Because our natural world is so pleasing to the human eye, it must be the handiwork of God. So the argument goes. It is usually put forth by those with little firsthand experience, apparently, of Nature.
Have you been out in the woods lately? Swarms of gnats, savage horseflies, blood-ravening mosquitoes, and homicidal spiders assault you at every step. A poem, addressed to God:
Why/The fly?/And at that/The gnat?
The spider strings its webs between low-hanging branches, in the air lanes of flying insects, and those that are trapped it often devours alive. All through the murmurous glade, creatures pursue and are pursued; the race is to the swift, and as for those that stumble and fall, seldom is the courtesy paid to let death descend before beginning the meal.
“What a book a devil’s chaplain might right on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature!” That was Charles Darwin, devout to begin, who gradually lost his faith through long observation of random and remorseless nature.
The woods offer a pretty prospect from my back deck. All art is deception.
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