Making Believe

The more thought I give to the universe around me, the more preposterous I realize it is to argue that this came into existence by random happenstance. Yes, I’ve said all this before. We must never forget that removing God from the picture removes any concept of plan, design, purpose or instigator for any of what you see around you. There can be no “why?” There is no reason for anything that ever happened to have happened. The idea that a billion changes all took place, leading to a goal is nonsense. There was no goal.

It is beyond comprehension that change A led to change B, and change B led to change C, and, etc. in a progression toward an end product. Several times along the way, that progression would have gone sideways, or skipped necessary steps, or simply stopped, or even have gone backwards, or more likely it would have incorporated all of these debilitating steps because it could not have been headed in any certain direction anyway. There was nothing to instigate it, nor to guide it. There was no purpose for it, and no design.

Butterflies and bees, and flowers and pollination, seem a fitting consideration for the spring of the year. You may have learned the following in a high school biology course, or you may have stood outside with your eyes open and observed the world around you, but you don’t need a degree in ornithology and botany to understand this. Butterflies are attracted to brightly colored flowers as a source of nectar upon which they feed. In the process of feeding on the flower, the butterfly will pick up pollen on its body and/or legs. Then, when it flies to and lands on a different flower of the same kind some of the pollen will come off the butterfly and enter the female part of the plant. Thus the flower will be pollinated and able to reproduce.

The same process is true of honey bees, or other bees with similar behavior regarding flowering plants. Bees, in general, are better “fertilizers”, i.e. pollinators, of flowers than are butterflies because their squatty body and thicker legs will naturally be more capable of gathering larger quantities of pollen than the thinner butterfly. But the process is the same. Bees are attracted to the brightly colored flowers and gather pollen from flowers and also leave that pollen on different flowers, thus pollinating, or fertilizing them.

Here is the situation. The flowers need the bees and butterflies in order to achieve fertilization, and their bright colors serve to attract them. The bees and butterflies need the flowers for nutrients to sustain life, and the bright colors help them find the flowers. When whatever the developing thing that would end up a flower was in its evolutionary stages of development, which took maybe a million years, it had no idea that there were such things as bees and butterflies. It really had no idea that it would need help in pollination, or that it would produce pollen, or needed bright flowers either, really. In fact, it had no idea of its existence, its development or its needs or progress. Neither did anything else because there was no guidance, no plan, no purpose, no instigator - nothing.

Likewise, the bees and the butterflies, or whatever it was that would eventually become bees and butterflies, had no idea regarding their existence and development, or that they would be feeding from flowers that they would find with the help of the flowers’ bright colors. Nor did they have any idea what pollen was, nor that they would be moving it from flower to flower when they came into their own in a few hundred thousand, or million, years.

In short, these species, all of the various flowers pertinent to pollination, and butterflies and bees, all developed totally independently of each other over an incredibly long span of time. There was no plan, no design, no purpose, no guidance, no connection of any kind between any of them. Yet when their development was complete, the bees and butterflies could not live without nourishment from the nectar of the flowers, and the flowers could not reproduce without the visits from the bees and butterflies. All of the species involved would not be able to exist without the complementary existence and behavior of the others, and miraculously that existence and behavior was there when it had to be and as it had to be, right on time, and just as needed, in perfect form to perform the function the other needed, without instigation, without design, without plan, without purpose. Without God. Some people actually believe that.

The human body is complex beyond description. The structure of the eye, or the ear, and how they work are enough to command awe in the beholder. But let us consider one of the functions the body carries out everyday (and night) of a person’s life - pumping oxygenated blood throughout the entire body. This “structure” is less complicated in design, but is still awesome to consider.

The heart has a left atrium and a left ventricle, and a right atrium and right ventricle. Let’s start with the left atrium. Beat by beat, blood from the entire circulatory system flows into the left atrium with its oxygen (O2) supply depleted and replaced with CO2. As the heart pumps, the blood flows into the left ventricle. From the left ventricle the blood is pumped into the lungs where it trades the CO2 to the lungs for a refill of the O2 that the body needs. That the lungs can accomplish this function is a matter of awesomeness on a level all its own, but we’ll just take it for granted right now (like we do every minute of our lives, anyway.) From the lungs, the pumping force of the heart moves the blood back to the heart where it enters the right atrium. From the right atrium, the now oxygenated blood is pumped throughout the entire body where it provides the O2 necessary for the cells to carry on their individual functions. As it flows through the body, the blood is giving up O2 and taking on CO2 which it carries back to the left atrium and the process starts over.

This process is not at all trivial, far from it. There are several layers of complication here. There is the the four chambered heart, which first pumps blood from its left side to the lungs to receive O2, then receives blood back from the lungs on the right side from which it is pumped throughout the body. It is interesting that there are two circuits, each with a different purpose, and that they work together through the structure of the heart to first oxygenate blood before pumping it throughout the body. Then there is the matter that you have a chemistry lab in your body, we call it “lungs,” that can remove CO2 and implant O2 constantly. It is open and operating 24/7. This heart/lungs/circulatory thing is incredible. It is awesome. It deserves more thought than taking it for granted.

Without God, this entire structure and process had to come into being without instigation, without purpose, without design, without guidance, without plan. The original “bud”

Which would be the developing lungs didn’t know what the heart was doing, nor did the heart “bud” know what the lungs were doing. Neither even had an iota of knowledge of the others existence or of the function the other would or did play in the body. Neither really had a clue what its own function would be in the body, or even that it was in and part of a body. Remember, there was no intelligence nor power in the universe to design or guide any of this. They were just random items developing totally randomly and independently of each other with no guidance, according to no plan without purpose or design. Yet they both reached a point at which they perform a function without which the body could not survive.

But either one of them doing their function without the other would be insufficient. If the lungs oxygenated a blood supply that never circulated through the body, or if the heart circulated blood that was not oxygenated through the body, the body could not survive. So why did lungs, with no knowledgeable relation with a heart, why did a heart with no knowledgeable relation with lungs, even develop when individually they are useless?

Both heart and lungs as a stand alone unit are useless. They must be paired with a complementary counterpart in order for their function to be of value. Miraculously, that complementary element was there when needed, as needed, each a perfect match for the other. Both performing their different functions in sync with the other. Without any instigator, without any plan, without a purpose, without design, without guidance. Without God. Some people believe that.

When a person is thinking seriously and honestly, they cannot glibly pass over this information. It absolutely must give one pause for thought. And that thought is of the awesome power and knowledge of a God that spoke all this into being. It is unbelievable that what we have mentioned here, butterflies and bees and flowers, and the human hearts and lungs happened without planning from an intelligent being. A rational person cannot believe that a series of random events brought this about by happenstance.

Atheists will mock and ridicule me and the things I have written here (and elsewhere.) Mocking and ridiculing are not an argument. They are a ploy to avoid an argument. There is no plausible alternative. The only conclusion available to a logical mind is that there must be a God.