“Furthermore, if it considers flying creatures of every kind, a mind
capable of deep thought will encounter stupefying things. For example,
in the smallest thing that flies, just as in the largest, in the microscopic,
just as in the plainly visible, in tiny insects, just as in songbirds and giant
birds of prey, there are sensory organs of sight, smell, taste, and touch,
and motor organs or muscles allowing them to fly and walk; and there are
internal organs attached to their hearts and lungs that are activated by
their brains.
“Those who attribute everything to nature do indeed see these phe-
nomena, but their only thought is that they exist. They simply say that
nature has that effect. They say this because they turn their minds away
from thoughts about the Divine; and when people who turn away from
the Divine see astounding things in nature they cannot think about them
rationally, much less spiritually. They think with their senses and in a
material way. They think in nature, from nature, and not beyond it. The
only difference between them and animals is that they have rational
capability, meaning that they could understand if they wanted to.
[ 4 ] “Those who are averse to thinking about the Divine and have
therefore become mindlessly sense-oriented, fail to realize that their eye-
sight is so dull and limited to physical matter that it sees a mass of tiny
insects as a single vague object, although in fact every single one of those
insects has organs for sensing and moving. They are equipped with fibers
and vessels, with tiny little hearts, windpipes that function like lungs,
internal organs, and brains that have all been woven out of the finest sub-
stances in nature. Those structures respond to life at the lowest level; that
life individually activates their most minuscule parts. Eyesight, then, is so
dull that it sees many things, each of which has countless elements, as
nothing more than a little blur; and yet sense-oriented people think and
pass judgment on the basis of their eyesight. Obviously, then, their
minds are dulled, and they are in darkness regarding what is spiritual.
[ 5 ] “All of us, if we want to, can use phenomena in nature to support
a belief in the Divine; and we do so when we think about God, about the
omnipotence he displayed in creating the universe, and about his omni -
presence in preserving the universe.
“For example, when we see the birds that fly in the sky we can reflect
on the fact that each species of them knows its own food and where to
find it, and recognizes its companions by sight and sound. In fact it knows
which birds among all others are friendly and which are hostile. Birds
know the mating of their kind; they pair off with a mate, they artfully
§12 god the creator & creation 15