"Beauty is crucial to the human enterprise because it triggers wonder."
(Fr. Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty)
But it’s not just the birds, all the animals amaze me. Some of them more or less than others. I love the variety and also the similarities visible throughout the natural world. It’s amazing to me to learn and see how each species has the right kind of fur or skin or legs or tails, claws or sharp teeth or even no teeth that’s just right for their unique environment, tastes, and survival needs.
All animals are all wonder-ful in their own ways – even the gross ones are kind of cool. Creepy crawly things are gross, however, a spider’s geometrically perfect web captivates me; the orb spider’s distinct zig-zag design is too cool. I love Okapi’s for their super radical leggings and somewhat mismatched top, along with the zebra’s stripes, the giraffe’s unique spots, the hexagonal formation of the turtle’s shell pattern, and the perfect spiral on a snail’s shell.
Speaking of spirals in nature, have you ever heard of the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Number? It’s mind-boggling mathematics that is seen throughout all nature and even in man-built architecture. I remember when I first discovered this one boring day in my high school Pre-Calc class – I was so bored I was actually reading my math book! I can still hear the explosions going off as the revelation of this incredible mathematical equation active in nature blew my mind away. Here’s a cool video that shows the awesomeness of Numbers in Nature. Watch that and then try and tell me there’s no Intelligent Designer!
And to think that all of this – this “spiral of evolution” – started from one simple point and followed a very purposeful and intelligent order and turned into the present day unfathomable universe we now live in. This was not random. The path of evolution is smart. Intelligent. Purposeful. There’s no way it could have just done all this randomly on its own. There’s no way a sunflower could know to spread its seeds out in a spiral pattern because it’s more efficient that way – on its own. There’s no way a flowers’ nectar attracts the hummingbird for both feeding and re-pollination or a pine tree’s needles could absorb moisture from fog in the absence of rain – all on its own. White light beams from the sun hitting raindrops on the way down at a specific angle separating the different colors that make up the beam and displaying them beautifully in a perfect, unbroken arch in our sky couldn’t just coincidentally do that – all on its own. DNA from two different life forms couldn’t mix and combine to form a completely new genetic code for a whole new & unique life – all on its own. Two hydrogen atoms would not know they need to bind together with just one oxygen atom to form water – all on its own. The earth’s moon could not orbit the earth approximately every 28 days and affect the earth’s oceans tide in the process – all on its own. Nor could the trees shed their leaves and the summers turn to autumn as the earth makes its way around the sun year after year.
I don’t mean to say that God is constantly ‘turning the crank’ of the universe’s gears to make it all work or that there are any little fairies or elves painting the flowers’ designs or teaching the birds how to fly. I’m saying, based on my own simple observations, and from what little I retained from my formal education, that everything has an order, nature has a purpose. It is not random. It’s all too smart, too ordered, to factually or even logically say that everything is some random coincidence of various chemicals and energies bumping into each other here and there.
On page 34 & 35 of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion
What most atheists do believe it’s that although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe and it is physical, out of this stuff comes minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life…Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain…An atheist…believes there is nothing beyond the physical and natural world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe…
…any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.
The laws of physics, the powerful forces of gravity, the intricate workings of chemistry – all of that – could not make itself without an initial cause and design. In order to set something new into motion, the original cause would need to exist outside of existence. Something from within could not start itself if that which is within did not previously exist.
