Stevan Speheger
[Originally published as Shapes and Sizes]
Here’s a little project for you when you’re bored:
I’ll give you a shape, roughly of the proportion of an egg.
Then I’ll give you two pairs of items, each element the mirror image of its mate.
Now I’ll give you two more individual items.
I’ll start you out with an approximate location for each of these items on the shape. Your assignment, should you decide to accept it is, by making very small changes in each of the five components while keeping them very near their given locations, create different, individually recognizable versions of the resultant image. How many? Let’s start with, say, 8,000,000,000 or so. Let me know when you’ve finished.
Done? Great! Now just one more thing. Take the formula or instructions for accomplishing what you’ve done and place it in a container that I’ll provide. Oh, there is one catch. The container is a fairly small sphere, .004 inches in diameter.
What is it?
You’ve probably recognized the components as eyes, ears, nose, and mouth on the shape of the human face and the container as a fertilized human egg.
The absolutely incredible miracle of this phenomenon is lost on most of us most of the time because it is so commonplace. We see hundreds of faces every day, and we can instantly pick out a familiar one in a crowd. And now our smartphones recognize these variations with amazing accuracy. And this selection is made from a flat, two-dimensional image of the face.
Then consider that all of these potential variations come from differing arrangements of the same sets of chemicals packaged in something we can barely see with the human eye — the fertilized human egg.
The 8,000,000,000 number represents everyone alive on planet earth presently, but everyone who has lived in the past and will live in the future has their own unique arrangement of these and many other characteristics.
With all of these variations, human beings are still instantly distinguishable from other living creatures. The variations in the features are quite small compared with the overall arrangement of the basic form.
You’re an intelligent person, but my guess is that you failed to complete the assignment I gave you earlier. (I confess that I didn’t even try, myself.) However, there are supposedly intelligent, well-educated individuals today who adamantly state that this process came to pass with no external creative intelligence. Their faith remains in the omniscience of nothingness. I’m not able to stretch my logic and common sense far enough to embrace that concept. Once again, God’s creative work is obvious if we stop long enough to look under the hood of the commonplace. Skeptics remain without excuse.
