Seeing the World in Color

It strikes me as a bit odd, how totally at-odds our two most prominent crowds of modern screamers seem to be on the surface, yet how absolutely alike they are underneath.

In one corner are the religious fundamentalists, and in the other, the godless secularists. They certainly do seem, at first glance, to have nothing in common other than a mutual hatred. Yet they share exactly the same set of presuppositions about the world.

To both "sides," reality is all starkly black-and-white. There are no shades of gray, and colors are completely out of the question. And if you do not share their presuppositions -- if you do not view the world through their very limited frame -- then you must belong to the "other side," because God knows that, to these people, there are no other options.

As, to them, it's all either black or white, one side chooses the black, and the other the white. "Either science is true," they both declare, "or religion." But notice that for both, it always had to be simply one or the other.

Tell a fundamentalist how much like a secularist he or she really is, under the skin, and reap their immediate, gale-force wrath. They don't like it when you get under their skin. Tell a secularist how much he or she resembles a fundamentalist, and just watch the sparks fly. My, what a nerve you've touched!

One crowd flatters itself by thinking that it, and it alone, knows God and is numbered among the saved. The other must believe, with all its heart, that it is intelligent and sophisticated, with its finger on the pulse of the whole universe. To everyone else, they all merely look like the puffed-up fools they really are.

When I contemplate the labyrinthine path that life has taken from the primordial slime to where we now stand, heads erect and able to count at least all the stars we can see, I stand in awe of the inscrutable power of God. Of course we are all the product of Intelligent Design. Why must so many resort to fairy tales and hocus-pocus in order to believe in the existence of the divine?

The latest insanity is the trumped-up controversy between something dimmer wits insist on calling "Intelligent Design" and another that wits not too much brighter call "science." What the former means is that whatever we do not yet know is unknowable without resorting to "the God of the gaps," while the latter believes that once we discover what fills those gaps, there will be no room for God. Only those with a genuine faith in a real God can see all this for the tempest-in-a-teapot it actually is.

To think that anything we cannot understand at present must be explained away by hocus-pocus -- living in deathly fear that one day we'll find out too much and God will just disappear in a puff of smoke -- is not real religious faith at all. It is nothing more than a form of atheism too cowardly even to tell itself the truth about its unbelief. And to imagine that any God Who might exist is so feeble and tenuous that someday "science" will surely outpace "Him" is tragicomic hubris at its worst. Again, underneath the thin veneer of their differences, both of these crowds believe precisely the same thing.

I'm not worried that science will ever find out there is no God. That Soviet cosmonaut who, a few decades ago, declared that he saw no giant eyeball staring back at him from space, so therefore the subject of God's existence was a closed one, had all the intelligence and imagination of a laboratory chimp. He was stuck in the gulag of Cold War black-and-white. All these "people of faith" who have now declared war on science are right there in the gulag with him.

The media focus on their silly little squabble because it sells ad space and air time. It's high time we stopped acting like sheep and letting them herd us wherever they want us to go. If we stop buying into this bogus and utterly colorless view of reality, it will eventually shut up and go away. We have allowed the media to be dominated for far too long by stupid people devoid of imagination.

It's time to demand our right to behold and enjoy all the colors in the rainbow. It's time to worship the God Who Really Is. Liberal people of faith are the only ones now making that demand. Thus far, post 9-11, we have been held hostage by the colorblind. It's time for us to raise our eyes, see past the storm clouds, behold that rainbow in all its splendor, and remember, as did the earliest people of God, that God chose a rainbow to remind us that our covenant with "Him" will never end.