Tool Time
Been in the basement a lot this week. Making clouds of dust to see what I can produce just short of spontaneous generation. I am reminded of high school when we were taught to politely sneer at the ‘science’ that proclaimed life could emerge ‘spontaneously’ from a pond. How simple minded those pre-enlightenment fools were to think that fish could just spring into existence as if of their own volition.
Today we teach our children an either-or tale of similarly stunning foolishness. We teach them that life either sprang, like Athena, full grown from the divine skull or it popped into being from an accidental combination of various compounds. Maybe we should coin a new phrase to label our own implausible possibility; “the divine mistake”. There was a god who liked to spend time stirring dust in the cosmic basement. Being a careless divinity some etheral compounds leaked onto the pile of molecular debris and, voila (this instance of divinity must be French, of course), life was percolating on the cellar floor.
So, there you have it, perhaps we are the product of a cosmic Tim Allen. Isn’t that just as comforting as the alternatives offered by the battalions of opinionated critters engaged in our current cultural war?
On a whim... 
I think your implication is right: it is more comforting, than the alternatives projected like missiles in the culture war.
It is interesting to think about the role and meaning of chance in things divine. I think Darwin thought about this. Although he was not one who prayed nor one who professed faith in God, in his autobiography he wrote that he wondered whether chance and necessity alone were sufficient to explain “the immense and wonderful universe.” He wondered if there was divine intelligence behind that universe, an intelligence something like that of humanity’s.
I think your metaphor, the cosmic Tim Allen, synthesizes the kindness of God, the possibility that divine intelligence is something like human intelligence, and the idea that chance may be involved in the creative acts of God just as it is in human creative activity: life is a grand project conceived in the intelligent, creative mind and kind heart of God and, as was the case with Tim Allen’s Tool Man, chance plays a role in its in the way it turns out. Or, something like that.
Ken
12 March 2008 at 4:15 pm