The Beauty of Creation

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The other day on Facebook I saw a meme featuring an expositor preacher, on Mother’s Day, ignoring that it was Mother’s Day and proceeding to the next biblical passage on the docket. It was interesting because this past Sunday, by coincidence, I was asked to speak on a passage from Genesis at a church here in Houston, and it was Mother’s Day.

I started by mentioning Mother’s Day, told some stories about my own mother, pointed out that there are some passages, especially in Isaiah, that offer images of God as a mother and not just a father, and, after discussing the Genesis excerpt, ended by reading Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard.” It was easy to carve out a few minutes to honor mothers.

Anyway, the passage from Genesis was from chapter 2, verses 8-17. It begins with God planting a garden in Eden, where he put Adam. God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees pleasing to the eye and good for food. And in the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Near the end of the passage we’re told that God charged Adam to work the garden and take care of it, and then told Adam that he was free to eat from any tree in the garden save for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

I spoke about three things: (1) the garden, (2) the work of tending the garden, and then (3) this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In this post I’m going to talk about the garden, and in the next two posts I’ll talk about tending the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, respectively. I do this without taking any position on the literalness of these chapters. Such questions are notoriously vexed when it comes to the early chapters of Genesis, but I take it that, however literally or figuratively we are to take some of these matters, the passages are rife with substantive theological insight.

The garden of Eden represents the world prior to the fall. It’s unspoiled, creation as it was intended to be. And we all know that Adam and Eve will soon disobey God, and the horrible fall will ensue. But sometimes Christians get accused, and properly so, of starting with the fall and paying short shrift to the preceding creation narrative. The flow of salvation history in the Bible goes like this: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation (or Restoration). Whereas Adam is responsible for our expulsion from the Garden, Jesus makes possible life once more at it was intended be.

We shouldn’t start with the fall. We should start with the creation narrative. God created this world, and he made us, and in fact made us in his image and after his likeness. That’s an even more central aspect of who we are than our fallenness. Our fallenness is a contingent feature that we have—like where we live. It can change; likewise, our sin problem can be fixed, and for those who follow Christ it has been fixed and it will be fixed. But our having been made in God’s image is an essential feature of ours—a feature that, if we were to lose it, would prevent us from being us. It’s not an accidental feature, but a necessary feature. It’s central to our identity. This is one among other aspects of this all-important creation narrative that predated the fall.

The creation narrative also reminds us that there really is a way the world ought to be, and the world as it currently is isn’t it. We as Christians have an account for why this world falls short of what it should be. When it comes to something like the problem of evil, therefore, its whole force comes from the sense that the world is somehow broken, not what it ought to be. And that’s true, and something that Christianity itself acknowledges and explains. In contrast, a wholly secular or naturalistic understanding of the world doesn’t leave much if any room for the world not matching up to a higher ideal. It is what it is; why expect anything different? It’s all an inevitable byproduct of the laws at work in the world and atoms in motion. Christians in strong contrast have a principled and grounded hope for the world’s redemption, the closing of the awful gap between is and ought. This is part of the good news of the gospel.

Another reminder the creation story offers us is the goodness with which God imbued the world. Think about the garden, filled with delightful fruit and stunning beauty. God wants us to enjoy life and the goodness of the world he created. He imposes some limits on our behavior, it’s true, but the freedoms far exceed the limitations. And what limitations he imposes are for our own good. He wants us to taste and see his goodness in a plethora or resplendent ways. There are so many wonderful things this world contains—meaningful work, rich friendships, faithful marriages, rearing children, beautiful art, transformative conversations, music and literature, food and sport, worship and love The world contains great goodness, enough to break our hearts with joy.

Yet still it isn’t what it was originally intended, and for some their lives are filled with sadness and pain. In fact, the world wasn’t perfect even in Eden, was it? Temptation comes to Adam and Eve—in the form of the serpent. If the world were perfect, that wouldn’t be the case. Plausibly this points to something like a fall before the fall. Tradition has it that Satan was an angel who fell. So the world, even in Adam’s time, was already in need of fixing, even prior to the fall.

There are thus at least two ways that the ultimate redemption of the world will make for a world even better than Eden: (1) Satan will eventually be utterly defeated and silenced. And (2) we won’t be vulnerable and susceptible to sin in our glorified state.

The latter point raise in the minds of some the issue of freedom. If we can’t fall in our beatified state, does that mean we lose our free will in heaven? I don’t think so. I think we’ll lose a vulnerability to sin that they had (and we still retain for now). In that sense our glorified state isn’t simply a return to Eden. It’s better. The picture is one of complete victory over sin—not just forgiveness for our sins, but the defeat of sin itself—understood in a broader way than just individual sins. Whatever is wrong with the world—and clearly the world isn’t the way it ought to be—will be wholly fixed.

Biblically speaking, the deepest sense of freedom is freedom from sin. Sin binds us, holds us in bondage. This is why those who think they’ve broken free from God’s constraints are often those most held in the grip of sin.

One more thing about the creation narrative for now—notice that the creation is described as good—and the notion there is interchangeable with the notion of beautiful. Christianity has always taught there’s a close connection between the good and the beautiful, so that makes sense. Kant thought of the beautiful as a symbol of morality, and of course the history of philosophy is replete with those who have thought of the transcendentals of the beautiful and goodness as flip sides of the same proverbial coin, in some ultimate sense ontologically inseparable, even if they remain conceptually distinct.

Hans Urs von Balthasar famously argued that Kant’s arrival at beauty only in his 3rd Critique (after truth in the 1st and goodness in the 2nd) represents the way philosophers tend to privilege truth and goodness over beauty. Balthasar actually argued that this is a mistake. He thought that beauty paves the way to thinking of goodness and finally of truth in the right sort of way, making beauty the appropriate place to begin. It can offer an enrapturing vision of how the world ought to be, something that includes our will within God’s animating providence. This is one reason among others why, though I’ve devoted most of my professional energies to work on the moral argument(s), I have a growing desire to extend my work to an aesthetic argument for God’s existence. If goodness and beauty are in fact inseparable, perhaps I’ve been doing so all along.

In His Image: How Man is Designed to Legislate Morality

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In The Bible, God creates man in His image. I set out below to show a tiny overview of a far more complicated and amazing collection of working parts in man that show that God designed man not just in His physical image, but in the way we are designed to do things similar to what God has done: Legislate Morality. 

Speaking of Man

It is often stated in varying degrees that man is extremely similar to monkeys, and that he is just a primate that learned to talk through a series of accidental, beneficial mutations that occurred to better ensure his survival. So how does the language of man compare to the sounds of animals? 

According to the National Human Genome Research Institute (1), a human being is 96% similar to a chimpanzee. Some say this is evidence of a recent evolutionary link between the two very distinct species. It also turns out humans are 90% similar to a cat, 85% similar to a mouse, 80% similar to a cow, and 61% similar to a fruit fly. Your DNA is also said to be 60% identical to both a chicken and a banana. That said, DNA research continues to throw these numbers farther apart with every new discovery of the layers of information contained within each of your cells, but that’s a topic for another day. 

If we just look at what is around us, we can see what the codes of that DNA bring about; people, cows, fruit flies, monkeys, bananas and all the other living things on this planet. Humans aren’t as good as monkeys at climbing trees. They both eat bananas, which now seems strange if we are actually 60% like bananas. 

But monkeys don’t talk. They simply lack the physical design in their throats, mouths, lips and jaws (think hardware) and far more importantly they lack the dedicated areas of the brain (think software) to comprehend oral communication. Depending on the desired sound, there are as many as 100 muscles used by a human in order to make the precise sounds of the tens of thousands of words in the English language. There are animals with a variety of chirps, squeeks, grunts or howls, but nothing even remotely close to the complexity and order we find in any one of the many human languages. 

Monkeys are an entertaining animal, and clearly have non-verbal forms of communication, but it seems clear that monkeys were not designed to communicate with words. Monkeys will never be able to describe how they feel, or say how their banana tastes. They can’t say thank you and they can’t say I’m sorry. Monkeys will never converse with one another about how the DNA of humans is 60% similar to bananas and chickens. 

No other living kind can communicate information the way humans do. A few animals may mimic the sound that humans make, but they can’t understand why the sounds are significant. Animals can certainly sense fear and react to it, but they cannot tell another creature how the fear makes them feel, or tell another about their day, or where they are from. Animals can be a part of a story, but they can never tell the story.  

Man is designed in such a vastly different way than any other creature to use the fine motor skills of his mouth, and the circuitry of his brain to be able to speak and comprehend speech. Without speech, so much human achievement would have been impossible. And yet, the animals go on without the mutations proposed to be of our benefit. They continue to chirp and grunt and live and go on about their lives unchanged for thousands of generations. They don’t seem bothered by their inability to speak in terms of their ability to survive, as would seem to be the point of evolving the ability in the first place. 

There is no denying that man seems intentionally designed to speak, especially when compared to all other living creatures. The Genesis account of creation begins with God speaking creation into existence. Jesus is referred to as “the Word” in the book of John. Without speech, we would not be able to ask the questions, where did we come from, or, why are we here? Without speech we would not be able to communicate our ideas of right and wrong. We could never tell someone they must not do this, or they must do that. 

 

Hands on Purpose 

When I was a new recruit at the police academy 20 years ago, there were a number of things that the instructors drilled into our heads, everything from how to shine your shoes to how to shoot a gun. One of the most often repeated things I heard, and continue to preach to officers, is that you have to watch peoples’ hands. The hands are what will kill you. 

There are lots of ways for a man to kill another man, but the vast majority require the hands. The hands can strangle and punch. The hands are what throws the spear, swings the sword, pulls the trigger or pushes the button. 

The other thing they taught us about hands in the academy is that we officers should always have our hands out of our pockets. If you were seen with your hands in your uniform pockets by a drill instructor, get ready for problems. This was their way of getting it through to us that our hands were our defense. We had to be ready to react with our hands at any moment to whatever may be thrown at us. I have threatened to sew pockets of officers’ uniforms shut for fear of them not being prepared to react to the random human outburst, often aimed more at the uniform than the individual officer. 

Man’s hands aren’t just dangerous though. Man’s hands are the only hands of all the creatures that are so finely tuned to provide enough strength and dexterity that a person can go from climbing a mountain to swinging a bat to writing a letter to playing a piano without issue. Man’s hands have created the incalculable amount of art that has existed in history. Hands are the primary instrument in expressing design and imagination, using tools small and large, and putting the intricate finishing touches on a creation. 

No animal comes close to the potential of man and his hands, especially when combined with his intelligence and imagination. Animals continue to live on, seeming not to need the capabilities we possess with our hands, and instead relying on instinct rather than imagination and finely tuned hands. From the beginning, the hands of a human seem important. A fetus at 10 weeks is only 2 ½ inches long, but already has fully identifiable hands formed(1).  

 The hands of man, while capable of being used to commit terrible atrocities, are the same hands used to perform the most complex surgeries imaginable to save other human lives. Human hands are used for eating, greeting, expressing thoughts, writing, sensuality and for prayer. And when speech doesn’t come to a person, our hands are capable of  speaking (sign) and reading (braille). Hands are used to feed infants their first solid food. Hands can be used by a father learning to braid his daughter’s hair, or a mother teaching her son to tie his shoes. 

 Man also uses his hands quite frequently to write important things down, especially things like history and laws. No animal has written a history of their kind from creation to present. No animal has compiled so much as a sentence about the right and wrong ways to conduct themselves. The law of the jungle is not   

 

Legislating Morality 

In criticizing Christianity, many point to the idea of how unjust the world is as clear evidence that there cannot be a good God. It is initially hard to argue against this idea when you consider the horrible ways people treat one another on a daily basis around the world. How do we deal with this undeniable evil? 

In the recorded history of man, laws of one sort or another have been a staple of every civilization. In a very summarizing statement, a law is supposed to bring about order and establish standards of behaviors. This is not a uniquely Judeo-Christian philosophy. Every society has laws that govern the behavior of its people in their conduct toward one another. It is a fundamental purpose of governments, as even the bible notes.1 

One thing I often hear is that we should not try to “legislate morality.” We should let others do as they please, as long as no one gets hurt. My response is that all laws legislate morality. That is the purpose of laws in the first place. If people were inherently moral, we would not need to legislate any laws. But people are not inherently moral. While people are quick to point out their relatively good behavior compared to their neighbor or Hitler, it is not often they compare their behavior to Mother Teresa or God Himself. 

Every statute in our criminal code legislates morality. Laws against violence, rape and murder exist because people recognize that man has inherent value, and should be protected. That is a moral position. Laws against white collar crime and fraud exist because stealing from others is agreed upon to be morally wrong. Laws concerning drug, food and water safety exist to protect people because we value people. That is a moral position. Stop signs legislate morality. If none existed, do you think anyone would stop out of pure courtesy to their neighbor as they are running late for work, with no potential traffic ticket to worry about? If you follow any law back to its source, you will eventually find a moral position that grounds it. 

The moral basis for laws are a reflection of the value man sees in other men. These laws have many similarities to natural laws in that if you break them, bad things happen. If you try to defy gravity, you will likely crash to the ground. If you defy a stop sign, you will likely crash into a car.

If the Bible is true, we are all the sons and daughters of the God Who spoke the laws of nature and of man into being. Man is given dominion to act in a way that reflects God’s value for the life He originally spoke into existence. 

There is no other creature aside from man that possesses the hardware or software to speak the way we speak, to read the way we read or the fine motor skills we have in our hands that allow us to write complex symbols that express ideas to others. Without the ability to speak, read and write, humanity would be unable to collectively have a history, and as importantly, to have a law that came about as a result of that understanding of history. 

Simply being able to speak, or even to read and write, would not get us to a point where we speak and write about right and wrongs. We have also been given a sense of right and wrong from the same Creator Who created us in His image. The animal kingdom has it’s laws, but they are not written down or even spoken. They are just instinct. 

The God of the Bible is the original Lawgiver, and we are the Lawgiver’s law givers, acting out our instinct, with the use of our completely unique abilities to speak, read and write, to legislate morality in defense of creation and our fellow image bearers.

Tony Williams is currently serving in his 20th year as a police officer in a city in Southern Illinois. He has been studying apologetics in his spare time for two decades, since a crisis of faith led him to the discovery of vast and ever-increasing evidence for his faith. Tony received a bachelor's degree in University Studies from Southern Illinois University in 2019. His career in law enforcement has provided valuable insight into the concepts of truth, evidence, confession, testimony, cultural competency, morality, and most of all, the compelling need for Christ in the lives of the lost. Tony plans to pursue postgraduate studies in apologetics in the near future to sharpen his understanding of the various facets of Christian apologetics. Tony has been married for 9 years and has two sons. He and his family currently reside in Southern Illinois. 


Morality and The Recalcitrant Imago Dei

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Morality and The Recalcitrant Imago Dei.jpg

The Recalcitrant Imago Dei: Human Persons and the Failure of Naturalism (SCM Press, 2009) is a concise, deep, challenging, and wide-ranging critique of philosophical naturalism. In it, philosopher J.P. Moreland argues that there are several aspects of reality which naturalism is unable to account for, while theism can: consciousness, free will, rationality, morality, value, and a substantial human soul. The arguments are controversial and many will disagree, but I would urge anyone who has the time and inclination to read and think about this book, if you are interested in comparing the explanatory power of naturalism compared to theism with respect to these issues. If Moreland is right, and I think he is, theism has more explanatory power regarding many central aspects of human persons. I don't agree with everything in the book, of course, but the case is very well made.

Rather than summarizing the entire book, I will focus on the last chapter which is entitled "Naturalism, Objective Morality, Intrinsic Value and Human Persons." Moreland begins the chapter by noting three features of the moral order:

  1. objective, intrinsic value and an objective moral law;

  2. the reality of human moral action; and

  3. intrinsic value and human rights.

His claim is that these features of moral reality fit very well within a theistic worldview. By contrast, some naturalist philosophers believe that naturalism yields defeaters for these aspects of moral reality. Moreland alludes to naturalists John Bishop and Michael Ruse as examples of such philosophers. (As a side note, other philosophical naturalists, such as Erik Wielenberg, disagree, and contend that the foregoing can fit within a naturalistic metaphysical framework. But Moreland's points count against a naturalist view which seeks to accommodate such non-natural properties within its ontology if he's right that these features have better metaphysical fit within a theistic framework.)

Moreland offers an argument that the following features are defeaters for a naturalistic worldview. To fully appreciate and evaluate his argument of course requires reading the chapter in the book, but I'll give a quick summary of his points.

  1. The existence of objective moral value: If the universe starts with the Big Bang, and over its history we find the arrangement of microphysical entities into increasingly complex physical compounds, how does value arise? How can a naturalist, as a naturalist, embrace non-natural, objective values?

  2. The nature of the moral law: The moral order presents itself imperatively, that is, as something which commands action. The sense of guilt one feels for falling short of the moral law is best explained if a good God is the source or ultimate exemplification of that law. As Moreland puts it, "One cannot sense shame and guilt towards a Platonic form" (p. 147).

  3. The instantiation of morally relevant value properties: Even if a naturalist allows for the existence of some Platonic realm of the Forms, the naturalist has no explanation for why these universals were and are instantiated in the physical universe.

  4. The intersection of intrinsic value and human persons: How is it that human beings are able to do as morality requires, and that such obedience to the moral law also happens to contribute to human flourishing? Theism has an obvious answer to such questions related to human nature and the intentions and design of God, but it is not clear, and is far from obvious, how naturalism would account for this.

  5. Knowledge of intrinsic value and the moral law: Given that such values are not empirically detectable and cannot stand in physical causal relations with the brain, how is it that we could know such things? Evolutionary explanations fall short because of what is selected for in evolutionary processes on naturalistic versions of evolutionary theory.

  6. An adequate answer to the question, "Why should I be moral?": Both naturalists and theists can respond, "Because it is the moral thing to do." But beyond this, when thinking about the question outside of the moral point of view, the issue becomes why is it rational to adopt the moral point of view rather than an egoistic one? According to Moreland, this is a problem for the naturalist. But the theist can offer a variety of reasons to adopt the moral point of view--the moral law is true; it is an expression of the non-arbitrary character of a good, loving, wise, and just God; and we were designed to function properly when living a moral life.

The rest of the chapter includes a discussion of the value of human beings and human rights, which I'll leave to the interested reader to explore. The book is worth the price, and I highly recommend it for those inclined to do the work of reading and considering the arguments it contains.