Traces of Goodness
A few years ago, the host of a Scandinavian talk show asked Richard Dawkins,
the English biologist and militant atheist, “What is the most common
misconception about evolution?” Dawkins’s response was “That it is a theory of
random chance. It obviously can’t be a theory of random chance. If it was a
theory of random chance, it couldn’t possibly explain why all animals and plants
are so beautifully...well designed.” Dawkins noted that even Darwin himself
didn’t believe in random chance. “What Darwin did was to discover the only
known alternative to random chance, which [he thought] was natural
selection.”*2
Yes, he actually said that! Dawkins is leaving the door fully open for what
some call “intelligent design,” but let’s not fight about the wording. As a result
of this fight, many educated people no longer want to talk with religious people,
or use our phraseology. Thus the dead-ended culture wars we are involved in
today where each side is entrenched behind symbolic words.
All I know is that creationists and evolutionists do not have to be enemies.
The evolutionists rightly want to say the universe is unfolding, while believers
can rightly insist on the personal meaning of that unfolding. We give the
phenomenon of life and matter a positive and certain end point, which we call
“resurrection,” while also accounting for lots of suffering and death along the
way, which we call “crucifixion.” That is, indeed, a momentous and grand
vision, and it explains a lot, but it also carries so much extra baggage that I can
see why rational and scientifically minded folks usually resist it.
Yet to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead is actually not a leap of
faith. Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern
of everything. We might just as well use nonreligious terms like “springtime,”
“regeneration,” “healing,” “forgiveness,” “life cycles,” “darkness,” and “light.” If
incarnation is real, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully
expected. Or to paraphrase that earlier statement attributed to Albert Einstein,
it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle!
This point is worth sitting with for a few moments.
Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking spirit
into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam.