Let’s recap:
1. People love Buzzfeed-style pablum (e.g., “Take this quiz to find out what a good-looking GENIUS you are!”), which is why this blog has maybe five readers, tops.
2. That’s four more readers than I ever expected.
3. Why bother?
This is a Dad blog, so what I’ve written here is mainly for the benefit of my kids. They can’t read yet, but at some point when they are reading, they’ll likely be pressured to accept the same fraudulent pseudo-scientific orthodoxy that was imposed on me to varying degrees through 20+ years of education. I can’t necessarily assume that I will be around at that point (even though I’m in reasonably good health), and so I hope these words will endure and give the kids something with which to answer the rhetorical questions that smug, self-assured teachers and professors use to bully smart and inquisitive students (and even fellow academics) into resigned conformity. They’re the same questions a visiting family member asked me some three years ago in the NICU as I held my infant son, who was born five weeks premature. Sleep-deprived and unprepared for a petty-minded war of rhetorical points, I didn’t rise to the occasion. That particular person seems incapable of venturing much beyond his own self-regard anyways, so I really didn’t miss an opportunity (other than to maybe feel what it’s like to try explaining water to a fish).
I can already hear people asking me, “Don’t you want your kids to know about evolutionary biology?” I do, and I’ll encourage them to read “On the Origin of Species” from cover to cover—although I expect they’ll soon realize that as an explanation for the origin of life, it’s about as scientifically credible as phrenology or flat-Earth cosmology. But I’m also going to encourage them to read the works of Stephen Meyer, John Lennox, and Alvin Plantinga (among many others). They’ll be educated, not indoctrinated, because nothing will be concealed from them. They’ll be taught how to think instead of told what to think, and they’ll be able to stand on their own two feet intellectually. That is one of my sacred ambitions for them as a Dad.
No matter what they read, they can hardly do better than this:
… [S]ince the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
Scholars believe these words were likely written in Corinth in the Winter of 57-58 AD by the Apostle Paul, a product of both the rigorously logical Hellenistic and philosophical Hebrew worlds. The irony of this statement—about God’s “invisible” qualities being “clearly seen”—is intentional. While the original text is Greek, Paul employs Hebrew idiom by which the deliberate use of irony, paradoxes, and seeming contradictions (and sometimes puns) draws the reader into a deeper meditation on the text and consequently reveals more layers of meaning than one reading could provide.
And the deeper meaning here is a frank repudiation of reductive materialism and postmodernism: We can infer truth higher than the laws of chemistry and physics, and that higher truth is independent of our refusal to make the observations and inferences that necessarily lead to it. Way back when The Onion was still funny, there was a column titled “This Lump Under My Arm Is Probably Nothing” that brilliantly (if darkly) portrayed an author whose symptoms were screaming that he do exactly what he evidently most feared (go see a doctor). This is the same kind of nagging, ineluctable cognitive dissonance I struggled with as an agnostic. Three-billion-character-long data structures don’t just pop into existence by accident. Such things are engineered. And if the implications of that are extremely unsettling to you, just try to imagine how Michelangelo might have felt if people had said of his David statue, “Look what we found in a Tuscan marble quarry!” Some bluntness is warranted: As a finite mortal being, maybe it’s not so smart to insult your Engineer, Who necessarily transcends life itself (and also time, space, and energy), by asserting that you resulted from an accident. Refusing to acknowledge the truth could prove dangerous.
Behold what ignoring a piece of rock for 500 million years can do! Now for some pants ….
I said before that my son is fascinated with machines, and sometimes he makes his own machines (usually out of Mega Bloks, LEGOs, and old raisin boxes). It’s pretty basic stuff, but he is exceedingly proud of his work and invests lots of time trying to preserve prototypes and improve upon them. Any IT worker who’s ever written some code that worked well knows this feeling. We tend to love what we create. This is important because if we are the result of a design, our Designer probably loves us A LOT.
That’s hard for us to wrap our brains around because we tend to judge ourselves by human standards, by what we have or haven’t accomplished or by how others value (or devalue) us. It’s especially hard to understand for people who’ve experienced a lot of rejection in life, or for people who have a lot of shame and regrets from the past.
Or for people who’ve been literally treated like garbage. That’s what happened to Marcus Wallace. His biological mother didn’t want to have a baby back in 1985, so after he was born in her dorm room, she put him in a trash bag and threw him in a dumpster behind a local gas station. She left him there to die, but Michael Randelman, a 25-year-old painting contractor found the infant and rescued him. Thirty-one years later, Marcus tracked down Randelman and two police officers from the local police department in New Jersey who were also involved.
‘”I love you, Marcus,” Randelman told him. “You are special, and you were meant to be here. Don’t let that incident tell you otherwise.”‘
Those are some of the best and truest words ever uttered because they express how God views you, whoever you are, whatever you’ve experienced in life, whatever you’ve done or failed to do. Your life has meaning and purpose and value, and you were meant to be here, at this moment in time, because you are special, and you are loved by the only One whose love actually imparts eternal value.
Even if you don’t have silky pony hair.
(And yes, kids, I know Leibniz was wearing a wig.)