Another Explanation

My key concern in writing about creation as God's means to bear witness to him - to his glorious presence and his amazing nurture of all he has made - is to help us begin to understand that the God who so baffles us established this world as a place that he would bless.

But there is another explanation - simply that God was never in the picture and that the natural processes of evolution created a self-perpetuating world. With this explanation, the earth is a closed system, self-generated and governed by its own laws.

What I find so baffling about this explanation is that it is not science but a reconstruction based on artifacts - fossils, species relationships, and so on. To be sure, we can observe small changes in species over time, but a lot more time would be needed to observe major changes. And the direction of those changes would always have to be positive or the die-off rate would be enormous.

All of this is beside the point, however, because my lack of faith in the other explanation is really based on the magic and beauty of any animal or plant you would want to show me. There is simply too much complexity, too much enchantment, even if we don't go into the amazing things we can't see like instincts, immune systems, cell self-repair, and so on.

Given that magic and beauty exist, it's easier for me to believe in a Creator than in the mindless processes of mutation.

Utter Dependence?

If God made the world, the world speaks (testifies) about him. The first thing it tells us about is his glory - his amazing power, wisdom, brilliant mind, worthiness of praise. The second thing it speaks about is nurture - God's desire to care for the needs of all he has made.

The witness of nurture demands a recognition of our utter dependence on our Creator. When we look at our environment, we realize how much we need the plants and the air and the water and the animals for our very survival. Creation, in turn, looks to God for its survival. This is how one of the Psalms put it, describing the creatures of this world:

All of these depend on you
to provide them with food,
and you feed each one
with your own hand,
until they are full.
But when you turn away,
they are terrified;
when you end their life,
they die and rot.
You created all of them
by your Spirit,
and you give new life
to the earth. (Psalm 104:27-30)

Nature itself tells us that God made this world to nurture us, if, indeed, you believe he made this world. Without his ongoing sustaining work, life would cease. It would take nothing more than a sustained drought or a massive flood or an intense cold snap when it should be warm, and God could turn our self-sufficiency on its head. We need him because our ongoing existence is in his hand. Because he nurtures us, we continue to live.

Nurture

If you believe that God is ultimately responsible for this world, you can have several different ways of looking at his role in the world. You could say he made the earth then abandoned it to struggle on its own. You could say that he made the world to be his own nasty little playground where he toys with all of his handiwork like a cat torments a mouse before he kills it. Or you could see the signs that God built into his creation everything it needed to be nurtured and provided for.

In the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1: 29-30, we read

And God said, "Look! I have given you the seed-bearing plants throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food. And I have given all the grasses and other green plants to the animals and birds for their food." And so it was.

This was much more than a mere survival ration. We have to see the Garden of Eden as the perfect ecosystem, with every organism helping to guarantee the ongoing life of every other organism. Fertility was everywhere, abundant and unending, because the Maker had provided everything for life to be full in every respect. Thus all of creation bore witness, not just to the wondrous Glory of its Creator, but to God's power to nurture life, to richly sustain all the life forms he had made.

In the Book of Job, the amazing provision of God turns to poetry:

"Who created a channel for the torrents of rain?
Who laid out the path for the lightning?
Who makes the rain fall on barren land, in a desert where no one lives?
Who sends the rain that satisfies the parched ground
and makes the tender grass spring up?
Does the rain have a father?
Where does dew come from?"

If you can say it all happens by chance, you have more faith in a mindless, millions-of-years process of change than I do.