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Last night we were
watching a TV nature program on flowers. Jasmine, sweat pea, bleeding
heart. The orchids, so many orchids. A fully-spread red rose. All the
zoomings-in on quivering pistils and arrays of prongs and threads.
Fragrances maddening or calming, overwhelming or subliminal. Textures
suggestive, private, alarmingly sensuous and shapes and patterns fractal
and confounding or merry and playful. Colors deadeningly intense and
dreamily delicate. Passion flowers and primroses. Suddenly the
narrator stopped and blurted that old question: “Why are flowers
so beautiful?”
Funny how flowers
do that, make you blurt out, for no reason, except simply because of
their beauty. We remember the first time, long ago now, that we brought
a bouquet of spring daffodils to our wife, for no particular reason
except we thought we were supposed to, and she looked both startled and
delighted, to us a startling and delightful combination, and she gasped,
“Oh! Flowers!” Just to hear her say that in that certain way
and to see her face blossom into such loveliness, and how that made us
feel, are the simple reasons, the best reasons in the world, why we are
still bringing her flowers. But usually there is already a vase of
fresh flowers, frequently dusky orange alstromeria, that she bought at
Kroger, arranged in a vase on the coffee table. Then it’s our turn to
say (at first awkwardly, now it seems so natural): “Wow! Those – what
are they? – are really so beautiful!” She and the nature
narrator say it better.
Meanwhile our
narrator was answering himself. “For no reason, none at all for
mankind,
no reason except for flowers to reproduce themselves, by luring insects,
only certain insects, luring them and ingeniously loading …”
What a letdown.
But we knew it was coming. We’ve heard this kind of Evo locution all
our life (long before TV nature programs). It’s sad. We’re old now,
and the sadness is getting to us – how sad it is, the void, the hollow
feeling that must come to an award-winning expert-in-his-field Evoean
forcing himself to clamp his eyes shut against beauty, simple astounding
beauty, and having to mumble, “For no reason…”
To Evoeans beauty,
as mankind senses and uses it, is a gosh-awful stumbling block, more
embarrassing and appalling than any fossil gap, any mere scientific or
philosophical challenge. Evo has enough trouble just explaining how a
couple of quarks collided and aggregated and crawled out of a black hole
as microtubules and eventually, as a fish, sprouted legs and crawled out
of the swamp onto dry land, and from then on wildly sprouted anatomy all
over the place, much less how the soul and the perception of beauty
sprouted. That’s when Evo’s troubles really begin, to the embarrassment
of our TV nature narrator who, caught of guard, ejaculates, “Why is a
flower so beautiful?”
For no reason, Evo
answers, none at all for mankind. But why then, please tell us, why is
mankind involved at all -- as he, and especially she, just looking,
smelling, touching, receiving, knows in her heart? There’s no Evo sense
to it.
Evolectuals tend
their unsustainable weed patch and throw together, at random, a corsage
for you, “aesthetics” – that’s Evo’s plastic substitute for what you
feel when you
see an orchid.
That’s all you get, aesthetics, dry, wilted, rattling around inside a
fatuously beribboned presentation box, sans even the baby’s breath.
Like a bee lured to an impotent daisy and leaving cross-eyed and
unsatisfied, we’ve buzzed the blighted Evo hothouse, not a pretty sight,
storms of mutant pollen, we’re allergic – ca-ca-CA…CHOO!
We don’t know any
professional Evolectuals personally. But we wouldn’t be surprised if a
good many of these academicians, especially the ladies, after a hard day
at the glassed-in Evo office escape and rush outside and, of a summer
evening, smell the real roses, maybe tend their own in their own
high-rise urban rose gardens.
We hope so. Or nurse their prize rare orchid collection. Or arrange
ikebanas, thus to exercise, and enjoy, the full powers of intelligent
oriental artistic design. We really hope so.
Explaining the
existence of beauty, and human craving for, and appreciation of, beauty,
comes naturally, in our case joyfully, to a Creationist because it’s so
basic to Creationism. A Creationist sees the beauty of a flower as even
more irreducible than the complexity of DNA, which nobody has ever
actually seen, no doubt exquisite just to behold if we could. A Creator
(skip the theology) would be expected not only to be in command of every
molecular intricacy of what He created, and how to get insects involved,
but also to really enjoy creating, like you would, and enjoy what He had
created, (“And he saw that it was good” Genesis 1:12),
and enjoy passing it on to us to enjoy too, like a good mother or your
grandfather who gave you, when you were a child, a birdhouse he’d built
himself, whom, yes, He also created.
When not denying
the existence of beauty altogether as just another Eurocentricity, or
otherwise ripping its petals off,
Evolectuals say the perception of beauty is only an odd confluence of
molecules that register certain vibrations, nothing personal. That
beauty is a perception in the eye of the beholder, we have never
denied. What we’re saying is, the Creator created that too. Beauty is
an attribute of God Himself (skip the theology), which He has shared
with us, after His own image.
Again thanks to the
Creator’s intent, flowers can be hybridized to create even more beauty.
Hybridizing Evo and Creationism cannot. Stretching the days of Genesis
into eons; letting God toss a few seeds into the air and then sending
Him or him or Her or her or it off to play somewhere else, or just
letting Him insert a soul into a promising hominid like a bee
inseminating a waiting petunia, or weeding Him out altogether – yields
only something uglier and thornier.
Meanwhile, back to
watching TV nature programs. For well over a half a century we’ve
especially enjoyed nature films, and now it’s our very favorite, almost
exclusive, media entertainment. The quality of the photography has
improved so incredibly, but the sound, alas, has become increasingly
degraded by noise and static -- irrelevant Eco and Evo propaganda -- as
annoying as commercials, actually are commercials. The zapper solves
our problem. But what about the narrator’s? Our advice to Evoean
documentarians is to stick to waltzing with wolves and sharks. At least
you won’t be blurting out that 64-million-year question, why
so beautiful? And on your way home don’t forget the O
flowers.
1. We really wanted to
give her nasturtiums. The reason? Because of the name, the word,
the way it sounds. We think syllables can be as pretty as petals.
Rhododendron. Astilbe. Bugbane, bee-wort.
2. Since the Enlightenment Reason has been exalted over everything
else. Odd how it works, the more you go by Reason alone, the less
reason there is for anything.
3. And we won't ask why.
4. Genesis 3 tells why it went bad.
5. Technically that’s “deconstructionism”
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