When I was a child, “organic” just wasn’t part of my vocabulary. I don’t recall ever hearing it except as a form of chemistry in college. Since I avoided all classes of chemistry, organic seemed no different than any other. I would not have imagined there could be organic sections of a grocery store, that some vegetables could be organic, and others, by default, inorganic.
Since organic seems to be a category now popular in many areas of life, what about Christianity? Can there be such a thing?
Well, upon some reflection, I think Charles Darwin pointed the church toward Organic Christianity.
Below is a section from an article I have coming out in the May edition of SciTech that I’ll provide a link to when it is released. It is based on a chapter from my book, Out of The Crowd. The title of the article is Darwin’s Gift.
People of all faiths should celebrate the beauty of the particularity of life, of all life, and of each life, particularly each person. To help us celebrate life, Charles Darwin presented the church with a beautiful gift. However, as with Galileo, the church rejected Darwin’s gift and marked it with a huge, Return to Sender. The majority of religious leaders and religious people in Darwin’s day and since have wanted little of Darwin’s gift.
In a counter argument to ideas like Darwin’s, William Paley, a physician and a theologian, view was the more popular. He had looked at the world, and its complexity, and offered this illustration as proof that the world didn’t evolve over time but was produced, as is, by God.
Imagine you’re walking down the beach and your foot hits a rock. You probably won’t wonder, “Where did that rock come from?” because you don’t expect an interesting answer to that question. Maybe it was always there. Maybe it fell from the sky. But suppose you are walking on the beach and found a watch on the ground and then you asked where the watch had come from.
Paley pointed out that, unlike a rock washed ashore, complex machines like watches don’t just appear on beaches. Machines need a maker. To believe the watch just happened would be foolish, and so he cited Darwin’s ideas as foolish. In a more contemporary example, the argument against Darwin’s observations is to imagine a tornado blows through a junkyard and the result is not chaos but a huge airplane. Chaos does not lead to complexity but needs a craftsman, an engineer, with an intelligent design.
The problem with these metaphors is that they are mechanical. Paley pointed to an industrial model of the universe. Darwin pointed at an organic one. To view the world as a machine misses Darwin’s insight altogether and the beauty of life.
Alan Watts challenged the industrial image that God “made” the world. The rules for production in factories are far different from the principles that apply to life. Watts pointed out that with a mechanical model is a common way of thinking in Western culture,
It is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother ‘How was I made?’ or ‘Who made me?’ And this is a very, very powerful idea, but for example, it is not shared by the Chinese, or by the Hindus. A Chinese child would not ask its mother ‘How was I made?’ A Chinese child might ask its mother ‘How did I grow?’ which is an entirely different procedure from making. You see, when you make something, you put it together, you arrange parts, or you work from the outside in, as a sculptor works on stone, or as a potter works on clay. But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction. It works from the inside to the outside. It expands. It burgeons. It blossoms. And it happens all of itself at once. In other words, the original simple form, say of a living cell in the womb, progressively complicates itself, and that’s the growing process, and it’s quite different from the making process.
Watts used this image and said that if you look at an apple tree it is not a factory for apples, it does not produce apples, it apples. In the same way an apple tree apples, a giraffe giraffes, and the world peoples. Life produces life, and that life is not a factory reproduction of an engineered design, but each beautiful in unique characteristics. This is not Christianity vs. Hinduism, or Creation vs. Evolution, or even America vs. China. It is a mechanical model compared to an organic model. Organic Christianity looks at life, and particularly lives, human lives.
Each of us is organic, particular, unique, and called for a special journey.
Jesus didn’t look at people as broken, trash, or malfunctioning. Jesus saw humans, alive, choosing, suffering from consequences of our own choices and those of others, but also full of potential. Organic all.
To think a little deeper about your own organic journey, check out Out of The Crowd
