Pondering the Patterns of God's Garden

Creation is messy… Creation sometimes appears random. Until you look more closely…

I have the largest flower bed on our cul de sac—maybe in my whole neighborhood.  It’s kind of a blessing and a curse.  I like gardening, and the flowers are always so pretty once they are planted and established. But there’s hours of hard work each year bent over on my hands and knees to get to the pretty part.  

Beauty doesn’t just naturally spring from the Earth.  Barren soil is not all that attractive.  

The "before" picture.
A large eyesore on my front yard.

When you dig in it you’re bound to get dirty—especially when it’s humid.  You can try wearing gloves but, generally speaking, gardening is not a good hobby for those who are averse to getting dirt under their nails.  

I find the process of creating my flower garden each year is less science and more art.  While there may be similarities from year to year in my garden, each year’s creation is unique.   I go to the nursery and procure a few flats of plants.  I always have some idea of what I want when I start out, but it’s somewhat random, based on what they have available, and what strikes me as good-looking plants.  

Once I start planting, the random element continues.  One "communes" with the soil for a sense of what plants should go where.  I planted a red plant here, so it would be good if other red plants were around it.  These plants are bigger, so they go behind smaller ones.  These I know make a good border, so I plant them on the edge of the garden.  Patterns begin to emerge after a while, but they are subject to random interruptions that I, the gardener, choose to insert.

At my church, we've been having a science and faith discussion.  We have been reading The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis Collins.  We’ve been talking about how God has used evolution to bring about creation as we know it today. As I was digging in the dirt of my garden recently, I started thinking about how creation is sort of like God working in a garden.  It's not that big of a leap to connect the two.  After all,  the Creation Stories of Genesis 1 & 2 take place in a garden.  Furthermore, John 20 describes Mary's first encounter with Jesus after the resurrection as taking place in a garden. When Mary first encounters the Risen Lord, she mistakenly identifies him as "the gardener".   I don't think it was an accident that those details in John's account of the resurrection evoke parallels to the Creation stories of Genesis.  The original first century readers would have surely noticed the connection as well.  The storyteller's message is clear: the resurrection of Jesus is the firstfruits of the "new creation".  

Anyway, back to my flower garden.  Look at the image at the top of this article again.  At first the flowers appear completely random; but stare at the picture long enough and patterns begin to emerge.  Those patterns aren't accidents; they were put there intentionally by the gardener—me. 

Probing the patterns of DNA.

Likewise, Collins argues that if you examine the DNA evidence in detail—which he has done in his role as head of the government's Human Genome Project—the patterns of creation (or language of God, as he calls it) begin to emerge.

For example, humans are clearly quite different than mice, so at first glance we might assume we were created completely independently of each other.  However, if you compare the DNA structure of a mouse to that of a human, you find surprising similarities, particularly in the portions of the gene that “code” for protein.  In other areas (called junk DNA), humans and mice are much less similar—but if you search, you can still find similarities.  Long story short, Collins shows that there is compelling evidence to suggest that at some point in our ancient evolutionary history there was a common ancestor between mice and men.  

In my garden, I interrupt the pattern at times, usually to “fit” a flower in an awkward space.  I introduce a variation from what might be expected.   Likewise, it seems God (nature) interrupts the genetic pattern at times.  For reasons science can’t (yet) explain, there is a random element introduced to the language of God through genetic mutations.  Collins explains that these mutations seem to occur naturally once in every one hundred million base pairs of DNA per generation.   To put this jargon in perspective, that means that any one of us has 60 mutations that neither of our parents had.  (So, X-Men fans, maybe there’s a sense that we are ALL potential mutants.)  Obviously, most mutations are either benign, and thus have little impact one way or another, or harmful, in which case they quickly die out in successive generations. However, once in a great while, a mutation comes along that proves advantageous.  Offspring born with said mutation then gain an advantage over those without it and it passes along.  

Collins concludes that evolution through random variation combined with natural selection seems to be the most elegant explanation of how God “gardens”. Darwin's theory was  developed in the 1800s (published in 1859), long before we could see what was going on at the cellular level.  However, it has stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny and proven to be a remarkably accurate portrayal of how God (nature) actually works. There are, if you will, patterns that are used—but the patterns are imperfect.  Over long periods of time, those imperfections are what account for the diversity of life on Earth, which can all trace their way back to common ancestors.  Again, the theory only makes sense if the time intervals involved are immense—as in millions if not billions of years.  Truly our God is not in a hurry.  

There are some other explanations or theories that explain how we got here.  For example, Collins has a chapter on Intelligent Design (ID), which suggests there are “gaps” in evolution that science can’t explain (e.g., lack of fossil evidence), and in these “gaps”, God had to have intervened in the creative process.  While ID might initially look like a cleaner explanation of creation—and is one that explicitly puts the Creator in the process—Collins concludes the theory doesn’t stand up to rigorous scientific analysis. It also lapses into a common theological fallacy of placing God in the gaps.  That is, there is an acknowledged “gap” in our scientific understanding of these processes at this point.  That must mean that thisis where God stepped into the process.  The problem arises when subsequent scientific investigations find an explanation for what used to be attributed to God.  We have the makings of a theological crisis!

In contrast, the theory of evolution suggests God is part of the whole messy—but glorious—unfolding of creation from Genesis to Revelation.  It’s similar to the role I play as gardener creating my flower bed each year; I have to be involved in the whole process: e.g., buying plants, planting, weeding, mulching.  Be warned though: Just as gardening gets you dirty, you’re sure to get some “dirt” in your nails if you dig in to the details of evolution.  It might stretch your faith to think of God working this way.  There’s so much baggage surrounding the “e-word”.  It’s seen as opposing faith, but I don’t think it is intended to be that way.  

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob is also the God of the genome and evolution.  Evolution is simply the means that God has used—and continues to use—to create, or if you will, to garden.

Science has shown us that change is constantly happening on levels our eyes cannot see (i.e., DNA)—but it will typically take millennia for those changes to result in a favorable adaptation, much less a new species emerging.  Randomness is clearly required for evolution to work.  Does that mean God cannot be part of it?  Is it possible that what we see as random is not in fact random to God?   If the process is random, if it were to happen again, it might not turn out the same way.  Is that a problem?  Maybe some other lifeform would become dominant this time? (But for an asteroid crashing to the Yucatan Peninsula ~66 million years ago, maybe the dominant form that evolved would’ve been reptilian.)  But then again, what if God is in control, and we trust God to deal with the details. Perhaps the Creator’s whole point in doing all this was the end result (at least so far): the human race.  As Daniel Harrel says in Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, “Natural selection doesn’t have to mean godless selection.”  Perhaps God uses natural selection to “reign in” the randomness of mutation and point the whole process of creation toward its intended end.  That’s my working assumption, at least for now.  

How about you?? What's your take on evolution?  Does belief in evolution sit squarely with your faith in God?