Journey To: Wisdom in the Lifeless Things

(2-minute read)

Of course I believe in evolution. It has been hammered into my brain. But perhaps it’s a little more complicated than Darwin himself would say we’ve made of his famous studies. And maybe some of Darwin can be let go.

I think an intelligent creator is just as possible. Else how would an explosion of creatures in a 174-million year period have come to be? And what designed the “computer code” (for a better term) that ignited the universe from nothing in the first place?

The fact is, Darwin worried. We don’t talk about that much, but he did. His diary is very clear.

“The difficulty of understanding the absence of vast piles of fossiliferous strata, which on my theory were no doubt somewhere accumulated before the Silurian [now known as Cambrian] epoch, is very great,” he wrote in his epic Origin of Species.

Rocks have yet to prove Darwin’s theory. But certainly the leaves have made an argument in favor of it.

He went on to explain:

“I allude to the manner in which numbers of species of the same group suddenly appear in the lowest known fossiliferous rocks.”

The creature below is, of course, a figment of my imagination. It was created by human will, made with an autumn leaf and a black tuft of tree bark. The imagined thing, for me, serves the same purpose as a real bird: it helps me believe in the beautiful mysteries of creation.

Birds are the living descendants of a dinosaur tribe that first appeared around 231 million years ago. This species appeared on Earth this year.

I’m not Beethoven, Da Vinci or Maya Angelou, yet that silly and very original bird I molded together proves I have something in common with them.

Perhaps it is our imagination that makes a case we can all agree on: intelligent minds create in extraordinary ways. That in itself points to a sculptor/painter/musician/computer genius designing alongside and perhaps far beyond the laws of physics and biology.