Somewhere Before Evolution…

There is the beauty of it, of the world and its wonders⎯the seasons, the sunset, the majesty of a storm-filled sky; the innocent eyes of a child, the wonderful welcome of loved ones; the awareness of being alive. And as we look out upon life, the air, the sea, the mountains, the morning, and all the complexity and most marvelous and infinite mechanism we may know that there is intelligence, order, power, purpose, and that we are part of that purpose. That wonderful awareness of our world suggests citing some lines from John Muir⎯lines that wonderfully set aside a creation of chance or of an unknowing, unfeeling mechanistic machine: “Every motion of the constantly shifting bodies in the world,” he said, “is timed to the occasion for some definite, foreordered end. The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that marks the course of constellations . . . Nature is one, and to me the greatest delight of observation and study is to discover new unities in this all-embracing and eternal harmony. . . . Men, with only a book of knowledge . . . have seized upon evolution as an escape from the idea of a GOD. ‘Evolution!’⎯a wonderful, mouth-filling word . . . Just say ‘evolution’ and you have explained every phenomenon of Nature, and explained away GOD. It sounds big and wise. Evolution, they say, brought the earth through its glacial periods, cased the snow blanket to recede, and the flower carpet to follow it, raised the forests of the world, developed animal life from the jelly-fish to the thinking man. But what caused evolution? There they stick. To my mind, it is inconceivable that a plan that has worked out . . . the development of beauty that has made every microscopic particle of matter perform its function in harmony with every other in the universe⎯that such a plan is the blind product of an unthinking abstraction. No; somewhere, before evolution was, was an Intelligence . . . You may call that Intelligence what you please; I cannot see why so many people object to call it GOD.”²