Reposted from The Yellow Times.
John Brand
A sort of a parable happened when I started thinking about writing this column. Stopping for a red light, I saw a homeless man holding up a sign that read, “Why lie? I need a beer.” Impressed with his honesty, I gave him several dollars.
I believe that one badly handwritten sign contained more truth than can be found among many of those who claim to be our leaders. My fervent wish is that they—politicians, executives, religionists, academicians—might learn to speak to us with the same integrity as that bum who stood on the corner of Braker Lane and Highway 183 in Austin, Texas on July 18 at about 3:30 p.m.
What a shot in the arm it would be to our ailing and sick society if truth would take the place of mendacity. How gratifying it would be if honest examination and logical evaluation would replace the mumbo-jumbo inundating our lives. Certainly, before the dogmatists seeking to plaster the Ten Commandments all over the U.S., it would behoove them to discover the profound problems raised by these proscriptions.
In the Fourth Commandment we are told that God made the world in seven days and rested after he finished his labors. If God rested the seventh day, did he just take a break from his creative work or did he go off on a permanent vacation? Genesis 1:1-2:3 comments “And God saw that it was good” after each day’s scheduled work. Well, how good was it? Was it good enough that no further improvements and developments were needed? Or was it just good enough for starters?
Of course, the Fourth Commandment raises the question how the universe began. Those who believe that every word in the Bible is the expressed word of God waged a major campaign under the heading of “Creationism.” Seeking to defend the six days creation story, they wanted public schools to teach as science that the biblical account of creation supersedes any evolutionary explanation of origins.
Their intellectual dishonesty went so far that they built a museum in Glen Rose, TX, which is close to some exposed dinosaur tracks. In the museum is an explanation that, supposedly next to one of the reptilian footprints left millions and millions of years ago, there is also the footprint of a human being. That, to their contention, proves that both species existed side-by-side. Of course, closer examination of the supposed human footprint turns it out to be nothing more than just a shallow depression next to the dinosaurian imprint. It takes a wild imagination to call it a human footprint. But such is the imagination and mentality of creationists.
Creationism seems to have been trounced. Now the orthodox camp is back again waging its warfare under the banner of intelligent design. They seek to sneak in their dogmas through the back door saying that intelligence, really their own parochial understanding of God, is the genesis of the cosmos. “How could there be such a marvelous world without intelligence designing the whole scheme?” they ask.
But just how intelligent is this universe? If man is the crowning achievement of God’s creation, how does it come about that we live in a world where some microbes are mightier than humans? It doesn’t seem very intelligent to me to make a human being the ultimate act of creation and then have millions wiped out by a mutating virus such as AIDS.
Is it intelligent to go to all the trouble to fashion this world and then have it ravaged by floods and earthquakes, droughts and meteorites? Of course, unexamined standard dogmatism avows that human sinfulness brings about all these tragedies. However, I cannot for the life of me reconcile a god who would drown a little kid in a flood because either parent had done something wrong.
It would seem to me to be much more honest intellectually to hold up a sign saying, “Why lie? God could care less about what is happening in the world!” Even the great Einstein could not bring himself to accept that conclusion. He proclaimed, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Yet all the evidence is that that is precisely what God does. The dice are rolled and sometimes they come up sevens and elevens and at other times it’s snake eyes and double sixes.
The one hundred billion galaxies, each one with about one hundred billion stars, provide the evidence that God only took a breather on the seventh day. The universe is very much a work in progress. Stellar furnaces explode with a million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Old stars die and become the debris from which heavier elements are formed. Black holes swallow other black holes. The horizon of the universe is ever expanding.
While there are mathematical equations and laws of physics explaining the nature of Nature, there is no evidence that a benign intelligence is at work. On our planet, starvation is an ever-growing reality. If God is behind every little squirming sperm that finally penetrates an egg, then that intelligence does not give a fig whether or not “his beloved creatures” survive. If things keep on as they are, by the year 2600, God will be responsible for so many of us that we will stand shoulder to shoulder. The total consumption of electricity would make Earth glow red-hot. That does not seem to be a sign of intelligence.
Assigning blame for cataclysmic events to Adam and Eve eating one lousy, forbidden fruit reflects a petty, narrow-minded, vindictive god. Now if he would pinpoint his wrath against Mafia bosses, crooked politicians, Kenneth Lay, and sundry other such sorry characters, I’d be all for him or her or it. However, it seems that all of this kit and caboodle have big homes in secluded estates and eat “pheasant under glass” for dinner.
Obviously, God did not rest on the seventh day. The world is still very much in process. As things are developing, tragedies and horror stories are part of the everyday.
Of course, to me the biggest single indicator of a lack of intelligent design in the universe is presence of that creature calling itself homo sapiens, sapiens. How smart are we when our single most consistent behavior pattern is genocide? We just love killing each other.
How smart was it on the part of this supposedly intelligent creator to give our species a brain reflecting hundreds of millions of years of development? A brain of three brains where the several parts are not well coordinated is not evidence of a lot of intelligence on the part of the designer.
So before various and sundry folks plaster the Ten Commandments all over this country, they ought to know what in the world they are promoting.
John Brand is a Purple Heart, Combat Infantry veteran of World War II. He received his Juris Doctor degree at Northwestern University and a Master of Theology and a Doctor of Ministry at Southern Methodist University. He served as a Methodist minister for 19 years, was Vice President, Birkman & Associates, Industrial Psychologists, and concluded his career as Director, Organizational and Human Resources, Warren-King Enterprises, an independent oil and gas company. He is the author of Shaking the Foundations, and encourages your comments, please write him.
This essay was originally posted under the title: The Ten Commandments: #4. See also: The Ten Commandments: #1-3.