Cathedrals and Blue Algae 12-23-9

Anderson, South Carolina

Bricks are a useful metaphor for a life of faith. Bricks are perfectly dumb and have little to say for themselves. Yet, one can find entire castles built of them, magnificent terra cotta structures complete with towers, drawbridges, and magnificent halls for opulent dining and celebration. With very little effort one can also find spectacular cathedrals built entirely out of these innocuous non-thinking little blocks of burnt clay, grand structures that seem to reach to the sky and inspire us to transcendent thinking.

I recently built a small planter in my front yard out of these same little bits of fired earth. My project involved mortaring perhaps 120 common bricks together onto a tiny foundation of concrete. I didn’t need much of a structure, as my only objective was to prevent mulch from washing away from the bases of three modest plants. Even as minuscule as my project was, it did require a plan of some sort and a bit of preparation. It was necessary to dig a tiny trench and use a level to adjust for the slope of the ground. It was essential to be sure I had enough mortar, concrete, bricks, water to complete the project and to have the right tools to accomplish a result the neighbors would not find offensive.

Now imagine a cathedral that has ten million bricks in it, reaching heights of hundreds of feet and providing a clear pillar-free floor of 50,000 square feet that will require a century or two to complete. Plan? You better, and give it your best thinking.

It is commonly known throughout the world that bricks are made, are created, and are not accidents of nature. No one has ever refuted this because they are found in both cathedrals and microscopic projects such as my planter. This is a rational response to the widely observed phenomenon of brick making and their subsequent use in all manner of structures.

Infinitely, more complex that all the cathedrals of the world with their millions of bricks and stones is a single living cell. A single living cell is a biochemical factory that puts the entirety of our chemical industry to shame. Within a single cell are structures complex beyond imagination, endoplasmic reticulum, cellular matrix, de-oxy-ribose-nucleic acid helixes, and mitochondria. It so happens that, like bricks, these structures are combined into different forms of cells and the cells are then combined into different species of life. Like bricks, one can use them to make simple things like phytoplankton or grand inspiring things like a stargazer lily or a peregrine falcon.

During the past several decades it has become possible with the development of modern biochemistry to clearly demonstrate that the simplest single cell life forms and the highest orders of life contain many of the same building blocks. Because this is so, a lot of highly educated people believe that the higher life forms are random results generated by some very stupid non-thinking single cell blue algae. These academic scientists actually believe that random stochastic processes can take the common bricks of life and combine them into structures, orders of magnitude more complex than the cathedrals that point us to God. It is a far greater stretch scientifically to believe that primordial soup can ‘come up with’ blue algae or that blue algae can ‘come up with’ peregrine falcons.

It is more than curious that intelligent educated people are willing to acknowledge the creators of simple easily described things like red bricks but refuse to acknowledge even the existence of the Architect and Creator of things so complex that their educated brains cannot grasp them.

One has to be profoundly intelligent and well educated to do some very dense thinking. The wisdom of man is but foolishness in the sight of God. God said one finds the Kingdom of Heaven by coming with the faith of a child.