Carol-Jean and I stopped by the rock show in Lincoln, MO, yesterday on the way back from preaching at Warsaw. And I bought some rocks. It may sound strange that a cheapskate like me--who hates paying a dollar for a bottle of water, something which covers 3/5 of the planet--would spend about twenty dollars for a handfull of rock, considering that the whole planet is made of it. But these nonprescious rocks are special. For example, I bought two small meteorites. It's silly, but as a space & sci-fi nut I am always thrilled to put my hands on stone which came from another world. And I bought a small, polished nugget of Missouri's state stone, creatively named Mozarkite.
But the piece which I am holding in my hand while contemplating this blog entry is shown in the picture, above. It's a chunk of petrified wood. The photo doesn't do it justice. You can see lines in the bark and it really looks like a broken tree branch. Of course, all the organic material has long since leached into the earth, replaced by the minerals of the fossilizing process. But nature makes filecopy when She petrifies wood, and so I am holding the record of a branch that was some millions of years ago on a tree, with leaves or pine needles bristling its woody arms.
I wonder what kind of creatures rested under the shade of this tree. One of my primordial, small furry ancestors, perhaps? Or an ambush predator, hiding in the leaves until lunch walks by. There's a thought. If he gets that furry ancestor, there may not be a human race some day. The sun rose and warmed its bark; seasons changed, rain fell, dry spells came and went... All without human intervention.
In fact, the Cosmos has been operating perfectly well, thank you very much, without human engineering required. Nature seems to know what to do and She just does it. Sure, the natural order is not always pretty, not always kind-hearted, not always fair to the weaker creatures. Nature nevertheless seems to have a program which runs quite well, and, given the proper conditions for life to emerge, She eagerly manufctures an almost infinite diversity of well-adapted living organisms for every available bio-niche.
Could it be that this program, which churns out life with its adaptive characteristics, is another word for Divine Order? Not the order of predesintaion, rather the opportunity to respond to free-acting circumstances and to create like an artist from the materials at hand. When theologians speak of "deep history" they mean that God--however conceived--was not just sitting around, thwddling his anthropocentric thumbs, waiting for 13.7 billion years (plus or minus) until humanity appeared less than a millions years ago.
This realization, provoked by Copernicus and driven home by the late Carl Sagan, has grave consequences for Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other religionists. It removes humanity from center stage and places them on a tiny planet revolving around an ordinary yellow star among upwards of four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way glaxy, which is just one of perhaps 50-100 billion galaxies. God must have business elsewhere, or He/She needs to be fired as CEO of the Cosmos for flagrant mismanagement of resources.
So, what was God doing when the first mammals scurried under my tree branch to seek shelter from the noonday heat? Divine Order suggests that God was the process. The whole process. The symphonic movement of evolution providing the musical score to the cosmic geology of worlds born and stars exploding. The dance of great, swirling galaxies, turning like dervishes in the cold black of space, with each particle of matter-and-energy, down to the quantum level, empowered to choose and create and respond and anticipate and make beauty blossom in ways more diverse than any mind can comprehend.
This is Divine Order. And having reflected on deep history with you, I don't feel bad at all about spending $1.50 to hold a little chunk of it petrified in my hand...
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