascertain his great majesty nor to fathom his singular mind.

a scientist may speculate on matters of faith and what mighty force, what great heart, what boundless intellect may have been working here.

a man of faith may speculate as to the miraclulous workings of atoms and stars and things to small and distant for us to understand.

and although one may think about these things with one heart, one soul, one is not science and the other is not faith. to teach one as the other devalues both.