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OF MONKEYS AND MEN #8
RANDOM FACES IN THE SKY
Three theologians named Lucy, Linus, and Rev. Charles
Brown are lying on their backs, looking up at the fluffy white clouds
in the magical land of Peanuts. And as they consider the universe of God’s
creation, cartoonist Charles Schulz has Lucy saying, “If you use your
imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations . . .
what do you think you see, Linus?”
Well, if you’ve kept up with the relative IQ strengths of the players
in Charlie Brown’s hometown, you know that Linus may be the smartest thing
in town, with the possible exception of Snoopy the beagle. So he begins
to wax eloquent. “Those clouds up there look to me like the map of the
British Honduras on the Caribbean.” He scans a bit to the west and adds:
“That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins,
the famous painter and sculptor.” At this point, Charlie Brown begins
to shift uncomfortably in the grass, because he hadn’t really noticed
the profile of Eakins anywhere in the sky, and wasn’t sure he could tell
the difference between Honduras and Hayfork Junction. But Linus isn’t
done with his travelogue just yet. Looking to the other side of the horizon,
he clears his throat and continues: “And that group of clouds over there
gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen . . . I can see the
apostle Paul standing there to one side.” (Here at the Voice of Prophecy,
we like that one, of course.)
By now Charlie Brown is ready to check himself in at the nearest home
for slow, round-headed boys. Just then Lucy turns and asks him the same
question: “What do YOU see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?” And in a low
voice, he confesses: “Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie,
but I changed my mind!”
We got that particular strip out of the classic book, The Gospel According
to “Peanuts,” by Robert Short. He actually uses it to encourage the Christian
Church to embrace imagination and creativity . . . at least enough to
keep up with a world where fiction writers and film-makers entertain us
by “seeing Honduras in the clouds,” so to speak. But as you and I consider
the evidence for a Creator, a designer behind the shapes of clouds and
mountain peaks, let’s ask this: what sorts of forms in the universe around
us hint at a God up in heaven, and which ones don’t?
In one of the books we’ve been borrowing from, entitled How Now Shall
We Live?, authors Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey pull up an old clip from
a film entitled Reunion in France. Speaking of cloud formations, during
World War II, over in Nazi-occupied France, there was a pilot with the
Allies who, every day, would fly over Paris and sky-write the single word
COURAGE. As in: “Hang in there. We haven’t forgotten you.” And Colson
makes the obvious point when he writes:
“Had you and I been there, we would never have mistaken
the skywriting for an ordinary cloud; even though the words were white
and fluffy, we would have been certain that natural forces did not create
the message.”
Most of the time, the average person can simply look
and know that clouds either just blew by, or were created by a rational
pilot in a plane built by other rational people, rationally spelling out
“Compaq Computers” or “COURAGE” in the sky. It’s either random shapes
that just HAPPEN to look like Honduras, or it’s something much more deliberate
and designed.
Take that innocuous little Greek letter, “pi.” We all know that it represents
the ratio of the circumference of a circle divided by the diameter, and
comes to 3.14159265358979323, etc. A web site recently announced that
a team of researchers at Tokyo University had calculated pi to 1.24 trillion
places. To which most of us respond, “Get a life.” And of course, you’re
aware that if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by ITS diameter,
you get pumpkin pi. Divide that big silvery ball in the sky’s circumference
by its diameter, and that’s a moon pi. Or take a native Alaskan’s circumference
divided by the diameter, and you say hello to an Eskimo pi. And so on.
The good news is that once you tire of these jokes, you can divide the
circumference of a bowl of ice cream by its diameter, and have yourself
some “pi a la mode.”
Well, friend, let me tell you something. If all pi was . . . was this
fourth-grade math number, 3.14, we’d say: “Okay, that’s what pi happens
to be, that’s the number, I’ll finish my homework, and then go have some
REAL pie, thank you very much.” Here at the Voice of Prophecy, which is
one block away from a Marie Callendar’s, most of us prefer our pie with
an “e” on the end anyway. But how do we explain that this mysterious little
animal, 3.14, doesn’t just show up in fourth-grade math books and in our
five-dollar calculators. Instead, it’s all over the place. A web site
by a Paul Gusmorino observes:
“Pi is fundamental to the way in which our universe
functions; practically EVERYTHING is dependent on p at some basic level:
light, sound, energy, gravity, electromagnetic fields, matter itself.
In fact, p is so central that it can be seen as a symbol of our universe.”
And that’s true. In higher calculus and science and
physics, this number 3.14 is just everywhere . . . and in places that
have nothing to do with the circumference of a circle. If you climb up
to the highest levels of abstract algebra or differential equations, there
it is. And even though pi itself is the most famous of IRrational numbers
– meaning that it can’t be exactly written as a fraction –it appears that
its presence in the universe, in all these fields, is a decidedly rational
and planned, even designed, thing. This Paul Gusmorino, as he concludes
his web site essay, confesses:
“Pi represents an omniscience which we will never possess,
but that we can nudge closer and closer to as we approach its true value.
Calculating p is a quest parallel to trying to fully understand our universe.”
A mathematician named William Demski has written a
new book entitled The Design Inference, and Colson paraphrases a pertinent
passage. Here it is:
“When we try to explain any natural phenomenon, there
are three possibilities: chance, law, or design. If the natural phenomenon
is irregular, erratic, and unspecified, we conclude that it is a random
event.” Like that cloud which happened to look like the stoning of Stephen.
He continues: “If it is regular, repeatable, and predictable, we conclude
that it is a result of natural forces.”
That might be something like the Yellowstone geyser,
“Old Faithful,” spouting every hour for all these decades. Now here’s
number three:
“BUT . . . if it is UNpredictable and yet highly specified,
we conclude that it is designed. The four presidents’ faces on Mt. Rushmore
are irregular (not something we see happening generally as a result of
erosion), yet specified (they fit a particular, preselected pattern).
. . .The evidence clearly points to design.”
Do you understand what he’s saying? A piece of rock
might vaguely resemble some famous person, and we say: “Huh.” But if there’s
a place in South Dakota where you see the exact replica of four American
Presidents, then you know a designer did it. Just so, when a number like
p happens to connect the circumference to the diameter, we say “Huh.”
But when we go higher and higher in all branches of science – math, biology,
chemistry, physics, engineering – and there’s pi, pi, and more pi all
over the place, you begin to realize that a Designer up in heaven gave
us this vast, incredible, interconnected universe, where broad principles
and benchmark numbers and provable theorems and formulas all hang together
in an exciting mosaic of creative power.
Friend, I want to tell you that I believe this old Book called “Holy Bible.”
Did you know that even Darwin himself said: “You can either believe in
my theories – in Darwinism – or you can believe this Book. But the two
ideas are mutually exclusive. You can’t mix them up; you can’t blend them.
They do not co-exist.” And friend, I believe this Book. From cover to
cover. If you’re on a walk, and you see a turtle up on a fence post, you
know one thing: somebody came along. That turtle didn’t get up there by
itself. And I see the evidence in this sin-scarred but still beautiful
world we live in, and I say: somebody came through here. A powerful God
did all of this. A mathematical God put “pi” in the vast structure of
all He had made. Even the animals in our backyards and buzzing around
our hummingbird feeders are a vibrant testimony to the creative power
of somebody who came through here and made all these species: birds that
can migrate and return to San Juan Capistrano the same day every year;
whales and salmon that traverse the great depths, honeybees that build
honeycombs that are a marvel of design. The next time Eddie Murphy plays
that Dr. Dolittle character who can talk to the animals, I wish he’d ask
some of them how they do these amazing, God-inspired things. But we already
know the answer, don’t we, Dr. Dolittle? Because the testimony’s right
in front of us in the book of Job, chapter 12:
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the
birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it
will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these
does not know that the Lord has done this?”
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