I
was watching a starling work on building a nest. It was in the upper corner of an outside
stairwell at a hotel. The starling had a
piece of a leaf in its beak and was trying to squeeze into a small opening in
which it was making its nest. It had to make
several attempts before it was able to balance properly while retaining its
grip on the partial leaf and still get through the opening. This made me ask a simple question: why would
the starling go through all this trouble?
Why not just lay its eggs in the crevasse without building a nest at
all? Certainly the eggs would be safe
from weather and predators there.
Of
course, birds don’t think, they just behave, right? So the starling simply follows its
pre-determined, genetically distilled reality without analysis, right? Well, not so fast. What made the starling put its nest in the
place where it put the nest? What made
the starling choose a particular piece of leaf versus some other piece of
leaf?
Before
entering seminary, I was a practicing trial lawyer for 23 years. I get the idea of evidence. I also get, though, that two people looking
at the same evidence sometimes come to different conclusions about the meaning
of and value of evidence. As a Christian, I see the starling and
immediately think God. I immediately
think of a world made and ordered which follows certain principles. I think of a world in which God makes
provision even for the birds of the air.
Part of that provision is that starlings, like so many other birds,
build nests rather than just plopping their eggs in any old place. So, I see the starling behaving and conclude
design because it certainly appears the starling is making decisions.
The
atheistic naturalist, however, sees the starling doing the same thing and
concludes, time and chance, I guess. The
starling really isn’t choosing anything.
It picks up the particular leaf because it was, in some sense,
genetically pre-destined to pick up that particular leaf, at that particular
time, to place it in that particular crevasse, in that particular stairwell, to
build that particular nest, right? There
is no design, and no decision making, just raw reaction based chemical and
electrical activity that was functionally determined billions of years
ago. Ultimately the starling was
building it nest because it was predestined to build its nest, just like I was
predestined to be there at the moment and predestined to write these words
because some blob of inanimate material mysteriously morphed into animate
material way back when. I am no more
deciding to write these words than the starling decided to make its nest. We just can’t help ourselves.
There
is a stark difference between these two possibilities.
I
understand why one might choose to conclude we and the starling are captured by
our genes, given Darwinian evolutionary theory.
What I don’t understand is why anyone would WANT that to be true. It has to mean that our lives have no
intrinsic value, meaning or purpose. It
has to mean that we are ultimately robots on a course over which we have no
control. We simply react.
Yet,
that’s not how we live our lives from day to day. We live like our choices matter. The starling appears to be making
decisions. You can claim its all an
illusion, like the Buddhists. But even
(most?) Buddhists step back onto the curb when they see a truck barreling down
the road, getting ready to hit them! We
don’t live like the truck is an illusion.
We don’t live like robots, either.
We engage all the time. Atheists
are constantly telling me how irrational and unscientific my worldview is. But based on their own theorizing, am I not
simply behaving based on the chemical and electrical reality in my brain, and
therefore, doing precisely what the cosmos has unintentionally programmed me to
do? Therefore, there is no rational or
logical basis for claiming I should not believe in God because the cosmos made
me this way! I am utterly, properly, and profoundly right, then to believe what
I believe.
Experience
tells us our choices matter, though.
Even atheists don’t live like their choices are irrelevant. Even atheists choose to send their children
to a particular school because they think it’s important for them to get the
best education. Even atheists choose to
drive in a manner that doesn’t cause accidents, because someone, including the
atheist, could get hurt. Even atheists
operate every day as if it matters whether they exercise, eat right, or take
the right nutritional supplements to maintain their health. Because inside of us, in our fully honest
moments, when no one else is looking, we know that our decisions matter. We know that life doesn’t just appear to have
intrinsic purpose, value, and meaning: it does, in fact, have intrinsic
purpose, value, and meaning. In fact, we
crave these things. How did the random,
unintentional animation of some previously inanimate blob of stuff cause us to
have these desires? It just doesn’t make
sense.
Christianity
makes sense of these longings, though. A
creator God designed us to have purpose, value, and meaning based on our relationship to him. That’s why starlings make choices about which
scrap of paper or which leaf to put into their nest. God designed them to make those choices. We are designed to make much more
sophisticated choices like whether we hurt another human being or not, whether
we move our family to a new place, whether we treat our bodies well or not,
whether we . . . you get the point. That creator God infused us with longings for
purpose, meaning, and value. In order to
guarantee that our longings actually have that intrinsic purpose, meaning, and
value God provided a perfect standard that secures this reality: his son, Jesus
Christ. God stepped into time and space
and acted as a human being in order to give us sufficient evidence to see his
glory and to acknowledge him as creator and sustainer of our reality.
Jesus
is the only person in recorded history who died, was raised from the dead, and
never died again. The offer of the
gospel of Jesus Christ is you can review the evidence and make a God-given
choice to accept the evidence or reject it.
And, if the gospel message of God’s intervention in time to give us purpose, meaning, and value is true, then our choices matter eternally. Otherwise, how are we not simply puppets of
the cosmos?
The
starling acts like its choices matter. What
about you – will you continue living a lie – will you continue living like your
choices matter when time, space, chance, chemicals, and electricity say
otherwise? Or, will you accept that there
is a God who designed you and that your choices really do matter?
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