Friday, May 25, 2007

A friend sent me this on Alberta's new Creation (no scare quotes) Museum.

I have no scientific knowledge to offer in settling this question either way. My only arguments for an old universe are aesthetic. It simply delights me to contemplate that the wonder we see around us may have been created by such slow and tiny incremental steps--swirling about, not with protons and electrons or even in the murky layers of existence physicists call quantum indeterminacy, but in mystical undiscovered (and perhaps undiscoverable) layers of reality below that--that it almost seems that each particular creative act could have been an accident--a stray note on a string: out of tune and out of time. But, taken together, the trillions upon trillions of minute waves of the Conductor's baton have given us our unspeakably intricate symphony of symphonies of symphonies, which could not have arisen any other way than by His constant loving will.

As against that, "Bang! There’s a planet; Bang! There’s an amoeba; Bang! There’s a dinosaur; Bang! There’s a man," seems rather a crude way for God to have gone about things.

As for Adam and Eve, my own pet theory is that Adam was a product of evolution, but that Eve was born of an act of special creation. This implies I "believe" (that's too strong a word, actually) in evolution, but not in the mechanism of natural selection of random (undirected) gene mutations which I find ludicrous. That is to say, Adam was created from mud (if some protozoa and some proto-chimps weren't intermediate steps who can say?) and then had supernatural life breathed into him. But Eve was conceived whole, just as the Blessed Virgin was conceived holy.

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I'd be a blackguard and a cad, if I weren't so ineffectual. The less said "About Me", the better.