God works in mysterious ways

Even when I was a boy I always considered this statement a cop-out. Any questions that I would ask that were maybe a little unorthodox, but what I would see as 'common sense' would more often than not be greeted with this supposedly unassailable argument 'God works in mysterious ways'.

It is strange how religious people are allowed to use this as an argument and not feel in any way that they have lost the debate. Another strange thing is that when things are unknown or not fully understood in science (which is expected to be the case) the religious apologists often step in and attribute God as the cause. What they don't seem to realise is they have been doing this for centuries. Something is unknown to science at a particular time; Oh well, it must be God then surely, what else could it be? Then a few years or decades down the road scientists will discover the answer, and strangely enough, it will not include God. Now for a time there will be a little gnashing of teeth and general ignorant disagreement from the religious folk, but eventually they will be forced to admit that the scientists are right (well most of them will anyway—there will always be a few extremists who think the Sun goes around the earth). Even the most ardent religious believer will these days believe that gravity, motion, stars, lightning, rock formation, and most other phenomena are naturally occurring and completely explainable, and therefore do not rely on any supreme being.

So where does that leave God? Well in the eyes of the religious believer, exactly in the same (albeit fluid) position he was before—in the areas that science cannot explain. I know, I know, you think they would learn.

Not too long in the past the majority of people (if we consider them Christian at least) believed that we were created on this Earth 'as is', meaning we started our existence in the human form we have today. This is a fair assumption, especially as the Bible specifically says that we were created in God's image, and what reason would there be to think otherwise? Science didn't know, so true to form, God took the reigns. Thankfully though, through a string of extremely intelligent and insightful people like Lamarck, we arrived at the genius of Darwin (and Wallace of course). His fantastically simple, yet extraordinarily powerful theory of evolution explained our origins perfectly. We did not begin our existence as humans, but evolved instead from the tiniest of lifeforms through tiny mutations over millions and millions of years.

Now it has to be said that the majority of normal, rational Christians believe in evolution. They have of course just pushed God's involvement back a few billion years as the 'catalyst' that started life off. Scientists themselves have many theories as to how life itself began and I am certain that one day we will know for sure and God will once again be relegated further and further back in time to the Christian final stand at the Big Bang (which incidentally has some very interesting scientific theories of its own).

I always had a problem with this reconciliation of evolution and God though. Let's look at a general belief today (although most people will probably not think it through like this): God starts the universe off with a bang (an event that takes an awful lot of energy but only millionths of a second) and then watches and waits for several billions of years as the Universe expands and gives birth to stars. Then he watches as our Sun and Solar System form and our Earth takes shape and evolves from a lump of molten rock and iron into a planet with oceans and continents (or more likely an ocean and a continent). Here he suddenly decides to create life. Does he create life in his own image? Does he create intelligent beings that can worship him in prayer and be tested on their suitability for heaven? No. He assembles a few chemicals. By this, I do not mean that he assembled billions of chemicals to form a complex living organism. No, he assembled a few strips of amino acids to form the simplest of organic molecules and let them get on with it. That was all he did (if that). Doesn't it sound a bit like overkill to have this supreme omniscient being doing a job that a four year old and a box of organic lego could perform? Anyway apparently he did nothing else for another few billions of years until we arrived and he sent his Son to see us (Who happened to be human...but that's another story).

I hope people can see where my problem arose as a kid. I would ask questions like: “If we are made in God's image and God is an ultimate being, then why didn't he make us 'as is', why did he wait all that time for us to evolve?”

“God works in mysterious ways” was of course the usual answer.

Sometimes I would get the “God is infinite and so time has no bearing to him” but that still never explained why he wanted to wait and was really no different from the 'mysterious ways' answer.

Another problem I had was with how much control God supposedly had. If we believe in evolution completely—as I do and most rational people do these days (we will ignore creationists for now-I did say rational) —we have to believe that evolution has no 'design', no preconceived plan as to what will be made. The mutations that occur in living things are random genetic anomalies and cannot be predicted. Once these mutations express themselves physically, they are subject to environmental factors and the organism will find the mutation either a help or a hindrance and therefore either be more or less successful than its peers. This is natural selection (albeit in a simplified form).

The environmental factors are of course not controllable either. The climate, being only a small part of the environment, is affected by the natural 'evolution' of the Earth—volcanoes form and spew out gases which change the atmosphere; other life forms (animals, plants etc.) are taking in and giving out gases all the time. These other life forms play an even more important role within the environment as they compete with each other for niches, for food and habitats and may be predator or prey. Each of these living organisms has also evolved through random mutations and the pressures of natural selection, and in turn affects the natural selection factors present on all of the other organisms around it.

My point is this: If each organism is undesigned and has evolved in a direction governed solely by its surroundings, and these surroundings are caused by organisms or other factors which are themselves undesigned and moulded through environment, then it has to be statistically impossible to predetermine how any organism will evolve. It would be impossible to 'guess' how organisms would evolve over only a couple of evolutionary changes (as we could not know how these changes would affect the environment and hence affect the next naturally selected step) so it is foolhardy to think it would be possible to predict the changes that would occur from a simple bacterial cell three billion years ago to any present day organism. My question therefore, is how could God make us in his own image if, left to evolution, there is no way he could predict how we would turn out. In fact the chances of there being a 'we' at all (as we know it) are pretty slim.

“God works in mysterious ways” maybe? More likely the Christian answer would be that God could control and plan the random mutations, the natural selection that occurred, and our ultimate evolution to Homo sapiens sapiens. My question would be why? If God really is that powerful (and he would have to be to have constant control over every genetic mutation of every living creature, not to mention the control of every nuance of the climate, atmosphere and geological change) then surely it really would have been easier just to make us as we are if that is what he wanted all along. Less of a headache I would imagine, build a world full of animals, insects, plants and the like, make them unchangeable so they don't evolve and that's it, job done. Humans could have been worshipping him for billions of years not just a few thousand. For an all powerful supreme being, the process of going through billions of years of evolution to reach a few thousand years of one particular species seems awfully inefficient, and to be honest--incalculably complicated tasks aside--not too smart.

“God works in mysterious ways”. Yeah right.