Citrus
Yesterday I spent some time talking about the creation of the universe and telling you that Young Earth theories come largely out of human hubris and ego, but that’s not all God had to say on the subject. There was one other thing that he said that I wanted to tell you about.
It has to do with the mechanical aspects of the creation of the world. Another way to look at it is as a lack of imagination on the part of the Young Earthers. God gave us our brains and expects us to use them. The universe is so complex that even to just understand our most local part of it is more than a single human mind can do to any great depth. The best way we have come up with to extend our knowledge, then, is to follow the scientific method. What this does for us is nicely summed up in Sir Isaac Newton’s famous line, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The Young Earthers will go to great lengths to support their notion. They will explain that the Grand Canyon was created by the Great Flood of Noah. They will tell you that God created the fossils in the ground to test our faith. They will cling to ever smaller gaps in the evidence of evolution.
God told me that, sure, he could have done everything they said, but that would have been easy. The Young Earthers have limited their own imaginations. They can imagine that it would take a great and supreme being to create the universe just as we see it, but they have failed to imagine how much harder it would have been to have created the seed of a universe capable of growing until man could emerge many billions of years down the line.
By way of metaphor God told me to think about citrus trees. You can head on out to your local nursery and buy a citrus tree with some branches that grow lemons, others that grow oranges and still others that grow grapefruit. This is possible because horticulturists can graft branches from different kinds of citrus trees onto the trunks of other citrus trees and they will grow and thrive. This does not happen because scientists were able to manipulate the DNA of citrus seeds and produce a seed that will grow into a tree that produces more than one kind of fruit.
Which do you think requires a greater God? A universe that was set in motion to grow for billions of years and then produce mankind in the image of God? Or a universe where God individually places all the things that he wants us to see?
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