God And Mr. Darwin

It's hard, with it all, to see why the scientific types cling so feverishly to the creed -- alien to the whole of civilization, prior to the 19th century -- that God couldn't have dealt the cards originally. Well -- they respond -- it's because there's no evidence to show it. Possibly not. There is something else, though: a thing called common sense. Everything here and all around us just happened, without the intervention of a Designer? Isn't that just a little improbable?

Whittaker Chambers, observing his baby daughter's ear one day, sensed the argument for creation. Through volumes of fossil evidence his mind hacked with a dazzling blade. "No God" made no sense. I have thought the same thing about the body's digestive faculties. It all just -- you know -- happened? Tell me another one.

How you introduce God to classrooms armored in the secularism of the past century -- with pedagogues and politicians wary of breaking down some mythological "wall" between church and state -- is another matter entirely, one on which I don't expect to see us make much progress in our present mood.

So what happens now? "God knows" could be a cop-out -- or a scintillating revelation. Maybe we just leave the Darwinian theory to lie there and gather appreciation, or the reverse, as we await a Final Word. A God capable of making the world (assuming, as I do, that He did so) would seem capable of prying open fast-shut eyes that they might see His handiwork, and, seeing, come to know how it all happened.