I was watching my 2-year-old son playing a few months ago and noticed how easy it was for him to take things apart. He dumped his toys on the ground, scattered everything around and pulled apart all the Lego pieces. He wanted to influence his surroundings by interacting with the world, and with his limited understanding, the only way that he knew how was to “deconstruct” things. As most parents know, a toddler can leave a wake of destruction and chaos in their path. Now that he’s maturing though, he’s more thoughtful and deliberate. He assembles the Lego, he puts the toys into the bin, he constructs a puzzle. While I’m sure this is a very common stage of human development, it led me to think about the relationship we have with the world and by extension, what God is to the world.

For all humans, it’s very easy to take things apart, to criticise, and to destroy. It takes vulnerability and time to create art but one doesn’t risk anything to criticise it. It takes much more effort to build a house than it does to tear it down. In fact, one needn’t expend any energy to destroy it. If given enough time, a house will decompose all by itself. What’s more, the level of understanding required to build more complex systems increases with that system’s complexity. Building the pyramids required planning, perseverance and a lot of labour, but to build something as complex as the Mars Rover requires understanding. Creation takes consciousness, in the form of deliberate action. Destruction only takes force… or no effort at all.

Consider the examples around you of creation. There are all the inspiring examples of people’s creation: Pyramids, Westminster Abbey, Puccini’s Turandot, The Mars Rover. All of these achievements took consciousness: learning, forethought, inspiration and perseverance, and the level of consciousness necessary for the achievement increased with its complexity. Note that I’m defining consciousness here as “The totality in psychology of … ideas, attitudes, and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span” as per the third definition here. Now consider the complexity and interdependence of everything else that people will never have the consciousness to create: The sun, this planet, that blade of grass, the grasshopper, you, me. In fact, the only phenomenon that resists destruction, nihilism and chaos is life : The circumstances and conditions that lead to life, life itself, or the things that life (i.e. us) creates. It takes a great degree of sophistication to create… now try to imagine the sophistication of the source of creation itself.

Let’s be clear, I’m not trying to rehash the Intelligent Design “scientific proof” of creationists. As I’ve said before, rational thought and science are very good for some things but absolutely insufficient and inappropriate for others. A carpenter needs both a saw and a hammer to do his work, but he doesn’t use the saw to drive nails or a hammer to cut wood. Instead, I offer something to contemplate outside of your reasoning and “proof”:

Construction is Consciousness is Life is Perfection.

Destruction is Nihilism is Death is Chaos.