GOD (PRESENCE OF)
Illustration★★★★“There is no God! All of the wonders around us are acciden- tal. No almighty hand made a thousand-billion starts. They made themselves.
No power keeps them on their steady course. The earth spins itself to keep the oceans from falling off toward the sun. Infants teach themselves to cry when they are hungry or hurt.
A small flower invented itself so that we could extract digitalis for sick hearts. “The earth gave itself day and night, tilted itself so that we get seasons. Without the magnetic poles man would be unable to navigate the trackless oceans of water and air, but they ‘just grew there.’
God’s Love 151 “How about the sugar-thermostat in the pancreas? It maintains a level of sugar in the blood without which all of us would fall into a coma and die. “Why does snow sit on mountaintops waiting for the warm spring sun to melt it at just the right time for the young crops in farms below to drink? A very lovely accident.
“The human heart will beat for 70 or 80 years without faltering. How does it get sufficient rest between beats? A kidney will fil- ter poison from the blood, and leave the good things alone. How does it know one from the other?
“Who gave the human tongue flexibility to form words, and a brain to understand them, but denied it to all other animals? “Who showed a womb how to take the love of two persons and keep splitting a tiny ovum until, in time, a baby would have the proper number of fingers and eyes and ears, and hair in the right places, and come into the world when it is strong enough to sustain life?
“There is no God?”
— Bishop
The point
A rhetorical passage ironically denying God's existence and attributing all wonders to accident, meant to prove the opposite—the accumulation of perfectly designed natural systems demands a designer.