“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail? . . . From whose womb comes the ice?  Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens when the waters become hard as stone, when the surface of the deep is frozen? (Job 39:22, 29-30)

The end of 2009 has been beautiful—with snow either falling or fallen since well before Christmas.  I say, “If we have to have winter, let’s have it with snow!”  Some of the snowfalls have been of the mesmerizing sort: the air filled with giant flakes ambling downward tipping and twirling slow enough that you can follow one flake from sky to touchdown.

It was during just one of those snowfalls several years ago that a thought suddenly overwhelmed me: materiality is the miracle. What I came to understand is that we are living in the miracle.  If God the Father is spirit and did create and continues to create and sustain all things through Christ the Son, then the ultimate reality that makes our visible material existence possible is found in the invisible spiritual realm.  The material world that we see, feel, hear, smell, and taste is God’s persistent miracle (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15 ff). 

So for a material being to ask if miracles are possible is really a ludicrous question.  Our senses are the material gift of our Creator that allows us to know in only a limited way just one small part of a reality so far beyond human comprehension that our reactions to it must chiefly be humility, wonder, and wordship.

It’s this truth that is the motivation for this website and the chief reason we don’t get into the debate on how or how long ago God created the material world.  For more that forty years I argued and debated and debated and argued—mostly with other Christians—about what the Genesis account of creation was telling us about the scientific manner of God’s creation work.  I was convinced that the proud humanist who denies the existence of a Creator but is nonetheless awestruck by the cosmos will eventuallybe led, as Paul tells us in Romans 1, into idolatry—to worshiping the creation instead of the Creator (Romans 1:19-23). 

What I didn’t see for decades, however, is that when Christians claim that we know how and how long ago our Creator did it, we too are a long way from humility and can easily fall into a sort of “righteous idolatry” of the material world.  I feel that too quickly we call the Darwian scientist off base when he makes proud pronouncements about how the material world came to be and are too slow to confess that even so-called creation scientists make pronouncements that may be a far cry from the truth—truth that no created being may ever be able to grasp. 

Frankly, I believe if anyone, Christian or non-Christian, ever claims he knows anything more than an inkling about God’s creation miracle, he ends by adding speculation to ignorance and calling it knowledge. For that reason I’m not much interested anymore in the “Great Creation Debate.”  Always fresh in my mind are the often logical pronouncements of Job’s counselors (and Job himself) that were blown away in a whirlwind followed by the appearance of God who shushed them all not with theology, mathematics, physics, geology, botany, or zoology (responding to their “words without knowledge”) but by showing the patriarch “things too wonderful for [him] to know” (Job 38-42).

I find it to be a lot safer—and more fulfilling—to be content to merely celebrate the miracle and wonder of His Creation and follow William Blake’s advice:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.