Perspective

[Today’s run: 3.4 miles – Watson Road]

I was reading a blazing hot rebuttal of on the internet from Kevin Williamson on the National Review website.  In it Mr. Williamson shows great skepticism about alternative medical theories, a category into which he places yoga, aromatherapy and acupuncture.  And he has some good points as well as some good writing.

I think he gives intelligent design a mention also.  I happen to think intelligent design has a good point to make, but I can understand why many people don’t like it.

The naturalist views about the origins of the universe and life as we know it are interesting.  I can’t claim to be any kind of an expert on them.  But I trust that the people who study such things have put a lot of thought into it.  And I am convinced they are sincere and doing their best to further human knowledge.

But there’s a problem.

Imagine those scenes in the Wizard of Oz where you can see the Yellow Brick Road that leads to the Emerald City.  Guess what… the movie studio never built an Emerald City or a road for that matter.  It was just a set, a prop, probably a painting on the wall.  Some part of the Yellow Brick Road is real, we can see Dorothy standing on it.  But not too far past Dorothy there is a transition from real bricks to painted bricks and the road goes under some set material and the rest is a two dimensional fake.

But the whole thing looks convincing.  Dorothy takes the arm of the Tin Man and starts skipping down the road and you’re sure she could go all the way to the Emerald City.  (And the director yells “Cut!” before they hit the wall.)  It looks great from the camera angle.

And that’s the problem with looking back  (or forward) through time.  There is the constant assumption that things have always been this way and will always be this way.

I think it is amazing that someone working under that assumption was able to come up with a plausible means for life to develop and the world to have arrived at this point in time.

But then someone from outside the scene, someone with a different perspective pipes up and says, “I did it.”  (Genesis 1:1).

There is something called the Omphalos hypothesis which says that created life would have had to have been started in full motion.  A created tree would have rings, a created man would be full grown with hair follicles already pushing out more hair, and that the illusion of time having passed would be a necessity for creation to function from the beginning.  People objected to the Omphalos idea because they said that God would not be honest to make an illusory history.  I’m not sure how they can say that when we have God saying He did it.    He’s not a very good illusionist if he’s already telling us what the magic trick was.

So we now have a plausible naturalistic explanation for the existence of everything.  It may have some gaps and whatnot, but the general gist of it seems to work.   The Yellow Brick Road goes off toward the past as far as the eye can see.  And we have somewhere in the more recent past a point in time where there is a plausible written record of outside forces, God, taking credit for the whole thing.  Like Chico Marx said in the movie Duck Soup, “who are you going to believe, me or your own  eyes?”

That’s pretty much the situation.