Between A Strock And A Hard Place.

I did not hie myself over to the Schenectady County Community College to listen to Columnist Carl Strock debate Jay Wile on the topic of intelligent design. If I had, I would have been in a bind. Carl Strock is, in my opinion, the finest columnist in the area. What I especially like is the way he exposes corruption in politics and goes to bat for people like Jack Carroll who is in prison for something he didn’t do. Carl is one of the main reasons I read The Gazette.

However, I do feel that there is some basis for the concept of intelligent design. Actually, whether our universe came about through the process of creation or evolution doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to other Christians. If God chose to bring about the universe through the process of evolution, that’s his prerogative.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of theistic evolution, the idea that God created the initial mass of energy or matter from which the evolutionary process began. I am troubled however, by a universe without God.

What Strock and Wile were debating was the process by which the universe came into being. Neither evolution nor intelligent design are as hard for me to comprehend as the idea that there was no beginning. If you believe in creation or theistic evolution, you believe in a God who always existed. If you believe in atheistic evolution, you believe in energy that always existed. While evolution and intelligent design can be argued using the evidence of fossils, etc., how do you discuss the concept of someone or something having always existed?

It seems to me that when we go back beyond the process of how the universe began, we leave the area of science and enter the area of faith. Was there a mass of energy that was always there or a God who was always there? Both concepts stretch my mind beyond its limits. Nevertheless, I have chosen to believe in a God who was always there.