The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19)

For the follower of Christ, this psalm of David is a virtual manifesto for our belief in a personal Creator.  But for a large number of people, this passage is a mere affirmation of blind faith.  These are the philosophical naturalists.  As I understand it, the naturalistic theory of origins says that for billions of years after the unknown and unknowable beginning there was nobody. There was something, but it wasn’t somebody. As the universe was developing and organizing without order or purpose, nobody knew or observed it. There was no person, no intelligence, no will, no consciousness, no sensory awareness, no knowledge, no thought, no reason, no word—nowhere!

For millions of eons something was here, but no conscious mind was aware that something was here. There was no purpose or principle, yet without anybody or anything here to supervise it, something followed an orderly progression from a simplicity that’s never been observed to a complexity we still cannot grasp.

So what was in the beginning? Naturalists assert that an unimaginably huge and awesomely productive “explosion” caused immateriality to take on materiality.

Purposelessness then created a cosmos.
Chaos organized itself.
Unconsciousness awoke.
Deadness begot life.
Asexuality engendered sexuality.
No one became someone.
Impersonality gained personhood.
Non-self became a self.
Irrationality became rational.

And this material self functioned for millions of years according to the principle of self-preservation to evolve into a being who, oddly, could even purposely will to give up his life for the belief that everybody has a spiritual (supercosmic) cause, purpose, and destiny. So godlessness created God. And because of that belief, amorality produced morality, which in turn developed into complex moral and ethical systems based on irrational beliefs about diety, spirituality, goodness, love, and immortality.

Summary: For all but the last tiny eon of existence, nothing had knowledge of anything else; yet something lifeless and unconscious cooperated with something else lifeless and unconscious to bring into existence the living, knowing, conscious, intelligent, rational creature called man who survives by deliberate cooperative relationships. This accidental—and oddly naked—ape communicating in symbols invented language and made poetry. The uncreated thing created music* and art, and its evolved and embarrassingly illogical emotions still cause it to weep over the stunning beauty and grandeur of its apparent purposeless and meaningless environment. This reasoning, decision-making, sensory somebody who came into existence by the will of nobody can yet will to love or hate, kill or allow itself to be killed, and even develop the capacity to senselessly alter the natural processes that created it—threatening to send everything back into unconsciousness.

So according to naturalism, man is nothing but a cosmic orphan overwhelmed by the knowledge that he has no ultimate purpose. Shakespeare’s Macbeth articulated it well:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

To me the wonder of the creation is so great and the naturalistic worldview is so unthinkable, I can only declare with David: “The heavens declare the glory of God!”

*Read Krista Tippet’s column on Einstein’s God in which she includes this quote:
Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) is considered one of the premiere classical musicians of the 20th century. Born in New York, Menuhin first performed at the age of seven in San Francisco and four years later performed with the New York Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. After Menuhin performed a violin recital of Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1929, Einstein was reported to be so taken that he rushed into Menuhin’s dressing room and exclaimed, “Jetzt weiss ich, dass es einen Gott im Himmel gibt” (“Now I know that there is a God in heaven.”)

[Photos: NASA/ESA Hubble images]