November 21, 2005
Aha!
Charles Darwin strikes me rather like the sculptor who fashioned a lion by knocking everything off a great block of stone that didn’t look like a lion. One of God’s greatest gifts to us is the privilege — and the responsibility — to name everything and to shape some things, that is, everything but God. Which, of course, is as it should be.
Maybe God is pleased to be thought of as intelligent, surely an irony that is not lost on him. But I rather suspect she’s not all that sanguine about our presuming to know how exactly how she went about creating creation which might be construed as to name her. This bit about naming, what is it more or less than also discovering, a sort of endless scavenger hunt, as it were. One startled Aha! after another. And then with the names which, of course, is what science is all about — discovering and naming, unfolding and sorting out, and even harnessing on occasion, that is, when we don’t blow up the lab.
Is it not for God to know and for us to find out how it all came about? For the time being, why not just call it evolution? We’re no less secure afterward than before and maybe even a bit closer to discovering what’s happening. Surely a rose smells the same by any other name and, of course, has no fewer thorns.