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Religion & Law

: Thoughts in a Haystack

The Ultimate Pareidolia

By John Pieret

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From The Athens (Georgia) Banner-Herald comes this about Charles Gordon, a Texas neurosurgeon who had a "crisis of faith" because of the death of a friend at a young age from cancer:

God is manifest in all creation, so says Romans 1:20 in the Bible. Gordon found God in the similarities and beauty that is all around the world.
"The harder I looked, the more it occurred to me that these striking similarities I was seeing had to be more than just coincidence," Gordon said. "They suggested there was a super-intelligence behind it all."
Similarities like the blood vessels in the eye's retina looks just like lightning striking in the night sky. Or the spiral, which is found in something as grand as a galaxy, as small as a grain of sand or sea shell, or inside our bodies like the cochlea.
"It's a very elegant, beautiful pattern, and no one can explain why," he said. "Our spirits are immediately attracted to things of beauty, things that have nothing to do with procreation or extending our lives.
"It's a universal response, and I think it's because God created it and said it was good, and we have in our spirits that attraction to beauty."

So he wrote a book, In Plain Sight, to supposedly show that God's signature is all over creation. Some other examples he's drawn from his blog:

"A girl in Nashville sent in similar pictures of a mushroom and a jellyfish, and how they look similar," Gordon said. "A fifth-grader pointed out brain coral and how it looks just like a human brain. ... We've found some really cool stuff."

Far be it from me to denigrate anyone's attempt to understand and cope with the brutal fact of people dying of cancer at age 31 leaving behind a young family, but really! ... is it so amazing that a species such as H. sapiens, whose survival is so tied to pattern-recognition, would see similarities everywhere? And the evolution of an aesthetic sense, while not as obvious, is hardly beyond all understanding. To see "beauty" in symmetry when, for example, that tends to indicates health in a potential mate, or in vibrant colors when that tends to indicates ripeness in the fruit we might want to eat, seems hardly surprising.

And what, exactly, would a God be trying to tell us by causing polyps to group together in colonies that, very superficially, resemble vertebrate (not just human) brains?

And why would a neurosurgeon fail to see how superficial the resemblance is?
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on May 27, 2010 (boomark / email).