Sunday, February 16, 2020

Chain of Life


When I go to my fitness club to swim I often meet friends who arrive around the same time. Furthermore, by the time I get to the hot tub, usually a person I know is there.
The other day during my routine of using the steam room, showering, using the tub and then swimming laps, I met Carlos and Daniel in the hot tub. We talk and relax. Carlos is an atheist of sorts. I used the word “God” and he objected that "God" is nonsense. Like many other non-believers, he insists God is an invention of man’s mind.
Carlos and I went back and forth about it for a few minutes before I went to the pool to swim, and he went back to the lockers, calling to me, “Steve! You are God!”. I grinned back at him, “And so are you!”
For a few moments as I swam laps, I thought of Carlos and I as God. It felt good to be so powerful. 

I am not under any delusion that I am God. 
When I was a young adult, I was a non-believer without religion. Then in my freshman year at college, my soul talked to my mind and asked, “Do you believe in God?” For days, as I walked the university campus and attended classes, I grappled with the question. Looking around at creation, including my own life, I thought, “Something Greater must have made this world and it’s beings.” Scientists cannot create even one blade of grass. I struggled thinking that many gods might exist throughout the limitless universes. Why not? 

At last, I concluded that if God exists, then His attribute of being All-Powerful would preclude any opposition—since if there were a power outside of Himself that existed it would mean He was limited. I knew from the philosophy class I was taking at the time that this would be an a-priori contradiction in terms.

As Carlos and I spoke in the hot tub, I asked, “Where do you think humans come from?” He answered from “nature” through “natural selection.”



A couple days later, while thinking back to Carlos and his view of evolution, an image came to my mind of humans evolving from worms. Simple forms had to evolve to more complex. Worms came into existence 518 million years ago. Man is only about 200,000 years old. 

So where did man come from? He descended from simpler life forms such as worms.

My view is God made humans and gave us powers not unlike His own. Our evolution is such that at one time we may have looked like a worm, or a reptile, or other mammal. Just like in the womb, at one time we looked like a tadpole, or something with a tail, not resembling human. But in time, a beautiful human being is born. 

This is the chain of life; by divine plan and the Hand of God.

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