From Genesis 1:3 onward we are clearly now in the territory of God’s active creation of the physical world that we can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell all around us. One of the fascinating claims the Bible makes about all of creation is that it stands as a witness to certain things about the God who formed it all.
Once upon a time I was working through the difficult process of making my faith in God my own. It was a painful process full of dead ends and stupid decisions, but it was necessary. I began that process by abandoning everything, including a belief in God.
I was an atheist for about three hours. It took three hours because I remained inside my apartment for the first two hours and fifty minutes. There, surrounded by the works of man, it was easy not to believe in a God. Men made the carpet, the windows, the trash can, the plumbing and all the electronic joys that we depend on so much for our life, health, and being. Once outside, deep in the temperate rainforest on a spring day, things took on a whole new wrinkle entirely.
I was confronted at every turn with the question of origin and complexity. Yes, some person put that Japanese Maple in that planter on the end of that bench. A human did that. The seed was watered and grew. But who set all the intermediate processes from seed to full growth into established order?
If you plant a Japanese Maple you only get a Japanese Maple. You can depend on that with certainty. Certain diseases, nutrient abnormalities, or insect infestations can make it into something less that your typical Japanese Maple, but the point remains. It’s thingness is always going to be a Japanese Maple.
The tree was a complex organism whose entire life we can only understand with mile markers, ultimately. It moved from seed, to shoot, to sapling, and through a predictable maturation process into the tree that stood before me. We can study the process, but with all our scientific knowledge, technology, and power we cannot synthesize a seed, let alone one that can do even remotely the same task. We can understand it. We can know about it. We can bring our knowledge to bear upon the fact of making that tree bigger and healthier. We can heal a wounded tree. We can even graft another species of tree onto it. But we cannot create the basic stuff of it. We can only observe it and make notes. We cannot recreate it.
I can still see the red Japanese Maple leaf in my hand. I held it up against the sun, my thumb and forefinger pinching the stem, and stood amazed as I could see the veins and little textures and subtleties of the plant.
I considered the system of photosynthesis, that amazing factory that harnesses solar energy and stands at the foundation of our food supply. The sun’s energy is captured and stored in plants that gets stored in animals and, ultimately, ends up in you. Two steps removed, you are still solar powered.
I remembered as a child looking at the world and watching the way a ladybug folded her wings under its polka dotted carapace. I was amazed by the fact that ants can easily lift and carry many times their weight. I was enchanted and delighted that something like water can exist in all three states of matter.
Somewhere along the line we forget how complex everything is. We yearn, for one reason or another, for a separation from that magic, that information, that wonder. “How does it work?” stops at the mile markers. We know that it works, and yet we can’t replicate it. We count ourselves at the masters of it. Mystery solved. Petty, little kings on knowledge thrones studded with facts, figures, and DNA analysis.
And yet even hardcore evolutionists can’t help but use words like “designed to”, or “made for”, or “selected to”. All of these turns of phrase belie an admission of an intelligence out there that has designed, made, selected, and intended. They will, of course, use the nebulous word “nature” as that intelligence; as if nature has a will and intellect of its own. Could nature have some sort of collective unconscious of all matter. That only opens more logical doors. It is not so easy to take God out of the creation.
So, there I was, confronted by the manifold beauty and complexity of everything in Genesis 1:3-31, looking like a special kind of town idiot, tourists swarming around me as I held a leaf up to the sun, and I could not deny that there had to be a God; a Creator of some sort. I didn’t know what God it might be that had blessed us with life and structures beyond our comprehension and ability to replicate. But I knew, as sure as I can know anything including that two plus two is four, that there was a God.
The closer I examined things in the natural world the more I was compelled to exclaim, internally, “What an intellect! What a designer!” Even when we delve into the world of psychiatry, brain or hormone science, my goodness! Every single thing is complexity on complexity working in harmony with other levels of complexity in other complex beings creating a further entangled complex of complexity, and yet somehow it works!
The only way that I could have remained an atheist after that leaf was if I had a wholly ulterior motive and used intentional ignorance as an excuse to remain so.
I saw a glimpse of what God saw in His creation at the end of every few days.
“It was good.”
Finding Narnia 
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