I was in a bad mood yesterday, until I saw a squirrel on a trash can. This is not the kind of thing that typically punctures my surliness. I generally don’t even like squirrels—one bit me when I was seven years old. But I liked this one, for some reason. He pranced about the top of one of those trash cans with a triangle roof and a swinging lid. He sniffed and tried to look inside. It was about 10:30 a.m., and the sun was heading toward its zenith. My foul humor started to melt away as I realized that I was witnessing a miracle.
People on both sides of the evolution/creation debate might be missing the point, and folks who mock the idea of intelligent design definitely don’t get it. I had my own eyes opened only recently, and only because my five-year-old son is nuts about astronomy.
I’m starting to sound like some of the people I used to work with in a psychiatric hospital, so let me string some of these loose associations together.
We can see a really long way into space now. Radiation, radio waves, and magnetic resonance paint a picture of things far, far away. Past the limits of our own galaxy, we can see galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Our far-reaching knowledge reveals a powerful truth: the universe is filled with beautiful garbage.
Gas, rock, and ice—that about sums up the contents of what lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere. We think there might be some water underneath some of the ice and rock. Volcanoes puke up lava once in a while, too. Most of the planets don’t even have what we would consider a surface; they’re gas giants with a molten-metal core. The stuff out there is pretty and moves in majestic symmetry, but it’s all junk. Most it even smells bad. Uranus really stinks—or at least it would if you entered its atmosphere and got a whiff of all that methane.
With the exception of Earth, everything we’ve found in the universe is too hot or too cold (or both) to be anything but gorgeous garbage. It’s interesting garbage that does cool stuff, but it doesn’t even get close to what happens here. What happens here is miraculous.
